Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Berkeley was unashamedly autocratic, and his philosophy was more in tune with the emerging autocracy in Muscovy than with any later American notions of democracy. As Hobbes also wrote, those who dislike monarchy call it tyranny, those who dislike aristocracy call it oligarchy, and those who suffer under democracy call it anarchy. Just as Bacon railed against oligarchy, Berkeley saw in democracy the end of civilised government. He praised God that in Virginia there were no such tools of the devil as free schools or the printing press. In 1661 he suspended elections (which in any case had a very limited franchise), and managed without them until Bacon’s rebellion.

  The revolt was short lived. Bacon burnt Jamestown, but died of dysentery, leaving his rabble leaderless. Berkeley counterattacked, recaptured Jamestown and launched a reign of terror on his opponents, hanging twenty-three of them and plundering their property. The government back in London was thoroughly alarmed and sent a fleet with 1,100 soldiers under Sir Herbert Jeffreys to the colony. Jeffreys was more sympathetic to the frontier settlers than to the oligarchs, and in the short time he was in the colony he introduced measures to rein in the elite’s power. Along with 900 of the 1,100 soldiers he died of disease, but not before he had sent Governor Berkeley back to England in disgrace.

  Steps had to be taken to meld the elite and the frontiersman together, to avoid a repetition of the disastrous class conflict of Bacon’s rebellion. Somehow the tobacco and sugar barons and the poor settlers on the frontier had to feel that their interests were the same. In the eighteenth century this was achieved by positing the British as the common enemy, but in the seventeenth century the colonials were themselves British (or at least English until the 1707 union of England and Scotland). The answer arrived by an accident of economics. Black slavery not only provided labour for the plantations but also a common ‘enemy’, which was to bind rich and poor whites together in a common political cause for centuries to come.

  Slavery

  Slavery had been introduced to the Americas by the Spanish but, largely thanks to the vigorous anti-slavery campaign of Bartholomew de Las Casas, had been abolished in the Spanish empire in 1542. This was not an example followed by the other colonial nations.

  In the early days of the Virginia colony slavery was uncommon: native slaves ran away, and imported slaves tended to die before their masters had earned enough from them to cover their purchase price. African slaves were not objected to for moral reasons, but were simply too expensive; vagrants from England were a much better investment. The earliest African slaves were treated appallingly, although no worse it seems than indentured servants. In 1650 there were just 300 slaves in the colony. There is some documentary evidence that after a period they could obtain their freedom, if they were in the minority that lived more than a very few years. At least one black ex-slave is known to have successfully sued a white man in court, and even owned slaves himself. There are a significant number of known cases of black men marrying white women and, more rarely, black women marrying white men.

  By the end of the colony’s first century conditions had changed. The land had been ‘tamed’, diseases were less virulent and therefore life expectancy increased, improving the payback period for investing in slave labour. Slave traders became more numerous, so supply and price stabilised. At the same time conditions in Europe improved, and indentured servants became scarcer and more expensive. Between 1650 and the end of the century the slave population increased more than forty times, and by 1700 slaves made up 13 per cent of the population.

  Although the increase in slavery was driven entirely by economic considerations, the political implications of having an alien minority in their midst were not lost on the governing oligarchy. On the one hand, having a significant new working class element with even more reason to rebel was a real threat. On the other hand, this threat could be used to frighten the rest of the lower orders into supporting the establishment. Dividing the working class was achieved by the quite conscious introduction of institutional racism. Laws were passed that took away virtually all rights from blacks. Freed blacks had their property confiscated, and could even face re-enslavement.

  In 1669 the Virginia legislature passed ‘An Act About the Casual Killing of Slaves’, making it legal to kill slaves who resisted punishment, ‘since it cannot be presumed that … malice should induce any man to destroy his own estate’. It was an argument not dissimilar to that used centuries later to justify the ‘casual’ killing of Afghans and Iraqis, which was labelled ‘collateral damage’.

  The issues of racism and slavery were closely entwined but they were not identical. Slavery came to be justified because blacks as a race were deemed ‘inferior’. Right up until 1865 states like South Carolina insisted that black British sailors, although free men, be held in prison while ashore.

  Racism was leavened with sexism. As in many other societies, sex was a consuming passion clothed in rank hypocrisy. The first law dealing with sexual relations between the races was passed in Maryland in 1664; ‘An Act Concerning Negroes & Other Slaves’ was designed to stop the increasing number of marriages between black slave men and free white women. As Alan Taylor has pointed out, for a white man to rape a black slave was not a crime but to marry her was. While male slave owners begat hundreds, and later thousands, of mixed race children with black slaves, any free white woman giving birth to a mixed race child was condemned to indentured servitude. Indeed, sleeping with a black man could result in six months’ imprisonment.

  Slavery rapidly became a dominant feature not only in Virginia and Maryland but in the vibrant new English colonies springing up in the second half of the seventeenth century further to the south. Fortunes were made in the Carolinas and Jamaica on the broken backs of African slaves. During the seventeenth century the English colonies in the West Indies received more migrants than all the mainland colonies put together, but they could hardly be described as the most ‘popular’ destination. Most of the migrants were from Africa, and by 1700 no less than 78 per cent of the population were slaves.

  It is worth emphasising that the most successful English colonies were initially those in the West Indies. The colonies on the Chesapeake Bay and in New England, which today are taken to form the crucible of Anglophone America, were very much a sideshow. By 1650 there were around 80,000 English emigrants in the New World, of whom well over half were in the Caribbean. Barbados alone had two and a half times the population of Virginia, even excluding the slaves. The success of the West Indian colonies was what spurred the development of settlements on the mainland; and later it was to be the slave economies in the Caribbean that provided the export markets upon which the commercial survival of the New England colonies depended.

  The West Indian colonists were themselves to be the founders of the colonies that, even more than Virginia and Maryland, came to typify life on the North American mainland. The Carolinas and Georgia became extreme examples of the two main characteristics of early English colonialism: slavery and genocide. They represented the spirit of the West Indies, and this representation was made manifest in the form of their first governor, Sir John Yeamans.

  Charles II had appointed eight of his friends as lord proprietors of a vast territory between Virginia and Maryland to the north and Spanish Florida to the south. With his customary lack of modesty the colony was named after himself, and called simply Carolina. Today it forms the states of North and South Carolina and Georgia. The lord proprietors were interested only in profit and had no intention of risking their own lives in crossing the Atlantic, so they looked for an experienced colonial leader. They found him in Sir John.

  The Yeamans were a wealthy Bristol merchant family. Sir John’s father was a prominent royalist and his brother mayor of Bristol. John himself made his fortune as a planter in Barbados, and in 1665 he arrived on the mainland with a group of emigrants from Barbados where opportunities were fast declining. Immigrants from England and from Holland (including some from the new Dutch colony in New York) soon f
ollowed. They were joined by slaves that Sir John shipped in from Barbados.

  The tourist version of Sir John’s life is a romantic one, and comes complete with imagined dialogue. He went into partnership with one of the richest men in Barbados, Colonel Benjamin Berringer, who lived with his beautiful wife Margaret on an enormous estate two and a half hours’ carriage ride from Bridgetown. With only African slaves and a few white ex-convicts for company, poor Margaret was awfully lonely. ‘I am a prisoner in paradise,’ she thought. That was before Sir John arrived and swept her off her feet.

  In such a closed society affairs of the heart could not remain secret for long. ‘Some boys done seen them together,’ one of the slaves told the Colonel.

  ‘You know what this means, John,’ Berringer told Sir John.

  ‘But I love her,’ Yeamans replied. ‘These things happen. It’s not personal, Benjamin.’

  Armed with pistols, the two men stood back to back, then marched twenty paces apart, turned and fired. Sir John had no wish to harm his friend but he knew the colonel would be aiming to kill; he had no option but to do the same. His was the more accurate shot, and Colonel Berringer fell dead.

  Within six weeks Sir John had married the lovely Margaret and taken over her estate. But Barbados society shunned the newly weds, and Sir John turned his eyes further west to the verdant pastures of Carolina.

  It is a charming story with a core of truth: Sir John did kill Colonel Berringer, but almost certainly by poisoning him rather than in a face-to-face duel. And his motivation had more to do with the size of Berringer’s estate than the beauty of Berringer’s wife. Yeamans was one of the nastiest men ever to have been governor of an American colony. His venality shocked even the lord proprietors, who were especially upset that by enriching himself so assiduously he was depriving them of profit. They decided that he was nothing but a ‘sordid calculator’, and in 1674 removed him from office. He returned to Barbados, where he died two years later. What happened to Margaret is not recorded.

  The links between Carolina and the Caribbean colonies remained strong even without Yeamans. Rich West Indians, known as the Goose Creek men, dominated the new colony’s politics for years to come. They also developed a novel form of economic interdependence. The Carolina colonists were given enormous land grants (including a grant to slave owners of 150 acres for every slave they imported), but two factors stopped them exploiting the land: firstly the land was already occupied and secondly tilling the soil and harvesting required an abundance of cheap labour. The obvious solution to both problems was to enslave the natives, but, as in Virginia, that was impractical as the slaves ran away. In this respect the Carolina colonists had an advantage over the Virginians: their links with the Caribbean colonies. A formal barter trade was soon in place: two natives shipped as slaves to Barbados and the other islands could be swapped for one black slave shipped the other way to work in the rice and indigo fields of Carolina; natives were worth less than blacks as they tended to die sooner. For this system to work there needed to be a supply of enslaved natives, and slave raiding became a feature of Carolina colonisation. One well-documented raid by a gang led by Captain James Moore Jr against the Tuscarora Iroquois village of Nooherooka in North Carolina netted 392 women and children for sale as slaves. Far more natives were killed in the raid itself or, in the case of the male captives who were considered unsuitable for slavery, executed afterwards.

  Particular targets for the English settlers were the natives in the Spanish territory to the south. Unlike the English the Spanish not only forbade slavery but expended much effort in missionary activities among the natives. The ‘Mission Indians’ were considered more docile than the tribes to the west, and were therefore a tempting prospect for the slave raiders. The tribal nature of the native population made it easy for the English to divide and rule, and they found many tribes willing to raid deep into Spanish territory to maintain their supply of native slaves. James Moore Sr, the Carolina governor, personally organised a huge thousand-strong army of natives with a few white lieutenants to raid the Spanish missions in Florida. It is thought that about 10,000 slaves were brought back to Carolina, and the destruction wrought was almost total. The native population of Florida was cut by 70 or 80 per cent, as those unfit for slavery were butchered. The raiders reserved a particular fate for any Spanish priests they could capture; they died under unspeakable tortures.

  The frontiers of Carolina bore less resemblance to the frontiers glorified in the Cowboys and Indians tales of Hollywood than they did to the frontiers of Rus in the age of the Mongols. The difference was that in the case of Rus the barbarians were trying to break in.

  CHAPTER 3

  LEGACY OF THE MONGOL TERROR

  The lust for empire goes back to biblical times and beyond. The lust for land, power, resources, or simply for conquest has consumed tribes and nations for millennia. Imperialism is not a recent invention, nor is it a European one: empires have existed in the Americas, in Africa and on a gigantic scale in Asia.

  One empire in particular exceeded any that had gone before, and crossed from Asia into Europe in an orgy of violence and destruction. The Mongols brought terror to Europe on a scale not seen again until the twentieth century. They left a particular mark on Russia, where all traces of nascent democracy, of which there were very few, were obliterated. The murderous methods of the Mongols survived them as the grand dukes of Muscovy took over the reins of power and began themselves to lust after empire. Ivan IV gave himself the new title of tsar and set out to turn that dream into reality; what the world witnessed was not a dream but the nightmare empire of Ivan the Terrible.

  When, nearly four centuries after the Mongol invasion, Michael Romanov founded the dynasty that would rule Russia until the revolution, the guiding principles of autocratic imperialism were firmly established. They were principles that the handful of Englishmen by then settled on the coast of Virginia could choose to ignore or follow as they started to build their own empire.

  The Mongols

  The bows and arrows of the North American natives were powerless before the microbes and muskets of the Europeans, but those of the Mongols rapidly overcame the Rus.

  The Rus were not used to being on the receiving end of such aggression. From their earliest days the Slavs were an expansionist people. In this they prefigured the early Americans, but it is dangerous to draw too many parallels. There were two striking differences between the early American and Russian models of colonisation: the new American colonies had local assemblies with varying degrees of power, and the Rus had no policy or practice of ethnic cleansing.

  Before the Mongols had a chance to shoot their arrows at them, the Kiev Rus took the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot. Yaroslav the Wise ruled for thirty-five years of unprecedented glory, but in death showed none of his famed wisdom. In dividing his kingdom among his five sons Yaroslav guaranteed conflict within and disunity without. Principalities fought each other, and barbarian tribes raided with increasing impunity. In one season alone, in 1160, Cuman tribesmen carried off 10,000 slaves from the region of Smolensk in an uncanny parallel with Governor Moore’s raids into Florida half a millennium later.

  The pre-Mongol inheritance rules, where titles and land could pass to the eldest relative rather than the eldest child, meant that at one point there were estimated to be four or five times as many princes as there were principalities to fill. As a consequence there were always nobles available for war parties or the founding of new settlements. To the north and east of the early Russian state were the Finns, scattered thinly over a large and relatively attractive territory. Being dispersed so widely, they were easy prey for the far more numerous Rus, and were constantly pushed back by the advancing tide of Russian settlement. This was particularly true along Europe’s longest river, the Volga. The Kievan Rus state continued an old tradition of the more or less gradual pushing out of its frontiers, down the Volga and to the east and north. Slowly the primacy of the Dnieper, wit
h Kiev guarding its passage down to the Black Sea, gave way to the Volga as the heartland of the Russian people, with the 2,300 mile river linking the far north to the Sea of Azov on the borders of Asia.

  The frontier moved through a process of military colonisation. Princes seized parcels of land by force and their armed bands, or drujinas, then protected settlers arriving from further west. The new settlements on the frontier were quite different from the traditional societies of Kiev. The prince was the undisputed autocrat, whose only legitimacy was force. At the same time settlers intermarried with the native Finns and adopted some of their traditions. The result was the creation of two Russias. In time the distinction became so fundamental that the ‘Great Russians’ on the Volga and the ‘Little Russians’ around Kiev came to regard themselves as different nations. The division came to a head in 1169, when the Prince of Rostov-Suzdal became Grand Prince, and used his military might to sack Kiev and forcibly move the capital to his own seat on the Volga far to the north-east.