ABSTRACT
The British Economist in September 1861 predicted that the dissolution of the Union will prove good to the world, to Great Britain, and probably in the end to America herself. A prominent British military historian characterised the American Civil War as the greatest struggle of the nineteenth century. The most destructive conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War and that Europeans are inclined to forget that the rise of the United States to world power is the greatest historical event of the nineteenth century. Southern leaders by contrast naturally looked to Great Britain for help during the Civil War were counting on the Royal Navy to break the Yankee blockade and resume the cotton trade which had made both countries filthy rich by 1860. The relatively recent experience of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars suggested that despotism was in fact a natural by-product of rampant democracy.
