The American Civil War is little understood in contemporary Britain. It is hardly on primary-school history syllabuses and seldom has been. It appears on some university courses, but about the only students in Britain today who study the American Civil War are those who have elected to research it independently for undergraduate or postgraduate dissertations, or doctoral theses. Among the general public, understanding is dismal. Some seem to imagine it was a conflict between cowboys and Indians, as represented in the old black-and-white films that still grace a few cheap and cheerful British cable-TV channels.

Hugh Dubrulle’s new book, Ambivalent Nation, reminds us that such obliviousness to this highly significant event in the history of Britain’s now-most important ally has not always been so. Britons watched events between 1861 and 1865 so closely at the time that, at one point, there seemed a possibility that British troops would come over the border from Canada and join in. The subtitle of the book is indicative: how Britain imagined the war. Because, inevitably, very few Britons were there, especially within the Confederacy, and so had to imagine what the conflagration and its participants were like. And the information upon which they built their imaginings was not especially reliable. The man who at the time was the most famous journalist in the world—William Howard Russell of The Times, who had made his name as a correspondent in the Crimean War and was the natural choice to cover the