The Russian Fleet has come out of the Baltic and are now in New York,” Gideon Welles, President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the Navy, reported on 23 September 1863. “God bless the Russians.”1
Secretary Welles was probably not the only U.S. Cabinet officer ever to urge God’s blessings on the Russians (opportunities for that benediction came again during the world wars of the 20th century), but he almost certainly was the first since diplomatic relations had been established in 1809 between the imperial court in St. Petersburg and the fledgling republican government in Washington.
As would eventually become clear to some, however, the motive behind the unexpected appearance of tsarist navy squadrons in New York and San Francisco during the third autumn of the Civil War was much less generous than it initially appeared to Secretary Welles. That motive had little to do with support for the Union in the bloody contest between North and South, and much to do with tensions in Europe.
‘King Cotton’ Dethroned
As America’s Civil War loomed, the secessionist South’s leadership was absolutely confident the new Confederate government would receive European diplomatic recognition—a confidence born of the conviction that Southern cotton was the essential raw material for continued British industrialization, trade, and prosperity, and that England’s as well as France’s and other continental powers’ appetite for the South’s cotton was insatiable. The expected recognition would be a triumph culminating, if necessary, with the Royal Navy punching through any Federal blockade of Confederate ports to guarantee access to cotton.
It all turned out to be one of history’s great and tragic political misjudgments; the coming war would impoverish the Southern states and retard their economic development for a century. On 13 May 1861—a month into the American fratricide—London issued a neutrality proclamation, according the South belligerent status, but nothing more. Despite their own sympathies for the Confederacy, the other European capitals followed London’s stay-out-of-it lead.
But while much of Europe reluctantly restrained a natural enthusiasm for the Confederacy, Russia openly supported the Union. The sentiment was made explicit in an extraordinary manifesto written by Foreign Minister Prince Alexander Gorchakov for Tsar Alexander II and delivered by the Russian ambassador in Washington to Secretary of State William Seward. Gorchakov’s letter, published in The New York Times on 9 September 1861, noted that the two countries formed “a natural community of interests and sympathies,” and that Russia viewed the United States as an essential element of the “international equilibrium.”
That Russia and the United States shared a warm friendship during the Civil War is a fascinating irony given the history to come. The relationship began tentatively in the 18th century and grew during the 19th, as each party adhered consistently to a policy of nonintervention in the affairs of the other and both frequently exchanged reassurances that this policy continued to govern. While the Russians declined to support an initiative by Napoleon III for European mediation of the American Civil War, the Americans reciprocated by firmly rejecting entreaties by other European states to join them in pressuring Russia over a revolt bedeviling the tsar. In this rosy glow of mutual appreciation, some in the United States believed that Russia under Alexander II would continue to modernize and liberalize, even eventually becoming democratic. As Harper’s Weekly observed:
The analogies between the American and the Russian people have too often been described to need further explanation here. Russia, like the United States, is a nation of the future. Its capabilities are only just being developed. Its national destiny is barely shaped. Its very institutions are in their cradle, and have yet to be modeled to fit advancing civilization and the spread of intelligence. Like the United States, Russia is in the agonies of a terrible transition; the Russian serfs, like the American negroes, are receiving their liberty; and the Russian boiars, like the Southern slave-owners, are mutinous at the loss of their property. When this great problem shall have been solved, and the Russian people shall consist of 100,000,000 intelligent, educated human beings, it is possible that Russian institutions will have been welded by the force of civilization into a similarity with ours.2
During his reign, Alexander II was celebrated as a great reformer; measured against the standards of the dozen or so Romanov tsars and tsarinas who preceded him, he was. But despite Alexander’s historic emancipation of the serfs in February 1861 and some tentative gestures toward further liberalization, Russia in the 1860s was still an autocracy.
A January 1863 mutiny of Polish draftees in the Russian army capped off a revolt that had begun two years earlier and had grown to challenge the scope of Alexander’s control of Russian-occupied Poland and Lithuania. As the English, French, and Austrian governments in the spring of 1863 pressured St. Petersburg over the Polish situation, they also tried to recruit the United States to join them in their protestations. But Secretary of State Seward disappointed them by responding that he “trusted the liberality, sagacity, and magnanimity” of the tsar to solve the problems underlying the violence erupting on Russia’s periphery.
Wary of potential European reprisals over Poland, the tsar and his foreign minister decided to relocate the Russian fleet from its home ports, where it might be confined and defeated if war erupted. Relocation also could put Russia’s men-of-war in good position to raid British commerce should war come. American harbors, where Alexander had reason to expect his ships would be welcomed (and where their visit might be usefully misunderstood), offered an ideal alternative to remaining homeported and vulnerable. Moreover, prior correspondence had established that American shipyard facilities at Brooklyn, New York, and Mare Island, California, would be available to support the vessels, certain to need maintenance during any extended deployment.
The Russians Are Coming
His Imperial Russian Majesty’s 33-gun frigate Osliabia was the first surprise visitor to enter the port of New York. Executing her orders, she had sailed from the eastern Mediterranean to Portugal then across the Atlantic, appearing at New York on 11 September 1863. The Osliabia was about two weeks ahead of the arrival from Kronstadt of the Baltic Squadron’s flagship, the Alexander Nevskii, and another frigate, the Peresviet. Those two anchored at New York on 24 September. The Alexander Nevskii flew Rear Admiral Stepan Lissovski’s flag. A captain only weeks earlier, he’d been promoted when his predecessor declined to make the cruise, and Lissovski took command just before the squadron sailed.
The corvettes Variag and Vitiaz soon followed into New York Harbor. The last member of the squadron, the clipper Almaz, appeared at the rendezvous roughly two weeks later. All but the Osliabia had sailed north of the British Isles, avoiding the English Channel and observation as they carefully edged westward. Their arrival in New York—spread out over a month or so—apparently caught Whitehall and the British Admiralty flat-footed—a rare mid-19th-century example of the Royal Navy suffering complete surprise.
The editors of Harper’s Weekly looked at the visitors now unexpectedly in the harbor and liked everything they saw: ships, officers, and men. The admiration was consistent with Harper’s general view that it would “be wise to meet the hostile alliance of the Western Powers of Europe by an alliance with Russia.” As for the Osliabia, “She looks taut and trim, and good seamanship is everywhere displayed,” Harper’s noted on 3 October. “The ship herself is well built, and looks as if she might stand a deal of hard fighting.”
Harper’s admiration for Admiral Lissovski and his six captains was no less generous. The caption to its illustration of the senior Russian officers, a woodcut copied from a Mathew Brady photograph taken 21 October, allowed that “they are all sturdy-looking men, perfect gentlemen, and as accomplished in letters and science as they are skillful in their profession.” As for the enlisted men (450 in the Osliabia and a similar complement in the other frigates), “they, too, look hearty, and as if when called upon they might be able to do good service for their country . . . a pleasant-looking set.” The New York Times and other newspapers were no less complimentary.
Kronstadt to New York, Vladivostok to San Francisco
The Baltic Squadron’s crossing apparently had been a near thing. Frank Golder, whose essay in July 1915’s The American Historical Review drew on imperial archives in St. Petersburg to reveal that the Russians’ motive for the visits was self-preservation, tapped other Russian sources as the basis for this description of the voyage:
Before going very far Lisovskii must have concluded that [the vessels sailing with him] were far from being in condition for hard service. The sails did not fit, the sea poured in through the port-holes, the food was poor, the sailors were inexperienced, never having undertaken such a long and hard voyage: all of which caused hardships, and scurvy broke out.3
Significantly, the five steamers had sailed across, a reflection of the condition of their propulsion plants. The mention of scurvy, if true, is surprising. James Lind’s discovery in the 1740s of a remedy (lemon juice) for scurvy took decades before it was adopted as a prophylactic for the fatal vitamin-deficiency disease, but an outbreak of scurvy in the 1860s during a relatively short time at sea suggests that serious nutrition problems ashore predated any such afloat.
Even so, the Baltic Squadron’s arrival was dull stuff compared with that of the Vladivostok-based Pacific Squadron on the other side of the continent. Its front-runner, the steam corvette Norvick, 26 days out of China, ran aground “under a full head of steam” near Point Reyes, California, early Saturday, 26 September, in heavy fog. All but one member of her 160-man crew survived, but by late that night when the U.S. Revenue Cutter Shubrick arrived on the scene from San Francisco with the Russian vice consul on board, the corvette already had been battered to bits and pieces by the surf. (The Shubrick, a former lighthouse tender, was for most of the Civil War the guardship of San Francisco, and the only floating defenses the city had.) Much of what was left of the Norvick eventually was put on display at a San Francisco curio shop.4 What was salvaged and put on auction, including several of the Norvick’s big guns and her engines, sold at bargain prices.
“The disaster to the corvette occurred when her officers thought her at least twenty miles outside of land, which she would have been had she been a few miles to the southward,” explained the Daily Alta California on 28 September. “At this season of the year a strong southeasterly current prevails which, coupled with the fact that the cloudy weather had prevented observations for some days, accounts for the mishap, the like of which might at this season occur to almost any vessel bound for this port.” To anyone bound there at high speed while uncertain of his position, anyway. A Russian court-martial subsequently exonerated all concerned, on the basis of the Norvick’s charts being faulty.
Squadron commander Rear Admiral Andrei Popov arrived at San Francisco on the corvette Bogatyre on 12 October. The rest of his diminished squadron, the corvettes Rynda and Calevala and the clippers Abreck and Gaidamack, dribbled into San Francisco between 16 October and 7 November. All five were welcomed happily, in large part because anxious city fathers had been unsuccessful in getting a U.S. Navy presence and the Russian corvettes were optimistically assumed to be a substitute. For a short while they might have been. On his own initiative, Admiral Popov came up with a plan to defend the city against a Confederate raider, should one appear at the Golden Gate as was rumored possible. Captain James Waddell of the CSS Shenandoah had just such a plan for a raid on the city, and miscellaneous Rebels greedily eyed the California gold-field shipments coming out of San Francisco; one hijacking attempt was narrowly averted. Despite his willingness to help defend the city, Popov was quickly instructed to preserve the strictest neutrality and to act only in case of humanitarian necessity.
Feting the Sailors of the Tsar
Both East and West Coast squadrons were greeted with gala entertainments, none more effusive than an enormous welcoming parade and several evening events arranged by New York City’s social and political leadership. The eating, drinking, and toasting were prodigious. A special moment came during the toasts at the splendid banquet in Astor House, when a Reverend Boole proclaimed with a flourish that the eagle of the East had come to mate with the eagle of the West. He hoped that the birds’ union would be consummated speedily, and that both would be joined in a single nest. Anyone still sober and actually listening must have found the imagery amusing.
In San Francisco the Russians were hosted less grandly, but no less hospitably. Popov’s ships, officers, and men were celebrated just as their counterparts across the continent were, and the press in San Francisco was every bit as enthusiastic as were newspapers on the East Coast. Popov’s officers refreshed themselves at grand balls staged by their admiring hosts—California Governor Leland Stanford was a guest of honor at one on 17 November that seated 2,400. Before they left for home nearly one year later, the officers and men of the Russian Pacific Squadron logged the West Coast tourist trifecta: a fire in the city, an earthquake (two, actually), and many complaints about the cost of living.
Secretary Welles, looking back on the visits as the end of 1863 approached, noted in his diary, “I have directed our naval officers to show them all proper courtesy, and the municipal authorities in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia have exhibited the right spirit.”5 “Right spirit” was understatement. The ball for 2,000 honoring the Russians in New York’s Academy of Music was estimated to have represented outlays of $1.34 million, including $250,000 in ball-gown purchases alone—all this in wartime.
In May 1864, at the outset of their return voyage home, three of the Baltic Squadron’s ships stopped in Boston. The official visit began with calls on the governor of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston, and then turned into a track meet, including visits to military facilities and monuments, libraries, zoos, museums, a hospital, a cemetery, and public schools. One highlight was a tour of the enormous Pacific Mills factory, an hour from Boston by train, where, in good times and flush with cotton, hundreds would have been laboring in shifts at the spindles.
The remainder of the squadron headed for home via Hampton Roads, Virginia. A measure of the enthusiasm raised by the ships’ presence on the Eastern Seaboard was the participation of all three adult Lincolns at one time or another during the Russians’ visit. On 5 December Mary Todd Lincoln was an honored guest at a reception on board the Osliabia, hosted by Admiral Lissovski and his officers. President Lincoln evidently was unavailable because Mrs. Lincoln was escorted by Major General John Dix. On 19 December the White House reciprocated by holding an afternoon reception in the East Room for the foreign visitors, an exclusive gathering to which Cabinet members, congressmen, and select others were invited to meet the Russians. One report noted that the Russian officers’ wives were present also, “magnificently dressed,” the only suggestion found these women had made the crossing to the United States.6 Finally, on 15 June, the day before the Peresviet, Vitiaz, and Osliabia departed Boston after their six-week stop, Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln, then a law student at Harvard, was among the guests at a private farewell dinner for the Russians at Boston’s Parker House.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the brilliant Harvard professor of medicine and author, was pressed into service to write appropriate paeans and other commemorations of the Russian visit in verse. He urged the “sea birds of Muscovy” to “rest in our waters, fold your white wings by our rock-girdled shore . . . God bless the Empire that loves the great Union; Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar!”7 Holmes was pressed twice more into versification, and later complained he’d used up all the “most effective rhymes.”
At the end of April 1864 St. Petersburg ordered the squadrons home. The other Europeans had backed down over the Polish crisis. Through spring and into late summer the 11 visitors left San Francisco and New York piecemeal, to sail home via various port calls on the way. Two of Popov’s vessels, the Gaidamack and Rynda, were instructed to transfer between the squadrons and to proceed not to Vladivostok but to Kronstadt.
Absent any evidence to the contrary, many Americans assumed at the time of the visits that the Russians arrived to express solidarity with the Union, perhaps invited and perhaps not, and that if circumstances required, the two squadrons quickly would have put to sea with guns loaded and run out to defend the Union’s interests against all comers. The Sacramento Daily Union wrote about a “proposed Russian alliance” as if one was already before the Senate, and quoted at length an opponent of such a treaty with the government of “the foremost despot under heaven.”
But most viewed the relationship—whatever it was—much more favorably. No less shrewd observer of the Washington scene than the old pol Thurlow Weed, Lincoln’s friend and Secretary Seward’s New York state sidekick, believed this to be true. Weed claimed as proof to have been present during an after-dinner conversation between old friends Admirals David Farragut and Lissovski about sealed orders, and to have heard from a New Yorker who said that, while in St. Petersburg, he saw orders directing the admirals “to report to President Lincoln for orders, in case England or France sided with the Confederates.”8
From Russia, With . . . What?
After the war the visits to Union ports by the two Imperial Russian Navy squadrons quickly receded into history, to emerge from footnote obscurity only occasionally in learned journal articles or in the popular press.9 As late as 1911 the received wisdom reflected Weed’s contemporary view, that the Russians “came to augment the federal navy at it most critical period.” That’s what James Barres wrote about the visit in a ten-volume photographic history of the Civil War. The trigger for a fundamental reappraisal finally came with Frank Golder’s 1915 essay, “The Russian Fleet and the Civil War,” that made clear the motive for the twin deployments had been entirely selfish.
For early 20th-century historians seeking opportunities to publish, the Russian squadrons’ port visits were the gift that kept on giving. A running spat was carried out in the pages of scholarly publications, as academics argued with Golder about what the visits really meant and who at the time had understood their true motivating strategy. In January 1949 William Nagengast, then a graduate student, published in the Russian Review a response to Golder and his own answer to the question,“were most Americans deceived about the motives behind the Russian port visits?”10 In a word, it was “no.” In an era long before digital databases, Nagengast managed to find 14 contemporaneous American newspapers and four periodicals that offered evidence of a sophisticated understanding in the North of what was really behind the Russian deployments of 1863.
But Nagengast’s conclusion stood only for another year before it was countered by Thomas A. Bailey who, in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, re-examined the “Russian fleet myth.” He judged that Golder had been right all along and that Nagengast’s proof had relied on too small a sample. Worse yet, the author “in his understandable zeal to present an arresting discovery in its best light, has hand-picked the evidence.”11 And so it went. By the turn of the century the analysis had become pretty fine-grained: One scholar in 2000 wrote 17 pages on “How Northwestern Ohio Newspapers Interpreted the Russian Fleet Visit in 1863.”
Despite Golder’s evidence, the notion that imperial Russia and the Union shared something much more profound than a wary concern about being bullied by Britain and France has been remarkably durable. In July 2008 a traveling exhibition, “Lincoln & Alexander: Martyrs to Freedom,” a collection of some 200 objects and artifacts connected to the two, began a tour of the United States. An implicit subtext (made explicit in publicity posters) paired the two chiefs of state: one, “the Great Emancipator,” the elected leader of what was then the world’s only democratic republic; the other, “the Tsar Liberator,” hereditary autocrat of a vast empire. It was a stretch. Accompanying press materials characterized the exhibit (its motivating idea came from the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation) as an “introduction to a brief but strategic period in U.S.-Russian diplomatic history . . . when Czar Alexander ordered his entire Atlantic and Pacific fleets to New York and San Francisco. . . .” Those are likely not the last words on this brief, curious episode.
1. Edgar T. Welles, ed., The Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), vol. 1, p. 443.
2. “A Russian Alliance,” Harper’s Weekly, 17 October 1863.
3. Frank A. Golder, “The Russian Fleet and the Civil War,” The American Historical Review, vol. 20, no. 1, p. 807.
4. Benjamin Franklin Gilbert, “Welcome to the Czar’s Fleet,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (March 1947), p. 14.
5. Welles, Dairy, vol. 1, pp. 480–81.
6. The source of the anomalous reference to Russian officers’ wives is Mary Todd Lincoln’s cousin, John Todd Stuart, a former Lincoln law partner and Illinois politician. Most other sources say that the Russian crews were deliberately composed entirely of bachelors.
7. Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted in Edward W. Ellsworth, “Sea Birds of Muscovy in Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly, March 1960, pp. 8–9.
8. Thurlow Weed et al., Life of Thurlow Weed including his Autobiography and a Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), vol. 2, pp. 346–47.
9. Marshall B. Davidson, “A Royal Welcome for the Russian Navy,” American Heritage, vol. 1, no. 4 (June 1960). See also Albert A. Woldman, Lincoln and the Russians (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1952) and C. Douglas Kroll, “Friends in Peace and War”: The Russian Navy’s Landmark Visit to Civil War San Francisco (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007).
10. William Nagengast, “The Visit of the Russian Fleet to the United States: Were Americans Deceived?” Russian Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1949), pp. 46–55.
11. Thomas A. Bailey, “The Russian Fleet Myth Re-examined,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 38, no. 1 (June 1951), pp. 81–90. See also Howard I. Kushner, “The Russian Fleet and the American Civil War: Another View,” The Historian, vol. 34, no. 4. (August 1972), pp. 633–49.
