Richard Cobden - American Civil War

American Civil War

When the American Civil War threatened to break out in the United States, Cobden was deeply distressed. But after the conflict became inevitable his sympathies were wholly with the Union, because of the perception that the Confederacy was fighting for slavery. His great anxiety, however, was that the British nation should not be committed to any unworthy course during the progress of that struggle. When relations with America were becoming critical and menacing in consequence of the depredations committed on American commerce by vessels issuing from British ports, actions that would lead to the post-war Alabama Claims, he brought the question before the House of Commons in a series of speeches of rare clearness and force.

Read more about this topic:  Richard Cobden

Famous quotes containing the words civil war, american, civil and/or war:

    The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)

    It is a war against the pines, the only real Aroostook or Penobscot war.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)