Raamin Mostaghimi
AFP Section 1
2/14/07

Summary of McPherson's "British Realpolitik Trumps 'King Cotton'"

McPherson's essay essentially lays out the power politics motives behind international during the civil war. This is a viewpoint not often visited in a standard US History class, and as such was very interesting to me, but there were a few points that I found of more interest than others, and these are the points I'll visit in more detail.
The main point I found interesting was the notion that most of Europe seemed to hold that the war was inevitably going to be won by the South. This runs contrary to everything I was taught in all of my history classes, that despite the superiority of the generals of the South, the North's material advantage was so strong that there was essentially no chance that they'd lose. The South most likely realized this (at least to some degree) and it was for this reason that they were so persistent in trying to gain official recognition of statehood and mediation from European powers. Without some sort of European support, there was no way that the South could even hope to stand a chance against the sheer material the North had, and they knew this, but Europe didn't seem to.
Whether this is a failure simply of European intelligence gathering (which I would assume is really not something too developed at this point in history) or if it was willful blindness on the part of idealistic individuals was not really explained in the article, but I'd guess it was a little of both. European sympathies would have lain squarely in the lap of the "revolutionaries" (especially in France) EXCEPT for the fact that the South supported slavery. As stated in this article, as long as the Union kept the scope of the war away from abolition, the Europeans would be neutral. As soon as Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, however, the tables turned dramatically in favor of the Union.
Another extremely interesting set of facts was the sheer number of times the European powers (notably Britain) came to within an inch of intervention. The seizure of the two CSA ambassadors is the particular instance that comes to mind as the most egregious of these occurrences, and also the most interesting. Seward's sheer testicular fortitude in standing up to the might of the British Naval Fleet in the face of possible blockade and invasion from Canada is without parallel, and really should have been exemplified in a general as well as a Secretary of State. The fact that the US had to return the ambassadors notwithstanding, the very fact that Seward and Lincoln sent the British back home eating crow is a major victory in and of itself.