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

body and independence by resisting our measures of suppression.” In that case, Seward trumpeted, “we, from that hour, shall cease to be friends and become once more, as we have twice before been… forced to become, enemies of Great Britain.”10

It was not clear from Seward’s logic whether the British proclamation was to be treated as an intervention itself, whether the next British ship to try its chances on the blockade would constitute such an intervention, or whether intervention meant the formal use of warships and troops on U.S. soil. That unsteadiness of focus only made the dispatch more inflammatory, and Seward’s little manifesto might have been enough, all by itself, to bring on a war had not Charles Francis Adams took it upon himself to delete the most provocative passages in the document before reading it to Lord Russell. Russell merely reminded Adams that the United States itself had granted belligerent status to the Latin American republics when they rose in rebellion against their Spanish colonial masters, and he added that the United States had tried to extend similar status to French Canadian rebels in a revolt against British authority in Canada in 1837. As for the belligerent status of the Confederacy, the Lincoln government might claim that the Confederacy was merely an insurrection, but to British eyes the Confederacy was an organized government with its own constitution, congress, and president, with an army and 9 million citizens behind it. In the end, all that Seward’s note served to create was a dangerous and highly charged diplomatic atmosphere that would require only a small spark to ignite an explosion.11

The greatest difficulty the imposition of a blockade posed for Lincoln was a practical one: how was the U.S. Navy to enforce it? In 1864, Denmark’s tiny navy struggled to enforce a blockade of the coast of Prussia during its brief and unhappy war with Prussia and Austria and succeeded only intermittently, despite the inability of the Prussians to float more than a handful of gunboats and corvettes in their own defense.12 On the day Lincoln proclaimed the blockade to be in effect, the U.S. Navy listed only forty-two ships in commission, and of them only twenty-four were modern steam-powered vessels (and just three of those were in Northern ports at the outbreak of the war and thus available immediately for blockade duty). Before them stretched 3,550 miles of Southern coastline, with 189 openings for commerce and nine major ports—Charleston, Wilmington, Mobile, Galveston, New Orleans, Savannah, Pensacola, Norfolk, and Jacksonville.

The suggestion that a blockade of the Confederacy now existed with these ships seemed preposterous. In short order, the aggressive secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, chartered or commissioned 200 vessels of various sizes and descriptions, while 23 specially designed steam-powered blockade gunboats (which became known as the ingenious “ninety-day gunboats”) were laid down and completed by March 1862. On April 30, Norfolk was officially blockaded, followed by Charleston on May 28, New Orleans on May 31, and Wilmington on July 21.13

The speed of the navy’s mobilization stunned the Confederacy. Yet that speed presented a problem for the Federal navy, too, for in addition to the logistical problems of supplying and organizing these vessels, few Federal naval officers were prepared to deal with the even more incendiary difficulties in international diplomacy that blockade duty might present. In November 1861 one of those officers struck off the fireball that almost created war between the United States and Great Britain.

On November 8, 1861, the Federal steam sloop San Jacinto stopped a British mail steamer, the Trent, en route from Havana, Cuba, to St. Thomas in the West Indies. The San Jacinto’s master, Captain Charles Wilkes, had learned through a U.S. consul in Cuba that two new Confederate commissioners, James M. Mason and John Slidell, had slipped through the blockade to Nassau and from there to Cuba, and had purchased passage on the British mail packet Trent for St. Thomas, where they planned to board another steamer for England. “Probably no two men in the entire South were more thoroughly obnoxious to those of the Union side than Mason and Slidell,” wrote Charles Adams’s son, Henry, serving as his father’s secretary in the American legation in London. The vision of these two Confederate diplomats sailing serenely to England to plot the destruction of the Union alternately maddened and excited Wilkes, who pulled down every book on the law of the sea in his possession, pored over them in his cabin, and decided that the presence of the Confederates on the Trent provided sufficient reason for stopping and searching an unarmed neutral ship and seizing the diplomats. “I carefully examined all the authorities on international law to which I had access, which bore upon the rights of neutrals and their responsibilities,” Wilkes reported to Gideon Welles, and he convinced himself that “it became my duty to make these parties prisoners, and to bring them to the United States.”14

Wilkes waited for the Trent in the Bahama Channel, and when the Trent hove into view, Wilkes fired a shot across her bow, then boarded the ship with an armed party. He demanded to see a list of the passengers and was refused, but Mason and Slidell identified themselves, and were manhandled (along with their two secretaries, J. E. McFarland and George Eustis) over the side of the Trent and into the San Jacinto’s waiting cutter.15

Northern public opinion was at first jubilant at Wilkes’s daring pinch of the two Confederate emissaries, and Congress voted to grant Wilkes a gold medal. The British government was substantially less enthused: an unarmed British ship flying the British flag under a declaration of British neutrality and carrying British mail had been fired upon, stopped, and boarded by an American war vessel, and four passengers had been hauled off without so much as a by-your-leave. The deck of a ship is considered an extension of the territory of the nation under whose flag it flies, and so Wilkes might as well have sailed up the