Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship

The title of his book is “somewhat misleading,” Duncan Andrew Campbell confesses, as his account extends beyond the Victorian era (p. 2). It also employs the adjective “special” and takes the popular works of Winston Churchill and the academic study Conflict and Concord (1959) by H. C. Allen as historiographical starting points. Yet the special nature of the Anglo-American relationship was called into question immediately after that starting point by the Eisenhower administration's response to the Suez crisis, and while the problems were subsequently papered over, few Britons have relished the recent image of Prime Minister Tony Blair's cockboat travelling in the wake of George W. Bush's man-of-war. At much the same time, Churchill's version of the World War II alliance was exposed as a myth. If the tale of the gradual development of a measure of cooperation and mutual understanding during the nineteenth century is a familiar one, it is retold with zest and skill. Campbell is dismissive of “notions of American exceptionalism” (p. 9). The United States was not man's last best hope, Abraham Lincoln's evocative peroration at Gettysburg notwithstanding, yet this was an illusion to which many Americans clung and politicians paid lip service. Its influence on the Anglo-American relationship merited at least passing consideration. In his otherwise interesting brief discussion of the impact of immigration on the relationship, Campbell surprisingly ignores, the Fenians excepted, the domestic political consequences of the massive, century-long Irish movement across the Atlantic Ocean. Thus William Henry Seward is assailed, as in an earlier book, without due consideration of the anglophobic popular context in which he operated. Nevertheless, a distinctive, informative, and frequently engaging feature of this study is the author's use of individuals to illustrate his sweeping generalizations. For example, Andrew Jackson and Viscount Palmerston become representative of anglophobia and anti-Americanism, respectively. There are pitfalls in the approach that Campbell disdains to avoid out of a desire, or so it seems, to be provocative. The much admired Charles Francis Adams was a “political crony of Seward's” who spent much of his time as American minister in London “misrepresenting” the intentions of the British government to Washington (p. 148). D'Arcy McGee, the Irish Canadian political martyr, would be mortified by the inaccurate inscription Campbell chisels into his historical headstone: “repentant Fenian” (p. 178). Campbell might also have qualified his assertion that prior to the late nineteenth century, British society was more racially tolerant than that of the democratic republic. As evidence, he offers the reception given to black American visitors to Britain. But well before his death in 1862, Robert Knox, a father of “scientific racism,” had accused the editor of Britain's most influential newspaper of plagiarizing his ideas on race, while George Dallas, Adams's immediate predecessor as American minister, believed he had detected a significant shift in British racial attitudes with the collapse of West Indian plantations dependent on free labor and then the mutiny by Indian sepoys.

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