Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  At this point the weaknesses in the mighty military machine that Alexander I had thrust into the centre of European political life became evident. Without having to worry about public opinion, or even the opinion of the nobility, the Russian autocracy was able to treat its population as cannon fodder – but it still needed to manufacture the cannon. Russia lacked the economic and organisational resources to turn brute force into lasting success. The death of 300,000 Russians in Nicholas’s adventures on the Turkish front and military defeat, along with Austrian pressure, forced his successor, Alexander II, to withdraw.

  The Crimean War in Britain is remembered for the blinding incompetence of the British general, Lord Raglan, at the Charge of the Light Brigade, but the Russian general, Prince Menshikov, surpassed him in aristocratic stupidity. Russia’s defeat showed plainly to the world that the days when Russia had been the continent’s superpower were long gone. Moldavia and Walachia returned to Turkish control, and as so often Russia’s attention swung back to the west. In 1863 another Polish revolt was brutally suppressed. Not only were rebels executed or exiled to Siberia as before but Alexander II introduced a deliberate policy of cultural cleansing aimed at expunging Polish culture, language and Catholicism. As in the earlier partitions of Poland, and as Stalin and Hitler would do seventy-five years later, the Russian and German leaders co-operated in destroying any chance of an independent Poland; the Prussian leader Bismarck forcibly repatriated Polish rebels who tried to flee west.

  Under Alexander II one particular long-running colonial conflict on the southern frontier was finally ‘settled’: the Chechens were pacified. Some of the native tribes encountered by the Russians as they expanded their empire were less easily quelled than others, and nowhere was the resistance fiercer than in the Caucasus. Since the time of Ivan the Terrible Russians had been pushing into the region, and in the eighteenth century serious attempts were made to control the Muslim mountain tribes. In the latter half of the century the Chechen Sheikh Mansur declared holy war on the advancing Russians, uniting clans and mobilising resistance until his capture in 1791. In 1817 the leadership of the resistance forces passed to a twenty-year-old Dagestani mullah, Imam Shamil, who fought a bitter guerrilla war for more than forty years. Russia eventually deployed an enormous number of troops, one source says half a million, until Shamil was captured in 1859. His captors wary of the dangers of creating martyrs, he was jailed and later allowed to go into exile in Mecca. Following age-old Russian practice his two sons became officers in the Russian army.

  Today the name of Imam Shamil is venerated by Dagestanis and Chechens as much as Kossuth by Hungarians or Kosciuszko by Poles. If in the west the histories of Hungary and Poland are largely ignored, the history of the Caucasus wars is entirely forgotten. Only after the breakup of the Soviet empire did the west suddenly take note of the bitterness still bubbling in the region; bitterness that exploded in the atrocities of the Chechen War. That bitterness has existed since at least the time of Alexander II. Leo Tolstoy, in his novella Hadji Murat, set in 1852, wrote, ‘The feeling experienced by all the Chechens from the youngest to the oldest was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures that the desire to exterminate them – like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders or wolves – was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.’

  Alexander II was known as the Tsar Liberator for his role in emancipating the serfs. To the Chechens and other conquered people it must have seemed a particularly inappropriate title.

  Although the conquest of Chechnya took so many years and so much blood it was not a particularly momentous event in Russian history. The expansion of empire was a given, one of those inexorable tides in the affairs of man that almost all Russians expected to continue more or less without end. Similarly Americans considered their nation-empire was virtually limitless. Having dealt with the Mexicans to the south, attention once more turned north and west.

  The British had long settled in what was then called Oregon (the modern US states of Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and the Canadian province of British Columbia). Their main settlement was the great Hudson’s Bay Company trading post of Fort Vancouver on the Columbia river, opposite the site of modern Portland, Oregon. Over time the beaver on which the trading post depended were hunted to the brink of extinction and the fertile terrain of the Oregon region started to attract pioneers more committed to farming than to hunting. Most of these pioneers came overland in covered wagons, and for most of them the starting point was Independence, Missouri. The result was that by the 1840s Canadian settlers in Oregon were greatly outnumbered by American. In 1845 the Hudson’s Bay Company abandoned Fort Vancouver and retreated north to Vancouver Island.

  In an early example of political spin Polk had been elected in 1844 on a platform of both ‘re-annexing Texas’ and ‘re-occupying Oregon’, although in neither case was it obvious that ‘re-’ had any historical justification. In an attempt to stop Canada extending to the Pacific Ocean he demanded that the northern boundary of Oregon be set at 54° 40’, the latitude Tsar Alexander I and President Monroe had agreed would be the frontier between Russia and America. As Canadian explorers had crossed the continent before Lewis and Clark, Britain was never going to agree, and Polk eventually settled for 49°, outraging northern imperialists who wanted a massive new Oregon to balance slave-holding Texas.

  A wave of anti-English hysteria again swept America. In New York passions ran particularly high when an English actor, William Macready, was given a starring role in a play at the Astor Place Opera House. Despite the play itself being English (Shakespeare’s Macbeth), demonstrators outside the theatre demanded that Macready (quite probably one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time), be replaced by an American. In the subsequent riots more than twenty people died and over a hundred were injured.

  Stymied in the north-west, potential opportunities beckoned again in the south. American empire building had always involved a mixture of free enterprise and conventional military force. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo sealed the successful outcome of its attack on Mexico, the emphasis moved away from open aggression to the surreptitious activities of the private sector.

  American filibusters were still anxious to add more slave states. William Walker and his private army invaded Baja California in 1853, but Mexican troops easily defeated his 300 mercenaries. Escaping back to the United States he was arrested for contravening laws supposedly guaranteeing American neutrality, but was acquitted. He then started a tradition of American intervention in Central America by offering his men to one of the factions competing for power in Nicaragua (just as the US government did repeatedly in the twentieth century). Once in Nicaragua his forces quickly seized power. Walker declared himself president, legalised slavery and started manoeuvring for annexation by the United States. He also started building up the Nicaraguan army in preparation for further conquests, but he was pre-empted by neighbouring Costa Rica (supplied with arms by a British government fearful of America’s imperial intentions). Costa Rican troops forced Walker to flee back to the United States, where he attracted enormous crowds wherever he spoke. In 1857 he tried to regain power in Nicaragua but was captured and sent back to the US, where once again he was arrested and then acquitted. In 1860 he made one final attempt to fulfil his dream, this time by attempting a coup d’état in Honduras. He was captured by the British, who knew better than to return him to the US; they passed him to the Honduran authorities, who promptly executed him.

  Walker and the other filibusters were essentially independent freebooters but they were not acting alone. Just as Yermak and his Cossacks were employed by the Stroganoff family to protect and extend their interests, so Walker had a patron who kept himself well away from the dirty work on the frontier. Cornelius Vanderbilt had become one of the leading plutocrats of his day by exercising a near monop
oly over steamships plying on the Hudson river. He also controlled other key routes, one of which was by river and mule across the isthmus of Panama via Lake Nicaragua, and he was anxious that his interest be protected against the twin threats of Latin American nationalism and British imperialism. (Britain had three fledgling colonies in Central America at that time: modern Belize, the Bay Islands off Honduras and Mosquitia with the port of Greytown on the Nicaraguan coast.) The US navy helped Vanderbilt by bombarding Greytown in 1854, safe in the knowledge that the Russian tsar was keeping Britain occupied with war in the Crimea. Vanderbilt then funded Walker’s first Nicaraguan coup d’état. Later the two men, both with gigantic egos, fell out, and Walker paid the price when Vanderbilt withdrew his support.

  The important point about the filibusters is that although they operated outside the law their actions were largely supported by the American public, especially in the south, and their leaders moved effortlessly at the highest levels of American society. A classic example was John Quitman, indicted by the federal government for organising a filibuster expedition to Cuba. Quitman served as governor of Mississippi, as brigadier-general in the Mexican War and as governor of Mexico City during the American occupation. He was governor of Mississippi for the second time when he was indicted, and even after that he continued as a member of the US House of Representatives until his death in 1855. His views were by no means unique. The two US senators from Mississippi (one of whom, Jefferson Davis, went on to become President of the Confederate States in the civil war) openly advocated the conquest of Cuba and the Mexican states of San Luis Potosi, Tamaulipas and Yucatan.

  Right up to the civil war there was constant pressure on Mexico to cede more territory so that it could be absorbed ‘piece by piece’, as Jefferson had advocated for Florida. Under the Gadsden Treaty in 1853 Mexico was compelled to sell what would become the southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico; the price paid was the highest in US history: 19m acres at 53 cents an acre.

  Mexico was attractive, especially as its mines were considered eminently suitable for slave labour, but the prospective jewel in the southern imperialists’ crown was Cuba, for which Spain was offered $130m. American colonists had helped Britain capture Havana in 1762, and were outraged when the island was handed back to Spain. Jefferson and Adams II were among the early American leaders who confidently predicted its early annexation. It became an article of faith in the south in the years leading up to the civil war that Cuba had to be taken. Havana, it was predicted, would become the south’s New York – the commercial hub for a tropical empire based entirely on slavery.

  Cuba was both an opportunity and a threat for the south. As another slave territory it would tilt the balance of power in their favour. If, on the other hand, Cuban slaves ever gained their freedom it would be another nail in the coffin of slave-holding in the United States. In 1791 a slave revolt had erupted in the French colony of Haiti. Initially many Americans had sympathised with the rebel cause, but when a black republic was declared southern slaveholders were horrified, and the United States imposed an economic embargo (similar to that imposed in the twentieth century on revolutionary Cuba). The thought of another black republic in Cuba was terrifying.

  When Colombia and Mexico revealed plans to invade and liberate Cuba the United States was bitterly opposed, and in 1848 the US offered to buy the island. Spain would not sell. Many Cuban Creoles favoured US annexation to head off the gathering pressures for emancipation, and Quitman sponsored four filibuster expeditions under the Cuban Creole Narcisco Lopez, but they all failed. Lopez himself was eventually captured and executed by the Spanish.

  When, under pressure from British abolitionists, the Spanish authorities on the island started emancipating the slaves war clouds gathered. If they had not rolled north into the conflagration of the civil war there is little doubt that somewhere along the Cuban coast, perhaps even at the Bay of Pigs, US troops would soon have been wading ashore.

  The filibusters were motivated by personal greed and their fears for the future of slavery but in as much as they and the rest of the country had any imperial ideology it was a philosophy that came to be known as manifest destiny. This term was first used by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan in 1845. He was writing specifically about the inevitability of the whole of California becoming part of the United States because, he wrote, ‘the advance guard of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle’. What he called ‘imbecile’ Mexico would be unable to hold on to its territory. The philosophy soon came to be applied to more than California; indeed, in the same article O’Sullivan celebrated the future annexation of Canada.

  Ever since the Pilgrim Fathers a fundamental conviction of many Americans had been that their actions embodied God’s will. After the Mystic Massacre that conviction turned from a simple belief that God willed them to settle and prosper among the savages of the New World to a belief that God expected them to displace those savages. This, combined with the more mercenary motives of men like the filibusters, produced an ideology that not only justified territorial aggrandisement but proclaimed its inevitability. God wanted Americans to use the special gifts he had given them to spread their wings over the globe. As Albert Beveridge, senator from Indiana, told his Senate colleagues, God had decreed that Americans were the ‘master organisers of the world’ and should rule over the ‘savage and the senile’.

  Right from the nation’s birth America’s leaders were determined on conquest. Jefferson spoke of the United States covering ‘the whole northern if not the southern continent’ and more immediately of taking Florida from Spain ‘piece by piece’. John Quincy Adams declared that ‘the whole continent of North America’ was ‘destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation’. Both men expressed the commonly held view that it was a matter of time before the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico fell into their hands.

  In Britain in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries the notion of ‘to the victor belongs the spoils’ underpinned not only political life at home but imperial expansion abroad. Greed motivated both. Only with the advent of the Victorians did this give way to something more high-minded. The ending of parliamentary corruption and the creation of a politically independent judiciary at home, and the development of paternalistic notions of ‘the white man’s burden’ and imperial citizenship overseas, were two sides of the same coin – a belief in public service for its own sake and for the sake of others. Whatever the objective reality, the British believed that in their empire justice and fair play took precedence over self-interest. Such a belief has never existed in Russia. Russian imperialism has always been about glory, about tribute, about spoils. ‘Greed is good’ might be a slogan ascribed to modern Wall Street but it would not be out of place as a description of the Russian imperial ideology. In America high-mindedness and greed co-existed from the earliest days of the New England colonies. After the revolution high-mindedness seemed to have come out on top, but the spoils system and the imperial antics of the filibusters showed that greed had not disappeared. This juxtaposition of idealism and greed continued into modern times. After the First World War Woodrow Wilson was determined to ensure a ‘just peace’, and joined Britain in opposing French demands for German reparations. After the second invasion of Iraq Bush II rushed to ensure that American corporations (rather than, for example, British) grabbed the spoils of victory.

  Whereas Britain claimed to put justice before self-interest, and Russia had no trouble putting self-interest first, America convinced itself that justice and self-interest were the same thing. The essence of empire remained constant – lands that had belonged to someone else were taken away – but America’s new ideology fused southern dreams of imperial glory with the northern conviction that God’s will informed their every action.

  The Road to Civil War

  Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth two great questions hung over the Russian and American empires:
where would their territorial ambitions carry them and what sort of society would their nations become?

  The territorial aggrandisements of Russia and America proceeded in parallel. The two mid-century imperial wars, against Mexico and Turkey, set the tone for the next century. America would feel free to intervene anywhere it wanted in the western hemisphere confident that there would be no opposition. Its overwhelming military power ensured that the United States could achieve its imperial ambitions without having to fire a shot (except when Spain tried to flex its withered muscles later in the century). Russia, on the other hand, was once again surrounded by enemies, its every move circumscribed by the ambitions of competing imperial powers. Nevertheless both nations would expand their borders further. In Russia imperial growth was a continuation of a centuries-old pattern, while in America it reflected the innate dynamism of the newly born nation. In both cases the nation’s leaders were convinced that their realms were manifestly destined to grow.