American History Revised (34 page)

It was not to be. By the end of 1866 the United States Army was down to 25,000 men—the fastest military downsizing in world history.
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President Andrew Johnson refrained from seizing Canada, and instead settled America’s shipping claims against the British for $15.5 million. He sent General Phil Sheridan to the Rio Grande to remind the French that the Monroe Doctrine still applied to Mexico, but went no further. Observes the historian Robert Leckie, “Europe was astonished … she could not understand—as modern despotisms still do not understand—that a nation may be martial without being militarist.”

Years later, on December 6, 1941, when Japan broke off peace negotiations, it was suggested to the president that the United States launch a preemptive strike. FDR refused. “This means war,” he said. “No, we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people.”

After the war his successor reaffirmed this distinction in the most official manner possible. In 1945, by executive order,
President Harry Truman made a major change to the eagle on the presidential seal: he had the eagle’s head turned away from the arrows and toward the olive branch.

Democracy (power to the people) and peace go hand in hand. Whenever the United States embarked on far-flung imperialist adventures, it had to be quick (Santo Domingo, Grenada, Kuwait). Whenever it got bogged down, such as in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, voter aversion would compel withdrawal, not because we couldn’t win but because the fight was not worth it. In addition, inevitably there would be substantial collateral deaths of innocent civilians, costing us our all-important “moral advantage” and the loss of friends. Said Samuel Adams back in 1775, “Put your enemy in the wrong, and keep him so, is a wise maxim in politics, as well as in war.” “Moral advantage” is a little-appreciated but fundamental concept of effective foreign policy. There is a saying, says the historian John Freeman Clarke, that “should be engraved over the mantel of the Oval Office to remind every President: ‘We are friends of liberty everywhere but we do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’”

This saying, of course, comes from the Monroe Doctrine (written by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, not by President James Monroe). Best known for its warning to the European powers to stay away from meddling in Latin American affairs, its more important message is its warning to ourselves. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” asked George Washington. “When civilizations take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “they sacrifice their moral advantage.”

In 1896, Harvard president Charles Eliot put militarism in its proper perspective: “The building of a navy and the presence of a large standing army mean … the abandonment of what is characteristically American….The building of a navy and particularly of battleships is English and French policy. It should never be ours.” This principle was reaffirmed in 1947 when the National Security Council was formed. Its charter reads, “To preserve the United States as a free nation with our fundamental institutions and values intact.”

Finally, consider the man who was America’s greatest military leader. He did not go to Annapolis or West Point. He was not a general. He never fought in war, or killed a man. But when war came, he rose to the occasion with a sterling military performance. The war was the Civil War. When it started, the head Union commander was George B. McClellan—the idol of his troops, second in his class at West Point, author of a text on the art of war, the ultimate professional soldier. If résumés could win wars, the Union had its man.

But even résumés have their limitations: the man has to be the right person
for the particular job. Opposing McClellan were Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson, both masters of defense: strike, withdraw, strike again. The Confederate states with their deep forests and valleys offered perfect terrain in which to wage hide-and-seek warfare. McClellan was the master of large confrontations, and therefore kept calling for more reinforcements. When he went in to fight, he usually found that the enemy had slipped away.

The winning strategy was developed by a man with no military experience. But he was observant and curious. He spent hours upon days in the War Department’s telegraph office reading and sending telegrams to his generals (the e-mails of the day). He sent an assistant to the Library of Congress to bring him some good books on warfare, which he read at night. After several weeks of reading, he noted that the superior forces belonged to the Union, but that the Confederates had better generals and greater mobility to shift their troops to particular points. The only way to win this troublesome war, he concluded, would be to engage the Confederate forces on many points simultaneously: eventually one or more points would give way and the Union forces could cause disarray.

Most people told him to forget it, that such a policy was amateurish: the war would be over in a year or two, anyway.

What did he know about how to win a war? Who was he to be such an authority from reading a couple of books?

But the man persisted and got his “bookish” ideas implemented by issuing commands and signing his name at the bottom “A. Lincoln.” Most historians today rank Lincoln number one among our presidents, for his leadership in preserving the Union and bringing slavery to an end. Major credit, moreover, should be given him for his contributions as a military leader. No president fulfilled the responsibility of commander-in-chief as he did.
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1772
Lord Clive, the great British military hero who refused to go to America to fight the American rebels, envisioned America as eventually taking over the entire New World: “That the Americans will sooner or later take all of the Spanish possessions and make Cape Horn the boundary of their empire is beyond a doubt.” Imagine, from Boston to the tip of Tierra del Fuego!

Four years later Benjamin Franklin was in Paris, outlining various conditions for peace that might be negotiated with England. He demanded more than just
independence; he demanded that Great Britain cede to the yet-to-be-established United States a sum of money for all of Canada, the Floridas, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the West Indies, and even Ireland “if it wished.” Of course this didn’t happen, but the precedent was set: Americans think big.

At the end of the Mexican War, the U.S. added Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and California to its borders. When President Polk asked the Senate to ratify the treaty with Mexico, a dozen senators objected and said no. Why?

They wanted to annex all of Mexico.

Among the defenders of American aggression in Mexico were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. “Was it such a misfortune,” Marx asked sarcastically, “that glorious California has been wrenched from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Engels went even further, saying that “in the interest of its own development, Mexico should be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

In fact, the American expansion across the West and on to the Pacific is not the history of imperialism, but the denial of it. The dozen senators who wanted to annex Mexico were a minority at the time, and also throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. America took several territories after 1840, but relinquished most of them. For a clearer picture of American “imperialism,” we might try looking not at what America did take, but rather at the territories it did
not
take. The “glass half empty” suggests a different story from the “glass half full.”

Here are American empires that never happened:

The prospect of annexing Mexico intrigued the Founding Fathers; in 1798 Alexander Hamilton, retired from office after serving as Washington’s treasury secretary and most powerful advisor, drew up specific plans for taking over Mexico. His fellow Federalist, President John Adams, said no (Hamilton must be “stark mad,” he said). In 1846 the U.S. finally took over Texas, a full ten years after Texas had won independence from Mexico and sought American statehood. The U.S., fearful of starting a war with Mexico, had insisted that Texas remain an independent republic, despite the advice of Marx and Engels. President Polk had his eyes on Mexico, but backpedaled fast lest he jeopardize what little congressional support he had for New Mexico and California. Congress was in no mood for reckless acquisitions.

The vision of a north-south empire excited many Americans ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Walt Whitman to Henry Cabot Lodge. Jefferson had wanted to seize Canada during the American
Revolution. He also wanted more. “We must have the Floridas and Cuba,” he said during his last days as president. When it was proposed that the United States establish a penal colony in Cuba for Negro criminals, Jefferson rejected the idea only because the United States might end up someday annexing the territory.

Said Henry Adams in 1869, “That the whole continent of North America and all its adjacent islands must at last fall under the control of the United States is a conviction absolutely ingrained in our people.”

Americans would have none of it. Expansionists salivating about the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines had to hold their breath while the Senate met to vote on the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The treaty passed—by barely one vote. In 1907 the powerful Speaker of the House, Champ Clark, led the ratification of the proposed reciprocity treaty with Canada: “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole.” His loose lips cost him plenty: Canada promptly rejected the reciprocity treaty, and the Democratic chieftains the following year rejected the candidacy of Champ Clark for the presidential nomination.

Even in America’s most expansionist mood—after the Civil War—Secretary of State William Seward got nowhere. He got Alaska, a frozen tundra the Russians didn’t want, but little else. The acquisition of Hawaii and Samoa got nowhere in the Senate.

Even after its overwhelming victory over Spain in 1898, the U.S. refrained from incorporating conquered territories into the Union. Cuba was left untouched, the Philippines were set free forty years later, Puerto Rico remained an affiliate, and it was not until 1960 that Alaska and Hawaii became states.

1776
American soldiers in Vietnam complained bitterly about the lack of support from their fellow Americans at home. But nonsupport for our fighting men is nothing new. Profiteering in war and dodging the draft are long-standing American traditions.

During the American Revolution, almost as many inhabitants of the American colonies fought for the British as for the Continental Army: seven thousand loyalists versus eight thousand patriots. During the brutal winter at Valley Forge, George Washington’s troops were starving not because there was no local food available, but because the colonial farmers preferred to go to Philadelphia and sell their food to the British, who could pay more.

Even more treacherous was the War of 1812, in which two thirds of the beef
eaten by the British army was provided by American traders. Without this food, the British army could not have survived against the Americans. Rail against this though he might, President James Madison could do nothing: his more basic problem was finding enough men to fight. Out of a vast force of 500,000 men called upon to serve, only 35,000 troops were in uniform at the war’s peak in 1814. And this total was achieved only by offering generous bounties to prospective recruits, who rarely served more than a year anyway.

In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln relied on the states to raise volunteers—an effort derided by General William Tecumseh Sherman as “putting out the flames of a burning house with a squirt gun.” When it became clear that the war would drag on and would require longer terms of service duty, President Lincoln resorted to forced conscription. The 1863 Enrollment Act, requiring all able-bodied males to register for three-year service, was not well received: New York City was racked by a bloody four-day draft riot, and thousands of recruits—including a future U.S. president, Grover Cleveland—paid the government a $300 “commutation” fee to escape service. Instead of raising the needed 300,000 troops, the Enrollment Act raised only 150,000—and three quarters of those were paid “substitutes.” In the South, conscription problems were even worse. Whereas the Confederacy had a half-million men under arms in 1863, within a year the number had plummeted to 200,000. The war ended with more Southern troops literally hiding out in the woods and under haystacks than reporting to duty.