Great Britain and the American Civil War

British Opinion and Policy, 1860-1865

Ephraim Douglass Adams

• Publisher: Aeneas Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9785486002793
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How England nearly recognised the Confederacy, and why she did not: the cotton famine, the Trent affair, the Alabama, the mill-hands of Lancashire who starved and petitioned for the North anyway. Ephraim Adams worked in the British archives and published in 1925, when the diplomatic papers were finally open. It remains the standard account of the closest the war came to becoming a European one. Sixty plates of Homer, Turner and their contemporaries carry the storm, the harbour and the American landscape that shaped how Britain saw the war.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Preface
• Chapter I. Backgrounds
• Chapter II. First Knowledge of Impending Conflict, 1860-61
• Chapter III. The Development of a Policy, May, 1861
• Chapter IV. British Suspicion of Seward
• Chapter V. The Declaration of Paris Negotiation
• Chapter VI. Bull Run; Consul Bunch; Cotton and Mercier
• Chapter VII. The “Trent”
• Chapter VIII. The Blockade
• Chapter IX. Enter Mr. Lindsay
• Chapter X. King Cotton
• Chapter XI. Russell’s Mediation Plan
• Chapter XII. The Emancipation Proclamation
• Chapter XIII. The Laird Rams
• Chapter XIV. Roebuck’s Motion
• Chapter XV. The Southern Independence Association
• Chapter XVI. British Confidence in the South
• Chapter XVII. The End of the War
• Chapter XVIII. The Key-Note of British Attitude
• About the Author