Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (53 page)

The neutrality/belligerent-rights option was, in fact, what the United States itself had practiced in the 1820s by conceding belligerent rights to Spain’s rebellious colonies in South America, and the British took swift advantage of this fact in May 1861, when the Foreign Office simultaneously proclaimed its neutrality in the American conflict but also extended belligerent rights to the Confederacy (even before the new American minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, had arrived to take up his duties). Adams protested this concession to the British foreign secretary, the crusty and dismissive Lord John Russell, but Russell had only to point out that this was the price the Americans were going to have to pay if they wanted to impose a blockade. “It was… your own government which, in assuming the belligerent right of blockade, recognized the Southern states as belligerents,” Russell later explained; in fact, the United States “could lawfully interrupt the trade of neutrals with the Southern States upon one ground only—namely, that the Southern States were carrying on war against the government of the United States; in other words, that they were belligerents.”
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Lincoln was not happy with the British decision, but he was unhappier still with the unsolicited attempts of his secretary of state, William Henry Seward, to respond to that decision on his own. Before his inauguration, Lincoln had been confronted with the need to placate the major Republican front-runners who had been passed over by his nomination, which was why he handed the Department of the Treasury to Salmon P. Chase, and why he gave the Department of State to William H. Seward, the most famous political name in the Republican Party. Seward had been the most prominent voice among the anti-slavery Whigs long before Lincoln had ever been heard of outside Illinois, and in 1860 he had confidently expected to win the Republican Party’s nomination without much contest. Of course he hadn’t, but when Lincoln offered the State Department to Seward as a sop to Seward’s political vanity and to cement the unity of the Republican Party, the New Yorker interpreted the proposal as a concession of weakness on Lincoln’s part.

Seward promptly cast his tenure in the role as a grand secretaryship, on the model of John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and Henry Clay. That led him to make on-the-spot decisions and bottomless promises that he lacked authority to
make: on April 1, Seward actually presented a memorandum to Lincoln, seriously urging the president to provoke a war with France and Spain in the Caribbean as a way of reunifying the states in the face of a foreign threat. Lincoln ignored Seward’s proposal and made it clear that, so far as the war was concerned, the president would be responsible for foreign policy, not Seward.
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However, Lincoln did not anticipate Seward’s penchant for composing incontinent dispatches and firing them off to American diplomats to present to other governments. The worst of these dispatches went out to Charles Francis Adams a week after the British neutrality proclamation.

Seward entertained little affection for Great Britain, and British recognition of Confederate belligerency brought out the worst in him. On May 21, Seward drafted a violent protest against the British action that actually threatened the British with war if they made any attempt to intervene in the blockade or the American conflict. “The true character of the pretended new State is… a power existing in
pronunciamento
only,” Seward announced, and British recognition of belligerent rights would have no effect unless the British also meant to intervene militarily to “give it body and independence by resisting our measures of suppression.” In that case, Seward trumpeted, “we, from that hour, shall cease to be friends and become once more, as we have twice before been… forced to become, enemies of Great Britain.”
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It was not clear from Seward’s logic whether the British proclamation was to be treated as an intervention itself, whether the next British ship to try its chances on the blockade would constitute such an intervention, or whether intervention meant the formal use of warships and troops on U.S. soil. That unsteadiness of focus only made the dispatch more inflammatory, and Seward’s little manifesto might have been enough, all by itself, to bring on a war had not Charles Francis Adams took it upon himself to delete the most provocative passages in the document before reading it to Lord Russell. Russell merely reminded Adams that the United States itself had granted belligerent status to the Latin American republics when they rose in rebellion against their Spanish colonial masters, and he added that the United States had tried to extend similar status to French Canadian rebels in a revolt against British authority in Canada in 1837. As for the belligerent status of the Confederacy, the Lincoln government might claim that the Confederacy was merely an insurrection, but to British eyes the Confederacy was an organized government with its own constitution, congress, and president, with an army and
9 million citizens behind it. In the end, all that Seward’s note served to create was a dangerous and highly charged diplomatic atmosphere that would require only a small spark to ignite an explosion.
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The greatest difficulty the imposition of a blockade posed for Lincoln was a practical one: how was the U.S. Navy to enforce it? In 1864, Denmark’s tiny navy struggled to enforce a blockade of the coast of Prussia during its brief and unhappy war with Prussia and Austria and succeeded only intermittently, despite the inability of the Prussians to float more than a handful of gunboats and corvettes in their own defense.
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On the day Lincoln proclaimed the blockade to be in effect, the U.S. Navy listed only forty-two ships in commission, and of them only twenty-four were modern steam-powered vessels (and just three of those were in Northern ports at the outbreak of the war and thus available immediately for blockade duty). Before them stretched 3,550 miles of Southern coastline, with 189 openings for commerce and nine major ports—Charleston, Wilmington, Mobile, Galveston, New Orleans, Savannah, Pensacola, Norfolk, and Jacksonville.

The suggestion that a blockade of the Confederacy now existed with these ships seemed preposterous. In short order, the aggressive secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, chartered or commissioned 200 vessels of various sizes and descriptions, while 23 specially designed steam-powered blockade gunboats (which became known as the ingenious “ninety-day gunboats”) were laid down and completed by March 1862. On April 30, Norfolk was officially blockaded, followed by Charleston on May 28, New Orleans on May 31, and Wilmington on July 21.
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The speed of the navy’s mobilization stunned the Confederacy. Yet that speed presented a problem for the Federal navy, too, for in addition to the logistical problems of supplying and organizing these vessels, few Federal naval officers were prepared to deal with the even more incendiary difficulties in international diplomacy that blockade duty might present. In November 1861 one of those officers struck off the fireball that almost created war between the United States and Great Britain.

On November 8, 1861, the Federal steam sloop
San Jacinto
stopped a British mail steamer, the
Trent
, en route from Havana, Cuba, to St. Thomas in the West Indies. The
San Jacinto
’s master, Captain Charles Wilkes, had learned through a U.S. consul in Cuba that two new Confederate commissioners, James M. Mason and John Slidell, had slipped through the blockade to Nassau and from there to Cuba, and
had purchased passage on the British mail packet
Trent
for St. Thomas, where they planned to board another steamer for England. “Probably no two men in the entire South were more thoroughly obnoxious to those of the Union side than Mason and Slidell,” wrote Charles Adams’s son, Henry, serving as his father’s secretary in the American legation in London. The vision of these two Confederate diplomats sailing serenely to England to plot the destruction of the Union alternately maddened and excited Wilkes, who pulled down every book on the law of the sea in his possession, pored over them in his cabin, and decided that the presence of the Confederates on the
Trent
provided sufficient reason for stopping and searching an unarmed neutral ship and seizing the diplomats. “I carefully examined all the authorities on international law to which I had access, which bore upon the rights of neutrals and their responsibilities,” Wilkes reported to Gideon Welles, and he convinced himself that “it became my duty to make these parties prisoners, and to bring them to the United States.”
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Wilkes waited for the
Trent
in the Bahama Channel, and when the
Trent
hove into view, Wilkes fired a shot across her bow, then boarded the ship with an armed party. He demanded to see a list of the passengers and was refused, but Mason and Slidell identified themselves, and were manhandled (along with their two secretaries, J. E. McFarland and George Eustis) over the side of the
Trent
and into the
San Jacinto
’s waiting cutter.
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Northern public opinion was at first jubilant at Wilkes’s daring pinch of the two Confederate emissaries, and Congress voted to grant Wilkes a gold medal. The British government was substantially less enthused: an unarmed British ship flying the British flag under a declaration of British neutrality and carrying British mail had been fired upon, stopped, and boarded by an American war vessel, and four passengers had been hauled off without so much as a by-your-leave. The deck of a ship is considered an extension of the territory of the nation under whose flag it flies, and so Wilkes might as well have sailed up the Thames and kidnapped four diplomats right off the docks.

So when news of the
Trent
boarding reached Britain on November 28, 1861, the prime minister, Lord Henry John Temple Palmerston, immediately drafted an ultimatum and ordered a squadron of steamers and 7,000 troops readied to send to Canada. On December 19 the British minister in Washington, Lord Richard Lyons, handed Seward a note from Earl Russell (who had by this point inherited the family earldom) demanding immediate redress—“namely, the liberation of the four gentlemen and their delivery to your lordship, in order that they may again be placed under
British protection, and a suitable apology for the aggression which has been committed”—or else Lyons was instructed to break off diplomatic relations and return to London. “If Commodore Wilkes designed making a sensation he succeeded to his heart’s content,” wrote Edwin de Leon, the Confederacy’s chief propagandist in Britain. “The usually apathetic Englishmen were roused to a sudden frenzy by this insult to their flag, such as I had never witnessed in them before.”
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Seward was always happy to talk about war with Britain, but with the reality of the situation staring him in the face, he reluctantly proceeded to eat his words. Seward consulted with McClellan, who advised him that the United States was in no position to fight the Confederates along the Ohio and the Potomac and simultaneously fight a British army along the St. Lawrence. There was no doubt that the British could muster more than sufficient forces in Canada to cause serious trouble. Up until the 1840s, the British government had left the defense of Canada largely in the hands of local militia, and much of that militia was as disorganized and ragtag as its counterparts across the border. The Crimean War taught the British the valuable lesson of relying on well-organized colonial auxiliary forces to sustain its far-flung empire, and in 1855 the Canadian Militia Act allowed the governor-general of Canada to reorganize the Canadian militia around a core of 5,000 volunteers who were to be armed and uniformed on a par with British regulars.
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When the
Trent
affair exploded, the Canadian Volunteer Militia was immediately called out, and Palmerston’s troops were shipped to New Brunswick; another 35,000 Canadian volunteers were called up, and an additional 11,000 British regulars were soon on their way across the Atlantic. These were not forces that either Lincoln or Seward wanted to tangle with, and on December 25, Lincoln met with his cabinet and decided to swallow their humiliation. Mason and Slidell were released and placed on board a ship bound for Southampton, England, Wilkes was made to bear the blame for the seizure of the
Trent
for having acted “upon his own suggestions of duty,” and the crisis relaxed. Mason and Slidell, who had been incarcerated at Fort Warren in Boston harbor, were retrieved by a British steamer on January 8 and made their way to London without any further interruptions. Still, it had been a near thing.
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The international ill temper created by the Federal blockade and its problems seemed to set every diplomatic wind blowing in the Confederacy’s favor. The landed
English aristocracy sympathized with what they saw as a corresponding plantation aristocracy in the South, and they were not sad at the prospect of the American republic demonstrating what they had all along insisted was the inevitable fate of all popular democracies—instability, faction, division, civil war, and dismemberment. The aristocratic regimes of Europe were determined to put down anything which looked like liberal revolutions—in Spain, in Poland, in Russia, and all across Europe in 1848. In Britain, the traditional powers of an elected Parliament exerted the strongest check on monarchical authority, and liberalism there had great champions in the philosopher John Stuart Mill and the free-market capitalists of the Manchester School, Richard Cobden and John Bright. But Britain remained a far cry from liberal democracy. Despite a widening of voting rights in the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the repeal of the Tory aristocracy’s chief economic bulwark, the Corn Laws, in 1848, it remained true that “the great institutions of society, the church… primogeniture, the house of peers, though threatened, are not overthrown.”
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Not only not overthrown, but the American Civil War seemed likely to remove the principal bad example in the path of Tory privilege. In the House of Commons, Sir John Ramsden happily greeted the American Civil War as the bursting of “the great republican bubble,” and the
Times
of London, the great mouthpiece of Tory reaction, offered its considered opinion that the self-destruction of “the American Colossus” would be the “riddance of a nightmare” for all monarchies. Henry Adams found that “British society had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except Sumner. … Every one waited to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast
debacle
.” On Commemoration Day at Oxford, the custom “of cheering and hissing the different names of popular or odious public men as they are proposed” earned Jefferson Davis “tumultuous and unanimous applause” while the name of Lincoln “was greeted with hisses and groans.”
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