UVa historian presents British point of view on Civil War

Though Great Britain was neutral during the American Civil War, there were “compelling reasons” for Britain to support the Confederacy, according to a University of Virginia historian.

“The American Civil War posed an obvious dilemma to British politicians,” said Richard Floyd, an author and lecturer at UVa. “One immediate issue was that both sides — both the Union and the Confederacy — tried to secure a formal alliance with Great Britain.”

Floyd said the British perspective of the Civil War was “very complex” during a lecture Sunday at the James Madison Museum in Orange, which also opened a new exhibit to mark the war’s 150th anniversary.

Britain was the most powerful nation on the world stage when the war broke out in 1861, Floyd said. At the time, 75 percent of U.S. exports consisted of American cotton bound for the British textile industry.

“Cotton from the American South, planted and picked and cleaned by black slaves … fed the industrial factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire,” Floyd said.

The economic link was so strong, Floyd said, that a group of Liverpool cotton importers set up an unofficial, illegal embassy to the Confederacy.

Politics aside, there was also some degree of cultural affinity between Britons and Southerners, Floyd said.

“This was the perception — that the South, that Southerners, that they were Englishmen,” Floyd said. “The North, on the other hand, well maybe the best families or the earliest families had been English … but beyond that there were a whole lot of miscellaneous immigrant rabble.”

Liberal Victorian Britons also had a tendency to favor independence movements, Floyd said, and some viewed the Confederacy as just that.

“In this light, the North was the aggressor,” Floyd said. “And the Southerners were plucky, nationalist fellows who simply wanted to govern themselves.”

That view gained credibility in the early years of the war, when Lincoln didn’t insist that the war was over slavery, saying instead that the purpose was to preserve the Union.

The British Empire had managed to abolish slavery incrementally from 1833 to 1838, Floyd said. Though national freedom was a popular argument, the personal freedom for black slaves helped tip British views toward favoring the Union, Floyd said.

“This clearly would be denied in the Confederate States of America,” Floyd said. “And this meant that there were always practical, political, religious, humane reasons to justify condemning the Southern states.”

Floyd’s lecture marked the end of the museum’s spring lecture series, but the talks will start again in September, said programs coordinator Meredith Wouters.

The new exhibit features uniforms, family letters, tax documents and other artifacts from the Civil War period. Museum officials expect to keep the exhibit on display for at least a year.

During the summer, the museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday.