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.
The return lists arrest on November 8, 1861. It lists the historical residence as Virginia. It records actual discharge on January 1, 1862. The individual disposition or conditions read: Trent affair; case elsewhere. Source: Official Records, Series II, Volume II, printed page 233, https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570242/page/n248/mode/1up.
The Fort Warren return records admission on November 24, 1861; this is a prison admission, not a separately verified physical arrest day. The November 27 return separately records the prisoner’s reported arrest date as November 8, 1861; that self-report is not substituted for a conflicting contemporary record. It lists the historical residence as Frederick County, Virginia. Source: Official Records, Series II, Volume II, printed page 154, https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570242/page/n169/mode/2up.
The primary execution reports establish January 1, 1862 as actual release from United States custody: Dimick delivered all four to E. D. Webster at 10:30am and they departed Fort Warren at 10:45am; Frederick Seward and Lord Lyons independently confirm delivery to HMS Rinaldo at Provincetown at 4 p.m.. Mason’s own February 2 account agrees and records onward travel via Bermuda and Saint Thomas, arriving Southampton January 29. The December 26 promise and December 28 transfer instruction were preliminary orders, not the executed release. British acceptance described liberation without conditions; onward transport to a neutral port was not a criminal sentence. The women continued to England and were not arrested with the four. Source: Official Records, Series II, Volume II, printed pages 1162–1165 and1241–1242, https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570259/page/n363/mode/1up and https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570259/page/n442/mode/1up.
