BROWNSVILLE OFTEN AT CROSSROADS OF WORLD HISTORY

By Juan Montoya
BROWNSVILLE – 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 a few miles upriver from the Gateway International Bridge carrying copies of the infamous “Zimmerman Telegram” where Germany was inducing Mexico to join it against the United States in WWI in return for the territory it lost 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.

More recently, in 1976, the death certificate of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes places the airspace over Brownsville as the place of his 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.

Charles Lindbergh’s presence here to promote international air mail is well known, as is the fiction that Dr. William Gorgas worked at what is now Texas Southmost College and found a cure to eradicate yellow fever that enabled workers later to continue the digging of the Panama Canal.

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 Bagdad 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.

They feared that emancipation would incite a slave revolution that would grow into a race war.

The British government feared that a terrible slave revolution would ensue. This would upset the entire commercial relationship with the American States and, as a result, it would pull England into the conflict too. The British asked the chargé in Washington to make the point to Secretary of State William H. Seward that a race war would “only make other nations more desirous to see an end to this desolating and destructive conflict.”

Seward was infuriated with the British reaction. He said Union victory “does not satisfy our enemies abroad. Defeats in their eyes prove our national incapacity.”

Seward promised that British intervention would turn the conflict into “a war of the world.”

As the demand for manufactured goods from the Lancashire textile factories was high, the conditions and temperaments of the workers hit by the cotton famine were improving.

France was suffering from the reduced supply of cotton and 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.

Yet, the British government made no moves to condemn these actions on the part of her subjects. Neutral obligations with respect to the warships had been defined in the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819. This stated that “No British subject ... could engage in equipping … any ship or vessel, with intent or in order that such ship or vessel shall be employed in the service of a belligerent.”

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

(We used David Herbert Donald's "Lincoln", 1996, as a prime reference for this article. However, recently we have found divergent accounts of how the ship was seized in other sources such as Wikepedia. Unless Donald's account is discredited through other academic works, we will continue to use it as the most credible source.)
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 U.S. 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.”
And so, with Lincoln proclaiming that the U.S. could not fight two wars at one time, the incident off the coast of Brownsville came within a hair's breadth of instigating a major international incident when the divided country could least afford it.