British History

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire, by Eliga Gould (2012)

The expectation that the United States of America would become an empire in its own right is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. In his new book, Eliga Gould contends that when the delegates to the Continental Congress of 1776 asserted the United States’ right “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” they were declaring their right to colonise peoples and lands that had not yet been conquered by European powers. Instead of offering an alternative to the European empires, the new United States sought to mimic them. The colonists’ imperial ambitions lay at the heart of the nation-building project.

The significance of “among the powers of the earth” has been marginalized in the endless popular and scholarly discussions of “the most treasured national relic.” Gould is not the first historian to deconstruct the Declaration’s preamble in a way that forces us to rethink the origins of the independent United States of America. In his “Global History” of the Declaration, David Armitage recognised the pertinent phrase “among the powers of the earth” as evidence that European leaders were the Declaration’s primary audience. He emphasised that the proclamation “sought the admission of the United States to a pre-existing international order;” it was an inherently conservative statement that “signalled to the world that their revolution would be decidedly un-revolutionary.” Yet Armitage did not make explicit that the United States defined itself, from the very beginning, as an empire. This uncomfortable underbelly of the Declaration of Independence prompts us to reconsider claims that the American Revolution constituted “the first of the modern era’s great liberationist events.”

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, by Armand-Dumaresq, (c. 1873). Via Wikimedia Commons

Moving forward from the American War for Independence, Gould explores the emergence of the idea and reality of a United States empire though the analysis of Union diplomacy in the decades leading to the First Seminole War (1816-1819) and the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine (1823). Gould pays close attention to the development of political relationships between the United States federal government and its citizens, and European and Native American leaders and their emissaries. It is less concerned with the dry details of specific international treaties than with the “broader process by which Americans sought to make themselves appear worthy of peaceful relations with other nations.”

United States Declaration of Independence, 1776. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In this account we discover that treaty-making ultimately succeeded in protecting the right of US citizens to own slaves and dispossess Native Americans of their lands. North American slave-owners successfully used British legal precedents to defend the legality of plantation slavery. The outbreak of war in Europe also influenced the survival of slavery and the rapid expansion of the United States into Indian territory. Gould suggests that European powers, particularly Britain and Spain, were less willing and able to fight against slavery and support their indigenous allies against the American behemoth when confronting Napoleon’s army demanded their attention and resources. In this way Among the Powers of the Earth makes a convincing case that the history of the United States cannot be studied in a vacuum. At its core the evolution of the United States was deeply entangled with the European empires whose ranks it wanted to join.

Theodore Roosevelt and his Big Stick in the Caribbean cartoon, 1904. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Gould’s Atlantic focus, however, keeps him from grappling with the fact that European empires were aggressively expanding in the period he considers. For example, as the Union army marched into Creek and Seminole territory, British soldiers and convicts invaded Aboriginal lands in Australia and India, and Spain was working to extend its network of missions, forts, and trading posts into northern Mexico and the Pacific northwest of the American continent. Surely European powers’ ongoing campaigns to expand their empires in the Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds affected their readiness to accept the Union’s violent push into Florida? Gould’s Atlantic focus leads him to give an imbalanced account of how the law of nations vis à vis imperial economic interests shaped Europe’s responses to the American empire.

An oil painting of Aborigines watching Captain Phillip's First Fleet arriving in Sydney Cove. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library.

An oil painting of indigenous Australians watching Captain Phillip’s First Fleet arriving in Sydney Cove, 1788. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library.

Had Gould turned his critical gaze towards the Pacific, he could have more forcefully challenged the dominant narrative about the Age of Revolutions. Gould’s findings have implications far beyond American history. Among the Powers of the Earth disrupts the mantra that the Age of Revolutions ushered in the Age of Nations. It makes an important contribution to the recent wave of historical research that destabilises the notion that the bloody rebellions that erupted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were fundamentally anti-colonial and democratising in their aspirations and impact. Gould belongs to the school of historians who consider the period from 1760 to 1830 as “the first age of global imperialism,” as C.A. Bayly put it. Other new and noteworthy revisionist monographs include David Lambert’s history of the pro-slavery movement in the Anglo Atlantic World (2013), and Gabrielle Paquette’s study of the nineteenth-century Portuguese monarchy and empire (2013). The Age of Revolutions was more complex than romantic myths of national election seem to suggest.

Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. (Harvard University Press, 2012).

More in the Entangled Histories series on Not Even Past:

Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott

You may also enjoy:

David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Harvard University Press, 2007.

C.A. Bayly, “The First Age of Global Imperialism, C. 1760–1830.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 2 (1996): 28-47.

David Lambert, Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery. (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Garielle Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Giving a life, winning a patrimony

By Sumit Guha

It was the Indian month of Shravana, and early summer rains of 1653 would have set in as the delegation of villagers toiled up the steep slopes to the gates of the fort of Rohida, (later named Vicitragadh) and presented themselves to the officials there. They came into the court of Dhond-deu, the Hawaldar – an officer charged with the general fiscal and administrative control of the villages subordinate to the fort. These were turbulent times in western India as the Mughal empire from the north began to slowly conquer the southern kingdoms based in Bijapur and Golkunda. Locally a young lord, Shivaji Bhosle, was gradually adding fort after fort to his domains and planning the creation of an independent kingdom. The officers seated around Dhond-deu must have heard many tales of strife before this time. But this one was stranger than usual.

“The fort gateway was probably elaborately ornamented, a contrast to the simple huts of the villagers who toiled up the hill to it. We may conceive its appearance from the sketch made about 1850 of the gateway to the fort of Panhala – not far from Rohida.”

Some days earlier the two hereditary headmen from the village Karanjiya had come to the fort to pay their taxes. The headmen, Balaji Kudhle and Nayakji Kudhle, were accompanied by a Dalit (lower-caste) servant named Gondnak who was employed by the tax office. Maybe he had been sent to summon them? While in the fort, Gondnak (so the document says) got into a broil and beat up a junior treasury official. The headmen seem to have quickly fled back to their village, but a cavalry unit soon arrived in pursuit and seized their extended families and servants. They then demanded to be fed: the villagers slaughtered a goat and supplied them with rich viands and marijuana candy among other things. After a while, some of the soldiers went to sleep and others sat on guard. But their repast began to tell, and so they summoned the hereditary Dalit (Mahar) servants attached to the village and told them that if even a single detainee was missing in the morning, all of their heads would be cut off.

The villagers held a hasty confabulation: they asked the Dalits who had patrimonial rights in the village if one of them would step forward to confess to the offense: each of these replied – “Confess and have our heads and our sons’ heads cut off? We cannot do this.” The Gondnak who had gone to the fort that day was found and the headmen and their kinsmen beseeched him to surrender and redeem all of them. He had no patrimony and was merely a servant at the fort. He said: “Very well, I will ransom you all with my neck. But swear to me now what share of inheritance you will give my son and swear on your ancestors that you will fulfill that promise.” So they all duly swore to give his son, Arajnak, an eighth share of the rights and fees pertaining to the Dalit Mahar servants of the village as well as an honorific role in village ceremonies and shares in taxable and tax-free lands. They swore this on their ancestors and the name of the fearsome god Mahakala. They bound their descendants to never contest this claim in future. Then Gondnak stepped forward and was taken away and beheaded.

Teen darwaza gate, Panhala, Maharashtra, India, 1894

Thus it was that the village delegation came up to the fort to have the deed attesting the creation of a new share in patrimonial rights and lands of the village attested and recorded in the fort where they paid their revenue. The officials in the fort asked the head of the current holders of village service shares, Dhaknak, son of Jannak if he accepted the arrangement. He said that the promise the headmen made bound him and his clan in perpetuity. A deed recounting the circumstances in which Arajnak gained a share in the patrimony was written out and sealed. Copies were kept in the district office and the original given to Arajnak, son of Gondnak to hold as evidence of his rights.

My narrative so far follows that in the document. But I suspect that the village heads may have been the instigators or indeed participants in the broil where the official was beaten up and that the impoverished Dalit Gondnak was the scapegoat for the whole affair. Else it would be unclear why the headmen and their relatives were arrested at the outset. Surely the horsemen would have sought out Gondnak’s kin or children for reprisals? But the incident is a vivid illustration of how important acceptance into the village community was – even if only as a lowly watchman and servant, in western India a few centuries ago.

Image of doorway to fort of Rohida, later named Vicitragadh

The fort is now in ruins but a gateway – perhaps even the one through which the villagers came – survives largely undamaged.

For more on the social and political system where this incident occurred:

Sumit Guha Beyond Caste: Power and Identity in South Asia, Past and Present (2013)

First image via Graham, D.C. 1854. Statistical Report on the Principality of Kolhapoor Selection from the Records of the government of Bombay No. VIII (new series) Bombay: Education Society Press.

Second Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Third image via Wikimapia.org

Student Showcase – Truth is a Defense: John Peter Zenger and Freedom of the Press

Jonathan M. Garcia
Ross S. Sterling High School
Senior Division
Individual Exhibit

Read Jonathan’s Process Paper

John Peter Zenger may not be a household name today, but he was a crucial figure in the history of free press in America. In 1734, authorities in New York City arrested the German immigrant for criticizing the colonial government in his newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal. However, no jury ever convicted Zenger, a major victory for Zenger and his right to print freely.

Jonathan M. Garcia designed an exhibit outlining this remarkable journalist and his contributions to American history. Jonathan talked about how he came to this topic in his process paper:

My topic, rights and responsibilities of the press, relates to this year’s theme, “Rights and Responsibilities in History” in many ways. Freedom of the press comes with rights and responsibilities. In the 1700s, American journalists did have the freedom that exists today. John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant, printed The New York Weekly Journal and was put on trial for libel because he published articles that questioned the government and its integrity. Zenger was found not guilty. This trial was an important step toward the freedom of the American press. However, freedom of the press was not truly known until the First Amendment was passed. Once the First Amendment was passed, publishers felt that they were able to express their views more freely. A democracy cannot exist in the modern world without free press.

Another section of Jonathan's exhibit — A section of Jonathan’s Texas History Day exhibit

The press is an essential weapon against a corrupt government who holds power. Newspapers and other forms of media allow for ideas, even those that voice opposition. However, with these rights does come responsibilities. Today, some people feel the press has too much freedom and question how much is too much information. Celebrities and politicians often fear the paparazzi and having their private lives exposed for everyone to see. The rights of journalists have increased since John Peter Zenger was a publisher and now the responsibilities of the press are even more important for keeping the public informed without overstepping rights to privacy.

More great work from Texas high school and middle school students:

The story of the “little lady who wrote the book that started this great war”

The harsh world of migrant work during the Great Depression

And the history behind one of New Orleans’s most iconic neighborhoods

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009)

by Ben Weiss

Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective constitutes an impressively holistic approach in economic history to a topic that can be infinitely multifaceted and is often severely oversimplified. Considering that the causes of British industrialization have been the subject of heavy debate for the better part of a century, if not longer, Allen offers a refreshing infusion of nuance to classic questions in European and global economic history. He provides a well-rounded account of why Britain industrialized without becoming either too technical or too simplistic in its dialogue with other economic explanations.

Allen argues that industrialization occurred in Britain because institutionalized labor costs were comparatively higher there than in other places in the world. The use of coal to provide energy to its burgeoning commercial centers was associated with costs that were drastically lower than those of other industrial contenders. Healthy wages engendered a comparatively well-educated class of laborers, which also helped generate significant technological innovation and investment. Allen contends that his combination of advanced labor and cheaper energy not only explains why the industrial revolution began in Britain, but also why it had to occur there.

Throughout the book, Allen refutes earlier arguments that see science, the Enlightenment, politics, demographic shifts, agricultural movements, and numerous other issues as the singular key factors in industrialization. His discussions of each of these alternate explanations for the industrial revolution systematically detaches, or at least makes an effort to detach, strict causality from each. For many of these accounts, such as the role of agricultural, technology, and population change, he is able to avoid direct confrontation with scholars in his field by incorporating their arguments into his own interpretations of the importance of wage labor and the pursuit of economic opportunity.

Philip James de Loutherbourg's "Coalbrookdale by Night," which depicts the Madeley Wood Furnaces of Coalbrookdale (Science Museum, London)

Philip James de Loutherbourg’s “Coalbrookdale by Night,” which depicts the Madeley Wood Furnaces (Science Museum, London)

While a few of Allen’s comparisons and data may require more interrogation from the arena of political and cultural history, his attempt to cover as many counterarguments as possible features valiantly throughout the work. Most impressive for an economic history is the way in which domestic British cultural evolution is meticulously addressed. For example, Allen carefully examines the qualitative influence of shifts in agriculture, technology, and literacy rates on generating a willingness to engage in the social and economic opportunities created by energy and labor circumstances in Britain.

Gustave Doré’s “Over London by Rail,” circa 1870 (Wikimedia Commons)

Allen’s book will prove a helpful introduction to the traditional literature of industrialization. Though its argument, which is deeply rooted in economic methodology, may be insufficient for readers who desire substantial political and social explanations, its comprehensiveness in the arena of economic history is admirable. Most importantly, Allen does well to seat his analysis in the current scholarly emphasis on globalization, and in the case of economic history, the global dimensions of commerce. These dimensions help Allen situate the rise of Britain as a core financial power with complicated connections to the global peripheries. Fundamentally, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective delivers a refreshing account of an old narrative in industrial economic history.

Election Fraud! Read All About It!

by Charters Wynn

The week before our presidential elections is a good time to remember one of the greatest political bombshells in history.

On October 25, 1924, four days before the British general election, the conservative mass-circulation newspaper, the Daily Mail, published a letter that caused a political sensation. The front-page headline read: “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow’s Orders to Our Reds: Great Plot Disclosed Yesterday.” These alleged orders from the Soviet Union took the form of a 1200-word “very secret” letter to the leadership of the British Communist Party, from Grigori Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern), whose goal was to spread communism around the world.

The “Zinoviev Letter” instructed British communists on how to promote revolution among the country’s factory workers and armed forces. The letter stated that “agitation-propaganda” cells should be formed in all soldier and sailor units and in munitions factories and military store depots. It also stated that it was essential to organize uprisings in Ireland and the British colonies. None of this is particularly surprising given Comintern policy. What made the letter so inflammatory was its directive that British communists should put pressure on their “sympathizers” in the Labour Party to push for the parliamentary ratification of the recent Anglo-Soviet trade treaty. It was Conservative Party outrage with the treaty that had forced Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Government prime minster, to call the general election, so the issue was central to the political debates of the election. The Conservative charge that the Labour Party leaders were dupes of the Soviet Union already had been at the center of the bitter campaign even before publication of the letter, and then the letter seemed to offer proof that Conservatives were right.

Punch cartoon suggesting that a vote for Labour would bring the Communist revolutionary poor to power

The Soviet government immediately denounced the letter as a forgery, but the damage was done. Since then, controversy has raged over whether the “Red Letter” was genuine or not. It is still impossible to say with certainty who wrote it since the original letter has disappeared. Some historians argued in the 1990s that the letter was genuine, but the preponderance of evidence from British and Soviet documents declassified over the last two decades indicates the letter was forged. That evidence suggests that anti-communist Russian émigrés in Latvia sent the letter to conservative members of the British secret service. They then forwarded it to the Foreign Office and Scotland Yard with the false assurance that “the authenticity is undoubted,” and they leaked it to the press.

Publication of the letter in the last days of what became known as the Red Scare campaign contributed to the sweeping defeat of MacDonald and the Labour Party. Conservatives came back into power and the country’s policy toward the Soviet Union changed dramatically. The Anglo-Soviet treaty was not ratified and in 1927 Great Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. The outcome of a major election in a powerful country was, in this way, influenced by outright trickery.

Documents:

Photograph of the copy of the letter

Transcript of the copy of the letter

You might also enjoy:

Charters Wynn, “Order No. 227: Stalinist Methods and Victory on the Eastern Front“

Lend-Lease

by Charters Wynn

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. The significance of this aid to the Soviet war effort has long been debated. During the Cold War, the Russians minimized its impact and the West exaggerated it. While it is obviously impossible to know what would have happened without the aid, it is clear that Lend-Lease came too late to be the decisive factor in the Soviet victory. But it is equally clear that when aid began to arrive on a massive scale, it significantly increased the speed with which the German Army was pushed out of the Soviet Union. Without Lend-Lease, the Soviet people would have had to make even greater sacrifices and would have suffered even more deaths.

The American Lend-Lease aid program was passed by the United States Congress in March of 1941 originally to support the war effort in Great Britain. American public and congressional opinion at first resisted the idea of extending the aid to the Soviet Union. Many Americans shared the views of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who argued, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.” But aid was offered to the Soviet Union in October 1941 and when Hitler incautiously declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the de facto American-Soviet alliance became a reality.

Most of the early aid arrived on the dangerous “Murmansk run.” In raging seas and Arctic temperatures, convoys carrying American war materials and basic goods ran a gauntlet of German air and U-boat attacks, from Great Britain to the Soviet Arctic ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. One convoy lost 70 out of 80 ships. Later in the war, the Pacific route, a short voyage across the Bering Straits from Alaska to the Siberian port of Vladivostok, made up nearly half the shipments, and one-third came over the mountains into Soviet Central Asia via the Persian Gulf.

The main American motive was self-interest, not generosity. While remaining suspicious of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, President Roosevelt believed the United States could lose only if Germany emerged victorious on the Eastern Front. With Germany controlling the continent of Europe from the English Channel to Central Russia, it was in the western Allies’ interests to help the Red Army fight the German forces.

Nor did the Russians see Lend-Lease as charity. They saw themselves as carrying the war on their shoulders in its most critical phase. As late as the end of 1942, the Red Army faced 193 German divisions, while Anglo-American forces in Africa faced only four. To Stalin and people in the Soviet Union, the western Allies’ failure to open a second front in Europe until June 6, 1944 was deliberately intended to let the Soviet Union bear the brunt of the fighting and casualties.

Lend-Lease aid was slow to arrive. During the most crucial period of the war on the Eastern Front it remained little more than a trickle. Only following the Battle of Stalingrad (August 19, 1942-February 2, 1943), when the Soviet Union’s eventual victory seemed assured, did American aid began to arrive on a significant scale – 85% of the supplies arrived after the beginning of 1943. Although the vast majority of the Red Army’s best aircraft, tanks, guns and ammunition continued to be manufactured in the Soviet Union, its mobility and communications, in particular, came to rely on Lend-Lease.

The Soviet ability to mount massive and overwhelmingly successful offensives against the still formidable German forces depended on the more than 360,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 32,000 motorcycles, 380,000 field telephones, 2.5 million belts and 14 million boots produced in the United States, as well as large amounts of other equipment. Soldiers also depended on American food supplies, including hundreds of thousands of tons of Spam and other canned meat. Red Army troops advanced into Berlin driving American trucks and wearing American boots. As Stalin told Roosevelt, without Lend-Lease “victory would have been delayed.”

Ironically, although the Soviet Union would have won the war on the Eastern Front without Lend-Lease, American aid facilitated the Red Army’s arrival in Eastern Europe before Anglo-American forces, which set the stage for the beginning of the Cold War.

You may also like:

Russian newsreel video about Lend-Lease on our blog

Transcript of the Lend-Lease Act (1941)

“One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943)

To read more about the war on the Eastern Front:

Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945 (1997)
Roger Munting, “Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19 (1984), 495-510
Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. (2004)

Photo Credits:
American Douglas A-20 bomber, provided through Lend-Lease, is loaded on to a ship bound for Allied ports, ca. 1943. Photo by Gruber for U.S. Office of War Information, via Wikimedia commons
Graphs from “One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease”

Samuel Pepys Tweets

by Jessica Luther

On August 29, 2011, Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys) tweeted the following:

Took my wife, and Mercer, and Deb., to Bartholomew Fair, and there did see a ridiculous, obscene little stage-play, called “Marry Andrey.

While this may seem rather boring in content, it is extraordinary considering that Samuel Pepys originally wrote that in 1668. And now it is a tweet.

Pepys was a seventeenth-century English diarist, famous for the journal that he kept during the decade of the 1660s. He chronicled such events as the reestablishment of the monarchy under Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and 1666, the Great Fire of London in September 1666, the demolition of St. Paul’s cathedral in 1668, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War later in the decade. He also recorded the mundane activities of domestic life, squabbles with servants, and his extramarital affairs. Pepys was a Member of Parliament, a successful businessman, a Justice of the Peace, and a member of the Royal Society. (For more on Pepys’ biography)

The diary is an incredible resource for any historian studying early modern England but it is also an enjoyable read, especially in small 140-character bits delivered to your Twitter feed.

Since January 1, 2003, a website designer named Phil Gyford has been publishing an entry from the diary everyday, beginning with the first entry from Pepys’ diary on January 1, 1660. The main site always hosts the latest entries. Each entry is also annotated so that specific people, places, and events are easily explained by simply rolling your mouse over the highlighted term.

Pepys’ Twitter feed publishes one or two sentences from that day’s entry. It is refreshing among updates from Libya, the 2012 presidential race, and some actor’s latest scandal to see the seventeenth-century English prose of Pepys in this modern-day form of communication.

Sometimes the tweets simply serve as a reminder of the realities and lived experience of people in early modern England.

Tweeted on July 18, 2011 (which corresponds to entry for July 18, 1668):

My Lord Cornwallis did endeavour to get the King a whore, but she did get away, and killed herself, which if true is very sad.

Tweeted on July 12, 2011:

Betty Michell cries out, and my wife goes to her, and she brings forth a girl, and my wife godmother again to a Betty.

Tweeted on June 18, 2011:

I by little words find that my wife hath heard of my going to plays, and carrying people abroad every day, in her absence.

Tweeted on June 11, 2011: (Pepys’ trip to Stonehenge):

Find Stonage prodigious as any tales I ever heard of them. God knows what their use was! They are hard to tell, but yet maybe told.

Pepys’ final entry was on May 31, 1669. That means that Gyford’s online project of unveiling the diary over the course of nine years will end at the end of next May.

Image Credits:
H.B. Wheatley, ed, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Pepysiana (London, 1899)
Anonymous, Great fire of London, 1666 (cropped and inverted)
both public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor (2010)

by James Jenkins

The War of 1812 was not a war between two nations, but rather a civil war, in which “brother fought brother in a borderland of mixed peoples.” Alan Taylor focuses on the U.S.-Canada borderland, which stretched from Detroit to Montreal. Before the war, the distinctions between British subjects and American citizens in the region remained uncertain. The British asserted that their empire’s subjects remained subjects for life, precisely when a stream of Irish people were migrating to the United States. Moreover, immigrants from the United States made up the majority of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). Although the War of 1812 resulted in a stalemate from a diplomatic or military perspective, it gave closure to the contested border and resulted in the emergence of the United States and Canada as modern nation-states.

Taylor identifies four components that made the War of 1812 a civil war. First, The Republican-led American government vied with Britain over who would control Upper Canada. Yet, the U.S.’s poorly trained military struggled to occupy even a sliver of Canadian territory. Taylor describes how supply lines, propaganda, and prisons all played pivotal roles in the war’s outcome. Second, American Federalists sympathized with Britain. Most Federalists opposed the war and some even contributed to Britain’s war effort by smuggling, spying and threatening secession. Moreover, the United States never waged a significant campaign on the upper St. Lawrence River because Federalists in Ogdensburg, NY used their political influence to block such a strategy. Possessing the St. Lawrence River would have weakened all of Upper Canada, which relied on the seaway for supplies. But Republican politicians from western New York and Kentucky successfully lobbied to make the Detroit and Niagara Rivers the primary American fronts. Third, Irish republicans who had immigrated to the United States renewed a failed rebellion in Ireland by enlisting in American forces. But, they also faced Irish soldiers who had joined the royal army, pitting Irishman against Irishman.

Taylor describes a fourth aspect to the civil war: the involvement of Native peoples. Many Indians joined British forces in the hopes of stopping further U.S. settlement in the Ohio Valley. However, Native peoples are curiously peripheral to Taylor’s narrative, and he instead highlights their ability to terrify untrained American soldiers and provide fodder for anti-British propaganda. Taylor’s emphasis on imagined Indians leaves some paradoxical questions unanswered. For instance, he argues that American General William Henry Harrison’s troops considered arming Indians to be racial treason. Yet Taylor has little to say about the two hundred some Native people who joined Harrison’s forces. In addition, Taylor offers almost no biographical details on Native individuals. Those wishing for the next chapter of Taylor’s The Divided Ground (2006), which places the Haudenosaunee at the center of the American Revolution, will be disappointed.

Despite this shortcoming, Taylor’s borderland approach and assiduous research make for a welcome revision to an often overlooked war. The Civil War of 1812 should appeal to a large audience thanks to Taylor’s engaging narratives and elegant writing style.

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