Houses. Ultimately the Commons contented themselves with a protest against
this unwonted stretch of authority, and the paper-duty was removed in
1861.

From 1861 to 1865, a civil war raged in America, between the slave-holding
Southern States (the Confederates) and the abolitionist Northern States
(the Federals). At first, British feeling was strongly in favour of the
Northerners; but it changed before long, partly in consequence of their
seizure of two Confederate envoys on a British mail-steamer, the
_Trent_, and of the interruption of our cotton trade, which caused a
cotton famine and great distress in Lancashire. With the war itself, and
the final hard-won triumph of the North, we had no immediate connection;
but the Southern cause was promoted by five privateers being built in
England. These armed cruisers were not professedly built for the
Southerners, but under false pretences were actually equipped for war
against Northern commerce. One of them, the _Alabama_, was not merely
built in a British dockyard, but manned for the most part by a British
crew. In her two years' cruise she burned sixty-five Federal merchantmen.
The Federal government protested at the time; but it was not till 1872
that the Alabama question was peacefully settled by arbitration in a
conference at Geneva, and we had to pay three millions sterling in
satisfaction of the American claims.

Other events during the Palmerston administration were a tedious native
rebellion in New Zealand (1860-65); the marriage of the Prince of Wales to
the Princess Alexandra of Denmark (1863); the cession of the Ionian Isles
to Greece (1864); and on the Continent there was the Schleswig-Holstein
War (1864), in which, beset by both Prussia and Austria, Denmark looked,
but looked vainly, for succour from Britain.