During the 1860s, federal intervention to alter patterns of southern landholding was a distinct possibility, but ultimately land redistribution lay outside the boundaries of the post-Civil War settlement. This thesis examines the evolution of wartime attitudes both towards confiscation, and to the related policy question' of how to transform four million ex-slaves into effective free workers. During the second half of the war these two issues became increasingly intertwined, as Republicans were prompted, by re-evaluations of British West Indian emancipation and the trajectory of free labour experiments in the Union-occupied South, to regard the freedmen as potentially effective free labourers and independent farmers. Despite a surge in support for confiscation in early 1864, political and legal obstacles continued to prevent the adoption of a radical and permanent policy towards southern lands. The prospect of former slaves as landowners also met with conflicting responses. Some argued that economic independence was the most effective stimulus to the freedmen's, acceptance of free labour mores, while others believed that access to land brought with it too much freedom: fr~ed slaves could only be brought to intemalise the values of hard work, ambition and self-reliance through wage labour under the supervision and guidance of whites. These two approaches to post-emancipation policy, along with attitudes towards the broader question of confiscation, reveal that free labour ideology was being contested even before the end of the war, and had begun to fracture prior to the political and social conflicts of Reconstruction. Furthermore, the steps which Republicans had taken to provide ex-slaves with access to land demonstrated the appeal of the arguments developed by supporters of land redistribution, but also revealed the persistent power of the more conservative, wagelabour centred position.

The misconception has persistently lingered on that during the Civil War which tore America apart between the springs of 1861 and 1865 cotton-starved Lancashire refused to support the slave-holding Confederacy. Few have questioned the assumption that even those who were destitute asked only for a continuation of neutrality. Hitherto unscanned press sources reveal the falsity of this assumption. The desire for neutrality existed but was insignificant when compared with the massive preference for giving aid to the South. Huge meetings in the cotton towns and numerous petitions to Parliament pleaded for British recognition of the South or mediation on her behalf so that the war would quickly be ended and the mills reopen. Editorials pounded out the same requests. But the government only listened to voices they wanted to hear, voices such as those of Richard Cobden and John Bright sagely advising non-involvement and mistakenly taken as typical of Lancashire. Contrary to belief, the majority in Lancashire did not sympathise with Abraham Lincoln and glory in his Emancipation Proclamation. The President was dismissed as a nonentity and his Proclamation as a calculated strategic gesture. Only the non cotton regions supported Lincoln and the North. Elsewhere mistrust of the North and determination to aid the South were supreme, correlating in strength to the intensity of the distress. The unique efforts of Liverpool secured some cotton by breaking the blockade imposed by the North on Southern ports. Pressure from Lancashire for an official denial of the legality of the blockade was ignored as completely as that for any kind of intervention on behalf of the South. This indifference only caused Lancashire to increase demands for British interposition during the final year of the war. The supposed passive silence of Lancashire was no more than a myth.

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This thesis is an examination of the place of the Bible in Abraham Lincoln's political career. Lincoln is one of the most celebrated historical figures of the past 200 years, and his speeches and writings are a major part of his legacy. Lincoln employed the text and message of the Bible more than any other American President. This research examines the entire contents of the Collected Works, in order to better understand his engagement with the Bible. Lincoln used the Bible with considerable skill, seeking to apply it to situations of national importance; he was unpredictably selective in his use of the Bible, but generally he chose material that would add what he considered to be the highest authority to his delivery. The issue of Lincoln and the Bible is usually consumed by the endless debate regarding the nature of his personal beliefs. This research concentrates upon his use of the Bible; the material he selected and the way that he used it are evaluated in the light of both earlier and recent scholarship. During the examination of Lincoln's unprecedented use of the Bible, understanding is sought of the question of essentiality. What role did the Bible play in Lincoln's career? Was it simply literary adornment of his compositions or something profound? This thesis will offer the suggestion that Lincoln's use of the Bible was an essential influence upon his illustrious career and legacy. This research has discovered new material that calls into question the claims of William Herndon, which have deflected historians away from the possibility that Lincoln's message, his view of the American Civil War and the Republic's destiny would have been different without his use of the Bible.

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No description available.

This thesis analyses Union and Confederate propaganda in Britain during the American Civil War. The London American, founded in 1860, became an unofficial Union propaganda journal after the outbreak of the conflict. In 1862, two doors down Fleet Street, it was joined by the Confederate-funded newspaper, The Index. Examination for the first time of subscriber lists shows that the often anti-British tone of the former limited its appeal beyond radical groups. The Index, however, was able to use propaganda gifts such as General Butler's occupation of New Orleans in order to build sympathy amidst British aristocratic and parliamentary elites at the highest level. Despite the lack of support for slavery amongst these elites, that sympathy is shown to persist after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederacy needed propaganda in order to win the hearts and minds in Europe much more than did Lincoln's administration. Indeed, lack of external financing and internal embezzlement led to The London American's collapse in 1863. Meanwhile, The Index was able instead to become the mouthpiece of the Southern Independence Association, a well-connected society which emerged as the war dragged on, trying to persuade Palmerston's Government to offer some form of mediation or intervention. It continued to have propaganda opportunities, such as the Saxon Affair. However, despite the enormity of the offence given to Britain by such episodes, they are shown to have elicited rather different responses from the Government compared to the much more well-known Trent Affair two years earlier. This reflected the changed naval balance between Britain and the United States, a principal factor in ensuring the ultimate failure of The Index. It is shown that these two newspapers cast new light on various under-considered issues, including Union recruitment in Ireland, the Confederate Cotton Loan, and Anglo-American relations more widely in this period.

This is a study of the pursuit of African American colonization as a state and latterly a federal policy during the period c. 1850-65. Historians generally come to the topic via an interest in the Civil War and especially in Lincoln, but in so doing, they saddle it with moral judgment and the burden of rather self-referential debates. The thesis argues that, whilst the era’s most noteworthy ventures into African American colonization did indeed emerge from the circumstances of the Civil War, and from the personal efforts of the president, one can actually offer the freshest insights on Lincoln by bearing in mind that colonization was, above all, a real policy. It enjoyed the support of other adherents too, and could be pursued by various means, which themselves might have undergone adjustment over time and by trial and error. Using an array of unpublished primary sources, the study finds that Lincoln and his allies actively pursued colonization for a longer time, and with more persistence in the face of setbacks, than scholars normally assume. The policy became entangled in considerations of whether it was primarily a domestic or an international matter, whilst other overlapping briefs also sabotaged its execution, even as the administration slowly learned various lessons about how not to go about its implementation.By early 1864, the resulting confusion, as well as the political fallout from the fiasco of the one expedition to go ahead, curtailed the president’s ability to continue with the policy. There are strong suggestions, however, that he had not repudiated colonization, and possibly looked to revive it, even as he showed a tentative interest in alternative futures for African Americans. This thesis makes a case against unrealistically binary thinking, anachronistic assumptions, abused hindsight, sweeping interpretive frameworks, and double standards of evidentiary assessment respecting a technically imperfect and ethically awkward policy.

Working within the field of nineteenth century transatlantic history this thesis takes as its starting point British attempts to engage with the American Civil War. It emphasizes the historiographical oversights within the current scholarship on this topic which have tended to downplay the significance of antebellum British commentators in constructing an image of the United States for their readers which was highly regionalized, and which have failed to recognize the antebellum heritage of the tropes deployed during the Civil War to describe the Union and Confederacy. Drawing on the accounts of over fifty British pre-war commentators and supplemented by the political press, monthly magazines and personal correspondence, in addition to significant amounts of Civil War propaganda this thesis contends that the understanding of the British literate classes of the conflict was part of a continuum. It equally emphasizes that by measuring the reception of texts among the literate public it is possible to ascertain the levels of British understanding of different aspects of the American nation and its sections in this period. It aims to demonstrate that any attempt to understand the conflict in a British context must adequately reflect the long-standing image of the United States as being characterized by discrete regions with particular social, cultural, economic and political identities. At the same time, it makes clear that pre-war discussions of the United States as a nation did not preclude the use of sectional identities; in fact the tropes of the pre-war United States themselves came to be highly sectionalized during the conflict. This thesis, therefore, places the American Civil War in both a transatlantic framework and emphasizes the extensive chronological span of British engagements with American sectionalism in order to explain the occasionally counter-intuitive and often confusing attitude of the British towards the conflict.

This thesis places the Democratic party at the centre of the Reconstruction narrative and investigates the transformation of the antebellum Democracy into its postbellum form. In doing so, it addresses the relative scarcity of scholarship on the postwar Democrats, and provides an original contribution to knowledge by (a) explaining how the party survived the Civil War and (b) providing a comprehensive analysis of an extended process of internal conflict over the Democracy's future. This research concludes that while the Civil War caused a crisis in partisanship that lasted until the mid-1870s, it was Democrats' underlying devotion to their party, and flexibility over party principle that allowed the Democracy to survive and reestablish itself as a strong national party. Rather than extensively investigating state-level or grassroots politics, this thesis focuses on the party's national leadership. It finds that public memories of the party's wartime course constituted the most significant barrier to rebuilding the Democratic national coalition. Following an overview of the fractures exposed by civil war, the extent of these splits is assessed through an investigation of sectional reconciliation during Presidential and Radical Reconstruction. The analysis then shifts to explore competing visions of the party's future during the late 1860s and early 1870s when public confidence in the Democracy hit its lowest point. While the early years of Reconstruction opened the party to the possibility of disintegration, by the mid-1870s Democrats had begun to adopt a stronger national party organisation. Through a coherent national strategy that turned national politics away from issues of race and loyalty and towards those of economic development and political reform, while simultaneously appealing to the party's history, national Democratic leaders restored public confidence in the Democracy, silenced advocates of the creation of a new national party, and propelled the party back to power in 1884.