• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The resolution of the Alabama claims brought the Civil War chapter of British-American history to a close. The prewar resentment between the two countries had finally played itself out and a new, less hysterical and suspicious relationship was forming. Thirteen years later, in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant could write about the two countries in his memoirs with hope instead of rancor. “England’s course towards the United States during the rebellion exasperated the people of this country very much against the mother country,” he wrote.

I regretted it. England and the United States are natural allies, and should be the best of friends. They speak one language, and are related by blood and other ties. We together, or even either separately, are better qualified than any other people to establish commerce between all the nationalities of the world.42

—

Almost immediately after the war, the British writer William Michael Rossetti (the brother of the artist Dante Gabriel) tried to explain its impact on English public opinion in an essay for the American Atlantic Monthly. Rossetti claimed never to have seen his compatriots so animated “in connection with any other non-English occurrences”: the entire country had divided over the merits of the Civil War, and whether abolition, democracy, the Union, or the right to self-determination had been the real principle at stake. Expressions such as “ ‘I am a Northerner,’ and ‘I am a Southerner’ ” were “as common on Englishmen’s lips as ‘I am a Liberal’ or ‘a Conservative.’ ”43 It has been the purpose of this book to restore to view the Anglo-American world that Rossetti described.

In 1925, the U.S. consulate in London collected information on British Civil War veterans for the Federal Pensions Bureau for the last time. By then, the largest survivors’ organization in the country, the American Civil War Veterans (London Branch), had dwindled from 140 members to a mere 24 ex-soldiers and 21 widows. But already in histories of the war it was as though the British volunteers in the Union and Confederate armies had never existed.44

This is not to say that Britain was rubbed out of the Civil War, far from it: 1925 was also the year that the first major study of Anglo-American relations during the war was published, E. D. Adams’s Great Britain and the American Civil War. After Adams came a trickle and then a flood of books on the subject as the role of international diplomacy gained ever greater prominence in the historiography of the Civil War. “No battle,” observed Allan Nevins, author of the eight-volume series Ordeal of the Union, in 1959, “not Gettysburg, not the Wilderness, was more important than the contest waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion.” The seemingly inexhaustible scholarly interest in these two areas continues to endorse the truth of Nevins’s insight. But studies of movements, forces, factors, and political calculations ultimately have to be anchored by individual experience. A World on Fire has been an attempt to balance the vast body of work on Anglo-American history in the 1860s with the equally vast material left behind by witnesses and participants in the war—to depict the world as it was seen by Britons in America, and Americans in Britain, during a defining moment not just in U.S. history but in the relations between the two countries.45

The histories of the British participants in what is and always will be an American story bring the sharper focus that often comes with distance. Though united by language and a shared heritage, the Britons in America were nevertheless strangers who happened to find themselves, for a variety of reasons, in the midst of great events. Their simultaneous involvement and detachment (even when their observations turned out to be misleading or mistaken) provide a special perspective on the war, one that by definition was not possible for native-born Americans.46 There were also many instances when the intimate access granted to British observers meant they were the only independent witnesses to record a particular