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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well 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.
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.
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.
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.
Thus the various Fenian invasions of Canada post-war.
Bottom line, from the Brit point of view, I guess:
You weren’t all that.
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…”)
We hadn’t the logistics to conquer the US even if it weren’t for 1 & 2.
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?
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.
We had no real reason to take sides.
We were terrified of your countless millions of armed citizens (y’know, like the Confederates were).
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…)
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.
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.
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.
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.