Napoleon well understood the difficulties of campaigning across the Russian steppes, and at first tried to tame Alexander by marrying the tsar’s favourite sister (despite not yet having divorced the childless Josephine). When Alexander refused the offer Napoleon lost no time moping; within three days he had proposed to the daughter of the defeated emperor of Austria, and war between the French and Russian empires became inevitable. Although Napoleon had lost a few battles in Spain to the British and been driven out of Portugal by Lord Wellington at the beginning of 1812, he still looked invincible. Allied with Austria and Prussia, and holding the Pope captive at Fontainebleau, Napoleon crossed the Niemen in June with half a million men, the majority drawn not from France but from Spain, Italy, Germany and above all Poland. This was his Grande Armée. Six months later just five thousand of them managed to retreat back to Vilnius; it was one of the most significant military disasters of all time. Alexander had defeated the mightiest European army since the Romans.
There has long been a debate about whether Alexander actually knew what he was doing when he destroyed the Grande Armée: did he have a cunning plan or did a sequence of tactical decisions by chance cohere into a winning strategy? His military commanders were divided into a majority Russian faction and a minority German faction. The Russian faction, largely Russian aristocrats, many with origins in the warrior tribes of Asia, wanted to fight a head-on offensive campaign against the invader. The German faction, which included many Prussian officers who had emigrated to Russia after Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army in 1806, favoured a more cautious approach. Alexander seemed to oscillate between the two – retreating as the German faction advised, then letting the Russian faction persuade him to make a stand at Borodino and then, when that failed, retreating again.
Whatever the truth about Alexander’s strategy, Napoleon certainly had a plan: to defeat the Russian army in battle, take Moscow and force Alexander’s capitulation. At first the French plan gave every sign of working. The Russians were defeated in the bloodbath of Borodino and Napoleon’s army entered Moscow. As in earlier campaigns in Italy, Spain, Prussia and Austria, Napoleon found himself with his invincible army in control of the enemy’s capital; it was now just a question of negotiating the terms of surrender. But Alexander refused to negotiate. The Governor of Moscow had the city torched and Napoleon was left with the most pyrrhic of victories. He could not stay where he was, as his army had no food; he could not destroy Alexander in battle, as after Borodino the tsar avoided any full-scale engagement; he could not advance, as Alexander would just retreat all the way to the Pacific. Napoleon’s only option was to turn round and march back the way he had come. But the Russians had by now destroyed everything in their path that the Grande Armée itself had not destroyed on its march to Moscow. With winter closing in Napoleon’s soldiers starved to death, froze to death or were picked off by Alexander’s Cossacks or local militias. If the British thought the retreat from Lexington was bloody, this was ten thousand times worse.
Just as the American War of Independence signalled the triumph of democracy, the destruction of the Grande Armée showed the power of autocracy. Any other monarch, in the desperate circumstances Alexander faced after Borodino, would have had to consider the wishes of his nobles, if not the feelings of the citizens of Moscow as their homes were brought down around them. Alexander had none of these constraints. For good or ill the ideology of autocracy had placed total power in the hands of one man. The consequence was the salvation of Russia and the further glorification of the Russian empire. It was a lesson not lost on the Russian people; as in America the triumphs of war were taken as god-given sanction of their view of the world. The same God was apparently endorsing two totally opposed ideologies.
After the disastrous retreat from Moscow Napoleon raised new forces and tried to fight on, but Austria and Prussia swapped sides again and the allies fought their way to the French frontier. The Austrian emperor wanted to make peace but Alexander, who was now the strongest monarch in Europe, refused. Inside France Napoleon fought a brilliant rearguard action, and after a string of minor defeats the Austrian and Prussian leaders again pressed Alexander to negotiate. Instead Alexander sent 10,000 cavalry in a diversionary move that completely fooled the French emperor and directed the bulk of his forces in an attack on Paris. Napoleon had left his capital in the hands of his elder brother Joseph, whom he had made King of Spain, but on 31 March 1814 Paris capitulated (King Joseph fleeing to America with a stash of jewels that financed a luxurious New Jersey exile).
Napoleon was exiled to the Tuscan island of Elba. He was allowed to take his own guards, among whom he chose 120 volunteer Polish lancers. Ten months later he was back in France raising a new army. Knowing that he had to strike before Alexander and the Austrian emperor had time to re-mobilise their forces, Napoleon attacked the Prussian, British and Dutch forces close to home. Heavily outnumbered, he suffered his final defeat at Waterloo (although contrary to Abba’s version of history he did not surrender there; retreating to Paris, he found himself without support and eventually surrendered to a British warship).
In British eyes Napoleon was destroyed by Wellington at Waterloo but the reality is that Napoleon’s power was gone long before that. Napoleon’s enemies had already made their triumphant entry into Paris, where the grand procession was led not by Wellington or his Austrian or Prussian equivalents but, by common consent, by Alexander, the last great Russian tsar. The Russian empire had moved from eastern barbarism to the centre of the European stage. Alexander was greeted with rapturous applause wherever he went; in England mobs surrounded him like a modern pop star and Oxford University granted him an honorary degree.
Not only had Alexander personally emerged as the most powerful monarch in Europe but the Romanov autocracy appeared to be the most successful regime in the world. Few could have predicted that a century later that regime would collapse with the murder of the last Romanov tsar and his family. Whether through skill, luck or sheer bloody-minded endurance Alexander I had destroyed the greatest army Europe had witnessed since the Mongols. (No Frenchman would of course liken the Grande Armée to the Mongols; Napoleon’s troops are still pictured as the standard bearers of French civilisation, spreading French culture and virtue across the continent. They certainly spread something: scientists examining the mass graves in Vilnius of Napoleonic soldiers who perished in the retreat from Moscow discovered that no less than 80 per cent showed signs of venereal disease.)
One of the great what ifs of history is what would have happened if instead of invading Russia Napoleon had done what many Americans feared he would do – invade America. Napoleon posed the most immediate foreign threat to the new American republic and his navy relentlessly harassed American shipping (the newly independent America had to turn to Britain, which sold or donated munitions, gave naval protection to American ships and provided Caribbean bases for the fledgling US navy.) If, rather than sell his North American empire, Napoleon had used it as a springboard and sent his Grande Armée across the Atlantic to seize the wealth that Britain had lost just a few short decades before, the history of the world might have been very different. But that is not what happened.
At the Congress of Vienna held to resolve the territorial and dynastic issues that followed Napoleon’s defeat, Alexander gained most, although not all, of the territory he wanted. He made liberal promises about limited self-government in his new Polish colony. Tadeusz Kosciuszko was invited to the congress and offered a leading role, but the Polish hero well understood Alexander’s intentions and gave him the same reply he had earlier given Napoleon. He was right to be suspicious: Alexander simply absorbed most of the old Poland into Russia and the new ‘self-governing’ remnant was placed firmly under Russian control, with Alexander’s brother Constantine commanding the Polish army. (Kosciuszko retired to Switzerland, where he died in 1817.) Russia had gained much but not as much as America.
The Louisiana Purchase was almost universally welcomed in
the American south but caused consternation in the north, where the prospect of more slave states was met with moral outrage and, more importantly, a recognition that the balance of power would tip away from them. The nineteenth century in America was characterised by the same two themes seen in Russia: continual territorial expansion and ideological conflicts leading to civil war. The views of north and south were starkly opposed on both of these topics. Slavery is the issue normally associated with the political chasm between the two halves of the country, but in the early years it was America’s role as a quasi-imperial power that most seriously divided the nation.
Following the conclusion of the Louisiana Purchase the north-south divide came to dominate politics. There was talk of secession, particularly in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and Aaron Burr, dumped as vice-presidential candidate by President Jefferson, tried to get himself elected Governor of New York as the first stage on the road to becoming president of an independent northern confederacy.
Colonel Aaron Burr is one of the characters who had no real historical impact but whose story illustrates the swirls and eddies of the period in which they lived. Burr was at one time talked of as a future president, not least by himself, but is now best remembered for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. In 1804, when his plans for a northern confederacy failed, Burr turned his eyes south and west. He gathered round him a motley collection of adventurers committed to grabbing power in the western states and then invading Mexico, where Burr would be proclaimed emperor of a new realm stretching west from the Mississippi. For two years Burr travelled the frontier weaving his plot. Andrew Jackson, later to become US president, helped provide boats and men that were intended to sail down the Mississippi and seize New Orleans (it is ironic that Jackson’s later rise to power was based on his reputation as the defender of New Orleans). Burr promised Britain the prospect of a vast new export market stretching from Canada to New Orleans in return for naval support. Eventually Burr was betrayed by one of his co-conspirators and arrested near Natchez, where a grand jury found him innocent of any crime. He disappeared into the Alabama wilderness but was eventually recaptured and sent back east for trial.
The government of Thomas Jefferson argued that as Burr intended to seize New Orleans, recently purchased from France, he was guilty of treason; his defenders argued that he had only ever been interested in seizing territory from Mexico. The case developed into a trial of strength between President Jefferson and Chief Justice Marshall; Marshall subpoenaed letters held by the president but Jefferson simply refused to obey; when Marshall ruled that there was no case to answer, Jefferson threatened to have Marshall impeached, and contemplated amending the constitution to limit the powers of the judiciary. Once released, Burr sailed to Europe where he failed to find anyone to support his plans for revolution in Mexico. He eventually settled into relative obscurity as a lawyer and land speculator in New York, where he lived to see the Texan Revolution of 1835 achieve much of what he had attempted. His last act, a year before his death, was to marry a rich widow who left him after just four months when she discovered he was plundering her accounts.
The antics of imperialists in the south spurred northerners to look westwards themselves, where nothing stood in their way but a few natives. The victory of Fallen Timbers cleared the way for new settlements on a massive scale. The natives were not completely destroyed and in the early nineteenth century another dangerous confederation of Midwestern tribes, led by one of the great native generals, Tecumseh, started to reassert native power before being decisively smashed at the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Tecumseh escaped to Canada, where his presence was used by the advocates of a more aggressive foreign policy to bolster their case for a pre-emptive attack on the remaining British settlements in North America.
Although they were keen to cleanse the native tribes from their borders, the northern states were much less gung-ho about attacking the European imperial powers. However, almost all of the early presidents were drawn from the Virginian ruling class, plantation owners with southern values. None illustrated the southern mind-set more clearly than James Madison, elected president in 1808. Facing the prospect of a tough reelection campaign, Madison lighted on the perfect issue to appeal to the southern electorate.
In 1810 American settlers who had moved into part of Spanish Florida staged a revolt. Using a tactic later used on a much larger scale in Texas, the Americans declared their independence. (American history of the period, just like Russian history, is confused by ever-changing boundaries – although then part of Florida the disputed area, centring on the city of Baton Rouge, is today in the modern state of Louisiana – despite not being part of the Louisiana Purchase.) The independent nation of West Florida existed from 23 September to 6 December 1810, at which point President Madison annexed the whole area below the thirty-first parallel between the Mississippi and Pearl rivers. The popularity of this land grab ensured his successful re-election in 1812.
Encouraged by his success in Florida, Madison and a congressional group known as the War Hawks looked for further conquest. Britain, preoccupied with the Napoleonic wars in Europe, tried to stop American ships trading with the enemy. Using this as an excuse, Madison declared war and launched an invasion of Canada. The British blockade had actually been lifted by the time war was declared but the news had not crossed the Atlantic; by the time it arrived Washington was gripped by war fever, and Madison had no more intention of admitting his mistake than Bush II had when events proved the non-existence of the weapons of mass destruction used to justify invading Iraq.
The War Hawks had their eyes on the fertile territory west of Quebec, modern Ontario, and expected it to fall into their hands. The 1810 census had just revealed the US population to be 7.25 million, while there were fewer than 500,000 whites in the whole of British North America – and that included Americans who had already moved in to settle on the Canadian side of the border. Henry Clay, a War Hawk leader from Kentucky, boasted that his state’s militia on their own could deliver Montreal and Upper Canada. But in 1812 the fusion of northern moral crusade and southern imperial ambition had not yet occurred, and the northern states wanted no part of Madison’s imperial war. The congressional vote on the declaration of war was 79–49; the representatives of every state from Massachusetts to Delaware voted against, while the southern and western delegations were almost unanimously in favour.
Tempers ran high. When a leading newspaper in Baltimore advocated peace its editor and his supporters were forced to seek sanctuary in the local jail. They were dragged out and beaten by an angry mob who took particular exception to the presence of two army generals. General Henry Lee, known as ‘Light Horse Harry’, a hero of the American Revolution and close friend of George Washington, was left maimed for life. The other, General James Lingan, who had been wounded during the revolution and spent more than three years as a prisoner of the British, was murdered. When Lingan’s killers were brought to trial they were acquitted, after the district attorney expressed regret that Lingan had been the only traitor to die.
When the ‘War of 1812’ started, the New England and New York militias refused to join the invasion force and the British successfully counter-attacked, seizing Detroit. Contrary to expectations the Canadian militias fought hard, as the region’s settlers spurned the invitation to opt for ‘liberty’ under the Stars and Stripes. The Kentucky militia, on the other hand, rapidly became mutinous, and a council of officers demanded they be allowed to retreat. America and Britain then slogged it out in one of history’s most pointless wars. American forces again invaded Canada, burning down the city of York (modern Toronto), and the British retaliated by attacking Washington and burning down the Capitol and the White House. But as Napoleon had found out less than two years earlier, seizing the enemy’s capital was no guarantee of ultimate victory; the new colossuses of Russia and America were changing the rules of war. The puny states of western Europe would one day be relegated to the military second division.
> In 1813 an attempt at mediation by the Russian tsar, Alexander I, fresh from his success crushing Napoleon, failed and the war finally ended in stalemate. Under the terms of the Treaty of Ghent both parties Returned to Go; Madison had not gained an inch of new territory. Although northern manufacturers prospered as imports were disrupted, opposition to the war there had continued; a vote of thanks for one naval hero was defeated in the Massachusetts legislature as ‘not becoming a moral and religious people’.
Ironically the most famous battle of the war (or at least famous to those exposed to 1950s pop music) was fought after the war was officially over. Just as the slow pace of transatlantic communication allowed the war to start, so it also allowed one final pointless slaughter in the battle of New Orleans. The British commander committed one of the biggest blunders in British military history when, rather than exploiting a breakthrough on the American flank, he launched a full-frontal assault on the most heavily fortified enemy positions. ‘The Battle of New Orleans’, which won the Grammy Award for the Best Song of 1959, described what happened next as the British fled ‘down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico’ (although in a rare example of cultural sensitivity the version released in Britain meaninglessly substituted ‘rebels’ for ‘British’).
The War of 1812 may have been a draw, but to much of the American population the battle of New Orleans reinforced their pride in the nation’s military prowess. The fact that many of the British troops came from the Caribbean and were black reinforced Americans’ sense of superiority, and their dreams of further conquests.
Empires Apart Page 22