US note on the search of mail

The British chronology of the war records under 26 May 1916 a note from the United States government protesting against the search of mail. According to American diplomatic documents, Secretary of State Robert Lansing handed it over in Washington two days earlier, on 24 May. Two identical notes were received by the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, and the British ambassador, Cecil Spring Rice. It was a sharp protest about the mail which the Allies were removing from ships sailing between America and the neutral countries of Europe.

Mail and the blockade

The dispute had sharpened in December 1915. The British then began to take off for inspection the mail sacks from neutral ships that called at their ports or were directed to them. On 18 December customs officers at Kirkwall in Orkney removed from the Danish ship Frederik VIII 597 sacks of parcel post for Scandinavia, and a few days later from the Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam all the mail from the United States to the Netherlands. The Allies explained that rubber, coffee and jewellery were being smuggled to Germany in the parcels. At the beginning of January 1916 Washington protested. London and Paris replied with a joint memorandum of 15 February. In it they treated parcel post as ordinary merchandise, subject to search and seizure, and stipulated only that they would not seize or confiscate “genuine correspondence” on the high seas, and would forward it as soon as they had satisfied themselves of its character.

The content of the protest

Lansing agreed that parcel post could be treated as merchandise. He argued, however, that the Allies were depriving the neutrals of the benefit of their own assurances. By renouncing the seizure of letters at sea, they forced ships into their ports or put pressure on shipowners to call there. They then took off all the mail, carried it to London and opened every item, even those sent from one neutral country to another. According to the note, there was no legal difference between seizing mail at sea and seizing it in port. The announcement of 15 February therefore meant only that one unlawful practice had been replaced by another, still more vexatious. Lansing recalled that in the American Civil War, the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War the belligerents had let neutral mail pass. Even Germany in this war had forwarded to their addressees 144 sacks of letters from the captured French ship Floride.

The note listed the losses suffered by Americans. Patents, powers of attorney, probate documents, cheques and money orders had gone missing. The MacNiff horticultural firm of New York could not collect plants and bulbs from the Netherlands, which froze in port, because the shipping documents taken from the ships were missing. A cable firm from Pittsburgh lost a contract in Kristiania (today Oslo) because its tender did not arrive in time, and the order went to a British competitor. The US government announced that it would soon claim compensation. It also held that letters, shipping documents and similar papers were “genuine correspondence” and should pass unmolested, while securities and cheques could be treated as merchandise. Finally it declared that only a radical change in Allied policy, restoring to the United States the full rights of a neutral state, would satisfy it.

No quick reply

London was in no hurry to reply. On 20 July the British sent only a memorandum in which they rebutted in detail the four examples of damage given in the note, and postponed their answer to the legal arguments until they had consulted their allies. The joint reply of France and Great Britain came only on 12 October 1916. In it the Allies maintained that their conduct did not violate international law, and promised only to make good any mistakes by their officials. The mail dispute was one of many that in the summer of 1916 soured relations between Washington and London. Earlier there had been a dispute over the British blacklist, which soon came to include American firms as well.