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Changing British Attitudes towards the United States in the 1880s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

H. A. Tulloch
H. A. Tulloch
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Extract

On returning to England in 1900 after an absence of some thirty-two years, James Ford Rhodes was much surprised by a number of changes he observed, and more particularly by the novel attitude of a number of newspapers and journals which had previously reflected more traditional assumptions and beliefs. Radicals, from Paine and Cobbett, Bentham and the Mills to Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School had traditionally identified America as the precursor of the new millennium. In contrast to this radical tradition was a conservative counter-theme that insisted that within its revolutionary and republican origins lay the seeds of American self-destruction. All such convictions seemed confirmed by the civil war, and The Times under Delane – the apogee of this conservative tradition – continued to prophesy the imminent collapse of the Union throughout most of the war. Yet in 1901 Rhodes noticed a far more sympathetic approach to American matters by the conservative Times and Spectator, and their formerly denigrating tone now echoed ironically in the pages of the radical Speaker. The purpose of this article is to try to explain some of the intellectual origins of this fundamental realignment, with reference to changing English interpretations of the American race, of the American revolution and of the American constitution, particularly as reflected in James Bryce's American Commonwealth, the classic exposition of this reinterpretation. This realignment was effected by a small body of academics, jurists and intellectuals whose writings in learned journals, legal textbooks and works of comparative politics lacked extensive appeal.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 825 - 840
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Cf. C. P. Crook's excellent American democracy in English politics 1815–1850 (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar. Andrew Harvie's ‘Ideology and home rule: James Bryce, A. V. Dicey and Ireland, 1880–1887’ (English Historical Review, April 1976, pp. 298–314)Google Scholar, touches on some similar ground.

2 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Nov. 1900, pp. 316–17.

3 Goldwin Smith (1832–1910) and Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92) both went up to Oxford in 1841, served as Bryce's mentors when he arrived at Trinity College from Glasgow University in 1857, and were Regius professors of modern history from 1858–66 and 1884–92 respectively. Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822–88) was Corpus professor of jurisprudence at Oxford 1869–78, then master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. John Emerich Dalberg-Acton (1834–1902) was a close friend and liberal colleague of Bryce's, and Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge after 1895. James Bryce (1838–1922) entered parliament as member for Tower Hamlets in 1880 and served as Regius professor of Civil Law at Oxford (1870–93), visiting the United States for the first time in 1870 in the company of his closest friend Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922), Vinerian professor of English law and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (1882–1909).

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28 Acton to Bryce, 25 March 1889, MS Bryce 1, where Acton insists that the American example ‘affirms the legitimacy of revolution’; EHR, April 1889, p. 395, where Acton again insists that the example of the founding fathers ‘presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms’. The great Chief Justice referred to is John Marshall, third Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835.

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51 Cf. e.g. Max Beloff's contribution to A century of conflict, 1848–88, ed. by Gilbert, Martin (London, 1966), pp. 151–71Google Scholar, and Watt, D. C., Personalities and policies (London, 1965), pp. 19–52Google Scholar, who, in exploding the myth of the ‘special relationship’ recognize its potency. Both pay less attention to the more fundamental recognition of interests and values which have absorbed Anglo-American relations into the more conspicuous and lasting’ free world’ identity.