Every friend of despotism rejoices at your misfortune; it points the moral and adorns the tale in every aristocratic salon; it is the shame of them who have perhaps over zealously advocated the absolute perfection of the great Republic.
—WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL, TIMES (LONDON) CORRESPONDENT, FEBRUARY 4, 1861
WHILE CONFEDERATE AND UNION SPOKESMEN CRAFTED THEIR messages to the world, foreign observers began formulating their own interpretations of what became known as the American question. European political leaders, intellectuals, workers, students, and people of widely divergent ideological persuasions came to view America’s Civil War as part of a much larger struggle that had been taking place in the Euro-American world since the late eighteenth century. This interpretation of the American conflict must be understood within the context of alternating swells of revolutionary hope and reactionary oppression that radiated through the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution.
Spanning the American Revolution to the Revolution of 1848 and beyond, the Age of Revolution witnessed the advocates of popular sovereignty, human equality, and universal emancipation locked in battle against the defenders of dynastic rule, aristocratic privilege, and inherited inequality. Though some took care to distinguish republicanism from democracy, the latter entailing broad voting rights, the terms were not always used with careful distinction and were commonly conflated in the expression popular government. Whatever their precise political goals, many in Europe saw the failure of the Revolution of 1848 as the end of the revolutionary challenge to the old regime of dynastic oligarchies. Conservatives welcomed the American secession crisis, seeing it as the coup de grâce to the republican experiment in both hemispheres. For revolutionaries and liberals, America’s war came to be seen as the crucial trial that would decide the fate of government by the people, the “last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s unforgettable words. At stake were not only systems of labor, but also whole systems of government and society. London Times correspondent William Howard Russell was hardly exaggerating when he wrote to his friend John Bigelow in February 1861 that the crisis about to unfold in America was “the most important social and political phenomenon of the later ages of the world, the result of which will be felt for good or evil to the end of time.”1
One of most poignant testimonies to this idea of republicanism on trial arrived in May 1861 as an inauspicious letter of congratulation to President Lincoln from the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, a tiny rock-bound city-state nestled in the Apennine Mountains of Italy whose history of self-government stretched back to 1300. The Captain Regents, San Marino’s governing body, represented the oldest surviving republic in the world. They were writing to honor the leader of the second oldest republic in the world, and at this moment certainly the least serene country in the world.
The letter from San Marino was dated March 29, but it was delayed for more than a month, probably because it was addressed to “Mr. Lincoln” in New York City, which the Captain Regents must have assumed to be the nation’s capital. The letter was divided into two columns, one written in Italian and the other in imperfect but clear English.
“It is a some while since the Republic of San Marino wishes to make alliance with the United States of America in that manner as it is possible between a great Potency and a very small country.” We “are sure you will be glad to shake hands with a people who in its smallness and poverty can exhibit to you an antiquity from fourteen centuries of its free government.” The San Marino regents wanted to bestow an honor on a fellow republican across the sea. “Now we must inform you,” the letter continued, “that the citizenship of the Republic of San Marino was conferred for ever to the President pro tempore of the United States of America and we are very happy to send you the diploma of it.” (In honor of the 150th anniversary of this letter, President Obama’s citizenship in San Marino was renewed in 2011.) “We are acquainted from newspapers,” the regents gently added, “with political griefs, wich you are now suffering, therefore we pray to God to grant you a peaceful solution of your questions.”2
On May 7 the president and Seward, who probably wrote the letter of reply for Lincoln to sign, took time in those hectic days to salute their fellow republicans across the sea. “Great and Good Friends . . . Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring.”
There was also a lesson Seward and Lincoln wanted their fellow republicans in Europe to consider: “You have kindly adverted to the trial through which this Republic is now passing. It is one of deep import. It involves the question whether a Representative republic, extended and aggrandized so much as to be safe against foreign enemies can save itself from the dangers of domestic faction. I have faith in a good result.”3
THE REPUBLICAN IDEA HAD ANCIENT ORIGINS IN GREECE AND ROME and had been rekindled in Italian city-states, San Marino among them, toward the end of the Middle Ages. But it was not until the late eighteenth century that the modern experiment in popular self-government began. It grew out of ideas from the radical fringe of the Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the chief maxim being that all persons possessed basic natural rights, “unalienable rights,” Thomas Jefferson called them. All humans were born with common needs, and they held in common basic rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” in Jefferson’s felicitous phrase. It was to protect these rights that governments were formed. Such radical ideas were accepted nowhere before the American Revolution, but it was these principles that would inspire the Age of Revolution that swept through the Atlantic world between 1776 and 1848.4
Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” served to delegitimize a king, who was accused of abusing the colonists’ natural rights, and to bestow sovereignty on “the people,” in whose name the new American republic was proclaimed. But the ideas were far more than rhetorical devices for the moment; natural, universal human rights constituted the core idea of popular sovereignty that formed the very foundation of the entire republican experiment. Such ideas also had radical implications for all forms of social inequality, not just hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. Jefferson himself understood the implications, as he acknowledged in a private letter: the “mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”5
Everywhere in the Atlantic world political movements for national independence and popular self-rule inevitably became entangled with revolutionary social change that assailed the bastions of aristocratic privilege and hereditary power. The Confederate rebellion stands in retrospect as a conspicuous exception to the egalitarian spirit of the Age of Revolution.6
In Europe the experiment in human equality and self-government met with violent resistance from the ramparts of aristocracy and established religion. But in the Americas the republican idea was propelled by powerful waves of colonial national revolutions that swept monarchy and European imperial rule aside in the name of popular sovereignty. In the half century between 1776 and 1825, most of the colonial possessions of Britain, France, and Spain in the American hemisphere repudiated their imperial rulers and proclaimed independent republics.
Not all embraced republicanism. Brazil followed an unusual path to independence that transformed it into the seat of the Portuguese Empire when Napoleon I invaded Portugal in 1808, then an independent constitutional monarchy, the Empire of Brazil, in 1822. Mexico, too, experimented briefly with a homegrown version of monarchy, installing Agustín de Iturbide as emperor of Mexico at the end of its grueling war of independence. Iturbide’s empire quickly collapsed, and in 1823 Mexico began its rocky experiment with republican self-government.
Republicanism and slavery were mutually antagonistic in theory but also in practice. With important exceptions, the new American republics abolished slavery not long after throwing off monarchical rule. The United States was both a leader and a laggard in this republican antagonism toward slavery. Several Northern states had passed laws to end slavery after the break with Britain in 1776, and in 1787 the federal government banned it altogether from the Northwest Territory above the Ohio River. The founding fathers, including many southerners, agreed that human slavery did not belong in their republic, that it was immoral, dangerous, and should be put on a path toward extinction. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, believed the founding fathers were wrong about all that, but he acknowledged this to be their belief.7
By 1860 the remaining strongholds of slavery outside the United States included Cuba and Puerto Rico, both of them Spanish colonies, and the Empire of Brazil. Significantly, all three were vestiges of European monarchies lacking strong liberal challenges to slavery from within. The American South presented the strange anomaly of a slave society organized around ideas of fixed, hereditary racial inequality flourishing within a robust democratic nation that was, in theory at least, based on the very opposite principles. “Neither hereditary monarchy nor hereditary aristocracy planted itself on our soil,” George Bancroft, a Republican critic of the slaveholding South, remarked after the war. “The only hereditary condition that fastened itself upon us was servitude.” Slavery was frequently denounced by American abolitionists as a vestige of aristocracy that the Revolution had failed to eradicate, and some would describe America’s Civil War as the Second American Revolution.8
Though often beleaguered, especially in Latin America, the “vine of liberty,” as George Bancroft put it, “took deep root and filled the land.” The republican experiment flourished in the American hemisphere thanks in large part to distance from its aristocratic enemies in the Old World.9
In Europe, however, violent and repressive reaction followed the French Revolution of 1789. Beginning as a protest against absolutist monarchical power, the Revolution broadened into a radical assault on entrenched citadels of hereditary privilege and religious authority. At the heart of the French Revolution was the exaltation of the same idea embedded in America’s revolution: popular sovereignty, derived from the natural rights of the people, must supersede monarchical sovereignty derived from the divine rights of kings.10
The American and French Revolutions differed in many ways, but they shared a common vocabulary of natural rights, equality, liberty, and self-government. The reverberations from both revolutions shook the pillars of church and crown throughout the Atlantic world. The old regime fought back hard, appealing to fears of disorder, decrying the anarchy of “godless republicanism,” and mocking the arrogance of those who thought they could govern themselves without kings or God.11
The French Revolution provided critics with memorable lessons about the murderous violence and social disorder that ensued from attempts at radical reform. The French Republic descended into the Reign of Terror that sent thousands of aristocrats, clergy, and other enemies of the Revolution to their death at the guillotine. A bloodfest of reaction and revenge finally came to an end when Napoleon Bonaparte led a coup d’état in 1799. Later crowning himself Emperor Napoleon I and operating as military dictator of France, Napoleon set out to destroy the old regime of Europe.
As Napoleon’s reign approached its end at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the monarchist leaders gathered in the Congress of Vienna, the bastion of Hapsburg absolutism. They redrew the map of Europe, returned dynastic rulers to their thrones, and restored the Catholic Church to its traditional position of authority. A cold blanket of repression and censorship settled over Europe. The only republics to survive were a handful of small German city-states, Swiss cantons, and, of course, la serenissima San Marino.
The revolution would not die, however. During “three glorious days” in 1830, the French people went to the barricades and deposed King Charles X, but this time they did not dare give republicanism another trial. They turned instead to Louis Philippe, of the liberal Orléans branch of the Bourbon dynasty, beseeching him to serve as “king of the French” under a constitutional monarchy. François Guizot, who later served as Louis Philippe’s prime minister, summarized the views of many chastened French when he said, “Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”12
Many European monarchs operated within constitutional restraints and were checked by parliaments elected by citizens, whose voting rights were generally restricted to a narrow slice of the propertied male population. Though Britain had the strongest parliamentary tradition, only about one in five adult males could vote. Everywhere the exclusion of women was taken for granted. Constitutional monarchy, with parliaments of varying strength, became the European center, flanked on the right by absolutist monarchists in league with the Catholic Church and on the left by republicans, liberals, and radicals from among the workers and middle class.13
“Free England” became the asylum for republicans and revolutionaries from all parts of Europe, and it enjoyed freedom of speech and assembly unparalleled under most other European monarchies. On the Continent “red republicans,” as the revolutionary element was known, were forced underground, where they met in secret societies, often Masonic lodges, or gathered at what were ostensibly public banquets where politically coded toasts and speeches were offered. They sang the French republican anthem “La Marseillaise” and waved flags modeled after the French tricolor but in various national colors. Some donned red Phrygian caps, an ancient emblem of liberty. They denounced the aristocracy, made surreptitious references to the justice of the guillotine, and waited for the day when the tinder of revolution might be ignited once again.14
That moment came unexpectedly in January 1848. Furious that their public banquets had been outlawed, Parisian revolutionaries took to the streets, threw up hundreds of barricades, and called for the ouster of King Louis Philippe and his prime minister, François Guizot. After police shot into a crowd, killing more than fifty demonstrators, the man once hailed as the “king of the French” abdicated and fled to Britain. Out of the ruins of the “July monarchy,” the republican experiment was reborn in its French cradle.15
The Revolution of 1848 spread to most of the main capitals of continental Europe and into the rural countryside. Socialists played significant roles in many places, but this was essentially a movement of the educated middle class, whose motto was “Liberty, affluence and education for all.” Students, professionals, and military officers threw up barricades, waved tricolor flags, and demanded constitutions based on popular sovereignty. In London thousands of veteran Chartists, a workers political reform movement of the 1840s, led a public march to protest for universal manhood suffrage before being turned back by a massive show of government force.16
Hailed as “the springtime of peoples,” the Revolution of 1848 brought a brief resurgence of hope for republicanism in Europe. It did not last long. Weakened by internal divisions, the revolutionaries were defeated in one country after another. In France the Second Republic rested on a shaky coalition of radicals, socialists, constitutional monarchists, “pure republicans,” and liberal Catholics. Leaders decided to rally behind Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, as candidate for president. His famous name won stunning popular majorities at the polls. Republicans saw an early sign of betrayal in 1849 when, in order to firm up Catholic support, Louis-Napoleon sent French troops to Rome to topple the Republic of Rome, drive out Garibaldi’s army of Red Shirts, and restore Pope Pius IX to his temporal throne. Three years after being elected president, taking a page from his uncle’s book, Louis-Napoleon staged a coup d’état and had himself crowned Napoleon III. Under the Second Empire he called for the revival of Bonapartisme, the French civilizing mission conceived by his uncle under the First Empire. France, the birthplace of liberty, equality, and fraternity, became a land of repression, censorship, and imperialism under Napoleon III.17
Republican hopes for Germany died painfully in Berlin in early 1849. Prussia’s king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had conceded to popular demands for parliamentary representation, but his prime minister, Count Brandenburg, called in troops and declared a state of siege, and when revolutionary resistance spread he dismissed the assembly. By the spring of 1849, dissident revolutionaries were being rounded up and sent to prison at Spandau, on the edge of Berlin. Frederick Salomon, a young Prussian officer and architecture student, was among them but once officials realized they had mistaken him for his brother Karl, he was unexpectedly released in April 1849. Within days he and his brothers and sister fled to Bremen and then to America, making their way to Wisconsin, where the rest of the family would join them. The Salomon brothers would take up arms for republicanism again, but this time it would be in America.18
Thousands of other Forty-Eighters, as veterans of the Revolution became known, sought asylum in Switzerland, among the few republics to survive in Europe. Others fled to England, and tens of thousands made their way to America. All hopes for a liberal republican future for Germany had failed. Prussia would subsume the German states within a centralized authoritarian regime ruled by the “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck.
“The Revolution,” the ongoing battle against dynastic sovereignty, was defeated across Europe. After 1848 the republican experiment seemed to be settled, at least as to which side had the stronger brigades. Many European liberals who believed in individual freedom, equal rights, free trade, and constitutional limits on government powers were questioning whether large, modern nations could ever be successfully united and ruled without a king and church. For conservatives, the fury and contagion of revolution that spring of 1848 left them with an uneasy dread that it might be reignited at any time.19
12. Frederick Salomon. A German Forty-Eighter who commanded the all-German 9th Wisconsin Volunteers; he is the author’s great-great-grandfather. (WILLIAM D. LOVE, WISCONSIN IN THE WAR OF THE REBELLION, COURTESY WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
AFTER 1848 THE REPUBLICAN EXPERIMENT WAS UNDER SEVERE DURESS on the American side of the globe as well. Since independence the Spanish American republics had endured constant challenges from the combined forces of conservative landowners, military leaders, and the Catholic Church. By the 1860s most Latin American republics had succumbed to one or more cycles of peaceful constitutional democracy interrupted by pronunciamento (coup d’état), military dictatorship, civil war, and back again. The travails of Latin American republics gave critics all the proof they needed of the inherent instability of popular sovereignty, but they also presented undeniable evidence of a heroic, enduring commitment to republican ideals.20
There was a prevailing idea, shared by hopeful republicans as well as skeptical conservatives, that all the young American republics were little more than fragile experiments, subject to tumultuous discord and vulnerable to foreign intervention. Because the Latin American republics had declared independence during the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, there was good reason to expect that European powers would attempt to restore their American empires once they had subdued republicanism in Europe.
As the new independent Latin American republics emerged, British foreign secretary George Canning looked upon the Euro-American world taking shape in 1825 with grave apprehension. The great danger of the time, he warned, was the “division of the World into European and American, Republican and Monarchical” nations with “worn-out Governments” on one side and on the other side “youthful and stirring” republics, foremost among them the United States. Canning, naturally, wanted to bolster the worn-out system, not give way to the brash young spirit of republicanism. During the 1820s the British tried to nurture Latin American monarchies under Simón Bolívar in South America and Agustín Iturbide in Mexico. Both failed as bulwarks against what the British saw as the insidious spread of republicanism and democracy emanating from the United States.21
It was in response to European monarchical schemes for recolonizing the Americas that the United States had issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Monroe warned European nations that any further colonizing ventures in the American hemisphere would be regarded as an act of aggression against the United States. Later the Monroe Doctrine would become identified with American imperialism, but its origins were defensive and prorepublican, more a shield than a weapon.22
A glance at the map of the Western Hemisphere showed the United States surrounded by imperial monarchies: Britain in Canada and the Caribbean, Spain in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Russia in Alaska and the Pacific Coast. While the Monroe Doctrine did not challenge the presence of existing European empires, it discouraged further encroachment and was intended to protect Latin America’s frail republics from European enemies—that is, until the 1860s, when America’s Civil War suddenly rendered the United States powerless to keep European predators at bay.23
Until the American Civil War, republicans everywhere looked to the United States as the best working example of how a free people, unfettered by aristocracy and established religion, might live in peace and prosperity. The most remarkable measure of republican success in the United States was its stability. Since the Constitution was established in 1789, power had been transferred peacefully from one elected president and Congress to the next over more than seventy years, through thirty-six congressional and eighteen presidential elections. The coups d’état, dictatorships, assassinations, and civil wars that plagued the dynasties of the Old World and the republics of Latin America did not appear in the US political world. Elections were often acrimonious, but Americans accepted their outcome without resorting to the sword—until the election of 1860.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s widely influential book Democracy in America (1835) recognized America as the “great experiment,” a valiant “attempt to construct society upon a new basis.” “It was there,” Tocqueville wrote, “that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by history of the past.” “Sooner or later,” he thought, France and all of Europe “shall arrive, like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of condition.” “In America I saw more than America,” he told the world. “I sought there the image of democracy itself . . . in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”24
Other European visitors came to America seeking to make a case against it as a model for the future. They decried its violence and vulgarity and mocked its pieties and hypocrisies. The aristocratic classes of Europe, one British defender of the United States noted, always sought to put republicanism in the worst possible light: “They recognize America as the stronghold of republicanism. If they can bring it into disrepute here, they know that they inflict upon it the deadliest blow in Europe.”25
In 1861 European aristocrats were pointing to the conflagration of the so-called Great Republic as clear proof of democracy’s doom. Sir John Pakington, an arch Tory MP, treated the large audience gathered at the Worcester Shire Hall for the annual Conservative Association dinner to a vivid portrait of an America destroying itself. Look across the Atlantic, he told them, and “see the sudden and, extraordinary collapse of that attempt to promote and increase the happiness and welfare of mankind by governing them on the principles of extreme Democracy.” Let them ask any American, he taunted: “Had democracy succeeded? Had extreme democracy contributed to promote the happiness of mankind?” “Take warning from this country,” he admonished the cheering crowd.26
British conservatives took delight in invoking the American disaster as a means of rebuking the Radicals, led by John Bright, who had been calling for the democratization of Britain and a vast expansion of voting rights to include the working class. British journalist William Howard Russell explained it all in his October 1861 letter to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner in America: We are threatened with “Americanization which to our islands would be anarchy and ruin.” America’s troubles provide an ideal opportunity for politicians and writers to deal “deadly blows at Brightism.”27
Sir Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope, editor of the Saturday Review, took the lead in denouncing the United States for aggression against the valiant South. He gave a series of well-attended public lectures in which he applauded the South’s secession and happily forecast further division of the “once United States.” An impartial view of the map, he instructed his British listeners, shows that “the inevitable design of Providence” dictated that “the country should be divided into at least four great commonwealths,” the Northeast, Midland, South, and Pacific. Such division, he proposed, would create a balance of power in North America much like that of Europe (conveniently ignoring centuries of bloodshed in the Old World). Each new fragment would have to maintain a standing army to guard its frontiers, instead of there being one nation menacing Canada and Mexico. “Every other country in the world does the like, and it is time that our bumptious cousins” did the same instead of displaying such “childish petulance” unbecoming to a mature nation.28
Hope saw the South fighting “with one heart and mind for independence from a hateful thralldom” against that “hotbed of anarchy” in the North. All those who want to see peace must recognize the independence of the Confederacy, though he groused that Palmerston’s government was “too mealy-mouthed to say so.” His lacerating critique of America’s democracy met with loud cheers from English audiences, and published versions of the lectures went through multiple editions. America’s spectacular disaster became an object lesson on the errors of democracy that conservatives were happy to teach.29
The Palmerston government was rejoicing “at the threatened dismemberment of the American Union,” Malakoff grimly reported to New York Times readers in May 1861. “The feeling of hostility is no stronger against one section than the other; all they ask is to see each tearing the other to pieces.” Rumors spread that Palmerston, now in his late seventies, wanted to see another war with America before he died, “such is his hatred of the insolent Yankees.” Malakoff also accused Palmerston’s foreign secretary, Earl Russell, of actively “prolonging and embittering” the fratricidal war in America and doing all he could to rekindle Britain’s lingering hatred of its former colonies.30
Others in Britain’s Parliament marked the lesson that America’s debacle had for Britain. In a widely quoted comment, Tory MP Sir John Ramsden in May 1861 warned that Britain was “now witnessing the bursting of that great Republican bubble which had been so often held up to us as the model on which to recast our own English Constitution.” The first duty of the British government, he advised, ought to be to strengthen “the great distinction between the safe and rational, and tempered liberties of England, and the wild and unreflecting excesses of mob-rule which had too often desecrated freedom and outraged humanity in America.” When Ramsden’s comments were repeated in an open session of Parliament, they brought cheers from some MPs.31
The Earl of Shrewsbury, a venerable Tory MP, speaking before a large crowd of party faithful at Worcester in October 1861, congratulated Britain on its aristocratic government and drew disparaging comparisons between it and the extreme democracy running amok in America. “In America they saw Democracy on its trial, and they saw how it failed.” “Hear, hear!” the crowd cheered. The separation of North from South was inevitable, sooner or later, and the whole republican experiment would eventually face the cruel choice between “democracy and despotism.” Those before him now, he prophesied, “who lived long enough would . . . see an aristocracy established in America.”32
Such caustic remarks, coming from their English brethren in the freest country in Europe, puzzled American observers. “Monadnock,” pseudonym for George Nicholls, the New York Times correspondent in London, tried to explain that “Londoners amuse themselves” with our struggles. They seemed to take pleasure in accounts of the country’s troubles, which showed “what a gigantic humbug the United States have been.” Their enmity was “not directed against America merely,” he tried to assure Americans. Ramsden’s “bubble” remark was aimed at those advocating America’s democracy as a model for Britain. Their “dread of John Bright and his Democratic principles” was so deep that “they cannot resist the temptation to pound him, to sneer at him, and to hold him up to the British nation as the man who wished to exchange their beloved Queen, and their ancient and glorious aristocracy, for a system of government like ours.”33
Whatever their inspiration, such comments played a key role in framing the war as a contest between America’s troubled democracy and the British monarchy it had forsaken in 1776. The rhetoric set a tone of mutual hostility between two peoples and two systems of government. The idea of the war as a clash between political ideologies and systems of government originated with European conservatives and was only later taken up by those on the Left.
In London US minister Charles Francis Adams recognized the origins of anti-American sentiment: “The secret of the ill will to us here is to be traced to the terror of democratic movement entertained by the aristocracy. They feel it hanging over their heads, and think they may evade it by appealing to the example of our failure.” The question, he wrote later, “is of aristocracy and democracy. The former interest wishes us to fail because our success may ultimately be its ruin.”34
FRENCH CONSERVATIVES TOOK THEIR OWN LESSONS FROM THE DISASTER in America. They saw in it exactly what they had opposed in France’s violent history of revolutionary republicanism and positively gloated that la Grande République had finally arrived at the same sorry fate. “Your Republic is dead, and it is probably the last the world will see,” one French cabinet officer, Achille Fould, brazenly announced to an astonished American in the fall of 1861. “You will have a reign of terror, and then two or three monarchies.” The Marquis de Boissy told the French Corps législatif that he rejoiced at the news of civil war in America and prayed to God that both sides would be “irretrievably ruined.”35
French critics saw America’s democracy plagued by the same flaws that had doomed the first French Republic. In the North there was an aristocracy of wealth and another of “ultra puritan reverends” who led their flock beneath a mantle of hypocrisy and intolerance. Le Monde, an arch-monarchist journal, condemned the American experiment as a mistake from the beginning. Eighty years ago “the republican tree” had been planted; now “its spoiled fruits had fallen, and its roots were rotten.” Behold slaveholding liberals crying Vive la liberté!36
Those among Napoleon III’s French imperialist party were especially pleased to see the Great Republic pulled apart, and some were already hailing the result. French journalist Taxile Delord later wrote that some monarchists fantasized about “the White House transformed into a palace, and a deputation from Congress crossing the Atlantic to offer the crown of America to some available prince.” The enemies of America, French historian Henri Soret, put it neatly, included those from whatever party who “look upon ’89 as an evil date” and to whom ideas of liberty, equality, and self-government “have always meant horror.” Like their British counterparts, the French conservatives’ hatred for democracy, Soret concluded, made them “joyfully welcome” its destruction in America.37
Other European conservatives confirmed the view that popular sovereignty had come to its inevitable end in America. From Hamburg an American visitor reported that among intelligent circles, the crisis in America was understood to be the “natural consequence of unlimited freedom.” The experiment in a federal republic had finally come to its inevitable end, and “the day for a monarchy in America has at last arrived.”38
Spain’s Catholic press was equally happy to pronounce the death of “the Revolution” in its American crib. In an especially vitriolic editorial, Madrid’s El Pensamiento Español in September 1862 summarized the indictment: “In the model republic of what were the United States, we see more and more clearly of how little account is a society constituted without God, merely for the sake of men. . . . Look at their wild ways of annihilating each other, confiscating each other’s goods, mutually destroying each other’s cities, and cordially wishing each other extinct!” It mocked the “model republic” founded in rebellion and atheism, “populated by the dregs of all the nations in the world” and living “without law of God or man.” Now America’s republic stood doomed to “die in a flood of blood and mire” and serve as a rebuke to “the flaming theories of democracy.”39
THE FOREIGN VIEW OF AN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY RUN AMOK resonated with the sharp distinctions Confederate sympathizers made between the South’s aristocratic Anglo-Saxon landed gentry and the democratic “mobs” of the North polluted by the “scum” of Europe. James Spence, a Liverpool businessman and foremost defender of the Confederacy in Europe, explained that the US Constitution designed by George Washington and John Adams originally served as the basis for an aristocratic government by the nation’s best men. Jefferson, unfortunately, was off in Paris imbibing Jacobin principles and “cultivating the acquaintance of Thomas Paine.” The French “temple of infidelity was about to open its portals—in the purlieus of brooding socialism, in the coming shadow of the guillotine.” The Constitution of the conservative founding fathers, by Spence’s account, had been “subverted by this spirit of extreme democracy, imported from France.” The effect of universal suffrage had also been aggravated by the flood of foreign immigrants “placed in the command of political power, without either training or association to fit them for it.”40
“Universal suffrage tramples everything down to a dead level,” railed another British Confederate partisan. “Infidelity is rampant” and “newspapers are violent, untruthful, scurrilous to a degree which we cannot imagine in this orderly old land.”41
Many viewed Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 as the culmination of America’s descent into “extreme democracy” that witnessed unwashed immigrants and ignorant masses partaking of the “unqualified suffrage.” Southerners justified secession as the last resort in the face of “Black Republican” rule, an aspersion that resonated with European conservatives in flight from the terrors of “red republicanism.” Thus, black and red republicans were equally portrayed as incendiary revolutionaries whose aims were to level society and overturn natural hierarchies of race and class.42
Southern secessionists assumed that their hostility to extreme democracy would go over well with Europeans in the press and government circles, and some openly expressed preference for some form of monarchy. When London Times correspondent William Howard Russell toured the South in the spring and summer of 1861, he was treated again and again to ranting against universal suffrage, mob rule, and foreign influence in the North. What took him by surprise were the expressions of nostalgia for life under the British crown. His secessionist witnesses seemed especially eager to point to Abraham Lincoln as proof of a democracy gone so far astray that it would elect such a vulgar rustic frontiersman to the highest office of the land. The South, in contrast, was yet governed by its “best men.” All “the better classes in the South,” Russell reported, display the “utmost dread of universal suffrage and would restrict the franchise largely to-morrow” should they win independence.43
13. William Howard Russell, special correspondent to America for the London Times and veteran war correspondent. He gave the world strong impressions of a permanently ruptured Union. (MATHEW BRADY PHOTOGRAPH, NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
South Carolina’s leading men seemed especially eager to let Russell know of their feelings of kinship with the European aristocracy, whose landed wealth and habits of mastery alone bred the proper requisites for public leadership. Russell was fascinated by their repeated expressions “of regret for the rebellion of 1776 and the desire that if it came to the worst England would receive back her erring children or give them a prince under whom they could secure a monarchical form of government.” (Louisianans, he later learned in his travels, preferred reunion with their former “mother country,” France.) There was general agreement that this desire for reunion with Britain could not be practically gratified, at least not until independence was secured, Russell told his readers, “but the admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy and gentry, is undisguised and apparently genuine.”44
When Russell’s dispatches to the Times found their way back across the Atlantic and into print in the American press in the summer of 1861, Southerners hastily denied these pleas for monarchy or blamed them on a few eccentrics. Some even tried to quietly apply pressure through British diplomats to get Russell to issue a retraction—or at least not supply proof of his assertions. No doubt, they feared that such royalist sympathies would alienate their less aristocratic brethren in the border states and the West. Russell stood his ground. What he wrote, he told his editor, John Delane, in July 1861, “was in fact not half of what I had reason to state in reference to the pro-monarchy sentiments.”45
The idea that the South was in rebellion against democracy itself had been running through numerous Northern newspaper accounts well before Russell began his tour of the South in April 1861. “The South to Be a Monarchy,” a New York Tribune headline exclaimed on April 2, 1861. Based on testimony from a Tennessee Unionist, the story revealed secret plans to dupe the border states into joining the Confederacy under the terms of the old US Constitution, as modified in Montgomery in February. After a year under the provisional government, a constitutional convention would be called, the report revealed, and a new government would be formed “on a Monarchical basis.” This is what the secessionist envoys were to explain to European governments, the Tennessee Unionist alleged. Republican government was to be abolished and “the last vestige of Democracy to be destroyed under the new order of things.”46
In July 1861 New York’s Commercial Advertiser charged that at the heart of the rebellion was a “strong aversion to popular government and a sinister purpose of repudiating the principle that the people, through the ballot-box, must be their own rulers.” The right to secede was an invitation not only to anarchy but also to foreign incursion, for it meant that citizens claimed the right to “transfer allegiance to another government or system of government and thus bring to our very doors the corrupting and politically demoralizing influence of monarchy or despotism.” The “lurking fondness for such a system, already betrayed frequently and in many quarters,” points toward an alliance with European powers. Far more than separation was involved in the South’s rebellion, as this report would have it; America’s very existence as an independent republic was under siege.47
Similar reports were circulating in Europe. In early February 1861 from Paris, Malakoff issued an account of Southern monarchist leanings. It came from an entirely reliable source, he assured readers. Two “commissioners” from Mississippi and South Carolina had met with Napoleon III the previous August. They had implored the emperor to recognize the South should it secede and made it clear they were not only at odds with Republican Party ideas about ending slavery but also at war with republican principles of equality in general. They had complained that the radical “ultra Democratic” North was crushing the only class in America that “answers to the aristocratic classes of the Old World” and urged Europe to protect them. “Baiting their hook a little more heavily,” Malakoff continued, “they intimated that the Southern people rather inclined towards a monarchy, and would like a prince to reign over them,” Preferably a Bonaparte prince, so they flattered the French to believe. The South Carolina commissioner reminded His Majesty that his people “were largely descended from the Huguenots” and “felt a warm admiration of and affection for France as the ‘mother country,’” and Louisiana’s French legacy left it still a part of France in its culture and affections. In Paris another story broke in the summer of 1861 that Southern envoys had approached Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, the American-born nephew of Napoleon I, to serve as “military dictator” of the South, for which he would be awarded a “crown with cotton lining.”48
As rumors and denials of Confederate sympathy for monarchy continued to circulate, President Lincoln took the occasion of his first annual message to Congress in December 1861 to draw attention to this alarming report of Southern monarchism and to sharply define the Union’s cause as the defense of democracy. “It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people.”
Lincoln mentioned unspecified “abridgments” of democracy, alluding to the lack of an election for president and vice president, never mind the absence of plebiscites on secession itself in most states. Lincoln noted also the “labored arguments” from the rebels “to prove that large control of the people in government, is the source of all political evil.” Then he moved to the reports of Southern royalism: “Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people,” and to this he felt compelled to raise “a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.”49
These hints of monarchist sympathies were also disturbing to democratic elements within the South. Not least, Confederate soldiers had reason to question if they were fighting to undo their hard-earned democracy. Rumors that the Richmond government was alleged to be plotting the “founding of a monarchy” with full support from the slaveholding elite circulated with disturbing effect among Confederate soldiers during 1862. An Alabama newspaper alarmed readers with reports that Confederate officials were proposing to “take their chances” under the government of Napoleon III.50
Various schemes to unite the South with a European empire would surface again at the end of the war, some of them floated by the Richmond Sentinel, the semiofficial organ of the Confederate government. The states of the Confederacy, one of its editorials recommended, “ought to repeal the old Declaration of Independence and voluntarily revert to their original proprietors—England, France, and Spain and by them be protected from the North.” In January 1865 Governor George Allen of Louisiana sent representatives to meet with Napoleon III in what appeared to be negotiations for a separate peace by which Louisiana would seek the protection of its former mother country.51
Years later, evidence came to light of a mysterious unsigned letter sent in August 1860 to Sir Edward Archibald, British consul in New York. The letter invited Archibald to act as liaison in a plot to bring the Southern states back into the British Empire. Should the impending presidential election bring Lincoln and the Black Republicans to power, it explained, “we will either Secede from the Union and form a separate government or upon certain conditions at once return to our allegiance to Great Britain our Mother Country.” This plan, the anonymous royalist confided, had to be kept secret from the “gossiping newsmongers and babbling pothouse politicians,” but was quietly gaining force among the leading men of the South. “Select Dinner Parties come off every day throughout the whole South and not one of them ends without a strong accession to our forces. I have even heard some of them address each other by titles already.” The letter went on to offer Archibald a pivotal role in “accomplishing this grand object of returning to the dominion of our fathers’ Kingdom” by bringing this plan to the attention of Lord Lyons, the British ambassador to Washington.52
The author withheld his name but told Archibald to reply to “Benjamin” at the US Congress. The obvious suspect was Judah P. Benjamin, US senator from Louisiana, future secretary of state for the Confederacy, and, not incidentally, a British subject by birth. When the letter was published in the 1880s, Benjamin (who fled to England after the war) denied authorship, but he could not resist taking credit for planting the idea. It was all a ploy, he suggested, to win support among British aristocrats who were convinced of the failure of republicanism.53
These and other clandestine overtures took place in the shadows of diplomacy and rarely with a traceable link to official authority. Some rumors may have been concocted by journalists or planted by agents working for various governments. The idea of the South’s rebellion rising out of hostility to “extreme democracy,” “fanatical egalitarianism,” and “mob rule,” however, was not all fanciful exaggeration and slander. The antagonism between the egalitarian ideals underlying democracy and the ideals of fixed hierarchy and inherited privilege that upheld monarchy paralleled the conflict between free and slave labor. The hints of monarchy emanating from the South, whether genuine or concocted, played into the emerging narrative of an epic battle between systems of government and society about to take place in America.