"...rejection of France as a mediator and Paris as the place to sign a treaty. It did not get better from there.
The British, naturally, stepped in, and Muller traveled to the Canadian port city of Halifax on London's invitation with the Foreign Secretary, Sir Ian Malcolm, personally in attendance to resolve the issue. Despite the proximity to Philadelphia, the United States sent a gaggle of junior diplomats as well as a justice of their Supreme Court, Julian Mack - a liberal Jew - to treat with Muller rather than President Hughes or Secretary of State Root, both of whom described themselves as far too busy to make the journey what with the impending collapse of the Confederacy. Muller, insulted, announced he would not meet with the Americans until he was met by somebody of "proper station;" three weeks later, on October 24th, the Vice President, Herbert Hadley, arrived as the head of the American delegation, the first Vice President to travel on a diplomatic mission outside of the United States.
While this mollified Muller to a point, it still did not solve the fact that the slight from Philadelphia had not been accidental. He learned quickly, from a British spy in the American delegation, that while the Americans had no intention of prosecuting the still-extant war in the South Atlantic or Caribbean any longer, there was considerable pressure in Congress, especially with a looming election in just two weeks, to take as hard a line as possible on the "slave powers," and that influential abolitionists who had the ear of the Hughes administration were pushing to demand that the price of a peace treaty with Brazil, much as the price of formal recognition of the rebellious Republic of Texas, would have to be total, unqualified, and uncompensated manumission of Brazil's slaves.
As a practical matter, this was not a huge issue; Brazil's youngest slaves were in their mid-forties and estimates suggested there were fewer than ten thousand enslaved persons remaining in the entire country, and the government was expected to pass some sort of abolition in the next two years anyways. The issue was that Brazil was entirely disinterested in being ordered by the United States to do anything; Muller, by any reasonable definition a political moderate in the Brazilian government, took the view that Philadelphia and Rio had essentially fought their part of the war to a draw, taking one dreadnought off the other and with no remaining issues standing in the way of peace. Indeed, harsher men had the notion that as the United States was fighting purely to defend Argentina, and that peace was settled at Asuncion, any agreement was a mere formality dictating status quo ante.
The Halifax Protocol was thus a grotesque compromise which had to satisfy two matters: American domestic political realities, and Brazil's refusal to regard its campaigns against the Americans as anything less than a stalemate. A formal treaty required a two-thirds Senate majority to pass, which a "light peace" against any Bloc Sud member was unlikely to carry; a "protocol," however, had no constitutional weight whatsoever. Hadley, who would along with Hughes be leaving office by March and was simply spent, proposed to Muller the terms of the Halifax Protocol: both countries acknowledged that hostilities were "permanently suspended" and "that no state of war exists," while falling short of a binding peace treaty "until such terms can be negotiated and resolved favorably to both parties." Muller begrudgingly agreed, partly at Malcolm's behest - the Foreign Secretary now had his fingerprints on the documents signed both in Asuncion and in Halifax - and thus the Protocol was promulgated.
For the United States, the Halifax Protocol delivered them the best of both worlds: it allowed the Hughes administration to declare that the war was over on November 11th when the Confederate government surrendered and asked for an armistice before his single term ended, but also allowed them to defer the ideological question of "eradicating slave power from the Hemisphere" to the incoming Root administration and indeed inadvertently formalized the practice that the United States did not treat with countries that allowed legal slavery. Neither side formally revoked their declarations of war but the Protocol was an informal enforcement of peace that, while shaky from the standpoint of international law, nonetheless guided the actions of each government. [1]
Muller never ceased to be insulted, however, and the Protocol engendered a fair deal of ill will in Brazil for years to come. Not only had their victory in Uruguay been mutilated, but they had not even been given the courtesy of all the other powers in the Great American War of signing a treaty formalizing the conflict's end with the United States because they would not allow Philadelphia to dictate domestic policy to them. Anti-American sentiment, fairly limited during the war despite the formal hostilities, erupted upon the Protocol's promulgation as opportunist politicians denounced "Americanism" in all its forms, regarding it as an even more insidious, radical form of Alemism. The phantoms of the war in the Cisplatine had not vanished with its end - indeed, the same impulses that had driven it were perhaps suddenly stronger than ever..."
- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil
[1] In case its not clear from the text, this half-loaf, have-your-cake-and-eat-it bullshit from the US is not going to work long term as far as US-Brazil relations go. While this chapter is specific to Brazil, this is one of our first iterations of the victory disease that's going to start setting in regarding Latin American relations for the US soon
