Empires Apart (31 page)

The north African coast was a dangerous place for American ships, which had previously enjoyed the protection of the British navy. Depending on which version is believed, a horde of savage Barbary pirates terrorised peaceful merchantmen or arrogant Christian sailors refused to pay the tributes due to local Muslim rulers. As ships were liable to attack when they were nowhere near the north African coast, the former may be somewhat closer to the truth. In 1804 US navy captain Stephen Decatur had led a night-time raid to rescue a captured American ship and its crew; the raid failed, and the crew languished in jail for two more years until the US Senate agreed to ransom them, but even Admiral Nelson was moved to applaud Decatur's daring. A year later a contingent of US sailors, marines and mercenaries marched 600 miles across the Libyan desert to capture an obscure fort near Tripoli on the north African coast – an event of no historical significance and one that by now would be totally forgotten but for its celebration in the opening line of the US marines' official hymn, ‘From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli'.

With their confidence invigorated in the war against Britain, the US navy sailed into the lions' dens again. The first American bombardment of Tripoli took place in 1815, 131 years before President Reagan repeated the exercise. Within months the navy, under Decatur, by now a commodore, had imposed treaties on Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Decatur returned to a hero's welcome and at the state banquet in his honour famously proposed the toast ‘Our country right or wrong'. Shortly afterwards he was killed duelling with a fellow officer.

It is sometimes imagined that in the early days of the United States the nation's focus was entirely on establishing itself on the North American continent, but the reality is that the US saw itself as a world power almost from its inception. It was also seen as such by others. Denmark and Sweden were among the nations that funded the US navy's operations
on the Barbary coast, presaging a pattern to be repeated right up to the first Iraq War. Catherine the Great had developed the concept of nations banding together to enforce ‘armed neutrality', but thirty years later it was America rather than Russia that was acting as the world's policeman.

The US navy was soon demonstrating America's new role again, this time in the South Atlantic. The Malvinas/Falkland Islands were claimed by Britain but occupied by an Argentine cattle baron, whose animals were tempting targets for the crews of American whaling ships. Eventually tiring of these depredations, the Argentines burnt two of the rustlers' ships. The US navy responded immediately, not by policing the activities of American whalers but by clearing all Argentines from the islands. In so doing America almost accidentally paved the way for Britain to take possession of the vacant islands, creating a permanent sense of injustice in Argentina that more than a century and a half later would lead to war.

Although the US navy remained small when compared with European counterparts, at least until the 1880s, it proved a highly effective extension to US diplomacy. Japan, for example, had the temerity to declare itself closed to foreigners; the closure lasted for two centuries until the US navy sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and made the emperor an offer he could not refuse. Eighteen years later a US naval task force was sent to Korea, the ‘Hermit Kingdom', and when the Koreans made the mistake of opening fire it attacked the defenders' forts, killing everyone inside. Korea realised it stood no chance against the ‘barbarians' and opened up its markets.

Closer to home, the War of 1812 had left the Canadian border unchanged, but the US had taken advantage of the conflict to strike at the native tribes on its frontiers. The native leader Tecumseh was finally killed fighting alongside the British and Andrew Jackson, on his way to routing the British at New Orleans, put down a native uprising with exemplary ferocity. When the war was over Jackson led a punitive campaign against the Seminoles in Florida. The fact that the Seminole villages were on Spanish not American soil did not stop Jackson burning them down. The Florida natives were not the only ones to
suffer. A small community of former slaves had established itself on the Apalachicola river inside Spanish Florida. The very existence of such a settlement was regarded as a threat to the United States, and in 1816 American troops supported by a naval gunboat and native mercenaries attacked and destroyed it. Prefiguring the attack on tiny Grenada 167 years later, the US responded to international outrage by insisting it was acting in ‘self-defence'.

Florida remained Spanish, but Spain was no longer a power to be reckoned with. Jackson marched into northern Florida in what became known as the First Seminole War. He used the same savage tactics against the native Seminoles as he had used against the natives of Alabama, tactics Mongol-like in their terror and devastation. An attempt was made to subject him to congressional censure for his behaviour during the campaign, which included the summary execution of prisoners (among them two Britons seized when Jackson took the Spanish port of St Marks). Most of the cabinet were in favour of censure, as Jackson's actions threatened to precipitate war with both Britain and Spain, but the motion failed. The only cabinet member to support Jackson was John Quincy Adams, who had learnt as ambassador to the Russian court the value of decisive military action in expanding the frontiers of empire.

Spain was powerless to protect its native subjects, and in 1821 bowed to the inevitable and sold the state for $5m. Jackson became Florida's first governor and settlers poured in, preceded by southern slave catchers who rounded up runaway slaves, free blacks and natives for shipping to the new plantations in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Jackson himself was soon on the move again – his target this time being the White House. In 1824 he was defeated; four years later he made it. In the meantime, in 1825, Alexander I, the last great Russian tsar, had died.

CHAPTER 8

DETERMINED OPPORTUNISM AND CONQUEST

As the nineteenth century progressed the imperial ambitions of Russia and America began to move in parallel, but their ideologies of empire remained very different.

The Russian approach to their empire was simple: it was theirs by right of conquest; no more needed to be said. For Americans pushing to the Mississippi and beyond the position was not as simple. The ideology that underpinned America's existence as a nation was based on a commitment to the rights of man, rights that did not include the right of conquest. Those in their way, whether French, Spanish or native, might represent inferior civilisations or even no civilisation at all, but they were still men. Conquest smacked of theft; to take what had belonged to others there needed to be agreement. But how to make an agreement with natives who had no concept of property? And more fundamentally, how to make an agreement with natives who had no incentive to give up their land? The answer was provided in Britain in the ideas of men like John Locke and Adam Smith, ideas that eventually coalesced into the principles of capitalism. Fundamental to the efficient working of society, they argued, was private property, which the Almighty had bestowed not for its own sake but so that it could be used to benefit all. The natives might regard land as just
another part of nature like air or water, which enabled them to hunt and gather all they needed, but that was not what God intended. Land was there to be tilled in order to produce crops that could be traded. It was the concept of commerce that was fundamental to the ethical justification of American territorial aggrandisement. The purpose of land was to grow food for the townspeople back east, to produce crops to export in return for European imports, to offer up gold and silver to further oil the wheels of commerce. The natives were not ‘using' their land in the way that God and ‘civilisation' demanded, and therefore they should let somebody else take over. Similarly Latin American and Caribbean republics were not governing themselves properly, and so the US had a duty to intervene. As Robert Kagan has pointed out, the same rationale for imposing American values on other cultures would be heard again as American corporations justified their quest for ‘globalisation'.

America's imperial ambitions emerged erratically from its ideology rather than being part of some grand imperial design. Kagan, writing about the American purchase of Louisiana, violent conquest of Florida and opportunistic acquisition of Pacific coastline in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, noted the paradox that ‘American leaders had a clear vision of a continental empire' but ‘had no specific plans to obtain it'. Imperial expansion in the period he characterised as ‘determined opportunism'. Russia's imperial strategies were much more straightforward.

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.

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.'