To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Gustav, who many thought treated statecraft like one of the theatrical performances he so enjoyed, was undeterred by a worsening economy and growing discontent. He still wanted to retake Norway from Denmark and portions of Finland from Russia. At first, he approached Russia about a joint attack on Denmark. It seemed an opportune moment to pounce on an old rival. Like Sweden, Denmark had seen its once buoyant economy crumble in the wake of the American War. Politically, the enlightened government of Bernstorff was ousted in 1780 when it became known that he had made a secret deal with Britain to protect Danish colonies. In his place, the Anglophobic Ove Høegh-Guldberg consolidated his grip on power and set about monopolizing Denmark’s overseas trade companies. In Denmark, the reaction to the change in regime was a proliferation of political clubs, but a series of land reforms and legal changes introducing free trade, universal education, and an end to serfdom largely pacified the populace. In Danish-controlled Norway, however, the American Revolution had profound effects, leading to social disorder and near rebellion.

  The economic expansion of the war years hit Norway like a bolt of lightning. The opportunities available in seafaring, shipbuilding, and international traded expanded almost inexhaustibly. Traditionally and legally, such industries were the exclusive preserve of Norway’s incorporated towns. The unprecedented boom caused by the American War, combined with lean conditions in farming and logging, drew many rural Norwegians into the market and money economy for the first time. When the war ended and trade once more contracted, the towns, jealous of their commercial privileges, pushed to have their monopoly on these trades confirmed. Facing a wider financial crisis, Denmark had little choice but to concede to the towns’ demands. In addition, local Norwegian officials, faced with raising revenue in the post-war slump, raised taxes just when the peasantry were beginning to feel the squeeze. As such, many Norwegians, especially in rural areas, were loath to give up the new industries they had forged during the war, especially after a series of poor harvests in 1781, 1782, 1784, and 1785 caused mortality to skyrocket and deaths to exceed births. Starting in 1785, a peasant protest movement began to call for redress.

  The protesters were, however, staunch in their loyalty to the crown and thus confident that the king would right the wrongs if only he were made aware of the situation in Norway. In 1786, the leader of the movement, Christian Jensen Lofthuus, traveled to Copenhagen to personally deliver a complaint against local officials and civic authorities to Crown Prince Frederik. Lofthuus had been an improving farmer from Lillesand, but, like many others, he saw the opportunity presented by the American War and diversified into shipbuilding and commercial trade in grain, timber, and other supplies. The pursuit of these new avenues for profit even led him all the way to England. Back in Norway in 1782, he was fined for violating the commercial privileges of the city of Arendal, and the debt that resulted forced him to sell his farm. With other roads blocked to him, Lofthuus became the center of the peasant movement for reform.

  After delivering his message to the crown prince, Lofthuus returned to Norway, claiming authority to investigate peasant grievances. He then returned to Copenhagen to present two petitions signed by 532 peasants and rural landowners from thirteen parishes asking for official permission to investigate peasant complaints. By this time the authorities in Norway had had enough and threatened to arrest Lofthuus after his return from Denmark. In response, Lofthuus once more traveled to Copenhagen, this time with an armed guard and representatives from the rural parishes. Fearing a peasant uprising, the authorities attempted to arrest Lofthuus, but he managed to flee. The peasants were furious that their chosen representative had been treated so poorly. They responded by taking up arms and marching on Lillesand where they forced the bailiff to grant Lofthuus and thirty-eight followers a pass to travel to Copenhagen. By November of 1786 more than 800 peasants were in arms. Norway’s towns, the source of peasant rage, in turn raised militias to fight the peasants. A merchant from Christiania spoke for many townsmen and officials when he contended, “If the rebellious mob is not punished, it can murder us in our homes and go scot-free. This is a base soul, a rascal in public affairs and a stupid rebel in political life . . . Some call this rude butcher a second Washington, but if I should wish to see him it would be to spit in his face.” Sweden was on the brink of civil war.66

  Lofthuus was not a revolutionary, however, and balked at the prospect of bloodshed. As tensions cooled, Denmark agreed to form a commission to address rural complaints, which recommended actual reforms, but also urged the authorities to arrest “the people’s hero.” Lofthuus was thus arrested in February of 1787, touching off another peasant uprising. Nearly a thousand peasants rose in arms, seized the offending bailiff, and demanded the release of their leader. Once more, it seemed as if civil war was imminent, but the peasants again backed down when confronted by Danish soldiers called in to quell the disturbances once and for all. Lofthuus and twelve others were sentenced to life in prison, though all but Lofthuus would eventually be released. Lofthuus was no republican, and certainly not a nationalist as some later claimed, but his abortive revolt did set a precedent for united peasant movements and provided inspiration for nationalist independence movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  The Russians, however, remained distrustful of Sweden’s intentions and refused to back a war against Denmark. With Russia uncooperative, Gustav, whom Catherine the Great called “about as reticent as a cannon shot,” turned to his second objective and entered talks with the Ottomans and dissident Poles for a joint war on Russia.67 The Ottomans were already clashing with Russia in the Crimea and could offer little support, so in 1788 Sweden declared war on Russia alone and invaded Russia’s Finnish territory. Legally, Gustav needed permission from the Riksdag for an offensive war, but in a neat piece of theater, he had dressed some of his Finnish troops as Russians and had them feign an assault on Swedish territory, allowing him to invade Russian territory in response. Most saw through this charade, and many, like the elder Fersen, believed the war was simply a royal ploy to further undermine noble power. “The preparations for this monstrous war plan were not undertaken against Russia alone,” he boomed, “but equally against the Estates of the realm, against the constitution . . . in short, for furtherance of absolutism.”68

  This view of Gustav’s war was especially prevalent among the nobility and officer corps of Finland, some of them disciples of Sprengtporten and his autonomist movement. Gustav, they believed, had violated Sweden’s social contract and so they took it upon themselves to negotiate peace with Russia on Sweden’s behalf. To that end, in 1788, a group of army officers drafted a letter to Catherine of Russia. When Gustav heard of his officers’ actions he was apoplectic and demanded an immediate pledge of loyalty. In response, more than a hundred officers stationed at Anjala signed a declaration condemning the war and outlining their plans to negotiate peace with Russia. Some also began to talk of forming an independent government in Finland under Catherine’s protection. Catherine was interested in cleaving Finland from Sweden, but she was also occupied with the Ottoman wars and thus overstretched. Her response was thus encouraging but noncommittal.

  When Denmark allied with Russia and invaded Sweden it seemed that Gustav had been beaten, and indeed he contemplated abdication. In the end though, the Danish invasion solidified his position in Sweden by winning him the support of the people. Sure of his position in Sweden, Gustav outflanked his rivals by issuing a new constitution that gave concessions to non-noble supporters, ended feudalism, and further undermined the power of the nobility. After defeating the attempted coup and arresting nearly ninety officers, timely monetary aid from Britain, Prussia, and the Turks, and a spectacular naval victory over Russian forces, allowed Gustav to make an advantageous peace with Russia in 1790. But with his position strengthened at the expense of the nobility, a group of disgruntled nobles began to plot his assassination. Among the conspirators was Adolf Ludvig Ribbing, an enthusiastic volunteer in the
American War who had brought the ideas of the American Revolution home with him. On March 16, 1792, the noble conspirators struck, killing the king at a masquerade ball. The coup failed, and Gustav was replaced by his son Gustav IV—with his brother Karl serving as regent—but the assassination was a crippling blow for the prospect of Russian containment.

  With little to fear from their European rivals, Russia and Austria now had a free hand in the east. When the Russo-Turkish and Austro-Turkish Wars ended in 1792, after four years of violent struggle, Russia had consolidated its gains, and the Ottomans had been confirmed as an empire on the verge of collapse. In the words of one historian, the full annexation of the Crimea, and the loss of further territory on the Black Sea and in the Balkans “signaled that the partition of the Ottoman Empire, like Poland’s was imminent.” Military defeat initiated a period of steep economic and fiscal decline in Ottoman lands. Over-expenditure on soldiers, ships, artillery, and new border forts bankrupted the empire, leading to a fracturing of political authority as local autonomy grew in the face of central weakness. Mutinies sprang up in the Balkans, Syria, Egypt, and Arabia, threatening to tear the fragile empire to shreds. Russia and Austria waited in the wings, hoping to seize the opportunity of Ottoman weakness to finish their plan to partition the empire among themselves. The prospect of Russian and Austrian empires strengthened by the remains of the Ottoman Empire alarmed the other powers of Europe, leading to decades of fear for the balance of power in Europe. With the conquest of the Crimea, the “sick man of Europe” had been born. From now on the “Eastern Question” would continually plague European politics and diplomacy. Once more, the American Revolution had played an important role.69

  For Britain, Russia’s invasion of the Crimea and its continual focus on its conflict with the Ottoman Empire bore valuable, if unexpected, fruit. The American War and the League of Armed Neutrality had damaged Britain’s relationship with Russia and threatened to disrupt British naval and commercial dominance in northern waters. The potential dangers to British trade were so great that Britain initially, if reluctantly, welcomed the prospect of a Russian-negotiated peace with the Netherlands. Britain hoped that such a peace would divide the Dutch from their American, French, and Spanish allies, allowing Britain to make separate and more advantageous peace treaties instead of facing a unified front of avenging powers. Britain’s new foreign secretary, Charles James Fox, was intent on both securing the best terms possible and improving relations with Russia. To sweeten the deal, Britain sent word to Russia and the Netherlands that it would be willing to accept the neutral maritime principles of the League of Armed Neutrality if the Dutch would agree to a separate peace brokered by Russia. The Dutch were wary of Russian promises—they had, after all, abandoned the Dutch to their fate when Britain targeted their shipping in the lead-up to the Anglo-Dutch War—and hesitated to betray their French allies, who insisted on a unified front in all peace negotiations with Britain. For Russia, however, gaining British acceptance of the league’s underlying principles would have been a considerable victory, helping to bolster and protect Russia’s maritime trade at the very moment it was attempting to expand its commerce as a means of joining the great powers of Europe.70

  When rebellion broke out in Crimea, Catherine saw her chance to seize her long-wished-for southern port and abandoned her efforts to act as mediatrix. This was not simply a case of distracted attention, but rather a conscious decision to abandon free trade in the north for an expanded empire in the south. The opportunity to grasp the Crimea was too good to pass up, and Catherine knew full well that she could ill afford to risk British opposition to her Crimean conquests by insisting on the maritime principles of the League of Armed Neutrality. Russia had still hoped to force Britain to accept its maritime principles, but by 1782 Britain had entered into peace negotiations with France. Once peace was made between France and Britain, the likelihood that either country might come to the Ottomans’ aid rose exponentially. While still in power, Lord Shelburne had hinted that a joint Anglo-French expedition to protect the Ottomans was actively being considered, but the new regime, with Fox as foreign secretary, agreed to abandon any joint action with the French in return for Russia quietly scrapping its demands for maritime concessions. Britain thus emerged from the American War with its commercial and naval dominance in northern Europe still very much intact, a crucial victory seized from the very jaws of defeat.71

  In 1787, as Catherine and Joseph were making their tour of the Crimea, an equally extraordinary flotilla was sailing across the Mediterranean bound for Istanbul. The party belonged to the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India, and they had come on behalf of their ruler Tipu Sultan to the court of Abdul Hamid in desperate need of assistance. Since the end of the American War, Mysore had been preparing for a renewal of hostilities with the British Empire. As a fellow Muslim kingdom, Tipu Sultan reasoned, surely the Ottomans would come to their aid as allies against the encroachment of an expansionist Christian Empire. But the American War had cast its long shadow over the Ottoman Empire as well, and Abdul Hamid was in no position to offer help to Mysore. The Ottomans had been drained by the wars with Austria and Russia, and in 1787, with the prospect of yet another war on the horizon, they could not afford to alienate the British. Mysore sent ambassadors to France as well. In 1794, in an attempt to appeal to the new revolutionary republican regime in France, Tipu Sultan, every bit a despot, founded a Jacobin Club in Mysore, planted a symbolic “liberty tree,” and gave himself the republican title of “citizen Tipu.” But though France would pledge assistance, it was too depleted by the American War to offer more than empty promises. Mysore would have to face the British alone.

  7

  CONFLICT AND CAPTIVITY

  IN INDIA

  As her ship made its way into the harbor of Calicut (modern Kozhikode) on November 5, 1779, Eliza Fay was worried. It was her first view of India, the destination she had been envisioning for months, but rather than enjoying the turquoise waters and lush forests of the Malabar Coast—a “picturesque beauty equal to any country on earth” in the words of another English traveler—Eliza was plagued by impatience and unease.1 As for so many British subjects making their way to the major British possessions in Madras and Bengal, Calicut was merely a brief waypoint for Eliza and her husband Anthony; they were not planning to stay for long. Eliza, the daughter of a sailor and Anthony, an aspiring attorney of Irish extraction, had married shortly before departing for India. For the newlyweds, the opportunity for rapid advancement in the emerging legal system of British India was well worth the risks of transcontinental travel and the long months, perhaps years, of separation from family and friends. In the Indian theater of the global American Revolution just then there was a desperate need for men to conquer, defend, and govern the growing British possessions in South Asia. For the British, war with America had led to war with France, and the war with France spread beyond the Atlantic to India, where it burst forth in a vicious imperial struggle with France and its Indian allies. With war in the subcontinent came conquest, and with conquest came the need for administration. With positions in the British bureaucracy of India multiplying rapidly, men like Anthony Fay arrived in droves to seek their fortunes in the world made by war and revolution.

  The British presence on the subcontinent stretched back even before the founding of the East India Company as a monopoly trading company in 1600. In those early years, indeed for more than a century, the East India Company was the junior partner in its relationship with the ruling Mughal Empire, an oft-ignored supplicant clinging to a series of trading posts scattered along the Indian coast. The Company chafed at its subordinate status, but the profits from the monopoly trade with India meant the English were in India to stay. By 1647 the Company had expanded from its initial factory at Surat to a string of twenty-three trading posts across the peninsula. With trade as its impetus, there was no sense that the Company aspired to anything grander than this, a sentiment most forcefully expounded by its fir
st formal ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe. In the early seventeenth century he had wisely counseled the Company that “it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India . . . Let this be received as a rule, that if you will profit, seek it at sea and in quiet trade.”2