Hope, you didn’t include the qualifier “for the first time” until your most recent comment.
“I mean, if Parliament didn’t care about the working class and only cared about the rich and elite, it stands to reason that they should have recognized the CSA immediately, right?”
Not at all. As I said previously, Great Britain was being prudent and waiting to see how the war progressed before taking sides. Made a lot of sense, too.
Your comment about Great Britain not wanting to recognize CSA because of slavery just does not hold water. Think about it: Britain knew that Southern cotton was produced mostly by slave labor, and yet Great Britain continued to be the largest market for that cotton. Don’t you think that Great Britain — if it were so incensed about slavery — would have refused to be the largest purchaser of a product that was primarily produced by slave labor? It’s not like Great Britain did not have access to other sources of cotton (i.e., Egypt and India).
I think you’re not recognizing the effects of inertia on human relations. It’s one thing to hate something, but to accept current conditions. so, yes, the working class in Great Britain could hate slavery, but still accept the United States as a slaveholding nation, and run their mills with cotton grown by slaves, as this did not really drive any great effort on their part. The difference was in 1861, when the Confederacy asked to be recognized as a country explicitly formed to protect and continue slavery. This is where they drew the line, because their actions would have essentially meant they approved of slavery. This, I believe, was a major reason they did not recognize the Confederacy, although, as I said previously, Lee’s loss at Antietam had a lot to do with it as well.