AN ASPECT OF CONFEDERATE FINANCE DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE ERLANGER LOAN AND THE PLAN OF 1864.

The article focuses on an aspect of confederate finance during the American Civil War. The attitudes of France and Great Britain toward the American Civil War were important to both the South and the North; and these attitudes also had a bearing on any European financial operations involving the disunited states. At the beginning of the war, the ruling classes of both France and Great Britain were in sympathy with the Confederacy. Because of his colonial plans in the western hemisphere, French President Louis Napoleon was in favour of intervening on the side of the South, but he could not do so without the concurrence of Great Britain with whom France was joined in an entente. Great Britain was unwilling to undertake such an overt action, partly because a large segment of English liberals and English working men saw the Civil War as a struggle of free versus slave labour and hence supported the North even though southern cotton was wanted for English mills. Although France and Great Britain both issued proclamations of neutrality, thus according to the South, the status of a belligerent nation rather than an internal territory in rebellion, neither they nor any European nation ultimately took the further step of granting diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy.