Far from idealism

If you think the Special Relationship has been looking strained in recent years, consider its condition during the American Civil War(1861-65). In 1863, an anonymous letter was delivered to Charles Francis Adams at the US legation in London:

Dam the Federals. Dam the Confederates.Dam you both. Kill you damned selves for the next 10 years if you like; so much the better for the world and for England. Thus thinks every Englishman with any brains. NB PS We’ll cut your throats fast enough afterwards for you if you ain’t tired of blood, you devils.

Brevity, they say, is the first grace of style. The feeling that letter encapsulates ran pretty high in England. For us, the Civil War was — as Amanda Foreman’s new book shows — a colossal economic, political and diplomatic pain in the backside. But it was a pain that — strive as we might — couldn’t very well be avoided.

British and Irish volunteers joined up, or were impressed, on both sides of the conflict — and for more than the odd one it was a coin-toss as to which army they joined. Henry Morton Stanley, later to find fame for tracking down Dr Livingstone, at one point blithely swapped sides: ‘He had never cared about politics anyway; “there were no blackies in Wales”.’ Our pipes ran on American baccy and our mills on American cotton.

Diplomatic pressure was intense from both sides: the Confederacy yearned for great power recognition; the North wanted British noses (and British blockade- runners) out of it. In defiance of the conditions of British neutrality both sides were quietly recruiting— and ingenious Confederate agents were having warships knocked up on the quiet in British shipyards.