His new Department was the one for which he was pre-eminently fit; and while he could not, in the nature of things, accomplish all that was expected of him, he earned the undying fame which was best expressed in the description of him as the “Brains of the Confederacy.” The great problem was to obtain assistance from a maritime power, the only one who could help the blockaded Confederacy, which was prevented by the blockade from selling its chief staple article――cotton. Spain, though a slave power herself at that time, was unfriendly to the former persistent filibusters, and her distrust could not be overcome. France was too friendly with England and would not interfere without the latter’s consent or co-operation, so that even if the South could send out a new Benjamin Franklin to Paris he could accomplish little. Benjamin, like almost all Southern statesmen, believed that England will be unable to get along without cotton, and ignoring or misunderstanding the moral forces which the cause of the North awakened in Europe, he displayed more independence at the beginning than was justifiable. Later, when he was in England, Benjamin declared: “I did not believe that your government would allow such misery to your operatives, such loss to your manufacturers, or that the people themselves would have borne it.” Benjamin believed that recognition (by England and France) even without intervention would end the war, and he might have been right if recognition came early. Mason, the Southern representative in England, made little headway, and even had his cause been stronger, he was no match for Adams, the minister of the North. Slidell, Benjamin’s friend, was apparently more successful in France. Benjamin authorized him to offer France a cotton subsidy valued at over sixty million francs for breaking the blockade or even for simple recognition of the Confederacy. Emperor Louis Napoleon (1808–73) seemed to have been favorably inclined, and Mercier, the French minister at Washington, who visited Richmond with Lincoln’s permission, was so influenced by Benjamin that he became almost enthusiastic. But communications were unsteady and unsafe, and some dispatches came seven months after they were sent from Paris. As an instance: Benjamin received from Slidell on February 27, 1863, a message written December 27, 1862, stating that the envoy to France was “without any dispatch from you later than April 15th.” The fall of New Orleans, May 1, 1862, blasted the hopes of early intervention.