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.
The return lists arrest on November 8, 1861. It lists the historical residence as Louisiana. 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 234, https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570242/page/n249/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 Louisiana. Source: Official Records, Series II, Volume II, printed page 155, https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570242/page/n170/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.
