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What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

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Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#81

Post by watwut »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #56
caublestone wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deter…

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.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#82

Post by inglor_cz »

bee_rider wrote: post #66
Animats wrote: post #15

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 militar…

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.

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.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#83

Post by berdario »

edgyquant wrote: post #64
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deter…

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 si…

> 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.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#84

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #43
mistrial9 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Qing dynasty (i.e., China), which had just put down a massive rebellion, probably had many times that number of men under arms.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#85

Post by inglor_cz »

tokai wrote: post #12
trynumber9 wrote: post #6

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.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#86

Post by threatofrain »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #56
caublestone wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deter…

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.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#87

Post by jacquesm »

edgyquant wrote: post #65
spywaregorilla wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> like in Roman history, where the income of entire villages was only enough to field one Calvary soldier

What an interesting data point.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#88

Post by carrionpigeon »

Hayvok wrote: post #37

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 confli…

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.

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#89

Post by wilkestelephone »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #74

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 tho…

What am I reading here?

Re: What did British officers think of the American civil war as it was happening?

#90

Post by SemanticStrengh »

berdario wrote: post #83
edgyquant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

> 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…

> 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

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