Empires Apart (38 page)

America has never been a ‘militaristic' nation like the fascist regimes of the twentieth century to whom democracy was a weakness to be eradicated; in the United States, by contrast, military values were sewn into the fabric of democracy.

In moving from the officers' mess to the presidential suite, George Washington, the nation's first president, set the pattern for a surprising
number of nineteenth-century presidents who embodied both the popular will of a democracy and the supposed strongman virtues of autocracy. American generals gained their political credibility in fighting the British, the natives or each other. In other cultures military strongmen have used the armed force at their disposal to take power. In America the process was far more subtle. The popularity of conquest and military adventure allowed American generals from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower to move smoothly into the political arena. Five nineteenth-century presidents were military leaders (Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant and Hayes). A sixth, McKinley, first gained his reputation as a soldier and Abraham Lincoln was not averse to exploiting his role in the militia that put down the native uprising known as the Black Hawk War. Another veteran of that campaign, Jefferson Davies, became President of the Confederate States. (Mexican War veteran Franklin Pierce was one soldier president remembered not for his war exploits but rather for his bar exploits, being, as one contemporary wag remarked, ‘the hero of many well-fought bottles'.) Davy Crockett gained his celebrity status and political credibility fighting alongside Andrew Jackson against the Creeks. The victor of the crucially important battle of Tippecanoe, William Harrison, was one of those who went on from the battlefield to the White House, campaigning with his vice-presidential running mate John Tyler on the slogan ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too'. Those who imagine a golden age of political debate before the advent of public relations and spin should remember the man who claimed to have killed the great native leader Tecumseh: Richard Johnson eventually became vice-president of the United States using what must be one of the most infantile campaign slogans of all time – ‘Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.' (‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' may have been slogan enough to carry Harrison to the White House, but the slogan of his opponent Martin Van Buren has proved far more enduring – known by the nickname Old Kinderhook after his hometown, Van Buren campaigned with the now ubiquitous incantation ‘OK!')

How the values of bullet and ballot were brought together can be illustrated by looking at the lives of those who embodied that nexus, men like Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. The northern general William T. Sherman perhaps best personified the contradictions that have come to characterise the American approach to war – the ruthlessly brutal application of overwhelming military force and a near-total disregard of what is now euphemistically termed collateral damage, combined with a passionate commitment to the ideological banner of ‘liberty' with repeated public affirmations of the sanctity of the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Even his name, William Tecumseh Sherman, seemed to embody the contradiction. The man who after the war led the US army in some of their most vicious campaigns against the natives was named after Tecumseh, the native chieftain who had defied that same army half a century earlier.

Like many of the civil war generals Sherman first saw service in the imperial wars in Florida and later commanded the San Francisco militia, which played a controversial role in the California
coup d'état
now remembered as the War of Rebellion. But it was in the civil war that Sherman's national reputation was established, first at the battle of Shiloh, where he was wounded and had two horses shot from under him, and above all in Georgia.

Sherman's Georgia campaign, for good or ill, determined how history would remember him. After Atlanta was captured the city was torched and Sherman set out on his twenty-four day ‘March to the Sea', destroying everything in his path – not just the infrastructure of fortifications, bridges and railway tracks but homes, crops and livestock. His troops lacked the sadistic cruelty of the Mongols but their aim was the same: to deprive the enemy of all sources of food and other supplies, and to terrorise the civilian population into withdrawing support from the Confederate cause.

In popular memory the civil war ended with the surrender of the gallant rebel general Robert E. Lee to soon-to-be-president Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. This was the effective
end of the rebellion, but much of the rebel army under Joseph E. Johnston remained until it surrendered to Sherman on 26 April 1865. It was typical that Sherman, who is still reviled in the south for his March to the Sea, should offer Johnston such generous surrender terms that the politicians back in Washington immediately repudiated them. It also says much about the peculiar mixture of brutality and chivalry in the civil war that Johnston was one of the pallbearers at Sherman's funeral many years later.

William Tecumseh Sherman is a symbolic figure, but what he symbolises says as much about the political climate of today as about the historical reality of his own period. Westerners are frequently amazed that while many Russians today glory in their new-found freedom others worship the memory of Joseph Stalin, one of the most murderous despots in the whole of human history. And yet the mirror image of this situation exists with regard to Sherman in America. Sherman is one of the great American heroes. He was the man who won the civil war and then pacified the west. He was a man of integrity who ended the ‘Indian' menace (although sometimes by imposing absurdly one-sided treaties) and then rooted out corruption among government officials supposedly employed to protect the natives. His sense of honour led him to refuse all attempts to persuade him to stand as president, famously proclaiming ‘If nominated I will not accept, if elected I will not serve.' He even had the Second World War's most famous tank named after him. There are, however, historians who would cogently argue that Sherman was one of the greatest war criminals and bigots of all time. His campaigns in the south were characterised by pillaging, plundering and gang rape; long before Hitler Sherman used the phrase ‘final solution' to refer to his plans to solve the ‘Indian problem' through a campaign of ‘extermination', and he explicitly authorised his troops to kill women and children in their campaigns against the natives of the western plains (campaigns designed to further the interests of the railroads in which Sherman was an investor).

The moral complexity of men like Sherman is now largely forgotten; what is remembered is the unambiguous moral virtue of Abraham Lincoln. At his second inaugural Lincoln used another of the phrases
which to some have marked him out as the Nelson Mandela of his age when he committed to rebuilding his nation ‘with malice towards none and charity for all'. Not everyone felt that way, and when Lincoln was assassinated normal politics resumed.

After the civil war the votes of Florida Democrats were discarded, along with those in South Carolina and Louisiana, in one of the most cynically manipulated presidential elections ever. Southern Democrat politicians connived at Republican vote rigging in return for a commitment not to enforce the fifteenth amendment guaranteeing civil rights for former slaves. Politicians who had been unable to find a compromise that would allow slavery to continue found a way to ensure that its abolition had minimal effect. 124 years later during the presidential campaign of Bush II the judiciary upheld the result in Florida, finding no corruption or malpractice, despite a media furore reflecting political claim and counterclaim over supposed irregularities in the system and allegations of lost votes.

The emancipations of serfs and slaves happened at roughly the same time, but it is worth stepping back to consider how the two events meshed with the ideologies of the two empires. The forces at work were fundamentally different, not least because American slavery and Russian serfdom were not the same thing.

American slaves had absolutely no rights. Russian serfs in practice, if not in law, had their own strips of land and what they produced was their own. They lived in their own homes, not in slave quarters, and their work was organised largely by their community leaders rather than by overseers employed by the slave owner. Because serfs were attached to the land, landlords could not trade serfs the way that American landlords traded slaves. In the final analysis serfs belonged not to the landlords but, like everyone else, to the tsar. When Catherine the Great gave 600 ‘souls' to one of her lovers, Grigory Potemkin, he would have known that she could just as easily take them away again. Furthermore, by Catherine's time many serfs, perhaps as many as half, were paying money rents to the
landholders and could to some extent move around as they wished and take up whatever occupation they wanted – something quite impossible for most American slaves.

Russian historians insisted that even in ancient times, when slaves were a key part of economic and social life, serfs were not slaves. From the point of view of the serf or slave, however, the difference was almost meaningless. The distinction was only really important to the state: serfs paid taxes, slaves did not. Serfdom was a relic of the Mongol system of taxation where landowners were expected to deliver up dues based on the number of people in each area. The old Muscovite princes had outlawed the practice of the poor pledging themselves as slaves precisely because it reduced tax revenues.

The important point when comparing slavery and serfdom is not their legal status or their relative degrees of immorality, or even the differing levels of protest they engendered in the two societies, but the political frameworks in which those protests were made. Under American democracy the opponents of slavery had a voice that could be manifested as political power. Abolitionists won elections, controlled legislatures and eventually wielded legitimate military force. Under Russian autocracy none of this was possible; no matter how much popular support there was for the abolition of serfdom (and ‘popular support' was a totally meaningless phrase in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia) only if the tsar willed it would it happen. In terms of the parallel moral imperatives of abolishing slavery and abolishing serfdom autocracy eventually proved itself superior to democracy. Despite fierce opposition from the landowning class on 19 February 1861 Alexander II issued an edict emancipating the serfs; just nine days later the US House and Senate, in a last desperate attempt to avert civil war, passed a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding Congress ever to abolish slavery. (The outbreak of war stopped the amendment being ratified and twenty months later, after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation arguing that freeing the Negroes was now a ‘military necessity'.)

The American Civil War may have had its origins in economics, but the abolition of slavery was driven almost entirely by ideology. There were economic reasons for ending the institution of slavery and when it came to the crunch in the middle of a civil war there were political and military reasons, but the main motivation of the abolitionists was moral indignation. Slavery was simply incompatible with the official ideology of democracy. That same moral indignation also existed in the struggle against Russian serfdom, but it was not the driving force behind emancipation; equally important was the belief that serfdom was economically inefficient. The modernisers in Russia simply saw serfdom as a backward way to organise production. Emancipation of the serfs was intended to make Russian agriculture more efficient, and as a by-product facilitate the development of modern manufacturing industries. It would allow Russia to take the first real steps down the path of industrialisation, a path already well trodden in America. By cutting the links that tied peasants to the land it made it possible to assemble the huge workforces needed for the newly emerging industrial sector, but this in turn created social pressures that autocracy could not contain.

Serfdom was not considered incompatible with the ideology of autocracy, but it was considered incompatible with a modern, westernised way of living. What only became apparent over time was that in attacking serfdom the philosophical underpinning of autocracy itself was bound to come under attack. Once it was conceded that serfs were not an inferior breed of animal qualitatively different from the rest of society, it became less easy to argue that the nobility were qualitatively superior. If God had not created the serfs to serve had he really created the Romanovs to rule?

Not only was the balance of moral, economic and philosophical argument in America and Russia not the same but the class dynamics were very different. It is no exaggeration to say that in America abolitionists in the north freed the slaves in the south; the slaves themselves played very little part in their liberation. Although a significant number of freed slaves eventually fought for the Union army (and a much smaller number fought with the Confederacy) they were not militarily critical. There
had been slave revolts, such as those in New York in 1712, Carolina in 1739 and 1822 and Virginia in 1831, but these were suppressed, often with sickening brutality, and their historical impact was insignificant. By contrast, in Russia peasant revolts, and the fear of such revolts, were potent factors in driving change (just as in Britain the eventual abolition of slavery was driven as much by the impact of the Jamaican slave rebellion as by the decades of moralising by abolitionists).

In the 1770s an illiterate Russian peasant called Emilian Pugachev claimed to be the murdered Tsar Peter III and stirred up a revolt against Peter's widow, Catherine the Great. Pugachev's was not the first such rebellion but the scale of his uprising was dramatic. Initially his support was limited, and he was quickly captured, but when he managed to escape his fame grew and he attracted tens of thousands of Cossacks, native tribesmen and serfs. He defeated the imperial forces sent against him, sacked Kazan and ravaged the towns and villages of the Volga basin, offered bounties for dead aristocrats and tied up a major part of Catherine's army. Eventually Pugachev was defeated near Volgograd and dispatched to Moscow, where his head, hands and feet were ceremoniously chopped off. The Pugachev rebellion terrified the Russian aristocracy by its sheer scale and brutality, but smaller peasant revolts became almost everyday events. In the reign of Nicholas I there were said to have been 556 separate peasant uprisings, prompting his successor Alexander II to try to eliminate peasant unrest by emancipating the serfs. But this proved merely to be a milestone on the way to far more radical change.