Edwin De Leon

Background

Edwin De Leon was born on May 4, 1818, in Columbia, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of Dr. Mardici Heimrich and Rebecca Lopez De Leon and brother of Thomas Cooper and David Camden De Leon.

Education

De Leon graduated from South Carolina College (now University of South Carolina) and studied law, but soon turned to literature and politics.

Career

Edwin De Leon was admitted to the bar in 1840. From 1842 to 1848 he coedited the Savannah 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 a 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 re-establish 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.

Achievements

• Edwin De Leon was a prolific writer, respected diplomat, and dedicated propagandist for the S.
  
  He is known for publishing 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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Secret History of Confederate Diplomacy Abroad

    (One of the South's most urgent priorities in the Civil Wa...)

    1868
  • Askaros Kassis: The Copt ; a Romance of Modern Egypt 1870
  • Egypt Under Its Khedives, Or, The Old House Of Bondage Under New Masters 1878
  • Thirty Years of My Life on Three Continents 1890

Religion

Edwin De Leon was Jewish but joined the Roman Catholic Church at his wife's request.

Politics

From 1850 to 1854, De Leon was part of the southern wing of the Democratic party.

Connections

De Leon married Ellen Mary Novlan of Rothgar, Ireland, on August 25, 1858, in Somerset, England.

Father:

Mordecai Hendricks De Leon

1791-1848

Mother:

Rebecca Lopez De Leon

1797-1868

Brother:

David Camden DeLeon

1816-1872

Sister:

Agnes DeLeon

1819-1902

Sister:

Maria Louisa DeLeon

1820-1901

Sister:

Addie Mary DeLeon Adams

1837-1877

Brother:

Thomas Cooper De Leon

1839-1914

Wife:

Ellen Mary Novlan

1846-1891

References

• The Diplomatic History Of The Southern Confederacy
  2015
• King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America
  2008