Young

Senator James Murray Mason: Defender of the Old South. By Robert W. Young. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

Typically known only as one of the political prisoners of the Trent affair, James Murray Mason had a far reaching impact on the Old South. His biographer, Robert W. Young, seeks to restore his significance for the Confederacy, particularly through an examination of his work in foreign affairs. Like any tragic figure, Mason’s greatest strengths, his belief in the purity of law and his loyalty to his country, became the cause of his downfall. Young asserts that Mason’s ideals blinded him to the world of real politics and helped to doom the Confederacy.

Mason, a true Virginia cavalier, was the grandson of George Mason, signer of the Declaration and shaper of the Bill of Rights. James Mason shared his grandfather’s fierce loyalty to the republic, but to him loyalty to Virginia and the South superseded fidelity to the nation at large. Interestingly, though he was born into the Tidewater elite, as a young man he moved to Winchester and thus favored the more democratic frontier movements in his early political career.

Committed to acting upon his ideals, Mason twice found himself forced from elected position—once in 1827 and again in 1839. His real political career did not begin until 1847 when he was elected to the United States Senate. There he became known as a defender of the Constitution, refusing to enact legislative he believed outside its parameters. In particular, he opposed the transcontinental railway. His main achievement in the Senate was his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee. Once again, he applied his strict-constructionist mentality to treaties and expected other nations to follow the letter of the law as well. His tenure in the Senate was also marked by his defense of slavery and southern rights, particularly after John Brown’s raid.

During the secession crisis, Mason stayed in the Senate as long as possible. Young asserts that the acted as a spy or double agent, reporting Washington’s plans to the Virginia legislature until Virginia was ready to secede. After secession, Mason worked as the commissioner to Maryland and a representative to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. After the outbreak of the war, President Jefferson Davis, wanting to capitalize on the Virginian’s diplomatic skills, sent Mason to Great Britain to lobby for recognition. The capture of Mason and his fellow diplomat John Slidell on the Trent on their way to perform this mission, brought Britain close to war, but, ironically, once freed the two never again had the same level of clout.

Young characterizes Mason’s diplomacy as passive. Mason, he suggests, was content to wait behind the scenes instead of asserting himself. Young also blames Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Confederate government for not pushing for action. Instead of work on diplomatic angles, Mason spent most of his time in England as a purchasing agent, trying to get ships and supplies to the Confederacy. Even this ended in disaster as England seized the Laird rams. By putting all of his faith in King Cotton, Mason was not able to successfully maneuver in the international scene. In addition, Young suggests that Mason’s belief that countries would act according to the letter of the law clouded his judgment.

After the war, Mason was a man without a country. He spent a year in England trying to manage Jefferson Davis’ legal defense from afar before moving his family to Canada. There the former diplomat spent his time fishing and raising chickens. After several years of exile, Mason finally returned to Virginia, though not to his beloved Winchester. He died, according to Young, of a broken heart in 1871.

Young has written a thorough and sometimes moving biography of Senator Mason. By drawing Mason out from under the shadow of the Trent affair, Young has added to historians’ understanding of the Confederate strategy in foreign affairs. His biography also underscores the position of the cavalier patrician as an anachronism in mid-nineteenth century society.

Amanda Bresie

Senator James Murray Mason: Defender of the Old South. By Robert W. Young. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998) xvii + 288.

Robert Young’s study of James Murray Mason is in large part traditional biography. In accomplishing this task, the author provides a prototypical portrait of a conservative Southern gentlemen and the aristocratic society existing before the Civil War. Young finds his subject “a quintessential southerner, the embodiment of stereotypes,” determined “as much as any southern politician” to keep the south unchanged in a world characterized by change (xi).

Like so many of his contemporaries, the centrality of slavery to the Southern system led him to equate attacks on slavery with attacks on the Southern way of life and the power of the Federal government with tyranny. A disciple of John C. Calhoun, Mason led Southern Senators, drafted the Fugitive Slave Law, and chaired the committee investigating John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry expedition. As well as defending Southern rights within the confines of U. S. internal affairs, Mason also found himself concerned with foreign policy, serving as chairman of the Senate foreign Relations Committee from 1851 until secession. This experience with foreign affairs led to the role with which we are most familiar, his appointment by Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s chief diplomat to England.

Mason’s political theory is intimately bound-up with his defense of slavery and preservation of Southern power. Rigid construction of the U. S. Constitution limited the expansion of Federal power and preserved liberty. Mason’s first speech in the Senate in defense of free speech rings not with concern over deprivation of individual liberty, but with fear of the power of the central government (28). Young does not provide us with Mason’s views on the gag rule, or his views on suppression of abolitionist literature by Southern postmasters.

Mason throughout his Senate career opposed most legislation requiring government expenditure, whether beneficial to Southern states or not. His opposition to seemingly innocuous bills allowing for removal of obstructions in the Rio Grande for example, led him to be labeled a fiscal conservative. Young instead finds Mason an ideologue, unwilling to concede Federal authority to make such expenditures. (28-29). Mason opposed railroad construction, the Homestead Act (it only benefited lazy Americans and foreign immigrants), agricultural colleges and new furniture for Senate committee rooms (29-33).

Mason’s strict constructionalism extended to slavery, finding within the Constitution’s compromises precedent for expansion of slavery into Oregon Territory. Denial of such expansion would be grounds for disunion, as no slave state would have ratified the original document if it allowed limitation of slavery in future states (35).

Mason played a pivotal role in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid, personally interrogating the wounded abolitionist and investigating the sources of Brown’s financing and the implications of the attack. Mason felt the rebellion failed because of the loyalty of Virginia’s slaves: “Their affection, the kindness, the love which they bear to their masters” doomed Brown’s efforts (89).

Mason’s career as a diplomat on behalf of the Confederacy occupies a major portion of Young’s study. In his treatment Young points out the linkage (unfounded) of “Mason and Slidell” in the minds of many historians. The two men had little in common, either philosophically or geographically, and South developed no comprehensive diplomatic strategic method for either man to follow (xiv).

The story of Mason’s efforts in a European context is one of frustration and failure. Young details the difficulties of Southern diplomacy and the unsuccessful attempts to achieve recognition or purchase weapons in significant numbers. “King Cotton” diplomacy failed for a variety of reasons, many out of the control of Mason or and his compatriots. To Young, Southern policy failed in large part because the British government didn’t care if their textile industry was damaged or if English mill workers starved (165-66).

Failure of Confederate efforts became abundantly clear with the purchase by the Royal Navy of two armored rams, laboriously constructed at great effort and expense by Southern agents in Britain. The British government felt it best to avoid the risk of war with the United States or exposure of its own ships to American privateers any attempt to break the blockade would entail. Around this same time Mason became personally aware of the course of the war. Union soldiers over a period of ten months had chipped away the walls of his house in Winchester, sending the contents North as souvenirs (159).

Mason’s mission failed along with Confederate arms. Lincoln’s re-election and Grant’s bloody campaign in Virginia dashed all hopes of British intervention. Mason abandoned his diplomatic duties (though their was little to be done) and traveled throughout Europe in the last weeks of 1864. At the end, Mason rejected last ditch efforts to arm slaves in exchange for their freedom, due to “the great mischief and inconvenience” a large number of free blacks would cause Southern society (181). Mason grasped at straws until the end, predicting the rout of Sherman and victories over Grant leading to British recognition (184). Even with Lee’s surrender, Mason still hoped for a favorable outcome. While Slidell admitted defeat and left Paris, Mason vowed never to return until Southern partisan activity produced independence and victory (186).

Mason remained in exile in Canada until 1869. He returned to Virginia and remained until his death in 1871. Young concludes finding Mason an anachronism in his struggle to maintain chattel slavery, believing it “uplifted all parties involved” and in his struggle “against democracy and freedom for all races.” The results rendered him “little more than a pathetic remnant of the patrician fantasy world known as the ‘Old South’ (205).”

Texas Christian University

Paul Schmelzer