Divided Hearts explores the passionate political strife that raged
in Britain as a result of the American Civil War. Moving beyond
Mary Ellison's 1972 landmark regional study of Lancashire cotton
workers' reactions, R. J. M. Blackett opens the subject to a new,
wider transatlantic context of influence and undertakes a deftly
researched and written sociological, intellectual, and political
examination of who in Britain supported the Union, who the
Confederacy, and why.
Blackett argues that the traditional historiographical
assessments of British partisanship along class and economic lines
must be reevaluated in light of the nature and changing contours of
transatlantic abolitionist connections, the ways in which
nationalism framed the debate, and the effect that race -- among
other issues -- exerted over the British public's perception of
conditions in America. He conducts a detailed study of the
meetings, lectures, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and other means
that friends of the protagonists used to shape the public's view of
the war. Both sides, he shows, operating on the assumption that in
a democracy pressure from without can and frequently does sway the
government's action, made every effort to win widespread support
for their position.
The American Civil War had a profound effect on Britain's
political culture; no other event during that period -- not in
Poland, Hungary, Italy, or British colonies -- compared. "The Civil
War in the United States affects our people more generally even
than the Indian Mutiny", the London Times asserted in 1862. In his
superb delineation of the arguments that British citizens of every
rank employed to justify positions taken on the war,
Blackettbroaches the provocative question of the degree to which
this involvement redirected their gaze toward political reform at
home, resulting in an extension of the franchise among other
things. Divided Hearts presents a compelling and innovative thesis,
one sure to engage scholars in many fields of history.
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