A Mann with a title: - Commissioner of the Confederate States of America for Belgium and the Vatican
From The New-York Times March 25, 1861 (The New York Times Archive
REPORTS FROM NEW-ORLEANS.
NEW-ORLEANS, Friday, March 22.
The Commissioners of the Confederate States to Europe — Messrs. YANCEY, MANN and ROST — will leave here on the 31st inst. for Havana, and connect with the British steamer on the 7th of April for England.
The military statu quo at Pensacola continues. None but official communication is allowed between the shore and the fleet off the harbor.
The armed propeller Cushman keeps up a strict police force off the harbor.
A duel was fought on Tuesday morning at Fort McRae, between a Charlestonian and a resigned midshipman with Sharp’s rifles. The Charlestonian was badly wounded in the groin.
Pierre Aldophe Rost: French-born CSA Commissioner to Spain
William Lowndes Yancey was a fire-eater who strongly supported slavery and the right of states to secede from the Union. According to Wikipedia he even supported the resumption of the slave trade:
If slavery is right per se, if it is right to raise slaves for sale, does it not appear that it is right to import them?
Let us then wipe from our statute book this mark of Cain which our enemies have placed there.
We want negroes [sic] cheap, and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.
This seems like a more consistent position to me (just like I couldn’t understand why Charleston forbade public slave auctions). But it seems strange that he would be appointed as as sort-of ambassador to France and England, which opposed the slave trade. Wowever, the same Wikipedia article says Yancey did as well “as could have been expected”.
Yancey and Pierre Adolphe Rost were replaced by Mason and Slidell. After his CSA service Ambrose Dudley Mann lived the rest of his life in France.
Sharps rifle - great duelling weapon
ExploreSouthernHistory has information about Fort McRee with some photos. There is a good picture of the interior of the fort with some of the rebels who were presumably manning it. I wonder if the duelists were in the photo?
