American Civil War - why did no one attack us?

[Bob55]

There seemed to be a few countries out there that had beef with America in the mid-1800s - Britain, Canada, France, Spain, Mexico...wouldn't the Civil War have given them the perfect opportunity to reclaim some lost land like the Southwestern US? I'm curious why no one decided to take a shot at America when it was at its weakest.

[RickJay]

There seemed to be a few countries out there that had beef with America in the mid-1800s - Britain, Canada, France, Spain, Mexico...wouldn't the Civil War have given them the perfect opportunity to reclaim some lost land like the Southwestern US? I'm curious why no one decided to take a shot at America when it was at its weakest.
Mexico was crippled by the Mexican War, in which about half their country had been stolen and the army decimated, and then had a civil war from 1857 to 1860.

Canada in 1861 was not an independent country and didn't have enough adult males to build an army big enough to hurt the United States.

Everyone else was on the other side of an ocean, and it's a hell of a job to mount a cross-Atlantic amphibious assault. The United States could have easily spared a few divisions to fight off a foreign invasion if necessary.

[Pushkin]

There's a book about this, "Stars and Stripes forever"?

[DrDeth]

Well, to a large exent- no one wanted to have it look like they were siding with Slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation made that issue something that couldn't be winked at. The people in France and Britian were strongly anti-slavery. The South had tied themselves inextrictably as pro-slavery (it was in their Constitition for gods sake). Oddly, the very issue* that caused them to seceed was the issue that caused them to have no real allies. The Governments of France and GB were less "noble"- they did make overtures and winked at pro-Southern violations of Neutrality. They wanted the cotton trade. However, after the Emancipation Proclamation, it would have been political suicide to suggest allying with the CSA.

As to other nations like Mexico- it could also have been that they knew we'd kick their ass. At the end of the Civil War, the Union was likely the strongest Military power on earth.

*Indeed, the causes of the Civil War were many and varied. Slavery, however, was the primary issue and the one issue there could be no longer be a compromise on. Yes, "states rights' was an issue- but the primary "right" those states wanted was the right to have slavery. For example the Southern St ates fought very hard against the "right" of Northern States to aid & abet run-away slaves. There were economic issues too, of course- mainly rooted in the slave-labour agricultural South, and the Industrial North.

[Dewey Finn]

Were any countries pro-slavery or did any countries endorse the Confederate cause after the Emancipation Proclamation?

[Exapno Mapcase]

There are several answers to this.

One is that the time to have attacked the U.S. was before the Civil War, not during it. Before the war our armed forces were in a state of near hibernation. Other than a few troops fighting Indians, the army was a sleepy backwater. Once the war started, however, we quickly put together the largest mechanized armies the world had ever seen. Why would anyone have wanted to fight us then?

Another is that the U.S. was always extremely fortunate to be a full ocean's width away from Asia and Europe. Getting an army to the southwest from Europe would have required sailing for over 10,000 miles, a ridiculous distance to transport troops in those days. And the U.S. Navy was busy patrolling the Atlantic to capture Confederate blockade runners.

Mexico was a possible source for an invasion, true. The problem was that it had itself just undergone a civil war of sorts. [A quick overview. (http://workmall.com/wfb2001/mexico/mexico_history_civil_war_and_the_french_intervention.html)] The European powers were more concerned about Juárez's suspension of payments to them, and England, France and Spain sent 10,000 to Mexico in 1862. Mexico City fell in 1863.

So why not use Mexico as a staging area? Mostly because of the final point: it would be insane. The U.S. was a major economic power by the 1860s. But it was more of an importer of European goods than an exporter to them. As such, the European powers had every reason to stay on good terms with the U.S. It was too distant to invade, had too many people in arms to be as easily overpowered as Mexico, and was sending them money for all sorts of goods by the barrelful.

Of what use was the barren southwest? At the time, absolutely none. The transcontinental railroad wouldn't be put through until after the war, you couldn't grow crops there, and few of the major metal ore strikes had yet been made. Worse, even if you might get a few thousand troops there by some devious route what happens when the war ends? Then the U.S. has a half million wildly angry soldiers ready to march across the country to exterminate those few soldiers in the middle of a waterless desert. And every other European power would be cheering them on, knowing that whoever did such a stupid act would be a pariah in the U.S. for generations to come, giving them a chance to reap all that good trade money.

And all this doesn't even mention that nobody really had a beef against the U.S. at the time: I'm not even sure what you're referring to.

I'm sorry, but this is a really hairbrained idea. It doesn't seem to emerge from any understanding of the world in the 1860s. Have you been reading too much bad alternate history sf? :D

[DrDeth]

Were any countries pro-slavery or did any countries endorse the Confederate cause after the Emancipation Proclamation?

No significant nations were pro-slavery, and no one endorsed the CSA at all, AFAIK. I think only a couple of African nations still had legalized slavery, and I could be wrong about that. (They certainly had slavery, yes, but whether or it it was "legal" or just winked at is another thing). Until WWI, it wasn't common for just about every nation to "jump on the bandwagon" on one side or the other. Indeed, that's the reason why it's called a "World War".

[DrDeth]

And all this doesn't even mention that nobody really had a beef against the U.S. at the time: I'm not even sure what you're referring to.



Overall, an excellent post. :cool:

However, historically GB had a grudge against us, and we had allied with France- which is another reason for GB to have a grudge against us. But I don't think it was enough to spend millions of pounds on a war.

Mexico- well, yes, they had a beef (Texas, California, etc). But they were in a state of chaos.

[Colibri]

No significant nations were pro-slavery, and no one endorsed the CSA at all, AFAIK. I think only a couple of African nations still had legalized slavery, and I could be wrong about that.

Brazil did not formally abolish slavery until 1888, which is why several thousand Confederate expatriates emigrated there after the war.

Confederate colonies in Brazil (http://patsabin.com/lowcountry/confederados.htm)

[DrDeth]

Brazil did not formally abolish slavery until 1888, which is why several thousand Confederate expatriates emigrated there after the war.



:smack:

[Exapno Mapcase]

Overall, an excellent post. :cool:

[Elvis voice]Thank you. Thank you very much.[/Elvis voice]

However, historically GB had a grudge against us, and we had allied with France- which is another reason for GB to have a grudge against us. But I don't think it was enough to spend millions of pounds on a war.

Fortunately, Britain isn't the Balkans. The War of 1812 was a half century in the past. Anti-slavery opinion ran high throughout the war era, more than high enough to keep the Confederate emissaries from gaining any kind of real voice in Parliament to sway Britain into an anti-North antagonism. The English were also happy to have the U.S. as a dumping ground for Irish emigrants and wouldn't have wanted that to end. (How many people realize that over a million people immigrated into the North during the Civil War? That amount of immigration into a country at war has to be unique. In fact, the North gained more eligible soldier bodies by immigration than it lost to deaths, making it stronger after four years of war. Please stop all nonsense about how the South could have won the war.)

And economics trumps pretty much everything, always. The North was an economic powerhouse in 1860 and the war basically quadrupled everything. The English were already strapped supplying their armies in their various colonies. Why cut off their largest purchaser of goods at the same time? Armies live outside of economics only in fiction.

[Bob55]

And all this doesn't even mention that nobody really had a beef against the U.S. at the time: I'm not even sure what you're referring to.


Great posts. I figured the beef was the historical differences with Great Britain (Rev. War, 1812), Mexico losing much of it's southwestern territory to the US, France losing in 1763, Canada fighting the US in 1812, Spain losing Florida and France the Louisana area (ok both were bought by the US but both areas probably still had loyalists and wouldn't you want to get these chunks of land back if you could easily?). On top of this the Indians probably had a few reasons to go to war - I figured the Civil War would have been the perfect opportunity for all and was wondering why no one jumped on the chance.

[Bryan Ekers]

Well, the British very nearly attacked the Union over the Trent Affair. That might've messed things up a little.

[Little Nemo]

The superpower back then was Britain. Britain was not going to allow any other country to occupy the United States without British approval. So the real issue is why Britain decided to stay out.

Domestically, Britain was very divided on the American Civil War. There were economic issues, ideological issues, and moral issues involved and different segments of the British population were on opposing sides. So any intervention in the American Civil War would have caused a huge political crisis in Britain.

Strategically, Britain knew that the United States and the Monroe Doctrine worked to British advantage. Occupying the United States would have been a huge expense and would have forced Britain to either allow other Europeans to occupy their own shares of the Americas or to assume the burden of keeping them out. Either option would have stretched British resources and made Britain the target of more foreign resentment.

Militarily, it would have been a tough war. The British Empire was the number one power in the world. But the United States was also a major power and was geared up to its peak for the war. Britain was still rebuilding its military from the Crimean War and Sepoy Mutiny a few years before and was involved in some big operations in China and Africa during the same time as the Civil War.

[RealityChuck]

Another factor is that in the middle of the war, the Union had the largest army in the world. Any European country would have been outnumbered, especially with the difficulty of getting the troops over here.

[Civil Guy]

Not to dispute any of this... but, er, there is one conflicting report.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, "Plunges into History Again", c. 2004, has an entry on Rose O'Niel Greenhow, a confederate agent, who at the time of her death may have been coming back from Great Britain with news that GB was prepared to enter the war against the Union.

Okay, okay, give me a few moments to see if there's anything on this in Wikipedia...

("Even if it's not true, it's still a good story.")

[Northern Piper]

There seemed to be a few countries out there that had beef with America in the mid-1800s - Britain, Canada, France, Spain, Mexico...As others have noted, Canada did not exist as a separate dominion during the period of the U.S. Civil War. In fact, the U.S. Civil War was one of the concerns that pushed the British North American colonies towards Confederation.* There was a fear in the B.N.A. colonies that once the war was over, the North might be inclined to march north into Canada in a replay of 1812, this time with a much stronger army, and take over. One purpose of the Canadian Confederation was "in union, strength" - to discourage the victorious U.S. armies from taking us over, colony by colony.

Canada fighting the US in 1812The U.S. declared war on Britain in 1812, and then invaded Canada. The fact that we were attacked by the U.S. didn't create a "beef" - other than a healthy concern to prevent it from happening again.


* "Confederation" in the Canadian meaning, a union of the British North American colonies, not meaning the C.S.A.

[Civil Guy]

...I'm back. Wikipedia says only that she had been on a mission to Great Britain, not the results of that mission.

Well, and that she died carrying $2,000 to be brought back to the CSA.

She drowned when the lifeboat she was in capsized: she was in the lifeboat to evade capture by the Union Navy.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Not to dispute any of this... but, er, there is one conflicting report.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, "Plunges into History Again", c. 2004, has an entry on Rose O'Niel Greenhow, a confederate agent, who at the time of her death may have been coming back from Great Britain with news that GB was prepared to enter the war against the Union.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Hee hee hee hee hee. Guffaw. Chortle, chortle.

Good one, Civil Guy. :)

[Civil Guy]

Well, yes, it's a funny sounding source, and I'm not going to pretend it's the last word (or any other word) in historical references, but...

"I am not making this up."

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592232612/qid=1118206662/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/104-5936819-2357509?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)

[Spavined Gelding]

It is worth remembering that France, Napoleon III’s Second Empire, did take advantage of the Civil War to engage in a Mexican Adventure and that at the end of the war a fair hunk of the Union army was sent to Texas under Uncle Billy Sherman to make sure that France did not try to pull any funny stuff.

Napoleon was probably eager to get involved in the war but would not do it without British support. Given the antagonism toward a strong and expansive US by the ruling class in Britain and that British democracy was not all that robust, the primary thing that kept Britain out was Prince Albert. It is easy to make fun of him and Victoria’s nearly pathological grief when he died, but for a time he was the primary reason that Gladstone’s ambitions to permanently cripple the US were not put into action. It was Prince Albert who cooled popular anger over the Trent Affair. Victoria continued his policies. That, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Egyptian long staple cotton pretty well assured that Britain was not going to overtly intervene in the American war.

That did not stop the British from doing semi-unofficially all sorts of stuff that was very helpful to the Confederacy, for instance the CSS Alabama (armed with British guns and men) and other British built, armed and crewed commerce raiders, the Enfield rifle, and safe harbor for blockade runners in Bermuda.

Also, while the British navy was formidable, her army was a pretty small show and poorly organized, equipped, supplied and lead, all as demonstrated by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Militarily Britain had a full plate in the 1860s without sending an expeditionary force to take a place on the firing line with the Army of Northern Virginia.

[Civil Guy]

Er, no, the link to Amazon.com doesn't work. :smack:

Slinks away...

[Askance]

we quickly put together the largest mechanized armies the world had ever seen.

And then just as quickly disbanded them, when it was realised the internal combustion engine had not yet been invented?

[DrDeth]

Well, yes, Britian had a mighty navy. But if it had got within reach of our Ironclad Monitors, it would have been blown to hell in short order. We also had the greatest navy in the world too, albiet not one meant for overseas action.

Our army was not only large, it had been modernized, and had the best equiptment, tactic and scads of veterans, too.

[Alessan]

Plus, the war was never all that popular in certain sectors of the North - consider the New York Draft Riots. Throughout the was there were Northern Democrats who sympathised with the southern position. The moment British troops would have landed on American shores, the war would have changed in their minds from an avoidable dispute between the states to a foreign invasion. It would be Pearl Harbor X10.

[lokij]

And then just as quickly disbanded them, when it was realised the internal combustion engine had not yet been invented?


The War Between the States was the first large scale conflict to make widespread use of the railroad and in a larger sense the full fruits of the industrial revolution. It also saw the emergence of the steam powered, armored naval vessel's dominance of the seas. It was mechanized warfare, just not the kind we're familiar with today.

[lokij]

Well, yes, Britian had a mighty navy. But if it had got within reach of our Ironclad Monitors, it would have been blown to hell in short order. We also had the greatest navy in the world too, albiet not one meant for overseas action.

Our army was not only large, it had been modernized, and had the best equiptment, tactic and scads of veterans, too.

The British navy would likely have wiped the US Navy out. Yes, we did have the Monitors and they were revolutionary ships but the Brits had the HMS Warrior as well as a profound numerical superiority in conventional wooden ships. It would have been costly to the empire but they would have won in that contest.

[guizot]

And all this doesn't even mention that nobody really had a beef against the U.S. at the time: I'm not even sure what you're referring to.

I'm sorry, but this is a really hairbrained idea. It doesn't seem to emerge from any understanding of the world in the 1860s. Have you been reading too much bad alternate history sf? :DWell said. Canada invade the U.S.? In the 1860s? As far as I can tell, they still haven't even finished settling their own territory. And what "beef" did Canada have with the U.S., ignoring that it wasn't sovereign? And even if Mexico had been stable at the time, invading a terriotory for which you've just lost a war, and which you've just sold (albeit under duress), and a vast inhospitable area at that, would be difficult to justify both domestically and internationally.

IIRC, the Brits did meddle a bit in the South, but as mentioned above, this was a look-see to future trade.

[guizot]

Plus, the war was never all that popular in certain sectors of the North - consider the New York Draft Riots. Throughout the was there were Northern Democrats who sympathised with the southern position. The moment British troops would have landed on American shores, the war would have changed in their minds from an avoidable dispute between the states to a foreign invasion. It would be Pearl Harbor X10.I agree. I'm not a historian, but I also feel that our (US) collective awareness of both the Civil War and the war for independence downplays the role of money. When you read all the details, Lockean (sp?) philosophy alone would never have been sufficient for a "revolution." It was the taxes that angered people the most. And who were those who participated in the Draft Riots? Those who couldn't afford the $350 to buy their way out of conscription. Those in the North who could buy their way out were among those who really wanted the cheap labor of freed slaves coming north for manufacturing work, especially textiles. Neither war was so cut and dried. Similar to the wars of today.

[RandomLetters]

Also note that a lot of the draft rioters were Irish immigrants - while they feared more competition for low-level labor that black emancipation would bring, I am willing to wager most of them would be incredibly eager to get a chance to fight the British.

[MMI]

I seem to recall that in addition to the potential threat to Canada intervention might pose (and a general willingness to wait and see - the Confederacy would have to prove their worthiness of intervention just as the nascent US did to the French), one factor in Britain's decision to not intervene was concern about Union privateers - the griping of the merchants, need for convoying, etc might exceed the potential benefits of taking sides.

IIRC, had the UK taken sides though, the US would probably have to find alternative suppliers of gunpowder (or the components thereof?) domestically, as we imported large quantities of the stuff from the UK.

Also note that a lot of the draft rioters were Irish immigrants - while they feared more competition for low-level labor that black emancipation would bring, I am willing to wager most of them would be incredibly eager to get a chance to fight the British.

Thus the various Fenian invasions of Canada post-war.

[Balle_M]

That did not stop the British from doing semi-unofficially all sorts of stuff that was very helpful to the Confederacy, for instance the CSS Alabama (armed with British guns and men) and other British built, armed and crewed commerce raiders, the Enfield rifle, and safe harbor for blockade runners in Bermuda. (Bolding Mine)


To be fair, the Brits had no problem selling these to BOTH sides.

[Crandolph]

And then just as quickly disbanded them, when it was realised the internal combustion engine had not yet been invented?

Maybe not widely used practical ones, but it had in effect been invented:

1680 - Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens designed (but never built) an internal combustion engine that was to be fueled with gunpowder.

1824 - English engineer, Samuel Brown adapted an old Newcomen steam engine to burn gas, and he used it to briefly power a vehicle up Shooter's Hill in London.

1858 - Belgian-born engineer, Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir invented and patented (1860) a double-acting, electric spark-ignition internal combustion engine fueled by coal gas. In 1863, Lenoir attached an improved engine (using petroleum and a primitive carburetor) to a three-wheeled wagon that managed to complete an historic fifty-mile road trip.

1862 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a French civil engineer, patented but did not build a four-stroke engine (French patent #52,593, January 16, 1862).

1864 - Austrian engineer, Siegfried Marcus, built a one-cylinder engine with a crude carburetor, and attached his engine to a cart for a rocky 500-foot drive. Several years later, Marcus designed a vehicle that briefly ran at 10 mph that a few historians have considered as the forerunner of the modern automobile by being the world's first gasoline-powered vehicle (however, read conflicting notes below).

Link (http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsgasa.htm) (yes, to About.com... you've been warned)

[Malacandra]

Bottom line, from the Brit point of view, I guess:

1) You weren't all that.
2) We weren't into conquering other industrialised nations, only with getting a toe-hold into places where we could get valuable resources, industrialising them, educating them, building infrastructure and so on. Call it enlightened self-interest. We weren't interested in conquering Russia in the Crimean undertaking, only in getting them to leave Constantinople alone. ("We don't want to fight, but by jingo, if we do...")
3) We hadn't the logistics to conquer the US even if it weren't for 1 & 2.
4) Our existing strategy was a winning one, I mean, 40% of the planet calling Victoria the Queen by the end of the century? Britain the workshop of the world?
5) We did have some ironclads of our own (HMS Warrior, for a start) but it's true our navy needed modernisation. OTOH your Monitors couldn't be everywhere.
6) We had no real reason to take sides.
7) We were terrified of your countless millions of armed citizens (y'know, like the Confederates were).
8) You weren't all that.

Just a few random thoughts...

[Rocketeer]

The British navy would likely have wiped the US Navy out. Yes, we did have the Monitors and they were revolutionary ships but the Brits had the HMS Warrior as well as a profound numerical superiority in conventional wooden ships. It would have been costly to the empire but they would have won in that contest.

None of Britain's wooden ships would have mattered at all; as Hampton Roads and countless riverine battles showed, the ironclads would have demolished them easily (if the battles were near the coastline).

Warrior, now, that's a different story. I think the only Union ship that could have matched her was New Ironsides.

And by the end of the Civil War, the Union was working on a powerful class of enormous ocean-going moniotrs that would have beaten anything afloat. (Scrapped after the war....)

[Little Nemo]

A war between Britain and the United States in the 1860's would have been similar to a replay of the Anglo-French wars of fifty years before - a whale fighting a lion. The Royal Navy would have swept the Americans from the ocean and ended the Union blockade on the South. But America's forts and ironclads would have made it difficult for the British to carry out any coastal operations. And the Union's strength in the field would have, at best, restricted the British Army to defending Canada.

After that it would become an economic war. People talk about "King Cotton" but they forget about "King Corn". By 1860, the United States was already a massive exporter of grain, much of it to Britain. And while the United States did not have the world's biggest navy, it did have the world's biggest merchant fleet. So a British blockade of the United States might have hurt the British more than the Americans. At the very least, you would have seen a major price increase in the cost of food.

[dropzone]

1) You weren't all that.Yeah, but we were damned close to being all that and MORE!OTOH your Monitors couldn't be everywhere.As Rocketeer suggests, due to their non-existant freeboard our monitors had trouble being anywhere besides the bottom in any but the calmest water.

[DrDeth]

Yeah, but we were damned close to being all that and MORE!As Rocketeer suggests, due to their non-existant freeboard our monitors had trouble being anywhere besides the bottom in any but the calmest water.

It's true that the Monitor sank becuase of that, but it was in a rather severe storm. The monitors could and did cruise the coast with relative safety. I'd hate to be on one in a storm in the middle of the North Atlantic, yes.

[dropzone]

No, the early monitors took water through the hatches, vents, and around the turret whenever the opportunity presented itself. Monitor, itself, had to go on a diet to end up with 14" of freeboard so the deck was awash in even moderate seas. All of the monitors were virtually semi-submersibles and the Casco class even had ballast tanks to bring freeboard down to three inches, but one of them started out running that low before the turret had even been fitted so early ones of the class were refitted as very slow spar torpedo boats and all but one had the raft built up another 22".

Surprising to me, though, of the Civil War monitors that were completed only Monitor and Weehawken sank in high seas, but then Weehawken was at anchor at the time. (To be fair, it was during a gale.) This record can be attributed in part to the USN knowing they were not designed for and had no business on the high seas, though Roanoke and Dictator were supposed to be for use further away from the coastal and river waters most were designed for. On the other hand, they were sometimes used for mine clearing and since they dropped like rocks when mined (Patapsco in fifteen seconds and Tecumseh in 25-30 seconds) maybe the Navy didn't really know what they were good for. The other thing that saved the lives of many seamen was that most of the monitors started during the Civil War were never commissioned and because they were not needed and were built too quickly from green timber they were either scrapped before their launch or subjected to a "great repair," which amounted to the same thing--the hulk was scrapped and a new ship built with the same name in an attempt to get new ships built against Congress' wishes.

As an aside (does it look like I've been bursting for an excuse to talk about monitors?) the low freeboard made later, more watertight monitors handy submarine tenders and the British found monitors useful both for coastal bombardment and as a cheap way to use spare turrets (examples are at home) up through WWII, though they were so slow and unseaworthy they often needed to be towed to where they were to be used.

http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/battleships/us_mon.htm#cas-cl

[Cerowyn]

The British navy would likely have wiped the US Navy out. Yes, we did have the Monitors and they were revolutionary ships but the Brits had the HMS Warrior as well as a profound numerical superiority in conventional wooden ships. It would have been costly to the empire but they would have won in that contest.The Royal Navy also had HMS Black Prince, another Warrior-class ironclad. Also, IIRC, there were something like twenty to twenty-five other ironclads of various classes in the Royal Navy at the time.

[dropzone]

Yeah, but if we could have lured them onto the Mississippi or Charleston Harbor they'd've been in BIG trouble. Monitors may not be seaworthy but they're wicked hard to hit! ;)

[Rodd Hill]

/Hijack: one of my proudest moments was finding a very tacky circa 1950s pressed glass ashtray, with a photo of the U.S.S. Cairo, the whole thing then being countersunk into a largish 6" by 6" worm-eaten chunk of that ill-fated monitor's framework. It cost me a whopping $25 at a local junk emporium, and I found it just days before the 30th anniversary of the guy I work with starting here at the Fort--he's the orginal Civil War buff nonpareil. Our search for an appropriate gift was at an end.

Trouble is, he's still working here--and September will mark his 40th year. Where the hell I am going to find something to top that?

(And how did a piece of the "Kay-row" find its way up here?)

//Hijack ends

[clairobscur]

None of Britain's wooden ships would have mattered at all; as Hampton Roads and countless riverine battles showed, the ironclads would have demolished them easily (if the battles were near the coastline).




The first Ironclad had been build a dozen years ago by the french navy, and used during the Crimea war. By the time of the american civil war, both France and the UK had seaworthy ironclads.



Regarding the OP, the first question to ask would be : Mexico excepted, what reasons could have other countries to attak the USA, exactly? What would have been the point?

[dropzone]

What was the thickness of the armor on the French and British ironclads? Both North and South had projectiles (some were of british design) that could penetrate four inches of wrought iron.

[Rodd Hill]

This article, in the Journal for Maritime Research gives her iron armour as four and a half inch, back by two layers of teak:

http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conJmrArticle.14/setPaginate/No

[Rodd Hill]

I should add that my link refers to HMS Warrior. Of course, she was armed with 10 of the the rather less-than reliable Armstrong 110 pr rifled breech-loaders, which had the alarming propensity to blow up in the crew's faces at times.

Two years after she was first commissioned, the 10 Armstrong RBLs were sold off...to the Confederate States of America.

[DrDeth]

The Monitor had double that- and later monitors had triple that- with much larger guns, placed in two turrents. And, they were very difficult targets to hit, too. If the Warrior was in close to the shore, one of our double-turrented monitors could sink it with impunity- and outmanuever it, also. And we had squadrons of monitors. Their guns would go right through 4" armour, and explod on the inside, causing immense destruction due to the splinters.

Sure, like I said- they couldn't make it overseas unless they were lucky, but a squadron of "modern" Union Monitors could have sank the entire British armada easily, if the Brit's tried to come over here.

[Tamerlane]

Sure, like I said- they couldn't make it overseas unless they were lucky, but a squadron of "modern" Union Monitors could have sank the entire British armada easily, if the Brit's tried to come over here.

Perhaps, perhaps not. But even that scenario is assuming stasis. Personally I have no doubt that given her vast resources and expertise at the time Britain would have been more than capable of handling a naval arms race with the Union, especially a Union still locked in combat with the Confederacy.

A moot point of course. As other posters have noted it would have taken an extremely unlikely course of events for such a conflict to develop.

- Tamerlane

[DrDeth]

Perhaps, perhaps not. But even that scenario is assuming stasis. Personally I have no doubt that given her vast resources and expertise at the time Britain would have been more than capable of handling a naval arms race with the Union, especially a Union still locked in combat with the Confederacy.


- Tamerlane

Correct. The Union likely only had World naval superiourity for less than a decade, and GB could likely have cut that in half with a serious naval programme. Having the USA and GB in a naval building race would be a doubtful "alternate universe" , but interesting.

There are ways it could have- IF Lincoln hadn't issued the Emancipation Proclamation, AND the Confederates promised to end slavery. The second is extremely doubtful. One of Harry Turtletaubs "Alternate history" books ends like this which places it firmly into fantasy. :dubious: If the President of the CSA had tried to do so, most of the Confederacy would have seceded again- from the CSA. IMHO. of course.

[Muffin]

Confederates operating out of Canada raided the Union in Vermont and on the not so high seas of Lake Erie. Immediately after the war, Fenians (many of whom were Union vets), made several raids into Canada.

http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/charlie/canada1864.htm
http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/cfa7/philo_parsons.htm
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dbertuca/g/FenianRaid.html

[Daboman]

Read "Stars and Stripes Together" it explains this very well

[HPL]

Plus, the war was never all that popular in certain sectors of the North - consider the New York Draft Riots. Throughout the was there were Northern Democrats who sympathised with the southern position. The moment British troops would have landed on American shores, the war would have changed in their minds from an avoidable dispute between the states to a foreign invasion. It would be Pearl Harbor X10.

12-7 X10,

that's..... 1270.

My God!

[Pushkin]

Read "Stars and Stripes Together" it explains this very well

Is that a sequel or do you mean "Stars and Stripes Forever (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345409345/ref=pd_sxp_f/103-4052506-3048608)" a good book but as the review says perhaps a little Anglophobic :)

[Malacandra]

Yeah, but we were damned close to being all that and MORE!
All that and a bag of chips, these days. But in the 1860s we were the industrial colossus of the world, though not for very much longer. Like I say, why change a winning strategy?

As Rocketeer suggests, due to their non-existant freeboard our monitors had trouble being anywhere besides the bottom in any but the calmest water.
This goes a long way towards explaining why, in History of the World, the United States is unable to cross the Atlantic. :D