Empires Apart (26 page)

Catherine is another of those Russian leaders credited with opening up the country to the west, in her case particularly to France. Russian aristocrats frequented the salons of Paris and their children were introduced to the literature and music of France by the French tutors they brought back with them. French language and manners came to dominate the imperial court. Catherine herself entered into regular correspondence with Voltaire, quoted Montesquieu and invited Diderot to visit St Petersburg. She bought one of the largest collections of Old Masters in Europe, previously owned by Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. She was, it is said, a child of the Enlightenment, although her liberal reforms tended to be restricted to matters, like the education of girls, that did not threaten the core prerogatives of the regime.

Like that other ‘Great' westerniser, Peter the Great, at heart Catherine the Great remained an autocrat of the traditional school. The new philosophies spawned the American Revolution and then, even more alarmingly, the French Revolution, and Catherine took fright. When Diderot published his
Encyclopedie
Catherine banned it, and when the Orthodox Metropolitan Arseny Matseevich questioned her interference in church affairs she had him thrown into prison.

It would have been inconceivable for a foreign-born woman to lead America, as Catherine the Great led Russia, if only because neither women nor the foreign-born could stand as candidates in presidential elections. American presidents were to be white male Protestants. In the early days it looked as though the new nation might develop its own informal aristocracy; four of the first six presidents were slave-holding Virginia oligarchs and the other two were a father and son from one of New England's patrician dynasties. Later presidents were less aristocratic and two forces emerged to shape the political leadership. The first was an institution for whom the term ‘force' was particularly apposite – the army, from whose ranks a great many presidential candidates emerged. The second was political parties.

Although not foreseen when the constitution was drafted, parties almost immediately became a fundamental part of American political life. In Russia's imperial court factions jostled for influence, but open opposition to the tsar's policies was pointless; with very few exceptions personal ambitions did not extend as far as replacing the tsar. In America, on the other hand, factions could hope that open opposition would be rewarded at the next election. The Founding Fathers divided into a southern faction known as Republicans and a northern faction, the Federalists.

The Federalists soon showed that Americans could be just as tyrannous as any British king or Russian empress. The 1798 Sedition Act introduced the US version of crimes against the state, making the publication of ‘any false, scandalous and malicious writing' a high misdemeanour. Twenty-five Republicans were quickly arrested, most of them editors whose
newspapers were simultaneously shut down. Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon was thrown into prison for criticising President Adams's ‘ridiculous pomp'. When Jefferson and the Republicans took power in 1800 the Sedition Act was repealed, and all those who had been convicted were pardoned. Not until the 1948 Smith Act was merely advocating a political belief once again made a federal crime.

Thomas Jefferson envisaged a rough egalitarianism in which all white males would be more or less equal. On the other hand Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists regarded the rule of the ‘well-born' as both inevitable and desirable (an odd creed for a bastard). Hamilton is sometimes described as a ‘typical' New Yorker, but he was born and brought up on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, one of the colonial outposts that remained loyal to Britain, and always retained a lingering attachment to the mother country and its aristocratic mores. As secretary of the treasury he set the financial priorities of the new nation, and the main priority was the maintenance of oligarchy. In Morison's words, Hamilton determined that ‘The old families, merchant-ship owners, public creditors, and financiers must be made a loyal governing class by a straightforward policy favouring their interests.'

In fighting for independence the state and federal governments had amassed considerable debts, and Hamilton proposed to pay them off by raising taxes; for him this was essential to establish the creditworthiness of the United States in the fledgling international capital markets. But some states, like Virginia, had already repaid their debt and saw no reason they should foot the bill for states like Massachusetts which hadn't. The original loan certificates had been issued to revolutionary soldiers in lieu of pay or represented loans made by patriotic citizens who, in many cases, had given up all hope of having their money returned, and had sold their certificates for virtually nothing. There was outrage that rather than repaying the original holders, £80m of previously worthless paper was now in the hands of speculators – including it is said members of Hamilton's wife's family – who were set to make a fortune. Nevertheless Hamilton went ahead.

In the long run it was Hamilton's proto-capitalism rather than Jefferson's romantic revolutionary purity that proved the more enduring. It was also more influential on the other side of the world. A Russian edition of Hamilton's 1791
Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture
, sponsored by the minister of finance, was published in St Petersburg in 1807. The two nations were still poles apart but their two ideologies were starting to overlap.

At the same time that ideological currents were changing America and Russia, America and Russia were changing the lands around them. The armies of both nations spent most of the nineteenth century pushing out the frontiers of empire. Indeed the outstanding feature of American and Russian history in the period from the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 up to the fall of the Romanovs in 1917 was what might be called territorial aggrandisement. Both nations were totally committed to their own expansion and both realised their ambitions. Catherine the Great and her successors continued a long tsarist tradition, firmly believing in their divine right to conquer; her American counterparts believed equally firmly that their new nation, representing as it did God's will on earth, was destined to surpass all others.

There are clear historical parallels between the Russian conquest of Siberia and the territorial expansion of the United States, but by the time Catherine came to the throne the campaigns against the Siberian natives were almost over; only a few tribes in the Aleutian Islands on the way to Alaska remained to be ‘pacified'. From then on Russian imperialism was primarily focussed on the Christian states to the west and the largely Muslim states to the south. Under her leadership Russia conquered most of Poland and gained access to the Black Sea, grabbing the whole area around the Sea of Azov, the Crimea and the port of Odessa. America, on the other hand, still had a whole continent of natives to displace.

During their war against the British the colonial rebels had been desperate for native allies. In 1775 the new Congress concluded its first
treaty with natives living in southern Ohio and Indiana, a treaty that suggested the creation of a fourteenth native state with representatives in the Congress. Once the war was over, however, the victors turned on what the Declaration of Independence had described as ‘the merciless Indian Savages'.

Fifteen years after that first treaty was signed it was ripped up. In 1790 and again in 1791 the American army invaded what was called the Northwest Territory, a vast swathe of land between the Ohio and Mississippi stretching from Pennsylvania as far west as the modern states of Michigan and Wisconsin. On both occasions it was soundly defeated by native forces led by the Miami general Michikinikwa or Little Turtle. In 1794 a reorganised army made one final attempt at conquest. British troops moved south from Canada in support of the natives but in the event failed to intervene, although a hundred British volunteers stiffened the resistance in the battle of Fallen Timbers that eventually took place south of Detroit. An enormous force of Shawnee, Ottawa, Chippewa, Miami, Delaware, Pottawatomi and other tribes under Little Turtle and the Shawnee general Blue Jacket faced the American troops of General Anthony Wayne. The American advance guard of Kentucky militia were ambushed, and when they turned and ran the Shawnees made the crucial mistake of leaving their heavily defended positions to set off in hot pursuit, running into the path of the main American force and into range of their artillery. The Americans successfully counter-attacked and by the end of the day native troops were streaming north seeking British protection; those left on the battlefield were scalped and mutilated by the American soldiers. Losses on both sides were heavy, with the casualty rate highest among the British volunteers who had fought to the end. The American army then advanced along the Maumee river, destroying native villages and crops in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.

In the subsequent Treaty of Greenville the natives were forced to give up most of modern Ohio and Indiana and the site of today's city of Chicago. The treaty was a total travesty: the federal government solemnly guaranteed territory to the natives that it had already sold to speculators
or promised to revolutionary war soldiers. Any idea of the natives having a state of their own had evaporated. America would expand through further white (or black and white) colonisation, not through the incorporation of native states. And it would expand by force. In 1797 American settlers in Natchez rebelled against the Spanish authorities; US troops marched in and the future state of Mississippi was born. It was a demonstration of what would happen repeatedly in years to come from Florida to Hawaii.

Not everyone agreed that every opportunity to expand the nation should be seized. In 1798 the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, who had fought for the rebels in the American Revolution and taken part in the French Revolution, approached the American government with a plan for American troops, supported by the British navy, to liberate Latin America from the Spanish empire and in the process grab Florida and Louisiana for themselves. Alexander Hamilton was a fervent enthusiast and put himself forward as commander of the US forces but President Adams I vetoed the project. Seizing land occupied by Europeans was quite different to seizing land occupied only by ‘Indians'.

When the Founding Fathers declared it to be self-evident that all men were created equal most of them had taken it for granted that such equality did not extend to the natives. Thomas Paine's irreligious idealism was not shared by most Americans and particularly not by the fundamentalists of New England who so influenced the development of the nation's political ideology.

Looking at early American history though the prism of today's religious ideologies it is easy to misinterpret its religious dimension. The Puritans were not bringing with them the religious conventions of their mother countries; they were fundamentalists escaping from religious convention. There was no inevitability in their own religious certainties becoming the American orthodoxy. The exalted position of religion in America today is due to the outstanding economic success of the New England settlers who were able to translate their economic dominance into political and cultural power, instilling a version of their Puritan values on the rest of society.

Things could have been different. This was the age of the Enlightenment. In Europe Frederick the Great, in his political testament of 1768, famously described Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, which was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread over Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it'. In 1740 Frederick, anxious to find settlers to come into his under-populated domains had made plain that ‘if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them'. Nothing could have been further from the ideology that was developing on the other side of the Atlantic.

A macabre example of the fusion of the democratic spirit and horrific savagery towards the continent's original inhabitants occurred in the spring of 1782. The British had surrendered at Yorktown the previous year but not yet formally conceded defeat when Shawnee natives murdered two settler families in what is now Ohio. The local militia decided that Christian natives from the Moravian townships on the Muskingum river were somehow involved and surrounded a large group of native men, women and children whom they found gathering corn. After herding them into two large huts the militiamen, in the spirit of frontier democracy, had a vote to decide whether to take the prisoners to Fort Pitt or kill them on the spot. The result was another massacre.

Having objected to paying taxes to the British, the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies were none too happy to pay taxes to a central government after Independence. Fortunately the new government had an alternative source of revenue: it would sell off the land to the west of the 1763 proclamation line that the British had tried to reserve for the natives.

The major difference between the agricultural methods of the new ‘white' natives and the old ‘red' natives was their impact on the environment. In Virginia, for example, tobacco farming ruined the land to such an extent that further tobacco cultivation became prohibitively expensive (as Samuel Eliot Morison notes, the only industry able to
replace the wealth previously generated by tobacco was ‘slave-breeding'). As agricultural land in the east rapidly became exhausted the federal government, dominated by plutocrats and in particular the southern planter aristocracy, ensured that policy on the sale of ‘new' land favoured large-scale purchases. As the original tobacco and cotton plantations declined the plantation owners were able to buy massive new estates to the west, shipping their slaves with them and creating new states based firmly on the institution of slavery. The first two were the tobacco states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Later, when they had been cleansed of their native populations, came cotton states like Louisiana and Alabama.