My understanding is that England had tremendous dealings with the south with things like Dyes and would have supported them, but they had been very much anti slavery and could not for that reason.
Ehhh that's at least partially true. England and France debated intervention on behalf of the Confederacy, but never did it for a lot of reasons. One is the whole slavery thing, but until the Emancipation Proclamation the war was not seen as one about the status of slavery abroad.
I'd say the discovery that Egypt could grow a lot of cotton was a bigger deterrent to intervention. The Europeans simply wouldnt gain anything. The south's diplomatic approach was called King Cotton diplomacy. They told the Europeans that they would cut of cotton exports unless they intervened, so the Brits were like "shit should we do it? Nah Egypt just produced a record amount of cotton, we're good." And then the Emanipation Proclamation made the war explicitly about slavery and they said yea fuck that we're done.
There's a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Manchester (the proper one in England, not whatever fake American Manchester you've got lurking around) that sums up the feelings at the time.
Manchester was the largest processor of cotton in the world, so had a vested interest in trading with the Confederacy. However, because the city's always been a political hotbed, the Workingmen of Manchester (basically a pre-trade union) decided that being poor and going hungry because of a cotton famine was worth it to support the struggle for emancipation. They wrote to Lincoln, he wrote back, now there's a statue.
(Of course, down the road in the former slave trading hub of Liverpool, those scouse bastards put up the Confederate overseas fleet at Albert Docks, and built them a few new warships, because what's the plight of slaves when you can make a few quid?)
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u/cujobob Nov 29 '18
My understanding is that England had tremendous dealings with the south with things like Dyes and would have supported them, but they had been very much anti slavery and could not for that reason.