{"id":653643,"date":"2026-06-23T08:20:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T08:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/653643\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T08:20:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T08:20:16","slug":"how-the-united-kingdom-had-to-pay-15-million-dollars-or-give-up-canada-to-the-united-states-for-having-supplied-confederate-privateer-ships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/653643\/","title":{"rendered":"How the United Kingdom Had to Pay 15 Million Dollars or Give Up Canada to the United States for Having Supplied Confederate Privateer Ships"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the autumn of 1984, the Circ\u00e9, a minesweeper of the French Navy under the command of Captain Max Guerout, was sailing off the coast of Cherbourg when it discovered a wreck about sixty meters deep. Shortly after, it was identified as the CSS Alabama, a corvette that participated in the Civil War as a Confederate privateer and later became the protagonist of a legal dispute between the United States and Great Britain, as the U.S. government demanded damages from the British government, which ended in 1872 with an agreement between the two parties that laid the foundations of international law<\/a>. Moreover, many believe that Jules Verne<\/a> was inspired by the adventures of the CSS Alabama for Captain Nemo\u2019s Nautilus.<\/p>\n

The Civil War broke out on April 12, 1861, after, following the electoral victory of Republican Abraham Lincoln, considered an abolitionist of slavery, the southern states declared their secession from the Union to form the Confederacy and seized Fort Sumter. The president then mobilized the armed forces in defense of national unity, while the southerners elected their own leader, Democrat Jefferson Davies.<\/p>\n

The country was split into two quite different parts: a northern one, made up of twenty-three states plus two others created during the conflict and several territories; and a southern one of seven states supported by slaveholding Indian tribes; in between, there were some border states whose population was polarized in their sympathies for one side or the other.<\/p>\n

The northern economy was industrial, based on the protectionist customs policy of its factories to shield them from British competition. In contrast, the southern economy was agrarian, based on the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane with slave labor<\/a>, which, contrary to popular belief, was profitable (even though, ironically, the African slave trade was banned, limiting it to internal trade).<\/p>\n

\"UnitedCaptain Raphael Semems. Behind him is his second-in-command, John M. Kell. Credit: Public domain \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n

But the imposition of tariffs was detrimental to the South, and it also considered its stability and prosperity at risk if the abolitionist measures increasingly advocated by sectors of the northern population in favor of industrialization were enacted. It was a clash of opposing models, more economic than political, since both professed liberal ideology.<\/p>\n

However, due to its lower technological development, the Confederate States Navy was inferior in both quantity and quality to its rivals and was practically forced to be used as mere defense of ports and coasts against a possible invasion. This was worsened by the fact that the northerners captured the Gosport Navy Yard, although the Confederates managed to improvise the construction of ships and eventually had 101 vessels.<\/p>\n

This inequality had to be mitigated, as it threatened the export of those products\u2014their main source of income\u2014so in April 1861, as part of that effort and with the authorization of the Confederate Congress, President Davies began issuing letters of marque.<\/p>\n

The 1856 Declaration of Paris on maritime law in times of war agreed to the proscription of seizing goods from neutral countries even if found on enemy ships, as well as the commitment not to grant privateering licenses. However, exceptions were provided for some countries, including Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n

The United States withdrew from that pact in 1857 but pledged to respect it. However, no matter how much the Confederacy legislatively detailed the conditions and rules that privateers had to follow, its existence as a country was not recognized by the Union, which understandably warned that anyone who collaborated in any way with the rebels would be identified as a belligerent.<\/p>\n

\"UnitedThe CSS Alabama capturing the Tonawanda. Credit: B20180 \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n

And, following that logic, ships trading with the South were considered smugglers, and those engaged in military actions were deemed pirates. It was even established that violating these rules would be punished by hanging, the classic penalty for piracy<\/a>, although in the end, no one suffered this fate because the Confederates threatened to take reprisals against prisoners of war.<\/p>\n

Despite this, the Confederates saw their trade so compromised that they even resorted to the use of submarines, but it was the privateers who truly troubled the enemy; there was intensive activity of this type, first operating from New Orleans and then from Atlantic ports, harassing and attacking Union ships carrying out a blockade of the enemy coast.<\/p>\n

It was 1861, the first year of the war, when naval commander James Dunwoody Bulloch (whose half-sister would be the mother of future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt) arrived in England and settled in Liverpool. Apart from being a military man and owner of a cotton plantation, he was a southern secret agent whose mission was to acquire war material (weapons, ammunition, uniforms, naval supplies\u2026) in exchange for cotton.<\/p>\n

Part of the cargo he transported himself on the SS Fingal, a steamship he bought ex profeso, but he was also entrusted with obtaining vessels to expand the Confederate fleet. He first converted the Sea King into the CSS Shenandoah, which went down in History for being the one that fired the last shots of the conflict and the last to surrender<\/a> (in November 1865, after five months of peace).<\/p>\n

Then, he commissioned the construction of two ships. Under British law, it was legal as long as the armament was installed outside their waters, though they could be equipped with armor and the necessary structures. One was the CSS Florida, which heroically evaded the Union blockade amid a rain of fire and entered Mobile Bay (Alabama), officially joining the Confederate Navy. It performed brilliantly, making notable captures, but was relentlessly pursued and eventually boarded by sailors of the USS Wachuset while in Bahia, who took it away ignoring Brazilian protests.<\/p>\n

The second vessel delivered to Bulloch was the CSS Alabama, launched as Enrica on May 15, 1862. Once the Union learned of it, they sent the USS Tuscarora to intercept it, but it managed to slip away, and under Captain Raphael Semmes, it set sail loaded with weapons and coal. It stopped in the Azores to have its cannons installed (three on each side of 15 kg and two pivoting, one at the bow of 31 and one at the stern of 50), and there, to the sounds of Dixie and with an incomplete crew (83 sailors\u2014many of them British\u2014and 24 officers) assembled on deck, it received its new name and a motto in French: Aide-toi et Dieu t\u2019aidera (\u201cGod helps those who help themselves\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"UnitedKearsarge and Alabama, by Julian O. Davidson. In the foreground, the Union crew. Credit: Public domain \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a three-masted corvette that measured 67 meters in length and was propelled both by sail and steam (a curiosity: its funnel could be lowered to make it look like a simple sailing vessel), a combination that allowed it to exceed 13.25 knots. It immediately went into service in the eastern Atlantic, attacking merchant ships until off the coast of Mexico it engaged in its first battle with a warship, the USS Hatteras, a sidewheel steamer that ended up at the bottom of the sea. Its most successful period took place in equatorial waters, off the coast of Brazil, but it reached as far as South Africa and the East Indies before returning and heading to France.<\/p>\n

It spent 534 days at sea out of a total of 657, without ever docking in a Confederate port. During that time, it boarded nearly half a thousand vessels; of those identified as Union, it burned 52 and sank four, and made about 2,000 prisoners\u2014whom it sent to England aboard one of the captured ships, the Tonawanda, without suffering a single casualty. Only at the end of the war did things change. In June 1864, the Alabama had docked in Cherbourg to clean the hull and undergo an inspection when one of its relentless pursuers, the corvette USS Kearsarge, appeared, soon reinforced by the USS St. Louis, both blocking the harbor entrance.<\/p>\n

Semmes decided to engage and sailed toward his enemies, but, contrary to his expectations, the Kearsarge proved to be far superior in armament. After an exchange of hundreds of broadsides lasting just under an hour, his ship sank. Of the 170 men in the crew, 19 died and 21 were wounded; the rest were rescued by the Kearsarge, except for the officers, whom the British steamer Deerhound pulled from the water and took to England, thus avoiding their capture. Thanks to that, Semmes was able to return to America and be appointed admiral. In contrast, the English assistant surgeon on board, David Herbert Llewellyn, drowned because he could not swim and refused to board a lifeboat to avoid endangering the wounded it carried.<\/p>\n

The two years of privateering activity by the CSS Alabama cost the Union losses worth about 6 million dollars, adding to the outrage in the United States that the British government had done nothing to prevent its construction and that of other ships, such as the CSS Lark and the CSS Tallahassee, along with the aforementioned Florida and Shenandoah.<\/p>\n

The truth is that London indeed sought to fish in troubled waters with its passivity, but, although the courts upheld that neutrality had been respected, there were critics who believed it had effectively been violated. That is why the British government later tried to make amends by attempting to buy two other ironclads being built for the Confederacy in the shipyards.<\/p>\n

\"UnitedRoute followed by the CSS Alabama during its two years of navigation. Credit: RollAlabamaRoll \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n

In any case, that ambiguity left a dark memory in the Union, and some senators asked the executive branch to demand compensation from the British, who, in addition to allowing the launch of enemy ships, had often broken the blockade by smuggling into the South thousands of tons of gunpowder, half a million rifles, and hundreds of cannons. They calculated that this prolonged the war by two years and cost the lives of 400,000 soldiers.<\/p>\n

Consequently, in 1869 the United States sued Great Britain for damages, focusing the claim on the CSS Alabama case, which went down in history as the Alabama Claims. It argued that it had been built on English soil, launched and armed with the knowledge and acquiescence of the Royal Navy.<\/p>\n

The first demand was for 2 billion dollars, offering as an alternative the cession of Canada, since two years earlier Alaska had been purchased from Russia, and in this way, the United States would expand its borders across the entire northern part of the continent. But the matter did not go forward since the Canadians strengthened their internal ties by incorporating British Columbia into the Canadian Confederation, and London did not respond to the disproportionate financial claim.<\/p>\n

The truth is that the Americans themselves, having just finished their bloody civil war, were not particularly enthusiastic about entering another conflict and annexing more territory, with the consequent war risk it could entail.<\/p>\n

However, Great Britain retained a certain sense of guilt, and so it accepted the idea of Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State under Ulysses S. Grant (who had succeeded Andrew Johnson in the presidency in 1869), to establish a joint commission to resolve the claim, which by that time already included Canadian territorial aspects.<\/p>\n

Made up of twelve members, six from each country, in 1871 it agreed to the Treaty of Washington, which opened the door for an international arbitration tribunal to find a solution. It consisted of five judges (one British, one American, one Italian, one Swiss, and one Brazilian) who met in Geneva City Hall, in a room now called the Salle de l\u2019Alabama.<\/p>\n

\"UnitedMeeting of the international arbitration tribunal in an engraving from 1907. Credit: Internet Archive Book Images \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, Great Britain agreed to pay fifteen and a half million dollars\u2014which it paid in 1873\u2014while the United States also paid the British nearly two million for illegal fishing in Canadian waters and the illegal blockade of their merchant ships during the Civil War, renouncing border claims until Trump revived them in 2026.<\/p>\n

It was also the beginning of the Great Rapprochement, as the convergence of diplomatic, political, military, and economic objectives between the United States and Great Britain until 1915 was called. It also gave rise to the concept of international arbitration, which soon led to the development of ad hoc legislation to find peaceful solutions to disputes between countries.<\/p>\n

The influence of this new idea of international law was evident at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and set a precedent for the creation of the League of Nations in 1820 and the United Nations in 1945. What many did not realize until the late 20th century was another less serious and more entertaining influence: the one the story of the CSS Alabama may have had on Jules Verne when he wrote one of his most famous novels: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.<\/p>\n

Published in serial form between March 1869 and June 1870 to great acclaim, its author declared that he got the idea when he saw the model of the French submarine Plongeur (which was enormous for its time as it was the first propelled by a motor\u2014compressed air\u2014instead of human power) at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition.<\/p>\n

However, Verne could not escape the context, and in his book, many references to the Confederate corvette can be found, as he himself admitted in a letter to his editor Jules Hetzel. Thus, the construction of the CSS Alabama was financed by the Confederate headquarters in Liverpool, which was based in a building called Nautilus House.<\/p>\n

As the reader will recall, that was the name of Nemo\u2019s submarine, which, according to the novel, came from the same Birkenhead (Cheshire) shipyard, and both had many coincidences in their navigation history: they sank about seventy merchant vessels, carried out their last attack in the English Channel, survived a giant whirlpool, and took refuge on an uninhabited volcanic island\u2026<\/p>\n

There is also a parallel between their captains. Raphael Semmes was born in the town of Mobile, the only port in the state of Alabama, while Nemo\u2019s motto was Mobilis in mobile (something like \u201cMobile in the element<\/a> mobile,\u201d that is, the ocean). Semmes, declared a pirate by Lincoln, was pursued across the seas by the Union fleet led by Vice Admiral David Farragut (the son of Spaniards, incidentally), the same one tasked with discovering the mystery of the Nautilus\u2026 aboard a war frigate called USS Abraham Lincoln. Moreover, Semmes kept in his cabin a portrait of Confederate President Davies, and Nemo one of Lincoln.<\/p>\n

It was not only the ship. The legal process, the Alabama Claims, also inspired the French writer. In this case, not in the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea but in another equally acclaimed: Around the World in Eighty Days. When the characters arrive in San Francisco after crossing the Pacific from the Japanese port of Yokohama, they come upon a street meeting which, according to Inspector Fix to Phileas Fogg: \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised if it were about the Alabama case, even though it\u2019s already been resolved.\u201d Indeed, the book was published\u2014also in serial form\u2014between November 7 and December 22, 1872.<\/p>\n

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on June 23, 2026: C\u00f3mo el Reino Unido tuvo que pagar 15 millones de d\u00f3lares o ceder Canad\u00e1 a los Estados Unidos por haber suministrado barcos corsarios a los confederados<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the autumn of 1984, the Circ\u00e9, a minesweeper of the French Navy under the command of Captain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-653643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}