Hey everyone, welcome to the 84th episode of our Civil War podcast.

My name is Rich.

I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Thanks for tuning into the podcast.

Last week we started to look at Union and Confederate Foreign Relations during the Civil

War. We said that early in the conflict in 1861 in the realm of diplomacy, it was a

widely held Southern belief that Britain and France were certain to intervene or mediate

on behalf of the Confederacy because of the dependence of their textile industries on

Southern cotton. But as y'all already know, this reliance on King cotton diplomacy was

a mistake, and ultimately the South will fail in its bid to secure foreign mediation or

active intervention during the Civil War.

And we said that William H. Seward, as Abraham Lincoln Secretary of State, was the man

in Washington primarily responsible for the conduct of Union diplomacy during the Civil

War. Seward responded to the apparent threat of European intervention by adopting a firm

even threatening posture. Historians, depending on how much credit they choose to give Seward

for deterring European intervention, have interpreted his policies as either shrewd and tough

or dangerous and reckless.

This week Rich and I will look at the Trent affair, which occurred when Lieutenant Donald

Fairfax of the USS San Jacinto removed the Confederate envoys James Mason and John

Slydel from the British male steamer Trent, triggering a major international incident that

brought the United States and Britain to the brink of war.

At the end of the last episode, we said that in the late summer of 1861, Jefferson Davis

disappointed by the ineffectiveness of the three southern emissaries already sent to Europe,

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