Civil War
With the passage of the Louisiana ordinance of secession, Slidell resigned from the U.S. Senate and headed home. In a dramatic farewell address, he threatened the boycott of all northern manufacturing and predicted the dominance of southern ships on the seas. He argued that foreign countries would prevent the Union from blockading southern ports: "This will be war, . . . and we shall meet it with . . . efficient weapons." Despite the looming war, the historian John D. Winters reports that many Confederates "still thought a peaceful solution could be found. Many believed the Yankee incapable of learning to use a gun or of mustering enough courage to fight; the emergency would soon dissipate."
Slidell soon accepted a diplomatic appointment to represent the Confederacy in France. John Slidell was one of the two CSA diplomats involved in the Trent Affair in November 1861. After having been appointed the Confederate States of America's commissioner to France in September, 1861, he ran the blockade from Charleston, South Carolina, with James Murray Mason of Virginia. They then set sail from Havana on the British mail boat steamer RMS Trent, but were intercepted by the U.S. Navy while en route and taken into captivity at Fort Warren in Boston.
After the resolution of the Trent Affair, the two diplomats set sail for England on January 1, 1862. From England Slidell at once went to Paris, where in February 1862, he paid his first visit to the French minister of foreign affairs. His mission to gain recognition of the Confederate States by France failed, as did his effort to negotiate a commercial agreement, for example that France might get control of Southern cotton if the blockade were broken. In both cases, France refused to move without the cooperation of England. But he did succeed in negotiating a loan of $15,000,000 from French capitalists and in securing the ship “Stonewall” for the Confederate government.
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Famous quotes related to civil war:
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
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—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)