few doubts about the low character of his compatriots and hoped that one outcome of the Civil War would be to humble them. Above all it had called for a speedy end to the conflict, and resumption of cheap and unrestricted flows of raw cotton to the shuttered mills of Lancashire, cut off from their supplies by the blockade of Southern ports. While Bagehot stopped just short of calling for Britain’s Royal Navy to reopen them, he had welcomed the dissolution of the Union in 1861 and looked forward to a future with two ‘less aggressive, less insolent, and less irritable’ trading partners.122 In many ways a lucid critic of American politics, he was less perceptive about the impact of the ultimate victory of the North, in part because the Economist had a profound interest in the economic and imperial consequences of the outcome for Britain.
Bagehot had personally sympathized with the Confederacy and maintained it could not be defeated, scoffing at the idea that ‘5 or 6 millions of resolute and virulent Anglo-Saxons can be forcibly retained as citizens’.123 He urged Russian or French or English mediation, for ‘there is not the slightest prospect of their forcible subjugation’. The brilliant victories of the South had earned it ‘the right to be admitted into the society of the world as a substantive and sovereign State. Certainly, neither Belgium, nor Greece, nor the Spanish colonies of the New World, manifested in anything like the same degree the qualities and resources which enable nations to maintain freedom and command respect.’124 With the Confederate capital of Richmond in flames, he saluted its ‘vanquished gallantry which appeals to the good side of human nature’.125
Southern courage contrasted with Northern cowardice. ‘They are a wholly untried people, they have never yet faced a really formidable foe.’ In the war of American independence, it was true, they had shown ‘pluck’, but ‘the indescribable imbecility of their enemies was yet more wonderful than their own vigour’. The only triumph since 1783 had been in the War of 1812, a short conflict in a minor theatre of Britain’s war against Napoleonic France, when the future president Andrew Jackson ‘defended a walled city against an inadequately-provided invading force lodged in an unhealthy swamp’ outside New Orleans – not exactly bad odds. ‘All their other contests have been against naked Indians and degenerate and undisciplined Mexicans: these were raids rather than wars.’126 The Economist flew into a rage at US interference with British shipping, which was ‘very like insanity’ for Northern officials to condone.127 When two Confederate diplomats aboard the Trent were taken prisoner en route to London in 1861, it demanded their release and an apology, ‘or we have no alternative save war’. The incident was blamed on ‘the voting, electioneering, spouting, rowdying public’ in the North, which actually believed it could beat the South, ‘lick Great Britain in the bargain’, and add ‘Canada to Texas’. ‘The depth of their ignorance is unfathomable. The height of their frenzy is inconceivable.’128
The Economist repeatedly predicted the collapse of the Northern war effort at the turn of 1862 for lack of funds. ‘With a revenue of twelve millions they are spending one hundred and twenty millions; indirect taxes bring in next to nothing; direct taxes are not even yet voted; the loans required are not taken up; and already they have resorted to the desperate, ruinous, and speedily exhausted contrivance of inconvertible paper money.’ There was no need to intervene: ‘mere want of funds must almost infallibly bring them to a stand in twelve months – probably in six.’129
Nor did Bagehot accept the casus belli of the Union, and he steadfastly denied the charge levelled against the Economist as a result – that it was condoning slavery. Lincoln had made it quite clear, he reminded readers, that the North was not fighting to extinguish this peculiar institution. If the choice were ‘between the preservation of the Union and the perpetuation of slavery; if “Union” meant negro emancipation as surely as “secession” means negro servitude, – then, indeed, we should be called upon to take a very different view of the subject.’130 He scoffed at the Emancipation Proclamation a year later, a strategic ploy to stir slave rebellions behind enemy lines and score humanitarian points abroad. ‘Half-hearted and inconsistent’, it would disgust public opinion in Europe. This ‘shibboleth of Emancipation’, which freed slaves in enemy but not loyal states, ‘is so curiously infelicitous, so grotesquely illogical, so transparently un-anti-slavery, that we cannot conceive how it could have emanated from a shrewd man.’ Lincoln had confirmed ‘the servitude of those whom he might set free, and he decrees the freedom of those whom neither his decree nor his arm can reach!’
Britain and the Economist sincerely desired to see slavery abolished, without a thought as to the price of raw cotton, Bagehot insisted. Still, the paper made some surprising claims about what would tend to that end – perhaps reflecting the fact that, as one biographer puts it, its editor ‘did not take a high principled abstract view on slavery’.131 The surest route to abolition, argued the Economist, was the success of the South. ‘It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor.’132 The paper was no friend of ‘the fanatics who hope to found a great empire on the basis of slavery’, it clarified, for ‘we do not believe that predial slavery such as exists in the slave states is a possible basis for a good and enduring commonwealth’. But it was unclear why, in that case, Southern independence was desirable. ‘We wish the area of slavery should be so small that, by the sure operation of economical causes, and especially by the inevitable exhaustion of the soil which it always produces, slavery should, within a reasonable time, be gradually extinguished.’133
In the end slavery was a side note, however. Far more important in the paper’s warnings about a Northern victory was the intertwining logic of empire and economics. Two states were better than one, and would balance the naturally grasping character of each: ‘reckless Southerners may talk of seizing on Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba; unprincipled and inflated Northerners may talk of seizing on Canada; but there will be some hope that we may leave them to each other’s mutual control, and smile at the villainous cupidities of both.’134 Harriet Beecher Stowe and her abolitionist ilk were thus wrong to accuse London of rooting for the South: ‘The effectual discomfiture of either party would answer our purpose equally well.’135 If the Economist looked slightly more favourably on the South, this was because it had a right to leave the Union, was ‘more decent and courteous’ to Britain, and because it desired ‘to admit our goods at 10 per cent duty, while their enemies imposed 40 per cent’.136 Not just a geopolitical check, then, but freer trade would flow from the Southern states’ independence. In articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx had mocked the Economist up to this point for rationalizing slavery; now he gave it an ironic salute, as ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy is a mere question of tariff’.137
Bagehot continued to push British Liberals to acknowledge that, despite their distaste for slavery, ‘the experiment of one nation for one continent has turned out on the whole far from well.’ America was an only child, with ‘no correct measure of its own strength’, and having never played with others, ‘indulges in the infinite braggadocio which a public school soon rubs out of a conceited boy’.138 It was, in other words, a dangerous imperial rival, a point nicely captured by his image of the English public school, where playground bullying was preparatory to a career in the Empire. By the turn of 1865 the victory of the North looked imminent, ‘exciting the brains of Americans’, based on a mania for ‘empire and exclusive possession of a continent’. Bagehot was hostile to this outcome. The rest of the world, he wrote ruefully, ‘could not look with much favour or anticipated comfort on the formation of a new power thus motivated and thus clenched – a power whose two fundamental rules of action and raisons d’être would be, to defy its neighbour, and to annex its neighbour’s land.’139
The British Empire
If Bagehot viewed America through the prism of the British Empire and its interests, what did he have to say about the latter? Bagehot’s editorship was less rich in incident than Wilson’s – sitting between bursts of warfare and annexation in the 1850s and 1880s–1890s – and Bagehot showed