Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Many of the Founding Fathers spoke of the nascent nation’s future status as an ‘empire’ spreading its values way beyond the existing frontiers of the new United States of America. But first they needed a period of peace. Disregarding their earlier treaty with France, American envoys signed a peace agreement with Britain on 30 November 1782. The next year France and Spain followed suit, Spain regaining Florida and France gaining islands in the Caribbean and Gulf of St Lawrence. The United States gained its independence and, in a sign of things to come, demanded and received unrestricted fishing rights along the Newfoundland coast where New Englanders had previously been banned. The new Treaty of Paris was sent back to Congress to ratify, and on 14 January 1784 the war was officially over. The merchant princes of Boston could turn their eyes to the American hinterland and gather the riches waiting to be exploited there.

  Theirs were not the only eyes to glisten with excitement at the opportunities awaiting them in that vast and ‘empty’ continent. At the very time Congress was debating the treaty that would end America’s subservience to the British empire, merchant princes of a very different empire were waiting for the snows of winter to melt. When the ice had cleared their leader Grigori Shelikhov set sail for Kodiak Island, to found the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE EMPIRES GET GOING

  There are parallels between early America and Russia but they are somewhat forced. Both nations treated the native populations they encountered on their way to the Pacific in remarkably similar, and brutal, ways and both have written much of this out of their popular histories. Both nations relied for their economic well-being on a heavily exploited underclass of slaves or serfs. Both the proud successors to the Kievan Rus crown and the Founding Fathers of the United States of America proclaimed their nations to be empires favoured by the same God. But in most respects the two societies were fundamentally different. The Russian tradition of autocratic government and the English concept of the rule of law were ideologically poles apart. Differences of geography and geopolitics were profound: the might and scale of Catherine the Great’s empire dwarfed the new nation clinging to the eastern seaboard of a largely unexplored continent. America and Russia had, in substance, little in common, and the chapters into which their stories can be divided rarely overlapped. During the nineteenth century this changed. The two nations moved along increasingly similar paths and were buffeted by increasingly similar forces. By the end of the century both were great imperial powers and both were coming to terms with the transition from agricultural to industrial societies. Two great historical currents dominated the nineteenth century in both Russia and America: the continual enlargement of the nation and what might be called the struggle for the nation’s soul, a struggle concluded in both cases by civil war.

  Enlightenment: Russian and American Style

  Soviet leaders and historians were fond of describing the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War as the most important event in the history of the world. The Russian Revolution, they insisted, changed the course of human development for ever. They were wrong, but for more than half a century many hoped or feared that they might be right.

  Revolutions by definition change their worlds, but some more than others. The English Revolution (usually called the English Civil War) turned the nation upside down: the hereditary monarch Charles I lost his head and was effectively replaced by the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, albeit tempered with the trappings of democracy, but a dozen years later Charles II was back on the throne and English life continued much as before. The American Revolution created a nation that would determine the future of the world, but that was only apparent with hindsight; at the time hardly anyone in the rest of the world considered that the political antics of a few remote colonials had any global significance. Other revolutions throughout Europe made more or less difference to their own histories but had no impact beyond their borders.

  In the last 250 years only two revolutions had an instantaneous impact on the history of the western world: the Russian Revolution and before that the French Revolution.

  The execution of Louis XVI and the welter of bloodletting that followed terrified the monarchies of Europe and triggered a tidal wave of ideological ferment. Everywhere forms of government that had evolved gradually over centuries, or even millennia, were forced into new directions. New philosophies, new moral certainties and uncertainties, new values rolled across Europe colliding with centuries-old traditions, assumptions and creeds. The result was an intellectual maelstrom in which everything was effectively questioned and nothing was definitively answered. And while this fervour was gripping the ‘intelligentsia’, itself a concept unknown and unknowable in the centuries before, technology was changing the world all around. Startling advances in science and engineering throughout the nineteenth century delivered the power of steam, the economies of mass production, the benefits of vaccination and the brutality of the machine gun.

  At the end of the eighteenth century it was far from obvious that Russia and America would develop as they did. The United States of America did not emerge from the American Revolution a paragon of political purity. John Quincy Adams (President Adams II) called the American Constitution, nowadays held up as a model for the world, a ‘morally vicious … bargain between freedom and slavery’. (In determining how to allocate representatives in the new Congress the constitution even defined the precise mathematical relationship between free men and slaves: a slave was decreed to be worth three-fifths of a white.) The fine words of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson stirred the spirit and inspired a revolution, but a nation imbued with the ideology of democracy was not the same as a nation able to function as a democracy. Popular will could cast out an unpopular monarchy, but could not be guaranteed to sustain its replacement. Army mutinies and a threatened coup d’état forced the new federal government to flee from Philadelphia to Princeton. The merchant oligarchs of Boston who had done so much to stir up opposition to the British set about exploiting their power over the local economy with such greed that farmers in western Massachusetts rose up in armed rebellion, only to be crushed by the Boston militia. For a time it looked as though the new republic would be stillborn; indeed the continuing unity of the United States remained uncertain for the next century. There was talk of a northern breakaway confederacy, and Colonel Aaron Burr attempted to create his own empire west of the Mississippi.

  But despite its internal strains the fledgling nation survived and eventually thrived. Its institutions may have wobbled but they did not fall. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, with the Bill of Rights constituting its first ten amendments, were manifestations of the democratic ideal destined to become a model for nations everywhere. Millions of the world’s downtrodden masses would heed their noble vision. The phrase ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal’ reverberated around the globe.

  Two million migrants had voyaged west across the ocean in the course of the eighteenth century, but not all were drawn by dreams of freedom; indeed the vast majority were not. For every free white migrant reaching the western shore three black slaves arrived in chains. The American Revolution changed for ever the political landscape inhabited by the white elite; it changed not at all the economic landscape inhabited by the vast bulk of the population – black, native and white alike.

  Had slaves lived as long as whites, the startling reality is that at the time of its birth the United States of America would have been a predominantly black nation. But they did not: a quarter of slaves died in their first year in the land of the free; a third died within three years. Life expectancy varied from colony to colony, as the conditions in which slaves existed varied with the economic superstructure built largely on their backs. In the Caribbean and southern colonies (Carolina and Georgia) small white elites held sway over a black majority. The only way to maintain power in such a society was through sheer bru
tality; blacks were literally beaten into submission. By contrast, in the colonies from Delaware up to Newfoundland there were ‘only’ around 30,000 slaves by the middle of the century, and in general they were perceived to be less of a threat to the established order and consequently were usually better treated. Between these two extremes were the 150,000 slaves in Virginia and Maryland. Even in the north there was a world of difference between the lot of a black slave and that of a white servant. When slaves stepped out of line all the savagery the Puritans had demonstrated in their ethnic cleansing of the native population reappeared. In 1712, at a time when Peter the Great was pushing tens of thousands to their deaths building St Petersburg, white Americans responded to a ‘rebellion’ by just two dozen black slaves in New York with a round of sadistic ritual executions: burning at the stake, hanging in chains to starve to death, slowly breaking on the wheel and plain hanging on the gallows until strangled to death.

  The ideology of democracy united the seceding colonies in their successful struggle against British rule but there remained deep divisions between them. The democratic vision of Thomas Paine resonated with the religious fundamentalism of much of New England and instilled in the mass of the population of the northern states an instinctive, almost atavistic, attachment to such concepts as liberty, however defined. Such an attachment was largely absent further south where liberty was a dangerous concept; social hierarchy determined political life and economic life was founded on slavery. There the lesson of the American Revolution was not that righteousness will triumph but simply that America will triumph. The rest of American history reflects the fusing of these two traditions. Political debate in the northern colonies was conducted in the language of moral and religious principle; in the south and the increasingly important west the language was of glory and self-interest. By the end of the nineteenth century a common language had emerged in which America’s glory became synonymous with God’s will. In a phrase much used at the time, conquering its neighbours became America’s manifest destiny.

  This was a concept that would have been well understood by Catherine the Great. The belief in a manifest destiny to continually expand the empire had been a part of the vision that had inspired Russian leaders since the first Viking warlords set off looking for spoils; it was part of the fabric of tsardom.

  Nobody embodied Russia’s struggles for territory and soul more than Catherine. In her reign the Russian empire’s frontiers were pushed dramatically outward and, for the first time, notions of liberty gained a tentative foothold in the recesses of autocracy. When she ascended the imperial throne George III was the confident master of his American colonies and George Washington was an officer in the British army. By the time she died thirteen of those colonies had won their independence, and George Washington had become the first president of the United States of America.

  Catherine was one of the most important figures of her time, indeed of any time. She steered her nation through a period when the divine right of monarchs was under unprecedented attack. And yet, like her predecessor the Empress Elizabeth, Catherine the Great is now mainly remembered for her sexual exploits, in particular that she was killed while making love to a horse. The story of her equine death seems to have been invented in France very soon after the supposed event, and despite being widely quoted is a complete fantasy. In fact Catherine collapsed on the toilet and was carried to her bed where she passed away peacefully some hours later. Tales of her debauchery were rampant in western courts during her lifetime; British diplomats seemed to be particularly interested in relaying whatever gossip they could uncover or manufacture. When Britain threatened war over Catherine’s seizure of an obscure medieval fortress in Ukraine, the British press published cartoons of her that verged on the pornographic. Gaggles of historians have been kept busy researching Catherine’s love life. Prodigious numbers of putative lovers have been advanced, although Peter Neville quotes the conclusion of one respected expert, J. T. Alexander, that there were ‘only’ twelve. Of course had Catherine been male the subject would have warranted very little attention, given her monumental achievements in other areas.

  Catherine is another of those Russian leaders credited with opening up the country to the west, in her case particularly to France. Russian aristocrats frequented the salons of Paris and their children were introduced to the literature and music of France by the French tutors they brought back with them. French language and manners came to dominate the imperial court. Catherine herself entered into regular correspondence with Voltaire, quoted Montesquieu and invited Diderot to visit St Petersburg. She bought one of the largest collections of Old Masters in Europe, previously owned by Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. She was, it is said, a child of the Enlightenment, although her liberal reforms tended to be restricted to matters, like the education of girls, that did not threaten the core prerogatives of the regime.

  Like that other ‘Great’ westerniser, Peter the Great, at heart Catherine the Great remained an autocrat of the traditional school. The new philosophies spawned the American Revolution and then, even more alarmingly, the French Revolution, and Catherine took fright. When Diderot published his Encyclopedie Catherine banned it, and when the Orthodox Metropolitan Arseny Matseevich questioned her interference in church affairs she had him thrown into prison.

  It would have been inconceivable for a foreign-born woman to lead America, as Catherine the Great led Russia, if only because neither women nor the foreign-born could stand as candidates in presidential elections. American presidents were to be white male Protestants. In the early days it looked as though the new nation might develop its own informal aristocracy; four of the first six presidents were slave-holding Virginia oligarchs and the other two were a father and son from one of New England’s patrician dynasties. Later presidents were less aristocratic and two forces emerged to shape the political leadership. The first was an institution for whom the term ‘force’ was particularly apposite – the army, from whose ranks a great many presidential candidates emerged. The second was political parties.

  Although not foreseen when the constitution was drafted, parties almost immediately became a fundamental part of American political life. In Russia’s imperial court factions jostled for influence, but open opposition to the tsar’s policies was pointless; with very few exceptions personal ambitions did not extend as far as replacing the tsar. In America, on the other hand, factions could hope that open opposition would be rewarded at the next election. The Founding Fathers divided into a southern faction known as Republicans and a northern faction, the Federalists.

  The Federalists soon showed that Americans could be just as tyrannous as any British king or Russian empress. The 1798 Sedition Act introduced the US version of crimes against the state, making the publication of ‘any false, scandalous and malicious writing’ a high misdemeanour. Twenty-five Republicans were quickly arrested, most of them editors whose newspapers were simultaneously shut down. Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon was thrown into prison for criticising President Adams’s ‘ridiculous pomp’. When Jefferson and the Republicans took power in 1800 the Sedition Act was repealed, and all those who had been convicted were pardoned. Not until the 1948 Smith Act was merely advocating a political belief once again made a federal crime.

  Thomas Jefferson envisaged a rough egalitarianism in which all white males would be more or less equal. On the other hand Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists regarded the rule of the ‘well-born’ as both inevitable and desirable (an odd creed for a bastard). Hamilton is sometimes described as a ‘typical’ New Yorker, but he was born and brought up on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, one of the colonial outposts that remained loyal to Britain, and always retained a lingering attachment to the mother country and its aristocratic mores. As secretary of the treasury he set the financial priorities of the new nation, and the main priority was the maintenance of oligarchy. In Morison’s words, Hamilton determined that ‘The old families, merchant-ship owners, public
creditors, and financiers must be made a loyal governing class by a straightforward policy favouring their interests.’

  In fighting for independence the state and federal governments had amassed considerable debts, and Hamilton proposed to pay them off by raising taxes; for him this was essential to establish the creditworthiness of the United States in the fledgling international capital markets. But some states, like Virginia, had already repaid their debt and saw no reason they should foot the bill for states like Massachusetts which hadn’t. The original loan certificates had been issued to revolutionary soldiers in lieu of pay or represented loans made by patriotic citizens who, in many cases, had given up all hope of having their money returned, and had sold their certificates for virtually nothing. There was outrage that rather than repaying the original holders, £80m of previously worthless paper was now in the hands of speculators – including it is said members of Hamilton’s wife’s family – who were set to make a fortune. Nevertheless Hamilton went ahead.

  In the long run it was Hamilton’s proto-capitalism rather than Jefferson’s romantic revolutionary purity that proved the more enduring. It was also more influential on the other side of the world. A Russian edition of Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture, sponsored by the minister of finance, was published in St Petersburg in 1807. The two nations were still poles apart but their two ideologies were starting to overlap.