In a recent article on the history of race and liberal thought, The Economist wrote that while they had always opposed slavery, during the American civil war they made the bizarre argument that the south winning would likely result in Abolition sooner than if the north won. The article doesn't say anything more about this. What was the rationale for this belief? Did many people, including those in the US, believe this?
In 1862, The Economist wrote:
It is because we wish well to the Africans [(referring to slaves)] - because we are ardently bent upon their immediate improvement and their ultimate emancipation - that we wish for a dissolution of that Union which has hitherto crushed them down by its banded, undivided, and resistless might.
There was meaningful support among the elite of 1860-era Great Britain, particularly at the beginning of the war, that the secession of the Confederate States would lead to emancipation faster than a restoration of the Union. Within the senior ranks of the government, examples of individuals that held this view include: Lord Russell (the foreign secretary), William Gladstone (chancellor of the exchequer), and the Duke of Argyll (lord of the privy seal). Prominent academics (for example, John Stuart Mill) expressed similar ideas, and The Economist cites Mill in that 1862 article I mentioned above. Even the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society made this argument. There were several different rationales for this opinion.
(1) An independent Confederate States of America will be less able to ignore British demands for emancipation than a unified United States of America. Meanwhile, a restored Union will need to support slavery in order to bring the rebel states back into the fold.
At the start of the war, Lincoln argued that the purpose of the war was to preserve the Union rather than end slavery. While we can clearly see that slavery was the cause of disunion, Lincoln made it perfectly clear that he was interested in saving the Union, and the British elite took him at his word. When you combine that fact with the wide held belief in Britain that it would difficult if not impossible for the Union to suppress the Confederacy, then you get to the logical conclusion that Lincoln would have to make guarantees to preserve slavery to bring the south back into the nation.
It would be difficult to convince a preserved Union that guaranteed the continued existence of slavery to change course on the Peculiar Institution. It was bad enough during the ante bellum period when the north acquiesced to slavery, now both the north and south would be actively united to keep the institution of slavery intact. On the other hand, an independent Confederacy would be significantly weaker and more susceptible to British demands for some form of emancipation.
To quote The Economist on this topic:
We feel by no means confident that the conquest and re-annexation of the South would secure the limitation of the area of Slavery; and we feel very confident that such conquest would neither be the best nor the surest nor the shortest way to that end; - while at the same time it would work the double mischief of involving the North once more in the sin and the perplexity of Slavery, and of rivetting, consecrating, and consolidating that disastrous institution again by the physical strength and the moral sanction of the entire Union, instead of only one section, and that the smallest, weakest, and least numerous section, of the Union...
So that we say distinctly, we dare not trust the United States, if once again a single, a reconciled, a fused Republic, to the extent of believing that they will seize and annex no new tropical territory, or that they - as a whole, the Democrats and Planters as well as the Republicans - will have the resolute self-denial to forbid the cultivation of such newly-seized territory by that Slave-labour, which is clamouring for virgin soils.
(2) An independent Confederate States of America could no longer depend upon the Fugitive Slave Laws to return runaways to bondage, guaranteeing that the institution of slavery would inevitably fail.
As Lord Russell stated, the result of disunion would be "one Republic to be constituted on the principle of freedom and personal liberty - the other on the principle of slavery and the mutual surrender of fugitives." Whereas previously any escaped slave had to reach Canada to be free of the slave catchers, following secession, slaves in Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas would be directly across the border from freedom in the now-reduced United States (these states collectively represented over a quarter of the total slaves in the US). Every slave in the newly-independent Confederacy would be thousands of miles closer to freedom than when they were part of the United States. The view was that slavery could not persist if freedom was so close.
(3) Slavery is doomed. A war would delay the natural forces of economics from bringing slavery to an end.
The Anti-Slavery Reporter, the newspaper of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, summarizes this view quite succinctly.
In providing for the permanence of Slavery, the Congress of the Confederated States is legislating against nature, and against the inevitable tendencies of the law of progress, which underlies all human institutions. Slavery cannot endure in those State, because, first, it is wrong, and secondly, because it is self-ruinous. Whether, therefore, the Secession becomes completed by the accession to the movement of the hesitating Border States, or is confined to those which form the new Confederation, the issue cannot be long doubtful, and emancipation will be forced upon them as an economical question. To leave the Confederated States to consummate their own ruin, is evidently the wisest policy.
In conclusion, the view that secession would hasten the end of slavery is not completely unrealistic. Yes, the 2nd and 3rd rationales I outlined are not wholly convincing on their own, but when combined with the 1st are not unreasonable. Yes, this view relied on the assumption that the Union could not defeat the Confederacy militarily, which turned out to be inaccurate. However, we should remember that the Union alone lost nearly as many men during the war as the United States overall would lose in World War II, so it is difficult to judge those that held this incorrect assumption too harshly given the effort that was needed to win the war in the end. If one therefore assumes that re-unification requires the Union to wholeheartedly support slavery, then it naturally follows that the steady expansion of the United States since independence would continue, now moving south through Mexico and central America as the planters demand ever more fresh soil to replace the nitrogen-depleted lands of the existing slave states. Slavery would continue and grow. In contrast, an independent Confederacy would be isolated between a Union that no longer had to support slavery and could thus become wholly free and a Mexico that, with the assistance of Great Britain and France, could defend itself against a now much smaller slave power to the north. Eventually, British diplomatic pressure and the economic ruin of the south through soil depletion of cotton harvesting would bring emancipation.
Sources for Further Reading:
Lorimer, Douglas. "The Role of Anti-Slavery Sentiment in English Reactions to the American Civil War." The Historical Journal. Vol 19, No 2 (June 1976). pp 405-420.
Jones, Howard. Blue & Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. University of North Carolina Press. 2010.
OP, can you please link the article?
This recollection by The Economist is (as per the linked quote provided by u/SeeYouNextTyrsday) is nestled amid acknowledgements that The Economist in more contemporary times has suffered from a tendency to misremember the nature of its own supposedly pure commitment to liberalism in the first two or three decades of its operations.
What the Economist is trying to reckon with here is substantially specific to British liberalism in the mid-19th Century. The magazine is to some extent catching up with a much wider reckoning spurred by historians and political theorists who have been re-examining the entanglement of 19th Century liberalism, imperialism and racism, in books like Uday Singh Mehta's Liberalism and Empire and Sankar Muthu's Enlightenment Against Empire, as well as a host of recent critical re-appraisals of liberalism like Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History and Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed.
There's a lot of interesting debates within this increasingly sprawling literature--Mehta is a good example of the scholarship that sees imperialism as deeply connected to and arising out of liberalism, whereas Muthu argues strongly that a good deal of Enlightenment and liberal thought was the origin of anti-imperial, anti-slavery and anti-racist political belief in the West. But I think it's fair to say that the common sketch that I can recall encountering as an undergraduate some decades ago has been upended.
What was that sketch? (It was one that the Economist itself liked to recount in the 1970s and 1980s.) Fundamentally, this: that as liberalism rose to political prominence in England in the first half of the 19th Century, it followed strongly on Adam Smith's critique of mercantilism to argue against imperial rule abroad, instead arguing that the superiority of British manufacture would win out in global trade. As the old basic sketch would have it, liberal anti-imperialism generally dominated British foreign policy, especially in Gladstone's Liberal Party. which was then eroded by the beginnings of the "Scramble for Africa" and came to a crashing end when Gordon was killed in Khartoum, leaving liberal anti-imperialists at the margins of British politics (such as J.A. Hobson in his critique of the Boer War).
The active reappraisal of liberalism's entanglement with imperialism and ethnocentrism (which the Economist essay references) has shown that contrary to this older sketch, Britain undertook numerous imperial activities during the highwater mark of 19th Century liberalism and that frequently liberals like John Stuart Mill and Bagehot (editor-in-chief of the Economist at this time) were enthusiastic proponents of imperial conquest, sometimes in the view that liberal ideas had to be spread around the world by force--that various illiberal or non-Western societies needed to be remade by liberalism-from-above. They shared some of these views with humanitarian evangelists like David Livingstone, who argued that the lingering evil of slavery and the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa could only be repaired through some form of imperial authority.
There could be odd permutations of these ideas at times. One of the most fascinating, I think, was the Niger Expedition of 1841--Howard Temperly's 1991 White Dreams, Black Africa, remains a good recounting of the expedition. The basics were that British anti-slavery activists, many of whom were also committed liberals, believed that if they could only demonstrate the value of free-market approaches to agriculture, they would naturally turn on slavery. So they sponsored an expedition of missionaries and agriculturalists to the lower Niger River (at the confluence of the Niger and the Benue) that was supposed to establish normal free-market plantations and encourage local people to embrace working for wages. You can probably guess how well this went--the basic idea didn't look any different to local people than slavery, the missionaries were forced to buy slaves and then set them "free" to work on the plantation, and most of the people in the expedition died of malaria in any event.
So that brings us back to the odd claim in the Economist that if the South were only left alone, it would embrace abolition on its own. I wouldn't call this a common view, exactly, but there were American industrialists in the North as well as British liberals who believed that slavery was so obviously inferior as a form of economic organization to free-market capitalism that it was only a short matter of time before all remaining slave economies made a natural transition to industrialization and wage labor, no costly wars or conquests required. But to some extent the Economist and other liberals were also comfortable with racist paternalism--they certainly did not see Africans in the Americas or in sub-Saharan Africa as "civilized" and entitled to full liberal rights in their own democratically-controlled societies. So to some extent, the Economist's approval of an independent Confederacy was a reflection of its comfort at the time with some form of white supremacy over all non-whites, just as J.S. Mill (and Mill's father as well) saw little contradiction between his belief in liberal democracy and the continuation of British imperial rule over Indians.