For the most part these citations represented a comparatively unknown and uninfluential section, both in politics and literature, of the British people.

Matthew Arnold was among the first of men of letters to record his faith that secession was final and, as he hoped, an excellent thing for the North, looking to the purity of race and the opportunity for unhampered advance[57].

If English writers were in any way influenced by their correspondents in the United States they may, indeed, have well been in doubt as to the origin and prospects of the American quarrel.

Hawthorne, but recently at home again after seven years' consulship in England, was writing that abolition was not a Northern object in the war just begun.

Whittier wrote to _his_ English friends that slavery, and slavery alone, was the basic issue[58].