William Seward, the Czar of Russia, Mexico and the Polish insurrenction of 1863

Emperador Maximiliano I: his presence in Mexico helped determine US policy toward Poland

I could get lost poking around in the historical journals. For instance, I came across a brief article called "Seward and the Polish Rebellion of 1863" by Harold Blinn in The American Historical Review July 1940.

The reference is to Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward, who was also a leading figure in the Republican Party in his own right.

Obviously, the biggest problem that their administration had to deal with was the Confederate revolt.

One of the problems that the Civil War had caused is that Emperor Napoleon III of France had taken the opportunity presented by that distraction to install a Habsburg emperor to rule Mexico on behalf of France, Emperador Maximiliano I. The Lincoln administration had no intention of allowing the French to establish Mexico as essentially a new colony in the Western Hemisphere. But until that little matter over secession was cleared up, there wasn't much they could do about it.

Czar Alexander II of Russia maintained good relations with the United States (the Union) and unlike Great Britain, showed no interest in establishing diplomatic ties to the Confederacy and thereby help legitimate Jefferson Davis' regime.

The Poles revolted against their Russian overlords in January, 1863, a revolt which dragged on until the autumn of 1864. Napoleon III saw a new opportunity to extend French influence and he announced plans to assist the Polish revolutionaries. He also invited the Americans to do the same.

Napoleon certainly knew that the Americans were not in much of a position to provide any meaningful aid to revolutionaries in Poland. But his pitch, as Blinn points out in his article, was an attempt to get the Americans to legitimize an intervention that bore notable similarities to French intervention in Mexico. And since the revolt was against Russia, which was providing badly needed diplomatic support in Europe to the beleaguered Union, it was too difficult a call for the Lincoln administration to decline to show much formal interest in the cause of the Polish revolutionaries. Seward did communicate to his American Ambassador in Paris that he regarded the Poles as "the gallant nation whose wrongs, whose misfortunes, and whose valor have so deeply excited universal sympathy in Europe."

The Czar's government at the time was regarded by European democrats as the ultimate guarantee to the monarchical regimes of Western Europe against the threat of democracy. The Russian government had willingly played such a role in acting to suppress the Revolutions of 1848.

Blinn's description of the position that Seward took on behalf of the Lincoln administration is worth quoting, though, for the light it sheds on the American stance toward interventions in European civil conflicts:

Seward's reply to the French invitation to the United States to join in the proposed intervention, written on May 11, 1863, was very skillful. After expressing appreciation of Napoleon's considerations and motives, Seward declared his belief that the czar's enlightened and humane character would lead him to receive the proposal "with all the favor that is consistent with the general welfare of the great state over which he presides with such eminent wisdom and moderation". He then pointed out that, despite the favor with which we regarded Napoleon's suggestion, there was an insurmountable difficulty in the way of our active co-operation with France, Austria, and Great Britain. Declaring that the builders of the American republic had at once been recognized as political reformers, that revolutionaries in every country had hailed them as such and consequently looked to the United States for effective sympathy if not for active support and patronage, Seward pointed out that soon after the adoption of the Constitution we had to consider "to what extent we could with propriety. safety and beneficence, intervene, either by alliance or concerted action with friendly powers or otherwise, in the political affairs of foreign states". An urgent appeal for such aid and sympathy had early been made on behalf of France, and so deeply did this touch the heart of the American people, that only the "deference they cherished to the counsels of the Father of our Country, who was then in the fullness of his unapproachable moral greatness, reconciled them to the stern decision that, in view of the location of this republic, the characters, habits and sentiments of the constituent parts, and especially its complex yet unique and very popular constitution, the American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention, and interference". Although Washington had recognized that the time might come when, American institutions being firmly established and working with complete success, "we might safely and perhaps beneficially take part in the consultations held by foreign states for the common advantage of the nations", Seward recalled that we had on frequent occasions declined such offers and declared that the decisions of the government each time had been approved by the deliberate judgment of the American people. "Our policy of non-intervention, straight, absolute and peculiar as it may seem to other nations, has thus become a traditional one, which could not be abandoned without the most urgent occasion, amounting to a manifest necessity. Certainly it could not be wisely departed from at this moment, when the existence of a local, although as we trust only a transient disturbance, deprives the government of the counsel of a portion of the American people, to whom so wide a departure from the settled policy of the country must in any case be deeply interesting."

Tags: civil war, harold blinn, us civil war, william seward