The Declaration of Paris and the American Civil War

Abstract

The first major war that was fought under the rules of the Declaration of Paris was the American Civil War, a confrontation between two parties who had both not signed up to the treaty. The theatre of the conflict was closely connected to Europe by transatlantic commerce, so the laws of neutrality became the field where the European states first had to define their positions vis-à-vis the belligerents. Nearly all of the decisive questions regarding the recognition of the Confederacy first arose in a naval context, and maritime law assumed an exceptional importance in the diplomacy of the early Civil War. Because of this prominent position, the American Civil War is the only mid-19th-century conflict for which the importance of maritime law has been recognised by many, though not all, diplomatic historians.¹ However, the best specialists in this field, such as Warren Spencer, Lynn Case and Frank Merli, were first and foremost Civil War historians and knew little about the laws of neutrality in the decades before or after 1861–5. Therefore they never claimed to be able to explain the significance of the Civil War to the wider history of neutrality. As Frank Merli put it, ‘the precise relationship between that 1856 declaration of neutral rights and the American war has never been properly defined’.²