Edwin de Leon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_de_Leon

Edwin de Leon (May 4, 1818 – November 30, 1891) was a Confederate diplomat, writer, and journalist.

Biography

De Leon was born in Columbia, South Carolina of parents Mordecai Hendricks De Leon and Rebecca Lopez. He was the brother of newspaperman Thomas Cooper de Leon as well as another brother David Camden De Leon and three sisters: Agnes, Maria Louisa, and Adeline Mary (who married Joseph Henry Adams, of Boston). Edwin's father Mordecai De Leon, a physician, removed from Philadelphia to Columbia, South Carolina, and was mayor of that city for several years. De Leon married Ellen Mary Novlan of Rothgar, Ireland, on August 25, 1858, in Somerset, England.

(In a biography of Jefferson Davis Edwin De Leon is incorrectly identified as "Daniel De Leon". Daniel De Leon was an American socialist organizer and theoretician and the long-time leader of the Socialist Labor Party. When the Civil War began Daniel De Leon was eight years old and living on the island of Curaçao.)

De Leon graduated from South Carolina College, where he was a member of the Euphradian Society, and studied law, but soon turned to literature and politics. He became an active collaborator on the Southern Review, the Magnolia, the Southern Literary Messenger, and other periodicals. Removing to Savannah, Georgia, he took editorial charge of the Savannah Republican and made it a political factor in the state; his next charge was the Columbia, South Carolina Telegraph, a daily.

Young America

De Leon was a leader of the Young America movement. At the invitation of a committee of Southern members of Congress, De Leon established, in Washington The Southern Press, which had a large circulation during the early fifties. For his services during the Pierce campaign, Pierce appointed him consul-general to Egypt, which position he filled for two terms with marked success. At the commencement of the Crimean War, an order was issued by the Porte expelling all Greeks from the Ottoman dominion. The Greeks in Egypt appealed to De Leon, who took them under the protection of the American flag, guaranteed their good behavior, and insisted that they should not be interfered with. The home government approved his course, and Congress paid him the compliment of ordering the printing of his dispatches. The King of Greece tendered him the grand cross of the Order of San Sauveur, but Leon declined on the ground that it was anti-republican.

De Leon rendered conspicuous services in protecting American missionaries at Jaffa, and for this he received for the second time the thanks of the State Department. Through his influence American commerce with Egypt was largely extended and American machinery introduced into that country. It was during his incumbency of the consul-general-ship that he heard of the secession of his native state from the Union. He at once forwarded his resignation. Returning home, he ran the blockade and made his way to New Orleans. Thence he proceeded to Richmond and reported to Jefferson Davis, volunteering for military duty. Davis sent him instead on a confidential mission to Europe to secure the recognition of the Southern Confederacy by foreign powers. De Leon refused any salary or remuneration for his services, but advanced from his own purse considerable sums for the use of the Confederacy. He again ran the blockade, reached Nassau, and arrived in England in July, 1862. As diplomatic agent he was received in the highest circles, both in England and in France, and personally pleaded the cause of the Confederacy with Lord Palmerston and the emperor Napoleon.

His dispatches to the Southern government were intercepted, however, and were published by order of secretary of state, William H. Seward.

Through his friend Thackeray, De Leon became a member of the Garrick Club and a contributor to the Cornhill Magazine. After the Civil War, De Leon returned to America and settled in New York City. He frequently contributed to the leading magazines, chiefly on Eastern topics. Among his works are: "Thirty Years of My Life on Three Continents";"The Khedive's Egypt"; "Under the Star and Under the Crescent"; "Askaros Kassis, the Copt," a novel, republished in England.

Writings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_de_Leon#Writings

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https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/de-leon-edwin/

Diplomat, writer. De Leon was born in Charleston on May 4, 1818, to Mardici Heinrich De Leon and Rebecca Lopez-y-Nuñez. His father was a prominent Jewish physician, and his brothers also had notable careers: Thomas Cooper as a journalist and author, and David Camden as surgeon general of the Confederate Medical Department. Edwin De Leon was a prolific writer, respected diplomat, and dedicated propagandist for the South.

Growing up in Columbia, De Leon read widely in his father’s extensive library (destroyed in 1865) and attended South Carolina College. Graduating in 1837, he was admitted to the bar in 1840. From 1842 to 1848 he coedited the Savannah (Ga.) Republican. He drew the attention of southern Democrats in Congress, who in 1850 invited De Leon to Washington, where he and Ellwood Fisher founded the proslavery Southern Press. De Leon was friendly with politicians including Jefferson Davis and Franklin Pierce, and with writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he traveled in Italy. He also spent time with Mormon leader Joseph Smith at Nauvoo, Illinois, and knew William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson later in England.

In 1853 President Franklin Pierce appointed De Leon diplomatic agent and consul general to Egypt, a position reaffirmed by Pierce’s successor, James Buchanan. De Leon distinguished himself in Turkish-controlled Egypt by his boldness, most notably in protecting Greek inhabitants from a massacre during the Crimean War. Awarded the Cross of His Royal Order of the Saviour by King Otho of Greece, De Leon graciously turned the honor down on grounds that decorations violated the spirit of republicanism.

Hearing news of the outbreak of the Civil War, De Leon immediately resigned his position and returned to the South, where he ran the blockade at New Orleans and made his way to Jefferson Davis’s home in Richmond, Virginia. Davis appointed him diplomatic agent for the Confederacy to Europe, and he arrived in England in June 1862. Finding a propaganda apparatus already in place, De Leon moved on to France, where he argued the Southern cause and defended slavery as a benevolent institution in a thirty-two-page pamphlet entitled La Vérité sur les Etats Confédérés d’Amérique (The Truth about the Confederate States of America). Despite a vigorous effort, he was unable to secure official French support and, having alienated Judah P. Benjamin, Davis’s powerful secretary of war, received a letter announcing his dismissal in February 1864.

After the war De Leon returned to America and worked to reestablish the Democratic Party in the South, campaigning for Horatio Seymour for president in 1868 and Horace Greeley in 1872. Living primarily in New York, he also traveled in Europe and the Middle East, helping to establish Egypt’s telephone system in 1881. He published widely in newspapers and journals such as the Southern Quarterly Review and Harper’s and wrote several books, including a novel, Askaros Kossis, the Copt (1870), and Thirty Years of My Life on Three Continents (1890), a memoir. He died on December 1, 1891, in New York City.