Free Blood and Daring by John Boyko Page A

Anderson is one of the gravest possible importance, and Her Majesty’s Government are not satisfied that the decision of the Court at Toronto is in conformity with the view of the treaty which has hitherto guided the authorities in this country.” 68
    A number of issues were considered in the cabinet’s decision. Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Lord Palmerton, was Britain’s prime minister from 1855 to 1858 and he returned to office from 1859 to 1865. At the time of the Anderson decision he was seventy-six years old, with long, white hair and side-whiskers, but he remained a wily politician and, despite a half century in public life, one whom few wished to cross. Palmerston was an avowed abolitionist, who held America and Americans in rather low esteem. 69 But he was a clever player of
realpolitik
. He understood that Britain needed to maintain its supply of southern cotton if its textile mills were to keep operating and so he wanted to avoid unnecessarily provoking the United States. Then again, if an Anglo-American war would help the United States to break in two or shatter to shards, then the balance of global geopolitical power that had been teetering toward America might totter back to Britain. 70 A series ofAnglo-American spats in the mid-1850s had made clear that, just as there was a need for diplomatic calm and understanding, those elements of the relationship were demonstrably absent.
    Palmerston also needed to keep his eye on Europe, where the growing unity of a new Prussian-German state was made more even troubling by the fact that Britain was still recovering from the Crimean War and a crisis in India. Those crises had necessitated the shifting of troops and resources from its colonies, including Canada, to engage in struggles that were expensive, divisive and inconclusive.
    With respect to Canada, while Palmerston and Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell had never supported Canada’s steady evolution toward political and economic independence, they were reluctant to impose British interference on colonial legislatures and courts. 71 Yet there was anger on the part of many British leaders that Canada’s Militia Act of 1856 had demonstrated Canada’s reluctance to muster the money and men to adequately defend itself against possible American threats, and that the 1859 Canadian tariff on British goods had served up a bit of economic pain with a large dollop of colonial temerity. Although Palmerston and Russell did not count themselves among their numbers, the so-called Little Englanders, who argued for a reduction or perhaps even a severing of colonial ties, were growing in power among Britain’s political elite. And if all that was not enough, Palmerston’s government was on unsteady political ground, with unreliable support in the caucus and the House and victory in the next election by no means assured.
    The British government’s Anderson decision told Americans that abolitionist sentiment would be a considerable factor in Britain’s reaction to their growing sectional crisis. And for Canadians, Palmerston’s decision made it clear that Britain had no compunction about overriding Canada’s nascent sovereignty. The old lion had roared. Southern secessionists and Canadian nationalists took heed.
    The
London Times
supported the decision and predicted criticism from the United States, but argued that morality and the law were on the side of the Cockburn court. It also noted that Canadians deserved to be shockedby the decision. “It may excite surprise, when we consider the ample powers of self-government possessed by Canada … to find the Court of Queen’s Bench assuming to act directly on the rights of persons within her territories, just as if Toronto were situate on Windermere instead of Lake Ontario.” 72 The
Liverpool Post
was also prescient in predicting the negative response of both Canadians and Americans: “While a quarrel between the United States and Great Britain is therefore possible