For their part, the Confederates were fully aware of the value of the cotton export trade, and they expected that the loss of cotton would compel Britain, and perhaps France, to intervene before a few months had passed. Henry L. Benning of Georgia confidently declared, “We have an article which England must have.”
To deprive England of cotton would be the same as to deprive 4,000,000 of her subjects of the means of subsistence, and to throw them out to work anarchy and revolution. This she would never consent to. … She has ships enough to destroy the entire navy which the North would have, and to enter the harbor of New York and Boston, and with the improved artillery of the day destroy these cities in a few hours.4
A week and a half after Lincoln’s blockade proclamation, the English newspaper correspondent William Howard Russell noticed an advertisement in a Charleston merchant’s office for direct sailings between Charleston and Europe, and when Russell wondered whether that might be a little premature due to the blockade, he was quickly told that cotton would solve that problem in a short while.
“Why, I expect, sir,” replied the merchant, “that if those miserable Yankees try to blockade us, and keep you from our cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.” It was in vain I assured him he would be disappointed. “Look out there,” he said, pointing to the wharf, on which were piled some cotton bales; “there’s the key will open all our ports, and put us into John Bull’s strong box as well.”5
Southerners were also convinced that it was worth Britain’s while to remember that the South, which had always needed to import British manufactured goods as badly as Britain needed to import Southern cotton, would continue to be an important market for the sale of British exports. The Confederate states, freed from the federal government’s high import tariffs, would be in an even better position to buy British goods than if they had still been in the Union. The logic of commerce alone would seem to dictate that any attempt by the Federal navy to stopper the Confederacy’s ports would sooner or later invite some kind of unpleasant action from the vastly superior British navy, and to help that conclusion along, the Confederacy sent its first set of commissioners to Europe in the summer of 1861 to appeal to France and Britain for formal diplomatic recognition and military aid.
Entirely apart from the realpolitik of cotton, the status of blockades in international law was a highly technical and tricky affair that posed problem of its own. Lincoln insisted from the beginning of the war that the Southern states had no constitutional right to secede from the Union, and when the Confederates insisted that their republic was a legitimate and independent nation and the civil war a conflict of two belligerent nations, Lincoln would reply that it was really only an insurrection against Federal authority. This involved more than simple bandying about. For the British in particular, with their outsize naval power, it was possible for a blockade to cut off an enemy nation’s inflow of supplies, serve as an early-warning tripwire in the event of an attempted invasion, and act as a net to apprehend an enemy nation’s privateers before they could escape onto the world’s oceans and damage British commerce—all at once. The more complex blockades became, the more urgent the need to define how they operated, since the seizure of ships and cargoes attempting to penetrate the blockade included the shipping of neutrals whose antagonism the British might not want to inflame.
The first serious attempt at defining the operations of blockades—the Declaration of Paris—bound its adherents to four rules. Privateering must be abolished—in other words, letters of marque and reprisal (government licenses to private shipping to prey on the commerce of an enemy nation) must end. The ships and cargoes of neutral-nation owners must be protected from confiscation if stopped by a blockade (provided the cargoes were not actual contraband of war). The cargoes of neutral-nation owners must be protected from confiscation even if they were being shipped in vessels owned by the blockaders’ enemy (although no such protection was extended to the ships or the cargoes actually owned by that enemy). And blockades, to be legal, must be effective, not mere token or “paper” blockades. The Declaration of Paris offered no actual definition of what an effective blockade would look like, but the presumption was that everyone would know it when they saw it.
The first point operated very much to the favor of Great Britain, since it removed a threat that British commerce around the world dreaded; the second and third bought the adherence of the other major European powers, since it guarded their seaborne commerce from arbitrary seizure by British warships. However, the United States declined to endorse the Declaration of Paris. The secretary of state at the time, William Marcy, was happy to agree to the second and third points, but the United States had always looked to fall back on privateering as a way to augment its naval forces in the event of war, without having to pay for the privateers’ upkeep in time of peace; the absence of any working definition of an effective blockade provided another annoyance that Marcy objected to. Marcy proposed an amendment that would have exempted even the private property of belligerents from seizure by a blockade. But the British government would not agree to Marcy’s amendment, and there the matter rested until the outbreak of the Civil War.6
The customary alternative to blockade in the case of insurrections was a declaration of closure of ports (since any sovereign nation has the prerogative of closing its ports to foreign shipping). Closure of ports assumed that the insurrection was a localized and small-scale affair; ships of foreign nations might defy the closure and trade in those ports, but they were served notice that, at the end of the insurrection, ships that ignored the closure would be assessed for duties otherwise owed to the original government. It did not actually prevent outside supplies from reaching the ports and hands of rebels, and the most that the Federal navy could have done under those terms was stop a ship trying to enter a closed port, register a warning on the ship’s log, and then again stop the ship when it made a second attempt to enter. This left Lincoln with the problem of defining and imposing a blockade upon an insurrection—which was a contradiction in terms of international law.7
At the same time, though, Lincoln carefully avoided any use of terms suggesting that the Confederacy was a legitimate sovereign nation. Never would he use the term “Confederate States,” and he would describe them only as a “combination” that federal authority found “too powerful to suppress” by normal police action. He would act by blockade, as though the Confederacy were a sovereign nation, but he would talk insurrection, as if the Confederacy didn’t exist. In the eyes of the European powers, however, a blockade was a blockade, and in that case, other nations had one of three options open to them. They could agree to the pretense that the Confederacy was only an insurrection and forbid their own shipping to have any contact with rebel-held ports. They could agree that the Confederacy was not exactly a sovereign nation, but they could also point to the fact that it was a large-scale affair with a functioning government of its own, conducting what amounted in fact to a civil war. Under those circumstances, they might declare neutrality and concede belligerent rights to the Confederates. Conceding belligerent rights recognized that the conflict had moved from the realm of a mere uprising, to be suppressed as a police action, to a full-scale war, to be conducted by the international laws of war; this, in turn, would allow Confederate agents, emissaries, and suppliers to operate on foreign shores within certain limited spheres of action. Or they could go all the way up to formal diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Recognition might then trigger a Confederate appeal, as a nation to other nations, for allies, for international mediation, or for foreign intervention.
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 al
so 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.”8
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.9 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.”10
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.11
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.12 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 21.13
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.”14
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 w
ith their two secretaries, J. E. McFarland and George Eustis) over the side of the Trent and into the San Jacinto’s waiting cutter.15
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.”16
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 40