Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Territorial Aggrandisement

  At the same time that ideological currents were changing America and Russia, America and Russia were changing the lands around them. The armies of both nations spent most of the nineteenth century pushing out the frontiers of empire. Indeed the outstanding feature of American and Russian history in the period from the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 up to the fall of the Romanovs in 1917 was what might be called territorial aggrandisement. Both nations were totally committed to their own expansion and both realised their ambitions. Catherine the Great and her successors continued a long tsarist tradition, firmly believing in their divine right to conquer; her American counterparts believed equally firmly that their new nation, representing as it did God’s will on earth, was destined to surpass all others.

  There are clear historical parallels between the Russian conquest of Siberia and the territorial expansion of the United States, but by the time Catherine came to the throne the campaigns against the Siberian natives were almost over; only a few tribes in the Aleutian Islands on the way to Alaska remained to be ‘pacified’. From then on Russian imperialism was primarily focussed on the Christian states to the west and the largely Muslim states to the south. Under her leadership Russia conquered most of Poland and gained access to the Black Sea, grabbing the whole area around the Sea of Azov, the Crimea and the port of Odessa. America, on the other hand, still had a whole continent of natives to displace.

  During their war against the British the colonial rebels had been desperate for native allies. In 1775 the new Congress concluded its first treaty with natives living in southern Ohio and Indiana, a treaty that suggested the creation of a fourteenth native state with representatives in the Congress. Once the war was over, however, the victors turned on what the Declaration of Independence had described as ‘the merciless Indian Savages’.

  Fifteen years after that first treaty was signed it was ripped up. In 1790 and again in 1791 the American army invaded what was called the Northwest Territory, a vast swathe of land between the Ohio and Mississippi stretching from Pennsylvania as far west as the modern states of Michigan and Wisconsin. On both occasions it was soundly defeated by native forces led by the Miami general Michikinikwa or Little Turtle. In 1794 a reorganised army made one final attempt at conquest. British troops moved south from Canada in support of the natives but in the event failed to intervene, although a hundred British volunteers stiffened the resistance in the battle of Fallen Timbers that eventually took place south of Detroit. An enormous force of Shawnee, Ottawa, Chippewa, Miami, Delaware, Pottawatomi and other tribes under Little Turtle and the Shawnee general Blue Jacket faced the American troops of General Anthony Wayne. The American advance guard of Kentucky militia were ambushed, and when they turned and ran the Shawnees made the crucial mistake of leaving their heavily defended positions to set off in hot pursuit, running into the path of the main American force and into range of their artillery. The Americans successfully counter-attacked and by the end of the day native troops were streaming north seeking British protection; those left on the battlefield were scalped and mutilated by the American soldiers. Losses on both sides were heavy, with the casualty rate highest among the British volunteers who had fought to the end. The American army then advanced along the Maumee river, destroying native villages and crops in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.

  In the subsequent Treaty of Greenville the natives were forced to give up most of modern Ohio and Indiana and the site of today’s city of Chicago. The treaty was a total travesty: the federal government solemnly guaranteed territory to the natives that it had already sold to speculators or promised to revolutionary war soldiers. Any idea of the natives having a state of their own had evaporated. America would expand through further white (or black and white) colonisation, not through the incorporation of native states. And it would expand by force. In 1797 American settlers in Natchez rebelled against the Spanish authorities; US troops marched in and the future state of Mississippi was born. It was a demonstration of what would happen repeatedly in years to come from Florida to Hawaii.

  Not everyone agreed that every opportunity to expand the nation should be seized. In 1798 the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, who had fought for the rebels in the American Revolution and taken part in the French Revolution, approached the American government with a plan for American troops, supported by the British navy, to liberate Latin America from the Spanish empire and in the process grab Florida and Louisiana for themselves. Alexander Hamilton was a fervent enthusiast and put himself forward as commander of the US forces but President Adams I vetoed the project. Seizing land occupied by Europeans was quite different to seizing land occupied only by ‘Indians’.

  When the Founding Fathers declared it to be self-evident that all men were created equal most of them had taken it for granted that such equality did not extend to the natives. Thomas Paine’s irreligious idealism was not shared by most Americans and particularly not by the fundamentalists of New England who so influenced the development of the nation’s political ideology.

  Looking at early American history though the prism of today’s religious ideologies it is easy to misinterpret its religious dimension. The Puritans were not bringing with them the religious conventions of their mother countries; they were fundamentalists escaping from religious convention. There was no inevitability in their own religious certainties becoming the American orthodoxy. The exalted position of religion in America today is due to the outstanding economic success of the New England settlers who were able to translate their economic dominance into political and cultural power, instilling a version of their Puritan values on the rest of society.

  Things could have been different. This was the age of the Enlightenment. In Europe Frederick the Great, in his political testament of 1768, famously described Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, which was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread over Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it’. In 1740 Frederick, anxious to find settlers to come into his under-populated domains had made plain that ‘if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them’. Nothing could have been further from the ideology that was developing on the other side of the Atlantic.

  A macabre example of the fusion of the democratic spirit and horrific savagery towards the continent’s original inhabitants occurred in the spring of 1782. The British had surrendered at Yorktown the previous year but not yet formally conceded defeat when Shawnee natives murdered two settler families in what is now Ohio. The local militia decided that Christian natives from the Moravian townships on the Muskingum river were somehow involved and surrounded a large group of native men, women and children whom they found gathering corn. After herding them into two large huts the militiamen, in the spirit of frontier democracy, had a vote to decide whether to take the prisoners to Fort Pitt or kill them on the spot. The result was another massacre.

  Having objected to paying taxes to the British, the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies were none too happy to pay taxes to a central government after Independence. Fortunately the new government had an alternative source of revenue: it would sell off the land to the west of the 1763 proclamation line that the British had tried to reserve for the natives.

  The major difference between the agricultural methods of the new ‘white’ natives and the old ‘red’ natives was their impact on the environment. In Virginia, for example, tobacco farming ruined the land to such an extent that further tobacco cultivation became prohibitively expensive (as Samuel Eliot Morison notes, the only industry able to replace the wealth previously generated by tobacco was ‘slave-breeding’). As agricultural land in the east rapidly became exhausted the federal government, dominated by plutocrats and in particular the southern planter aristocracy, ensured that polic
y on the sale of ‘new’ land favoured large-scale purchases. As the original tobacco and cotton plantations declined the plantation owners were able to buy massive new estates to the west, shipping their slaves with them and creating new states based firmly on the institution of slavery. The first two were the tobacco states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Later, when they had been cleansed of their native populations, came cotton states like Louisiana and Alabama.

  The westward expansion of the slave states mirrored the experience of territorial expansion in early Russia. There, colonisation had been driven by a desire for new agricultural land, although not as a means of generating wealth; the Rus and their Russian successors needed to find new land, however poor, simply to provide food for their population. Often Russian colonisation had been to replace land that had already been worked to exhaustion, just as was happening in early nineteenth-century America. Russian colonisation was also driven by the slave trade. Slaves were the principal export commodity for early Russia; but with the fall of Byzantium this export market suddenly disappeared and a use had to be found for slaves at home. The answer was colonising new land. Similarly in America the success of slave breeders, the decline in death rates among slaves as malaria and other diseases were brought under control and the continuing (if lessening) inflow of new slaves from Africa, the Caribbean and Florida prompted the search for new territory suitable for slave labour. Colonisation of this territory brought further wealth to an already dominant planter aristocracy.

  The economic imperatives of the slave trade were absent further north but here too those who were already wealthy, or who had access to wealth to fund their speculative investments, were the ones to benefit from westward expansion. In colonial times many of the revolutionary leaders including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had speculated in land, particularly in the Ohio Valley – territory claimed by France and occupied by natives. George Washington started buying land as a teenager and amassed a fortune as land prices soared. After Independence Congress provided that land in the Northwest Territory would be sold in plots no smaller than a square mile (640 acres), and in practice most of the land was taken by speculators like the Ohio Company of General Knox, which acquired 1.5m acres at $1 an acre. In 1796 the Land Act doubled the price of public lands to $2 an acre, making speculators even more likely to be the prime beneficiaries.

  Typical of the period was the Yazoo Land Fraud. In 1795 a corrupt Georgia legislature sold 35m acres of land along the Yazoo river to speculators for 1½ cents per acre. The next year a new legislature rescinded the sale but the speculators pursued their claim for compensation through the courts, and eventually in 1810 the US Supreme Court ruled that however corrupt the motives of the legislators the original deal had been valid. In 1814 Congress provided $4.2m to compensate the disgruntled speculators. The case yet again demonstrated the precedence of legality over justice.

  In the same year as the sale of the land on the Yazoo and a year after the battle of Fallen Timbers, Spain conceded the US navigation rights on the full length of the Mississippi: the gateway to future expansion was open. In Russia colonisation continued along the Volga, albeit more slowly than in contemporary North America. The rigid social structures in Russia meant that there was little room for individual initiative when it came to colonisation. The social pressures that kept the American frontier expanding westward were almost entirely missing. Nor was there a pool of ‘sturdy vagabonds’ of the type England had dispatched across the Atlantic in the previous century. The economic imperative to colonise new land and thereby maintain or increase agricultural production remained and Catherine resorted to immigration to settle the new lands. Both America and Russia benefited from the desire of land-hungry German farmers to escape their warring princes. The ethnic German communities along the lower Volga that two centuries later excited the paranoia of Joseph Stalin had their roots in the incentives Catherine had offered their forebears.

  Controlling the Volga gave Russia access to the Caspian Sea, but what Catherine wanted, like Peter the Great before her, was access via the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Unlike Peter she got it, pushing the Ottoman Turks aside in a series of battles that saw Russian armies storming through what today are the states of Moldova and Romania. A British naval captain, John Elphinston, was made an admiral in the imperial navy; sailing from Kronstadt in the Baltic around Europe to the Aegean, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at Chesme Bay, forcing Turkey into granting independence to the Crimea. That independence lasted less than a decade before Russia formally annexed the whole of Crimea, gaining a Black Sea coastline stretching from Odessa in the west to the Sea of Azov and beyond in the east. In 1783 a treaty with Georgia extended the Russian zone of influence even further.

  The incorporation of Georgia is a classic example of Russian imperial expansion. Threatened by the Islamic forces of Turkey and Persia the Georgian king Irakli agreed to Russian suzerainty over eastern Georgia. Once established there Russia annexed the remainder of his kingdom eighteen years later. Annexation in this case was very different from the American annexations of Spanish possessions like Florida, Texas and New Mexico that started in the very same year, 1801. Florida was annexed to gain territory to be settled by Americans and their imported slaves; the existing natives and their leaders were an impediment to be removed. Russia on the other hand was as keen to gain population as land. The Georgian leaders were courted and recruited into Russian service, and the nobility were given Russian imperial titles of higher rank. The vast mass of Georgians continued life as before; only in the last days of the Romanovs in the 1890s was there any attempt to Russify the annexed people by making Russian the language of instruction in schools.

  Catherine’s southern conquests provided Russia with outlets to the Black Sea and, vitally, a granary. The Russian heartland had poor soil and often atrocious weather but the newly conquered territories provided rich agricultural land, which, along with the subtropical produce of Georgia, sustained a 300 per cent growth in the Russian population in the nineteenth century.

  That Russia and America had much in common was demonstrated by the life of one of the most unusual characters in late eighteenth-century history. Elphinston was not the only mercenary Catherine recruited to the Russian navy. A far more famous figure was a Scottish slave trader, freemason and pirate with an assumed Welsh name who, after leaving Catherine’s service, died in Paris where he was buried in an unmarked grave, only to be exhumed more than a century later and carried across the Atlantic in what may well have been the most impressive naval cortege in history. His story is a bizarre example of the increasingly intertwined histories of America and Russia.

  John Paul was born in Kirkcudbright in 1747 and went to sea at the age of thirteen. Four years later he went into the slave trade, but reputedly left in disgust. Known for his fiery temper, Paul was arrested in Tobago for ‘excessively’ flogging his ship’s carpenter and sent home to Kirkcudbright, where the charges were dismissed. He returned to the Caribbean but had to move on again after killing a sailor in a dispute over wages. He fled to Virginia, where his brother had settled, and changed his name, first to John Jones and later to John Paul Jones.

  When war broke out between the colonists and Britain, John Paul Jones joined the rebels and depending on who is telling the story either became the most heroic figure in the infant US navy, famed especially for his defeat of HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, or became the leader of a gang of American and French pirates who preyed on British merchantmen, raided the town of Whitehaven in Cumbria and returned to Kirkcudbright to steal the Countess of Selkirk’s family silver. Posters distributed throughout the rebel colonies and signed by John Hancock on behalf of the infant Congress suggest that both versions of history are true. They encouraged sailors to join John Paul Jones Esq. ‘for the Glorious Cause of their country’ and, perhaps more importantly, to ‘make their fortune’.

  Jones became a hero not just in America but in France, and it was here after the war
that Thomas Jefferson, the new American ambassador to France, arranged for him to become Admiral Pavel Dzhones in the Russian navy. According to legend, at the battle of Liman he carried out a night-time reconnaissance of the Turkish fleet in a rowing boat before destroying fifteen of their ships, killing 3,000 of their men and taking 1,600 prisoners at a cost of one ship lost and just eighteen Russians killed. On settling in St Petersburg he was charged with molesting the ten-year-old daughter of a German immigrant and, although the charge was dropped, returned to Paris, where he died at the age of forty-five. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

  Like Columbus, his body was not to remain at peace. The story of John Paul Jones had assumed mythic proportions in America and, despite the objections of his family in Scotland, plans were made to transport his remains across the Atlantic, providing they could be found. In 1905 his grave was at last identified. The American government sent four cruisers, escorted on the final leg by seven battleships, to bring the ‘Father of the American Navy’ back ‘home’. In 1913 his body was finally laid to rest in a marble sarcophagus, modelled on the tomb of Napoleon, at the Annapolis Naval Academy. It is another of the ironies of history that the father of the US navy achieved a higher rank in the Russian navy than he ever did in the American.

  Tadeusz Kosciuszko and The Polish Question

  John Paul Jones was not the only veteran of the American Revolution to make his mark on the history of Russian imperialism. The Polish army engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who played a key part in the siege of Charleston, had returned home and was to prove as formidable an opponent to Catherine as he had to the British. Although Catherine’s conquests in the south had given Russia what she desperately needed economically, agricultural wealth and access to warm water ports, it was to her campaigns in the west that Catherine devoted most of her energies. Poland blocked the westward expansion of her empire and Catherine was determined to crush the old enemy once and for all. Standing in her way were two men: Tadeusz Kosciuszko and, before him, an even more remarkable figure, Stanislas Poniatowski.