oked
through Lincoln's express disavowal of any intention to interfere with
slavery, and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery,
that slavery was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and
behind the Northern slogan about preserving the Union. They saw and
they stuck. "Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of
mankind, has there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy."
France was likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have
liked to recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an
empire in Mexico, behind which lay hostility to our Democracy. He wished
us defeat; but he was afraid to move without England, to whom he made
a succession of indirect approaches. These nearly came to something
towards the close of 1862. It was on October 7th that Gladstone spoke
at Newcastle about Jefferson Davis having made a nation. Yet, after all,
England didn't budge, and thus held Napoleon back. From France in
the end the South got neither ships nor recognition, in spite of his
deceitful connivance and desire; Napoleon flirted a while with Slidell,
but grew cold when he saw no chance of English cooperation.

Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of
influence and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith,
Leslie Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them.
All from the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for
us. The Union and Emancipation Society was founded. "Your Committee,"
says its final report when the war was ended, "have issued and
circulated upwards of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and
tracts... and nearly five hundred official and public meetings have
been held..." The president of this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty
thousand dollars in the cause, and at a time when times were hard and
fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in distress through our blockade.
Another member of the Society, Mr. Thompson, writes of one of the public
meetings: "... I addressed a crowded assembly of unemployed operatives
in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours
about the Slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in
the expression of their willingness to suffer all hardships consequent
upon a want of cotton, if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern
despotism might be promoted. All honor to the half million of our
working populatio