ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Confederates' presentation of the conservative world; the context of which they understood the American Civil War as part of a global crisis. Confederate journalists had long seen their conflict with the North in terms of universal values and global consequences. The Confederate fear was that the British policy was dictated by both fear of the United States and a wish to see both sides exhausted from the conflict. The Confederate proposition appeared at the same time that Conservatives rethought their foreign policy and hence called into being a conservative world, which would endure to World War One. Disraeli proclaimed in 1866 that the existence of the Empire was proof that 'the abstention of England from any unnecessary interference in the affairs of Europe is the consequence not of her decline of power but of her strength'. Tories worried about the conjunction of imperial vulnerability and the dangers of the United States.
