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00 caution and cooperation 5 Dissolving Intervention in 862 Good feelings following the Trent settlement, and cooperation in the first half of 862 gave way to Federal military defeats in the summer of 862. These defeats led Russell and Gladstone to consider intervention for humanitarian and other reasons .¹ Palmerston was initially interested, but large forces debunked the idea as the months passed. The tradition of isolation in British foreign policy in North America went back to the post–Napoleonic era when the two powers preferred to negotiate rather than intervene against each other. Britain had repeatedly shown that it did not want to fight in North America. It knew that the United States viewed intervention even for humanitarian purposes as a pro-South act and would retaliate. For that reason, Britain could not intervene unilaterally, and it needed France and Russia for support, which would not de-escalate tensions with the Union. The United States had made clear that intervention under any terms was unthinkable. Frank Merli recalls David Paul Crook’s point, made in the 970s, that the establishment of an “independent nation in America never impinged on a vital British interest.”² Traditional suspicions in British-French relations stymied joint intervention, and Russia was friendly toward the United States primarily to split Britain and France. The two western European powers opposed Russia’s attempts to subdue the Poles and the czar’s attempts to expand into central Asia. Finally, beginning in late September, once they found out about Russell’s plan, the quantified arguments against intervention by British statesmen far outweighed the qualitative arguments of Russell and Gladstone. Despite the Civil War, they wrote, British manufacturing and commerce continued to boom, public opinion was uninterested in intervention because there was prosperity at home, Palmerston’s majority was shaky, sources of cotton were available elsewhere, there were no overt acts of rebellion by the cotton workers, and there was no treasury to prosecute a foreign war. Britain’s policy should be one of watchful waiting, so Palmerston concluded, and this instinct satisfied his cabinet. To Palmerston, watchful waiting meant that he was past the dispute and was content to let the Civil War grind on to its natural 00 dissolving intervention in 862 0 outcome. Meanwhile, popular contentment at home and his unparalleled popularity remained uppermost. While Palmerston worked his way through the dispute, Russell’s fear of a slave insurrection peaked in August 862, and Seward could not get Lincoln’s cabinet to approve Russell’s plan for buying cotton directly from the planters in states under Union control, despite Seward’s promises that a solution was near. Russell refused to consider the plan further on 23 October, the same day as his informal cabinet met to consider intervention (discussed later in this chapter).³ There were more emotional reasons for intervening, along with wanting to stop the carnage and free themselves from the daily tensions that the Civil War brought to relations. Nevertheless, the diplomacy of caution and realism as to outcomes overcame the qualified reasons that were used to justify the intervention debate. So why was intervention considered at all? Perhaps the most general reason is that the war had driven Russell to the depths of his political and diplomatic talents with its fits and starts. He was tired of it despite his commendable prosecution of diplomacy with the United States. Several bits of information came to him in July, August, and September that caused him to focus on intervention. Russell was informed by Stuart of Seward’s belief stated on 2 July that a servile insurrection would occur within six months to complement the pro-Unionism of that party in the South.⁴ Fearing an unprecedented slaughter of innocent people and not being able to forecast the future, a stolid Russell began to think that enough was enough, that there was going to be no end to the bloodshed, and that something had to be done from the outside. A few days later, on the morning of 29 July, the Alabama escaped from Birkenhead and, once armed in the Azores, quickly began decimating the Union merchant marine on the world’s oceans. Under American pressure since 22 June to stop the ship from being completed, Russell had tried to secure evidence to detain the No. 290. Thomas Dudley, the American consul at Liverpool, was reticent at getting sound evidence to the British government in a timely manner . Russell and the government acted with the utmost...

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