CHAPTER 5
Union and Confederacy at Bay

The war has become one of Separation—or Subjugation.

—LORD LYONS TO LORD JOHN RUSSELL, June 9, 1862

While I do not wish to create or indulge false expectations, I will venture to say that I am more hopeful than I have been at any moment since my arrival in Europe.

—JOHN SLIDELL TO JUDAH P. BENJAMIN, July 25, 1862

The threat of European intervention intensified in the summer of 1862, highlighted by the first pitched debate on the issue in Parliament. The Union's victory at New Orleans had not quieted the advocates of British and French involvement in the war. Indeed, Russell rejected Adams's appeals to revoke the belligerent status of the South, as did Napoleon in overriding Dayton's protests, repeatedly expressing interest in intervention but holding back until England took the lead. Russell infuriated Adams by declaring again that neutrality was “exceedingly advantageous” to the Union. Relations became so raw that William H. Russell warned his fellow British citizens that the Union might turn on England next.¹

How bitter for the Union that its victory at New Orleans had failed to undercut the pressure for British and French intervention! Surging economic problems in both countries forced legislators to consider interceding. Some British observers regarded the fall of the southern port city as an aberration, one that misled the Union into believing it possible to defeat the Confederacy. The result would be prolonged fighting that hurt their own economy and that of France as well. French cotton supplies had already dropped to a dangerous level, and by the autumn of 1862, the British surplus would have disappeared. Challenging the Union blockade meant certain hostilities, leaving mediation as the only viable solution to the war. The process was less provocative than an arbitration in that mediation entailed no binding terms—simply a friendly offer to sit with the two adversaries and explore avenues for peace that they both must accept before becoming final. But when Richard Cobden, no southern sympathizer, broached this idea at a breakfast meeting with Adams, the minister sternly replied that the European powers participating in such a venture must have a detailed peace plan. Slavery was the central issue, Adams maintained; the Union, he believed, would reject any arrangement that permitted the institution to survive, whereas southerners regarded its continuation as vital to their future. There was no room for compromise: Lincoln insisted on union, Davis on disunion. “It was the failure to comprehend this truth,” Adams wrote in his diary that evening, “that clouded every European judgment of our affairs.”²

---

Anglo-French interest in intervention after the collapse of New Orleans greatly alarmed the Union. The threat of a joint action seemed so real to the Lincoln administration, according to Lyons, that it had temporarily toned down criticisms of the Palmerston ministry in an effort to avoid a confrontation and defuse interest in stepping into the fight. Lyons believed that Seward thought the French involvement in Mexico might undermine the entente and reduce the danger of intervention, but the truth was that Napoleon had become more determined to see the American conflict end with southern independence, even if that entailed intervention. Though not yet clear to his foreign contemporaries, the emperor's purpose was to fashion a Confederacy both beholden to him for achieving independence and powerful enough to ward off Washington's opposition to his expansionist aims in northern Mexico as well as in the southwestern part of the present United States. But what form should intervention take? What territorial spoils would he demand without antagonizing the Confederacy? And, most important, how would intervention ensure an influx of cotton? Mercier had expressed concern that the Confederacy would fight at the risk of its own destruction and, thinking like the British, that the Union's expected demand for immediate emancipation would spark a race war that disrupted the southern economy and stopped the cotton flow. Such a conflict could spread beyond sectional boundaries and drag in other nations. Lyons thought Mercier correct in his summary of the dilemma confronting the powers: A decision not to intervene guaranteed massive economic destruction in America that could hurt world commerce, whereas intervention meant involvement in the war without assured benefits. If the Union's military advances continued, the southerners would destroy more cotton to force Anglo-French intervention. The only remedy, Lyons asserted, lay in the war itself—a major Confederate victory in the field was needed to convince the Union of its inability to win. Russell agreed, lamenting that northerners mistakenly believed that their success in New Orleans “portend[ed] the conquest of the South.” The only “fair solution” was southern separation.³

Ironically, Lyons's dire forecast of a long war raised the possibility of a British intervention that he vehemently opposed. Outside involvement in the conflict, he believed, could come only when the Union had lost its will to fight—and no signs of a diminished spirit had appeared. A defensive pact with the Confederacy, even if tied solely to protecting the cotton flow, could cause war with the Union. The only chance of a bloodless involvement lay in the willingness of either antagonist to accept peace “at any price.” Even then, he noted, the war would be over at that point because one side would have compelled the other to lay down its arms. Mercier concurred, arguing that intervention was inseparable from recognition and that success could come only after the Union had exhausted itself on the battlefield and realized it was pursuing a hopeless cause. Poor health would soon force Lyons to return home for a time, when he intended to discuss the situation with his superiors. “The war,” he wrote Russell, “has become one of Separation—or Subjugation.”⁴

The Lincoln administration prepared to fend off what it regarded as a certain Anglo-French intervention. The National Intelligencer in Washington ran an unsigned piece in mid-May that contained ideas expressed by Seward to Lyons less than a week earlier. In “Rumoured Foreign Intervention,” the writer argued that the only acceptable path was a “moral intervention” aimed at restoring the Union. Any involvement condoning southern separation to satisfy European economic interests would be tantamount to a military alliance with the Confederacy. The Union would consider this step an “act of hostility” and resist “to the last extremity.” The Confederacy had become desperate, as shown by its burning of hundreds of thousands of cotton bales to reduce the 1862 crop and force outside intervention. “Can a rebellion claim recognition by virtue of its weakness, or sympathy because of the recklessness of its leaders?” Southerners had not “vindicated their independence among the commonwealth of States.”⁵

In a note to Adams, Seward asserted that British intervention would spark widespread slave insurrections and a climactic race war having no sectional boundaries. How ironic that Russell had recently expressed a similar concern but, of course, from the British perspective—that failure to intervene would prolong the war and likewise lead to slave uprisings and racial conflict throughout America. Slaves looked to the Union armies as their ticket to freedom, Seward wrote. Outside interference would undermine this new hope by bolstering the Confederacy's chances for separation. Who could then prevent the conflict from “degenerating into a servile war?” The outcome would be massive economic destruction at home that would, in turn, hurt European interests. If the Palmerston ministry showed any signs of intervening, Adams was to share this note with Russell—not realizing that its contents would actually encourage British intervention.⁶

Thus another irony of this Civil War and the outside powers' course of neutrality: Just as the British and French advocates of intervention warned that failure to stop the war would lead to a slave insurrection followed by racial violence that dragged in other nations, so did the opponents of intervention contend that any foreign involvement would produce the same results. And even though Seward dreaded such an outcome, the British came to believe that he encouraged it.

The Lincoln administration's fear of intervention made it extremely sensitive to any British actions. When Union occupation forces in New Orleans encountered bitter female resistance, General Benjamin Butler just as stubbornly decreed that any woman who insulted his men would “be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” A note from Palmerston indignantly denouncing the “woman order” persuaded Adams that the prime minister had purposely overblown the matter to justify intervention. Russell tried to calm Adams, assuring him that the statement had resulted from anger and was unofficial, therefore signifying no change in ministerial policy. Palmerston, however, did not abandon the issue. He refused to speak with Adams, and Lady Palmerston no longer invited the minister and his wife to receptions. This was no small matter, for at these social affairs the minister had on numerous occasions picked up useful information from conversations with British figures.⁷

Further events in June 1862 elevated White House apprehension and raised southern expectations of British involvement. Lindsay announced his plan to introduce a motion in Parliament calling on the government to recognize the Confederacy. “All this I hope,” Mason excitedly informed his superiors in Richmond, “indicates that some movement is to be made at last.” Adams was so alarmed that he showed Russell the note from Seward warning that intervention could incite slave insurrections. The motion would “come to nothing,” Russell insisted. The ministry, he emphasized in a response that was by no means assuring, had no mediation plan under consideration. The implication was clear: The timing was wrong though the concept was right. British leaders still failed to realize that the Union regarded any outside expression of interest in the war as an unwarranted intrusion that benefited the Confederacy. Both Russell and Palmerston refused to renounce a mediation that was their preferred way to peace but nonetheless, by definition, rested on southern separation. Eternally vigilant in detecting anti-Union feeling, Moran thought that most of the British press had been calling for “the mediation to be all on one side, and that of the South.” The prime minister only postponed a confrontation with the Union by informing Russell that “no intention at present exists to offer mediation.” A move at this time would be like asking two boxers to stop their fight after only “the third round.” Mediation would become likely only after the war had convinced the Lincoln administration of the impossibility of reunion.⁸

The time appeared propitious for intervention when General McClellan shocked Washington by failing to take Richmond in the Peninsula campaign of early June. Moran conceded that the news from the Eastern Theater had hurt the Union's cause in Europe and heightened the chances for intervention. Henry Adams discerned surging support for the Confederacy. Lyons meanwhile had arrived in London, where he expressed great concern about the Union's reversal. “I'm afraid no one but me is sorry for it.” The call for intervention, he feared, would swell as the war seemed certain to continue for an indefinite period. A parliamentary debate over recognition would make matters worse. “I do not think we know here sufficiently the extent of the disaster to be able to come to any conclusion as to what the European Powers should do.”⁹

The irony was evident: Neither the Union's conquest of New Orleans nor its rebuff at Richmond had stemmed the talk of intervention. Nothing turned the British from what the Union angrily denounced as their southern course. Whether or not they favored the Confederacy, the British refused to budge from their belief in southern separation as the inevitable outcome of the war.

Lindsay, like his contemporaries, had not comprehended the depth of the Union's resolve and felt confident that his peers in Parliament would approve his July call for recognition. Russell had requested a copy of the motion beforehand; it arrived along with a note from Lindsay effusively claiming that 90 percent of the Commons supported immediate recognition and that the majority would vote for the motion even without the ministry's endorsement. The government, Lindsay stoutly asserted, had a “right” to extend recognition. The Union, he assured Russell, would not make war on England. Furthermore, in an utterly baseless argument, he said that most northerners would welcome foreign recognition of the Confederacy. Indeed, so would Seward, who desperately wanted the fighting to end.¹⁰

The Palmerston ministry nevertheless opposed extending recognition at this juncture in the war. The Union controlled the entire Atlantic coast and every important inland waterway, the prime minister noted, and one of the Confederacy's largest armies lay “split into Fragments.” Admittedly, southerners would not quit, “but we ought to know that their separate independence is a Truth and a Fact before we can declare it to be so.” The war's verdict had not become clear, meaning that recognition at this point would make England a virtual ally of the Confederacy.¹¹

As the British failed to grasp the importance of Union, so did Adams find the Palmerston ministry's support for mediation incomprehensible. Only in semantics was there a difference between southern separation and recognition as a nation. Yet Palmerston and Russell insisted that mediation posed no threat to the Union because, even though confirming the Confederacy's status as a belligerent, the action did not imply recognition of national sovereignty. Hence the conundrum: The British argued in good faith that their motives were pure in calling for a mediation aimed only at ending a war between belligerents and not nations; the Union countered, in equally good faith, that mediation constituted interference in domestic affairs and further acknowledgment of the South as a belligerent that placed it one step closer to nationhood. Such a mutual feeling of distrust guaranteed trouble over any form of intervention.¹²

The steadily diminishing supply of cotton had become a driving force in England's foreign policy by the summer of 1862. British workers, Cobden explained to Adams, had gathered in huge meetings to decide how to convince the ministry to work with France in making a “joint representation” to the Lincoln administration. Impressions obscured realities as contemporaries erroneously believed that popular sympathy for the Confederacy had grown to such intensity that only a massive injection of cotton could ease the clamor for intervention. But they failed to consider that the British (and French) need for cotton did not automatically translate into support for the American South. A Union admission of its inability to subjugate the Confederacy would stop the war and ensure a reopened cotton flow and the ultimate end of slavery. Yet these arguments did not penetrate the emotions carrying the war and the popular pressures demanding government action. On reading Adams's note detailing his conversation with Cobden, Seward conceded that Europe's leaders were perhaps acting in good conscience, but, he charged, they had no understanding of America's reverence for the Union. Foreign involvement would stiffen northern resolve, prolong the war, promote a violent end to slavery, and, by wreaking havoc throughout the Confederacy, cut off the flow of cotton.¹³

In the interim, McClellan's troops had not only failed to take Richmond, but also had sustained a major defeat at the hands of Lee's forces in the Seven Days' battle of late June and early July, which had serious internal and diplomatic consequences. The war had taken a vicious turn in the Eastern Theater. Seven Days left more than thirty thousand Union and Confederate casualties—a number that matched those slain in all battles in the Western Theater up to this point, including Shiloh—and deflating the Union's hopes for victory despite its capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee the previous February. Had McClellan's campaign succeeded, it might have ended the war in the summer of 1862—with slavery largely untouched. Instead, Lee won his first victory, causing widespread jubilation among his people that, in retrospect, prolonged the fighting and threatened total war. Lincoln countered with a harder line toward the Confederacy. This shift brought him a step closer to emancipation by supporting the Militia Act, which instituted the draft and the use of “persons of African descent” as soldiers, and the Second Confiscation Act of July, which authorized the seizure of traitors' property, including slaves who “shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free.” The death toll and the inability of McClellan's forces to take Richmond reinforced Europe's interest in intervening in a war that it did not believe the Union could win.¹⁴

Seward had become exasperated with the European flirtations with intervention and warned again that such a move meant war with the United States. Adams met with Lyons in London to emphasize Russell's failure to understand the gravity of the issue. Adams was relieved by Lyons's admission that foreign involvement in the war would make matters worse, yet highly concerned that his opinion did not always shape that of his superiors. From Paris, Dayton reported Napoleon's growing doubts that the Union could subjugate the Confederacy. But it was the British attitude that infuriated Seward. Military successes, they had once professed, must determine the question of intervention. Yet when the Union won a string of battles in Louisiana and in the West, the ministry virtually discounted them while underscoring the earlier reverses at Richmond and Corinth along with the lukewarm Union sentiment in Norfolk and New Orleans. Expressing his total frustration to Adams in London, Seward wrote: “Ah, well! Skepticism must be expected in this world in regard to new political systems, insomuch as even Divine revelation needs the aid of miracles to make converts to a new religious faith.” It was ironic, he noted, that the Union finally took Corinth on the same day the British people proclaimed that Confederate control of that city confirmed the permanent dissolution of the Union. When the Union seize Memphis, Moran sarcastically predicted, the British would surely dismiss the conquest as meaningless. British aristocrats, Adams sourly complained, maintained their “ill-disguised antipathy” for the Union.¹⁵

In the midst of the news of McClellan's failure, Mercier paid a visit to the U.S. secretary of state and reiterated his call for mediation. Seward could no longer contain his rage. The emperor, he declared, “can commit no graver error than to mix himself in our affairs. At the rumor alone of intervention all the factions will reunite themselves against you and even in the border states you will meet resistance unanimous and desperate.” Obviously shaken after the encounter, Mercier repeated his May warning to leaders in Paris that intervention meant war with the Union.¹⁶

---

The Confederacy meanwhile widened its attempt to gain foreign recognition. In April 1862 it appointed Edwin De Leon, a friend of President Davis and a wealthy South Carolina attorney, to the State Department post of confidential agent to Europe. In that capacity De Leon was authorized to spend $25,000 in secret service funds to commission press articles aimed at winning support for the Confederacy. Previously, he had served as a consul general and diplomatic agent in Egypt before also agreeing in the spring of 1861 to become an unofficial adviser to the three southern commissioners sent abroad. De Leon arrived in Paris in May and in London shortly afterward, where as part of his job he wrote letters to the press on behalf of the Confederacy. Only after the Trent crisis had ended did he return home to seek a military commission from Davis. Although impressed by De Leon's arguments appearing in newspapers, the Confederate president preferred that he continue to serve as a propaganda agent.¹⁷

From the beginning of De Leon's mission, the outlook was not auspicious. On his second Atlantic voyage in the spring of 1862, he broke a diplomatic trust by opening and reading Richmond's dispatches he carried to Mason and Slidell. From them he learned that Confederate secretary Benjamin had instructed Slidell to bribe Napoleon to challenge the Union blockade by offering cotton and the promise of free trade. Slidell never forgave De Leon for violating the sanctity of the diplomatic seal, refusing to work with him or even to introduce him to French leaders. Furthermore, the Confederate government made no effort to foster cooperation between De Leon and its agent already in London, Henry Hotze. They met shortly after De Leon's arrival and just as Hotze had begun publishing the Index; but if De Leon was aware of Hotze's actions as propaganda agent, he disapproved of the publication as too openly pro-Confederate to win converts. Benjamin would finally recall De Leon in February 1864 after New York newspapers intercepted and published a letter he had written to Davis criticizing Slidell and the French press. Until then, however, De Leon met unofficially with Palmerston on one occasion and, though Napoleon claimed to be too preoccupied with an ongoing crisis in Italy to see him, wrote monthly dispatches to Benjamin, emphasizing in the critical summer of 1862 that British involvement in the war was unlikely but that French intervention on behalf of the Confederacy was almost certain. Partly due to De Leon's assessment, Richmond's diplomatic focus gradually shifted from London to Paris.¹⁸

On his arrival in London in late June 1862, De Leon quickly used his connections with Palmerston's closest friends to arrange a meeting—as a private citizen—with the prime minister. Stating that his purpose was to share information on the Confederacy, De Leon aroused Palmerston's interest and received an invitation to his home in Piccadilly at noon the following day. The timing was not the best for the Confederacy in that the British public's enthusiasm for its cause had diminished following the Union's victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in February, and at Shiloh, Fort Pulaski, and New Orleans in April. But Mason had been unable to meet with Russell on an official basis, making De Leon's conference with Palmerston all the more important.¹⁹

At the appointed hour De Leon appeared and was led into the library, where Palmerston rose from his chair to extend a warm welcome. As the prime minister slowly made his way toward his visitor, De Leon noticed a limp resulting from a heavily cushioned foot necessitated by an attack of the gout—“the old foe of ‘all fine old English gentlemen' who live at ease,” he thought, “‘not wisely but too well.'” How gracefully and self-assuredly did the once-fiery leader move, De Leon later recalled, and how convincingly did he belie his age with his full head of gray hair sprouting from atop his tall and well-preserved stature. Palmerston could not have been aware of his visitor's clandestine but official ties with the Confederate government when he remarked that his friends had spoken so highly of De Leon that a meeting with him as a private individual seemed acceptable. Palmerston smiled before establishing the parameters of their conversation. “You must remember in talking to me you are not talking to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs; that is Lord John Russell's field; and also, that I am only speaking to a private Southern gentleman, and that the expression of our opinions is personal entirely.” After De Leon agreed with these guidelines, Palmerston went directly to the point: “Now, tell me, what do your people think England ought to do, and what they expect?”

Southerners, De Leon replied, thought the British should extend recognition to the Confederate government on at least a de facto basis. “All the precedents were in their favor.”

“Briefly cite some of these precedents to which you refer.”

Belgium, Greece, and the South American republics, responded De Leon.

“Your argument is plausible,” Palmerston admitted, “but you seem to forget that as yet you have not established your right to recognition, and are in the first stage only—that of revolutionists. We recognize you as belligerents, and you must sustain yourselves in that position before we recognize that revolution as successful.” Showing his detailed knowledge of the war, he observed: “At the present moment your great city of New Orleans is in the hands of the Federals; your other cities are all blockaded, and your capital itself is in a state of siege.” Both Seward and Adams had insisted that the Union's forces would soon put down the rebellion.

If De Leon believed the stories that Palmerston's sympathies lay with the Confederacy, the prime minister crushed those hopes by a blunt remark that demonstrated his realistic outlook toward foreign affairs. “I do not think your people have yet done enough to prove the falsity of this or establish their right to recognition.”

Palmerston could not ignore the irony in the present situation. With what De Leon termed “a sly twinkle in his eyes,” the prime minister added: “Besides, you Southerners, as well as Northerners, have always insisted that European Governments must not interfere in affairs on the American Continent. We are adopting your Monroe doctrine in our non-intervention.”

“But,” De Leon objected, “Mr. [George] Canning recognized the revolted provinces of Spain on our continent, when their situation without it would have been hopeless, and both Greece and Belgium were recognized, without doing or being able to do a tithe as much as we have done.” It could not have escaped Palmerston's notice that De Leon did not understand the profound difference between those situations and the present case (or did he try to hide this reality?)—that in the American war, recognition of the Confederacy could pull the outside nation into the fighting.

De Leon also embellished the Confederacy's position, whether in error or in a further attempt to mislead his host. “We have a regularly organized government, whose authority is recognized by twelve States and twelve millions of people.” The southern agent must have known that only eleven states had seceded, bringing with them 5.5 million southerners. If intentionally misleading, his inflated calculations could not have fooled the crafty statesman, for the only way to reach such lofty figures was to include 4 million slaves plus the residents of Missouri and Kentucky, Border States that never seceded but had unofficial representatives in the Confederate Congress. Only then did the number come close to 12 million, though still falling short by 600,000.

Palmerston said nothing as De Leon continued to praise the Confederate position, just days after the prime minister had opposed Lindsay's announced intention to propose a parliamentary motion for recognition—one based on the successes of the Union. “We have been accorded all the rights of belligerents by the Federal Government,” De Leon asserted, “your own and that of France. Is not this enough to establish our claim?”

“I think not,” the prime minister responded. “You must do much more to establish it. We always have recognized, and still do recognize the Government in Washington, and its representative to-day represents the people of the United States to us.”

“Well,” remarked De Leon, “the Confederate forces to-day menace the city of Washington, and it is not impossible they may compel Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet to evacuate that city and transfer the seat of government to Philadelphia or some other Northern city. If it is the ‘Government of Washington' which you alone recognize, would you recognize its representative in the person of one who brought his commission from that place, only bearing the sign[ed] manual of Jefferson Davis instead of Abraham Lincoln?”

“No,” asserted Palmerston. “I do not say that; that is not what I mean.” The Confederacy must do more than force the evacuation of Washington and change the government representative. It had to demonstrate its capacity to stand as a nation. “You must break through the blockade that makes you prisoners within your limits, and makes all communication with you contracted. You must strike some decisive blows to free yourselves, and to compel the recognition of foreign nations, and of the old Government.”

“But,” said De Leon, revealing the southern naïveté about diplomatic realities, “we only ask fair play to do this.” He then lodged a complaint that unknowingly mirrored the Union's repeated plea: “We insist that European neutrality is not the real thing; that it is one-sided, and interpreted in such a way as always to injure us and aid our adversary. For example, the acknowledgment of the validity of this paper blockade, which is defied with impunity by the blockade runners, who earn millions of money by breaking through its paper meshes.”

“We have considered that question of blockade,” the prime minister noted, “and accepted the existing one as sufficient.” “Tell me,” he asked with what De Leon called “a laughing twinkle in his eye,” “did you find the blockade such an imaginary thing when you went into and came out of the Confederacy? My friends tell me not.”

De Leon considered this a “hard hit” that brought “the matter home with a vengeance.” His crossing had been a harrowing experience that he now tried to dismiss as merely an annoyance. But Palmerston's observation, given as if he had witnessed De Leon's tribulations firsthand, rubbed deeply and made the point. Gathering his composure, he lamely replied: “What might occasion inconvenience or difficulty to individuals was not sufficient to shut up the ports of a whole country, and that the Law of Nations—”

Palmerston interrupted his guest, saying “It's useless to dwell on that point, for we have recognized the validity of the blockade, and there is an end of it; but the same complaint your people make about our neutrality your Yankee neighbors make too; so, as both sides abuse us, we think we must be pretty impartial. It is the fate of neutrals to be complained of by both parties.”

This was a disabling rebuttal that De Leon vainly tried to parry. “Lord Palmerston must admit,” replied De Leon with some degree of sharpness, “that his name hitherto has not been regarded in Europe as a synonym of neutrality, but rather the reverse.”

Palmerston laughed aloud, appearing to relish his new image as a moderate who had mellowed after a career-long reputation as a wild-eyed, overly aggressive sword bearer. “Live and learn, I suppose; it is high time that I should prove myself a man of peace and quietness, and not a stirrer up of strife, as they have long considered me on the Continent; but, as I said before, Lord Russell is Foreign Secretary, not I, and the consideration of this matter is more in his province than mine.”

De Leon knew, however, that Palmerston remained the acknowledged head of the ministry and repeated his earlier hollow assertion that the South sought only “fair play in this fight.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly,” the prime minister quickly replied. “You have a right to demand and to expect even-handed justice at the hands of the English Government; but,” he keenly observed, “both your people and the Northerners ask more. Each of you wants us to take your side, and as we had no hand in getting up this quarrel, we really do not see why we should meddle in it.”

But in pursuing such a policy, De Leon persisted, “England will make two enemies, instead of securing one friend, as she would by taking either side.”

“No, no,” Palmerston objected. “This is an exceptional case; it is a family quarrel—like interfering between man and wife—both would combine to assail the intermeddler. Besides, we are no more bound to your side than to the other. Suppose we were to take the Northern, what then?”

“We should consider it as very disinterested as it is against your interest,” De Leon replied. “But that we do not fear. We think that both the precedents and the interests of England are in our favor, and we only complain that the same neutrality which openly furnishes the North with all the supplies she needs, under Lord John Russell's construction of it, makes us, and everything intended for us, contraband of war.”

Palmerston strongly disagreed. “Dr. John [Russell] has [a] great reputation as a constitutional lawyer, and can have no particular reason to construe the law more harshly in your case than in the other. It is the misfortune of your position at the start.” Thus did Palmerston put his finger on the innate legal advantages that the parent country had over its recalcitrant citizenry seeking to break familial ties (advantages the Union still failed to comprehend): the long-standing status of the established state—the United States—and all the commercial and military benefits accrued; and the people striking out on their own—the Confederacy—having to prove, beyond any doubt, their claim to independence and nationhood status to observer nations that must out of their own interests remain skeptical.

Perhaps enjoying the discomfort the Confederacy had inflicted on itself by imposing a cotton embargo (whether or not official), Palmerston threw down a challenge: “Break through this blockade, get some decisive advantage, and no country will recognize you more cheerfully when you have earned your right to it, than England will.”

Then laughing, he expressed pride in his neutrality. “You know that I am accused of having strong Confederate sympathies, and you are a gallant people. Yes, a very gallant people; nobody can gainsay that. But our talk to-day satisfies me, that whatever my personal feelings or wishes may be, I have not given any grounds in my public course for the accusation of partiality.”

Trying to ease the sudden tension, Palmerston briefly inquired about Confederate military matériel, leadership, and commitment before speaking candidly again. “The common idea of England is that the Southern people are more like us in character than the Yankees, who have too much of the old Puritan leaven in them to suit us. You Southerners we consider only as transplanted Englishmen of the old stock. Probably the truest reflection of real English feeling is to be found in Punch, and you will observe the Yankee is generally caricatured very freely there.”

De Leon sensed that the interview had come to an end and fired what he called a “parting shot” as a warning. “Has it not occurred to your lordship, that in the desperation of obtaining aid and countenance here in our mother country, we may turn towards France, the traditional rival of England, and more so now than ever before, practically, and offer her such tempting inducements as may secure her intervention, to the great detriment of English interests?”

Palmerston paused a moment at this bald threat before fixing his eyes on his visitor. “Yes,” he replied, “we have considered that point, and I will not pretend to mistake your meaning, but I tell you candidly, your hopes are vain. You will not succeed in detaching France from England on this question, nor in breaking the entente cordiale which is stronger than you suppose. French and English interests are identical in these matters, and not conflicting as your people think; and you will fail to divide them. There was a time when such a thing was feasible, but not now, not now.” Lest there be doubt, he reemphasized: “Do not deceive yourselves with that idea. Whatever action may be taken, will be joint action, not separate. Our understanding with France is perfect.”

De Leon remained unconvinced about the closeness of Anglo-French ties but thought Palmerston sincere. “The sharpest arrow I had kept in reserve in my quiver,” he told himself, “was pointless for him.” As he rose from his seat, Palmerston did also and asked one last question. “Now tell me frankly, what do your people think and say of us, and how do they regard the attitude of England? Speak freely, for I am curious to know.”

“If your lordship really wishes to know the whole unvarnished truth, I must answer, that the Southern people generally think and say precisely what your lordship's conversation with me to-day confirms, … that the Government and people of England, entertaining the most sympathetic feelings possible towards them, will intervene in this quarrel, and give them the aid of their countenance and assistance, precisely at the moment they are convinced the Southern States stand in no need of either.”

“That is—hum! Ha!—putting it rather strongly, is it not?” The prime minister, according to De Leon, was “slightly staggered by this unexpected answer, but not at all offended.”

“I think not,” De Leon returned, “but believe such to be the sentiment, which, I fear, the frank admissions your lordship makes of the future as well as the past policy of the Government, will confirm.”

“I am sorry for that,” Palmerston asserted. “They do not do us justice. Our embarrassments and the difficulties of taking another course are greater than they dream of. But I hope time will set it all right. Your people are fine fellows—very fine fellows.”²⁰

After securing Palmerston's hesitant approval to share their nonofficial conversation with “friends at home,” De Leon forwarded his assessment of what he termed a mixed and discouraging British reaction to the Confederacy's appeal for intervention. He thought the prime minister privately sympathized with the Confederacy but had become more conservative in his elder years and therefore more cautious. Russell was “the most ungracious of private as of public men” and had alienated northerners and southerners by his “impertinence” but leaned toward the Union and therefore balanced Palmerston's southern inclination. Gladstone showed his “usual brilliant inconsistency,” appearing to be “on both sides or neither alternately.” Lewis opposed the Confederacy, and the radical members of the coalition cabinet, led by the president of the Board of Trade, Thomas Milner Gibson, and the head of the Admiralty, James Stansfeld, were “violently Northern.” The cabinet thus remained “in equipoise, and preserved its equilibrium like a boy standing midway on a see-saw, putting down his foot first on one side and then on the other, an attitude not very dignified for a great power to maintain, and which subjected it to severe buffeting from both sides alternately.”²¹

Despite this rare firsthand glimpse into Palmerston's thinking, De Leon had gained at best a superficial understanding of British sentiment toward the war. Yet his prognosis about the slim chances of securing recognition must have been disheartening although not surprising to his superiors in Richmond. The Trent affair had presented the best chance for southern independence but did not pull the London ministry into the war. Mason had repeatedly been denied an official meeting with Russell, while making no headway in convincing the British to challenge the blockade, and Palmerston opposed Lindsay's imminent motion for recognition. Whatever the prime minister's private feelings toward the Confederacy, he remained pragmatic in policy, refusing to act unless in the national interest. And so far, as he made plain to De Leon, intervention did not benefit the crown—and certainly not on the Confederate side. Nor did he mention slavery. Furthermore, it was not the foreign secretary's alleged pro-Union feeling that dissuaded Palmerston from extending recognition. Rather, as the prime minister emphasized: Only success on the battlefield could lead to recognition. Yet De Leon refused to accept this hard reality.

De Leon failed to grasp the realistic positions of other British leaders as well. To De Leon, Russell did not cut a figure nearly as impressive as Palmerston's towering silhouette and domineering manner, old in years but young in carriage. In Parliament the foreign secretary sat “like a small boy perched on a high stool, … with the large head, crabbed countenance and dwarfish,” his “worn and haggard face” carrying the “expression of a roguish little bull terrier.”²² But De Leon's spite for Russell clouded recognition of his hard core. The admittedly diminutive and deceptively weak-looking foreign secretary firmly maintained a neutral course that, from the southern point of view, appeared to support the Union, just as from the Union perspective that same policy seemed to favor the Confederacy. Gladstone, too, De Leon mistakenly dismissed as driven solely by politics and not by his oft-expressed abhorrence of the American war. Probably Gladstone's allegiance to neutrality had likewise left the impression of wavering from one side to the other, never knowing where he stood. And Lewis was less anti-Confederacy than he was a stone-cold legalist and realist who believed that intervention in the American war meant British participation in that war—as an opponent of the Union and thus, by default, as a friend of the Confederacy. Neutrality was the only possible British policy, yet it spawned all manner of difficulties that by its very nature alienated both American antagonists. De Leon joined his southern compatriots along with his northern enemies in never comprehending this fundamental reality.

De Leon and most other contemporaries similarly failed to understand another critical element of Russell's conception of neutrality: It contained the potential for an intervention aimed at bringing an increasingly destructive war to a close—and on the basis of a southern separation that could lead only to recognition.

---

The Union, of course, was unaware of De Leon's private conversation in London and continued to fear an Anglo-French intervention during the summer of 1862. Neither battlefield victories nor battlefield defeats had dissuaded the proponents of involvement, and, most ominous, the prewar cotton glut was virtually gone. Nearly half of England's labor force was out of work, cotton stocks had plummeted in tandem with rising prices, and the overall crop yield was dismal. In France, the economic situation was comparable if not worse. The Union must crush the Confederacy, Henry Adams declared—and quickly.²³

The chief saving factor for the Union was Britain's continued refusal to renounce the blockade. Mason had accused the Palmerston ministry of unilaterally altering the Declaration of Paris by introducing a new definition of an effective blockade. The original text had stipulated that the blockading nation must maintain “a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.” Thus Russell shocked the Confederacy by declaring a blockade effective if the force managed “to create an evident danger of entering or leaving” a port [emphasis Mason's]. President Davis, Mason complained in a note to Russell, was not aware of these words until they appeared in recently published correspondence before Parliament. Russell, however, had already clarified the ministry's position by unofficially telling Mason that documentation of ships passing through the blockade did not automatically make the blockade ineffective. Mason nonetheless forwarded the names of numerous vessels entering and leaving southern ports, calling this evidence of a paper blockade. “Not one in 10, in the large number of voyages so made, it is believed, has been captured.” The Lincoln government, he wrongly charged, had hardened British policy by circulating lies that the Confederacy had ordered the burning of cotton. Perhaps Mason was unaware of the recent March 1862 decision by the Confederate Congress to approve crop destruction as a means for drawing an Anglo-French intervention. If so, his inability to maintain communications with home provided further proof of the Confederacy's difficulties in running the blockade. Any drop in the cotton supply, Mason bitterly insisted, was “because Europe has not thought it proper to send her ships to America for cotton.”²⁴

Washington's fear of foreign intervention had become so intense that it helped push the Lincoln administration into an antislavery position. Months earlier, the president had hinted at an impending change in policy when, in an unprecedented move, he convinced Congress of the wisdom in extending recognition to the black governments in Haiti and Liberia. A little more than a month later, in mid-July 1862, he invited Border State congressmen to the White House and argued for compensated emancipation. Lincoln had long supported the principles of the American Colonization Society and now insisted that the freed blacks could relocate in South America. The legislators rejected the proposal, leaving him no alternative but to take the final step. The next day, July 13, Lincoln won the approval of Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in calling for emancipation in order to “strike at the heart of the rebellion.” Taking a stand against slavery, the president argued, was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.”²⁵

Not by coincidence did Lincoln make this pivotal move at precisely the time recognition of the Confederacy appeared certain. Cobden had warned that only a reopened cotton flow could undercut the move toward intervention. To ease the threat of domestic disturbances, Palmerston approved a massive relief program for unemployed mill workers. Mason jubilantly reported to Confederate leaders in Richmond that the cotton shortage had generated widespread public pressure in England for recognition. Slidell detected the same feelings in France. And Mann noted that Belgium, the Germanic States, Switzerland, and Holland would follow suit because their manufacturing districts were hurting badly. The cotton famine, he thought, would cause those European countries to extend recognition and put pressure on England and France to do the same. With Lyons temporarily at home, British chargé William Stuart had become the chief barometer of Union behavior in Washington, and he sensed a turning point in the war. Numerous observers in Louisiana suspected that Lincoln was ready to proclaim emancipation. A U.S. State Department representative in New Orleans, Reverdy Johnson, warned the president that his growing stand against slavery had alienated southern Unionists.²⁶

Adams praised the timing of emancipation in warding off intervention and urged Seward to strengthen the Union's moral position by proclaiming freedom the central issue of the war. He also informed the secretary that a mediation offer seemed imminent. If its proponents pushed the measure as “the most benevolent aspect possible, the effect would be to concentrate in a degree the moral sense of the civilized nations of Europe in its behalf.” Palmerston might submit to the call for mediation from Russell, Gladstone, and many textile workers, as well as from numerous British observers who believed that McClellan's retreat from Richmond had signaled the Union's collapse and the necessity of intervention. The atmosphere in London, Adams reported, was similar to that air of exhilaration following the Union debacle at Bull Run. Buoyed by the latest battlefield news, Lindsay triumphantly announced that his motion before Parliament would link intervention with recognition and that he intended to invite other European powers to join England in a mediation offer. Lindsay had built a strong and vocal following in Parliament that included the outspoken southern sympathizer, John Roebuck, and the Conservative opposition leader in the Commons, Benjamin Disraeli. Adams doubted that the ministry and most opposition party members supported recognition, but “it is a good deal nursed by the rank and file of the latter [the Conservatives], and by a portion of the ministerialists.” This growing push for intervention could succeed, especially because the line between southern separation and southern nationhood appeared so thin. Adams could not have known that Mason had already assured Russell of the Confederacy's willingness to accept a British mediation aimed at ending the war and ensuring southern independence.²⁷

The economic problems fostered by the American war had combined with the dangerous Mexican situation to intensify the clamor for intervention. England's cotton supply had plummeted from a high of 1.2 million bales in 1861 to a mere 200,000 bales by the summer of 1862. The Economist warned that “the time when mills must stop and Lancashire must starve from an actual exhaustion of the whole supply of raw materials may be very near at hand.” Of 1,678 textile mills in Manchester, only 497 were operating full time; 903 were open two to five days a week, and the remaining 278 had shut down. As Americans celebrated their Fourth of July holiday, almost 80,000 British textile workers were out of work and 370,000 were on half time, drastically cutting the average total weekly wage by more than half—from £250,000 to £100,000. “These are the figures of the cotton famine,” dourly reported the paper.²⁸

The French need for cotton overrode the nation's sentiment against slavery, attracting interest in an intervention aimed at bringing peace to America. In March 1862 Paris legislators praised the Union as “defender of the right and of humanity”; a Union victory would guarantee an end to slavery, they declared. And yet they wondered how long they could wait for that to happen. As the American war wore heavily on the French economy, so did public support for intervention grow. Lincoln's initial moves against slavery in early 1862—the Confiscation Acts, the Seward-Lyons Treaty, the gradual emancipation bill, and the colonization of blacks freed in Washington, D.C.—had failed to arouse popular support. The cotton surplus in France, as in England, had dropped dramatically, forcing many mill owners to close their factories. The once high backlog of 578,000 bales in 1861 had plunged to 311,000 in 1862, lowering the weekly average consumption by nearly half—from 11,114 bales in 1861 to 5,981 in 1862. Slavery remained a French concern, but, as Thouvenel emphasized, the French need for cotton played a more critical role in recognition discussions. The likelihood of a prolonged war raised talk of challenging the Union's blockade.²⁹

By mid-July 1862, Napoleon III had become Europe's most ardent supporter of intervention—but for reasons having little to do with the American war. He had expressed concern over the threat that republicanism posed to monarchies, and he wanted to fulfill a long-cherished dream of constructing a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that would make Central America the crossroads of international commerce. To promote this ambitious scheme, Napoleon privately directed Major General Elie Frédéric Forey, his friend and commander of French forces in Mexico, to assure its people of good treatment if they cooperated with France. “As for the prince who may mount the Mexican throne,” Napoleon continued, “he will always be forced to act in the interests of France, not only by gratitude but especially because those of his new country will be in accordance with ours and he will not be able to sustain himself without our influence.” To stem the dangerous spread of republicanism, he sought to implant a monarchy in Mexico that would promote the conversion of the other Spanish American republics to monarchies patterned after the Second Empire of France. Such a bold but risky move would block U.S. expansion into Latin America and give Mexico the opportunity to take advantage of a massive injection of talented European immigrants to become the most powerful nation in the region. Recognition of the Confederacy would encourage Mexico to become a commercial partner with France and thereby promote what Napoleon called his “Grand Design for the Americas.”³⁰

It was thus no coincidence that as the British Parliament prepared to debate Lindsay's motion for recognizing the Confederacy, Napoleon met again at his Vichy retreat with Slidell at noon on July 16 and left the distinct impression that he had moved closer to a unilateral intervention. In this way he would gain the upper hand with the Confederacy by acting on his own, rather than in the wake of the British. The emperor appeared satisfied with the news of the Union army's retreat from Richmond and observed that Lincoln's call for 300,000 more troops had demonstrated a sense of desperation resulting from significant manpower losses. It was in the French interest that the United States remain sufficiently strong to balance English maritime power, he asserted, and yet he admitted to admiring the Confederacy's drive for independence. In a blatant attempt to advance his Grand Design, he praised the Confederacy's break with the United States. “My sympathies,” declared the lifelong champion of monarchy, “have always been with the South, whose people are struggling for the principle of self-government, of which I am a firm and consistent advocate.” The Union's restoration was impossible. The Palmerston ministry, however, had shown no interest in his proposals. “I have several times intimated my wish for action in your behalf,” he assured Slidell, “but have met with no favorable response.” Still, he wanted to preserve good relations with England and could not act without its lead. He insisted that his neighbor across the channel had more to gain from granting recognition to the Confederacy than did France and wanted him “to draw the chestnuts from the fire for her benefit.”³¹

In respecting the blockade, Napoleon admitted, “I have committed a great error, which I now deeply regret.” France and the other European powers should have recognized the Confederacy in the summer of 1861, when it controlled its ports and threatened Washington. “But what,” he asked in feigned exasperation, “can now be done?” A forceful opening of southern ports would constitute an act of war, and the Union would reject mediation—“probably in insulting terms.” Recognition would do little to help the Confederacy and would undoubtedly pull France into the war. To exploit this remarkable concession, Slidell agreed that the Union would refuse mediation and that the Confederacy would accept the offer. Such an outcome, he argued, would benefit the Confederacy by enlisting other countries' sympathies and, in a thinly veiled invitation to use force, provide reasons for a “more potent intervention.” The Union would capitulate to pressure as it did during the Trent crisis, and France would be justified under international law to take action. “I think you're right,” Napoleon responded. “I regret to say that England has not properly appreciated my friendly action in the affair of the Trent.”

Anglo-French differences over Mexico gave Slidell a chance to widen the gap by praising the French military intervention as helpful to the southern cause. Yet he must have suspected that Napoleon's long-standing interest in North America did not stop in Mexico. Once established in Central America, the emperor's New World Empire would put Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana within his grasp. But the present needs of the war drove Slidell to ignore this certain postwar danger. Better to cross the bridge, he realized, before worrying about what was on the other side. The Confederacy, Slidell assured Napoleon, trusted him to bring about a “respectable, responsible, and stable government” in Mexico. Admittedly without clearance from Richmond, Slidell mentioned the possibility of a Franco-Confederate alliance. Since the Union supported France's opposition leader in the Mexican conflict, President Benito Juárez, the Confederacy had “no objection to make common cause with you against the common enemy.”

Napoleon seemed tempted by a military alliance, repeating that “simple recognition” would not help the Confederacy and that the Union would refuse mediation. Southern independence, he knew, depended on commercial and military alliances. Slidell insisted that the Union's expected rejection of mediation would help the Confederacy by drawing other nations into a multilateral intervention aimed at ending the war on the basis of a southern separation. “But we do not ask for mediation,” Slidell asserted; “all we ask for is recognition.” Napoleon must have appeared puzzled as Slidell tried to explain the southern position. The Lincoln administration had resorted to a “reign of terror” in clamping down on those northerners who sought peace at the price of disunion. Recognition would boost the Democrats' chances for victory in the coming congressional elections and thereby encourage France and other nations to stop a war that threatened the economies of both North America and Europe.

“What you say is true,” Napoleon allowed, “but the policy of nations is controlled by their interest and not by their sentiments, and ought to be so.”

Slidell agreed but said that the European nations needed to consider the long-term impact of a devastating war. England had ignored its obligation to the world by pursuing “a tortuous, selfish, and time-serving policy” that had alienated other nations—including the Confederacy. “We should never hereafter consider her our friend.”

Napoleon appeared to be pondering the question of intervention, as he concurred with Slidell on the weakness of the Union's blockade and admitted to the importance of southern cotton. “If you do not give it to us,” the emperor conceded, “we cannot find it elsewhere.”

“Your Majesty has now an opportunity of securing a faithful ally, bound to you not only by the ties of gratitude, but by those more reliable of a common interest and congenial habits.”

“Yes,” Napoleon acknowledged, “you have many families of French descent in Louisiana who yet preserve their habits and languages.”

Slidell could not deny it, pointing out that his own family regularly spoke French.

Would the Confederacy have any problem with its slaves? asked Napoleon.

Slidell's response, so grounded in southern culture and history, could not have surprised the emperor. “They have never been more quiet and more respectful and no better evidence could be given of their being contented and happy.” With no small measure of relief, Slidell later reported to his home office that this was the only time the subject of slavery arose in the discussion.

The emperor then raised the most penetrating issue. “Do you expect that England will agree to cooperate with me in your recognition?”

Slidell assured him that his English friends were more confident than ever before, and that, for the first time, Mason felt good about the prospect. Lindsay intended to introduce a motion for recognition in Parliament, a move that would force Palmerston to take a stand.

What would Cobden do? asked Napoleon.

Slidell considered him “unfriendly” to the Confederacy, though not as unfriendly as Bright. Most observers thought that a great majority in the House of Commons favored the Confederacy, but that Lord Derby was not ready to take office and no one would do anything that might push Palmerston into resigning.

At this point Napoleon flashed “a very significant smile,” noting: “It is very singular that while you ask absolute recognition, Mr. Dayton is calling upon me to retract my qualified recognition of you as belligerents.” Such a demand, Slidell retorted, was further proof of the Lincoln administration's “insolence.” If France and England intervened, Napoleon asked, what would be the peace terms? The boundary question was a major problem—especially for the four Border States. Slidell thought the solution clear. Those states that had voted in conventions for separation would remain with the Confederacy; Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland should have a popular referendum on whether to join. Slidell had no doubts that they would do so. Did not the emperor pursue this policy in Italy with other nations' approval? Then, in a mistake not discerned by Napoleon because he had no map on hand, Slidell inadvertently left Maryland and Delaware to the Union by delineating the Chesapeake, Potomac, and Ohio rivers as the Confederacy's natural boundaries.

To push Napoleon closer to intervention, Slidell held out the prospect of a cotton subsidy as a thinly disguised bribe that his home office had authorized sometime earlier.³² He also emphasized that the emperor must understand that the Union's restoration was not possible, and that peace was out of the question without some form of European intervention at the earliest possible date. An armistice must first take place, accompanied by the opening of southern ports.

Slidell also informed Napoleon that Lincoln had sent the U.S. Senate a treaty with Mexico, which approved a congressional allotment of $11 million to help finance Juárez's war against France. The emperor expressed confidence that “the Senate will not ratify it.” Perhaps, Slidell replied, but he reminded Napoleon that Lincoln controlled foreign affairs. A reliable source had claimed that the first installment of $2 million had already reached Juárez, meaning that his army was already using Union funds to fight French troops.

In closing the discussion, Slidell explained that he intended to present Thouvenel with a “formal demand” for recognition on his return from England. Napoleon did not object, although he did not intimate what his response would be.

Slidell emerged from the seventy-minute meeting very optimistic about French intervention. He found the emperor “frank, unreserved, I might perhaps say cordial, placing me entirely at my ease by the freedom with which he spoke himself.” The emperor made no commitments, but Slidell felt certain that “if England long persevered in obstinate inaction, he would take the responsibility of moving by himself.”³³

Slidell correctly noted the importance of cotton to Napoleon's thinking, but he still had not fathomed the reasoning behind the emperor's refusal to take the initiative in any interventionist proposal. When the moment for action came, Slidell appeared to believe, Napoleon would move with or without British participation. Was he trying to thrust ahead of the British, thereby cultivating southern favor before Parliament passed Lindsay's motion? Slidell could not see how it was not in the French interest to act without England, particularly if the Union carried out its threats of war against an intruder. Nor could he have known how clearly Palmerston emphasized to De Leon that it was not in the ministry's interests to intervene. Whether or not Slidell suspected Napoleon's motives, he showed no concern about how the emperor's push into Mexico might someday pose a threat to the Confederacy—particularly if his expansionist interests turned toward Texas and Louisiana. Slidell had dismissed the danger of slave disturbances, permitting the emperor to consider an intervention based on his people's need for cotton—and on his own imperial designs on Mexico.

Napoleon, however, still hesitated to take the lead because of the resistance of both the British and his own advisers. The highly anticipated debate over recognition in the House of Commons led him to believe the time had come to push the Palmerston ministry into a joint intervention. He telegraphed Thouvenel, then in England on an unrelated matter: “Ask the English government if they don't think the time has come to recognize the South.” Thouvenel pondered his country's financial problems along with the troubles over its military expedition in Mexico and concluded that an Anglo-French involvement in the American war would be a certain impetus to further difficulties. He warned Napoleon that “our haste in starting a conflict with the United States is unwise and dangerous.”³⁴

The emperor did not heed this advice; instead, he explored the possibility of inviting Russia to join an Anglo-French mediation effort. Collaboration with the Union's trusted friend might not only ensure success, but also help to mend relations with France and England after their recent war against Russia in the Crimea. Soon after his conversation with Slidell, Napoleon raised the issue with the Russian foreign minister, Prince Alexander Gorchakov. Russia supported the Union, Gorchakov affirmed, and deplored the war's destruction. But, he added, his government could never work with England because of the Union's animosity toward that country. Furthermore, a cooperative effort with England and France would grant stature to the Confederacy and appear to be a hostile act against the Lincoln administration. Russia had no pressing need for cotton, and it stood outside the European community of nations that the United States so roundly distrusted. In fact, Russia had a natural affinity with the Union. “Both of them being young nations in the life of the civilized world,” Gorchakov observed, “Russia and America have a special regard for each other which is never adversely affected because they have no points of conflict.”³⁵ As in the Trent crisis, Russia refused to pursue any policy that offended the Union. The United States, the Russians well remembered, had been the only nation to make its good offices available to them during the Crimean War.

Russia remained outside the circle of British and French peoples considering intervention, but the Palmerston ministry held the pivotal position and, to Napoleon, appeared certain to approve Lindsay's motion in Parliament for recognition. That done, so would the French follow the British lead, with or without the Russians.

---

By mid-July 1862 both the Union and the Confederacy thought that popular pressure would force British and French intervention in a war that had become a violation of humanity and destructive to the Atlantic economy. The Economist called for the “friendly interposition” of the European powers to stop this horrendous war. A mediation could halt the economic calamity resulting from a vastly reduced cotton trade and its devastating impact on Atlantic commerce. The Union could not defeat the Confederacy, making the war a senseless waste of humanity and economic resources. Slavery was not the issue. Southern independence would isolate and confine slaveholders, meaning the end of profits and the end of slavery. The British government had the right to intervene on the basis of the war's destruction of the economy. “We participate in the ruin that is going on,” proclaimed the paper's editor, Walter Bagehot. “We have, therefore, a right to speak and to be heard.”³⁶

French arguments were similar. By mid-June 1862, French governmental leaders were discussing mediation and what actions to take if it was refused. The semiofficial Constitutionnel insisted that the Union could not conquer the Confederacy, that neither side could stop the war, and that mediation was the only way to find peace, end slavery, and satisfy France's economic needs. Other Conservative papers agreed that North-South differences were irreconcilable and, according to one writer, had caused both camps to become “drunk with raging insanity.” Two Conservative journals supported mediation, one in the name of humanity and civilization, the other calling it “the best guarantor of abolition of slavery.”³⁷

Recognition of the Confederacy seemed a certainty. Although the Palmerston ministry opposed Lindsay's motion for recognition, it remained open to making a mediation offer that the Times appeared to believe would lead to recognition, regardless of the outcome of mediation. But Lindsay wanted to act quickly and decisively. He had drummed up popular support for his recognition proposal by putting it before the public and by working with Roebuck and Disraeli in lining up endorsements in the House of Commons. In the excitement of the moment, southern sympathizers had heralded McClellan's setback in Virginia as a sign of defeat not just there but for the entire Union cause. In a letter to Slidell, Mason could scarcely contain his exuberance: “I am happy to say that the rout before Richmond has had the happiest effect here in all quarters, and things look well for Lindsay's motion tonight.” The British permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Edmund Hammond, thought the Confederacy deserved recognition; the Union had sustained a sound defeat, though still not “sufficiently humbled to seek for peace.” Adams suspected that southern supporters had exaggerated the McClellan reversal to round up more votes in the Commons for recognition. Henry Adams wrote that anti-Union feeling was “rising every hour and running harder against us than at any time since the Trent affair.” Believing the moment had come, Benjamin instructed Mason to formally request recognition.³⁸

Thus on the outside, it appeared that Palmerston would go along with Parliament and popular sentiment in recognizing the Confederacy. But the proponents of recognition were not aware of the prime minister's strong feelings against such a move that he had revealed so clearly to De Leon.

On the evening of July 18, Parliament resonated with anticipation, driven to a fever pitch when Palmerston entered the great hall in response to Lindsay's intention to make a motion for recognition. Joining the proceedings were Mason and, as Moran contemptuously described them, “two or three vulgar looking Confederates.” A short and testy exchange broke out over their seating in the chamber; as a result, an usher escorted Mason and one of his companions to seats just below the gallery (Moran's perch), and the others had to trudge upstairs. The electricity in the air suddenly intensified as a legislator dashed in, excitedly waving a newspaper with the headline: “Capitulation of McClellan's Army; Flight of McClellan on a Steamer.” While a large number of colleagues squeezed in to learn the details, Henry Adams stood back, watching them and remarking that “Southern liars” had concocted the story. McClellan had not surrendered, according to reliable reports that had earlier reached the Union's London legation and were, most crucially, dated two days after the article ravenously devoured by members of the Commons.³⁹

When order returned to the hall, Lindsay stood to bring his motion to the floor. The Union was dissolved, he proclaimed with the finality of an undertaker; the Confederacy was engaged in a just war for independence. Steering around the volatile issue of recognition, he emphasized the need for mediation as a wedge for getting to his real objective. Cotton was running out in Lancashire, he told the lawmakers, leading workers to support southern independence in an effort to replenish nearly depleted cotton stores. Palmerston had yanked his cap over his eyes, feigning sleep, while numerous members abruptly stalked out of the chamber, disgusted with the obviously gross distortions highlighted by Lindsay's fumbling delivery. His assault on the Union drummed on for nearly an hour before he admitted to his real purpose: to support “the disruption of the American Union, as every honest Englishman did, because it was too great a Power and England sh'd not let such a power exist on the American continent.” Mason had become increasingly animated as Lindsay continued. “Old Mason,” Moran observed, “spat tobacco more furiously at this than ever, and covered the carpet.” In the excitement of the moment, Moran added, Mason failed to realize that Lindsay had cavalierly considered the Confederacy's independence as important only in destroying England's chief commercial rival. Surely the legislators had more lofty reasons for intervening in the war.⁴⁰

The ensuing debate over Lindsay's motion convinced Moran that most Commons members questioned the advisability of intervention. To cultivate this growing doubt, Moran circulated a private telegram throughout the hall, attesting that McClellan had not surrendered. “It seemed to me,” he later recorded in his diary, “that fear of us, and fear alone, was the check to action.” The Conservative opposition railed against Leicester's P. A. Taylor, a member of the London Emancipation Society who had recently won election to the Commons and now came to the ministry's defense. In the midst of the tumult, those who had departed the hall now returned, and the prime minister began to stir as if a bear awakened from his winter slumber. Pushing back his cap, he listened intently as Taylor attempted to speak above the heckling. The American conflict marked a significant chapter in the epic battle between slavery and freedom, he insisted. Lincoln played a vital role in this struggle, according to Taylor while trying to shout above, as Moran put it, a “burst of horse-laughter and ridicule” that marked a “disgrace to the age.” Any policy helping the Confederacy, Taylor thundered, made England an ally of slavery. Not so, countered—just as loudly—Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, son-in-law of the Duke of Newcastle. In a fierce rejoinder, he defended Lindsay's stand but embarrassed his comrades when, clearly inebriated, he repeatedly fell over the bench in front of him. Union advocate William E. Forster then delivered a brief but spirited argument in support of the ministry, concluding with an ominous warning that intervention could incite a slave insurrection followed by a race war.⁴¹

Into the early morning hours the debate hammered on, until the climactic point when Palmerston pulled himself from his seat and, now standing, pronounced his opposition to intervention. His ministry's only concern about the American war, he declared, was “that it should end.” Implicitly reminding the House members that his government had kept the peace during the popular outcry for war over the Trent, he emphasized the danger in basing foreign policy on sentiment in the streets. The hot criticisms coming from all sides to the controversy could only inflame both American belligerents and prolong the war. The ministry alone must make foreign policy decisions. The Commons lacked sufficient information to deal with such sensitive issues “according to the varying circumstances of the moment.” Intervention, he insisted, must not rest on emotion but solely on that moment when Confederate independence was “firmly and permanently established.” A premature grant of recognition would not guarantee nationhood unless “followed by some direct active interference.” Gazing around the room at his rapt listeners, Palmerston sternly warned that such provocative action ensured “greater evils, greater sufferings, and greater privations.” History had never recorded “a contest of such magnitude between two different sections of the same people.” Mediation had no chance for success at this point in the war, for neither side had expressed any interest in ending the fight. Indeed, he darkly added, “Mediation meant war.” Lindsay's motion must not pass. The ministry must retain the power to decide “what can be done, when it can be done, and how it can be done.”⁴²

Palmerston's three-minute speech had been cryptic and decisive. The ministry would not act at this moment, but the situation in America could change and force a reconsideration. The silence that had enveloped the room so quickly after the ceaseless bantering of the past few hours just as suddenly gave way to booming applause. Lindsay withdrew his motion, angrily shouting that he would “wait for king cotton to turn the screws still further.” As Moran walked out with colleagues after adjournment, he cheerfully observed Mason still sitting, “looking sullen and dejected.” Southern enthusiast William H. Gregory also saw Mason and tried to console him as they left the building. The next day's papers confirmed Moran's telegram declaring that McClellan had not capitulated at Richmond. They then praised Lindsay's decision to withdraw his motion.⁴³

Palmerston's words had nonetheless unsettled American observers in the Union, further encouraging Adams's growing interest in turning the war's focus to a fight against slavery. The Union's narrow escape from British recognition had been only a reprieve, for the prime minister had made clear that Confederate successes on the battlefield pointed to an intervention aimed only at ending the war. Adams, however, considered the recognition question still very much alive in light of what he regarded as the upper class's unbending objective of seeing the United States permanently disabled. Mixed results from the military campaigns had promoted the confused reaction in England. The Union victory at New Orleans had rung hollow after McClellan's failure to seize Richmond, affirming the widespread belief in the impossibility of defeating the Confederacy. Henry Adams's earlier prognosis seemed correct: A Union failure to take Virginia by July meant certain outside interference. Only the European powers' inability to agree on mediation had restrained their involvement. Adams joined his father in urging the White House to shift the war into an antislavery direction.⁴⁴

Palmerston's strategy of waiting for the war to determine the fate of intervention was not entirely final. He could not ignore the certain cotton shortage in autumn that would cause an economic crisis and heighten pressure for British involvement in the conflict. At that point, the hard feelings toward the Confederacy for withholding cotton would give way to the exigencies of a nationwide emergency caused by its diminished supply. A balancing factor, of course, was the fear of war with the Union, which boasted an army larger than England's and a navy uniquely strong in ironclads. Furthermore, the logistical problems in waging a war three thousand miles away would be horrendous while exposing British North America to Union conquest. Mediation stood as the only possible means for ending the war—but even that measure rested on the Union's realization that it could not subjugate the Confederacy.

Thus with no feelings of bias, the British insisted they were not taking the Confederate side in the war by hoping for a major southern military victory. Indeed, a close analysis of the parliamentary debate over recognition, followed by the overwhelming vote against the motion and the praise its defeat drew from the press afterward, strongly suggests that most British lawmakers and their constituents did not support the Confederacy and that they simply wanted to bring the war to a close.⁴⁵ According to their convoluted argument, a decisive battle might convince northerners that they had only two options: Either fight until both antagonists had sustained irreparable destruction, or agree to an armistice engineered by outside powers and followed by a negotiated peace. Not surprisingly, the Union considered this a phony rationale that underlined British hostility toward the United States.

Slidell moved quickly after the Lindsay motion failed, meeting with Thouvenel on July 23 to present a formal demand for recognition. The Confederate minister remained enthusiastic after talking with the emperor, so sure of singlehanded French intervention that he sought immediate action. “Had you not better withhold it for the present?” asked Thouvenel. “In a few weeks, when we shall have further news from the seat of war, we can better judge of the expediency of so grave a step, and the English Government may perhaps then be prepared to cooperate with us, which they certainly are not now; that the refusal to acknowledge us, however worded, could not fail to be prejudicial to our cause; that the answer could only be couched ‘en banalités' and unmeaning generalities.”

Slidell refused to withdraw his demand. He had wanted to act some weeks earlier but did not do so because Mason claimed to have had encouraging discussions with southern friends in Parliament. Slidell now felt he could no longer wait. Napoleon was ready to act alone, or so Slidell believed. Thinking that Thouvenel had not yet seen the emperor, Slidell purposely implied that he was privy to information not yet revealed to French officials. “Your Excellency does not probably know that I have had the honor of an audience with the Emperor.”

Thouvenel apparently had not been aware of this meeting, for the revelation suddenly made him more receptive to Slidell's demand for recognition. Had Napoleon once again made a foreign policy decision without consulting his chief foreign policy adviser? Uncertain about what Slidell knew, Thouvenel asked: Would Mason make a similar demand of Russell?

Mason would do so either that day or the next, Slidell responded.

Thouvenel was glad to know this, for, based on his most recent conversation with the emperor, Slidell must make a demand for recognition simultaneously with that made by Mason in England. Both Lyons and Mercier thought a mediation offer would infuriate the Union. Slidell noted that the Confederacy did not prefer mediation but would accept the offer. It wanted only recognition—a principle that both the emperor and England had always respected.

Mercier and “everyone in France” felt the same way, Thouvenel added, reiterating his belief that the Union's restoration was impossible.

Slidell was confident of success. He expected an answer to his demand by mid-August—the contents of which depended on the war's progress. “While I do not wish to create or indulge false expectations,” he wrote Benjamin, “I will venture to say that I am more hopeful than I have been at any moment since my arrival in Europe.”⁴⁶

Slidell's optimism was unwarranted, resting as it did on numerous questionable assumptions and his belief in the justice of the Confederate cause. If Napoleon had a history of acting independently of his advisers and the public, and if he were willing to move without the British, Slidell would have been correct in anticipating an imminent intervention. But the emperor usually did not act on his own and, despite his blustery talk, remained reluctant to intervene without a British initiative. His senior advisers were nonetheless concerned that he would do something rash. Both Thouvenel and Mercier warned him that premature recognition of the Confederacy meant war with the Union. To his ambassador in London, Count Flahault, Thouvenel expressed concern that Napoleon would act as hastily in America as he had done in Mexico. “I see with great satisfaction,” Thouvenel wrote, “that, on this point as on others, we are in agreement, and I shall perhaps need your help in order to guard us from an adventure even more serious than the Mexican one.”⁴⁷

Slidell did not become concerned even after learning that the British had not changed their position. Russell had coldly declined Mason's request for a meeting, explaining that only the war could determine British policy. Yet Mason remained optimistic because of Slidell's favorable reports on Napoleon's attitude. If France called for recognition, Mason insisted, the British “may be dragged into an ungraceful reversal of their decision.”⁴⁸

Thouvenel had long recognized the difficulty in discouraging Napoleon's interest in intervention; in the early summer of 1862 he had directed his staff to draft a detailed set of terms that the intervening powers could propose after a mediation. The proposal came before him on July 4 under the title, “Note for the Minister, the American Question.” Based on the premise of a southern separation, the staff recommended a boundary between the two American republics that depended on a compromise between free and slave states and the military front at the time of the armistice. Northern Virginia and the four Border States of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri would remain in the Union, and the Confederacy would retain slavery along with the Union's agreement to return fugitive slaves. In late August Thouvenel called for “the formation of two federated confederations,” a formula strikingly similar to the solution posed by Russell and others in England. He invited Mercier to forward his own ideas, adding that in the event of a mediation, “it would be helpful to have a sketch of an arrangement in my pocket.”⁴⁹

De Leon had crossed the channel to Paris in August, convinced that France alone offered hope for Confederate recognition. Like Slidell, however, he ignored the realities of European politics in believing that France would act without a British lead. In failing to win an audience with the emperor (Napoleon was too bogged down in the Italian question to discuss American affairs, he was told), De Leon should have realized that his mission was futile. Undeterred by this rebuff, he focused on the press, using his ample funds to secure propaganda support from the Paris journal Patrie as a cross-channel partner with Hotze's sparsely financed Index in London. De Leon felt certain that Napoleon's primary objective was to advance French interests over those of England's but soon realized that popular opposition to slavery posed a major obstacle in his consideration of intervention. As Slidell had done earlier, De Leon defended bondage—slaves were loyal servants and constituted an efficient workforce in producing the cotton France needed. Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens had been even more emphatic about the virtues of slavery, calling it the “corner stone” of the South that rested on “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man—that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” But De Leon believed that even though the British and French people favored the Confederacy, they could not support a society whose “corner stone” was loudly “proclaimed to be slavery; and whose chief public men boastfully announced their ability to compel such recognition, basing their ability on the meanest of all motives of human action, self-interest.” On the other hand, whereas England “had everything to gain and nothing to risk by the policy of inaction,” France had too many economic interests at stake to stand quietly aside.⁵⁰

De Leon emphasized that Napoleon's advisers, like Palmerston's, were divided on the American conflict. Napoleon wished to be “Emperor of the French” and not merely emperor of France. A powerful egotist, he never made decisions based on private sentiment but always listened carefully to his people in trying to govern in harmony with their wishes. Yet his policies rested on secrecy. “His left hand never knows what his right hand is doing.” And he had a “great talent for silence,” leaving his ministers to guess his intentions. He was closest to Jean François Mocquard, his confidential secretary, and to the Duke of Morny, president of the French legislature. De Leon thought Morny sympathetic to the Confederacy but never willing to act without first protecting French interests. He and the Duke of Persigny, another confidante of Napoleon, proved helpful to the Confederacy. Empress Eugénie admired the Confederacy's free spirit and regarded the struggle as pitting the Puritan descendant of the Anglo-Saxon northerner against its Catholic or “semi-Catholic Episcopalian of French or Spanish descent.” Thus the people closest to the emperor were pro-Confederate. But strong opposition came from Thouvenel and Prince Napoleon. The foreign minister supported the French understanding with England, keeping his distance from the Confederacy. The prince, although related to the emperor, opposed Confederate recognition and insisted that the Union would win. But he was enormously unpopular in France. Indeed, De Leon observed, one might describe this attitude in the words of King Charles II to his brother James: “No one will ever kill me to make you king!”⁵¹

In a rare southern nod to realistic diplomacy, De Leon urged Davis and Benjamin to negotiate offensive and defensive alliances with the European powers rather than rely on cotton. London and Paris acted out of “selfish” motives, not sentiment or principle. “Let us, therefore, appeal to that selfishness and make it a fulcrum for our lever.” Confederate diplomacy should focus on France. Napoleon, who sought to surpass England in commerce and industry, would welcome a southern alliance. The Confederacy should therefore make some concessions—perhaps a gradual emancipation program that would appeal to the French people and put pressure on their government to ally with the American South. But he never convinced the Confederate decision makers to change policy.⁵²

De Leon's findings in England and France confirmed what leaders in both nations had already made clear—that neither government would extend recognition until the Confederacy proved its independence on the battlefield. This meant, as he had cynically remarked to Palmerston, that recognition could come only after the British were persuaded that the Confederacy no longer needed them in the war. De Leon also denounced as a fallacy the southern profession that “cotton is king,” making it a product of former secretary of state Robert Toombs's imagination. Such public declarations had fostered “the Southern hallucination” that England was a “sure ally” because its “principles were supposed to be deposited in [its] pockets.” Palmerston maintained his pragmatic stance, refusing to recognize the Confederacy until it had established independent status and the Union realized it could not win a war of subjugation. Regardless of Napoleon's southern sympathies, he was too preoccupied with European affairs to intervene in the American war without a British initiative. Thus England remained the key to outside intervention, and it refused to act.⁵³

Mediation nonetheless maintained its appeal to numerous British contemporaries, both inside and outside the government. Strategists warned that a prolonged war would eventually lead to a servile insurrection and a trans-sectional race war capable of dragging in other nations and leading to international confrontations. Humanitarians insisted that civilized nations had a moral obligation to end such vicious and pointless carnage. Business interests stressed the importance of reestablishing American stability as the chief means for resuming the importation of northern grain as well as southern cotton. And legal theorists argued that the doctrine of neutrality encompassed the right of neutrals to intervene in a war that damaged their well-being. But the central enigma remained: how to convince the Union of the war's futility.⁵⁴

The Lincoln government continued to miss the central thrust of Europe's growing interest in intervention. Instead of analyzing the foreign position, Seward simply noted the great resentment among Americans caused by all this needless meddling. The direction of the war should be the sole barometer of foreign reaction to it, and that direction pointed in the Union's favor. Yet this was not the case. Europeans regarded the Union's failure in one battle as indicative of the failure of its entire war effort; yet its growing number of victories had not forced the Confederacy to submit, thus rendering those successes “ineffectual and valueless.” Seward had unknowingly put his finger on the problem. England and France, and perhaps the other European players, were less concerned about which side won the conflict than how quickly the fighting came to an end. Both powers had their own interests. England wanted peace for various economic, humanitarian, and strategic reasons, with the last focusing on blocking French expansion in Europe and in the Americas. France sought cotton along with Napoleon's wish to restore the family's New World Empire. The latter could be achieved only with the cooperation of a new Confederate nation—by acting as a buffer against a postwar Union. Neither victory nor defeat for the Union swayed the Anglo-French view, except insofar as the battle outcomes directly led to the termination of hostilities.⁵⁵

Seeing great danger ahead, the Lincoln administration prepared to play its trump card in undercutting the Anglo-French move toward intervention: Take the moral high ground by converting the war into a crusade for freedom dependent on the death of slavery.