It was during the reign of Alexander II that the relations between the United States and Russia became especially friendly. This government and the Autocracy had always from the start been on good term. It is said that even during our revolution Catherine II, with Frederick the Great, connived at the loss of England's American colonies, and had encouraged France to lend us money and send the fleets of D'Estang, and the army of Rochambeau, which wound up the conflict at Yorktown. We never had done much business with Russia, and it must be admitted that for the first eighty or ninety years of our existence as an independent nation our relations had been rather formal and our friendship purely official and perfunctory. Perhaps the fact that England was always opposing the aspirations of the Tsar, we naturally wished the Russians well, so long as the recollections of our old trouble with the mother country rankled in the breasts of the American people.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
