The 1812 Overtures
Russia had defeated the might of the French empire, and America had defeated the might of the British empire. The two nations emerged from the turmoil of 1812 confident in their own imperial destinies. It was inevitable that these two empires of the future would soon collide. The seeds of the superpower conflict that dominated the second half of the twentieth century were planted long before the advent of communism.
On the surface Russia under Alexander seemed to have become the world’s only superpower. The reality was somewhat different. The Russian empire was geographically enormous but economically weak. The tsar’s willingness to let his people and his army accept privations on a colossal scale made his military might seem greater than it really was. Russia’s agriculture was primitive, its industry basic and its rigid class structure stifling. All that, however, was irrelevant; what mattered was what other people believed about Russia’s power and above all what Alexander believed. And what Alexander increasingly believed was that he and Russia had been chosen by God to show the rest of the world the true path to salvation. The Russian empire’s role was global, and global included the Americas.
Throughout the reigns of Catherine, Paul and Alexander Russians continued to push east, hunting almost to extinction the fur-bearing animals of Siberia and the Aleutians. Alaska’s first man-made environmental disaster arose from the free market competition between American and Russian fur traders as Aleut fur-hunters drove the sea otter to virtual extinction, causing the population of the otters’ favourite food, sea urchins, to explode and destroy the underwater forests of kelp on which much of the area’s sea life depended.
Tsar Paul chartered the Russian-American Company in 1799, fifteen years after the first permanent settlement in Alaska. At first healthy profits flowed back to the shareholders, including the Romanov family, but, as the French had found on the other side of the continent, a colony could not survive on the fur trade alone: it was time to do more.
In the spring of 1812 Napoleon was massing his troops in Poland ready to strike east, General Andrew Jackson was calling for volunteers for ‘the conquest of all the British dominions upon the continent of North America’ and in Russia most eyes were turning fearfully west; most but not all. The Russian pioneers in Alaska were looking south – to California.
California offered not only an abundance of sea otters but also fertile agricultural land. In March 1812 the first Russian settlement in California was founded at Fort Ross (from Rossiya, the Russian for Russia). Reminiscent of Peter Minuit in Manhattan, the land all around was bought from the native inhabitants for three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes and some beads. The settlement initially prospered and farms were established inland. Again like the French, but unlike the English, the Russians intermarried with the Californian natives and the Alaskans they brought with them.
Meanwhile the golden boy of Europe, the young Tsar Alexander I, was becoming ever less attractive as he grew older. He developed an almost messianic conviction that autocracy was God’s plan for the entire world. His constant lecturing left other European rulers bemused; when he extended his musings to life across the Atlantic the consequences were more serious. First he tried to extend the frontiers of Russian Alaska further south. In 1821 he decreed that all lands along North America’s Pacific coast as far south as Latitude 51° N belonged to Russia. If implemented, a significant part of the Oregon Territory, already claimed by both America and Britain, would have become Russian. Even though the United States only really occupied territory east of the Mississippi, American leaders were convinced that the whole of North America should rightfully be theirs. In 1805 Lewis and Clark had reached the Pacific reinforcing this view. (Some American texts write as if they were the first to cross the North American continent, but they were only sent because it had been done before. In 1801 the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who had already twice crossed Canada to the Pacific, published his book Voyages from Montreal, directly inspiring US president Thomas Jefferson to send Lewis and Clark to repeat Mackenzie’s feat.)
The Russian tsar could pass whatever decrees he liked, but the reality was that he had no way of enforcing them. The settlers at Fort Ross reached agreement with the Spanish to the south but the British in Oregon outmanoeuvred them. In 1839 the Hudson Bay Company agreed a trade deal with the Russian colonies in Alaska, and two years later Fort Ross was sold to American settlers; the Romanov flag was hoisted for the last time over Russian California a few months short of the colony’s thirtieth birthday. Fort Ross had been far more successful than the first English settlement on Roanoke Island, but the Russians were too late. North America was no longer ‘available’; the world had moved on.
Eventually Russia agreed to site no settlements south of latitude 54° 40° N and America agreed not to settle north of that latitude. In a strange twist of historical fate the territory the treaty gave to Russia – Alaska – is now part of America, and the territory it gave to the United States is not part of America, the British ensuring that it became part of the Canadian province of British Columbia.
Not satisfied with claiming a chunk of North America for himself, Alexander also turned his mind further south. Having inspired the so-called Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, Prussia and France to crush stirrings of liberalism in Spain and force the restoration of a more autocratic monarchy, Alexander started musing on the desirability of recovering Spain’s former Latin American colonies.
Spurred on by the British who were excluded from the Holy Alliance, President Monroe reacted angrily to Alexander’s proposals for both the Pacific North-West and Latin America. He told the tsar, and all the other European powers, that the United States would not intervene in European wars and in return they would not be allowed to establish any new colonies anywhere in the Americas. In effect Monroe declared the rest of the western hemisphere a US protectorate.
Alexander had inadvertently caused a doctrine to be accepted that would underlie American imperialism throughout the western hemisphere, and would help inculcate into the American psyche the conviction that their imperialism was somehow qualitatively different to the European imperialisms that it sought to prevent. In proclaiming America’s right to deploy military force anywhere in the Americas in order to stop the European powers doing the same thing, Monroe formulated the moral basis for his country’s imperial expansion. He was, he insisted, not proclaiming an imperial intent but preventing one. In classic Orwellian newspeak America’s fight ‘for’ empire became a fight ‘against’ empire; imperialism became anti-imperialism.
The full implications of the Monroe Doctrine were not made explicit until much later. In 1895 the ‘Olney Corollary’ was added by the American secretary of state, Richard Olney, when he insisted that America had the right to arbitrate in an obscure border dispute between Venezuela and the British colony of Guyana. ‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent,’ declared Olney, ‘and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.’
Since the Mystic Massacre American settlers had believed in their god-given right to exert hegemony over the natives on their frontiers, but now that right was extended to the whole hemisphere. Moreover that right was to be asserted not just over ‘merciless Indian savages’ but Christian elites, whose Spanish and Portuguese ancestors had crossed the Atlantic Ocean long before the Pilgrim Fathers.
Just as Americans saw their geographic growth as manifesting God’s will, so Alexander saw himself as divinely inspired. To an extent rarely seen in tsars before or after, Alexander imputed an almost messianic dimension to his nation’s imperialism. His bizarre plan for returning the former colonies of Latin America to their ‘rightful’ owners was in his mind a logical consequence of God’s will that earthly power should rest in the hands of his chosen monarchs, Alexander himself prime among them. Hereditary monarchy was God’s preferred form of government, and this formed the moral justification for imperial expansion. O
ther empires such as the Roman and British convinced themselves that their rule was beneficial for the peoples they subdued, but Alexander believed that the form of his government – autocracy – was in itself beneficial even to nations that remained outside his own empire. This conviction that he had a divine duty to ensure that the world enjoyed the benefits of autocracy was to find echoes in the beliefs of American presidents who were determined that everyone should enjoy the benefits of democracy. Alexander nudged forward the development of an American view of empire that was a mirror image of his own. It too was fundamentally messianic, but the American God had chosen not monarchy but democracy. Both Tsar Alexander and President Monroe believed that their imperial ambitions were not about conquering territory but, in the phrase used to describe the Pequot War, about ‘bringing light into darkness’.
Therefore both nations were toying with the prospect that their destinies were not regional but global. Russia already possessed territory in Europe, Asia and North America; America now turned its eyes to the whole of the western hemisphere and less obviously to Africa.
One of the beneficiaries of the war against Britain was the infant US navy. Although many of its ships remained bottled up in port it secured a number of psychologically important victories. Indeed, it was still attacking British vessels off the coast of Africa months after the war was over. This development of naval power helped to make a practical reality not just of Monroe’s assertion of the American right to police the western hemisphere but also of the wider flexing of American imperial power across the globe. Within three months of the end of the war that power was being demonstrated in the Mediterranean.
The north African coast was a dangerous place for American ships, which had previously enjoyed the protection of the British navy. Depending on which version is believed, a horde of savage Barbary pirates terrorised peaceful merchantmen or arrogant Christian sailors refused to pay the tributes due to local Muslim rulers. As ships were liable to attack when they were nowhere near the north African coast, the former may be somewhat closer to the truth. In 1804 US navy captain Stephen Decatur had led a night-time raid to rescue a captured American ship and its crew; the raid failed, and the crew languished in jail for two more years until the US Senate agreed to ransom them, but even Admiral Nelson was moved to applaud Decatur’s daring. A year later a contingent of US sailors, marines and mercenaries marched 600 miles across the Libyan desert to capture an obscure fort near Tripoli on the north African coast – an event of no historical significance and one that by now would be totally forgotten but for its celebration in the opening line of the US marines’ official hymn, ‘From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli’.
With their confidence invigorated in the war against Britain, the US navy sailed into the lions’ dens again. The first American bombardment of Tripoli took place in 1815, 131 years before President Reagan repeated the exercise. Within months the navy, under Decatur, by now a commodore, had imposed treaties on Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Decatur returned to a hero’s welcome and at the state banquet in his honour famously proposed the toast ‘Our country right or wrong’. Shortly afterwards he was killed duelling with a fellow officer.
It is sometimes imagined that in the early days of the United States the nation’s focus was entirely on establishing itself on the North American continent, but the reality is that the US saw itself as a world power almost from its inception. It was also seen as such by others. Denmark and Sweden were among the nations that funded the US navy’s operations on the Barbary coast, presaging a pattern to be repeated right up to the first Iraq War. Catherine the Great had developed the concept of nations banding together to enforce ‘armed neutrality’, but thirty years later it was America rather than Russia that was acting as the world’s policeman.
The US navy was soon demonstrating America’s new role again, this time in the South Atlantic. The Malvinas/Falkland Islands were claimed by Britain but occupied by an Argentine cattle baron, whose animals were tempting targets for the crews of American whaling ships. Eventually tiring of these depredations, the Argentines burnt two of the rustlers’ ships. The US navy responded immediately, not by policing the activities of American whalers but by clearing all Argentines from the islands. In so doing America almost accidentally paved the way for Britain to take possession of the vacant islands, creating a permanent sense of injustice in Argentina that more than a century and a half later would lead to war.
Although the US navy remained small when compared with European counterparts, at least until the 1880s, it proved a highly effective extension to US diplomacy. Japan, for example, had the temerity to declare itself closed to foreigners; the closure lasted for two centuries until the US navy sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and made the emperor an offer he could not refuse. Eighteen years later a US naval task force was sent to Korea, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’, and when the Koreans made the mistake of opening fire it attacked the defenders’ forts, killing everyone inside. Korea realised it stood no chance against the ‘barbarians’ and opened up its markets.
Closer to home, the War of 1812 had left the Canadian border unchanged, but the US had taken advantage of the conflict to strike at the native tribes on its frontiers. The native leader Tecumseh was finally killed fighting alongside the British and Andrew Jackson, on his way to routing the British at New Orleans, put down a native uprising with exemplary ferocity. When the war was over Jackson led a punitive campaign against the Seminoles in Florida. The fact that the Seminole villages were on Spanish not American soil did not stop Jackson burning them down. The Florida natives were not the only ones to suffer. A small community of former slaves had established itself on the Apalachicola river inside Spanish Florida. The very existence of such a settlement was regarded as a threat to the United States, and in 1816 American troops supported by a naval gunboat and native mercenaries attacked and destroyed it. Prefiguring the attack on tiny Grenada 167 years later, the US responded to international outrage by insisting it was acting in ‘self-defence’.
Florida remained Spanish, but Spain was no longer a power to be reckoned with. Jackson marched into northern Florida in what became known as the First Seminole War. He used the same savage tactics against the native Seminoles as he had used against the natives of Alabama, tactics Mongol-like in their terror and devastation. An attempt was made to subject him to congressional censure for his behaviour during the campaign, which included the summary execution of prisoners (among them two Britons seized when Jackson took the Spanish port of St Marks). Most of the cabinet were in favour of censure, as Jackson’s actions threatened to precipitate war with both Britain and Spain, but the motion failed. The only cabinet member to support Jackson was John Quincy Adams, who had learnt as ambassador to the Russian court the value of decisive military action in expanding the frontiers of empire.
Spain was powerless to protect its native subjects, and in 1821 bowed to the inevitable and sold the state for $5m. Jackson became Florida’s first governor and settlers poured in, preceded by southern slave catchers who rounded up runaway slaves, free blacks and natives for shipping to the new plantations in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Jackson himself was soon on the move again – his target this time being the White House. In 1824 he was defeated; four years later he made it. In the meantime, in 1825, Alexander I, the last great Russian tsar, had died.
CHAPTER 8
DETERMINED OPPORTUNISM AND CONQUEST
As the nineteenth century progressed the imperial ambitions of Russia and America began to move in parallel, but their ideologies of empire remained very different.
The Russian approach to their empire was simple: it was theirs by right of conquest; no more needed to be said. For Americans pushing to the Mississippi and beyond the position was not as simple. The ideology that underpinned America’s existence as a nation was based on a commitment to the rights of man, rights that did not include the right of conquest. Those in their way, whether French, Spanish or native, might repres
ent inferior civilisations or even no civilisation at all, but they were still men. Conquest smacked of theft; to take what had belonged to others there needed to be agreement. But how to make an agreement with natives who had no concept of property? And more fundamentally, how to make an agreement with natives who had no incentive to give up their land? The answer was provided in Britain in the ideas of men like John Locke and Adam Smith, ideas that eventually coalesced into the principles of capitalism. Fundamental to the efficient working of society, they argued, was private property, which the Almighty had bestowed not for its own sake but so that it could be used to benefit all. The natives might regard land as just another part of nature like air or water, which enabled them to hunt and gather all they needed, but that was not what God intended. Land was there to be tilled in order to produce crops that could be traded. It was the concept of commerce that was fundamental to the ethical justification of American territorial aggrandisement. The purpose of land was to grow food for the townspeople back east, to produce crops to export in return for European imports, to offer up gold and silver to further oil the wheels of commerce. The natives were not ‘using’ their land in the way that God and ‘civilisation’ demanded, and therefore they should let somebody else take over. Similarly Latin American and Caribbean republics were not governing themselves properly, and so the US had a duty to intervene. As Robert Kagan has pointed out, the same rationale for imposing American values on other cultures would be heard again as American corporations justified their quest for ‘globalisation’.
America’s imperial ambitions emerged erratically from its ideology rather than being part of some grand imperial design. Kagan, writing about the American purchase of Louisiana, violent conquest of Florida and opportunistic acquisition of Pacific coastline in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, noted the paradox that ‘American leaders had a clear vision of a continental empire’ but ‘had no specific plans to obtain it’. Imperial expansion in the period he characterised as ‘determined opportunism’. Russia’s imperial strategies were much more straightforward.
Empires Apart Page 23