Union and the destruction of a rival power.  Nationality was the issue for the North; that democracy was an issue in America was denied, nor could it, in the intensity of the conflict, be conceived as the vital question determining British attitude.  The Reform Bill of 1867 brought a new British nation into existence, the nation decrying American institutions was dead and a “sister democracy” holding out hands to the United States had replaced it, but to this the men who had won the war for the North long remained blind.  Not during the generation when Americans, immersed in a life and death struggle for national existence, felt that “he who is not for me is against me,” could the generally correct neutrality of the British Government and the whole-hearted support of Radical England be accepted at their true value to the North.  For nearly half a century after the American Civil War the natural sentiments of friendship, based upon ties of blood and a common heritage of literature and history and law, were distorted by bitter and exaggerated memories.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1323:  See my article, “The Point of View of the British Traveller in America,” Pol.  Sci.  Quarterly, June, 1914.]

[Footnote 1324:  Alexander Mackay, The Western World; or Travels in the United States in 1846-47.]

[Footnote 1325:  Ibid., Fourth Edition, London, 1850, Vol.  III, p. 24.]

[Footnote 1326:  Hugh Seymour Tremenheere, The Constitution of the United States compared with Our Own, London, 1854.]

[Footnote 1327:  e.g., William Kelly, Across the Rocky Mountains from New York to California, London, 1852.  He made one acute observation on American democracy.  “The division of parties is just the reverse in America to what it is in England.  In England the stronghold of democracy is in the large towns, and aristocracy has its strongest supporters in the country.  In America the ultra-democrat and leveller is the western farmer, and the aristocratic tendency is most visible amongst the manufacturers and merchants of the eastern cities.” (p. 181.)]

[Footnote 1328:  Monypenny, Disraeli, IV, pp. 293-4, states a Tory offer to support Palmerston on these lines.]

[Footnote 1329:  Dodd, Jefferson Davis, p. 217.]

[Footnote 1330:  March, 30, 1861.]

[Footnote 1331:  March 16, 1861.]

[Footnote 1332:  To John Bigelow, April 14, 1861. (Bigelow, Retrospections, I, p. 347.)]

[Footnote 1333:  April 27, 1861.]

[Footnote 1334:  Bunch wrote to Russell, May 15, 1861, that the war in America was the “natural result of the much vaunted system of government of the United States”; it had “crumbled to pieces,” and this result had long been evident to the public mind of Europe. (F.O., Am., Vol. 780, No. 58.)]

[Footnote 1335:  State Department, Eng., Vol. 77, No. 9.  Adams to Seward, June 21, 1861.]