The History of the Tangier Difficulty: The American Civil War in Morocco

Abstract

The History of the Tangier DifficultyThe American Civil War in Morocco Graham H. Cornwell (bio) It was a typically mild February day in 1862 in Tangier, Morocco. James DeLong, US consul to Morocco, kept watch from his perch in the US legation, from which he had a direct view of the Bay of Tangier. On clear days, he could identify every ship that passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and thus entered the Mediterranean Sea. Since his arrival in the fall of 1861, he had been constantly vigilant for signs or reports of Confederate naval operations. On the morning of February 19, word arrived that two Confederate sailors had disembarked in Tangier en route to Cadiz, Spain, aboard a French ship. DeLong leapt into action and summoned a handful of Moroccan guards to assist him. Together they marched through the narrow streets of the Tangier medina, the walled portion of the city, and arrested the rebels on the spot. In the ensuing days, DeLong's extraterritorial arrest caused an uproar in the streets of Tangier, as hundreds of the city's European residents marched through the city streets and gathered in protest outside the American legation building. As the Confederates had been passengers on a French vessel, French officials in [End Page 262] Click for larger view View full resolution James DeLong, circa 1861 (Courtesy of private collection of Philip Abensur) Tangier (and later in Paris and Washington) were the most vehement in their condemnation of DeLong's actions. The uproar over the arrest—and DeLong's insensitive handling of it among the Tangier consular corps—reveals much about Morocco's relationship to European imperial powers and about the strength of Moroccan-US relations during the war. The gradual erosion of Moroccan sovereignty at the hands of European imperial powers both made DeLong's arrest possible and provided the context in which French consular officials (as they had arrived on a French ship) would protest and demand their release. The arrest and subsequent outcry say much, too, about the war's significance in the Middle East and North Africa. The American Civil War had material consequences in the region, most notably affecting the flow of cotton textiles, manufactured in Europe using Southern cotton, into the region's newly liberalized markets. In the western Mediterranean, American consuls worked to minimize and subdue the Confederate sympathies among merchant communities who wished to maintain access to the cheap Southern cotton upon which their business depended. But the possibilities for action by US consuls varied depending on geography: what was possible and legal in Tangier was not in Gibraltar. In turn, the independent states of the Middle East and North Africa could also directly, materially intervene in the Civil War. Western consuls may have considered the Islamic states of region [End Page 263] "semi-barbarous" or "uncivilized," but they were still able to make autonomous decisions regarding their own international relations. Morocco's marginal status in global affairs meant that, unlike France and Britain, it never declared its neutrality during the Civil War. Although Morocco in the 1860s was in the midst of a struggle to preserve its own sovereignty in the face of European imperial ambitions, it maintained the capacity to materially support the Union cause. The "Tangier difficulty" thus points to more expansive commercial and naval theaters of the war that stretched across the Atlantic and into Mediterranean. American-Moroccan Relations Scholars have heretofore treated the history of the United States and Morocco during the 1860s as two discrete narratives. The Tangier difficulty, however, reiterates the international character of the American Civil War as well as how European and African monarchical and imperial processes shaped the global context of the American conflict, and vice versa. In 1861, the year the American Civil War broke out, Morocco was reeling from a decisive military defeat by Spain, a loss that allowed European trading partners to liberalize international trade in a series of treaties that permanently altered the trade balance between Morocco and Europe. The main item of this import-heavy trade was cheap textiles produced in France and Britain from American cotton. In short, the US Civil War mattered in Morocco: to merchants...