Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope
Doctor of Civil Law 1874
Honored with a Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1874, Beresford Hope was a Conservative member of Parliament. He was a devoted supporter of the Church of England. In regard to the Confederacy and slavery, he said the following:
"I have sympathised, I do sympathise, and shall sympathise with the South – and will not mince matters...as I have said before, and as I will say again, I have stood and will stand by the Southern Confederacy... I am not blind to that slavery which exists amongst them... I have privately to the Southerners, and publicly in lectures, denounced that atrocious system. But I do say in that system England is first guilty, and in the second place the Northern States, – New York above all, –New York that mortgages the south, – New York that carries slaves to Cuba...When the treacherous action of New York is gone and the South falls back upon her own independent action, that system of slavery is doomed..."
"I was a Southerner before Bull's Run."
"[T]here is this peculiarity, that while in the free States the negro is treated with unchristian cruelty, excluded from the same church, from the same table, from the same railway carriage, from the same altar of God, as a loathsome beast of the field, in the slave states this terrible aversion has no existence, or is found in a much milder degree."
In the October 21, 1862 edition of The Nashville Daily Union, Hope was described thusly:
“A BLASTED HOPE – Mr. Beresford Hope, who is a candidate for the Parliament of Great Britain for the borough of Stoke, openly expressed his sympathy for the Southern rebels in a most offensive manner, and compared himself to Stonewall Jackson, as likely to win in the contest, has been defeated by his liberal opponent, Mr. Grenfell. Undoubtedly the people of England are on the side of the Union and freedom.”
"Mr. Beresford Hope's Address Upon the Political Questions of the Day at Stoke-Upon-Trent Town Hall," (Hanley: William Timmis, 1862): 4-5.
A.J.B. Beresford Hope, A Popular View of the American Civil War (London: James Ridgway, 1861): 10.
“A Blasted Hope,” The Nashville Daily Union, October 21, 1862.
Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.