No Wars at a Time

As we see another round of British hostages being humiliated in front of the world, I harken back to a not too dissimilar situation that happened a little closer to home:

Outright war with England nearly took place in the fall of 1861, when a hot-headed US. naval officer, Captain Charles Wilkes, undertook to twist the lion's tail and got more of a reaction than anyone was prepared for.

Jefferson Davis had named two distinguished Southerners, James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, as commissioners to represent Confederate interests abroad, Mason in England and Slidell in France. They got out of Charleston, South Carolina, on a blockade-runner at the beginning of October and went via Nassau to Havana, where they took passage for England on the British mail steamer Trent.

Precisely at this time U.S.S. San Jacinto was returning to the United States from a long tour of duty along the African coast.. She put in at a Cuban port, looking for news of Confederate commerce raiders which were reported to be active in that vicinity, and there her commander, Captain Wilkes, heard about Mason and Slidell. He now worked out a novel interpretation of international law. A nation at war (it was generally agreed) had a right to stop and search a neutral merchant ship if it suspected that ship of carrying the enemy's dispatches. Mason and Slidell, Wilkes reasoned, were in effect Confederate dispatches, and he had a right to remove them. So on November 8, 1861, he steamed out into the Bahama Channel, fired twice across Trent's bows, sent a boat's crew aboard, collared the Confederate commissioners, and bore them off in triumph to the United States, where they were lodged in Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor. Wilkes was hailed as a national hero. Congress voted him its thanks, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, ordinarily a most cautious mortal, warmly commended him.

But in England there was an uproar which almost brought on a war. The mere notion that Americans could halt a British ship on the high seas and remove lawful passengers was intolerable. Eleven thousand regular troops were sent to Canada, the British fleet was put on a war footing, and a sharp note was dispatched to the United States, demanding surrender of the prisoners and a prompt apology.

It was touch and go for a while, because a good many brash Yankees were quite willing to fight the British, and the seizure of the Confederate commissioners had somehow seemed like a great victory. But Lincoln stuck to the policy of one war at a time, and after due deliberation the apology was made and the prisoners were released. The Trent incident was forgotten, and the final note was strangely anticlimactic. The transports bearing the British troops to Canada arrived off the American coast just after the release and apology. Secretary of State Seward offered, a little too graciously, to let the soldiers disembark on American soil for rapid transportation across Maine, but the British coldly rejected this unnecessary courtesy.

This was the so-called Trent incident, which was the source of Abraham Lincoln's famous quote about fighting only "one war at a time."

Britain threatened and prepared for war over some sketchy foreigners getting abducted from a British ship. Imagine how they would have reacted back then to their own sailors getting lifted off of a ship of war and humiliated in front of the world. We have to imagine that, because there wasn't a government in the world that would have attempted such a thing in the nineteenth century.

And the Union believed the Brits would travel across the ocean and invade over this relatively minor offense, so they capitulated to British demands, careful never to repeat the offense. That's what a plausible deterrent can do for you. The means and will to make your tormentors suffer lessens the incidence of being tormented. Said in other words, about a different context, by VDH today:

With the demise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism, and in the new luxury of peace, the West found itself a collective desire to save money that could be better spent on entitlements, to create some distance from the United States, and to enhance international talking clubs in which mellifluent Europeans might outpoint less sophisticated others. And so three post-Cold War myths arose justify these.

First, that the past carnage had been due to misunderstanding rather than the failure of military preparedness to deter evil.

We all know that Europe, even the UK, has basically disarmed itself over the past few decades. Not as evident to me was the effect this had on (or was it the original cause of?) the will, even the survival instincts, of their people. The British Marines gave themselves up without firing a shot! I suspect their rules of engagement were in essence, no firing at anything, ever. Which is fine, as long as your enemy doesn't know that.

Now that the cat's out of the bag, how can they even do the job they were assigned by the UN (stop and board ships, looking for smuggling operations)? If the suspect ships don't stop, what are they going to do them, if they won't even fight to save themselves?

If this mindset is the new paradigm, this could be last time you ever see the British Navy conducting operations outside of British waters. An historic, tragic moment for the world.