Caution and Cooperation

The American Civil War in British-American Relations

Phillip E. Myers

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776002
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A provocative reinterpretation of Civil War–era diplomacy

Click here to read a review from The British Scholar

"Phillip E. Myers's Caution and Cooperation places Anglo-American relations during the Civil War within the broader context of the whole nineteenth century, arguing convincingly for the lack of any real chance of British intervention on the side of the Confederacy and dating the end-of-the-century Anglo-American rapprochement back about three decades. Based on extensive research in the United States and Great Britain, this major reinterpretation of the transatlantic special relationship is 'international history' in its truest sense."

—Mary Ann Heiss, Editor, New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations Series

It has long been a mainstay in historical literature that the Civil War had a deleterious effect on Anglo-American relations and that Britain came close to intervention in the conflict. Historians assert that it was only a combination of desperate diplomacy, the Confederacy's military losses, and Lincoln's timely issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation that kept the British on the sidelines. Phillip E. Myers seeks to revise this prevailing view by arguing instead that wartime relations between Britain and the United States were marked by caution rather than conflict.

Using a wide array of primary materials from both sides of the Atlantic, Myers traces the sources of potential Anglo-American wartime turmoil as well as the various reasons both sides had for avoiding war. And while he does note the disagreement between Washington and London, he convincingly demonstrates that transatlantic discord was ultimately minor and neither side seriously considered war against the other.

Myers further extends his study into the postwar period to see how that bond strengthened and grew, culminating with the Treaty of Washington in 1871. The Civil War was not, as many have believed for so long, an unpleasant interruption in British-American affairs; instead, it was an event that helped bring the two countries closer together to seal the friendship.

Soundly researched and cogently argued, Caution and Cooperation will surely prompt discussion among Civil War historians, foreign relations scholars, and readers of history.

1

The Antebellum Rapprochement

The growth of cooperation between America and Britain after 1815 provides a clearer understanding about the activities and outcomes of the British-American relationship before, during, and after the Civil War. Britain and the United States stopped competing militarily for advantages in North America after 1815, and the absence of military maneuvers and the discovery of using diplomacy to settle disputes enabled relations to grow into a rapprochement from 1815 to 1861.¹ The British and American governments used similar principles of diplomacy because each had much more to lose than to gain from war. They refused to intervene when either got into international trouble, shelved disagreements that they could not resolve, and shrouded their dislike for one another to maintain peace. When they negotiated, they negotiated in private, out of the purview of public opinion. Personal communication was “more significant than official channels. Dispatches, memoranda, and reports undeniably exercised great influence, but personal letters and conversations had an enormous impact. Private correspondence from a friend not only appeared more trustworthy, it had the stamp of candor.”² The fact that provocative disputes were contained for decades attests to the mutual will not to fight. Repeatedly, diplomacy absolved the cousins of their mutual antagonisms and ensured peaceful settlements. To find the basis of this peaceful diplomacy, one has to dig through the bluster that was often in the news and look precisely at the actions of the governments’ views of national self-interest. Older histories support this view: “It may be doubted whether the various questions dealt with and settled between the two great English-speaking nations from the [Rush-Bagot] Treaty of 1817 … can be equalled for general sanity and fairness by any similar number of agreements made between any other Powers since history began. Nor, as far as definite acts are concerned, have the relations between any two nations ever been at once so intimate and so free from serious injury to one another.”³

In Great Britain and the American Civil War, Ephraim Douglas Adams advised for this longer view to explain the dynamics that charged relations. Although he hesitated to analyze why peace was the strongest characteristic in relations, he saw the value of the antebellum contingencies in explaining why the Civil War did not shatter relations. He implied that the peaceful destiny of both governments stemmed from cooperation. He did not believe that the Civil War was “an isolated and unique situation, but that the conditions preceding that situation—some of them lying far back in the relations of the two nations—had a vital bearing on British policy and opinion when the crisis arose.” Adams noted that “understanding the elements that influenced British perceptions of America during the mid-nineteenth century requires looking back to the end of the 1820s.”⁴

The mutual desire for peace stemmed from the foreign policy of both governments resting on the same philosophical structure, what Walter McDougall terms “unilateralism” and “minimalism.” Unilateralism meant that both governments eschewed formal alliances. Minimalism meant that each government wanted to gain maximum economic and strategic benefits abroad without aggression and at the lowest cost possible. These two strategies also meant that in the four decades before the Civil War British governments followed a realistic policy toward the United States instead of warring over disputes because the benefits of peace were too great to lose. The United States thought the same way: the rewards of a cooperative relationship were stronger than those of war. By the Compromise of 1846, Britain realized that the balance of power in North America had shifted to the United States, but that it was more important for Britain to surrender this costly stance than contest it. Britain could surrender without loss of honor, and it was hesitant to anger its best trading and investment partner. By the mid-nineteenth century the huge British banking houses led by the Baring brothers, the Rothschilds, and the American George Peabody and Company were at the height of their control over the Atlantic economy. These financiers knew how to build wealth, and the United States was critical in their pursuits. Historian Jay Sexton points out that American foreign indebtedness grew to unprecedented proportions in the twenty-five years before the Civil War. Thus it is no wonder that the Barings and their American agents such as Daniel Webster were forces in maintaining the diplomatic peace, to the extent that “ninety percent of the United States’ foreign indebtedness in 1861 was of British origin.”⁵

Despite what E. D. Adams wrote about the rapprochement’s being detectable from the 1820s, this shift to dependable relations can be detected as early as before the War of 1812. This war was an anomaly in relations, and the British had tried in vain to stop it in June 1812 but were too late. Relations improved after the war, as evidenced by both governments’ getting trade back on track, and ambiguous and incomplete agreements became permanent manifestations of the cooperative relationship. Britain needed the United States as an export and investment base, and it needed peace to import American cotton to keep its textile industries booming and to protect its weak North American colonies of Canada and the Maritimes (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island). Bilateral trade was restored by agreement in 1815. Signs of rapprochement continued in 1817 when the Rush-Bagot Agreement demilitarized the Great Lakes to remove that border region from conflict. The agreement stood as the first reciprocal naval disarmament “in the history of international relations.” Probably just as important in the antebellum decades was the wide-ranging and practical Convention of 1818 that further eased potential border tensions by demarcating the Canadian-American boundary along the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies. It called for joint occupation of the Oregon Territory west of the Rockies to the Pacific, and it was renewed in 1826 and continued until 1846. It also enabled New Englanders to fish in British colonial inshore waters where the best fishing was found; and they could dry and transship their catches from colonial shores. Even before the Convention of 1818, Britain refused to commit resources to the Northwest Coast, an area rich in furs and strategic locations for the Royal Navy to operate and support commercial operations into the Far East. In the decades that followed, conflicts were resolved by the mutual policy of conciliation and cooperation.⁶

These actions show that Anglo-American leaders worked to maximize their commonalities and shelve their differences. Both were each other’s best trading and investment partner, experienced industrial growth, and had expansionist goals. Both experienced social dislocations, with immigrants in the United States spilling into the eastern cities and into the farmlands of the Midwest and the far West, and in Britain, with farmhands dislocated into the teeming industrial cities by mechanization and the promise of higher wages. In addition, both governments were extremely suspicious of French pretensions in Europe and abroad. The Anglo-French rivalry remained after 1815, became pronounced by the 1830s, and grew apace over the next two decades. By 1861 the two powers were involved in an intense rivalry capped by the first modern arms race over ironclad ship construction and British fear of a surprise cross-channel invasion by French steam vessels no longer controlled by wind and waves.

Furthermore, at no time throughout the antebellum period could Britain withstand a two-front war against France and the United States. To guard against this eventuality, Britain and the United States advanced transatlantic commerce and popular democracy, both of which strengthened the common bond of democracy. The 1830s brought unprecedented foreign investments into the United States. Few Americans resisted this impetus to support the transportation and industrial revolutions. By 1838, foreigners had invested $110 million in American businesses. The ties between Britain and the United States were strengthened in this way because the huge increases in investments in American development showed that the United States could be trusted in fiscal matters. Baring Brothers spent huge sums on lobbying, propaganda, and its network of American agents, such as Webster, but also on journalists, politicians, and religious leaders.⁷

Other mutually beneficial movements occurred during this time. As the abolitionist movement flowered in the United States and took a strong hold on the Whig and then Republican parties, British antislavery legislation triumphed and the franchise was modestly extended. In the 1840s and 1850s North and Central American boundary settlements succeeded through British and American compromise that enabled the completion of American transcontinental expansion and mutual commerce in Central America. It is unsurprising that British Liberal and Conservative ministries sent leading financiers to Washington to negotiate these treaties partly to deflect the pressure of public opinion.⁸ Whether the territory negotiated was north or south of the American borders, the treaties were negotiated privately and quickly out of a desire to maintain calm relations. By the early 1840s both governments were aware that diplomatic disputes were not “in the interests of either British capitalists or their American debtors.”⁹

As already suggested, Palmerston was the key player that prevented Britain from going to war to solve the various American problems in the antebellum period. What was it about his career that made his blustering always stop short of war with the United States? From 1807 through 1865, he served as war minister, foreign secretary, home secretary, and prime minister. As a young administrator he learned about the realistic diplomacy that the British foreign secretaries of the day practiced to keep the peace. This realism helped to create the Convention of 1818 that settled boundary and fishery disputes until clearer agreements were possible. Palmerston unsurprisingly pursued a mild American policy during his first tour at the Foreign Office from 1830 to 1841, and President Andrew Jackson and his successors generally reciprocated his work. In 1835, Palmerston wrote that the United States and Britain were “joined by Community of Interests, & by the Bonds of Kindred.” Over the next two years he refused to encourage Texas independence or block its entry into the Union. Moreover, he stated, “that as far as our Commercial Interests are concerned we should have no objections to see the whole of Mexico belong to the United States.” In 1839, he wrote that “Commercial interests [with the United States] … are so Strong … that it would require a very extraordinary state of things to bring an actual war.” He deepened the friendship with the United States during his last five years as foreign secretary.¹⁰

In the 1840s, with an even more peaceful foreign secretary, the earl of Aberdeen, Britain privately ceded huge amounts of North American territory to the United States. Secretary of state Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton, who was a member of the Baring family but had renounced his American investments, negotiated the Maine boundary treaty privately and quickly in Washington in mid-1842. British financiers did not want a war over the disputed boundary. The Rothschild’s American agent, August Belmont, wrote to the home office in London that “England, in a war with her largest debtor, the consumer of her manufacturers, has all to lose and nothing to gain.” If negotiations were unsuccessful and a battle of national honor ensued, British investments would be completely suspended, trade would be reduced, and a run on banks might occur. Moreover, successful negotiations would increase American security rates on the London Stock Exchange. Webster (also a Baring’s agent) and Ashburton both agreed, as Webster remarked, “No difference shall be permitted seriously to endanger the maintenance of peace with England.”¹¹

Amid these pressures, the Webster-Ashburton negotiations showed that Britain and the United States respected each other’s intelligence and power, as they ignored traditional protocols and calmly negotiated a complex treaty concerning twelve thousand square miles bordering Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont. In what was becoming commonplace in the Anglo-American diplomatic tradition, they ensured that the provisions were not written until after the talks, kept few minutes, and exchanged few notes. The treaty tranquilized the Canadian-American border and provided joint operations against the slave trade (which the United States did not uphold until after the Civil War began). It also ended the illegal operations of groups who resented Britain, such as the Patriot Hunters, a secret society of Canadian rebels and their American supporters who disturbed relations during the Canadian rebellion against the mother country in the late 1830s. The treaty’s extradition provisions prohibited flights for safety across the border. Further cooperation came to the chagrin of Maine’s leaders, from Webster’s ceding territory along the contested Maine and New Brunswick border to Britain. This cession of territory was the only one made in any American treaty. With that treaty American leaders realized that Britain preferred not to fight about remaining territorial disputes to the extent that the treaty did not have to be precise in all respects, another common outcome. For example, Webster dropped demands for reparation for escaped slaves in return for a British pledge not to interfere with American ships brought into British ports that might be commandeered by slaves, as in the Creole case. Moreover, both parties expressed regret to each other over the awkwardness created in relations by the Caroline and McLeod disputes a few years before that had resulted in the death of an American at the hands of the British. As Jay Sexton writes, this treaty was created because it was at this time (and other times as well) more prudent to cover up the sore spots in relations than to negotiate a substantial treaty that would have proved impossible to accomplish.¹²

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 20 August 1842 proved to be a model to use in realizing cooperation over other sore spots in relations. A few years later, as the “Oregon question” began to fester, Boston author and diplomat A. H. Everett wrote President James K. Polk that Britain would “acquiesce” and negotiate an “equitable adjustment.” He reminded the president what British leaders had already certified: that trade was the basis for British foreign policy, and trade with the United States was worth more to it than all of its other commercial connections. Everett concluded that the abuse of the United States by the British press should not be perceived as critical to relations because the British government realized the “absolute political necessity, of entertaining friendly intercourse with us.”¹³

Polk did not heed Everett’s advice, however. The president went the way of the Democrats and blustered for “fifty-four forty or fight,” while emitting his famous manifesto that “the only way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the eye.” Secret lobbying by the Barings and Sen. Daniel Webster’s call for a compromise border at the 49th parallel gave the president more to think about. Conservative foreign secretary Aberdeen supported this plan, which was published in London journals. Moreover, Britain’s practical needs overrode forceful solutions. Both governments wanted to lower tariff barriers to increase the mutual economic benefits. For immediate purposes, Britain could import more staples from the United States to alleviate the plight of the starving Irish in the midst of the potato famine. American leaders were thoughtful about the challenge of funding a war against their largest creditor.¹⁴

In a fashion reminiscent of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the Oregon Treaty of 1846 was negotiated just as rapidly and privately in Washington in June 1846. In terms of the extent of the territorial cession to the United States, it far outdistanced the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. The United States gained more than 500,000 square miles of contested territory in the Pacific Northwest. In support of Everett’s prognosis, Palmerston proclaimed “that nothing could be more calamitous to both countries, than a war between Great Britain and the United States.” This treaty too was imprecise, with the water boundary along the 49th parallel extending through Puget Sound left unsettled because neither side could agree to lose control of the strategically located Haro Strait and deep water ports of the region that divided the San Juan Islands from Vancouver Island. As the natural boundaries of the United States began to be realized through these treaties, British statesmen and financiers showed that American Manifest Destiny, thought by prideful American leaders and midwestern Democrats to be a predetermined, God-given right and a symbol of national honor worth fighting for, was not as important as expanding finance and maintaining peace. As Jay Sexton points out, “There can be little question that the larger financial and commercial interdependence of Britain and the United States that they embodied connected the two nations to such an extent that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic desired to avoid war at all costs.” With the Mexican War brewing and thirty Royal Navy ships dispatched to North American waters as a deterrent to war, Polk opted for compromise over Oregon. As Sexton summarizes, “for the second time in less than five years, cool heads prevailed during a diplomatic crisis.”¹⁵

These cool heads continued to dominate relations with the tensions that the Crimean War of the mid-1850s threatened to unleash in British-American relations. With the British government distracted fighting Russia in the Near East, expansionist America took the opportunity to steal a march on Britain in the Western Hemisphere. Nothing happened as a result, because the expansionist focus of the United States was southward and westw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Realism and Private Diplomacy
• 1 The Antebellum Rapprochement
• 2 Caution, Cooperation, and Mutual Understanding, 1860–1864
• 3 The Trent Affair and Its Aftermath in the Rapprochement
• 4 Averting Crisis in
• 5 Dissolving Intervention in
• 6 Lincoln’s Cabinet Crisis of December 1862 in the Rapprochement
• 7 Mutual Support in
• 8 Mutual Dependence in
• 9 The Failure of Confederate Diplomacy and British Pro-South Impotence
• 10 Cooperation to End the Slave Trade and Promote Commercial Expansion
• 11 War’s End: Retrenchment and Commerce Ascendant
• 12 Conclusion: Accommodations and Rapprochement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index