In the spring of the year 1861, in which Prince Albert died, the American Civil War broke out between the Northern and Southern States.  Lord Palmerston, the Liberal Prime Minister, preferred to be considered the minister of the nation rather than the head of a political party.  At the beginning of the war he was in favor of the North.  As the conflict threatened to be bitter the Queen issued a proclamation declaring her “determination to maintain a strict and impartial neutrality in the contest between the said contending parties.”  The rights of belligerents—­in other words, all the rights of war according to the law of nations—­were granted to the South equally with the North; and her Majesty’s subjects were warned against aiding either side in the conflict.

The progress of the war caused terrible distress in Lancashire, owing to the cutting off of supplies of cotton for the mills through the blockade of the ports of the Confederate States.  The starving weavers, however, gave their moral support to the North, and continued steadfast to the cause of the Union even in the sorest period of their suffering.  The great majority of the manufacturers and business classes generally, and the nobility, with a few exceptions, sympathized with the efforts of the South to establish an independent Confederacy.  Most of the distinguished political and social leaders, in Parliament and out, with nearly all the influential journals, were on the same side, and were openly hostile to the Union.[1]

[1] Lord John Russell (Foreign Secretary), Lord Brougham, Sir John Bowring, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the London Times and Punch espouses the cause of the South more or less openly; while others, like Mr. Gladstone, declared their full belief in the ultimate success of the Confederacy.  On the other hand, Prince Albert, the Duke of Argyll, John Bright, John Stuart Mill, Professor Newman, Lord Palmerston, at least for a time, and the London Daily News defended the cause of the North.  After the death of President Lincoln, Punch manfully acknowledged (see issue of May 6, 1865) that it had been altogether wrong in its estimation of him and his measures; and Mr. Gladstone, in an essay on “Kin beyond Sea” in his “Gleanings of Past Years,” paid a noble tribute to the course pursued by America since the close of the war.

Late in Autumn (1861) Captain Wilkes, of the United States Navy, boarded the British mail steamer Trent, and seized two Confederate commissioners (Mason and Slidell) who were on their way to England.  When intelligence of the act was conveyed to President Lincoln, he expressed his unqualified disapproval of it, saying:  “This is the very thing the British captains used to do.  They claimed the right of searching American ships, and taking men out of them.  That was the cause of the War of 1812.  Now, we cannot abandon our own principles; we shall have to give up these men, and apologize for what we have done.”