[MUSIC] Britain had abolished slavery throughout its empire in the 1830s, so one might expect to see it strongly in support of the Union states as they tried to defend the election of Abraham Lincoln against the states in the Confederacy. However, many politicians, judges, and even bishops in the Protestant Church sided with that Confederate group of states in the south. Now of course, the desire for cotton and the urge to sell guns and warships to the Confederate states would've played a part in the support for the American south during the Civil War. But it's also the case that many of the pro-slavery arguments used in Britain before abolition didn't just vanish when slavery was abolished in the empire. The same arguments were replayed by the pro-slavery lobby in the 1860s. Arguments such as, it would be better for Africans to be governed by enlightened masters in the American states than it would be to be ruled by tyrants in their home nations appeared again in newspapers as the American Civil War waged on. The claim that one had the right to be governed fairly also lay behind the Confederate states determination to break away from the Union. They argued that the Union states were behaving themselves like tyrants, by imposing too strong a Federal government and limiting the powers of individuals to be governed as they so chose within their own states. British supports for the Southern states only began to decline with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on New Year's day, 1863. Lincoln declared that all the slaves in the Confederate states would be freed on this date if the Confederate states did not rejoin the Union. And in so doing, he made the American Civil War firmly around democracy and the rights of every man to be considered a free man and to have the Bill of Rights apply to him. Lincoln's proclamation made the argument one about democracy. And the power of Magna Carta to be extended to all men, to render slaves free and to extend to them the same protections as the charter offered those who were already free.