Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations

Tensions were somewhat quelled when Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell stopped Confederate shipbuilding in Bri rain; and his suspicions about the riming of the Emancipation Proclamation were eased when a slave insurrection that might have caused intervention failed to transpire, a telling insight, and when Abraham Lincoln's war aims were clarified to Europe. Perhaps the final paradox of intervention occurred when Britain and the United States jointly untangled Civil War and long-standing differences in their tradition of private diplomacy when a Joint High Commission negotiated the Treaty of Washington in 1871.