Abstract
In announcing the August 20 Order in Council, Prime Minister Henry Asquiths administration had demonstrated that it had no intention of accepting the Declaration of London or any other international accord that interfered with its political and military objectives. Once the western front had developed into a near stalemate, however, British officials recognized that they would need more men and significantly larger quantities of materiel to win the war. Foreign Secretary Edward Grey realized his government would have to compromise with the United States if Britain was to assure a constant flow of goods across the Atlantic. At the same time, the Order in Council placed the United States in a difficult position. Wilson, it seems, did not believe that Britain would give in to American opposition. Nevertheless, being an astute politician, he knew that anything other than a bold stand against the August 20 decree might turn public opinion against him and the Democratic Party during the upcoming midterm elections. In the months of October and November 1914, Britain and the United States worked to find a middle ground regarding the Order in Council and sought to compromise on the adherence of the Declaration of London without alienating the American public.
[C]ertainly no administration ever tried more diligently or watchfully to preserve an attitude and pursue a line of conduct absolutely neutral.
—Wilson to Professor Hugo Münsterberg, November 10, 19141
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Notes
Wilson to Hugo Münsterberg, November 10, 1914, Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 31: 293.
Ibid.; Arthur Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 110–11.
See also John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 265–66.
Spring-Rice in Embassy Diary, October 4, 1914, FO 800 / 84. During the American Civil War, the United States seized a British ship headed to Nassau that was carrying sabers destined for the Confederacy. In doing so, the United States not only upheld the idea of continuous voyage, it accepted the British understanding of the principle. Washington asserted that intent to break the blockade was pretext enough to seize a neutral vessel. John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 23.
Viscount Grey of Fallodon, KG, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, Volume 2 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), 107–8.
Daniel M. Smith, Robert Lansing and American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 27.
Ross Gregory, Walter Hines Page: Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 66–68.
Wilson and Lansing wrote the letter to Page, but Lansing signed it. Lansing to Page, October 16, 1914, Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 31:163–66; Herbert Whittaker Briggs, The Doctrine of Continuous Voyage (Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein, 2003), 110–11;
William A. Shepherd, The Protection of Neutral Rights at Sea: Documents on Naval Warfare (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1915), 10.
Lance E. Davis and Stanley L. Engerman, Naval Blockades in War and Peace: An Economic History since 1750 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118; Spring-Rice to Lansing, October 20, 1914, FO 800 / 241, National Archives, Kew, UK.
Coogan, The End of Neutrality, 20; Daniel M. Smith, “Robert Lansing and the Formulation of American Neutrality Policies, 1914–1915,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (June 1956), 63; Precedent and state interests not only directed international law, but also, as the Wilson administration would learn, laws pertaining to the confiscation of contraband and decisions made by prize courts. While prize courts were supposed to provide unbiased verdicts about contraband and neutral vessels, they usually would not make rulings that were counter to military strategy. See Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 159–60.
The Acting Secretary of State to Page, October 22, 1914, FRUS: 1914. Supplement, The World War, 257–58. For a different view on the conclusion to the Declaration of London debate, see Coogan, The End of Neutrality, 210–11 and Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 68. They assert that US acquiescence was an unneutral act that intentionally favored the Allies.
Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People: The Founding of the Government, Volume 3 (London: Harper and Brothers, 1908), 194;
See also William Diamond, The Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943), 156.
Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789–1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 150–51; “The Cotton Crisis, The South, and Anglo-American Diplomacy, 1914–1915,” in Arthur S. Link, The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971), 309;
Martin T. Olliff, ed., The Great War in the Heart of Dixie: Alabama during World War I (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 6.
Grey of Fallodon, KG, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, Volume 2 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), 109.
Link, “The Cotton Crisis, The South, and Anglo-American Diplomacy, 1914–1915,” in The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971), 310;
Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 42.
Diary of Colonel House, Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 31: 95; Johr Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pres; of Harvard University Press, 1985), 275.
Ernest R. May The World War and American Isolation 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 42–45.
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© 2013 M. Ryan Floyd
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Floyd, M.R. (2013). “An Exceedingly Tender Spot”. In: Abandoning American Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334121_3
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