As Union forces fought, under President Abraham Lincoln’s direction, against the Confederacy in the American Civil War in an effort to restore the sovereignty of United States over the eleven Confederate states, representatives from Washington, D.C., and Great Britain met to negotiate a treaty designed to undermine the Confederacy. At its core, the treaty was designed to use diplomacy to achieve three objectives beneficial to the Union in its ongoing efforts to defeat the Confederate States of America. Those objectives were associated with (a) the immorality of slavery, whether domestic or international, (b) the utility of casting a negative global light on that institution that would reflect negatively on the credibility and legitimacy of the Confederacy, and (c) undermining in practical terms the economic prospects of the eleven states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 and were still reliant on the enslaved people continuing to work the land in those political territories.