So even Dahomey had some claim to be regarded as a more
important place than Great Britain, and the early settlers wasted little
thought on the affairs of Queen Victoria. Amid these conditions,
absorbed even more than his neighbors in the exciting questions of
domestic politics, and having no tastes or pursuits which guided his
thoughts abroad, Mr. Lincoln had never had occasion to consider the
foreign relations of the United States, up to the time when he was
suddenly obliged to take an active part in managing them.
At an early stage of the civil dissensions each side hoped for the
good-will of England. For obvious reasons, that island counted to the
United States for more than the whole continent of Europe; indeed, the
continental nations were likely to await and to follow her lead.
Southern orators, advocating secession, assured their hearers that "King
Cotton" would be the supreme power, and would compel that realm of
spinners and weavers to friendship if not to alliance with the
Confederacy. Northern men, on the other hand, expressed confidence that
a people with the record of Englishmen against slavery would not
countenance a war conducted in behalf of that institution; nor did they
allow their hopes to be at all impaired by the consideration that, in
order to found them upon this support, they had to overlook the fact
that they were at the same time distinctly declaring that slavery really
had nothing to do with the war, in which only and strictly the question
of the Union, the integrity of the nation, was at stake.
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