Lincoln's Diplomacy

[Don1946]

(01-22-2014 10:27 PM)Anita Wrote:  Gene, I highy recommend this article "U.S. Civil War: The US-Russian Alliance that Saved the Union" by Webster G. Tarpley. It can be found at http://www.voltairenet.org/article169488.html

It's a wonderful example of Lincoln's brilliance in understanding the vulnerabilities of key world players to his advantage.

I was concerned after exploring Webster G. Tarpley's other writings on Amazon that this might be a little, shall I say, on the fringe, but he seems to have done a good job of digesting some of the older scholarship on the diplomacy of the Civil War.
Lincoln was not really involved in foreign policy and claims about his genius for it ought to be tempered by recognition of Seward's leading role in these matters. The two men worked well together. Theirs was a team of collaboration not rivalry, pace Doris Kearns Goodwin.
The Russian affair, the visiting of the fleet to NYC and San Francisco, is a fascinating story, and Russia's reluctance to join with Britain and France was important, but it exaggerates matters to say that Russia thwarted the 1862 plan for intervention. The British public recoiled from Gladstone's bombastic speech, Oct. 1862, foreshadowing British intervention. France went through a government crisis at the same time, thanks to Giuseppe Garibaldi and his march on Rome. Later, the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and the public embrace of that by early 1863 helped the US. The Polish uprising in January 1863, crushed by the Russians by the way, distracted Europe that winter and spring. The threat of intervention would resurface, but never with so much peril as in the autumn of 1862.