The Confederate States of America have . . . formed an independent government, perfect in all its branches, and endowed with every attribute of sovereignty and power necessary to entitle them to assume a place among the nations of the world.
—ROBERT TOOMBS, CONFEDERATE SECRETARY OF STATE, MARCH 16, 1861
THE SOUTH WOULD ALSO HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO THE WORLD WHAT it was fighting for. Why exactly had it determined to separate from a nation it had been a part of for eighty-five years? It would not do to explain that the Southern states simply did not like the outcome of the late election and preferred going their own way. Most modern wars, exposed to the scrutiny of political opposition and the press at home and abroad, require each side to come forth with some public explanation of the conflict’s origin and purpose. Separatist movements bear a special burden of demonstrating just cause for their rebellion. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1776: “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”1
Respect for the opinions of mankind had a practical element as well, for in order to survive, aspiring nations needed to win international recognition as sovereign powers—or be relegated to the dustheap of lost causes. Until their country was recognized, Confederate emissaries could not expect to be officially received or be treated with the respect accorded other diplomats. Jefferson Davis huffed early in 1863 that Confederate envoys were left “waiting in servants’ halls and on the back stairs,” begging for an audience with European officials. He would have liked the crowns of Europe to send supplicants to the South, but the world of nations did not operate that way.2
Of course, recognition involved far more than all the courtesy, pomp, and plumage that surrounded formal diplomacy in the nineteenth century. Recognition meant that a nation was a legitimate sovereign power able to negotiate treaties, form commercial and military alliances, assume international loans, and enjoy all the rights of other nations under international law. Recognizing or aiding the South invited confrontation and possible war with the United States, as Secretary of State William Seward made emphatically clear. But once Britain or perhaps another Great Power led the way, and other countries followed, the Union itself would come under tremendous pressure to acknowledge the South’s independence, especially if multiple European powers acted in concert to mediate peace, break the North’s blockade of Southern ports, or perhaps intervene military. Recognition, in other words, quite likely meant independence for the South.3
Revolutions and separatist rebellions had already become well-worn paths to nationhood by the time the South seceded. Roughly half of today’s nearly two hundred UN members originated as breakaway states. What is cheerfully referred to as the family of nations has been largely the product of hostile divorces, forced marriages, and patricidal violence. Questions as to the legitimacy of the newborn and doubts about life expectancy often loom like dark shadows over embryonic nations until the verdict of war or diplomacy decides their fate.4
The American Civil War is usually viewed as a military contest decided by major battles. Nationalist independence movements are not always decided by the fortunes of war alone, however. Rebels need not fully triumph on the field of battle so long as they can continue to field an army, wear down the enemy, and hope for international intervention of some kind. Davids often triumph over Goliaths in such struggles, precisely as Britain learned in the American Revolution and the United States would learn much later in Vietnam.5
The South’s bid for independence took place within living memory of dozens of successful nationalist independence movements in the Atlantic world, including the wars for independence that gave birth to the Spanish American republics, all of which won international recognition despite the fulminations of imperial Spain. The Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire and the Italian Risorgimento were also widely admired by most European and American onlookers at the time. When Belgium broke off from the Netherlands in 1830, Great Britain and other European powers hastened to recognize it as an independent kingdom. Hungary, Ireland, and Poland had not achieved independence by the 1860s, but these nationalist aspirations also inspired enthusiasm abroad. By the time the Confederacy came upon the world stage, the idea that people possessed a natural right to govern themselves and pursue their own destiny had a firm basis in liberal philosophy and a clear precedent in international law. Confederate diplomats were eager to remind Europe of that.6
During the crucial first months of the conflict, the Confederacy was able to set the terms of debate by emphasizing its desire for national self-determination and free trade—not slavery—as the motive for secession. The principle of self-governance was closely joined to the legal argument that secession was a legitimate as well as peaceful means of separation. Far from being revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the existing government, secessionists insisted they were merely withdrawing from the existing “compact” of states and creating a government of their own among the other like-minded Southern states. We are a nation, and we exist already in fact and in law, the Confederate States of America proclaimed to the world. The self-declared new nation sent forth emissaries to the world asking nothing more than recognition of this fact. It went to war not to achieve nationhood, but to defend a fait accompli.
THE DEBATE OVER THE RIGHT TO SECEDE WAS A LEGAL QUARREL about the origin of the Union among states, the US Constitution, and the original intent of the founding fathers. That debate obscured a far more salient question as to the reason for secession. It was notable that the Confederacy never issued a Declaration of Independence that submitted “facts to a candid world.” This was no mere oversight. During the Secession Winter of 1860–1861, the radical secessionists, known as “Fire-Eaters,” had been altogether forthright in arguing that secession was the only means of perpetuating slavery and white supremacy and that the alternative was racial holocaust and economic ruin under “Black Republican” rule. As they seceded, several states went on the public record with declarations of the causes of secession that spelled out the Republican Party’s threat to slavery and to the peace and prosperity of the South and the world.7
The first state to secede, South Carolina, issued a Declaration of Immediate Causes on December 24, 1861, which was essentially a breach-of-contract suit that tediously outlined the grounds for termination. South Carolina in 1788, the declaration explained, had entered into a league with other states under certain well-understood terms, and the US government had repeatedly forsaken its obligations under this contract. Every one of South Carolina’s grievances centered on slavery. The declaration complained of those in nonslaveholding states who “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and “encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.” Worse yet, those slaves who remained were being incited by “emissaries, books and pictures” to engage in “servile insurrection.” South Carolina’s declaration also made allusions to Republicans “subverting” the Constitution by electing a president without Southern support and accused them of “elevating to citizenship” people, apparently immigrants, who were unfit to vote. Shifting to future tense, the declaration prophesied that, once in power, the Republican Party would wage war against slavery and deprive the South of the “power of self-government, or self-protection.”8
South Carolinians of more diplomatic temperament thought it unwise to put slavery so boldly before the world. Robert Barnwell Rhett and Maxey Gregg, both proslavery secessionists, nonetheless understood that Southern independence would require European support. They urged their fellow delegates to tone down the hysterical rhetoric about abolitionism, play up the South’s alienation over tariff policy, and place the South’s desire for free trade with Europe front and center. But with more bravado than tact, the new Republic of South Carolina brazenly staked its claim to independence on the preservation of slavery.9
Mississippi followed in early January by cleverly joining the anxiety over the safety of slavery to alarming predictions of economic disaster for the world once the antislavery party took power. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” the declaration led off. The “imperious law of nature,” it further explained, dictated that only blacks could bear the tropical sun. A “blow at slavery” will be “a blow at commerce and civilization.” Mississippi had to choose between “submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”10
The other Deep South states fell in, one by one, during January and February: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. According to plan, the legislature of each seceding state sent delegates to a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, exactly one month before Lincoln took office. They gathered there to create what they unblinkingly called a “permanent federal government.”11
Voices of caution urging the South to wait and see what Lincoln did were silenced by ominous warnings of a diabolical plot among the Black Republicans to ignite a race war on the model of the bloody revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) during the French Revolution. The secessionist delegates in Montgomery were also determined to show that the South was not just bluffing in order to win concessions from the Lincoln administration. They came to create “a government of their own” and present the North and the world with a fully conceived new nation before Lincoln even took power.12
Within mere days the Montgomery convention assembled all the essential trappings of modern nationhood: a constitution, a president and vice president, a cabinet, money, a flag, even a motto—Deo Vindice (God Will Vindicate). For its constitution the delegates borrowed the US model, but with crucial alterations, including ones to safeguard slavery, restrict voting rights of foreigners, limit presidential terms, and admit new states. The new nation needed a name. One delegate proposed calling it the “Republic of the Southern United States,” which would force everyone to distinguish it from the “Northern United States.” In the end the delegates chose “Confederate States of America” to convey the core idea of a compact of sovereign states and one to which others might be added in due time.13
This was a provisional government organized under a provisional constitution. There was no time before March 4, secessionists insisted, to conduct plebiscites on the constitution and the presidency. Besides, the Confederacy was designed to do away with acrimonious party strife and rancorous election campaigns of the kind that had so plagued what they characterized as the “extreme democracy” of the North. To that end, under the Confederate government the president would serve only one six-year term. The Montgomery congress, having authorized itself as a sovereign body, nominated Jefferson Davis, former secretary of war and US senator from Mississippi, and Alexander Stephens, former US senator representing Georgia, as the provisional president and vice president. Elections were to follow in November 1861.14
ON FEBRUARY 18, 1861, JEFFERSON DAVIS GAVE HIS INAUGURAL address and, for the first time, presented to the world the official justification for the Confederacy and its claim to nationhood. On that frosty morning a procession formed in front of the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery to escort the nominee to the ceremony. A brass band led the parade, followed by militia groups in bright blue and red uniforms. Six iron-gray horses pulled an elegant carriage lined with saffron and white cloth, trimmed with silver, and carrying Davis, Stephens, and Howell Cobb, president of the provisional Confederate Congress. Behind them in carriages were other officials, followed by citizens in carriages and on foot, all forming a long procession that passed by cheering crowds. The band played “Dixie” as the convoy made its way to the Alabama statehouse where an anxious crowd of five thousand gathered to hear their new leader.15
On the portico of the statehouse, framed by high stone columns, Davis was introduced amid a storm of applause. Though he was only fifty-two, the strain of political life showed on his face. Hollow cheeks, thin lips, and weathered skin made him look “haggard, care-worn, and pain drawn,” a British journalist noted. He suffered chronic nervous dyspepsia and a recurring facial neuralgia that intensified with stress, contorting the left side of his face and affecting a pained grimace. His left eye, covered with an opaque film, seemed nearly blind.16
Davis’s wife, Varina, later remarked that, when Davis first received news that the Confederate Congress had chosen him to be the provisional president, he looked positively stricken. He was not a radical secessionist. He shared none of the illusions other secessionists propagated that the North would give up the South without a fight, and he warned the Fire-Eaters against precipitating a war they were not equipped to win. He arrived in Montgomery after five days of difficult travel from his plantation in Mississippi, giving speeches along the way, but he apparently gave very little time to preparing an inaugural address. It showed.17
4. Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
After taking the oath of office, Davis pulled sheets of paper from his coat pocket and, with what the Harper’s Weekly reporter described as his usual “soldierly bearing” and “rather stern manners,” began a surprisingly brief and perplexing speech. He opened by proclaiming the Confederacy as “unprecedented in the history of nations” and then invoked a familiar precedent: the Declaration of Independence. Echoing Thomas Jefferson on the right of the people to “alter or abolish” governments once they become “destructive of the ends for which they were established,” he seemed to embrace the revolutionary model of 1776. Then he abruptly reversed course, denouncing as “abuse of language” the notion of some that Southern secession amounted to a “revolution.” The Southern states, Davis rationalized, had simply “formed a new alliance,” and “within each State its government has remained.” The Confederacy’s new constitution differed from its predecessor only “so far as it is explanatory of their well-known intent.” When Abraham Lincoln described secession as a “sugar-coated” rebellion, it was exactly this kind of obfuscation that he had in mind.18
5. Jefferson Davis, imagined here as a dashing, young cavalier arriving at the Battle of Bull Run. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
IT WAS LEFT TO THE CONFEDERATE VICE PRESIDENT, ALEXANDER Stephens, to provide a full, unguarded public exposition of the reasons for Southern independence without sugarcoating. It came in a widely published and much-discussed speech in Savannah, Georgia, about a month after Davis’s unremarkable inaugural address.
A large, raucous crowd of men and women packed the Athenaeum hall the evening of March 21, 1861. Hundreds more were left outside, straining to hear. Stephens was afflicted by multiple maladies, ranging from neuralgia to pneumonia, which led one reporter to describe him as “painfully thin.” He spoke in a sharp, shrill voice that did not carry well, but he was nonetheless a brilliant orator and much beloved by his fellow Georgians. The crowd outside began chanting, urging him to come address them since there were more outside the hall than inside.19
Stephens told them his frail health required him to remain inside at the rostrum. He began by setting forth the several “improvements” the Confederate government had made to the US Constitution. He rang off some of the more noncontroversial novelties in the new constitution, those involving the tariff, internal improvements, cabinet membership, and the one-term presidency. The boisterous crowd outside began remonstrating again, complaining they could not hear. They were about to miss a sensational moment of candor. If it did not register with those outside the hall that night, the rest of the world would hear it again and again during the next four years.
Stephens resumed speaking as the crowd quieted. He referred to one final “improvement” the Confederate Constitution had introduced, a brief but crucial clause that banned forever any “bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” “The new Constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” This question, Stephens baldly admitted, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”20
Stephens then referenced Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers who thought slavery to be something “wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically.” Men of that day, Stephens explained, seemed to wish that slavery would somehow fade away in due time. “Those ideas were fundamentally wrong”; the whole idea of equality of the races was “an error,” he told the crowd. The Confederacy had at last corrected Jefferson’s mistake. “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” The hall burst with applause.
This last passage gave the address its name—the Cornerstone Speech. It was astonishing. The vice president of the new nation had not only admitted that slavery was at the very heart of the South’s rebellion, but also went out of his way to repudiate the underlying principle of democracy—human equality.
Stephens later claimed that he spoke extemporaneously, that the notes of the reporter were “very imperfect,” and that he had been careless about correcting them before the speech was published. But it was untrue. He had given very similar remarks earlier and never repudiated a word. After the war he tried to explain what he really meant to say, but his rationalizations confirmed exactly what he was reported to have said. Stephens had committed a classic political gaffe: a politician telling the truth.21
Arguments against Jefferson, the “Godless ideas of equality,” and the “fanatical egalitarianism” of the antislavery movement had been running through Southern proslavery rhetoric for years. Though Stephens did not go into the scientific basis for what he called “new truths” about Africans, he was undoubtedly alluding to Arthur Gobineau, the French author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853), a pioneering treatise on the inequality of human races that had been translated in 1856 by Henry Hotze, who would serve as chief Confederate propaganda agent in London. Hotze’s coeditor was Josiah Nott, a Mobile physician whose science of race led him to propound the theory of polygenesis, by which Negroes were categorized as an altogether separate species from whites. Gobineau’s work was applauded by proslavery Southerners for its scientific explanation of race as an immutable, biologically determined human trait. The “sentimental” antislavery fanatics of the North, Stephens told his Savannah audience, were blindly “attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.” The South, instead, was embracing modern science.22
Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech has been called “the Gettysburg Address of the Confederate South” because it neatly summarized the most salient principles of the Confederacy. It would become an important asset for Unionists abroad and was widely quoted in the international press. Use of the term cornerstone (la pierre angulaire in French) became a shorthand method of reminding foreigners of the real purpose of the South’s rebellion. Stephens’s speech was a gift to the Union, but its power was dampened at first by the Union’s own diffident stance on slavery.23
MEANWHILE, MANY IN THE NEW CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT WERE anxious to get their case before the world using less controversial arguments for self-government and free trade. The seceding states had hastily drafted a constitution, set up a government, and fielded an army, in large part to convince foreign nations that the Confederacy was a viable, permanent nation-state worthy of recognition. The next step was to send out emissaries to the nations of the world. On February 13, 1861, the Confederate Congress authorized two foreign missions: one to Europe and the other to Washington.24
The Washington “peace commission” was sent by Jefferson Davis with a letter addressed to the president of the United States introducing the commission’s leader, Martin Crawford, and explaining that his mission was to establish friendly relations between the two countries. Davis took the occasion to date the letter the “27th day of February, A.D. 1861, and of the Independence of the Confederate States the eighty-fifth,” a pointed reference to the Confederate theory that its independence was first established in 1776.25
Crawford and his fellow commissioners, Andre Roman and John Forsyth, went to Washington ostensibly to arrange an amicable political divorce, settle debts, divide property, and establish new commercial treaties going forward. This was also a Confederate public diplomacy ploy to demonstrate goodwill and win public sympathy at home and abroad.
Lincoln and Seward, once in office, wisely avoided the trap being set. They refused to meet with agents of rebellion or even to speak the name of what they insisted on calling the “so-called Confederacy.” Seward effectively stalled Crawford and his commission, while Lincoln and his cabinet prepared for the confrontation over federal control of Fort Sumter, South Carolina. For the Confederacy, the Washington commission was a dress rehearsal for the delicate dance of diplomacy, an exercise in which Confederate envoys would often appear graceless, especially as they grew impatient with the lack of respect accorded them.26
WHEREAS THE WASHINGTON COMMISSION WENT NORTH TO SETTLE A divorce, the European commission went abroad to court marriage partners. The South, many thought, would need to propose rich dowries in the form of commercial treaties offering Southern cotton for European arms and supplies. The South would also need financial loans and military allies with naval prowess to break the blockade Lincoln inaugurated soon after the conflict began.
Cabinet member Judah P. Benjamin proposed that the government buy up as much cotton as possible and sell it to Europe in exchange for arms, supplies, and ships, thus fastening European creditors to the fate of the South. Others, such as Robert Toombs, Davis’s first secretary of state, and Robert Barnwell Rhett, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Montgomery, advocated generous long-term trade agreements, up to twenty years or more, with exclusive most-favored-nation status awarded to the first European nation willing to aid the South’s struggle for independence.
The South would thus “make a league” with Europe’s Great Powers and, in turn, promise not to poach their possessions in the American hemisphere. Toombs thought that Spain, the only European power still sanctioning slavery and with its rich sugar colonies in neighboring Cuba and Puerto Rico, was destined to become the South’s natural ally. One cynic thought Toombs would favor “an alliance with Satan himself” if that is what it would take to win the South’s independence. From the beginning there were serious differences within the Confederate government over foreign policy, and even some who thought diplomacy was a complete waste of time and resources. But most Confederate leaders accepted a common assumption: Europe’s material self-interests, not constitutional arguments for secession and not moral defenses of slavery, were the vital key to winning recognition abroad.27
Jefferson Davis found it demeaning to plead for aid from Europe and remained convinced that the South would have to win its independence at arms without foreign aid. Instead of inducing European assistance by generous offers of cheap cotton, he adopted an opposite strategy by imposing an embargo on cotton exports, confiscating cotton, and even burning crops to force European nations to terms, or face cotton famine and social upheaval among their workers. Eventually, the tightening Union blockade rendered Davis’s proposed embargo policy redundant, but the arrogant assumption that King Cotton would bring the world to heel was not soon forgotten abroad.28
Jefferson Davis typically betrayed a certain tone deafness when it came to diplomatic appointments and policy. To head the first Confederate commission to Europe he appointed William Yancey, a rabid proslavery extremist who had advocated reopening the African slave trade. The other two commissioners—Pierre Rost, a Louisiana judge, and Ambrose Dudley Mann, the only envoy with diplomatic experience—would prove of little help. They were, one historian would later conclude, the “poorest choices possible.”29
Whomever Davis appointed to the European commission, their main problem, Robert Barnwell Rhett thought, was that they had nothing of substance with which to tempt foreign governments to risk aiding their bid for independence. “You have no business in Europe,” he told a startled Yancey. “You have nothing to propose; and nothing therefore, to treat about.” Rhett urged his friend Yancey not to accept the appointment on these terms and warned that his mission would meet with nothing but “failure and mortification.”30
Yancey should have listened. A fiery Southern rights politician from Alabama with a marvelous reputation for oratory, a man who could hold a crowd for hours, Yancey was entirely out of his depth amid the intrigue of European diplomatic courts. He was ignorant of the world and, by his own admission, wholly unsuited by experience and personality to the gentle art of diplomacy. But Davis saw him as a political rival in the upcoming presidential contest and wanted him out of the country. Why Yancey accepted, especially after Rhett’s stern warning, is not clear. He was by reputation a quick-tempered, violent man. It was said he had killed a relative in an affair of honor. He “was not a winning or persuasive man,” one Confederate envoy uncharitably described his colleague. He was “bold, antagonistic and somewhat dogmatical,” never good traits for diplomats. Unrefined in deportment, he was “not at all impressive in personal appearance, and decidedly negligent in dress.” This description, from a fellow Confederate envoy, leaves us only to wonder what the English made of Yancey.31
Pierre Adolfe Rost, another of the commissioners, was completely unknown outside Louisiana, where he had lived as a planter, politician, and judge. Born in France in 1797 and schooled in Paris, he had fled with his family to Louisiana after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. If nothing else, Rost’s command of French ought to have recommended him to the post. But some found his accent a bit too Creole for the Parisian ear. “Has the South no sons capable of representing your country?” one French official asked. Among the diplomatic corps in Paris, Rost became something of a joke for strolling down the Champs-Élysées and greeting all who inquired about the Confederate fortunes in France with a jaunty Tout va bien.32
Alone among the three commissioners, Ambrose Dudley Mann had considerable diplomatic experience and extensive knowledge of Europe. Before the war he had won a string of appointments in Bremen, Hungary; Hanover, the German Confederation; and Switzerland. He had also served as assistant secretary of state in Washington. His command of French and other European languages and his understanding of diplomatic protocol made him indispensable to the Confederate mission, and he knew it. But his close friendship with Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, often led him to overestimate his influence with the president. In Europe Mann exhausted enormous amounts of ink and time penning lengthy dispatches to the home office, sometimes brimming with insights on European affairs, but just as often given to self-serving reports on trifling diplomatic triumphs and grandiose promises of glory ahead.33
Mann had foolishly decided to risk crossing the Atlantic from New York to London and, more foolishly still, to stop in Washington on the way to show off his copy of the new Confederate Constitution to friends. Seward nearly had him arrested before he rushed to New York and took the first ship for London, where he arrived in mid-April, two weeks before his colleagues.34
Yancey and Rost, meanwhile, were delayed in New Orleans by Yancey’s chronic ill health. They sailed to Havana, then Saint Thomas, where they finally caught a ship to London, arriving April 29, just after news broke that the South was at war with the United States. Meanwhile, in London, Mann used his time and connections to open communications with the inner circle of Prime Minister Lord Palmerston’s government. Arriving on a high tide of Confederate confidence, Yancey and his troupe were about to be initiated into the cunning world of European diplomacy.35
BRITISH PRIME MINISTER HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, THIRD VISCOUNT, otherwise known as Lord Palmerston, was the picture of England’s aristocratic governing class. Born in 1784, he had been in one government office or another since 1807. “Pam,” as he was affectionately known, instinctively feared the excesses of democracy and thoroughly detested the United States for inspiring British Radicals, Member of Parliament (MP) John Bright chief among them, to agitate for “universal suffrage.” Palmerston still remembered the summer of 1792 when, as a child on holiday with his family in France, he witnessed the revolutionary fury of Parisian mobs.36
Palmerston viewed Britain’s constitutional monarchy as the best and only proper model for good government, for it avoided at once the abuses of absolutist monarchy and the turmoil of democratic republicanism. “The History of the world in all Times and countries,” he later wrote to his foreign secretary, John Russell, reflecting on the American crisis, “shows that Power in the Hands of the Masses throws the Scum of the Community to the Surface and that Truth and Justice are Soon banished from the Land.” If Bright and company had their way in Britain, he groused, it would fare the same.37
John Russell, recently elevated to the peerage as an earl, also came from a prominent aristocratic family. Born in 1792, “Johnny,” as some referred to him, shared Lord Palmerston’s profound distrust of democracy. His icy aristocratic aloofness left diplomats on both sides of the American war suspecting that he wished them ill, and they were usually right. Like Palmerston, Russell had championed the Reform Act of 1832, which eliminated some “rotten boroughs” and ended the most egregious forms of aristocratic domination, but that was the first and last step toward democracy he was willing to see Britain take. Russell staunchly opposed Bright’s movement to expand voting rights to workers. America’s disaster seemed quite enough proof of the dangers of “Brightism” to the British way.38
There was nothing Russell and Palmerston feared more than being dragged into another war with the United States. Two wars with the belligerent American republic, in 1776 and 1812, had proved costly, fruitless, and humiliating. Now Britain faced a far stronger nation across a vast ocean, one with a powerful army and navy in the making. In the event of war, British Canada would be exposed to invasion by the United States across a long, unprotected border. Furthermore, as an imperial power with possessions in North America, the Caribbean, India, and the Far East, to say nothing of Ireland, the British government dared not side with rebel nationalists. “For God’s sake,” Russell implored his fellow MPs, “let us if possible keep out of it.”39
Though Palmerston had no American-style democracy to contend with, the American question threatened to upset the thin majority on which his newly formed Liberal coalition government rested. He had to constantly mind the storms of public opinion aggravated by a free and boisterous press. And he had to keep an eye on the line of rival politicians eager to take his place as prime minister. For the same reasons that he feared democracy, Palmerston understood the danger of alienating public opinion. “What are opinions against armies?” one of Palmerston’s political rivals had asked years earlier. “Opinions are stronger than armies,” he famously answered. It was a lesson worth remembering as Britain grappled with the American question during the next four years.40
ON MAY 3, 1861, YANCEY, ROST, AND MANN MADE THEIR WAY through the crowded streets of London to meet with Earl Russell. He had invited them to his private home on Chesham Place in order to underscore the unofficial nature of their interview and, of course, to avoid antagonizing the United States. While Russell listened in stone-faced silence, Yancey, taking his cues from Toombs’s instructions, rehearsed the history leading up to Southern secession, taking care to emphasize the desire of the South to free itself from the tribute it had been forced to pay in tariffs. Two months earlier the Republican-dominated Congress had passed the Morrill Tariff, which sharply raised duties on foreign imports, some said to raise revenue for the coming war. The new tariff followed rather than caused secession, of course, but it was a gift to Confederate diplomacy, and Yancey made it clear that an independent South would be devoted to free trade.
The “people,” Yancey explained to the poker-faced foreign minister, “had thrown off one Federal Government and formed a new one . . . without shedding a drop of blood.” He closed by expressing the hope that Great Britain, “for the benefit of industrial interests generally” and in “the highest interests of peace, civilization, and constitutional government,” would recognize the independence of the Confederate States of America. Russell gave absolutely no hint of sympathy for either side, but he assured Yancey and the other commissioners that he would take the matter up with the cabinet. Without further ceremony, he showed them out.41
Ten days later, on May 13, Yancey and his fellow commissioners were thrilled to learn that Queen Victoria had issued a formal Proclamation of Neutrality. In the stroke of a pen, the queen’s proclamation swept aside the Union’s characterization of the conflict as a domestic insurrection and recognized instead two belligerent parties engaged in a regular war. Recognition of belligerent status was quite different from recognizing the Confederacy’s national sovereignty, but everyone understood this to be a first step in that direction. France, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and Portugal followed Britain’s lead by the end of June (Brazil and even the Kingdom of Hawaii did so in August). Before any major engagements on the field of battle, it looked as though the Confederacy was marching toward a bloodless diplomatic triumph in the marbled courts of Europe.42
Soon after their interview with Russell, Yancey dispatched Rost to Paris, where he arranged an unofficial interview with the Duc de Morny, the illegitimate half brother and trusted confidant of Emperor Napoleon III. France and Britain had a long tradition of enmity and distrust, but during this period the two powers were operating on the tacit understanding that neither would act on the American question without at least informing the other. Morny gave encouraging assurances to Rost, who immediately reported to Yancey that the Confederacy “need apprehend no unfriendly action” from France and that recognition was “a mere question of time.”43
Yancey and his fellow commissioners wrote the home office on May 21, 1861, to explain that while neither Britain nor France was quite ready to take the step of recognizing the South’s independence, “England in reality is not averse to a disintegration of the United States,” and both nations would act at the first sign of decisive military success. In June Yancey reported that the London press was “growing more favorable to our cause” and that public opinion was “more enlightened” than ever. The public remained divided on the right to secession, he wrote in July, but self-government was understood by all as “the great principle underlying the contest.” By the end of the summer, Yancey’s commission cheerfully reported to Richmond (the Confederate capital as of May 1861) that the “antislavery sentiment so universally prevalent here no longer interferes with a proper judgment of this contest.” The South, by their account, seemed to be winning the war for public opinion in Britain, and, if it could defend the nation it had proclaimed, the “diplomatic solution” would soon be at hand.44
ROBERT TOOMBS, BORED WITH DIPLOMACY AND CROSS WITH DAVIS, resigned as secretary of state in July 1861 to take the field in command of an army. To replace him Davis appointed Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, a strong-headed aristocratic Virginia politician whose career was notably devoid of experience in foreign affairs. Hunter assumed duties two days before the stunning Confederate victory at Bull Run on July 21, 1861. Here was the battlefield victory Yancey and the European commission were waiting for in London. But the new secretary of state did not get around to writing Yancey for a week, and then it was only to explain that he saw “no reason to make any change in the instructions” and merely wished to bring them up to speed on “such facts and events of recent date as are deemed of interest.”45
Yancey had already received news of Bull Run weeks before Hunter’s desultory message arrived and immediately recognized it as the “great victory” he and the other commissioners had been anticipating. Right away he requested another unofficial interview with Earl Russell. Russell, on vacation at his country estate, replied with a curt request that they “put in writing” anything they had to say.46
Yancey, Mann, and Rost worked diligently for a full week preparing a lengthy treatise on the case for recognition. Now, with victory at Bull Run to its glory, their appeal asserted, the South had met all the conditions for recognition. They had put a government in place and “raised, organized, and armed an army sufficient to . . . drive in ignominious flight from that field the myriads of invaders.”
Inexplicably, their letter to Russell veered off topic to address “the antislavery sentiment so universally prevalent in England.” Contradicting massive evidence to the contrary, they argued that “it was from no fear that the slaves would be liberated that secession took place.” Referring to Lincoln’s inaugural address, they pointed out that “the very party in power has proposed to guarantee slavery forever in the States if the South would but remain in the Union.”
They should have left it there. Instead, the Southern commissioners seemed unable to resist scoring points by reminding Earl Russell of the shameful role Britain had played in introducing slavery to colonial America. The founding fathers were confronted with “two distinct races in the colonies, one free and capable of maintaining their freedom, the other slave, and in their opinion unfitted” to govern themselves. They “made their famous declaration of freedom for the white race alone” and created a government “resting upon that great and recognized distinction between the white and black man.”
Still undercutting the commissioners’ own claim that slavery was not at issue, the letter went on to extol the beneficial effects of slavery in the rich commerce between America and Europe. Slavery’s destruction, they cautioned Russell, would be “disastrous to the world, as well as to the master and slave.” They further warned that the Union might “resort to servile war” by pretending to emancipate the slaves, but far from “that high philanthropic consideration which undoubtedly beats in the hearts of many in England,” Yankee abolitionism was motivated solely by a “baser feeling of selfish aggrandisement not unmixed with a cowardly spirit of revenge.”
The letter closed by clumsily calling attention to the coming cotton harvest and warning that, should Britain decide the “Confederate States have not yet won a right to a place among the nations of the earth,” it would be Europe that would suffer and not the South. The valiant Southerners would “buckle themselves to the great task before them with a vigor and determination,” and Britain would be responsible for prolonging a conflict that would inflict suffering “upon millions of the human race.”47
Russell must have groaned while reading this blustering epistle. He made Yancey’s commission wait ten agonizing days before he replied on August 24, and then only with a terse note that acknowledged the letter “on behalf of the so-styled Confederate States of North America,” and he put the entire matter on ice by reminding them: “Her Majesty has considered this contest as constituting a civil war” and will maintain “a strict neutrality between the contending parties in that war.”48
Yancey was deflated. In an unguarded letter to his brother, he gave a decidedly pessimistic review of his mission in England. “Anti-slavery sentiment is universal. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been read and believed.” Though only forty-seven, he felt old and tired, and he missed his family. “I am fattening and growing gray,” he told his brother. “My bowels are not right and my back pains me.” For years he had suffered bouts of excruciating pain that at times immobilized him, and as usual he sought relief in strong drink. It was becoming clear to him that “the war will be a long one” and that British recognition would come only after a military victory brought the war to an end.49
Yancey wanted to go home. Not long after Russell’s reply, he sent a message to Richmond, asking to be recalled. He found Mann’s obsequious diplomatic groveling before the British ministers thoroughly disgusting. He also had sense enough to realize that his own training and temperament were ill-suited to diplomacy, and he much preferred the political arena at home. “I ought never to have come here,” he admitted in a rare flash of self-doubt. “This kind of thing does not suit me. I do not understand these people or their ways well enough.”50
BACK IN RICHMOND, JEFFERSON DAVIS HAD ALSO COME TO THE conclusion that the war would last far longer than the radical Fire-Eaters had so bravely forecast. By August 1861 he and Hunter had determined to expand diplomatic operations in Europe. They wanted to establish permanent posts in each capital rather than rely upon itinerant commissioners and had decided to send Mann to Belgium and Rost to Spain. To replace Yancey in London, they would send James M. Mason of Virginia, who as a US senator had extensive experience on the Foreign Relations Committee. For Paris Davis appointed John Slidell, a Louisiana senator with previous diplomatic experience in Mexico.
Since May 1861, when Britain extended belligerent rights to the South, Seward’s threats of war had effectively stalled further momentum toward full recognition, and Yancey and the Confederate European commission were thoroughly demoralized. All that was about to change. After midnight on October 12, 1861, Mason, Slidell, their two secretaries, and several family members sailed out of Charleston into a stormy night, trying to evade the US Navy ships that lay outside the harbor. They made it safely to Nassau, a British port in the Bahamas, and from there sailed to Havana, Cuba.
On November 7 Mason and Slidell boarded a British Royal Mail steamer, the Trent, for what would be the most fateful voyage of the Civil War. One day after they left Havana, a Union naval vessel commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes intercepted the Trent at sea. Boarding the British ship, Wilkes’s officers announced they were there to arrest the two Confederate envoys and their secretaries. The Trent’s captain protested that this was an act of piracy and a violation of British neutrality. Mason and Slidell insisted they would have to be apprehended by force. An angry group of passengers, many of them Southerners, gathered on deck and howled in protest as the men were taken away. “This is the best thing in the world for the South,” one of them yelled. “We will have a good chance at them now.”51
The Trent affair was indeed a gift to the Confederates, so much so that some suspected it was all a setup to pull Britain into the war against the United States. Thurlow Weed, on assignment as special agent for the Union in London at the time, informed Seward that some viewed the capture of Slidell and Mason as “an understood thing” and that “the arrest was courted.” Malakoff, the New York Times correspondent in Paris, reported that “the whole scheme was concocted at London.” French insiders told Malakoff that “it was a trap laid for Mr. Seward, into which he incontinently stumbled.”52
If there was a setup, Seward was not the only one taken in. The British press and many prominent political leaders roundly denounced the “wanton outrage and insult” to the British flag. They displayed remarkably little concern for Slidell and Mason, who were very comfortably billeted at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, but the offense to British honor must be answered. When news arrived in London that ecstatic Northerners were crowing about the escapade and hailing Captain Wilkes as a great hero, it ignited even greater fury.53
The London Times, always happy to give vent to British indignation against America, published an eyewitness account from an officer on board the Trent that described “cowardly bullying” by the arresting officers. Whereas Weed’s and Malakoff’s informants detected Confederate or European intrigue behind events, the Times’s informants saw Seward’s hand at work. Seward, they thought, was deliberately inciting the fanatical passions of the democratic mob and trying to reunite America against a foreign foe.54
Across Britain the drums of war began beating in the press, at public indignation meetings, and over dinner parties among the upper class. Young boys peddled miniature Confederate flags on the streets. Britain seemed to be getting ready for military retaliation. “The people are frantic with rage,” Charles Mackay, an English friend, wrote to Seward from London on November 29. “Were the country polled I fear 999 men out of a thousand would declare for war.”55
The Palmerston government had to do something to respond to the public clamor for war—and soon—lest the Tory opposition use the crisis to unseat the government. On November 30 Earl Russell began preparations to send ten thousand troops to Canada and bolster the British naval presence in the Caribbean.56
Yancey, still waiting in London to be relieved by Mason, immediately recognized the Trent affair as a windfall for the Confederacy and volunteered to stay at his post. On December 2, with British public indignation at full boil, he reported having “addressed to her Britannic Majesty’s Government a solemn remonstrance against the outrage perpetrated by the United States.” Yancey tried to goad Palmerston into demanding satisfaction, urging him to insist not only on an apology but also on reparations for the Trent outrage. To Richmond he sent clippings from British and French journals demonstrating the furor the Trent affair had caused. Yancey and most all the Confederate sympathizers in Europe were positively thrilled by the prospect of war between Britain and the United States.57
Eager as always to take credit, Ambrose Dudley Mann sent his own dispatch to Richmond, gloating over the triumph at hand. Great Britain was downright earnest “in her purpose to humiliate by disgraceful concessions” or punish the United States for its “flagrant violation of the integrity of her flag upon the high seas.” Carried away by the moment, he gushed, “What a noble statesman Lord Palmerston! His heart is as young as it was 40 years ago.”58
Pierre Rost wrote from Paris with equal élan, predicting that France would stay out of any war Britain commenced against the United States but would come in later as a mediator. France might delay in recognizing the South, he thought, “but a great change in public opinion has taken place here within the last six months.” He immodestly added that Édouard Thouvenel, the French foreign minister, had confided that “no one could have done or accomplished more than I had.”59
Tout va bien for the Confederacy in Europe. At the end of 1861 it appeared that a Union navy captain boarding a British mail ship on the high seas had done more for the Confederate cause than all its vainglorious envoys could have dreamed.