Edward Grey Quotes

There was some fear in the North that the shots fired by the Southern rebels, might encourage one or more of the European Powers to start a war with the United States. And if the Rebellion turned into a full scale Civil War, the South would surely encourage such acts be promising trade concessions in the export of Southern cotton. Seward’s confident and bellicose statement distressed some Union colleagues who feared that Seward might anger and provoke one of more of the machismo and nationalistic European Powers. However, if Seward was bluffing, the bluff worked. No country encroached on American interests during the Civil War. If he was not bluffing, he certainly, along with many others, understated the difficulty that the North would have putting down the Southern rebellion.

He himself became a victim of the Civil War when Oliver Cromwell ordered him beheaded in 1658

The Spanish had been beaten and bloodied by England, but no one else until Napoleon would come along later. So it was easy for Spain to bully and dominate the non-English countries.

The 6 Day War began less then 6 months later. This was another failure of U. S. Intelligence. Essentially, Rusk and others took the belligerent speeches of Nasser and other Arab leaders as rhetoric meant only for local consumption and did not realize that the Arabs had so deluded themselves that they thought that they could really destroy the state of Israel. American intelligence assumed that they knew better and their threats were just traditional Arab exaggeration and boasting.

Nasser was indeed planning an attack. Israeli intelligence had discovered it, and the Israeli’s informed President Lyndon Johnson who in turn called Kosygin. Nasser and the Arabs had miscalculated again and ended up being not only defeated in the war they wanted but totally embarrassed by the incredibly poor performance of the Arab armies who greatly outnumbered the Israelis but had no stomach for a fight.

This quotation is important for two reasons. First, it shows that there was a very hostile environment in Europe well before the assassination of the Archduke of Austria that “triggered” WWI. Second, that the Germans were racist before Hitler ever came on the scene. The Emperor demagogued the issue and took it to new extremes, but the evil was there. To the Germans, the Slavs and Russians were a lesser form of humanity than the Germans. The Austrians were threatening to attack Serbia and Russia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled many ethnic Slavs, Russians and Muslims—the lower forms of humanity—and long before Hitler, Wilhelm and other leading Germans thought that the Germanic Peoples should rule that part of the world as the lesser “races” were not fit to rule.

German ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had declared war on Serbia. See {642085}. The Russian Czar was under great pressure because a large Roman Catholic Empire was warring against a small Orthodox co-religionist of Russia and Russians of all classes wanted Russia to defend Serbia. The Czar was making a good faith effort to stave off the war. What he did not realize was that Germany had actually planned for war against Russia and France and was using the alliance with Austria as an excuse.

The Times regretted that the Germans did not speak to the Austrians more vigorously when they were threatening to attack Serbia who harbored anti-Austro-Hungarian terrorists (see {642085}). What the Times editors did not realize was that the Germans had already made their war plans (see {642092}) and the Serbian issue was just the justification they needed to implement them. So there was no real reason for the Germans to discourage the Austro-Hungarian Empire from its mission to punish Serbia.

Veiled threat to England to stop Confederate agents from building ships in Britain. In one of the great, artfully worded, diplomatic messages, Adams threatened to take direct action in British territory without ever threatening anything. It worked, and the vessel construction was curtailed by the British.

An earlier version was written by Congressman Louis L. Ludlow, 1873-1950—see his quotation about it—{39681}. The proposed amendment was narrowly defeated.

Congress never did declare war.

King George did not want to give up the American Colonies and claimed the loss at Yorktown was just a loss of a single battle. The English soldiers had controlled New York, Charlestown and other places and American Tories wanted to fighting to continue. The French were having major problems elsewhere and the states were all broke from the war effort. Hamilton urged Clinton to offer all the New York offers and soldiers half pay tp be available to fight against the other ex-colonies represented in the Continental Congress.