It watched with anxiety the evidence of a developing struggle over slavery in the United States, hopeful, as each crisis arose, that the free Northern States would impose their will upon the Southern Slave States.
But as each crisis turned to compromise, seemingly enhancing the power of the South, and committing America to a retention of slavery, the hopes of British abolitionists waned.

The North did indeed, to British opinion, become identified with opposition to the expansion of slavery, but after the "great compromise of 1850," where the elder American statesmen of both North and South proclaimed the "finality" of that measure, British sympathy for the North rapidly lessened.

Moreover, after 1850, there was in Britain itself a decay of general humanitarian sentiment as regards slavery.

The crusade had begun to seem hopeless and the earlier vigorous agitators were dead.

The British Government still maintained its naval squadron for the suppression of the African slave trade, but the British official mind no longer keenly interested itself either in this effort or in the general question of slavery.
Nevertheless American slavery and slave conditions were still, after 1850, favourite matters for discussion, almost universally critical, by English writers.