The Contest in America

A magazine article written as Britain stepped back from war with the United States, telling English readers that the American conflict was about slavery.

by John Stuart Mill30 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1862(aged 56)
Original language: English

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Overview

On 8 November 1861 Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto stopped the British mail steamer Trent at sea and removed two envoys of the Confederate states. Britain demanded their release and sent troops to Canada, and for some weeks a war between Britain and the United States seemed likely. Washington gave the men up, and by the middle of January 1862 the crisis had passed. While it lasted, Mill wrote later, nothing favourable to the Northern cause could get a hearing in England, where most of the upper and middle classes had taken the side of the South. He was about to leave for Greece, and his stepdaughter Helen Taylor urged him to write before he went. "The Contest in America" appeared in Fraser's Magazine in February 1862. It begins with what Britain had just escaped: the country that had spent half a century suppressing the slave trade would have gone to war as the ally of a republic founded in order to extend slavery. Mill then answers the South's English friends point by point. The quarrel was not about tariffs, he says, since the Morrill Tariff could never have passed if the Southern states had not already left. Nor did the bare fact of rebellion earn sympathy. A rebellion deserves support according to what it is for, and by their own declarations the seceding states had left because the spread of slavery into new territories was going to be stopped. Mill concedes that the North was not yet fighting to abolish slavery, and predicts that it would come to that if the war lasted. He ends by defending war in a just cause as a smaller evil than a people that thinks nothing worth fighting for. The Boston publisher Little, Brown reprinted the article as a pamphlet the same year. Mill believed it had encouraged those English Liberals who felt overwhelmed by the opinion around them, and he later included it in his collected Dissertations and Discussions.

Key concepts

Why does Mill deny that the South had a right to secede?

Mill denies that being ready to fight for separation creates a right to it. Secession was the withdrawal of the Southern slave states from the American Union to form a confederacy of their own. A people may be justified in breaking away, he says, and whether it is depends on what it breaks away for. The seceding states left because they expected a limit to be set on carrying slavery into new territories.

What makes a war just, according to Mill's article?

A war is justified, for Mill, when a people fights by its own free choice for an honest purpose: to protect others against tyrannical injustice, or to give victory to its own ideas of right and good. He sets this against a war in which people are used as mere instruments for firing cannon for a master's selfish purposes, which degrades them. A war of the first kind, he says, is often the means of a people's regeneration.

How do Republicans differ from Abolitionists in Mill's account?

Abolitionists, as Mill uses the word, want slavery ended wherever it exists, by a power outside the constitution if need be. The Republican party keeps within the constitution, which leaves slavery inside each state to that state, and resists only its introduction into the territories that are not yet states. Mill insists on the difference. He then argues that slavery confined to its existing soil is on the way to extinction, so the narrower aim serves the wider.

Why does slavery need new territory, in Mill's argument?

Slavery needs new territory, Mill argues, because in America it lives by cotton, and cotton grown year after year exhausts the land within a moderate time. He cites the writer Olmsted on the desolate state of parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Slave labour must therefore keep moving westward to fresh soil. That is why the planters treated a bar on slavery in the territories as a matter of life and death.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A war about slavery, and which rebellions deserve support

Does a people that takes up arms for its independence deserve sympathy whatever it means to do with it? Mill tells English readers that the answer lies in the cause, and that the Southern cause was the spread of slavery.

Mill writes just after the Trent crisis, in which England, having spent half a century blockading the African coast against the slave trade, came close to war on the side of a slaveholding confederacy. He then answers the South's English friends point by point. The quarrel is not about tariffs: the Southern leaders say themselves that it is about slavery, which exhausts the soil under cotton and must have new territory. The North is not abolitionist and fights only to confine slavery, yet confinement leads to emancipation. A rebellion earns sympathy by its object. And war in a good cause is not the greatest evil a nation can suffer.

slavery
secession
justice
abolitionism
emancipation
public opinion
political legitimacy
war
civil war
rebellion
slave trade
national reputation
moral responsibility
territorial expansion
tariffs
just war
constitutional law

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Within this work

passages held: 30
distinct concepts: 71
by passages held, corpus-wide: #727

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “secession” and “slavery”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 2 concepts, joined by 1 pairing. 17 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
secession	slavery	5

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
It was the first book of his own, and it made his name in 1843. Its claim that every belief must answer to experience is the ground on which the later books on morals and politics stand.
EN
1844 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy)
Written at twenty-three and twenty-four, these five essays waited until the System of Logic had found him readers. Their argument on trade returns, four years later, in the Principles of Political Economy.
EN
1848 Principles of Political Economy
Seven editions carried this treatise from 1848 to 1871, revised as his view of socialism moved. It is read here in the text of the seventh, the last Mill revised himself.
EN
1859 On Liberty
One of the two books Mill expected to outlast the rest, the other being the System of Logic. Its defence of individuality against majority opinion runs on into Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women.
EN
1861 Considerations on Representative Government
Written two years after On Liberty, it faces the same danger, a majority that overrides everyone else, and meets it with electoral machinery. It is his fullest statement on how a free people should be governed.
EN
1861 Utilitarianism
A defence of the ethics he inherited from Bentham and from his father, assembled from papers of the 1850s. Short as it is, it supplies the standard of right and wrong that his political books take for granted.
EN
1862 The Contest in America you are here EN
1865 Auguste Comte and Positivism
Two essays from the Westminster Review of 1865, written eight years after Comte's death. They close a relationship that began with admiring letters in 1841 and left its mark on the System of Logic.
EN
1869 The Subjection of Women
The most contested of his books in its day, published in 1869 after his one term in Parliament. It carries the reasoning of On Liberty into marriage and the household.
EN
1879 Socialism
Left unfinished at his death, these are the posthumous "Chapters on Socialism", first drafts for a book planned in 1869. They return to a question that the Principles of Political Economy had reopened from one edition to the next.
EN

— or open another of their works