Blue and Gray Diplomacy

A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations

Howard Jones

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781469629087, 9780807833490
• eBook ISBN: 9780807898574
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil.

Jones explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the North’s attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III’s meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans to understand the interrelated nature of slavery and union, resulting in their tendency to interpret the war as a senseless struggle between a South too large and populous to have its independence denied and a North too obstinate to give up on the preservation of the Union. Most of all, Jones explores the horrible nature of a war that attracted outside involvement as much as it repelled it.

Written in a narrative style that relates the story as its participants saw it play out around them, Blue and Gray Diplomacy depicts the complex set of problems faced by policy makers from Richmond and Washington to London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.

CHAPTER 1
Republic in Peril

No, you dare not make war on cotton.
No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King!

—SENATOR JAMES H. HAMMOND of South Carolina, March 4, 1858

The firm and universal conviction here is, that Great Britain,
France, and Russia will acknowledge us at once in the family of nations.

—SENATOR THOMAS R. R. COBB of Georgia, February 21, 1861

What possible chance can the South have?

—CALEB CUSHING of New York, late April 1861

Supporters of the Confederate States of America regarded themselves as the true progenitors of the republic and their secession from the Union as a return to the world of limited national government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In his Inaugural Address of February 1861 delivered in Montgomery, Alabama, President Jefferson Davis declared: “We have assembled to usher into existence the Permanent Government of the Confederate States. Through this instrumentality, under the favor of Divine Providence, we hope to perpetuate the principles of our revolutionary fathers…. Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.” Thus from the southern perspective, the Union was in peril, but not from the secessionists; rather, the danger came from a big government in Washington that had subverted the original Union's emphasis on states' rights into a northern tyranny. Southerners sought to unseat the northern power brokers who had devised an oppressive central government that had for too long trampled on the minority South by violating its right to manage its own affairs, whether tariffs, internal improvements, or slavery. The Union, as southerners saw it, had become an overly centralized governing mechanism run by a repressive northern majority. The agreement underlying the Philadelphia compact of 1787 had been broken; secession was the only remedy.¹

Shortly after the Civil War erupted in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asserted that his central objective was to preserve the Union based on a strong federal government created by the Founding Fathers. Secession therefore posed its most severe challenge because the South's attempt to stand on its own would destroy that Union. “The right of revolution,” he wrote, “is never a legal right. The very term implies the breaking, and not the abiding by, organic law. At most, it is a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause.” Otherwise, revolution is “simply a wicked exercise of physical power.” In his Inaugural Address of March 1861, he declared: “I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.” No government ever included “a provision in its organic law for its own termination.” Secession was “the essence of anarchy.”²

On many levels Davis and Lincoln waged a war for the very survival of the republic as each president defined the vision of the Founding Fathers. Well known were Davis's advantages in military leadership from the beginning of the war; also well known was Lincoln's frustrating search for a general who could rally a massive yet ineptly led war machine to victory. Lesser known were the two presidents' struggles on an international level—Davis's efforts to win diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy and hence the right to negotiate military and commercial treaties, and Lincoln's attempts to ward off a foreign intervention in the war that could have led to southern alliances undermining the Union. Whereas Davis sought to maintain the status quo—a southern civilization built on slavery and dependent on the Constitution's guarantees of property—Lincoln soon tried to construct an improved America based on ending slavery and adhering to the natural rights doctrine that underlay the Declaration of Independence. Davis considered the war a struggle for liberty, which he defined as the absence of governmental interference in state, local, and personal affairs—including the right to own slaves. In contrast, Lincoln came to regard the war as the chief means for forming a more perfect Union emanating from a new birth of freedom that fellow white northerners interpreted as the political and economic freedoms enjoyed under the Constitution but that he expanded to include the death of slavery and the Old South. Davis had such a legalistic mind that he thought the European powers relied on international law only when it served their self-interest; Lincoln was highly pragmatic, knowing he had to convince the foreign governments that it was not in their best interest to intervene in America's affairs. Davis appealed to Europe to acknowledge southern independence as a righteous cause and welcome the Confederacy into the community of nations; Lincoln insisted that the conflict in America was a purely domestic concern and warned that any outside interference meant war with the Union.³

Both sets of arguments were morally and legally defensible and thereby right, making the two opposing leaders' positions irreconcilable and, combined with the vendettalike infighting that often comes in a familial contest, ensuring a massive bloodletting that would stop only when both sides were exhausted.

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From the outbreak of the Civil War, the Confederacy's chief objective in foreign affairs was to secure diplomatic recognition from England first and then other European powers. Loans, a morale boost, military and economic assistance, perhaps even an alliance—everything was possible once the Confederacy won recognition as a nation. Shortly after the creation of its government in Montgomery in February 1861, the South sent three commissioners abroad, assigned to Great Britain, France, Russia, and Belgium, but always looking first to London. By no means did they expect British sympathy for their cause; not only were the British cold practitioners of a foreign policy grounded in self-interest, but also they opposed slavery, having outlawed it within their empire in 1833 and then hosting World Antislavery Conventions in London during the early 1840s. Furthermore, strong ties had developed between antislavery advocates in England and the United States. True, the British were not as staunchly antislavery as earlier, but they still supported abolition. Some of the more radical abolitionists, in fact, argued that southern independence would bring an end to slavery by making the region vulnerable to the influence of adjoining free territories. Southerners assumed that British sympathies would initially go to the Union and prepared to argue that the sectional struggle did not focus on slavery but on their drive for independence against an oppressive northern majority.⁴

Confederate leaders appealed to British self-interest by reminding their Atlantic cousins that mutual economic needs based on cotton tied them together. Thus “King Cotton Diplomacy” held the key to Confederate recognition and hence victory in the war. In 1858 Senator James H. Hammond of South Carolina insisted that if the South withheld cotton, “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King!” On December 12, 1860, just eight days before South Carolina announced secession, Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas confidently asserted in that august chamber: “I say that cotton is King, and that he waves his scepter not only over these thirty-three States, but over the island of Great Britain and over continental Europe.” A leading southerner assured a colleague that cotton was “the king who can shake the jewels in the crown of Queen Victoria.”⁵

The South appeared correct in assuming the overweening importance of cotton at home and abroad. The 1850s had been a time of great profit for cotton growers. The North, many southerners believed, needed the product so badly (about a fifth of the South's cotton went to markets above the Mason-Dixon Line by 1860) that it had no choice but to accept secession. As for the British, they consumed three times that amount and must extend recognition to the Confederacy in an effort to maintain the flow. If the North resisted secession, the British would act out of self-interest and intervene on behalf of the South. Up to 85 percent of the product they imported came from the South. A great portion of Britain's economic base—the textile industry and its five million workers—depended on southern cotton.⁶

The South's only concern, which it quickly dismissed, was that the British might seek other sources of cotton. Their Cotton Supply Association had already engaged in a search around the globe. But secession's supporters argued persuasively that the British had failed to increase their draw from India, which had offered the greatest potential alternative source. The South's cotton was king and hence its chief means for attaining recognition. The Richmond Whig boasted that the Confederacy had “its hand on the mane of the British lion, and that beast, so formidable to all the rest of the world, must crouch at her bidding.”⁷

By every economic measure, King Cotton Diplomacy should have won British recognition of southern independence. Cotton provided the breath of life for the Confederacy, and it surely was the lifeblood of the British textile industry. American cotton was purer and cheaper than that from India. In the two decades preceding the Civil War, British manufacturers turned to the South for most of their cotton supply. France and other nations in Europe were proportionately as reliant, although none of their production figures matched those in England. The British recognized the danger in becoming overly dependent on the South, but they also knew that Indian cotton lacked comparable quality. The latter, according to the Economist in April 1861, “yields more waste, that is, loses more in the process of spinning” because of the dirt and other particles gathered in the lint. “The Surat [Indian cotton] when cleaned, though of a richer color than the bulk of the American, is always much shorter in staple or fibre; the result of which is that in order to make it into equally strong yarn it requires to be harder twisted…. The consequence is that the same machinery will give out from 10 to 20% more American yarn than Surat yarn.” American cotton “spins better, does not break so easily and cause delay in work.” The cloth from Surat cotton “does not take the finish so well, and is apt, after washing, to look poor and thin…. In all respects (except color) the Indian cotton is an inferior article.”⁸

By 1860, more than four million people of about twenty-one million in the British Isles owed their livelihood to the cotton mills. The Times of London later warned that “so nearly are our interests intertwined with America that civil war in the States means destitution in Lancashire.” Soon afterward it proclaimed that “the destiny of the world hangs on a thread—never did so much depend on a mere flock of down!” A writer in De Bow's Review declared that a loss of southern cotton to England would lead to “the most disastrous political results—if not a revolution.” President Davis and his advisers were so confident in the leverage of cotton, according to his wife, that “foreign recognition was looked forward to as an assured fact.” They counted on “the stringency of the English cotton market, and the suspension of the manufactories, to send up a ground-swell from the English operatives, that would compel recognition.” The mere threat of a cotton cutoff, the South concluded, would force England to intervene in the war.⁹

The Confederacy, however, had overestimated the importance of cotton to diplomacy. The implicit though heavy-handed threat of extortion by slaveholders almost immediately alienated the British. In mid-January 1861 the Saturday Review in London warned that “it will be national suicide if we do not strain every nerve to emancipate ourselves from moral servitude to a community of slaveowners.” Later that month, the Economist likewise blasted King Cotton Diplomacy. How could southerners think that British merchants would want their government to “interfere in a struggle between the Federal Union and revolted states, and interfere on the side of those they deem willfully and fearfully in the wrong, simply for the sake of buying their cotton at a cheaper rate?” Furthermore, in a strange twist of fate, the region's economic successes hurt its drive for recognition. Southern farmers had produced bumper crops in the two seasons preceding secession winter, saddling both England and France with an enormous surplus of cotton. In early February 1861, the Economist issued a warning sign, denying the need for cotton and asserting that “the stock of cotton in our ports has never been so large as now.” But no Confederate official carefully examined the King Cotton premise. Moreover, southern strategists had overlooked the concurrent surge in British reliance on northern grains and foodstuffs during the 1850s, which had received impetus from their repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Britain depended on wheat imports from the Union that would predictably increase because of lower costs than in Europe. The need for wheat joined with other concerns to severely weaken King Cotton Diplomacy.¹⁰

The Confederacy nonetheless counted on cotton to overcome all obstacles to recognition, including British antipathy toward slavery, and fell under the illusion that success would come as a matter of course. In reality, southerners had no other viable economic options than King Cotton Diplomacy. Their greatest assets lay in slaves and real estate, neither of which was easily convertible into money. Cotton as collateral for loans, of course, carried little weight in light of England and France's huge surplus that would probably last into the fall of 1862. In addition, the Confederacy never officially implemented a cotton embargo. Davis did not support such a measure, despite authorization by some states, and Confederate leaders put an export tax on cotton and tacitly approved holding back supplies. The Confederacy's almost total dependence on outside manufactures dictated a turn to Europe for war necessities and other goods—a need hampered by its small fleet of ten viable merchant vessels. It was no surprise that on numerous occasions southern spokesmen ignored these hard realities and referred to either justice or divine intervention in asserting the surety of diplomatic recognition. A young southern patriot proudly chided the Times's military correspondent in the United States, William H. Russell: “The Yankees ain't such cussed fools as to think they can come here and whip us, let alone the British.” “Why, what have the British got to do with it?” asked Russell. “They are bound to take our part,” came the reply without hesitation and perhaps with a smirk. “If they don't we'll just give them a hint about cotton, and that will set matters right.”¹¹

To facilitate recognition, southerners tried to make slavery a nonissue. Louisiana secessionists told the British consul in New Orleans how much they wanted European support and, not by coincidence, took the occasion to offer assurances that their new government opposed reopening the African slave trade. Alabama and Georgia soon joined Louisiana in denouncing this “infamous traffic,” as did southern leaders then gathered in Montgomery to form their new government. Indeed, the Montgomery convention opening in early February 1861 required the Confederate Congress to outlaw the practice.¹²

British contemporaries remained skeptical about the South's efforts to diminish the importance of the peculiar institution. The great majority of workers hated slavery and favored the Union because of its emphasis on democracy and free labor. The Economist accused the South of lacking “scruples” and “morality” in supporting a system “strangely warped by slavery.” British Conservatives were torn by their opposition to the democracy associated with the Union and by their hesitation to support a southern struggle for nationalism that rested on a secession doctrine conducive to the same government disorder underlying the recent revolutions on the Continent. Despite the oft-argued claim that the so-called aristocratic South appealed to British Conservatives, they had found in their visits to the region that it was backward and based on slavery, whereas the North was industrialized, based on free labor, and more advanced. The highly heralded cities of Richmond and Charleston, in particular, were stricken by poverty and decay and greatly disappointed British travelers. Most of the British press considered slavery the root of America's troubles. Punch in London made its position clear when it sneered at the Confederacy as “Slaveownia.”¹³

The French likewise thought slavery lay at the heart of the sectional division in America. Numerous French journals joined Liberals and the public in considering Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin an accurate portrayal of slavery's inhumanity in the South and a sure stimulus to servile war. The Liberal opposition party perhaps seized on the slavery issue for domestic political purposes, but these same domestic issues could have great impact on the French government's decision on recognizing the Confederacy. According to Paul Pecquet du Bellet, a New Orleans attorney who had lived in Paris for several years, “War meant Emancipation.” Even the few “neutral” editors in France blasted the “Southern Cannibals” who feasted on young blacks for breakfast.¹⁴

The future of recognition rested largely in the hands of President Davis, of Mississippi, who appeared to personify everything the Old South romanticized itself to be. His administrative, political, and military background suggested...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Blue & Gray Diplomacy
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• CHAPTER 1 Republic in Peril
• CHAPTER 2 British Neutrality on Trial
• CHAPTER 3 The Trent and Confederate Independence
• CHAPTER 4 Road to Recognition
• CHAPTER 5 Union and Confederacy at Bay
• CHAPTER 6 The Paradox of Intervention
• CHAPTER 7 Antietam and Emancipation
• CHAPTER 8 Union-Confederate Crisis over Intervention
• CHAPTER 9 Requiem for Napoleon—and Intervention
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index