A year after the defeat of the Confederacy, Evangelical Presbyterian-turned-Congregationalist minister Charles B. Boynton, professor at the Naval Academy, Chaplain to the House of Representatives, and president of what became Howard University, laid down his thoughts about the reunited American republic’s place in the international order in his 1866 The Four Great Powers: England, France, Russia, and America. Boynton declared that “America desires no war, foreign or domestic. A contest with England or France should be avoided at almost any sacrifice that does not involve a principle or our national honor.” Boynton tied the idea of national honor not to a spirit of international altruism, but to the idea that the United States should not be interfered with in its battle to eradicate slavery in the South and to the United States’ sight to order the Western Hemisphere as it pleased. Boynton, like many Republicans in the era, was committed to maintaining America’s hemispheric hegemony. The question of national honor, therefore, was not about keeping America involved in European affairs, but keeping Europe out of American affairs. France and England, Boynton complained, still hoped to exercise some influence in North America, and were “not yet ready to yield to us the control of this Continent. They never will do it, unless compelled.” If Americans were fully aware of their danger of European influence, and held “themselves in readiness to repel attack, especially if they will maintain a navy, which shall be the true expression of our national power, then the question whether Americans shall rule America may be settled without a war.”
Boynton most interesting analysis, especially for the 21st Century reader, is undoubtedly his relative affinity for Russia compared to other European powers. The United States and Russia maintained a relatively warm relationship with the Russian Empire during the Civil War. The Russian Empire, unlike every other major European power, refused even to meet with Confederate diplomats. In 1863 independence movement in Poland sparked an international crisis that led Britain and France to threaten the Tsar with war. Napoleon III’s family ties to Poland, and the Liberal British government’s commitment to liberal nationalism made the threat serious enough that the tsar moved the Imperial Navy out of the Baltic Sea and into a warm water port. No European state was willing to allow Russia’s navy to winter, but the United States decided show to its appreciation for Russia’s collusion with the Lincoln government on suppressing secession in Poland and in the southern states by agreeing to allow Russia’s Navy to winter in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. The Lincoln government fetted Russian officers throughout the winter of 1863, and Russian nobleman regularly attended Washington DC’s party circuit. Boynton, like many northern Protestants, saw Russia as a potential friend to America not because they shared political systems, but because they were both the most powerful representatives of their respective political regimes and could order the rest of the world between them. Boynton recalled that Russia had been “viewed with dislike or indifference by Americans, because of the form of her government, and her supposed hatred of a liberal and republican policy.” Americans historically viewed the Tsarist empire as the “determined foe of the rights of man; as neither desiring for herself, nor willing to admit in others, any other form of civilization than such as may be produced by an absolute military despotism.” Boynton knew that his countrymen previous to the Civil War “supposed that Russia and America are the true opposites and even antagonists of each other, the one representing a half-civilized oriental despotism, the other rational republicanism.” Times, however, had changed. A “thought once scarce entered the American mind that a mutual regard might spring up between the two Powers, and that they may yet become the friendly representatives of the two leading ideas of the world.” America and Russia, Boynton proposed, might be friendly precisely because thy represented the apotheosis of democracy and autocracy, respectively.