Was British support for the Confederacy paradoxical?

Question

It is well known that not only had Great Britain outlawed slavery but even interfered with ships of foreign powers carrying slaves.

However, there are multiple cases of Britain supporting the South. One notable case is allowing Judah P. Benjamin to live openly there after the war. They also sold warships and engaged in trade with the Confederacy.

It could be argued that Britain liked the split itself, expecting to perhaps move in and re-take the colonies of a weakened United States.

But as far as slavery itself, did Britain object more strongly against the slave trade than against enslaved people remaining enslaved? Or was it simply that despite their opposition to slavery itself, it was worth it to the Brits to ignore this major aspect of the Confederacy and perhaps they themselves saw one result of their taking back the colonies as being Britain abolishing slavery in the rewon colonies?

Answer 1

The British support for confederacy was more cynical than paradoxical.

Britain was one of the most important commercial partner of the ex-colonies.

The north and the south had different economic policies and trade effect with Britain, in particular:

• Union was more industrial-base, and had a policy of trade protection, through the Morrill Tariffs: "These tariff acts raised import duties considerably compared, and they were designed to both raise revenue and protect domestic manufacturing against foreign competition."
• Confederacy was more agricultural based, trading cotton (of which "King Cotton" is the key expression)

Those two views were one of the drive to secession, other than slavery.

So Britain had more interest in keep the cotton flowing, specially as "around one quarter of the British population at the time depended on the cotton textile industry for their income.", other than having difficulties to export to US.

The population was split, by different beliefs and social class.

In the end we can say that officially England was neutral, but wanted to keep the raw materials flowing, as it was needed for its own industrial revolution.

On a side note - thanks to @releseabe for the comment - trading slaves from Africa was abolished by both Britain and US in 1807, so way before civil war, with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves for the US and the Slave Trade Act 1807 for Britain.

(On the side, this generated work for lawyer - see United States v. The Amistad, portrayed by Spielberg's Amistad film)

Answer 2

I think hypocritical would be a better term. In that you are asking if the nation's support of the Confederacy was contrary to its stated values. In fact, it was not hypocritical, and the moment it did become publicly hypocritical, the UK stopped doing it (publicly).

The thing you have to realize here is that while the South always maintained, from the very beginning of secession, that the purpose of their actions was to preserve slavery, that was not the story in the rest of the United States.

Initially Lincoln's chief goal was to preserve the union of the United States of America. At the very beginning, this meant to limit the amount of states that joined the Confederacy.

So since the rebels' main casus belli was the preservation of slavery, the Lincoln Administration, and the POTUS himself, repeatedly asserted that the war was not about slavery at all, and the USA had no intention of ending slavery.

From his first Inaugural Address (about a month after the secessions started)

I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Given that repeated public position from the US Administration that slavery wasn't actually under threat, and an ultimate Union victory would not alter it, it was a quite reasonable position in the UK to consider the war a domestic American matter, not a moral matter. In that circumstance, it made perfect sense for foreign policy to center the domestic commercial interests of the UK¹.

This is why it is often said that the Emancipation Proclamation, and its timing (announcement in late September 1882, release in 1863), was largely calculated for its foreign policy effect. While it didn't free a lot of slaves directly, it promised to free every slave in any rebelling territory that got reconquered. Thus the war became, indisputably, about ending slavery. This made public recognition of the rebelling states as their own nation politically impossible in the UK and France, and public support of them politically dangerous (publicly).

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^{1 - As mentioned in Dan M's answer}