ABSTRACT
This chapter examines British accounts of the problems white mass suffrage created for gradual emancipation and black freedom in the United States. It reveals the reality of emancipation and the consequent prospect of African-American enfranchisement also highlighted the dangers of democracy to many British observers. The chapter explores these impulses, explaining how many Britons squared racist voting requirements with colour-blind political equality in their own empire. Both Kemble and the London Review author needed to explain the relationship between American slavery and American democracy to champion their favoured side in the Civil War. Popular books and periodicals of the period reveal the strange ways that fears about the poor quality of white American voters informed British critiques of America's democracy of race. A consistent current of British opinion condemned overt discrimination on the basis of skin colour, but welcomed the mass exclusion of blacks from citizenship on the basis of supposedly meritocratic qualifications.
