The New Yorker Who Almost Started a War with England
John Slidell was a New York City kid who moved to New Orleans and became one of the most powerful politicians in the antebellum South—a U.S. senator, a diplomatic envoy, and eventually the Confederate agent whose capture on the high seas nearly brought Great Britain into the Civil War on the side of the South. If that had happened, the entire course of American history would have changed. And it almost did, because of a man from New Orleans.
Slidell was born in 1793 in New York and came to Louisiana as a young man, drawn by the same opportunity that drew so many ambitious Americans to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century. He became a lawyer, entered politics, and began climbing. He served as U.S. Attorney, a member of the Louisiana House, and a U.S. representative before landing in the Senate in 1853, where he became one of the most influential Democrats in Washington.
Before his Senate career, Slidell had already been involved in one of the most consequential diplomatic missions in American history. In 1845, President Polk sent him to Mexico to negotiate the purchase of California and New Mexico and to settle the Texas border dispute. Mexico refused to receive him, and the failure of diplomacy led directly to the Mexican-American War. Slidell's rejected mission helped start a war that added a third of a continent to the United States.
When Louisiana seceded in 1861, Slidell went with it. The Confederacy needed European recognition and support to survive, and Slidell was dispatched to France as the Confederate commissioner, while James Mason was sent to England. In November 1861, a Union warship intercepted the British mail steamer RMS Trent and seized both men. The Trent Affair became an international crisis.
Britain was furious. Seizing diplomats from a neutral vessel was a violation of maritime law, and the British government seriously considered declaring war on the Union. If they had, the Confederacy would have gained a powerful ally, and the Civil War might have ended very differently. Lincoln's government ultimately backed down, released Slidell and Mason, and the crisis passed. But for a few weeks, the fate of the American experiment hung on the question of what to do with a politician from New Orleans.
Slidell spent the rest of the war in France, where he successfully negotiated a fifteen-million-dollar loan for the Confederacy and secured the purchase of an ironclad warship. He never returned to the United States, dying in exile in England in 1871. The city of Slidell, Louisiana, was named for him by his son-in-law.
John Slidell is one of those figures whose significance is inversely proportional to his fame. He nearly started two wars, helped start a third, and was one of the most powerful political operators of his era. That he did it all from a base in New Orleans tells you something about the city's outsized role in nineteenth-century American politics.
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