Lincoln's Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months that Gave America the Emancipation

[Thomas Thorne]

I am not as confident as Eva Elisabeth that there was no need to worry about Anglo-Franco intervention in the American Civil War after resolution of the Trent affair.

On the same day as the battle of Antietam-9/17/1862-Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, proposed to Prime Minister Palmerston "that if the North refused to negotiate{on the basis of separation}we ought ourselves to recognise the Southern States as an independent state." According to Gary W Gallagher's "The Confederate War ", parts of which are available in Google Books, the Palmerston cabinet was moving toward adoption of this policy which depended upon Confederate military success.

Recognition of the Confederacy would have provoked a United States declaration of war on the offending state.

What is so puzzling about this is ,contrary to a venerable historical tradition, how little support the CSA enjoyed among members of the British parliament. See Amanda Foreman's "A World on Fire."
Tom