Empires Apart (40 page)

The island of Hispaniola had had a particularly bloody history ever since Columbus discovered it, and after the civil war the US government sent General Babcock to investigate a proposal to annexe the eastern Spanish-speaking part. He successfully negotiated a treaty under which the Dominican Republic would become a part of the United States, but the Senate rejected it (not least because of fears about increasing America's black population). A presidential commission was set up and again recommended annexation, but again it was blocked. US imperialism was struggling to find a new form that would achieve a new consensus.

Flush with their success in the civil war and still in possession of an enormous army, American eyes turned northwards. The Confederate navy had been greatly strengthened by a steam-powered raider, the CSS
Alabama
, which had been built in Britain, and the victorious Union government demanded compensation; it was suggested that Britain should hand over all her North American colonies. The colonists themselves,
however, were bitterly opposed to the idea, and in 1867 Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia formed the Dominion of Canada. The US Congress responded with a resolution condemning the new arrangements and hinting that they were in contravention of the Monroe Doctrine (in fact they were not, as Monroe had explicitly committed the United States to a policy of non-intervention in existing European colonies, and in any case the doctrine was a unilateral proclamation with no standing in international law).

Benjamin Franklin had famously described the division of North America between Britain and the US as ‘unnatural' and therefore doomed one day to disappear, and many if not most Americans still agreed. Fearing this, two of Britain's other colonies, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, joined the new dominion, which also took over the territory controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company. Only Newfoundland remained as a crown colony, and the United States found its northern ambitions stymied. As late as 1910 a free trade treaty between Canada and the United States was scuppered by Canadian opposition, which was incensed in part by the demand of an obscure US congressman that President Taft open negotiations with the British government for the annexation of Canada. (The British colonists had solid economic as well as political reasons for their decision: per capita GDP grew more rapidly in Canada than in the US in the ninety years up to the First World War.)

The first priority of the American government after the civil war was not further annexation but the cleansing and integration of the territory it already had. The emblem of this integration was the completion of the transcontinental railway on 10 May 1869, when the famous golden spike was knocked into the ground by California governor Leland Sanford at Promontory Summit, Utah. The Central Pacific, in which Sanford was one of the five original investors, laid 690 miles of track from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific 1086 miles from Omaha, Nebraska. The project knitted the nation together and symbolised the grandeur of the American dream: the definitive study of this first transcontinental railway is appropriately titled
Empire Express
. The creation of the railway
has been described as a triumph of American capitalism, with the two railroad companies competing with each other to bring the project to early fruition. In fact the railway owed its existence to extensive professional lobbying in Washington, which eventually resulted in the passage in 1862 of the Pacific Railroad Act. This ensured that as well as generous land grants along the right of way the two companies were subsidised $16,000 for each mile built over an easy grade, $32,000 in the high plains and $48,000 for each mile in the mountains. For the two companies money was the prime objective, and when the two lines neared their meeting point they changed paths to be nearly parallel, so that each company could claim extra subsidies from the government. A disgruntled Congress finally intervened to lay down when and where the railways would meet.

Business and politics were intimately entwined. Not only was Leland Stanford president of the Central Pacific and governor of California at the same time, pushing through state legislation favouring his company in the process, but one of the most passionate advocates of the railroad scheme in the US House of Representatives was the Massachusetts oligarch Oakes Ames, who had invested heavily in the Union Pacific Company – which was headed by his brother, Oliver.

The railroad workers on the other hand were not so well represented, and working conditions were not good, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The two companies made extensive use of immigrant labour – Chinese on the Pacific end and Irish on the other. Although conditions were far easier than on the Trans-Siberian railway (which was also more than three times longer), fatalities were high, especially when the Central Pacific began to use the newly invented and very unstable nitro-glycerine explosive for tunnelling; eventually its use had to be abandoned owing to the death rate among the Chinese workers. The mortality rate was not only high among those working on the railways. The Union Pacific hired marksmen to kill the herds of buffalo, which posed a risk to the trains and more importantly were the main source of food for the natives who needed to be ‘cleansed' from the region.

In 1871 the US Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act, forbidding any future treaties with the natives and declaring that no ‘Indian tribe' should ever again be regarded as an independent authority with whom treaty negotiations could be conducted. Once the civil war was over the US army looked west again and started mopping up the remaining native tribes. Compared with the full-scale battles of the civil war the engagements were tiny and usually very one-sided (the most famous exception being the battle of the Little Bighorn). As the whites pushed further and further west in ever-greater numbers, the threat to the natives' way of life became overwhelming. The natives' desperate military responses inevitably failed and were often followed by vicious retribution. A Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862 left a thousand settlers dead, but the US army overwhelmed the native forces and, like the tsars in Poland, emphasised their power in a round of public executions. After the Navajo War in New Mexico and Arizona the native survivors were marched 300 miles to a barren reservation to endure four years of near starvation. One of the worst massacres since Mystic occurred when the Third Colorado Cavalry surprised a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, and mutilated and murdered hundreds of mainly women and children (the number of dead is variously quoted from 200 to more than twice that number). The purpose of the Sand Creek Massacre was to cleanse the region to make it safe for miners. One remarkable aspect of the massacre, and of the deportations in the south-west, is that they were carried out right in the middle of the civil war; for the US army's imperial mission it was business as usual.

The two most famous encounters between the US army and the natives in the second half of the nineteenth century were at the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. At the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 General Custer immediately became one of US history's great martyrs, who, like Davy Crockett, had given his life as a sacrifice to America's manifest destiny – pushing onwards the frontiers of civilisation. The US army quite consciously exploited the story, turning the battlefield into a national cemetery. In reality, however, Custer was an unlikely army hero.
George Armstrong Custer graduated from West Point at the bottom of his class and went on to be court-martialled for deserting his troops to visit his wife (while ordering other deserters to be shot). In 1868 he was part of the attack on a native encampment on the Washita river in Oklahoma that came close to being a repetition of the Mystic Massacre, except that Custer seems to have gone out of his way to minimise casualties among the women and children (although many of the women prisoners were subsequently raped by cavalry officers, and Custer himself ‘acquired' a young Cheyenne woman to warm his bed until his wife joined him the following year). At the Little Bighorn Custer rushed in where wiser men would have feared to tread, gaining martyrdom for himself and over two hundred men of the US Seventh Cavalry.

The Russian equivalent of George Custer lived and died 130 years earlier. Dmitri Pavlutsky commanded campaigns in Russia's remotest colonial war against the Chukchi in the extreme north-east, just across the Bering Straights from Alaska. In 1731 Pavlutsky lead a force of 700 sleds 900 miles to the Arctic Ocean. His Cossack troops and their native allies claimed to have killed a thousand Chukchi warriors in battle and captured hundreds of women and tens of thousands of reindeer. The Chukchi learnt from their disastrous experience, and when Pavlutsky mounted more expeditions they avoided him and raided, guerrilla-style, the Russian outposts. In March 1747, 500 Chukchi rustlers raided the town of Anadyrsk, driving away seven herds of deer. Pavlutsky set off in pursuit with 131 men. They caught up with the Chukchi on a hill near today's town of Markovo and, without waiting for reinforcements, attacked. The Chukchi were ready, and Pavlutsky and all but a handful of his men died as the native warriors came storming down the hill to meet the advancing Russians in hand to hand combat.

The contrast with Custer could hardly be more marked. Custer's idealised portrait, golden locks flowing, is one of the iconic images of the old west, and the American army was quick to revenge his death. By contrast there are no surviving images of Pavlutsky, no memorials, no heroic stories passed on to generations of Russian schoolchildren. The Russian response to Pavlutsky's last stand was a few half-hearted raids before Anadyrsk was abandoned and its eight church bells carried mournfully west by its Cossack inhabitants. In 1778 the Chukchi – uniquely among Siberian natives – signed a formal treaty under which Russia allowed them limited self-government, a situation that continued right up to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Indeed the Chukchi acted as a bridge between Russians pressing from the west and Americans from the east; the Chukchi traded with American whalers and sometimes travelled as far south as San Francisco.

By contrast there were to be no treaties with the natives who had defeated Custer a century later. Following the Lakota Sioux victory at the Little Bighorn some of the native leaders, most famously Sitting Bull, sought sanctuary in Canada. The remainder, under Crazy Horse, were relentlessly pursued, and after their inevitable surrender packed off to a reservation. Crazy Horse remained on the reservation for just four months before trying to leave to take his sick wife to her parents; he was seized and, with his arms pinioned, bayoneted to death.

As well as the battle of the Little Bighorn, the only other clash between natives and whites to have achieved any great fame occurred nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1890 at Wounded Knee, where the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than 200 hundred men, women and children of the Miniconjou Sioux. Unlike the Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee has not been one of those events permanently seared into the public imagination; in fact it was almost entirely forgotten until the book and later the film
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
appeared in 1970. What is most remarkable about the massacre at Wounded Knee is not that it happened but the date at which it happened.

By 1890 the era of hardy pioneers pushing into the unknown was long gone. New York and Chicago were competing to prove that the skyscraper had been invented there (New York was earlier, 1868, but Chicago claimed their 1885 effort to be the first to truly scrape the sky).
The authorities in New Orleans were investigating the murder of a city policeman by a shadowy Sicilian gang that they had labelled ‘mafia'. In the wider world a German engineer called Gottlieb Daimler had produced the world's first four-wheel petrol-engined car four years earlier, and Queen Victoria had already celebrated her golden jubilee. In Russia the execution of an insignificant revolutionary named Alexander Ulyanov drove his younger brother to devote his life to the revolutionary cause, using the
nom de guerre
of Lenin.

It can be argued that Wounded Knee was part of a chain of events going back to Mystic and beyond; it could equally be argued to be part of a chain going forward to My Lai and beyond. In any event it signalled the end of the line for Native Americans. The poorest county in America today is not in an inner city ghetto nor in a deep south backwater but in the Badlands of South Dakota. Pine Ridge is the home of the Lakota Sioux. Around the site of the Wounded Knee massacre native Americans are sunk in a slough of alcoholism and poverty; and, with an unemployment level of 65 per cent, most can see no way out.

By 1890 the campaigns against the natives were not only over but had already passed from the realms of history into the realms of entertainment. Sitting Bull became a star in the touring Wild West show of Buffalo Bill Cody. Twenty years later Geronimo, who had led one of the last Apache campaigns along the Mexican border and had been shipped off to a Florida reservation, joined other celebrities in Washington for the inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt. And Roosevelt himself was helped on his way to the White House by his military prowess not in conflict with the natives but in America's first global imperial struggle, for in 1898 America had declared war on Spain.

Before the Spanish-American War there was one last imperial annexation of native land to be consummated. During the civil war the north had been deprived of one essential southern product: sugar. The response was to look elsewhere, and American eyes settled on the islands of Hawaii, 2,000 miles from the mainland. Hawaii had long been an important stopover for American whaling ships, and in 1842 Secretary
of State Daniel Webster spelt out American opposition to annexation by any of the imperial powers, a position re-emphasised in 1849 when the United States and Hawaii signed a treaty of friendship. The civil war changed the situation dramatically, and sugar plantation owners from the United States came to dominate the economic and political life of the islands under the so-called Bayonet Constitution of 1887. This was represented as a triumph of democracy over autocracy as King Kalakaua was forced to cede power to an elected assembly, but this assembly was elected not by the people of Hawaii but by property owners, many of whom happened to be American. Pearl Harbor was promptly ceded to the United States. The American oligarchs now in control carried on the traditions of the American pre-civil war filibusters, and had considerable support from influential parts of the US establishment. When Kalakaua's successor Queen Lili'uokalani tried to regain control a group of oligarchs, mainly American sugar planters and led by Samuel Dole, were able to call upon US marines from the USS
Boston
, who landed in Honolulu and surrounded the royal palace with howitzers. The queen was deposed and the plotters declared themselves a provisional government. In a pattern repeated elsewhere throughout the twentieth century the administration of outgoing president Benjamin Harrison encouraged the takeover, with the US minister to Hawaii, John L. Stevens, deeply involved in the planning of the coup. The coup leaders declared Hawaii a republic on 4 July 1894. The next step was annexation by the United States, following the path already trodden in Florida, Texas and California.