"...partially staking his reputation on the summer of 1915's "Anglo-French Mission for Peace." Poincaré was skeptical, [1] worrying that a result that embarrassed France would damage his government ahead of early snap elections he called for late October of 1915 that had already left many of his political allies scratching their heads, but he gave Paleologue the go-ahead provided that France could find a second partner in the endeavor.
This was more difficult than met the eye. Russia, Germany and Italy were all emphatically pro-United States to begin with and Germany had even provided tangible assistance to American operations in the Caribbean, and exactly none of them viewed a negotiated peace settlement after the titanic defeats at Nashville (on land) and Hilton Head (at sea) for the Confederacy as creating a space where it was in their interest to now intervene diplomatically. Britain, suffering from tight economic conditions due to the war, was via backchannels already trying to find a conclusion to fighting between Brazil and Argentina, and indeed considered the looming American annihilation of the Confederate war economy as something of a secondary concern to its agricultural imports, but the flailing, unpopular Cecil government eventually acceded and agreed to send Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ronald McNeill as Paleologue's right hand.
The "Paleologue Mission," as the affair quickly became known to both its supporters and its much larger legions of detractors, was kneecapped almost immediately from its arrival in Philadelphia. Though American politicos, to French eyes, had famously short shelf-lives - William Hearst's eight years was the longest Presidency in seventy years, after all - there was a lengthy institutional memory of the Havana Conference that left the administration of Charles Evans Hughes polite but deeply skeptical of Paleologue and French intentions. Making matters worse, the bitter violence in Ireland and the Cecil administration's passive allowance bordering on tacit encouragement of paramilitary killings led by Ulster Unionists who were opposed to Home Rule over the island by its Catholic majority had made McNeill, who was Ulster-born and a staunch opponent of Home Rule, a persona non grata in the United States' massive and politically influential Irish-descended community. The Anglophilic Hughes administration was courteous, but Democratic officials, who depended heavily upon the graces of Irish political bosses in cities such as New York, Chicago, Cleveland and increasingly Boston, were loathe to even be photographed next to "Monster McNeill," let alone entertain him formally.
This deep suspicion from "official Philadelphia" and the American press together made Paleologue's job extraordinarily difficult, but he was game to try nonetheless. In a one-on-one meeting between him and Hughes alone, the exhausted American President outlined a straightforward list of demands that could be made to the Confederacy; when Paleologue noted that these demands made no mention of Mexico, Hughes demurred, and within a few months it had been revealed that backchannels between Philadelphia and Mexico City had been busy negotiating a peace everyone could live with. The American position on their immediate neighbors to the south was a bit too simple for European tastes: unilateral, unconditional, full surrender as the price for a ceasefire or armistice. Paleologue noted that the Confederacy was unlikely to accept such a conceit, what with American forces still only in the northernmost states, and Hughes responded simply that individual parameters of a final peace could be negotiated "as gentlemen, but gentlemen do not negotiate through cannon smoke." McNeill was told much the same from men such as American Secretary of State Elihu Root, Paleologue's direct counterpart, and by Senator George Turner, head of the Senate committee that would have to vote on a peace treaty and who was a Democrat rather than of the Liberal Party of Hughes and Root. There was no politician in Philadelphia, of any party, who would accept anything other than the Confederacy bending the knee. It was Richmond that had started the war, and Richmond that would have to now accept the consequences when it ended. McNeill noted that this view had, from what he gleaned, been longstanding, but that it had solidified after Hilton Head essentially ended any threat to American naval dominance and all the chief principals of the United States had met at Long Branch in New Jersey to agree on a joint position.
Paleologue and McNeill's efforts in Richmond somehow managed to go even more poorly. In Philadelphia, at least, the uncompromising stance of a people attacked and now on the front foot in the war was fairly understandable; Hughes had little to gain in a negotiated peace in July and August of 1915 when he could likely dictate terms at will by July and August of 1916. The air in Richmond was one of "remarkable delusions," McNeill wrote back to his immediate superior Curzon as well as Cecil. Army officers confidently predicted coming offensives that would drive the "hated Yankee" back across the Potomac, and politicians, in particular President-in-waiting James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, had essentially created a hermetically-sealed environment where the mere idea that victory was not around the corner was tantamount to treason. Nearly the whole city, from its tony Senators and generals to its poor working class, was convinced that they were in a civilizational struggle (here, they were perhaps not wrong) and that they were providentially ordained to secure the last great future of Anglo-Saxon superiority over barbarism. "Having convinced themselves that their mission of racial supremacy is divine, and of the belief that their society will implode from within should anyone breathe the reality that they are beginning to lose this war," McNeill noted, "the entire country, at least its residents of European stock, have concluded that they would rather die than lose. If they cannot defeat the Yankee, the Confederate States will commit mass suicide rather than face what they think is like to be homicide." Ellison Smith, the lame-duck President of the Confederacy who was barely in charge over day-to-day decisions any longer and mostly just smoked cigars and drank whiskey alone at the executive mansion, suggested to McNeill in private and on condition that the exchange be kept utterly secret that Confederate politicians who spoke the truth were likely to be assassinated, and he noted the case in the weeks before the war began of the Speaker of the House, John Sharp Williams, being murdered simply for his language being insufficiently belligerent.
There was thus little reasoning in Richmond, not while the industrial heartland of the Confederacy and capital remained, for the time being, relatively unthreatened. The Confederacy had their own list of demands drafted, that being the tolling of the Mississippi River, the immediate evacuation of the US forces from their land, and the return of all escaped and captured slaves. Paleologue was utterly baffled by the intransigence of these demands and noted that they seemed utterly divorced from reality; in a few years time, he too would become familiar with diplomatic notes that seemed exist in an entirely different plane of existence, but in 1915 he wrote in bewilderment back to the Quai d'Orsay of the "near-rabid stubbornness of the Confederate political class." He did, however, manage to secure one major boon in his Mission - the release of seventeen American politicians held captive since near the start of the war, including Senators Carroll Prouty and Dudley Doolittle, and their return to Philadelphia in a brokered prisoner exchange in which thirty captured Confederate Army officers and two hundred wounded infantrymen were returned, with the French dreadnought Napoleon III managing the exchange. This was, in the end, the lasting legacy for the Paleologue Mission, a considerable letdown when taking into account the high hopes and hype that it had begun with in Paris.
By mid-August, Paleologue elected to quit while he was ahead and return to France empty-handed but for the prisoner exchange, which Root graciously credited him for facilitating but which in France was met largely with mockery. In the early days of that month, a reconstituted American naval force recovered from Hilton Head had ambushed a Confederate-Mexican squadron off the coast of Key West near the southern tip of Florida and, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Florida Straits, sunk the CSS Arkansas, the last dreadnought in the Confederate fleet, and several Mexican vessels including two cruisers and so badly damaging the dreadnought Imperador Maximiliano that it was forced to retreat back into port at Tampico where it remained stuck for the final months of Mexico's participation in the war. This elimination of a major force of the Bloc Sud plugging up the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico essentially ended the ability of Confederate-Mexican shipping to occur unmolested in the Gulf and provided a second huge strategic boon, in that commercial shipping in the Gulf was now fair game and, after the Confederacy had sunk American ships at will, the United States Navy announced in a bluntly worded missive to all European powers that it would reciprocate and consider "all waters west of Florida and the Yucatan an area of combat in which prize rules for merchant vessels do not apply, in the manner in which the Confederacy has treated the Caribbean for the past eleven months." Between Hilton Head and now Florida Straits, punctuated by the capture of Key West by US Marines, Europe definitively no longer had any real say on how the US Navy conducted itself in the waters of the Confederacy, nor did it really have any desire to. This battle and its aftermath perhaps put paid to the Paleologue Mission more than anything else that had occurred, because Philadelphia clearly had no incentive to indulge European entreaties any longer, either.
McNeill turned his attention to brokering a deal in Rio de Janeiro instead, steaming south on the HMS Invincible and leaving Paleologue to rue his failure. But the endeavor had likely been doomed to peace anyways, and in a sense his failure was perhaps better than succeeding. By summer of 1915, the Confederacy was almost as unpopular with European leadership, even its conservative elite, as it was toxic with the European street, which held its slave-owning society in contempt and broadly sympathized with the United States - indeed, the war had perhaps made America more popular with Europe's populace than it had been previously. Politically speaking, Paleologue having his fingers on a peace deal that rescued the Confederacy from its just desserts could indeed have been worse than coming home having given his best efforts to end to bloodshed to no avail. Indeed, the tide was now turning so decisively in public and elite opinion against the Bloc Sud across Europe that it was even rumored that Spain, which was known to despise Richmond but hold great sympathy for Mexico City, had assisted from Cuba in providing key intelligence to the United States and had even mulled intervening in the Florida Straits directly with its own naval vessels.
Europe's role in the Great American War was drawing rapidly to an end before it even began - and the Poincaré ministry had little to show for it but egg on its face..."
- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] Raymond Poincaré and peace, name a less iconic duo