I may be Canadian but I understand that at the end of the 18th century, there was a big brouhaha between the US and the UK owing to some disagreements.
In 1812, British troops paid a visit to Washington DC and were very rude guests indeed.
Even during the US civil war, the UK was supporting the South in the hope of weakening the US.
In WWI, the US sided with the UK.
What happened in the meantime?
Cuba and cotton? Seems really thin grounds to base an alliance lasting nearly a century.
Even that Wikipedia article backs off that ludicrous claim that relations were strained for 80 years, if you read earlier in it. That’s why I recommend never using Wikipedia for interpretive history.
The subject is too big and the timeline is too long for one easy answer. But one way to think about the relationship is like a marriage that had serious quarrels and even a short separation without ever really breaking up or moving too far apart.
Remember that the colonists desperately wanted to remain part of England. They practically begged to get the worst laws and taxes repealed. They wanted to stay because for the vast majority of colonists, their ties, their history, their relatives, their economic interests, their philosophies, and their culture was completely English. (There were of course small pockets of other nationalities, but the national culture stayed English until it finally turned American.) Whatever happened at the top with the King and Parliament never changed that basic fact. The Revolution was as much an economic event as a political or philosophical one. Once it was over, those basic ties reattached. The new America and England went back to trade immediately after the war. People started sending their kids to British schools again. They imported everything from furniture to books in the English style. France was a critical ally - they won the war, literally - but Americans didn’t speak French, didn’t like the autocratic King, and were horrified to their bones by the Terror.
Yeah, there was that kerfluffle in 1812. Economics again. Americans lived on the ocean and wanted to extend its freedoms into places where Britain thought it had power. That was an issue at the top again. The people in the countries didn’t stop their allegiances. Look at the continuing stream of immigrants from all areas of Britain throughout the century.
And that’s why the Civil War didn’t make that much of a difference. A few people in power saw an opportunity. Cotton was vitally important to the British economy. And some in Parliament saw it as a way to spank the power-mad Yanks and cut them down to size.
They couldn’t. Opposition to slavery pervaded British society. They preferred to take the hit on cotton over backing slavers. The South kept sending over ambassadors and they kept getting the runaround. The Northern ambassadors didn’t. The South had a one-note plantation economy. The North was an economic powerhouse. Trading the many for the one didn’t make sense. It may be possible that if the North looked completely defeated at some point that the British might have seized the opportunity. We can see in hindsight that the economic power of the North so dwarfed the pitiful South that an unwarranted surrender was the only possible path to defeat. Surrender wasn’t a possibility while Lincoln was president.
The US and the UK never had to come back together because it was never really apart. The people of the two countries were too close. The North and the South in the US came back together quickly after the Civil War for exactly the same reasons, and that was a million times as much provocation. What happens at the highest levels of power is not representative of what whole countries feel. We see that all around the world today. That’s never changed.
Yeah, I use a dozen different terms for the UK. Sue me. 
I remember that Issac Asimov claimed that the Spanish American war caused a deliberate in British policy to make nice to the Americans, since the American Navy had proved to be formidable. If so, it seems like a sound calculation on the British part. If the Americans had come in on the German side, it would have been a much different war. I also read articles by H.L. Mencken talking about how the British manipulated the American media to switch Americans from neutrality to a pro-British stand.
If you read anything at all about the Spanish-American War, you’re struck over the head by how pitifully bad our navy was. The ships were bad, the crews were bad, the training was bad, the officers were bad, the higher brass were criminally bad. The British couldn’t have been fooled by that. Spain didn’t want a war, and was in worse shape to fight one than us. I don’t want to start a board war, but indications are that Spain would have just left Cuba on its own if the Maine’s design wasn’t so bad that it allowed the munitions to catch fire. (All ships of that kind were redesigned in 1899 to prevent that.) Things got much worse after that.
Mencken was pro-German. Of course he made loud stupid noises about the relationship between Britain and the U.S. It got him nowhere then and meant nothing except to the German community in the U.S. They were already the enemy because they owned the beer and whiskey interests and the prohibition movement already controlled most of the states. Nothing on earth could have persuaded the U.S. to enter on the German side, especially after the Germans helpfully sank so many of our ships while we were neutral.
The Spanish Navy was 2nd rate, but they should have made a respectable showing against another 2nd rate power. Instead the Battle of Santiago de Cuba and the Battle of Manila Bay were two of the most lopsided naval battles in history in terms of casualties.
Do you have the slightest documentation that the British weren’t concerned about the American fleet after the Spanish American war?
Mencken was pro-German. Of course he made loud stupid noises about the relationship between Britain and the U.S. It got him nowhere then and meant nothing except to the German community in the U.S. They were already the enemy because they owned the beer and whiskey interests and the prohibition movement already controlled most of the states. Nothing on earth could have persuaded the U.S. to enter on the German side, especially after the Germans helpfully sank so many of our ships while we were neutral.
I’ve read many books by Mencken and he wasn’t pro-German. He just wasn’t pro-British. There wouldn’t have been attacks on American shipping if Wilson hadn’t been violating the neutrality platform he disingenuously ran on on 1916.
Do you have any evidence that the British weren’t running a propaganda campaign in the U.S. during the war.
Sorry, this paragraph should have been in quotes.
This is an interesting book I read recently.
In 1815, just after the war, American ship captain James Riley and his crew where shipwrecked on the Saharan coast and enslaved by the locals. Riley managed to contact the British consul in Morocco who helped Riley and some of his crew get free and return to America. Riley’s account was a popular read in America for decades and was a favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s.
I don’t know if this incident of aid delivered by a British official to Americans had any effect on softening attitudes towards the Brits, and I don’t know if Williams’ no-hard-feelings attitude was typical. But, maybe.
The US, UK, Spanish and French navies cooperated to stem piracy shortly after the War of 1812 ended. It really was just business to cooperate at that point.
I have read that Britain heavily favored the Monroe Doctrine and considered it to be very much in their mutual interest, and they even took it upon themselves to ‘enforce’ it. So perhaps it starts there.
Years ago on the old NBC Letterman show Python John Cleese put it very simply & succinctly. His appearance was near the Fourth of July and Dave asked him if any Brits still harbored any ill-feelings towards us.
Cleese responded cheerfully: "Oh goodness no. No, the French are our natural enemies…"
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