During the American Civil War, what was the official policy of the British government? The French? Did they declare neutrality? Did they send any troops? Economic sanctions? Did they openly declare support for the Union or the Confederacy?
The official policy of the British and French governments was neutrality. Unofficially, they were inclined to the Confederacy, as 80% of Britain’s cotton, and almost as much of France’s, came from the South.
Europe leaned heavily towards the south and may well have entered the war on the Confederacy’s side. That is until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Which was a ploy to play on Europes anti slavery leanings.
It worked.
Britain might have preferred to see the South win for realpoltik reasons, but was unwilling to do anything to actively aid the Confederacy.
For starters, the Crimean War had soured the British on foreign adventures, and Britain was as likely to send troops to fight in a foreign war as the United States was in 1979.
Secondly, aiding the South would have meant first of all breaking the Northern blockade. And since Britain was a naval power whose strength depended on being able to blockade it’s own enemies if need be, they were extremely loath to establish any precident for the breaking of blockades.
Thirdly, they were getting rich from selling war material to both the Confederacy and the Union, so they didn’t want to choose sides.
Fourthly, the dreaded “cotton famine” never materialized. Britain had been glutted with cotton at the start of the war, and when southren cotton became too scare, that just made higher priced Egyptian and Indian cotton competative.
Lastly, public sentiment in Britain was about evenly split between sympathizers of the South and the North, and as mentioned earlier the Emancipation Proclamation was an influential propaganda move.
France was more actively pro-Confederate, but Napoleon III ultimately couldn’t save his own regime, much less offer assistance to anyone else.
The North endangered its relations with Britain in the so-called Trent Incident, when the USS *San Jacinto * halted the British steamer *Trent * on Nov. 8, 1861, and removed two Confederate diplomatic envoys, James Mason and John Slidell. (They were being dispatched as ministers plenipotentiary to London and Paris, respectively.) The British cabinet voted to send the Northern government an ultimatum demanding an apology and the diplomats’ release. Britain, the North’s main source of saltpeter for making gunpowder, also embargoed shipments until there was a resolution. The North and Britain eventually agreed on a compromise under which the men were released on the grounds that Wilkes had acted without instruction.
Awfully sorry to respond to my own post, but re the last sentence I should have noted that Charles Wilkes was the captain of the San Jacinto.
Britain did more than “prefer” the South; they supplied a fair amount of weaponry and other materiel as well. The CSA had to do its own blockade-running, though - Bermuda was a major transshipment point, and the CSA had an active consulate there (now an interesting museum). More notoriously, the UK built and armed a major warship, the CSS Alabama, for the South (good cite). The Alabama destroyed a great deal of US shipping before being run down at Cherbourg by the USS Kearsarge.
Just a bit of a nitpick. The Alabama was built in England but it was not armed there. She met with supply ships in the Atlantic and her guns were brought on board there.