Article
Trent Affair
On 8 November 1861, seven months after the onset of the American Civil War, American Captain Charles Wilkes stopped RMS Trent, an unarmed British ship, in international waters between Cuba and the Bahamas. He took two Confederate envoys prisoner. The incident led to a diplomatic crisis between Britain and the United States that nearly led to a war that would have involved Canada. The Trent Affair was peacefully resolved when the two envoys were released on 1 January 1862 and allowed passage to Britain.