Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Although the two nations had imperial ambition in common they had little else. The way that power was transferred in St Petersburg and Washington in the 1820s showed how fundamentally different the two nations remained. Nevertheless the accession of Alexander I’s successor, Nicholas I, and the election of Andrew Jackson started to push both nations along a common path. In the struggle that would emerge for the soul of each empire the innate absolutism of the two men helped create an environment in which compromise became impossible, and eventually led both nations into civil war.

  King Andrew

  As Alexander grew older his behaviour became increasingly bizarre as he fell under the influence of a Rasputin-like figure, Count Alexander Arakcheyev.

  Arakcheyev was not, like Rasputin, a semi-literate peasant, but his antics were equally grotesque. He ordered women to be flogged for washing clothes on the wrong day and had a forest cleared of nightingales when they kept him awake. Arakcheyev was made minister of war after Napoleon’s defeat and created military colonies in the newly conquered territories. Hundreds of thousands of serfs were made into soldiers for life and transported to military encampments where they both farmed the land and formed local militias. Alexander and Arakcheyev were trying to do by imperial dictat what in America was happening naturally, just as Peter the Great had done when he colonised the western marshes to build St Petersburg. The spontaneous pressure to colonise and settle ever more land that arose in America could not develop in Russia, because the practices of autocracy allowed no spontaneous actions of any kind.

  The serfs of the Arakcheyev colonies were subject to military discipline, with savage penalties for dereliction of duties or desertion, which increased the pressures from below for radical change. These colonies left a profound impression on Russian attitudes to both colonisation and the institution of serfdom. A hundred years later the Bolsheviks introduced the concept of ‘labour armies’ and Trotsky felt compelled to write of the need for an ‘Ideological struggle against petit-bourgeois intellectual and trade-unionist prejudices which see the militarisation of labour or the widespread use of military units for labour as an Arakcheyev system’.

  Unlike Russian autocracy American democracy allowed society to evolve as new interests and new philosophies became part of the political process. Andrew Jackson’s 1824 presidential campaign demonstrated that new political forces were emerging in America and one day would have to be heard. When, a year later, Alexander I died the familiar problems of transferring power in an autocracy illustrated dramatically the absence of outlets for such new forces in Russia.

  The choice of potential candidates was between the eldest of Alexander’s brothers, Constantine, and the next eldest, Nicholas. Constantine had married a Polish Catholic, thus disqualifying himself, but as commander of the Polish army he had widespread military support. In St Petersburg Nicholas acclaimed Constantine as tsar. Meanwhile in Warsaw Constantine acknowledged Nicholas. Into this confusion erupted in December 1825 an unprecedented new force: a clandestine network of radical army officers, some opposed to the very idea of monarchical government and all committed to the emancipation of the serfs (although disagreeing on what emancipation actually meant). Whereas American democracy provided a ready channel for army officers to gain political power, in Russia there was only one alternative: attempt a coup. Nicholas reacted promptly; most of the army stayed loyal and the mutinous officers were quickly arrested and their leaders executed. (Among those on the sentencing panel was the French soldier of fortune Comte de Langéron, showing that the contemporaries of Lafayette were not all drawn to visions of liberty and democracy.)

  The ‘Decembrist’ conspirators had no realistic hope of success, but the very fact that such a conspiracy could exist, with members across Russia, was a startling revelation to the Romanovs. Tsar Nicholas I spent the thirty years of his reign trying to ensure that nothing similar could ever happen again. The tool he created was the Imperial Chancellery’s Third Directorate which, under his successors, became better known as the Okhrana, the tsarist state’s secret police.

  The concept of a police state is often associated with the rise to power of the twentieth century’s dictators, especially Stalin and Hitler, but in Russia the institutions of the police state were codified by Nicholas I in 1845. He first made explicit the notion of ‘crimes against the state’, which were defined so widely that they included not just actions but ‘intent’. Any action or thought designed to bring the state into disrepute or weaken its authority became illegal. Pipes comments that ‘Chapters 3 and 4 of the Russian Criminal Code of 1845 are to totalitarianism what the Magna Carta is to liberty.’

  In Russia there has never been a tradition of liberty as understood by Americans. Absolute power belonged to the tsar not because of some aberration in which the rights of citizens were denied but because autocracy was seen by virtually everyone as the natural state of affairs. Citizenship in Russian terms is about duties not rights. If power is the rightful preserve of the tsar it follows that trying to usurp or even share that power is not rightful, is indeed criminal. Thus the tsar is perfectly justified in acting against anyone who questions his authority. The concept of ‘crimes against the state’ may have been codified in 1845 but it really goes back to Mongol times or even earlier. Since the days of the Mongols power had resided at the top and only at the top. The Bolshevik police state was to continue not just the institutions of Nicholas I but a much older tradition of unfettered central power.

  If the succession of Nicholas I to the throne in 1825 indicated merely a slight reinterpretation of centuries-old political traditions, Andrew Jackson’s election three years later was thought at the time to demonstrate a radical change in the direction and tone of American political life. Politics dumbed down. Ludicrous rumours circulated, such as the claim that the Pope intended to send millions of immigrants to take over the country, and would then relocate the Vatican to the Mississippi Valley. Whereas Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had been a bestseller at the time of the American Rebellion, the bestseller sixty years later was Maria Monk’s virulently anti-Catholic Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, which detailed the alleged sexual practices of monks and nuns. (Monk claimed to have been a nun herself but was actually a former prostitute; that did not reduce her popularity on the lecture circuit.)

  Intellectual debates among members of the political elite had given way to mob violence in New York and Baltimore in the run-up to the 1812 War. These were not totally new apparitions; after all, the American Revolution had started with mob violence in Boston and Lexington. What had changed is that the old aristocratic structures could no longer contain and manipulate the popular forces the revolution had unleashed. The best ways to illustrate these developments is to consider the two central characters of the period: John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

  John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, son of John Adams, second president, was an intellectual and diplomat. Part of the New England elite that abhorred slavery but mixed easily with the Virginia aristocracy, Adams II moved as effortlessly in the palaces of Europe as in the salons of Washington and Boston. In 1808 Adams was made the first United States minister to Russia and arrived in St Petersburg just as Tsar Alexander broke off his alliance with Napoleon. He was therefore received as a welcome new ally and set to work enhancing America’s position with such success that the United States soon surpassed Britain as Russia’s leading trading partner. Adams’s imperial vision was of a commercial empire far more sophisticated than the crude territorial ambitions of Jackson. Nevertheless he set out a grand strategy for conquering the continent and in particular was a passionate supporter of Jackson’s conquest of Florida, which he insisted was undertaken not to gain territory but to protect the security of the United States (using arguments uncannily similar to those later used to justify invading Iraq). Adams displayed a dedication to public service typical of the earliest leaders, as ambassador to Paris and then St Petersburg, as
secretary of state, as president and finally, after his term in the White House, as a simple member of the House of Representatives for the last twenty years of his life. His conscience and his conviction of the moral superiority of his new nation drove all that he did. He was no naïve dreamer, but his realpolitik had at its core a belief that he and his class were destined to rule by virtue of their virtue. His world disappeared for ever with the election of his successor, Andrew Jackson.

  In 1824 Jackson gained the most votes but lost the presidential election when a third party candidate swung behind Adams. In 1828 the two men competed again. Yet again the north voted solidly for Adams, but this time the south and west were unanimously behind Jackson and he swept to power. The outstanding feature of Jackson’s campaign was its dishonesty. As Samuel Eliot Morison points out, Jackson gained power because of his campaign’s ‘persistent lying about the “extravagance and corruption” of the honest, efficient and economical Adams administration’. Peddling this nonsense gave him, once in power, an excuse for firing around 40 per cent of the existing senior government officials and replacing them with his cronies.

  Jackson is a man whose life is well documented, and yet it is almost impossible to separate man from myth. He is held up as the champion of the common man, the Scotch-Irish frontiersman who overturned for ever the rule of Virginian aristocrats and New England patricians. School textbooks typically portray him as born in poverty – often recording that he was ‘the first president to be born in a log cabin’. That is true, but in fact Jackson’s father died before he was born and he was brought up surrounded by slaves on the South Carolina plantation of his uncle. At fourteen Jackson was fighting in the American rebellion, and was captured by the British. After the war he is reputed to have gambled away a family inheritance and moved west, where he married his landlady’s daughter, despite the lady concerned already being married. (Jackson married her again three years later when she had divorced her first husband. It seems to have been a true love match; Jackson was later to challenge and kill a man who made unkind remarks about her.)

  In Tennessee he prospered, becoming the state’s first member of the US House of Representatives and serving briefly in the Senate. When war with the British erupted in 1812 Jackson, as a major-general in the state militia, threw himself into the fray (once he had recovered from a pistol wound incurred in a street brawl with future US senator Thomas Benton). Jackson’s first contribution to the war effort was to lead a savage campaign against the native Creeks of Alabama and Georgia. He then imposed a punitive ‘peace’, stripping land and rights from native enemies and allies alike, before gaining even greater glory at the battle of New Orleans.

  Jackson was self-consciously the opposite of Adams II, rough and self-made, soldier not diplomat and above all, as he saw it, democrat not elitist. His cabinet was the first to include nobody from New England or Virginia. The crux of what came to be known as ‘Jacksonian democracy’ was a determination to wrest power and wealth from the eastern ruling class and pass it to the people. In some ways Jackson was the Lenin of America. He cut through the fragile checks and balances created by the Founding Fathers, vetoing legislation and ignoring court rulings. Known to his friends as Old Hickory because of his fabled toughness, he was known to opponents as King Andrew and was censured by Congress in 1834 for his autocratic behaviour; the censure was expunged from the record two years later in a vote moved by Senator Benton from Missouri, the same man who had been engaged in the street brawl with Jackson twenty years earlier. Jackson remained a brawler with little commitment to the precepts of free speech and open debate; he even tried to make it illegal to send anti-slavery literature through the post. One of his lasting legacies was the ‘spoils system’ – distributing offices and largesse to friends and supporters, the American equivalent of kormenlie – the Russian system in which public servants helped themselves to a share of taxation. In the same way that Russia’s autocrats needed a massive bureaucracy to manage their empire and gather what they needed above all, taxes, America’s democratic rulers needed a similar bureaucracy to manage the affairs of state and to gather in what they needed above all: votes. The principal features of the spoils system were established within fifty years of the revolution, when the original Founding Fathers died off and were replaced by a new breed of professional politicians, most vividly personified by a group known as the Regents who ruled the state of New York. The political elite of New York had been bitterly opposed to the 1812 invasion of Canada and war with Britain, but the American victory in the battle of New Orleans had made these sentiments deeply unpopular. Labelling the old elite as traitors, the Regents, led by Martin van Buren, stormed to power and set about ensuring that they stayed there. (The Regents enriched themselves and the English language; their meetings with sponsors in the lobby of the state capitol in Albany inspired the verb ‘to lobby’.) Like kormlenie in Russia the spoils system, although branded by some as corruption, was regarded by others as perfectly natural. Its most famous justification was given by US senator and three-term New York governor William Learned Marcy, when nominating Van Buren to serve as ambassador to Great Britain. New York politicians, he explained, did not pretend to be anything but what they were: ‘When they are contending for victory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. If they are successful, they claim, as a matter of right, the advantages of success. They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils of the enemy.’ Macy went on to put the same principle into practice internationally: as secretary for war from 1845 to 1849 he helped launch the US invasion of Mexico.

  The spoils system spread far beyond New York. In 1820 Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which laid down that a host of government appointments should be for four years only, allowing each new administration to reward its supporters when it came to power. In return the office holders were expected to make regular ‘donations’ to party funds from their government salaries, and to work tirelessly to get out the vote at election time. As Hugh Brogan puts it, politics in America in the nineteenth century was ‘as thoroughly, recklessly, unscrupulously and joyously corrupt as the politics of wicked old eighteenth-century Britain’. As long as voting was public voters could be coerced or bribed. Secret voting, known as the ‘Australian ballot’ following its introduction there in 1856, was not prevalent in America until the end of the nineteenth century. The spoils system continued well into the next century in southern states like Louisiana and northern cities like Chicago. Its underlying principles remain part of the American political culture to this day. Thousands of jobs remain in the gift of politicians, and it is accepted that political patronage will extend from appointments of minor local officials right up to membership of the Supreme Court.

  The most infamous beneficiary of the spoils system was Samuel Swartwout. As a twenty-three year old Swartwout was arrested for his part in Aaron Burr’s conspiracy to create a western empire. When Burr’s trial collapsed Swartwout threw himself into a host of dubious schemes in Europe and the United States, eventually becoming an accomplished land speculator. As one of the key fundraisers for Jackson’s presidential campaign, Swartwout was awarded the most attractive of presidential sinecures – customs collector in his native New York. After serving two four-year terms he left for Europe, whereupon Jackson’s successor had the accounts audited and discovered a $1.2m hole. Swartwout eventually returned to New York, and reached a compromise with the authorities under which he avoided prosecution by returning some of the missing funds.

  Despite episodes like this, Jackson is still remembered as the great democrat who replaced corrupt aristocracy with frontier egalitarianism. That egalitarianism did not extend to anyone with a black skin. John Quincy Adams spent his final years vigorously denouncing slavery, while Jackson in equally passionate terms denounced the opponents of slavery, accusing them of attacking the very concept of property. Jackson’s views were mirrored by Russi
ans desperately trying to stop any move towards emancipating the serfs.

  Slavery and serfdom were the foundations on which the agricultural economies of Russia and the southern United States were built. But as the technology of conquest and colonisation moved from musket and horse to mass-produced rifle and steam train the primacy of agriculture disappeared, particularly in the United States.

  A Time for Guns

  The engine of American territorial expansion was its economy. In the early days the fertility of the land stimulated agricultural production both for internal consumption and for export, primarily to the other British colonies in the Caribbean, and the export trade in turn fostered shipping and commerce. But to generate the wealth needed to take the vast tracts of land acquired by the US government in a great arc from Florida through eventually to Alaska, and then to invest in the infrastructure needed to exploit these new territories, the new nation needed its own industrial revolution. As long as it relied on imports of European manufactured goods the profits at the top of the value chain remained outside its control.

  At the end of the eighteenth century those profits were being made by the British, who were starting to overtake France in the economic leadership of Europe (although a fact often forgotten is that Europe still lagged far behind Asia in terms of manufacturing output). The industrial revolution in Britain had started in the textile industry, where the invention of the spinning jenny had revolutionised cotton spinning and allowed Richard Arkwright to create textile factories, whose mass-produced products swept away traditional cottage industries and allowed the formation of the first truly global businesses – buying cotton from Asia and America for the mills of England, and then selling the finished product to the four corners of the earth.