Current Border Disputes The Chesapeake Affair was an international diplomatic incident that occurred during the American Civil War.

On December 7, 1863, Confederate sympathizers from the British colonies Nova Scotia and New Brunswick captured the American steamer Chesapeake off the coast of Cape Cod.

[2] The Confederate sympathizers had planned to re-coal at Saint John, New Brunswick, and head south to Wilmington, North Carolina.

[6] When the Civil War began, most Canadians and Maritimers were overtly sympathetic to the North, which had abolished slavery after the Revolution and which had trading ties.

Hundreds of blockade runners loaded with British arms and supplies would use the port of Halifax to ship their goods between Britain and the Confederate States.

[13] Halifax's role in arms trafficking for the South was so noticeable that the Acadian Recorder in 1864 described the city's effort as a "mercenary aid to a fratricidal war, which, without outside intervention, would have long ago ended.

"[14] U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward complained on March 14, 1865: Halifax has been for more than one year, and yet is, a naval station for vessels which, running the blockade, furnish supplies and munitions of war to our enemy, and it has been made a rendezvous for those piratical cruisers which come out from Liverpool and Glasgow, to destroy our commerce on the high seas, and even to carry war into the ports of the United States.

Toronto, Montreal, St. Catharines, and Halifax were centers of a well-financed network of Confederate spies, escaped prisoners, and soldiers of fortune who were trying to influence government opinion in the war.

[18] The Chesapeake Affair was the result of a plan created in Saint John, New Brunswick, by Confederate sympathizers: they intended to capture an American ship and use it as a blockade runner for the South.

[19] Locke had arranged for John C. Braine and sixteen Confederate sympathizers from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to board the Chesapeake as normal passengers in New York.

[20] While en route to Maine, on the night of 7 December, just off the coast of Cape Cod, Braine and his men seized control of the vessel.

[22] Locke sailed Chesapeake to Saint John, New Brunswick, as planned but was unable to load coal for the voyage south.

Lieutenant Nickels of Malvern violated British sovereignty and international laws by arresting the three men who remained: one from New Brunswick and two from Nova Scotia.

The New York Herald condemned the attack as the "most daring and atrocious on record" and the assailants for showing "cold blood and feeble circulation of reptiles."

Another paper derided the citizens of Saint John as "mere pimps" of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and "his fellow traitors.

The fate of the Chesapeake awaited adjudication in the colonial Admiralty court, but the British planned to give Confederate prisoner Wade to the United States authorities for extradition.