During the opening months of the American Civil War, Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto took international law into his own hands. On November 8, 1861, Wilkes intercepted the neutral British mail packet RMS Trent in the Bahama Channel. Without orders from Washington, his crew forcibly removed two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, who were bound for Europe to secure diplomatic recognition and military support for the Confederacy.
While the Northern public hailed Wilkes as a hero, Great Britain viewed the seizure of passengers from a British ship as an unpardonable violation of neutral rights and an explicit act of war. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston dispatched 11,000 troops to Canada, put the Royal Navy on war footing, and issued a strict ultimatum demanding the release of the diplomats and an official apology. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H.
Seward faced an agonizing dilemma: backing down would outrage Northern public opinion, but refusing would mean facing the world's most powerful military while already locked in a desperate war against the South. Lincoln famously observed that he could only fight one war at a time. The administration diplomatically resolved the crisis by releasing Mason and Slidell, officially declaring that Wilkes had acted without authorization.