LINCOLN AVERTED WAR OVER BRITISH BLOCKADE RUNNER OFF MATAMOROS

By Juan Montoya

Throughout history, it is often surprising to see how often this border city shows up in narratives of different times.

There is, for example, the story of the capture in 1917, of German couriers arrested 25 miles upriver carrying copies of the infamous “Zimmerman Telegram” where Germany was inducing Mexico to join it against the United States in return for its lost territory in the southwest.

There are now some historians who say the telegram was a clever British forgery to draw the United States into the war on its side, and that debate continues.

Charles Lindbergh’s presence here to promote international air mail is well known, as were aviators Amelia Earhart's and Billy Mitchell's.

More recently, in 1976, the death certificate of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes places the airspace over Brownsville as the place of death from kidney failure as his private jet flew across the border. Whether this was necessary to place the billionaire’s will well away from the hands Mexican authorities or whether he really died immediately upon entering U.S. airspace has become pretty much academic.

Going further back, Brownsville also was known as a strategic point in the Civil war.

The Union navy had blockaded many southern ports, including Point Isabel. However, Puerto Baghdad and other Mexican ports served the confederacy to smuggle cotton and receive contraband from other nations, notably England.
The Sept. 22, 1862, Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln that on Jan. 1, 1863, all the slaves in all the rebelling states would be free unleashed unexpected fallout across the world.

The motivation was clear. Lincoln had recently told an anti-slavery group in Washington that no other step “would be so potent to prevent foreign intervention.” The Chicago Tribune agreed, describing the proclamation as “a practical war measure ... to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”

Most British observers did not believe that the proclamation was a moral or humanitarian measure. It was more an attempt to bring down King Cotton from within, with which Britain carried on a brisk trade running the Union blockade.

The demand for manufactured goods from the Lancashire textile manufactures was high, and France was suffering so much from the reduced supply of cotton that Napoleon publicly condemned the war that had exhausted “one of the most fruitful of [French] industries.”

Meanwhile Union patience was running out with Britain since, despite her words, Britain's continuing dereliction of neutral responsibilities implied favor to the South. English vessels continued to compromise the blockade and confederate warships were being built in England.

Things came to a head off the Texas coast when a vessel carrying goods to the Confederacy, The Peterhoff, en route to Puerto Baghdad, off Matamoros, was intercepted by the blockade off the coast of Brownsville.

Although the British argued that the seizure was illegal as goods were bound for Mexico when on the ship, the incident resulted in a decision by Lloyd's of London to stop underwriting such trips.

The British protested this as a violation of international law, while Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles defended the navy, claiming the Peterhoff was carrying contraband intended for the Confederacy. The mails aboard the Peterhoff posed a specially touchy issue, because they might prove the vessel was really a blockade runner.

Secretary of State Seward insisted that under international law, mails were inviolate, while Welles argued that they had been lawfully seized.

Although a minor affair in the context of the civil war, the incident had the potential for becoming an explosive issue and occupied the secretaries of state and the navy until the middle of 1863, when Lincoln decided to release the mails.

He reminded his secretaries “we are in no condition to plunge into a foreign war on a subject of so little importance in comparison with the terrible consequences which must follow our act.”