Empires Apart (39 page)

In the United States, on the other hand, the abolition of slavery was long regarded as the end of the road; the issue of real civil rights for the descendants of the freed black slaves only became a serious political issue a century later. Today the American Civil War is remembered almost exclusively in terms of the abolition of slavery. It is portrayed as yet another vindication of the values of democracy and the triumph of human rights over manifest evil. The south may have had elements of chivalry and elegance but fundamentally, it is claimed, the war ensured that the core American values of equality and dignity triumphed over
racism and discrimination. The problem is that concepts like racism and discrimination are constructs of a much later age. The Union soldiers may have been determined to destroy the monstrous evil of human beings buying and selling other human beings, but they were not fighting to end racism.

The idea of a racially enlightened north fighting a bigoted south is very far from the truth. General William T. Sherman's writings are full of attacks on natives and Jews, and just eight days before Christmas in 1862 General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling all Jews ‘as a class' from the newly conquered areas of Kentucky, western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Men, women and children were given just twenty-four hours to evacuate their homes and leave the region.

The Jewish experience of the civil war casts an interesting sidelight on the values of the two sides. Jews played an important part in southern life. By the end of the eighteenth century there were a number of important Jewish communities in America; the largest, founded in 1695, was in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time of the civil war the majority of America's Jews lived in the south and had absorbed southern values. Abraham Myers, a graduate of the US military academy at West Point, played an important role in the ethnic cleansing of Florida (the city of Fort Myers is named after him). As many as 10,000 Jews, for example Myers and the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, are thought to have fought for the Confederacy.

The most famous Jewish American of his day was probably Judah Benjamin, the US Senate's first Jewish member. What seems extraordinary today is that Benjamin did not represent cosmopolitan New York or liberal New England but Louisiana in the deep south. Born in the West Indies, Benjamin became a lawyer and plantation owner before entering politics. When war arrived he became secretary of war and later secretary of state in the Confederate government. Despite achieving such high office Benjamin was subject to anti-semitic attacks throughout his career. He was falsely accused by other southern politicians of transferring Confederate funds to his personal bank accounts in Europe, and when
the war was over had to flee to Britain to escape unfounded accusations by northerners that he had plotted Lincoln's assassination.

One of the dangers of any historical study is the temptation to assume that modern paradigms and values can be applied historically. Views that today may be lumped together and labelled left wing or right wing, liberal or conservative, may in earlier days have been regarded as wildly inconsistent. Conversely historical figures may have sincerely held views that at the time seemed readily compatible but today would seem diametrically opposed. One of the men most active in trying to ensure that freedom really meant something practical to newly emancipated slaves was the genocidal militarist and anti-semite General Sherman. In his mind there was nothing incompatible between his conviction that non-whites were inherently inferior and his determination to ensure that freed slaves could live in dignity and relative prosperity. In his Field Order No. 15 Sherman decreed that a great swathe of territory on the Atlantic coast should be appropriated and given to freed slaves, more than 40,000 of whom took advantage of his offer. They did not keep the land for long.

That the war had not been a fight for racial equality became apparent as soon as the war was over. Slavery could never be reimposed, but other gains that had been made by black people were soon reversed.

The desire of many northerners to ensure that blacks received their full civil rights after the war was undoubtedly genuine. The thirteenth amendment proposed before the civil war had sought effectively to enshrine slavery in the constitution for ever; what actually became the thirteenth amendment after the war banned slavery. A Civil Rights Act was embodied in the fourteenth amendment; interestingly it excepted natives and immigrants. Just three days before his assassination Lincoln pledged to give votes to literate blacks and black civil war veterans, and immediately after the war black candidates were victorious in a number of local elections. The fifteenth amendment made it illegal to prohibit anyone from voting on the basis of their colour, and in 1868 General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president thanks in part to support from
700,000 newly enfranchised black voters. However, intimidation soon made a mockery of declarations of equality.

Lincoln's successors moved quickly to heal the divisions of war, and that meant healing the wounds of southern whites by reversing the gains made by blacks. Slavery was replaced by what on another continent would be called apartheid. In one notorious case a man named Plessy, who had seven white great-grandparents and one black, was jailed in Louisiana for travelling in a whites-only carriage. The case was heard right up to the Supreme Court, who in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 upheld the conviction, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection for blacks did not mean that states could not treat the races differently. The apartheid doctrine of separate but nominally equal was sanctified by the United States Supreme Court more than sixty years before its application in South Africa. The right of former slaves to vote was effectively removed soon after the civil war, and laws were put in place throughout the south that obliged blacks to enter long term labour contracts and stopped them from leaving their plantations to seek work. Many of the former slaves who had claimed land were forcibly removed as the old southern power structures reappeared. Slavery had been abolished and with it the gross inhumanities associated with the breeding and trading of human beings as if they were cattle, but the day-to-day lives of most of the freed slaves changed very little.

The same was basically true on the other side of the world. Emancipation of the serfs achieved less in reality than many of those fighting for reform had hoped. With their freedom the serfs also received land (something that critically did not happen when US slavery was abolished), but the land was not free. The peasants were expected to pay for it over an extended period, and as a consequence many were soon deep in debt.

The emancipations of serfs and slaves have long been held up as key events in the histories of both Russia and America, and yet the reality is that in both cases emancipation proved largely illusory. Peter Neville concludes that ‘There is an uncanny historical parallel between the
emancipation of the serfs in Russia and Abraham Lincoln's freeing of the black slaves in the USA in 1863. Lincoln (like Alexander) recognised the evil nature of slavery, and that in addition no democracy could exist “half slave and half free”. He too compromised in the Gettysburg address by only freeing the slaves in the Confederate-held states (a fact that is often forgotten). The black slaves received no land, but their freedom also proved to be an illusion in the bitter aftermath of the American Civil War in the southern states. Their disappointment therefore was as great as that of their counterparts in Russia.'

The main difference between the twin emancipations of serf and slave was one of perception. The emancipation of American slaves was perceived to have resolved the burning moral and political issue of the day, whereas the emancipation of the serfs was quickly perceived to have solved nothing. Slaves were legally free and, with the American predisposition to equate legality with justice, this satisfied the abolitionists in their largely black-free states. Theirs had never been a class struggle in the Russian sense; they had not been trying to narrow the enormous gap between rich and poor in American society. They were fighting for the rights of slaves as individuals, not as a class. The Russian peasants, however, had been struggling to change their place in society and to share in the wealth of their ‘betters'; they were not going to be bought off by a few legal niceties. For them substance was always more important than form.

The struggle for the soul of America during the civil war had minimal impact on the other great theme of American history, the quest for empire. The latter half of the nineteenth century is often painted as the high point of European imperialism in which the tentacles of the European powers spread out over Africa and Asia. The imperialists of St Petersburg and Washington were no less active.

For Russia, defeat in the Crimean War had merely redirected the imperial urge. Just as America conquered territory in the south-west piece by piece the gradual extension of the Russian empire's boundaries to the
south continued slowly but steadily. All the land between the Caspian and Black seas was annexed. Tashkent was taken and made the capital of the governor-generalship of Turkestan. What is today Uzbekistan was seized step by step: the emirate of Bukhara and the khanate of Samarkand in 1868, the khanate of Khiva in 1873 and of Kokand in 1876. America expanded its imperial power directly by outright annexation, as in Florida or Texas, and indirectly through controlling the local ruling elite, as in much of Central America and the Caribbean. Russia did the same: Kokand was annexed outright, while Khiva and Bukhara remained as vassal states under their native rulers.

In America in the decade before the civil war the Sioux were forced out of Iowa and Minnesota and southern plutocrats, anxious to pre-empt their northern counterparts and ensure that the first rail link to the Pacific coast took a southern route, pushed through the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico. Northerners were as ardent imperialists as southerners. New York governor William Seward congratulated Canadians on ‘building states to be hereafter admitted to the American union' and opposed the annexation of Cuba only as long as slavery persisted on the island. As secretary of state after the civil war he bought Alaska from the Russians for just $7.2m. (The price was a record low for the territorial purchases made by the United States: 375m acres at just 2 cents an acre.) Seward's ambitions did not stop there. America would become, he declared, ‘in a very few years the controlling influence in the world'. This, he correctly predicted, would not be through military conquest but by dominating global commerce, what he described as achieving ‘the empire of the world'. He advocated raising tariffs to protect the home market while forcing open in whatever way necessary markets overseas. He was particularly keen to control the trade in the Pacific, and one of his achievements was to gain US possession of the Midway Islands.

After the war the US army waged overtly genocidal campaigns against the Plains Indians and the natives of the south-west; American filibusters were caught and executed while supporting rebels in Cuba; the government of Hawaii was overthrown and the islands annexed;
above all, the United States declared war on Spain in 1898 and, in a tactic followed by Japan forty-three years later at Pearl Harbor, launched a pre-emptive attack on Spain's Pacific fleet. At the end of the Spanish-American War the United States held Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam. Nobody could be in any doubt that America had now joined Russia as a truly imperial power.

The religious commentator and historian John Robert Seely was not alone in warning of the dangers to the established European order: ‘If the United States and Russia hold together for another half-century, they will at the end of that time completely dwarf such old European states as France and Germany.'Seely's response was to call for the strengthening of the British empire, a call that made his book
The Expansion of England
into a bestseller.

Nowadays Britain's imperial past has become the subject of ridicule. The work of the most famous literary exponent of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, is held up as an example of the racist claptrap that disappeared with the sahibs and memsahibs of the British India Kipling inhabited and extolled. And yet when Kipling wrote his most famous stories, the two Jungle Books, he was living not in the imperial grandeur of Delhi or Bombay but in republican Vermont with his American wife. His most infamous poem, ‘The White Man's Burden', was not a panegyric for the British empire, even though the classrooms of British public schools rang out with heartfelt renditions of the opening verse:

Take up the White Man's burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need

Kipling wrote the poem not to glorify a British empire on which the sun was yet to set but as an appeal to the empire he saw rising in its place. ‘The White Man's Burden' was Kipling's call to the United States government to take on the role of colonial stewardship of the Philippines, recently conquered in the Spanish-American War.

Americans, however, were not keen to take on the white man's burden. Their concept of conquest was derived from the frontier, where the natives once defeated could be forgotten. The peculiar circumstances of the western frontier have formed the American imperial character that continues to this day: the objective is to conquer; once the battles are over the peace will look after itself, and liberty will prevail just as it did west of the Mississippi. Of course the American way of life prevailed west of the Mississippi because American settlers took it there, something that was clearly not going to happen when America conquered the Philippines in the nineteenth century or Iraq in the twenty-first.

The civil war changed the dynamics of American imperialism. The southern pressure to create new slave states, and so maintain the balance of power in the Senate, was replaced by northern commercial pressures. As America's foreign policy became more interventionist southerners, fearful of enhancing the status of the federal government and the power of northern corporations, campaigned against territorial aggrandisement in Latin America and the annexation of Hawaii. Domestic politics may have changed but to the outside world US imperial policy continued as before.