Empires Apart (35 page)

Right up to the civil war there was constant pressure on Mexico to cede more territory so that it could be absorbed ‘piece by piece', as Jefferson had advocated for Florida. Under the Gadsden Treaty in 1853 Mexico was compelled to sell what would become the southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico; the price paid was the highest in US history: 19m acres at 53 cents an acre.

Mexico was attractive, especially as its mines were considered eminently suitable for slave labour, but the prospective jewel in the southern imperialists' crown was Cuba, for which Spain was offered $130m. American colonists had helped Britain capture Havana in 1762, and were outraged when the island was handed back to Spain. Jefferson and Adams II were among the early American leaders who confidently predicted its early annexation. It became an article of faith in the south in the years leading up to the civil war that Cuba had to be taken. Havana, it was predicted, would become the south's New York – the commercial hub for a tropical empire based entirely on slavery.

Cuba was both an opportunity and a threat for the south. As another slave territory it would tilt the balance of power in their favour. If, on the other hand, Cuban slaves ever gained their freedom it would be another nail in the coffin of slave-holding in the United States. In 1791 a slave revolt had erupted in the French colony of Haiti. Initially many Americans had sympathised with the rebel cause, but when a black republic was declared southern slaveholders were horrified, and the United States imposed an economic embargo (similar to that imposed in the twentieth century on revolutionary Cuba). The thought of another black republic in Cuba was terrifying.

When Colombia and Mexico revealed plans to invade and liberate Cuba the United States was bitterly opposed, and in 1848 the US offered to buy the island. Spain would not sell. Many Cuban Creoles favoured US annexation to head off the gathering pressures for emancipation, and Quitman sponsored four filibuster expeditions under the Cuban Creole Narcisco Lopez, but they all failed. Lopez himself was eventually captured and executed by the Spanish.

When, under pressure from British abolitionists, the Spanish authorities on the island started emancipating the slaves war clouds gathered. If they had not rolled north into the conflagration of the civil war there is little doubt that somewhere along the Cuban coast, perhaps even at the Bay of Pigs, US troops would soon have been wading ashore.

The filibusters were motivated by personal greed and their fears for the future of slavery but in as much as they and the rest of the country had any imperial ideology it was a philosophy that came to be known as manifest destiny. This term was first used by newspaper editor John O'Sullivan in 1845. He was writing specifically about the inevitability of the whole of California becoming part of the United States because, he wrote, ‘the advance guard of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle'. What he called ‘imbecile' Mexico would be unable to hold on to its territory. The philosophy soon came to be applied to more than California; indeed, in the same article O'Sullivan celebrated the future annexation of Canada.

Ever since the Pilgrim Fathers a fundamental conviction of many Americans had been that their actions embodied God's will. After the Mystic Massacre that conviction turned from a simple belief that God willed them to settle and prosper among the savages of the New World to a belief that God expected them to displace those savages. This, combined with the more mercenary motives of men like the filibusters, produced an ideology that not only justified territorial aggrandisement but proclaimed its inevitability. God wanted Americans to use the special gifts he had given them to spread their wings over the globe. As Albert Beveridge, senator from Indiana, told his Senate colleagues, God had decreed that Americans were the ‘master organisers of the world' and should rule over the ‘savage and the senile'.

Right from the nation's birth America's leaders were determined on conquest. Jefferson spoke of the United States covering ‘the whole northern if not the southern continent' and more immediately of taking Florida from Spain ‘piece by piece'. John Quincy Adams declared that ‘the whole continent of North America' was ‘destined by Divine Providence
to be peopled by one nation'. Both men expressed the commonly held view that it was a matter of time before the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico fell into their hands.

In Britain in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries the notion of ‘to the victor belongs the spoils' underpinned not only political life at home but imperial expansion abroad. Greed motivated both. Only with the advent of the Victorians did this give way to something more high-minded. The ending of parliamentary corruption and the creation of a politically independent judiciary at home, and the development of paternalistic notions of ‘the white man's burden' and imperial citizenship overseas, were two sides of the same coin – a belief in public service for its own sake and for the sake of others. Whatever the objective reality, the British believed that in their empire justice and fair play took precedence over self-interest. Such a belief has never existed in Russia. Russian imperialism has always been about glory, about tribute, about spoils. ‘Greed is good' might be a slogan ascribed to modern Wall Street but it would not be out of place as a description of the Russian imperial ideology. In America high-mindedness and greed co-existed from the earliest days of the New England colonies. After the revolution high-mindedness seemed to have come out on top, but the spoils system and the imperial antics of the filibusters showed that greed had not disappeared. This juxtaposition of idealism and greed continued into modern times. After the First World War Woodrow Wilson was determined to ensure a ‘just peace', and joined Britain in opposing French demands for German reparations. After the second invasion of Iraq Bush II rushed to ensure that American corporations (rather than, for example, British) grabbed the spoils of victory.

Whereas Britain claimed to put justice before self-interest, and Russia had no trouble putting self-interest first, America convinced itself that justice and self-interest were the same thing. The essence of empire remained constant – lands that had belonged to someone else were taken away – but America's new ideology fused southern dreams of imperial glory with the northern conviction that God's will informed their every action.

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth two great questions hung over the Russian and American empires: where would their territorial ambitions carry them and what sort of society would their nations become?

The territorial aggrandisements of Russia and America proceeded in parallel. The two mid-century imperial wars, against Mexico and Turkey, set the tone for the next century. America would feel free to intervene anywhere it wanted in the western hemisphere confident that there would be no opposition. Its overwhelming military power ensured that the United States could achieve its imperial ambitions without having to fire a shot (except when Spain tried to flex its withered muscles later in the century). Russia, on the other hand, was once again surrounded by enemies, its every move circumscribed by the ambitions of competing imperial powers. Nevertheless both nations would expand their borders further. In Russia imperial growth was a continuation of a centuries-old pattern, while in America it reflected the innate dynamism of the newly born nation. In both cases the nation's leaders were convinced that their realms were manifestly destined to grow.

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.