Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  There were also those in the north who argued that, like serfdom in Russia, slavery would eventually disappear of its own accord because it was inherently inefficient. They pointed out that slavery was declining in Virginia and Maryland and that New York and Pennsylvania had been slave states, but as capitalism expanded slaves there were sold south and the remainder eventually freed. In fact these northern appeasers misunderstood the economics of slavery. In 1958 two Harvard economists, Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, overturned conventional wisdom by asking whether it was economically rational to buy and breed slaves. By looking at the discounted value of expected future income over the life of the ‘asset’, they were able to demonstrate that slavery was immensely profitable to the whole south in the period immediately before the civil war.

  If public opinion in the north was not demanding war to free the slaves, and politicians on all sides were keen to compromise, why then did the war begin? The answer has to be because the ‘two distinct civilisations’ identified by Samuel Eliot Morison were talking such radically different languages that compromise was impossible. Those languages were determined above all by economics. Very simplistically the southern oligarchs could make their plantations and businesses pay whether or not their states were part of a union, as they relied on markets outside the United States. For them the natural compromise was to let each state do as it wished; they wanted a union in which slavery would be guaranteed for ever, but if that was impossible secession was their compromise position. The northern oligarchs, on the other hand, had few significant export markets, but what they did have is what economists call ‘economies of scale’ – bigger factories produced proportionately bigger profits – and so they would inevitably fight to protect their existing market from European competition. In the north preserving the union became the overwhelming commercial priority. The northern interest was not what happened to slavery but what happened to the union – their compromise position was to fudge the issue of slavery. Secession, proposed by the south as a compromise, was no compromise at all for the north.

  CHAPTER 9

  MORE CONQUEST

  The moral and political arguments over slavery and serfdom split not just nation but communities and even families. In the United States the civil war forced everyone to take sides. Even the largest remaining native group, the Cherokee nation, divided. Many of its leaders were significant slave owners and it tore itself apart providing troops to both sides. In Britain the non-conformist churches had been at the forefront of the campaigns against the slave trade but in America even they divided, amid much recrimination, into warring southern and northern factions before the civil war, and stayed that way thereafter.

  Americans derived conflicting values from a common religion. In Virginia the House of Burgesses passed a law in 1632 requiring ‘uniformitie throughout this colony both in substance and in circumstance to the cannons and constitution of the Church of England’, but uniformity was something that never happened. The Virginia Company’s instructions to its governors made conversion of the natives one of their objectives, and in some parts of the country the churches were still the only institutions offering support to natives and slaves, but in most of the south the Church had become part of the white establishment. There it occupied a role similar to that in Russia, where the Church had never been a force for social change. The Holy Synod created by Peter the Great acted like a government ministry, and was headed by a chief procurator who often had a military rather than clerical background. If any priest discovered evidence of treason, or even treasonous intent, during confession, by law he had to report it. Pipes points out that ‘In the nineteenth century, a denunciation of political dissidents was considered a regular part of a priest’s obligations’, and concludes, ‘No branch of Christianity has shown such callous indifference to social and political injustice.’ Many churches in the American south came close.

  Although calls for justice might not themselves drive reform when added to other economic and political pressures, the demand for change became unstoppable. In 1861 the dam gave way and gave way first in Russia: Alexander II ended serfdom. Twenty million serfs were emancipated, arousing much enthusiasm among abolitionists in America and enormous opposition from landowners closer to home. They argued that any concession to the serfs would fatally weaken the fabric of Russian society, which depended more than most on everyone knowing their place and staying there. They were probably right, but as Alexander himself said it was better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for serfdom to abolish itself from below. Being an autocrat, Alexander II could do this simply by issuing an edict, in the process earning himself the sobriquet of the Tsar Liberator.

  In April 1861 (barely two months after the tsar had acted) the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. Southern forces attacked Fort Sumner in Charleston, South Carolina. America had stumbled into war as if in a trance.

  The War Between The States

  South Carolina seceded in 1860, and was soon joined by the new slave states that had been carved out of the former French and Spanish realms from Florida to Texas. Most of those seceding had little expectation of war. To them the United States, still less than a century old, had always been a federation of like-minded states; now that the states were not like-minded it was time for southerners to go their separate way. Similarly most northerners were genuinely surprised that southerners were prepared to fight to preserve slavery. Central to ‘Yankee’ ideology, as with American ideology today, was the concept of progress: they were at the forefront of history; others would inevitably follow in their wake. Northerners believed that the spirit of progress would eventually lead the south to abandon its primitive ways and travel peacefully along the path they had already marked out.

  Of those who still believed they could avoid war one man in particular thought he could negotiate a peaceful solution. The Russian ambassador, Edouard de Stoeckl, who had been in America for twenty years volunteered to act as a mediator between Confederate and Federal representatives. Stoeckl was known to have a low opinion of Lincoln and a high opinion of the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. Unsurprisingly Secretary of State William Seward declined Stoeckl’s offer, which had the Confederates’ wholehearted support.

  Thereafter Russia aligned itself with the north, because Britain and France tended to support the Confederacy and because a reunited United States could be a powerful ally, an ally that Russia desperately needed after losing the Crimean War. In one bizarre episode Tsar Alexander II ordered the Russian Atlantic and Pacific fleets to winter in US ports so that they would not become ice-bound in Russia. The Atlantic fleet sailed into New York and received a rapturous welcome, as the city’s inhabitants assumed it was there as protection against the Confederate navy.

  The southern states might have peacefully seceded but for the determination of one man to maintain the unity of the nation. Just as modern Russia would not have existed without Peter the Great, so modern America would not have existed but for Abraham Lincoln.

  Abraham Lincoln is a classic American icon, the self-made man, born in a log cabin and carried to the highest office in the land by his own abilities. If anything shows the dangers of using the similarities between the emancipation of Russian serfs and American slaves to imply more fundamental similarities between the two societies, it is the contrast between the two emancipators: Abraham Lincoln and the Tsar Liberator Alexander II. Lincoln arrived in the White House because American democracy provided the framework within which his outstanding skills and the persuasiveness of his ideals could take him there. Alexander on the other hand had nothing outstanding about him; his arrival in the Imperial Palace was literally an accident of birth – he had been born there – and his persuasiveness did not help make him tsar – being tsar is what made him persuasive.

  One of the clearest expositions of the political issues surrounding slavery was given in a long speech that Lincoln gave in Peoria, Illinois, on 16 October 1854. It is a classic example of the
American practice of promoting arguments about legality above arguments about justice. Right from the outset Lincoln made clear that he was not arguing about the ‘existing institution’ of slavery but about its ‘extension’. This, he argued, was essentially a legal matter to be settled by reference to the legal frameworks that had governed America’s various imperial aggrandisements. He made an impassioned condemnation of the immorality of slavery, but the great bulk of his speech was devoted not to moral arguments but to legal precedents in French Louisiana and the former Spanish territories, and the legal implications of the Founding Fathers’ claims to the Northwest Territory. This speech is a fascinating insight into the mindset of the day. Lincoln made a casual reference to the possibility of annexing Cuba, and emphasised that he was not arguing for the total equality of whites and blacks. Freeing southern slaves, he added, was impractical because there were not enough ships to carry them all back to Africa.

  In 1858 Lincoln contested one of the most famous Senate elections in American history, opposing the incumbent Democratic senator Stephen Douglas. The two men took part in a series of debates that articulated more clearly than any modern political confrontation the moral issues dividing the American nation. The Lincoln-Douglas campaign was a throwback to the pre-Jackson era of political debate. Lincoln’s speeches in particular are closely argued discourses from an age when sound arguments were more important than sound bites. Douglas was quite clear that the American nation was created by the white man, and that blacks and natives could never have any role in its government; Lincoln was equally clear that when the Declaration of Independence said that all men are created equal it really meant ‘all’ men without exception. Although Lincoln made his famous remark that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’, insisting that the United States could not continue for ever half slave and half free, he also made it plain that, whatever he personally thought about slavery, he would not attempt to remove it in the southern states.

  Nevertheless after Fort Sumner it was clear that the time for peacemaking was over and the remaining slave states would have to choose sides. Most, starting with Virginia, went with the south. Despite calls by the rioting Baltimore mob, Maryland stayed with the north. Dramatic displays of force by the Union army also persuaded Kentucky and Missouri to stay loyal, although thousands of men from both states joined the rebel cause. States and individuals had to choose between two entrenched and irreconcilable moral positions.

  The Marxist view that the civil war was merely the inevitable victory of industrial capitalism over agrarian feudalism would be more plausible if the south was the impoverished backwater the phrase ‘Deep South’ sometimes conjures up. But in reality southerners were on average wealthier than northerners; even when the slaves are included per capita income was higher in the south than the north. Southerners were fond of comparing the supposedly blissful lives of their slaves with the horrors of life as a northern factory worker. The south was poorer than the north not because its people were poorer but simply because there were fewer of them. The civil war pitted the Confederacy’s 9 million population against the Union’s 22 million. Added to their numerical weakness was the south’s economic dependence on the export trade, particularly cotton, which the northern navy quickly blockaded virtually out of existence. On paper the Confederacy should have stood virtually no chance of success, but at times it looked as if they might win. Strategically they had the easier task: their objective was to make the north leave them alone by causing the enemy enough pain to persuade them to give up the fight and go home. The Union, on the other hand, had to destroy their opponents and occupy their territory. In the early stages the Confederates also had the better generals. The early Union generals did little but add to the English vocabulary: bewhiskered General Burnside provided the word sideburns, and a more common word was derived from the services offered to the troops of General Hooker.

  Had the Union army been able to crush the rebels quickly the south might well have been able to negotiate a peace settlement that allowed them to re-enter the Union while keeping slavery. As the war wore on, however, this became less and less likely. Blacks recruited into the Union army became a significant military factor, and it was largely for military reasons that Lincoln issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation eighteen months after the war had started. Just as in the American Revolution people needed an ideological goal to inspire their sacrifice, and in the north that goal became emancipation.

  In the civil war white America did to itself what it had been doing to the native population for nearly two centuries, inflicting the full horror of total war but on an altogether more horrific scale. More Americans, well over 600,000, died in the civil war than in all the other wars in American history put together. On a single day at the battle of Antietam nearly half as many Americans died as in the whole of the Vietnam War. Of the 360,000 northern soldiers and 260,000 southern who died, around 110,000 Union and 94,000 Confederate men died of wounds received in battle. Far more died not on the battlefield but in the squalor of disease and hunger that, as Napoleon had discovered, was the inevitable accompaniment of nineteenth-century warfare. The civilian casualties were proportionately lower than in the conquest of the natives, but the conflict still had a profound, if temporary, impact on the structure of American society. The south in particular lost a quarter of its white males of child-siring age.

  The legacy of the dreadful death toll was seared into the American psyche: never again would America’s boys be treated as mere cannon fodder. Russian autocrats were famous for their disregard for the lives of their own troops, but Russia lost fewer soldiers in all the imperial wars of Catherine the Great’s long reign than America lost in the few short years of the civil war. When it came to future foreign wars the lesson for America was simple: the objective would not just be to win but to win with the minimum of American casualties. That in turn meant whenever possible fighting only when American troops were able to exercise overwhelming military force. It was to be a philosophy that contributed enormously to later US military triumphs but caused repeated consternation to allies; it underlay, for example, the bitter divisions between Eisenhower and Montgomery in the Second World War – and when it failed, as in Vietnam, left many Americans deeply troubled. To Russian leaders in particular the philosophy was totally incomprehensible, and much of Stalin’s paranoia about US military intentions during and after the Second World War could be traced to the contrast with his own ruthless willingness to sacrifice millions of his own countrymen.

  The civil war both exemplified and exaggerated the impact of military values on the American ideology of democracy. In a frontier society in almost continuous conflict it was inevitable that settling issues by force would become commonplace. Like the War of Independence and the imperial wars that culminated in the invasion of Mexico the civil war reinforced the view, common to most societies at that time, that war was a natural way to solve problems. The civil war had ‘cleansed’ American society of the stain of slavery and solidified the notion that there were circumstances in which war could be the ethically preferable option. It was a philosophy that led a later advocate of American imperialism, Senator Albert Beveridge, to insist that ‘Our Indian wars would have been shortened, the lives of soldiers and settlers saved and the Indians themselves benefited had we made continuous and decisive war.’

  America has never been a ‘militaristic’ nation like the fascist regimes of the twentieth century to whom democracy was a weakness to be eradicated; in the United States, by contrast, military values were sewn into the fabric of democracy.

  In moving from the officers’ mess to the presidential suite, George Washington, the nation’s first president, set the pattern for a surprising number of nineteenth-century presidents who embodied both the popular will of a democracy and the supposed strongman virtues of autocracy. American generals gained their political credibility in fighting the British, the natives or each other. In other cultures military strongmen have used th
e armed force at their disposal to take power. In America the process was far more subtle. The popularity of conquest and military adventure allowed American generals from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower to move smoothly into the political arena. Five nineteenth-century presidents were military leaders (Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant and Hayes). A sixth, McKinley, first gained his reputation as a soldier and Abraham Lincoln was not averse to exploiting his role in the militia that put down the native uprising known as the Black Hawk War. Another veteran of that campaign, Jefferson Davies, became President of the Confederate States. (Mexican War veteran Franklin Pierce was one soldier president remembered not for his war exploits but rather for his bar exploits, being, as one contemporary wag remarked, ‘the hero of many well-fought bottles’.) Davy Crockett gained his celebrity status and political credibility fighting alongside Andrew Jackson against the Creeks. The victor of the crucially important battle of Tippecanoe, William Harrison, was one of those who went on from the battlefield to the White House, campaigning with his vice-presidential running mate John Tyler on the slogan ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’. Those who imagine a golden age of political debate before the advent of public relations and spin should remember the man who claimed to have killed the great native leader Tecumseh: Richard Johnson eventually became vice-president of the United States using what must be one of the most infantile campaign slogans of all time – ‘Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.’ (‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’ may have been slogan enough to carry Harrison to the White House, but the slogan of his opponent Martin Van Buren has proved far more enduring – known by the nickname Old Kinderhook after his hometown, Van Buren campaigned with the now ubiquitous incantation ‘OK!’)