A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman

Preface
     
    S ome years ago, while researching the life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, I learned that her great-nephew, later the eighth Duke of Devonshire, had spent Christmas Day 1862 making eggnog for the Confederate cavalry officers of General Robert E. Lee’s army. “I hope Freddy [his younger brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish] won’t groan much over my rebel sympathies, but I can’t help them,” he wrote to his father three days later. “The people here are so much more earnest about the [war] than the North seems to be.”
    I was aware that the American Civil War had sharply polarized public opinion in Britain (my original doctoral thesis had examined attitudes toward race and color in pre-Victorian England), but it was still a shock to discover that the heir to the greatest Liberal peerage in England thought the slaveholding South had the moral advantage over the antislavery North. Understanding how the Confederacy had managed to achieve this ascendancy, not only with the duke but also with people who might generally be considered as belonging to the “progressive” classes in Britain—journalists, writers, university students, actors, social reformers, even the clergy—became one of the driving obsessions behind this book.
    My original intention was to write a history of the British volunteers who fought in the Civil War. I had assumed that by examining their reasons for joining the Union or Confederate armies, I would gain an insight into the forces that had shaped public opinion. But once I began, the book refused to stay within its intended confines, especially as it became clear that these volunteers were part of an Anglo-American world that was far greater and more complex than I had ever imagined. It gradually became a biography of a relationship, or, more accurately, of the many relationships that together formed the British-American experience during the Civil War.
    The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The ensuing four-year struggle would lead to the freedom of 4 million slaves and cost the lives of more than 620,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians. President Abraham Lincoln responded to the attack on Fort Sumter by calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers and declaring a blockade of Southern ports. Across the Atlantic, however, Lord Palmerston’s Liberal government was chiefly concerned with ensuring that Britain did not become embroiled in the conflict. There was too much at stake: the livelihoods of nearly a million workers depended on Southern cotton, while British investors held $444 million worth of U.S. stocks and securities. On May 13, reflecting a rare moment of unanimity between Parliament, the press, and the public, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of neutrality, which recognized that a state of war existed between the Union and the Confederacy and forbade British subjects to take part. But this well-meaning act had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended. Each side accused Britain of favoring the other: the North threatened to invade Canada in retaliation, the South used every legal loophole to build its warships in British dockyards, and Britons ignored the injunction against interfering and volunteered by the thousands in the Union and Confederate armies. Twice in four years Britain and the North were on the brink of war: the first time, in December 1861, British troops were halfway to Canada by the time the two governments backed down.
    Biography is a subset of history, yet it stands independently, too. The most obvious difference is that biographers delve deeply into individual lives and the influences that shaped them, whereas for historians it is the sum of individual experiences that is important. In A World on Fire I have tried to combine both approaches. I decided from the beginning to treat each of the significant figures in the story, and many of the lesser ones, as