Wars not Fought: Neutrality and European Navies in American Waters during the US Civil War

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates that British and French warships in American Waters during the Civil War played a central role in maintaining neutrality and the rights that came with the status. Nineteenth-century powers maintained neutral rights by sending warships to the coasts of belligerents to facilitate the work of their diplomats and consuls. The first aim of European warships during the American Civil War was to determine if the Union blockade was effective and thus legal under international law. The observations by these naval officers generally acknowledged the blockade as effective around major ports. This allowed Lord Palmerston’s Ministry to formally recognise the US Navy’s blockade as legal, overriding the claims of British consuls that the Union had only achieved an illegal paper blockade, establishing the relatively loose blockade of the Confederacy as precedent of a legal blockade in international law. The French Government, though not sharing London’s assessment, was not able to contest this recognition, hamstrung by the sympathetic assessments of the Union blockade of its own naval officers and the needs of its own blockading force in Mexico. The British and French men-of-war, in a joint courier service, provided communications with consuls in blockaded ports, bringing the agents with instructions from the central government on how to make claims for the neutral rights of their nationals. Cooperation between the two navies also extended to the protection of each other’s consuls and nationals in areas of active warfare. After the British recognition of the Union blockade in February 1862, missions of protection became the main focus of the two navies in American waters. Though actual instances of evacuations are rare, and consuls often complained of the lack of support, the visits of these warships to the coast nevertheless forced Union and, to a less extent, Confederate officers to modulate their approach to fighting the war. Finally, though the decisions of declaring formal war or peace were made in European cabinets, the presence of British and French warships among Union blockading fleets was a source of tension. British and, to a less extent, French warships were sometimes misidentified as blockade-runners or Confederate cruisers and had tense standoffs with Union warships; these had the potential to escalate into an open conflict between United States and the European powers. The lack of escalation is in large part attributable to the actions of Admiral Sir Alexander Milne, who wrote detailed instructions on how to avoid confrontations and, somewhat belatedly, rearranged his naval station to keep commanding officers with strong Confederate sympathies away from the American coast.