Book Description

Excerpt from France and the Confederate Navy: 1862 1868; An International Episode At one stage of our civil war it seemed as though its fate was to be decided less by the belligerents than by the national powers on the other side of the Atlantic. The insurgents, in their desperation, were ready to make any sacrifice to secure their independence. They offered to Spain, as the price of recognition, to guarantee to her the possession of Cuba; to France, they offered to guarantee Maximilian's sovereignty in Mexico, and for the loan of a squadron of the emperor's navy several millions of dollars in cotton; while to England they offered yet greater temptations. It was even rumored that a restoration of British supremacy in the insurgent states would not have been esteemed too high a price to pay for the overthrow of the government at Washington. It was in one of these paroxysms of desperation that the agents of the Confederate States managed to tempt the Emperor of the French to authorize the construction in the dockyards of France of several vessels of war for the Confederate navy more formidable than any then afloat. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.