Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The same was basically true on the other side of the world. Emancipation of the serfs achieved less in reality than many of those fighting for reform had hoped. With their freedom the serfs also received land (something that critically did not happen when US slavery was abolished), but the land was not free. The peasants were expected to pay for it over an extended period, and as a consequence many were soon deep in debt.

  The emancipations of serfs and slaves have long been held up as key events in the histories of both Russia and America, and yet the reality is that in both cases emancipation proved largely illusory. Peter Neville concludes that ‘There is an uncanny historical parallel between the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and Abraham Lincoln’s freeing of the black slaves in the USA in 1863. Lincoln (like Alexander) recognised the evil nature of slavery, and that in addition no democracy could exist “half slave and half free”. He too compromised in the Gettysburg address by only freeing the slaves in the Confederate-held states (a fact that is often forgotten). The black slaves received no land, but their freedom also proved to be an illusion in the bitter aftermath of the American Civil War in the southern states. Their disappointment therefore was as great as that of their counterparts in Russia.’

  The main difference between the twin emancipations of serf and slave was one of perception. The emancipation of American slaves was perceived to have resolved the burning moral and political issue of the day, whereas the emancipation of the serfs was quickly perceived to have solved nothing. Slaves were legally free and, with the American predisposition to equate legality with justice, this satisfied the abolitionists in their largely black-free states. Theirs had never been a class struggle in the Russian sense; they had not been trying to narrow the enormous gap between rich and poor in American society. They were fighting for the rights of slaves as individuals, not as a class. The Russian peasants, however, had been struggling to change their place in society and to share in the wealth of their ‘betters’; they were not going to be bought off by a few legal niceties. For them substance was always more important than form.

  To the Little Bighorn and Anadyrsk

  The struggle for the soul of America during the civil war had minimal impact on the other great theme of American history, the quest for empire. The latter half of the nineteenth century is often painted as the high point of European imperialism in which the tentacles of the European powers spread out over Africa and Asia. The imperialists of St Petersburg and Washington were no less active.

  For Russia, defeat in the Crimean War had merely redirected the imperial urge. Just as America conquered territory in the south-west piece by piece the gradual extension of the Russian empire’s boundaries to the south continued slowly but steadily. All the land between the Caspian and Black seas was annexed. Tashkent was taken and made the capital of the governor-generalship of Turkestan. What is today Uzbekistan was seized step by step: the emirate of Bukhara and the khanate of Samarkand in 1868, the khanate of Khiva in 1873 and of Kokand in 1876. America expanded its imperial power directly by outright annexation, as in Florida or Texas, and indirectly through controlling the local ruling elite, as in much of Central America and the Caribbean. Russia did the same: Kokand was annexed outright, while Khiva and Bukhara remained as vassal states under their native rulers.

  In America in the decade before the civil war the Sioux were forced out of Iowa and Minnesota and southern plutocrats, anxious to pre-empt their northern counterparts and ensure that the first rail link to the Pacific coast took a southern route, pushed through the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico. Northerners were as ardent imperialists as southerners. New York governor William Seward congratulated Canadians on ‘building states to be hereafter admitted to the American union’ and opposed the annexation of Cuba only as long as slavery persisted on the island. As secretary of state after the civil war he bought Alaska from the Russians for just $7.2m. (The price was a record low for the territorial purchases made by the United States: 375m acres at just 2 cents an acre.) Seward’s ambitions did not stop there. America would become, he declared, ‘in a very few years the controlling influence in the world’. This, he correctly predicted, would not be through military conquest but by dominating global commerce, what he described as achieving ‘the empire of the world’. He advocated raising tariffs to protect the home market while forcing open in whatever way necessary markets overseas. He was particularly keen to control the trade in the Pacific, and one of his achievements was to gain US possession of the Midway Islands.

  After the war the US army waged overtly genocidal campaigns against the Plains Indians and the natives of the south-west; American filibusters were caught and executed while supporting rebels in Cuba; the government of Hawaii was overthrown and the islands annexed; above all, the United States declared war on Spain in 1898 and, in a tactic followed by Japan forty-three years later at Pearl Harbor, launched a pre-emptive attack on Spain’s Pacific fleet. At the end of the Spanish-American War the United States held Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam. Nobody could be in any doubt that America had now joined Russia as a truly imperial power.

  The religious commentator and historian John Robert Seely was not alone in warning of the dangers to the established European order: ‘If the United States and Russia hold together for another half-century, they will at the end of that time completely dwarf such old European states as France and Germany.’Seely’s response was to call for the strengthening of the British empire, a call that made his book The Expansion of England into a bestseller.

  Nowadays Britain’s imperial past has become the subject of ridicule. The work of the most famous literary exponent of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, is held up as an example of the racist claptrap that disappeared with the sahibs and memsahibs of the British India Kipling inhabited and extolled. And yet when Kipling wrote his most famous stories, the two Jungle Books, he was living not in the imperial grandeur of Delhi or Bombay but in republican Vermont with his American wife. His most infamous poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was not a panegyric for the British empire, even though the classrooms of British public schools rang out with heartfelt renditions of the opening verse:

  Take up the White Man’s burden–

  Send forth the best ye breed–

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need

  Kipling wrote the poem not to glorify a British empire on which the sun was yet to set but as an appeal to the empire he saw rising in its place. ‘The White Man’s Burden’ was Kipling’s call to the United States government to take on the role of colonial stewardship of the Philippines, recently conquered in the Spanish-American War.

  Americans, however, were not keen to take on the white man’s burden. Their concept of conquest was derived from the frontier, where the natives once defeated could be forgotten. The peculiar circumstances of the western frontier have formed the American imperial character that continues to this day: the objective is to conquer; once the battles are over the peace will look after itself, and liberty will prevail just as it did west of the Mississippi. Of course the American way of life prevailed west of the Mississippi because American settlers took it there, something that was clearly not going to happen when America conquered the Philippines in the nineteenth century or Iraq in the twenty-first.

  The civil war changed the dynamics of American imperialism. The southern pressure to create new slave states, and so maintain the balance of power in the Senate, was replaced by northern commercial pressures. As America’s foreign policy became more interventionist southerners, fearful of enhancing the status of the federal government and the power of northern corporations, campaigned against territorial aggrandisement in Latin America and the annexation of Hawaii. Domestic politics may have changed but to the outside world US imperial policy continued as before.

  The island of Hispaniola had had a particularly bloody history ever since Columbus discovered it, and after the civil war the US government sent General Babco
ck to investigate a proposal to annexe the eastern Spanish-speaking part. He successfully negotiated a treaty under which the Dominican Republic would become a part of the United States, but the Senate rejected it (not least because of fears about increasing America’s black population). A presidential commission was set up and again recommended annexation, but again it was blocked. US imperialism was struggling to find a new form that would achieve a new consensus.

  Flush with their success in the civil war and still in possession of an enormous army, American eyes turned northwards. The Confederate navy had been greatly strengthened by a steam-powered raider, the CSS Alabama, which had been built in Britain, and the victorious Union government demanded compensation; it was suggested that Britain should hand over all her North American colonies. The colonists themselves, however, were bitterly opposed to the idea, and in 1867 Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia formed the Dominion of Canada. The US Congress responded with a resolution condemning the new arrangements and hinting that they were in contravention of the Monroe Doctrine (in fact they were not, as Monroe had explicitly committed the United States to a policy of non-intervention in existing European colonies, and in any case the doctrine was a unilateral proclamation with no standing in international law).

  Benjamin Franklin had famously described the division of North America between Britain and the US as ‘unnatural’ and therefore doomed one day to disappear, and many if not most Americans still agreed. Fearing this, two of Britain’s other colonies, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, joined the new dominion, which also took over the territory controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Only Newfoundland remained as a crown colony, and the United States found its northern ambitions stymied. As late as 1910 a free trade treaty between Canada and the United States was scuppered by Canadian opposition, which was incensed in part by the demand of an obscure US congressman that President Taft open negotiations with the British government for the annexation of Canada. (The British colonists had solid economic as well as political reasons for their decision: per capita GDP grew more rapidly in Canada than in the US in the ninety years up to the First World War.)

  The first priority of the American government after the civil war was not further annexation but the cleansing and integration of the territory it already had. The emblem of this integration was the completion of the transcontinental railway on 10 May 1869, when the famous golden spike was knocked into the ground by California governor Leland Sanford at Promontory Summit, Utah. The Central Pacific, in which Sanford was one of the five original investors, laid 690 miles of track from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific 1086 miles from Omaha, Nebraska. The project knitted the nation together and symbolised the grandeur of the American dream: the definitive study of this first transcontinental railway is appropriately titled Empire Express. The creation of the railway has been described as a triumph of American capitalism, with the two railroad companies competing with each other to bring the project to early fruition. In fact the railway owed its existence to extensive professional lobbying in Washington, which eventually resulted in the passage in 1862 of the Pacific Railroad Act. This ensured that as well as generous land grants along the right of way the two companies were subsidised $16,000 for each mile built over an easy grade, $32,000 in the high plains and $48,000 for each mile in the mountains. For the two companies money was the prime objective, and when the two lines neared their meeting point they changed paths to be nearly parallel, so that each company could claim extra subsidies from the government. A disgruntled Congress finally intervened to lay down when and where the railways would meet.

  Business and politics were intimately entwined. Not only was Leland Stanford president of the Central Pacific and governor of California at the same time, pushing through state legislation favouring his company in the process, but one of the most passionate advocates of the railroad scheme in the US House of Representatives was the Massachusetts oligarch Oakes Ames, who had invested heavily in the Union Pacific Company – which was headed by his brother, Oliver.

  The railroad workers on the other hand were not so well represented, and working conditions were not good, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The two companies made extensive use of immigrant labour – Chinese on the Pacific end and Irish on the other. Although conditions were far easier than on the Trans-Siberian railway (which was also more than three times longer), fatalities were high, especially when the Central Pacific began to use the newly invented and very unstable nitro-glycerine explosive for tunnelling; eventually its use had to be abandoned owing to the death rate among the Chinese workers. The mortality rate was not only high among those working on the railways. The Union Pacific hired marksmen to kill the herds of buffalo, which posed a risk to the trains and more importantly were the main source of food for the natives who needed to be ‘cleansed’ from the region.

  In 1871 the US Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act, forbidding any future treaties with the natives and declaring that no ‘Indian tribe’ should ever again be regarded as an independent authority with whom treaty negotiations could be conducted. Once the civil war was over the US army looked west again and started mopping up the remaining native tribes. Compared with the full-scale battles of the civil war the engagements were tiny and usually very one-sided (the most famous exception being the battle of the Little Bighorn). As the whites pushed further and further west in ever-greater numbers, the threat to the natives’ way of life became overwhelming. The natives’ desperate military responses inevitably failed and were often followed by vicious retribution. A Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862 left a thousand settlers dead, but the US army overwhelmed the native forces and, like the tsars in Poland, emphasised their power in a round of public executions. After the Navajo War in New Mexico and Arizona the native survivors were marched 300 miles to a barren reservation to endure four years of near starvation. One of the worst massacres since Mystic occurred when the Third Colorado Cavalry surprised a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, and mutilated and murdered hundreds of mainly women and children (the number of dead is variously quoted from 200 to more than twice that number). The purpose of the Sand Creek Massacre was to cleanse the region to make it safe for miners. One remarkable aspect of the massacre, and of the deportations in the south-west, is that they were carried out right in the middle of the civil war; for the US army’s imperial mission it was business as usual.

  The two most famous encounters between the US army and the natives in the second half of the nineteenth century were at the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. At the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 General Custer immediately became one of US history’s great martyrs, who, like Davy Crockett, had given his life as a sacrifice to America’s manifest destiny – pushing onwards the frontiers of civilisation. The US army quite consciously exploited the story, turning the battlefield into a national cemetery. In reality, however, Custer was an unlikely army hero. George Armstrong Custer graduated from West Point at the bottom of his class and went on to be court-martialled for deserting his troops to visit his wife (while ordering other deserters to be shot). In 1868 he was part of the attack on a native encampment on the Washita river in Oklahoma that came close to being a repetition of the Mystic Massacre, except that Custer seems to have gone out of his way to minimise casualties among the women and children (although many of the women prisoners were subsequently raped by cavalry officers, and Custer himself ‘acquired’ a young Cheyenne woman to warm his bed until his wife joined him the following year). At the Little Bighorn Custer rushed in where wiser men would have feared to tread, gaining martyrdom for himself and over two hundred men of the US Seventh Cavalry.

  The Russian equivalent of George Custer lived and died 130 years earlier. Dmitri Pavlutsky commanded campaigns in Russia’s remotest colonial war against the Chukchi in the extreme north-east, just across the Bering Straights from Alaska. In 1731 Pavlutsky lead a force of 700 sleds 900 miles to the Arctic Ocean. His Coss
ack troops and their native allies claimed to have killed a thousand Chukchi warriors in battle and captured hundreds of women and tens of thousands of reindeer. The Chukchi learnt from their disastrous experience, and when Pavlutsky mounted more expeditions they avoided him and raided, guerrilla-style, the Russian outposts. In March 1747, 500 Chukchi rustlers raided the town of Anadyrsk, driving away seven herds of deer. Pavlutsky set off in pursuit with 131 men. They caught up with the Chukchi on a hill near today’s town of Markovo and, without waiting for reinforcements, attacked. The Chukchi were ready, and Pavlutsky and all but a handful of his men died as the native warriors came storming down the hill to meet the advancing Russians in hand to hand combat.

  The contrast with Custer could hardly be more marked. Custer’s idealised portrait, golden locks flowing, is one of the iconic images of the old west, and the American army was quick to revenge his death. By contrast there are no surviving images of Pavlutsky, no memorials, no heroic stories passed on to generations of Russian schoolchildren. The Russian response to Pavlutsky’s last stand was a few half-hearted raids before Anadyrsk was abandoned and its eight church bells carried mournfully west by its Cossack inhabitants. In 1778 the Chukchi – uniquely among Siberian natives – signed a formal treaty under which Russia allowed them limited self-government, a situation that continued right up to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Indeed the Chukchi acted as a bridge between Russians pressing from the west and Americans from the east; the Chukchi traded with American whalers and sometimes travelled as far south as San Francisco.