- IN HELPING FENDING OFF THE ROGUE DEEP STATE OF BRITAIN IN 1863, THE DEEP STATE GOT EVEN IN 1865, 1910AND IN NOVEMBER OF 1963..
The Russians Are Coming!
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The eponymous heroine of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera “Lucrezia Borgia” had just died, and the final notes of music had barely faded into the November night when hundreds of workers began to transform New York City’s Academy of Music. Less than 24 hours later, the 4,000-seat entertainment emporium — an opera house, theater, and meeting and exposition hall, all under one roof — was to host the social event of the 1863 season. The city’s elite had quickly snapped up 2,000 tickets for the “Soirée Russe”: a grand ball for the officers of the Russian fleet at anchor in New York.
A rapturous description of the preparations in The New York Times on Nov. 5, the morning of the ball, promised that the visiting Russian naval officers would enjoy “their first opportunity of seeing society in New-York in all its full regalia, style and splendor.” Guests would begin arriving at the 14th Street entrance to the Academy at 9 p.m., from where they would be conducted into the ballroom for dancing scheduled to begin at 10:30. As the Times reported, “There will be two splendid Bands,” one “for the Promenade and operatic music,” the other “for the dancing.” Despite a newly constructed dance floor more than 850 square yards in size, one reporter in attendance later noted, “We will call it a dance out of respect to conventional and popular prejudice. In truth it was a very wonderful and indescribable phantasmagoria of humanity” that “moved a little this way, a little that, but not a dance.”
The organizers spared no expense. Over 1,200 gas burners illuminated the building’s interior. Dressing rooms for women featured maids to attend to “the multitude of tears, and rips, and damages which dresses are liable to.” Hairdressers for both men and women were in attendance, as was “a corps” of bootblacks. The stage on which Ms. Borgia had expired just hours earlier was now enclosed “in a white ornamented tent, thirty feet high” that framed a trompe l’oeil scene of a “terrace, garden, and lake by moonlight.” Paintings, engravings, photographs and sculpture borrowed or executed especially for the occasion depicted everyone from Peter the Great and George Washington to Czar Alexander II, President Abraham Lincoln, and Union military worthies like Farragut, McClellan, Halleck, Hooker, Fremont, Grant and Meade.
Irving Hall, a building adjacent to and connected with the Academy by a covered walkway, was the setting for a supper catered by Delmonico, the city’s premier restaurant. Beginning at 11 p.m., guests could partake from a menu that, according to an account of the “principal edibles” in Harper’s Weekly, included 12,000 oysters, 12 “monster” salmon of 30 pounds each, 1,200 game birds, 250 turkeys, 400 chickens, a half ton of tenderloin, 100 pastry “pyramids,” 1,000 loaves of bread and 3,500 bottles of wine. Each heavily laden table was, in the words of a reporter for The New York Herald, “triumphant proof of the ability of our great caterer, and excelled all previous displays of the kind.”
This evening of lavish entertainment was the culminating moment in a series of events – a visit by Mary Lincoln to the Russian frigate Osliaba in New York Harbor on Sept. 16; a Fifth Avenue parade on Oct. 1; and two banquets at Astor House —to celebrate the unexpected arrival of six Russian warships just weeks earlier. The first to arrive in New York Harbor, the Osliaba, had been on patrol in the Mediterranean. On Sept. 24, the Alexander Nevsky, Peresviet, Variag, Vitiaz and Almaz (with composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov aboard) all arrived from the Kronstadt naval base near St. Petersburg. Their presence in American waters was testimony both to the amicability that had characterized Russian-American relations for decades and the growing threat posed by Russia’s neighbors.
Formal diplomatic relations between the two nations had begun during the Madison administration, with John Quincy Adams’s appointment as American ambassador to St. Petersburg. In 1832, Russia became the first nation to enjoy “most favored nation” trading status with the United States, which also extended its support to the czarist government during the Crimean War of the mid-1850s. In turn, the Russians consistently encouraged the growth of the United States, in large measure as a counterweight to the major European powers.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, the Russian foreign minister, Aleksandr Gorchakov, noted that “Russia and America have a special regard for each other … because they have no points of conflict.” The issue of slavery was of no consequence to the Russians, and their economy had no pressing need for cotton and so suffered little collateral damage from the war.
By late October 1862, however, the Russian minister was worried. The Union had “few friends among the powers. England rejoices over what is happening to you” and France “is not your friend,” he wrote in a letter to Bayard Taylor, secretary to the American legation in St. Petersburg. Russia, which desires “above all things the maintenance of the American Union as one indivisible nation,” will “refuse any invitation” to intervene, “But we entreat you to settle the difficulty. I cannot express to you how profound an anxiety we feel — how serious are our fears.”
Russian concerns that European powers might intervene to broker a peace between the North and South were well founded. The French emperor Napoleon III, eager to reassert France’s role on the world stage, spawned a series of plans intended to unite his nation with Britain and Russia in a triumvirate that could force negotiations to halt the American war. But the French efforts repeatedly miscarried because of the Russian distrust of Britain, a remnant of the Crimean War, and the Union resistance to any effort to extend recognition to the Confederacy. Lincoln summed up the latter situation when reacting to a French proposal to promote a six-month armistice and lift the blockade. Louis Napoleon’s efforts were the result, the president observed, of “a mistaken desire to counsel in a case where all foreign counsel excites distrust.”
The political situation in Europe grew more complicated after a spontaneous protest in Warsaw against the conscription policies of the Imperial Russian Army in January 1863 led to a broader insurrection in Poland. Britain and France quickly voiced support for the Polish revolutionaries, while Prussia agreed to help the Russians repel any effort by the French to intervene.
As hostilities grew more likely, Nikolai Krabbe, the Russian naval minister, took steps to guarantee that his ships would not find themselves trapped in port as had been the case during the Crimean War. On July 14, 1863, he ordered Rear Admiral Stepan Lisovsky, commander of Russia’s Atlantic fleet, to leave the Gulf of Finland and “proceed directly to New York.” Once there he was “to keep all the ships in that port” unless such an arrangement was “inconvenient for the American government.” In that case, he was to “dispose of the vessels among the various Atlantic ports of the United States.”
Simultaneously, Rear Admiral Andrei Popov received orders to lead Russia’s Pacific squadron to San Francisco. By the end of October 1863, the Bogatir, Kalevala, Rinda, Abrek, and Gaidamak were safely anchored in San Francisco Bay. The new arrivals immediately endeared themselves to San Franciscans when they helped put out a major fire in the center of the city. Like his counterpart in New York, Popov was to “be strictly neutral” unless Confederate raiders were to threaten the civilian population.
A Northern public eager for good news after the Union’s devastating defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga in late September was quick to assume that the Russians had arrived to support the federal cause, an assumption that shaped the prevailing historical interpretation for the next 50 years. Even Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who knew otherwise, was hard pressed to restrain his enthusiasm. “The presence in our waters of a squadron belonging to His Imperial Majesty’s navy,” he wrote the Russian ambassador, Baron Edouard de Stoeckl, was a “source of pleasure and happiness.” He opened the facilities of the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the visitors, and later concluded a diary entry with “God bless the Russians.”
Years later, Henry Clews, a banker involved in marketing Union war bonds, accurately characterized the squadron’s visit as a “‘splendid bluff’ at a very critical period in our history.” William Seward, he went on, was “astute enough to see that this visit of the Russian squadron might seem to be what it was not.” Their coming “might have a good moral and political effect in depressing the South and encouraging the North, and causing any foreign powers that might have been considering … recognizing the Southern Confederacy to postpone action.”
Newspapers both here and abroad echoed this view. In The Moscow Gazette, M. N. Katov editorialized: “We don’t wish to interfere in American affairs; we went there merely for our own convenience.” Closer to home, Leslie’s Illustrated Journal hoped that the Russian ships might “fit out in our ports privateers, as the rebels have done in the ports of England” and that “burning French or perhaps English vessels may throw some light on questions of international law which are now somewhat obscure.”
The Richmond Examiner unsurprisingly adopted a more jaundiced view of Russian intentions. “The Czar emancipates the serfs … and puts forth the whole strength of his empire to enslave the Poles. Lincoln proclaims the freedom of the African, and strives at the same time to subjugate freeborn Americans.”
During the winter of 1864, the threat of war in Europe evaporated, and on April 26, 1864, orders arrived directing the Atlantic and Pacific fleets to return to Russia. In retrospect, one historian has written that a pro-Union stance for the Russians was smart policy: if the North won, it would be grateful, while if the South won, it would be so elated that it would soon forget its grievances. The New York Herald wondered what had been gained by the fleet’s presence, noting: “Russia sends her navy here to keep it safe” but “we doubt if she would send it … to aid us in fighting England.” Her navy, in fact, was “not worth the sending.” The author rather accurately, if somewhat insultingly, observed that “one of our Ironsides could blow it out of water … in a couple of hours.”
While the lavish social events and celebrations may well have provided a needed civic tonic for a city that had recently survived one of the nation’s worst riots, they were not without their critics. The day after the grand ball, The New York World characterized the event as “one of those thoughtless and shallow demonstrations which have grown with us into a habit.” Another newspaper wrote: “Such extravagant festivities were out of place when the Boys in Blue were dying in the trenches. The millions spent “should instead have been given to the Sanitary Commission.”
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Sources: E. A. Adamov, “Russia and the United States at the Time of the Civil War”; Marshall B. Davidson, “A Royal Welcome for the Russian Navy”; Tom Delahaye, “The Bilateral Effect of the Visit of the Russian Fleet in 1863”; Benjamin F. Gilbert, “Welcome to the Czar’s Fleet: An Incident of Civil War Days in San Francisco”; F. A. Golder, “The Russian Fleet and the Civil War”; Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 21, 1863, “The Great Russian Ball;” Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 7, 1863, “Our Russian Visitors;” Howard Jones, “Blue and Gray Diplomacy A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations”; William E. Nagengast, “The Visit of the Russian Fleet to the United States: Were Americans Deceived”; New York Times, Sept. 24, 1863, “A Russian Fleet Coming into our Harbor”; The New York Times, Sept. 29, 1863, “Reception of the Russian Naval Officers”; The New York Times, Nov. 5, 1863, “The Grand Ball to the Russians”; The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1863, “The Russian Ball”; Earl S. Pomeroy, “The Myth After the Russian Fleet, 1863”; Hans Rogger, “Russia and the Civil War”; United States Naval Institute, “Visit of Russian Squadrons in 1863”; Henry Voigt, “The Russians Are Coming!”; Albert A. Woldman, “Lincoln and the Russians.”
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