Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Britain’s prosperity came to depend overwhelmingly on its industrial and commercial base, and the superiority of its manufacturing attracted envy from all over the world – as much from the fledgling democrats of America, who had so recently cast off the British yoke, as from tentative westernisers peering out through the fluttering curtains of Russian absolutism. In 1753 two Englishmen, William Chamberlain and Richard Cozzens, set up Russia’s first large-scale cotton printing and dye works with the help of subsidies from the Empress Elizabeth, but as with most such schemes it did not last long. Manufacturing took much stronger root in the entrepreneurial climate of the new empire across the Atlantic.

  Like Russia, America started on the road to industrialisation by borrowing from Britain, and it is not surprising that the man known as the Father of the American industrial revolution was an Englishman. Samuel Slater was the son of a landowner and speculator in Derbyshire and used his family contacts to become what today would be called a management trainee in one of England’s leading textile mills. In 1789 Slater crossed the Atlantic after the Pennsylvania legislature advertised in his local newspaper offering a bounty for skilled migrants. The British government was anxious to maintain its industrial secrets, fearing, quite rightly, that British patents were unlikely to be respected abroad, and had prohibited the emigration of men with Slater’s specialist knowledge. He therefore disguised himself as an agricultural labourer and slipped out of the country. Soon he was appointed manager of a struggling textile mill in Rhode Island. Using his knowledge of Arkwright’s processes, Slater turned the factory’s fortunes round and recognisably modern industrial production in the United States had started. (Slater brought with him not only the technology of early English capitalism but also its values: his first nine employees were all children aged seven to eleven.)

  In other industries the transfer of technology was less controversial. The pottery towns of England, for example, sent scores of entrepreneurs and thousands of potters to set up near suitable clay deposits in America to manufacture domestic crockery.

  Not all of the building blocks of America’s early industrial successes were pirated or imported from Europe. The cotton industry that fed Slater’s mills was itself transformed in 1794 when Eli Whitney patented his ‘cotton gin’. In India machines had long been used to separate the seeds and fibre of Asian ‘long staple’ cotton but they didn’t work on American ‘short staple’ cotton, which had to be laboriously cleaned by slave labour. Whitney’s machine overcame this problem and American cotton production was revolutionised. Although Whitney patented his ‘gin’ (a corruption of engine) he was unable to enforce his patent, and his attempt to franchise his invention at what many planters considered to be exorbitant rates (he demanded 40 per cent of their profits) led to years of legal disputes. These were resolved not by the forces of the free market or the courts of justice but by the legislatures of South and North Carolina and Tennessee, who bought out his patent rights. Having failed to make his fortune with his cotton gin, Whitney turned his inventive mind elsewhere and successfully pioneered the mass production of another staple of colonial life: guns. Guns were an essential part of American life. Without the superiority of their firepower the conquest of the native tribes to the west and south would have been far more difficult, and American expansion would have been significantly slower.

  In Florida the natives had fiercely resisted the American conquest but were pushed ever further south, where in 1823 they were ‘granted’ 5 million acres. That arrangement was short lived. By 1830 Andrew Jackson was president and Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, allowing the government to ‘exchange’ tribal lands in the east with territory west of the Mississippi – territory already inhabited not only by its traditional occupants but by tribes fleeing from the advancing whites.

  The Indian Removal Act created a supposedly permanent frontier at the 95th meridian. Native tribes east of that line were bribed, tricked or forced into migrating west, leaving behind their rich hereditary lands to be settled in Kansas, Iowa or Oklahoma. In 1834 the Indian Intercourse Act prohibited encroachment on the new native reservations, but to little avail. Until 1831 native tribes were treated as foreign nations, but in that year the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of The Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, that they were not foreign states and their land therefore fell under the jurisdiction of the state governments. The court partly reversed itself next year in Worcester v. Georgia, but Jackson simply ignored the court decision, declaring that the chief justice had made his decision and ‘now let him enforce it’. In 1838, in one of the most shameful episodes in American history, General Winfield Scott rounded up the Cherokees and put them into concentration camps before forcing them to walk west towards Oklahoma, in what became known as the Trail of Tears. One in four died along the way.

  In Florida the remaining Seminoles were coerced into moving to Oklahoma. Around 4,000 natives went, but in 1835 the Second Seminole War broke out when the rest refused to go. The Seminole forces were led by another of the great native leaders, Osceola, who made the fatal mistake of agreeing to negotiate under a flag of truce. He was seized and died in captivity. After seven years of bloody conflict an uneasy peace was agreed, which lasted until the Third Seminole War in 1855. By now the march of ‘progress’ was unstoppable. As Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator, mounted the Russian throne and moved to emancipate the serfs, Florida bounty hunters were being offered rewards of $500 for native men, $250 for women and $100 for children. By 1858 the Florida wars were officially declared over; one way or another all but a handful of Seminoles had been cleansed from the state.

  American treatment of natives in conquered Florida was mirrored in Russian treatment of natives in its newly conquered territory. Revolts in Finland and Poland were put down by force. Poland in particular suffered appallingly. In November 1830 Polish troops in Warsaw rose in revolt and the leaders of the self-governing Polish rump-state proclaimed solidarity with the rebels. The Russian response was overwhelming: rebel forces were crushed, hundreds of rebels were executed, 180,000 were banished to Siberian exile and another 6,000 fled into exile in France. At the same time the rump-state lost the remnants of its independence and its army. (One of those who fled into exile was Count Pawel Strzelecki, who became one of the most famous explorers of his time. Among his achievements was surveying Australia’s highest mountain and naming it after the great Polish hero Kosciuszko.)

  After completing the ethnic cleansing of Florida the next target of the southern imperialists was Texas. The 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, under which Spain ceded Florida to the United States also established America’s western frontier with the Spanish colony of Mexico, but American adventurers had never accepted the sanctity of their country’s borders. In common American parlance the term ‘frontier’ was not a demarcation line on a map but a vast expanse waiting to be exploited. When Davy Crockett is celebrated as the King of the Wild Frontier, it does not mean that he stood guard on the frontier but that he ignored the legal frontier and pushed on to create his own; and like many others he pushed on to Texas.

  The first Americans to invade Texas were known as filibusters. In modern times the term filibuster has come to mean using endless speechifying to stop legislation being approved, but originally it was not legislatures held to ransom but ships; the word originated in the Dutch for pirate or freebooter, vrijbuiter, particularly in the Caribbean whence, via Spanish, it passed into English to describe the mercenary gangs operating primarily from the city of Natchez, Mississippi. They were to America what Yermak’s Cossack freebooters had been to Russia: lawless ruffians expanding empire by going where presidents and tsars feared to tread. Under a Mississippi doctor and merchant named James Long, filibusters invaded Texas just months after the US had formally given up claim to the territory under the Adams-Onís Treaty. Spanish troops drove the filibusters out but, with revolution spreading throughout Latin America, Spain was no more able to protect its interests in Mexico than in Florida, and in 1821,
the same year that Andrew Jackson was made Governor of Florida, Mexican rebels secured their independence. Long moved in again, but the native Mexicans were no more receptive than the Spanish. Long was captured and six months later, in disputed circumstances, shot by one of his guards.

  More peaceful settlement had been welcomed, however, by both Spanish and Mexican authorities. Moses Austin was invited to settle 300 families in northern Texas by the Spanish authorities, later confirmed by the new Mexican government, and in 1821 his son Stephen led the first settlers and their slaves across the border. The Mexicans naïvely believed that the presence of the Americans would help suppress any native uprisings and dissuade any US invasion. Thousands more immigrants soon poured over the border. By 1835 eastern and central Texas was dominated by nearly 30,000 American settlers, who made up over 80 per cent of the population. The Mexican authorities became alarmed, and when they declared slavery illegal the Anglo immigrants also became alarmed. Just fifteen years after being invited in the immigrants proclaimed their independence, and called on the US government to annexe their new nation, just as West Florida had been annexed a quarter of a century earlier, and thereby protect their ‘right’ to own slaves. (Texas was an important entrepôt for the slave trade. The United States had banned the importation of slaves in 1808 but the potential profits were so large that slavers were willing to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy to transport captives from Africa via Cuba to Texas, for smuggling across the border to the slave markets in New Orleans.)

  The annexation proposal met stiff resistance not only from the Mexican government but also from many Americans. The balance of power within the US was swinging to the rapidly industrialising north. The addition of yet another slave state in Texas, to be followed no doubt by others as more of Mexico was gobbled up, was not welcomed.

  The reaction of the Mexican president Santa Anna to news of the impending revolt was more direct. He marched on the American rebels and besieged nearly 200 Anglo immigrants at the Alamo, a fortified mission at San Antonio. (Anglo is a more appropriate term than American as many of the Alamo’s defenders were European immigrants, mainly British.) About 2,000 Mexicans and all but one of the Anglos died. The cry ‘Remember the Alamo’ became a rallying call, although more appropriate would have been ‘Remember Goliad’, where, three weeks later, Santa Ana massacred 371 American prisoners of war. Less than a month after the Goliad massacre an American force under Samuel Houston defeated and captured Santa Ana, and forced him to sign a treaty recognising the independence of Texas, a treaty the Mexican Congress not surprisingly repudiated. Houston wanted Texas annexed by the United States, but although President Jackson recognised the independent Republic of Texas even he initially balked at annexation.

  Annexation was finally approved by the US Congress in 1845, and the Texas legislature was presented with a choice between accepting annexation or continued independence and a peace treaty with Mexico brokered by Britain. The legislators unanimously chose annexation. Acquiring Texas was important in terms of US economic strategy. The main globally traded resource at that time, and one on which Britain was heavily dependent, was cotton. Blocking British access to Texan cotton helped consolidate US economic power. President Tyler observed that by obtaining a ‘virtual monopoly’ the US was able to gain ‘a greater influence over the affairs of the world than would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous’. As he bluntly summarised, ‘It places all other nations at our feet.’

  The Texan Revolution was fundamentally different to the American Revolution of the previous century. The American Revolution was fought by men who believed they were protecting a heritage of civilisation handed down by their fathers and grandfathers – great cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, fertile plantations and farms, fisheries and ports. The Texan Revolution was fought by men who had only just arrived. The American Revolution was a war of liberation, the Texan a war of conquest. The American Revolution was fought against men who were not that different: they spoke the same language, shared much of the same history, and indeed were often members of the same family. The Texan struggle was a racial war fought not only to maintain the superiority of white over black but to protect whites against government by Hispanics with whom there was no shared culture, no shared values and with whom quite literally there would be no common language.

  Former President Adams II declared that the decision to annexe Texas was the ‘heaviest calamity that ever befell myself and my country’. The US could have occupied Texas long before it did; Spain would have conceded it in 1819, but Adams II turned it down because he was worried that it would tilt the balance of power towards the slaveholding states. For men like him, to whom slavery was totally repugnant, the admission of Texas represented the end of the Puritan ethic. It also marked the start of war with Mexico.

  Manifest Destiny: Chechnya to Cuba

  James Polk was elected president on a platform of ‘re-annexing’ Texas, and in 1845 ordered General Zachary Taylor to cross the Nueces river and invade Mexico. The Americans initially staged a three-pronged attack, with Taylor advancing across northern Mexico, Colonel Stephen Kearny occupying New Mexico and then moving into California, and the Pacific fleet landing on the California coast where American settlers had yet again proclaimed an independent republic. Zachary Taylor’s military successes made him a public hero, greatly alarming the White House. President Polk sent a naval expedition under General Winfield Scott, the organiser of the genocidal Trail of Tears, to land at Vera Cruz and march inland. Scott overwhelmed the Mexican forces and occupied Mexico City. In the words of their hymn the US marines, having reached the ‘shores of Tripoli’ forty years earlier, now entered ‘the halls of Montezuma’. In the subsequent treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico gave up all claims to California, New Mexico and Texas in return for $18.25m. Polk decided not to try to gain re-election, and Zachary Taylor became one of a long line of generals to move from battlefield to White House. (Oddly, a man whose opposition to this imperial war cost him his congressional seat also went on to the White House: Abraham Lincoln.)

  Russian and American troops marched west at the same time. Just after Winfield Scott captured Mexico City the Russians entered Hungary: Nicholas I had dutifully inherited the role of ‘gendarme of Europe’ from Alexander I, and used his army to suppress revolutionary elements beyond the borders of his empire. Both halves of the Austro-Hungarian empire were in turmoil. In the Hungarian half (which was far larger than Hungary today and extended down into the Balkans) the parliament pushed for more autonomy and demanded major reforms. Hungary was to be a constitutional monarchy, with a powerful parliament including an elected lower house, and its own army. Serfdom was to be abolished and civil rights guaranteed. The parliament made Hungarian the official language of administration, justice and education in all the areas it controlled. Depending upon your point of view this was the proud foundation stone of Hungarian independence, reflecting the throwing off of Germanic cultural, economic and military imperialism, or the descendants of Attila the Hun intent on doing to their own minorities (Croats, Serbs, Germans, Gypsies, Vlachs, Ruthenians and Slovaks) just what they accused the Austrians of doing to them. Many of these minority groups were Slavs, and a Pan-Slav congress in Prague condemned the Hungarians as oppressors, describing them in terms remarkably similar to those used to describe the British at a different congress in Philadelphia seventy-four years earlier. (Pan-Slavism was the Russian equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine, but justified in the name of ethnic solidarity rather than the racial superiority that America increasingly used to justify its interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.)

  Nicholas wanted no revolutionary changes on his borders, and in the guise of Pan-Slavism felt able to justify intervention. Russian troops marched west and occupied Slovakia and Ruthenia. The putative Hungarian revolution was crushed. Lajos Kossuth, who had declared himself leader of an independent Hungary, was forced to flee to Turkey where he was imprisoned. The Turks
did not want him in their country; his presence was just the sort of excuse that could be used to justify further Russian aggression (just as the presence of the native leader Tecumseh had been used to justify the American invasion of Canada). On the other hand they were not keen to hand him over to their Russian enemy – but by then there was another imperial power on the horizon. Following American intervention Kossuth was freed and travelled to America, where he received an enthusiastic reception. Abraham Lincoln tabled a Senate resolution, lamenting that the United States had not actively intervened to support the Hungarian revolution. Kossuth joined a group of Hungarian political refugees who had established the community of New Buda in Iowa. Like the Polish hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko he became another of the ‘democratic’ victims of Russian autocracy to be feted in the United States; and like Kosciuszko he eventually tired of the American way of life and returned to Europe.

  Like America Russia was keen to expand – annexing territory to the south and eventually starting a full-scale war with Turkey. The Turkish fleet was totally destroyed at Sinope Bay in 1853, and it looked as though the victory of Nicholas I would be as complete as Zachary Taylor’s in Mexico, but there was a fundamental difference in the geopolitics of the two nations: America was the only imperial power on its continent. Russia’s invasion of the Turkish-controlled provinces of Walachia (modern Romania) and Moldavia propelled Britain and France into the war on Turkey’s side.

  The west’s fear of the barbarian east flared into outright war in the Crimea. It was a fear that went back to Châlons and would continue into the future. During the cold war the spectre of Red Army troops parachuting into the English countryside or Soviet missiles raining down on New York seemed quite real. With hindsight the threat was plainly hollow and Russia’s empire was rotten at the core, but that is not how it seemed at the time. Exactly the same happened in the nineteenth century. Alexander I’s military machine overcame Napoleon and rolled on. By the middle of the century the west was shuddering each time the Russian Bear moved. Nowhere was safe. An emplacement built during the Crimean War for a battery of five 8-inch muzzle-loading guns still looks out over Sydney Harbour from Kirribilli Point. It is difficult now to believe that anyone seriously thought that Russia was about to invade Australia, but the alarms of the cold war proved just as far fetched.