Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward's Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.
Certainly one of the most tenuous years in American foreign relations is that between 1860 and 1861, as evidenced by the ad hoc, oftentimes desperate action taken by the United States discussed in Desperate Diplomacy. Many of the European powers with whom William Seward and the State Department would have intercourse over the next several years depended on Southern cash crops, particularly cotton, for much of their industry, thereby giving many European powers, but England and France in particular, a vested interest in the American insurgency. Seward, of course, understood the delicacy of the situation, and yet was tasked with asserting American dominance and insisting upon American sovereignty in dealing with its own civil affairs as the Civil War entered its first year.
One of the first actions to be undertaken by Lincoln's administration was to draw up plans for the subjugation of the confederate states, and these plans included blockading Southern ports as a major provision of compelling the South to acquiesce. Great Britain and France, seeing their potential supply of cotton endangered, began to insist that commerce between Europe and the South not be interrupted so long as the goods being shipped were of a non-bellicose nature. Provisions against privateering and the stopping of British ships on the high seas were also sought, and although the Federal navy never practiced privateering nor routinely stopped British ships without cause, formal provisions were not adopted.
Although both Britain and France may have harbored sympathies for the Southern states, reasons are varied for lack of participation on the part of Britain and France during the American war. Part of the reason was the fact that the Federal blockade of Confederate ports was completely legal according to the statutes of international law. In Great Britain more so than in France, public opinion favored the anti-slavery North above the South, and strongly opposed armed action for cotton's sake. Southern ports also temporarily refused to ship cotton to Europe, hoping that the shortage would impel the British to intervene on the South's behalf. A temporary cotton shortage was one thing, but food was another entirely, and commerce with the Northern states supplied about one-fifth of Britain's foodstuffs, and the British government was unwilling to endanger such a large percentage of their nutrition needlessly.
Yet, Northern officials within and without the Lincoln administration committed more than their fair share of faux pas. Likely the most common source of friction between Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and Lincoln's governments was Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, which inevitably led to the incarceration of British subjects with long waits between arrest and trial. One such example of this was the case of Robert Bunch, British consul in New Orleans, who was accused of correspondence which encouraged traitorous activities and arranging the purchase of arms for the South through an intermediary. Bunch was recalled, but the intermediary, a man by the name of Robert Mure, was arrested and did not come to trial for some time. Mure claimed to be a British subject, and Britain pressed the United States to see due process followed. Britain was still reeling from the embarrassment of the Bunch Affair, and following a decision by British courts to not pursue the matter on legal grounds, their requests turned out to be fruitless.
Overall, Desperate Diplomacy contains a great deal of excellent information, but many of the arguments are muddled, or are abandoned half-resolved. In the case of the Trent Affair, for example, perhaps one of the more delicate matters of Seward's first year of Secretary of State, the outcome is not discussed, nor are its ramifications. The questions raised by the Trent Affair are "answered in this book" (195), although not in the section which discusses the Trent Affair. Ferris' conclusion is that Seward's desperate diplomacy was inexpertly carried out, but Seward's strategy, whether good or bad, was nonetheless effective in keeping Great Britain and France out of active participation in the Civil War. Ferris does bring a worldwide view into Civil War diplomacy, covering France, Austria, Russia, and Mexico, in addition to Britain, although Britain is the focus as the most likely nation to intervene. Many questions remain unanswered by this work, but Ferris has addressed much of the turmoil associated with the relationship between Britain and the United States in 1861.
Stephen Edwards
Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy. By Norman Ferris. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1976. 265 pp.
With this work, noted diplomatic historian Norman Ferris attempts to counter what he terms the “traditional view” that Secretary of State William H. Seward tried “to plunge the United States into a rousing foreign war” (vii) while at the same time helping to subsume a domestic insurrection. On the contrary, after surveying a myriad of 1861 diplomatic crises and incidents, Ferris concludes the aggressors and bellicose diplomats worked not out of Washington but from Westminster. For Ferris, the Lord Palmerston government, especially its Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell and American envoy Baron Lyons, through “miscalculation and misunderstanding” (200) failed to take Seward seriously. Seward, for his part, comes off as an astute saber rattler who always compromised diplomatically, unwilling to risk the war he so often threatened. Based on an examination of American and British diplomatic sources, Desperate Diplomacy nonetheless fails in its argument for a number of reasons.
More than anything else, this work narrates a series of diplomatic controversies that arose between London and Washington in 1861. The first, London’s May issuance of neutrality, which recognized the belligerent status of the Confederacy, colored relations between the two capitals for the rest of the year. For Seward, according belligerent status represented the first step in recognition of the Confederacy, a policy the Secretary of State could not tolerate, as he officially viewed the conflict with the Confederacy as a domestic insurrection and not war between two states.
Nevertheless, the neutrality proclamation forced Seward, according to Ferris, to take a hard line against the British, resulting in one side backing down in a number of incidents. Ferris points to Seward acceding to the British position on the closing of Confederate ports, continuing the neutral cotton trade, outfitting Confederate commerce raiders in British ports, and the Mexican intervention. Conversely, Russell submitted to Seward’s interpretations in the Bunch affair, what Ferris terms a “total capitulation” (114), jailing of British seamen in the service of the Confederacy, and application of the Morrill Tariff. Ferris briefly concludes by mentioning the Trent affair of November 1861, the topic of his next book, calling it a “needless occurrence” (198) that resulted from Palmerstonian bellicosity and prejudices against the United States.
Desperate Diplomacy, despite purporting to offer a new interpretation, suffers from a number of problems. First, the title leads the reader to believe the work covers all of Seward’s foreign policy when, in fact, it discusses little more than his British policy. Such becomes a problem when Ferris either downplays third countries, like France, or fails to given them agency, as he does with Mexico; for example, he never once names Benito Juárez or any other Mexican leader despite devoting a chapter to the topic. Second, Ferris’s narrative reads more like the recitation of diplomatic dispatches, often overusing quotes, rather than a contextualized history. More than once, the reader wonders if he would be better off reading the dispatches himself owing to the lack of contextualization and narrative flow. Third and most importantly, Ferris never defines who proclaims the “traditional view” of Seward as a warmonger. Without any significant discussion of this school, the reader questions if Ferris has created a straw man to attack, especially since other histories such as Walter LaFeber’s New Empire, have portrayed Seward as an astute and pragmatic diplomat, as does Ferris, not one who risked a foreign war while fighting the Confederacy.
Nevertheless, the reader should commend Ferris for introducing the British perspective, using an extensive array of British sources, into the study of Civil War diplomacy. Ferris incisively notes that, in the critical year of 1861, British politicians distrusted and disrespected their American counterparts and they especially “disbelieved or misunderstood” (182) Seward. The reader should welcome this work as the beginning of a larger body of monographs on United States–British relations during the American Civil War that take into account British prejudices. Likewise, though burdensome in detail, the narrative provides historians, diplomats, and legal scholars springboards for topics of further study, such as the neglected Bunch affair. Even so, the reader cannot and should not overlook this work’s faults. Ferris limits his topic chronologically and geographically, quotes too much of his narrative, and offers only a slightly more nuanced view of Seward’s diplomacy than previous scholarly contributions, leading one to question just how desperate Seward’s foreign policy was.
J. Knarr