by Webster G. Tarpley
April 2011 marks the 150th
anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, which began when Confederate forces opened
fire upon Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The following essay by
Webster Tarpley, tells about the largely untold alliance between President Abraham
Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II, which by many accounts was key to the
North winning the U.S. Civil War, sealing the defeat of the British strategic
design.
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | WASHINGTON D. C. (ÉTATS-UNIS) | 25 APRIL 2011
At the point of maximum war danger
between Great Britain and the United States, the London satirical publication
Punch published a vicious caricature of US President Abraham Lincoln and
Russian Tsar Alexander II, demonizing the two friends as bloody oppressors.
From Punch, October 24,
1863.
"Who was our friend when the
world was our foe." -
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871
One hundred fifty years after the
attack on Fort Sumter, the international strategic dimension of the American
Civil War represents a much-neglected aspect of Civil War studies. In offering
a survey of some of the main issues involved, one feels required to justify the
importance of the topic. It is indeed true that, as things turned out, the
international strategic dimension of the 1861-65 conflict was of secondary
importance. However, it was an aspect that repeatedly threatened to thrust
itself into the center of the war, transforming the entire nature of the
conflict and indeed threatening to overturn the entire existing world system.
The big issue was always a British-French attack on the United States to
preserve the Confederate States of America. This is certainly how Union and
Confederate leaders viewed the matter, and how some important people in London,
St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin did as well.
The result is that today, the
international dimension is consistently underestimated: even a writer as
sophisticated as Richard Franklin Bensel can repeatedly insist in his recent Yankee
Leviathan that the US development over the decade before the Civil War
was “acted out in a vacuum,” while asserting that “the relative isolation of
the United States on the North American continent contributed to the
comparative unimportance of nationalism in American life prior to
secession.” [1] Reports of American isolation, however, were already
exaggerated in the era of a British fleet that could summer in the Baltic and
winter in the Caribbean.
Views of the domestic side of the
Civil War have often been colored by the sectional loyalties of the authors. In
the diplomatic sphere, the international alignments of 1861-65 have been
experienced as something of an embarrassment or aberration by American scholars
of the twentieth century, at least partly because they inverted the alliance
patterns that emerged after 1900. In 1865, the United States was friendly to
Russia and Prussia, and resentful and suspicious in regard to Britain and
France, whose governments had sympathized with and supported the Confederacy.
The general tendency of US historians in 1915 or 1945 or 1952 seems to have
been to put the best possible face on things, or, better yet, turn to another
area of inquiry. As the Civil War centennial approached, the historian Allan Nevins addressed this issue rather directly in a
chapter of his 1960 “War for the Union”. Here he dramatically evoked the immense worldwide
significance of Civil War diplomacy in a fascinating paragraph to which Howard
Jones calls attention. Nevins, horrified by the idea of US war with Britain,
wrote:
It is hardly too much to say that the
future of the world as we know it was at stake. A conflict between Great
Britain and America would have crushed all hope of the mutual understanding and
growing collaboration which led up to the practical alliance of 1917-18, and
the outright alliance which began in 1941. It would have made vastly more
difficult if not impossible the coalition which defeated the Central Powers in
the First World War, struck down Nazi tyranny in the Second World War, and
established the unbreakable front of Western freedom against Communism.
Anglo-French intervention in the American conflict would probably have
confirmed the splitting and consequent weakening of the United States; might
have given French power in Mexico a long lease, with the ruin of the Monroe
Doctrine; and would perhaps have led to the Northern conquest of Canada. The
forces of political liberalism in the modern world would have received a
disastrous setback. No battle, not Gettysburg, not the Wilderness, was more
important than the context waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of
public opinion. The popular conception of this contest is at some points
erroneous, and at a few grossly fallacious…. (Nevins II, 242)
While Nevins does make the point that
these questions are important, he feels that many accounts are unfair to Lord
Russell, the British foreign secretary, and to Prime Minister Palmerston.
Nevins sees Palmerston as a man of peace, an attitude which is impossible to
square with the bellicose imperialist bluster of Lord Pam’s civis
romanus sum interventionism. Between about 1848 and 1863, the British
Empire was at the aggressive height of its world power, had launched attacks on
China, India, and Russia, and in the 1860s was backing Napoleon III’s adventure
in Mexico and Spain’s in Santo Domingo, both direct challenges to the US Monroe
Doctrine. This is a context which often gets lost. Otherwise, Nevins’ assertion
that Britain “did not like other nations to fight” turns reality on its head;
the greatest art of the Foreign Office was that of divide and conquer. Finally,
Nevins pays no attention to the deterrent effect of Russia’s refusal to
countenance any European intervention against the Union.
Like so many other historians, Nevins
would seem to have allowed the needs of the Cold War present to shape his view
of the past — the tendency against which Sir Herbert Butterfield, long
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, warned in the 1930s when we wrote
that “it is part and parcel of the Whig interpretation of history that it
studies the past with reference to the present….” [2] In Butterfield’s view, this is a method which “has
often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken
to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the
present….it might be called the historian’s ‘pathetic fallacy.’” (Butterfield
11, 30) The following comments are inspired by the conviction that Union
diplomacy was Lincoln’s diplomacy, and that it offers valuable lessons for
today.
As far as I have been able to
determine, there exists no modern exhaustive study of Civil War diplomacy. Of
the books I have seen, D. P. Crook comes closest. Crook’s 1974 work is a very
serviceable and reliable survey of the entire topic. Crook naturally places
US-British relations at the center of his account, focusing on the three crises
when UK and/or French intervention against the Union was threatened: theTrent affair
of late 1861-1862; the push for intervention by Lord Russell and Gladstone
after Antietam in October-November 1862; and the mid-1863 Laird rams/Polish
rebellion flare-up (which Howard Jones, by contrast, omits from consideration).
For Crook, Secretary of State Seward is the center of attention on the Union
side, rather than Lincoln. But Lincoln repeatedly had to override Seward, as in
the case of the Secretary of State’s 1861 reckless “foreign war panacea”
proposal for a US war against France and Spain (probably involving Britain as
well), which Lincoln wisely rejected in favor of his “one war at a time”
policy. Here Bensel is of the opinion that Seward’s proposal “revealed the new
secretary of state’s profound awareness of the narrow basis of northern
nationalism during the early months of the Lincoln administration.” (Bensel
12n) Another view is that Seward was looking for a means of saving face while
permitting the south to secede. Seward’s panacea theory can also be seen as a
flight forward, a kind of political nervous breakdown. Crook has almost nothing
to say about the pro-Union role of Prussia (which surely dissuaded Napoleon III
from greater activism), nor about the Holy See, where Pius IX – who had lost
his moorings after having been driven out of Rome by Mazzini in 1849 — was
pro-Confederate and highly controversial at the time. He also plays down the
central importance of Russia for the Union. As for Napoleon II, Crook follows
the misleading tradition of stressing the conflicts and suspicion between
Napoleon III and Palmerston while downplaying the fundamental fact that Napoléon
le petit (who had once been a British constable) always operated
within the confines of a Franco-British alliance in which he provided the bulk
of the land forces but was decidedly the junior partner.
In contrast to Lincoln, Confederate
President Jefferson Davis took almost no interest in diplomatic affairs. The
Confederacy sent envoys to London and Paris, but never bothered to even send a
representative to St. Petersburg, which turned out to be the most important
capital of all.
The Threat of British Intervention
The two great interlocutors of Union
foreign policy were Great Britain and Russia, and the geopolitical vicissitudes
of the twentieth century tended to distort perceptions of both, minimizing the
importance of both British threat and Russian friendship. Crook, in his
valuable bibliographical essay, traces this tendency back to the “Great
Rapprochement” between Britain and the US in the early twentieth century. The
standard work on US-UK relations, Crook notes, was for many years E. D. Adams’ Great Britain and the American Civil
War, which plays down
friction between London and Washington, and narrates events “from the meridian
of London.” (Crook 381)
The Russia-American Special
Relationship that Saved the Union
Adams tells his reader that he does
not view his topic as part of American history; rather, he poses for himself
the contorted question of “how is the American Civil War to be depicted by
historians of Great Britain…?” (Adams I 2) Adams treats the autumn crisis of
1862 as the main danger point of US-UK conflict, writing that “here, and here
only, Great Britain voluntarily approached the danger of becoming involved in
the American conflict.” (Adams II 34) He pleads for understanding for the
much-vituperated British role, recalling that “the great crisis in America was
almost equally a crisis in the domestic history of Great Britain itself…,” and
providing valuable materials in this regard. (Adams I 2) Adams generally
relegates Russo-American diplomacy to the footnotes, mentioning the “extreme
friendship” and even the “special relationship” of these two nations. In the
North, he notes, Russia was viewed as a “true friend” in contrast to the
“unfriendly neutrality” of Great Britain and France. (Adams II, 45n, 70n, 225)
But for Adams, the main lesson is that the Anglo-American disputes of the Civil
War era have “distorted” the “natural ties of friendship, based upon ties of
blood and a common heritage of literature and history and law” which exist or
ought to exit between the two countries. Those disputes, he suggests, can be
relegated to the category of “bitter and exaggerated memories.” (Adams II 305)
Seward, 1861: A US-UK War Would “Wrap
the World in Flames”
Kenneth Bourne’s Britain and the Balance of Power in
North America, 1815-1908 provides an effective antidote to such sentimental
thinking in the form of a notable chapter (singled out for attention by Crook)
on the British planning for war with the United States at the time of theTrent affair
in December-January 1861, when Seward threatened to “wrap the world in flames” and
the British lion roared in reply. [3] Two Confederate
envoys, Mason and Slidell, were taken off the British merchant ship Trent by
a US warship as they were sailing to plead the cause of intervention in London
and Paris; the London press became hysterical with rage, and the anti-Union
group in the cabinet saw their chance to start a transatlantic war. This study
draws not only upon the British Admiralty archives in the Public Record Office,
but also on the papers of Admiral Sir Alexander Milne in the National Maritime
Museum at Greenwich. Bourne depicts the British predicament as their
“defenceless” position in Canada, even with the help of the 10,000 additional
regular infantry which Palmerston deployed in response to the crisis. (Bourne
211) A recurrent British fear was that their soldiers would desert to the
American side, urged on by “crimps.” (Bourne 217). Their Canadian
vulnerability, the British thought, encouraged Seward and others to twist the
tail of the British lion. The US had the only serious warships on the Great
Lakes, British fortifications were weak, Canadian volunteers were scarce, and
there were few decent muskets for them. The greatest problem was that the Saint
Lawrence River was blocked by ice in winter, preventing re-enforcements from
reaching Quebec City by water; the only roads inland went dangerously parallel
to the Maine border. Some of the British staff officers had to land in Boston
and take the Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal. [4] One is left with the impression that winter ice
might have cooled Palmerston’s aggressivity even before Seward’s release of the
captured Confederate envoys Mason and Slidell did.
Admiralty Plans to Bombard and Burn
Boston and New York
The heart of the British strategy in
case of war was “overwhelming naval strength based on a few select fortresses,”
especially Bermuda and Halifax (in today’s Nova Scotia). (Bourne 208) British
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston dispatched a powerful squadron of eight ships of
the line and thirteen frigates and corvettes under Admiral Milne to the western
Atlantic, and wanted to use the Great Eastern, the largest ship in
the world, as a troop transport. London even considered ways to foment
secession in Maine. Bombarding and burning both Boston and New York was
actively considered as a contingency; it was concluded that the reduction of
Boston would be very difficult because of the channels and forts; New York was
seen as more vulnerable, especially to a surprise attack. An Admiralty
hydrographer saw New York City as “the true heart of [US] commerce, — the
centre of …maritime resources; to strike her would be to paralyse all the
limbs.” (Bourne 240)
New US Monitors Deterred the British
Fleet
By the time spring of 1862 came, the Monitor had
come on the scene, further complicating British intervention. The Royal Navy
had ironclads, but they were only usable in deep water. Bourne aptly notes that
“the American monitors might have played havoc with any attempt by the older
wooden frigates to maintain a close blockade” of Union ports. (Bourne 240) As
more vessels of the Monitor type were produced by the US, this
aspect of the British predicament became even more acute. The point of
detailing these facts here is to suggest the existence of a fascinating array
of neglected issues. Crook at least sketches this strategic picture before he
falls back on the maudlin tradition that it was the dying Prince Albert who was
instrumental in restraining Palmerston’s jingoism and avoiding war. Crook also
recognizes that in any warlike denouement to the Trent affair,
“world-shaking trading and political alignments would be forged.” (136)
Howard Jones, in his account of
Anglo-American relations written just after the Thatcher era and the end of the
Cold War, pays very little attention to the salient military aspects of the
Atlantic situation. Jones offers a limited and legalistic interpretation of the
threat of British intervention. He calls “special attention” to the fact that
“the most outspoken opponent” of intervention in the British cabinet was the
Secretary for War, George Cornewall Lewis. This role emerged through public
speeches and cabinet memoranda issued in the wake of Gladstone’s well-known
speech in praise of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy at Tyneside on October
7, 1862. However, the role of Lewis had already been highlighted at some length
by Crook, who classified Lewis as “one of the ‘do-nothing’ school rather than a
partisan,” and possibly urged on by Palmerston for invidious reasons. (Crook
233) Jones argues that “the great majority of British interventionists were not
malevolent persons who wanted the American republic to commit national suicide
so they might further their own ends; they wanted to stop the war for the sake
of humanity in general and British textile workers in particular.” (Jones 8 )
It is hard to ascribe such humanitarian motives to a group of politicians who
had, according to contemporary accounts, recently shocked the world by their
murderous atrocities carried out during the repression of the Sepoy Mutiny in
India. Jones regards Lewis’s memoranda more as legal briefs rather than
strategic estimates: “Lewis knew that they key person he had to dissuade from
intervention was Russell. He also knew that the foreign secretary relied on
history and international law to justify his stand and that the only way to
undermine his argument for intervention was to appeal to that same history and
international law.” (Jones 224) This analysis does not capture what actually
went on in the brutal deliberations of the dominant power politicians and
imperialists of the age, who were more impressed by American monitors and by
Russian infantry divisions than by legalistic niceties or high ideals. Given
this emphasis, it is not surprising that Jones has little interest in the
Russian aspect of the problem, although he does concede that “Russia’s
pro-Union sentiment prevented participation in any policy alien to the Lincoln
Administration’s wishes.” (Jones 228)
The Union and Russia
The Russian-British rivalry was of
course the central antagonism of European history after the Napoleonic era, and
the Russian attitude towards London coincided with the traditional American
resentment against the former colonial power. Benjamin Platt Thomas’s older
study shows that the US-Russian convergence became decisive during the Crimean
War; while Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia, the United
States was ostentatiously friendly to the court of St. Petersburg. He depicts
Russian minister to Washington Éduard de Stoeckl as a diplomat “whose sole aim
was to nurture the chronic anti-British feeling in the United States.” (Thomas
111) According to Thomas, Stoeckl succeeded so well that there was even a
perceptible chance that the United States might enter the Crimean War on the
Russian side. The US press and public were all on the side of Russia, and
hostile to the Anglo-French, to the chagrin of the erratic US President Pierce
(who had been close to Admiralty agent Giuseppe Mazzini’s pro-British Young
America organization) and the doughface politician James Buchanan. The latter,
at that time US envoy to London, embraced the British view of the Tsar as “the
Despot.” (Thomas 117) Thomas finds that “the Crimean War undoubtedly proved the
wisdom of Russia’s policy of cultivating American friendship, and in fact, drew
the two nations closer together.” (Thomas 120) But Thomas glosses over some of
the more important US-UK frictions during this phase, which included British
army recruiting in the US, and the ejection of the British ambassador as persona
non grata. (Thomas 120)
Turning to the conflict of 1861-65,
Thomas points out that “in the first two years of the war, when its outcome was
still highly uncertain, the attitude of Russia was a potent factor in
preventing Great Britain and France from adopting a policy of aggressive
intervention.” (Thomas 129) He shows that the proposed British-French
interference promoted by Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, in October 1862
was “deterred at this time mainly” by the Russian attitude, and cites Russell’s
note to Palmerston concluding that Britain “ought not to move at present
without Russia.” [5] (Thomas 132)
The critical importance of Russian
help in deterring the British and Napoleon III as well is borne out by a closer
analysis. As early as 1861, Russia alerted the Lincoln government to the
machinations of Napoleon III, who was already scheming to promote a joint
UK-France-Russia intervention in favor of the Confederacy. [6] As Henry Adams, the son and private secretary of US
Ambassador to London Charles Francis Adams, sums up the strategic situation
during Lee’s first invasion of Maryland, on the eve of the Battle of Antietam:
These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented themselves to
the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on September 14, under the
impression that the President was about to be driven from Washington and the
Army of the Potomac dispersed, suggested to Russell that in such a case,
intervention might be feasible. Russell instantly answered that, in any case,
he wanted to intervene and should call a Cabinet for the purpose. Palmerston
hesitated; Russell insisted….” [7]
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln used
the Confederate repulse at Antietam to issue a warning that slavery would be
abolished in areas still engaged in rebellion against the United States on
January 1, 1863. The Russian Tsar Alexander II had liberated the 23 million
serfs of the Russian Empire in 1861, so this underlined the nature of the
US-Russian convergence as a force for human freedom. This imminent Emancipation
Proclamation was also an important political factor in slowing Anglo-French
meddling, but it would not have been decisive by itself. The British cabinet,
as Seward had predicted, regarded emancipation as an act of desperation. The London
Times accused Lincoln in lurid and racist terms of wanting to provoke
a slave rebellion and a race war,
Gladstone’s Open Hostility to the
United States, October 7, 1862
On October 7, 1862, despite the news
that the Confederates had been repulsed at Antietam, the British Chancellor of
the Exchequer William Gladstone, who spoke for Lord John Russell, pressed for
British intervention against the Union and on the side of the Confederacy in a
speech at Tyneside, saying: “. . . We know quite well that the people of the
Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup [of defeat and partition] — they
are still trying to hold it far from their lips — which all the rest of the
world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about
slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that
Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are
making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they
have made a nation… We may anticipate with certainty the success of the
Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North”. [8]
It was practically a declaration of
war against the Lincoln government, and it also contained a lie, since
Gladstone knew better than most that the only navy the Confederacy ever had was
the one provided with British connivance.
On October 13, 1862 Lord John Russell
called a meeting of the British cabinet for October 23, with the top agenda
item being a deliberation on the “duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the
most friendly and conciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of arms.” [9] Russell wanted an ultimatum to Washington and
Richmond for an armistice or cease-fire, followed by a lifting of the Union
blockade of southern ports, followed then by negotiations leading to
Washington’s recognition of the CSA as an independent state. If the Union
refused, then Britain would recognize the CSA and in all probability begin
military cooperation with the Confederates.
US Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
asked Russell in advance of the October 23 cabinet meeting what he had in mind.
As his son and private secretary Henry Adams recounts, “On October 23, Russell
assured Adams that no change in policy was now proposed. On the same day he had
proposed it, and was voted down.” Henry Adams was doubtless correct in his
impression that “every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to November, 1862,
showed the clearest determination to break up the Union.” [10]
At this point, Napoleon III of France
invited London to join him in a move against the Union. According to Adams’
memoir, “Instantly Napoleon III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone
with a proposition which had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to
replace America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence on Europe, and to
replace England in her old sovereignty of the seas, if Palmerston would support
France in Mexico…. The only resolute, vehement, conscientious champion of
Russell, Napoleon III, and Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.” [11] Napoleon III had conferred with the Confederate
envoy Slidell and proposed that France, England, and Russia impose a six-month
armistice on the US and CSA. Napoleon III believed that if Lincoln did not
accept his intrusion, this would provide a pretext for Anglo-French recognition
of the CSA, followed by military intervention against the Union. [12] There was no real hope of getting pro-Union Russia
to join such an initiative, and the reason Napoleon III included Russia was
merely as camouflage to cloak the fact that the whole enterprise was a hostile
act against Washington.
Russia Rejects the Anglo-French
Intrigues for Interference
The clouds of world war gathered
densely over the planet. Russell and Gladstone, now joined by Napoleon III,
continued to demand aggressive meddling in US affairs. This outcome was avoided
because of British and French fears of what Russia might do if the continued to
launch bellicose gestures against the Union. On October 29, 1862 there occurred
in St. Petersburg an extremely cordial meeting of Russian Foreign Minister
Gortchakov with US chargé d’affaires Bayard Taylor, which was marked by a
formal Russian pledge never to move against the US, and to oppose any attempt
by other powers to do so. Taylor reported these comments by Gortchakov to the
State Department: “You know the sentiments of Russia. We desire above all
things the maintenance of the American Union as one indivisible nation. We
cannot take any part, more than we have done. We have no hostility to the
Southern people. Russia has declared her position and will maintain it. There
will be proposals of intervention [by Britain and France]. We believe that
intervention could do no good at present. Proposals will be made to Russia to
join some plan of interference. She will refuse any intervention of the kind.
Russia will occupy the same ground as at the beginning of the struggle. You may
rely upon it, she will not change. But we entreat you to settle the difficulty.
I cannot express to you how profound an anxiety we feel — how serious are our
fears.” [13]
The Journal de St.
Petersbourg, the official gazette of the Tsarist government, denounced the
Anglo-French intervention plan against the US, which had been inspired by
Russell. This article helped prevent a wider war: the British cabinet, informed
of the Russian attitude by telegraph, voted down Russell’s aggressive project.
Russell made his last bid to swing the British cabinet in favor of a policy of
interference together with Napoleon III against the Union on November 12, 1862,
but he was unable to carry the day, and this turned out to be his last chance
for the year.
Seward thought that if the
Anglo-French were to assail the Union, they would soon find themselves at war
with Russia as well. He wrote to John Bigelow early in the war: “I have a
belief that the European State, whichever one it may be, that commits itself to
intervention anywhere in North America, will sooner or later fetch up in the
arms of a native of an oriental country not especially distinguished for
amiability of manners or temper.” (Thomas 128)
Adams to Russell: Superfluous to
Point Out this Means War
The summer of 1863, despite the news
of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, was marked by another close brush with US-UK war.
It was on September 5, 1863 that US Ambassador Charles Francis Adams told Lord
Russell that if the Laird rams – powerful ironclad warships capable of breaking
the Union blockade which were then under construction in England — were allowed
to leave port, “It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship
that this is war.” [14] Lord Russell had to pause, and then backed off
entirely. The Laird rams were put under surveillance by the British government
on September 9, and finally seized by the British government in mid-October,
1863. (Adams II 147) They never fought for the Confederacy.
A revolt against Russian domination
of Poland, incited by the British, started in 1863 and lasted into late 1864.
Crook points out that it was Lord Russell who told Lord Lyons in March 1863
that the Polish issue had the potential to create a Russo-American common front
and thus revolutionize world power relations, evidently to the detriment of
London. (Crook 285) Such a prophecy was coherent with the then -fashionable
ideas of de Tocqueville about Russia and America as the two great powers of the
future.
The Russian Fleets in New York and
San Francisco
The most dramatic gestures of
cooperation between the Russian Empire and the United States came in the autumn
of 1863, as the Laird rams crisis hung in the balance. On September 24, the
Russian Baltic fleet began to arrive in New York harbor. On October 12, the
Russian Far East fleet began to arrive in San Francisco. The Russians, judging
that they were on the verge of war with Britain and France over the
British-fomented Polish insurrection of 1863, had taken this measure to prevent
their ships from being bottled up in their home ports by the superior British
fleet. These ships were also the tokens of the vast Russian land armies that
could be thrown in the scales on a number of fronts, including the northwest
frontier of India; the British had long been worried about such an eventuality.
In mid-July 1863, French Foreign Minister Droun de Lhuys was offering London
the joint occupation of Poland by means of invasion. But the experience of the
Confederate commerce raiders had graphically illustrated just how effective
even a limited number of warships could be when they turned to commerce raiding,
which is what the Russian naval commanders had been ordered to do in case of
hostilities. The Russian admirals had also been told that, if the US and Russia
were to find themselves at war with Britain and France, the Russian ships
should place themselves under Lincoln’s command and operate in synergy with the
US Navy against the common enemies. It is thus highly significant that the
Russian ships were sent to the United States.
US Navy Secretary Gideon Welles: “God
Bless the Russians”
Coming on the heels of the bloody
Union reverse at Chickamauga, the news of the Russian fleet unleashed an
immense wave of euphoria in the North. It was this moment that inspired the
later verses of Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most popular writers in
America, for the 1871 friendship visit of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis:
Bleak are our shores with the blasts
of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow; Thrilling and warm are
the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe. Fires
of the North in eternal communion, Blend your broad flashes with evening’s
bright star; God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union Strength to her
people! Long life to the Czar! [15]
The Russians, as Clay reported to
Seward and Lincoln, were delighted in turn by the celebration of their fleets,
which stayed in American waters for over six months as the Polish revolt was
quelled. The Russian officers were lionized and feted, and had their pictures
taken by the famous New York photographer Matthew Brady. When an attack on San
Francisco by the Confederate cruiser Shenandoahseemed to be
imminent, the Russian admiral there gave orders to his ships to defend the city
if necessary. There were no major Union warships on the scene, so Russia was
about to fight for the United States. In the event, the Confederate raider did
not attack. Soon after the war, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, in
part because they felt that an influx of Americans searching for gold was
inevitable, and in part to keep the British from seizing control of this vast
region. Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “The
Russian fleet has come out of the Baltic and is now in New York, or a large
number of the vessels have arrived…. In sending them to this country at this
time there is something significant.” Welles was fully justified in his famous
concluding words, “God bless the Russians!” [16]
This exceedingly cordial
Russo-American friendship set the tone of much nineteenth-century
historiography; Thomas indicates that a darker view of Russian motivation began
to be heard around 1915 with the work of Professor Frank A. Golder, who
emphasized that the Russians were only following their own national interests. [17] According to Thomas, it was “not until Professor
Golder published the result of his researches that the matter was finally
cleared up and those who were less gullible were found to be correct.” (Thomas
138) Surely no one needs to be reminded that great nations defend their
national interests. Disinterested philanthropists are admittedly rare in
foreign ministries. However, when the interests converge, alliance de
jure or de facto may result, and these can have
far-reaching significance. During the American Civil War, the Russian attitude
was the most powerful outside factor deterring Anglo-French interference. The
need of Russia to prepare its own defenses during the Polish crisis of 1863 was
perfectly legitimate and a secret to no one. Nevertheless, Thomas feels
compelled to harp repeatedly on point that “the policy of Russia was dictated
solely by self-interest.” (Thomas 127)
For Crook, the visiting squadrons
were not a fleet, but a “fleet,” and a “not very seaworthy” one at that. In his
view, the entire matter can be written off as “popular hysteria” and
“folklore”. (Crook 317) The attempt to play down the Russian angle is evident.
When Simon Cameron is sent to St. Petersburg as US Ambassador, Woldman and
others can see nothing in this but an “exile in Siberia.” (Woldman 115) Another
favorite target is Cassius Clay, the very capable US Ambassador to Russia for
most of the Civil War (apart from the brief Simon Cameron interlude). Crook
retails Bayard Taylor’s crack to Horace Greeley that Clay was “better suited to
the meridian of Kentucky than of St. Petersburg.” (Crook 44) In reality, St.
Petersburg was on a par with London as one of the two most sensitive and
important diplomatic posts the Union had. Cassius Clay, who called himself a
“remote relative” of Lincoln’s great American System mentor Henry Clay, was a
distinguished American diplomat who played a critical role in saving the Union.
Another important US diplomat of the time was the Bostonian John Lothrop
Motley, who became a friend of the future Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck
while studying at the University of Goettingen. Motley served in US legation in
St. Petersburg and from 1861-1867 as the US minister to the Austrian Empire,
and later wrote an important biography of Oldenbarneveld, the father of the
Dutch Republic, and other studies of Dutch history.
Woldman, at the height of the Cold
War, devoted an entire book to denigrating the importance of the US-Russian
entente cordiale and of the Russian fleet in particular. In addition to Golder,
he cites Professor E. A. Adamov as a key precursor of his views. [18] For Woldman, the Russia of 1863 was already an
international pariah, “the most hated nation in Europe,” whose policy reflected
“no concern or friendship for the United States.” At the hands of Woldman, the
well-established Russo-American amity of the 1850s, 1860s, and beyond is
reduced to a “myth.” (Woldman, 156-7) This is not history, but propaganda laced
with bile.
Russian friendship provided an
economic as well as a military brake on the Anglo-French. Statistics provided
by Crook show that in 1861-64, the US and Russia together provided more half or
more of all Britain’s wheat imports (16.3 million cwt out of a total of 30.8 in
1863). In case of war with either the US and Russia (and a fortiori in case of
war with both), the British would have faced astronomical bread prices,
insufficient supply, and an overall situation of famine which would have been
conducive to serious internal revolt against the privileged classes — all in
all a situation which aristocrats and oligarchs like Palmerston, Russell and
Gladstone had to think twice about courting. King Wheat was therefore more
powerful than King Cotton. [19]
Confederate commerce raiders built
and fitted out with the help of the British had a devastating and long-lasting
effect. As Chester Hearn details, Confederate raiders fitted out in Europe,
including the Alabama, Shenandoah, and Florida, destroyed 110,000 tons of US
merchant shipping, and were factors in the transfer of 800,000 tons to foreign
registry, thus partially crippling the merchant marine of the North over
decades. [20] On July 11, 1863 Adams indicted London for “active
malevolence” on the question of the Laird rams, which were ironclad battleships
capable of breaking the blockade; as noted, on September 5 he told Foreign
Secretary John Russell, “It would be superfluous in me to point out to your
Lordship that this is war.” (Crook 324, 326) Forty years later, Henry Adams
remained “disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with growing energy,
to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of [US Ambassador] Adams’s whole
contention, that from the first he meant to break up the Union. [21]
Any international history must tackle
the question of the effectiveness of the Union blockade of Southern ports.
Crook does a workmanlike job of refuting the Owsley thesis that the blockade
was not effective. He reminds us that the statistics used by Owsley and Marcus
W. Price are far from conclusive. Crook suggests that the aggregate tonnages of
successful blockade runners need to be examined rather than simply the number
of ships getting through, since blockade runners were designed to sacrifice
cargo capacity for speed. He notes that many successful runs took place during
the first year of the war, “before the cordon tightened.” (Crook 174) Many
successful runs counted by Price were actually coastwise traders bound for
other parts of the Confederacy. “More realistic,” Crook sums up, “would be an
attempt to compare wartime clearances with pre-war figures.” (Crook 174) Using
Price’s figures for South Carolina, Crook suggests that the blockade may have
cut the number of ships leaving the ports of that state by one half during the
first year of the war, and by almost two thirds over 1862-1865. Crook’s finding
is that “modern naval opinion is inclined to the broad view that the blockade
achieved its major objectives by scaring off a potentially massive trade with
the south.” (Crook 174)
The British Working Class
A controversial issue linked to
Britain’s failure to intervene on the side of the Confederacy involves the
attitude of the British working classes, and the role of working class
resistance in deterring the Palmerston government from taking action against
the US. The traditional view, reflected during the war by contemporaries from
President Lincoln to Karl Marx, is that the textile workers of Lancashire,
despite the privations imposed on them by the cutoff of southern cotton
deliveries, nevertheless heroically supported the Union, especially once it had
become clear that this was the anti-slavery cause. This attitude by the British
workers was another factor in dissuading Palmerston from pursuing armed
intervention. [22]
Owsley, in his King Cotton Diplomacy, mocks any notion that the British working class
might have influenced the London cabinet in any way, writing contemptuously
that “the population of Lancashire and of all industrial England was
politically apathetic, sodden, ignorant, and docile, with the exception of a
few intelligent and earnest leaders. They wanted bread, they wanted clothes,
they needed medicines to give their sick children and aged parents, they wanted
pretty clothing for their daughters and sisters who were being forced into
prostitution.” (Owsley 545-6) But on this point as well, Owsley is blinded by
class prejudice and is thus highly vulnerable.
Philip Foner provides a useful
summary of this issue in his 1981British Labor and the American Civil
War. Foner starts from
the acknowledged fact that the British aristocracy was pro-Confederate. Free
traders like Cobden and Bright were momentarily antagonized by the Union’s
highly protectionist Morrill Tariff of February 1861 (passed the instant the
southerners had left the Congress); the Liberals in general were split. But
this leaves out the working classes altogether, who remained disenfranchised
and alienated from the party structures. He takes issue with the school of
writers who claim that British labor was actually sympathetic to the
Confederacy. Foner dates the attempt to revise the traditional view of British
labor as pro-Union especially from a 1957 article by Royden Harrison of the
University of Warwick, which argued that the older thesis was a “legend”;
Harrison based his view on an analysis of the labor press, where he discovered
that “working-class newspapers and journals were, on the whole, hostile to the
Federals” both before and after the Emancipation Proclamation. [23] (Foner 15) Harrison adduced evidence from such
papers as Reynolds’ News and the Bee-Hive, which
were sympathetic to the Confederacy. Foner calls special attention to a second
article by Harrison, published four years later, which seemed to repudiate much
of the first article. Writing in 1961, Harrison found that “from the end of
1862, there is overwhelming evidence to support the view that the great
majority of politically conscious workmen were pro-Federal and firmly united to
oppose war.” [24] Foner points out that subsequent historians have
often cited Harrison’s first article while ignoring his subsequent retractions
and qualifications. In Foner’s view, the “apex of revisionist historiography”
on this issue came in 1973 with the appearance of Mary Ellison’s Support for Secession: Lancashire
and the American Civil War, with an epilogue by Peter d’A. Jones. [25] Ellison’s
conclusion was that the workers of the Lancashire textile mills were
pro-Southern, suspicious of Lincoln, and adamant for British action to break
the Union blockade and save the Confederacy. Peter d’A. Jones seconded her
efforts, dismissing the older view as (yet another) “myth.” Foner criticizes
Ellison’s handling of the evidence in blunt terms. “Ellison’s methodology in
proving her thesis is simplicity personified,” writes Foner. “It is to assert
repeatedly that pro-Northern meetings were contrived, while pro-Southern
gatherings were spontaneous.” (Foner 20) For Foner, pro-Confederate sentiment
was limited to certain limited types of labor functionaries and to newspaper
publishers, who were sometimes suspected of being on the Confederate payroll.
Foner shows how the pro-Union agitation, in which British intelligence asset
Karl Marx had to participate to keep any credibility along the workers of
England and the continent, eventually lead to the extension of the British
franchise through the Reform Bill of 1867.
More recent research would seem to
decide this controversy in favor of Foner and the traditional view. R. J. M.
Blackett of the University of Houston published an extensive study of how the
British public viewed the American conflict, with significant attention for the
problem of working class attitudes. Blackett’s study is largely based on the
British press, from the London Times to the Bee-Hive to
the Confederate-controlled Index. The result is a detailed analysis
which in some ways approximates the methods of social history, albeit in regard
to a distinctly political topic. Blackett’s title, Divided Hearts,
relates to his finding that British society as a whole split over the Civil
War. “The Tories were with the Confederacy, so too were the Whigs, but among
Liberals there were deep divisions, enough to undermine the unity and strength
of the party.” (Blackett 11) After some initial hesitation, Cobden and Bright
took up the cudgels for the Union. Free traders were alienated by the Morrill
tariff, while abolitionists were unhappy with Lincoln, especially until the end
of 1862. British Garrisonians split over whether the Union was worth saving.
There was a crisis in the British anti-slavery movement over whether they had
lost their old vim of the West Indies abolition era. Literary men like Trollope
endorsed the government in Richmond, and Thomas Carlyle’s racism made him a CSA
sympathizer; others backed the Union. Chartists split, with Ernest Jones
supporting the Union, while most Chartist leaders favored the South. The Church
of England went with the South, while Dissenting ministers favored the North.
Quakers divided over whether slavery could be extirpated by violence. The
overall impression is that the American war stimulated an active politicization
which the privileged orders could hardly have welcomed.
Confederate and Union agents were
active in Britain, Blackett shows. The Confederate factotum was James Spence,
an indefatigable activist who wrote articles, set up organizations, hired
speakers, and bribed journalists. Spence was the author of The American Union, a best-selling apology for the Confederacy. Spence’s
prize recruit was Joseph Barker, who enjoyed the confidence of working class
audiences because of his earlier agitation for working-class causes. Among the
elite, a leading pro-Confederate was A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, the brother in
law of Lord Robert Cecil of the celebrated and influential political clan,
which was itself anti-Union. An energetic Confederate agent was Henry Hotze,
who published the pro-Confederate weekly, the Index.
Pro-Confederate organizations included the Society for Promoting the Cessation
of Hostilities in America, the Southern Independence Association, the Liverpool
Southern Club, the Manchester Southern Club, and others.
The pro-Lincoln operative Thurlow
Weed provided money and encouragement for friends of the North during a visit
early in the war. On the Union side, there were working-class activists like
George Thompson. Black Americans like Frederick Douglass, William Andrew
Jackson (the former coachman of Jefferson Davis), J. Sella Martin, and others
(Blackett provides a detailed list) were highly effective as lecturers on the
Union side. They were joined by Henry Ward Beecher and other touring lecturers.
Ambassador Charles Francis Adams restricted his own activity to the diplomatic
sphere, but encouraged his consuls to become very active on the political
front. Among the pro-Union groups were counted the Union and Emancipation
Society, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and more. Blackett
describes the way the contending forces attempted to operate through public
meetings and resolutions, using tactics that including packing the podium,
fixing the agenda, deceptively worded resolutions, parliamentary maneuvers,
rump sessions, goons, and intimidation. These meetings and the resolutions they
passed were regarded as being of great political importance. Blackett notes
that “Lincoln was so concerned that these resolutions express the right
sentiment that he crafted and had sent to Charles Sumner for transmission to
John Bright a set of resolutions that could be adopted by public meetings in
Britain.” (Blackett 209) Jefferson Davis, by contrast, took no personal
interest in such mass organizing.
Part of Blackett’s project is to
evaluate the Ellison revisionist thesis. He tests Ellison’s assertions of
pro-Confederate sentiment in representative towns like Ashton and Stalybridge,
and finds that “distress did not drive the towns’ textile workers to declare in
favor of an independent Confederacy.” (Blackett 175) Blackett’s survey of
meetings further concludes that “if public gatherings can be used to measure
levels of activity and support, then over the country as a whole the
Confederacy was at a distinct disadvantage.” (Blackett 198) Even in the textile
mill towns of Lancashire, Blackett finds substantial support for the Union. He
concludes that “if…the adoption of resolutions are [sic] reasonably accurate
indicators of levels of support, then it appears that Ellison has exaggerated
the degree to which meetings in Lancashire voted in support of the
Confederacy.” And if “in Lancashire the opposing forces seem to be equally
divided, the rest of the country voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Union…All
the indications are that…even in Lancashire, where Spence and his co-workers
had hoped to exploit the crisis to rally support for the Confederacy, the
friends of the Union carried the day.” (Blackett 210-212)
Charles Francis Adams wrote to Seward
on June 9, 1864 that the British aristocracy was hostile to the Union because
“of the fear of the spread of democratic feeling at home in the event of our
success.” (Adams II 300) The Civil War awakened the British working class to
the degree that Bright in 1866 was able to convince Gladstone that at least
part of the urban working class had to be given the vote. Through interaction
with Disraeli, the Reform Bill of 1867 was passed; the reactionary romantic
Carlyle complained that this was “shooting Niagara.” Foner shows that the
measure was due in large part to the agitations unleashed by American events.
The formation of the federation of Canada in 1867 was another postwar result.
Crook, to his credit, grapples with
the issue of why the Union never attempted after 1865 to use its preponderant
power to settle scores with the European powers who had proven hostile,
especially Britain. He writes that “one of the puzzles of Civil War history is
to explain why the immense anger generated against foreign foes during the war
was not translated into expansionist revenge after Appomattox.” (Crook 361) Grant’s
and Sherman’s armies were the most effective in the world, and Gideon Welles’
navy was at least among the top three, and most likely preponderant on the
coasts of Canada, Mexico, and Cuba, the likely sites of northern revanche.
Foner sees a brush with transatlantic war in 1869-70, before the British
finally agreed to pay the Union’s claims for damages to compensate the
depredations of theAlabama and the other CSA commerce raiders built
by the British. But Lincoln had promised an exhausted nation an end to warfare,
and this proved to be the last word.
The British government and
aristocracy wanted to split the Union; as long as the Confederates were winning
successes on the battlefield, they felt they could bide their time as the US
further weakened, thus facilitating intervention if required. The twin Confederate
disasters of Gettysburg and Vicksburg on July 3-4, 1863 came as a rapid and
stunning reverse, and the arrival of the Russian fleets that same summer on
both US coasts radically escalated the costs of Anglo-French military meddling.
Shortly thereafter, the Danish War of 1864 placed Bismarck’s moves towards
German unification at the center of the European and world stage, making it
even less likely that the British could tie their own hands by a risky strike
against the Union. At the same time, Bismarck’s growing activism made Napoleon
III – fearing the Prussian threat — less and less likely to denude his eastern
border of troops in order to employ them for intervention in the New World.
These factors, and not the moderation or humanitarianism of Palmerston,
Russell, or Gladstone, prevented an Anglo-French attack on the United States
and, quite possibly, on Russia.
If the British had attacked the
United States during the Civil War, this move might well have ushered in a
world war in which the United States, Russia, Prussia and perhaps Italy would
have been arrayed against Great Britain, France, Spain, and perhaps the
Portuguese and Austrian Empires. There is reason to believe that the
US-Russia-Prussia coalition would have prevailed. This war might have destroyed
the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial empires almost a century
early, and would have made the later creation of the triple entente of Britain,
France, and Russia by British King Edward VII impossible. World War I would
have taken place during the 1860s rather than half a century later. Fascism and
communism might not have occurred in the form they did. As it was, Lincoln fell
victim to an assassination plot in which British intelligence, through Canada
and other channels, played an important role. Alexander II was killed in 1881
by Russian terrorists of the London-centered post-Bakunin anarchist networks.
==
Bibliography
Adams, Ephraim Douglas. Great Britain
and the American Civil War. London: Longmans, Green, 1925. 2 vols. Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee
Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Blackburn, George M. French Newspaper
Opinion and the American Civil War. Westport CN: Greenwood, 1997. Blackett, R. J. M. Divided Hearts: Britain
and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2001. Bourne, Kenneth. Britain and the Balance
of Power in North America 1815-1908. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967. Callahan, James Morton. The Diplomatic
History of the Southern Confederacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1901;
reprint New York: Greenwood, 1968. Clay, Cassius. The Life of Cassius
Marcellus Clay. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Crook, D. P. The North, the South, and
the Powers 1861-1865. New York: John Wiley, 1974. Foner, Philip S. British Labor and the
American Civil War. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981. Hearn, Chester G. Gray Raiders of the
Sea How Eight Confederate Warships Destroyed the Union’s High Seas Commerce.
Camden ME: International Marine Publishing, 1992. Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The
Crisis Over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1992. Nevins, Allan. The War for the Union.
New York: Scribner, 1960. 2 vols. Owsley, Frank Lawrence. King Cotton Diplomacy:
Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1959. Second edition. Thomas, Benjamin Platt. Russo-American
Relations 1815-1867. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930. Woldman, Albert A. Lincoln and the
Russians. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1952.
[1] Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of
Central State Authority in America, 1859, 1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
[2] Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History(London: G. Bell, 1968), pp. 3-4.
[3] For Seward, see Jones, 88.
[4] Bourne glosses over the embarrassing moment when the
British were obliged to request permission to have their troops transit US
territory. (232n). Fletcher Pratt, in his perennially popular account evoked it
as follows: “With a final touch of ingenious irony the Secretary of State
offered England the use of Portland, Maine as an entrepôt for the Canadian
army; it was winter and so much more convenient than sending them up the
ice-bound St. Lawrence.” SeeA Short History of the Civil War (New York 1935; reprint New York: Dover, 1997),
47.
[5] This can be contrasted with Jones’ view that
“British neutrality remained the chief guarantee against intervention, and yet
this reality continued to escape observers in the North….” (Jones, 99)
[6] John Watson Foster, A Century of American Diplomacy,
1776-1876 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1900), p. 372.
[7] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
[8] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
[9] Ibid.
[10] The Education of Henry Adams -by- Henry
Adams; 10. Political Morality 1862.
[11] Ibid.
[12] See “Mr. Slidell’s Conference with Napoleon III,” New
York Times, November 22, 1862, with a despatch dated Paris, November 7
noting that “Mr. SLIDELL, the agent of the rebellion at Paris, has at length
and for the first time, obtained an interview with the Emperor.”
[13] US Department of State, Papers relating to
the foreign relations of the United States, Bayard Taylor to Secretary Seward,
October 29,1862 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), Part II, p.
764.
[14] The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Cosmo, 2007) p. 163.
[15] See Holmes, Poems (Boston, 1880), p. 256. In August,
1866 a US Navy monitor had visited St. Petersburg, occasioning Holmes’ verses:
“A nation’s love in tears and smiles/We bear across the sea, /O Neva of the
banded isles, /We moor our hearts in thee!” See Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 198-200.
[16] The Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), September 25,
1863, vol. I, p. 443.
[17] See Frank A. Golder, “The Russian Fleet and the American
Civil War,”
American Historical Review, XX.
[18] See E. A. Adamov, “Russia and the United States at the Time of the Civil War,” Journal of Modern History (II,
1930), 586-602.
[19] The acerbic Owsley dismisses wheat as “the scullion
in King Cotton’s kitchen or at most a buck private in the rear ranks of this
sovereign.” In any case, he argues, when it came to wheat “Great Britain’s
deficiencies could be easily supplied in many other places, including Poland,
Russia, and Prussia” Owsley does not seem to grasp that Poland and Russia were
part of the same empire, or that Bismarck’s Prussia might have driven a very
hard bargain with its limited production. (Owsley 545, 548).
[20] Bensel, who pays systematic attention to economic
factors, agrees that Confederate commerce raiders caused Union vessels to pay
higher insurance rates and change to foreign registry. The US merchant marine,
he notes, “never recovered afterward.” (418n) Bensel cites George W. Dalzell, The Flight from the Flag: The
Continuing Effect of the Civil War upon the American Carrying Trade(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1940).
[21] ”The Education of Henry Adams -by- Henry Adams; 11. The Battle Of The Rams (1863)
[22] A debate within this debate is whether the main
problem of the Lancashire textile industry in 1861-62 was the lack of raw fiber
from the American south, or rather a glut resulting from overproduction and
overstocking. The glut thesis was advanced by Eugene A. Brady in 1962, and was
supported by Foner and Crook.
[23] See Royden Harrison, “British Labour and the
Confederacy,” International Review of Social History II (1957),
78-79.
[24] See Royden Harrison, “British Labour and American
Slavery,” Science and Society XXV (1961), 315-316, cited by
Foner (16).
[25] Chicago, 1972; see Foner, 19.
The articles on Voltaire Network may
be freely reproduced provided the source is cited, their integrity is respected
and they are not used for commercial purposes (license CC BY-NC-ND).
Source : “U.S. Civil War: The
US-Russian Alliance that Saved the Union”, by Webster G. Tarpley, Voltaire Network, 25 April 2011,www.voltairenet.org/article169488.html
No comments:
Post a Comment