"Divided Hearts explores the passionate political strife that raged in Britain as a result of the American Civil War. Moving beyond Mary Ellison's 1972 landmark regional study of Lancashire cotton workers' reactions, R. J. M. Blackett opens the subject to a new, wider transatlantic context of influence and undertakes a deftly researched and written sociological, intellectual, and political examination of who in Britain supported the Union, who the Confederacy, and why.".

"The American Civil War had a profound effect on Britain's political culture; no other event during that period - not in Poland, Hungary, Italy, or the British colonies - compared. "The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian mutiny," the London Times asserted in 1862.

In his delineation of the arguments that British citizens of every rank employed to justify positions taken on the war, Blackett broaches the provocative question of the degree to which this involvement redirected their gaze toward political reform at home, resulting in an extension of the franchise, among other things. Divided Hearts presents a compelling and innovative thesis, one sure to engage scholars in many fields of history."--BOOK JACKET.