'I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus.
Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it, in
any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous
sentiment on the part of the North. But the North having
gradually g.ot to itself the making of the laws and the
settlement of the Tariff, and having taxed the South most
abominably for its own advantage, began to see as the
country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of
a geometrial line beyond which slavery should not extend,
the South would necessarily recover its old political power,
and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of commer
cial affairs. Any reasonable creature may know, if willing,
that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was conven
ient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause
of the war, it hated the abolitionists and derided them up
hill and down dale. For the rest there is not a pin to
choose between the two parties. They will both rant and lie
and fight until they come to a compromise*, and the slave may
be thrown into that compromise or thrown out of it, just as
it happens. As to Secession being Rebellion, it is distinctly
possible by the state papers, that Washington considered it
no such thing - that Massachusetts, now loudest against it,
has itself asserted its right to secede, again and again'.
Waller compares this passage with Spence's book and shows that all Dickens's
arguments are clearly derived from that source. Dickens, we note, declares
that 'there is not a pin to choose between' the Union and the Confederacy
but it is remarkable that All The Year Round contained so much about the
bravery of Confederate boy-soldiers or of Southern belles in beleagured
Mobile, about the daring and gallant exploits of Southern blockade-runners
and the brutal behaviour of the Federal army. Fanny Kemble (who had
experienced at first hand the wretchedness of being the mistress of slaves on a
Southern plantation) was apparently moved to reproach him with being a Southern
sympathizer. He replied
I am a Southern sympathizer to this extent - that r no
more believe in the Nothern love of the black man, or
in the Northern horror of slavery having anything to do
with the beginning of the war, save as a pretence - than
I believe that the Davenport Brothers and their proper
ties are under the special patronage of several angels
of distinction'
Certainly, no-one looking back at Dickens's comments on such of the South
as he saw in American Notes could regard him as sympathetically or romantically
disposed towards that part of the world. It was rather the case, I think,
that he was happy to use the Southern cause as a stick with which to belabour
his old Yankee enemies and cynically to regard the whole war as entirely a
matter of dollars and political power-struggles - just such a cicil war,
in fact, as the corrupt America of Martin Chuzzlewit would inevitably
embroil itself in.
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