May 4, 2012, 12:30 pm
By STEPHEN R. PLATT
Stephen R. Platt is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War.”

Half a world away from the battlefields of Virginia, a small community of American traders and missionaries in the international port of Shanghai watched the Civil War play out as a distant and grinding agony. News from the United States took at least two months to reach them – and when it did, the anxiety many felt to leap onto the next California-bound steamer generally faded when they thought through how long it would actually take before they could get back home, enlist and put on a uniform.

But the tensions of their home nevertheless bled into the local community. Most of the Americans in Shanghai were Northerners, but their British neighbors – who outnumbered them 10 to 1 – were overwhelmingly pro-Confederate and had no compunction about saying so, even joking about it. There wasn’t much the Americans could do, though now and then an Englishman would find himself getting beaten up at a dinner party.

The war finally came to Shanghai in the winter of 1862. After American sailors had boarded the British mail steamer Trent near Cuba in November 1861, Britain began preparations for war against the United States, and by the winter of 1862 Shanghai was echoing with the rumor that James Hope, the commander of Royal Navy forces in China, was just waiting for the orders from London that would authorize him to seize or destroy all United States ships in Chinese waters and throw his American neighbors into prison.

The Americans in Shanghai were helpless. With United States naval power concentrated on blockading the South, there was only one American gunship in Chinese waters: the little Saginaw, which had rotted out in December 1861, leaving them with nothing to rely on but the good graces of the same Royal Navy from which they now feared an attack. An American merchant in Shanghai wrote home to his mother in March 1862 that everyone was waiting for the next steamer from America, which “will bring us news of either peace or war. In the event of a war, business will be entirely broken up and nearly all the Americans in this place will make tracks for San Francisco.”

More: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/a-little-trouble-in-big-china/?ref=opinion