Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Slavery and Confederate foreign relations

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy: his rebellion gave hope to reactionaries far beyond the United States

David Brion Davis is a leading historian of slavery. He wrote on The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation in the New York Review of Books 07/18/02 issue (link behind subscription), reviewing Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War by R.J.M. Blackett and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight.

Slavery as such was very much an issue in the foreign relations of both the Union and the Confederacy. Davis writes:

The American South had supplied three quarters of the raw cotton for Britain's textile industry, the very heart of the British industrial economy, and by the summer of 1862 such cotton imports had fallen to one third of their 1860 level. This led to a "Cotton Famine" and widespread unemployment. Yet Britain's prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, remained cautious in the face of French pressure and reluctant to give formal recognition to the Confederacy until he could be certain of the latter's impending military victory. After a summer of Union defeats in 1862 and growing pressure from his cabinet for some kind of intervention, Palmerston and the Union were saved, at least temporarily, by Robert E. Lee's defeat in Maryland, on September 17, 1862, at the extremely bloody Battle of Antietam. It was this longed-for if marginal Union victory that opened the way a few days later for Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The central question, for both Palmerston and later historians, was the issue of British public opinion.

British public opinion was not uniformly anti-slavery. Many Britons were anti-Union. And even the important British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was passive during the debate over the Confederacy. Davis explains:

The initial caution and passivity of British abolitionists may well have been related to a subject that has been neglected or underestimated by historians: the drastic "failure" of West Indian slave emancipation. I use quotation marks to suggest that the disappointment and embarrassment did not concern the happiness and well-being of blacks but rather the expectations of whites, including many abolitionists, who often assumed that freed slaves would work harder and more efficiently on colonial plantations. However, wherever freedpeople could find plots of land for subsistence agriculture, they fled the plantations or worked as little as possible. After the end of so-called apprenticeship in 1838, both Britain and the Southern states absorbed a stream of evidence showing that freed blacks did everything they could to escape slave-like gang labor, and that plantation production and land values had plummeted. The evidence showed moreover that Britain had desperately turned to India and other poverty-stricken regions to find thousands of indentured laborers who could be transported to the West Indies, and that Cuba and Brazil, which still imported large numbers of slaves from Africa, had greatly prospered, especially in producing sugar and coffee for the world's expanding markets.

He also notes that his was a situation that added to the slaveowners' overheated fears of abolitionist politics:

... American diplomats had deluged Southern leaders with similar tales of West Indian catastrophe, which reinforced the older horrors associated with the Haitian Revolution that took place between 1791 and 1804. Interpreting these disasters as the inevitable results of French and British abolitionism, Southerners greatly overestimated the power of Northern abolitionists and thus escalated their demands in a self-defeating way. This finally antagonized many moderate Northerners and thus contributed to secession and civil war, despite Southern dominance of the federal government from Washington's time to that of President Buchanan (1789–1861). (my emphasis)

Eventually, anti-slavery sentiment carried the day on British recognition of the Confederacy:

Rumors that the government was seriously considering recognition of the Confederacy alarmed large numbers of Britons who equated a Union victory with furthering social and political reforms in their own land. It was no secret that the strongest supporters of the Confederacy were precisely those privileged minorities who opposed labor unions and the extension of suffrage in Britain. No less important, Lincoln's commitment to slave emancipation gave a moral objective to the preservation of the Union, a goal that coincided with an abstract and residual British pride in having led the global struggle for the liberty of slaves. (my emphasis)

He also notes that a namesake of Andrew Jackson played an important role in pro-Union politics in Britain:

... a large cadre of African-American speakers, including J. Sella Martin, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry "Box" Brown, challenged racist stereotypes and kept reminding Britons that slavery stood at the center of the American war. Nothing could embody this point more forcefully than the speeches of William Andrew Jackson, the escaped slave and former coachman of the Confederacy's President Jefferson Davis. (my emphasis)

Davis argues that the anti-slavery public's political perspective connecting reform in Britain to the defeat of the Confederacy and its slave system was accurate:

Though Blackett fails to recognize the importance of free-labor ideology, he makes it clear that a Confederate victory would have created an enormous impediment to the growth of democracy in Britain. This conclusion, underscored by the political and class alignments in Britain, conforms with the grim speculations of the economic historian and Nobel Laureate Robert William Fogel. After briefly surveying the plight of most workers in Europe and even England in the 1850s and 1860s, Fogel suggests that a Confederate victory would have delivered a devastating blow to antislavery and progressive politics, replacing democracy and liberal reform with "a drive for aristocratic privilege under the flags of paternalism and the preservation of order."

Given the high productivity of slave labor, an independent Confederacy could have exploited its monopoly on cotton by passing on a small sales tax to consumers, a tax that would have financed a huge standing army, along with expansionist, proslavery policies that might well have led to Confederate domination of Latin America and a reversal of Britain's antislavery pressures on Cuba and Brazil. While Fogel is fully aware that the abolition of American slavery brought "no heaven on earth," there is much to be said for his argument that Confederate independence would have greatly increased the power of the most conservative movements in much of the world. (my emphasis)

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, slavery, us civil war