Not until late in 1872 would the
government of the United Kingdom make amends for its role in the rebellion’s
oceanic rampages. By that point, this heated Anglo-American controversy had
smoldered for ten full years. Demands for British compensation aggravated three
US presidencies (with two secretaries of state and four London-based ministers
doing the heaviest lifting) and five British ministries (which cycled through
four foreign secretaries and three ambassadors to Washington). Also entangled
in the dispute were elected and appointed officials like Senator Charles
Sumner, the negotiators of the 1871 Treaty of Washington, and the
representatives from five countries whose Geneva deliberations imposed a burden
of $15 million on the UK for its negligence. Publicists on both sides of the
Atlantic ranged widely across issues. Canadian politics, greater rights for
Ireland, and the separatist Cuban insurgency against Spain each came to figure
in what seemed to be interminable debates. Forging an agreement seemed to be an
imperative, however, coming as it did during an especially delicate moment in
nineteenth-century US relationships with other world powers.
Diplomatic historians have
devoted considerable attention to the dizzying complexity of this prolonged
standoff, while studies of international law have, in various ways, understood
the arbitration judgment of the 1872 settlement as a high point of Victorian
legal innovation. The quality of that existing scholarship allows us to narrow
the focus on how the settlement demonstrated the waning precedent of
Confederate pariahdom. Meaningful changes occurred in how leading participants
framed three critical issues: which British actions were most objectionable,
how Britain’s disregard of the rebellion’s proslavery propagandism ultimately
mattered, and which solutions could secure a satisfactory settlement.
Nearly all of America’s postwar
accusations and denunciations were framed while the Alabama and the
other raiders were still at sea. Official diplomatic dispatches from Seward and
Adams after 1862 accused the Palmerston government of violating its own
professions of neutrality by allowing shipyards to fit out fearsome weapons
that seemed to imperil civilization itself. Charles Sumner escalated the
controversy with his 1863 New York speech on the immorality of bestowing
belligerent status on a slave-mongering rebellion. His case, and that made by a
host of other Americans, detailed a cycle of knowing complicity with a uniquely
vicious regime and aired suspicions that something more nefarious than simple
negligence was at work. A corollary of such charges was the demand that the
British government bear not just the “direct” costs (the total damage inflicted
on ships by Liverpool-built cruisers) but those “indirect” expenditures
(computed to represent a considerable portion of all US wartime spending). No
less important to some was the moral imperative that the British acknowledge
how they had contradicted their vaunted support for global emancipation by
aiding the Confederacy.
William Seward, who continued as
Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state after Lincoln’s death, made little headway
on settling with the British until the middle of 1868. Matters got off to a
bumpy start that spring when President Johnson, then under political siege,
selected General George McClellan, Lincoln’s nemesis in the army and foe in the
1864 election, to replace Charles Francis Adams as minister to the United
Kingdom. That provocative move was quickly voted down by a Senate that had a
short time earlier nearly removed the president through an impeachment trial.
The Senate then approved one of its own by authorizing, by a unanimous vote,
the mission of Reverdy Johnson. A long-serving Marylander, Johnson’s proslavery
conservatism had been most evident in his representing Dred Scott’s enslavers
during the 1850s, in a case that affirmed the sanctity of slave property more
generally. In war, he was a stalwart Unionist who came grudgingly to vote for
an antislavery constitutional amendment. Charles Sumner, who had worked well
with the Democrat on the Committee on Foreign Relations, helped to make him
minister by swaying the votes of his colleagues and the opinions of overseas
friends. He came to regret doing so soon enough. Johnson’s overly soft demands
to the British government were compounded by his “convivial and apparently
sympathetic association with the bitterest English partisans of the rebellion.”
Repeated gestures of friendliness toward Confederate backers John Roebuck, Lord
Wharncliffe, and even Alabama builder John Laird stirred outrage from
the American and British progressive press. Johnson returned with an agreement
that John Jay II sneeringly referred to as “the Alabama Wrong.”
The Reverdy Johnson treaty, drawn
up during the final stage of Andrew Johnson’s disastrous presidency, raised the
ire of the Committee on Foreign Relations, which unanimously rejected it.
Chairman Sumner echoed his 1863 speech with an assault on foreigners’
unforgivable and loathsome aid to slave-mongers, and his withering assault on
Britons created a transatlantic sensation. Britain had betrayed its “avowed
creed” by aiding those who “in the very madness of barbarism” had aspired to
raise an empire on the cornerstone of bondage. During a pivotal moment in human
history, “England gave her name, her influence, her material resources to the
wicked cause, and flung a sword into the scale with Slavery.” Such an instance
of gross immorality was perplexing. “Strange that the land of Wilberforce”
would depart from “the rule of justice and good neighborhood” in conduct that
was “pernicious in proportion to the scale of operations, affecting
individuals, corporations, communities, and the nation itself.” Perhaps worst
of all, “down to this day there is no acknowledgment of this wrong,—not a
single word.” In such circumstances, Sumner argued that only a “generous
expression” of contrition could produce “a just settlement” and “harmony
between two great and kindred nations.” British opinion makers pushed back. The
Spectator of London conceded that the country’s dalliance with slaveholders
had been an “act of marvelously bad taste and bad feeling” and thus opened the
way for an expression of regret. But this paper also insisted that the
government’s neutral posture could in no way be understood as “an international
crime.” Given that new doctrines of recognition had not resulted in expanded
human rights commitments, it was a difficult to argue otherwise.
Sumner’s speech ensured the
Senate’s rejection of the 1869 treaty, but the heat of that performance, and
its insult of Britain, caused him to forfeit a subsequent public role in
crafting a substitute treaty. He continued to push the new secretary of state,
Hamilton Fish, behind the scenes, and his influence was evident in official
communications referring to the “perpetual and exclusive slaveholding republic”
erected by wicked Confederates. The senator and the administration locked horns
on several issues, chief among them Sumner’s fixation on Great Britain’s 1861
declaration of neutrality. That emphasis moved the conversation from the matter
of whether an impious rebellion deserved full sovereign status (which no power
had ever granted) to whether its status as a belligerent should have been
conceded (the prevailing stance of the entire international community, which
followed the early lead of the British government). Sumner’s stubbornness about
the issue bedeviled cabinet-level consideration of whether Cuban freedom
fighters should be accorded belligerent status, which would have opened the
United States to charges of doing to Spain what it insisted others should not
have done to them. Other Caribbean currents and countercurrents eventually
doomed Sumner’s once mighty influence, which ceased altogether when his
opposition to the annexation of the Dominican Republic cost him, in the spring
of 1871, the chairmanship he had so deeply prized.
The senator’s ambition to achieve
a Sumnerian contribution to international law peaked in 1869, only to subside
at year’s end with his quixotic plan to sever ties to existing slave powers.
Overwrought language forecast how a “grand discussion” about a sweeping
settlement might remodel the existing, and badly outdated, maritime code and
“place our republic at the head of the civilized world.” In his own efforts, he
returned repeatedly to his elaboration of “ocean belligerency” in 1863. It
stood to reason, he explained to all who would listen, that powers incapable of
bringing prizes into their own ports, where they could put cases before
functioning prize courts, had no basis to pursue legitimate high seas captures.
To take and burn enemy vessels while in international waters, as Semmes and
others had done, could be made into a piratical act by raising the bar of who
might qualify as a high seas belligerent. Sumner’s fixation on that technical
point effectively pivoted from questions of morality (the wicked attempt of the
rebellion to vindicate and spread human bondage) to ones of capacity
(especially the seaborne Confederacy’s inability to move captured prizes past
an effective US blockade).
Questions about the intersection
of legality and morality in postwar settlements were addressed head-on by
Johann Bluntschli, who worked with Francis Lieber to establish the Alabama
dispute as a test case for academic experts to resolve national disagreements
over international law. The Heidelberg professor was dismissive about attempts
to establish the ethical shortcomings of one’s wartime enemies. It was a
commonplace, after all, for one party to claim as a “sacred right” what the
other denounced as a “scandalous iniquity.” If the North had the stronger case
that its enemies’ slaveholding was an “abominable” affront to world opinion,
the South’s aim to protect a “historic right” to human property logically
followed the US defense of that prerogative before 1860. Outside great powers
could hardly be blamed, Bluntschli wrote, for crafting a policy of neutrality
in a clash between two entities capable of conducting regular warfare aligned
with the general wishes of their respective citizenries. Absent from
Bluntschli’s analysis was a consideration of aspects of Confederate pariahdom
(whether ideological, maritime, or religious) that threatened greater
disruption than that posed by less aggressive slaving states. His neutral tone
was typical of wider European assumptions that immorality was not necessarily
at odds with the existing law of nations. Indeed, advocates of reform rested
their case for change on the gap between universally held moral principles and
rules that operated as authoritative. Bluntschli seemed to be at pains to
sustain his antislavery absolutism as he moved from international law to
political science. His theorizing about the modern state in the mid-1870s added
a new element in detailing the unique cruelty of a race-based slavery that
denied a shared humanity. But his belief in the natural inferiority of the
“negro” complicated his assessment about the extent of rights to those lacking
the “rare self-control and manly energy” of white Europeans. If Black former
slaves fully deserved their freedom, it did not follow that they should
exercise the suffrage within self-governing polities. He doubted whether
multiracial democracy was ever prudent.
Europeans more generally grew
averse in these years to antislavery argumentation, and many commentators made
a harder turn to racism than Bluntschli did. Nevertheless, the United States
continued to rest its case for damages inflicted by British-built raiders on
the most infamous qualities of the Confederacy. Americans’ 1872 brief at Geneva
established how Britain’s “studied unfriendliness or fixed predisposition
adverse to the United States” was “inconsistent with its duties as a neutral”
and did so through a chain of argumentation that replayed the public diplomacy
of Confederate pariahdom. Americans assumed, the brief noted, that Britain
would never act “in favor of supporters of slavery.” Passages from secession
orators, notably including Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech, established the dark
clarity of Confederate designs. A pro-Southern tribute from William Gladstone
late in 1862 sealed the case of how an iniquitous British government
sympathized with a barbarous power. Gladstone, who by 1872 had moved up within
the Liberal Party to become the sitting prime minister, realized the
awkwardness of being prominently included in the American account of the
wartime record. He composed a record of his contrition for the “most singular
and palpable error” of his public statements about a Southern people having
made a nation. His country’s Geneva representatives convinced him that
circulating the note was unwise. On the eve of his death, he deemed that advice
to have been misguided and regretted he had not made amends publicly and
forthrightly.
In the end, the settlement of the
claims in 1872 marked a “new departure” that echoed much of what was underway
in American domestic politics. Old topics, most notably those regarding British
betrayals of abolitionism, were put aside while earlier high expectations were
trimmed. Sumner voted for the treaty, reasoning that its inclusion of an
arbitration process (a centerpiece of the peace movement he had earlier
supported) compensated for its many shortcomings. The absence of a formal
apology greatly disappointed him, as did the hesitancy of congressmen and
British negotiators to recast existing maritime law more comprehensively. In
the immediate aftermath of the Geneva proceedings, Charles Francis Adams marked
the closing of the “great experiment” by commenting, with a sense of approval,
that Americans had achieved “as much success as we possibly could have
expected.” (Robert E. Bonner, The First Pariah State: How the Proslavery Confederacy
Menaced the World [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026], 129-33,
135)
The following image is taken from ibid., 134:
