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Preventing Diplomatic Recognition of the Confederacy: 1861-1865
One of the most important victories won by the United States during the American Civil War wasn't even fought
on a battlefield. Rather, it was a series of diplomatic victories that ensured that the Confederacy would fail to achieve
diplomatic recognition by even a single foreign government. Although this success can be attributed to the skill of Northern
diplomats, the anti-slavery sentiments of the European populace, and European diversion to crises in Poland and Denmark, the
most important factor stills rises from the battlefields on American soil. The Confederate states were incapable of winning
enough consecutive victories to convince European governments that they could sustain independence.
Southerners began the war effort confident that the cotton their plantations provided European textile manufacturers
would naturally ally their governments to the Confederacy, especially Great Britain. After declaring secession, the North
would declare a blockade on Southern ports. Any interruption of cotton supply would disrupt the British economy and reduce
the workers to starvation, they thought. Britain would have to break the blockade and provoke a war with the North that would
allow Confederates to solidify independence and gain international recognition.
When the Union did declare a blockade upon the rebel states in April 1861, however, it did not prompt the
response expected from the Europeans. The blockade’s legal and political implications took on greater significance than
its economic effects because it undermined Lincoln's insistence that the war was merely an internal insurrection. A blockade was a weapon of war between sovereign states. In
May, Britain responded to the blockade with a proclamation of neutrality, which the other European powers followed. This tacitly
granted the Confederacy belligerent status, the right to contract loans and purchase supplies in neutral nations and to exercise
belligerent rights on the high seas. The Union was greatly angered by European recognition of Southern belligerency, fearing
that is was a first step toward diplomatic recognition, but as British Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell said, “The
question of belligerent rights is one, not of principle, but of fact.”
Sensitive to any further international recognition of the Confederates as statesmen rather than rebels, Secretary
of State William H. Seward instructed Charles Francis Adams, Minister to England and the son of former Secretary of State
and President John Quincy Adams, to warn the British not to “fraternize with our domestic enemy,” whether officially
or unofficially, or risk an Anglo-American war. But the Union realized that Europe’s declarations of neutrality also
constituted official acceptance of the blockade, a position with many long-standing implications. Although international law
stated that a blockade must be “physically effective” to be legally binding on neutral powers, the definition
was ambiguous. From before the War of 1812, the United States had insisted upon a strict definition in order to maintain trading
rights as a neutral. Now, however, the United States was the belligerent and Britain the predominant neutral power.
By officially respecting the Union blockade, even if it was not fully “physically effective,” Britain maintained
a consistent position on belligerent rights. The U.S. reversal of its traditional position stressing neutral rights set the
precedent that it would be obligated to respect the British argument in future naval issues. (See: American Civil War and International Diplomacy and The Trent Affair.)
Sources: U.S. State Department; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
Recommended Reading: King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America.
Description: On its initial publication King Cotton
Diplomacy was hailed as a definitive study of Confederate foreign affairs. It was most highly acclaimed for its fresh interpretations
of the reasons why England and France refused to grant recognition and aid to the Confederacy. Harriet Chappell
Owsley presents a new and revised edition . . . and has in many places tightened and improved the literary style, but she
has permitted the new volume to retain both the substance and the flavor of the earlier edition. Continued below...
This book is
the exhaustive, definitive study of Southern attempts to gain international support for the Confederacy by leveraging the
cotton supply for European intervention during the Civil War. Using previously untapped sources from Britain and France, along with documents from the Confederacy’s
state department, Frank Owsley’s King Cotton Diplomacy is the first archival-based study of Confederate diplomacy.
Recommended Reading:
Secret History of Confederate Diplomacy Abroad (Hardcover). Description: One of the South's most urgent priorities in the Civil War was
obtaining the recognition of foreign governments. Edwin De Leon, a Confederate propagandist charged with wooing Britain and France,
opens up this vital dimension of the war in the earliest known account by a Confederate foreign agent. First published in
the New York Citizen in 1867-68, De Leon's
memoir subsequently sank out of sight until its recent rediscovery by William C. Davis, one of the Civil War field's true
luminaries. Both reflective and engaging, it brims with insights and immediacy lacking in other works, covering everything
from the diplomatic impact of the Battle of Bull Run to the candid opinions of Lord Palmerston to the progress of secret negotiations
at Vichy. Continued below.
De Leon discusses,
among other things, the strong stand against slavery by the French and a frustrating policy of inaction by the British, as
well as the troubling perceptions of some Europeans that the Confederacy was located in South America
and that most Americans were a cross between Davy Crockett and Sam Slick. With France's
recognition a priority, De Leon published
pamphlets and used French journals in a futile attempt to sway popular opinion and pressure the government of Napoleon III.
His interpretation of the latter's meeting with Confederate diplomat John Slidell and the eventual mediation proposal sheds
new light on that signal event. De Leon was a keen observer and a bit of a gossip, and his opinionated details and character
portraits help shed light on the dark crevices of the South's doomed diplomatic efforts and provide our only inside look at
the workings of Napoleon's court and Parliament regarding the Confederate cause. Davis adds
an illuminating introduction that places De Leon's
career in historical context, reveals much about his propagandist strategies, and traces the history of the Secret History
itself. Together they open up a provocative new window on the Civil War.
Recommended Reading: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Description: It hardly seems possible that there is more to say about someone who has been subjected to such minute scrutiny in
thousands of books and articles. Yet, Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln
manages to raise fresh and morally probing questions, challenging the image of the martyred 16th president that has been fashioned
carefully in marble and bronze, sentimentalism and myth. In doing so, DiLorenzo does not follow the lead of M. E. Bradford
or other Southern agrarians. Continued below...
He writes primarily not as a defender of the Old South and its institutions, culture, and traditions, but
as a libertarian enemy of the Leviathan state. DiLorenzo holds Lincoln and his war responsible for the triumph of "big government" and the birth of the
ubiquitous, suffocating modern U.S. state.
He seeks to replace the nation’s memory of Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator”
with the record of Lincoln as the “Great Centralizer.”
Recommended
Reading: One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War. Review:
One War at a Time - Lincoln's axiom for Union diplomacy- refutes
the opinion of most historians and biographers that Lincoln played
only a minor role in U.S.
foreign relations. It reveals his continuing efforts to avoid a war with England or France while using the threat
of war to prevent European recognition of Confederate independence. Mahin covers Confederate efforts to obtain diplomatic
recognition, the construction of warships for the Confederacy in Britain,
the British role in the blockade-running operation, and the postwar "Alabama
claims" against Britain.
Mahin also provides the first full analysis of U.S.
and Confederate reactions to the French intervention in Mexico
and to the efforts to establish an imperial government in Mexico.
Recommended
Reading: Union in Peril: The Crisis over British
Intervention in the Civil War. Review: The Lincoln
administration feared that Great
Britain would officially recognize the Confederacy during
the Civil War, thereby granting legitimacy to secession and undermining the U.S. Constitution. What did happen, and why, is
brilliantly described by Howard Jones in Union in Peril:
The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Continued below…
“An attractively
written, cogently argued study that merits a prominent place on the bookshelves of Anglo-American and Civil War scholars.”—Journal
of American History
(Journal of
American History)
“Jones
offers a fresh revision . . . on why England
failed to intervene in the American fratricidal struggle. . . . [His] book combines a delightful writing style with excellent
bibliography and footnotes. It is based on solid research, primarily in original sources. It is a work that will serve well
both the scholar and the general reader.”—American Historical Review (American Historical Review)
“Thought-provoking
. . . Jones does a laudable job of presenting both the British arguments for and against intervention and the foundations
of the crisis in the relationship between [Great Britain
and the United States].”—Library
Journal
(Library Journal)
About the Author:
Howard Jones, University Research Professor in history at the University of Alabama,
is the author of numerous books, including To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1843
and Course of American Diplomacy: From the Revolution to the Present.
Recommended Reading: Civil War High Commands
(1040 pages: Hardcover). Description: Based on
nearly five decades of research, this magisterial work is a biographical register and analysis of the people who most directly
influenced the course of the Civil War, its high commanders. Numbering 3,396, they include the presidents
and their cabinet members, state governors, general officers of the Union and Confederate
armies (regular, provisional, volunteers, and militia), and admirals and commodores of the two navies. Civil
War High Commands will become a cornerstone reference work on these personalities and the meaning of their commands, and on
the Civil War itself. Errors of fact and interpretation concerning the high commanders are legion in the Civil War literature,
in reference works as well as in narrative accounts. Continued below...
The present
work brings together for the first time in one volume the most reliable facts available, drawn from more than 1,000 sources
and including the most recent research. The biographical entries include complete names, birthplaces, important relatives,
education, vocations, publications, military grades, wartime assignments, wounds, captures, exchanges, paroles, honors, and
place of death and interment. In addition to its main
component, the biographies, the volume also includes a number of essays, tables, and synopses designed to clarify previously
obscure matters such as the definition of grades and ranks; the difference between commissions in regular, provisional, volunteer,
and militia services; the chronology of military laws and executive decisions before, during, and after the war; and the geographical
breakdown of command structures. The book is illustrated with 84 new diagrams of all the insignias used throughout the war
and with 129 portraits of the most important high commanders.
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