ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, neither the United States nor any other American country was considered, or had any wish to be considered, a 'Great Power' in the ordinary sense of the term. For that reason, most of the nineteenth-century history of North America is peripheral to the subject of this book. Yet several American events of the 1860s involved the European Powers directly to a limited extent, and had much wider indirect repercussions on their behaviour.
