Most civil wars in nation states through history have attracted foreign intervention of some kind, often military or diplomatic support for the faction rebelling against the established government. A very real possibility for such intervention existed during the American Civil War. Emperor Louis Napoleon of France looked with favor on the Confederacy, and the French economy was hurt by the sharp decline in the availability of Southern cotton. Several times during the war Napoleon pressed the British government to join France in an effort to mediate peace negotiations between the warring parties in America on the basis of Confederate independence. The British economy was hurt even more than France’s by the loss of cotton from the South. Large numbers of Englishmen also sympathized with the Confederacy. But while Britain came dangerously close to intervention on two occasions, the ministry of Viscount Henry Palmerston backed off. Napoleon did not want to act without British cooperation. So in the end the Union and the Confederacy fought it out between themselves without official intervention by any foreign power. Still, it was a very near thing.
Several factors shaped British policy toward the American Civil War, including pressures both for and against intervention: the “cotton famine,” as it was known especially in 1862, which caused massive unemployment and suffering among Lancashire textile workers; divisions between pro-Union and pro-Confederate elements of British public opinion; the importance to the British economy of foreign trade with the United States, as well as a desire for cotton from the Confederate states; the Palmerston ministry’s fears that a rupture with the United States would jeopardize Britain’s hold on its Canadian colonies; the slavery issue, especially after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation made it a war of freedom against slavery that strongly swayed British opinion toward the Union side; and international crises in Europe that diverted French as well as British attention from the war in America by 1863 and after.
But the single most important factor that directly or indirectly shaped Anglo-American and Anglo-Confederate relations, especially from 1861 to 1863, was the actions of Union and Confederate navies. Three such actions or proceedings played a crucial role in the international dimensions of the American Civil War and the potential for Anglo-American conflict: the “Trent Affair” in November and December 1861; the legal as well as economic aspects of the Union naval blockade of Confederate ports; and efforts by the Confederate navy to have warships built in private British shipyards.
First, the Trent affair. On November 8, 1861, the U.S. warship San Jacinto, patrolling the Old Bahama Channel off the northern coast of Cuba, fired a shot across the bow of the British packet steamer Trent and forced her to heave to in international waters. At the order of the San Jacinto’s captain, Charles Wilkes, the executive officer led armed sailors aboard the Trent and seized James Mason and John Slidell, who had escaped from Charleston aboard a blockade-runner and were on their way to Europe as Confederate envoys to Britain and France.
Wilkes was something of a loose cannon in the American navy. He had a bullying personality that demanded quick obedience from subordinates but often defied the orders of superiors. As a lieutenant twenty years earlier he had commanded an exploring expedition in the South Pacific that had produced much valuable information, including confirmation of Antarctica’s continental status. But his violent disciplinary measures had earned the hatred of sailors and officers alike. He faced a court-martial upon his return to the United States in 1842 but escaped conviction.
For the next two decades Wilkes remained unpopular in the navy, and his career languished. But the need for experienced naval officers when the Civil War broke out caused Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to give him command of the San Jacinto. He was in the Caribbean hunting for the Confederate commerce raider CSS Sumter, which had captured and destroyed several American merchant vessels, when he learned from the American consul in Havana that Mason and Slidell were about to embark on the Trent. Here, thought Wilkes, was an even greater prize than the Sumter. He lay in wait for the Trent in the Old Bahama Channel. On November 8 the Trent steamed into sight, and Wilkes pounced.
Although the Trent was a ship of a neutral nation on its way from one neutral port to another, Wilkes informed Gideon Welles that he had consulted the books on international and maritime law on board the San Jacinto and learned that he had the right to capture enemy dispatches on a neutral ship. As diplomats, he wrote, Mason and Slidell were “the embodiment of dispatches.” Whether this novel interpretation of international law would have stood up in a prize court is impossible to know, because Wilkes did not send the Trent to a port with a prize court. He was already shorthanded, Wilkes explained to Welles, and to have put a prize crew on board the Trent would have made him more so. The Trent was also carrying many passengers to England who would have been seriously inconvenienced by diversion to Key West or another American port. So he seized the Confederate diplomats and let the Trent go. Ironically, much of the angry British reaction would have been defused if he had sent her to a prize court.1
The Northern press lionized Wilkes as a hero. He was feted in Boston and lauded in Congress. In words he probably regretted later, Welles congratulated Wilkes “on the great public service you have rendered. … Your conduct in seizing these public enemies was marked by intelligence, ability, decision, and firmness.” Even President Lincoln seemed to share the public mood of euphoria.2
But the president and other cabinet members soon had second thoughts. Even before the furious reaction from across the Atlantic reached American shores, Lincoln remarked to Attorney General Edward Bates: “I am not much of a prize lawyer, but it seems to me that if Wilkes saw fit to make that capture on the high seas he had no right to turn his quarter-deck into a prize court.”3 Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reminded Lincoln that the United States had declared war on Britain in 1812 for behavior similar to Wilkes’s seizure of Mason and Slidell. The American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, made the same point to Secretary of State William H. Seward.
The jingo press in England clamored for revenge for this insult to the Union Jack. The Royal Navy strengthened its fleet in the western Atlantic and convoyed army reinforcements to Canada. The risk of war caused the American stock market to take a nosedive. Government bonds found no buyers. Southern newspapers speculated about the happy prospect of an Anglo-American war that would assure Confederate independence. The British cabinet drafted an ultimatum demanding an apology and the release of Mason and Slidell. Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, ill and soon to die, suggested language that softened the ultimatum, which Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell accepted. Russell even suggested to Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, that if the Americans released the two Confederates the British could be “rather easy about the apology.”4
By mid-December the Lincoln administration recognized that it must give in. Attorney General Bates, who had initially supported Wilkes, acknowledged that “to go to war with England now is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion.” While Lincoln realized that he must not have “two wars on his hands at a time,” he also wanted to avoid the humiliation and political danger of appearing to give in to John Bull. Seward took a hint from Prince Albert’s revision of the ultimatum. At cabinet meetings on Christmas and the following day, Seward presented a memorandum stating that Wilkes had acted without instructions (which was true) and had erred by failing to bring the Trent into port for adjudication by a prize court. As a face-saving gesture, Seward added that the United States was gratified by Britain’s recognition of the neutral rights for which America had always contended.5
The cabinet endorsed this document, and the Confederate envoys made their ways to London and Paris, where they spent three futile years trying to win the foreign recognition and intervention that might have occurred if they had remained imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. The Lincoln administration suffered less political damage than the president had feared, for most of the Northern public had come to the same “one war at a time” conclusion that Lincoln had. And the reaction in Britain was surprisingly pro-American. Charles Francis Adams reported from the American legation in January 1862 that “the current which ran against us with such extreme violence six weeks ago now seems to be going with equal fury in our direction.”6 That favorable current had crucial significance for the U.S. Navy, for the question of the blockade’s legitimacy under international law was coming to a head.
One of Lincoln’s first actions as commander in chief after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter was to declare a blockade of the Confederate coast, which eventually extended 3,500 miles from Virginia to Texas, including 189 harbors and coves where cargo could be landed. To block all of these holes was an impossible task. Only a dozen of these harbors had railroad connections to the interior, but imposing an effective blockade on just these ports would require large numbers of ships to cover the multiple channels and rivers and inland waterways radiating from or connecting several of them. Although the Navy Department purchased, chartered, and began to build vessels at a feverish pace in 1861 to create a large blockade fleet, the cordon was as leaky as a sieve at first. Most blockade-runners leaving or entering Confederate ports got through, as indeed they did throughout the war. But as time went on, the blockade became ever tighter, and those runners that did get through were built for speed and low visibility with limited carrying capacity, which much diminished Confederate seaborne trade at a time when the Southern ability to wage war required the importation of large amounts of war materiel and the export of cotton to pay for it. The blockade became an increasingly effective Union weapon by 1862, helping to cause shortages of almost everything in the South and a dizzying inflationary spiral that eventually ruined the Confederate economy.
The blockade had important diplomatic implications. In 1856 the leading maritime powers of Europe had adopted the Declaration of Paris, defining the international law of warfare at sea. A key part of this declaration stated: “Blockades, in order to be binding [on neutral powers] must be effective; that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.”7 The United States had not signed the declaration because it also outlawed privateering, which had been a potent American naval weapon in the Revolution and the War of 1812. Now that the United States was the victim of Confederate privateers in the early months of the Civil War, Secretary of State Seward was eager to sign. But the complications of doing so in the middle of a civil war postponed the question until some future time. Nevertheless, the provisions of the Declaration of Paris remained in force for European powers. Confederate envoys (including Mason and Slidell when they finally reached Europe) presented long lists of ships they claimed had evaded the blockade to prove that it was a mere “paper blockade” and therefore illegal under international law. Jefferson Davis condemned the North’s so-called blockade as a “monstrous pretension.”8
Their contention that many vessels breached the blockade was quite true. But they neglected to note that most of them were small coasting vessels traveling often on the inland waterways from one Southern port to another, not oceangoing ships or blockade-runners going to or from foreign ports. Nor did the Confederates help their cause by imposing an informal embargo on cotton exports in 1861 as a way to put pressure on Britain and France to intervene in the war to get cotton. By the time Confederate leaders realized that this embargo was counterproductive, the blockade had begun to tighten, and efforts to get cotton through it had become difficult.
Some did get through, however, and in November 1861 Foreign Secretary Lord Russell asked Lord Lyons for his opinion of Confederate claims about a paper blockade. Lyons confessed that he was “a good deal puzzled” about how to respond to Russell. He wrote that the blockade “is certainly by no means strict or vigorous along the immense extent of coast to which it is supposed to apply. On the other hand it is very far from being a mere Paper Blockade. A great many vessels are captured; it is a most serious interruption of trade; and if it were as ineffective as Mr. Jefferson Davis says in his message, he would not be so very anxious to get rid of it.” When John Slidell presented French officials with yet another list of ships that had run the blockade, they asked him “how it was that so little cotton had reached neutral ports.” Slidell answered that most of the successful runners had small cargo capacity, and “the risk of capture was sufficiently great to deter those who had not an adventurous spirit from attempting it.”9
Fatal admission! The true measure of the blockade’s effectiveness was not how many ships got through or even how many were captured, but how many never tried. Lord Russell said as much in a statement on February 2, 1862, when in effect he announced to Parliament a corollary to the Declaration of Paris: “Assuming … that a number of ships is stationed and remains at the entrance to a port, sufficiently really to prevent access to it or to create an evident danger of entering or leaving it … the fact that various ships may have successfully escaped through it … will not of itself prevent the blockade from being an effective one by international law.”10
The Russell Corollary drove a stake through the heart of Confederate efforts to convince European governments of the blockade’s illegitimacy. But to the extent that the blockade was a practical as well as legal success, it ironically heightened the potential danger to the Union cause. Confederate diplomacy in 1862 switched its focus from discrediting the blockade to seeking diplomatic recognition of Confederate nationhood. The Southern nation was a going concern that had successfully defended its independence for a year. Recognition of this reality by foreign powers, argued Confederate leaders, could be the first step toward commercial treaties that might reopen trade and overcome the blockade-imposed cotton famine that was taking a rising toll on the British and French economies.
A good many Europeans shared this conviction. They viewed diplomatic recognition as part of a package that would include peace negotiations between the warring parties brokered by the British and French governments. Confederate military success in 1861 sustained a widespread belief in Europe that the Union cause was hopeless. Northern armies could never reestablish control over 750,000 square miles of territory defended by a determined and courageous people. Northern leaders greatly feared the possibility of European recognition of the Confederacy if Union armies did not do something to convince foreign nations of their ability to crush the rebellion. As Lord Robert Cecil told a Northern acquaintance in 1861: “Well, there is one way to convert us all—Win the battles, and we shall come round at once.”11
In February 1862 Union forces did begin winning battles—Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, Roanoke Island and a series of other victories in North Carolina, Pea Ridge in Arkansas, Shiloh in Tennessee, the capture of Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis, and Norfolk, and a massive invasion of Virginia that brought the Army of the Potomac to Richmond’s doorstep by May. The Union navy played a key role in most of these victories, especially the capture of New Orleans. Although Confederate envoys continued to press for recognition, they now found a cold reception. In June 1862 British prime minister Palmerston observed in a letter that “this seems an odd moment to Chuse for acknowledging the separate Independence of the South when all the Seaboard, and the principal internal Rivers are in the hands of the North. … We ought to know that their Separate Independence is a Truth and a Fact before we declare it to be so.”12
But even as Palmerston wrote these words, the pendulum of victory swung over to the Confederacy again. General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia drove General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac back from Richmond in the Seven Days Battles and then inflicted a humiliating defeat on another Union army only twenty-five miles from Washington at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Confederate armies in Tennessee launched counteroffensives and invaded Kentucky in September while Lee invaded Maryland.
This startling reversal of momentum revived the possibility of European intervention, especially as the blockade-imposed cotton famine was devastating the British and French textile industries. Louis Napoleon pressed the British government to join France in an offer to mediate peace negotiations on the basis of Confederate independence. Palmerston and Foreign Secretary Russell now seemed almost ready for such an overture. Palmerston observed that at Second Bull Run the Federals “got a very complete smashing, and it seems not altogether unlikely that still greater disasters await them, and that even Washington or Baltimore might fall into the hands of the Confederates.” If something like that happened, he asked Russell, “would it not be time for us to consider whether … England and France might not address the contending parties and recommend an arrangement on the basis of separation?” Russell needed little persuasion. He concurred, and added that if the Lincoln administration rejected an offer of mediation, “we ought ourselves to recognise the Southern States as an independent State.”13
Palmerston and Russell planned to hold a cabinet meeting in October 1862 when they would vote on a proposal to the Union and Confederate governments of “an Armistice and Cessation of Blockades with a view to Negotiation on the Basis of Separation” to be followed by diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. But they also agreed to take no action until the outcomes of the Confederate invasions of Maryland and Kentucky were more clear. “If the Federals sustain a great defeat … [their] Cause will be manifestly hopeless and the iron should be struck while it is hot,” declared Palmerston. “If, on the other hand, they should have the best of it, we may wait a while and see what may follow.”14
What followed was the battles of Antietam in Maryland and Perryville in Kentucky, which turned back the dual invasions and forced the Confederates to retreat. These were not tactically decisive Union victories, but they did have important strategic consequences, especially on the diplomatic front. Charles Francis Adams reported from London that most Englishmen had expected the Confederates to capture Washington, and “the surprise” at their retreat instead “has been quite in proportion. … As a consequence, less and less seems to be thought of mediation and intervention.”15
Palmerston did indeed back away from the idea of intervention. The only favorable condition for mediation would have been “the great success of the South against the North,” he commented to Russell in October. “That state of things seemed ten days ago to be approaching,” but at Antietam “its advance has been lately checked. … I am therefore inclined to change the opinion I wrote you when the Confederates seemed to be carrying all before them, and I am [convinced] … that we must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.”16
It never did take a decided enough turn toward the Confederates as far as Britain was concerned, especially because of another consequence of the Battle of Antietam: it gave Lincoln the Union victory he had been waiting for to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, followed by the final Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863. Young Henry Adams, who served as private secretary for his father at the legation in London, wrote on January 23 that “the Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor all over this country.” Richard Cobden, a pro-Union member of the British Parliament, declared that the Proclamation “has had a powerful effect on our newspapers and politicians. It has closed the mouths of those who have been advocating the side of the South. Recognition of the South, by England, whilst it bases itself on Negro slavery, is an impossibility.”17
Cobden’s assertion was undoubtedly correct. But that did not end the danger of a rupture in Anglo-American relations that might redound to the benefit of the Confederacy. In the early months of the war, Confederate naval secretary Stephen Mallory had sent agents to Europe to purchase and contract for the building of warships to prey on American commerce and to attack Union blockade ships. The most successful of these agents was James D. Bulloch, a Georgia native and former officer in the U.S. Navy, who in 1861 contracted for two fast and powerful commerce raiders that became the CSS Florida and CSS Alabama when they were launched in 1862.
The building of these ships in Liverpool was an egregious violation of British neutrality. Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act prohibited the construction and arming of warships for a belligerent power. But Bulloch was a master of misdirection. The Confederate government itself was not named as a party to the contracts he negotiated. The ship that became the Florida was supposedly being built for a merchant in Palermo, Sicily. The American consul in Liverpool, Thomas H. Dudley, uncovered a great deal of evidence that the ship was in fact destined for the Confederacy. But the British government did not stop her from going to sea in March 1862 as an ostensible merchant vessel without any guns or other warlike equipment. In August she took on her armament, ammunition, and supplies that had been separately shipped to an uninhabited cay in the Bahamas. Soon afterward she sailed forth on a career that destroyed thirty-eight American merchant ships.
Even more deadly was the Alabama, which Bulloch managed to get out of Britain in July 1862 owing to the laxness of British enforcement of the Foreign Enlistment Act. In a contest of lawyers, spies, and double agents that would furnish material for an espionage thriller, Dudley amassed evidence of the ship’s illegal purpose, and Bulloch struggled to slip through the legal net surrounding him. Once again bureaucratic negligence, legal pettifoggery, and the Confederate sympathies of the British customs collector in Liverpool gave Bulloch time to ready the ship for sea. When an agent informed him of the government’s belated intention to seize the ship, Bulloch took her out for a “trial cruise” from which she never returned. She rendezvoused at the Azores with a tender carrying guns and ammunition sent separately from Britain. Under her redoubtable Confederate commander, Raphael Semmes, the Alabama roamed the seas for the next two years capturing and destroying sixty-four American merchant vessels and one naval ship before being sunk by the USS Kearsarge in a dramatic action near Cherbourg, France, in June 1864.
Encouraged by British negligence, which he interpreted as sympathy for the Confederacy, Bulloch aimed even higher. In 1862 he contracted with the same Liverpool firm that had built the Alabama, the Laird Brothers, for the construction of two powerful ironclad rams intended to raise havoc with the Union blockading fleets. Designed with two gun turrets and a lethal underwater ram, the warlike purpose of these formidable “Laird rams” was difficult to disguise. As they were nearing completion in 1863, another Confederate agent, Matthew Fontaine Maury, purchased a British steamer suitable for conversion into a commerce raider to be named the CSS Georgia. In March 1863 she was ready to sail from the obscure port of White Haven, and Maury sent coded messages to various Confederate officers in Britain to rendezvous there. The British Foreign Office woke up and tried to stop the ship’s departure, but the telegram to White Haven sat in an out-box in London on March 31 until the port’s telegraph office closed for the day. After midnight the Georgia sailed, took on her armament off Ushant, and began her career as a raider.18
The embarrassment caused by the Georgia’s escape made the Foreign Office determined to prevent any more such occurrences. Also in March 1863 a parliamentary committee issued a report condemning the British government for its failures to prevent the escape of the Florida and Alabama. And Charles Francis Adams continued to flood the Foreign Office with evidence of the Laird rams’ Confederate provenance. Adams also pressed Foreign Secretary Russell to seize the Alexandra, a small steamer just completed in Liverpool as a commerce raider.
In April 1863 the government did seize the Alexandra. But the Court of Exchequer ruled the seizure illegal on the grounds that there was no proof of Confederate ownership or of the arming or fitting out of the vessel in England. That was technically true—it had been built for Fraser, Trenholm, and Company, a British firm that just happened to be the Confederacy’s financial agent in London. The government appealed the Exchequer’s decision and continued to detain the Alexandra. The officer slated to command the ship—one of several Southern naval officers in Britain awaiting assignment—complained that “it is clear that the English Government never intends to permit anything in the way of a man-of-war to leave its shores. I know Mr. Adams is accurately informed of the whereabouts and employment of every one of us, and that Yankee spies are aided by English Government detectives. … With the other vessels the same plan will be instituted as with the Alexandra. They will be exchequered, and thus put into a court where the Government has superior opportunities for instituting delays.”19
Despite the obstacles that this precedent posed to getting the Laird rams into Confederate possession, Bulloch did not give up. He arranged for the dummy purchase of them by the French firm of Bravay and Company, ostensibly acting as agents for “his Serene Highness the Pasha of Egypt.” This subterfuge fooled no one, but clear proof of Confederate ownership was elusive despite the mounting circumstantial evidence piled up by Thomas Dudley. Charles Francis Adams sent a series of increasingly ominous warnings to Foreign Secretary Russell against allowing the rams to escape, culminating in a dispatch on September 5, 1863, concluding that “it would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war.”20
Despite the stark nature of Adams’s words, his phraseology was actually ambiguous. Did he mean that the United States would respond to the escape of the rams with a declaration of war against Britain? Or that it would be seen as an act of war against the United States? Or was it a warning that it would make England complicit in the Confederate war against the United States? Whatever meaning Adams intended to convey, the matter was already moot when he wrote these words. Russell had given orders two days earlier for the detention of the ships, and they were subsequently purchased by the Royal Navy.
A disappointed and angry Bulloch moved his efforts to the friendlier environment of France, where he had reason to believe that Louis Napoleon’s government would look the other way as he contracted with French shipbuilding companies for the construction of two ironclad warships and four corvettes as commerce raiders. After a promising beginning, however, Bulloch was dumbfounded in 1864 by the French government’s decision to seize these vessels rather than risk rupture with the United States. Bulloch lamented this “most remarkable and astounding circumstance that has yet occurred in reference to our operations in Europe,” which had caused him “greater pain and regret than I ever considered it possible to feel.” John Slidell, who was still the Confederate envoy in Paris, confessed that this failure was “a most lame and impotent conclusion to all our efforts to create a Navy.”21
In the end the American Civil War proved an exception to the rule that civil wars tend to attract foreign intervention. Neither the United States nor foreign powers, especially Britain, considered it in their self-interest to provoke or undertake such intervention and acted rationally to prevent it. The Lincoln administration determined in 1861 that it could only carry on “one war at a time” and let Mason and Slidell go. The British government decided in 1862 to recognize the legality of the Union blockade, in considerable part because Britain relied heavily on naval blockades in its own wars and did not want to create a precedent that might undermine the legitimacy of such a weapon in a future war. Later in 1862, the Palmerston ministry resolved that Confederate strategic defeats in the battles of Antietam and Perryville raised sufficient doubts about the ability of the Southern nation to sustain itself as to make it in British self-interest not to risk a break with the United States by recognizing the Confederacy. And for the same reason, Britain and France decided to clamp down on Confederate efforts to build warships in the shipyards of those nations. These decisions prevented the American Civil War from becoming an international war.