Lincoln's Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months that Gave America the Emancipation

[Wild Bill]

The key is in Sept 1863, when the British refused to allow the Laird Rams to leave Birkenhead shipyards. The settlement of the Alabama Claims in 1871 in the US favor proves the point, as does the settlement of the San Juan Islands dispute in Puget Sound (Seattle), as referred by Kaiser Wilhelm I. An angry USA was not in British interest in the future