It was the misfortune of the South that its contention for its own right of self-government was inseparably linked in the minds of men abroad with the cause of human bondage, against which British public sentiment revolted.
Great Britain is not a republic in our sense of the word, but under all its forms of monarchy, and with all its embarrassments of aristocratic privilege, its people actually and absolutely rule.
Its people strongly sympathized with the Southern claim of a right of autonomy. They still more strongly sympathized with themselves in their desire to cripple their greatest and most threatening commercial and industrial rival, and to get all the cotton they needed for their mills. They wanted the war to end quickly. They wanted the Southern ports opened to their ships, and the Southern cotton to be accessible again for their use. They wanted the American Union broken up. They wanted to trade with the Southern States upon equal terms or with a positive advantage over their New England competitors. But even for such sake they were unwilling to lend the power of Great Britain to the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere upon earth.
There was the fatal miscalculation of the Southerners. They reckoned with British trade interests, with British and other European political prejudice, but they did not sufficiently reckon with that British hostility to slavery which--whatever the political or trade considerations might be--would not consent to any action on the part of a British government which should even seem to make Great Britain responsible for the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere.
Thus the British government was restrained by the all-dominating British sentiment from interfering, and France did not venture to interfere alone or even with the probability of Austrian or Prussian support.
There was Russia to be reckoned with, also, and as later official publications show, the Czar not only set his face against intervention in behalf of the South, but at one critical time actually sent his fleets to American waters to menace any and every power that might assume to interpose to the detriment of the United States.
At the time, however, the Manassas victory gave great and well-justified occasion for the fear at the North that Great Britain and France, backed by the other western European powers, might be persuaded to interpose in behalf of the Confederates. For a time, therefore, the outlook for the Union was a very gloomy one, but the youth of the country continued to enlist by tens and scores of thousands, and in spite of the hostility of a political party strongly opposed to the administration and to the war itself, Mr. Lincoln's government went on with its preparations for prosecuting the war with vigor, to its predestined end.