Between God and Slave
After the southern and New England colonies were established an eclectic group of four colonies appeared between them: New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.
Catholics were one religious group who found no welcome in New England. At the same time as thousands of Puritans were escaping from what they regarded as the dangerously papist practices of the Anglican Church of Charles I, others fled for exactly the opposite reason. A year after the Mayflower the Catholic George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, set sail for the New World and founded the colony of Avalon in Newfoundland. The settlement was not a success, and after George’s death his son Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore, decided to try again further south, and dispatched his younger brother Leonard. In 1634 the Ark and the Dove landed in Maryland. Among the two hundred religious refugees on board were two Jesuit priests, who had been smuggled aboard before leaving England and who on arrival recited on their bended knees the Litanies of the Sacred Cross. The physical climate in Maryland was more hospitable than Newfoundland, but the same could not be said for the religious climate. The two ships contained Catholic and Protestant colonists but the new colony soon developed a Protestant majority, which resented the power wielded by Calvert’s Catholic cronies. In 1689, when the Dutch king William seized the English throne in a coup d’état (the ‘Glorious Revolution’), Maryland’s Protestants seized the opportunity to mount an armed coup of their own, and America’s first attempt at religious pluralism outside Rhode Island ended as Catholics lost the right to vote and hold office.
The Dutch settlements on the Hudson welcomed European settlers of almost any persuasion, and when they were captured by the British in 1664 added yet another facet to colonial life. New Netherland became the state of New York. New Amsterdam became the city of New York, and its enterprising burghers were soon making their presence felt in the commercial life of British North America.
The Quaker William Penn founded Pennsylvania. The first settlers there, largely English Quakers and Germans escaping from their wartorn homelands, were distinctive for their relatively civilised treatment of the natives. Even here, however, the exigencies of ethnic cleansing won out when a group arrived in the colony with a very different view of life. In the 1690s Scottish Protestants had been ‘planted’ in Ireland, particularly in Ulster, to help the English tame what was effectively the first English colony. Ireland was not the Promised Land, however, and many ‘Scotch-Irish’ moved further west, to the frontiers of Pennsylvania. These new settlers had no truck with Penn’s pacifism. They had learnt how to deal with unruly natives in Ireland and followed the same tactics in their new home – stealing, intimidating and killing those whose land they were determined to take over. Those who claimed to know better, including Penn’s own family, soon joined them. After William Penn’s death his son Thomas led a famously audacious land grab. Having agreed with the local natives to buy a piece of land as big as a man could walk around in a day, Penn had a special trail cleared through the forest and then used trained runners to sprint along it. When the natives refused to hand over the enormous territory Penn had thus gained he employed Iroquois mercenaries to enforce the ‘agreement’.
The strangest colony to emerge on the eastern seaboard was named after an English lord, founded by Dutch entrepreneurs based in Sweden and populated largely by Finns.
The Finns are one of the oldest races in Europe, so perhaps some background would be helpful here. At the height of their power some 8,000 years ago these Ural-Altaic peoples dominated a vast land from Mongolia to the Baltic and, according to some, introduced hieroglyphic writing to Egypt. Some Ural-Altaic tribes, like the Finns, settled down, while others erupted in streams of conquest (the last of these to pillage their way west only stopped when their leader Attila was defeated at Châlons). Over time their territory was taken by other groups, especially the Slavs, and their people and languages absorbed, so that in Europe today only the Finns, Estonians and Hungarians remain. The Finns were pushed westward by Slavs expanding to form Russia. In one version of the legend surrounding the founding of Russia, Finns and Slavs joined together to invite Rurik to rule over and protect them. In this version the term Rus comes from the Finnish ruotsaa, meaning to row, the means of propulsion used by Vikings on the rivers of their new domain.
In 1157 another Viking king invaded Finland, but by then the Vikings were no longer pagan barbarians. A mysterious Scottish bishop named Henry accompanied King Erik Jedwardson and, by judicious use of his patron’s sword, converted the Finns to Christianity. At the same time King Erik brought the Finns firmly into Sweden’s orbit, so that when, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Finns found themselves once again under attack from the Slavs, this time Poles, it was natural for many Finns to move west themselves. Between 1600 and 1650 numerous Finnish settlements sprang up in Sweden, but not everyone welcomed the immigrants. While the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus used Finnish troops in his conquests across Europe, at home their families were being massacred. A way of solving this ‘Finnish problem’ was suggested by a man named Peter Minuit.
The first American colonies owed their creation to a small number of energetic men, ranging from the godly to the godless. Peter Minuit was not at the godly end of the spectrum, and is perhaps most charitably described as an entrepreneur. He is known today as the man who bought Manhattan from the natives for a handful of shells, a Dutchman who had been appointed Governor of New Netherland but had fallen out with its proprietor, the Dutch West India Company. Minuit persuaded Swedish leaders not only to allow him and a group of Dutch ‘promoters’ to set up a colony under the Swedish flag but to put up half of the funds as well. This colony was the ideal place to send surplus Finns, and a trading post was established on the Delaware river in 1638. Minuit himself disappeared in the Caribbean, and neither he nor his ship were ever seen again, but his idea had taken hold on the imagination of his Swedish partners. In 1643 New Sweden was established, populated largely by Finns.
The colony prospered, and soon Finns were petitioning the queen to be allowed to emigrate. In 1655 the Dutch seized the colony but were soon replaced by the English (who, always alive to commercial possibilities, sold the Dutch garrison to Virginia planters as cheap labour for their fields). Eventually the English colony of Delaware came into formal existence.
(The role of Finns in the intertwined histories of Russia and America deserves a book of its own. One of the most curious chapters occurred during the Depression of the 1920s. Stalin decided that Finnish-Americans presented a potentially useful pool of talent and sent recruiters to encourage emigration from the promised land of the past to the promised land of the future. They presented such a rosy picture of life in Russian Karelia that some 25,000 are thought to have sailed east, only to discover that conditions were no better on the other side of the Atlantic. Stalin was unimpressed by their complaints and shipped them off to the gulags.)
The colonies to the north of Chesapeake Bay, in a great swathe from Delaware up to Newfoundland, differed significantly one from another, but they differed much more profoundly from the colonies further south. By the middle of the eighteenth century the northern colonies were developing the heterogeneity of cultures – German, Dutch, Scandinavian, as well as British – and the economic dynamism that would become such a feature of later American history. Economic prosperity depended on trade and expanding markets, and that brought with it more toleration of the religion and cultures of others. That tolerance extended to toleration of the intolerable. Slavery still formed the bedrock of life in British North America. New England’s economic well-being depended on providing supplies to the Caribbean colonies, and it soon became home to one of the world’s largest merchant fleets, benefiting enormously from the British Navigation Acts, which decreed that only British ships could carry cargo to and from its colonies (and British included New English). As well as protecting their commerce from Dutch and other competitors, the American colonies depended on a Brit
ish army willing to protect it from the French to the north, the Spanish to the south and hostile natives to the west. Safe behind barriers of tariffs and gunpowder, the English colonies started to prosper.
With wealth came power. Whereas in the early days the English colonial heart lay in the West Indies, it now moved to the mainland. Boston assumed a commanding position controlling the mercantile wealth of all the English colonies, but it was later overtaken by the more cosmopolitan New York. Philadelphia too grew in importance as it took over from Boston the role of provisioner to the southern and Caribbean colonies, being both closer to them and to the more fertile farmlands of Pennsylvania.
Ostentatious displays of wealth began to characterise the cities of the north as much as the grand plantations of the south. The elites aped European culture and started to develop their own. Harvard was founded in 1636, but civilisation was a fragile flower. Forty years later, and only a few miles from Harvard, the new colonists showed another side of their character, demonstrating their continuing intolerance for anyone who crossed the line that separated the godly from the godless.
Joshua Tift made the mistake of quite literally going native. He married a native woman and went to live with her family. Furious Puritans raided their village and captured Tift. What happened then is open to dispute. One respected historian has recently described how the settlers tied Tift’s limbs to horses and tore him apart. Another version claims that he was hanged, taken down before he died, cut open and forced to watch his entrails and genitals burning before being beheaded. His body was then cut into four parts and his head displayed on a stake. Whatever the precise form of his death, it was an act of savagery Ivan the Terrible would have understood all too well.
Such acts are not what the early colonists are remembered for. The first English settlers are held up not as exemplars of tsarist-style savagery but as the forerunners of modern democracy. In 1893 historian Frederick Turner argued, in his enormously influential work The Significance of the Frontier in American History, that a limitless supply of free land occupied only by insignificant natives led almost inevitably to the values of equality and democracy that form the bedrock of the American political culture. It was the westward expansion of the American frontier, he argued, that ensured that Americans developed the individualism that he thought was the hallmark of American democracy. Proponents of the ‘Turner Thesis’ argue that the ever-present frontier allowed those dissatisfied with their lot to move on, and so those that remained did so only by consent. That consent was achieved through the granting of personal liberty, individual rights and democracy. At the same time those who moved to the frontiers and beyond were demonstrating the spirit of independence and self-reliance that is the natural corollary of democracy. Later American experience may lend support to this thesis, but the history of the first American colonies presents quite a different picture. In the south, the presence of the frontier made more territory available not for the creation of democracy but for the expansion of slavery. In the north, those moving to the frontiers were not yearning for freedom but were as often dedicated to the theocratic suppression of liberty.
A clearer vindication of the Turner Thesis occurred on the other side of the world. On the wilderness frontiers of southern Russia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries disgruntled serfs, escaping criminals and soldiers who had ended up on the losing side created their own society beyond the arm of tsarist autocracy. These horsemen of the steppes were the nearest Russia ever produced to the noble frontiersman and gunfighters of American legend. Eventually their descendants were reabsorbed into Russian society, inspiring hero worship among their compatriots while enemies cowered at the very thought of their name. They were the Cossacks. Thanks to them, Russia would expand to the Pacific at a pace that America would never come close to matching.
CHAPTER 5
RUSSIA BETWEEN WEST AND EAST
History is made up of words, and the nuances of history are determined by the words chosen to describe the events of the past. Russians seized and settled the region on the eastern Baltic coast where the city of St Petersburg now stands just as the English seized and settled the region on the western Atlantic coast where Boston now stands. The settlement of St Petersburg was on an altogether larger scale, and history books talk not of the ‘settlement’ of Livonia but of its ‘conquest’. Nobody talks about the conquest of New England. The creation of the American empire was hidden behind other words. America expanded not by conquest but by ‘settlement’ or ‘colonisation’ or, occasionally, by ‘annexation’. Russia conquered its way to empire; America merely grew.
America advanced slowly to the Pacific, exploiting the rich resources it found by planting its own natives to replace those already there. Russia advanced to the Pacific more rapidly and found a land that was largely inhospitable; to gain other resources it had to look elsewhere – to ‘conquests’ in the south and west. Whatever the terminology used, the imperatives that drove Russia to conquer territory in its paths to the Baltic and the Black Sea were the same that drove it to seize the barren lands of Siberia. In the same way the imperatives that drove America westward were the same that led it to attack Canada or annexe Florida from the Spanish. Settling New England and Livonia; annexing Texas and Turkistan; occupying California and Chechnya: all were manifestations of the same desire to push forward the wild frontiers.
Yermak Timofeyevich: King of the Wild Frontier
Children’s tastes are fickle. This year’s must-have toy is next year’s embarrassing antique. Fads are created and, once their full commercial value has been extracted, they are lost in the dark corners of childhood memory, only to be resurrected much later as sepia-tinted nostalgia.
In 1955 the annual craze was manufactured by Walt Disney with a new television show. Some of the episodes were not long enough, so to pad them out the scriptwriter wrote a song. He had never written a song before, but in just twenty minutes he and a colleague produced words and music; in six months 7 million copies were sold. No record had ever sold so fast. It seemed that every child in the English-speaking world was singing endlessly about ‘the land of the free’ and its hero, Davy Crockett, ‘King of the Wild Frontier’.
A relatively obscure nineteenth-century politician had been turned into a national hero. Within weeks parents were buying Davy Crockett watches, guitars, toothbrushes and lunchboxes. The trademark coonskin cap became obligatory for the street cred of every six-year-old boy (the price of raccoon reportedly leapt from 25 cents a pound to $8 a pound). A year later the craze was over. Television’s Davy Crockett had died heroically at the Alamo and actor Fess Parker was off to pastures new, eventually becoming one of California’s top winemakers. But the folk-memory remained; a genuine national hero had been created. His name became synonymous with a virile patriotism, so that when the US army decided the next year that XM-388 was not the most gripping of names for its new wonder-weapon, a tiny nuclear warhead that could be fired from a recoilless rifle, they chose to call it the Davy Crockett. (As if to illustrate that the American attitude to foreigners had remained unchanged since Davy Crockett’s days, critics concerned about nuclear fallout were told not to worry: the Davy Crockett would stop the Russians in their tracks – and so would only ever be used in Europe, well away from America.)
The equivalent figure to Crockett in Russian mythology is Yermak Timofeyevich, a frontiersman and explorer who preceded Crockett to a martyr’s death by 250 years. Yermak’s name has remained as commercially potent as Crockett’s (one of Moscow’s leading restaurants is named after him today), and he has the same heroic significance in the folk-memory of his nation. When the Russian navy commissioned the world’s first true icebreaker in 1898, Admiral Makarov named it Yermak. Yermak even has his own song, the tune of which is known to millions of Russians, although unlike Davy Crockett’s his is a genuine folk song. Yermak symbolises the coming of age of Russia, and in this too he parallels Crockett. America formed as a collection of dissimilar colonies, uniti
ng in conflict with a distant empire, and then cementing themselves together in a massive expansion that eventually reached the Pacific. Crockett represented that post-colonial frontier spirit when for the first time it became meaningful to speak of ‘America’ as a nation state. Yermak did just the same for Russia, appearing on the stage of history at a critical point when Russia, having shrunk from the glories of Kievan Rus to the Mongol-dependent Duchy of Muscovy, finally became recognisably ‘Russia’.
Muscovy had been just one of many principalities into which the kingdom of the Rus fractured before and after the Mongol invasion. In 1300 it covered more than 7,500 square miles. When Ivan III, Ivan the Great, mounted the throne in 1462 he inherited 166,000 square miles. The secret of Muscovy’s astonishing growth was sycophancy; when the khan growled Muscovy grovelled. Such obeisance was rewarded with grants of land and authority. Muscovy not only provided the Mongols with taxes and troops raised from its own lands but also collected taxes from neighbouring princes for the khan. When those princes could not pay the Muscovite princes they first lent them money at usurious rates and then foreclosed on the debts. Not for nothing was Ivan I known as Ivan Moneybags.
When the Mongols finally conceded power in Russia they left no state behind them. Their immediate successors were not monarchs in the sense that the Tudors were monarchs on the other side of Europe. They were warlords whose rule extended as far as their military might; their borders moved from year to year with the vicissitudes of battle. Ivan III may have employed Italian architects to remodel Moscow, and Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible, may have crowned himself Caesar and styled his capital the Third Rome, successor to the glories of Constantinople, but few western visitors would have shared their vision. Indeed at that time Russia was not even part of Europe, as Peter the Great’s court cartographer had yet to move the frontier of Europe east to the Urals. To European monarchs Ivan the Terrible was another barbarian despot who threatened from the east, a bothersome but fortunately unsuccessful invader. This view reflected an innate sense of superiority in the west that was not entirely fair; when Ivan came to the throne his realms were already larger than England, France and Spain put together. But the west’s condescension seemed justified by their own military strength and by the weakness of Ivan. That Russia was an alien land with a king some way below the standards of western Europe was made very obvious in 1571 when Devlet Giray, the Muslim khan of Crimea, one of the Mongol successor states, sacked Moscow and captured thousands of Slavs to be carried off as slaves.
Empires Apart Page 11
