Booknotes: Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria

New Arrival:

• Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy by Beau Cleland (UGA Press, 2025).

As studies exploring the international dimensions of the American Civil War continue to expand their geographical and conceptual reach, it remains easy to see why various aspects of the three-way social, political, economic, and diplomatic relationship between the British Empire and the United States and Confederate governments still garners the most attention in the literature. Contributing to that discussion, Beau Cleland's Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy draws renewed attention toward those actions undertaken by public and private colonial networks operating close to the conflict in North America.

Cleland's study "recenters our understanding of the Civil War by framing it as a hemispheric affair, deeply influenced by the actions of a network of private parties and minor officials in the Confederacy and British territory in and around North America."

A map on page 178 cites seventeen pro-Confederate plots in North America and surrounding waters (eight of which were actually set into motion) that were directly linked to connections with these British colonial networks. More from the description: "John Wilkes Booth likely would not have been in a position to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, for example, without the logistical support and assistance of the pro-Confederate network in Canada. That network, to which he was personally introduced in Montreal in the fall of 1864, was hosted and facilitated by willing colonials across the hemisphere.Many of its Confederate members arrived in British North America via a long-established transportation and communications network built around British colonies, especially Bermuda and the Bahamas, whose primary purpose was running the blockade." Of course, the parts played by British colonial authorities and enterprising private citizens in blockade running operations based out of Bermuda and Nassau are well established. Nevertheless, "(i)t is difficult to overstate how essential blockade running was for the rebellion’s survival, and it would have been impossible without the aid of sympathetic colonials."

The first two chapters of Cleland's study revisit "antebellum relations between the South and Britain" and restate the "critical importance of British colonial support for the establishment and sustainment of Confederate blockade running" over the first half of the Civil War. The actions of prominent British colonials are also highlighted. Chapter 3 traces Confederate social connections in Bermuda as well as the Confederate government's attempt to "take control over blockade running." The "ambivalent" attitudes toward the Confederacy from black inhabitants of the British colonies, as well as the ways in which they opposed pro-Confederate networks, are examined in the following chapter. Chapter 5 highlights "the case of the Chesapeake hijacking as an example of the increasing fusion of privateering and filibustering by pro-Confederate raiders." The final two chapters, "set largely in Canada, explore how Confederates embraced the logic of informal warfare and diplomacy in 1864-65, with increasingly chaotic results" (pp. 10-11).

In the final estimation, Cleland maintains that the pro-Confederate "informal, semiprivate network(s)" described in the book "were of enormous consequence for the course of the war and its aftermath, and our understanding of the Civil War is incomplete without a deeper reckoning with the power and potential for chaos of these private networks imbued with the power of a state."