From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (39 page)

The
Trent
affair was both ominous and useful, forcing the United States and Britain at an early stage to confront the risks and possible costs of war. By eliminating a very real threat of conflict with Britain, it left the Union free to concentrate on defeating the Confederacy. But it did not end the possibility of recognition of southern independence or British intervention. And British leaders appear to have concluded from the experience that the best way to deal with the United States was to take a hard line.
²³

Following the
Trent
crisis, while Union and Confederate armies settled into their bloody struggle, diplomats from both sides competed for advantages that might determine the outcome of the war. Southern diplomacy
could never quite rise above its considerable limits. Communications posed especially difficult problems. The blockade and lack of access to a cable made it extremely difficult to issue instructions and receive dispatches. Confederate officials often had to get news from the northern press. Dispatches were lost or captured and sometimes appeared in Union newspapers.
²⁴
In dealing with Caribbean countries, southerners had to explain away their aggressive past, something they tried to do—with only limited success—by noting that they had sought additional territory only to preserve a "balance of power in a Government from whose dominant majority they feared oppression and injury."
²⁵
The Confederacy faced a huge challenge in persuading Britain and France to do things that threatened war with the Union. Most important, it could never overcome the stigma of slavery.

Ironically, although the Confederacy inherited through the national Democratic Party a corps of experienced diplomats, it made notably poor appointments. The first commissioners sent to England were an undistinguished group not well suited to a difficult assignment. William Lowndes Yancey, their spokesman, defended slavery with such passion that he quickly made himself unpopular in England.
²⁶
Slidell and Mason were both seasoned diplomats, but they were not especially effective. Mason was an intelligent individual, but his boorish behavior, his errant aim with tobacco juice, and his reputation as an apologist for slavery limited his efforts in England. Slidell was astute and experienced and presumably had an affinity with the French through his background in Louisiana and fluency in the language, but he never grasped what motivated French officials or how the government operated. Historian Charles Roland has wryly observed that the two did more good for their cause while incarcerated in a northern prison than when they actually took their posts. Mexican recognition could have been a huge boon to the Confederacy, but John Pickett of Kentucky was as bad a choice for that country as Joel Poinsett and Anthony Butler. Like those two notorious predecessors, he blustered and threatened and displayed open contempt for the Mexican nation and people. His personal behavior was reprehensible—he was jailed for assaulting another American in Mexico City and eventually bribed his way out. In all, southern diplomats were a provincial lot who, even by the
standards of the time, evinced enormous insensitivity to foreign cultures. They were much less astute than their Union counterparts when dealing with world affairs.
²⁷

Southern foreign policy was poorly conceived. Confederate leaders did not give diplomacy high priority or adequate attention at the outset. By the time they recognized its importance, it was too late. Confident of victory, they did not seek alliances or even foreign assistance. Inexplicably, the Confederacy did not try to establish ties with Russia despite its size and the importance of cotton exports. It did not appoint a mission until late 1862; the commissioner never made it to St. Petersburg.
²⁸
The South perceived the importance of an alliance with Mexico to secure access to the outside world through its ports, but it pursued this important goal in a bumbling way. Much in the mode of Butler, Pickett tried to bribe Mexico into recognition. That failing, like Poinsett, he backed the political opposition. When Mason met unofficially with Russell, he did not press the case for recognition and aid, perhaps the South's only hope for survival, letting Britain off the hook.

Even where it achieved some success, southern diplomacy was hemmed in by sharp limitations. Displaying a rare shrewdness born perhaps of necessity, the Confederacy negotiated in 1861 treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes living in Indian Territory in Oklahoma, even pledging that the Indians would not be "troubled or molested" by individuals or the states. The key provision for the Indians was the protection offered against the Union; in return, they vowed fealty to the South and even promised to fight. When the Confederacy could no longer provide such protection, however, and this came as early as the spring of 1862, the alliance disintegrated. The Indians were not inclined to assist a Confederacy that could do nothing for them.
²⁹

Confederate propaganda also revealed limitations. The key figure was Henry Hotze, a Swiss-born Mobile journalist who in May 1862 launched on his own the
Index,
a weekly newspaper propounding the southern point of view. In time, the Richmond government began to subsidize Hotze's work. It also sponsored a propaganda effort in France. Late in 1863, the Confederacy promoted the founding of a Society to Promote the Cessation of Hostilities, a pro-southern organization that used fact sheets, handbills, and lectures to sway British opinion toward recognition. Confederate propaganda evinced some sophistication, revealing a growing
maturity in southern foreign relations. Propagandists shrewdly concentrated on the hardest-hit areas of Britain, where they presumed their message would be best received. They admitted, however, that they could not get their point of view across even in these areas because of fierce working-class opposition to slavery.
³⁰

The South continued to rely on King Cotton. The voluntary embargo requested by the Confederate government was remarkably effective, far more so than Jefferson's leak-plagued efforts before 1812, making clear the power of southern nationalism. By the spring of 1862, the shortage of cotton began to have significant effects in Europe. Baron Rothschild spoke of a "whole continent in convulsion." Many British mills closed in 1862, prices skyrocketed, and unemployment steadily increased.

Whatever its effects, the cotton embargo did not live up to the faith placed in it. Economic sanctions take time to work, and time was not on the Confederacy's side. It was also a matter of strategy. The South tried to use the embargo as a "lever" to force European recognition. It might have done better to bargain shipments of cotton in return for recognition and assistance. The British blamed the South rather than the Union for the shortages. The virtual embargo of cotton undermined its value as a diplomatic weapon.
³¹

Timing also worked against King Cotton. When war broke out in 1861, England had a huge surplus in its warehouses, in large part because of a bumper crop in 1860 and record imports. There was also a surplus of manufactured cotton goods, so much so, in fact, that many factory owners had shut down or drastically cut back production to keep prices from plummeting. Despite the effectiveness of the voluntary embargo, greed could not be eliminated, and some cotton made it through the embargoes and the Union blockade. Later in the war, the loss of southern cotton was offset by new sources in Egypt and British India. As the Union began to occupy parts of the South, it made sure to get as much cotton as possible to England.

Other factors limited the presumed clout of King Cotton. However important southern cotton may have been to its economy, Britain also had vital economic ties to the North. Bad crops at home during the war forced it to turn to the United States for grain. King Wheat thus proved as important as King Cotton. British citizens had also invested heavily in U.S. canals, railroads, and banks, and these sizeable investments might be
threatened if Britain moved too close to the Confederacy. Finally, and perhaps ironically, the Civil War stimulated an economic boom in England in various industries, more than compensating for the loss of cotton. King Cotton may have worked as well as economic sanctions ever have, but it was still not enough. Not for the first time or the last did a nation, or in this case an aspirant nation, fall victim to the chimera of what Jefferson called "peaceable coercion."

The central task of northern diplomacy was easier, of course: to keep the British and French on the cautious path toward which they were already predisposed rather than persuade them to take drastic steps. A new political party, the Republicans had no reservoir of diplomatic experience to draw on, but their diplomats in key positions performed effectively, in some cases remarkably so. Seward matured quickly. He worked diligently to maintain the harmony in Anglo-American relations that followed the
Trent
affair. He attempted to use Union military success to deter any European move toward intervention and to turn cotton against the South by opening captured southern ports to European ships as a gesture of goodwill.
³²
Although ignorant of the language and unschooled in diplomacy, William Dayton of New Jersey proved a competent minister in Paris, establishing good relations with Napoleon III and working hard to head off French intervention.
³³
Nominally minister to Belgium, the wealthy Henry Sanford of Connecticut did much more. Imaginative, indefatigable, often meddlesome in the eyes of colleagues, Sanford was a one-man diplomatic wrecking crew, organizing a number of Union propaganda initiatives, establishing an "octopus-like" secret service network of private investigators and paid informants to track Confederate activities on the Continent, and overseeing and sometimes funding with his own money preemptive purchases to keep crucial war supplies out of Confederate hands. A colleague referred to Sanford without exaggeration as a "Legation on Wheels."
³⁴

Cassius Clay of Kentucky earned both notoriety and a measure of distinction in Russia. Clay was one of those anti-slavery radicals Charles Francis Adams labeled "the noisy jackasses," and his militance worried Lincoln. He was sent to St. Petersburg because, it was said, he could do no harm there and—more important—it would get him out of Washington. Clay wore a dazzling array of Bowie knives and brought to his post
his notoriously thin skin and propensity for the duel. His "pigeon wing" dancing provided amusement at court. Despite his characteristically eccentric behavior—maybe in part because of it—he proved a good choice. He came to admire the Russian people and to see Russia as "our sincere friend" and "most powerful ally." A surprisingly sophisticated diplomatist with a keen understanding of balance of power politics, he did nothing to harm the existing friendship. In many ways, he actively promoted it.
³⁵

Charles Francis Adams in London was even more effective—and much more significant. Like his illustrious father—and indeed grandfather—he also was a "bulldog among spaniels," relentless, tireless in bringing to British attention alleged violations of neutrality and warning of the pitfalls of intervention. Less combative than his distinguished forebears, characterized even by Russell as "calm and judicious," he also employed friendly persuasion to mitigate and reinforce Seward's threats. Adams is generally viewed as one of the most skillful diplomats to have served his nation, a person who made a difference during a critical period.

From expediency, the Union shelved its expansionist ambitions for the duration. Lincoln was in the Whig mold, believing that America's mission could best be carried out by demonstrating "before an admiring world . . . the capacity of a people to govern themselves."
³⁶
Seward, in contrast, was an avowed expansionist, whose vision of empire exceeded that of John Quincy Adams. But he understood that such ambitions must be put aside to deal with the emergency. Early in the war, Lincoln and Seward toyed with colonization schemes as a means to address domestic problems and expand U.S. influence abroad. The dispatch of freed slaves into Central America and Mexico, they reasoned, would not only ease racial tensions at home but also help ensure U.S. control over raw materials, harbors, and transit facilities in a vital area. The national security argument gained force as Europeans intervened in Mexico and Central America, In 1862, Congress appropriated funds for a colonization program. African Americans and abolitionists bitterly opposed the idea, however. When Central Americans expressed fears of "Africanization" and especially of the intrusion of a nation that had already revealed its true colors "in the aggression of Walker," Seward and Lincoln backed off.
³⁷

In large part to promote U.S. diplomatic objectives, Lincoln slowly and with the utmost caution seized the moral high ground. The United States recognized Haiti and Liberia in 1862. Still wary of measures long urged by abolitionists and opposed by southerners, the president took the unusual step of asking Congress to endorse the move. The first U.S. representative to Haiti held the relatively lowly rank of commissioner. Also in 1862, the United States and Britain agreed to a treaty providing for mutual searches to end the slave trade. "If I have done nothing else worthy of self-congratulation," Seward boasted, "I deem this treaty worthy to have lived for."
³⁸
In February 1863, the first American was executed for participation in that illegal activity. At least compared to the days when southerners controlled Congress, U.S. diplomacy was becoming increasingly color-blind.
³⁹

The issue of slavery had huge domestic and international implications, and Lincoln handled it with special care. As a young man, he had come to view the institution as morally wrong, but he accepted its protection by the Constitution. He had staunchly opposed the expansion of slavery but, like his idol Henry Clay, looked upon colonization as a possible solution to America's racial problems. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act pushed him toward a harder line. Claiming to be "thunderstruck and stunned" by a measure that infused new life into a moribund institution, he opposed the further expansion of slavery with great moral force. He insisted that the demise of this "monstrous injustice" was essential to preserve the United States as a beacon of freedom throughout the world. When the war began, he was sufficiently concerned about the loyalty of border states such as Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland and the support of moderates North and South to downplay slavery, focusing instead on preserving the Union. By July 1862, in the face of battlefield defeat and possible European intervention, he concluded that emancipation was a military necessity. Freeing the slaves in territory held by the Confederacy could undermine the southern war effort. It might fend off British and French intervention. It would preserve and indeed perfect the Union by securing the promises of freedom enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. "I shall not surrender the game leaving any available card unplayed," Lincoln affirmed.
⁴⁰
On Seward's advice, to avoid the appearance of desperation, he delayed any move until the Union achieved some battlefield success.