Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The other great historical theme – the struggle for their nations’ souls – was altogether different. There was nothing inexorable about the path along which the two powers developed, and parallels between them, while they existed, were far more tenuous. As the emphasis of history moved from the external to the internal the time had come to put an end to slavery and serfdom.

  Although Russian serfdom and American slavery were not the same, campaigners were not slow to draw parallels. Alexander Radischev chronicled the appalling suffering of the Russian peasantry and made explicit comparisons with slavery in the Americas. Catherine’s reaction was to sentence him to ten years’ Siberian exile (a punishment she considered generous, as he had originally been sentenced to death). American abolitionists pointed to the emancipation of the serfs to bolster their own case.

  In Common Sense Thomas Paine had claimed that one of the evils of the British was that they ‘hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us’. Events soon showed that Americans were quite capable of stirring up such trouble themselves, and although the ‘Indians’ soon lost the power to influence events, the ‘Negroes’ would nearly wreck the union. From the earliest days slavery divided the country, arousing moral outrage on one side and indignant defence on the other. Men like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were impassioned in their condemnation of the institution and determined to see its abolition, but their opponents countered with visions of slaves toiling happily in their fields. George Washington, himself a slave owner, complained peevishly about Quakers trying to liberate slaves brought to Philadelphia by southern visitors: ‘When slaves who are happy and contented with their present masters, are tampered with and seduced to leave,’ he wrote, ‘it begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other.’ He could have been writing about the ‘benefits’ of Russian serfdom.

  The arguments in favour of slavery and of serfdom were very similar: that their abolition would destroy the American/Russian way of life. But in America the argument was a sectional one; it was not really the American way of life that was threatened by abolition but the southern way of life. There slaves were being bred as a ‘cash crop’ to be traded at will, and although the importation of new slaves was banned in 1808 the practice continued, as the new nation refused to join in combined operations with the British to eradicate the trade; 300,000 slaves were imported after such commerce was declared illegal. If it had not been for the puritan settlement of Massachusetts there might have been just one set of American values in which slave-holding was considered as naturally beneficial as motherhood and apple pie. But there were by the time of the American Rebellion two sets of values. In the century that followed the tensions between them were papered over but not resolved. Eventually the nation and its institutions simply split apart.

  Today’s perception of the civil war period owes more to Hollywood than to history: cowboys and Indians roam an untamed landscape and dusty streets echo to the sounds of stampeding cattle or noisy gunfights. The reality of American life was very different. Eli Whitney’s success as a gun-maker, for example, says as much about the progress of industrialisation in the north-east as about the need for weapons on the western frontier, but it is the God-fearing, gun-toting men of the frontier that have come to symbolise the spirit of the age. In the final reel right triumphs over wrong, as in a democracy it must surely do, but does so in a hail of bullets rather than a rustle of ballots.

  The idea of America as a gun-owning democracy that depended for its liberty on the constitutional right of all free Americans to bear arms is a myth. The vision of sturdy citizens defending their rights and their property in a long line from the militias of the American Revolution through the craggy heroes of the old west to the massed ranks of the National Rifle Association misses the point that the majority of Americans who bore arms in the nineteenth century did so not to defend themselves against the forces of evil but to kill each other in a fratricidal civil war.

  Guns were certainly an essential part of American life, but not as a means of defending liberty. Without the superiority of their firepower the conquest of the natives would have been far more difficult (one of the reasons for the success of the Sioux at the Little Bighorn is said to have been that for once they had more modern weapons than Custer’s cavalry). The one technology in which America soon led the world was the technology of death epitomised by Samuel Colt, who in 1836 patented the revolver and was one of the first American capitalists to expand overseas. In 1853 Colt leased a government-owned factory in Pimlico and started manufacturing revolvers in London. Britain and Russia were soon at war in the Crimea and Colt’s factory was inundated with orders from the British army and navy, but after the war demand dried up and Colt’s London operation was closed down. The Colt revolver would for ever be associated not with the Royal Navy but with the cowboys who have come to represent the modern image of nineteenth-century America.

  Life on the frontier is often represented as the place and the era that determined the American character. The ‘frontier spirit’ typified the rugged independence, innate decency and dogged determination to which succeeding generations of Americans have aspired. However unfair it may have been to America’s native population, the territorial expansion of the United States not only established the geographical boundaries of the new nation but also, it is claimed, established its unique character.

  Growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, although not on the scale of its earlier Russian equivalent, was phenomenal. At Independence nine out of ten Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic; sixty years later the United States stretched to the Pacific. Despite that, in demographic terms the main feature of the period was not westward expansion but urbanisation, and it was the cities that moulded the nascent American character. In 1800 fewer than one in twelve Americans lived in a town of more than 25,000, but as the century wore on urban living became the norm. In the 1840s, for example, although the total population increased by an amazing 36 per cent, the population of cities (defined as towns with more than 8,000 inhabitants) increased by 90 per cent. By 1850 the United States extended across the continent, covering the whole area of today’s forty-eight contiguous states, but one in seven of the population lived in the state of New York alone. By 1860 the population of New York was well over a million. It is impossible to understand why the American Civil War happened without understanding the fundamental changes in American society that had occurred since Independence.

  Russia was very different. Serfs formed the bedrock of society, as agriculture was by far the most important sector of the economy. There was industrialisation and urbanisation but on a smaller scale. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Łódz in Poland, the second largest city in the Russian empire, was one of Central Europe’s largest textile manufacturing locations, but such industrial centres were rare.

  It would be unfair to say that at the time of the civil war America was an industrial nation – more than three times as many Americans worked on farms and plantations as worked in manufacturing industry, and it was not until 1921 that census data showed for the first time that more than half the population lived in towns – but the trend towards industrialisation was rapidly accelerating. In the last three decades of the century the number of farm workers would grow by 60 per cent, the number of industrial workers by 135 per cent.

  The typical American of the period is sometimes pictured perched on a Conestoga wagon heading off into the Wild West. In fact he or she was much more likely to be sitting in a twelve-seat stagecoach on the way to work in New York City (Abraham Brower had established New York City’s first public transport running along Broadway in 1827). Hardy pioneers in their covered wagons braving the dangers of the Oregon Trail have featured in countless cowboy films, but even in the Great Migration of 1843 the number of wagons was less than a thousand. By contrast, just ten years later thousands of city dwellers were travelling between the urban centres of New York and Chicago on the newly opened railwa
y. As tens of thousands of Texans celebrated becoming part of America in 1845, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were celebrating the opening of the city’s first department store.

  Stephanie Williams’s account of life in Siberia just before the revolution, with its fur trappers, gold miners and China traders all out to make a quick buck, reads like a story of the Wild West or the California Gold Rush. Although undoubtedly an accurate picture of life on the Siberian frontier, nobody would base a description of the Russian character on it, but that is effectively what many observers have done with America.

  The 1997 film True Women set out to portray the crucial and underrecognised role of women in the development of nineteenth-century America. It followed the stories of three women caught up in the Texan Revolution of 1835, and made enormous efforts to reflect the reality of frontier life. As a film about women in Texas it was a success, but it was also a parable about the American dream and as such was deeply flawed. In the early 1830s there were at most 10,000 American women in Texas; it may suit modern American sensibilities to believe that the character and values of modern America are derived from women such as these, but in reality they were about as representative of the period as the 10,000 women that an 1832 survey estimated were working New York City as prostitutes.

  It is the myth of the frontier that has influenced American values not the reality;Americans are a largely urban people, even if they often behave as if they were beleaguered pioneers living in a world of hostile natives.

  That urbanisation could race ahead at the same time that men and women were leaving the cities to head west was down to phenomenal population growth. By 1850 there were nearly six times as many Americans as there had been when the nation was born. Early stage abortion, which had been an accepted form of contraception for America’s early colonists, was curbed in Connecticut in 1821 and New York in 1828, and by the end of the nineteenth century abortion had been outlawed throughout the country except in very limited circumstances. More significant was immigration, which shot up from 129,000 in the 1820s to 540,000 in the 1830s, 1.5 million in the 1840s and 2.8 million in the 1850s. Around one in five potential immigrants arriving from Europe were refused entry when they landed, and of those accepted up to one in three subsequently returned home.

  Territorial aggrandisement was facilitated by immigrants but not caused by them. Homesteading immigrants often established lives that were immeasurably better than they could have expected in famine-struck Ireland or war-torn Germany, but the real wealth of the west went to those who were already at the top of the ladder. The impetus for further colonisation came not from those who wanted to make their fortunes but from those who wanted to keep the fortunes they already possessed.

  Nearly half of the immigrants were Irish, which significantly changed the cultural make-up of the nation. Such changes were not always peaceful. Immigration became a major political issue. Naturalisation regulations were a political football, the residency qualifications being driven by whether the party in power was likely to benefit or suffer from an increase in immigrant voters. A requirement for five years’ residence was changed to fourteen years and then back to five. Anti-immigrant groups campaigned to increase the qualifying period to twenty-one years. In Philadelphia anti-Irish riots led to several deaths, and brawls between Irish and American were commonplace in many cities. On one hand immigration was encouraged by promising liberty under the law and on the other the president was given the power to deport aliens without needing to give a reason. Just as today there was a decidedly racist tinge to the immigration debate. Once the railway construction boom was over Chinese immigration was banned (the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended Chinese immigration for ten years, but it was extended in 1892 and made permanent in 1902). Simon Schama’s recent history highlights not only the appalling treatment meted out to Irish immigrants in the 1850s attacked by the xenophobic ‘Know Nothing Party’ but also the Chinese railway builders expelled or murdered in the 1870s. By contrast, the first serious restrictions on white immigration were not introduced until 1921.

  Immigration, along with the technological developments of the period, changed the character of the whole country. By no means all immigrants remained in the cities of the eastern seaboard. German immigrants in particular streamed into the new states of the Midwest; Milwaukee became a virtually German city. Canals criss-crossed the north-east and then railways linked the country together. The cotton gin changed the face of the southern cotton industry, but it was in the north that the industrial revolution had its real impact. In the first half of the nineteenth century life in the north-eastern states changed at a pace not seen again for another century. By 1850 the US produced around 0.5m tons of pig iron, a tenfold increase in forty years (but still a fraction of the 3m tons produced in Britain). Manufacturing on an enormous scale, cheap and effective transportation, unprecedented standards of public education and massive immigration combined to make the contrasts of north and south, present from the earliest colonial days, overwhelming. In the words of Samuel Eliot Morison, ‘By 1850 two distinct civilisations had been evolved.’ United in their imperial ambition, Christian religion and republican institutions, they were divided by fundamental economic and moral differences.

  It is the great moral divide over slavery that is conventionally posited as the critical fracture that led to the civil war, but to some historians the war was not a clash of moral principles but the continuation of economic conflict by other means: the thrusting entrepreneurial north taking on the economically stagnant south. New economic forces had been unleashed in which unfree labour had no place. What the American economy needed, and what the Russian economy would come to need, were not slaves in the traditional sense but ‘wage slaves’ who would move around as the market demanded. These historians argue that the irrelevance of the moral arguments against slavery was demonstrated after the civil war, when freed slaves soon discovered that ‘freedom’ for them would not mean the same as the ‘freedom’ whites espoused for themselves.

  There was a vociferous abolitionist movement in America for whom slavery in any part of the country was abhorrent, but the real political debate was not about the abolition of slavery where it already existed but about whether it should be allowed in the newly acquired territories. Strictly speaking the war between north and south was not about slavery but about territorial expansion and the nature of the American empire. The cause of the conflict was the insistence by both north and south that the way they organised themselves economically – one with slaves and one without – should be replicated in the new states being carved out of the old French and Spanish possessions. If either side had been content to let the other have political domination over the new territories there would have been no war. The south could have continued with slavery if it had been content not to export its culture. If the southern states had not insisted that some of the newly conquered territories had to be open to slavery then the civil war might not have happened, and slavery might have been a feature of American life to this day. Indeed, even once the war had started slavery might still have survived. In the summer of 1864, as the war bogged down in the siege of Atlanta, the Democratic Convention in Chicago – representing a still significant part of northern society – called for an immediate end to the war, with states left free to choose whether or not to permit slavery within their own jurisdiction.

  In the words of the old dictum, in politics compromise is less an expedient than a principle. Politicians repeatedly managed to produce compromises on the issue of slavery even when these were met with popular disdain on both sides. American leaders, with some notable exceptions, were concerned primarily not to rock the boat. Slavery was an evil in the north, so ban it in the north; slave-owning was a fundamental right in the south, so maintain it in the south. The Fugitive Slave Act was a typical manifestation of the politicians’ skill in reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. Although slavery was illegal in the north, the Act laid down that if southern s
laves escaped north they remained legally owned in the south, and therefore should be returned to their legal owner. Over 300 fugitive slaves were shipped back south, often under the guard of armed US troops, to stop abolitionists rescuing them and smuggling them further north to freedom in the British colonies. The Fugitive Slave Act caused popular outrage in much of the north, which in turn enflamed popular opinion in the south where pro-slavery campaigners could point to the abolitionists’ flagrant disregard for the rule of law.

  The Supreme Court went even further in the Dred Scott case, ruling that Congress could not deprive citizens of their property – and that included depriving slave-owners of their slaves, theoretically making any attempt anywhere to ban slavery illegal.

  The causes of the American Civil War were far more diverse than one side’s rejection of slavery. The complexities and nuances of the period have largely been written out of popular history, but at the time they were well understood by both sides. Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate soldier who moved to Rome after the war and became one of the most famous sculptors of his day, insisted, ‘We were not fighting for the perpetuation of slavery but for the principles of States’ Rights and Free Trade.’ The man who has become for ever associated with the emancipation of the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, repeatedly made clear that despite his own moral repugnance he was not trying to end the right of existing slave states to continue their peculiar institution. The slave states, however, realised that this position was increasingly untenable. They had seen what had happened in Britain, where moral indignation had led to slavery being banned throughout the empire thirty years before. Many southerners retained contact with Barbados where slavery was abolished in 1838, and, although none of the dire consequences predicted by the pro-slavery lobby had happened, they did not want to repeat the experiment themselves.

  Many, perhaps most, northerners regarded slavery as an affront to their moral consciences, but the north was far from united. Many of the newer immigrants, who were themselves often subject to bitter discrimination, were keen to ensure that those on an even lower rung stayed there. First generation Irish Catholics were an important political force by the time of the civil war (they formed 34 per cent of the electorate of New York City, for example), and not only were they not offended by slavery but in Morison’s words ‘their hostility to abolitionists and hatred of free Negroes became proverbial’.