Rise to Greatness Read Online Free Page B

perspective until his duties demanded otherwise; there is scant evidence that he gave much thought to foreign relations before he became president.
    But now the world pressed in too powerfully to ignore. As the president’s closest staff members, his secretaries Nicolay and Hay, wrote in their history of the Lincoln administration: “The most critical point of the contest on both sides was the possibility of foreign intervention.” In his message to Congress in December, Lincoln had explained that securing support from foreign powers was the essential element of the Confederate strategy for victory. Mighty in cotton but weak in manufacturing, the Rebel states intended to lure Europe into the conflict—especially Great Britain, which possessed the naval strength that the Confederacy sorely lacked. British ships could break the Union blockade and open Southern ports, protecting cotton on its way out while allowing weapons and supplies to flow in. Lincoln well understood that the growing armies in Union blue would have little hope of conquering the rebellion unless he could keep the Europeans on the sidelines.
    Among the envoys entering the Blue Room that day was a square-faced man with shiny black hair whose arrival sent a current of excitement through the crowd. Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, a career diplomat and the first Viscount Lyons, was Great Britain’s minister to the United States. The two countries had an unusually complicated relationship; cousins in history, partners in commerce, they were riven by rivalry. Two times in less than a century they had been at war. In recent weeks, they had come dangerously close to a third.
    The arrival of Lord Lyons sent a surge through the room because only a short time earlier, in late December, he had received instructions from London to prepare for a formal withdrawal from Washington. This break in diplomacy would, if it came, almost certainly be followed by war. The crisis stemmed from the arrest of two Confederate officials as they attempted to reach Europe to appeal for support. Until the South’s secession, both these men had been important figures at Washington events like this one. James Mason, a wild-haired Virginian, had been president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate. John Slidell of Louisiana had served in the Senate as well. As they embarked on their mission to Europe, yet another distinguished Washingtonian—navy captain Charles Wilkes, famed explorer of Antarctica and the Pacific—learned from his station in the Caribbean that Mason and Slidell could be found aboard the British steamship Trent. The idea of such high-ranking U.S. officials touring London and Paris to promote the breakup of the Republic was too much for Wilkes to swallow. He overtook the Trent, ordered a warning shot fired across her bow, then sent a boarding party to seize the traitorous former senators.
    Wilkes’s bold step was entirely unauthorized, and clearly violated Britain’s declared neutrality in the North-South conflict. But the captain had shown exactly the sort of spine many Unionists were clamoring for from Washington, and he was glorified in Northern newspapers. Congress passed a resolution extolling his action and ordered a gold medal struck bearing his likeness. Lincoln, however, was put in a terrible spot, because the British were understandably furious. The Trent affair threatened to undo months of careful maneuvering to isolate the Confederacy.
    Britain’s elderly prime minister, Lord Palmerston, summoned his cabinet when the news reached London, flung his hat on the table, and declared: “You may stand for this, but damned if I will!” As he calmed down, though, the shrewd and patient Palmerston saw that the Trent crisis presented both an opportunity and a danger. His government was already annoyed with the United States over tariffs and the cotton shortage. And the United States had recently sent packing a British consul, Robert Bunch, because of his sympathy for the