Abraham Lincoln quarterly. [Vol. 3, no. 2]

LINCOLN THROUGH BRITISH EYES

73

have a war over slavery, which he considered legal slavery
wherever it had begun; and by British ignorance and misunderstanding of his reasons. The Times and other antinorthern, anti-Lincoln papers did not like slavery. But while
they might have supported a war to abolish something the
South wanted to retain, they could neither comprehend nor
condone a war to preserve something which the South clearly
did not want, a war to embrace people who did not want to
be embraced, a war to save the Union.
Wendell Phillips remarked that Lincoln took about two
months to abolish habeas corpus but almost two years to
abolish slavery. That is what puzzled Englishmen. Not one in
1o,ooo knew of the existence of the "peculiar institution" in
three vital border states, which Lincoln was grappling to the
bosom of the North, one of them his own native state. He
and Seward from the outset had repeatedly asserted that
slavery was not the issue. This gave the Confederate agents
and sympathizers in Britain a free run; indeed, it created
sympathy for the South, for the so-called plain, blunt Englishman (who always, upon examination, turns out to be utterly
illogical) asked: if the North was not out to abolish the peculiar institution of the South, what could it be out for, except
mere armed repression of the South? And of course the copperhead press of the North was saying that of Lincoln anyway.
So the so-called "thinking Englishmen," sympathizing with
the rising claims of the new nationalities in Europe, tended at
first not to think very hard but to be emotionally sympathetic
to the South. Moreover the North was avowedly high-tariff,
whereas the Articles of the Confederacy expressly forbade a
Confederate (though not a state) tariff. This troubled many
English liberals. So the North had not one single emotional
ace up its sleeve, except Uncle Tom's Cabin, on which all
British children were brought up (I was myself!); and that
ace, Lincoln refused for nearly two years to play.