A review of Slavery,
Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe,
1856-1865 (Scarecrow Press, 2007) by Charles Adams.
At long last Charles Adams’s new book, Slavery, Secession, &
Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865, has been
published. I’ve been anxiously waiting for this book for about five years.
The book contains about 500 pages of excerpts from European (mostly British)
magazines and journals on the events leading up to the war, the war itself,
and the nature of the Lincoln regime. This is a most valuable effort since
the mainstream Northern press was censored during the war. Foreign writers,
however, “were not arrested and imprisoned,” as they were in the North,
writes Adams. “They were not silenced by aimed soldiers, mobs, or censorship
of the mails,” and “their editors were not hauled off to prison,” to mention
just a few of the more totalitarian acts of the Lincoln regime. Even today,
writes Adams, the “gatekeepers” of “Civil War” history are “still making war
on the South” by distorting history.
Although it is a very long book, I could not put it down.
Nineteenth-century English commentators on the war were remarkably astute,
well informed, and articulate in expressing their views—so astute as to make
your typical mainstream “Lincoln scholar” of today sound like an uneducated
boob. There were supporters of both North and South in the European press,
although many Northern supporters switched sides once they began observing
the behavior of Dishonest Abe and his regime. They all opposed slavery very
strongly, but those who supported the Southern cause believed that the
North’s invasion of the Southern states had nothing to do with freeing the
slaves. 
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During the 1856-1860 period, writes Adams, quite a few British editors
“saw the separation of the North and South as a good thing,” and believed
that “slavery had no significant part in the conflict.” For example, Chamber’s
Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, one of the
“workingman’s journals,” wrote on March 21, 1857, that a major source of
conflict was that Northern business interests wanted the South to “consent to
the high protective tariff,” and if they did, “anti-slavery agitation would
stop.” “Antislavery agitation” meant opposition to the extension of slavery,
not Southern slavery. Pretending to want to “check the progress of slavery”
in this way “has been only a disguise under which to advance the interests of
the [Republican] party.”
This publication also noted that the black population of the North was
generally treated as inhuman. “In scarcely any of the large cities of the
North did they [blacks] escape violence” at the hand of whites. It was hardly
likely, therefore, that Northern whites would fight a war and die by the
hundreds of thousands purely for the benefit of black strangers, as has been
taught to generations of American school children.
The Edinburgh Review was a prominent British journal
that observed in 1858 that “abolition was not a policy of the North,” and
that secession would actually spell the end of slavery because it would no
longer be propped up by the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act. This
view was echoed by other high-quality British publications such as Fraser’s
Magazine and The Saturday Review, among others. Thus,
the most prominent British journals agreed on the eve of the War with a
statement that Alexander Stephens would make five or six years later, that
slavery was actually “more secure” in the union than out of it.
A British publication called The Quarterly Review ran a
long article in April 1857 on the New York State Disunion Convention. The
stridently pro-North Westminster Review, founded by
philosophers James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill) and Jeremy Bentham, also
wrote that “Massachusetts was, we believe, the first State which organized
Disunion Associations.” 
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Who has ever run across that fact in an American history book?! The
magazine also wrote of a Massachusetts secession convention that was held
around the same time in the town of Worcester.
Perhaps the most influential pro-South journal in England was All
the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens. Writing on “The American
Disunion” on September 6,1861, Dickens recognized that the opposition to
slavery extension in the territories was not based on moral, but political
and economic grounds. It was “a question of political power between North and
South” because of the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution, which added
three persons to a state’s population count for every five slaves. This
inflated the South’s representation in Congress, which in turn allowed the
South to effectively oppose the North’s corporatist or mercantilist agenda of
high tariffs, corporate welfare, and a government-ran central bank.
The Morrill Tariff was the main cause of the war as Dickens saw it. “Union
means so many millions a year lost to the South [due to high protective
tariffs on manufactured goods]; secession means the loss of the same millions
to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many, many other
evils.” “The quarrel between the North and South,” Charles Dickens believed,
“is … solely a fiscal quarrel.” (Dickens entertainingly wrote of how Lincoln
“came across as a bit of a country bumpkin” to those Europeans who had met
him.)
The Quarterly Review agreed wholeheartedly with Dickens,
calling the protectionist tariff a “revolting tribute” paid to Northern
businessmen by Southerners who “had been groaning for years under the
crashing bondage of Northern protectionists.” This publication also noted
that the Republican Party platform of 1860 supported the “inviolate rights of
the states,” especially “the right of each State to order and control its own
domestic institutions” (i.e., slavery); that Lincoln strongly supported his
party’s platform; and that he also supported the notorious Corwin
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would have enshrined slavery in the
Constitution explicitly. (The Amendment passed the House and Senate before
Lincoln’s inauguration, with exclusively Northern votes.) These are all facts
that few, if any, American school students are ever made aware of but which were
well known all around the world in the 1860s.
The Athenaeum, a London journal that published such famous
authors as T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, and Thomas Hardy, echoed Dickens’s
views regarding the economic causes of the war, and excoriated Lincoln as a
dictator and a tyrant. “President Lincoln … suspended the writ of habeas
corpus. He has muzzled the press and abridged the freedom of speech…. He has,
without authority of law and against the Constitution … plunged the country
into war, murdered … citizens, burned … houses…. He has seized unoffending
citizens [of the North], and, … has imprisoned them in loathsome dungeons.”
Moreover, “under the tyrant’s plea, he is proceeding to do a great many acts
and things which would more become the savage and the brute.”
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Blackwood’s
Magazine, which is still being published, argued in 1861 that “slavery
had no significant part in the conflict.” The union, through the Fugitive
Slave Act, protected slavery, said Blackwood’s, repeating the
view of other British journals that secession would actually lead to the
demise of slavery by nullifying that federal law. The tariff laws, on the
other hand, were “ruinous to the South.” They were “the chief complaint of
the South,” and “have been for thirty years oppressive and unjust.” As for
Lincoln, “He may possibly be a good attorney,” the magazine wrote, “though we
should never have selected him as a legal adviser.”
By 1862, Blackwood’s was denouncing the Lincoln regime
as “[M]onstrous, reckless, devilish.” ‘The North seeks to make the South a
desert—a wilderness of bloodshed and misery,” and all for money. “The North
would league itself with Beelzebub, and seek to make a hell of half the
continent.” Lincoln had “inaugurated dictatorship” and “abolished liberty” in
the North. ‘Taxes had been imposed, debt incurred, and paper money issued, to
the fullest amount possible.” All of this is what today’s court historians
call “a new birth of freedom.”
The events of the War proved to Blackwood’s that the
“Yankees” of New England “do not care a straw for the Constitution,” for
“they have sacrificed both legality and liberty long ago.” Nor did the
Yankees “care a cent for the abolition of slavery on the day when the South
inaugurated the war by the attack on Fort Sumter.” “With Mr. Lincoln at their
head,” they “would have rejoiced exceedingly if the whole race could be
transported to their native Africa.”
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