ABSTRACT
One reason for English sympathy crossed party lines: Whigs and Tories alike admired Southerners' style. In the South portrayed by our increasingly international popular culture, the aristocrats have become villains or comic figures, and the white plain folk are likely to be vicious or grotesque—at best, amusing. About the only admirable figures identifiable as Southerners are the working-class heroes and heroines of sports, country music, and old Burt Reynolds movies. There were several reasons for that, as Sheldon Vanauken points out in his study, The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy. Liberals' support for free trade and their sympathy for a small nation fighting for its liberty combined with longstanding Tory disdain for American democracy to guarantee that few among "the educated million" had a good word for the North. So successfully had the Lincoln administration argued that war was not to free the slaves but to preserve the Union that even many abolitionists favored the Confederate cause.
