Lord Russell indicated that there would be no more meetings with Yancey. Throughout the rest of 1861 relations between the Americans and the British simmered, until they came to a sudden boil in November, when the Confederacy named new and eminent emissaries to Britain and France, Senators Mason and Slidell, and when Captain Wilkes of the American navy, famous already for Antarctic expeditions, undertook his act of freelance derring-do.
IN LATE NOVEMBER and the first days of December 1861, the president of the United States, in addition to handling a great many other activities, was preparing his first annual message to Congress, the constitutionally mandated report on the “State of the Union,” to be intoned by a clerk over the heads of congressmen on December 3. In contrast to the message to the special session in July, which had been a powerful moral argument on central matters, this was one of those more characteristic lists for the governmental laundry. He folded in material from each department and proposed a new one, a Department of Agriculture. He said there was no reason to withhold recognition of two new black nations, Haiti and Liberia—an unthinkable position for any earlier American administration. If one wanted to know the U.S. government’s revenue from all sources for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1861, down to the penny, in words and in numbers, it was here ($9,049,296.40). The war, military affairs, and foreign relations of course were not omitted. There is an early mention of the effort by the “disloyal portion” of the country to invoke foreign intervention, and even a reference to one incident the previous June involving Great Britain and the blockade. And yet in all these pages there was no mention whatever of the Trent, of the alleged hero Captain Wilkes, or of the capture of Mason and Slidell—the incident that was throbbing in the daily news exactly at the moment this message was being prepared and presented. That was a significant presidential silence.
To be sure, there had been from the start of this episode, for those Americans who would stop cheering for a moment and think, questions about proper national conduct. Captain Wilkes had defended his action with the novel theory that Mason and Slidell were the “embodiment of dispatches.” Since a nation at war could stop the ship of a neutral on the high seas in order to seize enemy dispatches, his action could be justified on the ground that Mason and Slidell were themselves, in person, as it were, human enemy dispatches. But under that same international law, what Wilkes then should have done was to bring the ship into port so a prize court could judge the action. Wilkes had not done that. He had seized the two by force and sent the Trent on its way to St. Thomas, leaving the crew and outraged passengers to take a ship there to tell their tale in London.
Although much theorizing justifying Wilkes in international law blossomed in American centers in November and December 1861, some Americans from the outset did not think the seizure was such a good idea. Senator Sumner heard from his British friends—liberals, friends of the United States, opponents of secession and slavery—that all England was outraged and that the cabinet had met twice to contemplate war and that those eight thousand British troops were being sent to Canada. When he showed his correspondence to Lincoln, the troubled president told him “there will be no war unless England is bent on having one.” The admiring Nicolay and Hay would write: “The President’s usual cool judgment at once recognized the dangers and complications that might grow out of the occurrence.” And they quote “a well-known writer” who recorded what Lincoln said “in a confidential interview” on the very day he heard the news: “I fear the traitors will prove to be white elephants.”
One did not have to be an expert in international law to grasp the moral and practical shape of this incident. As Charles Francis Adams’s son would write fifty years later, “The United States did not have, and never had, in reality, a justifying leg to stand upon.” If an American would do the elementary moral exercise of reversing positions, of putting himself in the other’s situation, he might come across a memory. Suppose a British man-of-war fired a shot across the bow of a merchant ship flying the American flag on the high seas, then sent a body of armed men onto the totally civilian ship, and suppose these armed intruders then demanded a list of those on board—wait, wasn’t that exactly what happened not so long ago? Americans objected so strongly when the British navy at war with France did that in their “impressment” of sailors that it became a cause of the War of 1812. On the issue of freedom of the seas, the two nations seemed to have suddenly switched their positions.*38 And that opened an opportunity. That “well-known writer,” whom Nicolay and Hay quote, reported that, after the remark about white elephants, Lincoln continued:
We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain for insisting, by theory and practice, on the right to do precisely what Captain Wilkes has done. If Great Britain shall now protest against the act, and demand their release, we must give them up, apologize for the act as a violation of our doctrines, and thus forever bind her over to keep the peace in relation to neutrals, and so acknowledge that she has been wrong for sixty years.
If Lincoln did say that, on the very first day of the incident, then he surely did move swiftly to the heart of the matter.
Lincoln himself drafted a proposed American reply (never sent) to a dispatch from Lord Russell in which he pointed out that the American government “intended no affront to the British flag, or to the British nation,” and that Wilkes had acted without the authority of his government. But, he wrote, since the act had been done, it was necessary to consider that the United States, like Great Britain, had “a people justly jealous of their rights.” He proposed “such friendly arbitration as is usual among nations.” Or if it could be established that the United States should make reparation, then “the determination thus made shall be the law for all future analogous cases, between Great Britain and the United States.”
One may note in passing, about the moral dilemmas of American presidents, that this executive of an abruptly enlarged governmental apparatus was repeatedly put in this position: a (nominal) subordinate takes an action that the president neither ordered, nor had been told about, nor would have approved had he been told. Often indeed he might definitely have disapproved of the action. But he then nevertheless has to cope with a fait accompli for which he has a nominal responsibility and which has political consequences. In the present case—Charles Wilkes having taken his excessively bold action and a large segment of the American public having responded with an enthusiastic whoop—Lincoln would have to steer away from war with England without completely puncturing the balloon of his own public’s proud thrill. The categorical requirement of his policy in this Trent episode was that it not end in war. Lincoln had an alternative formulation of his elementary judgment of prudence: his chief thought, he said, was to avoid the folly of having “two wars on his hands at a time.”
Fortunately there was prudence also on the other side of the Atlantic, particularly in the person of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, who, though ill, in the last public act of his life, acting as confidential adviser and private secretary to the queen, cooled down the British cabinet’s heated dispatch, which had been a virtual ultimatum and a demand for reparations. Prince Albert’s changes make the dispatch rather an expression of Her Majesty’s hope that she would be informed that the American captain had acted on his own, not under instruction from his government, and that the American government would spontaneously offer redress. (Perhaps it was Prince Albert who really was Lincoln’s “great and good friend.”)
On both sides the hot blood roused by the first outburst would have to be cooled and kept from further inflammation by the other side. Charles Sumner, who conferred often with the president during this affair, showed him letters from his friends, the great English reformers John Bright and Richard Cobden, who urged that the United States make “a courageous stroke, not of arms, but of moral action, in order to avert a war.”
Britain asked that Mason and Slidell be released into British custody, with a suita
ble apology, and indicated that if this were not done within seven days, Lord Lyons and his delegation should withdraw from Washington. Although this last was not put exactly in the formidable shape of an “ultimatum,” with all the somber attention-grabbing, mind-concentrating meaning that form of address has in world politics, and although the seven-day period was not to start until Lord Lyons actually presented his note to Seward (and Lord Lyons postponed presenting it), American decision-making nevertheless still had a certain clock-ticking urgency. And those eight thousand British troops were still headed for Canada.
At a four-hour cabinet discussion on Christmas Day, with Senator Sumner in attendance, Seward, now switching over to his diplomatic posture, argued for the release of the prisoners, and Sumner read letters from Cobden and Bright. Afterward Lincoln proposed to Seward that Seward draft a dispatch proposing the release of the prisoners while he, Lincoln, would write one opposing it, proposing arbitration. This last was evidently a ploy. Lincoln had already written the draft reply to Lord Russell insisting that Wilkes’s act was not that of the government and that no affront to the British flag was intended—but nevertheless proposing “friendly arbitration.” He wrote no new paper. The next day there was no Lincoln proposal; only Seward’s was discussed.
Seward’s dispatch was a bit of a tour de force. Captain Wilkes had gone wrong, he said, not in stopping and boarding the ship or extracting the Confederate emissaries—they were indeed contraband of war and capturing them had been legal—but rather in not then taking the ship to an American port where a prize court could have made the judgment. Wilkes’s error was that he had done what the British had done in their impressments at the time of the War of 1812. So in pressing for Mason and Slidell’s release, the British were now implicitly endorsing American principles, and the United States, in releasing them, was following “an old, honored, and cherished American cause.” Whatever they thought of Seward’s way of reaching the result, the cabinet did adopt his dispatch, and the message went out that Mason and Slidell would now be “cheerfully” released.
On New Year’s Day a tugboat from Boston brought Mason and Slidell from Fort Warren to a British sloop anchored in Provincetown, and the Trent affair was over. Audiences in London theaters cheered when the announcement was made. Great Britain was happy to accept the release of the men as the equivalent of an apology. There would be no war.
Although avoiding war was mandatory, it was also quite important to let the air out of the balloon of truculent American jubilation slowly—not to puncture it abruptly. American pride could be assuaged by showing that even as we yielded, we achieved something at the same time—we brought Great Britain over to our view on freedom of the seas.
Seward was proud of his dispatch. Charles Sumner, who thought Seward’s moral reasoning and knowledge of international law were defective, was even prouder of the address, well attended and adorned with learned quotations, that he gave in the Senate correcting Seward. Sumner agreed of course that the men had to be released, but for more fundamental moral reasons than Seward had stated.
In 1912 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., produced the article we have already referred to. With the convenient perspective of five decades and a radically altered world, Adams would find the heroes in the Trent affair to be not Seward, not Lincoln (scarcely mentioned), but rather an oddly assorted pair: the conservative postmaster general Montgomery Blair and the Radical chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Charles Sumner (and, subtly included, the father of the writer of the article, “Mr. Adams,” the American ambassador in London). These two men wanted to do what the younger Adams, with the perfectionism of hindsight and insulated distance, thought should have been done. Mason and Slidell should have been released, not for Seward’s complicated pseudo-English reasons but for American reasons: We don’t do that sort of thing. We have always believed in the freedom of the seas, the rights of neutrals, and we still do. Blair (Adams wrote) saw immediately that Wilkes’s action was indefensible and proposed that he be ordered to take Mason and Slidell back on the San Jacinto and deliver them to England. Adams was retrospectively thrilled by the effect he thought that such an act would have had: “What a magnificent move…how effectually a checkmate would have been administered to the game of both the Confederates and their European sympathizers!” Bullying Britain suddenly undercut in midfury! Maverick commanders like Wilkes rebuked! American principles of freedom of the seas categorically affirmed and dramatically practiced! Outrageous British naval treatment of neutrals unequivocally rejected!
Perhaps it was magnificent, abstractly considered, for the purpose of an article written fifty years later. But for a president in office at the time, it would have been the opposite. The point about morals in high politics presents itself again and again: being “right” in the abstract can be only one consideration; timing is everything; context is everything. Of course what Wilkes did was both wrong and a blunder. Of course Mason and Slidell would have to be turned over. But to have slapped Wilkes in the face and abruptly punctured American glee, letting down the public ecstasy with a tremendous deflationary bump, in order to chortle at British discomfiture at your having done already what they were just rousing the indignant demand that you do—that would have been not magnificent but disastrous. For an American president the state of American public opinion is a fact not to be ignored.
Lincoln’s quieter, slower, less dramatic course was much wiser. Historian James Randall in the middle of the next century would give this summary:
Though Lincoln’s part in the episode was not publicized, it was of decisive importance. It is now possible to see the president’s contribution in his restraint, his avoidance of any outward expression of truculence, his early softening of the state department’s attitude toward Britain, his deference toward Seward and Sumner, his withholding of his own paper prepared for the occasion, his readiness to arbitrate, his golden silence in addressing Congress, his shrewdness in recognizing that war must be averted, and his clear perception that a point could be clinched for America’s true position at the same time that full satisfaction was given to a friendly country.
THE HAPPY RESULT of the Trent affair as it actually did play out was not only that war was avoided and American principles about ships at sea affirmed but also that relationships between Britain and the United States were momentarily improved. But only momentarily.
Lincoln would soon have other occasions in which he would need wisdom and restraint to restrict the number of wars he was engaging in to the manageable number he had specified.
There would continue to be, at a lower temperature, simmering disagreements with the British and the French. Nicolay and Hay wrote that “the original mistake of the French and the British governments” was in “putting upon equal terms a great and friendly power and the insurgent organization of a portion of its citizens.” One result was the building and fitting out in British ports of Confederate raiders like the Alabama. Constructed in the Liverpool shipyards of a Confederate-sympathizing member of Parliament, its orders were “to sink, burn, or destroy everything which flew the ensign of the so-called United States of America.” The Alabama proceeded to do that for almost two years, capturing or burning more than two dozen American ships, until she herself was sunk by an American ship in 1864. “The vessel was English, the armament was English, almost all the crew was English” but she did the destructive deeds of the American insurgency. American ambassador Adams steadily, patiently, firmly protested to the English government. Nicolay and Hay would write: “In reviewing this long correspondence, one would hesitate to say that the British government was actuated by feelings positively unfriendly to the United States. It is easier to conclude that not being sure which side would win and being entirely indifferent to the contest between the federal government and the rebellion, it stood simply on the letter of the English law.”
Lincoln was acutely aware of the importance of that “not being sure which side would win.” He wanted to make t
hem sure, and soon.
War rumblings would arise in 1864–65 over the toleration of Confederate nests in British-controlled Canada, out of which came terrorist raids, political interventions in midwestern elections, and notorious acts of rebel daring: the capture and sinking of a ship on Lake Erie; an attempt to free rebel prisoners in the Union prison Johnson Island; the derailing of a train in upstate New York; an attempt to burn thirty-two buildings, including ten hotels and Barnum’s Museum, in New York City.
Late in 1864 there was a raid from a Canadian base on St. Albans, Vermont, in which the town was plundered, banks robbed, horses stolen, and one citizen killed. When a posse captured the raiders, a British major demanded that they be turned over to Canadian authorities. And a Canadian magistrate, instead of extraditing them, outraged American opinion by releasing them.
So there was belligerent talk, even of war. General John A. Dix, commanding in New York, on his own angry initiative ordered all commanders to shoot such invaders, to pursue raiders over the border into Canada, and “under no circumstances” to turn over captured raiders to British authorities in Canada. The British could not take lightly that infringement on British sovereignty.
But Lincoln the next day revoked Dix’s order. Here was another example of the maverick subordinate. This time it could be solved. The Canadian prime minister, appreciating Lincoln’s quick revocation of Dix’s order, took steps to rearrest the fugitives, recompense St. Albans, and patrol the border. Lincoln for his part then set aside a proposal that passports be required to enter the United States from Canada.
France offered additional chances to multiply wars. Lincoln’s allegedly good friend the Emperor Napoleon III granted interviews to the Confederate emissary John Slidell (momentarily elevated to fame by the Trent affair), told Slidell of his sympathy with the South, and proposed that France too get into the business of building Confederate ships. In 1864 Napoleon intervened in Mexico and set up a puppet regime. Lincoln privately deplored the setting up of an imperial, nonrepublican regime in the Western Hemisphere, but in his public statements he assured the French government that the United States had no intention to intervene and was not hostile either to France or to its puppet. Now it was the American turn to be strictly neutral. This president did not do what many Radicals in Congress and loud voices in the press insisted he ought to do: he did not invoke the Monroe Doctrine. This was another extra war he was not going to encourage.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 26