What was: The Trent Affair?

The Trent Affair was one of the most major international events that occurred during the ACW. An event that nearly pushed the United States and Great Britain into conflict. Yet, the details surrounding it tend to be rather un-known,but, not today.

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Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, had dispatched these envoys to secure British and French recognition as a sovereign nation. Britain and France had maintained their diplomatic relations with the United States following the outbreak of the Civil War and had recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent power, but not a sovereign government, in early 1861. Davis sought to change this by negotiating with these nations for full diplomatic recognition, largely through the use of heavy cotton shipments to these states, something, known as King Cotton Diplomacy, that figured that the shortage in the textile mills in both Britain and France would force both governments to recognize the nation in return for regular cotton shipments.

Official recognition would not only lend credibility to the Confederacy for its bid of independence but would also pave the way for lucrative trade deals between the powers, and they would force the Union to give up on blockading southern ports, as they lacked the naval arm to fight against the European fleets. Davis hoped that the recent victories against Union troops would make the governments favor the envoys much more.

In October 1861, James Mason and John Slidell, two of the diplomats sent, slipped through the U.S. naval blockade and left Charleston, South Carolina for Spanish Cuba, from there, they took passage for England on the Trent. U.S. Captain Wilkes intercepted the Trent on November 8, 1861 and, without permission from Washington, ordered his lieutenant to board and search the ship. The U.S. boarding party took Mason, Slidell, and their secretaries as prisoners, but allowed the Trent to depart for England without taking the ship as a prize, which was the original intention of Wilkes.

Initial reaction on both sides of the Atlantic to this was strong. The United States, publicly celebrated this turn of events as a victory against the Confederacy and a blow to Confederate diplomacy. The British, on the other hand, strongly protested Wilkes’s action as illegal and a violation of their neutrality and demanded the release of the captive Confederate envoys as well as a formal apology. Although British officials continued to advocate a policy of neutrality, they did sent over 20,000 regulars to Canada, raised the Canadian militia, and sent naval reinforcements to the Western Hemisphere, in the advent that war did occur. Neither the United States nor Great Britain wanted war, but it was clear that, at best, the Trent incident had sparked a major diplomatic disagreement and, at worst, appeared to have pushed Great Britain and the United States towards armed conflict.