II

In foreign policy, too, the second half of 1863 brought cruel disappointment to the South. Not only had dreams of British recognition gone glimmering after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, but hopes for a new super-weapon to break the blockade were also dashed.

British laxity in allowing the commerce raiders Florida and Alabama to escape from Liverpool encouraged Confederate naval envoy James Bulloch to aim even higher. In the summer of 1862 he had contracted with the Laird firm for construction of two armor-plated vessels carrying turrets for nine-inch guns and a seven-foot iron spike attached to the prow to pierce wooden ships below the waterline. These fearsome "Laird rams" were expected to raise havoc with the blockade fleet, perhaps even to steam into New York harbor and hold the city for ransom.

While such extravagant hopes were doubtless unrealistic, the diplomatic crisis generated by the rams was real enough. Charles Francis Adams bombarded the Foreign Office with protests and warnings. Bulloch countered by transferring ownership of the vessels to a French firm which was ostensibly buying them for His Serene Highness the Pasha of Egypt. This subterfuge deceived only those who wished to be deceived. The diplomatic tension escalated as the ships neared completion in midsummer 1863.

A British court decision in an unrelated case buoyed Bulloch's prospects. In April the Palmerston government had seized the commerce raider Alexandra being built for the Confederacy, on the grounds that its warlike intent could be inferred from its structure despite the absence of guns. But in June the Court of Exchequer ruled against the government in this case. The way seemed clear for Bulloch to sail his unarmed rams out of Liverpool through a loophole in British law. Adams sent Foreign Secretary Russell increasingly acerbic protests culminating in a declaration on September 5: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war." Unknown to Adams, the Palmerston ministry had decided to detain the ships even before receiving this note. But when the diplomatic correspondence was later published, Adams became a hero at home for apparently forcing John Bull to give in. Despite Palmerston's resentment of Adams's tone ("We ought," the prime minister told Russell, "to say to him in civil Terms 'you be damned' "), Union diplomacy had won a victory that Henry Adams described as "a second Vicksburg."¹⁹

19. Quotations from D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), 325, 326; and Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), H, 82.

A disheartened James Bulloch transferred his efforts to France, where during 1863 the Confederates contracted for four commerce raiders and two double-turreted ironclad rams. Louis Napoleon continued to nurture southern hopes for recognition. He was still trying to restore a French empire in the new world. In June 1863 a French army of 35,000 men captured Mexico City and overthrew the republican government of Benito Juarez. Meanwhile the Confederates had formed alliances with anti-Juarez chieftains in provinces bordering Texas to foster the contraband trade across the Rio Grande. Perceiving a similarity of interests with the clerical monarchists and hacienda owners whose laborers were peons, southern leaders welcomed French intervention in behalf of this group. When Napoleon made clear his intent to set up the Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, Confederate envoys made contact with Maximilian and offered to recognize him if he would help obtain French recognition of the South. Maximilian was willing, but by January 1864 Napoleon seemed to have lost interest in the scheme.

A combination of Union diplomacy and European great-power politics had produced this outcome. The United States was friendly to the Juarez government. When it was overthrown, the Lincoln administration called home the American minister and refused to recognize the French-installed provisional government. Lincoln also modified Union military strategy in order to show the flag in Texas as a warning to the French. After the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Grant and Banks wanted to mount a campaign against Mobile. But for purposes of diplomacy, the government ordered Banks to move against Texas instead. The first Union effort in this direction, at Sabine Pass on the Texas-Louisiana border, turned into a fiasco in September 1863 when a single Confederate battery drove off the gunboats trying to protect an infantry landing. Banks did better in November, capturing Brownsville and making a token lodgement near the Mexican border for Napoleon to ponder.

Ponder it he did, for he wanted no trouble with the United States at a time when his intricate house of cards in European diplomacy seemed about to collapse. Part of Napoleon's purpose in setting Maximilian on the Mexican throne was to extract favors from Austria in the delicate but deadly game of diplomacy and war among the Continental powers as each sought to protect its flanks while trying to defend or gobble up

parts of Poland, Italy, and Denmark. Austria's alliance with Prussia in a war against Denmark by which Prussia gained Schleswig-Holstein cooled Napoleon's ardor for the Hapsburg connection. In early 1864 he scaled down the French commitment to Maximilian and spurned Confederate attempts to use Mexico as bait for French recognition. Napoleon's foreign ministry also shut down Confederate efforts to build a navy in France. The six ships contracted for by the South were sold instead to Peru, Prussia, and Denmark. But Bulloch went down fighting. Through legal legerdemain at which he had become expert, he eventually obtained transfer of one ironclad from Denmark to the Confederacy. Christened C.S.S. Stonewall, it crossed the Atlantic and arrived one month after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. The Stonewall ultimately found its way into the Japanese navy.²⁰