A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [22]
In 1848, the discovery of gold in California led to a rush of settlers—more than eighty thousand of them in a matter of months—and the urgent need to accept the newly acquired territory as the thirty-first state so that law and order could be imposed. But the Southern states would not agree to the addition (since the Californians were demanding to be admitted as a free state) until they had secured a series of concessions. The most bitterly contested of these was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed “owners” to pursue and recapture their escaped “property” in whatever state he or she happened to be hiding. Graphic newspaper reports—of families torn apart, of law-abiding blacks dragged in chains back to their erstwhile masters—raised an outcry in the North. Several Northern states passed personal liberty laws to try to circumvent the act; in some towns, there was violent resistance to the federal agents who arrived in search of fugitive slaves; and the “underground railroad,” with its vast network of safe houses from Louisiana to the Canadian border, received many more volunteers.
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The domestic and political turbulence during 1850 was one of the reasons why the United States’ pavilion at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 displayed so few objects compared to those of other nations. The suspicion among Americans that Britain had put on the exhibition simply to show off its status as the richest country in the world had also diminished enthusiasm for taking part. Yet even with a fraction of the exhibits presented by the Great Powers, the American pavilion still won 5 of the 170 Council medals (admittedly, France won 56). The American photography contingent, led by Mathew Brady, won first, second, and third prize.1.5 The great number of American tourists and businessmen who visited the exhibition brought more contact between the citizens of the two countries than at any other time during the century. Britons now realized the extent to which the United States had developed separately from the mother country. Americans not only had different accents and wore different fashions; their choice of words and phrases sounded quite foreign. They said “I guess” instead of “I suppose,” and “Let’s skedaddle” instead of “Shall we go,” and they called con men “shysters,” an epithet entirely new to English ears.12 It was their strange and different mannerisms that inspired Tom Taylor to compose Our American Cousin.
Taylor also wrote the popular 1852 stage version of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The English took to heart the story of the saintly slave whose goodness and humanity upstage a succession of masters until his murder by the evil Simon Legree. In 1852, its first year of publication, the book sold a million copies in Britain—compared to 300,000 in the United States.13 Every respectable British household owned a copy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was allegedly the first novel Lord Palmerston had read in thirty years, and whether it was the effects of the long abstinence or the allure of the book, he read it from cover to cover three times.14 The depressing and grisly portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin articulated what the British had long suspected was the truth—despite the South’s self-depiction as an agrarian paradise of courtly manners, charming plantations, and contented slaves. Few Britons had ever seen how slaves really lived, unlike the celebrated British actress Fanny Kemble, whose marriage to Pierce Butler, a Southern slave owner, fell apart after they moved to his Georgia plantation in 1838. They divorced acrimoniously in 1849, with Butler holding Fanny’s daughters hostage until they turned twenty-one.
The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin led to a renaissance of antislavery clubs in Britain, after they had tottered along in a state