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adopt a lenient approach regarding complaints about American harassment of “innocent” cargo ships. He also held firm even when the U.S. Navy widened its net to include merchant ships sailing between the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico. The chief destination of these ships was Matamoros, a miserable, drought-ridden town on the Mexican border about thirty miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande. Powdery white dust covered every surface in Matamoros, including the hair and clothes of the inhabitants, making them look like the walking dead. The town would have dissolved back into the scrubland were it not directly across the river from Brownsville, Texas, another miserable little town whose existence was saved by the Civil War.

These two places, more than fifteen hundred miles from Richmond, were the only open gates into the Confederacy. The narrow, winding Rio Grande was a neutral river, and so, according to international law, it could not be blockaded. At first the North paid little attention to Matamoros. It was situated in a barren waste that spread for hundreds of miles; there were no port facilities or roads, and its only connection to Brownsville was a rickety ferryboat. But even with these obstacles, cotton sellers were prepared to risk their lives hauling long wagon trains across the Texas plains and over the river. By early 1863, nearly two hundred ships a month were calling at Matamoros, bringing supplies to the Confederacy and leaving with cotton.

Although he could not admit it publicly, Russell was anxious for the sake of the British cotton industry that this tiny chink in the blockade should stay open. He ordered Lyons to protest the U.S. Navy’s habit of seizing any British ship heading toward Mexico. There was no way of proving whether the guns and matériel were destined for the South or for the beleaguered Mexican government, whose twelve-month resistance against a French invasion force was showing signs of fatigue. But Milne was loath to interfere with the practices of the U.S. Navy; HMS Phaeton was already cruising the gulf as a friendly reminder of British neutrality. The only help that Milne was prepared to give to British merchantmen was the advice to anchor on the Mexican side of the Gulf, where the U.S. Navy was powerless to molest them.

The fate of several British merchant ships was already worrying the Foreign Office—and the readers of The Times—when U.S. admiral Charles Wilkes once again exercised his uncanny ability to create an international crisis. Learning that a British-owned merchant ship called the Peterhoff was leaving the Danish island of St. Thomas to sail to Matamoros, Wilkes ordered USS Vanderbilt to stop her as soon as she left the harbor. As the Vanderbilt approached, one of the Peterhoff’s passengers was observed throwing a large packet into the water. Her captain was nowhere to be seen, since he was busy burning papers in his cabin. The captured ship was brought to Key West in Florida on March 10, 1863, where the British vice consul said that the vessel could not possibly have been involved in anything so low as blockade running since Captain Stephen Jarman was a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve. Moreover, she had been transporting the Lloyd’s insurance agent for Matamoros and a bag of mail from the Post Office. The return of the mail became an instant cause célèbre in England. The poisonous combination of Charles Wilkes and British property provoked Trent-like hysteria, with the press insisting that national honor was at stake.55

Ill.35 Punch warns the United States not to irritate the British lion, May 1863.

Lyons warned Russell that the mood of the Northerners was just as violent.56 Whatever their disagreements over the war and the merits of abolition, they were united by their resentment toward Britain. “Everybody is furious with England and with everybody and everything English,” Lyons wrote sadly.57 The Northern press was claiming that the British were building a navy for the Confederates, supplying their armies, lending them money, and providing moral if not