The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy. By Sheldon Vanauken. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989. Pp. 1, 182 ISBN: 0-89526-552-4

            Here is an elegant and thought-provoking book from an Indianan turned Virginian and Anglophile. Vanauken took degrees from Wabash College (A.B.), Yale University (M.A.), and Oxford University (B.Litt). Upon his graduation from Wabash, Vanauken joined the Naval Reserve. Promptly shipped to Hawaii, he and his wife witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from shore on 7 December 1941. Following the war, Vanauken made himself a Yale man and learned history. He taught for some time at Lynchburg College, VA, as a professor of English and history before traveling to England. At Oxford, Vanauken studied literature and in the process befriended perhaps the most influential British intellectual of the twentieth century, the critic of medieval literature, novelist, and philosopher C.S. Lewis. Vanauken did much of his research while in Oxford at the Bodliean Library. The Glittering Illusion came into being as a monograph in 1955. After series of revisions it appeared in 1989 in book form. It is a work of English history, as its title implies, with an emphasis on English interests in the United States on the eve of, and during, the American Civil War.

            At base, Vanauken looks to assess the age-old question of why, exactly, Great Britain chose to withhold its diplomatic blessing from the burgeoning Confederacy. Though historians cannot know in fact, a British intervention, had it occurred, would almost certainly have tipped the balance of power in the war and secured a victory for the Southern Confederacy, all but shattering the American experiment in liberal democracy and self-government. Moreover, the prospect of British intervention held long term promise for Britain’s commercial interests. Why, then, did Great Britain choose to remain politically neutral? The answer lies in what the author terms a “glittering illusion”: the English belief in the inevitable victory of Southern arms over the Union. Though many British stood willing—indeed, more than willing—to intervene in the crisis, they did not feel a strict need for such an intervention.

Vanauken demonstrates in the book’s first half the great sympathy Englanders held for the South. He refers often to “English opinion”—what the author defines broadly not as the majority opinion of all English people, but rather the predominant positions of those best positioned to express satisfaction or discontentment concerning English foreign policy. English opinion in the 1860s represented the thoughts and beliefs of the “enfranchised, literate, respectable middle, and the upper, classes—the ‘educated million’” (16). According to Vanauken, the opinion of this educated million settled, emphatically, behind the position of the South. From the first, the English perceived that the Union cause concerned itself little with the issue of slavery. The Lincoln administration insisted, after all, that this was true. Furthermore, when it came to the issue of secession, the English—quite familiar with the legal thought and tradition of Locke—did not sympathize with the case of the North. That a headstrong administration should provoke a war through the raising of an army to quell an “insurrection” caused English onlookers to draw parallels between a stubborn and incompetent George III and the American situation in 1776. Indeed, the English awareness of the enthusiasm for secession and Confederate nationalism in the South rendered silly Lincoln’s insistence that southern states had not, in fact, seceded, but only enclaves of treasonous rebels within those states. Coercion ran contrary to the spirit of national self-determination and even contrary to founding of the American republic itself. The Trent Affair and the Battle of Bull Run broke open the dam of English support for the Confederacy.

Predictably, Vanauken devotes considerable space to exploring the English connection to the Cavalier image of the South. The English literate classes cared little for democracy, and Vanauken implies further that English opinion settled comfortably with Confederate war aims because it wished for the ultimate defeat of the democratic experiment on its native soil. The conduct of the war further alienated the English from the North. The English detested the generalship of Union officers such as Butler, Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan. They lauded the military geniuses and chivalric comportment of generals Stuart, Lee, and Jackson. Thus, in the genteel fight for its independence the South proved to the English its national legitimacy. The ultimate opportunity for English intervention came in 1862, and Vanauken shows how English parliamentary leadership favored the South. Gladstone, a Liberal, favored the South because it appeared an oppressed nationality. Palmerston harbored southern sympathy and was fiercely anti-northern. Both opted in 1862 to wait for a more desirable moment to decide the question of intervention on behalf of the southern cause.

Those uncomfortable with Vanauken’s analysis will doubtless be eager to identify the author and this book with Lost Cause legend. Vanauken, however, explicitly states his desire to inquire into the nature of English perception of the Confederacy, and acknowledges the fluid nature of this perception and its bearing on reality. Scholars may be wary of an history authored by a man with more extensive training in literature, but this reflects more the prejudices of an academic climate which privileges credentialization than the scholarly nature of the work itself. Vanauken makes exceptional use of rare and heretofore ignored primary source material. He finds, for instance, that Oxford dons lectured eloquently on the American war. More interesting still is the connection Vanauken perceives between the Union victory and the English Reform Bill of 1867. Historians can only speculate, but Vanauken theorizes that, had the Confederacy defeated liberal democracy in the United States, England might never have begun upon its own path to a more liberal society.

Mitchell G. Klingenberg

Texas Christian University