Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Seas?: Civil War Statecraft and the Liberal Quest for Oceanic Order

Abstract

In 1902, an aging Charles Francis Adams Jr. pondered how “the verdict of history” would justify “all the blood and treasure so freely poured out by us between Sumter and Appomattox.” Unlike most Union veterans, Adams did not linger on America’s battlefields or its liberated plantations but trained his sights upon the high seas, where a growing international appetite for maritime reform promised a “rounding out and completing the work of our Civil War.” Future generations would appreciate how, thanks to Union victory, “the last vestiges of piracy vanished from the ocean, as slavery had before disappeared from the land.”¹