HISTORY | LEGENDS
A Brief Brush with Russian Royalty: Grand Duke Alexis in Mobile, 1872 Exactly 150 years ago this month, the city of Mobile geared up for a royal appearance — with mixed results. text by DR. LEE A. FARROW
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n late November 1871, Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, son of Tsar Alexander II, arrived in New York harbor and began a tour of the United States and Canada that would ultimately last three months. The reasons for the tour were multifold. Russia and the United States had long had friendly relations, despite their distance from one another and very different approaches to government and political practice. Only a few years earlier, in 1867, the two nations had engaged in a mutually beneficial agreement in Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States. Now, in 1871, the two nations were seeking to further enhance and clarify their relationship in the wake of the traumatic decade of the 1860s. In a space of only 10 years, Russia had liberated its serfs, confronted an uprising in the Polish section of its empire, experienced an assassination attempt on its tsar and initiated a variety of domestic reforms. The United States had similarly suffered through a difficult period, with the Civil War, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the post-war challenges of Reconstruction. For several years, there had been talk of a possible visit from a member of the Russian Romanov family, but the choice of Alexis had a larger significance. Alexis, only 21 at the time, had fallen in love with a much older woman who was not of royal blood named Alexandra Zhukovskaya; to make matters worse, she was carrying his child. Consequently, the tsar and his wife decided that Alexis should be the member of the family to set out on a goodwill visit to the United States, proverbially killing two birds with one stone. Between late November 1871 and mid-February 1872, Grand Duke Alexis visited nearly two dozen cities and towns in the United States and Canada and experienced some of North America’s most notable natural wonders, such as Niagara Falls and Mammoth Cave. He met President Ulysses S. Grant, Samuel Morse, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Al-
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Above Grand Duke Alexis of Russia (son of Tsar Alexander II) started a goodwill tour of the United States in 1871. Alexis’ stopover created quite a stir in Mobile, as it did in every city he visited. This November 1871 edition of “Hearth and Home,” a weekly illustrated magazine based in New York City, features the grand duke on the front page.
