ABSTRACT
The amount of rhetorical anxiety in the opening sentence of Anthony Trollope's North America (1862) is surprising. In November, with the Trollope's still in Boston, Captain Charles Wilkes (17981877) of the USS San Jacinto boarded the British mail-packet Trent, removed the two Confederate commissioners on board, and subsequently caused a diplomatic rift that brought the United States and Britain to the brink of war. Like many of his views on America and democracy, Trollope's opinion of Lincoln, whose ability to live up to the rigors of office was questioned widely in Britain, and who was also seen as an example of democracy consequences, is conflicted. Many in Britain thought that the Lincoln administrations suspension of habeas corpus was the final blow announcing the end of American democracy. For Trollope, slavery was the source of the fundamental ideological differences between the Southern states that embraced it and the Northern states that rejected it.
