The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (26 page)

Still, there was reason for the new commissioners to be optimistic. The English and French mills seemed at last to have reached the bottom of their stockpiles of cotton; the great famine was at hand. During the first year of the war, Southerners had practiced a kind of informal embargo on cotton. President Davis was reluctant to make the embargo a matter of public policy or law, because he did not wish to give the impression that the new nation was blackmailing Europe or that the Confederacy had departed from its basic free trade posture. Nevertheless with an amazing degree of unanimity, Southerners withheld shipments of cotton in 1861, and in accord with laws of several states the planters reduced their cotton acreage in 1862. These actions, combined with the Federal blockade, severely reduced cotton supplies in Britain and France.
¹⁷

Throughout 1862 the European mills were able to buy only a fraction of their normal supply of cotton, and they paid premium prices for it. When the mills ran short of raw cotton, they reduced their operating time, and when they exhausted their supplies, they shut down entirely. The working classes in England and France suffered; among mill workers an estimated 330,000 in England were unemployed during November of 1862, and in France about 220,–000 were unemployed during the winter of 1862–1863. The cotton famine destroyed many of the smaller milling operations and depressed any segment of the economy that depended on the purchasing power of cotton mill workers.
¹⁸

As the cotton famine worsened during the early months of 1862, the Confederate position in Europe was paradoxical. On the one hand the Southerners hoped, as they had hoped all along, that the shortage of cotton would compel Britain and France to confront the United States over its blockade of the Confederacy. Such a confrontation would, the Confederates believed, result in recognition and assistance from the European powers, and to this end they blamed the cotton famine upon the Union blockade. On the other hand the Confederacy claimed that the Union blockade was in violation of international law because it was a “paper blockade,” that is, Union ships did not patrol every mile of the Southern coast. Obviously, the blockade was either effective or it was not effective, and King Cotton would resolve the paradox. To secure cotton, the British and French would have to support the Confederacy, either by breaking an effective blockade or by challenging one that was ineffective.
¹⁹

In fact the British and French fretted a great deal about the Northern blockade. Both nations were alarmed when the United States Congress enacted legislation closing Southern ports to international commerce and when the Union navy tried to seal Charleston Harbor by sinking a number of old whaling ships loaded with rocks—the “great stone fleet”—at the harbor mouth. In terms of the number of ships it seized, the Federal blockade may have been quite porous, but as a factor in Atlantic diplomacy, it was very real to the European mind.
²⁰

Nevertheless, for reasons which defied the Confederates’ understanding, England and France clung to their lofty neutrality in the spring of 1862. Despite the presumed justice of the Southern cause, the
“Trent
affair,” the blockade, and the “cotton famine,” Mason and Slidell still represented a non-nation in London and Paris.

Actually the British and French had good reasons to wait and see. The “cotton famine” may have severely injured some portions of the working class; but the mill managers and owners were not nearly so disturbed. They had warehouses full of cotton cloth, the product of the cotton glut in 1860 and 1861. Faced with the prospect of rising prices for raw cotton and falling prices for their finished products, the owners and managers were content to stop production for a time. Britain and France were able to import cotton from India, Egypt, and Brazil, and in fact the British even resold increasing amounts of raw cotton to France. Moreover the price of Northern grain was declining, and British traders were able to substitute wheat for cotton without challenging the Federal blockade. There is reason to believe that the crisis in the British cotton districts was one of overproduction instead of scarcity, and that the republican press of Paris exaggerated the crisis. In both countries the American war was a convenient scapegoat upon which to blame economic ills. To Southerners’ chagrin, “King Cotton” proved to be a puppet monarch whose strings the Confederacy did not control.
²¹

The European powers were most anxious about the military answer to the American question. Neither England nor France wanted to support a loser. If the Southerners proved themselves capable of perpetuating their independence, then Europe would be foolish to ignore the
fait accompli.
However, as long as the military issue remained in serious doubt, Europeans could afford to stand aside. And stand aside they did.

The Southern diplomats by 1862 had watched the Palmerston government accept the United States’ explanation of the
Trent
affair and had witnessed the “mistress of the seas” submit to the Union “paper blockade.” Slidell believed, correctly, that Napoleon III was sympathetic to the South but that the French foreign ministry—and for the most part the French people—favored the North. The two unofficial ambassadors had seen the cotton famine worsen without apparent effect upon the governments in London and Paris. They knew that the French minister to the United States, Henri Mercier, had visited Richmond in April of 1862 to meet President Davis, but as far as Mason and Slidell could see, the impressive string of Southern victories during the summer was having no tangible impact. Such a set of favorable circumstances surely should bear fruit, yet thus far the powers had remained aloof.
²²

Although nothing that Mason and Slidell did much influenced the British and French governments, Confederate diplomacy underwent a subtle change during 1862. While the Southern commissioners were doing their unofficial best to plead their case to European governments, Southern propagandists began the more basic task of selling the cause to broader segments of the foreign populace. The Confederate public relations effort, designed to counter the influence of “official” (United States) sources of American news, began in the mind of Secretary of State Benjamin and of a Swiss-born Mobile journalist named Henry Hotze. Hotze traveled to London in 1861 as a commercial agent and became a free-lance propagandist; then in May of 1862 he launched
The Index,
a weekly paper offering a Southern slant on scrupulously accurate news of the war. Hotze also “educated” British journalists to the Confederate cause and so expanded his influence. Secretary Benjamin, when he realized the depth and quality of Hotze’s contribution, hastened to subsidize his efforts from Richmond.
²³

Even as Hotze prepared his first issue, in April, 1862, Benjamin appointed Edwin DeLeon, a well-connected South Carolinian who had been living in France when the war began, to coordinate Confederate public relations activities in Europe. DeLeon returned to France in July 1862, where he used government funds to subsidize the Paris
Patrie,
advanced money to Hotze, and in the summer of 1862 produced a pamphlet,
la vérité sur les États-Confédérés d’Amérique,
for the instruction of the French press and public. In September, DeLeon was able to insert a favorable article on President Davis in
Blackwood’s
magazine, and the following month he wrote a piece on the ineffectiveness of the blockade for
Cornhill
magazine.
²⁴

The activities of Hotze and DeLeon bore witness to an increased degree of maturity in Confederate foreign relations. The Yancey-Rost-Mann mission in the summer of 1861 foundered in part at least because at the time Southerners had too naïve a faith in the righteousness of their cause and too simple a dependence on the potency of King Cotton. The
Trent
affair, the Union blockade, and the cotton famine demonstrated too well that obtaining recognition and/or intervention from the European powers was going to be no simple matter. The Confederate State Department altered its tactics accordingly. Mason and Slidell remained at their posts, but they no longer expected a grand coup in London or Paris to sweep away British or French neutrality. Instead they applied themselves to the more fundamental tasks of initiating and cultivating Southern friendships in government circles. Mason, ever frustrated by the aloof neutrality of Palmerston and Russell, sought to guide and expand sympathy for the South in Parliament. Slidell, aware of Napoleon’s friendly inclinations toward the Confederacy, tried to wean the French emperor from his ministry, his people, and his dependence upon concert with England. But although they were based upon clear-eyed analysis and probably held the most promise of success, the machinations of Mason and Slidell, like those of Hotze and DeLeon, came to naught. Certainly by the fall of 1862 the quality of Southern diplomacy had advanced several paces beyond the simplicity displayed by Yancey, Rost, and Mann.
²⁵

Ultimately the South’s hopes for independence marched with its armies, and indeed when the Army of Northern Virginia invaded Maryland in the fall of 1862, Palmerston and Russell became convinced of the depth and potential of Southern separation. On September 14, Palmerston wrote to Russell about Anglo-French mediation and “an arrangement upon the basis of separation.”
²⁶
Russell responded, “I agree with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the United States Government, with a view of the recognition of the Independence of the Confederates—I agree further that in case of failure, we ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States, as an Independent State.”
²⁷

In accord with these convictions, Russell informally approached his counterpart in Paris, Antoine Edouard Trouvenel, and discussed with Palmerston a date for a meeting of the cabinet to approve the mediation scheme.
²⁸
Russell was still firm in this policy on October 4, when he wrote Palmerston, “I think unless some miracle takes place this will be the very time for offering Mediation.”
²⁹
And on October 7, Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone let the cat out of the bag. Speaking at Newcastle, Gladstone affirmed, that, “Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.”
³⁰

Then, just as quickly as the mediation enthusiasm had developed in England, it evaporated. On October 24, Russell wrote to Palmerston, “As no good would come of a Cabinet [to consider mediation], I put it off.”
³¹
Actually, in Palmerston’s absence, a number of cabinet members did meet informally with Russell on October 23 and decided to forget mediation for the time being.
³²

During the brief period between the rise and fall of the British mediation mania, English statesmen received and digested two significant pieces of news from North America: Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation. On September 17, Lee’s invasion of Maryland suffered its bloody repulse on the banks of Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg. In the aftermath of that battle, on September 22, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. These events gave the British cabinet pause and weakened the French resolve to act jointly with the British. Lee’s retreat into Virginia meant that Washington and Baltimore were again safe and the South was again on the defensive. Emancipation, even though it applied only to those slaves in rebel hands, introduced a moral dimension heretofore lacking in the American war. Now the war for Union was a crusade against slavery.

Important as Antietam and emancipation were, other considerations contributed to England’s return to nonintervention. Mediation was attractive to free-traders who resented the Federal blockade, to liberals who supported self-determination, to conservatives who felt a kinship with landed aristocrats in the South, and to some varieties of nationalists who looked with favor upon the dissolution of the United States. But these attractions were essentially abstract. In the end British statesmen had to face the hard reality of what might follow an unsuccessful offer of mediation and subsequent recognition of the Confederacy: they had to ponder the consequences of a North American war. And if the British should be drawn into an American war, they wanted to support the winning side. In this regard, Antietam and emancipation were indecisive; neither event broke the American impasse to reveal a victor.
³³

On September 29, Lord President of the Queen’s Council, George Gower, the Second Earl of Granville, a Liberal-Whig elder statesman in foreign affairs, best summarized the case against mediation and recognition. In a rambling, stream-of-consciousness-style letter to Russell, Granville observed, “We might selfishly argue that it was not politically disadvantageous to us that both parties should exhaust themselves a little more before they make Peace…. I doubt whether in offering to mediate, we should do so with any bona-fide expectation of its being accepted…. It would not be a good moment to recognize the South just before a great Federal Success—If on the other hand, the Confederates continue Victorious as is to be hoped, we should stand better then than now in recognizing them. In any case I doubt, if the War continues long after our recognition of the South, whether it will be possible for us to avoid drifting into it.”
³⁴

The logic of Granville’s musing was compelling, and the date of his letter especially significant. Granville wrote from the continent on September 29; first reports of the Battle of Antietam did not reach England until September 30, and news of the Emancipation Proclamation came later still. Granville’s letter was only one of many in which members of Palmerston’s government expressed their views on the American question. The British government considered the question still unanswered, and recoiled from answering it at the cost of becoming embroiled in a potentially debilitating foreign war.
³⁵