Chief Justice Roger
Taney
Later
Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward caused an uproar in 1856
by publicly charging that Supreme Court justices were the tools of
recently inaugurated President James Buchanan. Chief Justice Roger
Taney said later that if Seward had been elected president he would have
refused to administer the oath of office.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Seward Declares Conflict Not Over Slavery:
“For
years the Old South had been close to Great Britain in both business
and society, and it was easy to see in the Southern planters an
equivalent of the English gentry. British aristocrats like the Marquis
of Lothian, the Marquis of Bath, Lord Robert Cecil, and Lord
Wharncliffe thought that the success of the Confederacy would give a
much-needed check to democracy, both in America and in Europe.
More
liberal Englishmen, too, could favor the South, supposing its desire to
escape Northern “tyranny” was something comparable to the fulfillment
of Italian and German national aspirations. The character of the
leaders of the Southern Confederacy inspired respect abroad, and the
chivalric bearing of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson enlisted the
Englishman’s deepest admiration.
At
first it seemed that the North muffed every opportunity to enlist
British support. Already fearful of Northern economic competition, which
threatened the supremacy of the British merchant marine and challenged
the pre-eminence of British manufactures, the English middle classes
were alienated when the Republicans adopted the Morrill tariff of 1861.
Northern
appeals to British idealism were undercut when [Secretary of State
William] Seward, early in the war, explicitly declared that the conflict
was not being waged over slavery and would not disturb the South’s
peculiar institution.
Even
a staunch friend of the Union like the Duke of Argyll was obliged to
conclude “that the North is not entitled to claim all the sympathy which
belongs to a cause which they do not avow; and which is promoted only
as an indirect consequence of a contest which (on their side at least)
is waged for other objects, and on other grounds.”
(The Civil War and Reconstruction, James G. Randall, D.C. Heath and Company, 1969, pp. 356-357)
