re: Would the Union Army have been strong enough to beat British after Civil War?

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Close. William the Conqueror (or the Bastard, if you prefer) successfully invaded England in 1066.

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In 1865, they were on par with European powers. My 1866, most of the Union army was disbanded. By the 1870s, European armies had left the U.S. in the dust with modernized weaponry, tactics, and organization.

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Didn't the British have a much bigger advantage during the Revolutionary War?

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In the last battle of the war at Yorktown the French army had more soldiers in the field than either the British or the Americans.

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Calm down, Harry Turtledove

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The real question is what could Lee have done if time travelers had given him AK47s and heart pills.

One of the main reasons Lincoln issued the EP was to deter Britain and France from aiding the South. Both countries had emancipated their slaves around a decade before the war. So the Union had to be concerned enough about them to keep them out.

If Britain wanted to join the war, their time would have been at the beginning of the war. Their navy would have been able to blockade the North and likely free up Union blockades in the South (which was the main driver to the fall of the South).

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Though they are currently willingly allowing themselves to be invaded as are we

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At least we're doing something about it here. England is now under a Islamic caliphate though. But that's apparently what they want.

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I dunno, Max Boot, before he went crazy with TDS, wrote the Union Navy at the end of the war was equal to the British Navy.

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He was wrong.

The US Navy through the American Civil War built itself to respond to the task at hand: blockade enforcement off the coasts of the US.

Not engagements with state-of-the-art full-sized experienced armed enemy vessels thousands of miles away from a nearest friendly port.

The Suez Canal didn’t open until 1867, the Brits were used to long distance voyages. Their Navy in 1865 would have absolutely waxed the US Navy.

It’d be like asking a competent cross country team to box against an experienced boxing team.

The Brits very existence as a free State had by that time relied on being really, really good at projecting naval power for centuries.

It was their national sport.

The US ironclads of the time were monitors with very little freeboard. Suitable for coastal and riverine actions only. They were not built for ocean voyages, let alone combat in any kind of sea.

Another factor, the overwhelming majority were volunteers enlisted for rhe duration of the current conflict. They could have said frick it I didnt sign up for this, and gone home.