ABSTRACT
It is not the simple matter of money that is in view; it is the peril of committing the honour of this country to the assumption of an attitude, which it may be unable or unwilling permanently to maintain. The fateful discussion over intervention in the American Civil War has finally become serious perhaps inevitable. Once the news of it crossed the Atlantic, wrote Pulitzer winner Bruce Catton in his immortal Centennial History of the Civil War, it began to exert a powerful effect on the attitude of the British government. As historian Howard Jones has demonstrated, The Unions move against slavery so repelled the British that it encouraged the very intervention that the Lincoln administration sought to prevent. Thus it took the more practical, military members of Palmerston’s cabinet to point out and underscore how things had changed since the great Union mobilization. These would be next to useless against heavily armoured Federal gun turrets, and Palmerston knew it.
