CHAPTER LXXX.
ENGLAND AND RUSSIA IN OUR CIVIL WAR AND THE WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA AND JAPAN.[[7]]
[7]. Written for the North American Review, June 1904 issue, by Henry Clews.
There has recently been much discussion relative to the attitude of England and Russia towards the United States during our Civil War. This was provoked by the war between Russia and Japan, which caused the partisans of Russia here to contend that Americans ought to sympathize with Russia in the contest. They argued that Americans should do this because Japan has an alliance by treaty with England, and English sentiment was a good deal against the United States in our struggle, or rather in favor of the South as against the North, whereas Russia was on our side, and made us, in 1863, as they erroneously claim, an offer of naval assistance in the event of intervention by England and France.
It is very easy to assert, as it has long been asserted and by many believed, that Russia, in 1863, offered the United States Government the use of her ships of war that then came to the port of New York, and that this prevented, or may have prevented, England and France from recognizing the independence of the Southern Confederacy. But we have yet to learn that there is any record of such an official overture by Russia, either at St. Petersburg or at Washington; and there certainly would be one in both countries if the assertion was a fact instead of being wholly mythical.
Would Lincoln or Seward have left the country in ignorance of such an affair, or of any suggestion in that direction, if it had been officially made? It is a myth that hardly calls for contradiction. Such matters between nations cannot be kept secret, and the lapse of forty years since 1863 without revealing anything concerning the alleged orders, goes to prove that there were none of the kind, and that there was nothing to reveal. The Russian ships came here in 1863, just as the Russian fleet with the Grand-Duke Alexis came to New York in 1871, merely on a cruise.
That sentiment in England during the war was largely pro-Southern among the wealthy mercantile and manufacturing class is not to be disputed. But this resulted from the interruption of the cotton supply by the war and the blockade of the Southern ports, and from the loss of the South as a customer for British manufactures, involving much depression and distress. The shoe pinched very severely. Liverpool and Manchester, in particular, were great sufferers by the war, and smarted under the extinction, for the time being, of their Southern cotton supply and connections, and they were against the North largely because it had choked off this trade.[[8]]
[8]. I except, of course, the great excitement and commotion created in England by the seizure of Mason and Slidell, on November 7th, 1861, by Captain Wilkes of the U.S.S. “San Jacinto,” when the British Government demanded their release and an apology; but that was because we had violated the rights of a neutral vessel by taking them from the “Trent,” flying a British flag. We released them on that ground, and so at once ended the trouble that had threatened war. This was a special case of our provoking.
But this sentiment, this irritation, due to business conditions growing out of the war, was merely personal, and in no way involved the British Government, or reflected its leanings, opinions, or future policy. Liverpool and Manchester were, not unnaturally, sentimentally against the North, because it was, under the necessities of war, preventing the South from shipping its produce to England or importing British goods. That feeling of irritability against the North would have disappeared at any time with the resumption of trade with the South; and it did disappear as soon as the war ended and the Southern ports were reopened to commerce.
England’s American trade up to that time had been very much larger with the South than with the North, for cotton was much more truly “king” then than it is now; and, apart from grain and provisions, the export trade of the North was very small in comparison with its present great extent. Moreover, the wealth of the United States was small in proportion, and our social relations with England and the rest of Europe were not nearly as intimate and extensive as they have since become. We have learned to know each other much better in the interval.
We had not then begun to export beauty and fashion, largely in the shape of American heiresses, for the delight and enrichment of the aristocracy of the Old World, and we could boast of no such colossal individual fortunes as we can now.