126. Helping the poor. But not too much

The American Civil War, like the war led by Prussia against Denmark, showed that Britain was no longer the superpower that had emerged from the Napoleonic wars. In both those conflicts, Britain had views – rather changeable ones, switching from one side to the other, in the American case – but couldn’t influence the outcome. Instead, Palmerston’s government could do little more than watch events take their course.

What the American war also demonstrated, however, was how British workers, in particular the workers put through great hardship by the Lancashire Cotton Famine the war had precipitated, could put principle above personal interest. Despite the pain they were suffering, they had called on President Lincoln to go right on prosecuting the war until the defeat of the South and the emancipation of the slaves.

Now, that didn’t loosen any purse strings. For some more decades, relief for people who needed help would continue to mean the Poor Laws with the workhouse in the background, and whatever voluntary help people felt they could spare. However, at a time when the question of extending the right to vote was re-emerging, the principled behaviour of the Lancashire workers encouraged those backing such a move, by revealing that artisans too could reach mature, even admirable, political judgements.

But the atmosphere wasn’t right in parliament yet. Besides, Palmerston was still opposed to electoral reform at least in the short term. However, when he died, and he was the last British Prime Minister to die in office, he opened the door to that debate again. Which will be the subject of our next episode.

Illustration: Prince Albert and Queen Victoria in 1859, by George Milner Gibson Jerrard, after Frances Sally Day. National Portrait Gallery x197484
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.