CHAPTER 4
Road to Recognition

I am heart and soul a neutral.

—LORD JOHN RUSSELL TO LORD LYONS, February 6, 1862

I think we are finally reaching the decisive moment of the crisis.
The Federals will shortly be in Richmond; there is no longer a shadow of a doubt about that. Then we shall see whether the Southerners are capable of persevering…. For myself, I would not yet dare to say anything positive.

—HENRI MERCIER TO EDOUARD THOUVENEL, May 12, 1862

The Trent crisis had caused war talk on both sides of the Atlantic, further driving British interest in ending the American conflict before another problem developed that could lead to a third Anglo-American war. The two Atlantic nations had narrowly escaped conflict over a question of honor in the Trent affair. What if they confronted each other over the blockade? How long must the war go on before it destroyed the economic livelihood of neutral nations? How many wartime atrocities were enough to convince the antagonists to lay down their arms? The United States, the British insisted, must accept Confederate independence as a fait accompli—so amply illustrated at Bull Run. Continuing the war assured a mindless waste of human and material treasure that violated humanity while inflicting economic hardships on both Europe and America. The dictates of civilization, they concluded, necessitated a mediated settlement of the American Civil War before other nations joined the fighting.

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The British government reaffirmed neutrality in the wake of the Trent settlement while acknowledging the dangers of a prolonged American war. Not looking beyond the present, the secretary for war noted with relief in February 1862 that the cabinet felt no great pressure to intervene in American affairs because the workers in Lancashire had “behaved with wonderful forbearance and moderation.” But Lewis knew this uneasy calm could not last. By autumn the cotton supply would drop to a dangerous level, forcing extended layoffs and raising the likelihood of massive disturbances. Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Russell tried to temper relations with the Union by announcing that, effective February 6, British waters were no longer open to privateers or warships from either Union or Confederacy. “I am heart and soul a neutral,” he assured Lyons. But when Seward thought he detected a softening British attitude and asked that England show good faith by withdrawing recognition of southern belligerency, Lyons quickly opposed the move, agreeing with the French that the Union's implied quid pro quo to open southern ports and relax the blockade offered no impetus to ending the war. The British minister realized that the maintenance of neutrality kept all principals involved within the well-defined constraints of international law and avoided the vagaries of municipal law that came with port closings. Lyons urged his superiors in London to maintain pressure on the Union by keeping it uncertain about their direction. “It is when the Americans feel sure of us,” he told Russell, “that they take liberties.”¹

Russell, however, raised questions in both American camps about the sincerity of his neutrality by meeting “unofficially” at his home with Mason in early February 1862. Though intending to reiterate his government's wish to stay out of the conflict, he again demonstrated his failure to understand that any contact with the Confederacy automatically signaled disfavor toward the Union. “What a fuss we have had about these men,” he remarked to Lyons in dismissing the matter as inconsequential. Had not the Bunch imbroglio taught Russell the perils of public impressions? In the midst of the Trent troubles, he had seemingly learned this maxim by informing the three Confederate commissioners that he would not meet with them a third time and asserting that he could have no “official communication with them.” But the Trent threat had passed, and Russell thought the time propitious to make his neutrality stance clear to the Confederacy. His well-intentioned effort satisfied neither side, as is so often the case in trying to walk the fine line of neutrality between belligerents. William Gregory took the initiative on behalf of his southern friends, first securing Russell's agreement to meet informally with Mason and then arranging for the minister to request the interview.² Southern hopes rose only to fall again, whereas the Union angrily denounced Russell for making another admission to the Confederacy's status as an entity.

Mason's discussion with Russell on February 10 proved “civil and kind,” according to the Confederate minister's account, but it disappointed him by revealing no prosouthern sentiment. Russell refused to accept Mason's credentials but patiently listened to his request that the British extend recognition and ignore the Union blockade. The Confederacy, Mason strongly emphasized, would win independence with or without recognition. Indeed, he must have baffled Russell by stating that the Confederacy did not seek either material aid or a military alliance. Mason had thought a mere profession of self-reliance would prove the Confederacy's capacity to stand on its own, but his refusal to seek specific assistance demonstrated a wealth of self-delusion that helped to undermine its only real chance for nationhood. Mason now realized that the road to recognition ran through the battlefield. If the Confederacy administered a telling blow on the advancing Union armies in the West, “it will be a great lever by which to operate here.”³

But that highly anticipated southern victory in the Western Theater did not come, for in mid-February Ulysses S. Grant's Union forces seized two critical points at the gateway into the Confederacy: Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River twelve miles eastward. Just days later Nashville fell, putting the Union in control of Kentucky and much of Tennessee and forecasting an assault on the Mississippi River that would split the Confederacy, throw open the port at New Orleans, and thereby ease European pressure for lifting the blockade. The New York Tribune mirrored the widespread optimism in the Union by predicting a quick end to the war. News of Fort Henry hit the British like a “flash of lightning,” Benjamin Moran gleefully declared in London. England must “desert her slave-driving allies now.” Adams considered the capture of Fort Donelson the greatest military event of the war because it reduced the danger of European intervention. Davis admitted to the Richmond Congress that the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson had hurt the Confederacy, but insisted that he and fellow southerners would never give up the cause of independence. Yet the ever-confident Mason conceded that news of the Union's two conquests had “an unfortunate effect” on the southern cause in England.⁴

A combination of circumstances, including the Confederacy's twin defeats in Tennessee, brought greater attention to the need for foreign assistance and led Davis to replace Robert M. T. Hunter with a new secretary of state, the former attorney general and secretary of war, Judah P. Benjamin. The scion of an established Jewish mercantile family in the British West Indies, Benjamin grew up in Charleston, studied at Yale until withdrawing in a cloud of mystery, became a successful commercial attorney in New Orleans and Louisiana sugar planter with 140 slaves, was instrumental in promoting a railroad, and won election as U.S. senator in 1852. Bearded, eternally optimistic, and a raconteur of fine food and witty conversation, he loved to gamble as much as he worked hard. But if Benjamin possessed the intellectual capacity for heading the Confederate State Department, he too often showed an inability to discern reality from exaggeration. According to one close contemporary colleague, Benjamin was “the most unreliable of news reporters, believes anything, and is as sanguine as he is credulous.”⁵

Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate attorney general, secretary of state (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Benjamin and Davis made a comfortable personal and professional fit. They had developed a close friendship, but only after a rocky relationship during their initial days in the U.S. Senate, when Benjamin challenged the future president of the Confederacy to a duel over a remark he quickly withdrew with an apology on the Senate floor. Now, about a decade later, Davis recognized that Benjamin had had more international experience than anyone else for the position of secretary of state. Indeed, Benjamin was as cosmopolitan as Davis was provincial, having visited France on a yearly basis to see his wife and daughter who preferred Paris to America. On appointing him attorney general in 1861, Davis had called him a highly respected lawyer who had impressed him with “the lucidity of his intellect, his systematic habits and capacity for labor.”⁶

Benjamin was ready for a change. In the Justice Department, he had argued for shipping cotton to England, using the money earned to purchase arms and supplies, and keeping the remaining bales for future credits. No need for such policy, his colleagues scoffed. Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker had told fellow Alabamians many times that he could easily “wipe up with my pocket handkerchief all the blood that would be shed.”⁷

Benjamin's selection to head the State Department did not mean that Davis assigned top priority to securing European recognition. Doubtless because of the president's military background, his primary interest and chief concern was victory in combat. After the Confederacy's recent setbacks on the battlefield, he recognized the need for a secretary of state capable of securing outside aid, but he also admired Benjamin's courage and, perhaps even more, his loyalty. In the same month Forts Henry and Donelson collapsed, while Benjamin was still secretary of war, the Confederates met defeat at Roanoke Island in North Carolina. Benjamin shielded Davis from criticism by taking responsibility and not defending himself against a congressional censure, even though the fault lay in the lack of cannons and other military supplies. In mid-March 1862, shortly after this string of defeats, Davis appointed Benjamin secretary of state. Yet if Davis considered foreign relations critical to Confederate success, it is baffling that in his three huge volumes of postwar writings on the Confederacy (about two thousand pages), he focused almost exclusively on military affairs. Indeed, he devoted a bare dozen or so pages to foreign relations and mentioned Benjamin only three times—and not a single reference to his role as secretary of state.⁸

News of the Union's victories arrived while Parliament was in session and compounded the Confederacy's ongoing problems in convincing the British to challenge the blockade. In their meeting, Mason had given Russell 126 pages of documents allegedly proving the porous nature of the blockade, and the foreign secretary had forwarded the papers to Parliament. Gregory immediately presented a motion in the House of Commons calling on the government to renounce the blockade. But the documents were as porous as Mason had claimed the blockade to be. The statistics cited as evidence were outdated in that they did not refer to the period after October 31, 1861, when the blockade had become more effective. Moreover, William Forster delivered a devastating rebuttal showing that Gregory's glowing references to successful blockade-runners pointed only to small coastal steamers that hugged the shores en route to the West Indies. Rising cotton prices in England, Forster insisted, also proved the growing effectiveness of the blockade. England's choice was simple, he declared: Continue neutrality and maintain peace or defy the blockade and, in so doing, ally with the Confederacy in a war for slavery. Henry Adams sat in the gallery, smugly asserting that Forster's sharp response had suddenly cast the aura of a “funeral eulogy” onto the Confederacy's supporters. Gregory withdrew his motion, leaving the blockade unchallenged.⁹

Likewise in the House of Lords did the blockade prove impervious to attack. On March 10, Russell (recently made an earl) pronounced its effectiveness. His legal advisers had informed him that an “actual and effective blockade by a competent force” meant the “actual presence of an adequate naval force, either stationary or sufficiently near to each blockaded port to cause an evident danger of capture.” Whether or not the blockade was effective, the Palmerston ministry had proclaimed it so, confirming its wish to avert a maritime confrontation with the Union navy.¹⁰

The Confederacy's leading propagandist in England, Henry Hotze, did not share Mason's gloom about the news from the battlefront and, like so many of his compatriots, deluded himself into believing his own convoluted arguments. The fall of Fort Donelson, Hotze declared to befuddled British editors, had actually helped the Confederacy by underlining the necessity of a British intervention aimed at ending a war that moved relentlessly toward southern separation. Even if the Union's forces overran Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, “the citadel would still remain untouched.” The Trent affair had admittedly left the British government less susceptible to public pressure in determining foreign policy, but, Hotze insisted, more than a few members of Parliament staunchly supported the Confederacy. “I am for the first time, almost sanguine in my hopes of speedy recognition.”¹¹

Adams felt relieved by the demise of Gregory's motion, but he knew the recognition battle was not over. Many parliamentary members had expressed a visceral hatred for the United States, some touting the benefits to England of a permanent breakup of the Union. In the Lords, Adams complained, Russell's statements suggested a belief in the ultimate collapse of the Union and the necessary extension of nationhood to the Confederacy. Adams correctly suspected that jealousy driven by fear had shattered the common sense of more than a few British leaders. The United States, they charged, had recently appeared ready to challenge British maritime supremacy, making its division into two American nations particularly advantageous to the crown's interests. One parliamentary member professed continued support for the government's policy of neutrality, but he suggested the possibility of intervention by noting widespread agreement in the Commons over Gregory's claim that the blockade had caused serious economic damage at home. In an unexpected twist of fate, the Union's victories on the battlefield had strengthened rather than weakened the pressure for recognition.¹²

The real story behind the threat of intervention lay in England's textile industry, where the Union's military successes in the West had drawn a mixed reaction that complicated any attempt to assess the war's impact. Because of the huge prewar cotton surplus, the slowdown in imports resulting from the conflict had actually helped mill owners by providing them a welcome opportunity to cut back on labor costs, sell their back stocks, and upgrade their factories. A mill owner in Clitheroe, James Garnett, had earlier joined other manufacturers in the district in reducing their workers to short time. But with the fall of Fort Donelson to Union forces, Garnett became concerned that his stock's value would plummet because of the imminent end of the war followed by a certain glut in the cotton trade. John O'Neil, a weaver in Lancashire who worked for Garnett, probably expressed the countersentiment of fellow textile workers when he hailed Fort Donelson's collapse as signaling the end of the war and the beginning of a revived cotton trade.¹³

Russell's chief concern was to keep order at home among textile workers, and that required a stable economy. Labor unrest, he knew, meant trouble for the government. It was difficult to tell whether the mill owners actually had surplus cotton and were therefore justified in laying off workers. Perhaps, he wondered, they had created a mythical surplus, intending to make a huge profit by lowering wages while raising prices. In either case, a prolonged American war would permit this domestic economic problem to fester into violence capable of undermining the government's clamp on nonintervention. Peace at home, he believed, depended on restoring peace to North America.

The Confederacy sensed Russell's vulnerability on this domestic issue and increased its economic pressure on England, hoping to force recognition but instead making him angry. Southern leaders had placed themselves in an impossible position by arguing that the Union had installed an illegal paper blockade while finding it difficult to explain why, if the blockade was so weak, so little cotton made it to Europe. How could they risk angering the British and French by admitting to an unofficial embargo calculated to force their intervention to secure cotton? Hence the Confederacy's central dilemma—which it never resolved: How to produce a cotton famine with an embargo aimed at securing British and French support without alienating both of them and leaving the impression that the Union had imposed an effective blockade? Russell did not fool easily. In a highly charged conversation, he complained to Adams that the Confederacy's decision to withhold cotton, although unofficial, was not attributable to the blockade, but to a self-serving effort to put pressure on the London ministry to grant recognition. This question, Russell indignantly declared, should rest on “great principles, and not merely immediate interests.” But he also knew that his people would soon feel the pinch, for by late summer or early fall of 1862 the British textile mills would need more cotton.¹⁴

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Although both antagonists had denied the relevance of slavery to their conflict, the issue soon became central to the Union's war effort. Slavery remained a moral question to the small band of abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic but not a vital concern to either the British or the French governments and therefore of little consequence to the interventionist controversy in these early stages of the war. Lincoln, however, was not aware of the Palmerston ministry's virtual dismissal of slavery as a factor in foreign policy and, as intervention became a serious threat, decided to elevate the issue to prominence in an effort to ward off outside involvement in the war. What developed was not an expected debate over the morality of slavery but a deep fear among British leaders that the president's move would stir up slave rebellions. The result, they predicted, would be a race war that crossed sectional lines and, contrary to Lincoln's intentions, forced other nations to intervene.

And there was another almost bizarre twist to the slavery issue: Russell told the Lords that British recognition might drive the Union into instigating slave insurrections to destroy the Confederacy from within and thereby salvage victory from its ruins. Within three months, he declared, the war must come to a halt on the basis of a southern separation. Otherwise, a full-scale race war would result, spiraling the American conflict upward to another level of atrocity and necessitating a British intervention intended to bring peace. This was no small concern, for Russell's warnings of a race war conjured up images among his peers of the ugly experiences in the Haitian rebellion of the 1790s, the emancipation program in the West Indies, the Sepoy rebellion in India of the late 1850s, and the ongoing strife in Ireland. Russell's primary interests were strategic and economic, of course, but there is no reason to doubt his humanitarian concerns. In his thinking, all aspects of the American war were interrelated, meaning that prolonged fighting would have an adverse impact on British security by destabilizing the Atlantic world. He repeatedly emphasized the futility of restoring the Union. Indeed, its dissolution might promote the end of slavery. Surrounded by free territory, the Confederacy could not maintain the institution.¹⁵

Despite denials by both the Union and the Confederacy, slavery was emerging as the focal point of the war. Seward strongly denounced Russell's simple-sounding remedy for chipping away at slavery, but he realized that the institution had become an important concern to growing numbers of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Freedom and slavery could not coexist in peace. Abolition offered no solution, Seward insisted, for it would intensify the southern war effort. Yet he knew that the Union had to forgo its earlier claim that slavery had no bearing on the war. Adams had recently reported Mason's intimation that the Confederacy was willing to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for British and French recognition. Clearly a deception, Adams heatedly observed, but dangerous enough “to demand the most active and immediate efforts at counteraction.” The White House must publicly oppose slavery. Seward needed no convincing. Emancipation, he knew, would underline the inseparability of a stronger Union and the end of slavery. “The time has probably come for the practical determination of the great issue which has thus been joined.”¹⁶

By the spring of 1862, the Washington government had edged closer to declaring slavery a vital issue in the war. Congress had passed the Confiscation Act in August 1861, authorizing the seizure of southern property integral to the war effort—including slaves. The following February 1862, the lawmakers debated a more ambitious confiscation bill that directed the freedom after sixty days of those slaves in areas still in rebellion who escaped to Union army camps, leaving the Confederacy with the unattractive prospect of holding onto its slaves only by stopping the war. Lincoln, however, expressed concern that the new bill would antagonize the Border States by encouraging all slaves to desert the plantations. Consequently, he would support the measure only in regions where its implementation had no negative impact on restoring Union control.¹⁷

Lincoln's public turn against slavery greatly appealed to Europeans but surprisingly won little support in England. In early March 1862, he confronted the Border State issue by calling on Congress to authorize gradual and voluntary emancipation with federal compensation to states that voluntarily freed their slaves. Adams praised this recommendation as Lincoln's most important step in the war and thought Europeans would agree. Dayton reported that Napoleon approved the action, as did “the minds of the Christian World.” Russell, on the other hand, remained skeptical about the president's motives. The pronouncement would incite slave rebellions and therefore constituted a last-ditch effort to win the war. Nothing about the measure suggested that Lincoln had taken a moral stand against the most immoral of institutions. From London, Hotze happily wrote of the widely unpopular reception given Lincoln's plan; it had “vastly brightened the prospects of speedy recognition.”¹⁸

The Union's move against slavery continued to gain momentum when, on April 7, Seward and Lyons signed a treaty pledging their nations' opposition to the international slave trade. Like most pacts, this one rested on mixed motives. The Lincoln administration sought to curtail British interest in intervention by clarifying the differences between the Union and the Confederacy over slavery. But the White House also had such a strong interest in ending the slave traffic that it approved a provision in the treaty that had long been a source of tension between the Atlantic nations: a mutual right of search in both African and Cuban waters. Lyons agreed to the treaty even though thinking the president's motives purely political—that Lincoln sought to solidify his leadership in the Republican Party, particularly if he soon had to make concessions to the Confederacy in an attempt to repair the Union. Seward, however, correctly asserted that Lincoln supported the treaty to attract British support.¹⁹

The Lincoln administration considered the Seward-Lyons treaty a significant milestone in the Civil War. It illustrated the inseparability of domestic and foreign events, for the president had several reasons for endorsing the pact. However transparent his attempt to win British support, he knew they could not reject an agreement promoting the end of the slave trade. Yet he also realized that a British signature on this treaty did not guarantee their backing in the war. The British still did not fathom the severe political and legal restraints that prevented Lincoln from taking a stronger stand against slavery.²⁰ Any public action approaching abolition violated the principles of both his Republican Party and the U.S. Constitution, and it would automatically alienate the Border States and moderate southerners as well as those white Americans in the North who refused to shed blood for black people. Yet the treaty reiterated the Union's longtime opposition to the slave trade and made it more difficult for the British to consider recognition of the slaveholding Confederacy. But they remained unconvinced that the president's antislavery efforts were sincere, leaving them bitterly suspicious that his only motive was to stir up slave insurrections in a desperate effort to win the war.

Just three days after Seward and Lyons signed their treaty, the White House stepped up its growing campaign against slavery by pressing for gradual emancipation with compensation. On April 10, the president signed a bill authorizing the measure. His concern about the Border States' reaction again became clear when Congress ignored federal law in attempting to expand the web of confiscation by prohibiting army officers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners. Lincoln opposed such a blatant violation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, believing that the most prudent approach lay in persuading the Border States to accept the new legislation. Not surprisingly, they resisted the measure, although it won approval by substantial margins in both houses. Six days later, on April 16, the president signed another bill promoting emancipation. It authorized compensation and colonization for slaves declared free in the District of Columbia.²¹

Lincoln's growing push for emancipation rested in large part on his concern over British and French intervention. The previous September, the Union's minister in Spain, Carl Schurz, had told Seward that a White House statement opposing slavery would unite the European states against the Confederacy. In January 1862 he talked with Lincoln about taking a public stand against slavery as a key step toward preventing intervention. The president pondered the matter before replying: “You may be right. Probably you are. I have been thinking so myself. I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it became clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.”²²

The president's position on slavery had undergone evolutionary changes. As a young lawmaker in 1837, he had maintained that Congress had “no power, under the Constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.” At that time in his life, Lincoln advocated gradual emancipation with compensation to owners, followed by the colonization of free blacks. Emancipation by choice, he insisted, was preferable to emancipation by the sword. By 1860, in accordance with the Republican Party's platform, he still merely wished to contain the spread of slavery and thereby promote its “ultimate extinction.”²³

At the outset of the war, Lincoln sought to preserve the Union as he knew it in 1861. His First Inaugural Address in March highlighted a mystical and permanent Union that exalted the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence. Secession would destroy the Union; so the Union must destroy secession. Integrally related to the sanctity of the Union was another critical issue—the need to block foreign intervention in the contest between North and South. Preservation of the Union—the republic itself—soon became transformed into the creation of a “more perfect Union” that he hoped would lay to rest the possibility of disunion.²⁴

Lincoln's carefully articulated stance on slavery at the war's beginning came at a heavy cost to his foreign policy. He believed slavery the root of the conflict but could not say so because of domestic and foreign considerations. Yet his public pronouncements about preserving the Union quickly combined with the Confederacy's dismissal of slavery's importance to the sectional struggle to have profound consequences abroad. Lincoln had wrongly assumed that the British and French would recognize slavery as the chief cause of the war and distance themselves from the Confederacy. Instead, he had been partly responsible for convincing them that slavery was not the core issue, inadvertently leaving the way open for an intervention in American affairs on economic, humanitarian, or, to some, strategic grounds. This unexpected position on the war by both the Union and the Confederacy led to shallow solutions such as that proposed by Foreign Secretary Russell, who attached no seminal importance to slavery in bringing on the war and called upon the Union to avoid senseless bloodshed by simply accepting southern separation.

Not surprisingly, Lincoln's efforts to end slavery derived from numerous motives and depended on a multifaceted compromise. He remained a staunch opponent of abolition but a strong supporter of gradual emancipation with compensation. Abolition, he knew, was politically volatile because it reminded contemporaries of prewar radicals who had left violence and death in their wake. The antislavery perspective, instead, offered a moderate approach that, of course, did not satisfy those opponents of slavery who regarded the institution as immoral and in need of immediate and wholesale destruction. But even the vast number of Americans who did not advocate racial equality might support an antislavery policy in which the government paid owners to liberate their slaves and incurred no further social, political, or economic obligations to the freed blacks. Lincoln also realized that the confiscation measures provided a sound military strategy that ensured the steady erosion of the Confederacy from within. Finally, the administration's move against slavery, no matter how hesitant and expedient it appeared to observers thousands of miles away in Europe, indelibly inked the Confederacy as the chief practitioner of human bondage in a world that had turned away from such medieval concepts.

Antislavery groups in England welcomed the president's new stand. On a mid-April morning, Adams greeted a large delegation of the Anti-Slavery Society, including a member of Parliament, who had come to the legation to praise the White House.²⁵ Lincoln the politician, the social reformer, the military strategist, the diplomatist—all aspects of effective, pragmatic leadership had merged in the slavery issue to solidify his control over the Union's war effort.

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In the meantime, maritime developments provided more impetus to Russell's interest in ending the war. During the summer of 1861, Confederate naval agent James D. Bulloch had privately contracted with British manufacturers for the construction of warships (masquerading as commercial vessels) to become the basis of a Confederate navy. One of them, later named the CSSFlorida, had left a Liverpool shipyard over Adams's hot protests. The vessel, Russell explained in trying to calm the indignant minister, had not been fitted for war in England and was therefore not subject to seizure under the Foreign Enlistment Act. Privately, however, Russell welcomed southern successes at sea, telling Lyons that they further demonstrated the futility of the Union cause by showing that the southern “spirit may be invincible.”²⁶

But in late March, the Union ironclad USSMonitor, surprisingly fought the Confederate ironclad CSSVirginia (formerly the Merrimack) to a standstill at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Not only did the Monitor's performance shock Russell and other British observers and stiffen the Union's resolve, but it also raised their concern about a new maritime rival from across the Atlantic. “John Bull,” Moran exuberantly proclaimed from the American legation, “is sorely frightened at the manifest weakness of his own navy and is very civil at once.” Adams confirmed the anxiety of British leaders when the news arrived from Hampton Roads at an evening reception hosted by Lady Palmerston. Secretary for War Lewis acted out of character in blasting the Union for trying to crush the Confederacy. The Union was dissolved, he exclaimed with the air of an angry angel of death. Adams curtly remarked that British interest in seeing a divided United States provided the most telling reason for continuing the war. Not by coincidence did the British show greater interest in the construction of a railway linking their three major North American provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.²⁷

The perils of neutrality became increasingly clear to the British as the war ground on. The Union believed the British too anxious to extend recognition; the Confederacy considered them too cautious. Both antagonists blamed the Palmerston ministry for needlessly prolonging the war—the Union because refusal to deny any chance of recognition gave false hopes to the Confederacy, the Confederacy because such refusal encouraged the Union to believe subjugation possible. Seward's criticisms of British policy were already legend. Those of his counterpart in the Richmond State Department, Judah P. Benjamin, had not yet reached similar intensity, but they soon came close. In Washington, Seward was so pleased with recent military progress that he sent Adams a map and a long dispatch (meant for Russell as much as for Adams) setting out the Union's plan to occupy more of the Confederacy and throw open its ports. A clear pronouncement against recognition from London and Paris would hasten the inevitable Union triumph, he asserted. From Richmond, the exasperated secretary of state lambasted the British for failing to see that recognizing the Confederacy would facilitate the Peace Democrats' rise to political power in the Union and a resulting push for a negotiated end to the war. After the fighting was over, Benjamin angrily promised, the Confederacy would get even by imposing severe commercial restrictions on Britain.²⁸

In the interim, the Union's international problems had opened the door for a three-power European intervention in Mexico that only lightly veiled Napoleon's real designs. Britain, France, and Spain had signed the Treaty of London in October 1861 with the ostensible purpose of collecting debts, but it quickly became evident that the French emperor was more interested in establishing control over all of Mexico. As early as January 1862, the British became suspicious of Napoleon's motives when he made known his intention to enlarge his military force after Spain sent six thousand troops into Vera Cruz the previous month. Then came rumors that Archduke Maximilian of Austria's Habsburg family had accepted the Mexican throne. The London ministry, although deeply concerned, could do nothing in light of its preoccupation with the Union over the Trent affair. President Ramón Castilla of Peru further embarrassed the British government when he denounced the Treaty of London as a ruse for a “war of the crowns against the Liberty Caps.” Spain joined England in wanting to distance itself from Napoleon. French aims in Mexico, Dayton thought, had collided with those of Spain, with the former wanting an Austrian on the throne to promote Napoleon's dynasty and the latter preferring either the younger son of King Leopold of Belgium (the brother of Maximilian's wife Charlotte) as monarch or, in accordance with Queen Isabel II's wishes, the retention of the republic. “A Monarchy under a European prince, if not guaranteed by Europe,” the Spanish minister wrote Russell in London, “would not last a year.”²⁹

The three powers' occupation of Vera Cruz had convinced Seward that territorial control rather than debt collection was their primary objective. All three ministries in London, Paris, and Madrid, along with other Union representatives on the Continent, confirmed his observation. Adams had alarmed the White House by observing that the French advance on Mexico City “may not stop until it shows itself in the heart of the Louisiana purchase.” Dayton warned that Napoleon had “his own ends and objects,” separate from those outlined by Thouvenel for the French government and the Mexicans, and that he “will prosecute them in his own way.” The Lincoln administration was well aware of Napoleon's larger goals but could do nothing while at war with the Confederacy. For the moment, Seward informed Dayton, the president “has relied upon the assurance given to his government by the allies that they were seeking no political object, and only a redress of grievances.” Yet the European actions in Mexico, the secretary emphasized, “are likely to be attended by a revolution in that country which will bring in a monarchical form of government there in which the crown will be assumed by some foreign prince.” If any European power tried to install a monarchy, it must send military forces to secure its position, which would mark “the beginning of a permanent policy of armed European intervention, injurious and practically hostile to the most general system of government on the continent of America.” In such event, Seward pointedly warned, “the permanent interests and sympathies of this country would be with the American republics.” Lest there be doubt about White House resolve, Dayton was to assure his hosts in Paris of war with the Union once it had defeated the Confederacy.³⁰

In response to Dayton's advisory, Thouvenel was less than candid in repeating his country's pledge against territorial designs. The French foreign minister well knew that Napoleon's reach always exceeded his grasp. Yet Thouvenel supported the idea of helping the Latin people and believed this could happen only under a monarchy. Even as Seward's note was en route to Paris, Thouvenel wrote Mercier in Washington that the war in America had afforded an opportunity for their emperor to expand his interests beyond a mere collection of debts. Less than three weeks later (and a day or so before renewing his assurances to Dayton), Thouvenel again wrote Mercier: “I have not received any information or any communication from Mr. Dayton concerning the Mexican affairs. Whatever it should be … you know already that it could not influence our conduct.” Meanwhile, French forces alone had moved on to the capital at Mexico City, preparing to overthrow the republican government and install a monarchy under a European prince.³¹ Palmerston was not surprised by Napoleon's deceit. Was not such transparent cunning consistent with the emperor's past behavior? But the prime minister derived special satisfaction from two unexpected results of the French intervention in Mexico, both beneficial to the British: Napoleon's entanglement in the weblike catacomb of Mexican affairs would keep him out of European ventures, and it would restrict further American expansion into Latin America.³²

Russell likewise had grasped the danger in associating with Napoleon. The foreign secretary now weighed the advantages of halting American expansion southward with the near certainty of a war in Mexico resulting from Napoleon's reckless policies. The intervention appeared to be a “pretext for a continued occupation of Mexico and the assumption of the Government of the Country by a foreign Power.” Had not the emperor made “excessive and exorbitant” demands of Mexico? The French had sought $15 million in bonds in return for a “fraudulent loan” of $750,000 to “a falling and bankrupt government.” Mexico's rejection of the claims would provide “a casus belli for the Allies.” Intervention to collect debts had served as a pretext for occupation and the establishment of a puppet regime. England joined Spain in negotiating separate agreements with Mexico that satisfied their reparation demands and then withdrew from that beleaguered country in early April 1862. Only the French remained.³³

The Lincoln administration had cause for alarm about the French presence in Mexico. Could a successful intervention below the international border provide precedent for the same action above? Would southern acceptance of a new French neighbor constitute a quid pro quo for French recognition of the Confederacy? In view of the ongoing Civil War, the president could do nothing more than express reliance on the European powers' assurance that their attempt to collect debts would not lead to interference in Mexican internal matters. But he warned the British that a monarchy established in the presence of foreign armies and fleets would not lead to stability—particularly if the monarch was “a Prince of a European reigning family.” This would result in “frequent European interference” and a situation “extremely offensive” to American interests.³⁴

As if privy to Thouvenel's confidential communications to Mercier, Seward was adamant in his belief that a monarchy installed by France in neighboring Mexico meant trouble. In a message to the French foreign minister through Dayton, he wrote: “We have more than once informed all parties to the alliance that we cannot look with indifference upon an armed European intervention for political ends in a country situated so near and connected with us so closely as Mexico.” Thouvenel immediately denied any wish to interfere with “the form of Government in Mexico.” But he added a curious statement that strongly suggested an ominous change in attitude if not policy. All France wanted, the foreign minister declared, was “a government, not an anarchy with which other nations could have no relations.” The French would not object if the Mexican people decided to create a republic. “If they chose to establish a monarchy, as that was the form of Government there, it would be charming, but they did not mean to do anything to induce such action.” The rumors that France wanted to place Maximilian on the Mexican throne “were utterly without foundation.”³⁵

Yet Thouvenel's assertions do not fit the evidence. He had already admitted to his government's preference for a monarchy over a republic, even while guaranteeing against interference with the form of government chosen by Mexico. Months earlier, in a private letter to the French ambassador in London, Count Flahault, he had written that an improved government “for the latin races” was not “possible except under a monarchy” and that “everyone assures me that all honest and sensible people in Mexico think the same.” A short time later, Thouvenel told the British ambassador to Paris, Lord Cowley, that the way to resolve the ongoing Venetian issue in Europe was to place an Austrian prince on the Mexican throne. And in early 1862 Thouvenel attributed Napoleon's hidden reason for the Mexican venture to his interest in promoting an alliance with Austria. He wished to compensate Maximilian with the throne for the loss of his position as viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia just before the war in Italy and thereby lay the basis for a French request for concessions on the Adriatic.³⁶

Dayton could not have been aware of all the European maneuvers affecting French thinking, but he did discern that Napoleon had pledged not to interfere with Mexico's internal affairs because he intended to fashion its government into a monarchy acting in French interests. An election would take place, of course, but one carefully managed by Napoleon in a monarchical path. Clearly and without emotion, Dayton observed to Thouvenel “that a French army in Mexico might give to the people of Mexico a tendency toward a particular form of government and if such a government should be established it might protect its existence afterwards.” Again, the foreign minister insisted that the United States could “rest assured” that the French army would not influence the Mexican government.³⁷

Lincoln and Seward saw through Napoleon's transparent assault on the Americas but could do nothing to remove his forces from Mexico while the Union was at war with the Confederacy. They ignored Thouvenel's well-crafted assurances and instead praised his government's pledge against either interfering with the Mexican government or seeking Mexican territory. So did the president and secretary of state make the Union's position clear, just as England and Spain formally withdrew from the Tripartite Pact in the midst of growing insistence by European observers that Napoleon intended to establish an empire under Maximilian. The northern press, as if prodded by Seward, warned Napoleon that once the Civil War ended, the United States would eject his armies from the Western Hemisphere.³⁸

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Across the English Channel in Paris, Slidell had become encouraged about the prospects for recognition after learning from French officials that slavery posed no obstacle to their sentiment for the Confederacy. Like the British, Napoleon thought southern independence incontrovertible and feared that the coming cotton shortage would inflict “immense injury” on his country; similarly, Thouvenel lamented the growing unemployment that spurred petitions and memorials arriving daily for the emperor from parts of France already experiencing economic destitution and public demonstrations. To be sure, the French people regretted the presence of slavery in the Confederacy and hoped for its gradual demise. But their lukewarm feelings had placed no pressure on the emperor and government leaders to take sides, leaving them “quite indifferent” on the matter and allowing them to focus on other aspects of the war.³⁹

Slidell considered this a good moment to press Thouvenel on recognition. The government's continuing refusal to grant it, Slidell complained, had made his status as “unrecognized minister” in Paris “very embarrassing.” To enhance his importance, Slidell offered to keep the French government informed on the impact of the blockade and the Union's efforts to close southern harbors by sinking old ships packed with huge stones. The foreign minister was receptive to these proposals though puzzled. If so many ships had run the blockade, why did so little cotton reach neutral ports? Here, as had been Mason's experience in England, the Confederacy confronted a major dilemma of its own making: How to push France into granting recognition by an unofficial embargo that it had to conceal for fear of alienating France? The ships making it through the Union's blockading squadrons, Slidell not so convincingly replied, were primarily small vessels, and most of them carried spirits and turpentine because they yielded bigger profits than cotton. Furthermore, the possibility of capture was just strong enough to drive away captains not given to risk. The London government, Slidell declared in testing Thouvenel's reaction, had sought French and Russian opinions regarding whether the blockade and the closing of southern harbors met the conditions of international law and civilized warfare. Russell had denounced the port closings by such methods, even though knowing that international law permitted the practice as long as it inflicted no permanent damage. Slidell alleged that both England and France had declared the blockade paper in nature and the harbor closings a violation of international law and civilized warfare because they caused irreparable damage. But Thouvenel denied receiving any such inquiries from London. Slidell asserted that someone in London had sent a private note to the Confederate government, insisting that the British Foreign Office had solicited the opinion of France and Russia regarding the two issues.⁴⁰

Slidell was more encouraged about potential recognition after talking with cabinet and other governmental figures. He met twice with Count Fialin Persigny, minister of the interior, and came away convinced that he supported the Confederacy “heart and soul.” The emperor, Persigny asserted, wanted to extend recognition and renounce the blockade but preferred that England take the lead. The minister of justice, Jules Baroche, likewise spoke favorably of the southern cause, promising that he would try to persuade the emperor to grant recognition. Achille Fould, the minister of finance, also affirmed his sympathy for the Confederacy, and the Duke of Morny, president of the lower house, was “decidedly favorable.”⁴¹

Slidell's major concern was the British. France, he believed, would extend recognition but only in conjunction with England. The French must realize that their present peace with the British could not last. When the two nations were at war over some future issue, Britain—based on the precedent of France's acquiescence to the Union blockade—could close its entire coast. British leaders had insisted that they would replenish their cotton supply from India's markets. France would be in trouble if it went to war with the British and had no southern cotton.⁴²

Napoleon's crafty shifts from one stance to another on the intervention issue added further uncertainty to the crisis. Dayton reported an early April 1862 meeting in which the emperor masterfully demonstrated his propensity for creating confusion about his position toward the American war. After expressing concern about his country's growing need for cotton, he inexplicably raised the possibility of withdrawing belligerent rights from the Confederacy. These two statements, Dayton knew, did not mesh. Revoking belligerent recognition would alienate the Confederacy and cut off any chance of resuming the cotton flow. But before the Union minister could sort out these ideas in his mind, Napoleon stressed that England must take the lead in reversing Anglo-French policy toward the Confederacy. Perhaps, the emperor pondered aloud, the two nations had acted prematurely in granting belligerent standing to the Confederacy before it had won independence. Had not Napoleon's concession vindicated the Union's argument?

When Adams received word of this conversation, he immediately pressed England to withdraw belligerent status from the Confederacy. He met with Russell for an hour, trying to persuade him to reverse his policy. The effort was a dismal failure. Russell's arguments for continued neutrality between the belligerents, Adams confided to his diary, were sincere and honest, though by their very nature harmful to the Union.⁴³

The Union minister could not have known, of course, but Napoleon's unorthodox and two-faced tactics had put additional strain on an already-tender Anglo-French relationship. Seward had recently approached Lyons with the proposal that, in exchange for withdrawing belligerent rights, the Union might “relax” the blockade. The secretary had also spoken with Mercier, posing a decidedly different proposition. If the Union permitted trade through southern ports, it must be in American ships. Neutrality took on a greater appeal to Mercier, who later told Lyons that it was preferable to becoming “friends to a Power engaged in suppressing a rebellion.” Palmerston was livid over Napoleon's duplicity. The French, he wrote Gladstone, “hate us as a nation from the Bottom of their Hearts, and would make any sacrifice to inflict a dark Humiliation upon England.” How outlandish to propose such a change in policy and then expect England to take the initiative in a program it could never support. Napoleon sought to win the Union's allegiance while advancing his long-range plans to build an army and a navy much larger than England's. He would do anything to undermine its position. Only the American war held the two European nations together.⁴⁴

Palmerston was undoubtedly correct in his assessment of Napoleon's motives. What better way to cause trouble for England than to manufacture a French friendship with the Union by offering to withdraw belligerent rights from the Confederacy? The emperor knew that England would reject the proposal, thus building his ties with the Union by proposing the move while preserving his relationship with the Confederacy by leaving its belligerent status intact. Even if the British consented to withdrawing belligerent recognition, he could maintain that the idea came first from London and that, in keeping with his earlier statements, he had merely followed England's lead. In either case, he would maintain relations with the Confederacy at the same time he won credibility with the Union by imparting the false impression that he was on the verge of terminating the Anglo-French concert.

Napoleon's unconventional behavior continued in a series of meetings in Paris with William S. Lindsay, an outspoken southern supporter in Parliament who advocated free trade as a boon to his shipping interests and now privately sought to achieve that goal by securing French intervention in the American war. After earlier failing to convince his home government to intervene, Lindsay obtained Cowley's assistance in arranging a meeting with Napoleon. The purpose, said Lindsay, was to discuss possible revisions in the Navigation Laws. Cowley thought this request reasonable and not so wisely agreed to a meeting. But Lindsay had not told the truth. His real objective was to persuade the emperor to take the lead in recognizing the Confederacy as a means for stopping the war and reopening commercial traffic. The time was opportune, as Napoleon had been pressing the French navy to speed up the construction of ironclads.⁴⁵

Three times in April the self-appointed British emissary made unauthorized visits to the emperor, repeatedly urging him to take the initiative. Lindsay had already talked with the minister of commerce, Eugene Rouher, who expressed great concern over the approaching dearth of cotton as a certain impetus to growing unemployment. Lindsay opened his first meeting with Napoleon on April 11 by underscoring his interest in establishing a steamer line from Bordeaux to New Orleans and then denouncing the Union blockade as ineffective and hence a violation of the Declaration of Paris of 1856. The emperor reaffirmed his willingness to challenge the blockade if England joined him in doing so. But, he groused, the Palmerston ministry had not responded to two private overtures. In about three months, Napoleon lamented, the shrinking cotton supply in France would inflict enormous personal hardships on textile workers. Recognition of the Confederacy, Lindsay quickly interjected, would remedy French economic troubles by reviving the cotton flow. If France and England did not act quickly, he warned the emperor, Spain and Belgium might take the lead. “The time for action had arrived.”⁴⁶ Napoleon was dubious about others leading the way. “England was the proper power to make the suggestion,” he maintained.⁴⁷

More than Europe's interests were at stake, Lindsay argued, adding another dimension to his appeal for French involvement. “Every principle of humanity demanded prompt intervention to stop so dreadful an effusion of blood and the mutual exhaustion of both parties.” Hatred had become so intense “that the Union could not be restored and … even if the South were overrun she could never be subjugated.” The Confederacy was waging “a most unequal contest, rendered still more unequal by the submission of neutral powers to an inefficient blockade.” The self-professed neutrals, he charged, were not really neutral. The Union had the capacity to purchase huge arms supplies, whereas the Confederacy was cut off from those goods and unable to produce them on its own. Seeing Napoleon's concurrence on this point, Lindsay leveled another accusation against the Union. Although claiming to oppose slavery, he had developed a friendship with Mason and Slidell in the course of which they had convinced him that slavery was benign—a position that, not surprisingly, facilitated his commercial objectives with the Confederacy. But now he had to turn the argument to fit France's antislavery feeling along with its interest in reviving trade. Washington's leaders had not gone to war to abolish slavery, Lindsay told Napoleon, “but to subjugate the South in order to reestablish their protective tariff and to restore their monopoly of Southern markets.”⁴⁸

“What then was to be done?” Napoleon asked. He was ready “to act promptly and decidedly” but had to know beforehand that the British would be receptive. He would join England in sending fleets to New Orleans to open that port to the free passage of cotton and other goods considered vital to the world's markets. He did not want to interfere in American affairs, but the Union had severely damaged French interests and its restoration was not possible. He asked Lindsay to relay this message to Cowley and then return to discuss his reaction in another meeting two days later.⁴⁹

Thoroughly excited about the prospects, Lindsay rushed to Slidell's residence that same day to inform him of the meeting. The southern minister was equally elated, immediately writing Mason that he could assure the Confederacy's friends in Parliament of “positive and authoritative evidence that France now waits the assent of England for recognition and other more cogent measures.” Lindsay then saw Cowley in the embassy. The emperor, Lindsay declared, had twice sought British collaboration to end the blockade and had received no response. Its impact now threatened France's domestic economy, raising Napoleon's support for intervening in a war he thought the Union could not win in an effort to reopen the cotton traffic. Cowley insisted that France had never asked England about challenging the blockade, but he admitted that its effectiveness had steadily grown.⁵⁰

On April 13 Napoleon again met with Lindsay, who reported his conversation with Cowley. England was not yet ready to take action, Lindsay said. But he remained hopeful. Even though Cowley believed that the “proper moment for action had passed,” a change in British policy seemed possible, for the ambassador had added that “further developments should be waited for.” At this moment, Lindsay later recalled, Napoleon became “even more emphatic” in asking him to notify Palmerston and Russell of the French position. In a striking move, he urged Lindsay to share this view with the leaders of the Conservative opposition, Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli. Napoleon recognized the threat posed to the Anglo-French entente by his making contact with Palmerston's opponents and, in a highly improbable move, hoped to hide his hand in the transaction. The emperor cautioned Lindsay not to leave the impression that the message had come directly from the throne. “I do not want to be embarrassed by the forms and delays of diplomacy, as I feel the necessity of immediate action.” Lindsay, according to Slidell, “inferred more from [Napoleon's] manner than from what he said, that he was dissatisfied with his present position, which made his action subordinate to the policy of England, and that he might be disposed to act alone.”⁵¹

Meanwhile, Cowley had become suspicious of Lindsay's motives and wondered if he was acting on his own initiative rather than the emperor's. The same day of Lindsay's second meeting with Napoleon, Cowley asked Thouvenel about the two private notes allegedly sent to London. The French foreign minister knew nothing about them and denied that anyone had sent them. When Thouvenel noted that Lindsay had assured him that Cowley “coincided in his views,” the British ambassador became livid. He denounced Lindsay's “unofficial diplomacy,” declaring that his “interference” had put him in a “false position.” Both Thouvenel and Cowley were career diplomats who deeply resented Lindsay's intrusion into their world. Thouvenel promised to discuss the matter with the emperor the following day. He assured Cowley that he had tried to convince Napoleon and Rouher that recognition of southern independence did not guarantee a resumed cotton flow and that resistance to the blockade would cause “a collision” with the Union.⁵²

This was a “nasty intrigue,” Cowley bitterly wrote Russell in London. Thouvenel had denied any knowledge of Napoleon's alleged proposals, and Cowley was inclined to believe him. “My own conviction is, from Lindsay's conversations with me, which are full of hesitations, and I fear much falsehood hidden under apparent candour, that he has told the Emperor his own views, and that those views are supported by the majority of the people of England, and by the present Opposition in Parliament, who would denounce the blockade if in power.” The emperor proved “a willing listener” because of his desperate need for cotton. Lindsay would certainly raise the matter before Parliament.⁵³

Thouvenel's meeting with Napoleon on April 14 proved a testy experience. The foreign minister was irate over Lindsay's claim to having French assurances of imminent recognition. Where did he get this idea? The emperor, it quickly became clear, had not consulted his advisers, and Lindsay had misinterpreted their conversations to mean much more than intended. Napoleon tried to calm Thouvenel by explaining that Rouher's report of an economic crisis over the cotton shortage had necessitated strong action. He had therefore approved Lindsay's offer to informally relay to the Palmerston ministry France's interest in working with England to reopen commercial lanes. “I can not, and will not, act without England,” he assured his agitated foreign minister. Only through a private exchange of views could he learn what arrangements the British government might consider. The record does not indicate that Napoleon told Thouvenel that he had also encouraged Lindsay to speak with the London ministry's opposition. His explanation did little to assuage Thouvenel's concern.⁵⁴

Thouvenel tried to placate Cowley by insisting that Napoleon had not understood “the intricacies of this question” and “had confounded remarks conveyed in dispatches with deliberate proposals.” The French government, Thouvenel asserted, was more concerned about the growing cotton shortage than were the British. On receiving this information through Cowley, Russell acknowledged the French need for cotton but opposed any immediate action. “The evil is evident—not equally so the remedy.” The British government, Russell told Cowley, “wish[es] to take no step in respect to the Civil War in America except in concert with France and upon full deliberation.”⁵⁵

Back in England, Lindsay encountered a mixed reaction to his proposals. The Palmerston ministry showed no interest in his meetings in Paris. Lindsay waited four days for an appointment, but Russell refused to see him, coldly asserting that contact with foreign governments must come only through established diplomatic channels. Palmerston was out of town and stayed out of town. Lindsay had a warmer reception from the Conservative opposition. Derby was too ill with the gout to discuss the matter, but Disraeli agreed with the French view and insisted that the Palmerston ministry would have overwhelming support if it repudiated the blockade. If France were to take the initiative in ending the war, a great majority of Parliament would approve and Russell would have to go along to save the ministry. Russell and Seward, Disraeli suspected (never proved), had entered into a “secret understanding” stipulating that England would honor the Union blockade and refuse to recognize the Confederacy.⁵⁶

Lindsay then visited Mason and, after considerable persuasion, convinced him to cross the channel and meet with Napoleon in Paris. On April 18 Lindsay, with Mason at his side, indignantly informed the emperor that Russell had dismissed the matter in a tone that was “flippant, although intended to be sarcastic.” Napoleon appeared irritated that Russell had treated Lindsay so brusquely. The emperor complained that he had twice received evasive replies from Russell on the American situation, and he did not intend to talk with England on an official basis without Russell's prior agreement to the proposition. The British, he grumbled, had acted “in a strange manner” toward France ever since its “friendly interposition” in the Trent affair. Russell had earlier acted “unfairly” in sharing French proposals regarding the blockade with Lyons, who had then passed this information to Seward. Had Russell lost interest in maintaining cordial relations?⁵⁷

Napoleon's reaction to Disraeli's remarks greatly pleased Lindsay and Mason. The emperor, Slidell reported, seemed “particularly struck” by the possibility of a private agreement between Russell and Seward and asserted that it would clear up what he had never “been able to comprehend” about the hardened British attitude. He also appeared taken by Disraeli's claim that if the French took the lead, Russell had to follow. The British foreign secretary surely could not remain neutral while his people suffered from the Union's blockade. The wisest approach, Napoleon observed in a statement that he wanted kept confidential, was for him as emperor to urge the Union to open American ports and, in a striking suggestion, “to accompany the appeal with a proper demonstration of force on the Southern coasts.”⁵⁸

Lindsay and Mason were exuberant after the meetings with Napoleon. The emperor appeared so angry about the Palmerston ministry's refusal to reciprocate his support in the Trent crisis that he had expressed a willingness to act alone in forcing open southern ports. Napoleon was ready to take military measures, Lindsay revealed to Slidell in a breach of confidence, and the London ministry might have to take action when Parliament convened in late April. Lindsay did not know this, of course, but support for this view soon came from Hotze, who reported that the cotton famine had hit England, forcing the government to confront the growing economic distress at home. Indeed, the crisis had spread across the Continent. Germany, Hotze noted, was suffering as much as England from the sinking American market. On hearing the details of the third meeting with the emperor, Slidell believed that Napoleon had finally tired of his subordinate role to England and was poised to act—immediately and alone.⁵⁹

On learning of the emperor's first two meetings with Lindsay, the French ambassador in London, Count Flahault, angrily wrote Thouvenel: “I cannot conceal from you that this kind of relations are helpful to no one's position, not to the emperor's or to mine.” If this practice continued, “I would see no other reason for it except the emperor's lack of confidence in me, either because I lack zeal or ability…. I should prefer a thousand times to cease to be His Majesty's representative in London than to continue to occupy this post after I no longer possess his entire confidence.” Thouvenel saw an opportunity to curtail Napoleon's indiscretions and passed this note directly to him. Less than a week later, the emperor lamely assured Flahault that he had never intended “to do anything behind your back.” Napoleon guessed that his own “easy-going” manner had encouraged Lindsay to exaggerate the importance of their conversation.⁶⁰

Napoleon also tried to calm Cowley, who had sent him a similar complaint. In a response dated April 20, which Cowley enclosed in a note to Russell two days later, the emperor reiterated his concern over the diminishing cotton supplies, then made a series of statements that directly contradicted Lindsay's account summarized in a message from Slidell to Richmond. “I have not been at all shocked that Lord Russell did not receive Mr. Lindsay,” Napoleon declared. All Lindsay asked was “my permission to report our conversation to the principal secretary of state, and I had given my consent and that's all there is to it.”⁶¹

Lindsay and Mason's elation proved fleeting, for they had joined British enthusiasts of the Confederacy (like southerners themselves) in a marked propensity for self-delusion. Lindsay had acted without government authorization in urging a European challenge to the blockade that aimed to restore commerce at the risk of going to war with the Union. Looking for every conceivable sign of French favor, he relayed the truth as he wanted it to be in asserting that the emperor stood poised to act on his own. Dayton informed Seward of Mason's presence in Paris with Slidell, reporting that the two southern ministers were in high spirits over the prospect of recognition, intervention, “or some other great good the character and extent of which, I think, neither they, nor I, distinctly understand.” Napoleon's unguarded statements had certainly left that impression. He had been sorely tempted to take matters into his own hands, but even he, reckless as he often was, quickly reconsidered his position in light of the not-so-gentle remonstrance from his advisers about the hazards of unilateral intervention. Had he not already undergone a similar upbraiding for his ongoing venture in Mexico? Thouvenel, Cowley, and Flahault had brought the imperious emperor to his senses by warning that any flirtation with Lindsay's unconventional methods invited trouble. Napoleon had blundered in not consulting his advisers. To Cowley, he conceded: “I quite agree that nothing is to be done for the moment but to watch events.” Lindsay and Mason returned to England empty-handed.⁶²

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The threatened French involvement in American affairs had deepened on another front when Mercier, like Lindsay's acting without authorization, engaged in a peace-seeking mission to Richmond in mid-April. After the Union's victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Thouvenel had instructed his minister in Washington to inquire whether Seward would consider mediation now that the Union armies had restored their prestige on the battlefield. But the U.S. secretary of state was so ebullient over the recent turn of military events—since capped by another victory, however narrow and brutal, at Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing) in southern Tennessee—that Mercier decided against making the recommendation. The Union was near restoration, Seward proudly proclaimed in his State Department office in early April. Mercier remained skeptical, remarking that “I wish I could be as sure of it as you are.” He then added in a near-casual manner, “It's just too bad I can't go down to Richmond and find out for myself what is the condition of things there.” Seward shocked his visitor by welcoming the idea. The insurrection, he later wrote Dayton, was “sinking and shriveling into very narrow dimensions,” and Mercier might convince the Confederacy to accept peace. Even if he failed, Seward doubtless hoped to subvert the Anglo-French relationship by encouraging Mercier to make the trek alone. “Have one of your ships take you to Norfolk,” Seward told him, “and I'll give you a pass. Your visit at this time could have a very good effect and do us a real service.”⁶³

Mercier had the presence of mind to ask for time to reflect on the matter but sensed an opportunity to end the war and immediately informed Stoeckl of the meeting with Seward. According to the Russian minister, Mercier proposed that the two ministers “make the trip together in the hope, if not of beginning negotiations, at least of looking over the situation and seeing if we could open some avenue of reconciliation.” Mercier had ensured trouble for himself in extending this invitation without Thouvenel's knowledge. How would the British react to a Franco-Russian peace delegation? The French foreign minister would certainly disapprove of Mercier's acting alone and thereby jeopardizing the Anglo-French entente; to go with Stoeckl could tear it apart.⁶⁴

If Stoeckl saw this opportunity, he could not take advantage of it. Certainly the proposition was tempting. He had long favored a private French overture to the belligerents in light of Russia's opposition to intervention and the certainty of Union rejection of a British proposal. But he turned down Mercier's invitation because, as he explained to his superiors at home, “I did not see any chance that this project would succeed.”⁶⁵

Mercier knew that Thouvenel supported the Anglo-French understanding and, with a reluctant sense of duty, presented the matter to Lyons on April 10. The British minister, Mercier had long complained, was overly cautious and would doubtless oppose the idea. He was correct. Lyons was under strict instructions to remain neutral toward the American conflict and could not have gone to Richmond had Mercier extended an invitation. Mercier nonetheless argued that if southerners were demoralized by recent defeats, he could speak frankly about their plight and thereby administer “a knockdown blow” that might convince them to give up the war. The British minister strongly disapproved of the mission, warning that unilateral action might suggest that the Anglo-French concert had collapsed. In a statement that contradicted Stoeckl's account of having received an invitation, Mercier, not wanting Lyons to know about his previous discussions with the Russian minister, wondered out loud whether he should ask Stoeckl to accompany him to Richmond. Lyons rejected that idea as well, saying it would give the appearance that Russia had undermined the Anglo-French entente. Mercier already knew of Stoeckl's decision against going and, as he reported to Thouvenel, “did not hesitate to make that concession to [the British minister].” Lyons recognized Mercier's determination to make the trip and approved his proposal to reaffirm the entente by telling Seward that the two ministers had agreed on the mission. Mercier would inform the Confederacy that recognition was unlikely in view of its recent battlefield reversals and that it should accept an armistice followed by a negotiated settlement. The Confederacy, he agreed to emphasize at Lyons's urging, should expect no European alliance.⁶⁶

Two days after meeting with Lyons, Mercier returned to Seward's office to announce his intention to go to Richmond. The secretary of state expressed great pleasure in the decision. Inform the southerners, he said, that they need fear “no spirit of vengeance” and that their representatives “would be cordially welcomed back to their seats in the Senate, and to their due share of political influence. I have not said so to any other person, but I'll tell you that I am willing to risk my own political station and reputation in pursuing a conciliatory course towards the South, and I am ready to make this policy and to stand or fall by it.” Without Thouvenel's sanction, Mercier and his first secretary and chargé, Louis de Geoffroy, boarded a French frigate on the morning of April 15 and proceeded to the Confederate capital.⁶⁷

Despite his outward confidence, Mercier entertained no illusions about achieving peace. Two days before his departure, he had written Thouvenel about the mission, knowing it would take two or more weeks for the note to reach Paris; by then he would have already returned to Washington. “I am … thoroughly convinced beforehand,” Mercier declared, “that my words will not bring the men of the Richmond government to accept the reestablishment of the Union, any more than they would bring Mr. Seward to accept separation. Each side is too much committed to be able to draw back.” But he hoped to uncover the “secret” that might draw the two warring parties into peace talks.⁶⁸

Mercier arrived in Richmond on April 16 and immediately headed to the office of the secretary of state. If any chance existed for peace, Mercier knew, it lay with his longtime friend Judah P. Benjamin, whom he had met before the war when Benjamin was a Louisiana senator alongside Slidell. The battlefront news had also seemed encouraging. McClellan's Union forces had just launched the highly heralded Peninsula campaign, reaching Yorktown in the first week of April en route to Richmond. Gazing around at the city as he rode to Benjamin's office, Mercier thought that surely the Confederacy had come to realize its plight. Granted, the Union blockade had not been a resounding success, but it had denied the Confederacy a number of goods to which it had long been accustomed. Mercier, a connoisseur of fine drink and gourmet food, would find nothing of the sort in Richmond. “Mercier did not taste tea, coffee, wine or Brandy while in Dixie,” according to one contemporary. “All Richmond could not furnish him a cup of coffee or a bottle of claret.” In addition to the shortages resulting from the blockade, the government had outlawed the production of spirits in an effort to halt the rising instances of intoxication in the army and among civilians. How disappointed Mercier must have been that, in the midst of widespread economic misery stemming from the war and the blockade, the Confederate secretary of state seemed impervious to his dismal surroundings and staunchly supported continued fighting. Even if the Federals “take our cities, they will find only women, old men, and children. All the people who can bear arms will withdraw into the hinterland…. In the face of such resistance, the North must decide to yield.”⁶⁹

But, Mercier asked, if the Union offered “substantial guarantees, more than you have ever asked for, would you refuse to engage in a compromise?”

“It's too late for that kind of patching up,” Benjamin replied bitterly. “In fact we are two distinct peoples and should each have a separate life. Our population today hates the Yankees as much as the French have ever hated the English. Look at the women. They are the first to push their husbands, sons, and fathers to take up arms. They single out those who don't and pursue them with sarcasm. Things have come to the point that the North must make up its mind either to exterminate us or to accept our separation.”

Mercier remained skeptical of the Confederacy's chances for independence. “With numbers, money, and the sea against you, it is a very unequal fight.”

“Not so much as you think,” responded Benjamin.⁷⁰

“But aren't you a little worried about your slaves?”

“Not a bit,” Benjamin declared. “As we retreat into the back country, we will take them with us, losing a few it's true, but we have to resign ourselves to that as with any property. As to getting them to revolt, if they try, they won't succeed. We're quite sure on that score.”⁷¹

When Benjamin complained about Europe's refusal to grant recognition, Mercier insisted that the Confederacy had not grasped the complexities of this issue. The French regretted the breakup of the Union, the minister asserted, but as long as restoration seemed possible, they could do nothing to shape the outcome. Premature recognition would alienate the Union while doing nothing to end the blockade. France must retain the use of recognition as leverage for achieving peace at the appropriate time.⁷²

“I understand all that,” Benjamin answered. “Also, we do not complain precisely about not yet being recognized. But what surprises us is the readiness you have shown in accepting the blockade as effective…. I can show you more than twenty ports before which a warship has never been stationed.”⁷³

Mercier found it difficult to counter this argument and, thoroughly exasperated by Benjamin's stubbornness, finally grasped the irreconcilable nature of the conflict. “How can anybody talk to either side?” he exclaimed to Benjamin as the meeting drew to a close. “I dare not utter to you a single sentence that does not begin by the word ‘independence,' nor can I say a syllable to the other side on any other basis than union.”

Benjamin vainly tried to close the conversation on a friendly and unofficial note. “Why should you say anything to either side? I know your good feeling for us, and we require no proof of it. But you know we are hot-blooded people, and we would not like to talk with anybody who entertained the idea of the possibility of our dishonoring ourselves by reuniting with a people for whom we feel unmitigated contempt as well as abhorrence.”⁷⁴

Mercier stayed in Virginia for three more days, glumly learning that most southerners shared Benjamin's unyielding opposition to stopping the war. He met a number of notables, including former secretary of state Robert M. T. Hunter and General Robert E. Lee, who remained undeterred about achieving ultimate victory. Mercier returned to Washington on April 24 and reported the failed mission to the secretary of state and then to the president. Seward appeared stunned, expressing consternation about the Confederacy's continued refusal to face reality; Lincoln sat in silence. How could southerners remain defiant in the face of so much adversity?⁷⁵

Mercier's visit was not a total failure, for he provided considerable firsthand information that supported his government's wisdom in maintaining neutrality. The Confederacy would not quit its war for independence, he became convinced, no matter how hopeless the situation, and the Lincoln administration demonstrated the same tenacity, demanding a restored Union as the sole prerequisite to peace. Mediation offered no hope for a compromise. Moreover, Mercier came away from his inspection of the massive destruction at Fredericksburg and Yorktown with a profound respect for the Union's military and economic power. France must avoid any policy that risked war with the Union, he warned his superiors in Paris. “I think we are finally reaching the decisive moment of the crisis,” he wrote Thouvenel. “The Federals will shortly be in Richmond; there is no longer a shadow of a doubt about that. Then we shall see whether the Southerners are capable of persevering…. For myself, I would not yet dare to say anything positive.”⁷⁶

Mercier's final report arrived in Paris on the evening of May 14, eliciting Thouvenel's immediate insistence on a continued policy of “strict neutrality.” The foreign minister remained embarrassed by his emissary's unilateral decision to visit the Confederacy and, like Lyons, feared that it could endanger the Anglo-French concert. But he considered Mercier correct in warning against a challenge to Washington and suggesting that the war was approaching its end. New Orleans had just fallen to Union forces, perhaps signifying that the Confederate withdrawal from Shiloh was the first in a pattern of southern reversals. A certain military confrontation in Richmond would determine whether the French should change its policy. “More than ever it is best to wait before modifying, if at all, our line of conduct.”⁷⁷

The collapse of New Orleans in early May 1862 seemingly ended the chances of foreign intervention. “New Orleans is gone,” lamented Mary Chesnut in her diary, “and with it the Confederacy! Are we not cut in two?” In London, Adams rejoiced at the news and felt even more relieved on hearing that General McClellan was finally moving toward Richmond. The British were in shock, he happily reported to Seward. Assistant Secretary Moran termed the collapse of the port city a devastating blow to the Confederacy; the British “refuse to believe it, simply no doubt, because they don't want it should be so.” Mill owners expressed alarm at the recent developments in the American war. Were not the reports of southerners burning cotton to force British intervention further proof of an impending Union victory?⁷⁸

The irony was that, despite Lincoln's proclamation that New Orleans and other ports were open after June 1, the Union successes had actually heightened European interest in intervention. British mediation suddenly seemed prudent—particularly since the Union had satisfied honor and presumably would see no point in continuing the war. French intervention also seemed wise. Although, Slidell conceded to Thouvenel, the outcome at New Orleans had seriously damaged the Confederate war effort, it had done nothing to undermine southern morale. Foreign intervention, the Confederate minister declared, would quicken the inevitable southern victory. In preparation for negotiations, he suggested terms. If France extended recognition, the Confederacy would accept a six-month armistice as long as the Union lifted the blockade during that period. Both Russell in England and Thouvenel in France would continue the policy of neutrality until the proper moment for mediation. That time had come.⁷⁹

Despite claims by Adams and others, Union victories on the battlefield had not closed the door on foreign intervention in the war. The Mississippi River was not completely open to commerce, and the resumption of trade in New Orleans did not automatically lead to a massive injection of cotton into the foreign market. More important, the Union victory did not satisfy honor; instead, it increased the likelihood of a longer conflict by greatly enhancing the Union's drive to subjugate the Confederacy. And as the government in Washington intensified its efforts to win the war, so did England and France increase their determination to end it.