Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

Closure of ports assumed that the insurrection was a localized and small-scale affair; ships of foreign nations might defy the closure and trade in those ports, but they were served notice that, at the end of the insurrection, ships that ignored the closure would be assessed for duties otherwise owed to the original government. It did not actually prevent outside supplies from reaching the ports and hands of rebels, and the most that the Federal navy could have done under those terms was stop a ship trying to enter a closed port, register a warning on the ship’s log, and then again stop the ship when it made a second attempt to enter. This left Lincoln with the problem of defining and imposing a blockade upon an insurrection—which was a contradiction in terms of international law.7

At the same time, though, Lincoln carefully avoided any use of terms suggesting that the Confederacy was a legitimate sovereign nation. Never would he use the term “Confederate States,” and he would describe them only as a “combination” that federal authority found “too powerful to suppress” by normal police action. He would act by blockade, as though the Confederacy were a sovereign nation, but he would talk insurrection, as if the Confederacy didn’t exist. In the eyes of the European powers, however, a blockade was a blockade, and in that case, other nations had one of three options open to them. They could agree to the pretense that the Confederacy was only an insurrection and forbid their own shipping to have any contact with rebel-held ports. They could agree that the Confederacy was not exactly a sovereign nation, but they could also point to the fact that it was a large-scale affair with a functioning government of its own, conducting what amounted in fact to a civil war. Under those circumstances, they might declare neutrality and concede belligerent rights to the Confederates. Conceding belligerent rights recognized that the conflict had moved from the realm of a mere uprising, to be suppressed as a police action, to a full-scale war, to be conducted by the international laws of war; this, in turn, would allow Confederate agents, emissaries, and suppliers to operate on foreign shores within certain limited spheres of action. Or they could go all the way up to formal diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Recognition might then trigger a Confederate appeal, as a nation to other nations, for allies, for international mediation, or for foreign intervention.

The neutrality/belligerent-rights option was, in fact, what the United States itself had practiced in the 1820s by conceding belligerent rights to Spain’s rebellious colonies in South America, and the British took swift advantage of this fact in May 1861, when the Foreign Office simultaneously proclaimed its neutrality in the American conflict but also extended belligerent rights to the Confederacy (even before the new American minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, had arrived to take up his duties). Adams protested this concession to the British foreign secretary, the crusty and dismissive Lord John Russell, but Russell had only to point out that this was the price the Americans were going to have to pay if they wanted to impose a blockade. “It was… your own government which, in assuming the belligerent right of blockade, recognized the Southern states as belligerents,” Russell later explained; in fact, the United States “could lawfully interrupt the trade of neutrals with the Southern States upon one ground only—namely, that the Southern States were carrying on war against the government of the United States; in other words, that they were belligerents.”8

Lincoln was not happy with the British decision, but he was unhappier still with the unsolicited attempts of his secretary of state, William Henry Seward, to respond to that decision on his own. Before his inauguration, Lincoln had been confronted with the need to placate the major Republican front-runners who had been passed over by his nomination, which was why he handed the Department of the Treasury to Salmon P. Chase, and why he gave the Department of State to William H. Seward, the most famous political name in the Republican Party. Seward had been the most prominent voice among the anti-slavery Whigs long before Lincoln had ever been heard of outside Illinois, and in 1860 he had confidently expected to win the Republican Party’s nomination without much contest. Of course he hadn’t, but when Lincoln offered the State Department to Seward as a sop to Seward’s political vanity and to cement the unity of the Republican Party, the New Yorker interpreted the proposal as a concession of weakness on Lincoln’s part.

Seward promptly cast his tenure in the role as a grand secretaryship, on the model of John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and Henry Clay. That led him to make on-the-spot decisions and bottomless promises that he lacked authority to make: on April 1, Seward actually presented a memorandum to Lincoln, seriously urging the president to provoke a war with France and Spain in the Caribbean as a way of reunifying the states in the face of a foreign threat. Lincoln ignored Seward’s proposal and made it clear that, so far as the war was concerned, the president would be responsible for foreign policy, not Seward.9 However, Lincoln did not anticipate Seward’s penchant for composing incontinent dispatches and firing them off to American diplomats to present to other governments. The worst of these dispatches went out to Charles Francis Adams a week after the British neutrality proclamation.

Seward entertained little affection for Great Britain, and British recognition of Confederate belligerency brought out the worst in him. On May 21, Seward drafted a violent protest against the British action that actually threatened the British with war if they made any attempt to intervene in the blockade or the American conflict. “The true character of the pretended new State is… a power existing in pronunciamento only,” Seward announced, and British recognition of belligerent rights would have no effect unless the British also meant to intervene militarily to “give it