Empires Apart (21 page)

The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was a classic example. It guaranteed that neither Britain nor America would try to exercise exclusive control over any future Panama canal, but by the time the canal was built the United States felt strong enough not to worry about British influence in the region. Just as treaties with the natives were ignored, as soon as circumstances allowed President Grant demanded ‘an American canal on American soil', by which he meant not moving the canal north but moving the American border south. In the words of a later US president, the canal should be ‘virtually a part of the coastline of the United States'. The Clayton-Bulwer treaty – like countless American treaties before and after – was consigned to the bin.

The apparent contradiction between the principles of justice and fair play espoused by the early settlers and the reality that was enacted was resolved by a developing belief among the immigrants that if just rules were being followed then by definition just outcomes were being achieved. If a contract is properly drawn up and properly executed then by definition it is a just contract. The central question of western European philosophy, ‘when is an action just?', became in America, ‘when is an action legal?' That difference in emphasis remains to this day. After the Enron financial scandal in 2002, when company executives amassed millions of dollars by
creating fictitious ‘off balance sheet' entities, British accountants insisted that it could not have happened in the UK because of the fundamental principle of British accounting, ‘substance over form'. In Britain all the rules can be complied with but the substance of the transaction can still be deemed illegal. In America an action must comply with all the rules to be legal, and if all the rules are complied with the action is legal.

Ironically the assertion by the early settlers that their treaties were legal and therefore just is used today in ways that would have horrified them. Davy Crockett TV star Fess Parker went into partnership with the Chumash tribe to develop a massive resort in Santa Barbara, California, arguing that the Chumash were a sovereign nation under ancient treaties, and thus not subject to city council zoning regulations – a consequence surely unanticipated when the treaties were signed.

On a more fundamental level, in their dealings with the natives the first settlers established the mental precedent that processes and principles are the same thing. Thus the processes of democracy came to be indistinguishable from democracy itself, so that in modern times America can install the institutions of representative government in Vietnam or Iraq and then assert, with apparent sincerity, that the resultant regimes are by definition democratic. The institutions of representative government appeared in some American colonies almost as soon as the first settlers arrived. In its fullest form, however, American democracy can be said to have originated with the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788. Before that could happen the new nation had to break away from the British empire.

With hindsight the American rebellion against British rule was one of the most profoundly important events in world history. At the time the rest of the world thought of it as a relatively minor piece of theatre in a global conflict. However bitter the fighting in North America, and however momentous the conclusion, the eyes of the rest of the world were not upon it. It is impossible to understand how English colonists were able to transform themselves into the American nation without understanding
what was happening across the Atlantic. In Europe the most important events of the period were happening in the centre of the continent. Russia, Austria and Prussia had between them annexed half of Poland. Austria and Prussia were thrown into the War of Bavarian Succession, and Russia turned its eyes south towards the Ottoman empire, effectively annexing the Crimea and gaining ports on the Black Sea for the first time. Russians colonised down the Volga as energetically as Americans wanted to push to the Mississippi.

On the fringes of Europe were nations not yet ready to intervene in the cauldron of Central European politics. England, Holland and France had long since joined Spain and Portugal in the race for empire. At one time even Scotland, then still fiercely independent, had a colony in Central America, the disastrous failure of which financially ruined the Edinburgh establishment and helped create the conditions for union with England. France especially had emerged as a major power and one determined to establish its authority in both the old world and the new.

The French imperial model contained elements of both the Russian and the English. Like Russia, France's imperial expansion was driven by the state, although not necessarily by the monarch: Louis XV's idea of a call to arms was to throw himself into the embrace of Mme de Pompadour or Mme du Barry. It is interesting to speculate what Peter the Great made of the French monarch's predilections during his extravagant state visit to France in 1717.

In the Americas the early French colonists were just like the early English: they much preferred the West Indies to more northern climes. Despite the high mortality rates ten times as many headed for the Caribbean as for Canada, taking with them shiploads of African slaves. Those French emigrants who survived settled into a life of plantations and piracy. Like the English, much smaller numbers went north to the fishing grounds of Acadia and inland along the St Lawrence river. The French explorer Jacques Cartier ventured along the St Lawrence as far as what is now Montreal in the 1530s, but disease and native hostility compelled early settlements to be abandoned. The French founded a
series of trading posts along the Canadian coast, but these too usually succumbed to disease, natives or English pirates. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec. Twenty years later the settlement still had a population of less than a hundred, all men.

As in Siberia the prime rationale for colonising Canada was fur, and to obtain that fur the French needed traders rather than settlers. By 1660 the French had 3,500 colonists in Canada (including the fishing settlements of Acadia) compared with 58,000 English colonists on the mainland. Like their Cossack counterparts, the French travelled enormous distances into the unexplored. In 1682 La Salle travelled right down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

The prospect of encircling the English colonies, which had just spread south to Carolina, appealed to Louis XIV and La Salle was sent back to the Gulf to plant a colony at the Mississippi's mouth. Incredibly he couldn't find the river again and was murdered by his own men, who were themselves then wiped out by Karankawa natives. His successors did found a number of small settlements in what they called Louisiana (a region much larger than the modern state of the same name), but they never had the numbers of the English. In the eighteenth century France encouraged more colonial settlement, both willing (hard-working German Catholics were particularly important) and unwilling (criminals transported from France and slaves transported from west Africa). Like Carolina, Louisiana soon had a slave majority. At the same time settlers started to farm along the St Lawrence, although always in smaller numbers than in the English colonies to the south. In the vast hinterland the French imperial interests continued to be represented by traders and occasional military garrisons – one on the site of the old native metropolis of Cahokia. In the middle of the century the largest French town in the interior, Detroit, had a population of just 600. In practice the French ‘encirclement' of the British colonies advocated by the authorities in Paris and feared by some in London was more apparent than real.

By the end of the seventeenth century the east coast of North America was speckled with very different colonies. In part these differences reflected
different national characteristics; the Spanish, for example, were the only imperialists for whom religious conversion of the natives assumed any importance. More important were the different physical conditions the colonists encountered. Although most English colonies followed a policy of ethnic cleansing, in Canada the Hudson's Bay Company wanted furs not farms and followed a native policy more like the Russians in Siberia: exploitation not extinction. By contrast French plantation owners in Louisiana, unlike the French further north, soon developed an explicit policy of genocide to clear the land they seized, committing Mystic-type massacres and glorying in the natives' extinction. As one French priest said of the native population, ‘God wishes that they yield their place to new people.'

Although the various colonies were growing, some of them very rapidly, there was plenty of space for them to grow into once the native populations had been cleared. They did not need to fight each other, and at the start of the eighteenth century there was no indication that a single, dramatically different, power would have effective control of most of the continent by the turn of the next century.

The form of government that in Russia would last right up until the twentieth century emerged out of the turbulent period under Ivan the Terrible, the Time of Troubles. The type of government that has persisted in America was formed after a similar period of turmoil. The eighteenth century in North America was marked by almost continuous conflict between immigrants and natives, but – much more important historically – it was also caught up in similarly continuous conflict between the European powers.

In Europe the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14) was followed by a host of other conflicts across the continent: the War of Polish Succession (1733–38), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and so on. Not all of them spilled over into the colonies of the New World, but most of them did.

The War of Spanish Succession pitted France, Spain and Bavaria against Austria, Holland, England and various German princes in a
dispute about whether the king of Spain should be French or Austrian. English colonists in North America were off the mark quickly with an unsuccessful attack on the Spanish in Florida. The French, with their Indian allies, retaliated with attacks on New England, and in 1708 captured St John's, Newfoundland. The English launched counterattacks on Canada, with support from the Royal Navy, but failed to capture anything more significant than Port Royal in Acadia. North America was a militarily irrelevant sideshow, and all the famous battles (like Blenheim and Ramillies) were fought in Europe. In order to maintain its national borders and keep control of the Spanish throne, France gave up Acadia under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The English (or more correctly since the 1707 Act of Union the British) rechristened their new colony Nova Scotia. Despite its potentially strategic position, few American colonists wanted to live there, and after the next war 2,500 immigrants were shipped out from Britain to found the city of Halifax as a counterweight to the French in Quebec and Montréal. In the meantime the French moved to strengthen their position on the continent by building an enormous fortress on Cape Breton Island. Known as the Gibraltar of America, the fortress of Louisburg had walls 40 feet thick, an 80 foot wide moat, the latest artillery and a garrison of 1600 soldiers.

Despite the formal peace French privateers used Louisburg as a base to attack British shipping. Further south British and British-American smugglers continued to flout Spanish colonial regulations. In 1739 Britain and Spain were at war again in the War of Jenkins' Ear. British attacks on Florida and Spanish attacks on Georgia and South Carolina all failed, and in 1744 France intervened. By now the conflict was called the War of Austrian Succession. Again, the French and their native allies attacked all along the frontiers of New England and Nova Scotia. In response a massive colonial force was put together under the command of a wealthy Maine merchant, William Pepperell, with troops from the New England colonies, ships from the West Indies, artillery from New York and provisions from Pennsylvania. Supported by the Royal Navy, Louisburg was taken after a forty-seven day siege in June 1745. The significance
of the Louisburg victory lay not in the capture of territory but in what it said about the stage of development reached by Britain's American colonies. The colonial oligarchs had put together an army many thousand strong and defeated a major European power. Admittedly the arrival of a British fleet had proved decisive in cutting off the French garrison but the victory belonged to the colonial army. It was a forewarning of events just thirty-six years later at Yorktown, when another colonial army repeated the same feat but with Britain and France playing on opposite sides.

Louisburg was a startling victory for the colonists, but it went almost unnoticed back in London; all eyes there were looking north. Within days of the news that Louisburg had fallen there began what might have been called the War of British Succession. The Jacobite leader Bonnie Prince Charlie, with French support, landed in Scotland and marched south to reclaim the throne from its German occupant, the Hanoverian George II. He reached Derby and, with a French army preparing to invade as well, the citizens of London were in a state of almost total panic. They had no interest in events across the Atlantic. The Jacobite advance was only stopped when a Hanoverian double agent persuaded the Jacobite leaders that a non-existent army was blocking their way to the capital. The Bonnie Prince turned round and marched back north. The twenty-four-year-old Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, who had been summoned back from his role as commander-in-chief of the allied forces in the War of Austrian Succession, took command of his father's troops and chased after the retreating Jacobites. He caught up with them on the killing fields of Culloden (often wrongly characterised as an English massacre of Scots; in reality Cumberland's army included many Lowland Scots and even some Highlanders). After the battle Cumberland embarked on a sadistic reign of terror across the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, which destroyed a vibrant culture and prompted yet another stream of emigrants to the New World.

Two years later, in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain gave Louisburg back to France in exchange for the much more attractive prize of Madras in India.