Biography
James Murray Mason was a Virginia politician who served in the U.S. House and Senate — where he authored the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — before becoming a Confederate diplomat during the Civil War. In 1861 the Confederacy appointed him envoy to Great Britain to seek diplomatic recognition. Traveling with fellow commissioner John Slidell, Mason boarded the British mail steamer RMS Trent. On November 8, 1861, the USS San Jacinto, commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, stopped the Trent and removed the two envoys, whom Wilkes treated as 'contraband' subject to seizure. They were taken to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor and held without trial. The seizure provoked the 'Trent Affair,' a grave diplomatic crisis that nearly brought Great Britain into the war on the Confederate side. To defuse it, the Lincoln administration released the envoys, and Mason and Slidell set sail for England on January 1, 1862. Mason never secured British recognition of the Confederacy and died in Virginia in 1871.
