ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the liberal critique of America, exploring why a progressive political culture proved so resistant to democratic thought. It considers the critique during the American Civil War, and its influence on the making of the Second Reform Act. The chapter then, takes a different view, expressing that the critique of democracy gained in both force and urgency from the experience of the Civil War. British political culture in the mid-nineteenth century was liberal and even populist; but it was emphatically not democratic. The Morrill Tariff shocked British liberals, as much for the provocation it offered to Southern exporters as for the danger it posed to their own commercial interests. Protection had almost split the Union in the past, and the new tariff had been opposed by all the seceding States. The tariff was signed into law by President Buchanan, but was associated in Britain with the Republican Party and the North.
