Britain in The American Civil War - The Trent Affair

The Trent Affair

Outright war between the U.S. and Britain was a possibility in the fall of 1861, when a U.S. naval officer, Captain Charles Wilkes, took control of a British mail ship and seized two Confederate diplomats. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had named James M. Mason and John Slidell as commissioners to represent Confederate interests abroad; Mason was en route to England and Slidell to France. They slipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, on a blockade runner at the beginning of October and went via the British Bahamas to Spanish Havana, where they took passage for England on the British mail steamer Trent.

USS San Jacinto had put in at a Cuban port, looking for news of Confederate agents who were reported to be active in that vicinity. Wilkes received word of Mason and Slidell's presence. It was generally agreed at this time that a nation at war had the right to stop and search a neutral merchant ship if it suspected that ship of carrying the enemy's dispatches. Mason and Slidell, Wilkes reasoned, were in effect Confederate dispatches, and he had the right to remove them. So on November 8, 1861, he steamed out into the Bahama Channel, fired twice across the Trent’s bow, sent a boat's crew aboard, seized the Confederate commissioners, and bore them off in triumph to the United States, where they were held prisoner in Boston. Wilkes was hailed as a national hero.

The violation of British neutral rights triggered an uproar in Britain. Eleven thousand British troops were sent to Canada, the British fleet was put on a war footing, with plans to capture New York City if war broke out, and a sharp note was dispatched to Washington demanding return of the prisoners and an apology. Lincoln, concerned about Britain entering the war, ignored anti-British sentiment and issued what the British interpreted as an apology (without apologizing) and ordered the prisoners released.

War was unlikely in any event, for the U.S. was providing Britain with over 40% of its wheat ("corn") imports during the war years, and suspension would have caused massive famine because Britain imported about 25-30% of its grain, and poor crops during 1861 and 1862 in France made Britain even more dependent on shiploads from New York. Britain's shortage of cotton was partially made up by imports from India and Egypt by 1863.

The Trent Affair led to the Lyons-Seward Treaty of 1862, an agreement to clamp down hard on the Atlantic slave trade, using the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy.