Official England held a different view.  Russell believed that the separation of North and South would conduce to the extinction of slavery since the South, left to itself and fronted by a great and prosperous free North, with a population united in ideals, would be forced, ultimately, to abandon its “special system.”  He professed that he could not understand Mrs. Stowe’s support of the war and thought she and Sumner “animated by a spirit of vengeance[882].”  If the South did yield and the Union were restored with slavery, Russell thought that “Slavery would prevail all over the New World.  For that reason I wish for separation[883].”  These views were repeated frequently by Russell.  He long had a fixed idea on the moral value of separation, but was careful to state, “I give you these views merely as speculations,” and it is worthy of note that after midsummer of 1862 he rarely indulged in them.  Against such speculations, whether by Russell or by others, Mill protested in his famous article in Fraser’s, February, 1862[884].

On one aspect of slavery the North was free to act and early did so.  Seward proposed to Lyons a treaty giving mutual right of search off the African Coast and on the coasts of Cuba for the suppression of the African Slave Trade.  Such a treaty had long been urged by Great Britain but persistently refused by the United States.  It could not well be declined now by the British Government and was signed by Seward, April 8, 1862[885], but if he expected any change in British attitude as a result he was disappointed.  The renewal by the South of that trade might be a barrier to British goodwill, but the action of the North was viewed as but a weak attempt to secure British sympathy, and to mark the limits of Northern anti-slavery efforts.  Indeed, the Government was not eager for the treaty on other grounds, since the Admiralty had never “felt any interest in the suppression of the slave trade ... whatever they have done ... they have done grudgingly and imperfectly[886].”

This was written at the exact period when Palmerston and Russell were initiating those steps which were to result in the Cabinet crisis on mediation in October-November, 1862.  Certainly the Slave Trade treaty with America had not influenced governmental attitude.  At this juncture there was founded, November, 1862, the London Emancipation Society, with the avowed object of stirring anti-slavery Englishmen in protest against “favouring the South.”  But George Thompson, its organizer, had been engaged in the preliminary work of organization for some months and the Society is therefore to be regarded as an expression of that small group who were persistent and determined in assertion of slavery as the cause and object of the Civil War, before the issue of Lincoln’s proclamation[887].  Thus for England as a whole and for official England the declarations of these few voices were regarded as expressive of a wish rather than as consistent with the facts.  The moral uplift of an anti-slavery object was denied to the North.