Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History Read Online Free PDF Page B

that British threats would not make untenable.
    The choice of a neutral country willing to offer a base and willing to thumb its nose at Britain in the process was obvious—the United States. Russian and American strategic priorities were rapidly converging. The two countries had been on the friendliest terms since Catherine the Great formed her League of Armed Neutrality during the American Revolution to protect neutral trade with the new country from British interdiction. Since then, they had found natural attraction in the similar problems and opportunities of developing vast continents. They also shared a healthy fear of British world hegemony. For the Russians, it had been the sting of their defeat in the Crimean War that had reinforced the danger facing them. For the Americans, it had been the undisguised British desire for a Southern victory and its huge and blatant support of the rebel war effort.
    Czar Alexander II and his foreign minister, Aleksandr Gorchakov, supported the survival of the Union, and their diplomatic assistance and advice in the first two years of the war had been critical. Russian advice had led to defusing the Trent Affair’s slide toward war between the United States and Great Britain in late 1861. Lincoln’s appointment of Cassius Marcellus Clay as ambassador to the imperial court had been a brilliant stroke in cementing the natural alliance between the two countries. Clay was a Southerner famous for his pro-Union and antislavery views, and he was a man not to be trifled with. He had fought and won more than one duel with his bowie knife. In Russia, he lectured on the necessity of industrializing the empire and weaning it away from its thrall to GreatBritain’s manufactures. His speeches were met with thunderous applause by Russian audiences.
    Yet the thought of an open-ocean voyage and the excitement of New York pushed thoughts of geopolitics from Midshipman Rimsky-Korsakov’s mind. He was intrigued by the squadron commander, whom he watched walking the bridge of the
Nevsky
. Adm. Stefan S. Lisovsky was a seaman to be reckoned with by all accounts. He was notorious for his irascible and ungovernable temper. Nikolai remembered a lieutenant telling the boys as Lisovsky’s appointment was announced, “Do you know what they say of him? In his last command, in a fit of wrath, he had rushed up to a sailor, guilty of some offense, and bitten off his nose!” The lieutenant crossed himself, “Dear God, it will be an interesting voyage. At least, you will be comforted, my boys, to know that the admiral felt badly enough about the nose-biting to get the poor man a pension.” 7
    Nikolai rubbed his own nose.
WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C., 3:43 PM , JULY 15, 1863
    He was an impatient man, Thomas Francis Meagher “Meagher of the Sword,” hero of the Young Ireland Movement, the gallant Gael who had led the Irish Brigade into the teeth of hell through the cornfields of Antietam and up the cold slopes of Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg. Now an impatient man in civilian clothes, his resignation had been moldering for four months in some War Department file. He wanted it back. Hat in hand he had come from New York to retrieve his commission as brigadier general with a promise to raise three thousand Irish to fight for the Stars and Stripes and for the green flag of Ireland—the mystic golden harp on the emerald green field.
    President Lincoln had shown interest in his offer, and Meagher had come to Washington to see it through. Now he cooled his heels in the lobby of the War Department building as officers and clerks scurried about, stirred by the bloody riots in New York. Meagher was heartsick that his own people had raised their hands against their new country. He had argued again and again that the road to a new life in this country was to share its battles. And many had flocked to the colors. His own Irish Brigade, now death-shrunk through too many battles, had marched off full of