Empires Apart (30 page)

The War Hawks had their eyes on the fertile territory west of Quebec, modern Ontario, and expected it to fall into their hands. The 1810 census had just revealed the US population to be 7.25 million, while there were fewer than 500,000 whites in the whole of British North America – and that included Americans who had already moved in to settle on the Canadian side of the border. Henry Clay, a War Hawk leader from Kentucky, boasted that his state's militia on their own could deliver Montreal and Upper Canada. But in 1812 the fusion of northern moral crusade and southern imperial ambition had not yet occurred, and the northern states wanted no part of Madison's imperial war. The congressional vote on the declaration of war was 79–49; the representatives of every state from Massachusetts to Delaware voted against, while the southern and western delegations were almost unanimously in favour.

Tempers ran high. When a leading newspaper in Baltimore advocated peace its editor and his supporters were forced to seek sanctuary in the local jail. They were dragged out and beaten by an angry mob who took particular exception to the presence of two army generals. General Henry Lee, known as ‘Light Horse Harry', a hero of the American Revolution and close friend of George Washington, was left maimed
for life. The other, General James Lingan, who had been wounded during the revolution and spent more than three years as a prisoner of the British, was murdered. When Lingan's killers were brought to trial they were acquitted, after the district attorney expressed regret that Lingan had been the only traitor to die.

When the ‘War of 1812' started, the New England and New York militias refused to join the invasion force and the British successfully counter-attacked, seizing Detroit. Contrary to expectations the Canadian militias fought hard, as the region's settlers spurned the invitation to opt for ‘liberty' under the Stars and Stripes. The Kentucky militia, on the other hand, rapidly became mutinous, and a council of officers demanded they be allowed to retreat. America and Britain then slogged it out in one of history's most pointless wars. American forces again invaded Canada, burning down the city of York (modern Toronto), and the British retaliated by attacking Washington and burning down the Capitol and the White House. But as Napoleon had found out less than two years earlier, seizing the enemy's capital was no guarantee of ultimate victory; the new colossuses of Russia and America were changing the rules of war. The puny states of western Europe would one day be relegated to the military second division.

In 1813 an attempt at mediation by the Russian tsar, Alexander I, fresh from his success crushing Napoleon, failed and the war finally ended in stalemate. Under the terms of the Treaty of Ghent both parties Returned to Go; Madison had not gained an inch of new territory. Although northern manufacturers prospered as imports were disrupted, opposition to the war there had continued; a vote of thanks for one naval hero was defeated in the Massachusetts legislature as ‘not becoming a moral and religious people'.

Ironically the most famous battle of the war (or at least famous to those exposed to 1950s pop music) was fought after the war was officially over. Just as the slow pace of transatlantic communication allowed the war to start, so it also allowed one final pointless slaughter in the battle of New Orleans. The British commander committed one of the biggest blunders
in British military history when, rather than exploiting a breakthrough on the American flank, he launched a full-frontal assault on the most heavily fortified enemy positions. ‘The Battle of New Orleans', which won the Grammy Award for the Best Song of 1959, described what happened next as the British fled ‘down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico' (although in a rare example of cultural sensitivity the version released in Britain meaninglessly substituted ‘rebels' for ‘British').

The War of 1812 may have been a draw, but to much of the American population the battle of New Orleans reinforced their pride in the nation's military prowess. The fact that many of the British troops came from the Caribbean and were black reinforced Americans' sense of superiority, and their dreams of further conquests.

Russia had defeated the might of the French empire, and America had defeated the might of the British empire. The two nations emerged from the turmoil of 1812 confident in their own imperial destinies. It was inevitable that these two empires of the future would soon collide. The seeds of the superpower conflict that dominated the second half of the twentieth century were planted long before the advent of communism.

On the surface Russia under Alexander seemed to have become the world's only superpower. The reality was somewhat different. The Russian empire was geographically enormous but economically weak. The tsar's willingness to let his people and his army accept privations on a colossal scale made his military might seem greater than it really was. Russia's agriculture was primitive, its industry basic and its rigid class structure stifling. All that, however, was irrelevant; what mattered was what other people believed about Russia's power and above all what Alexander believed. And what Alexander increasingly believed was that he and Russia had been chosen by God to show the rest of the world the true path to salvation. The Russian empire's role was global, and global included the Americas.

Throughout the reigns of Catherine, Paul and Alexander Russians continued to push east, hunting almost to extinction the fur-bearing animals of Siberia and the Aleutians. Alaska's first man-made environmental disaster arose from the free market competition between American and Russian fur traders as Aleut fur-hunters drove the sea otter to virtual extinction, causing the population of the otters' favourite food, sea urchins, to explode and destroy the underwater forests of kelp on which much of the area's sea life depended.

Tsar Paul chartered the Russian-American Company in 1799, fifteen years after the first permanent settlement in Alaska. At first healthy profits flowed back to the shareholders, including the Romanov family, but, as the French had found on the other side of the continent, a colony could not survive on the fur trade alone: it was time to do more.

In the spring of 1812 Napoleon was massing his troops in Poland ready to strike east, General Andrew Jackson was calling for volunteers for ‘the conquest of all the British dominions upon the continent of North America' and in Russia most eyes were turning fearfully west; most but not all. The Russian pioneers in Alaska were looking south – to California.

California offered not only an abundance of sea otters but also fertile agricultural land. In March 1812 the first Russian settlement in California was founded at Fort Ross (from Rossiya, the Russian for Russia). Reminiscent of Peter Minuit in Manhattan, the land all around was bought from the native inhabitants for three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes and some beads. The settlement initially prospered and farms were established inland. Again like the French, but unlike the English, the Russians intermarried with the Californian natives and the Alaskans they brought with them.

Meanwhile the golden boy of Europe, the young Tsar Alexander I, was becoming ever less attractive as he grew older. He developed an almost messianic conviction that autocracy was God's plan for the entire world. His constant lecturing left other European rulers bemused; when he extended his musings to life across the Atlantic the consequences were more serious. First he tried to extend the frontiers of Russian Alaska further
south. In 1821 he decreed that all lands along North America's Pacific coast as far south as Latitude 51° N belonged to Russia. If implemented, a significant part of the Oregon Territory, already claimed by both America and Britain, would have become Russian. Even though the United States only really occupied territory east of the Mississippi, American leaders were convinced that the whole of North America should rightfully be theirs. In 1805 Lewis and Clark had reached the Pacific reinforcing this view. (Some American texts write as if they were the first to cross the North American continent, but they were only sent because it had been done before. In 1801 the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who had already twice crossed Canada to the Pacific, published his book
Voyages from Montreal
, directly inspiring US president Thomas Jefferson to send Lewis and Clark to repeat Mackenzie's feat.)

The Russian tsar could pass whatever decrees he liked, but the reality was that he had no way of enforcing them. The settlers at Fort Ross reached agreement with the Spanish to the south but the British in Oregon outmanoeuvred them. In 1839 the Hudson Bay Company agreed a trade deal with the Russian colonies in Alaska, and two years later Fort Ross was sold to American settlers; the Romanov flag was hoisted for the last time over Russian California a few months short of the colony's thirtieth birthday. Fort Ross had been far more successful than the first English settlement on Roanoke Island, but the Russians were too late. North America was no longer ‘available'; the world had moved on.

Eventually Russia agreed to site no settlements south of latitude 54° 40° N and America agreed not to settle north of that latitude. In a strange twist of historical fate the territory the treaty gave to Russia – Alaska – is now part of America, and the territory it gave to the United States is not part of America, the British ensuring that it became part of the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Not satisfied with claiming a chunk of North America for himself, Alexander also turned his mind further south. Having inspired the so-called Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, Prussia and France to crush stirrings of liberalism in Spain and force the restoration of a more
autocratic monarchy, Alexander started musing on the desirability of recovering Spain's former Latin American colonies.

Spurred on by the British who were excluded from the Holy Alliance, President Monroe reacted angrily to Alexander's proposals for both the Pacific North-West and Latin America. He told the tsar, and all the other European powers, that the United States would not intervene in European wars and in return they would not be allowed to establish any new colonies anywhere in the Americas. In effect Monroe declared the rest of the western hemisphere a US protectorate.

Alexander had inadvertently caused a doctrine to be accepted that would underlie American imperialism throughout the western hemisphere, and would help inculcate into the American psyche the conviction that their imperialism was somehow qualitatively different to the European imperialisms that it sought to prevent. In proclaiming America's right to deploy military force anywhere in the Americas in order to stop the European powers doing the same thing, Monroe formulated the moral basis for his country's imperial expansion. He was, he insisted, not proclaiming an imperial intent but preventing one. In classic Orwellian newspeak America's fight ‘for' empire became a fight ‘against' empire; imperialism became anti-imperialism.

The full implications of the Monroe Doctrine were not made explicit until much later. In 1895 the ‘Olney Corollary' was added by the American secretary of state, Richard Olney, when he insisted that America had the right to arbitrate in an obscure border dispute between Venezuela and the British colony of Guyana. ‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent,' declared Olney, ‘and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.'

Since the Mystic Massacre American settlers had believed in their god-given right to exert hegemony over the natives on their frontiers, but now that right was extended to the whole hemisphere. Moreover that right was to be asserted not just over ‘merciless Indian savages' but Christian elites, whose Spanish and Portuguese ancestors had crossed the Atlantic Ocean long before the Pilgrim Fathers.

Just as Americans saw their geographic growth as manifesting God's will, so Alexander saw himself as divinely inspired. To an extent rarely seen in tsars before or after, Alexander imputed an almost messianic dimension to his nation's imperialism. His bizarre plan for returning the former colonies of Latin America to their ‘rightful' owners was in his mind a logical consequence of God's will that earthly power should rest in the hands of his chosen monarchs, Alexander himself prime among them. Hereditary monarchy was God's preferred form of government, and this formed the moral justification for imperial expansion. Other empires such as the Roman and British convinced themselves that their rule was beneficial for the peoples they subdued, but Alexander believed that the form of his government – autocracy – was in itself beneficial even to nations that remained outside his own empire. This conviction that he had a divine duty to ensure that the world enjoyed the benefits of autocracy was to find echoes in the beliefs of American presidents who were determined that everyone should enjoy the benefits of democracy. Alexander nudged forward the development of an American view of empire that was a mirror image of his own. It too was fundamentally messianic, but the American God had chosen not monarchy but democracy. Both Tsar Alexander and President Monroe believed that their imperial ambitions were not about conquering territory but, in the phrase used to describe the Pequot War, about ‘bringing light into darkness'.

Therefore both nations were toying with the prospect that their destinies were not regional but global. Russia already possessed territory in Europe, Asia and North America; America now turned its eyes to the whole of the western hemisphere and less obviously to Africa.

One of the beneficiaries of the war against Britain was the infant US navy. Although many of its ships remained bottled up in port it secured a number of psychologically important victories. Indeed, it was still attacking British vessels off the coast of Africa months after the war was over. This development of naval power helped to make a practical reality not just of Monroe's assertion of the American right to police the western
hemisphere but also of the wider flexing of American imperial power across the globe. Within three months of the end of the war that power was being demonstrated in the Mediterranean.