April 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, which
began when Confederate forces opened fire upon Fort Sumter in
Charleston, South Carolina. The following essay by Webster Tarpley,
tells about the largely untold alliance between President Abraham
Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II, which by many accounts was key to
the North winning the U.S. Civil War, sealing the defeat of the British
strategic design.
"Who was our friend when the world was our foe." -
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871
One hundred fifty years after the attack on Fort Sumter, the
international strategic dimension of the American Civil War represents a
much-neglected aspect of Civil War studies. In offering a survey of
some of the main issues involved, one feels required to justify the
importance of the topic. It is indeed true that, as things turned out,
the international strategic dimension of the 1861-65 conflict was of
secondary importance. However, it was an aspect that repeatedly
threatened to thrust itself into the center of the war, transforming the
entire nature of the conflict and indeed threatening to overturn the
entire existing world system. The big issue was always a British-French
attack on the United States to preserve the Confederate States of
America. This is certainly how Union and Confederate leaders viewed the
matter, and how some important people in London, St. Petersburg, Paris,
and Berlin did as well.
The result is that today, the international dimension is consistently
underestimated: even a writer as sophisticated as Richard Franklin
Bensel can repeatedly insist in his recent
Yankee Leviathan that
the US development over the decade before the Civil War was “acted out
in a vacuum,” while asserting that “the relative isolation of the United
States on the North American continent contributed to the comparative
unimportance of nationalism in American life prior to secession.” [
1]
Reports of American isolation, however, were already exaggerated in the
era of a British fleet that could summer in the Baltic and winter in
the Caribbean.
Views of the domestic side of the Civil War have often been colored
by the sectional loyalties of the authors. In the diplomatic sphere, the
international alignments of 1861-65 have been experienced as something
of an embarrassment or aberration by American scholars of the twentieth
century, at least partly because they inverted the alliance patterns
that emerged after 1900. In 1865, the United States was friendly to
Russia and Prussia, and resentful and suspicious in regard to Britain
and France, whose governments had sympathized with and supported the
Confederacy. The general tendency of US historians in 1915 or 1945 or
1952 seems to have been to put the best possible face on things, or,
better yet, turn to another area of inquiry. As the Civil War centennial
approached, the historian
Allan Nevins addressed this issue rather directly in a chapter of his 1960 “
War for the Union”.
Here he dramatically evoked the immense worldwide significance of Civil
War diplomacy in a fascinating paragraph to which Howard Jones calls
attention. Nevins, horrified by the idea of US war with Britain, wrote:
It is hardly too much to say that the future of the world as we
know it was at stake. A conflict between Great Britain and America would
have crushed all hope of the mutual understanding and growing
collaboration which led up to the practical alliance of 1917-18, and the
outright alliance which began in 1941. It would have made vastly more
difficult if not impossible the coalition which defeated the Central
Powers in the First World War, struck down Nazi tyranny in the Second
World War, and established the unbreakable front of Western freedom
against Communism. Anglo-French intervention in the American conflict
would probably have confirmed the splitting and consequent weakening of
the United States; might have given French power in Mexico a long lease,
with the ruin of the Monroe Doctrine; and would perhaps have led to the
Northern conquest of Canada. The forces of political liberalism in the
modern world would have received a disastrous setback. No battle, not
Gettysburg, not the Wilderness, was more important than the context
waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion. The
popular conception of this contest is at some points erroneous, and at a
few grossly fallacious…. (Nevins II, 242)
While Nevins does make the point that these questions are important,
he feels that many accounts are unfair to Lord Russell, the British
foreign secretary, and to Prime Minister Palmerston. Nevins sees
Palmerston as a man of peace, an attitude which is impossible to square
with the bellicose imperialist bluster of Lord Pam’s
civis romanus sum
interventionism. Between about 1848 and 1863, the British Empire was at
the aggressive height of its world power, had launched attacks on
China, India, and Russia, and in the 1860s was backing Napoleon III’s
adventure in Mexico and Spain’s in Santo Domingo, both direct challenges
to the US Monroe Doctrine. This is a context which often gets lost.
Otherwise, Nevins’ assertion that Britain “did not like other nations to
fight” turns reality on its head; the greatest art of the Foreign
Office was that of divide and conquer. Finally, Nevins pays no attention
to the deterrent effect of Russia’s refusal to countenance any European
intervention against the Union.
Like so many other historians, Nevins would seem to have allowed the
needs of the Cold War present to shape his view of the past — the
tendency against which Sir Herbert Butterfield, long Professor of Modern
History at Cambridge, warned in the 1930s when we wrote that “it is
part and parcel of the Whig interpretation of history that it studies
the past with reference to the present….” [
2]
In Butterfield’s view, this is a method which “has often been an
obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to
mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the
present….it might be called the historian’s ‘pathetic fallacy.’”
(Butterfield 11, 30) The following comments are inspired by the
conviction that Union diplomacy was Lincoln’s diplomacy, and that it
offers valuable lessons for today.
As far as I have been able to determine, there exists no modern
exhaustive study of Civil War diplomacy. Of the books I have seen,
D. P. Crook
comes closest. Crook’s 1974 work is a very serviceable and reliable
survey of the entire topic. Crook naturally places US-British relations
at the center of his account, focusing on the three crises when UK
and/or French intervention against the Union was threatened: the
Trent
affair of late 1861-1862; the push for intervention by Lord Russell and
Gladstone after Antietam in October-November 1862; and the mid-1863
Laird rams/Polish rebellion flare-up (which Howard Jones, by contrast,
omits from consideration). For Crook, Secretary of State Seward is the
center of attention on the Union side, rather than Lincoln. But Lincoln
repeatedly had to override Seward, as in the case of the Secretary of
State’s 1861 reckless “foreign war panacea” proposal for a US war
against France and Spain (probably involving Britain as well), which
Lincoln wisely rejected in favor of his “one war at a time” policy. Here
Bensel is of the opinion that Seward’s proposal “revealed the new
secretary of state’s profound awareness of the narrow basis of northern
nationalism during the early months of the Lincoln administration.”
(Bensel 12n) Another view is that Seward was looking for a means of
saving face while permitting the south to secede. Seward’s panacea
theory can also be seen as a flight forward, a kind of political nervous
breakdown. Crook has almost nothing to say about the pro-Union role of
Prussia (which surely dissuaded Napoleon III from greater activism), nor
about the Holy See, where Pius IX – who had lost his moorings after
having been driven out of Rome by Mazzini in 1849 — was pro-Confederate
and highly controversial at the time. He also plays down the central
importance of Russia for the Union. As for Napoleon II, Crook follows
the misleading tradition of stressing the conflicts and suspicion
between Napoleon III and Palmerston while downplaying the fundamental
fact that
Napoléon le petit (who had once been a British
constable) always operated within the confines of a Franco-British
alliance in which he provided the bulk of the land forces but was
decidedly the junior partner.
In contrast to Lincoln, Confederate President Jefferson Davis took
almost no interest in diplomatic affairs. The Confederacy sent envoys to
London and Paris, but never bothered to even send a representative to
St. Petersburg, which turned out to be the most important capital of
all.
The Threat of British Intervention
The two great interlocutors of Union foreign policy were Great
Britain and Russia, and the geopolitical vicissitudes of the twentieth
century tended to distort perceptions of both, minimizing the importance
of both British threat and Russian friendship. Crook, in his valuable
bibliographical essay, traces this tendency back to the “Great
Rapprochement” between Britain and the US in the early twentieth
century. The standard work on US-UK relations, Crook notes, was for many
years E. D. Adams’
Great Britain and the American Civil War, which plays down friction between London and Washington, and narrates events “from the meridian of London.” (Crook 381)
The Russia-American Special Relationship that Saved the Union
Adams tells his reader that he does not view his topic as part of
American history; rather, he poses for himself the contorted question of
“how is the American Civil War to be depicted by historians of Great
Britain…?” (Adams I 2) Adams treats the autumn crisis of 1862 as the
main danger point of US-UK conflict, writing that “here, and here only,
Great Britain voluntarily approached the danger of becoming involved in
the American conflict.” (Adams II 34) He pleads for understanding for
the much-vituperated British role, recalling that “the great crisis in
America was almost equally a crisis in the domestic history of Great
Britain itself…,” and providing valuable materials in this regard.
(Adams I 2) Adams generally relegates Russo-American diplomacy to the
footnotes, mentioning the “extreme friendship” and even the “special
relationship” of these two nations. In the North, he notes, Russia was
viewed as a “true friend” in contrast to the “unfriendly neutrality” of
Great Britain and France. (Adams II, 45n, 70n, 225) But for Adams, the
main lesson is that the Anglo-American disputes of the Civil War era
have “distorted” the “natural ties of friendship, based upon ties of
blood and a common heritage of literature and history and law” which
exist or ought to exit between the two countries. Those disputes, he
suggests, can be relegated to the category of “bitter and exaggerated
memories.” (Adams II 305)
Seward, 1861: A US-UK War Would “Wrap the World in Flames”
Kenneth Bourne’s
Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908
provides an effective antidote to such sentimental thinking in the form
of a notable chapter (singled out for attention by Crook) on the
British planning for war with the United States at the time of the
Trent affair in December-January 1861, when Seward threatened to “wrap the world in flames” and the British lion roared in reply. [
3] Two Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, were taken off the British merchant ship
Trent
by a US warship as they were sailing to plead the cause of intervention
in London and Paris; the London press became hysterical with rage, and
the anti-Union group in the cabinet saw their chance to start a
transatlantic war. This study draws not only upon the British Admiralty
archives in the Public Record Office, but also on the papers of Admiral
Sir Alexander Milne in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Bourne
depicts the British predicament as their “defenceless” position in
Canada, even with the help of the 10,000 additional regular infantry
which Palmerston deployed in response to the crisis. (Bourne 211) A
recurrent British fear was that their soldiers would desert to the
American side, urged on by “crimps.” (Bourne 217). Their Canadian
vulnerability, the British thought, encouraged Seward and others to
twist the tail of the British lion. The US had the only serious warships
on the Great Lakes, British fortifications were weak, Canadian
volunteers were scarce, and there were few decent muskets for them. The
greatest problem was that the Saint Lawrence River was blocked by ice in
winter, preventing re-enforcements from reaching Quebec City by water;
the only roads inland went dangerously parallel to the Maine border.
Some of the British staff officers had to land in Boston and take the
Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal. [
4]
One is left with the impression that winter ice might have cooled
Palmerston’s aggressivity even before Seward’s release of the captured
Confederate envoys Mason and Slidell did.
Admiralty Plans to Bombard and Burn Boston and New York
The heart of the British strategy in case of war was “overwhelming
naval strength based on a few select fortresses,” especially Bermuda and
Halifax (in today’s Nova Scotia). (Bourne 208) British Prime Minister
Lord Palmerston dispatched a powerful squadron of eight ships of the
line and thirteen frigates and corvettes under Admiral Milne to the
western Atlantic, and wanted to use the
Great Eastern, the
largest ship in the world, as a troop transport. London even considered
ways to foment secession in Maine. Bombarding and burning both Boston
and New York was actively considered as a contingency; it was concluded
that the reduction of Boston would be very difficult because of the
channels and forts; New York was seen as more vulnerable, especially to a
surprise attack. An Admiralty hydrographer saw New York City as “the
true heart of [US] commerce, — the centre of …maritime resources; to
strike her would be to paralyse all the limbs.” (Bourne 240)
New US Monitors Deterred the British Fleet
By the time spring of 1862 came, the
Monitor had come on the
scene, further complicating British intervention. The Royal Navy had
ironclads, but they were only usable in deep water. Bourne aptly notes
that “the American monitors might have played havoc with any attempt by
the older wooden frigates to maintain a close blockade” of Union ports.
(Bourne 240) As more vessels of the
Monitor type were produced by
the US, this aspect of the British predicament became even more acute.
The point of detailing these facts here is to suggest the existence of a
fascinating array of neglected issues. Crook at least sketches this
strategic picture before he falls back on the maudlin tradition that it
was the dying Prince Albert who was instrumental in restraining
Palmerston’s jingoism and avoiding war. Crook also recognizes that in
any warlike denouement to the
Trent affair, “world-shaking trading and political alignments would be forged.” (136)
Howard Jones, in his account of Anglo-American relations written just
after the Thatcher era and the end of the Cold War, pays very little
attention to the salient military aspects of the Atlantic situation.
Jones offers a limited and legalistic interpretation of the threat of
British intervention. He calls “special attention” to the fact that “the
most outspoken opponent” of intervention in the British cabinet was the
Secretary for War, George Cornewall Lewis. This role emerged through
public speeches and cabinet memoranda issued in the wake of Gladstone’s
well-known speech in praise of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy at
Tyneside on October 7, 1862. However, the role of Lewis had already
been highlighted at some length by Crook, who classified Lewis as “one
of the ‘do-nothing’ school rather than a partisan,” and possibly urged
on by Palmerston for invidious reasons. (Crook 233) Jones argues that
“the great majority of British interventionists were not malevolent
persons who wanted the American republic to commit national suicide so
they might further their own ends; they wanted to stop the war for the
sake of humanity in general and British textile workers in particular.”
(Jones 8 ) It is hard to ascribe such humanitarian motives to a group of
politicians who had, according to contemporary accounts, recently
shocked the world by their murderous atrocities carried out during the
repression of the Sepoy Mutiny in India. Jones regards Lewis’s memoranda
more as legal briefs rather than strategic estimates: “Lewis knew that
they key person he had to dissuade from intervention was Russell. He
also knew that the foreign secretary relied on history and international
law to justify his stand and that the only way to undermine his
argument for intervention was to appeal to that same history and
international law.” (Jones 224) This analysis does not capture what
actually went on in the brutal deliberations of the dominant power
politicians and imperialists of the age, who were more impressed by
American monitors and by Russian infantry divisions than by legalistic
niceties or high ideals. Given this emphasis, it is not surprising that
Jones has little interest in the Russian aspect of the problem, although
he does concede that “Russia’s pro-Union sentiment prevented
participation in any policy alien to the Lincoln Administration’s
wishes.” (Jones 228)
The Union and Russia
The Russian-British rivalry was of course the central antagonism of
European history after the Napoleonic era, and the Russian attitude
towards London coincided with the traditional American resentment
against the former colonial power. Benjamin Platt Thomas’s older study
shows that the US-Russian convergence became decisive during the Crimean
War; while Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia, the
United States was ostentatiously friendly to the court of St.
Petersburg. He depicts Russian minister to Washington Éduard de Stoeckl
as a diplomat “whose sole aim was to nurture the chronic anti-British
feeling in the United States.” (Thomas 111) According to Thomas, Stoeckl
succeeded so well that there was even a perceptible chance that the
United States might enter the Crimean War on the Russian side. The US
press and public were all on the side of Russia, and hostile to the
Anglo-French, to the chagrin of the erratic US President Pierce (who had
been close to Admiralty agent Giuseppe Mazzini’s pro-British Young
America organization) and the doughface politician James Buchanan. The
latter, at that time US envoy to London, embraced the British view of
the Tsar as “the Despot.” (Thomas 117) Thomas finds that “the Crimean
War undoubtedly proved the wisdom of Russia’s policy of cultivating
American friendship, and in fact, drew the two nations closer together.”
(Thomas 120) But Thomas glosses over some of the more important US-UK
frictions during this phase, which included British army recruiting in
the US, and the ejection of the British ambassador as
persona non grata. (Thomas 120)
Turning to the conflict of 1861-65, Thomas points out that “in the
first two years of the war, when its outcome was still highly uncertain,
the attitude of Russia was a potent factor in preventing Great Britain
and France from adopting a policy of aggressive intervention.” (Thomas
129) He shows that the proposed British-French interference promoted by
Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, in October 1862 was “deterred at
this time mainly” by the Russian attitude, and cites Russell’s note to
Palmerston concluding that Britain “ought not to move at present without
Russia.” [
5] (Thomas 132)
The critical importance of Russian help in deterring the British and
Napoleon III as well is borne out by a closer analysis. As early as
1861, Russia alerted the Lincoln government to the machinations of
Napoleon III, who was already scheming to promote a joint
UK-France-Russia intervention in favor of the Confederacy. [
6]
As Henry Adams, the son and private secretary of US Ambassador to
London Charles Francis Adams, sums up the strategic situation during
Lee’s first invasion of Maryland, on the eve of the Battle of Antietam:
These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on September
14, under the impression that the President was about to be driven from
Washington and the Army of the Potomac dispersed, suggested to Russell
that in such a case, intervention might be feasible. Russell instantly
answered that, in any case, he wanted to intervene and should call a
Cabinet for the purpose. Palmerston hesitated; Russell insisted….” [
7]
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln used the Confederate repulse at
Antietam to issue a warning that slavery would be abolished in areas
still engaged in rebellion against the United States on January 1, 1863.
The Russian Tsar Alexander II had liberated the 23 million serfs of the
Russian Empire in 1861, so this underlined the nature of the US-Russian
convergence as a force for human freedom. This imminent Emancipation
Proclamation was also an important political factor in slowing
Anglo-French meddling, but it would not have been decisive by itself.
The British cabinet, as Seward had predicted, regarded emancipation as
an act of desperation. The
London Times accused Lincoln in lurid and racist terms of wanting to provoke a slave rebellion and a race war,
Gladstone’s Open Hostility to the United States, October 7, 1862
On October 7, 1862, despite the news that the Confederates had been
repulsed at Antietam, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer William
Gladstone, who spoke for Lord John Russell, pressed for British
intervention against the Union and on the side of the Confederacy in a
speech at Tyneside, saying: “. . . We know quite well that the people of
the Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup [of defeat and
partition] — they are still trying to hold it far from their lips —
which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We
may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the
South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of
the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and
they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation… We
may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far
as regards their separation from the North”. [
8]
It was practically a declaration of war against the Lincoln
government, and it also contained a lie, since Gladstone knew better
than most that the only navy the Confederacy ever had was the one
provided with British connivance.
On October 13, 1862 Lord John Russell called a meeting of the British
cabinet for October 23, with the top agenda item being a deliberation
on the “duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the most friendly and
conciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of arms.” [
9]
Russell wanted an ultimatum to Washington and Richmond for an armistice
or cease-fire, followed by a lifting of the Union blockade of southern
ports, followed then by negotiations leading to Washington’s recognition
of the CSA as an independent state. If the Union refused, then Britain
would recognize the CSA and in all probability begin military
cooperation with the Confederates.
US Ambassador Charles Francis Adams asked Russell in advance of the
October 23 cabinet meeting what he had in mind. As his son and private
secretary Henry Adams recounts, “On October 23, Russell assured Adams
that no change in policy was now proposed. On the same day he had
proposed it, and was voted down.” Henry Adams was doubtless correct in
his impression that “every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to
November, 1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the
Union.” [
10]
At this point, Napoleon III of France invited London to join him in a
move against the Union. According to Adams’ memoir, “Instantly Napoleon
III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone with a proposition
which had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to replace America,
from pole to pole, in her old dependence on Europe, and to replace
England in her old sovereignty of the seas, if Palmerston would support
France in Mexico…. The only resolute, vehement, conscientious champion
of Russell, Napoleon III, and Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.” [
11]
Napoleon III had conferred with the Confederate envoy Slidell and
proposed that France, England, and Russia impose a six-month armistice
on the US and CSA. Napoleon III believed that if Lincoln did not accept
his intrusion, this would provide a pretext for Anglo-French recognition
of the CSA, followed by military intervention against the Union. [
12]
There was no real hope of getting pro-Union Russia to join such an
initiative, and the reason Napoleon III included Russia was merely as
camouflage to cloak the fact that the whole enterprise was a hostile act
against Washington.
Russia Rejects the Anglo-French Intrigues for Interference
The clouds of world war gathered densely over the planet. Russell and
Gladstone, now joined by Napoleon III, continued to demand aggressive
meddling in US affairs. This outcome was avoided because of British and
French fears of what Russia might do if the continued to launch
bellicose gestures against the Union. On October 29, 1862 there occurred
in St. Petersburg an extremely cordial meeting of Russian Foreign
Minister Gortchakov with US chargé d’affaires Bayard Taylor, which was
marked by a formal Russian pledge never to move against the US, and to
oppose any attempt by other powers to do so. Taylor reported these
comments by Gortchakov to the State Department: “You know the sentiments
of Russia. We desire above all things the maintenance of the American
Union as one indivisible nation. We cannot take any part, more than we
have done. We have no hostility to the Southern people. Russia has
declared her position and will maintain it. There will be proposals of
intervention [by Britain and France]. We believe that intervention could
do no good at present. Proposals will be made to Russia to join some
plan of interference. She will refuse any intervention of the kind.
Russia will occupy the same ground as at the beginning of the struggle.
You may rely upon it, she will not change. But we entreat you to settle
the difficulty. I cannot express to you how profound an anxiety we feel —
how serious are our fears.” [
13]
The
Journal de St. Petersbourg, the official gazette of the
Tsarist government, denounced the Anglo-French intervention plan against
the US, which had been inspired by Russell. This article helped prevent
a wider war: the British cabinet, informed of the Russian attitude by
telegraph, voted down Russell’s aggressive project. Russell made his
last bid to swing the British cabinet in favor of a policy of
interference together with Napoleon III against the Union on November
12, 1862, but he was unable to carry the day, and this turned out to be
his last chance for the year.
Seward thought that if the Anglo-French were to assail the Union,
they would soon find themselves at war with Russia as well. He wrote to
John Bigelow early in the war: “I have a belief that the European State,
whichever one it may be, that commits itself to intervention anywhere
in North America, will sooner or later fetch up in the arms of a native
of an oriental country not especially distinguished for amiability of
manners or temper.” (Thomas 128)
Adams to Russell: Superfluous to Point Out this Means War
The summer of 1863, despite the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, was
marked by another close brush with US-UK war. It was on September 5,
1863 that US Ambassador Charles Francis Adams told Lord Russell that if
the Laird rams – powerful ironclad warships capable of breaking the
Union blockade which were then under construction in England — were
allowed to leave port, “It would be superfluous in me to point out to
your Lordship that this is war.” [
14]
Lord Russell had to pause, and then backed off entirely. The Laird rams
were put under surveillance by the British government on September 9,
and finally seized by the British government in mid-October, 1863.
(Adams II 147) They never fought for the Confederacy.
A revolt against Russian domination of Poland, incited by the
British, started in 1863 and lasted into late 1864. Crook points out
that it was Lord Russell who told Lord Lyons in March 1863 that the
Polish issue had the potential to create a Russo-American common front
and thus revolutionize world power relations, evidently to the detriment
of London. (Crook 285) Such a prophecy was coherent with the then
-fashionable ideas of de Tocqueville about Russia and America as the two
great powers of the future.
The Russian Fleets in New York and San Francisco
The most dramatic gestures of cooperation between the Russian Empire
and the United States came in the autumn of 1863, as the Laird rams
crisis hung in the balance. On September 24, the Russian Baltic fleet
began to arrive in New York harbor. On October 12, the Russian Far East
fleet began to arrive in San Francisco. The Russians, judging that they
were on the verge of war with Britain and France over the
British-fomented Polish insurrection of 1863, had taken this measure to
prevent their ships from being bottled up in their home ports by the
superior British fleet. These ships were also the tokens of the vast
Russian land armies that could be thrown in the scales on a number of
fronts, including the northwest frontier of India; the British had long
been worried about such an eventuality. In mid-July 1863, French Foreign
Minister Droun de Lhuys was offering London the joint occupation of
Poland by means of invasion. But the experience of the Confederate
commerce raiders had graphically illustrated just how effective even a
limited number of warships could be when they turned to commerce
raiding, which is what the Russian naval commanders had been ordered to
do in case of hostilities. The Russian admirals had also been told that,
if the US and Russia were to find themselves at war with Britain and
France, the Russian ships should place themselves under Lincoln’s
command and operate in synergy with the US Navy against the common
enemies. It is thus highly significant that the Russian ships were sent
to the United States.
US Navy Secretary Gideon Welles: “God Bless the Russians”
Coming on the heels of the bloody Union reverse at Chickamauga, the
news of the Russian fleet unleashed an immense wave of euphoria in the
North. It was this moment that inspired the later verses of Oliver
Wendell Holmes, one of the most popular writers in America, for the 1871
friendship visit of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis:
Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December,
Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow;
Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember
Who was our friend when the world was our foe.
Fires of the North in eternal communion,
Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star;
God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union
Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar! [
15]
The Russians, as Clay reported to Seward and Lincoln, were delighted
in turn by the celebration of their fleets, which stayed in American
waters for over six months as the Polish revolt was quelled. The Russian
officers were lionized and feted, and had their pictures taken by the
famous New York photographer Matthew Brady. When an attack on San
Francisco by the Confederate cruiser
Shenandoah seemed to be
imminent, the Russian admiral there gave orders to his ships to defend
the city if necessary. There were no major Union warships on the scene,
so Russia was about to fight for the United States. In the event, the
Confederate raider did not attack. Soon after the war, Russia sold
Alaska to the United States, in part because they felt that an influx of
Americans searching for gold was inevitable, and in part to keep the
British from seizing control of this vast region. Lincoln’s Secretary of
the Navy Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “The Russian fleet has come
out of the Baltic and is now in New York, or a large number of the
vessels have arrived…. In sending them to this country at this time
there is something significant.” Welles was fully justified in his
famous concluding words, “God bless the Russians!” [
16]
This exceedingly cordial Russo-American friendship set the tone of
much nineteenth-century historiography; Thomas indicates that a darker
view of Russian motivation began to be heard around 1915 with the work
of Professor Frank A. Golder, who emphasized that the Russians were only
following their own national interests. [
17]
According to Thomas, it was “not until Professor Golder published the
result of his researches that the matter was finally cleared up and
those who were less gullible were found to be correct.” (Thomas 138)
Surely no one needs to be reminded that great nations defend their
national interests. Disinterested philanthropists are admittedly rare in
foreign ministries. However, when the interests converge, alliance
de jure or
de facto
may result, and these can have far-reaching significance. During the
American Civil War, the Russian attitude was the most powerful outside
factor deterring Anglo-French interference. The need of Russia to
prepare its own defenses during the Polish crisis of 1863 was perfectly
legitimate and a secret to no one. Nevertheless, Thomas feels compelled
to harp repeatedly on point that “the policy of Russia was dictated
solely by self-interest.” (Thomas 127)
For Crook, the visiting squadrons were not a fleet, but a “fleet,”
and a “not very seaworthy” one at that. In his view, the entire matter
can be written off as “popular hysteria” and “folklore”. (Crook 317) The
attempt to play down the Russian angle is evident. When Simon Cameron
is sent to St. Petersburg as US Ambassador, Woldman and others can see
nothing in this but an “exile in Siberia.” (Woldman 115) Another
favorite target is Cassius Clay, the very capable US Ambassador to
Russia for most of the Civil War (apart from the brief Simon Cameron
interlude). Crook retails Bayard Taylor’s crack to Horace Greeley that
Clay was “better suited to the meridian of Kentucky than of St.
Petersburg.” (Crook 44) In reality, St. Petersburg was on a par with
London as one of the two most sensitive and important diplomatic posts
the Union had. Cassius Clay, who called himself a “remote relative” of
Lincoln’s great American System mentor Henry Clay, was a distinguished
American diplomat who played a critical role in saving the Union.
Another important US diplomat of the time was the Bostonian John Lothrop
Motley, who became a friend of the future Prussian leader Otto von
Bismarck while studying at the University of Goettingen. Motley served
in US legation in St. Petersburg and from 1861-1867 as the US minister
to the Austrian Empire, and later wrote an important biography of
Oldenbarneveld, the father of the Dutch Republic, and other studies of
Dutch history.
Woldman, at the height of the Cold War, devoted an entire book to
denigrating the importance of the US-Russian entente cordiale and of the
Russian fleet in particular. In addition to Golder, he cites Professor
E. A. Adamov as a key precursor of his views. [
18]
For Woldman, the Russia of 1863 was already an international pariah,
“the most hated nation in Europe,” whose policy reflected “no concern or
friendship for the United States.” At the hands of Woldman, the
well-established Russo-American amity of the 1850s, 1860s, and beyond is
reduced to a “myth.” (Woldman, 156-7) This is not history, but
propaganda laced with bile.
Russian friendship provided an economic as well as a military brake
on the Anglo-French. Statistics provided by Crook show that in 1861-64,
the US and Russia together provided more half or more of all Britain’s
wheat imports (16.3 million cwt out of a total of 30.8 in 1863). In case
of war with either the US and Russia (and a fortiori in case of war
with both), the British would have faced astronomical bread prices,
insufficient supply, and an overall situation of famine which would have
been conducive to serious internal revolt against the privileged
classes — all in all a situation which aristocrats and oligarchs like
Palmerston, Russell and Gladstone had to think twice about courting.
King Wheat was therefore more powerful than King Cotton. [
19]
Confederate commerce raiders built and fitted out with the help of
the British had a devastating and long-lasting effect. As Chester Hearn
details, Confederate raiders fitted out in Europe, including the
Alabama, Shenandoah, and Florida, destroyed 110,000 tons of US merchant
shipping, and were factors in the transfer of 800,000 tons to foreign
registry, thus partially crippling the merchant marine of the North over
decades. [
20]
On July 11, 1863 Adams indicted London for “active malevolence” on the
question of the Laird rams, which were ironclad battleships capable of
breaking the blockade; as noted, on September 5 he told Foreign
Secretary John Russell, “It would be superfluous in me to point out to
your Lordship that this is war.” (Crook 324, 326) Forty years later,
Henry Adams remained “disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and
with growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of [US
Ambassador] Adams’s whole contention, that from the first he meant to
break up the Union. [
21]
Any international history must tackle the question of the
effectiveness of the Union blockade of Southern ports. Crook does a
workmanlike job of refuting the Owsley thesis that the blockade was not
effective. He reminds us that the statistics used by Owsley and Marcus
W. Price are far from conclusive. Crook suggests that the aggregate
tonnages of successful blockade runners need to be examined rather than
simply the number of ships getting through, since blockade runners were
designed to sacrifice cargo capacity for speed. He notes that many
successful runs took place during the first year of the war, “before the
cordon tightened.” (Crook 174) Many successful runs counted by Price
were actually coastwise traders bound for other parts of the
Confederacy. “More realistic,” Crook sums up, “would be an attempt to
compare wartime clearances with pre-war figures.” (Crook 174) Using
Price’s figures for South Carolina, Crook suggests that the blockade may
have cut the number of ships leaving the ports of that state by one
half during the first year of the war, and by almost two thirds over
1862-1865. Crook’s finding is that “modern naval opinion is inclined to
the broad view that the blockade achieved its major objectives by
scaring off a potentially massive trade with the south.” (Crook 174)
The British Working Class
A controversial issue linked to Britain’s failure to intervene on the
side of the Confederacy involves the attitude of the British working
classes, and the role of working class resistance in deterring the
Palmerston government from taking action against the US. The traditional
view, reflected during the war by contemporaries from President Lincoln
to Karl Marx, is that the textile workers of Lancashire, despite the
privations imposed on them by the cutoff of southern cotton deliveries,
nevertheless heroically supported the Union, especially once it had
become clear that this was the anti-slavery cause. This attitude by the
British workers was another factor in dissuading Palmerston from
pursuing armed intervention. [
22]
Owsley, in his
King Cotton Diplomacy,
mocks any notion that the British working class might have influenced
the London cabinet in any way, writing contemptuously that “the
population of Lancashire and of all industrial England was politically
apathetic, sodden, ignorant, and docile, with the exception of a few
intelligent and earnest leaders. They wanted bread, they wanted clothes,
they needed medicines to give their sick children and aged parents,
they wanted pretty clothing for their daughters and sisters who were
being forced into prostitution.” (Owsley 545-6) But on this point as
well, Owsley is blinded by class prejudice and is thus highly
vulnerable.
Philip Foner provides a useful summary of this issue in his 1981
British Labor and the American Civil War.
Foner starts from the acknowledged fact that the British aristocracy
was pro-Confederate. Free traders like Cobden and Bright were
momentarily antagonized by the Union’s highly protectionist Morrill
Tariff of February 1861 (passed the instant the southerners had left the
Congress); the Liberals in general were split. But this leaves out the
working classes altogether, who remained disenfranchised and alienated
from the party structures. He takes issue with the school of writers who
claim that British labor was actually sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Foner dates the attempt to revise the traditional view of British labor
as pro-Union especially from a 1957 article by Royden Harrison of the
University of Warwick, which argued that the older thesis was a
“legend”; Harrison based his view on an analysis of the labor press,
where he discovered that “working-class newspapers and journals were, on
the whole, hostile to the Federals” both before and after the
Emancipation Proclamation. [
23] (Foner 15) Harrison adduced evidence from such papers as
Reynolds’ News and the
Bee-Hive,
which were sympathetic to the Confederacy. Foner calls special
attention to a second article by Harrison, published four years later,
which seemed to repudiate much of the first article. Writing in 1961,
Harrison found that “from the end of 1862, there is overwhelming
evidence to support the view that the great majority of politically
conscious workmen were pro-Federal and firmly united to oppose war.” [
24]
Foner points out that subsequent historians have often cited Harrison’s
first article while ignoring his subsequent retractions and
qualifications. In Foner’s view, the “apex of revisionist
historiography” on this issue came in 1973 with the appearance of Mary
Ellison’s
Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War, with an epilogue by Peter d’A. Jones. [
25]
Ellison’s conclusion was that the workers of the Lancashire textile
mills were pro-Southern, suspicious of Lincoln, and adamant for British
action to break the Union blockade and save the Confederacy. Peter d’A.
Jones seconded her efforts, dismissing the older view as (yet another)
“myth.” Foner criticizes Ellison’s handling of the evidence in blunt
terms. “Ellison’s methodology in proving her thesis is simplicity
personified,” writes Foner. “It is to assert repeatedly that
pro-Northern meetings were contrived, while pro-Southern gatherings were
spontaneous.” (Foner 20) For Foner, pro-Confederate sentiment was
limited to certain limited types of labor functionaries and to newspaper
publishers, who were sometimes suspected of being on the Confederate
payroll. Foner shows how the pro-Union agitation, in which British
intelligence asset Karl Marx had to participate to keep any credibility
along the workers of England and the continent, eventually lead to the
extension of the British franchise through the Reform Bill of 1867.
More recent research would seem to decide this controversy in favor
of Foner and the traditional view. R. J. M. Blackett of the University
of Houston published an extensive study of how the British public viewed
the American conflict, with significant attention for the problem of
working class attitudes. Blackett’s study is largely based on the
British press, from the London
Times to the
Bee-Hive to the Confederate-controlled
Index.
The result is a detailed analysis which in some ways approximates the
methods of social history, albeit in regard to a distinctly political
topic. Blackett’s title,
Divided Hearts, relates to his finding
that British society as a whole split over the Civil War. “The Tories
were with the Confederacy, so too were the Whigs, but among Liberals
there were deep divisions, enough to undermine the unity and strength of
the party.” (Blackett 11) After some initial hesitation, Cobden and
Bright took up the cudgels for the Union. Free traders were alienated by
the Morrill tariff, while abolitionists were unhappy with Lincoln,
especially until the end of 1862. British Garrisonians split over
whether the Union was worth saving. There was a crisis in the British
anti-slavery movement over whether they had lost their old vim of the
West Indies abolition era. Literary men like Trollope endorsed the
government in Richmond, and Thomas Carlyle’s racism made him a CSA
sympathizer; others backed the Union. Chartists split, with Ernest Jones
supporting the Union, while most Chartist leaders favored the South.
The Church of England went with the South, while Dissenting ministers
favored the North. Quakers divided over whether slavery could be
extirpated by violence. The overall impression is that the American war
stimulated an active politicization which the privileged orders could
hardly have welcomed.
Confederate and Union agents were active in Britain, Blackett shows.
The Confederate factotum was James Spence, an indefatigable activist who
wrote articles, set up organizations, hired speakers, and bribed
journalists. Spence was the author of
The American Union,
a best-selling apology for the Confederacy. Spence’s prize recruit was
Joseph Barker, who enjoyed the confidence of working class audiences
because of his earlier agitation for working-class causes. Among the
elite, a leading pro-Confederate was A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, the
brother in law of Lord Robert Cecil of the celebrated and influential
political clan, which was itself anti-Union. An energetic Confederate
agent was Henry Hotze, who published the pro-Confederate weekly, the
Index.
Pro-Confederate organizations included the Society for Promoting the
Cessation of Hostilities in America, the Southern Independence
Association, the Liverpool Southern Club, the Manchester Southern Club,
and others.
The pro-Lincoln operative Thurlow Weed provided money and
encouragement for friends of the North during a visit early in the war.
On the Union side, there were working-class activists like George
Thompson. Black Americans like Frederick Douglass, William Andrew
Jackson (the former coachman of Jefferson Davis), J. Sella Martin, and
others (Blackett provides a detailed list) were highly effective as
lecturers on the Union side. They were joined by Henry Ward Beecher and
other touring lecturers. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams restricted his
own activity to the diplomatic sphere, but encouraged his consuls to
become very active on the political front. Among the pro-Union groups
were counted the Union and Emancipation Society, the British and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society, and more. Blackett describes the way the
contending forces attempted to operate through public meetings and
resolutions, using tactics that including packing the podium, fixing the
agenda, deceptively worded resolutions, parliamentary maneuvers, rump
sessions, goons, and intimidation. These meetings and the resolutions
they passed were regarded as being of great political importance.
Blackett notes that “Lincoln was so concerned that these resolutions
express the right sentiment that he crafted and had sent to Charles
Sumner for transmission to John Bright a set of resolutions that could
be adopted by public meetings in Britain.” (Blackett 209) Jefferson
Davis, by contrast, took no personal interest in such mass organizing.
Part of Blackett’s project is to evaluate the Ellison revisionist
thesis. He tests Ellison’s assertions of pro-Confederate sentiment in
representative towns like Ashton and Stalybridge, and finds that
“distress did not drive the towns’ textile workers to declare in favor
of an independent Confederacy.” (Blackett 175) Blackett’s survey of
meetings further concludes that “if public gatherings can be used to
measure levels of activity and support, then over the country as a whole
the Confederacy was at a distinct disadvantage.” (Blackett 198) Even in
the textile mill towns of Lancashire, Blackett finds substantial
support for the Union. He concludes that “if…the adoption of resolutions
are [sic] reasonably accurate indicators of levels of support, then it
appears that Ellison has exaggerated the degree to which meetings in
Lancashire voted in support of the Confederacy.” And if “in Lancashire
the opposing forces seem to be equally divided, the rest of the country
voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Union…All the indications are
that…even in Lancashire, where Spence and his co-workers had hoped to
exploit the crisis to rally support for the Confederacy, the friends of
the Union carried the day.” (Blackett 210-212)
Charles Francis Adams wrote to Seward on June 9, 1864 that the
British aristocracy was hostile to the Union because “of the fear of the
spread of democratic feeling at home in the event of our success.”
(Adams II 300) The Civil War awakened the British working class to the
degree that Bright in 1866 was able to convince Gladstone that at least
part of the urban working class had to be given the vote. Through
interaction with Disraeli, the Reform Bill of 1867 was passed; the
reactionary romantic Carlyle complained that this was “shooting
Niagara.” Foner shows that the measure was due in large part to the
agitations unleashed by American events. The formation of the federation
of Canada in 1867 was another postwar result.
Crook, to his credit, grapples with the issue of why the Union never
attempted after 1865 to use its preponderant power to settle scores with
the European powers who had proven hostile, especially Britain. He
writes that “one of the puzzles of Civil War history is to explain why
the immense anger generated against foreign foes during the war was not
translated into expansionist revenge after Appomattox.” (Crook 361)
Grant’s and Sherman’s armies were the most effective in the world, and
Gideon Welles’ navy was at least among the top three, and most likely
preponderant on the coasts of Canada, Mexico, and Cuba, the likely sites
of northern
revanche. Foner sees a brush with transatlantic war
in 1869-70, before the British finally agreed to pay the Union’s claims
for damages to compensate the depredations of the
Alabama and the
other CSA commerce raiders built by the British. But Lincoln had
promised an exhausted nation an end to warfare, and this proved to be
the last word.
The British government and aristocracy wanted to split the Union; as
long as the Confederates were winning successes on the battlefield, they
felt they could bide their time as the US further weakened, thus
facilitating intervention if required. The twin Confederate disasters of
Gettysburg and Vicksburg on July 3-4, 1863 came as a rapid and stunning
reverse, and the arrival of the Russian fleets that same summer on both
US coasts radically escalated the costs of Anglo-French military
meddling. Shortly thereafter, the Danish War of 1864 placed Bismarck’s
moves towards German unification at the center of the European and world
stage, making it even less likely that the British could tie their own
hands by a risky strike against the Union. At the same time, Bismarck’s
growing activism made Napoleon III – fearing the Prussian threat — less
and less likely to denude his eastern border of troops in order to
employ them for intervention in the New World. These factors, and not
the moderation or humanitarianism of Palmerston, Russell, or Gladstone,
prevented an Anglo-French attack on the United States and, quite
possibly, on Russia.
If the British had attacked the United States during the Civil War,
this move might well have ushered in a world war in which the United
States, Russia, Prussia and perhaps Italy would have been arrayed
against Great Britain, France, Spain, and perhaps the Portuguese and
Austrian Empires. There is reason to believe that the US-Russia-Prussia
coalition would have prevailed. This war might have destroyed the
British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial empires almost a
century early, and would have made the later creation of the triple
entente of Britain, France, and Russia by British King Edward VII
impossible. World War I would have taken place during the 1860s rather
than half a century later. Fascism and communism might not have occurred
in the form they did. As it was, Lincoln fell victim to an
assassination plot in which British intelligence, through Canada and
other channels, played an important role. Alexander II was killed in
1881 by Russian terrorists of the London-centered post-Bakunin anarchist
networks.
==
Bibliography
Adams, Ephraim Douglas.
Great Britain and the American Civil War. London: Longmans, Green, 1925. 2 vols.
Bensel, Richard Franklin.
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Blackburn, George M.
French Newspaper Opinion and the American Civil War. Westport CN: Greenwood, 1997.
Blackett, R. J. M.
Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Bourne, Kenneth.
Britain and the Balance of Power in North America 1815-1908. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Callahan, James Morton.
The Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1901; reprint New York: Greenwood, 1968.
Clay, Cassius.
The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Crook, D. P.
The North, the South, and the Powers 1861-1865. New York: John Wiley, 1974.
Foner, Philip S.
British Labor and the American Civil War. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981.
Hearn, Chester G. Gray
Raiders of the Sea How Eight Confederate Warships Destroyed the Union’s High Seas Commerce. Camden ME: International Marine Publishing, 1992.
Jones, Howard.
Union in Peril: The Crisis Over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Nevins, Allan.
The War for the Union. New York: Scribner, 1960. 2 vols.
Owsley, Frank Lawrence.
King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Second edition.
Thomas, Benjamin Platt.
Russo-American Relations 1815-1867. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930.
Woldman, Albert A.
Lincoln and the Russians. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1952.
[
1] Richard Franklin Bensel,
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859, 1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[
2] Herbert Butterfield,
The Whig Interpretation of History(London: G. Bell, 1968), pp. 3-4.
[
3] For Seward, see Jones, 88.
[
4]
Bourne glosses over the embarrassing moment when the British were
obliged to request permission to have their troops transit US territory.
(232n). Fletcher Pratt, in his perennially popular account evoked it as
follows: “With a final touch of ingenious irony the Secretary of State
offered England the use of Portland, Maine as an entrepôt for the
Canadian army; it was winter and so much more convenient than sending
them up the ice-bound St. Lawrence.” See
A Short History of the Civil War (New York 1935; reprint New York: Dover, 1997), 47.
[
5]
This can be contrasted with Jones’ view that “British neutrality
remained the chief guarantee against intervention, and yet this reality
continued to escape observers in the North….” (Jones, 99)
[
6] John Watson Foster,
A Century of American Diplomacy, 1776-1876 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), p. 372.
[
7] Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams
[
8] Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams
[
9]
Ibid.
[
10]
The Education of Henry Adams -by- Henry Adams;
10. Political Morality 1862.
[
11]
Ibid.
[
12] See “Mr. Slidell’s Conference with Napoleon III,”
New York Times,
November 22, 1862, with a despatch dated Paris, November 7 noting that
“Mr. SLIDELL, the agent of the rebellion at Paris, has at length and for
the first time, obtained an interview with the Emperor.”
[
13] US Department of State,
Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, Bayard Taylor to Secretary Seward, October 29,1862 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), Part II, p. 764.
[
14]
The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Cosmo, 2007) p. 163.
[
15]
See Holmes, Poems (Boston, 1880), p. 256. In August, 1866 a US Navy
monitor had visited St. Petersburg, occasioning Holmes’ verses: “
A nation’s love in tears and smiles/We bear across the sea, /O Neva of the banded isles, /We moor our hearts in thee!” See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 198-200.
[
16]
The Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), September 25, 1863, vol. I, p. 443.
[
17] See Frank A. Golder, “
The Russian Fleet and the American Civil War,” American Historical Review, XX.
[
18] See E. A. Adamov, “
Russia and the United States at the Time of the Civil War,”
Journal of Modern History (II, 1930), 586-602.
[
19]
The acerbic Owsley dismisses wheat as “the scullion in King Cotton’s
kitchen or at most a buck private in the rear ranks of this sovereign.”
In any case, he argues, when it came to wheat “Great Britain’s
deficiencies could be easily supplied in many other places, including
Poland, Russia, and Prussia” Owsley does not seem to grasp that Poland
and Russia were part of the same empire, or that Bismarck’s Prussia
might have driven a very hard bargain with its limited production.
(Owsley 545, 548).
[
20]
Bensel, who pays systematic attention to economic factors, agrees that
Confederate commerce raiders caused Union vessels to pay higher
insurance rates and change to foreign registry. The US merchant marine,
he notes, “never recovered afterward.” (418n) Bensel cites George W.
Dalzell,
The Flight from the Flag: The Continuing Effect of the Civil War upon the American Carrying Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940).
[
21] ”The Education of Henry Adams -by- Henry Adams;
11. The Battle Of The Rams (1863)
[
22]
A debate within this debate is whether the main problem of the
Lancashire textile industry in 1861-62 was the lack of raw fiber from
the American south, or rather a glut resulting from overproduction and
overstocking. The glut thesis was advanced by Eugene A. Brady in 1962,
and was supported by Foner and Crook.
[
23] See Royden Harrison, “British Labour and the Confederacy,”
International Review of Social History II (1957), 78-79.
[
24] See Royden Harrison, “British Labour and American Slavery,”
Science and Society XXV (1961), 315-316, cited by Foner (16).
[
25] Chicago, 1972; see Foner, 19.
