Alabama Claims

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Alabama Claims began with a single ship. During the American Civil War, a steam-powered raider built in Birkenhead, England, sailed out of a British harbor and proceeded to capture or destroy more than sixty Union merchant vessels before being sunk off the French coast in 1864. That ship was the CSS Alabama, and the damage she caused would echo through international law for generations.

  The United States did not forget. In 1869, Washington formally demanded payment from Britain for what it argued was a violation of British neutrality. The British government had known the Alabama was destined for the Confederacy. The American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, had said so directly. Yet the ship sailed anyway.

  What followed was not simply a bilateral quarrel over money. It became a test of whether nations could resolve disputes without war, a question that would draw in governments from Italy, Switzerland, and Brazil, and a hearing room in the Town Hall of Geneva. The settlement would pay $15.5 million to the United States and, in the process, help lay the groundwork for institutions that would eventually become the World Court and the United Nations.

• 2. The Ship That Sailed

  ›

  John Laird Sons and Company built the Alabama at their yards in Birkenhead, across the river from Liverpool. Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London, raised the alarm directly with the British government, arguing the vessel was bound for Confederate service and would be used against the United States.

  The British government had sought legal guidance from the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Sir Alexander Cockburn, who ruled that the Alabama's departure did not violate Britain's neutrality. His reasoning rested on a narrow technical point: she left British ports without guns fitted. Once at sea, she was armed and commissioned into Confederate service.

  Both Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell were widely believed to favor the Confederacy at the time the Alabama was under construction. British public opinion, though, was divided. Members of Parliament such as Richard Cobden actively campaigned against this kind of support for the South. The departure of the Alabama would prove publicly embarrassing for the government, and Palmerston and Russell were later forced to concede that the ship should not have been permitted to leave.

  Britain drew a harder line thereafter. In the following year, two ironclad warships also being built in Birkenhead for the Confederacy were detained. Palmerston instructed the Admiralty to offer to purchase the ships outright. They had been ordered through a go-between, a Monsieur Bravay of Paris, who acted as an intermediary for Confederate buyers.

• 3. The Scope of the Demand

  ›

  When the United States formally presented its claims in 1869, the Alabama stood at the center, but she was not alone. Washington argued that Britain had allowed five warships in total to enter Confederate service, each of them a violation of neutrality.

  The steam warship Oreto was one of these. In the summer of 1862, it was delivered to Nassau in the Bahamas under a secret arrangement, with the understanding that it would be transferred to the Confederate States Navy. Upon transfer, it was commissioned as CSS Florida. British Royal Navy Admiral George Willes Watson, born in 1827 and later recorded as dying in 1897, assisted that transfer, and his actions were reviewed by the later tribunal.

  Other ships on the list included vessels built at Alexander Stephen and Sons in Glasgow, at John Laird and Sons like the Alabama herself, and at J and W Dudgeon in London.

  Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pushed for a far more expansive accounting. He demanded that "indirect damages" be included in the reckoning. His argument was that British-built blockade runners had smuggled thousands of tons of gunpowder, half a million rifles, and several hundred cannons to the Confederacy through the Union blockade. Sumner argued this material support may have extended the Civil War by two years and cost 400,000 additional lives on both sides.

  Sumner's initial demand was $2 billion in damages. His alternative proposal was the cession of Canada to the United States.

• 4. Manifest Destiny and the Canada Gambit

  ›

  American Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had negotiated the Alaska Purchase in 1867, saw the Alabama claims as one lever in a larger ambition. He intended the Alaska acquisition as the first step toward controlling the entire northwest Pacific Coast. Seward was a committed believer in Manifest Destiny, valued primarily for its commercial advantages to the United States.

  Seward expected British Columbia, then a western province of British territory, to seek annexation into the United States. He believed Britain might accept this outcome in exchange for settling the Alabama claims. Soon other American politicians joined the idea, calling for annexation of British Columbia, the central Canadian Red River Colony that would later become Manitoba, and eastern Nova Scotia, all in trade for dropping the damage demands.

  The idea reached its peak in the spring and summer of 1870. American expansionists, Canadian separatists, and British anti-imperialists appeared briefly to be moving in the same direction.

  The plan collapsed under its own weight. London continued to stall. American commercial and financial interests pressed Washington to simply take a cash settlement and move on. Canada offered British Columbia very generous terms to join the Canadian Confederation, which reinforced nationalist sentiment in that province toward the British Empire. Congress grew consumed by Reconstruction at home. And most Americans, exhausted by the long years, expenses, and casualties of the Civil War, showed little interest in territorial expansion.

• 5. Treaty of Washington

  ›

  Hamilton Fish, serving as President Ulysses S. Grant's Secretary of State, took up the negotiations in 1871. He worked with British representative Sir John Rose to establish a joint commission of six members from the British Empire and six from the United States, meeting in Washington.

  The commission's mandate covered the Alabama claims, fisheries, and other outstanding disputes between Canada and the United States. On the 8th of March 1871, the Treaty of Washington was signed at the State Department. The Senate ratified it on the 24th of May 1871.

  Notably, the treaty excluded Senator Sumner's "indirect damages" claim. It did resolve other longstanding disputes, including the rights to Atlantic fisheries and the San Juan Boundary, a question concerning the Oregon border.

  Pre-arbitration negotiations took place at the Maryland estate of businessman Samuel Taylor Suit in Suitland. The arbitration tribunal itself convened in a reception room of the Town Hall in Geneva, Switzerland, a room that has since been named the salle de l'Alabama. Britain expressed regret over the Alabama damages, and the two countries formally became perpetual allies under the treaty's terms.

• 6. The Tribunal and Its Verdict

  ›

  The five-member arbitration panel that convened in Geneva drew representatives from four countries. Britain sent Sir Alexander Cockburn, the same jurist whose earlier ruling had cleared the Alabama's departure from British ports. The United States was represented by Charles Francis Adams, the same diplomat who had protested that departure to the British government years before; William Maxwell Evarts served as American counsel.

  The remaining three seats went to neutral nations. Federico Sclopis sat for Italy, Jakob Stämpfli for Switzerland, and Marcos Antonio de Araujo, the Viscount of Itajuba, represented Brazil.

  The tribunal endorsed the American position. The final award of $15,500,000, forming part of the Treaty of Washington, was paid by Great Britain on the 8th of September 1873. Against that figure, the United States paid Britain $1,929,819 for illegal Union blockade practices and ceded fishing privileges.

• 7. A Precedent That Spread

  ›

  The Geneva settlement did not simply close a dispute between two governments. It established, in practice, that international arbitration could resolve what might otherwise become a cause of war. International jurist Gustave Moynier drew on the Alabama Claims directly in the 1870s, pursuing legal arrangements to enforce international treaties.

  The case is now recognized as a precursor to the Hague Convention, the League of Nations, the World Court, and the United Nations. The Soviet Union, for its part, studied the Alabama Claims carefully when evaluating whether it could pursue damages against the Allied powers for their intervention in the Russian Civil War.

  The claims also filtered into literature in unexpected ways. According to Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy used the episode as a plot device in Anna Karenina. In an early passage, Stiva Oblonsky has a dream that may reflect his having read about the Alabama Claims through the Kölnische Zeitung. Jules Verne reached for the claims as well: in Around the World in Eighty Days, Inspector Fix warns Phileas Fogg that a riot they encounter in San Francisco may be connected to the Alabama dispute. A legal controversy that had split two governments and crossed four continents had become, within a decade, a shorthand that readers across Europe were expected to recognize.