were to assail the Union, they would soon find themselves at war with Russia as well. He wrote to John Bigelow early in the war: "I have a belief that the European State, whichever one it may be, that commits itself to intervention anywhere in North America, will sooner or later fetch up in the arms of a native of an oriental country not especially distinguished for amiability of manners or temper." (Thomas 128) Adams to Russell: "superfluous to point out this means war The summer of 1863, despite the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, was marked by another close brush with US-UK war. It was on 5 September 1863 that US Ambassador Charles Francis Adams told Lord Russell that if the Scorpion-class ironclads – powerful warships capable of breaking the Union blockade which were then under construction in England — were allowed to leave port, "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war." Lord Russell had to pause, and then backed off entirely. The Scorpion-class ships were put under surveillance by the British government on 9 September, and finally seized by the British government in mid-October, 1863. (Adams II 147) They never fought for the Confederacy. A revolt against Russian domination of Poland, incited by the British, started in 1863 and lasted into late 1864. Crook points out that it was Lord Russell who told Lord Lyons in March 1863 that the Polish issue had the potential to create a Russo-American common front and thus revolutionize world power relations, evidently to the detriment of London. (Crook 285) Such a prophecy was coherent with the then -fashionable ideas of de Tocqueville about Russia and America as the two great powers of the future. Russian fleets in New York and San Francisco The most dramatic gestures of cooperation between the Russian Empire and the United States came in the autumn of 1863, as the Laird rams crisis hung in the balance. On 24 September, the Russian Baltic fleet began to arrive in New York harbor. On 12 October, the Russian Far East fleet began to arrive in San Francisco. The Russians, judging that they were on the verge of war with Britain and France over the British-fomented Polish insurrection of 1863, had taken this measure to prevent their ships from being bottled up in their home ports by the superior British fleet. These