There has been a tendency among historians of the Anglo-American connection to suggest that there was a fairly rigid dichotomy in English opinion about America in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it is suggested, there were the Radicals, who, by tradition and in principle, favoured the United States and its institutions. This group - the Left of that period - comprised the excluded classes of society, the dissenters, the artisans and labourers, the Chartists and democrats, the utilitarians. Confronting them was the Establishment, opposed to innovation, and especially democratic innovation, embittered by memories of 1776 and 1812, and therefore thoroughly anti-American.

The second day's fight at Preeble's Farm, Va. was not much of a battle as battles went in those days, but it proved very disastrous to my regiment, and especially to my company. Of the thirty odd men captured by the Confederates thirty belonged to company D. As we were being conducted to the rear, a rebel soldier saw a ring on my finger and asked me for it. When I refused, he told me I might as well give it to him as it would be taken from me when we reached Petersburg. I took my pipe and managed to squeeze the ring into the bowl which I filled with tobacco, and carried in my mouth unlit. Sure enough we were searched at Petersburg and our money and other valuables confiscated. I had an old knife with a broken blade which the rebel officer allowed me to keep. I swapped this knife a few days later to a rebel guard for a cold sweet potato, the sweetest morsel I ever tasted having eaten nothing except a few mouldy crackers for three days.

(These notes were offered as a contribution to discussion at the nineteenth and twentieth century sessions of the Third Conference on African History and Archaeology at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, 3 - 7 July, 1961. Two additions - references 3 and 12 - have been made to the original notes.)

The historical position of the United States in Subsaharan Africa has until recently been one of detachment. There have been official moves, as when in 1833 an agreement was concluded with the Sultan of Zanzibar which, among other things, permitted American consuls to reside in his ports and judge disputes involving U. S. citizens; or the recognition of the Congo Free State in 1884. On the whole, however, the United States has left Africa to the European powers who took over the responsibility of governing her peoples.

When Huckleberry Finn was published in 1882 at least one New England library promptly banned it. This rather pathetic gesture is an apt indication of the larger crisis of culture of the decade, the significance of which extends in many directions - social, philosophical, and theological. In art, it took the form of a stylistic rebellion, a rebellion that ultimately rendered obsolete the cherished styles of Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, and set a tone which has remained a constant in American literature to this day. This rebellion was brought to a head by one man; and his book, Huckleberry Finn, is pivotal in the history of American literature.