Abstract
This article is focused on one of the behemoths of American history, Thomas Jefferson. Unlike most studies, however, it removes the Virginian statesman from his familiar American context in order to illustrate his significance as a British icon. It considers the use of his image in British discourse between 1800 and 1865 to demonstrate the resonance of his name for British people of the period. In doing so it examines the uses of Jefferson’s image with reference to democracy and slavery to illustrate how the ambiguity and seeming contradictions in the deployment of his image are indicative of a broader debate in nineteenth century Britain about the meaning of the USA. Furthermore it demonstrates, through the use of Jefferson’s image, the steady but uneven process of disillusion with American politics and society among British reformers.
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Glasgow Herald, [Article taken from Saturday Review] June 13, 1860. Modern additions to the cannon of Jefferson studies include Joseph J. Ellis], American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 199
Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1976)
Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution (London: Pimlico 1996); and
Peter S. Onuf Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). The scholar Paul Finkelman’s article ‘The Monster of Monticello’ sums up the passion responses which Jefferson’s name still elicits in the USA see New York Times, November 30, 2012.
Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, ‘American Synecdoche: Thomas Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character and Self’, American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (1998): 125–36, 128.
O’Brien, The Long Affair; Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (London: Alfred K. Knopf, 1969), 55. More recently Jamie L. Bronstein has touched on the influence of Jeffersonian ideas on British agrarian reform, however, his discussion of the connection is limited see
Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Harriet Martineau, Society in America Volume One (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 76.
Quoted in Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation (London: William Heinemann, 2010), 327–8. For Jefferson’s Anglophobia in both an international and domestic context see
Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo and the Republican Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979); Ellis, American Sphinx, 126; McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, 34, 96; and Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 100. For work on Jefferson’s relationship to British intellectual traditions and Anglo-Saxon identity see
John Ashworth, ‘The Jeffersonians: Classical Republicans or Liberal Capitalists?’, Journal of American Studies 18, no. 3 (1984): 425–35
Dorothy Ross, ‘“Are we a Nation?”: The Conjuncture of Nationhood and Race in the United States, 1850–1876’, Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2005): 327–60
Alexander O. Boulton, ‘The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science’, American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995): 467–92, 483
Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 98; McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, 33
Robert Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (London: MacMillan, 2000), 16–17
Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Donna Torr, ed. John Saville (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), 11–66
Billie Melman, 1991. ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 3 & 4: 575–95
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 94–5, 254
Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and
James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 306–7, 321.
Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 153
Lucia Stanton, ‘Looking for Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the British Lions’, Eighteenth Century Studies 26, no. 4 (1993): 649–68, 660–1; and
Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1965). In one of the most bizarre twists in the connection between Owen and Jefferson it was widely reported in 1853 that Owen’s son Robert Dale had claimed to have contacted Jefferson for advice during a séance see Derby Mercury, September 14, 1853; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, September 17, 1853; The Lady’s Newspaper, September 17, 1853. The Owenite movement was active in both Britain and America see
J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1968). For a printed extract of a letter from Jefferson to Cartwright see The Satirist, or the Censor of the Times, August 7, 1831
Rachel Eckersley, ‘Of Radical Design: John Cartwright and the Redesign of the Reform Campaign, c.1800–1811’, History 89, no. 296 (2004): 560–80
Frank Thistle-thwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1959), 73–4; and
Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
Boulton, ‘The American Paradox’. Adams quoted in David Paul Crook], American Democracy in English Politics 1815–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1, 73–7. The most valuable recent works on the use of the American example in
Gregory Claeys, ‘The Example of America Warning to England? The Transformation of America in British Radicalism and Socialism, 1790–1850’, in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C Harrison, ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996)
Jamie L. Bronstein, ‘From the Land of Liberty to Land Monopoly: The United States in a Chartist Context’, in The Chartist Legacy, ed. Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1999), 147–171
David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1992), 85
J.R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain 1780–1850 (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), 171–5, 210; Vernon, Politics and the People, 321; and Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution. Bonwick notes the respect which the religiously dissenting radicals of the 1780s and 90s had for Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 Statute for Establishing Religious Freedoms, see 203-4.
Margaret C. Jacob and James R. Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984)
John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America 1769–1782 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987); and
Richard Twomey, Jacobins and Jeffersonians: Anglo-American Radicalism in the United States 1790–1820 (London: Garland, 1989). For an introduction to British politics in this period with an emphasis on the development of political ideas see Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty
Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers 1760–1848 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982); and
Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Poor Man’s Guardian, June 9, 1832; and Cleaves Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, December 7, 1839, September 1, 1838.
Northern Star and National Trades Journal, June 22, 1850, September 7, 1850, October 5, 1850, November 2, 1850; For more on this series of engravings see Malcolm Chase, ‘Building Identity, Building Circulation: Engraved Portraiture and the Northern Star’, in Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, ed. Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 25–53; Claeys, ‘The Example of America Warning to England?’, 73; and
Matthew Roberts, ‘Chartism, Commeration, and the Cult of the Radical Hero c.1770–1840’, Labour History Review 78, no. 1 (2013): 3–32.
The key point of reference for this transition tended to be Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London in Relation to that Event (1790; repr., London: Penguin, 1986); Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 207–8
Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997); McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, 139; and Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis. For British accounts of American reaction to the embargo see The Hull Packet and Original Weekly Commercial, Literary and General Advertiser, June 28, 1808; Morning Chronicle, October 22, 1808; and Caledonian Mercury, December 29, 1808. Jefferson’s fellow Virginian John Randolph memorably described government enforcement of the embargo as an attempt ‘to cure corns by cutting of the toes’.
Donald A. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 20–1
Leonard W. Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Chicago: I.R Dee 1989). For the embargo and debates over its effectiveness in Britain see
Lawrence S. Kaplan, ‘Jefferson, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Balance of Power’, The William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1957): 196–217; and
Jeffrey A. Frankel, ‘The 1807–1809 Embargo Against Great Britain’, Journal of Economic History 42, no. 2 (1982): 291–308.
Cobbett was one of the most significant figures of British political radicalism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Daniel Green, Great Cobbett: The Noblest Agitator (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983)
Leonora Nattrass, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
John W. Osborne, William Cobbett: His Thought and Times (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966)
George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and
David A. Wilson, Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988). For political cartoons of the era see
H.T. Dickinson, Caricatures and the Constitution 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986); and
M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature 1793–1832: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). For a discussion of Cruikshank’s Jefferson cartoon and the relationship it had to Cobbett’s thought see George, English Political Caricature, 115.
Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, April 9, 1808, March 19, 1808.
Claeys, ‘The Example of America Warning to England?’; Bronstein, ‘From the Land of Liberty to Land Monopoly’; Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century, 40; Michael J. Turner, The Age of Unease Government and Reform in Britain, 1782–1832 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000)
Brent E. Kinser, The American Civil War in the Shaping of British Democracy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); and
Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or Scenes on the Mississippi (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1836), 333.
Age and Argus, December 23, 1843; Morning Post, August 19, 1862.
Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1960), 161. For a biography of Macaulay see
Owen Dudley Edwards, Macaulay (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988).
British Francophobia was particularly aggressive during this period with many in mainstream British politics concerned events in France could inspire revolution in Britain see Gerald Newman, ‘Anti-French Propaganda and British Liberal Nationalism in the Early Nineteenth Century: Suggestions towards a General Interpretation’, Victorian Studies 18, no. 4 (1975): 385–418
Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979)
Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform
Dudley Miles, Francis Place: The Life of a Remarkable Radical 1771–1854 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1988); Royle and Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers
James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Worrall, Radical Culture; Kaplan, ‘Jefferson, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Balance of Power’
William Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works; Containing Various Writings and Selections, Exhibiting a Faithful Picture of the United States of America; of their Governments, Laws, Politics and Resources; of the Characters of their Presidents, Governors, Legislators, Magistrates and Military Men; and of the Customs, Manners, Morals, Religion, Virtues and Vices of the People: Comprising also A Complete Series of Historical Documents and Remarks from the End of the War, in 1783, to the Election of the President, March 1801 Vol. IV (London: T. Baylis, 1801)
William Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works; Containing Various Writings and Selections, Exhibiting a Faithful Picture of the United States of America; of their Governments, Laws, Politics and Resources; of the Characters of their Presidents, Governors, Legislators, Magistrates and Military Men; and of the Customs, Manners, Morals, Religion, Virtues and Vices of the People: comprising also A Complete Series of Historical Documents and Remarks from the End of the War, in 1783, to the Election of the President, March 1801 Vol. XII (London: T. Baylis, 1801); Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, December 19, 1807; and Newman, ‘Anti-French Propaganda and British Liberal Nationalism’.
Morning Post, May 3, 1808; Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, March 19, 1808; The Times, August 17, 1808; Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 20–5; and
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (1966; repr., Cambridge, MA: The Arden Shakespeare, 1606), 15.
John Bull, February 11, 1843. This quote was taken from the so-called ‘Tree of Liberty Letter’ sent by Jefferson to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787. Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1997; repr., London: Wordsworth Classics, 1844), 256–7. For an account of Dickens’s time in the USA see American Notes for General Circulation (1842; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
John Robert Godley, Letters from America Volume One (London: John Murray, 1844), 55–7; and
G.W. Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States, from Washington on the Potomac to the Frontier of Mexico; With Sketches of Popular Manners and Geological Notices Volume Two (London: John Murray, 1844), 389.
Richard S. Cramer, ‘British Magazines and the Oregon Question’, Pacific Historical Review 32, no. 4 (1963): 369–82; and
David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973).
For more on Jefferson and slavery see Robert E. Shalhope, ‘Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought’, The Journal of Southern History 42, no. 4 (1976): 529–56, 531
Paul Finkelman, ‘Jefferson and Slavery “Treason Against the Hopes of the World”’, in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 206–12
William W. Freehling, ‘The Founding Fathers and Slavery’, American Historical Review 77, no. 1 (1972): 81–93, 91; and Wilson, Paine and Cobbett, 123. The key point of reference when it came to these tales of interracial relationships in Jefferson’s household was, of course, his long term connection with the slave Sally Hemmings see
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York, NY: Norton, 2008). This controversy had domestic political ramifications after it was publicised by James T. Callender in 1802 see
John Kyle Day, ‘The Federalist Press and Slavery in the Age of Jefferson’, The Historian 65, no. 6 (2003): 1303–29. For British abolitionism see
R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall: Black Americans and the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement 1830–1860 (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983)
Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo American Context 1830–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979)
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964)
Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Co-operation (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972)
James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London: Routledge, 1996)
Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Antsey (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980)
Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, ed., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999)
James Walvin, ed., Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846 (London: MacMillan, 1982)
Shearer West, ed., The Victorians and Race (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996)
Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 78–81; and
Duncan Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Hambledon, 2007), 88–114.
Thomas Jefferson, ‘Autobiography, 1743–1790 with the Declaration of Independence, 6th January, 1821’, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, NY: Library of America, 1984), 1–103
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn J. Moss, Dickens, Trollope, Jefferson: Three Anglo-American Encounters (Albany, NY: Whitston, 2000), 56–83; and
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1832), 58–9. Trollope’s work actually lead to the adoption of the term ‘Trollopism’ into the Anglo-American vocabulary to denote the social conventions she had been critical of. For further examples of the influence of Domestic Manners see
Charles Daubeny, Journal of a Tour Through the United States and Canada, 1837–1838 (Oxford: T. Combe, 1843); and
George Augustus Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1865); see also Examiner, March 4, 1832, June 29, 1832, August 21, 1841; Morning Chronicle, March 6, 1832; Caledonian Mercury, June 10, 1833; Morning Post, October 2, 1833, September 26, 1844, Febuary 16, 1853; Essex Standard, and Colchester and County Advertiser, March 31, 1832; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle etc, April 9, 1832; Derby Mercury, May 2, 1832; Leicester Chronicle: or, Commercial and Agricultural Advertiser, June 1, 1839; Poor Man’s Guardian, June 16, 1832; Trollope, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; for the reviews and responses to this work see Standard, April 30, 1846, September 2, 1836, August 23, 1838, July 25, 1836; Morning Post, May 3, 1836, September 6, 1836, July 5, 1836; Caledonian Mercury, May 30, 1836, September 15, 1836, January 26, 1837; Morning Chronicle, June 22, 1836, January 10, 1837; and London Dispatch and People’s Political and Social Reformer, October 8, 1836.
Moss and Moss, Dickens, Trollope, Jefferson; Liverpool Mercury, December 14, 1838; The Essex Standard & General Advertiser for the Eastern Counties, December 21, 1838; The Champion and Weekly Herald, December 23, 1838; The Examiner, December 23, 1838; and Bradford Observer, December 27, 1838.
Frederick Marryat, Diary in America, with Remarks on its Institutions (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1839), 251–2. For a recent biography of Marryat see
Tom Pocock, Captain Marryat, Seaman, Writer and Adventurer (London: Chatham, 2000); Claeys, ‘The Example of America’, 73-4; and Bronstein, ‘From Land of Liberty’, 147.
Martineau, Society in America Vol One, 80. For a useful biography of Martineau see R.K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London: Heinemann, 1960); and Godley, Letters from America Vol One, 216.
Jefferson’s position on slavery appears inconsistent from a contemporary perspective. In his Autobiography Jefferson contended that slavery would not be a permanent feature of the American republic, yet he failed to emancipate his own slaves. British Mother’s Magazine, January 1, 1854, 20.
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, June 11, 1851.
Morning Chronicle, June 19, 1849. For more on the Wilmot Proviso itself see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion Volume One: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 472–9
David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973); and Nassau William Senior, American Slavery: A Reprint of an Article on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of Which a Portion was Inserted in the 206th Number of the “Edinburgh Review;” and of Mr. Sumner’s Speech of the 19th and 20th of May, 1856, with a Notice of the Events which Followed that Speech (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts), 7–8. The distinction for the British between being a gradual abolitionist or anti-slavery advocate and adopting a perspective which wholeheartedly endorsed the slave system as something positive was crucial in establishing British sympathy for an American individual or cause see
Peter O’Connor, ‘“The Inextinguishable Struggle Between North and South”: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863’ (PhD thesis, Northumbria University, 2014).
Morning Post, May 28, 1858; Leicester Chronicle, or Commercial & Agricultural Advertiser, August 3, 1861; Anthony Trollope, North America Volume Two (1987; repr., Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1862), 78–9, 297–8. Anthony Trollope himself discussed the division between the statesmanship of the founding fathers and that ‘of Polk, of Pierce, and of Buchanan’. See North America Volume Two, 297–8. For biographical information on Trollope see
Graham Handley, Anthony Trollope (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); and
James Pope-Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (London: Phoenix, 2001).
A.J.B. Beresford-Hope, The Social and Political Bearings of the American Disruption (London: James Ridgway, 1863), 28. For Jefferson and the French Revolution see O’Brien, The Long Affair. For the Anglophobia of American political discourse which was ratcheted up by the French Revolution see Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 57.
James Spence, The American Union; Its Effect on National Character and Policy, with an Enquiry into Secession as a Constitutional Right, and the Causes of the Disruption (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), 39–41.
Spence, The American Union, 64; A.J.B. Beresford-Hope, England, the North and the South: Being a Popular View of the American Civil War (London: William Ridgway, 1862), 56, 14; and Morning Post, August 19, 1862.
Crook, English Democracy, 128 A. Trollope, North America Vol Two, 251–3.
The role of Fox as the father of Whiggery is well attested to, in fact it was one of the most prominent Whig/Liberals of the mid-Victorian era, Lord John Russell who collected and published four volumes of The Memories and Correspondence of Charles James Fox between 1854 and 1857 which combined his letters, and memories with a detailed biography of Fox’s life see Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed., Lord John Russell, 4 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1853); and Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600–1898 (London: Atlantic, 2006), 104–7. For the development of British ideas about the American political system during the Victorian period see
Frank Prochaska, Eminent Victorians on America Democracy: The View from Albion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and
Jon Roper, Democracy and its Critics: Anglo-American Democratic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
The Times, August 28, 1852; and Crook, American Democracy, 200.
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Peter O’Connor has recently completed his Ph.D. at Northumbria University with a thesis entitled ‘The Inextinguishable Struggle Between North and South’: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863. His research explores the meaning of the USA in nineteenth century Britain with an emphasis on the use of America in political discourse. He also has an interest in the American presidency and is the author of a book chapter on the political legacy of John Quincy Adams. He was recently awarded an Eccles Centre Visting Postgraduate Fellowship to begin a project examining the effects of the 1812 Anglo-American war on British perceptions of US democracy.
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O’Connor, P. The Anglo-American synecdoche? Thomas Jefferson’s British legacy 1800–1865. J Transatl Stud 13, 154–174 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2015.1022371
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2015.1022371