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Former slave and Lincoln ally, Frederick Douglass, though himself frustrated with the delay to equal rights, understood after meeting and discussing his concerns with Lincoln that the preservation of the country came first, stating:
"It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions [slaves], but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field."
For more on the Lincoln-Douglass story refer to my paper.
In addition, there are many speeches Lincoln gave while he was a lawyer, where he most clearly and transparently spoke out against slavery. In a speech at Peoria, Illinois (Oct 16, 1854), 7 years before he would become president, Lincoln stated:
"This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the worldenables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principle of civil libertycriticizing the Declaration of Independence and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest."
During the civil war lord Robert Cecil (later called the Marquess of Salisbury and three-time Prime Minister of Britain) expressed his viewpoint on the matter in the British Parliament:
"The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially "With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally." [emphasis added]
By 1840, cotton made up more than half of American exports. More than 75% of slave cotton was exported to Britain. American slave cotton was the centerpiece of the British Empire's world cheap-labor system.
The autumn of 1862 would mark the first critical phase of the Civil War. Lincoln sent an urgent letter to the Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov, informing him that France was ready to intervene militarily and was awaiting England. The salvation of the Union thus rested solely on Russia's decision to act.
The Foreign Minister Gorchakov wrote in response to Lincoln's plea:
"You know that the government of United States has few friends among the Powers. England rejoices over what is happening to you; she longs and prays for your overthrow. France is less actively hostile; her interests would be less affected by the result; but she is not unwilling to see it. She is not your friend. Your situation is getting worse and worse. The chances of preserving the Union are growing more desperate. Can nothing be done to stop this dreadful war? The hope of reunion is growing less and less, and I wish to impress upon your government that the separation, which I fear must come, will be considered by Russia as one of the greatest misfortunes. Russia alone, has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. We are very, very anxious that some means should be adopted-that any course should be pursued-which will prevent the division which now seems inevitable. One separation will be followed by another; you will break into fragments."
Russia's proclaimed support in its letters to Lincoln would be put to the test during the summer of 1863. By then, the South's invasion of the North had failed at Gettysburg and the violent anti-war New York draft riots also failed and Britain, as a result, was thinking of a direct military intervention with the backing of France. What would follow marks one of the greatest displays of support for another country's sovereignty to ever occur in modern history.
The Russian Navy arrived on both the east and west coastlines of the United States late September and early October 1863.
The timing was highly coordinated due to intelligence reports of when Britain and France were intending their military action. The Russian navy would stay along the US coastline in support of the Union for 7 months! They never intervened in the American civil war but rather remained in its waters at the behest of Lincoln in the case of a foreign power's interference.
If Russia had not done this, Britain and France would most certainly have intervened on behalf of the Confederate states as they made clear they would, and the United States would have most certainly broken in two at that point. It was Russia's direct naval support that allowed the United States to remain whole.
Czar Alexander II, who held sole power to declare war for Russia, stated in an interview to the American banker Wharton Barker on Aug. 17, 1879 (Published in The Independent March 24, 1904):
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