I

Throughout the Civil War, privateering, and by extension British neutrality, filled papers and letters on both sides of the Atlantic, prompting a public outpouring of speculation over the future of Anglo-American relations and impending war between Britain and the Union. Commenters’ opinions in American and British papers in turn fuelled gossip shared with American friends and family abroad and were reprinted extensively by local newspapers in Hong Kong and Shanghai. For those Americans in China who cared to read the news, such articles carried bleak predictions of further conflict.

One of the earliest such crises during the Civil War, the Trent Affair, caused American and British commenters to speculate on the shape an Anglo-American conflict might take, constituting the first real threat to peace within China's treaty ports.Footnote ²¹ In November 1861, Wilkes of the San Jacinto, a vessel familiar to Hong Kong's Western community for its service in East Asia and involvement in the Second Opium War, boarded the British mail packet Trent and seized the Confederate diplomats it was transporting.Footnote ²² Reactionary responses to the episode in the US and Britain speculated an Anglo-American war would follow. Adopting a tone similar to later responses to Confederate privateering, Union commenters claimed Britain had breached its neutrality by transporting belligerent diplomats, the British responding that the boarding of a neutral vessel had transgressed British sovereignty.Footnote ²³

Just as Ronald and Mary Zboray argue of intranational Civil War correspondence, frenetic news reporting and telegraphs accompanied letters to Americans abroad, exporting rumours that painted a metropolitan ‘social setting dominated by the spirit of war’.Footnote ²⁴ Writing to her sons in Hong Kong, Elizabeth Ann Farley of Ipswich, MA, described how the British press and people ‘[broke] forth with violent denunciations and abuse’ of America following the incident. The British government, she continued, was rumoured to be pouring ‘troops and munitions’ into Canada ‘with every demonstration of hostility’. Farley's letter, and a later one from her husband George W. Heard, related how the event ‘produced a profound sense of scorn and disgust’ in America.Footnote ²⁵ Her brother Augustine Heard Sr, writing from Boston, likewise informed his nephew Albert Heard that one ‘cannot find a man or woman [in America] that does not pray for a time when’ the North might ‘punish [Britain] as she deserves’.Footnote ²⁶ The ‘virulent Anglophobia’ the Trent inspired was slow to abate and, as Duncan Andrew Campbell argues, its memory affected anti-British and anti-Union sentiments for nearly two years following the episode.Footnote ²⁷ Building upon these sentiments, the Alabama's launching would rekindle concerns about British neutrality and the threat of conflict that China's Anglo-American community would discuss at length, the privateer's rumoured exploits further undermining confidence in American shipping between East Asia and the West.

The circumstances behind the Alabama's creation are well known and deeply mythologized. Depending on the ‘first-hand observer’ quoted, the accessed newspaper's loyalties, and too often the historian's political sensibilities, the episode is infused with tilted sentiments about the Civil War. For some, it was the world's most successful commerce-raider, launched through the guile of its builders and commissioning agents, captained by a shrewd yet brilliant lawyer, crewed by brave Southern patriots and British sympathizers, and engaged in a form of chivalrous privateering.Footnote ²⁸ For others, it was a symbol of British hypocrisy, its captain a cruel and arbitrary man, its crew unskilled and mutinous; a ship that owed its success to duplicitous tactics and that, when put to the test in a real naval battle, came up wanting.Footnote ²⁹ Such mythologizing forms an important part of the Alabama's story, however, because it helps explain why rumours surrounding the ship's exploits found such purchase amongst China's Anglo-American community. The mundane issue at the heart of the Alabama scandal was one of imprecise law and diplomatic posturing; an issue bearing limited relevance to remote and autonomous colonial administrators in China. Yet, for Americans and British abroad, the scandal's true impact lay in the ship's mythic exploits – Semmes being compared to Blackbeard or Francis Drake, and the Alabama to Vanderdecken's Flying Dutchman – and the threat its creation posed to commerce and Anglo-American relations.Footnote ³⁰

The Alabama was one of several war vessels that British shipwrights built for the Confederate States. In theory, such construction was clandestine, but all concerned parties recognized the practice and Britain's failure to end it chafed the Union public and administration. In 1862, The New York Times reported that the Union's Secretary of State William Seward accused the British of producing a fleet of steamers ‘expressly to run the [Union] blockade’ and prey on Union shipping.Footnote ³¹ Further articles charged shipwrights in Liverpool, ‘the most pro-Confederate place in the world outside the Confederacy itself’, with outfitting a number of vessels including the Labuan, Emily St Pierre, and General Miramon for Confederate buyers, but the sister sloops-of-war Florida and Alabama bore the brunt of Union outrage.Footnote ³² These two ships, known by various names and often mistaken for each other, soon sparked panic over Confederate privateering and the Union merchant marine's vulnerability. Such confusion further entrenched their British origins, as the Florida was often mistakenly identified by the Alabama's shipyard pseudonym ‘Gunboat 290’, or by its own: Oreto.Footnote ³³

Confederate agent James Bulloch, acting as a private individual, had commissioned Laird, Sons & Co. of Merseyside to build ‘290’.Footnote ³⁴ Discretion had been paramount, as the British Foreign Enlistment Act ‘prohibited “equipping, furnishing, fitting out, arming…any vessel with the intent that such vessel should be used to commit hostilities against any state”’ with which Britain was at peace.Footnote ³⁵ As with those vessels nominally for the ‘Emperor of China’, builders employed a range of deceptions including false names and red herrings about the ships’ intended destinations. The Italian government, for example, supposedly commissioned the Oreto, and 290 was for either a Spanish company or the Spanish government.Footnote ³⁶ Neither lie weathered scrutiny, and as 290 took shape, its true purpose became obvious.Footnote ³⁷ Technical consideration for the Foreign Enlistment Act ‘prevented the guns &c., being placed on board in Liverpool’, but the sleek form betrayed 290's function and, upon arrival at Terceira, the British ship Aggripina provided equipment as it would on multiple occasions throughout the steamer's career.Footnote ³⁸

Across the Atlantic and in China, such vessels’ British origins inspired debates over the laws of neutrality, and accompanying these debates came fresh stirrings of Anglo-American war. The issues of maritime neutrality and privateering's legality could be traced back to the 1856 Declaration of Paris, drafted during the Crimean War. The declaration abolished privateering, made provisions to protect enemy goods shipped under neutral flags and neutral goods shipped under enemy flags, and stipulated that for blockades to be binding they must effectively block all access to the enemy's coasts.Footnote ³⁹ The US, seeking to protect all private property from enemy warships, regardless of belligerent status, refused to sign unless such protection was guaranteed. Americans contended that, ‘if private property might still be seized by warships’ then why not by privateers, which they considered ‘another branch of the public armed forces of the state?’Footnote ⁴⁰ Britain opposed the amendment, and so by refusing to sign unless these conditions were met, the Americans technically endorsed privateering's legality.Footnote ⁴¹ The Alabama debates pivoted around this impasse. Americans vocally opposed privateering as well – almost a moot point during the Civil War, as they considered all Confederate privateers pirates – but in abstaining from the transnationally recognized declaration against it, their protests against British shipyards outfitting privateers and against British vessels running the Union's blockade had tenuous legal footing.Footnote ⁴²

The nuances of maritime law and this legal duel between British and American politicians are too numerous to discuss here and are, besides, the subject of many excellent studies.Footnote ⁴³ What is important to consider is that British and American commenters’ portrayals of the Alabama amplified the threat of its privateering in China. Confederate papers, for example, celebrated the damage Semmes inflicted upon Union shipping and Union–British relations. An early London and China Telegraph article reprinted in Atlanta's Daily Intelligencer gloated that as the US had not signed the Paris treaty, cargoes bound for the Northern states would be easy pickings for Confederate privateers.Footnote ⁴⁴ Later reports continued to laud Semmes and his ‘skill’, alongside the Florida's efforts, likening Northern ships to a defenceless ‘school of herrings chased by two sharks’, and congratulating both ships’ crews for ‘pretty well cut[ting] up the East India and China trade’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Despite the brevity of the Alabama's East Asian voyage, Confederate reporting fixated on damage to the Union's China trade. Playing upon the privateer's Dutchmanesque image, Captain Sedgewick's article, published in the Sentinel of Richmond, VA, provided an atmospheric account of the Latona's encounter with one of the Alabama's victims – ‘a cotton ship from China’ – off Java Head. The victim, encountered on a ‘dirty, rainy sort of night’, had been left standing aflame, ‘not a soul aboard her’, the light the fire emitted ‘doubly dim and black’. Sedgewick then witnessed ‘a long, low craft’ glide ‘out of the darkness’ past the Latona and slip again into the night.Footnote ⁴⁶ Another account recollected how the Alabama had, at the time, ‘seemed ubiquitous’, and ‘if suddenly on the Indian Ocean a red light was seen in the distance’ and ‘dim clouds of smoke’ rolled ‘before the wind’, then ‘men knew Semmes was at work’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such accounts perpetuated myths of the Alabama's Eastern exploits and its wraith-like potential to appear unexpectedly off any Asian port.Footnote ⁴⁸ The circulation of these reports, whether fact or fancy, contributed to anxieties in China about Union commerce's security and impending Anglo-American hostilities.

Responding to frequent news of the Alabama's success, Northern commentators redoubled their denunciations of Britain, even invoking China's ongoing Taiping Civil War to suggest Union raiders raise the Taiping flag and ‘prey on British commerce, a la Florida, Alabama, &c.’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The episode fanned Anglo-American outrage across the Atlantic and in China, The New York Times reprinting London articles alongside its own diplomatic reports to track the deteriorating relations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet many reports remained measured, arguing that given the Union's domestic crisis, war ‘would not be expedient’.Footnote ⁵¹ Correspondents in London confirmed such sentiments, and while reporting that British popular opinion favoured the South, a strong desire to ‘avoid a war’ with the Union prevailed.Footnote ⁵² Rather than force a conflict, Northerners – a loud component being the China merchants – demanded indemnification for British damages to American shipping, which they received through the 1871 Treaty of Washington.Footnote ⁵³ Still, as commenters debated the expediency of Anglo-British conflict in the Atlantic, fears of piracy and the immediate question of lost commerce threatened to drive a new wedge between China's British and American communities.

II

Historians championing integrative methodologies increasingly frame events such as the American Civil War within transnational or global contexts to assess the extent to which global and national historical narratives were intertwined.Footnote ⁵⁴ Applying such an approach to the study of China's Taiping Civil War (1850–64), Stephen Platt's Autumn in the heavenly kingdom emphasizes the connection between America's intranational developments and their international relationships with Britain, the Qing, and the Taiping in mid-nineteenth-century China.Footnote ⁵⁵ Focusing on China's internal crises, Platt flags the link between the American Civil War and developing concerns about the cohesiveness of Shanghai's Western community in the 1860s. The conflict – particularly the Trent and the Alabama episodes – sparked widespread processes of national reaffirmation, forcing Americans in ports such as Shanghai and Hong Kong to reconcile local interests with national sympathies.Footnote ⁵⁶

Rumours about Confederate privateering and Anglo-American conflict during the Civil War found such purchase in China because of the American community's tenuous position. Americans may have comprised China's second largest Western community, but since their first arrival they had been far outnumbered by the British and Chinese communities – only 1,043 of Hong Kong's 24,157 inhabitants in 1845 were ‘non-Chinese’, and of these eighty-four were American – and lacked the same domestic political and martial support that the British enjoyed.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, as Stephen Tuffnell and Nancy Green observe of American expatriates in London and Paris respectively, eighty-odd years living and trading in China had caused the American community's aspirations to diverge from those at home.Footnote ⁵⁸ While metropolitan letters described a breakdown in Anglo-American relations, China's Americans shared deep socio-political and commercial interests with the British that insulated them from domestic troubles.

One such interest revolved around the progression of China's ongoing Taiping Civil War.Footnote ⁵⁹ While British and American diplomats had initially raced to make contact with the Taiping leadership at Nanjing, the prospect of establishing normal relations proved dismal.Footnote ⁶⁰ With trade prospects looking grim, the mercantile community growing impatient with the instability blocking the Yangzi, and foreign policies of strict neutrality becoming harder to enforce, the British and French together elected to back the Qing in the conflict. Following the Anglo-French lead, Seward directed that American minister to China Anson Burlingame do the same in 1862.Footnote ⁶¹

Their reasons for doing so echoed those of 1855 when Shanghai's Anglo-American community begrudgingly consented to stop smuggling goods to Small Sword rebels who occupied the city on 7 September 1853. Months prior, the instability of this smaller insurgency had prompted the foreign community to band together to form a militia, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC), to defend foreign interests.Footnote ⁶² As with the Taiping, the foreign community initially entertained a positive, if profiteering, relationship with the rebels, the Small Sword leader Liu Lichuan 劉麗川 doing his utmost to garner foreign support. There was, by contrast, general derision for the Qing forces, driven by suspicions that the Shanghai Intendant Wu Jianzhang 吳健彰 was deliberately antagonizing Anglo-American relations. The SVC's first test was, accordingly, a battle on 3 April 1854 against Qing forces rather than the rebels to establish the International Settlement's ‘inviolability’.Footnote ⁶³

Such skirmishes aside, the foreign community concluded in both 1855 and 1862 that stability would better suit their agendas. With both the Small Swords rebels and the Taiping, the prospect of lost commerce convinced the British and Americans to adopt a unified policy of standing with – or at least out of the way of – the Qing government. Regardless of their opinions regarding China's internal struggles, the foreign community's impulse was to form a united front that protected and advanced their political and private interests, a sense of shared purpose in China thus binding Americans to their British rivals.

Yet when faced with Anglo-American conflict in the Atlantic, the mostly Northern American treaty-port community encountered new incongruities between national loyalty and reliance upon the British for the expansion and preservation of their interests in China. These distant diplomatic crises were accordingly double edged in a manner distinct from anxieties attending China's ongoing Civil War. While alarming that the Alabama might suddenly appear off China's coast to prey on American ships, the understanding that should an Anglo-American war erupt, Northerners in the predominantly British treaty port of Shanghai or the British colony of Hong Kong would be at the mercy of their former peers further compounded the issue. The situation was thus primed for conflict between the two communities, but closer examination of local discourse suggests that the wider foreign society, when prudent, resisted external pressures.

Despite occurring over 8,500 miles away, the Trent Affair soon filled the pages of Shanghai's North China Herald and Hong Kong's China Mail newspapers, and the Alabama would likewise become a matter of concern for British and American traders and diplomats. Testament to its notoriety, the Alabama's eastern voyage, lasting little over two months from November 1863 to January 1864, spawned rumours spreading from Singapore to Hong Kong and up the China coast of it taking the Fokkien, recently sailed from Shanghai, or more harrowing still, making for the Huangpu river to lay up shipping in that port.Footnote ⁶⁴ Through such channels, the ripples of the American conflict and its impact on Anglo-American relations reached China, the Trent and the Alabama threatening to destabilize the socio-commercial cohesion of China's foreign community.

From the reports, rumours, and misinformation circulating the China coast one would assume the foreign community conformed to metropolitan attitudes about British neutrality and the Civil War. Editorials reprinted in local British-run newspapers and letters from home supplied Americans in Hong Kong and Shanghai most Civil War information. Each contained a volatile mixture of nationalist and personal sentiment that threatened to antagonize China's Anglo-American community, importing a stream of reactionary speculation about the inevitability of Anglo-American conflict. Such sources predicted war, blaming commercial failings on British interventions, and threatening to degrade the Anglo-American relationship.

China Mail articles in Hong Kong reveal how Atlantic tensions polarized China's Anglo-American communities, the newspaper publishing numerous articles about relations between the two English-speaking nations. The paper's London correspondent reported ‘great excitement’ in Britain as both sides armed for conflict, articles encouraged Britain to support the Confederacy, and one commentary reprinted from the Economist even dared the Union to attack Canada.Footnote ⁶⁵ The China Mail's editors compiled most articles from metropolitan papers, publishing various stances to capitalize upon local interest in the debate, their selections representing an array of opinions about the war and Anglo-American relations. The 29 August 1861 supplement reprinted from The Spectator, for instance, educated readers on the cause of American bitterness towards Britain, citing the problem of Southern recognition and American beliefs that the British, possessing ‘false pretences of liberality’, took ‘wicked delight in the suffering of the states’.Footnote ⁶⁶ A counterpoint, taken from The Times, gloated that ‘the pedestal on which Americans have been placed has been knocked from under them’; that they were not ‘the paragons of enlightened rule that they had been constantly made out to be’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Cutting to the underlying matter, a 6 February 1862 China Mail editorial discussing the Trent Affair requested both parties consider each other's perspectives and find a peaceful solution.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even as the editors preached moderation, they reprinted reports from Britain describing preparations for war.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is far from an exhaustive sample, and contrary to Platt's findings that tensions in Shanghai defused following the winter of 1862, Hong Kong's China Mail periodically published incendiary materials from British newspapers throughout the war, the resulting anxieties bleeding into everyday life. The 1862 Fourth of July, for example, prompted Shanghai's North China Herald editor to publish articles criticizing America's patriotic vanity, and months later a British commenter's caustic China Mail editorial rejoiced at the mutual destruction of the slaveholding Confederates and the ‘ignorant and debased’ Union.Footnote ⁷⁰ Within the pages of local newspapers, at least, Anglo-American rivalries found a platform.

As the war progressed, the tone of local reporting mellowed. Although The China Mail provided a public outlet which could only have served to remind Americans of their British neighbours’ bitter sentiments, much of its 1863–4 reporting on the conflict was moderate. One such article reprinted from London's Saturday Review calmly laid out the causes of Anglophobia in the Union. Maintaining the stance that Britain had broken no laws in launching the Alabama, the author conceded that a hostile American press might find through this supposed transgression of neutrality further reason to denounce Britain.Footnote ⁷¹ Local articles could be more balanced still, sympathizing with the Northern cause even as they decried Union violence and cheered the Alabama's exploits.Footnote ⁷² Some, still, consciously labelled the Alabama a pirate.Footnote ⁷³ This last point was especially significant as it implicitly supported the Union stance that the South was a rebel force and that, regardless of the Treaty of Paris, Confederate raiding was illegal. Reflecting shifting attitudes about Britain's complicity in the affair, further articles cast the Alabama as a sobering lesson for maritime trade, cautioning that the US may retaliate in kind should Britain find itself warring with its European neighbours.Footnote ⁷⁴

Regardless of their stance on British neutrality, such muted articles furnished Hong Kong's Westerners with a balanced perspective of Anglo-American relations calibrated to diffuse tensions within the Anglo-American community. Indeed, while only five of the twenty surveyed China Mail articles preached moderation, four of these were locally written. The remaining twenty articles were reprinted from foreign papers. Prescott Clarke and Frank King have noted that while Americans were a ‘favourite target’ in The China Mail's pages, the editors were typically ‘pro-American’.Footnote ⁷⁵ For the purposes of the paper the editors preferred incendiary pieces, but the communities – and even the editors themselves – when in dialogue, demonstrated a capacity for level-headedness in the face of baiting journalism. Hong Kong's social dictates mitigated metropolitan tensions and transnational political conflicts, the inhabitants preferring to keep peace within their community.

Local China Mail articles reflected a widespread predisposition towards upholding the status quo in China, which found further purchase through colonial officials’ and foreign consuls’ activities. During the war, Hong Kong's and Shanghai's American and British officials handled reports of Anglo-American tensions rationally, but their activities still reflected unease about the diplomatic relationship between the Union and Britain. In Shanghai, as agitated reports arrived, the British Admiral James Hope made pragmatic preparations to seize the American community's ‘homes, ships, and assets’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Circulars sent from London suggest such eventualities were anticipated. To preserve peace, they instructed colonial officials that, while no foreign consul could act belligerently in British waters, officials too should not interfere with or bar Union or Confederate vessels seeking provisions in their ports.Footnote ⁷⁷

Hong Kong's officials, however, reinterpreted these orders into an even stricter policy of neutrality extended to Union and Confederate supporters alike. In March 1864, Hong Kong's colonial secretary W. S. Mercer wrote to the US Consul Horace Congar that the Union screw-sloop Wyoming had abused British neutrality by refuelling within the colony's jurisdiction and that its arrival should have been ‘intimated to the government of the Colony’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Contrasting the antagonistic rhetoric politicians in the metropole deployed, Hong Kong's officials maintained a respectful correspondence about the Wyoming, it being both the British Governor Hercules Robinson's desire to underscore the port's absolute neutrality regarding the American conflict, and Congar's to dutifully and lawfully observe said neutrality.Footnote ⁷⁹ While crises such as the Alabama sparked outrage in the metropole, Hong Kong's intimate context begged a more diplomatic touch.

The Trent Affair, the Alabama, and American fears of British interference gradually faded in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Although letters and news articles from home conveyed hostile rhetoric, China's American inhabitants rarely voiced concerns about their relationship with their British neighbours. Instead, George Dixwell described Shanghai dinners ruined by gaudy musicians; John Murray Forbes mentioned how all talk revolved around the coming horse races and ‘nothing else’; James Murray Forbes related days of ‘very good sport…at which almost every foreigner in Hong Kong was present’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Others described China's political instabilities, problems with Taiping rebels, Yangzi navigation, and Japan's opening.Footnote ⁸¹ Reports home carried a life-goes-on tenor. The relationship between the writer and recipient did, granted, determine content, and circumstances may have been embellished to avoid causing stress.Footnote ⁸² Still, these letters described overwhelmingly active lives. Whatever anxieties afflicted the community, Anglo-American inhabitants in Hong Kong and the treaty ports shared common socio-cultural values and interests in China which repaired the rifts Britain's and the Union's volatile relations created.

Social life rebounded following these episodic Civil War crises, with few references to local unrest appearing in merchant letters home. Augustine Heard Sr's 1862 reply to his nephew in Hong Kong suggests that while merchants such as Albert Heard once shook ‘from fear of a war with England’, recent updates showed the situation in China had relaxed.Footnote ⁸³ Dixwell wrote from Shanghai, October 1863, that the port's cosmopolitanism afforded a balanced view of the troubles, and with access to papers from Boston, New York, and London, Americans there were not ‘liable to the influence’ of reactionaries.Footnote ⁸⁴ That month, James Murray Forbes reported a similar thaw in Hong Kong, where arriving war news was ‘so very old’ that he found ‘little interest reading the papers’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Yet, despite the apathy of these merchants and the resiliency of Anglo-American social ties, the potential threat of the war spilling into the East Asian theatre caused China's Americans considerable commercial anxiety. Although debunked as rumour, reports about Confederate privateers visiting Shanghai trickled in as early as 1861, producing a general ‘indisposition’ to ship under the American flag.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such rumours fanned local unease about the state of Union shipping in China and abroad. China's foreign society may have been placid, but as Americans soon realized, their trade networks remained vulnerable to transnational influences.

III

If transnational politics instilled imaginary divisions, the (semi)colonial cultural and racial landscape helped China's Anglo-American community overcome disparities that, as Ann Laura Stoler suggests, ‘would in other contexts separate and often set [their] members in conflict’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Domestic politics clashed, but as Bickers argues of Shanghai's British and German communities during the First World War, China's foreigners did not want war; ‘they were partners, colleagues, friends’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In such an environment, political differences, social slights, commercial failings, and even transnational conflicts were re-evaluated against local circumstances. National influences were weighed against Anglo-American socio-cultural ties and discarded when prudent. But while interests in China subordinated distant tensions to preserve socio-political cohesion, there remained tangible effects of these Atlantic crises that altered local commercial systems.

The years preceding the Civil War's outbreak had been ones of commercial optimism for China's American community. In November 1860, after the Convention of Peking formally ended the Second Opium War and opened the Yangzi to foreign navigation, Shanghai-based Albert Heard wrote his uncle describing the river as ‘a promised land’ for trade.Footnote ⁸⁹ With the treaty resolved, his brother John Heard prepared his steamer Fire Dart for an exploratory voyage up river to assess the state of trade in the newly opened treaty ports and with the Taiping rebels invested at Nanjing.Footnote ⁹⁰ There had been scattered trade with the Taiping in the 1850s, but John Heard's voyage signalled a sustained American commercial interest in the Yangzi, spurred by visions of profit.Footnote ⁹¹ These visions prompted the remodelling of American companies from commission agents to shipping firms, as partners ordered steamships from New England and New York to ply the river. Before these ships reached China, the Civil War broke out and many were sold instead to the Union government to carry troops and supplies along America's inland waterways.Footnote ⁹² By the war's 1865 resolution, American commerce had stagnated, Yangzi enthusiasm had deflated, and, facing loss, China-trade merchants looked to jettison their steamships where possible. The ‘disruption of American trade during the Civil War years’ and the ‘failure of commerce in the Yangtze valley to increase as expected’ would eventually lead to retrenchment and bankruptcy for China's established American firms.Footnote ⁹³

As Americans struggled to make the Yangzi profitable, Congar's May 1862 report from Hong Kong outlined the grim situation for Seward. The Taiping Civil War, now firmly opposed by the foreign powers, had proved ‘disastrous to trade and commerce’.Footnote ⁹⁴ And if the China trade seemed anaemic, America's own conflict and the subsequent Anglo-American tensions crippled American mercantile enterprises the world over.Footnote ⁹⁵ Four months earlier, Congar had reported:

Already concerned over meagre returns from the Yangzi, American merchants became especially conscious of how their war's progress might affect relations with their British neighbours and their ability to turn a profit in China. Unverified rumours surrounding the Trent Affair and the Alabama's privateering compounded these concerns, producing imagined conflicts within China's Anglo-American community.Footnote ⁹⁷ I use, here, the term ‘imagined’ because the threats sensationalized in the papers were never realized in Hong Kong or the treaty ports.Footnote ⁹⁸ Still, the war existed in foreign minds as a construct with immediate ramifications.Footnote ⁹⁹ While the previous section argued that (semi)colonial society proved resilient to metropolitan opinions, these distant crises – the Alabama being the most notorious – posed real threats to American shipping that would alter the commercial landscape of Sino-Western trade in the coming decades.

The Alabama's ability to paralyse American shipping in China played upon two inter-related anxieties. The first was piracy's historical prevalence in East Asia and the widely acknowledged dangers of shipping in the Nanyang 南洋 region. The second, stemming from the first, was American reliance upon British military and naval strength in China. This reliance could be traced to the 1840s and the First Opium War, when Americans deferred to British authorities to secure indemnification for damages to their private enterprises and protect their vessels in the Pearl River Delta.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Culturally embedded understandings of the numerous personal and commercial risks attending global trade, amplified by the great distance between China and the US and the perception that the Union merchant marine was effectively defenceless, stoked such anxieties.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, while the decline in American shipping from East Asia was substantial, it was part of a historically justified global trend that saw prospective clients with little faith in the safety of Union vessels transfer goods to ships sailing under more secure flags.

Rumours about the Alabama operating in China were especially concerning as they mirrored regional fears predicated upon Chinese pirates’ historical success. Exploiting the Ming and Qing Empires’ loose maritime authority, regional pirates had grown syndicated, entrepreneurial, and enjoyed moderate success ‘carving out spheres of influence’.Footnote ¹⁰² To foreign merchants active in the early to mid-nineteenth century, piracy represented a major impediment to trade that they believed the Qing incapable of managing.Footnote ¹⁰³ The irony, Wang Wensheng notes, was that Anglo-American smuggling, opium importation, and blatant schemes to support pirates and rebels against the Qing contributed to the region's lawlessness.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such irony was lost on China's American traders, whose letters home betrayed both concerns and indignance about the insecurity of shipping in such a ‘lawless’ region.

Vulnerability remained a persistent anxiety for the American community and, leading up to the Civil War, American traders despaired at their navy's ‘disgraceful condition’ at Hong Kong.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Their discontent inspired appeals to domestic contacts, Albert Heard begging in an 1860 letter to New York that the city's influential magnates lobby on the China traders’ behalf for more protection.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If New Yorkers did, they failed and instead, by the war's 1861 outbreak, the sole sloop Hartford that Heard had mentioned was recalled for Union service. The US navy's commander-in-chief in China, Cornelius Stribling, and Commander William Radford of the Dacotah, scrutinized as Southern-born Americans but well regarded amongst China's predominantly New Englander community, were reassigned to America where they fought for the Union. With theirs and the Hartford's departure, China's Americans found themselves ‘without either protection or a minister’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The only remaining war steamer in the east, the Saginaw, floated crewless off Macau and Congar begged Seward to send forces ‘able and willing to defend American honor and interests’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

As Anglo-American relations in the Atlantic deteriorated, British and American officials such as Shanghai's Admiral Hope and Hong Kong's Congar prepared for trouble, but the foreign community's common interests helped soothe enflamed tempers. Anticipating the sentiments that would prevail, an 1861 China Mail article declared that, should Americans in China require protection, British naval commanders were duty-bound to ‘stand by [their] brethren’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As the American Josiah Tatnall had declared at the Bai He in 1860 while disregarding American neutrality during the Second Opium War to rescue stranded British forces, to many foreigners in China ‘blood [was] thicker than water’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Still, assurances published in local newspapers did little to protect American shipping. Despite implicitly understanding that they could rely upon their British neighbours, American traders soon realized the Civil War was undermining their trade. Rumours of Anglo-American hostilities spread through articles and letters from home froze shipping and even already-chartered vessels remained in port.Footnote ¹¹¹ The situation worsened in autumn 1863 when local newspapers reported the Alabama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope heading eastward. Such rumours panicked American traders, reducing confidence in ‘the use of American tonnage’ as vessels in Hong Kong busied themselves changing flags.Footnote ¹¹² Unproven reports of the Fokkien's capture in December that year seemingly legitimated such caution.

With the flag even ‘less in demand than before in Chinese waters’, The China Mail recommended Americans sell their ships.Footnote ¹¹³ A reprinted New York Times article, guessing incorrectly that four Confederate steamers were operating in East Asia, confirmed that such uncertainty gripped a transnational market, counting only one ship in Liverpool ‘loading under the American flag’. Others had swapped flags for those of ‘Peru, Prussia, and Portugal’, as Eastern insurance offices ‘point blank refused’ American risks.Footnote ¹¹⁴ James Morris estimates that the Union lost one third of its total shipping tonnage as American ships reregistered to escape Confederate raiders, high insurance rates, and Union service.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Widespread and damaging as they were, Alabama rumours in China barely lasted longer than the ship's eastern voyage. The following spring The China Mail reported the Alabama's departure from the region and its subsequent defeat by the Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The Alabama's defeat dissipated fears of privateering but made little difference to American merchants who had poured capital into what had, by 1865, become a bloated Yangzi trade. Although Americans maintained some confidence in the river's promised riches, John Heard's exploratory voyage in 1861 had uncovered few viable markets thanks to the Taiping Civil War's destruction.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Still, when the Qing restored stability and opened the river to regular commerce, American firms invested heavily in steamships.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Appeals to patriotic duty, however, encouraged merchants to sell these steamers to the Union at a loss before they could turn a profit in China.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Russell & Co. redirected the Antelope and Flambeau to the war effort, Olyphant & Co. only ran Ta-Kiang two years before chartering it to the Union Navy in 1864, and the Union appropriated other ships including the Fahkee and Howquah in 1863.Footnote ¹²⁰ Even the Dai-Ching, Chih-Kiang, and Kiang-Soo, commissioned from America by the Qing, were sold instead to the Union.Footnote ¹²¹ These steamships remained slated for the China trade as soon as they should be freed from military service.

With the war's end, decommissioned vessels flooded East Asia, but China's market for steamships had cooled. Without vessels to dominate the river during the war, or the confidence and security required to sustain an international trade, Americans faltered at a crucial moment. Augustine Heard & Co.'s struggles demonstrate how, facing a saturated market, offloading these now unneeded vessels to recover the expense of their construction, outfitting, or purchase became a real challenge. When the firm's steamer Suwonada was discharged following two-year's Union service, John Heard wrote his brother Augustine at Boston that ‘if she could be sold on the way then all the better’.Footnote ¹²² Heard was optimistic, however, and acting as brokers for the sale of the former gunboats Pawtuxtet, Kankakee, and Asheulot, the firm scrambled to find buyers, only selling two of the ships between January and July 1868.Footnote ¹²³ Assessing the situation in 1871, Dixwell complained that shipping and speculation had ruined the company, that Chinese customers had disappeared, and that the firm's capital was frozen in real estate and the ships Venus and Suwonada – still in the Heards’ possession seven years later.Footnote ¹²⁴

The Alabama and the Civil War provided convenient scapegoats to explain American shipping's decline, but there was some truth to such claims and following the war the old merchant houses realized the China trade had changed.Footnote ¹²⁵ The war had come at a promising time for China's foreign firms, and although American merchants were well situated to exploit the Treaty of Tianjin, their domestic conflict claimed the steamships they had built for the Yangzi, temporarily reduced confidence in their firms, and threatened relations with China's British community. In the following decade, George Heard would inform his brothers that their firm's coastal trade and China Sea business had ‘about played out’. Like other Americans, Augustine Heard & Co. was ‘hard up’ for funds, and even their unwavering rival Russell & Co. was conceding the Yangzi to the British Butterfield & Swire.Footnote ¹²⁶ The socio-political turmoil Anglo-American tensions caused during the American Civil War quickly faded but, having lost their footing, merchants continued to struggle. The depressed period between the mid-1860s and 1880s would see widespread commercial failure amongst China's American firms.

IV

Hong Kong's 1871 Fourth of July celebration was a jubilant affair. American houses and ships in the harbour were ‘lively in their bunting’, a cosmopolitan collection of flags adorned the US consulate and, amongst these, those of the US and Britain ‘were intertwined’. The China Mail congratulated the new US Consul David Bailey for bringing together Americans and non-Americans alike ‘in the most friendly manner possible to celebrate the day held in honour’. Bailey attributed the ‘good feeling’, so different from the previous decade's celebrations, to the ‘happy adjustment of all differences between Great Britain and the United States’. The Anglo-American Treaty of Washington's signing that May had ‘cleared away’ the difficulties existing between the two nations, establishing ‘an entente cordiale…welcomed in no part of the world more thoroughly and sincerely than in Hong Kong’.Footnote ¹²⁷

The Treaty of Washington resolved many outstanding issues related to the Alabama's privateering that plagued China's Anglo-American community. By now, Britain's complicity in the Alabama's creation was well known, and compensation had been sought for the damage Semmes had inflicted upon Union commerce. Whether through action or rumour, such privateers – and the Civil War generally – had frozen Union shipping in ports as distant as China; these crises in turn threatening to incite Anglo-American conflict in the Atlantic and abroad. In signing the Treaty of Washington in 1871, the British agreed to pay a $15,500,000 indemnity to the US, acknowledging and making reparations for their role in allowing the Alabama and ‘other vessels’ to ‘escape’ their ports, and reaffirming the meaning of neutrality for both parties.Footnote ¹²⁸ Commerce had suffered, but the exigencies of colonial and treaty-port life had mitigated Anglo-American conflict's threat to the socio-political order in China. With the treaty's signing, Bailey hoped a co-operative spirit could return to China's Western community.

Examining the Civil War's global impact through the Alabama and China's American community, I have argued that even as rumour and speculation undermined US commercial efforts in East Asia, colonial society proved resistant to the antagonistic sentiments gripping the metropole. Distant anxieties over flashpoints such as the Alabama's and Florida's construction or the Trent Affair spread rapidly to ports such as Hong Kong and Shanghai through private letters and newspapers. These reports’ effects were manifold, threatening to destabilize Anglo-American society, politics, and commerce in China. Still, while commercial systems proved fragile, crumbling in the face of such distant crises, society rebounded, strengthened by ideas of racial and cultural solidarity and shared experiences in a foreign land.

Adopting a transnational approach to Civil War tensions through the case of the Alabama offers an opportunity to assess the wider impact of such events, and the extent to which colonial spaces were susceptible to or insulated from metropolitan influences. Such an approach demonstrates that the colonial context diffused transnational tensions; that even as their enterprises suffered, Americans abroad were less reactive to Civil War panic than might be supposed from metropolitan letters and news reports. When measuring the global impact of any case-study, it is vital to consider not just the ways distant regions were interconnected but the ways in which they remained separate. Throughout the conflict, Anglo-American tensions remained concerning, American commerce struggling to rebound from lost opportunities on the Yangzi and the ephemeral crisis of a distant Civil War, but local affairs and the immediate contexts of Hong Kong and the treaty ports competed for the attention of China's American community. According to their letters home, life went on.