The Empire of Liberty – Part I – 1607-1860

 

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 18^th 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 19^th 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-19^th 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.