Dixie on Thames
Victorian MP Richard Cobden offered a startling analogy for the American Civil War.
1864
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Victorian MP Richard Cobden offered a startling analogy for the American Civil War.
1864
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republicans won the US general election in 1860, prompting eleven slave-owning southern States to declare independence. Some in Westminster sympathised, saying the national result did not reflect the majority of southern voters – but Richard Cobden was scornful.
abridged
THEY [the southern states] wanted to consolidate, perpetuate, and extend slavery. But, instead of that, what do they constantly say? ‘Leave us alone; all we want is to be left alone.’
And that is a reason that the Conservative Governments of Europe, and so large a section of the upper middle-class of England, and almost the whole aristocracy, have accepted as a sufficient ground on which to back this insurrection.*
How would they have liked it, if, when Essex and Kent had been beaten on the Corn-law question (and we know Essex gave a united and unanimous vote against us),* Kent and Essex had chosen to set up themselves as an East Anglia right across the mouth of the Thames, as the secessionists have done by Louisiana across the mouth of the Mississippi, and if, when we asked them why they did it, they should reply, ‘We want to be left alone’?
Can any Government be carried on if a portion of the territory, or a section of the people, can at any time secede when beaten at the polls in a peaceful election?
abridged
The French Empire, with interests in Mexico and Canada, on balance favoured the Confederacy; the Spanish did much the same. The Prussians and the Russian Empire supported the North. Cobden played a key role in reminding the public of the moral issue of slavery, and increasingly ordinary British people favoured the North.
In 1846, Richard Cobden persuaded the Commons into abolishing protectionist taxes on grain imports, which had been brought in to help Britain’s ailing agriculture industry. However, they sent the price of basic foods sky-rocketing, and cost jobs right across Britain. See our story: The Repeal of the Corn Laws.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.