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

1862 the United States was in no position to obstruct Napoleon’s ambitions in Mexico, and Napoleon hoped that the division of the American republic would permanently eliminate the United States as an obstacle to French colonization in Central America. The Confederate agents in Europe, headed by John Slidell, decided to play on Napoleon’s desires and offered Confederate support for his Mexican adventure, plus a renewed supply of cotton, if the emperor would grant French diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and aid the Confederates in breaking the blockade. Napoleon pulled shy of accepting the Confederate offer, but he did create a favorable climate in France for Confederate agents to obtain loans and other assistance. The French banking house of Emile Erlanger underwrote the sale of $14.5 million of Confederate bonds in March 1863, and Confederate purchasing agents were able to buy up substantial amounts of war supplies to run through the blockade.27

The most damaging pieces of war equipment that the British and French allowed the Confederates to buy from them were ships, especially armed commerce raiders. In March 1861 the Confederate government appointed a former U.S. naval officer named James Bulloch as its civilian naval agent, and by June Bulloch had set himself up in Liverpool to arrange contracts for building or buying ships for the Confederacy. Bulloch turned out to be an extremely adroit and successful bargainer, as well as a careful reader of the terms of Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819, which forbade even recognized belligerents to “equip, furnish, fit out, or arm… any Ship or Vessel, with Intent or in order that such Ship or Vessel shall be employed in the Service of any Foreign Prince, State, or Potentate.” The act threatened violators of the law with seizure of these vessels, but the law also provided little in terms of the proof required beforehand to demonstrate that a ship was being built or fitted out with belligerent intent. It became easy, therefore, for Bulloch to build or purchase English ships through registered agents or English partners, sail them out of British waters, and then outfit them for their real military purposes somewhere else.28

Bulloch’s first commission, a steamer named Oreto, sailed from Liverpool in March 1862 as a merchant ship with what appeared on the records as an English captain and crew and registry with the tiny Kingdom of Palermo. The builders “may … have had a tolerably clear notion that she would at some future time, and by some subsequent arrangement, pass into the possession of the Confederate Government,” Bulloch snickered, “but they never mentioned their suspicions, and they undertook nothing more than to build and deliver in Liverpool a screwsteamer, according to certain specified plans and conditions, fitted for sea in every respect, but without armament or equipment for fighting of any kind whatever.” Having fulfilled the letter of British neutrality, Bulloch then ordered the Oreto to a rendezvous on a deserted island in the Bahamas, where she was equipped with naval guns, a Confederate crew, and a new name, CSS Florida. The Florida then set off on a two-and-a-half-year career of commerce raiding that sent thirty-eight Yankee merchant ships to the bottom or into refit to emerge as Confederate raiders themselves.29

The Florida was not the only ship Bulloch would slip out of England through the cracks in the laws. In the summer of 1861 Bulloch negotiated with another firm, Laird Brothers, for the construction of a sleek steam cruiser known only by its yard number, 290. The U.S. consul in Liverpool, Thomas Haines Dudley, suspected from the beginning that Bulloch was planning another Oreto, and amassed considerable evidence that the 290 was intended for purposes other than peaceful trade. The British government was slow to follow up on the charges, and by the time an order to impound the ship was issued in July 1862, Bulloch had already bundled it out to sea.

It was now the turn of Charles Francis Adams to send barely contained statements of outrage to the Foreign Office. Given the 290’s “peculiar adaptation to war purposes, there could have been no doubt by those engaged in the work, and familiar with such details, that she was intended for other purposes than those of legitimate trade,” in blithe disregard of the Foreign Enlistment Act. Even worse, the 290, “although commanded by Americans in her navigation of the ocean… is manned almost entirely by English seamen, engaged and forwarded from that port by persons in league with her Commander”—yet another violation of the Act. It was all to no avail. The 290 sailed blithely to the Azores, where this vessel, too, was outfitted with guns and stores and took on the most dreaded name in the entire gallery of American ships—CSS Alabama.30

By the autumn of 1862, the Confederacy had come as close as it was ever to come to obtaining outright cooperation and recognition from France and Britain. The effects of the cotton blockade, the unpleasant consequences of the Trent affair, and other blockade incidents, and especially the surprising success of the Confederate armies under Lee and Bragg in Virginia and Kentucky, persuaded both Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III that the time had at last arrived to intervene in the American mess. Palmerston knew that recognition of the Confederacy could easily bring on the war with the United States that he had avoided in 1861, since the Confederacy would not be “a bit more independent for our saying so unless we followed up our Declaration by taking Part with them in the war.”31

But by late summer 1862 the North appeared exhausted anyway. In June Palmerston had surprised Charles Francis Adams with a savage note denouncing Union occupation practices in New Orleans, and Adams took the note as a signal that the Palmerston government was about to open a campaign for intervention and mediation. In July, James Mason, as the Confederacy’s representative in London, pressed Earl Russell with “a direct and vigorous effort to obtain recognition of the Confederacy … ending with a formal