The Empire of Liberty – Part I – 1607-1860
Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase "Empire of
Liberty" in 1780, while the American revolution was still being fought.
His goal was the creation of a new kind of empire whose founding, expansion and
foreign involvements would always be carried out to promote liberty, in
contrast to the actions of the old empires of Europe (he probably didn’t think
to include those of Asia, Africa and the Americas, an oversight that reveals a
lot about his conception of both empire and liberty).
Jefferson’s ideal of Liberty was clearly rooted in 18th
Century Enlightenment, which had emerged in some areas of Western Europe. But
it was also very much influenced by the history of the 13 English colonies that
hugged the Atlantic coast of North America. That history, as Nikole
Hannah-Jones has so ably documented in the 1619 Project, presents us with a
very different origin story of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty than is commonly
taught in public schools across the country.
As a historian I always encourage looking at current
events through the lens of the past. To understand where we are, we need to
know how we got here. As what some are describing as a “New Cold War” unfolds,
I want to look at how the Empire of Liberty has arrived at its current role in
the world and what that means for our future. I was spurred on to attempt this
history of the Empire of Liberty by a book that I read, and highly recommend,
Tomorrow the World by Stephen Wertheim. Later in this series, I intend to do a
short review of the book.
In the Beginning
The “discovery” of what was called the “new world” by Cristoforo
Colombo in 1492 inaugurated a period of conquest, colonization and genocide
that lasted for centuries. Although the Spanish and other Europeans actions in
seizing the land from the native peoples and enslaving or killing them was initially
justified on the basis of bringing religion to the “savages” (ignoring that
they already had religions), the fact that natives could convert to
Christianity presented a barrier to their total subjugation.
Gradually, the justifications for the exploitation of
native peoples and those kidnapped and brought to the “new world” from Africa changed
from religion to race, a categorization developed first and foremost by the
English, who applied their experience in the conquest of Ireland to the new world
after 1600. It directed the early British colonists’ approach to the native
populations, led to the most extreme form of chattel slavery and formed the
basis for the assertion of Anglo, i.e., “white”, supremacy.
Thus, the foundations of these United States, laid
between 1607 (first permanent English settlement in what was to become the US)
and Jefferson’s pronouncement of the Empire of Liberty, were based in liberty
for those defined as white and the subjugation of those who were defined as not
white. Historians have pointed out that it was slavery and the seizure of the
land of native peoples that made the liberty that some whites enjoyed possible
in 1776 and beyond. Thomas Jefferson is a prime example.
The “limits” of liberty for natives and slaves are even
clearly set out in the Declaration of Independence. When listing the history of
repeated injuries and usurpations by King George, the writers specified
“He has excited domestic
insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our
frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
At the same time, the founding fathers struck out a proposed
clause accusing the king of transporting slaves from Africa and
“suppressing every legislative
attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”
To put it bluntly, at the time of its founding, the US
can only be described as a settler nation based in genocide of the native
populations, African slaves and white (i.e., Anglo) supremacy. This would be
the basis for The Empire of Liberty. (For a concise analysis of the colonial
history of the US, I suggest the first two chapters of Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples
History of the United States”.)
Early US foreign relations: The Haitian Revolution
The Empire of Liberty had its first opportunity to
support liberty outside its boundaries in 1804. From 1791 to 1804, the slaves
of Haiti fought for their freedom from their French slaveholders and France,
which desperately wanted to hold on to Haiti, as it was their wealthiest colony.
In 1804, under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the rebellion succeeded
and Haiti became the first modern state to abolish slavery, the first state in
the world to be formed from a successful revolt of the lower classes (in this
case slaves), and the second republic in the Western Hemisphere, only
twenty-eight years behind the United States.
Despite this landmark event, the United States did nothing
to support the Haitian Revolution. In fact, its silence is very telling: it was
concerned because the Haitian Revolution might threaten its economic interests.
In addition, Southern plantation owners pressured the United States government
to refuse to recognize Haitian independence. The concept of slaves overthrowing
their French masters and ruling themselves was not only threatening, it was
unthinkable. It was clear that liberty was something only whites could
appreciate.
While the United States refused to recognize Haiti diplomatically
until 1862, it continued trade relations with the new nation. Throughout the 19th century,
the United States imported Haitian agricultural products and exported its own
goods to Haiti, with unfavorable trade policies for the Haitians. In fact, by
the mid-19th century, the United States exported more goods to
Haiti than to any other country in Latin America. Those economic interests
would lead to US intervention in this small and impoverished nation in the
future, but precluded support for “liberty”.
The Empire of Liberty expands
In the period following the American Revolution, the
Empire of Liberty expanded from its narrow band of states along the Atlantic
Coast to cross the entire continent.
At the time of the Revolution, one of the unstated
grievances against England concerned the Proclamation of 1763, which declared
native lands west of the Appalachians off limits to the colonial settlers. It
wasn’t concern for the natives that motivated the Brits, but the projected
costs of fighting the “savages”. With the British gone, settlers began westward
expansion in earnest. The idea of the frontier became imbedded in the American
mind and politics.
Then, in a stroke of luck for the Empire of Liberty, the
French Emperor Napoleon, strapped for cash as a result for the wars in Europe
and the revolution in Haiti, offered to sell that huge track of land, known
today as the Louisiana Purchase, to the US. The Purchase nearly doubled the
land claimed by the US and was hailed as providing enough room to satisfy land
hungry Anglo settlers for 100 generations. As it turned out, two generations
would have been a better estimate.
There was, of course, one major problem; the land that
was now part of the Empire of Liberty was already occupied. The original
inhabitants hadn’t been consulted by the Spanish or the French, who had just
claimed the land as theirs on the basis that white Europeans had the right to
claim any land, not already claimed by other white Europeans. As the land
passed to the US, the newly established nation asserted that same white
privilege.
What followed for the next 40 years was the progressive
dispossession of the native inhabitants, whose culture treated the land as the
commons, something no one “owned” and was free for everyone to use to provide
for their society. This conflicted with the capitalist conception of private
property, and its growing importance for the new nation. The process of privatizing
the land and parceling it out to the white settlers was aptly described as
“Indian Removal”.
It was accomplished by treaties promising that native
peoples could keep some of the land they inhabited for “as long as the
grass grows and the rivers run” in return for ceding the rest to the white
settlers. These treaties were often violated by white settlers before the ink
was dry; if the natives resisted, force was used (official and unofficial) to
remove them. The rule of warfare waged against the native people was “an
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”. And the heroes of the Indian Removal Wars,
like Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, became US Presidents. It is
little wonder that the US demands exemption from the United Nations Genocide
Convention; its very creation and growth was based on genocide.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal…”
One has to wonder how soundly the author of those words
slept in his bed with his mistress Sally Hemings, a black slave by whom he
fathered 6 children, but apparently, he saw no contradiction. White supremacy
was the natural order of things, Black slaves were not men and women, they were
property, and chattel slavery was based on the same right of the whites to own property
as was the seizure of native lands. In this, we see the origins of the primacy
of property rights over human rights which continues down to today.
For those who had some moral qualms about slavery, there
was always the argument that kidnapping blacks from Africa, transporting them
to the “new” world aboard slave ships, during which time at least 1 in 4 died,
some by their own hands to escape the horrors of the voyage and what lay ahead,
the Europeans were bring them the benefits of civilization.
Others argued that slavery had existed since the dawn of
civilization. What they were trying to cover up, was that slavery in the
British colonies was qualitatively different than earlier forms, both in terms
of the level of its violence, and because it created a caste system, one that
was socially defined and maintained, even if a slave somehow achieved freedom.
The very fact that slave patrols were able to seize any person of color and
return them to slavery, haunted every black person, North or South prior to the
civil war, and is documented in Twelve Years a Slave, an 1853 memoir and slave
narrative by Solomon Northup.
In the period after the American Revolution, slavery grew
and the slave owners prospered, their opulent lifestyle supported by the exploitation
of their human property. But it wasn’t only the slaveholders who benefited from
slavery. The cotton (and to a lesser extent other products produced in the
slave economy) were central to the beginnings of industrialization in the
country as a whole. The symbiotic relationship between the slave holding Southern
planters and the Northern financiers and industrialists is often overlooked
because they came down on opposite sides in the Civil War. The slave trade,
which continued after it was prohibited in 1808, and the access to cheep raw
materials for Northern industry were critical to the early development of US
capitalism (and, I should add, continued unabated after the “end” of slavery).
There should be no doubt that the economic development of these United States
was built on the back of 4,000,000 slaves and the land stolen from the native
population.
The slave system and the cotton economy faced one major
contradiction; the cultivation of cotton rapidly wore out the land. This
resulted in the constant drive for more land. “Resettling” native tribes
further and further west (the Cherokee “Trail of Tears”) soon exhausted much of
land east of the Mississippi River, and most of the land from the Louisiana
Purchase was too far north for cotton cultivation. The southern planters were
not to be denied and began to push beyond the borders into the northern section
of Mexico, aka, Texas.
Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent
Texas represented a vast new territory for the expansion
of the cotton kingdom and the slave system. It was a very sparsely populated part
of the vast Spanish colony of Mexico that had won its independence in 1821. The
new Mexican government encouraged southern planters to immigrate there, in part
as a buffer from the native American tribes in the territories further north
and west.
All went well for the planters until 1829, when the Guerrero
decree conditionally abolished slavery throughout Mexican territories. The
result was a revolt by Anglo Texicans, immortalized in US history – Remember the
Alamo – as a heroic struggle for freedom. For some that is, the Anglo planters,
but not the Mexican campesinos or the black slaves. Texas gained its
independence and slavery was ensconced in its territory. Once more the Empire
of Liberty made it clear, for whom liberty’s bell rang.
Expansionists in the US now eyed the territory of Texas
and saw it as the gateway to the West Coast. California, still part of Mexico,
was the prize, not only because of its vast territory and resources, but
because its Pacific coastline would give the US business access to trade with
the Far East. To start the process of acquiring these new territories, the US
annexed Texas and provoked a war with Mexico.
Reading Howard Zinn’s account of the US war with Mexico
in A People’s History of the United States, one could simply change the names
and it would sound like the accounts in the US media of the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, the only difference being that Mexico didn’t have the military support
of a NATO to bolster its resistance.
Having won the war, the US dictated the “peace”, taking
one-half of Mexico’s territory, including California. Some had proposed that
the US take all of Mexico, but cooler heads decided to take just that part that
had very few Mexicans, worrying that annexing all of Mexico would significantly
alter the racial composition of the US, since Mexicans were not Anglo, the
definition of white in this period. Little did they realize that some day the
Mexicans (and others from Central America) might threaten to do that by
migrating across the border to reclaim what was once part of their homeland.
But for the time being, the US appeared to be following
its destiny as it filled out the continent and developed a capitalist economy
which would begin to rival the greatest empire the world had ever known, that
of Great Britain. Only one problem stood in its way, an internal contradiction
between two powerful economic and political forces, each vying to dominate the expanding
nation: Slave Power (the name given to the economic, political and cultural
system of the Southern planters) and the rapidly growing Industrial Capitalism
of the North. This contradiction would lead to a Civil War, a war in which
approximately 620,000 died (2% of the population in 1861) and another 1 million
were injured. The war had tremendous consequences for American society and the
American economy and established Industrial Capital as the dominant economic
and political system.
But one thing didn’t change; the Empire of Liberty preserved
its expansionist and white supremist foundations as it was reunited under the
industrial capitalists, who would now rule supreme.
In part II of this series, I hope to examine the final
emergence of the Empire of Liberty as a world power in the period from the
Civil War through WWI and The Great Depression.
