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Anglo-American Relations During The Civil War: The Trent Affair, Marvin Bryan Moorhead

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

In the fall of 1861 the Confederacy decided to send a second diplomatic mission to Europe: James Mason to London and John Slidell to Paris. Mason and Slidell slipped through the Union blockade and booked passage from Havana to London on the Trent, a British mail packet. On November 8, 1861 Charles Wilkes, captain of the Union warship San Jacinto, stopped the Trent in the Bahama Channel. Instead of escorting the vessel to a Union prize court, which could legally judge who or what on board the British vessel constituted contraband, he seized the two emissaries and let the Trent …