The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (25 page)

S
OUTHERNERS in the mid-nineteenth century maintained a curiously ambivalent relationship with the wider world.
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Drawing upon the heritage of the eighteenth century, many planter-aristocrats considered themselves cosmopolites and citizens of the world; some had given their education “a finishing polish by making a tour of Europe.”
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They copied European fashions, listened to European music, read English and French books, and adorned their homes with foreign furniture and art. Yet as the nineteenth century progressed Southerners became less at ease with a Europe torn by revolution and driven by the currents of liberal nationalism. Although Southerners shared some of the nationalist feelings of Europeans, the logical conclusion of Southern nationalism was reactionary separation, in contrast to the European trend toward liberal unification. When reflecting upon European revolutions, Southerners quite often identified with the old order instead of the new. Consequently they tended to become as culturally isolated from the Old World as they were politically alienated in the New World. Like John B. Lamar of Georgia, some Southerners might talk about spending their later years living near Paris but in fact never trouble to learn French. Lamar’s love of things European was anachronistic; he identified with the European past and all but ignored its alien present.
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Travelers like Lamar could visit Europe, see the art and the relics of the past, and remain more or less insulated from contemporary Europeans. Diplomats could not. During the ante-bellum period the actions of Southerners in the United States diplomatic service often bore witness to the general ambivalence which characterized the South’s attitude toward Europe. One of the best examples of this worldly provincialism at work was John M. Daniel, who served in Turin as United States chargé d’affaires and later as minister resident to the court of Sardinia. Daniel was a journalist and an intellectual who read Latin classics and whose favorite authors were Voltaire and Swift. In 1853 he left his newspaper, the Richmond
Examiner,
and accepted the diplomatic post at Turin.
⁴
His initial reactions to life in a European capital were not at all those of a cosmopolite; homesick and disillusioned, he confided to a friend back in Virginia:

The real comforts of Europe don’t compare with those of the United States. The people are no where as good as ours. The women are uglier; the men have fewer ideas…. I am busily learning to speak French and studying what is popularly, but most falsely, termed the ‘great world’ and ‘polite society.’ I have dined with dukes, jabbered bad grammar to countesses, and am sponged on for seats in my opera-box by counts who stink of garlick, as does the whole country. I receive visits from diplomats with titles as long as a flagstaff, and heads as empty as their hearts, and find the whole concern more trashy than I have ever imagined.
⁵

Daniel remained in Turin until 1860 and witnessed but misunderstood the early machinations of Count Cavour which led eventually to Italian unification. He then returned home in the midst of the secession crisis, resumed editorship of the
Examiner,
and championed the cause of Southern disunification.
⁶
He may not have been a typical Southern diplomat; he did however betray the naïveté which often lay beneath the facade of Southern worldliness. When the South became the Confederacy, the personal prejudices of men like Daniel too often became national presumptions. Confederate hopes for recognition and intervention from Europe rested upon simple faith in the righteousness of the cause and in the commercial prerogatives of King Cotton. Hindsight reveals Southern optimism to have been founded upon unreal and antique assumptions much at odds with the century of
realpolitik.
Still Southerners persisted in hoping, and as a consequence Confederate diplomacy seemed to be a series of dashed hopes—great expectations followed by greater frustrations.
⁷

Perhaps it was fortunate that Robert Toombs did not last long as secretary of state. Toombs was not a diplomatic person. Moreover, he was a spokesman for the older South, a true believer in the cause, and he was convinced that Southern virtue combined with Southern cotton would win sentiment and support for the Confederacy in Europe. Because he resigned his post in July of 1861, Toombs was spared the full frustration of his hopes.

Toomb’s successor in the State Department was R. M. T. Hunter, who remained in the office no longer than Toombs. Jefferson Davis chose Hunter because he was an astute politician and because he was a Virginian; Hunter took the job because it seemed important and perhaps because he aspired to be president. He performed capably enough but soon learned that the Confederate State Department was no steppingstone to power or prestige and that securing recognition and assistance from Europe was no child’s game. A policy founded on righteousness and cotton did not sufficiently impress Britain and France, and the Confederacy had little more to offer.
⁸

The Confederacy’s first commissioners to Europe, William L. Yancey, Pierre A. Rost, and A. Dudley Mann, were still hopeful in the summer of 1861. After all, Britain and France had recognized the belligerency of the Southern rebels. This recognition was, however, insufficient by itself. The Confederacy needed more than neutrality; it needed formal recognition and material assistance, and these tangible things the British and French were ill-prepared to offer.

Both European powers needed cotton, though not necessarily Confederate cotton, and both could imagine benefits accruing from a permanently disunited States. Yet Britain and France also realized the cost of Confederate recognition: confrontation and war with at least the United States and, if the balance of power were threatened, perhaps one or more European states as well. The “American question” involved more than the pretensions of some planter nationalists; if Europe intervened, the distribution of world power would be at stake. Accordingly France determined to act in concert with England. The Confederates not only had to persuade both powers to act; they had to persuade them at the same moment.
⁹

Statesmen in London and Paris did not have to search for reasons to answer the American question cautiously. In France, Napoleon III maintained his authoritarian regime by means of a series of rather delicate domestic compromises with republican ideologues, the business community, the Church, and the army. At the same time, he attempted to emulate his famous uncle and fire French national pride through a series of international adventures on behalf of liberal nationalism. Confederates naturally hoped that Napoleon would exercise his supposedly autocratic will and intervene on the side of Southern national aspirations, as he had in Italy. But though the record of Napoleon’s Italian policy was indeed instructive, its lessons should not have been comforting to Confederates. Napoleon had allied himself with Sardinia (Piedmont) against Austria in 1859, and subsequently the allied armies had beaten the Hapsburgs thoroughly at the battles of Magenta and Solferino. Then, having opened the way for a united Italy, Napoleon drew back and made a separate peace (Treaty of Villafranca) with Austria. Not only did Austria retain Venetia; Napoleon now held Nice and Savoy (his price for the Sardinian alliance), and he also sent troops to Rome to protect the Pope and the Papal States. Clearly, Napoleon III was something of an international trimmer: he had assisted Italian nationalism but then recoiled when national unification, or
Risorgimento,
seemed to threaten the Church and the established order of power relationships in Europe. However much the Emperor might thrust himself and France into the center of world politics, his audacity had limits. In truth, by 1861 France was overextended; during the previous decade French armies had fought on three continents. No wonder French public opinion displayed increasing disenchantment with the mercurial foreign policy of the Third Empire. Accordingly Napoleon III cherished his agreement to act in concert with Great Britain on the American war and clung to the safety of his Anglo alliance.
¹⁰

Queen Victoria’s government, presided over by Lord Palmerston and Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell, accepted the leadership role in the French concert and doubtless regarded British primacy as natural. Palmerston, though, was never certain of his leadership in British politics. His government survived for six years, a period which encompassed the life span of the Confederacy, but the ministry rested upon a tenuous base of compromise at home and conservative policy abroad. Since the Peace of Ghent in 1814, British statesmen had realized the greater wisdom of commercial domination rather than political subjugation in the “colonies.” Palmerston and Russell thus looked with concern upon the American war. While they needed a climate of peace in North America for the sake of British capital, they also feared potential shocks to the system of power relationships among the European powers that the American war might generate.
¹¹

The Confederacy based its initial overtures to Europe on ideals and cotton, but both England and France had active antislavery societies and large segments of the populace committed to the ideals of liberal democracy as exhibited in the North. And although both nations needed raw cotton, in 1861 both had large stockpiles from the bumper crops of 1859 and 1860. Most significantly the British were heavily invested in the American industrial revolution, and England traditionally bought Northern grain as well as Southern cotton. Indeed during the war years the United States supplied an average of 33.3 percent of England’s wheat, flour, and corn imports, almost 50 percent of the nation’s supply.

Aid to the slaveholding aristocracy would thus cost the British and French governments in the marketplace of public opinion. Of course in nineteenth-century Europe public opinion did not make diplomatic decisions; but in England especially the diplomatic establishment gave consideration to the impact of its actions upon the popular will. The steady performance of United States ambassadors Charles Francis Adams in London and William L. Dayton in Paris also contributed to diplomatic inertia in Europe. The Confederates had reason to hope for the future; the Southern nation might demonstrate its legitimacy on the battlefield, and the “cotton famine” would strike sooner or later. But initially Europe’s answer to the “American question” was a firm “maybe.”
¹²

In early August of 1861, Yancey, Rost, and Mann gathered in London to present exciting news to the British secretary for foreign affairs. From Hunter they had just learned of the victory at Manassas, and accordingly they requested another informal interview with Russell. To the Confederates’ surprise and chagrin, Russell refused to meet them, requesting instead that they make their communication in writing. The commissioners wrote a brief; Russell promised to consider the matter further; and Yancey, Rost, and Mann still clung to some hope of success. Yet the three men could not always agree upon their best course of action. Yancey especially was so disgruntled with his assignment and his colleagues that he requested to be relieved.
¹³

In Richmond, Davis and Hunter were impatient. By September they concluded that Yancey, Rost, and Mann had failed and that it was time to replace all three. Late in the month, Hunter recalled Yancey and dispatched Rost and Mann to Spain and Belgium respectively. For the important tasks in London and Paris, Davis and Hunter selected James M. Mason and John Slidell. Mason was a crudely charming Virginian and a former United States senator. Davis and Hunter correctly predicted that Mason’s affability would win him and the Confederacy many friends among the British gentry. Slidell, an adopted Louisianian, was more subtle and ambitious; Davis and Hunter hoped that his guile as well as his charm would be effective with Napoleon III.
¹⁴

The two commissioners left Charleston on October 12, 1861, slipped through the blockade to Nassau, and then proceeded to Cuba. On November 7 they sailed with their secretaries from Havana aboard the British mail packet
Trent.
They planned to go to St. Thomas and there board a British steamer for Southhampton. One day out of Havana, on November 8, their plans miscarried and there occurred the first and most significant crisis in Anglo-American relations during the war.
¹⁵

As the
Trent
made its way through the Bahama Channel, the United States sloop of war
San Jacinto,
Captain Charles Wilkes commanding, approached, fired a shot across the
Trent’s
bow, and signaled it to heave to. Captain Wilkes then dispatched a boarding party, which searched the
Trent
and seized the two Confederates. Wilkes proceeded with his captives to Fort Monroe, Virginia. There he gave out the news that he had captured the Southerners and then took them to Boston, where they remained under house arrest.

Wilkes became an instant hero in the United States, but Confederates, too, were grateful to the aggressive Union captain. Search and seizure in international waters had often been a thorny issue between England and the United States; indeed the Americans had gone to war in 1812 over British actions similar to those of Wilkes. The British would hardly take this affront lying down. Indeed they did not. Russell sent a firm note to the United States demanding an apology and the return of Mason and Slidell, and the London
Times
among other British newspapers, called for war with the United States over the incident. The French, too, sent a note to Washington supporting the British demands, underscoring the concert between the two European powers. Southerners greeted these events with glee. Surely the
Trent
affair offered Britain the excuse to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy.

Lincoln and his secretary of state, William H. Seward, waited as long as they dared to respond to the British note. Then, on Christmas Day, 1861, Lincoln and his cabinet settled upon a reply. The United States did not apologize; instead the government explained that Wilkes had acted “without orders” in the matter. As for Mason and Slidell, they would be “cheerfully surrendered.” That the explanation and surrender were accepted bore witness to the British determination to remain neutral. The
Trent
affair provided an excuse for England to go to war with the United States, but excuse meant little without the inclination to do so. The incident was all but forgotten by the time Mason reached London on January 29, 1862.
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