Biography
John Slidell was a New York-born Louisiana politician and former U.S. senator who became a Confederate diplomat during the Civil War. In 1861 the Confederacy appointed him commissioner to France to seek diplomatic recognition and support. Traveling with fellow envoy James Murray Mason, Slidell sailed aboard the British mail steamer RMS Trent. On November 8, 1861, the USS San Jacinto under Captain Charles Wilkes stopped the Trent and removed the two commissioners as 'contraband.' Slidell and Mason were imprisoned without trial at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. The seizure triggered the Trent Affair, a serious crisis between the United States and Great Britain, which protested the violation of its neutral rights and prepared for possible war. To avert conflict, the Lincoln administration released the envoys, and they set sail for England on January 1, 1862; Slidell continued on to France. He never secured French recognition of the Confederacy, remained in Europe after the war, and died on the Isle of Wight in 1871.
