Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations

CHAPTER 5. Union and Confederacy at Bay

145 c ha p t e r 5 Union and Confederacy at Bay The war has become one of Separation—or Subjugation. Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell — , June 9, 1862 While I do not wish to create or indulge false expectations, I will venture to say that I am more hopeful than I have been at any moment since my arrival in Europe. John Slidell to Judah P. Benjamin — , July 25, 1862 The threat of European intervention intensified in the summer of 1862, highlighted by the first pitched debate on the issue in Parliament. The Union’s victory at New Orleans had not quieted the advocates of British and French involvement in the war. Indeed, Russell rejected Adams’s appeals to revoke the belligerent status of the South, as did Napoleon in overriding Dayton’s protests, repeatedly expressing interest in intervention but holding back until England took the lead. Russell infuriated Adams by declaring again that neutrality was “exceedingly advantageous” to the Union. Relations became so raw that William H. Russell warned his fellow British citizens that the Union might turn on England next. How bitter for the Union that its victory at New Orleans had failed to undercut the pressure for British and French intervention! Surging economic problems in both countries forced legislators to consider interceding. Some British observers regarded the fall of the southern port city as an aberration, one that misled the Union into believing it possible to defeat the Confederacy . The result would be prolonged fighting that hurt their own economy and that of France as well. French cotton supplies had already dropped to a 146 Union and Confederacy at Bay dangerous level, and by the autumn of 1862, the British surplus would have disappeared. Challenging the Union blockade meant certain hostilities, leaving mediation as the only viable solution to the war. The process was less provocative than an arbitration in that mediation entailed no binding terms—simply a friendly offer to sit with the two adversaries and explore avenues for peace that they both must accept before becoming final. But when Richard Cobden, no southern sympathizer, broached this idea at a breakfast meeting with Adams, the minister sternly replied that the European powers participating in such a venture must have a detailed peace plan. Slavery was the central issue, Adams maintained; the Union, he believed, would reject any arrangement that permitted the institution to survive, whereas southerners regarded its continuation as vital to their future. There was no room for compromise: Lincoln insisted on union, Davis on disunion. “It was the failure to comprehend this truth,” Adams wrote in his diary that evening, “that clouded every European judgment of our affairs.” Anglo-French interest in intervention after the collapse of New Orleans greatly alarmed the Union. The threat of a joint action seemed so real to the Lincoln administration, according to Lyons, that it had temporarily toned down criticisms of the Palmerston ministry in an effort to avoid a confrontation and defuse interest in stepping into the fight. Lyons believed that Seward thought the French involvement in Mexico might undermine the entente and reduce the danger of intervention, but the truth was that Napoleon had become more determined to see the American conflict end with southern independence, even if that entailed intervention. Though not yet clear to his foreign contemporaries, the emperor’s purpose was to fashion a Confederacy both beholden to him for achieving independence and powerful enough to ward off Washington’s opposition to his expansionist aims in northern Mexico as well as in the southwestern part of the present United States. But what form should intervention take? What territorial spoils would he demand without antagonizing the Confederacy? And, most important, how would intervention ensure an influx of cotton? Mercier had expressed concern that the Confederacy would fight at the risk of its own destruction and, thinking like the British, that the Union’s expected demand for immediate emancipation would spark a race war that disrupted the southern economy and stopped the cotton flow. Such a conflict could spread beyond sectional boundaries and drag in other nations. Lyons thought Mercier correct in his summary of the dilemma confronting the powers: A decision not to inter- Union and Confederacy at Bay 147 vene guaranteed massive economic destruction in America that could hurt world commerce, whereas intervention meant involvement in the war without assured benefits. If the Union’s military advances continued...