The country was spared this eye-for-an-eye bloodbath when the Lincoln administration backed down. Its legal position was untenable, for in the same proclamation that had branded the privateers as pirates Lincoln had also imposed a blockade against the Confederacy. This had implicitly recognized the conflict as a war rather than merely a domestic insurrection. The Union government’s decision on February 3, 1862, to treat captured privateer crews as prisoners of war was another step in the same direction.
