A Legal Landmark

CSS Alabama continued to make history, legal history, even after her sinking and the end of the Civil War. Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the government in Washington still smoldered with anger over the damage inflicted by Confederate warships on Northern commerce. The American wrath was directed mainly against Great Britain because most of the enemy cruisers, the most notorious of which was the Alabama, had been built in British shipyards. Yet Britain as a neutral power was not supposed to provide assistance to either of the belligerents.

In the early part of the war, until slavery emerged as the central issue, the British government had sympathized with the Confederacy--considered a group of gentlemen with whom the English upper classes felt an affinity they did not share with the money-grubbing Yankees. Moreover, the United States was a rising trade rival to Great Britain. The North was also protectionist, whereas the South, like England, supported free trade.

When Ulysses S. Grant became president, his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, negotiated the Treaty of Washington, in which the United States and Great Britain agreed to submit to arbitration the "Alabama" and other disputes arising from Britain's role in the war. An arbitration panel was established in Geneva in 1871, with members from Brazil, Switzerland and Italy, as well as Great Britain and the United States.

In this landmark case completed in 1872, the first international arbitration tribunal in history awarded the United States $15,500,000 in gold. The decision established the jurisprudence concerning the laws of neutrality that prevailed for the next 100 years. President Wilson remembered the event when the peacemakers of 1919 were deciding where to locate the new League of Nations. He proposed Geneva. Thus, the Alabama arbitration, along with the founding of the Red Cross and the signing of the first Geneva Convention in 1864, became one of that city's initial steps toward its present prominence as a site for international negotiations and peace talks. Today, visitors to the Geneva City Hall can see the proudly marked Alabama Room, where the arbitration took place, just as it was in 1872.

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