CHAPTER 2
British Neutrality on Trial
If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it.
A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire.
—WILLIAM H. SEWARD, July 4, 1861
I am not disposed to walk alone in the hornets' nest at Washington.
—LORD JOHN RUSSELL, July 13, 1861
[At stake was] nothing less than the life of the republic itself.
—WILLIAM H. SEWARD, July 21, 1861
News of British neutrality drew venomous attacks from the Union and wild exultation from the Confederacy. From the British perspective, the policy provided the best means for averting involvement in the war, but it recognized the existence of two belligerents and thereby infuriated the Union by awarding the Confederacy a stature higher than rebel. Confederate ships could raid Union commerce and enter neutral ports with prizes, and they could seek ship repairs in those same ports along with foods and other materials necessary for survival. Furthermore, the Confederacy could float loans, purchase war materials, and contract the building of ships not fitted for war. On the other side, however, the Union could exercise all of its material and manpower advantages in waging war on the Confederacy.
But both the Lincoln administration and the Confederacy saw much more involved than war between belligerents. The Constitution itself lay at the center of their differences. The Union claimed to be the only legitimate government in the United States and interpreted any foreign action bestowing credibility onto the Confederacy as an unwarranted interference in a domestic dispute over the very heart of the republic. The Confederacy, however, regarded the British move as the proper reaction to its declaration of independence based on constitutional, legal, and moral principles.
The Lincoln administration failed to realize that British neutrality more directly benefited the Union. Without such restraints on the British populace, private citizens were free to become involved in the war and thereby increase the chances of pulling the government into the conflagration. Furthermore, the growing economic interdependence of the Atlantic world prohibited any possibility of the British isolating themselves from the American conflict. Southern cotton, northern wheat—these products and more forced the British to maintain economic connections with both American antagonists. For the time being, the British surplus in cotton left the Confederacy with little leverage, but this reality remained unknown—if irrelevant—to northerners who regarded the secessionists as traitors and looked upon anyone consorting with them as fellow conspirators.
The Palmerston ministry's decision for neutrality had come from a sincere desire to stay out of the American conflict, which, in turn, derived in part from its hasty and inaccurate reading of Lincoln's blockade proclamation. Under international law, the Union's imposition of a blockade automatically defined the ongoing conflict as a “war.” Accordingly, the British government announced its recognition of both the Union and the Confederacy as belligerents and thereby claimed, as a neutral power, the right of free passage of its vessels through American waters as long as they carried noncontraband goods. From three thousand miles away in London, the president's blockade proclamation seemed eminently logical, given the physical size of the Confederacy, its population of millions, and the magnitude of its success at Fort Sumter. Lincoln's declaration had substantiated Britain's conclusion that war had come to America.
Just as British neutrality was a natural result of the blockade proclamation, so was the Union's indignant reaction to a neutrality policy that raised Confederate hopes. Both the Union and the British had followed procedures well established in international law, but their actions inadvertently gave substance to southern efforts and generated an explosive Anglo-American relationship that neither Washington nor London wanted but the Confederacy welcomed.
From the southern perspective, the queen's proclamation had enacted a pro-Confederate neutrality that encouraged southerners to take bolder action. Not by coincidence did they intensify pressure on Europe for recognition through King Cotton Diplomacy. Shortly after the queen's announcement, the Confederate Congress (moved to Richmond after Virginia's secession) barred the exportation of cotton to Europe except through southern ports—which made their staying open all the more important. The implicit threat of an all-out cotton embargo became clear. “The cards are in our hands,” the Charleston Mercury defiantly asserted, “and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France or the acknowledgment of our independence.” Numerous southerners, according to Times journalist William H. Russell, boasted of certain British recognition and military aid as if England were “a sort of appanage to their cotton kingdom.” Edmund Rhett from Charleston, a relative of fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, smartly observed that England's “Lord Chancellor sits on a cotton bale.”1
At this delicate juncture in international relations, the Confederacy's threatened cotton embargo proved ill advised, because the action infuriated the British and fostered an unfriendly neutrality. On the surface, the spring of 1861 seemed a good time to focus on King Cotton. Relations between the United States and Britain were raw. Even though the British had a year's back supply of cotton, their neutrality increased the likelihood of a protracted war that would eat into that surplus and perhaps, in a year's time, force England and other cotton-hungry nations to challenge the Union blockade. The wisest southern strategy lay in avoiding any action that irritated the British. But the Confederacy's resort to economic pressure clarified the precarious position now occupied by the British and made them increasingly wary of any contact with the Richmond government. The threat of a cotton embargo again underlined the wisdom of England's neutral course.
The United States, however, considered British neutrality mean-spirited and became livid over the turn of events. At the least, the queen's proclamation was precipitate in leaving the Lincoln administration only sixty days to devise a policy toward neutrality. More important, the British had injected life into the Confederacy before it had demonstrated its right to existence either by the maintenance of long-term relations with established nations or by a decisive victory on the battlefield. The British countered that the Confederacy had a de facto government in Richmond that entitled it to belligerent status and insisted that their refusal to recognize a de jure (legal) government provided proof of an honest neutrality.
Adams was not convinced of British sincerity. On May 18 he met with Foreign Secretary Russell at his lodging in Richmond, impatiently listening to his assurances against any British intention to interfere in the American contest. Russell missed the point, Adams believed. Actual interference was not the issue; the United States opposed any action that encouraged Confederate dreams of separation. The queen's neutrality proclamation, Adams charged, had “raised the insurgents to the level of a belligerent State.” Regardless of purpose, that pronouncement had mobilized the Confederacy's friends in England. The lord chancellor's recent address had termed the rebels “a belligerent State” engaged in a “justum bellum.” But, Russell replied, the crown's law officers had advised him that a large number of states were in “open resistance” in what could only be a war between two sides and that they had not meant to impute a moral judgment on right or wrong. The sole purpose of the neutrality proclamation was to implement “the rules of modern civilized warfare.” British citizens must be aware of the risks in taking part in these American events. Adams nonetheless thought the action too hasty in that it had given the Lincoln administration barely two months to formulate a policy. Furthermore, the British government extended belligerent rights before the Confederates had demonstrated any capacity to wage war beyond their immediate areas. The American people, Adams warned, would denounce this action as a deliberate attempt to prolong the struggle. If the British pursued this policy, he solemnly asserted, “I had nothing further left to do in Great Britain.”2
Adams had already felt compromised by Russell's decision to meet with the southern commissioners. When he inquired about that touchy matter, Russell had not been convincing in stating that his government “would not at any future time, no matter what the circumstances might be, recognize an existing State in America.” In a dispatch that did not reach London until June 10, Seward angrily instructed Adams to refrain from any contact with the British government if it persisted in actions tantamount to recognizing the Confederacy. The Confederacy was not “de facto a self-sustaining power” and did not deserve nationhood status. “British recognition,” he hotly maintained, “would be British intervention to create within our own territory a hostile state by overthrowing this Republic itself.” The United States might have to go to war with any European nations that “fraternize with our domestic enemy.” Lincoln had insisted that Seward delete some of the strong language in other parts of the dispatch and mark it private. But the president sought to reduce the intensity of the threat rather than eliminate it. Adams could use its contents to direct his conversations with Russell.3
The British feared that a confrontation with the United States over neutrality would drag them into the American conflict and as a matter of course help the Confederate cause. Toward averting that outcome, Parliament engaged in a lengthy debate on how to avoid trouble over the Union blockade, even leading a dubious Adams to believe that considerable British sentiment existed for the United States. A large majority of members in the House of Commons condemned Sir John Ramsden, who had gleefully declared that they “were now witnessing the bursting of the great republican bubble which had been so often held up to us as the model on which to recast our own English Constitution.” America's problems, Russell heatedly countered in that chamber, had stemmed from slavery, “the poisoned garment” that the British crown had draped around its former colonies. It did not seem appropriate “that there should be among us anything like exultation at their discord, and still less that we should reproach them with an evil for the origin of which we are ourselves to blame.”4
The British found it difficult to convince the United States that they were not guilty of malicious intent in supporting neutrality. Russell repeatedly insisted that his country refused to take sides in the conflict and that the proclamation “was designed … to explain to British subjects their liabilities in case they should engage in the war.” But the United States remained bitterly skeptical in the face of the Confederacy's new belligerent status. It was little wonder that Adams blasted the queen's neutrality proclamation as an “admission of equality.”5
But despite Union protests, the British had adhered to international law in equating a civil war with a war between nations and then assuming a position of neutrality intended to keep them out of the American contest. Other countries affected by the fighting likewise saw the wisdom in declaring neutrality and thus coming within the rules of international conduct. Russell emphasized that the Confederacy had a civil government and deserved belligerent standing. Vattel had defined rebellion as “open and unjust resistance” against lawful authority (the Union's position) and civil war as “a just insurrection of the subjects against their sovereign.” A rebellion, the Swiss legal theorist continued, became a civil war when the rebels “acquired sufficient strength to give [the sovereign] effectual opposition, and to oblige him to carry on the war against them according to the established rules.” Union leaders gave no credence to this broad edict and cherry-picked only those parts of the law that benefited their position. Rebellion, they insisted, best characterized the Confederacy's resistance, because its action was not just; they discarded the other part of the argument that spoke of a “just insurrection” and thereby awarded the Confederacy belligerent status.6
To encourage neutrality among its subjects, the Palmerston ministry tied the queen's proclamation to the British Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819. This municipal law was so far reaching in aim that it proved impossible to enforce. It barred British subjects from enlisting or participating in foreign service and from “fitting out or equipping” vessels in British possessions for warlike purposes without government approval. It also forbade them from enlisting in the military or naval services or transgressing the lawful blockade of any nation at peace with Britain. In reality, of course, the London government lacked the ability to govern all of its citizens' behavior and implemented the act to escape legal culpability for their predictable actions. The British emphasized that, as President George Washington had done in 1793 during the Anglo-French war, they were adhering to international law in declaring neutrality.7
The Union, however, refused to believe in the purity of British motives. It considered secession an act of treason and understandably interpreted British neutrality as a deceitful action in support of traitors who had found a foreign accomplice long interested in permanently damaging the United States. Both in the upper and lower parts of the Western Hemisphere the British would expand their holdings as the result of a vastly weakened American republic in the middle. And what more respectable way than an appeal to international law, which itself grew out of the natural law that Americans had exalted in their Declaration of Independence?
The Union complained that in bestowing status and credibility onto the Confederacy, British neutrality justified the rebels' destructive interpretation of the Constitution and sanctified the right of revolution. Furthermore, the Confederacy's new stature as belligerent meant that its raids on Union shipping did not fall into the category of piracy and were legitimate wartime actions by a fledgling navy engaged in privateering. Finally, the Confederacy's status as belligerent permitted private dealings with British merchants in military as well as commercial goods. Adams noted with disgust that most British observers thought America's division into two republics an incontrovertible fact. British neutrality provided the Confederacy with the stamp of legitimacy, constituting a provocative measure tantamount to outright interference in the war and part of a sweeping effort to eliminate the United States as a major player in the Western Hemisphere. The Confederacy, Adams bitterly argued, had committed treason in its futile attempt to leave the Union and had no legal or moral right to outside help. The British had unjustly raised southern expectations of assistance and thereby facilitated the destructive aims of secession.8
Adams met again with Russell on June 12, this time somewhat encouraged by the foreign secretary's assurances. Less than a week earlier, William H. Gregory had introduced his previously postponed motion in the House of Commons to recognize Confederate independence, but withdrew it at the request of Russell and the representatives from Manchester, Liverpool, and other cities and towns. To discuss the matter would sharply divide the lawmakers, Russell warned, and make it difficult for the government to act impartially. He told Adams there would be no more meetings with the southern commissioners and, much to the minister's relief, said that British naval officers were under instructions to respect the Union blockade. Adams now assured Seward that the queen's proclamation of neutrality did not suggest ill will toward the United States. British spokesmen expressed sympathy with the Lincoln administration—an attitude in marked contrast to what Adams had encountered on his arrival in London in May. British neutrality appeared sincere; the government's problem was to enforce that policy among its people.9
Actually, the British had been correct: Their neutrality benefited the Union far more than it did the Confederacy. Given the Union's enormous advantages in population, resources, and maritime vessels, its superiority over the Confederacy would continue if Britain treated the belligerents equally. In addition, British neutrality afforded respectability to a virtually nonexistent blockade by guaranteeing no challenge to its jurisdiction from the world's leading maritime power. Indeed, one of the Union's strongest supporters in the House of Commons, William E. Forster, favored neutrality as a measure capable of hurting the Confederacy. He was right. International law required neutral nations to accept the following ramifications of a civil war, all granting privileges particularly beneficial to the Union: alleviation of Union (as the parent government) responsibility for the insurgents' actions, the right of search by both belligerents (the Confederacy had no cruisers) of foreign merchant vessels for contraband and the submission of illegal goods to prize courts, the right of the parent state to impose a blockade that other nations must respect, and the prohibition of insurgents from hostile preparations in a neutral nation's territory. These were distinct advantages that the Union failed to comprehend, however, in lodging complaints against the British. The Lincoln administration actually sought the best of both worlds. While denying the existence of a war and therefore branding southerners as traitors, it nonetheless implied a state of war by insisting on the right to confiscate contraband headed for the Confederacy.10
Lincoln's views on international law and the American Civil War derived from his dual definition of the conflict. On the one side, he refused to call the fighting a war because that term elevated the Confederacy's status to a belligerent that had broken from the Union to take a major step toward becoming a nation. Hence he considered the conflict a domestic insurrection or armed uprising led by traitors who had failed in their quest to leave the United States and whose fate rested in the hands of patriotic Union supporters determined to defend the Constitution. On the other side, Lincoln labeled the conflict a rebellion, which suggested a wider and better organized effort to bring down the government and justified his use of all military powers at his disposal. His reasoning was clear. As president, Lincoln had a constitutional duty to guarantee a republican form of government throughout the country, and as commander in chief of the armed forces he could exercise military means to put down the rebellion. The problem in 1861 was that the Constitution nowhere enumerated the president's military powers as commander in chief, meaning that Lincoln would have to define them in accordance with constantly changing situations. But he had a compass to guide him through this novel experience. As he later declared, “As commander in chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.” He added, “I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds that cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.”11
Neither definition of the Confederacy's actions proved satisfactory to the Union; even Lincoln's attempt to extract only the most favorable qualities of each stand caused all manner of difficulties. His reference to the conflict as an insurrection was not convincing, given the huge size of the area and the great number of people involved. That left two realistic avenues for defining the conflict—a rebellion or an actual war—both of which automatically bestowed belligerent status onto the Confederacy. Then, when Lincoln claimed military powers as commander in chief, he thoroughly confounded the situation. His exercise of these powers included the imposition of a blockade, which, under international law, denoted the existence of war and required other nations either to take sides in the matter or declare neutrality.
The more attractive option—adopted by both England and France—was neutrality, which they pursued in an effort to stay out of the war but necessarily bestowed belligerent status onto both antagonists and succeeded only in drawing the deepest hostilities from the Union and the greatest anticipation from the Confederacy. The Union minister to Paris, William Dayton, reported as early as mid-May 1861 that an Anglo-French concert regarding American affairs had already developed. French foreign minister Edouard Thouvenel soon took the British position on the war, whether or not coincidental, by remarking to Dayton that southern separation seemed certain in light of the Confederacy's command of so much territory and so many people. Consequently, Napoleon III found no support in Washington when making his offices available for promoting a reconciliation to prevent a war certain to harm everyone's commerce and insisting that his offer was “neither an overture nor even an intimation.” Seward immediately warned the French against “giving any countenance to treason,” declaring any communications with Confederate agents as “injurious to the dignity and honor of the United States” and granting them “a prestige” that “would only protract and aggravate the civil war.” Both American antagonists regarded neutrality and its natural outgrowth of Confederate belligerent status as an important first step toward diplomatic recognition of southern independence.12
French opinion on the war was mixed and went through many of the same changes experienced in England. The semiofficial Constitutionnel (and hence the emperor) had initially expressed support for the Union's efforts to fulfill the revolutionary principles of the Founding Fathers of the republic over the resistance of the Confederacy, which had “turned its back upon the Revolution and deceived the hopes of 1776.” If the doctrine of states' rights were acceptable, southerners had the right to rebellion, but they had gone too far in expecting to take slaves into the territories. At the risk of oversimplifying a highly complex matter that involved domestic as well as foreign considerations, one could argue that Liberals praised the Union for its democracy and freedom, and opposed the Confederacy for supporting aristocracy and slavery, whereas Conservatives favored the Confederacy because of their hope that a Union failure would undermine its argument for democracy and justify the authoritarian government in France. But the Constitutionnel (and the emperor) in early May 1861 led others in the Liberal press in switching sides when the Lincoln administration emphasized maintenance of the Union rather than the elimination of slavery, and news arrived that the Confederacy had taken Fort Sumter. A southern separation had already occurred, the paper declared, making the American conflict a “war without meaning” and potentially injurious to the French economy. “What difference does it make whether it be based upon a true or false interpretation of the federal compact?” If the American government rested on the consent of the governed, it had no right “to impose its government upon the South.”13
At present, however, Britain's (and France's) safest stance lay in adhering to international law. The effectiveness of a blockade largely depended on other nations' willingness to respect its strictures, and the Palmerston ministry found it more expedient to interpret the measure as an actual rather than a paper blockade. The British did not want to resist a blockade and thus set a precedent that might work against them in future wars. More important, they realized that such a challenge dramatically increased the chances of a war that could benefit only the Confederacy. War with the Union would make Britain a virtual ally of the Confederacy and hence determine the outcome of the Civil War. But time was running out for the Union. By the spring of 1862, Britain's cotton supply (and that of France) would need replenishing, making the blockade a crucial issue in Anglo-American relations.14
While the British tried to quiet the blockade issue, the Lincoln administration followed through on a previously announced idea that aimed at defusing a potential problem but instead brought more trouble: It intended to close southern ports under municipal law. On the surface, such a simple-sounding step appeared practical because it offered an alternative to the hotly contested blockade approach. But in reality, the move—a poorly disguised effort to allow the Union time to enlarge its navy and implement an effective blockade—proved enormously complicated in its ramifications and demonstrated a remarkable lack of foresight by the administration.
Despite Lincoln's argument that port closures affirmed the domestic nature of the conflict, their implementation guaranteed both foreign and domestic problems. First, the measure promised all kinds of legal entanglements because it barred neutral vessels from belligerent ports on the basis of the United States's municipal law. In addition, the move did not fall within the parameters of international law and hence invoked no procedural guidelines. Most important, it posed a profound constitutional problem for the United States: Failure to close all ports signified U.S. recognition of southern independence for those states whose ports remained open. The U.S. Constitution barred Congress from enacting laws favoring one American port over another—which meant that the Lincoln administration either had to shut every port in the United States, or, in failing to do so, tacitly admit that those states with open ports were no longer part of the United States because secession had worked. Seward tried to avert this new imbroglio by arguing that the port closure idea constituted a lenient and more humane blockade to permit some trade in necessities for survival. Once the full blockade was in place, enforcement would be uniform.15
The United States's plan to close southern ports had unexpected effects: It encouraged the British to respect the blockade as a better choice, but it also drove the British and French closer together. The Palmerston ministry preferred a blockade over port closings because international law was clear on the former measure and thereby reduced the danger of confrontation if all parties played by the rules. Russell, in fact, thought that port closures enhanced the Confederacy's prospects of recognition by creating a fog of legal uncertainties. Consequently, he deemed it safer to concede the effectiveness of the Union blockade so that every party affected by it knew what procedures to follow. Convinced that France would agree, he instructed Richard Lyons to work closely with the French minister in Washington on resolving this potential problem. Lyons concurred. He feared that the port closings would force the recognition question more than would a blockade and was doubtless relieved to learn that the French thought so as well. For the moment at least, the blockade issue had eased, and with it, perhaps, the chances of a maritime confrontation conducive to recognition.16
By mid-June, the British had made clear their unwillingness to challenge the blockade. Their cotton surplus reduced the impact of any loss in trade until at least the end of the year. But they also knew that a maritime confrontation over the blockade would inject the British into American affairs and increase the chances of an Atlantic war. From his vantage point close to a potential line of fire, Lyons expressed fear of a conflict with the United States after its war with the Confederacy, one that would involve an invasion of British North America. It was in the British interest to help end the hostilities as quickly as possible. Palmerston, however, cautioned Russell: “They who in quarrels interpose, will often get a bloody nose.” Russell heeded that advice. British naval commanders had orders to adhere to the Union's blockade unless it endangered British subjects or property. A recent admiralty court decision in Washington, Russell wrote Lyons, was relevant. The Union had seized the Tropic Wind, a British schooner, for violating the blockade in Richmond. In a remarkable if unintended concession, the admiralty court ruled on June 13, 1861, that a blockade became effective in either a public war or civil war upon notice of implementation, whether “actual or constructive.”17
The port closings issue gradually subsided in intensity, even though Congress in mid-July authorized the president to shut those ports in which the Union proved unable to collect duties. Lyons predictably termed the intended action a paper blockade but acknowledged that the administration planned to use the interlude to make the blockade effective. Lincoln privately admitted as much. Following a dinner in the Executive Mansion later that same month, he assured friend and confidant Senator Orville Browning of Illinois that the chief means of averting war with the British lay in building a larger Union navy capable of blockading all southern ports. Adams had conceded to Russell in London that the president lacked the constitutional power to close southern ports (thereby evading the question of whether his navy was physically capable of doing so), but the foreign secretary recognized the expediency in accepting the Union's claim that a rebellion afforded an exception.18
Yet the Union remained suspicious of the British, particularly when Lyons played out Dayton's premonition by acting in concert with the French minister in Washington, Henri Mercier, on American matters. Less than a week earlier, Russell had expressed concern to his ambassador in Paris, Lord Cowley, that the Union wanted to divide the British and the French. But they must “act together in this critical business.” Accordingly, France had joined Britain in declaring neutrality, and on June 15 Mercier and Lyons unexpectedly appeared at Seward's office to officially announce their governments' position on the war and recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent. Their visit resulted in part from Seward's statement that he would ignore British and French recognition of Confederate belligerency until formally notified, but he read much more into their unannounced appearance. If this mission constituted a subtle warning of a joint Anglo-French intervention in the war, he would have none of it. He refused to meet with them jointly and would not formally acknowledge their instructions. After their departure, Seward hotly warned his emissaries in London and Paris about the European threat, stressing that he would not brook “any abridgment” of American sovereignty. In Paris ten years afterward, he still bristled when he indignantly told Lyons, then British ambassador to France, that “the three most impudent men in history … were Hernando Cortes, Lyons, and Mercier: Cortes for the way he treated Montezuma, Mercier and Lyons for the fifteenth of June, 1861.”19
Seward remained alarmed about this incident and reemphasized less than a week later that foreign intervention meant war. “The fountains of discontent in any society are many,” he wrote Adams, but outside meddling in a country's domestic affairs especially ensured trouble. If foreign nations had the right to intervene in another country's internal concerns, the result would be continual chaos and probable war. To British news correspondent William H. Russell on July 4, Seward delivered an ominous warning that he knew would make its way back to the London government: “If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it. A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire.” Russell did not consider Seward's threat a bluff. In his diary that evening, the journalist remarked with no small wonder: “I could not but admire the confidence—may I say the coolness?—of the statesman who sat in his modest little room within the sound of the evening's guns, in a capital menaced by their forces who spoke so fearlessly of war with a power which could have blotted out the paper blockade of the Southern forts and coast in a few hours, and, in conjunction with the Southern armies, have repeated the occupation and destruction of the capital.” At stake, Seward wrote Adams, was “nothing less than the life of the republic itself.”20
Seward had correctly interpreted the Anglo-French visit as carrying more meaning than its stated purpose. Lyons and Mercier were undoubtedly sincere in alleging their intention to keep all actions in the open and consistent with established procedures. One could argue that because the two ministers dealt with the U.S. State Department on a regular basis, they predictably banded together after Seward's harsh warning against intervention. But in the tense context of war, they were not persuasive in asserting that their sole aim was to respond to Seward's declaration that the United States would ignore their recognition of southern belligerency until formally notified. Thouvenel raised Dayton's suspicions when informing him of receiving Rost not as a commissioner from the Confederacy but only in seeking information from all sources. Any kind of exchange, official or not, did injury to the United States, Dayton protested.21
If Thouvenel's intention was harmless, Russell in London had more in mind. The foreign secretary had already decided to work with France in seeking a resolution to the blockade issue. He also realized that the longer the American war went on, the greater the chances for British involvement. How long could the British merchant marine avert a confrontation with Union cruisers, particularly when cotton stocks at home eventually ran out and the resultant slowdown in the textile mills led to domestic pressure to force open southern ports? Could he expect laid-off workers in Lancashire's mill districts to remain patient while the two American antagonists fought it out, leaving in their wake a dried-up cotton stream that translated into no food on British family tables?
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, Russell was becoming a convert to intervening in the American war with the primary purpose of bringing it to a close. Although unsure about how to do so, he came to believe that the best chance lay in a joint effort with France: “I am not disposed to walk alone in the hornets' nest at Washington,” he wrote his emissary in Paris. “These Yankees will require watching.” Russell had moved a step closer to some still-undefined type of intervention that aimed at stopping the war. But if his chief motive was peace, he failed to convince the Lincoln administration. Any form of peace short of a full restoration of the Union was as unacceptable to the Union as was any form of peace short of southern independence unacceptable to the Confederacy. Russell had still not fathomed the critical issue of “Union” that underlay both antagonists' view of the Civil War. Although a reasonable man who believed in the power of compromise, he failed to recognize that the burgeoning conflict in America had already gone beyond the pale of reason.22
Adams, of course, was not privy to the London ministry's intergovernmental communications, leaving him to discern from various public statements a growing British support for the Union that had nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with the war's impact on England. Seward's sharp warnings were having their desired effect on Britain's sensibilities, Adams reported to Washington, as was the British realization that any action injurious to the Union automatically meant support for the Confederacy and slavery. Adams's perceptive son and private secretary in the London legation, Henry Adams, noted that ever since the Union's virulent reaction to the queen's neutrality proclamation, the British had taken advantage of every opportunity to demonstrate goodwill to the Lincoln administration. The problem, as the younger Adams saw it, was that even British friends believed the United States's breakup unavoidable and that “this would be best for us as well as for themselves.” The elder Adams worried, however, that few Englishmen grasped the integral relationship between the Union and slavery. One group denied that slavery was the issue in the war because the Union had not supported emancipation; the other side thought the breakup of the United States would promote abolition by isolating slavery in the Confederacy. Growing numbers of British observers believed the Economist correct in thinking southern independence certain and the Union's “forcible re-incorporation of the seceding states … about as hopeless a scheme as it is unwise an aim.” The Saturday Review was angry with both American antagonists: “Neither of the belligerents has any reason to count on English assistance or sympathy, for the slave-owners are as loud in their childish threats of withholding their cotton from its principal market as the Republicans of the North in their blustering denunciations of [British] neutrality.” In this regard, Russell and his contemporaries remained in harmony: The Union's continued resistance to southern separation would lead to a pointless waste of lives.23
These issues meshed with numerous others to show that international law did not guarantee security for everyone involved in a conflict even if they followed the prescribed rules of conduct. The vast body of law did not encompass every principle governing the behavior of all parties affected by the American Civil War. As in all wars, no antagonist will comply with rules that endanger its existence. And it follows that compliance by either side on any issue rested on advantages gained at the expense of the other. British neutrality fell within the dictates of international law, yet it caused bitter resentment in the North because of the prevailing belief that the Union had everything to lose while the Confederacy had everything to gain. At the same time, British neutrality offered the Confederacy unintended and false hopes of recognition and assured a prolongation of the war. Seward therefore concluded that the best strategy lay in his heated warnings that any form of foreign intervention meant war with the United States. It slowly became clear that the only solution to the diplomatic problems caused by the Civil War lay in the very antithesis of diplomacy: the battlefield.
On July 21, 1861, Confederate forces routed the Union army at Bull Run (Manassas Junction) in Virginia, further solidifying the British view that southern independence was a fait accompli. In all circles, recognition seemed closer than ever before. From his perch above the road leading from the battlefield, Times correspondent William H. Russell gazed at the huge dust clouds swirling upward in the wake of a once-proud but now panic-stricken Union army, scurrying piecemeal back to Washington a bare thirty miles away while frantically warning in that day's stifling summer heat of an imminent southern invasion of the capital. How ironic, he perhaps thought, that President Davis had moved to Richmond not two months earlier, creating an embarrassing challenge for the Union by putting the Confederate capital much closer to Washington and tempting an attack that now would more likely come on Washington itself rather than on Richmond. Russell's letters printed in the New York Herald and the Times of London vividly described the chaotic aftermath in a manner having a profound impact on both sides of the Atlantic. His graphic accounts of Union forces in full disarray earned him the contempt of northerners as “Bull-Run Russell” while giving the lie to the official claim that the Army of the Potomac had merely beat a strategic retreat. Palmerston snidely referred to the “Bull's Run Races” and “Yankee's Run” in declaring with undisguised relief that the Confederacy had confirmed its separation with a single stroke and the stubborn Union must accept the obvious conclusion. The end of the war was nigh.24
Bull Run further undercut an ongoing but stumbling Union project: New York banker August Belmont's efforts on behalf of the Lincoln administration to negotiate a European loan. The previous June, Belmont, American agent of the Rothschilds' banking firm in London, conducted a mission at the request of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that had not achieved any success primarily because of the military and financial uncertainty of the time. More than a month before Bull Run, the London bank turned down the monetary request, maintaining that “if the war should continue, it can only be carried on at a monumental expense, and loan would have to follow loan in order to provide the means.” Applications to other London banks met the same response.25
If Belmont could not negotiate a loan for the Union, he appeared successful in helping to undermine one for his wartime enemy. He had earlier advised British financiers against granting loans to the Confederacy, insisting that such action could cause a war with the United States that would “entail ruin … upon the material interests of the commerce of the world.” Such fears shook the Economist, which warned that “a war with either of the belligerents would be a terrible calamity, but a war between England and the Northern states of America would be the most affecting misfortune which could happen to civilization.” It would wreck British shipping and investments in the Union, while destroying England's most lucrative commercial market.26
The Union army's defeat at Bull Run proved devastating to Belmont's loan efforts. Recognition of the Confederacy seemed certain as growing numbers of British observers considered southern independence a fait accompli. When Belmont tried to ease these thoughts and to remind Palmerston of southern slavery, the prime minister shot back: “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton and we dislike your Morrill tariff.” Belmont, an ardent free trader himself, urged Seward to seek repeal of the law because it alienated British capitalists and Liberals who leaned toward the Union. Even John Bright, no supporter of the Confederacy, denounced the measure as “stupid and unpatriotic,” and the Times bitterly dubbed it the “immoral tariff.” The Republican Congress, however, refused to repeal the tariff and, in fact, raised its rates a number of times during the war. The Union's rout in the first pitched battle of the Civil War confirmed European doubts about investing in such a risky cause.27
Another outcome of Bull Run was increased British interest in intervening in the war for humanitarian reasons. Slavery was not the stated issue; nor was a pro-Union feeling. In late April, the Paris Rothschilds had called for an end to the hostilities in the name of humanitarianism. The London Rothschilds told Belmont that they had thought for some time that the South would not rejoin the Union by force, that the federal government must “see the evil of prosecuting so destructive a war” for no attainable purpose, and that a foreign mediation seemed wise.28
The image of Bull Run consumed the reality as the Confederacy sought to exploit this first—and surely the last—major battle of the war. Lyons thought that “cooler heads” in the North would realize there was no big silent pocket of loyalists in the South and that the chances for a Union victory had disappeared after this fiasco. The Union seemed thoroughly demoralized by the defeat, leading southerners to overlook their inability to amass an assault on Washington and boast that the war was over. But Russell and other careful observers soon noted that northern resilience was stronger than anyone had expected even if based on a reckless stubbornness. Russell wrote in his diary that “this prick in the great Northern balloon will let out a quantity of poisonous gas, and rouse the people to a sense of the nature of the conflict on which they have entered.”29 Angry northerners gained some consolation from blasting William Russell's lurid (but accurate) accounts of the battle, even though their reaction was a transparent attempt to avoid admitting that the enemy was much stronger than presumed. President Davis already had a secret service operation under way in Europe, and its leader, the enormously talented businessman James D. Bulloch, suddenly found mercantile doors swing open when he sought contracts with private firms for constructing so-called commercial vessels that in reality became the warships of a Confederate navy.
The prognosis for Confederate recognition appeared to be the greatest benefactor of the Union's humiliation at Bull Run. The three southern commissioners had agreed that the British and French governments would remain neutral until they realized that the Union could not subdue the Confederacy. Antislavery feeling had no bearing on the issue; the Confederacy must prove itself a nation by winning a major battle in Virginia. Now, elated by the news from Bull Run, the commissioners sent Lord John Russell a note requesting a treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation. They informed the foreign secretary of their decision to hold off making a formal request for recognition until the full impact of Bull Run had set in and removed all doubt of their right to independence. They reminded Russell that Lincoln had made no move to free the slaves and that even if he did so now, his action would only be a frantic attempt to win British sympathies. Indeed, they darkly warned, he was not above inciting slave insurrections to undermine the Confederacy. Restoration of the Union had proved impossible, the commissioners argued. Recognition of the Confederacy must follow.30
Even though Russell remained unconvinced that the time had come for recognition, the Union could not have known this and angrily believed the worst. The British foreign secretary responded to the Confederate commissioners with a note affirming his nation's neutrality and declaring that any treaty with the Confederacy was out of the question because it was tantamount to extending recognition. The decisive consideration had become clear to Russell. Only a resolution by arms or a negotiated settlement, he wrote the southern commissioners, would lead to British recognition of Confederate independence. Russell refused to take any action that might determine the war's verdict. Adams, however, concluded that the British regarded southern independence as a fait accompli after the battle of Bull Run. Since they already thought Union subjugation of the Confederacy impossible, they now believed “the only thing to do is to recognize the necessity of a new government.”31
The Union's concern over the outcome at Bull Run encouraged the Lincoln administration to assuage British fears regarding the port closing measure. Seward suddenly emphasized that Lincoln would consider the interests of other nations before implementing what the secretary now carefully referred to as “enabling” legislation. Its enactment, Seward explained, did not mean that the president would close the ports but that he should have the power to do so. Furthermore, he apologized to Lyons for failing to keep Adams abreast of the administration's views so that he might inform the ministry in London; increasing work demands were responsible for the delay. But Lyons was not fooled by Seward's new coat of sheepskin and recommended that his superiors in London “disabuse both [the U.S.] Government and [its] people of the delusion that they can carry their points with us by bluster and violence, and that we are more afraid of a war than they are.”32
The ephemeral truce in Anglo-American relations came to an abrupt end in mid-August, when news reached Seward that a private citizen from Charleston, Robert Mure, was preparing to leave New York for London, carrying dispatches from Richmond to the British Foreign Office that suggested imminent recognition of the Confederacy. Regardless of the content of the papers, Seward realized, their acceptance in London meant the establishment of Anglo-Confederate relations and the surety of war between the United States and Britain.33
As in so many earlier incidents, the British found that no matter how noble their intentions, their claim to neutrality convinced neither the Union nor the Confederacy. In an effort to establish commercial guidelines that reduced the likelihood of British involvement, Russell had taken it upon himself to urge the Confederacy (as he had the Union) to adhere to all terms in the Declaration of Paris except the ban on privateering. But this seemingly innocent overture carried the seeds of recognition—or so believed both American antagonists.
If Russell's intentions were laudatory, his judgment was not. He should have realized that any British contact with the Richmond government elevated it to a level above that of rebel. Had not the harsh Union reaction to his reception of the southern commissioners provided ample warning of the danger in communicating with the Confederacy? Furthermore, the Union thought the plot thickened when learning that Mure held the position of colonel in the Confederacy's military forces in South Carolina and was a cousin of the British consul in New Orleans. Moreover, he carried dispatches for the southern commissioners in London and had secured his passport from the British consul in Charleston, Robert Bunch—the latter action a violation of a State Department directive barring foreign consuls from issuing passports without the countersignatures of the secretary of state and the U.S. Army's commanding general. The web of conspiracy proved too tightly woven for Seward to dismiss as a coincidence. Nor could he believe that Russell was so lacking in common sense as to stray innocently into this mindless jumble. Seward ordered New York police to seize Mure and his papers. Among the confiscated items were a sealed pouch, numerous private letters (only four of which were unsealed), a letter of introduction by Bunch, and, most exasperating, several copies of a pamphlet praising the Confederate army's performance at Bull Run.34
Impressions again spoke louder than truth, and in the feverish aftermath of Bull Run threatened to cause a major Anglo-American confrontation over intervention. Seward was infuriated that a British consul, whose authority was commercial and not diplomatic, had placed a diplomatic seal on dispatches to Confederate emissaries in England and had the audacity to include inflammatory anti-Union materials in those diplomatic pouches. If not a violation of neutrality, what further action was necessary to make it so? If not proof of southern treason, how far must the rebels go before the Lincoln government could take action? That the papers had not gone through Lyons's hands in Washington provided further proof of malicious intent. Indeed, Bunch's letter of introduction emphasized the importance of hiding the papers from Union officials. Without breaking the diplomatic seal protecting the bulk of the package, Seward read the few letters that were open and became incensed over Britain's sinister behavior and the Confederacy's traitorous actions. Particularly galling was the revelation that Bunch had worked with the French consul in Charleston in sending an intermediary to Richmond to discuss diplomatic issues. One letter addressed to a Confederate agent overseas boasted, “This is the first step of direct treating with our government.” Seward sent the entire bag to Adams in London, angrily calling Bunch a “conspirator” against the Union and declaring that the British had taken “the first step to recognition.”35
A testy exchange ensued between Adams and Russell, during which the Union minister bitterly assailed the transparent effort at negotiations and the British foreign secretary vehemently denied any designs on granting recognition to the Confederacy. Adams charged that the British and French consuls, whether or not by home directives, had collaborated with the Confederacy against the Union. Russell must recall Bunch, Adams insisted. Now under fire, the foreign secretary reluctantly admitted that Bunch had acted under “secret instructions” but quickly assured Adams that they had nothing to do with recognition. Russell initially explained that since the Washington government had suspended postal communications of British subjects across Union-Confederate lines, Bunch had merely facilitated their contact by authorizing the inclusion of private correspondence in consular bags. This argument proved reckless and foolish behavior even if true, because anyone in Bunch's position should have seen the danger in such a rash act. Worse, Russell should have prohibited such action as provocative to the extreme. Seeing Adams's skeptical reaction to this remarkably lame defense, Russell decided to reveal the whole truth and in doing so acknowledged that he had not been straightforward from the beginning. The British and French, he explained, had earlier agreed to cooperate in maintaining the right of neutral commercial traffic with America and, to promote this objective, decided that the Confederacy must adhere to all provisions in the Declaration of Paris, save that on privateering. Russell had been willing to negotiate with the Confederacy, somehow reasoning that to do so did not constitute recognition. He refused to recall Bunch and emphatically declared that his government had “not recognized, and [was] not prepared to recognize the so-called Confederate States as a separate and independent State.”36
Palmerston could not have been pleased at his foreign secretary's monumental indiscretion, but he predictably closed ranks in supporting his colleague and hoped the two Atlantic nations could escape the situation short of war. The prime minister doubted that Lincoln would “draw the sword,” though he could not be sure. Americans had proved themselves “so wild” about other seemingly inconsequential matters that they were capable of barbaric behavior at any time. The Bunch affair appeared to be another effort by the Lincoln administration to instigate war with the British. Both Palmerston and Russell sought to build up Canada's defenses and enlarge Britain's Atlantic squadron. Careful not to provoke Gladstone and others who resisted the buildup on economic grounds, Palmerston exclaimed that no one “with half an Eye in his Head, or half an Idea in his Brain could fail to perceive what a lowering of the Position of England in the world would follow the Conquest of our North American provinces by the north americans, especially after the Bulls Run Races.” At the worst, Palmerston believed, the United States would act on emotions and order Lyons out of the country. In that event, the prime minister declared, Lyons should relocate in Canada until Seward's hotheadedness had passed.37
Despite Russell's last-second candor, he had again demonstrated his inability to grasp the magnitude of the conflict in North America. He had repeatedly experienced how sensitive the United States was to every action he took in the name of neutrality. Had not Lyons made clear that a mere conversation with Confederate officials would raise a cry of outrage in the Union? Ignoring repeated warning signs, Russell had secretly authorized a consul having no diplomatic status to negotiate with a belligerent. Surely bilateral discussions extended tacit recognition to the Confederacy. Furthermore, he had accepted Bunch's assurance that Mure told the truth in asserting that the diplomatic pouch contained only private letters of a business nature. Indeed, Bunch had added, the so-called passport given to Mure was a simple certificate authorizing him to transport British dispatches to London. This last statement angered Russell, for Bunch had violated Lyons's directives against entrusting British dispatches to anyone carrying private correspondence. Russell nonetheless continued to insist that the British had not taken a step toward recognition, still failing to see a connection between negotiations and recognition. This is incomprehensible, given this touchy period in which every action he took was subject to intense scrutiny about whether it related to recognition. He knew the danger, once remarking that recognition was the “only step which the US have any pretence to take ill.”38
The Confederacy meanwhile saw the potential gains derived from Russell's invitation and welcomed negotiations with the British. To foster its image as a nation and to exploit the raw relationship between Britain and the Union, the Richmond Congress immediately approved Russell's request. Despite his disclaimers, the foreign secretary had initiated talks with the Confederacy and thereby signified its status as a nation.39
Russell had gotten involved in an imprudent effort that directly interfered in American affairs and yet lacked the support of his colleagues primarily because of the way he had proceeded rather than because he had taken the British government one step closer to recognition. Gladstone saw the danger that somehow escaped the head of the Foreign Office. A consul, he wrote Secretary for War George Cornewall Lewis, must not act as an “instrument in making any necessary arrangement with the Southern States.” Lyons allowed that Russell's motives were defensible but his methods were not. Russell had tried to achieve something that did not fall within his power. Under the Paris Declaration, no signatory had the right to negotiate a separate agreement on any of its terms with a nonsignatory. Then, in a statement demonstrating that Lyons, too, failed to understand the intensity of the American war, he blandly observed that there was a better way. By “conciliatory words, by avoiding as far as possible abstract assertions of principle, and especially by never yielding an iota in practice, we shall by degrees accustom the government and the People here to see us treat the Confederate States as de facto independent.” Indeed, Lyons rethought his remarks about the Paris pact by musing that Russell's attempt to secure Confederate compliance with its provisions might have succeeded if Mure had not carried “foolish private letters.”40
The Lincoln administration reacted to Russell's actions in predictable fashion: It revoked the British consul's exequatur (the U.S. government's written recognition of his authority as consul), accusing him of seeking British recognition of the Confederacy. Russell's clandestine attempt to initiate diplomatic contact with the Confederacy left an image of backhandedness that substantiated Seward's direst premonitions about British self-interest. The “proceeding in which [Bunch] was engaged,” the secretary furiously charged, “was in the nature of a treaty with the insurgents, and the first step towards a recognition by Great Britain of their sovereignty.”41
Ill feelings over the Bunch affair gradually receded, only to resume over a host of other issues that more often than not related to intervention. The British continued their military buildup in Canada, increasing northern apprehension about an attack rather than a defensive measure. In London, Mobile journalist and now Confederate agent Henry Hotze hurriedly prepared to publish the Index, a newly created weekly journal that sought to build pro-Confederate support throughout Britain. From the British capital came disturbing news: Rebel agents had purchased the sleek and fast Bermuda, which soon ran the Union blockade and arrived safely in Savannah, Georgia. Furthermore, these same agents had contracted with British shipbuilders in Liverpool for the construction of two huge cruisers that, under their eventual names of Alabama and Florida, would serve as blockade-runners and Union raiders and thus become the heart of a fledgling Confederate navy. The Union, however, confronted its most immediate problem in Mexico, where the War of the Reform had ended in December 1860 but left a legacy of violence that, like the Civil War raging above the Rio Grande, virtually invited foreign intervention and threatened hemispheric peace. Especially striking, outside involvement in Mexico could set a precedent for similar actions in the American Civil War.42
Russell realized that the American situation was fast slipping out of control. To his friend and former U.S. minister in London, Edward Everett, the foreign secretary revealed his deepest concerns. The Union's continual harping about his policies had worn his patience to the point that he must have questioned the wisdom of adhering to principle. Did not his own hatred of slavery make clear that only this emotional issue combined with its racial underpinnings could underlay the ferocity of the American contest? Russell attributed England's problems to Lincoln's refusal to admit that the war was over slavery. The London ministry would surely have leaned toward the antislavery Union if it had focused on the moral differences dividing the two sides in the war. Instead, Lincoln had talked fuzzily of preserving the Union and succeeded only in confusing everyone who struggled to understand the basis of the fighting. In accordance with international law, the Palmerston government had declared neutrality, confident that the White House would recognize the advantages falling in its favor. The United States's best interest, Russell fervently believed, lay in accepting southern separation as a fait accompli. Two American republics—one free, the other slave—offered the only feasible way to halt a war that almost daily reached new levels of atrocity. But all Russell gained from his many anxious hours of dealing with the conflict as an honest neutral was the bitter Union accusation that he was pro-Confederate and the Confederacy's continual entreaties for recognition.43
Russell was both angry and hurt by the Union's scurrilous attacks on his character. Why should a strict adherent to the rules come under vicious assault? How could the Union fail to understand that its blockade had implied a state of war that, based on international law, necessitated British neutrality and recognition of southern belligerency? The British government would never ponder the question of recognizing southern independence until the Confederacy, in fact, had won its independence. The conflict must render its own verdict on the battlefield.
Perhaps, Russell began to suspect, the only solution lay in an intervention to end the fighting. How ironic and yet satisfying that such action fell within the confines of international law. Nonbelligerent nations, he knew, had the right—even the duty—to urge those peoples at war to stop fighting and resolve their differences nonviolently. As a civilized nation, England bore a moral responsibility to devise a peaceful solution. Both antagonists had proved their point: The Union had given all it had and would suffer no loss of honor in acknowledging southern independence; the Confederacy had demonstrated sufficient determination to entitle it to a place in the community of nations. The Union had found it impossible to subjugate an area so large and a people so numerous. Prolonging the war meant massive devastation for both parties, along with the increasing likelihood of outside involvement by other nations not as disinterested as the British.
Instead of consoling, however, Russell found his friend Everett blunt and unforgiving in regard to the foreign secretary's inability to comprehend the meaning of the conflict in America. In early September, during the embittered Bunch affair, the arrival of Everett's letter in the Foreign Office only added to Russell's discomfiture. Everett felt betrayed by Russell. Had not their long sessions of whist and other social niceties helped to convince the British that the Atlantic relationship was positive? Despite the admitted legality of neutrality, Russell should have understood the practical necessity of bending the rules to demonstrate British affinity with the United States during its darkest hour. Recognition of southern belligerency and the reception of the Confederate commissioners had come too precipitously to a Union that had found every minute of its agony equivalent to a lifetime. Everett could not discern even a murmur of sympathy from the British; on the contrary, their “cold neutrality” suggested connivance with the southern traitors.44
Rather than accusing Russell of sinister motives, Everett criticized him for not making a thorough examination of the American situation before taking such decisive action. Russell exemplified the narrow-minded disposition of most British observers in failing to see that the war had grown out of slavery. The Union's most fundamental assumption at the war's outset was that Britain's antislavery views would prevent any action offering encouragement to the Confederacy. How shocking to the Lincoln administration that the British had set aside their antislavery sentiment and welcomed the breakup of the United States. Lincoln realized that great moral purpose guided his wartime effort and that he could not allow the South to leave the Union in peace. But before Adams could set foot in London to plead his case, the British ministry had declared neutrality, extended belligerent recognition to the Confederacy, and infuriated the Union by, in effect, condoning secession.45
Everett's assault on Russell was too severe. Even though the issues underlying the Civil War seemed obvious to the former U.S. minister to England, he presumed too much in expecting Russell and his people to comprehend the full dimensions of a crisis three thousand miles away. Certainly Russell understood the integral role of slavery in the war; yet he had no way of appreciating how political and constitutional considerations had prevented Lincoln from highlighting slavery as the root of the conflict. Reason had led the president, like Everett, to believe that the British would see this fundamental truth. But this was war, and war seldom lends itself to rational thinking. This hope—perhaps assumption—that the British would understand the real issues in America had proved to be a major miscalculation that contributed to the confusion. Had not Lincoln publicly emphasized the Union's preservation as the chief objective of the war? Had he not opposed only the expansion of slavery while recognizing the legal sanctity of the institution where it already existed? What kind of principle was this? The essence of international communications is to make messages simple and clear while leaving nothing for assumption. Just as Lincoln had little choice in his initial treatment of the war, so did Russell have little alternative to his initial reaction of neutrality.
As the arguments intensified over British neutrality, however, Russell had inched closer to some yet-undetermined form of intervention designed to end the American war. Seward had repeatedly warned that British intervention meant war with the United States—a challenge Russell did not take lightly. Yet he knew that failure to make an effort to stop the conflict meant not just forsaking his responsibility as leader of a civilized nation; doing nothing to prevent its prolongation into a more vicious war could ultimately compel a forceful intervention for both economic and humanitarian considerations. Not only would the war inflict widespread material destruction on both North and South, but also it would damage the British and other nations that had enjoyed a close commercial relationship with the United States. Moreover, the growing ferocity of the conflict provided another reason for bringing it to an end.
Russell found the remedy in a broad interpretation of international law that permitted nonbelligerent nations to do everything in their power to halt an ongoing war that threatened injury to them as well as to the principal actors. Vattel had argued that not only did a neutral nation have the obligation to help warring peoples stave off “disaster and ruin, so far as it can do without running too great a risk,” but it also could intervene when its own welfare was at stake.46 As a civilized nation, England bore a moral and legal obligation to show the way to peace. The time seemed propitious: Both northerners and southerners had ostensibly satisfied honor and principle, the former in trying to preserve the Union, the latter in reaffirming the irrevocable nature of secession.
At this point, Russell received support for intervention from across the English Channel: Emperor Napoleon III of France reiterated his interest in stopping the American conflict. Surely he was concerned about the steadily depleting supply of cotton. Doubtless he agreed with the British in concluding that the Union lacked the capacity to subjugate so much territory and so many people. Certainly he recognized the opportunity to fulfill the shattered dream of his illustrious uncle, Napoleon I, who had wanted to restore a French Empire in the New World (lost after the Treaty of Paris of 1763 ending the French and Indian War) that would swing the world balance of power away from England. Unfortunately for him, however, his search for glory in foreign policy depended too heavily on following the British lead rather than taking the initiative. As he allegedly remarked, “Other countries are my mistresses, but England is my wife.”47 The reality was that he needed the British more than they needed him, but in his world realities did not always determine his policies. Most definitely, the younger Napoleon was a notorious adventurer who repeatedly ignored danger and schemed his way into matters that furthered his own imperial interests. Those French who revered the first Napoleon may have sneeringly referred to his nephew as “Napoleon the Little” because of his short, squat stature, and they may have snickered at the remark of President Lincoln's private secretary, John Hay, who characterized the emperor's sideways walk as similar to that of a “gouty crab.” But they also knew that Napoleon III had a marked propensity to act without thinking through all the consequences—and this raised questions about his motives in wanting to intervene in the American war.48
Russell was familiar with the longtime machinations of Napoleon III and thought his chief objective was self-aggrandizement; but he also knew that if the French emperor oftentimes acted foolishly, he was no fool. France posed a growing threat to Britain's maritime supremacy, and the two nations had noticeably cooled their relationship since its high point of triumph in the Crimean War with Russia of the previous decade. Russell realized that, as in nearly all alliances, the Anglo-French entente regarding the American contest rested solely on mutual self-interest. He also knew that a joint intervention was less dangerous than a unilateral action. Not only would the cooperating nations pose a more formidable force, but also withdrawal in the event of failure was far less dishonorable when done in the company of others. Also important, Russell recognized the value of keeping France preoccupied with American affairs and therefore less likely to exploit other trouble spots in the world.49
Napoleon III, emperor of France (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Mercier took the lead in talking with Lyons in October 1861 about the wisdom of a joint intervention. The French minister had recently returned to Washington after a highly publicized tour of both the Union and the Confederacy with Prince Napoleon Jerome Bonaparte. Northerners had reacted angrily to the visit, for the prince was Napoleon III's cousin and second in the line of succession to the throne. The emperor, they feared, had revived France's longtime designs on the New World, making the visit an integral part of a European movement toward recognition. Just two weeks after the Union's disaster at Bull Run, the prince had sought a pass to the battlefield. Seward had consented, but only with great reluctance. William H. Russell highlighted the problem Seward and others had with the younger Napoleon: His presence in the South appeared to underline French “recognition of the Confederates as a belligerent power.” Mercier provided substance for this inflamed reaction. In a private meeting with Lyons, he focused on the contents of a letter to the prince from Thouvenel. According to the foreign minister's missive, the French need for cotton had become so critical that they sought to end the American war by some form of joint intervention with the British. The two countries, Mercier declared, should extend diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and then warn the Union not to interfere with the Atlantic trade.50
Mercier emphasized, however, that the time had not yet come for intervention. The Union, he believed, had recovered from its defeat at Bull Run and was again overly confident. When the last burst of optimism disappeared, the time for Anglo-French intervention would have arrived. Mercier thought British cooperation a surety in light of their dependence on southern cotton. But he was unaware of the huge surplus afforded by the three years of bountiful harvests in the South just before the war. France likewise had an abundance of cotton on hand, but when that supply ran out it would be in trouble. Whereas England bought 80 percent of its cotton from the American South and found other sources in India, Egypt, China, and Brazil, France drew a whopping 93 percent from southern cotton growers but had been unable to find adequate alternative supplies despite a worldwide search. When Lyons indicated that his government was not prepared either to recognize the Confederacy or to challenge the blockade, Mercier assured him that if England refused to intervene, “France would not act alone.”51
Lyons dutifully forwarded Mercier's proposal to London, but with the caveat that the only way recognition could end the war was for the intervening powers to use military force. The United States, Lyons insisted, would not stop fighting until its leaders became convinced that its restoration was impossible. That time would probably never come. Hence the British and French must have a formidable naval force that they could use “promptly and energetically and above all with no symptom of hesitation.” Recognition would not halt the conflict unless accompanied by “a defensive (if not also an offensive) Alliance with the South.”52
Palmerston agreed with Lyons's call to stand clear of the American war at the present time but cautioned that the situation could change. The hostilities had thus far inflicted no major economic damage on other nations and therefore provided no justification for intervention. Prolonged fighting, however, would change matters by causing economic problems in England and elsewhere. “This cotton question,” Palmerston told Russell, “will most certainly assume a serious character by the beginning of next year; and if the American civil war has not by that time come to an end, I suspect that we shall be obliged either singly or conjointly with France to tell the northerners that we cannot allow some millions of our people to perish to please the Northern States and that the blockade of the South must be so far relaxed as to [allow] cotton loaded ships to come out.”53
Palmerston remained cautious about becoming involved in a war that had not yet convinced northerners of the Union's dissolution. “A Rupture with the United States,” he warned Russell, “would at all times be an Evil.” Not only would the harsh Canadian winter obstruct a British assault from the north, but such an encounter would greatly benefit the French. They had no direct contact with the United States and would suffer fewer casualties in a war. Furthermore, the French navy was larger than the Union's and they had a smaller volume of commerce to risk. We should “lie on our oars,” Palmerston insisted. The war's operations, he told Russell's undersecretary, “have as yet been too indecisive to warrant an acknowledgment of the Southern Union.”54
At this juncture, the threat of foreign intervention in Mexico tied itself to the American Civil War by heightening the United States's apprehension of a European involvement that came through its southern neighbor. Presently deeply embroiled in postwar problems, Mexico remained a bare skeleton of a once-powerful and sprawling Spanish colony formerly known as New Spain. Mexico had borrowed heavily from England, France, and Spain, and now found itself called upon to meet its debts during a chaotic post–civil war period that made the splintered nation highly vulnerable to forced collection. The new republic under Liberal president Benito Juárez suspended debt payments and caused a firestorm abroad. As so often happens, an economic inroad can grow into a political-military involvement that, in this case, could directly challenge the Monroe Doctrine as guardian of the hemisphere. Foreign intervention would implant three European powers in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere and provide precedent for a similar joint venture above the Rio Grande.55
The Lincoln administration feared a European intervention in Mexico as the first step toward foreign involvement in the American war. Adams in London pointed out that European control of Mexico's coast would undermine the Union blockade by permitting the entry of foreign goods into the Confederacy through the back door. Dayton in Paris warned of “an imposing fleet” of European steamers soon stationed in the West Indies, carrying troops for the expedition but watching American affairs as much as those of Mexico. Like Adams, Dayton thought the powers could put a large fleet in the Gulf of Mexico and encourage their nationals to challenge the Union blockade. The mere presence of European warships could lead to a collision with Union vessels. French interests rather than sympathies would decide policy. The first French emperor, Dayton reminded Seward, had once asserted that “a statesman's heart should be in his head.” The present emperor would act on that same principle. Despite all the “professions of good feeling,” France “would, in the end, look to her own interests and, do it too, in connection with Great Britain.”56
The Washington government had tried to circumvent this new danger by assuming Mexico's debts, but it succeeded only in drawing both domestic and foreign opposition. The U.S. minister to Mexico, Thomas Corwin, recommended a loan of perhaps $12 million in exchange for the U.S. acquisition of Baja California (believed in danger of Confederate takeover) or a major reduction in tariffs on goods imported into Mexico. The proposed arrangement (ultimately voted down by the U.S. Senate) drew Palmerston's scorn because the securities sought for the loan would come in the form of public lands and mineral rights. As he cynically observed, “A mortgage of Mexico to the United States … would certainly lead to foreclosing.”57
Napoleon III's objective extended beyond collecting debts; he intended to establish a monarchy in Mexico aimed at restoring order and halting U.S. expansion into Latin America, building a French commercial empire in the Western Hemisphere, restructuring Europe by negotiating an alliance with Austria, and, most important, reshaping the world balance of power in France's favor. Granting recognition to the Confederacy would create a friendly buffer nation between the United States and a French-controlled Mexico.58
But Napoleon's imperial interests were not the sole guide for French behavior; like the British, many French observers regarded the war's outcome as a fait accompli whose destruction threatened to spread beyond American borders. In a private note to Mercier that he allowed Seward to read, Thouvenel expressed great concern about the impact of the American war on France and other nations. The vicious fighting indicated that no end was in sight. Compromise was out of the question, leaving “only force” to shorten the war. The “European Countries severally, unavoidably suffer more from interruption of their ordinary intercourse with the United States than they could be obliged to suffer by a similar interruption of intercourse with any other nation.” The loss of cotton would hurt industry worldwide and lead to starvation in France. “The crisis in France is about to begin.” To replenish the cotton supply, the Union must relax its blockade. Seward rejected any thought of doing this and, in fact, did not believe the situation that serious. Had the European countries used their “moral influence” in favor of the Union and “against the suicidal miserable attempts of our disloyal citizens to overthrow it, this civil war would well nigh have come to an end already.” Instead, they had searched for a compromise “at the cost of the Union itself.” If the Union fell, the entire economic network that France was so dependent on “will disappear forever.”59
Thouvenel was not privy to all the emperor's plans, but he knew that France's rapidly falling cotton supply had necessitated putting aside his personal support for the Union in favor of reopening the cotton flow with the Confederacy. More than 200,000 workers in France and another million in England depended on cotton. Its continued depletion, he told Dayton, would probably “destroy some of the strongest French firms” in the cities of Lyons and Bordeaux. “The pressure might become so great from these quarters that governments could not but heed it and look to its remedy.” Dayton warned that “in the event of a war, which must necessarily follow any interference, that other interests in England and France would of necessity suffer to an extent far beyond any advantage which could be gained from an increased supply of cotton or the present opening of trade with some Port of the South.” Thouvenel instructed Mercier to urge Lyons to support a joint intervention that, admittedly, raised the likelihood of Confederate recognition.60
The tripartite foreign intrusion in Mexico loomed as particularly dangerous to the Union because the French emperor's machinations threatened hemispheric security and provided the Confederacy with hopes of an alliance. Seward tried to secure a pledge from the European powers that they sought only to collect on their debts. Dayton met with Thouvenel, authorized to offer a U.S. guarantee on the interest on the loan. But Thouvenel rejected this proposal, declaring that his government must have the principal. The three powers sought nothing more than Mexico's payment of its debts. Dayton remained suspicious. “I cannot but feel,” he wrote Seward, “that all these Governments are disposed to take advantage of the present distracted condition of the United States.”61
Dayton could not have imagined the magnitude of Napoleon's intentions. As early as November 1861 Prince Richard Metternich, Austria's ambassador to Paris, was certain that the French emperor had decided to install Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph as monarch in Mexico. Indeed, Napoleon brazenly revealed to Metternich the procedure by which the new monarch would assume power and then build a modern state. Within a month rumors of Maximilian's ascension had become so widespread in Europe that Russell asked the Austrian ambassador in London whether the archduke had agreed to take the throne. The response was disturbing: Maximilian was waiting for suitable conditions before deciding whether to accept the offer. He and his wife Charlotte, unaware of the opposition in London, soon agreed to take the throne. The new monarch proudly proclaimed to Empress Eugénie in Austria that he was about to engage in a “holy work”—a crusade to save the Mexican people from their backward existence. As the guardian of monarchical order against the chaos engendered by republicanism, he intended to incorporate Central America into the new Mexican Empire and, with the collaboration of Maximilian's cousin, the emperor of Brazil, divide Spanish South America between them.62
Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, emperor of Mexico. After an engraving by Metzmacher Pierre Guillaume. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Over the bitter objections of his cabinet colleagues, Russell emphasized the importance of cultivating French support in ending the American war and won the prime minister's approval in collecting the debts in Mexico. Lewis denounced the use of force in collecting debts from “a notoriously bankrupt, dishonest, and unsettled government.” War was certain with a country in “anarchy,” which would be “like fighting with the Arabs of the desert.” Russell, however, told the queen that the British must send a naval force to help seize Vera Cruz and force payment of debts. He called for U.S. participation in the effort and, surely suspicious of Napoleon's broader objectives, stressed that the British government must publicly renounce any intention of interfering with the Mexican government. Failure to take these measures, he noted, would violate British adherence to nonintervention, enmesh England in Mexico's domestic turmoil, and alienate the United States. Lewis vehemently warned against “a Foreign Office war, in which the Cabinet is to have no voice.” His brother-in-law, the Earl of Clarendon, disgustedly remarked that a probable declaration of war on Mexico without cabinet consultation would be “Palmerstonian.” When he urged the prime minister to seek the cabinet's advice on a blockade of Vera Cruz, Palmerston responded almost in jest, “Oh, ah! the Cabinet … very well; call one then, if you think it necessary.”63
Given Russell's growing interest in ending the American war, his decision to join Napoleon III in Mexico was not surprising even if certain to alienate the Union. What better pretext for intervening in the conflict than to establish a precedent in Mexico that rested on the principles of international law? One would be hard pressed to find a more emphatic demonstration of the dangers of foreign intervention, no matter how professedly benign. England, France, and Spain dutifully agreed to pull out after collecting their debts, hoping to provide credence for their claimed disinterest. And in another weak effort to alleviate suspicions of imperial motives, they invited the United States to participate in the venture. The invitation came “somewhat late,” acidly remarked Dayton to Thouvenel. On October 31 the three powers signed the Treaty of London, authorizing a military expedition to Mexico to seek “the redress of grievances.”64
Seward rejected both their assurance and their invitation. Although he had foolishly called for war the previous April, he had matured enough to realize how imprudent it would be for the Union to challenge the three European powers while fighting the Confederacy. Indeed, with the European concert firmly entrenched in Mexico, the three powers might welcome American resistance as an opportunity to turn their attention northward and make Seward's fear of foreign intervention a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the Union quashed the secessionists, he groused, it would deal with its new European neighbors.65
On the Confederate side, however, the Great Power intervention in Mexico presented the tantalizing possibility of gaining up to three allies that might, in the process of satisfying their own interests, advance those of the Confederacy. Not protesting the intervention in Mexico would be a small price to pay for a quid pro quo of recognition and perhaps an alliance to guarantee the American South's new independence. But the advantages were mutual. The Confederacy, as it knew, offered something tangible to the European nations: an ally that discouraged a Union attack. Once achieving independence, it could deal with any foreign forces still occupying Mexico after the Civil War had ended. But for the moment, the possibilities afforded by a Union clash with the intervening powers offered the Confederacy an unparalleled opportunity to establish independence.
The battle at Bull Run had opened the door to the most significant foreign threat to the United States since the War of 1812. The challenge to the Union was evident. Seward had warned of England's self-interested motives and now felt justified in his prognosis. But the danger encompassed the Confederacy as well. Even though the threat was obscured by the Confederacy's immediate needs and the goodwill assurances of all three powers, the chief mover in the Mexican enterprise was the ever-devious and greatly ambitious Napoleon III. British and French neutrality had encouraged the Richmond government to expect recognition, and it had now silently acquiesced to a joint Old World venture whose necessary by-product was southern separation. The Times, Charles Francis Adams noted, had asserted that the destruction of the United States removed a major threat to Europe. Henry Adams characterized the Union's supporters in England as “lukewarm” and declared that no one in Europe would help. “They all hate us and fear us…. We must depend wholly on ourselves.”66 The Confederacy, on the other hand, saw immediate advantages in the tripartite intervention—particularly with the French—and was ready to pursue a risky policy of working with the interventionist powers in an effort to secure independence. It would deal with its new postwar neighbor(s) after winning the war with the Union.
The Union's blanket criticism of England and its people was not justified, for Russell was the chief spokesman for those who supported intervention and believed southern independence a foregone conclusion. In pondering these weighty issues, he held to his broad definition of neutrality, which encompassed the right of neutrals to intervene in a war that damaged their welfare. Furthermore, he considered southern independence certain and the war senseless. Russell had decided that the best solution to the American problem was southern separation. The joint effort in Mexico, he seemed to believe, would signal the Union that the same corrective action could occur in the Civil War if the belligerents refused to come to the peace table. From Russell's vantage point, southern independence would help the Union by ending the bloodshed and ultimately forcing the collapse of slavery. In a stand never supported by his colleagues but one that found favor with Lord Robert Cecil and a number of other Conservatives, Russell argued that as the sole slave nation in North America, the Confederacy would come under tremendous domestic and foreign pressure to approve emancipation as a more attractive alternative to a steady drain of slaves escaping into neighboring free territories. A breakup of the United States, Russell told Lyons, guaranteed the death of slavery. “For this reason I wish for separation.”67
But before Russell could find a way to convince the Lincoln administration that southern independence was a fait accompli, a crisis developed in Anglo-American relations in late 1861 that threatened to thrust the two Atlantic nations into a war that would virtually guarantee Confederate nationhood.