Britain had recognized the CSA?

So British merchants sold guns to Indian hunters they bought furs from. That's simple logic and good business. Never any sign of any government support for the Indians seeking to protect their independence from the US army. Its just that it makes an excuse for US actions against both the Indians and the British so the myth keeps getting repeated.
It does basically boil down to the argument that those Indians were already under US authority to the extent that the British should have actively prevented British merchants doing business with them.

What decades of British strategy? As Saphroneth said it was something that Britain would have favoured as it would have protected British trade in the region and also acted as a buffer against an aggressive neighbour but was never a British policy except briefly during the war when early US disasters made it a possibility. By 1814 this had passed.
It's a pretty fundamental point of negotiations that not everything you ask for at some point is necessarily going to make it into the final treaty, especially if you haven't pursued a war to the point of complete occupation of the enemy state.


More to the point, if it was a focus of decades of British strategy to establish a buffer state against the US, they'd have done it in 1782 when that was offered.
 
So, to be clear, sending ~170 regiments to the Peninsular over the course of the campaign, and Burnside's expedition, and the Louisiana expedition - totalling about a third of the Union army as of June 1862 sent to positions where it was supplied only by sea, movements which all happened after Trent had died down - qualifies as "very conservative".

In contrast to the movements which took place before Trent, consisting of ~30 regiments to positions where they were supplied only by sea.
April, May, June and July and on August 3, 1862, Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw. The operation lasted four months. It did result in the capture of Norfolk, David Farragut's naval home, and the destruction of the Virginia .
So yes, it was a large army, commanded by an inexperienced general, given a short time to make an attempt to capture Richmond. While the operation continued the administration shifted its attention to the west, where the British had no naval access, and McClellan's request that all available forces be concentrated in his theater was flatly refused.
Despite the size of McClellan's army, the Lincoln administration always kept a substantial force at Manassas/Washington, that could not be cut off from the capital by the British navy.
When the threat of British intervention had faded by 1864 the real operation to capture Richmond began.
 
And the answer probably has something to do with tables like this:
1627824233855.png

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/preliminary-report/1860e-07.pdf
 
April, May, June and July and on August 3, 1862, Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw. The operation lasted four months.
Yes. So there was a period of four months when over a third of the Union army across the continent could have been instantly cut off by sea if there was British intervention.

As opposed to what would have happened if McClellan's Urbana plan had been approved, which would have entailed (per the plan, at least) a period of a few weeks at most when half as many men would have been liable to being cut off (since the Urbana plan envisaged opening up railborne supply).

And, of course, at no point (despite Halleck and Lincoln apparently being fully aware of this) did either man use it as an argument about why McClellan could not or should not do something, despite it being actually a very good argument if that risk of intervention was considered significant. Instead Lincoln tells McClellan to wait at Harrisons Landing until he can be reinforced by 40,000+ men; he later changes his mind, but if the risk of intervention was dictating his decisions all along why make that promise in the first place?


What's more, when the corps commanders are discussing the preferred plan, Lincoln never mentions it to them (and nor does anyone else). And it never shows up in the diaries of the men involved that this is a significant part of the calculus.
 
The Secretary of State for War, George Cornewall Lewis, you mean? Someone who'd been an MP starting in 1847 and in governmental positions of one sort or another since that same year?
 
The decision wasn't based on the static position of the US and Great Britain as it existed in 1861. If no one interfered with Britain, the British could force an armistice on the US. The question had more to with rates of growth, and second order conditions about acceleration and deacceleration of rates of growth.
The US was the faster growing section relative to the Confederacy. It had a vast territory which was under US control by July of 1862. The US enjoyed good relations with the German states and Prussia, and Russia. Immigration was likely to resume.
Slavery was disappearing in New Jersey and Delaware. It was declining in Maryland, and relative to the white population, it was even declining in Virginia and Kentucky.
To someone like Baronet Lewis, the Confederacy had too many similarities to the Roman Empire. The Confederacy, cut off from territorial expansion, and with the British finally ending the involuntary smuggling of Africans off the continent and into Cuba and other Caribbean locations, was going to wither. Slavery itself formed a choke on the expansion of cotton production in America, and sooner or later that restraining factor was going to have to be broken. The pressure of northern expansion backed by European voluntary immigration was going to overwhelm the Confederacy the same way the partly Romanized tribes had swarmed over the Roman frontier and eventually taken power in the Empire.
 
The Secretary of State for War, George Cornewall Lewis, you mean? Someone who'd been an MP starting in 1847 and in governmental positions of one sort or another since that same year?
He was not a military man. He was an esteemed historian, with some mathematical training, so I think he would have had some introductory calculus. He was a writer and editor, never a great speaker. His interests were in Roman history and the use of rhetoric.
 
He was not a military man. He was an esteemed historian, with some mathematical training, so I think he would have had some introductory calculus. He was a writer and editor, never a great speaker. His interests were in Roman history and the use of rhetoric.
But he entered government in 1855?

To someone like Baronet Lewis, the Confederacy had too many similarities to the Roman Empire.
You'd need to show him actually writing or saying that in order to make that case. It's not like we're bereft of records of 1850s/1860s government debate.
 
It does basically boil down to the argument that those Indians were already under US authority to the extent that the British should have actively prevented British merchants doing business with them.


It's a pretty fundamental point of negotiations that not everything you ask for at some point is necessarily going to make it into the final treaty, especially if you haven't pursued a war to the point of complete occupation of the enemy state.


More to the point, if it was a focus of decades of British strategy to establish a buffer state against the US, they'd have done it in 1782 when that was offered.

I've always been amazed that Britain was willing to give the region to the new US as it was not only part of Canada and important to the fur traders there but would have secured control of the Great Lakes. But then that's another subject altogether.
 
But he entered government in 1855?


You'd need to show him actually writing or saying that in order to make that case. It's not like we're bereft of records of 1850s/1860s government debate.
The British chaps who are good at researching those types of records do not hang out here any more.
Apparently Lewis was allied with John Stuart Mill and other liberals. Its odd that the PM would make him War Secretary, a position that Lewis did not want.
 
But he entered government in 1855?


You'd need to show him actually writing or saying that in order to make that case. It's not like we're bereft of records of 1850s/1860s government debate.
Its fairly clear from the preliminary report, released in May 1862, that Commissioner Kennedy, through Lyons, was in communication with Lewis. Rates of growth and second order conditions figure prominently in the report.
 
I've always been amazed that Britain was willing to give the region to the new US as it was not only part of Canada and important to the fur traders there but would have secured control of the Great Lakes. But then that's another subject altogether.
It's not necessarily, so much as it shows that decisions like that aren't made in a vacuum. Perhaps the British would have continued to press in 1814-5 if there hadn't been a possible European resumption of hostilities at hand.

No such salvation is at hand for the Union in 1861-5, though, not unless things go differently to history just because of the intervention.

The British chaps who are good at researching those types of records do not hang out here any more.
Apparently Lewis was allied with John Stuart Mill and other liberals. Its odd that the PM would make him War Secretary, a position that Lewis did not want.
I mean, cabinet reshuffle when the old Secretary for War has to resign for his health, news at 11.

Its fairly clear from the preliminary report, released in May 1862, that Commissioner Kennedy, through Lyons, was in communication with Lewis. Rates of growth and second order conditions figure prominently in the report.
When you say "it's fairly clear", can you quote what you mean? Or do you simply mean that the preliminary report used maths?
 
One small question to the American ubermen supporters? If Britain did intervene, even as late as 1863 how the hell does the union fund its war programme? Its lost probably its primary source of government revenue and also going to have serious problems getting any foreign loans on anything but the most ruinous terms. At the same time the blockade will hamper a lot of other economic activity.
"American ubermen supporters"

Engaging in dialogue with anybody who has to resort to name-calling and labels is a waste of bandwidth. Have a nice day ....
 
"American ubermen supporters"

Engaging in dialogue with anybody who has to resort to name-calling and labels is a waste of bandwidth. Have a nice day ....

I call a spade a spade. If you hadn't been so blinkered you would have argued against the repeated name called and BS on your side so your calling yourself an hypocrite.

This thread has become a 'debate' between people dealing with hard facts in most cases and people stating a manta of "Americans can never lose, regardless of the circumstances." Repeatedly hard questions have been asked and ignored.
 
I call a spade a spade. If you hadn't been so blinkered you would have argued against the repeated name called and BS on your side so your calling yourself an hypocrite.

This thread has become a 'debate' between people dealing with hard facts in most cases and people stating a manta of "Americans can never lose, regardless of the circumstances." Repeatedly hard questions have been asked and ignored.
Now you are resorting to constructing a straw man. You want to argue so much that you are making up positions to argue with.
Its silly.
 
McClellan was withdrawn from eastern Virginia. Despite the fact that there was Congressional authorization for the EP and the recruitment of freedmen, Lincoln waited until a status quo that was acceptable existed. While he was waiting, the news trickled in from San Francisco, and from Golden/Denver, that the US was in full control of the west. The buying program was mostly complete by then and the US could wait out British interference.
 
I call a spade a spade. If you hadn't been so blinkered you would have argued against the repeated name called and BS on your side so your calling yourself an hypocrite.

This thread has become a 'debate' between people dealing with hard facts in most cases and people stating a manta of "Americans can never lose, regardless of the circumstances." Repeatedly hard questions have been asked and ignored.
Get a mirror.
 
The hard fact is that Great Britain did not intervene in the US Civil War. Its been 175 years since the 1846 settlement, and the US and Great Britain have never fought each other. So this is a debate about a fantasy the Great Britain was going to rescue the Confederacy from its strategic losses.
Others have noted, the US was a paying customer of Great Britain. And the empire had a place that could go grow cotton, even if it wasn't going to be of the same grade as American cotton.
 
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