American Experiment (81 page)

It was a bitter denouement for the communitarians who had, in Horace Greeley’s admiring words, sought to achieve their goals not “through hatred, collision, and depressing competition; not through War, whether of Nation against Nation, Class against Class, or Capital against Labor; but through Union, Harmony, and the reconciling of all Interests, the giving scope of all noble Sentiments and Aspirations.…” It was precisely this aspiration of harmony, however, that was the target of criticism by a young German who had watched the communal experiments with interest. Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels lauded Owenites and Fourierians for their attacks on competitive capitalism, on the treatment of employees as mere commodities, on the alienation of the worker from his labor and its product. But, in a document that would become far more famous and influential than anything Fourier or Owen ever wrote, Marx and Engels excoriated the communitarians for their very belief in harmony and unity:

“They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored,” Marx and Engels wrote in the
Communist Manifesto
in 1848. “Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class.…

“Hence, they reject all political and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.…These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.”

Class conflict, not communal harmony, was to Marx the driving social force in history, but neither Marx nor the harmonious anticipated the fundamental conflict that soon would rend American society.

T
HE QUARTER CENTURY FOLLOWING
the War of 1812-15 was an era of relative quiet in American foreign relations. The big powers across the Atlantic were relatively pacific, as though they were restoring energies lost in the carnage and chaos of the Napoleonic wars. The nation’s leaders rejoiced in the benignity of international affairs. “There has, indeed, rarely been a period in the history of civilized man in which the general condition of the Christian nations has been marked so extensively by peace and prosperity,” said President John Quincy Adams in 1825. Americans seemed preoccupied with domestic problems and opportunities—especially the vast lands to the west. Still, American war hawks repeatedly brought the country to a fever pitch against both France and Britain—and doubtless the jingoes would have challenged the third great European power, Spain, if Mexico had not gained its independence.

The brush with France came close to comic opera. For years Washington had been trying to collect on claims against the French for American commercial losses during the French Revolution. Although in 1831 Paris finally agreed to pay, the French Finance Minister reneged on the first installment for the plausible reason that the legislature had not appropriated the necessary funds. A year later that body balked at paying at all. President Jackson—who had been compelled to stand by fuming as Biddle’s bank assessed his government $170,000 for having presented an unredeemed instrument—now exploded, shouting, so it is said, “I know them French”—he had never been abroad—“they won’t pay unless they’re made to.” He told Congress that if the money was not forthcoming the United States government should be authorized to seize French property. Chauvinistic excitement swept the nation. The French minister demanded his passport. The French legislature made the appropriation but withheld payment until the President explained his language.

“Apologize? I’d see the whole race roasting in hell first!” was Jackson’s apocryphal reply. Jingoes had a field day. “No explanations! No apologies!”

It was rumored that Jackson blew up when he saw a French note with
the words
je demande
, not realizing that
demande
meant “request.” He ordered naval preparations. Paris assigned a squadron to the West Indies. By now the tiff had become so absurd as to fall of its own slight weight, and the British skillfully mediated. Jackson withdrew any possible imputation of insult to the French government in a way that enabled him to feel he had avoided apologizing. The French, their honor satisfied, arranged to pay the money. And the French chargé in Washington, Alphonse Pageot, who had indignantly departed for Paris with his little son, Andrew Jackson Pageot, returned triumphantly to Washington with his boy, name unchanged.

The encounter with the British was more serious. In 1837 Canadians led by William Lyon Mackenzie rebelled against British rule. Nothing could be calculated to appeal more to the hearts and minds of Americans—to their memories of their own insurrection, their missionary hope of bringing republicanism to their northern neighbors, the need of some for employment after the Panic of ’37. Incidents multiplied. Enlisting in the rebel cause, Americans raided United States arsenals and handed weapons over to their comrades. When they started to use a small steamship, the
Caroline
, to transport supplies to the insurrectionists, aroused Canadian loyalists rowed across the Niagara River, set the
Caroline
afire, and let it drift downstream. The ship had been sent over the falls with men trapped inside, American newspapers screamed. Actually the steamer had sunk above the falls, and only one man, Amos Durfee, had been killed, but this was enough. Durfee’s draped body was displayed in Buffalo. The Rochester
Democrat
demanded that the “outrage” be avenged “not by simpering diplomacy—
BUT BY BLOOD.
…”

Within a year tens of thousands of Americans, it was estimated, were active across the border from Vermont to Michigan, with the avowed goal of emancipating “the British Colonies from British Thralldom.” Organized in “Hunters’ Lodges,” equipped with cryptic signs, passwords, and badges, the Hunters planned to invade Canada. Meantime, diplomacy had been at work. President Van Buren, as firm in dampening the war fever as the jingoes had been in inflaming it, demanded that American volunteers in Canada return home, asked the governors of New York and Vermont to call their militias into service, and sent General Winfield Scott to pacify the sympathizers. At the end of 1838 several armed bands crossed the border; they were quickly broken up. Rensselaer Van Rensselaer, an American “general,” was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for violating the neutrality laws. Van Buren pardoned him—but only after his defeat in the 1840 election.

Feeling along the border eased a bit, only to flare up again late in 1840 when Alexander McLeod, a Canadian deputy sheriff, was picked up in New York State and incarcerated on the charge of having murdered Durfee in the
Caroline
raid. Downing Street formally demanded McLeod’s release, amid warnings of most serious consequences if the Canadian was not liberated. The State Department might have been conciliatory, but New Yorkers bridled—and they had the body. There was not gold enough in Britain to take McLeod out of Niagara County, a New York legislator proclaimed. London huffed and puffed in reply; McLeod must be surrendered alive, announced
The Times
, or avenged if dead. Although Webster, on taking office as Secretary of State, tried to calm the British, he could not overcome the stubborn fact that New York as a sovereign state was determined to try McLeod. Once again war cries echoed through the borderlands. The English tried vainly to understand a federal system that would allow a single state to determine a matter of such international concern while the national government was forced to watch helplessly. McLeod was tried before an American jury—and acquitted in twenty minutes—and the war threat dissipated.

People of good sense were more and more convinced that Anglo-American relations could not be left in the hands of mobs, adventurers, chauvinists, and the unexpected fair-mindedness of a New York jury. The coming to office of Robert Peel as Prime Minister, and the appointment of the more conciliatory Lord Aberdeen as Foreign Secretary in place of Lord Palmerston only a few months after Webster had taken office, set the stage for an attempt to resolve the knottiest issue between the two nations. This was the dispute over the northeastern boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.

For decades this poorly mapped area had been in dispute. In 1827, after Americans and Canadians competed for land grants along the Aroostook River, London and Washington agreed to submit the boundary differences to the King of the Netherlands for arbitration; but when the King submitted his compromise award, the British accepted and the Senate balked. A bloodless “war” broke out as Canadian lumberjacks invaded the disputed area; amid the usual alarms both Maine and New Brunswick called up their militias, and once again the hawks of Washington called for war rather than national dishonor. A truce was hastily patched together until the matter could be settled by negotiation, a task to test Daniel Webster’s vaunted skill at diplomacy. He was ready for it, having visited England in 1839 and met with its leaders. To parley with Webster, Aberdeen had chosen the agreeable Lord Ashburton, who had married an American belle and heiress,
Anne Bingham of Philadelphia, during George Washington’s presidency.

Webster and Ashburton had little trouble working out a compromise; the problem was gaining acceptance by border chauvinists and by the British government, which insisted on a boundary that would allow the Canadians an overland route between Quebec and St. John. Rarely has an issue turned so much on accurate mapping, and rarely has mapping been so faulty or inadequate. Some old maps, one of which seemed validated by Benjamin Franklin himself, supported British and Canadian claims. In order to gain Maine’s support for his planned compromise with Ashburton, Webster sent the historian Jared Sparks to Maine to persuade the political leaders to accept the deal or risk something worse. Ashburton paid almost $15,000 for Sparks’s expenses. As it turned out later, authentic maps supported the original American claims; unlucky Maine had lost the battle of the maps.

All the parties gained from the treaty itself, however. After the protracted negotiations with commissioners from Maine and Massachusetts (which still had property rights in Maine after the separation of 1820), the treaty settled a wide range of issues. The St. John, Detroit, and St. Clair rivers and Lake St. Clair were open to navigation by both parties. An extradition article dealt with the old problem of fugitives gone to Canada. On an entirely different but intensifying problem, the two nations agreed to maintain a joint cruising squadron on the coast of Africa to help curb the slave trade, though Washington would not accept a mutual right of visit to ascertain the real identity of a suspected slaver. The heart of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, however, lay in its settlement of the old boundary question. The United States received about 7,000 of the 12,000 square miles in dispute, and gained most of its claim to about 200 square miles of land around the head of the Connecticut River.

The treaty was a major achievement at a time of ill feeling between Americans and British. Sixty years after the Revolution countless Americans still hated the British—hated them for their aristocratic condescension, their exactions as creditors, their endless criticism of Americans and American ways. To many Britishers, the United States was still the land of drunks, duelers, spitters, anarchists, lynchers, thieves, gamblers, slave drivers, cattle rustlers, bumptious boasters and yarn spinners. The English and American languages set them apart orally, and verbally too, as each side could read in the press the scurrilous attacks by the other.

Given such attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed remarkable that the two nations avoided a major shooting war. Britain and the United States were economically interdependent, of course, but such a
relationship among nations had not always prevented war in the past. The explanation in large part lay with the nation’s foreign-policy and diplomatic leadership. Sixty years after the founding of the United States, it was still widely accepted that diplomats and negotiators must have a considerably free hand in parleys with other envoys, for a democratic foreign policy is not necessarily a pacific foreign policy; the popular mind was extremely touchy, suspicious, excitable, and belligerent. Time and again the leadership in Washington exercised restraint, but ultimately this leadership depended on the people for support. And the people were taking some leadership in foreign policy, not only with their votes, but with their feet, as they moved into Indian territories and into borderlands to the northwest or southwest, gazing across frontiers with envy, fear, greed, hostility, and often with a consuming missionary zeal.

Now these people were gazing toward the Far West. By the 1840s the trek west had lengthened considerably from the days of the first trans-Appalachian pioneers, with their Conestoga wagons and frontier stockades. The settlers of the plains bordering the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico also were more diverse, quicker to organize some kind of government, and more inventive in exploiting land than the Scotch-Irish piedmonters whom Daniel Boone had led through the Cumberland Gap. Boone had never known distances such as his grandchildren faced in the two-thousand-mile trek over the Oregon Trail. Undertaken primarily for private motives, the migration would have enormous public impact, as the settlements provided the rationale for a national war and tinder for a civil one.

Pioneers and settlers still tended to move along the latitudes. People from the Northeast headed toward the Great Lakes areas and the northern plains. Southerners traveled toward the Gulf seaboard but many turned northwestward in the direction of the lower tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The migrants were caricatured back East as unscrupulous traders or frontier ruffians; many a Boston or New York salon was titillated by tales of bowie knife fights, eye-gouging brawls, and general drunken mayhem, engaged in by ruffians who styled themselves “ring-tailed roarers, half-horse and half-alligator.” But Tocqueville discovered a more literate pioneer; “Everything about him is primitive and wild, but he is himself the result of the labor and experience of eighteen centuries…acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the
present…a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers.”