by Tom Anderson
It was in April 1796 (O.S. Russian calendar) that this status quo began to crumble. Though the eyes of the world were on Revolutionary France as it degenerated into a charnelhouse, not a few of those eyes kept flicking nervous glances back to Russia. Whether the Romanovs or Potemkins triumphed in the civil war would decide many nations’ policy towards Russia. Paul was known to favour a Baltic focus and was not particularly aggressive internationally, while the Potemkins advocated the outright annexation of Lithuania as part of their Slavicist propaganda against Paul. As if there could have been any more pressure upon the armies of both Generals Saltykov…
The armies of the two Russias met at Smolensk on April 14th. Paul had beaten the Potemkins to the strategically important city and now held it against their siege. However, the Potemkinite army had been reinforced by fresh troops raised in Moscow, and outnumbered the Romanovians by three to two. The Potemkins gave siege and, by using hot-shot artillery to set parts of the mostly wooden city on fire, forced Paul’s army to retreat. While the retreat was in good order, this was a huge blow to the Romanov army’s morale, and the news ricocheted around Europe. Statesmen began to plan for a Potemkin victory. This would not be not good news for Lithuania or the Ottoman Empire, but it was known that the Potemkins would probably have less of a focus on the Baltic than Peter and Paul had embraced.
The Swedes knew that here was an opportunity to be seized, lest it slip by. Though Charles XIII was a well-liked and decent ruler, he had failed to produce an heir. Sweden had already gone through one unhappy period not long ago under a foreign (Hessian) king brought in to resolve a similar crisis, and any possible claimants after Charles’ death enjoyed claims so tenuous that they would almost certainly result in a civil war – a civil war that the Danes and the Russians would doubtless intervene in and so weaken the Swedish state.
Therefore, to buy time to sort out their own dynastic crisis, the Swedish Riksdag moved to intervene in the Russian Civil War before the Russians could return the compliment. The aggressive Hat Party was returned to power for the first time since the 1760s, and the long-prepared Swedish Baltic fleet was assembled, both sailships and Baltic galleys.
Meanwhile, Paul’s retreating army was attacked by a secondary Potemkinite force led by General Suvorov[168] on May 14th, near Vitebsk. Suvorov employed aggressive and ground-breaking tactics which divided Paul’s force in three and then proceeded to virtually destroy one-third of the army while holding off the rest. It is possible that Suvorov could have broken Paul’s army altogether, but for the fact that he was killed at the height of the battle by a stray roundshot and his lieutenants were unable to maintain his intricate battleplan. The majority of Paul’s army escaped, and Nikolai Saltykov rallied sufficient forces to rout what remained of Suvorov’s smaller force, but the overall effect was once again a triumph for the Potemkinites. The armchair generals in their pubs and coffee houses across Europe were quite certain. As far as most people were concerned – including ordinary Russians – the Potemkins had won. St Petersburg remained in Romanov hands, but for how long?
The remainder of Paul’s army retreated to Vilnius, while the Potemkins set about consolidating their power. Alexander secured what remained of Smolensk with Sergei Saltykov and prepared a march on St Petersburg, while his brother Ivan returned to Moscow and began a purge of the existing civil service, reversing many of Peter III’s reforms. It was at this point that he was contacted by the Swedish consul, Ingvar Horn, who had a proposal…
To surprise from some quarters, the Potemkinite attack on St Petersburg, in August, failed. A Romanov army led by Mikhail Kamenski defeated Saltykov’s force near Novgorod; though it was not a dramatic battlefield victory, the pragmatic Kamenski attacked the Potemkinites’ siege train and successfully captured or spiked much of their siege artillery. Deprived of these weapons, there was no prospect of Saltykov forcing the well-defended city. After a brief, half-hearted siege, the Potemkinites retreated. By autumn 1796, the situation still seemed to be going the way of the Potemkinites, with them holding almost all Russia by default – but the repulse from St Petersburg revealed that the Romanovs were still in the game.
The overall impression from observers abroad was now that Russia was tearing itself apart, and showed no sign of stopping anytime soon. Policy in neighbouring countries was adjusted accordingly. The Ottoman Empire, under the rule of the cautious and philosophical Sultan Abdulhamid II[169] did not directly take a position on the war, but took the opportunity of a distracted and fragmented Russia to quietly re-exert more direct control over neighbouring provinces. Bessarabia, which had been unofficially going back and forth between Turkey and Russia for decades, was now brought fully back under the rule of the Sublime Porte via its puppets in the Danubian Principalities. Turkish troops were stationed in the Khanate of the Crimea to ‘discourage’ the state’s current alignment with Russia, and both the Ottomans and Zand Persia were able to expand their influence considerably into the Caucasus, with the Persians extending a protectorate over all Azerbaijan and the Ottomans to the border of Georgia.
Though the Potemkinite-Swedish treaty was secretly signed in November 1796 (after news of the defeat at St Petersburg had reached Moscow) it was not publicly announced until April 1797, when campaigning began in earnest again. The Kingdom of Sweden officially recognised Alexander Potemkin as legitimate Emperor of all the Russias, and Alexander, in turn, ceded various territories in Finland and Estonia to the Swedes. Alexander also proclaimed the annexation of Lithuania to the Russian crown and then immediately turned it over to Sweden, a legal fiction effectively allowing Sweden free reign to attack the Romanovs there.
Europe watched to see if Prussia would honour her unofficial alliance with Russia made by Peter III and Frederick William II by declaring war on Sweden. However, it was at about this time that Frederick William II himself died after a long illness, and even as his young son succeeded the throne as Frederick William III, the Poles took this as a signal to revolt. A rebellion led by the professional soldier Kazimierz Pulaski[170] seized control of Warsaw and successfully defeated the first token attempt by Prussia to put down the revolt – which was far more serious than previous outbreaks had been. This encouraged the Poles to rise up in several other cities, with much of the interior of the rump Kingdom of Poland soon under patriotic rebel control. Prussia was far from defeated, but with Frederick William III’s hands full, it was clear that there was no way the Prussians would be directly intervening in the Baltic war anytime soon.
Denmark, though, was another matter. Christian VII had spent much of his life rebuilding Danish power in Europe, and now it was time for his son Johannes II to put that power to use. The Swedes could not be allowed to gain supremacy over the Baltic, as they doubtless would if Lithuania and Estonia indeed passed to Swedish rule. Denmark declared war on Sweden and the Potemkins in May 1797, and it was at this point that the Russian Civil War became the Great Baltic War…
Chapter 30: Indian Summer
You say that you are our father and I am your son...
...We will not be like Father and Son, but like Brothers.
– from the Iroquois-American Covenant Chain, signed in 1692 between the Iroquois Grand Council and representatives of the Province of New York
*
From: Annum Septentrium: A History of North America, by Paul Withers (1978) -
Long before the founding of the Continental Parliament of North America, or even the Empire itself, what was generally known as the Indian Question had been hanging over the heads of its inhabitants. The Americas were known to have produced great indigenous civilisations: no map of the New World was complete without illustrations of the great cities of Tenochtitlan and Cusco. But the British and German settlers who became Americans were not there to spread the Catholic faith and hunt for treasure as the Spanish conquistadores had been, those same Spaniards who now ruled in Tenochtitlan, renamed Ciudad Mejico—even if Cusco was now, at the sufferance of the UPSA, back in Tahuantinsu
ya hands.
No, the Americans had come to the New World to grow tobacco, to escape religious persecution and, ultimately, to spread a belt of colonies across the continent to reach the Pacific and the rich trade that went with it. That goal had become increasingly harder as it emerged that the North American continent was much wider than it had at first been thought – when the colonies had first been laid down in the seventeenth century, most mapmakers had thought that the Pacific coast was only about a dozen days’ march to the west of the Atlantic coast. One relic of that belief was the fact that the colonies were entitled to strips of land going westward from their settlements on the east coast, which had intended to be neat rectangles but swiftly became ridiculous narrow stripes going across the larger continent. In the words of one contemporary historian, the colonies – and then the Confederations—had become like medieval villeins ploughing their little strips of private land. The solution was the same as it had been to that situation, too: land reform and common holdings. And, to continue the metaphor further, it would be a far more troublesome and drawn-out process than its naive proponents might have guessed.
The first move of the game began with New England giving up its westward claims to joint Imperial control—incidentally leading to the creation of Susan-Mary—in exchange for Canada being opened up to New Englander settlement. The other Confederations, though, were forced to face the Indian Question. How were they to continue westward settlements when there were Indian tribes in the way, some of them quite advanced and allied to Britain, entirely capable of opposing that settlement with force?
The solutions adopted were different in different Confederations. Generally speaking, Carolina and New York were considered the most enlightened in their dealings with the Indians, probably because said Indians were among the most powerful of all those in North America – the Cherokee Nation and the Six Nations, the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee (Howden) Confederacy, respectively. In both cases, dealings with the Indians were made on a discreet and quite respectful basis. The Confederal parliament of New York (still known as the Provincial Assembly for historical reasons) appointed a Special Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Albert Gallatin,[171] who handled all direct negotiations with the Howden Grand Council. Gallatin was able to negotiate a relatively equitable settlement with the Howden, although he constantly butted heads with the Speaker of New York, Aaron Burr, a confirmed Constitutionalist and political enemy of Lord Hamilton.[172] The Constitutionalist Party generally favoured a more hawkish attitude to the Indians, as much of their support came from the ‘pro-settler vote’, while the ruling Patriots advocated a more measured response.
The ‘Gallatin Accord’, as it was known among Anglophones (otherwise, the ‘Renewal of the Covenant Chain’, after the original treaty signed between colonial New York and the Howden in 1692[173]), secured a path for westward expansion for New York, removing a strip of land from the south of the Confederation in exchange for new Iroquois lands granted on the north side of the St Lawrence, in Niagara.[174] This was supported by five of the six nations, the dissenters being the Seneca, who lost the most land, but were voted down at the Grand Council. The new lands were allocated between the Six accordingly, with the settlement being judged by the relatively neutral Gallatin. The Confederation of New York kept the rest of Niagara and was now capable of expanding into the Ohio Country, frustrating the ambitions of Pennsylvanians who wanted to establish ports on the shores of Lake Michigan—at first...
Carolina had a more mixed history of Indian relations than New York’s century-old alliance with the Howden. The Carolinians had previously allied with the Yamasee tribe against the Tuscoara, successfully expelling the latter from the Carolinian hinterland in the 1710s—the Tuscoara then migrated north and became the Sixth Nation of the Howden Confederacy. The Cherokee entered the war on the side of Carolina in 1714, at the urging of two Carolinians who had no real backing from the colonial government to conduct negotiations, and helped defeat first the Tuscoara and then the Yuchi. When the Yamasee turned on the Carolinians afterwards, the Cherokee hedged their bets, theoretically remaining part of the pan-Indian alliance against the colonists, but deciding that the Carolinian militia was too strong to be worth challenging. The Cherokee were divided on whether to pursue an active alliance with the Carolinians against their traditional Creek enemies, but any doubts as to the power of Carolina were dismissed when the Carolinians defeated their former Yamasee allies and forced them to relocate to then-Spanish Florida, proceeding to settle their former lands.[175] In a further humilation, the Yamasee would themselves later face absorption by the Seminoles.[176]
In the 1730s the Cherokee politically unified, with the pro-British Chief of Tellico, Moytoy II, becoming Emperor of the Cherokee Empire, recognising King George II as his Protector. British representation to the Cherokee was provided by Sir Alexander Cuming and then, after the War of the British Succession restored Prince Frederick to the throne, by his political ally Sir Michael McAllister. Carolinian treaties with the Cherokee for land were typically lower-scale than those conducted by New York with the Howden, largely because the Empire was at first a fairly ceremonial government, with many affairs still conducted on the township basis. Over time, though, this began to change.[177] Many Cherokee political leaders visited England, Moytoy’s envoys having signed the Treaty of Westminster with the British Government in 1730, and this was far from the last time they would make the trip. The state visits are thought to have impressed upon the Cherokee both the importance of an effective central executive, and the fact that a war with the Carolinian settlers might not stay restricted to America, as the colonies could call upon their distant motherland for more hardened soldiers if necessary.
During the Third War of Supremacy, the Creek and Choctaw allied with the French in Louisiana against the Cherokee, their Chickasaw allies and the British/Americans. After the French were driven from all lands east of the Mississippi in 1759, the Creek and Choctaw alone were destroyed in a long and bitter war that lasted well into the 1760s. Eventually the power of those two nations was broken as the Cherokee focused their warriors into cohesive armies, and the Carolinian militia was backed up by both British regulars and new regiments raised in America for the late war. The Tennessee War, as it was known (after the river and the Cherokee town of Tanasi on it) was the greatest shift in the Indian nations since the Tuscoara and Yamasee had been expelled a half-century before. Once again, it had been the combined power of the Carolinians and the Cherokee which had accomplished this.
The shattered remnants of the Creek fled westward and south into Florida, while almost nothing remained of the smaller Choctaw nation. The newly vacated lands were divided between the Cherokee (who had by this point practically absorbed the Chickasaw as a protectorate) and the Carolinian settlers in an equitable treaty signed by McAllister in 1766. As with the Howden, some existing Cherokee land was transferred to Carolinian in return for greater concessions elsewhere, allowing for Carolinian control of the future Province of Franklin[178] and the Gulf of Mexico coast. The Carolinians also claimed Florida, which had been won mainly by their troops during the campaign of 1766 against Spain in the First Platinean War, but the precise status of Florida as an Imperial or Carolinian possession remained up in the air for some years afterwards.
It was this feat of conquest, fighting alongside British soldiers from the homeland and allied Indians alike, which earned Carolina its Confederal motto after 1788: FIDELIS ET VERAX, Faithful and True. When the American colonies were suffused by the ‘Summer of Discontent’ in the late 1760s and 1770s, when greater representation and less meddling from London were demanded, the Carolinas were the colonies who remained the most peaceful and loyal, with little of the radical mutterings that briefly emerged in New England and New York. This—and the motto—was rather ironic, considering the latter history of Carolina…
The other British colonies, and then the Confederations they became, typically took a less enlightened view of Indian relatio
ns. Often ‘their’ Indian nations were less powerful, and also more prone to breaking treaties and raiding settled land, not least because they tended not to be politically unified and thus a treaty signed by one chief might not be upheld by another. The Pennsylvanian militia, backed up eventually by the Royal Pennsylvania Rifles and the King’s Own Philadelphian Dragoons, all but destroyed the Lenape people. At the same time, the Virginians bulldozed the Shawnee through both warfare and persistent settlement, just as they had to the Powhatan years before – the same ‘Wolfean dilution’ policy that was pursued on an official level by the Empire against French colonists in Canada.
