The Civil War in America absolutely dominated the British national conversation, especially in the early years of the war. Politicians followed the conflict closely, and there were even several debates in Parliament over British policy toward the conflict.
Frequently discussed was a line that a lot of Americans would recognize today, of "when should Britain get involved??" because of the destructiveness of the conflict. Prime Minister Palmerston & Foreign Secretary Russell spent a lot of time maneuvering and deflecting calls for Britain to get involved or pick a side.
A few other bits I found surprising when studying this topic—
1. Some British MPs were very pro-Confederate, and pushed for recognition of the Confederacy as a real country in Parliament.
2. British war correspondents were on the ground with both Union and Confederate armies, and sent regular dispatches to British newspapers.
3. British (and other European) officers regularly volunteered on *both* sides.
4. It was fashionable for a time in Britain to be pro-Confederate. Confederate propagandist networks *in* Britain brilliantly played down slavery and played up "self-determination".
5. Britain nearly declared war on the Union (Trent affair), to the point that Royal Navy was just waiting for the go-signal to commence hostilities & Britain sent thousands of additional troops to Canada.
6. There were *tons* of ironclads already in European fleets, there had just never been a fight between ironclads! Europeans watched the Monitor v. Merrimack battle & adapted their fleets & battle doctrines accordingly.
7. The British cabinet had a very serious, "can we even win a war against the U.S. anymore?" conversation at the end of the conflict, after witnessing the million-man army of the Union, the Richmond campaign, and growing effectiveness of the U.S. Navy.
8. Americans credit Seward as a brilliant Secretary of State during the conflict, but in Britain and France he was considered foolish, dangerous, and unpredictable—a lot of the tension between the Union and Europe can be laid at his feet.
9. Prussian military observers watched how the Union used railroads to move massive numbers of troops & supplies around, and adopted a lot of the Union tactics to absolutely crush the French just a few years later. (Franco-Prussian war of 1870.) Seriously - there were European observers *all over the place*.
Strongly recommend A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman. Brilliant book, and a page-turner.
If you feel inclined | knowledgeable could you expand on any English economic turmoil as a result of the American Civil War. All that American Cotton not feeding the British industry must have hurt a lot.
You could argue that the Confederacy actually started the Cotton Famine, on purpose.
Early on the Union blockade was essentially a paper blockade, and therefore of dubious international legality. There were laws regarding blockades, but those laws were fuzzy when it came to civil wars & a nation blockading their own ports. The Union would have been in violation of international law if the Confederacy were a recognized country, which would have given Britain and France a pretext to end the blockade by force. Early in the war, almost any European sea power (Britain especially) could have broken the Union Navy in a matter of hours.
The Confederate government imposed a cotton boycott to trigger economic turmoil in Britain especially (Britain was always their primary diplomatic target), which they felt would create enough political pressure in Parliament to spur recognition and a complete lifting of the blockade by the Royal Navy.
The economic problems in Britain were very real (triggering waves of emigration & from Lancashire & other towns that were cotton dependent) but the British largely worked around them. They retooled their factories to work with cotton from Egypt, India, and the East Indies. Workers found other jobs. Government relief. A lot of people suffered though.
The Confederates seriously underestimated the degree to which Britain and British politicians loathed slavery. Slavery stacked the deck against them diplomatically from the beginning. There were other geopolitical reasons (like Britain not wanting to risk Canada by sparking a conflict with the Union) but the British basically chose to suck it up and endure the cotton famine & economic depression because they wanted slavery gone, and America was one of the last major holdouts at that point.
Not doubting to be clear, but do you have recommended sources on the desire for the American abolition of slavery being a principal motivation for Britain's non-involvement in the American Civil War? Would be curious to read it.
I've generally had a pretty cynical view towards British abolitionism, which is that the elites only disliked slavery to the extent that they found capitalistic imperialism (i.e. systems that controlled the lower classes through persistent indebtedness and restrictions on ownership of real estate) to be more profitable and politically stable than the systems constructed on the institution of slavery.
And, coincidentally, that their empire, whose 19th century wealth was bootstrapped on the profits of slave-trading and the manufacture of raw materials extracted via slave labor, was uniquely-well-positioned to come out on top in a world order deprived of slave labor.
In other words, they opposed slavery on the basis of limiting economic volatility, and maintaining their geopolitical status, more so than any moral basis.
I'd love to read more sources that balance out my cynicism. :)
The book I recommended in original comment (A World on Fire) will give you a good inside-look at the British political thought & decision making during that time, including Parliamentary debates & communiques between Palmerston and his ministers. Their motivations are complex, like any other politician, but if they were purely economic & geopolitical opportunists I would have expected them to leap at dividing America and keeping the cotton flowing. They didn't.
> I've generally had a pretty cynical view towards British abolitionism
I am not an expert on abolitionist movements or their political effects, but there was a strong moral outrage to slavery in the 19th century and it developed very rapidly, starting in Britain. I recommend reading about the British public's reaction to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
> their empire, whose 19th century wealth was bootstrapped on the profits of of slave-trading and the manufacture of raw materials extracted via slave labor, was uniquely-well-positioned to come out on top in a world order deprived of slave labor
You're not wrong, and you can toss colonialism in there, too. The Japanese were made the same argument in the early 20th century as they were trying to expand and acquire colonies and kept getting their knuckles whacked by the Europeans, who were (mostly) trying to pump the brakes on colonialism by that point.
Don’t forget Russia sending ships to America in support of the union. The letters between tsar Alex and Lincoln are some of the loveliest pieces of writing and highest praises for America.
American russophobia is a sad state of affair considering history, they also gave Alaska for a negligible price.
> When the Civil War broke out, both England and France considered hostile intervention on behalf of the South and they tried to convince the Tsar to join them. Alexander II’s refusal was critically important because the British and French then decided to abort their plans.
It's crazy to think Russia determined modern america fate
America and Russia had a great relationship until the end of WWI. The Bolshevik’s set this in stone towards the end of the civil war when the entente (specifically Britain) opened dialogue towards a trade deal. Lenin used them as the great other, despite knowing they wanted normalized relations, and then the USSR taking Eastern Europe sealed the deal. Self determination was US policy at that time (and kind of ever since.)
> The Bolshevik’s set this in stone towards the end of the civil war...
I'm not sure about the events that you're referring to. The Treaty of Riga was in 1921, the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed in 1921 as well, the USSR was only declared in 1922, and the UK recognized it in 1924, the same year in which Lenin died. In fact, related to the Trade Agreement he complained:
> The British government has handed us its draft, we have given our counterdraft, but it is still obvious that the British government is dragging its feet over the agreement because the reactionary war party is still hard at work there
So, I don't think it's fair to assume that it was only the UK who wanted normalized relations, and that the difficulties came from only one side.
> taking Eastern Europe sealed the deal
Which again, seems out of place, since I presume you're referring to events that followed the start of WW2.
Talking about WW2, Europe wasn't friendly to the USSR leading up to war:
The initial anti-comintern treaty in 1935 was extended to the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and China (ruled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek).
In 1939, Stalin offered to Britain and France to deploy a million troops against Nazi Germany, but he had been rebuffed:
and of course, Churchill's Operation Unthinkable means that Britan had a deep, deep distrust of the USSR.
Despite all this, the USSR asked to join NATO in 1954, but again: it had been rebuffed, along its proposals of reunification and neutrality for Germany.
We often forget about all this, and only think of the reasons for why we distrusted the USSR, but we ignore all of the opportunities that we missed for a friendlier relationship.
No, we don't forget about revisionist history. We view it with an appropriately skeptical eye.
The Telegraph article has a quote from a historian:
> "There was no mention of this in any of the three contemporaneous diaries, two British and one French - including that of Drax," he said. "I don't myself believe the Russians were serious."
You also seem unfamiliar with the purpose of NATO. Wikipedia:
> NATO is a system of collective security: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. It was established during the Cold War in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
And NATO rightfully said no, because of what kind of country Russia was.
Also, politicians, including and especially Russian politicians at the time having unserious claims is not weak thesis. That was their frequent negotiating/pressuring/rhetorical tactic.
You also seem unfamiliar with the purpose of NATO. Wikipedia:
> NATO is a system of collective security: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. It was established during the Cold War in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.</i>
That is the stated purpose of NATO. The details of its real life military actions do not square with what you quoted at all - unless you can tell me which NATO member state Libya attacked.
The Libyan conflict was several countries working together and stuck a NATO label on it. Most of NATO was not actually involved. It also included some countries outside of NATO, like Sweden.
You can blame it on France misusing the NATO moniker rather than it just being a coalition.
There were valid reasons to not be friendly to USSR. Does this justify USSR entering friendship pact with Germany, thus enabling it to start the war?
I also want to know more conditions under which Stalin (who really handled foreign policy then?) offered to send troops to Europe, considering USSR was sort of fighting Japan at the same time. I'm sure UK and France could corroborate and provide more details, if this offer was real.
For the record, the position* of Sotskov (the only source mentioned in the article you linked) is also that occupying Baltic states and dividing Europe between USSR and Germany was not in fact a land grab by USSR but rather a necessary measure to be able to resist Germany.
Never mind that this protection buffer would not have been needed if Germany did not expand its invasion... which it did thanks to USSR siding with it. Dubious twist of logic.
It seems obvious that leaving Germany to take more of Europe in the beginning of WWII would have drastically reduced the ability of USSR to withstand a subsequent attack by Germany, so the argument seems to be "our geniuses could foresee this, so they invaded Europe in order to save the world from fascists". This argument is canceled out, however, by considering that at the end of the day not entering a pact with the UK does not imply USSR needed to side with Germany, the act that enabled Germany to start the war (which presumably USSR was aware of) in the first place.
I'm not sure to which degree this treatment of WWII is truth vs. revisionism.
> There were valid reasons to not be friendly to USSR. Does this justify USSR entering friendship pact with Germany, thus enabling it to start the war?
This is not about "friendship pact", this is about non-aggression pact.
Was Poland not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?
> Never mind that this protection buffer would not have been needed if Germany did not expand its invasion... which it did thanks to USSR siding with it. Dubious twist of logic.
Good questions/points, but we're judging decisions made at the time with the hindsight of decades after the war. I don't think it was clear to anyone who would've joined the war, which sides would've won, and the likelihood of such events.
Every country, depending on the circumstances, was probably trying to do what's best for them. Either avoiding war, or exploiting the messy situation by expanding their territory by annexing small part of neighboring states.
In fact, after seeing what happened to Poland, I think that every party in such agreements realized that they could provide, at best, temporary respite and delay confrontation (but that's not a weird isolated phenomenon: circumstances changes, and that provides ammunition to arguments that old agreements are not valid anymore).
It's not as much to enable other countries' war, but rather to delay one's own involvement in one war.
In fact, the USSR state budget was dedicated to defense for only about ~5%. A confrontation with Nazi Germany at the time would've been disastrous. But in the extra couple of years since, it increased to > 40%
> Was Poland not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?
Did they also devise secret protocols dividing the world into spheres of influence, which were subsequently expanded with clauses that had "friendship" in their titles?
> we're judging decisions made at the time with the hindsight of decades after the war
This is exactly what allows us to see objectively what was happening.
It's always easy to say "we didn't mean it, we were playing 3D chess" (like Trump apologists) right afterwards.
However, we can judge based on the actions, which were:
1) sign a non-agression pact with Nazi Germany
2) almost immediately after, jointly with Nazi Germany invade and divide a country
3) extend the pact with a further "friendship" treaty, dividing Europe*
4) further discuss joining Axis**
Where do you think things were really headed?
> I don't think it was clear to anyone who would've joined the war, which sides would've won, and the likelihood of such events.
> Every country, depending on the circumstances, was probably trying to do what's best for them
You're quick to rob all countries and their leaders of moral baselines. There was documented massive surprise (including Western communists) and outrage worldwide when USSR signed the pact. I think the pact at the time was somewhat of a blow to general morale, a sign that another major player takes the world as a zero-sum dog eat dog arena that you allude to.
It seems feasible Stalin/Molotov would've joined Axis if it's "better" for USSR. And furthermore what was going on in USSR under Stalin (ethical cleanses, mass murder) is not too different from what Hitler did, USSR and Nazi Germany are fairly similar in many regards.
But I don't think this is somehow just an instance of how every normal country disregards ethics in the name of own profit. For one, USSR was geopolitically differently situated compared to small countries within immediate vicinity of Germany. It had immense territory. It was actively forging agreements and trade with Germany at the time.
I'm happy USSR ultimately didn't get to win the initial war and divide the world alongside Axis.
> It's not as much to enable other countries' war, but rather to delay one's own involvement in one war.
USSR invaded Poland as soon as Germany did. You're right, this is not enabling other countries' war. This is actually joining the war, and not on the side of the good guys.
Russia and the US became very friendly during WW2 as well. Stalin and Roosevelt had a solid relationship while Stalin and Churchill did not. Churchill did not like Stalin for various reasons. But Roosevelt was the glue. Unfortunately, US elections at the time stipulated that the Vice President was chosen by the Democrat electorate and there was a coup to replace Roosevelts first pick (a guy friendly to the ussr) with a nobody from Missouri named Truman. Stalin never respected Truman and US relationships with the USSR deteriorated quickly after FDRS passing. Churchill and England became the dominant western voice in post ww2 trade and the iron curtain was eventually dropped.
Truman had so many financial struggles that the pension for presidents was created for him to live a dignified life after leaving office.
Truman's presidency doesn't seem so terrible from today's viewpoint, look at the work he did to help rebuild western europe after the war. Making note that he had not enriched himself while president does not serve to make you or your arguments better appreciated.
> In 1939, Stalin offered to Britain and France to deploy a million troops against Nazi Germany, but he had been rebuffed
At which point he instead allied with Nazi Germany, aided in the invasion of Poland, personally ordered the mass execution of Polish POW's, and invaded Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
> Despite all this, the USSR asked to join NATO in 1954, but again: it had been rebuffed
By 1954, the USSR had already set up undemocratic communist puppet states in Eastern Europe, been caught engaging in espionage against the United States, attempted to blockade West Berlin in order to pressure the Western Allies into abandoning it to Soviet control, and committed genocide and war crimes on possibly the greatest scale seen in history.
It would be incredibly stupid to admit Russia of 1954 into NATO. The people taking power after Stalin were somewhat better, but still only slightly less murderous.
This is right after Russia organized processes and executions of class enemies. It demanded such processes of vasal states too. The monster processes were pretty large crime.
And this is btw, only like 14 years before Russia invaded other countries and started to occupie them in 1968.
> Talking about WW2, Europe wasn't friendly to the USSR leading up to war: The initial anti-comintern treaty in 1935 was extended to the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and China (ruled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek).
Such a shocking action, after only little thing like The Great Purge and active hostile rhetorics from Russia ... and Holodomor.
This is ridiculous point of view that casts Russia as victim when other countries react to its aggression - whether aggression outside or inside. Russia 1935 and Germany 1936 were not that dissimilar, you know. Except Russia more bloody at that point.
The Bolsheviks, who the Entente ( UK, France, US, Japan) deployed troops against and sponsored their enemies? They had valid reasons to at the very least skeptical.
Right now, Russophobia is kind of healthy thinking. Their current mix of tsarism and return to kinda communist thinking except the communist ideology is sucky and dangerous.
Russia is an authoritarian state lead by one man and his inner circle. This man has very high public support. In particular, Russian population supports imperial ideology.
That is no contradiction. Authoritarians can have public support while at the same time severely oppressing opposition or anyone who dares to voice something else.
Also, opposition to Putin does not imply opposition to annexation of Ukrainian lands or turning Ukrainians into Russians by force. Opposition to Putin does not imply pro-democracy reform either.
> It is rational to hate Russians in general
Hate is a feeling. But accusations of Russophobia are all about support for sanctions or Ukraine in war. And are deployed whenever someone points out Russia as is now is threat to not just Ukraine, but to all countries in former eastern block.
All those are rational. So, if that matter average Russians look really down on Ukrainians too, are happy to use slurs against them and act offended it other formerly occupied countries are not "thankful".
----------
If anything, Russia was enabled rather then opposed for years. It was treated as something special, more worthy then other countries around it.
Russia is not "opposing" it is expanding and starting major wars. It is actively working to destroy other countries.
Russia is not opposing America as much as they are opposing right to existence as democracies to countries around them. It is way more countries around Russia calling for help to Ukraine then anyone else.
And yes, being at risk of being invaded by someone makes people hate that one. It makes them think again about what that country done to them before.
> Russia is not "opposing" it is expanding and starting major wars. It is actively working to destroy other countries.
Brother. You are all over the place.
I was replying to this part:
> Russia is an authoritarian state lead by one man and his inner circle. This man has very high public support. In particular, Russian population supports imperial ideology.
To which I reply: Yes, it’s rational to “hate” someone if they oppose you. And “someone” here means normal Russians.
I was not talking about the Russian government in this context.
Putin ordered Russian forces to be on the highest level of nuclear readiness. We have programs on Russian state TV where people talk about using nuclear weapons to drown the UK and devastate the European coast with a nuclear tsunami. This is a scary time we live in.
The conversation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine may now be centered on NATO, but it began with statements of routine training exercises at the border and escalated to the de-Nazification of Ukraine. Russia has not done well to reach the hearts of its neighbors.
That we have to reach past the Cold War into the American Civil War to discuss amicable relations does not bode well.
When Russia bombed Syrian hospitals ... invaded Chehenia and other countries ... had assasins murder people living EU, likely caused explosion in Czechs (2014), likely shut down plane, supported dictators around the world ...
Common, Ukrainian invasion did not happened out of blue. And I don't even mention Russia actively trying to influence politics of ther countries to the worst.
A very general western hatred (not merely US!) has been brewing over Russian social media for awhile now, and the conversation of whether to deny Russians their prerogative to hate the west is not really there. There isn't even much conversation on western media as to what the state of Russian social media is even like.
There's a very brave, honorable politician, who unfortunately was lost in the annals of history, as a man directly responsible for Russian support during the civil war.
Ali's grandfather specifically named his son after Cassius to honor Cassius, the KY politician. The son proceeded to do the same, with who would eventually be a famous boxer, M. Ali.
The boxer changed his name to Ali, both due to his conversion to islam , and because he was angry to take the name of a plantation owner.
The latter is true - Cassius was a plantation owner. However, early on he defender ardently emancipation. He in fact suffered multiple murder attempts from actual slavery advocates... who surrounded him in KY
> 5. Britain nearly declared war on the Union (Trent affair), to the point that Royal Navy was just waiting for the go-signal to commence hostilities & Britain sent thousands of additional troops to Canada.
I wonder how much the Union's need to hedge against British intervention—so, to divert resources away from the war against the South, affecting troop placement, artillery availability, fortification building/maintenance/garrisoning, and fleet positioning—prolonged the war.
That's a good question, and I don't know the answer.
However, whatever that need was (to hedge against the British) should have been completely necessary, and really goes to show you just how valuable a strong diplomatic corps can be to a country.
The British wanted to be pro-Union. They wanted slavery gone. They didn't want to have to station huge numbers of troops in Canada, or large numbers of ships in the Atlantic.
Silly, unforced errors by Seward & Charles Francis Adams (the American ambassador) antagonized Britain throughout the war & made them unsure of their North American holdings. Ridiculous. Union diplomats should have been talking peace & partnership with Britain from day 1 of the conflict.
> The British wanted to be pro-Union. They wanted slavery gone.
tbf, we had moral reasons for wanting slavery gone but practical reasons for thinking we were better off with a divided America and an independent Confederacy as a useful source of cheap cotton. Some would say our political positions haven't got more realistic since. :)
It should be understood that the british empire was at the peak of economic dependence on the raw material coming from the "new world" at the onset of the civil war; in particular, cotton exports for consumption by british textile mills [1].
> By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.
One reason that there was support for the confederacy was the fear that the outcome of the war would lead to the end of access to abundant and cheap cotton (due to export duties, end of slavery, etc.).
One of the outcomes of the US Civil War was that the British Empire realized a need to "diversify" their sources, resulting in increasingly imperialistic behavior in India and Egypt, among others.
And the reason why Britain wanted those raw resources was because it was the epicenter of the industrial revolution. Manchester was nicknamed "Cottonopolis"... full of cotton mills driven by water and then steam, and connected by the first inter-city railway. Cotton picked by slaves in the U.S. south was the main source of raw materials for these factories.
> 6. There were tons of ironclads already in European fleets, there had just never been a fight between ironclads! Europeans watched the Monitor v. Merrimack battle & adapted their fleets & battle doctrines accordingly.
These were very different sorts of ironclads. The British and French ironclads mostly resembled traditional ships, at least at first glance. They had steam engines but also retained their masts, and had broadside guns rather than turrets (except for the ill-fated HMS Captain..)
The American ironclads were more bizarre, superficially resembling submarines, and weren't particularly seaworthy (unlike the European ironclads.) The USS Monitor in particular was a novel design; mastless and steam powered with an armored turret, a shallow draft and low freeboard (similar to earlier ironclad floating batteries, but a lot lower). European navies subsequently started building their own 'monitors'.
The monitor class of ships were eventually pushed to the side by pre-dreadnought battleships that derived more from the traditional and seaworthy European ironclads than from monitors, with some lessons learned from monitors. See the HMS Devastation particularly; mastless and steam powered with armored turrets, but with a hull that was actually seaworthy unlike monitors.
The difference in seaworthiness is abundantly clear. These American ironclads were more akin to gunboats, and mostly used on rivers (fighting for control of the Mississippi was a huge deal in the war). They were built comparatively cheaply, for a specific, immediate conflict. They often only had steam engines and lacked the endurance for transoceanic travel.
The British ironclads were built to project imperial power across the globe. The continued use of sail was important to extend endurance to reach far away places.
Because Vietnam showed that conscripting armies of that size was not an efficient way to fight a modern war. You want people, volunteers, who want to be in the army. Also technology. We’re close to that point in, like in Roman history, where the income of entire villages was only enough to field one Calvary soldier (knight.)
Not that we’re going towards feudalism but history has a cycle of armies going from a small force with a huge technology edge to a giant force with mundane tech. Even during the Roman Republic only the richest men could afford to fight.
During the early republic, only the richest could equipment themselves but my understanding is that the Marian reforms changed this by professionalizing the army and having the general of a legion supply the soldiers with their weapons.
Also, the thing about a village supporting one cavalry soldier seems off. The roman army focused on infantry with cavalry being supplied by allied forces.
>Also, the thing about a village supporting one cavalry soldier seems off. The roman army focused on infantry with cavalry being supplied by allied forces.
Also possible that they're thinking of the Roman Kingdom and the Equites?
Roman cavalry is often forgotten, but a considerable portion of social class all the way back to Roman Republic and I think pre-republic kingdom was existence of a class wealthy enough to fight as cavalry.
They were of course small compared to infantry legions, and as the Republic and later Empire expanded they frequently hired auxiliaries, especially from a more cavalry focused groups.
Sure, equites were an established social class but didn't that devolve to just a class without the training on horseback by the late republic and certainly by imperial rome. It seems like it made more sense for the imperial army to have auxilia handle cavalry, missile troops, and other functions.
It was not so easy back then as well. They had draft riots in New York City, which had to be suppressed by regular Union regiments. There were also deserters and bounty jumpers.
The South had trouble to support their armies. Lee basically planned the Gettysburg campaign to live of the land. Soldiers were happy because they had enough to eat. A lot of soldiers lacked shoes.
> 6. There were tons of ironclads already in European fleets, there had just never been a fight between ironclads! Europeans watched the Monitor v. Merrimack battle & adapted their fleets & battle doctrines accordingly.
And the fight they got was comically irrelevant to the ironclads they had.
I'm sure they had lots of great arguments trying to pull anything applicable out of it and apply the lessons to their own fleets.
A point I found interesting along the lines of perceived British ambivalence, my understanding is that the Emancipation Proclamation was a brilliant piece of diplomacy. It was anti-slavery enough to make it possible to convince Britain that the war was all about slavery and so they shouldn't intervene because of how much they were against slavery. Yet also weak enough against slavery - only freeing slaves in the territory they hadn't conquered yet - to make it possible to convince the Union officers and politicians that it was a tactical economic ploy against the Confederacy and not a changing of the primary war aims. They were rather ambivalent about slavery, and Lincoln himself feared that "half the officers would fling down their arms and three more states would rise" if he made full emancipation a primary war aim.
Karl Marx, who was residing in Britain at the time, also wrote much on the topic. He had nothing but withering criticism of mainstream/elite British attitudes for the war, namely the downplaying the importance of slavery in the formation of the Confederacy.
He, unlike his more socially acceptable contemporaries, also deeply admired Lincoln. Many pieces published in prominent periodicals, like The Economist, painted him as a wily and double-dealing politician. One could understand that interpretation given the compromises he was desperately trying to make with Southern states to prevent the outbreak of war, but it gave prominent Brits an excuses to dismiss the sincerity of his anti-slavery rhetoric after the war broke out. (Lincoln himself was also being deeply transformed by the savagery of war. He would come to believe the carnage was divine punishment for the sin of slavery.) Marx would have none of it. He called out the hypocrisy of those who in the years prior condemned American slavery but would not support the cause of Lincoln and the Union because it didn't have an unblemished history of being totally and consistently anti-slavery.
The claim regarding the effectiveness of "Confederate propagandist networks" is overstated, though. People across Britain were divided on the issue, even across political camps and ethnic groups (e.g. Irish and English). To be clear, by "divided", I don't mean that people necessarily individually ambivalent. There were some staunch supporters on both sides.
There were also multiple reasons for preferring one side over another, too. Slavery was just one issue. Another was potential weakening the Monroe Doctrine. (During the Civil War, France under Napoleon III invaded and conquered Mexico, and Spain re-colonized what would become the Dominican Republic.) Others were access to raw materials, support for wars of national unity (European nationalists admired Lincoln, as would Hitler decades later), etc.
> the compromises he was desperately trying to make with Southern states to prevent the outbreak of war
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. AFAIK between his inauguration and the outbreak of war Lincoln had basically no interaction with any of the Southern states.
One of my ancestors was a British aristocrat and tory MP who was so vocal in his opposition to appeasing the American colonists in any way at all that even King George raised an eyebrow.
His total conviction led him to purchase a commission as major of Grenadiers in the 20th Foot, and set off for The Colonies, where he was promptly shot at The Battle of Saratoga and then taken prisoner.
Because he was a wounded officer and a minor noble, his wife was permitted to come and pick him up.
Not mentioned: Towards the end of the Civil War, British officers became very concerned that the large and now experienced army might turn its attention North, as they had some 50 years prior. The Civil War was thus a direct catalyst for Canadian confederation.
In fact, there were some men (Irish nationalists) who gained military experience during the Civil War that were involved in armed raids into Canada from 1865-1871. Encyclopedia article: https://www.britannica.com/event/Fenian-raids
A direct American invasion was not a catalyst for confederation. Expansion westward was seen as vital, and America’s rapid growth made the endeavour even more vital, lest American immigrants seize Canadian land.
No one feared the American army would turn north. They could have crushed Canada, but peace between Canada and the US was seen as assured as long as the UK wanted it.
Perhaps not a direct catalyst as it was the Fenian Raids, in particular the battle of Ridgeway, that led to Canadian Confederation. The Fenians were largely Union Army veterans of the Civil War. Lincoln's decision to allow the formation of ethnic Irish regiments to aid recruitment allowed for the military organization and training of the Fenian Brotherhood.
The US took the oregon territories from the british empire in the 1840s. Even before the civil war, the british empire was in no position to challenge the US in north america. America was focused on western expansion to the pacific before and after the civil war, not to worthless canadian tundra and the frigid arctic.
* Miller and Chesney’s lectures describe the course of the war up to that point, with Chesney focussing first on fighting in Virginia and then on operations in the west and south, such as Sherman’s March to the Sea
* In his lectures, Chesney laments that Sherman, in his March to the Sea near the end of the war, ‘has given no voucher or note anywhere for the supplies he has seized [from civilians]’ and expresses concern about whether the North and South could be reconciled, given the brutality of the conflict
* The combat between the Monitor and the Merrimac, notable for being the first clash between ironclad ships, is referenced but purposely not discussed because ‘the result has not influenced the military progress of the war’
* In some cases, the conduct of the Civil War was used by British officers to justify their own opinions of how the UK should prepare its military for future wars
* The RUSI lectures demonstrate the challenges of following a war as it is occurring from a distance, the disappointment with the Union’s military performance early in the war and the manner in which foreign conflicts were mobilised to justify the policies of people like the Duke of Cambridge
Not enough, actually. The American Civil War was the first big war where railroads and telegraph lines allowed coordinated operations over a large area, and machine guns and repeating rifles allowed killing large numbers of advancing troops. Grant got this; he wrote "War is Progressive", meaning that there was progress through technology. This was a radical idea in military thinking at the time. Most European military leaders didn't get that until WWI. They were still trying mass charges. Which, against machine guns, absolutely does not work.
It also featured a little bit of trench warfare. I imagine the European observers who saw that were like "Huh, definitely not important, let's not come up with strategies to counter this sort of thing" and then forgot about it for the next 50 years or so.
I mean, it had been 50 years, it wasn't like there had been another war fought 10 years prior that also devolved into trench warfare that they completely failed to learn anything from.
In fairness, I think people thought the Eastern and Southern armies fought in a "civilized" manner.
It's just that the Western armies and Western generals came in, and they fought in a significantly different fashion. You can call the West of the Union more "modern". Or "pragmatic". Or maybe "barbaric" is the right word.
No one wanted to be seen as being "Barbaric". Except Western armies, who really didn't care what people thought about them. (At least, not as much as they cared about their orders.)
I just can't see how that can be true - 'we're going to murder you all, but we're going to do it with good manners because otherwise people will think we're bad'??
It seems way more likely to be 'cargo cult' type learning where something worked for centuries and so got formalised and taught rigidly?
Any good sources on this, it must have been covered on AskHistorians!?
The missing ingredient that prevented the ACW from turning into static trench warfare similar to the later Western Front was probably barbed wire, which was only patented in 1867.
Presumably also the rate of fire of WW1 weapons. While the ACW had Gatling guns and canons, the rate of fire during WW1 far exceeded anything seen before. The only protection was a trench
> The American Civil War was the first big war where railroads and telegraph lines allowed coordinated operations over a large area, and machine guns and repeating rifles allowed killing large numbers of advancing troops.
Hi, the Crimean War would like to remind you that it existed.
I think the real answer and probably why the article is a bit light on actual anecdotes, is that Britain or its military at the time probably didn't think much of it all, especially from a military point of view. Plus they were super busy with imperial concerns, especially in the British Raj post-1857 rebellion.
The U.S., although gaining steam economically (pun intended), was still a backwater, rural, nation isolated by a whole lot of ocean (edit: I meant all this from a military point of view). I am sure the abolitionists in power in Parliament were interested in the outcome of the war from that point of view, but it was really of very little consequence to UK or Europe as a whole.
Would have taken quite a while to be noticed, given the speed of communication and lack of American military presence overseas. Compared to the British Empire.
The US was economically beginning to be involved on the world level, but wasn't really a "power worth considering" until after WWI, partially just because of distance.
yeah, this was really my point.
A (maybe terrible) modern analogy is how concerned would we be with a civil war in say, South America, where a significant chunk of our lithium comes from? We would probably be concerned, but our economic and military clout means that we would always be the customer for whoever won that civil war.
Well yeah you are correct, and I wrote clumsily. That was meant to read 'although the U.S. was gaining steam economically, it was not of much consequence militarily'
Quite a few European powers embedded observers with both sides of the conflict. The application of improved small arms and artillery was something that military minds were very interested in, to see how it played out in a large scale conflict.
Not true. By 1860, the US was of comparable size to the UK and France, and had a similar GDP per capita to the UK. De Tocqueville‘s “Democracy in America” had introduced Europe to America’s prosperity in the 1830s and 1840s, so it wasn’t unknown.
The war might not have been militarily relevant to Europeans, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t paying attention. The US was as big and as rich as the European powers at that point. It’s like today: If France broke out in a civil war it would be all over the news 24/7.
> The U.S., although gaining steam economically (pun intended), was still a backwater, rural, nation isolated by a whole lot of ocean
A "backwater"? That forced the 49th parallel on the british in the 1810s? That took oregon territories from the british in the 1840s? The "backwater" that "took" louisiana territories from france and alaska from the russians? The "backwater" that took texas,california,et al from mexico? The "backwater" that took control over the yangtze river from china in 1854?
Militarily Europe walked away with simple caricatures of the war, but the lionization of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was (rightly) recognized as a new kind of general - one that would be far more familiar in World War I than in the Napoleonic War. This led to a lot of fame.
Generally, the US revolutionary war was viewed very positively in parts of Europe. That upstart new world was finally in its place and would now tear itself to pieces without European governance. Britain considered entering the war early on(on the southern side!) and benefited from the economic collapse of the Americas. The British commercial fleets went from near-parity with the US merchant marine to unquestioned ruler of the commercial seas by the devastation of the blockades and the lack of insurance underwriting for north or south flagged vehicles.
But a lot of things were missed millitary that they would learn in 1914. The role of rail lines and junctions, and the early signs of trench warfare and total war were the only thing that could break near-industrial societies. The potential of armored battleships and submarines. (Though to be fair, imagine how much history would have changed if the Turtle had detonated its torpedo in the Revolutionary War!) These lessons would be learned a hard way sixty years later.
> What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?
Go to the source.
Here is a book written by Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, a British officer who traveled with the Confederate army in 1863. He is well known due to appearing in the movie Gettysburg based on The Killer Angels book. Three Months in the Southern States: April, June, 1863.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/fremantle/fremantle.html
I think the world would collectively shit its pants. The world's largest economy and military suddenly splintering while in control of several thousand nuclear weapons? It would seem like Armageddon.
The us is far from the USSR - yet the USSR had so many nukes, the world treated them with kid gloves, for good or bad. Maybe after we in the US finish killing each other over imaginary grievances (is Tom Hanks really a pedophile who kills kids for their hormones, I can't believe I live in a country where anyone considers such idiocy) what will be left of the cities and rural areas.
America's allies would probably not support a side unless there was going to be a clear winner OR it was in that nation's interest to do so.
America's enemies maybe would pick a side in an attempt to destabilize the country more... But I think a splintered America would be extremely reluctant to accept help from Russia/China.
They thought the Confederate and US commanders lacked training, while Stanning for Lee. And generally thought that there was not much to learn that was applicable to European wars.
This resulted in “stiffness in the lines and clumsiness in management and direction of troops” as large divisions of the army fully relied on their higher officers to direct all movement. “The loss of an upper-level commander,” Scheibert states, “Would cripple advance and retard again in battle.”
Interesting, this kind of criticism is leveled at the Russian army today.
Why do you call it a civil war? In a civil war two parties fight for dominance over the country - England’s and Russian’s civil wars, more than two hundred years apart, are great example. In that war, South did not want to dominate North but secede. It seems calling the conflict “a
Civil war” just follows Northern narrative.
I upvoted because it's an interesting point: but I think your definition of 'civil war' is just wrong. It's people in a single nation/people group fighting to resolve differences. Limiting it to exclude things like secession is an unnatural split that doesn't have any obvious benefits. Like, some people end up fighting because 'their' side is being attacked, they don't wish for dominance but only survival ... you'd be deciding for each individual person if it was a civil war or not.
Luckily the US Navy wasn't doing so hot, and so the only real places to get worried were Canada and Mexico, as neither army had worked out how to walk on water.
without facts, I would expect some central Asian horse army to have 200,000 humans, far earlier than that.. Persian and Egyptian armies were large at different times too.. sounds uninformed..
As far as I know Qing military organization was weird for the time. There was no single central Chinese Army as such. There were some forces which officially reported to the Imperial government (the Green Standard and the Eight Banners), but these were of limited use. The armies that put down the Taiping Rebellion were raised by local governors, and were loyal to them not to the Emperor.
If we and the French could just help the Confederates a bit more America might be ripe for reconquest! The French are already in Mexico and we have ships in Canada! The mad king was a fool for letting those backwards colonists break away in the first place.
Those darn Russian fleets showing up in 1863 in NY and SF with sealed orders to attack anyone who attacked the US! How dare they, those Russians will pay!
Get those Freemasonic/B'nai B'rith networks pumping out more confederate spies!
Cotton cotton cotton
That Lord Palmerston and his Zoo!
Whew, they didnt find our connections to John Wilkes Booth.
The Civil War in America absolutely dominated the British national conversation, especially in the early years of the war. Politicians followed the conflict closely, and there were even several debates in Parliament over British policy toward the conflict.
Frequently discussed was a line that a lot of Americans would recognize today, of "when should Britain get involved??" because of the destructiveness of the conflict. Prime Minister Palmerston & Foreign Secretary Russell spent a lot of time maneuvering and deflecting calls for Britain to get involved or pick a side.
A few other bits I found surprising when studying this topic—
Strongly recommend A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman. Brilliant book, and a page-turner.
A lot more concrete information in this comment than in the article itself. Thank you.
If you feel inclined | knowledgeable could you expand on any English economic turmoil as a result of the American Civil War. All that American Cotton not feeding the British industry must have hurt a lot.
You could argue that the Confederacy actually started the Cotton Famine, on purpose.
Early on the Union blockade was essentially a paper blockade, and therefore of dubious international legality. There were laws regarding blockades, but those laws were fuzzy when it came to civil wars & a nation blockading their own ports. The Union would have been in violation of international law if the Confederacy were a recognized country, which would have given Britain and France a pretext to end the blockade by force. Early in the war, almost any European sea power (Britain especially) could have broken the Union Navy in a matter of hours.
The Confederate government imposed a cotton boycott to trigger economic turmoil in Britain especially (Britain was always their primary diplomatic target), which they felt would create enough political pressure in Parliament to spur recognition and a complete lifting of the blockade by the Royal Navy.
The economic problems in Britain were very real (triggering waves of emigration & from Lancashire & other towns that were cotton dependent) but the British largely worked around them. They retooled their factories to work with cotton from Egypt, India, and the East Indies. Workers found other jobs. Government relief. A lot of people suffered though.
The Confederates seriously underestimated the degree to which Britain and British politicians loathed slavery. Slavery stacked the deck against them diplomatically from the beginning. There were other geopolitical reasons (like Britain not wanting to risk Canada by sparking a conflict with the Union) but the British basically chose to suck it up and endure the cotton famine & economic depression because they wanted slavery gone, and America was one of the last major holdouts at that point.
Not doubting to be clear, but do you have recommended sources on the desire for the American abolition of slavery being a principal motivation for Britain's non-involvement in the American Civil War? Would be curious to read it.
I've generally had a pretty cynical view towards British abolitionism, which is that the elites only disliked slavery to the extent that they found capitalistic imperialism (i.e. systems that controlled the lower classes through persistent indebtedness and restrictions on ownership of real estate) to be more profitable and politically stable than the systems constructed on the institution of slavery.
And, coincidentally, that their empire, whose 19th century wealth was bootstrapped on the profits of slave-trading and the manufacture of raw materials extracted via slave labor, was uniquely-well-positioned to come out on top in a world order deprived of slave labor.
In other words, they opposed slavery on the basis of limiting economic volatility, and maintaining their geopolitical status, more so than any moral basis.
I'd love to read more sources that balance out my cynicism. :)
The book I recommended in original comment (A World on Fire) will give you a good inside-look at the British political thought & decision making during that time, including Parliamentary debates & communiques between Palmerston and his ministers. Their motivations are complex, like any other politician, but if they were purely economic & geopolitical opportunists I would have expected them to leap at dividing America and keeping the cotton flowing. They didn't.
> I've generally had a pretty cynical view towards British abolitionism
I am not an expert on abolitionist movements or their political effects, but there was a strong moral outrage to slavery in the 19th century and it developed very rapidly, starting in Britain. I recommend reading about the British public's reaction to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
> their empire, whose 19th century wealth was bootstrapped on the profits of of slave-trading and the manufacture of raw materials extracted via slave labor, was uniquely-well-positioned to come out on top in a world order deprived of slave labor
You're not wrong, and you can toss colonialism in there, too. The Japanese were made the same argument in the early 20th century as they were trying to expand and acquire colonies and kept getting their knuckles whacked by the Europeans, who were (mostly) trying to pump the brakes on colonialism by that point.
How dependent was British industry on American Cotton? Didn't British possessions include many cotton growing regions?
Don’t forget Russia sending ships to America in support of the union. The letters between tsar Alex and Lincoln are some of the loveliest pieces of writing and highest praises for America.
http://beam-inc.org/abraham-lincoln-and-tsar-alexander-ii-pa...
American russophobia is a sad state of affair considering history, they also gave Alaska for a negligible price. > When the Civil War broke out, both England and France considered hostile intervention on behalf of the South and they tried to convince the Tsar to join them. Alexander II’s refusal was critically important because the British and French then decided to abort their plans. It's crazy to think Russia determined modern america fate
You mean the country committing war crimes daily and threatening the world with nukes?
Yes, the russophobia of that country is a tragedy.
America and Russia had a great relationship until the end of WWI. The Bolshevik’s set this in stone towards the end of the civil war when the entente (specifically Britain) opened dialogue towards a trade deal. Lenin used them as the great other, despite knowing they wanted normalized relations, and then the USSR taking Eastern Europe sealed the deal. Self determination was US policy at that time (and kind of ever since.)
> The Bolshevik’s set this in stone towards the end of the civil war...
I'm not sure about the events that you're referring to. The Treaty of Riga was in 1921, the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed in 1921 as well, the USSR was only declared in 1922, and the UK recognized it in 1924, the same year in which Lenin died. In fact, related to the Trade Agreement he complained:
> The British government has handed us its draft, we have given our counterdraft, but it is still obvious that the British government is dragging its feet over the agreement because the reactionary war party is still hard at work there
So, I don't think it's fair to assume that it was only the UK who wanted normalized relations, and that the difficulties came from only one side.
> taking Eastern Europe sealed the deal
Which again, seems out of place, since I presume you're referring to events that followed the start of WW2.
Talking about WW2, Europe wasn't friendly to the USSR leading up to war:
The initial anti-comintern treaty in 1935 was extended to the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and China (ruled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek).
In 1939, Stalin offered to Britain and France to deploy a million troops against Nazi Germany, but he had been rebuffed:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/322...
and of course, Churchill's Operation Unthinkable means that Britan had a deep, deep distrust of the USSR.
Despite all this, the USSR asked to join NATO in 1954, but again: it had been rebuffed, along its proposals of reunification and neutrality for Germany.
We often forget about all this, and only think of the reasons for why we distrusted the USSR, but we ignore all of the opportunities that we missed for a friendlier relationship.
> In 1939, Stalin offered to Britain and France to deploy a million troops against Nazi Germany, but he had been rebuffed:
WOW thank you I never heard of this
Because it's not true - by 1939 discussions that led to Ribbentropp-Molotov were pretty advanced
No, we don't forget about revisionist history. We view it with an appropriately skeptical eye.
The Telegraph article has a quote from a historian:
> "There was no mention of this in any of the three contemporaneous diaries, two British and one French - including that of Drax," he said. "I don't myself believe the Russians were serious."
You also seem unfamiliar with the purpose of NATO. Wikipedia:
> NATO is a system of collective security: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. It was established during the Cold War in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
> "I don't myself believe the Russians were serious."
Oh so it was a prank? - - What a weak thesis...
> You also seem unfamiliar with the purpose of NATO. Wikipedia
You seem unfamiliar with the fact the USSR asked to join NATO it seems
And NATO rightfully said no, because of what kind of country Russia was.
Also, politicians, including and especially Russian politicians at the time having unserious claims is not weak thesis. That was their frequent negotiating/pressuring/rhetorical tactic.
You also seem unfamiliar with the purpose of NATO. Wikipedia:
> NATO is a system of collective security: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. It was established during the Cold War in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.</i>
That is the stated purpose of NATO. The details of its real life military actions do not square with what you quoted at all - unless you can tell me which NATO member state Libya attacked.
The Libyan conflict was several countries working together and stuck a NATO label on it. Most of NATO was not actually involved. It also included some countries outside of NATO, like Sweden.
You can blame it on France misusing the NATO moniker rather than it just being a coalition.
There were valid reasons to not be friendly to USSR. Does this justify USSR entering friendship pact with Germany, thus enabling it to start the war?
I also want to know more conditions under which Stalin (who really handled foreign policy then?) offered to send troops to Europe, considering USSR was sort of fighting Japan at the same time. I'm sure UK and France could corroborate and provide more details, if this offer was real.
For the record, the position* of Sotskov (the only source mentioned in the article you linked) is also that occupying Baltic states and dividing Europe between USSR and Germany was not in fact a land grab by USSR but rather a necessary measure to be able to resist Germany.
Never mind that this protection buffer would not have been needed if Germany did not expand its invasion... which it did thanks to USSR siding with it. Dubious twist of logic.
It seems obvious that leaving Germany to take more of Europe in the beginning of WWII would have drastically reduced the ability of USSR to withstand a subsequent attack by Germany, so the argument seems to be "our geniuses could foresee this, so they invaded Europe in order to save the world from fascists". This argument is canceled out, however, by considering that at the end of the day not entering a pact with the UK does not imply USSR needed to side with Germany, the act that enabled Germany to start the war (which presumably USSR was aware of) in the first place.
I'm not sure to which degree this treatment of WWII is truth vs. revisionism.
* Which also seems to be the official position of the Kremlin: http://www.svr.gov.ru/material/sbornik-dokumentov/otzyvy-na-...
> There were valid reasons to not be friendly to USSR. Does this justify USSR entering friendship pact with Germany, thus enabling it to start the war?
This is not about "friendship pact", this is about non-aggression pact.
Was Poland not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declarat...
Was France not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement#Consequences
> Never mind that this protection buffer would not have been needed if Germany did not expand its invasion... which it did thanks to USSR siding with it. Dubious twist of logic.
Good questions/points, but we're judging decisions made at the time with the hindsight of decades after the war. I don't think it was clear to anyone who would've joined the war, which sides would've won, and the likelihood of such events.
Every country, depending on the circumstances, was probably trying to do what's best for them. Either avoiding war, or exploiting the messy situation by expanding their territory by annexing small part of neighboring states.
In fact, after seeing what happened to Poland, I think that every party in such agreements realized that they could provide, at best, temporary respite and delay confrontation (but that's not a weird isolated phenomenon: circumstances changes, and that provides ammunition to arguments that old agreements are not valid anymore).
It's not as much to enable other countries' war, but rather to delay one's own involvement in one war.
In fact, the USSR state budget was dedicated to defense for only about ~5%. A confrontation with Nazi Germany at the time would've been disastrous. But in the extra couple of years since, it increased to > 40%
https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-military-spending/
> Was Poland not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?
Did they also devise secret protocols dividing the world into spheres of influence, which were subsequently expanded with clauses that had "friendship" in their titles?
> we're judging decisions made at the time with the hindsight of decades after the war
This is exactly what allows us to see objectively what was happening.
It's always easy to say "we didn't mean it, we were playing 3D chess" (like Trump apologists) right afterwards.
However, we can judge based on the actions, which were:
1) sign a non-agression pact with Nazi Germany
2) almost immediately after, jointly with Nazi Germany invade and divide a country
3) extend the pact with a further "friendship" treaty, dividing Europe*
4) further discuss joining Axis**
Where do you think things were really headed?
> I don't think it was clear to anyone who would've joined the war, which sides would've won, and the likelihood of such events.
> Every country, depending on the circumstances, was probably trying to do what's best for them
You're quick to rob all countries and their leaders of moral baselines. There was documented massive surprise (including Western communists) and outrage worldwide when USSR signed the pact. I think the pact at the time was somewhat of a blow to general morale, a sign that another major player takes the world as a zero-sum dog eat dog arena that you allude to.
It seems feasible Stalin/Molotov would've joined Axis if it's "better" for USSR. And furthermore what was going on in USSR under Stalin (ethical cleanses, mass murder) is not too different from what Hitler did, USSR and Nazi Germany are fairly similar in many regards.
But I don't think this is somehow just an instance of how every normal country disregards ethics in the name of own profit. For one, USSR was geopolitically differently situated compared to small countries within immediate vicinity of Germany. It had immense territory. It was actively forging agreements and trade with Germany at the time.
I'm happy USSR ultimately didn't get to win the initial war and divide the world alongside Axis.
> It's not as much to enable other countries' war, but rather to delay one's own involvement in one war.
USSR invaded Poland as soon as Germany did. You're right, this is not enabling other countries' war. This is actually joining the war, and not on the side of the good guys.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_Boundary_and_Fri...
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_Axis_talks#Molot...
Russia and the US became very friendly during WW2 as well. Stalin and Roosevelt had a solid relationship while Stalin and Churchill did not. Churchill did not like Stalin for various reasons. But Roosevelt was the glue. Unfortunately, US elections at the time stipulated that the Vice President was chosen by the Democrat electorate and there was a coup to replace Roosevelts first pick (a guy friendly to the ussr) with a nobody from Missouri named Truman. Stalin never respected Truman and US relationships with the USSR deteriorated quickly after FDRS passing. Churchill and England became the dominant western voice in post ww2 trade and the iron curtain was eventually dropped.
Truman had so many financial struggles that the pension for presidents was created for him to live a dignified life after leaving office.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/fdrpoland.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1944_Democratic_Party_vice_pre...
Truman's presidency doesn't seem so terrible from today's viewpoint, look at the work he did to help rebuild western europe after the war. Making note that he had not enriched himself while president does not serve to make you or your arguments better appreciated.
> In 1939, Stalin offered to Britain and France to deploy a million troops against Nazi Germany, but he had been rebuffed
At which point he instead allied with Nazi Germany, aided in the invasion of Poland, personally ordered the mass execution of Polish POW's, and invaded Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
> Despite all this, the USSR asked to join NATO in 1954, but again: it had been rebuffed
By 1954, the USSR had already set up undemocratic communist puppet states in Eastern Europe, been caught engaging in espionage against the United States, attempted to blockade West Berlin in order to pressure the Western Allies into abandoning it to Soviet control, and committed genocide and war crimes on possibly the greatest scale seen in history.
It would be incredibly stupid to admit Russia of 1954 into NATO. The people taking power after Stalin were somewhat better, but still only slightly less murderous.
This is right after Russia organized processes and executions of class enemies. It demanded such processes of vasal states too. The monster processes were pretty large crime.
And this is btw, only like 14 years before Russia invaded other countries and started to occupie them in 1968.
> Talking about WW2, Europe wasn't friendly to the USSR leading up to war: The initial anti-comintern treaty in 1935 was extended to the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and China (ruled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek).
Such a shocking action, after only little thing like The Great Purge and active hostile rhetorics from Russia ... and Holodomor.
This is ridiculous point of view that casts Russia as victim when other countries react to its aggression - whether aggression outside or inside. Russia 1935 and Germany 1936 were not that dissimilar, you know. Except Russia more bloody at that point.
The Bolsheviks, who the Entente ( UK, France, US, Japan) deployed troops against and sponsored their enemies? They had valid reasons to at the very least skeptical.
Right now, Russophobia is kind of healthy thinking. Their current mix of tsarism and return to kinda communist thinking except the communist ideology is sucky and dangerous.
Pick one:
- Russia is an authoritarian state lead by one man and his inner circle
- It is rational to hate Russians in general
Russia is an authoritarian state lead by one man and his inner circle. This man has very high public support. In particular, Russian population supports imperial ideology.
That is no contradiction. Authoritarians can have public support while at the same time severely oppressing opposition or anyone who dares to voice something else.
Also, opposition to Putin does not imply opposition to annexation of Ukrainian lands or turning Ukrainians into Russians by force. Opposition to Putin does not imply pro-democracy reform either.
> It is rational to hate Russians in general
Hate is a feeling. But accusations of Russophobia are all about support for sanctions or Ukraine in war. And are deployed whenever someone points out Russia as is now is threat to not just Ukraine, but to all countries in former eastern block.
All those are rational. So, if that matter average Russians look really down on Ukrainians too, are happy to use slurs against them and act offended it other formerly occupied countries are not "thankful".
----------
If anything, Russia was enabled rather then opposed for years. It was treated as something special, more worthy then other countries around it.
Sure. It is not unreasonable to “hate” someone if they oppose you. I’ll give you that.
Russia is not "opposing" it is expanding and starting major wars. It is actively working to destroy other countries.
Russia is not opposing America as much as they are opposing right to existence as democracies to countries around them. It is way more countries around Russia calling for help to Ukraine then anyone else.
And yes, being at risk of being invaded by someone makes people hate that one. It makes them think again about what that country done to them before.
> Russia is not "opposing" it is expanding and starting major wars. It is actively working to destroy other countries.
Brother. You are all over the place.
I was replying to this part:
> Russia is an authoritarian state lead by one man and his inner circle. This man has very high public support. In particular, Russian population supports imperial ideology.
To which I reply: Yes, it’s rational to “hate” someone if they oppose you. And “someone” here means normal Russians.
I was not talking about the Russian government in this context.
And I don’t know why you brought up America.
Putin ordered Russian forces to be on the highest level of nuclear readiness. We have programs on Russian state TV where people talk about using nuclear weapons to drown the UK and devastate the European coast with a nuclear tsunami. This is a scary time we live in.
The conversation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine may now be centered on NATO, but it began with statements of routine training exercises at the border and escalated to the de-Nazification of Ukraine. Russia has not done well to reach the hearts of its neighbors.
That we have to reach past the Cold War into the American Civil War to discuss amicable relations does not bode well.
If Russophobia is a widespread phenomenon then it started way before 2022.
When Russia bombed Syrian hospitals ... invaded Chehenia and other countries ... had assasins murder people living EU, likely caused explosion in Czechs (2014), likely shut down plane, supported dictators around the world ...
Common, Ukrainian invasion did not happened out of blue. And I don't even mention Russia actively trying to influence politics of ther countries to the worst.
how do you deal with the insane double standard? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc#/media/File:... I'm not advocating against russophobia per se, but americanophobia seems similarly legitimate
A very general western hatred (not merely US!) has been brewing over Russian social media for awhile now, and the conversation of whether to deny Russians their prerogative to hate the west is not really there. There isn't even much conversation on western media as to what the state of Russian social media is even like.
That 1972 picture somehow implies none of Russian escalation of aggression between late 1990 and 2022 happened?
Should we go into how many countries Russia occupied at that point and how oppressive and murderous it was?
Let’s put it like this: being critical of the American government does not force you to be Americophobic.
> invaded Chehenia
Invaded their own territory.
Nah. It was not theirs. It was invasion twice.
Just because you was stole something does not mean you can steal it again and again every time owners get it back.
Are the states of the US, Canada, and Australia (to name a few) on stolen land?
There's a very brave, honorable politician, who unfortunately was lost in the annals of history, as a man directly responsible for Russian support during the civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassius_Marcellus_Clay_(politi...
thx for sharing. Is Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. related to him ? (also known as Muhammad Ali)
No. However there is a relation.
Ali's grandfather specifically named his son after Cassius to honor Cassius, the KY politician. The son proceeded to do the same, with who would eventually be a famous boxer, M. Ali.
The boxer changed his name to Ali, both due to his conversion to islam , and because he was angry to take the name of a plantation owner.
The latter is true - Cassius was a plantation owner. However, early on he defender ardently emancipation. He in fact suffered multiple murder attempts from actual slavery advocates... who surrounded him in KY
“Russophobia” is a sham term invented by Russian propagandists to invalidate their opposition. It doesn’t exist.
> 5. Britain nearly declared war on the Union (Trent affair), to the point that Royal Navy was just waiting for the go-signal to commence hostilities & Britain sent thousands of additional troops to Canada.
I wonder how much the Union's need to hedge against British intervention—so, to divert resources away from the war against the South, affecting troop placement, artillery availability, fortification building/maintenance/garrisoning, and fleet positioning—prolonged the war.
That's a good question, and I don't know the answer.
However, whatever that need was (to hedge against the British) should have been completely necessary, and really goes to show you just how valuable a strong diplomatic corps can be to a country.
The British wanted to be pro-Union. They wanted slavery gone. They didn't want to have to station huge numbers of troops in Canada, or large numbers of ships in the Atlantic.
Silly, unforced errors by Seward & Charles Francis Adams (the American ambassador) antagonized Britain throughout the war & made them unsure of their North American holdings. Ridiculous. Union diplomats should have been talking peace & partnership with Britain from day 1 of the conflict.
> The British wanted to be pro-Union. They wanted slavery gone.
tbf, we had moral reasons for wanting slavery gone but practical reasons for thinking we were better off with a divided America and an independent Confederacy as a useful source of cheap cotton. Some would say our political positions haven't got more realistic since. :)
It should be understood that the british empire was at the peak of economic dependence on the raw material coming from the "new world" at the onset of the civil war; in particular, cotton exports for consumption by british textile mills [1].
> By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.
One reason that there was support for the confederacy was the fear that the outcome of the war would lead to the end of access to abundant and cheap cotton (due to export duties, end of slavery, etc.).
One of the outcomes of the US Civil War was that the British Empire realized a need to "diversify" their sources, resulting in increasingly imperialistic behavior in India and Egypt, among others.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/empire-... the whole book is a fantastic peek behind the curtains of the history of global capital markets
And the reason why Britain wanted those raw resources was because it was the epicenter of the industrial revolution. Manchester was nicknamed "Cottonopolis"... full of cotton mills driven by water and then steam, and connected by the first inter-city railway. Cotton picked by slaves in the U.S. south was the main source of raw materials for these factories.
> 6. There were tons of ironclads already in European fleets, there had just never been a fight between ironclads! Europeans watched the Monitor v. Merrimack battle & adapted their fleets & battle doctrines accordingly.
These were very different sorts of ironclads. The British and French ironclads mostly resembled traditional ships, at least at first glance. They had steam engines but also retained their masts, and had broadside guns rather than turrets (except for the ill-fated HMS Captain..)
The American ironclads were more bizarre, superficially resembling submarines, and weren't particularly seaworthy (unlike the European ironclads.) The USS Monitor in particular was a novel design; mastless and steam powered with an armored turret, a shallow draft and low freeboard (similar to earlier ironclad floating batteries, but a lot lower). European navies subsequently started building their own 'monitors'.
The monitor class of ships were eventually pushed to the side by pre-dreadnought battleships that derived more from the traditional and seaworthy European ironclads than from monitors, with some lessons learned from monitors. See the HMS Devastation particularly; mastless and steam powered with armored turrets, but with a hull that was actually seaworthy unlike monitors.
For a visual example, this was an American Civil-War era ironclad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Baron_DeKalb.jpg
This was a British oceangoing ironclad, launched in 1860: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HMSWarrior.JPG
The difference in seaworthiness is abundantly clear. These American ironclads were more akin to gunboats, and mostly used on rivers (fighting for control of the Mississippi was a huge deal in the war). They were built comparatively cheaply, for a specific, immediate conflict. They often only had steam engines and lacked the endurance for transoceanic travel.
The British ironclads were built to project imperial power across the globe. The continued use of sail was important to extend endurance to reach far away places.
It's interesting how difficult it is nowadays to field a million man army
Because Vietnam showed that conscripting armies of that size was not an efficient way to fight a modern war. You want people, volunteers, who want to be in the army. Also technology. We’re close to that point in, like in Roman history, where the income of entire villages was only enough to field one Calvary soldier (knight.)
Not that we’re going towards feudalism but history has a cycle of armies going from a small force with a huge technology edge to a giant force with mundane tech. Even during the Roman Republic only the richest men could afford to fight.
> like in Roman history, where the income of entire villages was only enough to field one Calvary soldier
What an interesting data point.
During the early republic, only the richest could equipment themselves but my understanding is that the Marian reforms changed this by professionalizing the army and having the general of a legion supply the soldiers with their weapons.
Also, the thing about a village supporting one cavalry soldier seems off. The roman army focused on infantry with cavalry being supplied by allied forces.
>Also, the thing about a village supporting one cavalry soldier seems off. The roman army focused on infantry with cavalry being supplied by allied forces.
Also possible that they're thinking of the Roman Kingdom and the Equites?
Roman cavalry is often forgotten, but a considerable portion of social class all the way back to Roman Republic and I think pre-republic kingdom was existence of a class wealthy enough to fight as cavalry.
They were of course small compared to infantry legions, and as the Republic and later Empire expanded they frequently hired auxiliaries, especially from a more cavalry focused groups.
Sure, equites were an established social class but didn't that devolve to just a class without the training on horseback by the late republic and certainly by imperial rome. It seems like it made more sense for the imperial army to have auxilia handle cavalry, missile troops, and other functions.
It was not so easy back then as well. They had draft riots in New York City, which had to be suppressed by regular Union regiments. There were also deserters and bounty jumpers.
The South had trouble to support their armies. Lee basically planned the Gettysburg campaign to live of the land. Soldiers were happy because they had enough to eat. A lot of soldiers lacked shoes.
> 6. There were tons of ironclads already in European fleets, there had just never been a fight between ironclads! Europeans watched the Monitor v. Merrimack battle & adapted their fleets & battle doctrines accordingly.
And the fight they got was comically irrelevant to the ironclads they had.
I'm sure they had lots of great arguments trying to pull anything applicable out of it and apply the lessons to their own fleets.
A point I found interesting along the lines of perceived British ambivalence, my understanding is that the Emancipation Proclamation was a brilliant piece of diplomacy. It was anti-slavery enough to make it possible to convince Britain that the war was all about slavery and so they shouldn't intervene because of how much they were against slavery. Yet also weak enough against slavery - only freeing slaves in the territory they hadn't conquered yet - to make it possible to convince the Union officers and politicians that it was a tactical economic ploy against the Confederacy and not a changing of the primary war aims. They were rather ambivalent about slavery, and Lincoln himself feared that "half the officers would fling down their arms and three more states would rise" if he made full emancipation a primary war aim.
Karl Marx, who was residing in Britain at the time, also wrote much on the topic. He had nothing but withering criticism of mainstream/elite British attitudes for the war, namely the downplaying the importance of slavery in the formation of the Confederacy.
He, unlike his more socially acceptable contemporaries, also deeply admired Lincoln. Many pieces published in prominent periodicals, like The Economist, painted him as a wily and double-dealing politician. One could understand that interpretation given the compromises he was desperately trying to make with Southern states to prevent the outbreak of war, but it gave prominent Brits an excuses to dismiss the sincerity of his anti-slavery rhetoric after the war broke out. (Lincoln himself was also being deeply transformed by the savagery of war. He would come to believe the carnage was divine punishment for the sin of slavery.) Marx would have none of it. He called out the hypocrisy of those who in the years prior condemned American slavery but would not support the cause of Lincoln and the Union because it didn't have an unblemished history of being totally and consistently anti-slavery.
The claim regarding the effectiveness of "Confederate propagandist networks" is overstated, though. People across Britain were divided on the issue, even across political camps and ethnic groups (e.g. Irish and English). To be clear, by "divided", I don't mean that people necessarily individually ambivalent. There were some staunch supporters on both sides.
There were also multiple reasons for preferring one side over another, too. Slavery was just one issue. Another was potential weakening the Monroe Doctrine. (During the Civil War, France under Napoleon III invaded and conquered Mexico, and Spain re-colonized what would become the Dominican Republic.) Others were access to raw materials, support for wars of national unity (European nationalists admired Lincoln, as would Hitler decades later), etc.
> the compromises he was desperately trying to make with Southern states to prevent the outbreak of war
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. AFAIK between his inauguration and the outbreak of war Lincoln had basically no interaction with any of the Southern states.
I learned more from this comment than the article, and I thank you
In addition to conveying information well, this comment motivated me to find Foreman’s cited work. My library even has the audiobook!
One of my ancestors was a British aristocrat and tory MP who was so vocal in his opposition to appeasing the American colonists in any way at all that even King George raised an eyebrow.
His total conviction led him to purchase a commission as major of Grenadiers in the 20th Foot, and set off for The Colonies, where he was promptly shot at The Battle of Saratoga and then taken prisoner.
Because he was a wounded officer and a minor noble, his wife was permitted to come and pick him up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dyke_Acland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Harriet_Acland
Maybe this is nitpicking but I suspect the motive was less "the destructiveness of the conflict" and more a chance to balkanize the US permanently.
What I found more interesting is the French role in both US and India in inciting rebellion against the British
- https://thediplomat.com/2018/04/the-last-time-the-us-and-ind...
- https://aeon.co/essays/why-american-revolutionaries-admired-...
Not mentioned: Towards the end of the Civil War, British officers became very concerned that the large and now experienced army might turn its attention North, as they had some 50 years prior. The Civil War was thus a direct catalyst for Canadian confederation.
In fact, there were some men (Irish nationalists) who gained military experience during the Civil War that were involved in armed raids into Canada from 1865-1871. Encyclopedia article: https://www.britannica.com/event/Fenian-raids
A direct American invasion was not a catalyst for confederation. Expansion westward was seen as vital, and America’s rapid growth made the endeavour even more vital, lest American immigrants seize Canadian land.
No one feared the American army would turn north. They could have crushed Canada, but peace between Canada and the US was seen as assured as long as the UK wanted it.
Perhaps not a direct catalyst as it was the Fenian Raids, in particular the battle of Ridgeway, that led to Canadian Confederation. The Fenians were largely Union Army veterans of the Civil War. Lincoln's decision to allow the formation of ethnic Irish regiments to aid recruitment allowed for the military organization and training of the Fenian Brotherhood.
The US took the oregon territories from the british empire in the 1840s. Even before the civil war, the british empire was in no position to challenge the US in north america. America was focused on western expansion to the pacific before and after the civil war, not to worthless canadian tundra and the frigid arctic.
My key takeaways:
* Miller and Chesney’s lectures describe the course of the war up to that point, with Chesney focussing first on fighting in Virginia and then on operations in the west and south, such as Sherman’s March to the Sea
* In his lectures, Chesney laments that Sherman, in his March to the Sea near the end of the war, ‘has given no voucher or note anywhere for the supplies he has seized [from civilians]’ and expresses concern about whether the North and South could be reconciled, given the brutality of the conflict
* The combat between the Monitor and the Merrimac, notable for being the first clash between ironclad ships, is referenced but purposely not discussed because ‘the result has not influenced the military progress of the war’
* In some cases, the conduct of the Civil War was used by British officers to justify their own opinions of how the UK should prepare its military for future wars
* The RUSI lectures demonstrate the challenges of following a war as it is occurring from a distance, the disappointment with the Union’s military performance early in the war and the manner in which foreign conflicts were mobilised to justify the policies of people like the Duke of Cambridge
Not enough, actually. The American Civil War was the first big war where railroads and telegraph lines allowed coordinated operations over a large area, and machine guns and repeating rifles allowed killing large numbers of advancing troops. Grant got this; he wrote "War is Progressive", meaning that there was progress through technology. This was a radical idea in military thinking at the time. Most European military leaders didn't get that until WWI. They were still trying mass charges. Which, against machine guns, absolutely does not work.
It also featured a little bit of trench warfare. I imagine the European observers who saw that were like "Huh, definitely not important, let's not come up with strategies to counter this sort of thing" and then forgot about it for the next 50 years or so.
I mean, it had been 50 years, it wasn't like there had been another war fought 10 years prior that also devolved into trench warfare that they completely failed to learn anything from.
In fairness, I think people thought the Eastern and Southern armies fought in a "civilized" manner.
It's just that the Western armies and Western generals came in, and they fought in a significantly different fashion. You can call the West of the Union more "modern". Or "pragmatic". Or maybe "barbaric" is the right word.
No one wanted to be seen as being "Barbaric". Except Western armies, who really didn't care what people thought about them. (At least, not as much as they cared about their orders.)
I just can't see how that can be true - 'we're going to murder you all, but we're going to do it with good manners because otherwise people will think we're bad'??
It seems way more likely to be 'cargo cult' type learning where something worked for centuries and so got formalised and taught rigidly?
Any good sources on this, it must have been covered on AskHistorians!?
The missing ingredient that prevented the ACW from turning into static trench warfare similar to the later Western Front was probably barbed wire, which was only patented in 1867.
Presumably also the rate of fire of WW1 weapons. While the ACW had Gatling guns and canons, the rate of fire during WW1 far exceeded anything seen before. The only protection was a trench
> The American Civil War was the first big war where railroads and telegraph lines allowed coordinated operations over a large area, and machine guns and repeating rifles allowed killing large numbers of advancing troops.
Hi, the Crimean War would like to remind you that it existed.
In which American Civil War battles did machine guns play a meaningful role?
I think the real answer and probably why the article is a bit light on actual anecdotes, is that Britain or its military at the time probably didn't think much of it all, especially from a military point of view. Plus they were super busy with imperial concerns, especially in the British Raj post-1857 rebellion.
The U.S., although gaining steam economically (pun intended), was still a backwater, rural, nation isolated by a whole lot of ocean (edit: I meant all this from a military point of view). I am sure the abolitionists in power in Parliament were interested in the outcome of the war from that point of view, but it was really of very little consequence to UK or Europe as a whole.
The US economy overtook the UK's right around the civil war. That's also around when the US population overtook the UK's.
They may have not thought much about the war, but it wouldn't be because the US had a small economy or population.
Right right, you are absolutely correct, but I meant that the U.S. was inconsequential to Europe militarily.
Really? I thought that happened way after WWI. The UK economy back then had a gazillion of colonies to sustain it.
No OP's correct, the US surpassed the UK both in population and in GDP sometime around the middle of the 19th century.
I think the point is that looking at the UK in a vacuum, outside the context of colonies like India, Kenya, Singapore, etc., is probably misleading.
The US overtook the UK in 1860, but overtaking the entire British Empire was closer to 1900.
Would have taken quite a while to be noticed, given the speed of communication and lack of American military presence overseas. Compared to the British Empire.
The US South provided 80% of British cotton, and the textile industry was the UK's largest employer and industry.[1].
[1] https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-aberc...
The US was economically beginning to be involved on the world level, but wasn't really a "power worth considering" until after WWI, partially just because of distance.
yeah, this was really my point. A (maybe terrible) modern analogy is how concerned would we be with a civil war in say, South America, where a significant chunk of our lithium comes from? We would probably be concerned, but our economic and military clout means that we would always be the customer for whoever won that civil war.
> We would probably be concerned, but our economic and military clout means that we would always be the customer for whoever won that civil war.
Don’t we typically just give a fuckton of guns and resources (and maybe more) to whichever side we want to win.
Absolutely not. We are also perfectly willing to overthrow democratically elected governments as well.
A good read about that: The Savage Wars of Peace.
Well yeah you are correct, and I wrote clumsily. That was meant to read 'although the U.S. was gaining steam economically, it was not of much consequence militarily'
I believe both things are true, but I'm going to have to hunt for some sources
Quite a few European powers embedded observers with both sides of the conflict. The application of improved small arms and artillery was something that military minds were very interested in, to see how it played out in a large scale conflict.
Not true. By 1860, the US was of comparable size to the UK and France, and had a similar GDP per capita to the UK. De Tocqueville‘s “Democracy in America” had introduced Europe to America’s prosperity in the 1830s and 1840s, so it wasn’t unknown.
The war might not have been militarily relevant to Europeans, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t paying attention. The US was as big and as rich as the European powers at that point. It’s like today: If France broke out in a civil war it would be all over the news 24/7.
> The U.S., although gaining steam economically (pun intended), was still a backwater, rural, nation isolated by a whole lot of ocean
A "backwater"? That forced the 49th parallel on the british in the 1810s? That took oregon territories from the british in the 1840s? The "backwater" that "took" louisiana territories from france and alaska from the russians? The "backwater" that took texas,california,et al from mexico? The "backwater" that took control over the yangtze river from china in 1854?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
The "backwater" that forced japan to open in the 1850s? Which no european power, including britain, was able to do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Expedition
It wasn't the british navy that dominated the seas mid 1800s. It was american whalers.
By the civil war, we had been shitting on the british and the rest of the great powers for decades. Not bad for a "backwater".
Militarily Europe walked away with simple caricatures of the war, but the lionization of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was (rightly) recognized as a new kind of general - one that would be far more familiar in World War I than in the Napoleonic War. This led to a lot of fame.
Generally, the US revolutionary war was viewed very positively in parts of Europe. That upstart new world was finally in its place and would now tear itself to pieces without European governance. Britain considered entering the war early on(on the southern side!) and benefited from the economic collapse of the Americas. The British commercial fleets went from near-parity with the US merchant marine to unquestioned ruler of the commercial seas by the devastation of the blockades and the lack of insurance underwriting for north or south flagged vehicles.
But a lot of things were missed millitary that they would learn in 1914. The role of rail lines and junctions, and the early signs of trench warfare and total war were the only thing that could break near-industrial societies. The potential of armored battleships and submarines. (Though to be fair, imagine how much history would have changed if the Turtle had detonated its torpedo in the Revolutionary War!) These lessons would be learned a hard way sixty years later.
There's also an interesting paper written on the Vatican's view of the American Civil War: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25018756
this was disappointingly content-light. I'm curious about the subject, but this was barely even an introduction.
Here’s an article I found with more info: https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1506&cont...
My chief takeaway: people who weren’t there didn’t have all the details.
> What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?
Go to the source.
Here is a book written by Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, a British officer who traveled with the Confederate army in 1863. He is well known due to appearing in the movie Gettysburg based on The Killer Angels book. Three Months in the Southern States: April, June, 1863. https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/fremantle/fremantle.html
I'd be interested in how the world would/might react to an American civil war today?
Would we see America's "enemies" sending arms to the side of their choice to fight a proxy war on American soil? Would a side accept that aide?
Would America's "allies" sit out or pick sides? Would those sides align with the sides "enemies" would choose?
>Would we see America's "enemies" sending arms to the side of their choice to fight a proxy war on American soil? Would a side accept that aide?
If history is any indication, yes and yes.
I think the world would collectively shit its pants. The world's largest economy and military suddenly splintering while in control of several thousand nuclear weapons? It would seem like Armageddon.
The us is far from the USSR - yet the USSR had so many nukes, the world treated them with kid gloves, for good or bad. Maybe after we in the US finish killing each other over imaginary grievances (is Tom Hanks really a pedophile who kills kids for their hormones, I can't believe I live in a country where anyone considers such idiocy) what will be left of the cities and rural areas.
America's allies would probably not support a side unless there was going to be a clear winner OR it was in that nation's interest to do so.
America's enemies maybe would pick a side in an attempt to destabilize the country more... But I think a splintered America would be extremely reluctant to accept help from Russia/China.
It would be interesting to know what Prussian officers thought of the battles as they soon after fought a few wars. But I can't read German.
They thought the Confederate and US commanders lacked training, while Stanning for Lee. And generally thought that there was not much to learn that was applicable to European wars.
https://gettysburgcompiler.org/2015/01/05/a-prussian-observe...
A quote from that article:
This resulted in “stiffness in the lines and clumsiness in management and direction of troops” as large divisions of the army fully relied on their higher officers to direct all movement. “The loss of an upper-level commander,” Scheibert states, “Would cripple advance and retard again in battle.”
Interesting, this kind of criticism is leveled at the Russian army today.
Is Chesney the Guards officer that is portrayed in the "lost cause" movie Gettysburg?
Um, no, sorry. Appparently that was Lt. Colonel Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards.
Why do you call it a civil war? In a civil war two parties fight for dominance over the country - England’s and Russian’s civil wars, more than two hundred years apart, are great example. In that war, South did not want to dominate North but secede. It seems calling the conflict “a Civil war” just follows Northern narrative.
I upvoted because it's an interesting point: but I think your definition of 'civil war' is just wrong. It's people in a single nation/people group fighting to resolve differences. Limiting it to exclude things like secession is an unnatural split that doesn't have any obvious benefits. Like, some people end up fighting because 'their' side is being attacked, they don't wish for dominance but only survival ... you'd be deciding for each individual person if it was a civil war or not.
The article was a bit "once over lightly"
Comments here are much more interesting.
After the war I'm sure they took note. The US Army of the North was then the largest army in the world. That had to be concerning.
Second place? The US Army of the South.
Luckily the US Navy wasn't doing so hot, and so the only real places to get worried were Canada and Mexico, as neither army had worked out how to walk on water.
Japan completely transformed their society, largely in response to a visit from that navy.
Looks like the troop strength was 200-600K on each side. I'm not sure that would have been the largest army in the world.
source: https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm#:~:text=In%20July%201....
It wouldn't be. Russia had a larger army. Only if you consider both sides a single army do they outnumber the Russian forces.
without facts, I would expect some central Asian horse army to have 200,000 humans, far earlier than that.. Persian and Egyptian armies were large at different times too.. sounds uninformed..
Really? In 1865? Which one of those was in existence and larger?
Asia has held the bulk of human population for quite a long time.
The Qing dynasty (i.e., China), which had just put down a massive rebellion, probably had many times that number of men under arms.
As far as I know Qing military organization was weird for the time. There was no single central Chinese Army as such. There were some forces which officially reported to the Imperial government (the Green Standard and the Eight Banners), but these were of limited use. The armies that put down the Taiping Rebellion were raised by local governors, and were loyal to them not to the Emperor.
The OP says largest army at the time, not largest ever
In the Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith refers to it as “an ongoing disturbance in our North American colonies” IIRC
"American Civil War" usually refers to the war in the 1860s. "American Revolution" is what we US people call the war in the 1770s.
That was the American Revolution. The American Civil War typically refers to the conflict of 1861-1865.
"War of Northern Aggression".
The south will rise again! and get its ass beat again!
Considering the manufacturing and ensuing migration, it’s rising one way or another.
Won or lose, we still see Carpet Baggers…
Alternatively, "War of Southern Treason".
Has that one common usage anywhere?
“The Recent Unpleasantness,” as a certain Great-Aunt used to say.
My bad, just got back from a run and obviously my brain was scrambled.
What am I reading here?
A response to the title. What were British officers thinking during the American civil war. Lots of hidden history I just hinted at.