Literary politics: The American Civil War in the shaping of British democracy (John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, Walter Bagehot, Thomas Carlyle)

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, a central question for British intellectuals was whether or not the American conflict was proof of the viability of democracy as a foundation for modern governance. The lessons that the American Civil War was teaching to Britain about democracy would remain a focal point in the debate on democracy throughout the war, to the suffrage reform of 1867, and after. This dissertation considers four figures connected by Woodrow Wilson's concept of "Literary Politician," whom he defined as a person who possesses a profound knowledge of politics, an equally acute literary ability to express that knowledge, but who also has the good sense to avoid the degrading practicalities of policy making.; The first is a self-admitted parliamentary failure, John Stuart Mill. In tracing the development of the political theories Mill had formulated under the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville, I argue that he came to view the Civil War as an affirmation of his philosophical system. Next, I consider Anthony Trollope, who failed to win election to Parliament in 1868, but who used his visit to America in the fall of 1861 as the foundation for his own de Tocquevillean analysis of American democracy. I then focus on Walter Bagehot, who ran and failed to win election to Parliament on four different occasions (1860, 1865--67), and who wrote a long series of articles on the Civil War in which he constructed his idea that the British, cabinet system of governance was vastly superior to the American, presidential system. I conclude with Thomas Carlyle, whose decades-long opposition to democracy culminated in Shooting Niagara: And After? (1867), in which he equates the expansion of democracy in Britain with a plunge over the Niagara Falls. Carlyle's last explicit attack on democracy reinforces the significance of the American conflict as a controlling metaphor in the British debate on democracy, and it also shifts the British debate back to America, where Walt Whitman would expand his direct response to Carlyle into a vast and prophetic vision of American democracy in Democratic Vistas (1871).