In November 1865 the Regency of Tunis sent an envoy to Washington bearing letters of condolences for the assassination of President Lincoln and of congratulations for the termination of the Civil War. The representative presented a portrait of the bey Muhammad al-Sadiq which still hangs in the State Department. It was a reciprocal act which recognized Tunisia’s own recent experience of civil war in the revolt of 1864. This paper examines understandings of the Trans-Atlantic other during the period of 1861-65, a time of revolutionary change and mutual trauma, through the personal memoirs of the abolitionist American consul Amos Perry, political pamphlets circulating at the time, the chronicle of Ahmad ibn abi al-Dhyaf, and the travel account of Gen. Othman, who led the 1865 delegation. In the years preceding the 1864 uprising, Tunis was an example of state-directed progress, adopting numerous reforms, including the abolition of slavery in 1846, and the first constitution in the Arab world in 1861. In 1862 the question of Tunis’ official admission into the international community was widely debated in the presses of Europe, right alongside the fate of the American Confederacy. The bey of Tunis understood the American experience of civil war refracted through the Tunisian experiment in state building and revolution. The travel writings of the bey’s envoy provide an insightful window to the Trans-Atlantic encounter after a period of deep national trauma. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, in 2011, under that very same portrait of Sadiq bey, Hillary Rodham Clinton unknowingly revived the memory of the 1864 revolt when she congratulated the Tunisian people for having toppled their dictator.