ntion. Such reasoning
lay behind a law passed in May forbidding the export of cotton except
through the seaports of the Confederacy. Similar laws were enacted by
the States. During the summer, many cotton factors joined in advising
the planters to hold their cotton until the blockade broke down. In the
autumn, the Governor of Louisiana forbade the export of cotton from New
Orleans. So unshakeable was the illusion in 1861, that King Cotton had
England in his grip! The illusion died hard. Throughout 1862, and even
in 1863, the newspapers published appeals to the planters to give up
growing cotton for a time, and even to destroy what they had, so as to
coerce the obdurate Englishmen.

Meanwhile, Mason had been accorded by the British upper classes that
generous welcome which they have always extended to the representative,
of a people fighting gallantly against odds. During the hopeful days of
1862--that Golden Age of Confederacy--Mason, though not recognized by
the English Government, was shown every kindness by leading members of
the aristocracy, who visited him in London and received him at their
houses in the country. It was during this period of buoyant hope that
the Alabama was allowed to go to sea from Liverpool in July, 1862. At
the same time Mason heard his hosts express undisguised admiration for
the valor of the soldiers serving under Jackson and Lee. Whether he
formed any true impression of the other side of British idealism, its
resolute opposition to slavery, may be questioned. There seems little
doubt that he did not perceive the turning of the tide of English public
opinion, in the autumn of 1862, following the Emancipation Proclamation
and the great reverses of September and October--Antietam-Sharpsburg,
Perryville, Corinth--the backflow of all three of the Confederate
offensives.

The cotton famine in England, where perhaps a million people were in
actual want through the shutting down of cotton mills, seemed to Mason
to be "looming up in fearful proportions." "The public mind," he wrote
home in November, 1862, "is very much disturbed by the prospect for the
winter; and I am not without hope that it will produce its effects on
the councils of the government." Yet it was the uprising of the British
working people in favor of the North that contributed to defeat the one
important attempt to intervene in American affairs. Napoleon III
had made an offer of mediation which was rejected by the Washington
Gove