British Pro-South Sympathizers Made Sure that the Tariff Argument Remained Prominent for Many Months

The South’s governmental and nongovernmental free-trade diplomacy was paying propagandistic dividends, compounded by the Union government’s initial unwillingness to declare slavery the primary issue of secession and reunion. Confederate diplomat Edwin de Leon wrote a letter to the editors of the London Times in late May that slavery was “a mere pretext” for secession, as shown by continued northern defenses of the institution through its guarantee of slavery where it existed and through its enforcement of the fugitive slave law. The Preston Guardian even asserted that when northerners cried “no slavery,” they really meant “protection.” William H. Gregory called for British recognition in the House of Commons. He argued that it would bring an end to the slave trade; keep the states from fighting a “fratricidal, needless war”; and provide retaliation against the North’s “selfish, short-sighted, retrograde” protectionist policy. The Union minister to England, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., after meeting with Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, noted that the Morrill Tariff and the conflict’s seeming nonissue of slavery yet left southern recognition on the table.

All the while, Britain’s maintenance of neutrality appeared to benefit the South and antagonize the North. The 1862 construction in British ports of Confederate war vessels like the Alabama further outraged the Union, many of whom viewed their construction as a covert act of war by the British against the North. The issue would remain a source of Anglophobic ire for years to come. Alongside northern protectionism, British neutrality heightened Anglo-Union animosity.

British pro-South sympathizers made sure that the tariff argument remained prominent for many months to come. James Spence, Liverpool’s pro-Confederate merchant and London Times writer, spent but one chapter on slavery in his influential publication The American Union (1861). He spent the other seven on the Morrill Tariff, the right to secession, and why he thought a future reunion was culturally and philosophically impossible. After a close reading of Spence in late 1861, Charles Dickens himself became decidedly pro-South, and argued in the pages of All the Year Round that the Morrill Tariff had “severed the last threads which bound the North and South together.” John Bright wrote to Charles Sumner that the subject of the tariff was of such “great importance” that little “would more restore sympathy between England and the States than the repeal of the present monstrous and absurd Tariff,” as it gave “all the speakers and writers for the South an extraordinary advantage in this country.”

Northern attempts to acquire loans from England further illustrated the tariff’s unfavorable transatlantic traction. Following the southern rout of northern troops at Bull Run in July 1861, New York banker August Belmont sought a Union loan from the British. As leverage, he reminded Prime Minister Palmerston of the South’s continued maintenance of slavery, to which Palmerston retorted: “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.”

—Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 44-45.