With the development of the U.S. Navy, it was natural for certain naval powers to feel threatened, and the British found that the U.S. ironclad seemed to have too many of them. The North of the United States planned to build 30 new ironclads at one time, and the British had to immediately formulate a new plan in order to maintain their naval supremacy in the Atlantic.

China has also absorbed the experience of the United States and is determined to build new warships, which are more ambitious than Britain, and the Chinese parliament has passed an appropriation and decided to build 100 new ironclad ships, which will be completed within five years, with five ships per year for the first two years as experiments and attempts, and 30 ships per year for the second three years.

The world powers have been groping for more than ten years in the era of ironclad ships, because of the test of the American Civil War, everyone understands the direction, and finally begins the era of political naval competition.

The protagonists are still China and Britain, and this may also be an opportunity for the battle for hegemony to be won or lost, so both sides are going all out, and the Chinese parliament even passed the budget by an absolute vote. This budget, based on 100,000 taels of gold per ironclad ship, is as high as 50 million taels of gold, equivalent to 260 million pounds.

The arms race has only just begun, and no one has thought about what this means for the world situation, and no other country except China and Britain has yet to follow suit. At present, the focus of the world is still the American Civil War, and the game around this war has just begun.

As the North gradually gained sea supremacy, more and more fleets began to enter the Gulf of Mexico, affecting the normal commercial trade in the region.

According to the treaty between China and the United States Federation, although the mouth of the Mississippi River belongs to the United States, the river is open to China, and China has the right to use this river to transport goods, because in most parts of the north, the border between the two sides is the Mississippi River, and the United States blockaded New Orleans, which affected China's transportation.

The Lincoln administration tried to avoid the intervention of the Great Powers at this time, before they could apologize for the British reparations, and it was even less likely to take a tough attitude towards China at this time, and after some explanation, they were forced to open the Mississippi River, allowing Chinese merchant ships to enter and leave the river freely, but still forbidding merchant ships from any country to enter and leave New Orleans, the largest seaport in the Gulf of Mexico, was blocked.

This had an impact on China, because New Orleans' location made it a natural distribution center for the Mississippi River Valley, just as Shanghai was to the Yangtze River. But the current blockade has allowed more goods to enter other ports, the most important of which is the port of Houston on the territory of China in the Americas, which the Chinese call Hugh.

Although Houston is not directly connected to the Mississippi River, it does have a railroad connection to the important river port city (St. Louis) on the Mississippi River, and the Kansas River River Port Little Rock, which allows goods to easily bypass the Mississippi and Louisiana states of the United States. After the blockade of New Orleans, a large number of goods began to turn to Houston port, and even goods from the southern United States began to leave the port of China, Houston completely surpassed New Orleans, and has never been surpassed by New Orleans since.

Because Chinese merchant ships can enter and leave the Mississippi River at will, the small countries of the United States blockade are greatly reduced, except for New Orleans, other Union cities, as long as they are not occupied by the United States, are equivalent to continuing to keep in touch with the outside world, and even arms continue to be transported here, which makes the United States very angry, and has stepped up the inspection of merchant ships entering the Mississippi River Basin, they have seized every arms ship, and there is more than one country involved in lucrative arms smuggling, and British, French and German merchants are involved.

At this time, all countries protested, and in the end the powerful British merchant ships were allowed to go, the French merchant ships were released, and only the German merchant ships were seized.

Through several wars, the German machinery industry, especially the arms industry, has expanded rapidly, and has become the second only to Britain in Europe, and even comparable to the British arms industry power, you must know that in the long history before the Austro-Prussian War, Prussia relied on British arms to fight wars, and several wars have made their arms industry, not only in terms of output, but also in terms of quality, have caught up with Britain. Krupp's artillery and Armstrong's artillery are the most advanced breech-loading rifled guns in Europe.

In this war, Germany exported a large number of arms to the southern part of the United States, ranking third only to China and Britain. However, the Americans did not dare to seize the Chinese merchant ships that had free navigation on the Mississippi River, nor did they dare to seize the British arms ships that were clearly smuggling, and the French ships did not pay a blind eye, but wanted to seize the German merchant ships, and even if the Germans protested, the attitude of the United States did not change.

This was insulting to German nationalists, who saw it as a reason for the lack of German naval power to extend German influence beyond Europe, and calls for a large navy emerged.

Under this trend, Bismarck also had to give a compromise and announce the construction of the German navy. Previously, the German Navy had only ten ironclads, which was not even comparable to the Greek Navy in Europe, and they were all old small ironclads, but now the parliament is quickly pushing to allow Germany to build a naval force led by 30 large ironclads.

Germany has finally joined the sequence of naval races.

By this time, the American war was in its second year.

This civil war was more fierce than in history, because the weapons were more advanced and the firepower was more powerful, but the tactics were still conservative.

Both sides fought with the world's most advanced breech-loading rifled guns, but they advanced slowly in a line formation, which was a real queue to shoot, and like the First World War in history, the superior firepower killed the soldiers too tragically. In World War I, the British suffered 60,000 casualties in a single day at the Battle of the Somme. Although the Americans were not armed with machine guns, both sides were killing and wounding the enemy in large numbers with modern rifles, and the casualties were not small, and it was not uncommon to drop twenty or thirty thousand dead and wounded in each battle.

As a result, in just one year, each side lost the lives of more than 100,000 soldiers. In the second year of the war, the armies of both sides were larger and the fighting became more fierce. After the passage of conscription bills in succession, the military strength of the North was greatly strengthened. But the conscription system was very unfair, requiring the states to send enough soldiers according to their numbers, and giving special care to the wealthy. The conscription order provided that if you could afford $300, you would be exempt from service. This gives the wealthy a legal avenue to evade military service, which is how some wealthy Americans, such as Morgan and Rockefeller, evade military service.

300 US dollars, for the poor, is a huge amount of money, and there are not many ordinary people in the United States who can come up with this advanced amount, let alone those European immigrants who have just immigrated to the United States. Among them, blacks and Irish immigrants are the worst, and there are also a large number of blacks in the north of the United States, whose occupations are either to serve as servants in the homes of the rich, or to do hard labor, and there are few upper classes, as a result, most blacks are forcibly conscripted into military service, and the same is true for the Irish who immigrated to the United States because of famine and other reasons, and even some young Irish men just arrived in New York Harbor, and at the same time as the residence permit was issued, they were forced to sign a "voluntary military service" letter, and were immediately sent to the front line with their wives and children!

This injustice soon led to riots, with anti-conscription riots in New York, Boston, New Jersey, Toledo, Ohio, Illinois, and Massachusetts. New York, where immigrants first stopped, was the most severe, with rioters storming New York's municipal offices, setting fires everywhere, and finally the federal government using Navy warships to bombard the city center, and then the Army to carry out indiscriminate massacres to suppress the riots.

But this is only a small incident, and the mobilization capacity of the violent apparatus is superb, without the collapse of the administration. The forces in the north continue to expand and have reached nearly two million men. The same is true in the South, where even 12-year-old boys joined the fight in the late stages of the Civil War. If the use of the Boy Scouts is the desire of the people, the ghost will believe it. But there are some films that portray it as the fighting spirit of the Southerners.

The manpower in the south has not been able to keep up, so after the number of troops reaches 1 million, it begins to be difficult to expand, and it begins to be at a disadvantage in every battle.

After the first batch of veterans was exhausted, the officer superiority of the southerners was gone, and the superiority of manpower, equipment and technology in the north began to come into play.

The North used dense railroad lines to transport soldiers to various fronts, quickly invaded Tennessee from Kentucky, and after capturing the entire territory of Tennessee, supported the abolitionist forces and formed a new government, the American army on the Western Front continued to advance southward, and Mississippi and Alabama experienced wars successively.

On the Eastern Front, the Confederate Alliance could only concentrate its limited forces on the Richmond line, desperately blocking the southward Confederate Army, which was increasingly unable to support a full-scale war. The following year, the armies of both sides were more numerous, but the casualties also multiplied, with 300,000 casualties in the north and 200,000 casualties in the south.

The lack of troops made it impossible for the Confederate to organize an effective defense in the west, and the Confederate Army continued to achieve results here, Mississippi and Alabama fell one after another, and the Confederate Army began to approach Georgia. This has also created a rift in the relationship between the southern states, with the Congress bickering over whether to concentrate forces to defend the common capital, Richmond, or whether the states should prioritize defending their homeland.

In a year, the alliance was a little unable to sustain it, although it was not yet the time for a 12-year-old child to go to the battlefield, but the finances had reached the limit, they first implemented the trade embargo as if they were dying, and then the Northern Federation implemented the embargo policy for them, and they wanted to contact the outside world, but they couldn't get in touch. The Southern Union was seriously short of funds for the purchase of arms, and all kinds of fundraising, printing paper money, and using all kinds of means to extract the gold accumulated by the slave owners for several generations, but it was still useless, and weapons, ammunition, and medicines were extremely scarce.

As a result of the emancipation of slaves in the North, slaves in the South continued to flee and rebelled, but the government was powerless to suppress them. And at this time, even if there is money, the channels of smuggling are tightened by the federal government. In the past, they could smuggle generously from China on the Mississippi River, which could not be completely blocked. But now, Mississippi and Alabama have fallen, and the Union has completely separated the Southern Union from the Mississippi River.

In this case, the defeat of the South is already a matter of time, and it will be difficult to survive the third year. As a result, various voices began to appear within the Alliance, some of whom believed that peace should be negotiated with the North, and that the conditions for the North to be emancipated were to emancipate the slaves and return to the Federation. Instead of returning to the American Federation at the cost of freeing slaves, it is better to fight the Yankees to the end at the cost of freeing slaves, and the two years of war have turned the prejudice between the North and the South into hatred, because the behavior of the Northern Army is really not as glorious as described in the book.