Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations, and Blockade-Running in the Bahamas

Abstract

Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations, and Blockade-Running in the Bahamas Beau Cleland (bio) In early 1862, the acting governor of the Bahamas welcomed the arrival of “numerous strangers from the neighbouring continent,” as Confederates and their supporters flowed into Nassau to open a critical and lucrative trade with the nearby Confederate coast. Their friendly reception in Nassau was not simply an accident of geography.1 In an unlikely triumph of informal Confederate diplomacy, merchants, planters, and ship captains on both sides created ties of trade, self-interest, and genuine sympathy and sustained them against pressure from both the U.S. federal and British imperial governments. It was a diplomacy of personal acquaintance, business relationships, and shipping routes rather than one of formal envoys, and these informal networks gave the Confederacy a rare success in international affairs. By using British colonial partners, the Confederacy’s ad hoc collection of minor officials, merchants, and shipowners pressed claims on the British government, and, through the British, on the Union, in ways that formal diplomats could not. In doing so, this Confederate commercial-diplomatic network formed and protected the blockade-running enterprise that sustained much of the Confederate war effort and created the means [End Page 61] for expatriates and foreign allies to materially aid the rebellion. This Confederate web extended across British America, from Toronto and Halifax to British Honduras and numerous places in between, but it had its greatest success in Nassau. This reassessment of who mattered and what constituted “success” in Confederate diplomacy is important for bringing scholarship on Civil War diplomacy in line with the broader deinstitutionalization of diplomatic history.2 It is also an opportunity to reconsider how and why individuals and subnational groups shaped the course of the war and international relations in the nineteenth century—and to push back against the paradigm of the state as the most important actor, a perspective that underlies even the “new” diplomatic history of the Civil War.3 Whatever the relative claims over state capacity in this era, it was still a time of comparative bureaucratic weakness and agonizingly slow and unreliable communication. We must embrace the trend in histories of empire and sovereignty that deemphasizes the role of the state by decentering the diplomatic history of the war from the State Department or Foreign Office and placing focus on the people who personally shaped the transformation of state policy into action and, perhaps more frequently, vice versa.4 This approach allows us to ask different questions about things like blockade-running. Rather than just assessing how much it helped the Confederacy in material terms, or what it meant for formal diplomacy, we have the opportunity to reassess the actual importance of formal state power, both in blockade-running as well as in the “international” Civil War. The merchants, supercargoes, and minor officials who [End Page 62] conducted the informal diplomacy that enabled blockade-running were but one aspect of a broader universe of filibusters, ad hoc militias, settler colonists, and others who mobilized private resources and violence in behalf of (or in resistance to) empire building in mid-nineteenth-century North America.5 While they have often escaped the notice of historians, these grassroots foreign policy actors deeply affected the course of the Civil War and the shaping of sovereignty and empire. The United States government certainly took notice of the Confederacy’s friends in the Bahamas. Secretary of State William H. Seward noted, “Among those British subjects who were the first to institute a contraband trade with the insurgents, in violation of our laws, and in contempt of the Queen’s proclamation [of neutrality], is a house established in Nassau and Liverpool, under the name of Adderly & Co.” Seward, with undisguised anger, referred to the head of that firm, Henry Adderley, as “a person who is so vicious as to dishonor his own country and send desolation abroad through mine upon the motive of commercial gain.” As Seward informed a British diplomat, “I desire that the British nation may understand that . . . we do not confound the just and the good with the unjust and depraved.”6 Henry Adderley, whom blockade-runners dubbed “King...