Early Steps: Downplaying Slavery

The administration of President Lincoln would thus, at first blush, appear to have had a strong motivation for stressing slavery as the cause, and emancipation as the aim, of the war. But Lincoln and his often-bumptious secretary of state, William H. Seward, were not initially able to exploit the central issue of the war for diplomatic advantage. The slaveholding border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri had not seceded from the United States, and American success in the war, Lincoln knew, depended on retaining their loyalty. This, in turn, dictated a consistent line from the administration, emphasizing that its goal in the war was not to liberate slaves but to maintain national unity. But “Lincoln and Seward’s decision to emphasize the preservation of the Union rather than the abolition of slavery” at this time “complicated … the conduct of diplomacy abroad.”¹¹ Lincoln’s policy on this issue was realistic, and dictated by circumstances. Yet it also denied him and his diplomatic corps use of the most effective tool at their disposal for influencing European opinion. As the American minister in Spain—the redoubtable Carl Schurz—lamented in 1861, the failure to emphasize slavery as the issue dividing the North and South had “stripped our cause of its peculiar moral force.”¹² This did not mean, however, that Confederate diplomats would have an easy time of it, since “slavery may not have been the primary determinant of foreign reactions to the American Civil War, but it put Confederates on the defensive throughout the conflict.”¹³ America’s minister to London, Charles Francis Adams, sent a report to Seward in January 1862 that expressed just such a perception. “The pressure of the popular feeling against slavery is so great here,” he wrote, “that [the Confederates’] friends feel it impossible to stem it without some such plea in extenuation as can be made out of an offer to do something for ultimate emancipation.”¹⁴ The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin saw things the same way. In January 1863 Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “The agitation kept up by the anti-slavery portion of America, by England, and by the general sentiment of humanity in Europe, had made the situation of the slaveholding aristocracy intolerable. As one of them at the time expressed it, they felt themselves under the ban of the civilized world.”¹⁵ Although both sides in the war wished, at its beginning, to downplay the significance of the slavery issue for their own reasons, neither could evade the “peculiar moral force” that it exerted.

During the 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln’s avowed goal was that of his party—namely, to prevent the spread of slavery into new territories. Convinced that slavery contained was slavery doomed, Lincoln took an antislavery rather than an abolitionist position at this juncture. Opposition to the spread of slavery was the “lowest common denominator of Republican opinion,” and Lincoln was determined to set aside all “peripheral” issues that might potentially sow division within the party.¹⁶ His election victory that November effectively broke the power that southern slaveholders had held over the federal government during the course of the preceding decades. Previously any northerner who sought “high federal office” had to “make some kind of peace with the nation’s peculiar institution.”¹⁷ As of March 1861, those days of genuflection would be at an end. Now, with the election of an Illinoisan president who clearly hoped for slavery’s eventual extirpation, it was manifest that “a united North had the power to determine the nation’s future.”¹⁸ The federal government would be in the hands of the Republicans, who owed no fealty to southern slaveholders, and who, minimally, wished to see slavery’s slow demise.

This realignment of federal power necessarily meant that slaveholders would lose control of the apparatus of the nation’s foreign policy. It was a sobering prospect: control of the “outward state” was considered by slaveholders as crucial to the vitality of the institution of bonded labor in the hemisphere.¹⁹ In fact, Lincoln, for reasons of party unity, would appoint a significant number of the dreaded Radical Republicans “to foreign diplomatic and consular posts in the spring of 1861.”²⁰ The reaction of southern slaveholders to this reversal of fortunes, and the threat to their social order that it entailed, was secession: if they could not control the institutions of the federal government, then they would live under a government of their own.

After secession, Lincoln long hesitated to declare that the war was fundamentally “about slavery.” The need to keep the Border States in the Union, together with his misguided belief in a significant repository of Union sentiment in the slave South, led to his caution. The discretion in declaratory policy was reflected early in administration diplomacy, as Seward instructed the American minister to London, Charles Francis Adams, to avoid discussion of the slavery issue.²¹ The upshot of this posturing was to be the “central political dilemma facing the president”: Lincoln and Seward “now confronted the serious challenge of convincing the British and others across the Atlantic that the conflagration threatening to break out over slavery did not concern slavery at all.” The president and the secretary of state did not necessarily see the problem with taking such an approach. The true cause of the war was clear to them. Thus, they assumed that the British leaders were “astute enough to recognize the obvious.” The Americans did not need to articulate what they, for domestic reasons, could not state. Unfortunately, Britons tended to take Lincoln and Seward at their word. The result was that they were let off the hook. Assured by the Americans that the war was being fought over the Union, the British “no longer had to make the hard choice between upholding their moral commitment against slavery and their need to maintain connections with the Confederacy’s cotton distributors.”²²

If the government of British prime minister Lord Palmerston could not believe its good fortune, there were others who did not look upon this development with glee. British abolitionists could be forgiven if they found Lincoln’s initial justification of the war frustrating. After all, if the goal was to bring the southern states back into the Union without ending slavery, then there was no point in getting mixed up in the matter.²³ Even the staunchly antislavery Duke of Argyll, the Lord Privy Seal in Palmerston’s cabinet, saw restoration of the Union as problematic. In Argyll’s view, the “breakup of the Union would remove US protection from the evil institution and permit the world’s progressive opinion to exert its remedial influence on the wayward Americans.… Both Union and Confederacy were responsible for impeding the advance of civilization.”²⁴ From this perspective, the preservation of the Union might actually impede the course of abolition. Were Lincoln to proclaim emancipation as his administration’s goal, then the Union’s integrity could instead have been viewed abroad as key to achieving abolition. But force of circumstance prevented the president from issuing such a pronouncement in 1861. Thus, the British people in general, though “violently opposed to slavery,” did not make the connection between Union and emancipation.²⁵

In fact, many among Britain’s governing class also failed to make this linkage. The fault for this lied in part, no doubt, with the administration itself, as the British foreign secretary, Lord Russell noted in the fall of 1861. Lincoln and Seward were, however, “puzzled when Europeans seemed unable or unwilling to acknowledge the seemingly obvious reality that the morality and fate of slavery constituted the fundamental differences between the North and South.”²⁶ But the president had “erroneously assumed that the British and other Europeans would automatically understand that slavery lay at the root of the American conflict.”²⁷ What appeared so obvious to the statesmen in Washington was, apparently, lost in translation as it crossed the Atlantic. Lincoln’s declaratory policy only “muddied the diplomatic waters.”²⁸

A dynamic similar to that in Britain prevailed across the English Channel. Those French who were most friendly toward the Union found themselves in a predicament. Although they saw in the North the “embodiment of the abolitionist force that had spread even to the remotest corners of France,” Lincoln was giving them nothing to work with. In fact, “for an intolerable period, the [French] liberals had to face the dilemma of attributing to the North an ideal which the president steadily refused to acknowledge.” As the liberal Republican journalist Auguste Nefftzer summarized the situation, Lincoln’s “vacillation” on the slavery issue was a factor that “stopped the American conflict from becoming the cause of our civilization.… What should we hate if not slavery?”²⁹ Lincoln’s denial that the American crisis was fundamentally about freedom versus slavery must, indeed, have come as a surprise to the French, who had been told by a majority of their newspapers that this was in fact the issue that had provoked southern secession. As a progovernment newspaper wrote on January 10, 1861, the conflict was the result of the burgeoning division between the South’s growing attachment to slavery and the North’s increasing abolitionist sentiment, and, “from these two opposed movements is born the present situation in the United States.” The South was rebelling in order to protect “that dear ‘peculiar institution.’ ” It was slavery that was “the principal cause of the catastrophe.”³⁰

Lincoln’s reticence on slavery was no doubt a boon to the European diplomacy of the Richmond government. Yet the president’s early caution in articulating the fundamental issue at stake in the newborn war did not mitigate French hostility toward slavery. An unofficial representative of the Richmond administration summarized the situation in an undated memorandum, and it was bleak indeed. The Louisianan Paul Pecquet du Bellet lamented the propaganda successes of Union representatives in Paris and urged that a pro-Confederate newspaper be founded in Paris to counter local “friends of the North.” The message of the pro-Union forces in the French capital was a potent one. “Slavery was proclaimed a national crime which ought to be extirpated from Confederate soil if it were to cost the blood of every white Southerner; the old principle of the red Republicans was exhumed: ‘Perisse une nation plutot qu’un principle’ [sic; “Perish a nation rather than a principle,” a reference to a similar quote from Maximilien Robespierre].” These assertions, “printed and circulated every day without refutation” had become “political axioms” among the French. By the time Richmond got around to sending representatives to Paris to “correct the evil, it was too deeply rooted in the mind of the french people to admit of radical cure.” In fact, “so intense had the hatred of the people become for that institution” that French emperor Napoleon III “dared not manifest his well known sympathy for the South much less continue to give them aid and comfort.”³¹ Du Bellet must surely have thought French antislavery sentiment virulent if it were enough to daunt the emperor himself.

The Struggle over Foreign Intervention

The issue of European opinion regarding the Civil War was integral to the diplomacy of both the North and the South. Lincoln and Seward sought, at all costs, to forestall European—and especially British—diplomatic intervention in the conflict; this was, in fact, the central component of their diplomacy. The survival of the Union depended upon their success at preventing British recognition of Richmond: with “the precarious balance of the war on the battlefield, such a decision by London virtually assured calamity for the Union.”³² The president and the secretary of state viewed Britain as the key to the game, believing as they did that that no other European nation would intervene in the American crisis if London remained aloof. French policy was nevertheless a significant, if secondary, concern, particularly due to the unpredictable and adventurous nature of Napoleon III.

Eventually, southern slavery came to play a greater role in Washington’s foreign policy with regard to Europe. The administration sought to use the South’s oppressive labor system to gain diplomatic leverage. Given the broadly spread public hostility to slavery in both Britain and France, this approach offered real possibilities: the British government “faced a voting public steeped in antislavery sentiment” and would thus have to tread very carefully when evaluating the benefits of intervention. The French government, while less beholden to voters, could not ignore the powerful abolitionist sentiment of the vast majority of its population. Nor, to its frustration, could it tame the French opposition press, which “urged France not to cooperate with a Republic that maintained such an ‘anachronistic practice’ ” as slavery.³³ To Europeans in general, “the true voice of the United States was the North, however hesitant it might have been to assume the moral responsibility thrust upon it by the world.”³⁴ Lincoln’s initial reluctance to address forthrightly the fundamental issue of the war no doubt frustrated his French sympathizers, who “had to face the dilemma of attributing to the North an ideal which the president steadily refused to acknowledge.”³⁵ Yet the fact that the Confederacy was built upon the cornerstone of inhuman racial exploitation gave Union diplomats an advantage in the contest with the South.

Southerners were thus motivated to downplay the significance of slavery as an issue in the war, just as they ironically maintained, for domestic consumption, that the war was fundamentally about liberty. Confederate policymakers and diplomats—direct heirs to the foreign policy of slavery elucidated by historian Matthew Karp—faced the unenviable task of trying to convince Europeans that the bedrock of their economy and social order had been irrelevant to secession and that the war was actually a struggle to vindicate the fundamental principles on which the United States had been founded. It was an uphill task. Nor was it made easier by the often poor quality of the diplomats whom Confederate president Jefferson Davis had dispatched to make this improbable case.³⁶

The Confederates had two advantages going for them in the diplomatic sphere. Their foremost mistake was in gravely overrating one of them—namely, the power of cotton. The other, Lincoln’s reticence on the slavery question, they sought to exploit for all it was worth—though with limited results. In deploying both they aimed minimally at gaining formal recognition from European states. The maximum goal was European military intervention in the war on the side of the South. In between stood the possibility of a united European diplomatic intervention. Though ostensibly aimed at bringing an end to a bloody and economically disruptive war, European mediation would almost certainly have resulted in achievement of southern independence. Richmond’s most valuable source of leverage in this endeavor was to be cotton: the Europeans needed it to keep their factories and economies running and their workers employed. “White gold” was to be their trump card on the Atlantic world stage.

The thought that this precious commodity, and access to it, would move diplomatic mountains for the South was not, on its face, ridiculous. By the year of Lincoln’s election to the White House, over four million Britons “owed their livelihood to the cotton mills,” and the vast majority of the cotton which kept those mills running came from the South.³⁷ French industry was more diversified, yet imported an even higher percentage of its cotton from the US South. Indeed, nearly all of France’s cotton came from the United States prior to the war.³⁸ It was not much of a stretch to assume that the disruption of the flow of cotton to Europe would impel governments there to intervene in order to end the war and restore the regular flow of the commodity across the ocean. Indeed, “by every economic measure, King Cotton Diplomacy should have won British recognition of southern independence.”³⁹

Where southerners erred was in overconfidently assuming that economics would be the determining factor in European, and especially British, decisions regarding intervention in American affairs. Foreign governments had to weigh economic interests against other considerations. The most significant of these by far was the danger that any sort of intervention would mean war with a rapidly arming United States. Seward had made at least one point crystal clear: recognition of the South would be viewed as a hostile act by the federal government. In the end, “the risk of war with the United States was always greater than the benefits gained from supporting Confederate independence.”⁴⁰ Additionally, the clumsy way in which Richmond attempted to play the cotton card did nothing to ingratiate the Confederate government with its British and French counterparts. Davis’s decision to exercise diplomatic leverage through an informal, self-imposed embargo of cotton exports was difficult to explain to Europeans. After all, his own government sought to present the Union blockade of southern ports as an illegal “paper blockade” due to its initially porous nature. It was thus difficult to explain why the cotton could not get through to European ports. The Confederates’ “arrogant assumption that King Cotton would bring the world to heel was not soon forgotten abroad.”⁴¹ Confederate secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin may indeed have been “obsessed with enticing France and Britain into the war,” but the methods by which he and his colleagues pursued King Cotton Diplomacy only made that goal more remote than it already had been.⁴²

The second arrow in the Confederate diplomatic quiver was Lincoln’s own assertion, often repeated, that the Union was fighting for the sole purpose of keeping the nation whole; his administration was not seeking to eradicate slavery where it already existed. The reassurances had started early. Lincoln was uncharacteristically taciturn during the Secession Winter that separated his election from his inauguration, but he was not silent. Using his Illinois colleague, Senator Lyman Trumbull, as a surrogate spokesman, the president-elect penned a speech that was soon attributed by the press to him. Through Trumbull, Lincoln told the nation that when the Republicans assumed power “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting their property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration.”⁴³ His administration would be no more of a threat to slavery—where it currently existed—than Buchanan’s had been.

Lincoln amplified this assertion on March 4, 1861. In his inaugural address, the newly sworn-in president sought to convince southern leaders that his administration would pose no threat to slavery where it already existed. Attempting to appeal in part to the eight slave states that had not yet seceded, Lincoln proclaimed that “he had neither the power nor inclination to interfere with slavery where it existed.” Three days later, the new president took a step in the direction of protecting the right to slavery. On that day he sent to the states a proposed constitutional amendment that would permanently preclude federal interference with the South’s institution.⁴⁴ Lincoln was thus seeking to portray himself as anything but the “Black Abolitionist” whom the southerners claimed to fear. The issue at stake, he repeatedly indicated, was between union and disunion, not slavery and abolition.

European Responses and Interests

Many in Europe took Lincoln’s words and actions at this decisive point, and in the year that followed, at face value. Southern representatives in European capitals, moreover, were advancing a similar argument—namely, that this was a war over independence and not human bondage. As a result, “the arguments of Southern emissaries gained in force as the Northern case weakened.”⁴⁵ Both sides “ironically found agreement on the most emotional issue that divided them: slavery itself. In a move that astounded observers thousands of miles away in Europe, Lincoln echoed the Confederacy’s cry that slavery had nothing to do with the American crisis.” Thus, “slavery retreated from center stage to assume a public status barely secondary in nature. The Confederacy sought diplomatic recognition from England and other nonslaveholding nations and predictably tried to remove slavery from the international picture. The Lincoln administration surprised Europeans by likewise dismissing the importance of slavery.”⁴⁶ The governments in both London and Paris “acted primarily upon … ideological, economic, and geopolitical considerations,” and had their own interests to advance.⁴⁷ But Lincoln had provided them—and particularly Palmerston—with greater flexibility in pursuing these ends: domestic pressure stemming from hostility to slavery was largely neutralized as long as both sides in the war claimed that this was a nonissue.

Lincoln had also given an unmerited gift to Confederate representatives in Europe, who would not constantly be faced with the need to defend the South’s slave system to those who had already eradicated the institution in their overseas possessions. Still, Richmond’s representatives in European capitals perceived themselves as fighting an uphill battle. True, the Confederate emissary in Paris, John Slidell, was granted access to leaders in the French government in a manner that Seward could only interpret as unfriendly. Yet Slidell remained convinced “that at the highest level slavery thwarted his efforts at recognition and weakened his position.”⁴⁸ There was apparently some truth to Slidell’s perception, since throughout the Civil War, the French foreign office was always under the direction of a minister who opposed slavery: initially Édouard Thouvenel, and, following his resignation in October 1862, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys. Yet as French historian Stève Sainlaude asserts, the slavery issue was never a significant determinant of Thouvenel’s or Drouyn’s opposition to recognition of the Confederacy.⁴⁹ For his part, the emperor was “more tolerant” of slavery than were his foreign ministers. In the end, the slavery issue simply was not a major factor in the considerations of the French government when it came to recognition, and it “treated slavery as a marginal issue that could on no account steer or determine its diplomacy.”⁵⁰

Napoleon had reasons for wanting to intervene in America, but they had nothing to do with slavery. Of particular interest to him was Mexico. The ambitious emperor had visions of attaining a new empire in the Western Hemisphere, and the key to this was America’s neighbor to the south. A united and powerful America would, of course, never allow France to dominate Mexico; war with the United States would have been a far more likely result than supine acquiescence on the part of the US government. The Civil War, however, gave him—in his view—a golden opportunity. With the Americans divided, weakened, and the Union now geographically cut off from Mexico, they would be in a poor position to thwart Napoleon’s designs in Latin America. Indeed, he hoped that southern independence would result in the emergence of a buffer state that would separate French-dominated Mexico from the United States, making American intervention that much more difficult. Additionally, if France were to intervene diplomatically in the Civil War in such a way as to help the South gain independence, Napoleon assumed he could then rely on a friendly Richmond government. In fact, “with the support of the South, the Mexican empire would have been consolidated and perpetuated [pérennisé].” Southern diplomats, sensing an opportunity, sought to use the Mexico issue as leverage to gain recognition from Paris.⁵¹

Seeking recognition from some European power, Davis’s government also sought to cultivate Spain. Franco-Confederate diplomacy was “purely tactical.”⁵² On the other hand, Richmond perceived that it might find kindred spirits in Madrid. Alone among the powers of Europe, Spain was a slaveholding empire with a presence in the New World; indeed, its most valuable possession, Cuba, still relied extensively on bonded labor to sustain its economy. To southern policymakers, this commonality with the South appeared to present an opportunity. Judah Benjamin’s predecessor as secretary of state, R. M. T. Hunter, wrote in August 1861 that “of all the great powers of Europe Spain alone is interested through her colonies in the same social system which pervades the Confederate States.”⁵³ In fact, the Confederates were “enchanted with the idea of an alliance with Spain.”⁵⁴ Lincoln’s first minister to Madrid, the fiery German immigrant and staunch abolitionist Carl Schurz, believed that Spain was ripe fruit for southern picking. Repeatedly during his brief foray into diplomacy, Schurz informed Washington that Spanish recognition of the Confederacy was just around the corner.⁵⁵ Yet, here again, Richmond was to suffer disappointment. Madrid was willing to act on recognition, but only if Britain or France did so as well; all the more so since the Spanish feared European intervention on the side of the Confederacy would provoke Russian entry on the side of the Union.⁵⁶ But since Paris would not act at this point in the war without London, Britain remained at the center of the diplomatic struggle between the Union and the Confederacy.

Palmerston’s policy toward intervention thus became the key issue for Lincoln and Seward’s diplomacy. In this, slavery initially played a rather minor role—one that would only increase by stages. For reasons mentioned previously, Lincoln and Seward kept the slavery issue muted in their foreign policy, assuming that Europeans would comprehend the fundamental issue at stake in the war, and becoming perplexed when they did not. The Lincoln administration’s relations with Britain were, furthermore, not improved in the early days of the war by the secretary of state’s reputation for inveterate Anglophobia. As a senator from New York, Seward had indeed engaged in significant baiting of John Bull, sometimes blatantly for his own political benefit, as when he “stirred up Irish-American animosities toward Britain in order to win votes.” Likewise, his perennial interest in US acquisition of Canada was not likely to go over well with the British.⁵⁷ Seward, moreover, was convinced that this hostility toward Britain was reciprocal, that Britain sought to use the opportunity presented by secession to weaken a growing strategic and commercial rival. He thus presumed general British animosity toward the North after the onset of war.

Seward was wrong. The fact was that Britons were deeply divided over the North-South struggle. The debate over the American Civil War was, in reality, of such broad interest to British society that “no other agitation in the period, not the movements in support of Polish or Hungarian independence or Italian unification, engaged the public interest so extensively as did the debate over the war in America.”⁵⁸ On the nonelite level, there was nothing like a consensus in favor of the Confederacy. Nor did pro-South sentiments reign among elite policymakers: “Rarely ones to be swayed by passions, [Foreign Secretary John] Russell, Palmerston and other leading British statesmen viewed the Civil War in a detached and pragmatic manner. Though they recognized the virtues of the causes of both sides and the international opportunities presented by the conflict, they were more compelled to stay at arm’s length from both the Union and Confederacy and to maintain a policy of neutrality.”⁵⁹ As Palmerston wrote in May 1861 with regard to diplomatic intervention, “there would … be great difficulty in suggesting any basis of arrangement to which both parties could agree, and which it would not be repugnant to English feelings and principles to propose. We could not well mix ourselves up with the acknowledgement of slavery.”⁶⁰ The fact that the American minister to London, Charles Francis Adams, “saw a southern supporter in every Briton” says more about American perceptions than British opinions.⁶¹ A desire to see the United States weakened as a challenger in the international arena, or a wish that an expansionistic upstart republic would get its comeuppance, did not translate into anything like a predilection for intervention in the American crisis.

If the British were in no mood to go to war, the same cannot be said of Seward. Infamously, the secretary submitted a “bizarre” memorandum to Lincoln on April 1, 1861, urging the president to provoke a crisis with France and Spain over the former’s reconquest of Santo Domingo. As if two European enemies were not enough, he urged the new president to “seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia.” If, furthermore, Spain and France did not provide satisfaction, the president should then “convene Congress and declare war against them.”⁶² Seward submitted his memorandum on April Fool’s Day. But the implications of his proposal were quite serious, even if his goal was unclear. Joseph A. Fry concludes that Seward “sought a ‘foreign crisis’ rather than a foreign war,” being too well apprised of the realities of international politics to seek to take on all comers.⁶³ Characteristically circumspect, Lincoln quashed the idea. The new president nonetheless found Seward’s transatlantic reputation for belligerence useful. The administration sought to signal consistently and forcefully to London and Paris that recognition of the Confederacy would result in war with the Union, and to emphasize that America would be a formidable foe.⁶⁴ Seward eagerly took on the task using “his Anglophobic reputation to cultivate the image of a madman willing to go to war to prevent foreign recognition of the Confederacy.”⁶⁵ The extent to which the administration’s brinkmanship was successful, or even useful, is open to debate. Both Howard Jones and Dean B. Mahin believe that it was, the latter asserting that, “on the whole, the strategy was successful.” Duncan Andrew Campbell, by way of contrast, suggests that the belligerent approach was superfluous: “The British government … was always convinced of the need to tread warily when it came to American affairs in general … and the Civil War in particular.”⁶⁶ D. P. Crook insightfully observes that Seward’s blustering diplomacy was directed not just at London and Paris but also at Richmond. His goal, thus, was not to provoke a transatlantic war, but to “demoralize the rebels by depriving them of the hope of foreign intervention or sympathy.”⁶⁷ Davis’s government was as aware as Lincoln’s of the stakes of foreign recognition—hence, the prospect of diplomatic isolation was always to be feared.

The Trent Affair

The greatest threat of a third Anglo-American war during the period came about not because of Seward’s threats but because of an event that the administration could not have foreseen. The Trent Affair began on November 8, 1861, when an American naval vessel stopped and boarded the British steamer Trent in the waters between the Bahamas and Cuba. The boarding party removed two Confederate diplomats—James Mason and John Slidell—who had been dispatched by Davis to Europe. The American sailors asserted that, as the “embodiment of dispatches,” the diplomats were contraband of war. Britons in and out of the Palmerston government responded to the seizure of the emissaries with fury, interpreting the action as a direct attack on the honor of the British nation. The risk of war between the two nations was real until Lincoln wisely decided the following month to release Mason and Slidell.⁶⁸ American capitulation to this British demand forestalled, at least for the time, British intervention in the Civil War: “British officials and their public received Lincoln and Seward’s decision with great relief, for they too recognized the calamitous consequences of an Anglo-American war.”⁶⁹ British utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill put well the dilemma that had faced the British people during the crisis. Mill, who would later proclaim that slavery was an “unmitigated abhorrence,” had no desire to see his nation intervene on the side of the slaveholding South: “It would have been a war in alliance with, and, to practical purposes, in defense and propagation of slavery.”⁷⁰ In fact there was “in most Englishmen a very decided aversion to adopt a position of open alliance with slaveholders.”⁷¹ What Britons labeled the “Trent outrage” had, nevertheless, “done incalculable damage to the British public’s views of the United States.” Additionally, the affair had sown division between American and British abolitionists, the latter already expressing concern that their internationalist movement was becoming tainted with nationalist passions.⁷²

The settling of the Trent dispute to the satisfaction of Britain did not, however, end the possibility of British intervention in the Civil War. While armed intervention by Britain now was less likely, the Lincoln administration continued to seek to preclude diplomatic intervention by either the British, the French, or both. Lincoln’s insistence throughout 1861 that the war was about preserving the Union did not help matters. According to one insightful analysis of the situation, “Southern separation, to the French as well as to the British, became an acceptable solution to the American crisis. As the focus of interest in the war turned from questions regarding the morality of slavery to those of an economic or political nature, a new danger developed: the increased chances of a foreign involvement that could benefit only the South.”⁷³ The declared policy of the administration—preserving the Union—gave Lincoln and Seward no added diplomatic leverage to forestall this eventuality.

Lincoln Seeks to Forestall Intervention

Lincoln was, nevertheless, quite conscious of the international ramifications of his policy toward slavery. In 1862 the government in Washington undertook a series of actions that helped to prepare the way for the Emancipation Proclamation that would come in September. Congress ended slavery in the District of Columbia, and the president proposed a plan of compensated emancipation to the Border States. Such measures—aside from being the right thing to do—helped Lincoln to placate the radicals within his party. But Lincoln was also aware of the effects of his actions on European opinion. Schurz recalled Lincoln telling him early in the year that “I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.”⁷⁴ While not the sole motivation for the president’s actions, the connection between foreign relations and slavery was very much on his mind as he took these significant steps toward a broader emancipation.

Some other decisions that Lincoln made at this time were, moreover, clearly taken with his mind firmly focused on Europe. The most significant of these was the signing of a slave trade suppression treaty with Britain. The Royal Navy would, under the new agreement, be allowed to stop and search US-flagged ships. Britain could now take the last step necessary for the effective suppression of the trade. Given the charged history of this issue in Anglo-American relations, the decision made by Lincoln and Seward to reverse a half century of policy indicates the seriousness with which they approached the issue of British intervention and the degree to which they believed slavery to be a complicating factor in transatlantic relations. Also significant was the American recognition, at long last, of the Black-ruled nations of Haiti and Liberia. The decision resulted in the first Black diplomats being sent as ministers representing their countries in Washington, a controversial development that Lincoln, however, found altogether acceptable.⁷⁵ These steps were welcomed by radicals in the United States, as well as by antislavery advocates abroad. The London Times, for its part, hailed the compensated emancipation act as “the greatest day” in US history since the signing of the Declaration of Independence; “the day of this century which will be honored throughout all time.”⁷⁶

American diplomats abroad, convinced of the force of antislavery sentiment among the European people, had urged Lincoln for some time to clarify what issue—what principle—was truly at stake. From St. Petersburg, Lincoln’s minister, Cassius Marcellus Clay, went so far as to encourage the president to declare the slaves emancipated. Clay was personally invested in the cause; a Kentucky landowner who had become an abolitionist while at Yale College and subsequently freed his inherited slaves, he was to serve twice as minister to St. Petersburg.⁷⁷ It was Clay’s conviction that only by proclaiming the slaves free could Lincoln forestall European recognition of the Confederacy. Lincoln heard precisely the same message from his envoy in Vienna. John Motley had traveled to London, Paris, and Berlin and had come away with the impression that, in the words of Russian historian R. F. Ivanov, “emancipation of the slaves was one of the most important decisions which might stop the European powers from recognizing the rebellious Confederacy.” Or, as Motley wrote Seward, emancipation “would strike the sword from England’s hands.”⁷⁸ This was, in fact, the consensus among American diplomats by September 1862; a month after Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Seward wrote American minister to London Charles Francis Adams, telling him that “all our representatives abroad … have long and earnestly urged an earlier adoption of such measure as the President has at last accepted.”⁷⁹ As the British chargé in Washington, William Stuart, saw it, one of Lincoln’s motivations for issuing the proclamation was to “render intervention impossible.”⁸⁰ Lincoln may well have assumed that his actions had made foreign intervention significantly less likely, if not impossible.

The opposite was, however, the case. One of the ironies of Civil War international relations was that the preliminary proclamation actually increased Anglo-French interest in intervening to stop the war. As Jones observes, “Despite Lincoln’s high hopes, the Union victory at Antietam had combined with his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to encourage, rather than undermine, intervention.… Contrary to the traditional story, the battle of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation did not stop the British movement toward intervention; rather, they only slowed down a process that once again had gotten underway.”⁸¹ The proclamation “further eroded the Confederacy’s chances for diplomatic recognition—though at first it seemed to have the contrary effect.” Indeed, the Union’s foes in London portrayed the proclamation “not as a genuine antislavery act but as a cynical attempt to deflect European opinion or as a desperate effort to encourage a slave insurrection.”⁸²

It was this latter matter—the danger of a “servile insurrection”—that the Union’s foes in the British government and press now stressed. Fear of a “race war” in the United States had influenced British thinking on intervention prior to September 1862. Memories of British experiences in Haiti still influenced statesmen in London.⁸³ Lincoln’s policy of progressively allowing African Americans, including former slaves, into the Union military had only added to these fears. To many, such an act was unconscionable: “Arms in the hands of slaves violated the rules of civilized warfare, threatening wholesale slave revolt and descent into barbarism.”⁸⁴ Rare were the voices, like that of British liberal Richard Cobden, who would say a good word about arming African Americans. Indeed, Cobden wrote Sumner in January 1864, “I hope to see a hundred thousand coloured men under arms before midsummer. Nothing will tend so much to raise the Africans in the social scale as to put muskets in their hands and drill them as soldiers.”⁸⁵ Of course, Cobden wrote these words a year after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, and thus after experience had demonstrated that a massive slave revolt was a chimerical monster. Much more common at the time was the opinion of British chargé Stuart, who called the proclamation “cold, vindictive, and entirely political,” bringing with it, as it did, the prospect of a slave revolt.⁸⁶ For its part, the London Times—never friendly toward the Lincoln administration—declared that Lincoln’s goal in issuing his proclamation was to incite the slaves to “murder the families of their masters.”⁸⁷ This was strong stuff. Yet the matter can be overstated. As Campbell indicates, the British press was not unanimous in condemning Lincoln’s decision. The influential Economist, for its part, sought to tamp down the fears of slave insurrection, the editors declaring that “we do not anticipate any such consequences, nor do we believe that Mr Lincoln designed nor desired them.”⁸⁸ The overall picture is, however, one of a “generally negative reception accorded to the proclamation in Europe.”⁸⁹

Russian Opinion

The salient exception to this rule among the powers of Europe was the nation that had consistently thrown its considerable diplomatic weight against European intervention in the war. Russia was, at that time, in the process of liberating its own serfs, a step that Tsar Alexander II had initiated in 1861. This major transformation in Russian society was likely on the minds of Russian liberal intellectuals as they sought to address the causes and consequences of emancipation in the United States. In assessing Lincoln’s decision, they proved to be both aware of, and sardonic toward, the response of their counterparts in more liberal nations of Europe. There was some irony in this. In a now famous quote from an 1855 letter to his closest friend, Joshua Speed, Lincoln had held up tsarist Russia as the incarnation of oppression; as a place “where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base allow of hypocracy [sic].”⁹⁰ Yet the tsar’s government had played a role in scuttling a great power intervention that would almost certainly have meant independence for the Confederacy. Now, once Lincoln proclaimed the permanent emancipation of slaves in rebel territory, editors at major Russian periodicals jumped to support his decision, and to lambaste his European critics.

No sooner had word of Lincoln’s proclamation reached Russia than the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti newspaper in Russia’s capital began the drumbeat in its favor. On January 12 the editors wrote a lengthy editorial on the subject. It was a tour de force of advocacy and analysis. The editors began by observing that “Lincoln’s proclamation of the emancipation of the slaves in the southern states has aroused against itself, as one would expect, a variety of denunciations [obvinenii] and reproaches, more or less pathetic, more or less passionate, but in essence rather unanimous and, in our opinion, equally unjust.” Critics, the Russians noted, attacked Lincoln for issuing the proclamation due to interest and not principle; “not a conviction, but a necessity.” The president’s detractors added that Lincoln’s action was cynical, since “he retains slavery where he could destroy it, and destroys it where it is not at all in his power; that the destruction of slavery, as it is expressed in the [London] Times, serves as nothing more than punishment for insurrection—saving it as a reward for loyalty to the Union.” But such assessments of Lincoln’s motives—whether accurate or not—missed the mark: “It is not so important for us what motivations guided Lincoln, in what degree his emancipationist tendencies are sincere and unselfish; the act of emancipation itself is important to us; it is considered separately, independently from those reasons for which it took place. From an unclean source can come a clean, salutary [blagotvornoe] thing, and a deed caused by necessity may be at the same time as just as is possible. What could one say about the historian who would condemn the Magna Carta because it was given by the despicable King John …?” Granted, Lincoln had had never been an abolitionist and, in the first year of his administration, he had not acted in the interest of emancipation. But Lincoln was also surrounded by advisers and friends, “on whom the Times practically calls down the curse of God, many of whom have long been committed to the cause of emancipation.” Therefore, it was “impossible to say that [the Proclamation] was inspired exclusively by calculation.”⁹¹

Certainly, the editors continued, it would have been better for the federal government, and for its “honor,” had the “war against the South adopted, at the very beginning, the character of a war against slavery.” But the abolitionists were too weak, while the desire to bring the South back to the Union as well as racial prejudice were both too strong. But “time and circumstances changed the situation, and Lincoln’s merit consists in that he decided to take advantage of circumstances. We see nothing heroic about this, but even less can we pronounce it shameful.” And here one saw the hypocrisy of London outlets like the Times and the Morning Post. They would not stop describing the Emancipation as a “clear, blatant, traitorous … violation of the Constitution.” Yet in the same breath, “they reproach Lincoln for the fact that he did not commit violations ten times more blatant and flagrant!” They could not have it both ways. As to the constitutionality of the proclamation, the Russian editors had no doubt: the Constitution provided that the central government was forbidden from touching the “local institutions of the individual states—and slavery, as is known, naturally is numbered among these local institutions.” But the rebellious states had declared that the Constitution no longer applied to them. Hence, they had “naturally also lost the rights which this constitution ensured them; accordingly, liberation of the slaves in rebel states may be carried out without any violation of the Constitution.”⁹² In making this case, it should be noted, Vedomosti was advancing an analysis that—though comporting with Lincoln’s thinking⁹³—was not open to the president: Lincoln had to maintain that the southern states were still governed by the Constitution, since they had never legally left the Union.

On the other hand, the Border States had remained under the Constitution. Therefore, the president and Congress had, in regard to them, “only those rights which are vested in the central authority in a peaceful and ordinary time. The federal government can, nay should, make every effort to persuade them to voluntarily liberate the blacks; but forcing them into this is not right until the Constitution is changed.” Lincoln had, in fact, shown “the determination to take all possible measures for the amicable abolition of slavery in the Border States.” To demand more would “obviously be an injustice—and we are sure that the Times itself knows this very well.” Besides, the Russian editors hoped that “the same force of things which led Lincoln to the proclamation of January 1 will lead the Border States to voluntary emancipation of their blacks, and in this, in our opinion, lies one of the best aspects of [Lincoln’s] proclamation.”⁹⁴

But were the proclamation’s harshest critics correct in saying that it would lead to spontaneous and sanguinary slave insurrections? Numerous European news outlets had said that it would, and “next follows eloquent phrases about innocent women and children, about torrents of blood, every drop of which is put upon Lincoln’s head, and so on.” Again, those critics were trying to have it both ways. They portrayed the Emancipation Proclamation as a “dead letter” that accomplished nothing; “not worth the pen with which Lincoln signed it.” Yet for them it was also the mighty document which would set off “thunder and the bowels of the earth will open.” Such contradictory arguments were not worth refuting, “bearing witness only to what kind of blindness defenders of the South come.” Given the slaves’ history of subjugation and their awareness of the power of slaveholders, the editors believed that the prospect of organized slave uprisings was quite remote. But did Lincoln’s allowance in the proclamation for slaves to act in self-defense encourage the enslaved to “revolt everywhere where they can be supported by the Federal troops”? The Times said that it would, but the editors of Vedomosti heartily disagreed. In fact, slaves were likely to turn to violence only when “the slaveholders will threaten their lives, when resistance will be the lesser of two evils” between which they were forced to choose. If, furthermore, slaves were to rise up in the presence of Union troops, those troops would, of course, constrain the revolt “within certain limits and restrain it from those excesses which one could fear from the fury of the slaves.” The editors, in any event, preferred candor “to the Times’s hypocrisy.” They evinced no greater admiration for French newspapers that likewise denounced the Emancipation Proclamation on spurious grounds.⁹⁵

Following up in early April, the newspaper reviewed the steps taken by Lincoln prior to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in particular the plan for compensated emancipation in the Border States and the ending of slavery in the nation’s capital. This latter had, the editors noted, been “accomplished peacefully and calmly: no riots occurred, contrary to the predictions—and perhaps the hopes—of the defenders of slavery.” From the Russians’ perspective, “one of the most important consequences of the January 1 proclamation is the inclusion of blacks in the Federal military.” Black soldiers had now fought engagements, and fought with surprising courage. Indeed, they “feel all the American people are watching them.” The editors also pointed to Lincoln’s reception of diplomats from Haiti and Liberia; a development that had been “unthinkable two years ago.” And facts had now proved, “beyond doubt,” the “idea, so fervently denied by defenders of the South, that blacks are fit for freedom, and deserve it.” The experience that had been gained of Black federal soldiers in combat in the South, furthermore, “attests that the danger of the massacre of slaveholders, and other horrors of slave war, belong to the phantoms created by the imagination of the Times and newspapers of its ilk.”⁹⁶ Many European newspapers had declared that disaster would befall southern whites when slaves were liberated. But even a couple months of experience proved to the satisfaction of Vedomosti that this was all a febrile dream.

The newspaper, furthermore, was not a lone voice crying out in the St. Petersburg wilderness. Joining it in support of Lincoln’s proclamation was the monthly Sovremennik. Founded by Aleksander Pushkin, the journal had recently been a leading advocate for the liberation of the Russian serfs.⁹⁷ In an extended treatment of recent developments in the American Civil War, Sovremennik’s editors ruminated on the meaning of emancipation of America’s slaves and, in doing so, found much fault with their journalistic counterparts in Britain. As they saw it, the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had “made a terrible storm, and reproaches poured down on Lincoln from various sides.”⁹⁸ Sovremennik’s editors had seen this sort of treatment of the Union’s civilian and military leadership before from the British and French press: “All that is done in the North—everything was subjected to the most biased, unfair criticism”; not so, however, “about their separatist friends.”⁹⁹ Not that the journal was itself a partisan cheerleader for the North: responding to Lincoln’s annual message to Congress of December, 1862, the editors confessed that “in general, we did not understand the need to restore the Union before reading Lincoln’s message, and do not understand it now.” For them, the salient issue was not Union, but slavery.¹⁰⁰ On this, they found the Times’s hypocrisy worthy of their withering sarcasm: “The same Times, which is always so eloquently talking about gradual progress, about the danger of all leaps and all violent upheavals, about legality and things of that sort, before getting carried away by friendship with the South … started very wittily to laugh at the cowardice of Mr. Lincoln, his excessive slowness [medlitel’nost], caution and so forth. It must be that this venerable newspaper wishes that he acted as energetically as possible to cut the Gordian Knot.”¹⁰¹ The Russians found the Morning Herald’s coverage of Lincoln’s address to be at least as worthy of ridicule. The London newspaper simply called attention to Lincoln’s “weakness,” Seward’s “shamelessness,” Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase’s “lack of talent,” and the “vainglory [khvastlivost]” of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The Morning Post also came in for criticism, based on its “prophecies” that Lincoln was going to go back on his proclamation.¹⁰² This was not a glowing record for the London papers.

The official southern response to the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation proved no more satisfying to the editors of Sovremennik. With good reason, the Russians castigated General Robert E. Lee’s announcement that he would shoot all captured Union officers if the proclamation went into effect and ridiculed Davis’s subsequent “restrictions” on his commander in chief’s declared policy. Davis, it seemed, was “studying” limiting the executions to officers who had served under General Benjamin Butler—“a novel restriction!”—as well as those who aided or commanded armed Blacks. As for those Blacks, Davis announced that they would be returned to their respective states, to be dealt with “according to the laws. For those of our readers who would like to know what ‘according to the laws’ means, we can add that by law of the individual states the insurgent slaves can be burned alive or whipped to death.” The Russians then went on to chastise the British and French “governments, the press, and the upper classes,” which lacked the moral fiber of the “noble lower classes” that had rallied to support liberation of their fellow disenfranchised laborers.¹⁰³ As to the British press’s response when Lincoln announced the permanent manumission of the slaves on January 1, Sovremennik once again, and at length, criticized the duplicity of the British newspapers, urging them to be honest in the future: “Frankness is always better than a lie.”¹⁰⁴ As these Russians saw it, the proverbial die had now been cast: slavery was going to be eradicated in the United States, even if Lincoln were to try to go back on the Emancipation Proclamation, as British papers suggested he might. Of course, many innocent whites might well die as the result of the slave insurgency that the British press professed to fear. But “still more likely to die also are blacks, even more innocent. But it has come to the point that there is no other solution (except for the project to postpone this issue until the next century).”¹⁰⁵ It was quite obvious to the editors in St. Petersburg that this was a ridiculous idea. Although the Russian minister in Washington, for his part, reported home the opinions of congressional Democrats, who claimed that the arming of large numbers of Blacks was “humiliating for the country,” such a reading of world opinion did not apply to these journalists in Russia.¹⁰⁶

Indeed, the criticism of Western newspapers by Russian intellectuals reveals a great rift between the elites of Britain and France, on one side, and those of America’s closest great power “friend,” on the other. It has been well established that Russian policymakers were hostile to the possibility of Anglo-French intervention in the American Civil War, and that they were so for reasons of national interest. But numerous Russian journalists—not always friendly to the tsar’s regime—also displayed a marked hostility to prevalent Anglo-French opinions on the broad range of issues associated with slavery, race, and the war. Their arguments were, furthermore, based on ideology and principle, rarely addressing Russia’s national interests. The schism between western European opinion on emancipation and that of Russia thus warrants a close study. This has yet to be undertaken.¹⁰⁷

Emancipation and Colonization

This is not to say that emancipation ended the threat of European intervention entirely. Two misconceptions regarding the international history of American emancipation have been challenged by scholars. The first of these is that the Emancipation Proclamation effectively ended any chance of European intervention in the American crisis. Although a French plan for mediation arose in 1863, its significance was easy to dismiss. As Sovremennik’s editors opined, “we do not attach any importance to the new mediation attempt made again by France (this time alone).”¹⁰⁸ It was easy enough to believe that France would make no serious attempt at intervention without Britain and that the Emancipation Proclamation had made impossible any British diplomatic initiative that would benefit the slaveholding South. Yet Napoleon III’s postemancipation initiative was quite serious, and was taken to be so by the Lincoln administration.¹⁰⁹

A second misconception is that Lincoln gave up on the idea of colonization after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Scholarship has called this interpretation into question. Robert E. May, Michael J. Douma, and Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page have all found evidence of continued administration interest in colonization after the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation.¹¹⁰ The significance of these discoveries has aroused scholarly debate.¹¹¹ Any discussion of slavery and Lincoln and Seward’s foreign relations must, nevertheless, address at least briefly the diplomacy connected with these colonization proposals.

It is generally known that Lincoln explored two attempts at colonization in 1862: one at Chiriqí, in what is now Panama, and the other the ill-fated Île á Vache (or Cow Island) experiment. The first was opposed by London and within Latin America, and it failed to materialize.¹¹² The second attempt actually settled some 450 African Americans on an island near Haiti; the colony “proved a disaster from the outset,” with the surviving settlers being rescued by the US Navy in 1864.¹¹³ The president and his administration bore some responsibility for this debacle, since they had been lackadaisical with regard to the contract and “remiss” in oversight of the effort.¹¹⁴ Lincoln’s early experiments with colonization bore no fruit and did not seem to presage future success. Yet the president and his administration would at least explore two more possibilities before giving up on the idea.¹¹⁵

British Honduras was, at the time, in need of laborers. Lincoln proved willing to consider sending African Americans to the colony to meet this need. He appears, in so doing, to have been motivated in part by a belief that “the British colonies would provide stronger protections for the rights of the freedmen than would the postwar South.”¹¹⁶ But attempts to negotiate an agreement proved frustrating to the British. On November 22, 1862, Foreign Secretary Lord Russell wrote to Lord Lyons, Britain’s minister in Washington, to ask for “observations … upon a plan for the introduction of free Negroes from this country into British Honduras.” According to Lyons, “the uncertain position of some of the principle Members of the Cabinet has retarded for some time my obtaining information with regard to the views of the Government.” Finally, on December 25, he was able to discuss the matter with the secretary of state. The result, however, “was not very encouraging.” Seward, who was not himself positively disposed toward colonization, “seemed to think that the Cabinet would be unwilling or unable to come to a decision at the present moment with regard to any definite scheme, and that it would be undesirable to press the subject until after the close of the session of Congress” on March 4.¹¹⁷ Seward was likely concerned about opposition to colonization from Republicans in Congress. For his part, Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opposed colonization but held off on confrontation over the issue at the time in order to “avoid a difference with the Presdt. [sic].”¹¹⁸ Seward could not, however, count on such forbearance indefinitely.

Nor could Seward reassure Lyons regarding Lincoln’s own policy team: “The opinions of Members of the Cabinet were, [Seward] said, so various and at the same time so indefinite on this question of emigration, that it would be impossible for him to bring them to an agreement, unless he had some plain written statement to produce as a basis of the discussion.” Seward thus encouraged the British to draw up a paper stating their views. Even if they did so, however, he did not give Lyons much reason for hope:

Many, he said, might, and indeed the President himself, be inclined to the opinion that the most desirable thing for both races was to separate them, and to reserve North America exclusively for the whites. On the other hand, the more ardent members of the emancipation party strongly objected to the removal of the Negroes. Nor was this feeling confined to the emancipation party. There existed in many quarters a strong opposition to sending away the coloured people at all and a special dislike of transferring them to the British of French colonies. It was asked whether it was wise to deprive the country of so much muscle and sinew, whether it was prudent to add to the strength of nations which might not be always friends of the United States.

Of particular concern to many was the need for Black labor and Black soldiers during a time of war. As Seward noted, “many excellent coloured regiments have been formed.” In summing up, he discouraged optimism: “Looking at matters practically, he certainly did regard it as extremely doubtful whether an emigration on a great scale would ever take place. The appearance was that neither whites nor blacks would be in favour of it.”¹¹⁹

The government in London had its own concerns. As Lyons confided to Russell, “it is obviously necessary to take care that no arrangement be made likely to embarrass the imperial government, either in its relations with the United States or in its neutral position with regard to the two belligerents.”¹²⁰ Of particular importance was to avoid coming to any sort of agreement with Washington that might suggest an attenuation of British neutrality. Russell was especially concerned that Britain not be seen as accepting “contrabands” into its colonies, which would inevitably cause diplomatic troubles with Richmond. “We must not expose ourselves to charges of kidnapping,” he declared.¹²¹ With such hurdles to overcome on both sides of the Atlantic, it is no wonder that the Honduras project proved to be a nonstarter.

More serious was the possibility that freed African Americans would be sent to the Dutch colony of Suriname as laborers. In the 1850s Dutch advocates for slaves were demanding an end to the “abhorrent system of coercion” [verfoeide dwangstelsel] in the colonies of the Netherlands.¹²² While “a good number of ministers were already in favor of abolition,” there were hurdles to be cleared. One was the issue of compensation for the owners. Additionally, there was “the idea that those who lived in slavery should be prepared for their freedom.”¹²³ Then there arose the central question of finding workers once the slaves were freed. After the emancipation of the slaves in July 1863, “the Surinamese planter class grew desperate for new sources of labor.”¹²⁴ In anticipation of this development, the Dutch colonial minister had raised the possibility of importing African Americans to fill the need. As he noted, the US government had, “under President Monroe already seen the necessity of sending the bulk of free Negroes and others away, with the consequence that on the west coast of Africa the Negro Republic of Liberia was founded.” He added that “if the Negroes from the United States can be received as emigrants with equal freedom and protection under the Dutch laws in Suriname, and advantages of this extensive and fertile land offered to them under the provisions of the Government established there, they could enter into contracts for, say, five years, with planters, and all of this would be fit to encourage an emigration to Suriname.”¹²⁵ The Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Paul Therèse van der Maesen de Sombreff, acted within days on his colleague’s suggestion. On July 1 he wrote to the Dutch minister in the United States, asking him to take the first steps toward negotiations with the Americans on “an emigration of Negroes from the United States to the Dutch Colony.” By July 19 the minister, Theodorus Marinus Roest van Limburg, had approached Seward.¹²⁶ The Dutch officials were clearly wasting no time in pursuing this possible source of cheap labor for Suriname.

As with the British, Seward sought to tamp down on Dutch optimism. “I have to state,” he wrote Roest van Limburg, “that it is believed the demand for laborers of that class in the military and naval service of the United States alone is sufficient to outweigh any inducement to their emigration abroad likely to be offered by foreign countries.” He did, however, refer the Dutchman to the secretary of the interior, Caleb Smith, since he “has been charged with that business” on behalf of the administration.¹²⁷ The minister followed up on the suggestion that September, with a request that he be informed of the terms on which the administration would enter into an agreement with The Hague “concerning an emigration of free negroes to Surinam.” It would appear that Roest van Limburg was by this time under no illusions about the long-term prospects of any negotiation, writing to van der Maesen de Sombreff on September 25 that not a single senator was likely to support an emigration treaty.¹²⁸ The administration nevertheless moved ahead. At the end of October the American minister in The Hague, James Shepherd Pike, informed van der Maesen de Sombreff that the United States was “ready to enter into negociations [sic] upon the subject” of African American emigration. One of the “general principles” guiding the discussions was, he added, that “all emigration of persons of African derivation to take place under the stipulations of the treaty, shall be perpetually free and voluntary.”¹²⁹

With this principle established, negotiations could begin. But Roest van Limburg remained skeptical of the enterprise. He was, at the time, relying in part on the advice of his father-in-law, former secretary of state Lewis Cass. Cass told the minister that “in the U.S. there is a sort of divide in the attempts to reach an agreement on emigration, which sooner or later will lead to unpleasant complications” in the government. In addition, he added, the Blacks sought by the Dutch were “very unfit” for the intended goal.¹³⁰ A convention was, nevertheless, signed in November 1863. Yet it was never submitted to the Senate for ratification. Seward did not believe that the treaty could be ratified by the Senate. As he told Pike, “the American people have advanced to a new position in regard to slavery, and the African class since the President in obedience to their prevailing wishes accepted the policy of colonization. Now not only their labor, but their military service is also appreciated and accepted.”¹³¹ Seward was being overly generous to Lincoln, whose interest in colonization had, after all, antedated his presidency. But as to Senate sentiment, Seward was representing the situation accurately: growing anticolonization sentiment in Congress had led the administration to withhold the treaty from Senate consideration.¹³² Even within Lincoln’s own cabinet, there was nothing like unanimity on the wisdom of African American emigration. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, in particular, wanted to utilize freedmen in the Union Army and did what he could to hinder the project.¹³³ Meanwhile, the chief American negotiator for the convention, Pike, believed that the principle behind the treaty was a “vicious” one, and privately confessed in April 1864 that he hoped it would not be ratified.¹³⁴ With such opposition, both legislative and executive, the scheme never had a chance. The Dutch still hoped as late as 1866 that at least some African Americans would arrive in Suriname, but executive enthusiasm for emigration appears to have been spent.¹³⁵

Conspicuous by its absence during this episode was the hand of the president. According to Allen C. Guelzo, this lack of evidence “is the most telling measure of Lincoln’s interest in colonization.” He adds that had the president “in any energetic way been determined to cram colonization down the emancipated black’s throats, then the new national energies that the Civil War put into his hands as president would have allowed very little to stand in his way.”¹³⁶ As it was, internal administration infighting and opposition from legislators like Sumner were enough to derail the most developed of emigration schemes. Lincoln may have flirted with colonization after emancipation, but the relationship never came close to consummation.

American slavery forced the United States to act in the international sphere in ways that it otherwise would not have, and to interact with the Atlantic world in a more dynamic way than its leaders might have preferred. Yet in the case of colonization, one administration after another managed to maintain a rather low international profile and to keep American commitments limited. They did so, furthermore, in spite of the fact that many influential policymakers, presidents included, were advocates of Black emigration. Colonization plans had been no mere velleity on the part of these players, who, for a variety of reasons, saw exporting America’s free Black population as a key to solving the issues raised by slavery. But the drive was not strong enough to lead policymakers to, say, risk conflict with Britain on the west coast of Africa, let alone to jeopardize federal unity during the Civil War. Other considerations, foreign and domestic, always took priority over removing African Americans from the nation.

Conclusion: Lincoln, Seward, and the Powers

With regard to the Lincoln administration’s top foreign policy priority, the president and the secretary of state met with success: the powers of Europe did not intervene diplomatically in the American Civil War, let alone militarily. There was a constellation of reasons for this, including lack of unity between London and Paris; Russian hostility toward European meddling in American affairs; and, above all, fear of provoking war with the Union. The British and French had priorities of their own, and these did not, in the end, align with intervention in America’s crisis. Slavery, then, was not the primary determinant of transatlantic relations during the war. Southern slavery, however, gave the Union diplomatic leverage from the beginning; the Confederates were always at a disadvantage, especially with Britain. Furthermore, the North’s leverage increased after September 1862. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation clarified the core issue that divided North and South. With this issue now manifest in Union diplomacy, British intervention on the side of the South was next to unthinkable.

Thus, in the final analysis, slavery proved to be less an advantage that the United States could actively exploit in its diplomacy than it was a disadvantage the Confederacy could not overcome in its own. Whether Lincoln and Seward chose to press the issue or, as early on in the war, to downplay it, the South always labored diplomatically under the weight of its “peculiar institution.” From the British laborer to the French foreign minister, the hostility of most Europeans toward southern slavery was a hurdle that Jefferson Davis’s exterior policy would have to overcome if foreign intervention were to be achieved. Richmond never overcame it. Lincoln’s was the first—and thus the only—administration to focus on restricting and then ending slavery rather than protecting or expanding it. Yet the edge that it gained from this internationally was less a result of its own skillful diplomacy than it was an unforced error on the side of its adversary in Richmond. But in a duel in which foreign intervention, or its prevention, was the salient issue, this was sufficient.