Empires Apart (36 page)

Russia was very different. Serfs formed the bedrock of society, as agriculture was by far the most important sector of the economy. There was industrialisation and urbanisation but on a smaller scale. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Łódz in Poland, the second largest city in the Russian empire, was one of Central Europe's largest textile manufacturing locations, but such industrial centres were rare.

It would be unfair to say that at the time of the civil war America was an industrial nation – more than three times as many Americans worked on farms and plantations as worked in manufacturing industry, and it was not until 1921 that census data showed for the first time that more than half the population lived in towns – but the trend towards
industrialisation was rapidly accelerating. In the last three decades of the century the number of farm workers would grow by 60 per cent, the number of industrial workers by 135 per cent.

The typical American of the period is sometimes pictured perched on a Conestoga wagon heading off into the Wild West. In fact he or she was much more likely to be sitting in a twelve-seat stagecoach on the way to work in New York City (Abraham Brower had established New York City's first public transport running along Broadway in 1827). Hardy pioneers in their covered wagons braving the dangers of the Oregon Trail have featured in countless cowboy films, but even in the Great Migration of 1843 the number of wagons was less than a thousand. By contrast, just ten years later thousands of city dwellers were travelling between the urban centres of New York and Chicago on the newly opened railway. As tens of thousands of Texans celebrated becoming part of America in 1845, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were celebrating the opening of the city's first department store.

Stephanie Williams's account of life in Siberia just before the revolution, with its fur trappers, gold miners and China traders all out to make a quick buck, reads like a story of the Wild West or the California Gold Rush. Although undoubtedly an accurate picture of life on the Siberian frontier, nobody would base a description of the Russian character on it, but that is effectively what many observers have done with America.

The 1997 film
True Women
set out to portray the crucial and underrecognised role of women in the development of nineteenth-century America. It followed the stories of three women caught up in the Texan Revolution of 1835, and made enormous efforts to reflect the reality of frontier life. As a film about women in Texas it was a success, but it was also a parable about the American dream and as such was deeply flawed. In the early 1830s there were at most 10,000 American women in Texas; it may suit modern American sensibilities to believe that the character and values of modern America are derived from women such as these, but in reality they were about as representative of the period as
the 10,000 women that an 1832 survey estimated were working New York City as prostitutes.

It is the myth of the frontier that has influenced American values not the reality;Americans are a largely urban people, even if they often behave as if they were beleaguered pioneers living in a world of hostile natives.

That urbanisation could race ahead at the same time that men and women were leaving the cities to head west was down to phenomenal population growth. By 1850 there were nearly six times as many Americans as there had been when the nation was born. Early stage abortion, which had been an accepted form of contraception for America's early colonists, was curbed in Connecticut in 1821 and New York in 1828, and by the end of the nineteenth century abortion had been outlawed throughout the country except in very limited circumstances. More significant was immigration, which shot up from 129,000 in the 1820s to 540,000 in the 1830s, 1.5 million in the 1840s and 2.8 million in the 1850s. Around one in five potential immigrants arriving from Europe were refused entry when they landed, and of those accepted up to one in three subsequently returned home.

Territorial aggrandisement was facilitated by immigrants but not caused by them. Homesteading immigrants often established lives that were immeasurably better than they could have expected in famine-struck Ireland or war-torn Germany, but the real wealth of the west went to those who were already at the top of the ladder. The impetus for further colonisation came not from those who wanted to make their fortunes but from those who wanted to keep the fortunes they already possessed.

Nearly half of the immigrants were Irish, which significantly changed the cultural make-up of the nation. Such changes were not always peaceful. Immigration became a major political issue. Naturalisation regulations were a political football, the residency qualifications being driven by whether the party in power was likely to benefit or suffer from an increase in immigrant voters. A requirement for five years' residence was changed to fourteen years and then back to five. Anti-immigrant groups campaigned to increase the qualifying period to twenty-one years.
In Philadelphia anti-Irish riots led to several deaths, and brawls between Irish and American were commonplace in many cities. On one hand immigration was encouraged by promising liberty under the law and on the other the president was given the power to deport aliens without needing to give a reason. Just as today there was a decidedly racist tinge to the immigration debate. Once the railway construction boom was over Chinese immigration was banned (the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended Chinese immigration for ten years, but it was extended in 1892 and made permanent in 1902). Simon Schama's recent history highlights not only the appalling treatment meted out to Irish immigrants in the 1850s attacked by the xenophobic ‘Know Nothing Party' but also the Chinese railway builders expelled or murdered in the 1870s. By contrast, the first serious restrictions on white immigration were not introduced until 1921.

Immigration, along with the technological developments of the period, changed the character of the whole country. By no means all immigrants remained in the cities of the eastern seaboard. German immigrants in particular streamed into the new states of the Midwest; Milwaukee became a virtually German city. Canals criss-crossed the north-east and then railways linked the country together. The cotton gin changed the face of the southern cotton industry, but it was in the north that the industrial revolution had its real impact. In the first half of the nineteenth century life in the north-eastern states changed at a pace not seen again for another century. By 1850 the US produced around 0.5m tons of pig iron, a tenfold increase in forty years (but still a fraction of the 3m tons produced in Britain). Manufacturing on an enormous scale, cheap and effective transportation, unprecedented standards of public education and massive immigration combined to make the contrasts of north and south, present from the earliest colonial days, overwhelming. In the words of Samuel Eliot Morison, ‘By 1850 two distinct civilisations had been evolved.' United in their imperial ambition, Christian religion and republican institutions, they were divided by fundamental economic and moral differences.

It is the great moral divide over slavery that is conventionally posited as the critical fracture that led to the civil war, but to some historians the war was not a clash of moral principles but the continuation of economic conflict by other means: the thrusting entrepreneurial north taking on the economically stagnant south. New economic forces had been unleashed in which unfree labour had no place. What the American economy needed, and what the Russian economy would come to need, were not slaves in the traditional sense but ‘wage slaves' who would move around as the market demanded. These historians argue that the irrelevance of the moral arguments against slavery was demonstrated after the civil war, when freed slaves soon discovered that ‘freedom' for them would not mean the same as the ‘freedom' whites espoused for themselves.

There was a vociferous abolitionist movement in America for whom slavery in any part of the country was abhorrent, but the real political debate was not about the abolition of slavery where it already existed but about whether it should be allowed in the newly acquired territories. Strictly speaking the war between north and south was not about slavery but about territorial expansion and the nature of the American empire. The cause of the conflict was the insistence by both north and south that the way they organised themselves economically – one with slaves and one without – should be replicated in the new states being carved out of the old French and Spanish possessions. If either side had been content to let the other have political domination over the new territories there would have been no war. The south could have continued with slavery if it had been content not to export its culture. If the southern states had not insisted that some of the newly conquered territories had to be open to slavery then the civil war might not have happened, and slavery might have been a feature of American life to this day. Indeed, even once the war had started slavery might still have survived. In the summer of 1864, as the war bogged down in the siege of Atlanta, the Democratic Convention in Chicago – representing a still significant part of northern society – called for an immediate end to the war, with states left free to choose whether or not to permit slavery within their own jurisdiction.

In the words of the old dictum, in politics compromise is less an expedient than a principle. Politicians repeatedly managed to produce compromises on the issue of slavery even when these were met with popular disdain on both sides. American leaders, with some notable exceptions, were concerned primarily not to rock the boat. Slavery was an evil in the north, so ban it in the north; slave-owning was a fundamental right in the south, so maintain it in the south. The Fugitive Slave Act was a typical manifestation of the politicians' skill in reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. Although slavery was illegal in the north, the Act laid down that if southern slaves escaped north they remained legally owned in the south, and therefore should be returned to their legal owner. Over 300 fugitive slaves were shipped back south, often under the guard of armed US troops, to stop abolitionists rescuing them and smuggling them further north to freedom in the British colonies. The Fugitive Slave Act caused popular outrage in much of the north, which in turn enflamed popular opinion in the south where pro-slavery campaigners could point to the abolitionists' flagrant disregard for the rule of law.

The Supreme Court went even further in the Dred Scott case, ruling that Congress could not deprive citizens of their property – and that included depriving slave-owners of their slaves, theoretically making any attempt anywhere to ban slavery illegal.

The causes of the American Civil War were far more diverse than one side's rejection of slavery. The complexities and nuances of the period have largely been written out of popular history, but at the time they were well understood by both sides. Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate soldier who moved to Rome after the war and became one of the most famous sculptors of his day, insisted, ‘We were not fighting for the perpetuation of slavery but for the principles of States' Rights and Free Trade.' The man who has become for ever associated with the emancipation of the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, repeatedly made clear that despite his own moral repugnance he was not trying to end the right of existing slave states to continue their peculiar institution. The slave
states, however, realised that this position was increasingly untenable. They had seen what had happened in Britain, where moral indignation had led to slavery being banned throughout the empire thirty years before. Many southerners retained contact with Barbados where slavery was abolished in 1838, and, although none of the dire consequences predicted by the pro-slavery lobby had happened, they did not want to repeat the experiment themselves.

Many, perhaps most, northerners regarded slavery as an affront to their moral consciences, but the north was far from united. Many of the newer immigrants, who were themselves often subject to bitter discrimination, were keen to ensure that those on an even lower rung stayed there. First generation Irish Catholics were an important political force by the time of the civil war (they formed 34 per cent of the electorate of New York City, for example), and not only were they not offended by slavery but in Morison's words ‘their hostility to abolitionists and hatred of free Negroes became proverbial'.

There were also those in the north who argued that, like serfdom in Russia, slavery would eventually disappear of its own accord because it was inherently inefficient. They pointed out that slavery was declining in Virginia and Maryland and that New York and Pennsylvania had been slave states, but as capitalism expanded slaves there were sold south and the remainder eventually freed. In fact these northern appeasers misunderstood the economics of slavery. In 1958 two Harvard economists, Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, overturned conventional wisdom by asking whether it was economically rational to buy and breed slaves. By looking at the discounted value of expected future income over the life of the ‘asset', they were able to demonstrate that slavery was immensely profitable to the whole south in the period immediately before the civil war.

If public opinion in the north was not demanding war to free the slaves, and politicians on all sides were keen to compromise, why then did the war begin? The answer has to be because the ‘two distinct civilisations' identified by Samuel Eliot Morison were talking such radically different
languages that compromise was impossible. Those languages were determined above all by economics. Very simplistically the southern oligarchs could make their plantations and businesses pay whether or not their states were part of a union, as they relied on markets outside the United States. For them the natural compromise was to let each state do as it wished; they wanted a union in which slavery would be guaranteed for ever, but if that was impossible secession was their compromise position. The northern oligarchs, on the other hand, had few significant export markets, but what they did have is what economists call ‘economies of scale' – bigger factories produced proportionately bigger profits – and so they would inevitably fight to protect their existing market from European competition. In the north preserving the union became the overwhelming commercial priority. The northern interest was not what happened to slavery but what happened to the union – their compromise position was to fudge the issue of slavery. Secession, proposed by the south as a compromise, was no compromise at all for the north.