UK Heritage
"A Popular Place With Rebels" A Footnote in Confederate History
.jpg)
By John Bennett
During the American Civil War, the genteel 'watering hole' of Royal Leamington Spa in the county of Warwickshire, England became a discreet nest of confederate operatives and their families. some of them found it hard to leave...
(This article appeared under the same title in 'Crossfire', the magazine of the ACWRT (UK) no. 76 - April 2005. Reproduced here with additional picture)
"Batavian Grace" - Alexander Beresford Hope
.jpg)
By Charles Priestley
An example of English upper class support for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
(This article appeared as 'Batavian Grace' in 'Crossfire', the magazine of the ACWRT (UK) no. 69 - August 2002. Reproduced here with additional photographs and minor corrections)
The traditional view of British support for the Confederacy is that it was largely the preserve of the upper classes, who felt greater kinship with an agrarian and aristocratic South than with the industrial North, while the broad mass of the population, hating slavery, supported the Union.
"France's Opportunity": an Englishman's Plea for French Intervention
By Charles Priestley
IN a pamphlet published in French in 1865, distinguished British banker John Welsford Cowell told his readers that he had "For four years...tried, on various occasions, to explain to my fellow-countrymen the vital duty which England had, in 1861, been called upon to fulfil towards herself, towards her race in the South and towards the whole of humanity."
One of the more curious examples of Confederate propaganda in Europe is a pamphlet of 30 pages entitled La France et les États Confédérés ("France and the Confederate States"). Published in February 1865, it was the work of an Englishman named John Welsford Cowell, who is described on the title page as "agent et représentant, muni de pleins pouvoirs, de la Banque d'Angleterre aux États-Unis dans les années 1837, 1838 et 1839" ("agent and representative, with full powers, of the Bank of England in the United States in the years 1837, 1838 and 1839"). It is of interest chiefly because its English author, despairing of any such action on the part of his own country, makes a sustained and, indeed, passionate plea for France to intervene on the side of the Confederacy.
A Civil War Tour of Liverpool
(The original version of this article appeared in 'Crossfire' the magazine of the ACWRT (UK) No.68 as 'The Liverpool Tour')
By Jeremy Edwards and Peter Burrows
The Civil War history of Liverpool, and the sites that can be visited to provide some background to that history are well-known to ACWRT (UK) members. But relatively few people from the other side of the pond know of this wealth of heritage. Here then, is an American's reaction to uncovering so much Civil War history in the North of England.
For an ACW Merseyside Trail Map by Len Ellison click here
Alexander Gardener: Scottish Photographer of the Civil War
click image to zoom
(This article appeared as 'War Photo Book Hailed as a Masterpiece' in 'Crossfire' the magazine of the ACWRT(UK) No. 57 August 1998 - With Acknowledgements to 'Golden Threads - A Look at Paisley's Past')
President Abraham Lincoln posed in front of a camera lens for a series of studio portraits. Five days later, on April 14, 1865, he was assassinated. The man who 'got the scoop' of these last historic pictures was a remarkable Paisley man called Alexander Gardener.