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During the 1850's the
issue of slavery and the right of a state to establish,
maintain and regulate this and other issues had reach a
critical boiling point. The states rights supports
believed that the States had the ultimate right to pass
laws on many important controversial matters and could
also withdraw from the Union by choice if the State was
not in agreement with the Federal Government. The
Federalists believed that not only did the Federal
Government have a superior authority over many of the
government powers such as the right to regulate or
abolish slavery but that the States once in the Union
could not unilaterally withdraw.
With the election of
Lincoln as President, many Southern States decided to
leave the United States and eventually they declared the
formation of another Federal government know as The
Confederate States of America. Besides the obvious
lessons to be learned over the creation of a federalist
system, the US had also raised the largest army in the
world and by 1863/64 as it became likely that the
Southern States were going to lose the war, it also
became somewhat of a worry to British North America that
the US would be able to invade and occupy any of the
British colonies with little resistance. This fostered a
belief among many that the colonies should move toward
unification rather then be occupied or annexed once
colony at a time.
By 1862 the United
States had the largest and most powerful army in the
world with a tremendous amount of experience which
triggered talk of Manifest Destiny in many quarters with
the objective of defeating the south and then absorbing
the rest of North America into the Union.
There incidents also
arose during the course of the Civil War that threatened
to trigger a war between Britain and the United States.
These were The
Trent Affair
As the battlefields took their toll on
the armies of both the North and the South, the
political battlefield also heated up. The South and
North both knew that if England recognized the South as
a new nation, then the Civil War would be all but won
and support for the south would flow in from all other
countries. The south however had to make an intense
effort to convince the British to recognize them and
sent several diplomats to England to plead their case.
Two such diplomats had been able to get to Havana on a
southern blockade runner and from there took passage on
a British ship to England. On November 8th, 1861, the US
naval vessel the USS Jacinto was given information that
these southern diplomats were on the British ship and
intercepted it at sea, boarded it and took the
southerners prisoner. The Jacinto returned to Boston
were the Southerners were imprisoned. A flurry of
diplomatic and military activity ensured in which
Halifax saw it's military contingent increase to over
18,000. The possibility of an armed confrontation
escalated drastically until Lincoln decided to release
the Southerners in order to keep the British out of the
Battle. Fighting both the Southern States and the
British would have been almost impossible and would have
caused the British to recognize the Confederate States
of America.
The
Chesapeake
Incident
On December 7, 1863 Confederate forces
captured a Northern vessel the Chesapeake while on a run
form New York to Portland Maine. They tried to flee to
British waters in the hopes of selling the cargo and
refitting the ship for the south. American naval forces
pursued and re-captured the Chesapeake in British
waters. Although the incident took place in British
waters, both the North and South had violated British
neutrality and once again brought home the
vulnerabilities of the British position in North
America.
The St. Albans Raid
On October 19th, 1864 a group of
Confederates robbed a bank in Vermont and fled across
the Canadian boarder to Montreal. Although the Canadian
Government recovered the funds and returned them, the
immediate planned reaction in the US was to send troops
into Canada to recover the money and wipe out the
Confederate forces. Lincoln once again recognized that
the heated zealotry of the initial reaction would simply
cause a more serious incident if not out and out war
with the British, so he overruled the plans to invade
Canada and minimized the impact of the event. The
British once again felt the threat of large military
forces on the boarder and this encourage the supports of
Confederation who saw security in unity of all British
colonies.
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