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Lord Palmerston's policy toward the Confederacy.
Lord Palmerston's sympathies in the American Civil War (1861-5) were with the secessionist Southern Confederacy of pro-slavery states. Although a professed opponent of the slave trade and slavery, he also had a deep life-long hostility towards the United States and believed that a dissolution of the Union would weaken the United States (and therefore enhance British power) and that a southern Confederacy "would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures".[69]
At the beginning of the Civil War, Britain had issued a proclamation of neutrality on 13 May 1861. Lord Palmerston decided to recognise the Confederacy as a belligerent and to receive their unofficial representatives (although he decided against recognising the South as a sovereign state because he thought this would be premature). The United States Secretary of State, William Seward, threatened to treat any country which recognised the Southern separatists as a belligerent, as an enemy of the Union and the North. Lord Palmerston ordered that reinforcements be sent to Canada because he was convinced that the North would make peace with the South and then invade Canada. When news reached him of the Confederate victory at Bull Run in July 1861 he was very pleased, although 15 months later he wrote that "the American [Civil] War...has manifestly ceased to have any attainable object as far as the Northerns are concerned, except to get rid of some more thousand troublesome Irish and Germans. It must be owned, however, that the Anglo-Saxon race on both sides have shown courage and endurance highly honourable to their stock".[70]
The Trent Affair in November 1861 produced a crisis. A U.S. Navy warship stopped the British steamer Trent, and seized two Confederate envoys en route to Europe. British opinion was outraged. Lord Palmerston called the action "a declared and gross insult". He demanded the release of the two diplomats, and ordered 3,000 troops to Canada. In a letter to Queen Victoria on 5 December 1861 he said, "Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten."[71] In another letter to his Foreign Secretary the next day, he predicted war between Britain and the Union:
It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the rabid hatred of England which animates the exiled Irishmen who direct almost all the Northern newspapers, will so excite the masses as to make it impossible for Lincoln and Seward to grant our demands; and we must therefore look forward to war as the probable result.[71]
However, the U.S. leaders decided to release the prisoners rather than risk war. Lord Palmerston was convinced that the troops sent to Canada had persuaded the U.S. to acquiesce.
After the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, and the subsequent issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Palmerston declined Napoleon III of France's proposal for the two powers to recognise the Confederacy.[70] Palmerston rejected all further efforts to gain British recognition for the Confederacy, as he thought the military situation did not warrant it. The tide eventually turned in the United States' favour and the Confederacy was defeated in 1865.
Another difficulty for Lord Palmerston was the raiding ship CSS Alabama, built in Birkenhead in Britain. On 29 July 1862, a law officer's report he had commissioned advised him to detain Alabama, as its construction was a breach of Britain's neutrality. Further, the cotton famine in industrial regions of the North was beginning to bite, just at the time when British popular opinion was starting to harden against the Confederates.
Lord Palmerston ordered Alabama detained on 31 July, but she had already put to sea before the order reached Birkenhead. In her subsequent cruise, Alabama captured or destroyed many Union merchant ships, as did other raiders also fitted out in Britain. (All of the raiders were armed after leaving Britain, though.)
The U.S. accused Britain of complicity in the construction of the raiders. This was the basis of the postwar Alabama claims for damages against Britain. Lord Palmerston refused to pay damages or to refer the dispute to arbitration. After his death, his Gladstone acknowledged the U.S. claim and agreed to arbitration. Britain paid $15,500,000 as damages.
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