How the Samurai Saw the U.S. Civil War

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When the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861, samurai still ruled Japan. How did the samurai - recently forced into trade with the US and on the cusp of their own war - react?

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On both sides of the Pacific, the 1860s were time a of momentous change. Not long after the decade began, civil war wracked the still-young United States of America. The outcome of this war, pitting brother against brother, would determine the very future of America and the millions of enslaved people within it. In Japan, on the Pacific’s west coast, the end of the decade saw its own civil strife in the form of the Boshin War. Japan threw off the centuries of Shogunal rule by the samurai of the Tokugawa clan; not long after, the class structure of feudalism was done away with. Both countries were changed, forever.

The United States had played a major role in opening Japan to Europe and the Americas only a mere decade earlier. In 1853, President Filmore sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan alongside a flotilla bristling with cannon; their goal, force the isolated island nation to trade. In 1854, samurai leaders admitted they had no recourse, and did as the foreign barbarians bid. The Americans had accomplished what the British, French, and Russians before them had failed to do. They had opened Japan.

And yet, this was not the end of the samurai, or of the long-lived Tokugawa Shogunate. For fourteen years, it was the Shogun’s samurai delegates who would deal with the Americans and other foreigners. And so it was the samurai who would watch on from afar as the United States descended into Civil War from 1861 until 1865. What did the samurai think, as they watched this overwhelmingly powerful nation – the very country that had forced them from isolationist reverie – tearing itself apart?

Commodore Perry meets with Tokugawa representatives.

Unequal Partners

The first direct head-of-state relationship between Japan and the US was that of Shogun Tokugawa Iesada and President Franklin Pierce. (Iesada’s father, Ieyoshi, had died of heat stroke just weeks after Commodore Perry’s fleet arrived in Uruga Bay. President Filmore, who had only reached the presidency via the untimely death of President Zachery Taylor, did not even attempt to run for a second term and was out of office by the time Perry arrived in Japan.) Iesada was Shogun during the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened Japan to the West; yet Iesada was essentially a figurehead, being too sickly to involve himself in politics.

During these decades, America was unquestionably the more relationally dominant of the two countries. The US forced Japan to sign loathsome “unequal treaties,” like the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Japan, whose samurai government and population did not want to interact with these foreigners, had no choice but to open up treaty ports, grant foreigners extraterritoriality, and put up with unfair trade regulations.

Franklin Pierce was the first American president to officially engage with Japan.

Weak Leaders on Both Sides of the Pacific

And yet, the 1850s and ’60s were a time when both countries were saddled with particularly weak leadership. Both went through de facto heads of state at a startlingly quick pace. The Shoguns in Edo (modern Tokyo) steadily lost authority, seen as weak both because of their capitulation to the Americans and concessions to the Emperor in Kyoto. (Essentially a distant figurehead for many centuries, Emperor Komei [1831-1867] was so offended by the idea of foreign barbarians in Japan that he broke with tradition and began interfering in national politics.)

For its part, America’s strong foreign policy belied troubles at home. As more territories were admitted to the Union, the specter of slavery resulted in violent clashes between slaveholders and abolitionists. Presidents Filmore, Pierce, and Buchanan all tolerated slavery and did little to quell the instability in the country. All were one-term presidents, currently counted amongst the worst in US history.

For the samurai, however, these three represented the first American leaders they’d directly dealt with. Filmore dispatched Perry, and it was his name on the messages directed towards the “Emperor” of Japan. (It was instead delivered to the samurai government.) Pierce was president during the actual opening of Japan; he assigned Towsend Harris as America’s first consul to the island nation.

In 1857, Shogun Tokugawa Iesada granted Harris the unprecedented honor of meeting with his august person. Harris traveled some two hundred miles from his ramshackle consul in Shimoda to meet the Shogun in Edo; he was guarded by Shogunal samurai the whole way. Harris recalled that “the whole train numbered some three hundred and fifty persons.”[1]

Townsend Harris’ 1857 procession to Edo.

Samurai in the Antebellum

Harris’ meeting with the Shogun was a great triumph for Pierce’s pushy foreign policy. In Japan, however, many grumbled yet again of Shogunal weakness. (Not least among them, we can assume, was Emperor Komei.) For many samurai, for whom martial valor was their supposed birthright (despite not a single war in their lifetimes), the humiliation of kowtowing to foreigners was unbearable. Many longed to strike out at the foreign interlopers, but most knew that, militarily, they stood no chance.

Japan, however, did have a major advantage over its neighbors in Asia. Despite being subject to onerous unequal treaties, it was not colonized. The Shogunate knew that in order to survive, it would have to modernize, both in terms of technology and its military. Purchasing modern armaments and training experts in the ways of the outside world was imperative. This was all occurring as the country still officially forbade its citizens from traveling abroad, on pain of death.

But samurai would visit the United States – and they would do so while the tensions between North and South were reaching a boiling point.

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Mission to America

This was part of what made the 1860 Shogunal mission to the United States so momentous. On January 19th, 1860, the delegates set sail; 96 Japanese men, 77 of them samurai, and a single American officer. The embassy’s leaders were both samurai lords; the daimyo of Buzen and Awaji. [2]

Amongst their ranks was Fukuzawa Yukichi, who would later emerge as one of Japan’s great modernizers. Nakahama “John” Manjiro, a former peasant castaway to the United States who had been spared death upon return to Japan and was instead given samurai status, served as English interpreter. They sailed across the seas on the Kanrin Maru, Japan’s first sail and screw-driven steam corvette, purchased in 1853 from the Dutch. A successful voyage would show the Americans just how quickly the samurai were taking to Western naval technology.

The Kairin Maru, bound for America on the eve of Civil War.

Ships Fated for Battle

The captain of the Kanrin Maru was Katsu Kaishu, “father of the Japanese navy.” A Tokugawa loyalist, it would be he who, seven years onwards, surrendered the Tokugawa capital of Edo to an army of rebels intent on restoring the emperor to power. But while that war still lay nearly a decade away, America’s own civil war was very near at hand.

The Kanrin Maru arrived in San Francisco on March 17th, 1860. The samurai, riding on the US sidewheel steam frigate Powhatan, had first stopped over in the Kingdom of Hawaii for refueling; this would have been the first time almost any of them had stepped foot outside of Japan. Both the Kanrin Maru and the Powhatan would serve in their countries’ respective civil wars. The Powhatan was active in numerous blockades of Confederate-held territory; the Kanrin Maru, for its part, was captured by the pro-imperial army as it sailed towards Hokkaido as part of Shogunate loyalist Enomoto Takeaki’s fleet.

The Kairin Maru, with captain Katsu Kaishu featured at top right.

In America on the Brink of Civil War

As the samurai disembarked in San Francisco, the American Civil War was only a single year away. Yet the political strife and bitter sectional infighting then rending the country made little impression on them.

Instead, they recorded their stunned reactions to this very different country. Greasy, unappealing food; vast fire-proof buildings composed of brick and masonry; everything felt so different from their home archipelago. [3] Worst of all was the way Americans mistreated rice. The samurai were served poor-quality rice, sometimes cooked in butter, or, heavens forefend, even mixed with sugar. For Muragaki Norimasa, daimyo of Awaji, all this was a “hardship [that]…cannot adequately be described with a pen.’ [2]

Fukuzawa purchased an English-Chinese Websters Dictionary, which he would later use to help make his own Japanese-English lexicon.

Fukuzawa with American Theodora Alice during his time in San Francisco. 1860.

After a few days in San Franciso, they were on their way again, once more by sea. The Kanrin Maru returned to Japan, but the Powhatan carried the embassy onwards to Panama. There, they road the Panama Railway across the isthmus, and then boarded yet another vessel, this one bound for Washington, D.C. When they finally came ashore on the American east coast, they found many thousands of American onlookers. All were excitedly waiting to catch a glimpse of these exotic foreigners, whose dress and appearance so differed from the American population of the antebellum era. Nearly everywhere they went, they were mobbed by Yankees excitedly wanting to shake their hand.

The Tokugawa samurai amongst American navy men in Washington DC. 1860.

Samurai and the President

On May 17th, 1860, history was made: for the first time, a Japanese delegation met with the president of the United States. The core members of the Shogunal embassy were feted at the White House itself, meeting with President Buchanan and many of the country’s top officials. The samurai bowed to Buchanan, who responded, perhaps awkwardly, in kind. They then presented him with a message from “the Tycoon,” the title for the Shogun invented for communication with foreigners. (Meaning “great prince,” it better implied the complete authority of the Shogun than the literal translation of “generalissimo.”)

President Buchanan responded:

“I give you a cordial welcome, as representatives of His Imperial Majesty, the Tycoon of Japan, to the American government. We are all much gratified that the first embassy which your great empire has ever accredited to any foreign power has been sent to the United States. I trust that this will be the harbinger of perpetual peace and friendship between the two countries.” 

President Buchanan, quoted in the Baltimore Sun, May 17th, 1860.

The nature of the presidency and Democracy itself was a shock for the Japanese delegates, who wondered at Buchanan’s limited authority as an elected leader with only a few years of power guaranteed from the popular rabble. Fukuzawa would later wonder as to why there was no powerful “Washington” dynasty in this Washington D.C. [3] Lord Muragaki was impressed by Buchanan, however, recalling him as “a silver-haired man [with]….a most genial manner without losing noble dignity.” [4] The samurai would visit with Buchanan twice more, and he even pressed upon them a gold watch engraved with his very likeness as a gift to the “Tycoon.”

The samurai and President Buchanan.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Even within the relative pomp and circumstance of America’s highest level of national government, the samurai delegates were shocked at how informal things felt. In Japan, every single element of government proceedings was regimented and stylized. Who sat where, on what raised tatami dais, who could speak to whom, and how; it was all ordered by class and status. Comparatively, American politicians acted shockingly friendly and informal. And as the samurai had mostly remained in free states (Washington DC notwithstanding), they would have missed the single starkest social ordering in America: slavery.

Tokugawa-era Japan, as a feudal society, was far from “free”; the archipelago had corvee labor, an inflexible class system, indentured servitude, and an oppressed “untouchable” class (the Burakumin). Peasants’ lives were restrictive and difficult. Yet, Japan lacked anything quite on the level of American chattel slavery. In fact, slavery had been banned some 270 years earlier by the conquering warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. While Toyotomi was often a cruel, brutal man, he found peacetime slavery extremely distasteful, perhaps because he was from an oppressed peasant background. (He would, however, condone the enslavement of innumerable Koreans during his invasion of that peninsula.)

Indeed, the Tokugawa samurai in America might already have associated Caucasians with slavery, since the Portuguese with whom the samurai of Toyotomi’s age interacted had taken many Japanese into slavery abroad. The very first Japanese people to set foot in Europe may well have been slaves. Toyotomi had attempted to retrieve these slaves, and when this proved impossible, banned the Portuguese from Japan. [5]

In 1860 in America, however, slavery was still alive and sadly well in 15 US states. And yet despite the deadly seriousness of the debate on slavery then raging, it was little commented upon by the 1860 samurai mission.

In a Congress Divided

The samurai delegates were in for another crash course in American civil society. One morning, they were shocked to see the vice president himself, John C. Breckinridge, approach their hotel – bereft of any escort! – to ask them if they’d like to visit Congress with him. The idea of the person holding the second highest rank in the country moving about without a trail of dozens of retainers must have been beyond the pale. Still, the samurai took Breckinridge up on his offer, and went off the visit a legislature at the height of sectional tensions.

Breckinridge presided over the session of Congress as the samurai watched on. Of course, most of the debates and discussions heard that day were lost on them. When asked if they’d like to ask any questions during the session, they responded laconically. “We considered it as presumptuous to inquire into the state affairs of another nation.” Little inquiry or comment was made regarding US domestic affairs, despite being welcomed into the heart of the nation’s political goings-on.

In the coming year, Breckinridge would run for president as part of a split Democratic ticket. Despite gaining the support of most of the South, his loss helped usher in newcomer Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Republican Party. Breckinridge would flee the Union as war erupted, becoming a Confederate general of some importance.

Back in March of 1860, disturbing news would soon reach the samurai during a stay in Pennsylvania. Ii Naosuke, a powerful minister of the Tokugawa government who had managed to restore much of its authority, had been assassinated. Word of the political murder had sped by pony express across the American continent to inform the embassy. It was an ill portent, and, indeed, the Tokugawa shogunate would only weaken following Ii’s death.

Vice President Breckinridge.

Rumblings of the Civil War

As the samurai left the United States, the end of the Shogunate was still seven years away. America would have its own reckoning much sooner.

The election of Abraham Lincoln precipitated the sudden secession of numerous southern states; seven left the Union before Buchanan even had the chance to hand the presidency over to his successor. Francis Hall, a reporter for the New York Tribune stationed in Edo, encapsulated the mood in Japan in the days before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumpter.

“Mail from the States today… Its secession news exciting the liveliest interest. Raw silk immediately fell one fourth in price, much to the astonishment of the Japanese who were unable to understand such a depression.”

F. G. Notehelfer, “Francis Hall,” in Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859- 1860. [4]

Economic worries held more sway in Japan than any considerations of internal politics in far-off America. Also of concern to the Tokugawa government was the procurement of American-made warships; the Civil War quickly derailed these plans. [7] In 1862, however, the new American consul to Japan, Robert Pruyn, convinced the Shogunate that the war would soon be over and to place massive armament orders with him. The shogunate officials believed Pruyn; the image of the Civil War at this point was one of a local disturbance, much like had occurred in Japan many times.

The war would not end nearly so quickly nor so easily. President Lincoln was made aware of the Japanese request for guns and ships, but could spare no armaments as long as war persisted. (He did, however, assign a naval officer to oversee the building of three ships for Japan. Pruyn recommended they be named America, Nippon, and Fujiyama.)

The process of building and delivering the ships took years. By 1864, the Shogunate was even considering sending naval students to “study” in wartorn America; in reality, these youths would covertly seek out information on the long-awaited ships. But more dramatic events geopolitical events were about to change all that.

Robert Pruyn, US minister to Japan during the Civil War.

America’s Wars in Japan

It’s easy to imagine the Civil War occupying all of the United State’s military output; yet, this was not quite so. President Lincoln thought it important to maintain a sense of American power abroad. This would help ensure foreign countries – like Japan – still consider the Union as the true and functional government of the United States.

As the Civil War raged in North America, sectional violence was increasing in Japan. The Sonnō jōi (“revere the emperor, expel the barbarian”) movement was gaining violent steam. Attacks by anti-foreign samurai elements on overseas delegates and businessmen increased; Robert Pruyn’s own Edo domicile was burnt down.

On June 25th, 1863, samurai of the radical Choshu domain attacked an American merchant steamer at anchor in the Straits of Shimonoseki. The samurai were responding to Emperor Komei’s recent unilateral “order to expel barbarians.” The Shogunate knew nothing of the Choshu samurai’s intentions, and was at a loss as similar attacks continued.

On July 16th, with the consent of Ambassador Pruyn, the USS Wyoming sailed into Shimonseki. There, it proceeded to engage the Choshu fleet. The samurai vessels had all been supplied by America, but were poorly maintained; nonetheless, they put up an impressive fight. Wyoming sank two ships and wounded or killed forty samurai; in turn, the Choshu soldiers badly damaged the larger Wyoming and killed four American seamen. After two hours of battle, Wyoming left Shimonseki, sailing back towards Yokohama. 

The Battle of Shimonoseki.

Acrimony on the Shores of the Pacific

This unilateral action in Japan had been undertaken only weeks after Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg halted Confederate General Lee’s invasion of the North. Often considered the turning point of the Civil War, it’s amazing that Lincoln had time to consider anything else; yet, foreign policy was not forgotten.

When Lincoln heard of the battle with Choshu in far-off Japan, he had the ships being built for the Shogunate impounded. Increasingly, Japan seemed fractured, and the Tokugawa dynasty unmoored from true authority. All this was occurring while America itself was at war with almost half of its states. 

The impounding of ships the Shogunate had already waited years for was a major blow to bilateral relations. While the US supported two additional attacks on Choshu, the Shogunate drifted towards France. America was no longer worthy of trust, distracted as it was with its own domestic troubles. 

Ambassador Robert Pruyn, who had received incredible sums for the Shogunate-ordered ships, was now under great pressure from the Tokugawa; unable to supply the armaments he had promised, he fled Japan. In 1867, two years after the Civil War had ended in victory for the Union, and Lincoln had been assassinated, the Shogunate sent a delegation to seek recompense for their lost ships.

The Battle of Gettysburg, only weeks before the Battle of Shimonoseki.

Ghost Ships in the Night

The samurai, the last who would be sent to America by the Tokugawa, were able to meet with the new President, Andrew Johnson. He apologized for the troubles of the past years, and offered to sell the samurai military ships left over from the war. He also showed them a map of recently purchased Alaska, to which one of the samurai replied “We are glad, for it brings our two countries nearer to each other.” Overall, the samurai were somewhat mollified by Johnson’s politeness.

(Meanwhile, Johnson was busy attempting to prevent freed slaves from receiving citizenship, enraging his own Republican congress.)

And yet, the damage to the shogunate had been done. In less than a year, Satsuma and Choshu domains rose up in support of now-late Emperor Komei’s son, Emperor Meiji. The Tokugawa Shogunate, the ultimate authority in Japan for two and a half centuries, lost battle after battle. As the Shogunate and rebels clashed, the Tokugawa-purchased ironclad, the Stonewall, was on its way to Japan. An advanced, powerful warship built for the Confederacy in France, it had been seized by the Union during the Civil War; if added to the Shogunate fleet, it would have been a powerful tool to use against the imperial rebels.

The ironclad CSS Stonewall. The Tokugawa renamed the warship Kotetsu; it would later be called the Azuma.

Civil War Ironclads Against Samurai

William H. Seward, Lincoln’s stalwart ally and now secretary of state under Johnson, felt it was the US’s duty to deliver the Stonewall to its rightful owners – the Shogunate. However, the US’s new Minister Resident in Japan, Robert Van Valkenburgh, thought otherwise. Unsure of who would end up victorious in Japan’s new civil war, he impounded the ship. Shortly thereafter, Katsu Kaishu surrendered Edo to rebel leader Saigo Takamori. The Shogun abdicated, secluding himself in the Tokugawa family temple in Ueno. Soon, this would be the site of the only major clash in Edo during the war. Enomoto Takeaki, Vice President of the Tokugawa navy, absconded to Hokkaido with the entire Shogunal fleet; the Stonewall, however, would not go with him.

Instead, with the imperialists now in control of Edo, the US embassy released the Stonewall – not to the Tokugawa, but to the new rebel government. The ironclad went on to play a pivotal role in the final battles of the war. When Tokugawa loyalists stormed the ship at anchor under cover of night, its modern Gatling guns sent the samurai to flight.

With the fall of Enomonoto Takeaki’s short-lived breakaway republic in Hokkaido, the Tokugawa cause was well and truly dead. And it was leftover weapons of the U.S. Civil War, only four years finished, that helped seal the Shogunate’s fate.

How the Samurai Saw the Civil War

The U.S. Civil War was one of the most momentous, impactful moments in North American history. It pit state against state and brother against brother; hundreds of thousands of Americans died, and the longstanding, horrific institution of slavery was finally brought to an end. The war lasted longer than expected, and the outcome was often far from clear.

But for the samurai rulers of Japan, far across the Pacific, the U.S. Civil War was far from the most pressing event in daily life. Pressured by foreign powers on all sides, and dealing with internal civil strife, the Shogunate had other things on its mind. Many samurai who were already well acquainted with America during this period had little to say on the matter; in his still well-read autobiography, Fukuzawa Yukichi only mentioned the Civil War in terms of the ships Japan tried to purchase during the conflict.

President Lincoln’s insistence that American power still be projected abroad during the war helped ensure that the Tokugawa samurai never considered that the US government might fall; however, as the ships and armaments promised by Ambassador Pruyn never showed up, the samurai did begin to see America as a distracted and unreliable partner. The United States lost some prestige in their eyes, and the Tokugawa began to look to France for assistance in modernizing its military.

Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu. Last Tokugawa head of state; relinquished office in 1868.

Two Worlds, Long Gone

But by 1869, it hardly mattered. The last Tokugawa holdouts had fallen. In Japan, a new government ruled; soon, it would do away with the samurai class and all feudal holdovers. America moved haltingly through Reconstruction, with slavery replaced with onerous Jim Crow laws.

In 1879, former commanding general of the Union Army Ulysses S. Grant became the first former US president to visit Japan. Grant received one of the most rapturous welcomes any foreigner ever has in the country. Emperor Meiji was deeply impressed with Grant, and would treasure advice given to him by the great general for many decades to come.

But Grant was feted not by topknot-wearing, sword-carrying warriors, like those who had met presidents Buchanan and Johnson. Instead, his hosts in the upper echelons of Japanese society wore top hats, suits, and ties. Two years previous, the final samurai rebellion had been put down. The age of the samurai was truly over. As both Civil and Boshin wars faded into the background, the memories of the decade when samurai strode the halls of a White House on the cusp of national conflagration became nothing but the ephemera of a long-distant past.

Former President Grant meets with Emperor Meiji, 1879. Their meeting came approx. 14 years on from the Civil War, and a decade on from the Boshin War. Grant was elected president just as Meiji gained full control over the Japanese archipelago.

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What to Read Next:

The Last Samurai: Enomoto Takeaki and the Warrior Democracy of Ezo

Sources:

[1] Keene, Donald. (2002) Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his World, 1852-1912. Colombia University Press.

[2] Harding, Christopher. (2023). When the Samurai came to America. Engelsberg Ideas.

[3] W. G. Beasley. (1995) Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travelers in America and Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press. 61. Referenced in Bridge (2013).

[4] Treese, Joel D. (2015). The Japanese Mission of 1860. The White House Historical Association.

[6] Nelson, Thomas. (2004). Slavery in Medieval Japan. Monumenta Nipponica, 59(4), 463–492.

[7] Francis Hall quoted in Bridge, Kyle (2013) “Japanese Westernization and the American Civil War,” Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 5.

[8] Ericson, Mark. D. (1997). “Yankee Impertinence, Yankee Corruption”: The Tokugawa Shogunate and Robert Pruyn, 1862—1867. The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 6(4), 235–260.

Haraguchi, Izumi. (1995). The Influence of the Civil War in the US on the Meiji Restoration in Japan. 南太平洋研究-South Pacific Study. Vol. 16, no.1. 127-134.

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