Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in Liverpool WHEN the secession movement first assumed serious proportions in the South, the sympathy of England was with the secessionists . There were many reasons for this. The political control of England was in the hands of the English aristocracy. Feudal England had always looked with both suspicion and aversion on her democratic daughter. The strongest argument against feudalism was the unparalleled growth of democratic America. Commercial England saw in the republic across the sea a rival who would soon contest with the mother country her claim to commercial supremacy, and she was not unwilling to see that rival dismembered, and her own commercial supremacy thus secured to her. For more than a quarter of a century England had seen the South aggressive and successful, the North timid and retreating. It was not strange that she believed the South brave, the North timid; and England admires pluck and despises cowardice. During the four mon...
Stories from Brooklyn's historical Plymouth Church and Henry Ward Beecher, America's most famous Abolitionist Preacher during the Civil War era.