I provided you a demonstrative anecdote to show what happened to people in Britain at the time who advanced theories of white supremacy (to summarise: they were laughed at, hissed, and refuted). You then responded with:
very few British people were even exposed to this positive view… you have not shown this anecdote to be in anyway representative of the national feelings of the British people just one tiny part of the British polity
I then provided you with 28 different quotes and anecdotes from newspapers and individuals, taken from across the country and from all political persuasions. With an encouraging regularity, these either completely rejected the argument that black people were inferior for anything other than social reasons or expressed abhorrence at the manifestations of systematic racism which they perceived in the North. This, I felt, would put to bed the idea that, in Britain, “almost all whites in this period were committed to white supremacy”. May I remind you (once again) that the evidence you have provided for your assertion consists of two quotes 10-30 years (possibly 30-90) after the events we’re discussing, and your own suppositions about what may lie beneath a selection of British foreign policy decisions cherry-picked from the period 1790-1900. If “almost all whites in this period were committed to white supremacy” you should able to be overwhelm us with quotations from contemporary sources arguing that black people are inherently inferior and fully endorsing schemes of discrimination.
When I discussed Britain, I was making no suggestions about the relative levels of racism in the Union compared to the Confederacy. I would, however, point out that the quotations I provided show that the British were horrified by the fact that the North did not treat black people as equal to whites. This is a substantial improvement on keeping them as property as the Confederates did, a situation which their state was created in order to codify and entrench. I must admit that I thought this was such a blindingly obvious point that I would not have to state it fully as I am doing now. Indeed, contributions from Fiver and usertron2020 demonstrate that the median Confederate (as we might term him) possessed racist attitudes qualitatively different to his northern neighbour, and how this was fully reflected in the political discourse of the Confederacy. My posts about Britain do nothing more than confirm that the Confederacy was even further up the bell curve when a more global perspective is taken into account.