It was a mistaken idea, said this journal, that there could be no enfranchisement without a slave rising, but should this occur, "the right of the slave to regain his freedom, even if the effort involve slaughter, is as clear as any other application of the right of self-defence[856]." Yet English abolitionists should not urge the slave to act for himself, since "as war goes on and all compromise fails the American mind will harden under the white heat and determine that the _cause_ of all conflict must cease." That slavery, in spite of any declaration by Lincoln or Northern denial of a purpose to attack it--denials which disgusted Harriet Martineau--was in real fact the basic cause of the war, seemed to her as clear as anything in reason[857].

She had no patience with English anti-slavery people who believed Northern protestations, and she did not express concern over the horrors of a possible servile insurrection.
Nevertheless this spectre was constantly appearing.

Again the _Spectator_ sought to allay such fears; but yet again also proclaimed that even such a contingency was less fearful than the consolidation of the slave-power in the South[858].
Thus a servile insurrection was early and frequently an argument which pro-Northern friends were compelled to meet.

In truth the bulk of the British press was constant in holding up this bogie to its readers, even going to the point of weakening its argument of the impossibility of a Northern conquest of the South by appealing to history to show that England in her two wars with America had had a comparatively easy time in the South, thus postulating the real danger of some "negro Garibaldi calling his countrymen to arms[859]." Nor was this fear merely a pretended one.

It affected all classes and partisans of both sides.