Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  How the values of bullet and ballot were brought together can be illustrated by looking at the lives of those who embodied that nexus, men like Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. The northern general William T. Sherman perhaps best personified the contradictions that have come to characterise the American approach to war – the ruthlessly brutal application of overwhelming military force and a near-total disregard of what is now euphemistically termed collateral damage, combined with a passionate commitment to the ideological banner of ‘liberty’ with repeated public affirmations of the sanctity of the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Even his name, William Tecumseh Sherman, seemed to embody the contradiction. The man who after the war led the US army in some of their most vicious campaigns against the natives was named after Tecumseh, the native chieftain who had defied that same army half a century earlier.

  Like many of the civil war generals Sherman first saw service in the imperial wars in Florida and later commanded the San Francisco militia, which played a controversial role in the California coup d’état now remembered as the War of Rebellion. But it was in the civil war that Sherman’s national reputation was established, first at the battle of Shiloh, where he was wounded and had two horses shot from under him, and above all in Georgia.

  Sherman’s Georgia campaign, for good or ill, determined how history would remember him. After Atlanta was captured the city was torched and Sherman set out on his twenty-four day ‘March to the Sea’, destroying everything in his path – not just the infrastructure of fortifications, bridges and railway tracks but homes, crops and livestock. His troops lacked the sadistic cruelty of the Mongols but their aim was the same: to deprive the enemy of all sources of food and other supplies, and to terrorise the civilian population into withdrawing support from the Confederate cause.

  In popular memory the civil war ended with the surrender of the gallant rebel general Robert E. Lee to soon-to-be-president Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. This was the effective end of the rebellion, but much of the rebel army under Joseph E. Johnston remained until it surrendered to Sherman on 26 April 1865. It was typical that Sherman, who is still reviled in the south for his March to the Sea, should offer Johnston such generous surrender terms that the politicians back in Washington immediately repudiated them. It also says much about the peculiar mixture of brutality and chivalry in the civil war that Johnston was one of the pallbearers at Sherman’s funeral many years later.

  William Tecumseh Sherman is a symbolic figure, but what he symbolises says as much about the political climate of today as about the historical reality of his own period. Westerners are frequently amazed that while many Russians today glory in their new-found freedom others worship the memory of Joseph Stalin, one of the most murderous despots in the whole of human history. And yet the mirror image of this situation exists with regard to Sherman in America. Sherman is one of the great American heroes. He was the man who won the civil war and then pacified the west. He was a man of integrity who ended the ‘Indian’ menace (although sometimes by imposing absurdly one-sided treaties) and then rooted out corruption among government officials supposedly employed to protect the natives. His sense of honour led him to refuse all attempts to persuade him to stand as president, famously proclaiming ‘If nominated I will not accept, if elected I will not serve.’ He even had the Second World War’s most famous tank named after him. There are, however, historians who would cogently argue that Sherman was one of the greatest war criminals and bigots of all time. His campaigns in the south were characterised by pillaging, plundering and gang rape; long before Hitler Sherman used the phrase ‘final solution’ to refer to his plans to solve the ‘Indian problem’ through a campaign of ‘extermination’, and he explicitly authorised his troops to kill women and children in their campaigns against the natives of the western plains (campaigns designed to further the interests of the railroads in which Sherman was an investor).

  The moral complexity of men like Sherman is now largely forgotten; what is remembered is the unambiguous moral virtue of Abraham Lincoln. At his second inaugural Lincoln used another of the phrases which to some have marked him out as the Nelson Mandela of his age when he committed to rebuilding his nation ‘with malice towards none and charity for all’. Not everyone felt that way, and when Lincoln was assassinated normal politics resumed.

  After the civil war the votes of Florida Democrats were discarded, along with those in South Carolina and Louisiana, in one of the most cynically manipulated presidential elections ever. Southern Democrat politicians connived at Republican vote rigging in return for a commitment not to enforce the fifteenth amendment guaranteeing civil rights for former slaves. Politicians who had been unable to find a compromise that would allow slavery to continue found a way to ensure that its abolition had minimal effect. 124 years later during the presidential campaign of Bush II the judiciary upheld the result in Florida, finding no corruption or malpractice, despite a media furore reflecting political claim and counterclaim over supposed irregularities in the system and allegations of lost votes.

  Slaves and Serfs

  The emancipations of serfs and slaves happened at roughly the same time, but it is worth stepping back to consider how the two events meshed with the ideologies of the two empires. The forces at work were fundamentally different, not least because American slavery and Russian serfdom were not the same thing.

  American slaves had absolutely no rights. Russian serfs in practice, if not in law, had their own strips of land and what they produced was their own. They lived in their own homes, not in slave quarters, and their work was organised largely by their community leaders rather than by overseers employed by the slave owner. Because serfs were attached to the land, landlords could not trade serfs the way that American landlords traded slaves. In the final analysis serfs belonged not to the landlords but, like everyone else, to the tsar. When Catherine the Great gave 600 ‘souls’ to one of her lovers, Grigory Potemkin, he would have known that she could just as easily take them away again. Furthermore, by Catherine’s time many serfs, perhaps as many as half, were paying money rents to the landholders and could to some extent move around as they wished and take up whatever occupation they wanted – something quite impossible for most American slaves.

  Russian historians insisted that even in ancient times, when slaves were a key part of economic and social life, serfs were not slaves. From the point of view of the serf or slave, however, the difference was almost meaningless. The distinction was only really important to the state: serfs paid taxes, slaves did not. Serfdom was a relic of the Mongol system of taxation where landowners were expected to deliver up dues based on the number of people in each area. The old Muscovite princes had outlawed the practice of the poor pledging themselves as slaves precisely because it reduced tax revenues.

  The important point when comparing slavery and serfdom is not their legal status or their relative degrees of immorality, or even the differing levels of protest they engendered in the two societies, but the political frameworks in which those protests were made. Under American democracy the opponents of slavery had a voice that could be manifested as political power. Abolitionists won elections, controlled legislatures and eventually wielded legitimate military force. Under Russian autocracy none of this was possible; no matter how much popular support there was for the abolition of serfdom (and ‘popular support’ was a totally meaningless phrase in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia) only if the tsar willed it would it happen. In terms of the parallel moral imperatives of abolishing slavery and abolishing serfdom autocracy eventually proved itself superior to democracy. Despite fierce opposition from the landowning class on 19 February 1861 Alexander II issued an edict emancipating the serfs; just nine days later the US House and Senate, in a last desperate attempt to avert civil war, passed a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding Congress ever to abolish slavery. (The outbreak of war stopped the amendment being ratified and twenty months
later, after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation arguing that freeing the Negroes was now a ‘military necessity’.)

  The American Civil War may have had its origins in economics, but the abolition of slavery was driven almost entirely by ideology. There were economic reasons for ending the institution of slavery and when it came to the crunch in the middle of a civil war there were political and military reasons, but the main motivation of the abolitionists was moral indignation. Slavery was simply incompatible with the official ideology of democracy. That same moral indignation also existed in the struggle against Russian serfdom, but it was not the driving force behind emancipation; equally important was the belief that serfdom was economically inefficient. The modernisers in Russia simply saw serfdom as a backward way to organise production. Emancipation of the serfs was intended to make Russian agriculture more efficient, and as a by-product facilitate the development of modern manufacturing industries. It would allow Russia to take the first real steps down the path of industrialisation, a path already well trodden in America. By cutting the links that tied peasants to the land it made it possible to assemble the huge workforces needed for the newly emerging industrial sector, but this in turn created social pressures that autocracy could not contain.

  Serfdom was not considered incompatible with the ideology of autocracy, but it was considered incompatible with a modern, westernised way of living. What only became apparent over time was that in attacking serfdom the philosophical underpinning of autocracy itself was bound to come under attack. Once it was conceded that serfs were not an inferior breed of animal qualitatively different from the rest of society, it became less easy to argue that the nobility were qualitatively superior. If God had not created the serfs to serve had he really created the Romanovs to rule?

  Not only was the balance of moral, economic and philosophical argument in America and Russia not the same but the class dynamics were very different. It is no exaggeration to say that in America abolitionists in the north freed the slaves in the south; the slaves themselves played very little part in their liberation. Although a significant number of freed slaves eventually fought for the Union army (and a much smaller number fought with the Confederacy) they were not militarily critical. There had been slave revolts, such as those in New York in 1712, Carolina in 1739 and 1822 and Virginia in 1831, but these were suppressed, often with sickening brutality, and their historical impact was insignificant. By contrast, in Russia peasant revolts, and the fear of such revolts, were potent factors in driving change (just as in Britain the eventual abolition of slavery was driven as much by the impact of the Jamaican slave rebellion as by the decades of moralising by abolitionists).

  In the 1770s an illiterate Russian peasant called Emilian Pugachev claimed to be the murdered Tsar Peter III and stirred up a revolt against Peter’s widow, Catherine the Great. Pugachev’s was not the first such rebellion but the scale of his uprising was dramatic. Initially his support was limited, and he was quickly captured, but when he managed to escape his fame grew and he attracted tens of thousands of Cossacks, native tribesmen and serfs. He defeated the imperial forces sent against him, sacked Kazan and ravaged the towns and villages of the Volga basin, offered bounties for dead aristocrats and tied up a major part of Catherine’s army. Eventually Pugachev was defeated near Volgograd and dispatched to Moscow, where his head, hands and feet were ceremoniously chopped off. The Pugachev rebellion terrified the Russian aristocracy by its sheer scale and brutality, but smaller peasant revolts became almost everyday events. In the reign of Nicholas I there were said to have been 556 separate peasant uprisings, prompting his successor Alexander II to try to eliminate peasant unrest by emancipating the serfs. But this proved merely to be a milestone on the way to far more radical change.

  In the United States, on the other hand, the abolition of slavery was long regarded as the end of the road; the issue of real civil rights for the descendants of the freed black slaves only became a serious political issue a century later. Today the American Civil War is remembered almost exclusively in terms of the abolition of slavery. It is portrayed as yet another vindication of the values of democracy and the triumph of human rights over manifest evil. The south may have had elements of chivalry and elegance but fundamentally, it is claimed, the war ensured that the core American values of equality and dignity triumphed over racism and discrimination. The problem is that concepts like racism and discrimination are constructs of a much later age. The Union soldiers may have been determined to destroy the monstrous evil of human beings buying and selling other human beings, but they were not fighting to end racism.

  The idea of a racially enlightened north fighting a bigoted south is very far from the truth. General William T. Sherman’s writings are full of attacks on natives and Jews, and just eight days before Christmas in 1862 General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling all Jews ‘as a class’ from the newly conquered areas of Kentucky, western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Men, women and children were given just twenty-four hours to evacuate their homes and leave the region.

  The Jewish experience of the civil war casts an interesting sidelight on the values of the two sides. Jews played an important part in southern life. By the end of the eighteenth century there were a number of important Jewish communities in America; the largest, founded in 1695, was in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time of the civil war the majority of America’s Jews lived in the south and had absorbed southern values. Abraham Myers, a graduate of the US military academy at West Point, played an important role in the ethnic cleansing of Florida (the city of Fort Myers is named after him). As many as 10,000 Jews, for example Myers and the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, are thought to have fought for the Confederacy.

  The most famous Jewish American of his day was probably Judah Benjamin, the US Senate’s first Jewish member. What seems extraordinary today is that Benjamin did not represent cosmopolitan New York or liberal New England but Louisiana in the deep south. Born in the West Indies, Benjamin became a lawyer and plantation owner before entering politics. When war arrived he became secretary of war and later secretary of state in the Confederate government. Despite achieving such high office Benjamin was subject to anti-semitic attacks throughout his career. He was falsely accused by other southern politicians of transferring Confederate funds to his personal bank accounts in Europe, and when the war was over had to flee to Britain to escape unfounded accusations by northerners that he had plotted Lincoln’s assassination.

  One of the dangers of any historical study is the temptation to assume that modern paradigms and values can be applied historically. Views that today may be lumped together and labelled left wing or right wing, liberal or conservative, may in earlier days have been regarded as wildly inconsistent. Conversely historical figures may have sincerely held views that at the time seemed readily compatible but today would seem diametrically opposed. One of the men most active in trying to ensure that freedom really meant something practical to newly emancipated slaves was the genocidal militarist and anti-semite General Sherman. In his mind there was nothing incompatible between his conviction that non-whites were inherently inferior and his determination to ensure that freed slaves could live in dignity and relative prosperity. In his Field Order No. 15 Sherman decreed that a great swathe of territory on the Atlantic coast should be appropriated and given to freed slaves, more than 40,000 of whom took advantage of his offer. They did not keep the land for long.

  That the war had not been a fight for racial equality became apparent as soon as the war was over. Slavery could never be reimposed, but other gains that had been made by black people were soon reversed.

  The desire of many northerners to ensure that blacks received their full civil rights after the war was undoubtedly genuine. The thirteenth amendment proposed before the civil war had sought effectively to enshrine slavery in the constitution for ever; what actually became the thirteenth amendment after the war banned slavery. A
Civil Rights Act was embodied in the fourteenth amendment; interestingly it excepted natives and immigrants. Just three days before his assassination Lincoln pledged to give votes to literate blacks and black civil war veterans, and immediately after the war black candidates were victorious in a number of local elections. The fifteenth amendment made it illegal to prohibit anyone from voting on the basis of their colour, and in 1868 General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president thanks in part to support from 700,000 newly enfranchised black voters. However, intimidation soon made a mockery of declarations of equality.

  Lincoln’s successors moved quickly to heal the divisions of war, and that meant healing the wounds of southern whites by reversing the gains made by blacks. Slavery was replaced by what on another continent would be called apartheid. In one notorious case a man named Plessy, who had seven white great-grandparents and one black, was jailed in Louisiana for travelling in a whites-only carriage. The case was heard right up to the Supreme Court, who in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 upheld the conviction, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection for blacks did not mean that states could not treat the races differently. The apartheid doctrine of separate but nominally equal was sanctified by the United States Supreme Court more than sixty years before its application in South Africa. The right of former slaves to vote was effectively removed soon after the civil war, and laws were put in place throughout the south that obliged blacks to enter long term labour contracts and stopped them from leaving their plantations to seek work. Many of the former slaves who had claimed land were forcibly removed as the old southern power structures reappeared. Slavery had been abolished and with it the gross inhumanities associated with the breeding and trading of human beings as if they were cattle, but the day-to-day lives of most of the freed slaves changed very little.