Alexander backed the Union during the American Civil War and sent warships to New York Harbor and San Francisco Bay to deter attacks by the Confederate Navy.

[5] He sought peace, moved away from bellicose France when Napoleon III fell in 1871, and in 1872 joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation.

His early life gave little indication of his ultimate potential; until the time of his accession in 1855, aged 37, few imagined that posterity would know him for implementing the most challenging reforms undertaken in Russia since the reign of Peter the Great.

In the period of his life as heir apparent (1825 to 1855), the intellectual atmosphere of Saint Petersburg did not favour any kind of change: freedom of thought and all forms of private initiative were suppressed vigorously by the order of his father.

[9] The education of the tsesarevich as future emperor took place under the supervision of the liberal romantic poet and gifted translator Vasily Zhukovsky,[10] grasping a smattering of a great many subjects and becoming familiar with the chief modern European languages.

He praised Alexander for the range of his fundamental reforms, arguing that the tsar was: called upon to execute one of the hardest tasks which can confront an autocratic ruler: to completely remodel the enormous state which had been entrusted to his care, to abolish an age-old order founded on slavery, to replace it with civic decency and freedom, to establish justice in a country which had never known the meaning of legality, to redesign the entire administration, to introduce freedom of the press in the context of untrammeled authority, to call new forces to life at every turn and set them on firm legal foundations, to put a repressed and humiliated society on its feet, and to give it the chance to flex its muscles.

[18] The first year of his reign was devoted to the prosecution of the Crimean War and, after the fall of Sevastopol, to negotiations for peace led by his trusted counsellor, Prince Alexander Gorchakov.

[9] Without consulting his ordinary advisers, Alexander ordered the Minister of the Interior to send a circular to the provincial governors of European Russia (serfdom was rare in other parts) containing a copy of the instructions forwarded to the Governor-General of Lithuania, praising the supposed generous, patriotic intentions of the Lithuanian landed proprietors, and suggesting that perhaps the landed proprietors of other provinces might express a similar desire.

[28] Reorganisation of the judiciary occurred to include trial in open court, with judges appointed for life, a jury system, and the creation of justices of the peace to deal with minor offences at local level.

Legal historian Sir Henry Maine credited Alexander II with the first great attempt since the time of Grotius to codify and humanise the usages of war.

The Emperor had earlier in the day signed the Loris-Melikov constitution, which would have created two legislative commissions made up of indirectly elected representatives, had it not been repealed by his reactionary successor Alexander III.

[38][39][full citation needed] However, in 1856, at the beginning of his reign, Alexander made a memorable speech to the deputies of the Polish nobility who inhabited Congress Poland, Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Livonia, and Belarus, in which he warned against further concessions with the words, "Gentlemen, let us have no dreams!

[45] During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Russia supported the Union, largely due to the view that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to their geopolitical rival, Great Britain.

Encouraged by the new attitude of French diplomacy and supported by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Russia renounced the Black Sea clauses of the Paris treaty agreed to in 1856.

In the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) the states of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro gained international recognition of their independence while Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia achieved their autonomy from direct Ottoman rule.

A few years of persistent efforts remain to utterly force out the hostile mountaineers from the fertile countries they occupy and settle on the latter a Russian Christian population forever.

Some of the most prominent intellectuals and politicians on the Continent, most notably Victor Hugo and William Gladstone, sought to raise awareness about the atrocities that the Turks imposed on the Bulgarian population.

After the failure of the Constantinople Conference, at the beginning of 1877, Emperor Alexander II started diplomatic preparations with the other Great Powers to secure their neutrality in case of a war between Russia and the Ottomans.

Modest Mussorgsky later wrote his piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, the last movement of which, "The Great Gate of Kiev", is based on Hartmann's sketches.

[citation needed] During the 1867 World's Fair in Paris, Polish immigrant Antoni Berezowski attacked the carriage containing Alexander, his two sons and Napoleon III.

[60] In December 1879, the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), a radical revolutionary group which hoped to ignite a social revolution, organised an explosion on the railway from Livadia[citation needed] to Moscow, but they missed the emperor's train.

[60] The New York Times (4 March 1880) reported "the dynamite used was enclosed in an iron box, and exploded by a system of clockwork used by the man Thomas in Bremen some years ago.

[60] After the last assassination attempt in February 1880, Count Loris-Melikov was appointed the head of the Supreme Executive Commission and given extraordinary powers to fight the revolutionaries.

[67] Alexander was carried by sleigh to the Winter Palace[60] to his study where almost the same day twenty years earlier, he had signed the Emancipation Edict freeing the serfs.

His father Nicholas I of Russia suggested Princess Alexandrine of Baden as a suitable choice, but he was prepared to allow Alexander to choose his own bride, as long as she was not Roman Catholic or a commoner.

He was reluctant to spend "a possibly dull evening" with their host Louis II, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, but he agreed to do so because Vasily Zhukovsky insisted that his entourage was exhausted and needed a rest.

[87] While not a state visit, but simply a trip to see his daughter, he nevertheless partook in receptions at Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House, inspected the artillery at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, reviewed troops at Aldershot and met both Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and the leader of the opposition, William Gladstone.

[89] Courtiers spread stories that the dying Empress Marie was forced to hear the noise of Catherine's children moving about overhead, but their respective rooms were actually far.

Andrew Williams's historical thriller, To Kill A Tsar, tells the story of The People's Will revolutionaries and the assassination through the eyes of an Anglo-Russian doctor living in St Petersburg.

Alexander II's reasons to sell Alaska to the United States in 1867 are fictionized in the epilogue of the novel Forty-Ninth[95] by Boris Pronsky and Craig Britton, in a form of a letter to Catherine Dolgorukova.