Diplomacy of the American Civil War

The Diplomacy of the American Civil War involved the United States of America and the Confederate States of America bringing their cases to the major world powers. The United States wanted to prevent any power from recognizing the Confederacy; none never did. The Confederacy expected that Britain or France would enter the war on their side to maintain their supply of cotton and to weaken a growing opponent.

Every nation was officially neutral throughout the American Civil War, and none recognized the Confederacy. That marked a major diplomatic achievement for Secretary Seward and the Lincoln Administration. France, under Napoleon III, had invaded Mexico and installed a puppet regime; it hoped to negate American influence. France therefore encouraged Britain in a policy of mediation suggesting that both would recognize the Confederacy. Washington repeatedly warned that meant war. The British textile industry depended on cotton from the South, but it had stocks to keep the mills operating for a year and in any case the industrialists and workers carried little weight in British politics. Knowing a war would cut off vital shipments of American food, wreak havoc on the British merchant fleet, and cause the immediate loss of Canada, Britain, with its powerful Royal Navy, refused to go along with French schemes.

United States

Lincoln's foreign policy was deficient in 1861 in terms of appealing to European public opinion. Diplomats had to explain that United States was not committed to the ending of slavery, but instead they repeated legalistic arguments about the unconstitutionality of secession. Confederate spokesman, on the other hand, were much more successful by ignoring slavery and instead focusing on their struggle for liberty, their commitment to free trade, and the essential role of cotton in the European economy. In addition, the European aristocracy (the dominant factor in every major country) was "absolutely gleeful in pronouncing the and American debacle as proof that the entire experiment in popular government had failed. European government leaders welcomed the fragmentation of the ascendant American Republic."

Great Britain

See also: United Kingdom and the American Civil War

Elite opinion in Britain tended to favor the Confederacy, while public opinion tended to favor the United States. Large scale trade continued in both directions with the United States, with the Americans shipping grain to Britain while Britain sent manufactured items and munitions. Immigration continued into the United States. British trade with the Confederacy was limited, with a trickle of cotton going to Britain and some munitions slipped in by numerous small blockade runners. The Confederate strategy for securing independence was largely based on the hope of military intervention by Britain and France, but Confederate diplomacy proved inept. With the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, it became a war against slavery that most British supported.

Trent affair

Main article: Trent Affair

A serious diplomatic dispute with the United States erupted over the "Trent Affair" in late 1861. The United States Navy illegally seized to Confederate diplomats from a British ship, and refused to release them. Public opinion in the United States celebrated the humiliation of the British, but London demanded redress. Lincoln gave in and sent back the diplomats James Murray Mason and John Slidell.

Blockade runners

British financiers built and operated most of the blockade runners, spending hundreds of millions of pounds on them; but that was legal and not the cause of serious tension. They were staffed by sailors and officers on leave from the Royal Navy. When the U.S. Navy captured one of the fast blockade runners, it sold the ship and cargo as prize money for the American sailors, then released the crew.

A long-term issue was the British shipyard (John Laird and Sons) building two warships for the Confederacy, including the CSS Alabama, over vehement protests from the United States. The controversy was resolved after the Civil War in the form of the Alabama Claims, in which the United States finally was given $15.5 million in arbitration by an international tribunal for damages caused by British-built warships.

In the end, these instances of British involvement neither shifted the outcome of the war nor provoked either side into war. The U.S. diplomatic mission headed by Minister Charles Francis Adams, Sr. proved much more successful than the Confederate missions, which were never officially recognized.

Confederate efforts

Main article: Confederate States of America § Diplomacy

Once the war began, the Confederacy pinned its hopes for survival on military intervention by Great Britain and France. The Confederates had for years uncritically assumed that "cotton is king"—that is, Britain had to support the Confederacy to obtain cotton. They never sent agents to see if the theory was true. It was false. The British had stocks to last over a year and had been developing alternative sources of cotton, most notably India and Egypt. They were not about to go to war with the U.S. to acquire more cotton at the risk of losing the large quantities of food imported from the North. The Confederate government sent repeated delegations to Europe but historians give them low marks for their poor diplomacy. Mason went to London and Slidell traveled to Paris. They were unofficially interviewed, but neither secured official recognition for the Confederacy.

In March 1862 after Confederate diplomat James Mason finally made it to England, he collaborated with several British politicians to push the government To ignore the Union blockade. Mason and his friends argued that it was only a "paper blockade," not actually enforceable, which by international law would make it illegal. In that case the British were therefore free to openly support the Confederacy. However most British politicians opposed this interpretation because it was counter to traditional British views on blockades, which Britain saw as one of its most effective naval weapons.

Confederate agent Father John B. Bannon was a Catholic priest who traveled to Rome in 1863 in a failed attempt to convince Pope Pius IX to grant diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. Bannon then moved on to Ireland , where he attempted to mobilize support for the Confederate cause and to stem the attempts of Union recruiters to enlist Irish men in the Union armies. Nevertheless thousands of Irishmen did volunteer.

Canada

The Union successfully recruited soldiers in Canada. However local officials tolerated the presence of Confederate agents despite American protests. These agents planned attacks on U.S. cities and encouraged antiwar sentiment. They actually did stage a small raid in late 1844 on a Vermont town, where they robbed three banks of $208,000.

Slave trade

the British had long pressured the United States to join vigorously in fighting the illegal Atlantic slave trade. Pressure from southern states had neutralize this, but the link administration was now eager to sign up. In the Anglo-American Treaty (1862) the United States gave Great Britain full authority to crack down on the trans-Atlantic slave trade when carried on by American ships.

France

Main article: France in the American Civil War

The Second French Empire under Napoleon III remained officially neutral throughout the War and never recognized the Confederate States of America. However, the textile industry needed cotton, and Napoleon III had imperial ambitions in Mexico which could be greatly aided by the Confederacy. The United States had warned that recognition meant war. France was reluctant to act alone without British collaboration, and the British rejected intervention. Emperor Napoleon III realized that a war with the U.S. without allies "would spell disaster" for France. Napoleon III and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Edouard Thouvenel adopted a cautious attitude and maintained diplomatically correct relations with Washington. Half the French press favored the Union, while the "imperial" press was more sympathetic to the Confederacy. Public opinion generally ignored the war, showing much interest in Mexico.

Mexico

Further information: Mexico–United States relations

In 1861, Mexican conservatives looked to French leader Napoleon III to abolish the Republic led by liberal President Benito Juárez. France favored the secessionist Southern states that formed the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War, but did not accord it diplomatic recognition. The French expected that a Confederate victory would facilitate French economic dominance in Mexico. Realizing the U.S. government could not intervene in Mexico, France invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian prince Maximilian I of Mexico as its puppet ruler in 1864. Owing to the shared convictions of the democratically-elected government of Juárez and U.S. President Lincoln, Matías Romero, Juárez's minister to Washington, mobilized support in the U.S. Congress and the U.S. protested France's violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

Once the Union won the American Civil War in April 1865, the U.S. allowed supporters of Juárez to openly purchase weapons and ammunition and issued stronger warnings to Paris. Napoleon III ultimately withdrew his army in disgrace, and Emperor Maximilian, who remained in Mexico even when given the choice of exile, was executed by the Mexican government in 1867. The support that the U.S. had accorded the liberal government of Juárez, by refusing to recognize the government of Maximilian and then by supplying arms to liberal forces, helped improve the U.S.–Mexican relationship.

Other countries

Russia

Russian-American relations were very generally cooperative. Alone among European powers, Russia offered oratorical support for the Union, largely due to the view that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to the British Empire.

During the winter of 1861–1862, the Imperial Russian Navy sent two fleets to American waters to avoid their getting trapped if a war broke out with Britain and France. Many Americans at the time viewed this as an intervention on behalf of the Union, though historians deny this. The Alexander Nevsky and the other vessels of the Atlantic squadron stayed in American waters for seven months (September 1863 to June 1864).

1865 saw a major project attempted: the building of a Russian-American telegraph line from Seattle, Washington through British Columbia, Russian America (Alaska) and Siberia - an early attempt to link East-West communications. It failed and never operated.

In 1863, Russia brutally suppressed a large scale insurrection in Poland. Many Polish resistance leaders fled the country, and Confederate agents tried and failed to encourage them to come to America to join the Confederacy.

The Netherlands

The Lincoln administration looked abroad for places to relocate freed slaves who wanted to leave the United States. It opened U.S. negotiations with the Dutch government regarding African American migration and colonization of the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America. Nothing came of the idea, and after 1864 the idea was dropped.

Garibaldi

The Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi was one of the most famous people in Europe as a proponent of liberty; Washington sent a diplomat to invite him to become an American general. Garibaldi declined the offer because he would not be given supreme power over all the armies, and because the United States was not yet committed to abolishing slavery. Historians agree that it was just as well because he was too independent in thought and deed to have worked smoothly with the U.S. government.

World perspective

Historian Don Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a major impact on the course of world history. The Union victory energized popular democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that:

The North's victory decisively proved the durability of democratic government. Confederate independence, on the other hand, would have established An American model for reactionary politics and race-based repression that would likely have cast an international shadow into the twentieth century and perhaps beyond."

Postwar adjustments

Relations with Britain (and Canada) were tense; Canada was negligent in allowing Confederates to raid Vermont. Confederation came in 1867, in part as a way to meet the American challenge without depending on British armed forces.

The U.S. looked the other way when Irish activists known as Fenians tried and failed badly in an invasion of Canada in 1871. The arbitration of the Alabama Claims in 1872 provided a satisfactory reconciliation; The British paid the United States $15.5 million for the economic damage caused by Confederate warships purchased from it. Congress did pay Russia for the Alaska Purchase in 1867, but otherwise rejected proposals for any major expansions, such as the proposal by President Ulysses Grant to acquire Santo Domingo.

Further reading

• Ayers, Edward L. "The American Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction on the World Stage." OAH Magazine of History 20.1 (2006): 54-61.
• Brauer, Kinley J. "The Slavery Problem in the Diplomacy of the American Civil War." Pacific Historical Review 46.3 (1977): 439-469. in JSTOR
• Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (1976).
• Jones, Howard. Blue & Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (2010) online
• "Monaghan, Jay. Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (1945), Popular study of Lincoln the diplomat
• Peraino, Kevin. Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power (2013). excerpt
• Sexton, Jay. "Civil War Diplomacy." in Aaron Sheehan-Dean ed., A Companion to the US Civil War (2014): 741-762.
• Sexton, Jay. "Toward a synthesis of foreign relations in the Civil War era, 1848–77." American Nineteenth Century History 5.3 (2004): 50-73.
• Sexton, Jay. Debtor diplomacy: finance and American foreign relations in the Civil War era, 1837-1873 (2005).
• Taylor, John M. William Henry Seward: Lincoln's Right Hand (Potomac Books, 1996).
• Warren, Gordon H. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas (1981).

Confederacy

• Owsley, Frank Lawrence. King Cotton Diplomacy (1931), The classic history; online review
• Thompson, Samuel Bernard. Confederate purchasing operations abroad (1935).

International perspectives

• Adams, E.D. Great Britain in the American Civil War (1925).
• Berwanger, Eugene. The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War (2015).
• Blackburn, George M. "Paris Newspapers and the American Civil War," Illinois Historical Journal (1991) 84#3 pp 177-193. online
• Blumenthal, Henry. A Reappraisal of Franco-American Relations, 1830-1871 (1959)
• Campbell, Duncan Andrew. English Public Opinion and the American Civil War (2003).
• Carroll, Daniel B. Henri Mercier and the American Civil War (1971); The French minister to Washington, 1860-63.
• Case, Lynn M. and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. 1970).
• Case, Lynn Marshall. French opinion on war and diplomacy during the Second Empire (1954).
• Foreman, Amanda. A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (2011).
• Hyman, Harold Melvin. Heard Round the World; the Impact Abroad of the Civil War. (1969).
• Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The Crisis Over British Intervention in the Civil War (1992).
• Jordan, Donaldson, and Edwin J. Pratt. Europe and the American Civil War (2nd ed. 1969).
• Klees, June. "External Threats and Consequences: John Bull Rhetoric in Northern Political Culture during the United States Civil War." Advances in the History of Rhetoric 10#1 (2007): 73-104.
• Long, Madeline. In The Shadow of the Alabama: The British Foreign Office and the American Civil War (Naval Institute Press, 2015).
• Mahin, Dean B. One war at a time: the international dimensions of the American Civil War (Potomac Books, 1999).
• Mayers, Adam. Dixie and the Dominion: Canada, the Confederacy, and the War for the Union (2003) online review
• Merli, Frank J., and David M. Fahey. The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War (2004).
• Meyers, Philip E. Caution & Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. (2008). excerpt; A revisionist approach; denies there was much risk of war between the United States and Britain
• Poast, Paul. "Lincoln’s Gamble: Bargaining Failure, British Recognition, and the Start of the American Civil War." (2011) online
• Sainlaude, Stève. The French Government and the Civil War, 1861-1865. The diplomatic action (2011)
• Schoonover, Thomas. "Mexican Cotton and the American Civil War." The Americas 30.04 (1974): 429-447.
• Sears, Louis Martin. "A Confederate Diplomat at the Court of Napoleon III," American Historical Review (1921) 26#2 pp. 255-281 in JSTOR on Slidell
• Sexton, Jay. "Transatlantic financiers and the Civil War." American Nineteenth Century History 2#3 (2001): 29-46.
• Vanauken, Sheldon. The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy (Gateway Books, 1989)