The Daily News was fortunate in having, after 1862, the best-informed New York correspondent writing to the London press.  This was an Irishman, E.L.  Godkin, who, both at home and in America, was the intimate friend of literary men, and himself, later, a great moulder of public opinion[114].  Harriet Martineau further aided the Daily News by contributing pro-Northern articles, and was a power in Radical circles[115].  But literary England in general, was slow to express itself with conviction, though Robert Browning, by April, 1861, was firmly determined in his pro-Northern sentiment.  In August he was writing in letters of the “good cause[116].”  But Browning was a rare exception and it was not until the Civil War had been under way for many months that men of talent in the non-political world were drawn to make comment or to take sides.  Their influence at the outset was negligible[117].

In spite of press utterances, or literary silence, alike indicative of a widespread conviction that Southern independence was assured, there still remained both in those circles where anti-slavery sentiment was strong, and in others more neutral in sympathy, a distaste for the newly-born State as the embodiment of a degrading institution.  Lincoln’s inaugural address denying an intention to interfere with slavery was a weapon for the friends of the South, but it could not wholly still that issue.  Even in the Times, through the medium of W.H.  Russell’s descriptive letters, there appeared caustic criticisms.  He wrote in his “Diary,” “I declare that to me the more orderly, methodical, and perfect the arrangements for economizing slave labour ... are, the more hateful and odious does slavery become[118],” and in his letter of May 8, from Montgomery, having witnessed an auction sale of slaves he stated: 

“I am neither sentimentalist nor Black Republican, nor negro worshipper, but I confess the sight caused a strange thrill through my heart.  I tried in vain to make myself familiar with the fact that I could, for the sum of $975, become as absolutely the owner of that mass of blood, bones, sinew, flesh and brains as of the horse which stood by my side.  There was no sophistry which could persuade me the man was not a man—­he was, indeed, by no means my brother, but assuredly he was a fellow creature[119].”

This was hard printing for the Times, in its new advocacy of the South, and Russell’s description was made much of by the Westminster Review and other publications that soon began to sound again the “issue” of slavery[120].  Yet the Westminster itself in the same article decried the folly of the Northern attempt at reconquest.  So also thought even John Bright at the moment, when expressing himself privately to friends in America[121].