How bad does the American civil war need to get to force European intervention?

That is what happened when the Trent package was stopped and the confederate diplomats removed.

the USN captains actions were disavowed and the Diplomats allowed to continue
Their trip.

However If the Diplomats had not been returned then Britain would have declaimed war. Orders for which had already been sent to the fleet and the ambassador.

Which is why they returned the diplomats. The Union realized that allowing a few Confederate diplomats to go on their trip was a small price to pay for keeping Britain out of the war. It would be monumentally stupid of them not to return the diplomats, and I'm not seeing the evidence that these were monumentally stupid men.
 
Furthermore I have trouble seeing what the British and French gain from all this. The only advantage is splitting America up before it becomes a superpower, but in the 1860s the idea of America being far more powerful than France or especially Britain would sound as crazy as humans living on the Sun sounds to us.

Actually a lot of people at that time recognized that the United States was an emerging power. Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted a generation earlier that the U.S. and Russia would be the two dominant nations of the future. By 1860, the U.S. had expanded geographically to the Pacific, its economy was rapidly industrializing, and its population was 31 million, already larger than Britain/Ireland's, and not much smaller than France's.
 
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The title of this thread betrays an anachronistic late 20th/early 21st century perspective. In the mid 19th century, no one in Europe cared "how bad" the US civil war might get. There was no such thing as an "international community" nor any thought that anyone would contemplate military intervention to save Americans (northerners, southerners, slaves, or whoever) from the effects of war, massacres, concentration camps, brutality or any other wartime activity.

Also, the only European power with any vague reason to care what happens in the US was Britain...because of the possible impacts of the Civil War on Canada. As long as Americans were happy to just kill each other, let them at it. Only if some sort of threat emerged against British North America or other British interests would intervention make sense.
 
The war itself could bleed both sides dry and you'd only get a half-hearted offer of mediation by powers interested in preventing a total collapse of either combatant as trade partners, and this offer would be more than likely one which the Union would reject out of hand.

Neither of the two powers interested in the outcome (France and Britain) were going to intervene on their own, Britain would only intervene if she felt her neutral rights were threatened (along with BNA) while France would only follow suit if Britain did, and even then you can bet the most they would do would be offer naval assistance on the high seas since that directly aligns with their desires in Mexico.

Other than those two powers no one at the time has an interest in the conflict. It was very much an American affair, and the Confederates were very bad at diplomacy making their cause abroad one which was almost hopeless from the start barring some pretty dramatic butterflies.
 

fred1451

Banned
Didn't the Russian Fleet show up in NYC and San Francisco and offered to help? I believe the Union said, "Thanks, but no thanks."
 
Didn't the Russian Fleet show up in NYC and San Francisco and offered to help? I believe the Union said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

It wasn't so much they offered to help as the Tsar sent the Pacific Fleet on a highly publicized trip to San Francisco just as hostilities were breaking out. He wasn't quite saying he was lending naval support to the Union war effort but anyone with half a brain and a map could tell you having your fleet out of home ports means the British can't pen them up at anchor and ships based out of San Francisco can attack the British grain fleets bound from Australia. Seeing as Russia had been beaten by the British only four years previously, not happy with London, and was the friendliest of any foreign power to the US during the Civil War it isn't hard to see that as a clear gesture of support.

More broadly it's funny how the international situation never comes up in these threads. Britain was not acting in a vacuum in 1860. They deployed troops to the Yangtze Delta in the 1860s to protect commercial interests during the Taiping Rebellion. They had only just finished crushing the 1857 Sepoy Revolt in India, the crown jewel of the Empire, and were still reforming the administration in the subcontinent. France was busy mucking around in Mexico to little benefit for the French beyond making Napoleon III feel important. On top of this you have Prussia's growing influence making France nervous, Italian unification, the perpetual running sore that was Ireland, and Russia's close relationship with the United States during the 1860s. There were a whole host of good, realpolitik, geopolitical reasons why the British and the French weren't going to get involved in a civil war in the United States when their hands were already quite full maintaining their positions in much more crucial places.

You'd need the 1850s to look very different for the French (who weren't jumping in without British support) or the British to get involved in the American Civil War on any greater level than they did OTL. There's simply no good reason and too many geopolitical commitments that come with building world-spanning colonial empires for either power to really do terribly much beyond sell weapons to the CSA and wish them all the best.
 
The title of this thread betrays an anachronistic late 20th/early 21st century perspective. In the mid 19th century, no one in Europe cared "how bad" the US civil war might get. There was no such thing as an "international community" nor any thought that anyone would contemplate military intervention to save Americans (northerners, southerners, slaves, or whoever) from the effects of war, massacres, concentration camps, brutality or any other wartime activity.

Also, the only European power with any vague reason to care what happens in the US was Britain...because of the possible impacts of the Civil War on Canada. As long as Americans were happy to just kill each other, let them at it. Only if some sort of threat emerged against British North America or other British interests would intervention make sense.
while no one would intervene on purely humanitarian grounds, there was a reason for France to intervene... if the CSA won, the USA wouldn't have been able to interfere with their Mexican adventure. But they weren't about to do it alone, and Britain never took a side...
 
Didn't the Russian Fleet show up in NYC and San Francisco and offered to help? I believe the Union said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Contrary to popular belief, no. The Russian fleet was running so it wouldn't be trapped in case war broke out over the Polish issue. They knew their chances of taking on the RN and French fleet were pretty much zilch so wisely decided to husband their assets by hiding them in neutral ports to act as commerce raiders if necessary.

Though many Americans at the time (and today still do) believed this was a sign of potential military support, in reality it was merely an self-serving act of good will and military strategy which people read far more into than was actually there.
 
On top of this you have Prussia's growing influence making France nervous, Italian unification, the perpetual running sore that was Ireland, and Russia's close relationship with the United States during the 1860s.

I just have to quibble on this. For one thing Prussia was not the aggressive military power she became seen as until after 1866 when she delivered a serious beating to Austria which no one expected (if people really think the Prussians beating up on Denmark when they had the entirety of the German Confederation and the Austrian Empire behind them caused Europe to sit up and take notice they need to think again) and really caused the French to become nervous about their eastern border. Napoleon felt confident enough to stay in Mexico until 1866 after all.

As for Russia, they had a relationship which was preferable to Union victory, but precious little desire or ability to do anything if another European power started mucking around in North America. The emancipation of the serfs and the subsequent Polish-Lithuanian revolt and the fear that Finland would follow coupled with Gorchakov's dogged insistence on avoiding foreign entanglements would prevent any serious Russian intervention on the matter.

As for Ireland, many of the prominent Fenian leaders and sponsors happened to be tied up in America at the time of the Civil War so there wasn't much need to fear an uprising. And considering the remarkably poor showing those same Fenian leaders had when they were free to attempt such a thing it becomes clear that the movement was pretty far away from another even semi-successful uprising.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Little more to it than that;

Didn't the Russian Fleet show up in NYC and San Francisco and offered to help? I believe the Union said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

As has been said, the Russians sent two squadrons of cruising vessels (steam frigates, corvettes, and sloops-of-war, essentially), one of six ships (including at least three frigates) to New York and one of five to San Francisco, in October-November of 1863; coupled with the Russian cruisers on station in the Med and elsewhere, they certainly could have posed problems for the French if they (the French, that is) had (rather quixotically) intervened in support of the Polish rebellion in the same period.

The liklihood of the British doing anything about Poland in 1863 is about nil; they didn't intervene when the Baltic exits were actually threatened in 1864, so the idea they ever would have considered it seriously in 1863 over whose flag flew in Warsaw is pretty questionable.

That being said, the Russians kept their ships of the line and similar types at home in the Baltic, to pose a deterrent to any French desire to imitate Napier, Dundas et al in 1854-55 (although presumably the French Army could have provided the 10,000-strong landing force for a combined operation in the Baltic, unlike the British a decade earlier.)

Likewise, the Russian cruisers certainly would have been capable of doing Alabama-scale damage to the French merchant marine, and the fact the French had obliging sent the equivalent of a reinforced army corps to play round and round the rugged rocks with the Mexican nationalists probably had something to do with NIII's decision not to try and force the issues - especially with the de facto Russo-Prussian alliance of the Alvensleben agreement.

The Russians were in both US ports for their own purposes, but they were welcomed for obvious reasons, as well; and the Russians, in fact, indicated that any effort by a semi-pirate like the Alabama to threaten US or neutral interests in waters near either city would have been met with force. Popov, the commander of the Russian squadron in San Francisco, said as much; excess of zeal or not, it was said publicly.

One interesting question is if Brig. Gen. John Turchin could have made it to the party in NYC; he was commanding 3rd Brigade, 4th Division, XIV Corps, Army of the Cumberland that fall, but might have made an interesting envoy...;)

Here's the Disunion column:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/the-russians-are-coming/?_r=0

Some interesting details there, including (yet again) an illustration of the "US fought the Civil War with one hand behind its back" truism...

All those cooks and waiters...

Best,
 
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I just have to quibble on this. For one thing Prussia was not the aggressive military power she became seen as until after 1866 when she delivered a serious beating to Austria which no one expected (if people really think the Prussians beating up on Denmark when they had the entirety of the German Confederation and the Austrian Empire behind them caused Europe to sit up and take notice they need to think again) and really caused the French to become nervous about their eastern border. Napoleon felt confident enough to stay in Mexico until 1866 after all.

As for Russia, they had a relationship which was preferable to Union victory, but precious little desire or ability to do anything if another European power started mucking around in North America. The emancipation of the serfs and the subsequent Polish-Lithuanian revolt and the fear that Finland would follow coupled with Gorchakov's dogged insistence on avoiding foreign entanglements would prevent any serious Russian intervention on the matter.

As for Ireland, many of the prominent Fenian leaders and sponsors happened to be tied up in America at the time of the Civil War so there wasn't much need to fear an uprising. And considering the remarkably poor showing those same Fenian leaders had when they were free to attempt such a thing it becomes clear that the movement was pretty far away from another even semi-successful uprising.

But the British don't know all of these things and have these problems to worry about and France, while not worried about Prussia, might see the Prussians take advantage of a major trans-Atlantic commitment. Bismark was too ruthlessly opportunistic to pass up such an opportunity. Perception is often as critical, if not moreso, than the actual facts on the ground and a Britain that's facing an angry Russia, turmoil in Italy, Ireland as an ever-present problem, and on the continent Bismark and Prussia opposite from the French. A world war is unlikely but such perceptions, along with existing British commitments, would be factors in British decision-making along with their actual troop commitments.
 
But the British don't know all of these things and have these problems to worry about and France, while not worried about Prussia, might see the Prussians take advantage of a major trans-Atlantic commitment. Bismark was too ruthlessly opportunistic to pass up such an opportunity. Perception is often as critical, if not moreso, than the actual facts on the ground and a Britain that's facing an angry Russia, turmoil in Italy, Ireland as an ever-present problem, and on the continent Bismark and Prussia opposite from the French. A world war is unlikely but such perceptions, along with existing British commitments, would be factors in British decision-making along with their actual troop commitments.

Bismarck is not quite ascendant yet. In the window of British intervention (roughly November 1861 to August 1862) Bismarck is not even in power yet, even then he did not become fully the master of Prussian diplomacy until after Second Schleswig-Holstein War in 1864. He was very much fighting an uphill battle in 1863 to get where he would be.

Russia is quite unwilling to stick its nose into the general European issues (Gorchakov made that quite clear at every given opportunity, and the Russian fleet was quite unable to threaten British mastery of the seas) and with the Emancipation of the serfs has more than enough on its plate without getting involved in Europe as a whole. The Polish-Lithuanian problem would be the icing on the cake.

There wasn't really any turmoil in Italy that the British would need to be aware of, the Kingdom of Italy being an established fact by 1862.

Ireland has not seen unrest since 1848 and the main leaders of the Fenian cause are either abroad, in prison, or under surveillance.

Indeed from British records France seemed to be their biggest concern thanks to Napoleon III's erratic foreign policy. But this is something which is unfounded since Napoleon III maintained a very conciliatory policy towards London and had precisely zero reason not to do so since any action otherwise puts his foreign adventures at risk.

The only other British concern, the Taipings, have effectively shot their bolt.

What I mean to say is that in the window of any potential British (and French) direct intervention in the American Civil War, there are very few things which would indicate that they would have trouble at home or abroad which might interfere with a war in North America.

Even having the benefit of hindsight we can see fairly clearly that even if Britain and France became embroiled in the conflict there is very little the other European powers would be able or willing to do which might seriously distract either power from that endeavor.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Bismarck was named Minister-President in September, 1862

But the British don't know all of these things and have these problems to worry about and France, while not worried about Prussia, might see the Prussians take advantage of a major trans-Atlantic commitment. Bismark was too ruthlessly opportunistic to pass up such an opportunity. Perception is often as critical, if not moreso, than the actual facts on the ground and a Britain that's facing an angry Russia, turmoil in Italy, Ireland as an ever-present problem, and on the continent Bismark and Prussia opposite from the French. A world war is unlikely but such perceptions, along with existing British commitments, would be factors in British decision-making along with their actual troop commitments.

Bismarck was named Minister-President in September, 1862; he was given the post because he stood in Wilhelm's favor. By the spring of 1863, he was the second most powerful man in Prussia, which made his goal of taking the Austrians out of the mix in the contest between Prussia and Austria over which nation would control "Germany" pretty much the focus of the next decade or so in Central European history.

Given the realities of European power politics in the Nineteenth Century, and the lack of a treaty system until later, none of the European powers could afford to take their eyes off the ball - if one had, another would have considered taking advantage of it, whether overtly or not.

Abd with that simple observation, the ripples flow... no one can safely say where they could have led, anymore than anyone could have said where the events of 1789 or 1914 led a year before.

Best,
 
What about the St. Albans' Raid?

Even though it was late in the war, could it have prompted British intervention in the war?
 
Even though it was late in the war, could it have prompted British intervention in the war?

By 1864? Not a chance. The Confederacy was on it's last legs, cut in half, and almost totally blockaded and Atlanta had fallen. It also violated British neutrality at a point where much of the support for the Confederacy had waned, which won them no friends abroad.

Roughly the only time where there could have been intervention on behalf of the Confederate States from Europe was from November 1861 to September 1862.
 
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