Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  All the principal countries made the trade illegal early in the nineteenth century or thereabouts. Even the United States did so. But although the slave trade was outlawed, slavery itself continued to be legal in America—that is to say, that the old slaves continued as slaves.

  The Expansion of the USA

  And because slavery was legal, the slave trade also continued in spite of prohibition. When Britain put an end to slavery also, then New York became the principal port for the slave trade.

  Although New York was the port for this trade for many years—till the middle of the century—the North was against slavery. The South, on the other hand, required these slaves for plantation work. Some of the States abolished slavery, others retained it. Negroes would often run away from a slavery State to a non-slavery one, and there would be disputes about them.

  The economic interests of the North and the South were different, and as early as 1830 friction arose about tariffs and customs duties. Threats of breaking away from the Union were made. The States were jealous of their rights, and did not like too much interference from the Federal Government. Two parties arose in the country, one favouring State sovereignty, the other wanting a strong central government. All these points of difference divided the North and South farther from each other, and wherever new States were added to the Union, the question arose which side they would support. Where would the majority lie? The population of the North was increasing rapidly because of the immigration from Europe, and this made southern people fear that soon they would be overwhelmed by the numbers of the North and outvoted on every question. So tension increased between the North and South.

  Meanwhile an agitation grew up in the North for the total abolition of slavery. The people who were in favour of this were called the “Abolitionists”, and their principal leader was William Lloyd Garrison. In 1831 Garrison brought out a paper called the Liberator to support his anti-slavery agitation. In the very first issue of this paper he made it clear that he was not going to compromise on this issue, and would not be moderate about it. Some of his sentences from that issue have become famous, and I shall give them to you here:

  I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of a ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen— but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.

  This brave attitude was, however, confined to a small minority. Most of those who opposed slavery did not want to interfere with it where it already existed. Still the tension grew between the North and the South, for this was due to their different economic interests, which conflicted especially on the tariff question.

  In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, and his election was a signal for the South to break away. He was opposed to slavery, but even so he had made it clear that there would be no interference with it where it existed. He was not prepared to see it extended to new States or to give it legality. The South was not appeased by this assurance, and State after State seceded from the Union. The United States were going to pieces. Such was the terrible position that faced the new President. He made another effort to win over the South and prevent this break-up. He gave them all manner of assurances about allowing slavery to go on; he even said that he was prepared to make it (where it existed) a part of the constitution, which would give it permanence. In fact, he was prepared to go to almost any length for peace, but one thing he would not agree to, and that was the break-up of the Union. He denied absolutely the right of any State to withdraw from the Union.

  Lincoln’s attempts to avoid Civil War failed. The South had decided to break away, and eleven States did so, while some other border States also sympathized with them. The seceding States called themselves the “Confederate States” and elected their own President, Jefferson Davis. In April 1861 the Civil War began, and it lasted for four weary years, during which many a brother fought against his brother and many a friend against a friend. Huge armies grew up as the war continued. The North had many advantages; it had a much bigger population and greater wealth. Being a manufacturing and industrial area, its resources were far greater, and it had more railways. But the South had the better soldiers and generals, especially General Lee, and all the early victories went to the South. But ultimately the South was worn out. The Northern navy cut off the South completely from its market in Europe, and cotton and tobacco could not be exported. This crippled the South, but it also had a disastrous result on Lancashire, where many mills had to stop working because there was no cotton. There was great distress among the workers thrown out of employment in Lancashire.

  English opinion about the war was generally in sympathy with the South, or at any rate the opinion of the wealthier classes was in favour of the South. The radical elements favoured the North.

  Slavery was not the principal cause of the Civil War. As I have told you, to the last Lincoln gave assurances that he would respect slavery wherever it existed. The real trouble arose from the different and somewhat conflicting economic interests of the North and South, and finally Lincoln fought to preserve the Union. Even after war had begun, Lincoln made no clear pronouncement about slavery, as he was afraid of irritating many people in the North who were in favour of it. As the war went on, he became more definite. He proposed first that Congress should free the slaves after giving compensation to the owners. Later he gave up this idea of compensation, and finally, in September 1862, he issued the Proclamation of Emancipation, in which it was declared that the slaves in all the States in rebellion against the government should be free on and after January 1st, 1863. The principal reason for issuing this proclamation was probably the desire to weaken the South in the war. It resulted in 4,000,000 slaves being freed, and it was no doubt hoped that these would create trouble in the Confederate States.

  The Civil War ended in 1865, after the South was thoroughly exhausted. War at any time is a terrible affair, but civil war is often more horrible still. The burden of four years of this awful struggle fell most of all on the President, Lincoln, and the result was largely due to his cool determination to persevere in spite of all disappointments and disasters. He was out not only to win, but to do so with as little ill-will as possible, so that the Union for which he was fighting might be a real union of hearts, and not a forced one. So, having won the war, he set out to be generous to the defeated South. But within a few days a crank shot him dead.

  Abraham Lincoln is one of the greatest of American heroes. He has also taken his place among the world’s great men. His beginnings were quite humble; he had little schooling, such education as he had was mostly his own work, and yet he grew up a great statesman and a great orator, and steered his country through a great crisis.

  After Lincoln’s death the American Congress was not as generous to the Southern Whites as he might have been. These Southern Whites were penalized in some ways and many were disfranchised—that is, their votes were taken away. On the other hand, the Negroes were given full rights as citizens, and this was made part of the American constitution. It was also laid down that no State could disfranchise a man on account of his race, colour, or previous slavery.

  The Negroes were now legally free and had the vote. But this did them little good, for their economic status remained the same. All the freed Negroes were wholly without property, and it became a problem to know what to do with them. Some migrated to the northern towns, but most of them remained where they were, as much under the thumb of their old white masters in the South as ever. They worked as wage-labourers in the old plantations on such wages as the white employers chose to give them. The Southern Whites also organized themselves to keep down the Negroes in every wa
y by terrorism. An extraordinary semi-secret organization, called the “Ku Klux Klan”, was formed, and its members went about in masks terrorizing the Negroes and preventing them from even voting at the elections.

  During the last half-century the Negroes have made some progress. Many own property, and they have some fine educational institutions. But they are still very definitely the subject race. There are about 12,000,000 of them in the United States—just about 10 per cent, of the total population. Wherever they are in small numbers they are tolerated, as in parts of the North, but as soon as their numbers increase they are heavily sat upon and made to feel that they are little better than the slaves of old. Everywhere they are segregated and kept apart from the Whites—in hotels, restaurants, churches, colleges, parks, bathing-beaches, trams, and even in stores! In railways they have to travel in special carriages called “Jim-Crow cars”. Marriage between the White and the Negro is forbidden by law. Indeed, there are all manner of strange laws. A law passed by the State of Virginia as recently as 1926 prohibited white and coloured persons from sitting on the same floor!

  Sometimes there are terrible race riots between the Whites and the Negroes. Frequently in the south there are horrible cases of lynching— that is, when a mob gets hold of a person it suspects of some offence and kills him. Cases have occurred in recent years of Negroes being burned at the stake by white mobs.

  All over America and especially in the southern States the lot of the Negro is still very hard. Often when labour is scarce innocent Negroes, in some States in the south, are sent to gaol on some trumped-up charge, and the convict labour is leased out to private contractors. This is bad enough, but the conditions accompanying it are shocking. So we see that legal freedom does not amount to very much, after all.

  Have you read or heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? This book is about the old slave Negroes in the southern States, and gives their sad story. It came out ten years before the Civil War, and had great influence in rousing the American people against slavery.

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  The Invisible Empire of America

  February 28, 1933

  The Civil War took a terrible toll of young men’s lives in America, and it left a heavy burden of debt. But the country was young and full of energy, and its growth continued. It had tremendous natural resources, and was especially rich in minerals. The three articles which form the basis of modern industry and civilization were there in abundance—coal, iron, and petroleum. There was plenty of water-power from which electric power could be produced; the Niagara Falls is one instance of this which will come to your mind. It was a huge country with a relatively small population, and there was plenty of elbow-room for everybody. Thus it had every advantage to develop as a great manufacturing and industrial country, and it began to do so at a rapid pace. By the ’eighties of the nineteenth century American industry began to compete in foreign markets with British industry. America and Germany put an end to the easy supremacy which Britain had had for 100 years in foreign trade.

  Immigrants poured into the country. They were all kinds of people from Europe: Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles; many were driven by political terrorism at home, and many in search of better living conditions. Overcrowded Europe poured out its surplus population to America. It was an extraordinary jumble of races, nationalities, languages, religions. In Europe they had all lived apart, each in its own little world, full of hatreds and animosities against the others; here they were thrown together in a new atmosphere where the old hates did not seem to count for much. A uniform system of compulsory education soon rubbed off their national corners, and the American type began to grow out of this hotch-potch of races. The old Anglo-Saxon stock still considered itself the aristocrats; they were the social leaders. Next to it, and not far from it, came the races from northern Europe. The people from southern Europe, especially from Italy, were looked down upon by these northern Europeans and called, rather contemptuously, “Dagos”. The Negroes, of course, were quite apart. They were at the bottom of the scale, and they did not mix with any of the white races. On the western coast there were some Chinese and Japanese and Indians, who had come when the demand for labour there was great. These Asiatic races also kept apart from the others.

  The effect of the widespread net of railways and telegraphs was to knit together this huge country. This would have been impossible in the old days, when it took weeks and months to travel from one coast to another. In the past we have seen that there were often great empires in Asia and Europe. But these could not be closely knit together because of the difficulties of communications and transport. Different parts of the empire would be practically independent, leading their own separate lives, except that they acknowledged the supremacy of the emperor and paid tribute to him. They were loose associations of different countries under one head. There was no common outlook about them. The United States, however, because of railways and other methods of communication, as well as a uniform education, developed this common outlook amongst its different races. The races were gradually assimilated into a common stock. The process is by no means complete; it is still going on. There is no other instance in history of assimilation on such a large scale.

  The United States tried to keep away from European entanglements and the intrigues of European Powers, and they wanted Europe to keep away from America, both North and South. I have told you already of the “Monroe Doctrine”, the rule which President Monroe of the United States laid down when some European Powers—the “Holy Alliance”— wanted to interfere in South America to preserve Spain’s empire. Monroe declared that the United States could not tolerate any armed intervention in the whole of America by any European Power. This declaration saved the young South American republics from Europe. It almost led to war with England once, but America has successfully stuck to this policy for more than 100 years now.

  South America was very different from the north, and hundred years have not lessened the differences. Canada in the north is becoming more and more like the United States, but not so the southern republics. As I told you once, these republics of South America, including Mexico, although it is in North America, are Latin republics. The frontier of the United States and Mexico divides two different peoples and cultures. South of it, across the thin band of Central America, and all over the great continent of South America, Spanish and Portuguese are the languages of the people. Spanish is really predominant, as Portuguese is, I believe, spoken only in Brazil. Because of South America, Spanish is today one of the great world languages. Latin America still looks to Spain for cultural inspiration. Racial differences do not count there as much as they do in the United States and Canada. Intermarriages between the Spanish stock and the original population, the Red Indians, and also to some extent the Negroes, have produced a mixed race.

  In spite of hundred years of freedom, these Latin republics of the south refuse to settle down. Periodically they have revolutions and military dictatorships and it is not easy to follow the course of their ever-changing politics and governments. The three leading countries of South America are Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—the A, B, C countries they are called, from the first letters of their names. Mexico, in North America, is a leading Latin-American country.

  The United States prevented interference in Latin America from Europe by means of the Monroe Doctrine. But as they grew wealthy they began to look outside for fresh fields for expansion. Naturally their eyes first fell on Latin America. They did not attempt to take possession of any of these countries by force in the old way of building up empires. They sent their goods there and captured their markets. They also invested their capital in railways, mines, and other undertakings in the south; they lent money to governments and sometimes to warring factions at times of revolution. By “they” I mean American capitalists and bankers, but behind them and supporting them was the American Government. Gradually these bankers controlled, through the money they had lent or invested, man
y of the smaller South and Central American governments. The bankers could even bring about revolutions by advancing money or arms to one party and not to another. Behind the bankers and capitalists was the great United States Government, so what could the small and weak South American countries do? Sometimes the United States actually sent troops to help one party in a State, on the pretext of maintaining order.

  In this way the American capitalists gained effective control of these smaller countries of the south and ran their banks, railways, and mines, and exploited them to their own advantage. Even in the larger countries of Latin America they had great influence because of their investments and money control. That is to say, the United States annexed the wealth, or a great part of it, of these countries. Now, this is worth noting, as it is a new kind of empire, the modern type of empire. It is invisible and economic, and exploits and dominates without any obvious outward signs. The South American republics are politically and internationally free and independent. On the map they are huge countries, and there is nothing to show that they are not free in any way. And yet most of them are dominated completely by the United States.

  We have seen in our glimpses of history imperialism of various kinds in different ages. Right at the beginning the victory of one people over another in war meant that the victors could do what they liked with conquered land and people. They annexed both the land and its inhabitants—that is to say, the conquered people became slaves. This was the ordinary custom. In the Bible one reads of the Jews being taken away into captivity, because they were defeated in war by the Babylonians, and there are many other instances. Gradually this gave place to another type of imperialism, when only the land was annexed and the people were not made slaves. It was, no doubt, discovered that it was easier to make money out of them by taxation and other methods of exploitation. Most of us still think of empires of this kind, like the British in India, and we imagine that if the British were not in actual political control of India, India would be free. But this type of empire is already passing away, and giving place to a more advanced and perfected type. This latest kind of empire does not annex even the land; it only annexes the wealth or the wealth-producing elements in the country. By doing so it can exploit the country fully to its own advantage and can largely control it, and at the same time has to shoulder no responsibility for governing and repressing that country. In effect both the land and the people living there are dominated and largely controlled with the least amount of trouble.