Along with his friend and parliamentary colleague John Bright, the reformer Richard Cobden was one of the leading British supporters of the Union cause. In the fall of 1862 the Liberal government led by Lord Palmerston had considered attempting to mediate an end to the American Civil War, but had decided to wait until the military situation was clearer. Cobden wrote about the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation to his friend Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts Radical Republican who chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
ATHENÆUM CLUB
LONDON, 13 Feby., 1863
Private
My dear Sumner.
If I have not written to you before it is not because I have been indifferent to what is passing in your midst. I may say sincerely that my thoughts have run almost as much on American as English politics. But I could do you no service, and shrunk from occupying your overtaxed attention even for a moment. My object in now writing is to speak of a matter which has a practical bearing on your affairs.
You know how much alarmed I was from the first lest our government should interpose in your affairs. The disposition of our ruling class, and the necessities of our cotton trade, pointed to some act of intervention and the indifference of the great mass of our population to your struggle, the object of which they did not foresee and understand, would have made intervention easy indeed popular if you had been a weaker naval power. This state of feeling existed up to the announcement of the President’s emancipation policy. From that moment our old anti-slavery feeling began to arouse itself, and it has been gathering strength ever since. The great rush of the public to all the public meetings called on the subject shows how wide and deep the sympathy for personal freedom still is in the hearts of our people. I know nothing in my political experience so striking as a display of spontaneous public action as that of the vast gathering at Exeter Hall when without one attraction in the form of a popular orator the vast building, its minor rooms and passages and the streets adjoining were crowded with an enthusiastic audience. That meeting has had a powerful effect on our newspapers and politicians. It has closed the mouths of those who have been advocating the side of the South. And I now write to assure you that any unfriendly act on the part of our government, no matter which of our aristocratic parties is in power, towards your cause is not to be apprehended. If an attempt were made by the government in any way to commit us to the South, a spirit would be instantly aroused which would drive our government from power. This I suppose will be known and felt by the Southern agents in Europe and if communicated to their government must I should think operate as a great discouragement to them. For I know that those agents have been incessantly urging in every quarter where they could hope to influence the French and English governments the absolute necessity of recognition as a means of putting an end to the war. Recognition of the South, by England, whilst it bases itself on negro slavery, is an impossibility, unless indeed after the Federal government have recognized the Confederates as a nation.
So much for the influence which your emancipation policy has had on the public opinion of England. But judging from the tone of your press in America it does not seem to have gained the support of your masses. About this however I do not feel competent to offer an opinion. Nor, to confess the truth, do I feel much satisfaction in treating of your politics at all. There appears to me great mismanagement I had almost said incapacity in the management of your affairs, and you seem to be hastening towards financial and economical evils in a manner which fills me with apprehension for the future.
When I met Frémont in Paris two years ago just as you commenced this terrible war I remarked to him that the total abolition of slavery in your northern Continent was the only issue which could justify the war to the civilized world. Every symptom seems to point to this result. But at what a price is the negro to be emancipated! I confess that if then I had been the arbiter of his fate I should have refused him freedom at the cost of so much white men’s blood and women’s tears. I do not however blame the North. The South fired the first shot, and on them righteously falls the malediction that “they who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” And it seems unlikely that after all the much despised “nigger,” and not the potentates and statesmen of Europe will be the final arbitrator in the great struggle.
Let me have a line from you when your Senatorial duties have ceased on the 4th, and afford you a little leisure.
Believe me,
Yours very truly
R. COBDEN.