US History Archives - Page 15 of 24

Personal Memoirs, by Ulysses S. Grant (2003)

April 2015 marks the sesquicentennial of the end of the U.S. Civil War. As we look back on that momentous event in U.S. history, we should take time to reconsider one of the war’s most important figures, Ulysses S. Grant. Most famous as a general, Grant’s life spans an important part of U.S. history. Moreover, Grant’s prose is clear and evocative, proving him to be a great writer,and the author of one of the finest examples of the military memoir.

Grant had resolved not to write his memoirs. However, nearing the end of his life, and with his family’s financial security in doubt, Grant put forth a tremendous effort to tell the story of his military service. The writing does not suffer from Grant’s apparent haste. Instead, the words spill forth from the page and propel the reader through a brief description of his early life, his education at West Point, and his service in the war with Mexico. Grant then embarks on a gripping account of the Civil War from his own perspective.

The Battle of Jackson, fought on May 14, 1863, was part of the Vicksburg Campaign. Via Wikimedia Commons. — The Battle of Jackson, fought on May 14, 1863, was part of the Vicksburg Campaign.

It is a perspective that differs from many military histories of the war. Grant served in the West during the early years of the conflict. There are no Bull Runs or Antietams here. Instead, Grant gives the reader an inside account of the siege of Vicksburg, a battle of tremendous importance to the Union’s ultimate victory, which is often obscured because it ended on the same day as that more famous battle in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Grant’s account also showcases his genius for war. Like his illustrious predecessor as war-hero-turned-president, George Washington, some military historians deride Grant as a poor tactical general, especially in comparison to his contemporary, Robert E. Lee. While this critique is accurate, insofar as Grant lost many battles, it ignores the far more important object of the general, which is to win the war. On this point, Grant has few equals. And how Grant won the war is most obvious in his description of what he calls the “Grand Campaign” of 1864-1865.

Grant recognized that between 1861 and 1863 the Union had not used its superior strength well, allowing the Confederate armies to survive. To correct this, Grant devised a coordinated series of movements and battles by the Union armies to defeat the Confederacy and end the war. The inclusion of the letters and telegrams that Grant sent to his commanders in the field.makes his description of the campaign and its planning evocative and revealing. These are brilliant: they are concise and precisely convey Grant’s intent for each action.

Grant’s memoirs also offer insights into the war beyond its military conduct. Throughout, he presents glimpses of the hardships imposed on the population of the Confederate states by the war that raged on their soil. He is aware of his culpability for this suffering, and, at times, made an effort to alleviate it. He also gives the reader his impressions of other figures, such as Lee, General William T. Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln. These are no doubt colored by the passage of years, but they are also blunt, yet nuanced.

The Peacemakers depicts Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter aboard the River Queen on March 27th & March 28th, 1865. White House copy of the lost 1868 painting. — The Peacemakers by George P.A. Healey depicts Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter aboard the River Queen on March 27th & March 28th, 1865. This is the White House copy of the lost 1868 painting.

Grant’s discussion of his relationship with Lincoln is fascinating. Much has been written decrying the interference of presidents in military operations, especially with regard to Vietnam. Grant’s memoirs offer a completely different viewpoint. He describes the many instances when he received direct communications from Lincoln about fighting the war, most of which were unsolicited. Rather than condemning these as interference, Grant shows that he understood his subordinate relationship to the president, and thus he vigorously obeyed the president’s orders.

Finally, Grant embodies the complicated feelings that the conflict aroused. He poignantly expresses the conflicting emotions he experienced during the negotiations with Lee for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. He relates that, when the two commanders met near Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865, he was unsure of Lee’s feelings, but his own had passed from jubilation about the pending end of the war to sadness and depression. Grant did not want to rejoice over the surrender of his valiant foe, who had battled for his cause, “though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

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A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, by Michael McGerr (2003)

By J. Taylor Vurpillat

The upsurge in public awareness of economic inequality since the 2008 financial crisis has refocused attention on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in American history, a period defined by wealth disparities that parallel our own. The problem with our search for historical analogies is that we often examine the past within the context of our individual assumptions, finding what we want to find—a process cognitive psychologists call confirmation bias. Given the need for well-observed general history to guide our inquiry, it is gratifying that we have Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920.

Until recently, historians of the era had nearly given up on synthesizing the fractal array of differing impulses behind progressive reform efforts. A large group of progressive reformers wanted to harness the unbridled energy and influence of industry in American life. Other reformers, such as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis, were more interested in ameliorating the day-to-day problems of America’s expanding immigrant working class. Another faction wanted good government, female suffrage, prohibition, and a world safe for democracy. The frustration of making sense of the period has been expressed by John D. Buenker and Peter G. Filene who argued in various essays that, beyond sharing a general dissatisfaction with Industrial America, reformers were too disparate to share common motives for reform.

President of the United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 1912

In a sustained and elegant effort, Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent has swept away much of the frustration of the previous generation. The argument at the center of the book makes a clear case that the array of progressive reform impulses were, in fact, quite unified when viewed through the lens of class. It was the horror with which many middle-class Americans viewed the personal excesses of the industrial upper class and the tumultuous and inharmonious society the “upper ten” had imposed on other Americans that inspired progressive reformers and ultimately the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Given his argument based on class, McGerr takes a few cues from Karl Marx—and many more from Sigmund Freud by way of Richard Hofstadter, the notable mid-century American historian. In the 1950s, it was Hofstadter who made the argument that the progressive impulse of the early twentieth century was driven by a status anxiety among middle-class Americans unsure of their place in the new industrial order.

McGerr has updated this brilliant but dashed-off argument, developing a deeper, more subtle analysis grounded in the primary sources of the era. For example, he takes time to portray the ethos of maximalist individualism that defined the industrial upper class at the turn of the century. He delves into the amusing details of an extravagant 1897 costume ball held for New York’s high society amid the worse economic depression before the 1930s. This set piece, which included reports of the backlash to the ball in America’s leading newspapers, perfectly illustrated the growing rift between a sober, civic-minded middle class and the excess and individualism of the upper class. As McGerr makes clear, it was the culture of the upper class—half perversion and half repudiation of Victorian virtues — that repelled “the middle class enough to transform them from respectable Victorians into radicals.”

Bradley-Martin Ball of 1897 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

In developing this argument, McGerr challenges the views of both the New Left in the 1960s, that progressives were nothing more than petty bourgeois defenders of the new industrial elite—and from more recent arguments of the New Right that progressives of the era were socialists in all but name.

There are many strong points in McGerr’s telling. Foremost among these is the way he brings progressive support for segregation into his larger argument. Many progressives supported legal segregation. Indeed, in the first decades of the twentieth century segregation intensified—and not only in the South. These efforts, McGerr argues, showed the limits of social transformation imagined by progressive reformers. More importantly, it demonstrated the ways in which progressive desires for order took primacy over ideas of racial equality and integration. Segregation was a way to “halt dangerous social conflict that could not otherwise be stopped,” according to McGerr.

National Progressive Convention at the Chicago Coliseum, 1912

The second strength of the book is the extensive use of sources embedded in a tightly organized narrative that covers both the major accomplishments and small victories of the progressive movement. As readers, we witness both the trust-busting heroics of Theodore Roosevelt and the long struggle of Lillian Wald and others to limit child labor. Most importantly, we are given a vantage of changing industrial society from the viewpoint of those whose everyday lives were most dramatically altered. Rahel Golub, the young daughter of German-Jewish immigrants, spent six days each week sewing and serving her family until settlement workers exposed her to a foreign world known as “uptown”—a world so different from the working-class neighborhoods of lower Manhattan that it seemed to her a foreign country.

Child Laborer in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, South Carolina, 1908.

A third strength is the discussion of the obstacles that challenged and ultimately defeated this army of crusading middle-class reformers. Progressivism, McGerr contends, offered middle-class Americans the utopian promise of a perfected society. Because such a transformational vision demanded so much of Americans, it proved to be an unrealistic vision that led to inevitable letdowns. Reform did not create a harmonious middle-class paradise. Nevertheless, the progressive movement captured the mainstream of American politics and public spirit and its downfall required more than half-met expectations. Despite progressive legislative triumphs against corporate power, the maximalist individualism of the upper class proved more difficult to contain. The leisure class, some of whom had decamped for Europe at the turn of the century, returned in force in the 1920s as American involvement in the First World War discredited the reform-minded collective action of Woodrow Wilson and others.

Editorial cartoon by Karl K. Knecht in Evansville Courier, Oct 1912.

Middle-class reformers also faced growing resistance from a second, new form of individualism emerging from the working-class neighborhoods of America’s industrial cities. Higher real wages and increased leisure time—a progressive triumph—gave rise to a series of new popular entertainments that drew young workers into jazz-filled dance halls, amusement parks, and cathedrals constructed for the era’s most magnificent amusement—moving pictures. The disillusionment with progressive efforts to remake society and the world—along with the resurgence of individualist sentiment on two fronts ultimately doomed progressive reform to the margins of American public life after 1920.

If there are faults in this sweeping history of the Progressive Era, they are few. One might quibble with McGerr’s repeated use of the term “the middle class” to refer to progressive reformers. It is useful but progressive reformers represented only a portion of the middle class and some development of the other sentiments across the middle-class political spectrum would have been helpful. It is hard to explain the popular election of anti-reform Republicans in the 1920s without a more explicit definition of the middle class.

A Fierce Discontent, shows historian Michael McGerr as master of both subject and craft. The book demonstrates his command of the intimate details that illuminate the past and of the analytical perspective that gives these details meaning. As far as historical insights that may help us understand our own times, McGerr’s argument highlights the fact that out of disparate material circumstances disparate sentiments, values, and cultures emerged. The problem for progressives then was that these cultures in conflict were all parts of a single nation, society, and political system.

Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (Free Press, 2003)

All images via Wikimedia Commons

#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy

The historical value of black life and the casual killing of Eric Garner.

by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan

This article first appeared in The American Prospect (December 5, 2014).

In less than a month, our nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. This should be a time of celebratory reflection, yet Wednesday night, after another grand jury failed to see the value of African-American life, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Black lives matter!”

Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

This legislation declared that a grand assembly [jury] could “acquit” those who killed their slaves during a “correction” because a slaveowner could not be guilty of a felony for destroying “his owne property.” Given such laws, the history of commodification before 1865 is clear: The enslaved were chattel—movable and disposable forms of property valued only as long as their labor produced wealth for their owners. A slave in need of “correction” could be destroyed with impunity. Black life existed on a pendulum, either valued or worthless according to the vagaries of the marketplace. With the abolition of slavery, it appeared that black life would no longer be determined by the starkness of a racial marketplace; however, in the aftermath of slavery, the devaluation of black life continues.

The abolition of slavery did not do away with the commodification of black people. Instead, in a nation founded on the idea that black life was only of value when it produced wealth for the elite, free black people became associated with sloth and violence. Slavery meant that black people had no intrinsic human worth, but were only of interest for the monetary value that they could convey. Apparently, freedom could not dislodge the fundamental belief that casual killing could be excused. Free or not, black men and women have remained disposable.

In 1886, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Hal Geiger, an African-American attorney and prominent leader of the black community from Texas, was shot five times in court. The prosecuting attorney and confirmed shooter, O.D. Cannon, did not like the way Geiger spoke to him. Taking the law into his own hands, Cannon pulled out a pistol and shot Geiger, who died a month later. It took 10 minutes for a jury to acquit Cannon of this “crime.” Twenty years after slavery, the state exonerated the murder of an African American, killed in full view of a judge and jury in a courtroom. Clearly Geiger’s life, and the lives of the black women he was defending, had no value in the eyes of the jury. Black death was deemed the legitimate and justifiable response to a black man who’d transgressed the boundaries of his proper place.

We live at a moment when many black men and women have secured our economic and social standing in this country—a moment at which black men and women occupy positions of prominence, influence and wealth. And yet this spate of murders at the hands of law enforcement clearly tells us that, on a fundamental level, black life does not matter. What does it mean that in 2014 we must warn our children that any one of us can be recast as dangerous monsters, whose pleas for breath, ignored on camera, might awaken the sleeping giant? We must say to ourselves and our children that, for many people, our lives, no longer associated with the accumulation of wealth for others, now do not matter at all.

How could this happen?” This is the question our own children asked us in the wake of the grand jury decisions regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner. This is the question reverberating in our communities. This is the question we ask ourselves. And yet, as scholars of slavery we know the answer. It happened because life that is bought and sold is life that can be reduced to surplus. Life that can be disposed of. Life that can be dismissed.

We are appalled by these deaths. But we are equally appalled by our ability to make sense of them. We live embedded in the afterlife of slavery. We are a nation that has failed to grapple with our past.

When the Virginia House of Commons argued that no one could be charged with committing a felony for a homicide that amounted to the destruction of their own property, it set in motion a racial logic in which we are still entangled. No one will be punished for the taking of black life. Darren Wilson’s actions are understood by the grand jury and many members of his community as unfortunate—but justified. The only valuable thing lost during those four hours as Michael Brown’s body lay uncovered in the street was Officer Darren Wilson’s peace of mind. Million-dollar war chests and speaking engagements will compensate Wilson. Because in the current racial marketplace, the only people compensated for the loss of black lives are those who take them. Black life is only valued when it’s harnessed to white capital.

What we are left with is a perversion of value. A society in which the taking of black life—in public, on camera—is of no consequence. Black men and women appear to be disposable to all but the families and communities who mourn them. We are reduced to the fury and loss and pathos encompassed in our screaming assertion that black lives matter.

Daina Ramey Berry, an associate professor of history and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project.

Jennifer L. Morgan, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, is currently a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.

After WWII: A Soviet View of U.S. Intentions

By Mark Atwood Lawrence

In February 1946, George F. Kennan, a senior U.S. diplomat based in Moscow, sent the State Department his famous “long telegram,” an attempt to explain Soviet behavior at a time of quickly worsening relations between the superpowers, as their wartime alliance unraveled. Among the first readers of Kennan’s missive were Soviet leaders, who obtained the top-secret document through intelligence channels. On orders from the Moscow, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Vasilovich Novikov, quickly set to work writing a comparable cable analyzing U.S. motives and behavior. It remains unclear whether the telegram, dispatched on September 27, 1946, reflects Novikov’s sense of what his superiors wished to read or his true understanding of U.S. policy. In any case, the document is a striking expression of mounting Soviet suspicions of Moscow’s erstwhile ally. Excerpts of Kennan’s statement were posted last week on NEP. Excerpt’s of Novikov’s message are posted below. Both come from our featured book this month, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror.

Nikolai Novikov, 1946. Via Wikimedia Commons

Reflecting the imperialistic tendency of American monopoly capital, U.S. foreign policy has been characterized in the postwar period by a desire for world domination. This is the real meaning of repeated statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles that the US has a right to world leadership. All the forces of American diplomacy, the Army, Navy, and Air Force, industry, and science have been placed at the service of this policy. With this objective in mind broad plans for expansion have been developed, to be realized both diplomatically and through the creation of a system of naval and air bases far from the US, an arms race, and the creation of newer and newer weapons….

This situation does not completely match the expectations of those reactionary circles who hoped during the Second World War that they would be able to remain apart from the main battles in Europe and Asia for a long time. Their expectation was that the United States of America, if it was not able to completely avoid participation in the war, would enter it only at the last moment when it might be able to influence its outcome without great effort, completely securing its own interests. It was intended thereby that the main rivals of the US would be crushed in this war or weakened to a great degree and that due to this circumstance the US would be the most powerful factor in deciding the main issues of the postwar world. These expectations also were based on the assumption quite widespread in the US during the first period of the war that the Soviet Union, which had been attacked by German fascism in June 1941, would be weakened as a result of the war or even completely destroyed.

Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, 1945. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Reality has not borne out all the expectations of the American imperialists….

Europe came out of the war with a thoroughly shattered economy, and the economic devastation which resulted during the war cannot soon be repaired. All the countries of Europe and Asia are feeling an enormous need for consumer goods, industrial and transportation equipment, etc. Such a situation opens up a vista for American monopoly capital of enormous deliveries of goods and the importation of capital to these countries, which would allow it [American monopoly capital] to be introduced into their economies.

Destruction of Dresden, 1945. Via Wikimedia Commons

The realization of this opportunity would mean a serious strengthening of the economic position of the US throughout the entire world and would be one of the stages in the path toward establishing American world supremacy….

On the other hand, the expectations of those American circles have not been justified which were based on the Soviet Union being destroyed during the war or coming out of it so weakened that it was forced to bow to the US for economic aid. In this event it could have dictated such conditions which would provide the US with an opportunity to carry out its expansion in Europe and Asia without hindrance from the USSR.

In reality, in spite of all the economic difficulties of the postwar period associated with the enormous damage caused by the war and the German fascist occupation the Soviet Union continues to remain economically independent from the outside world and is restoring its economy by its own means….

The increase in peacetime military potential and the organization of a large number of naval and air bases both in the US and beyond its borders are clear indicators of the US desire to establish world domination.

For the first time in the country’s history in the summer of 1946 Congress adopted a law to form a peacetime army not of volunteers but on the basis of universal military conscription…. The colossal growth of expenditures for the Army and Navy, comprising $13 billion in the 1946-1947 budget (about 40% of the entire budget of $36 billion) and is more than 10 times the corresponding expenditures in the 1938 budget, when it did not even reach $1 billion.

LTA Steel Hangar, Built by the 80th Seabees, at Carlson Field, Trinidad. Via WIkimedia Commons.

LTA Steel Hangar, Built by the 80th Seabees in 1914, at Carlson Field, Trinidad. Via WIkimedia Commons.

These enormous budget sums are being spent along with the maintenance of a large Army, Navy, and Air Force and also the creation of a vast system of naval and air bases in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. According to available official plans, in the coming years 228 bases, support bases, and radio stations are to be built in the Atlantic Ocean and 258 in the Pacific Ocean. The majority of these bases and support bases are located outside the United States….

The current policy of the American government with respect to the USSR is also directed at limiting or displacing Soviet influence from neighboring countries. While implementing it the US is trying to take steps at various international conferences or directly in these very same countries which, on the one hand, manifest themselves in the support of reactionary forces in former enemy or allied countries bordering the USSR with the object of creating obstacles to the processes of democratizing these countries but, on the other, in providing positions for the penetration of American capital into their economies….

U.S. Navy Douglas R4D and U.S. Air Force C-47 aircraft unload at Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift. 1948-49

The numerous statements by American government, political, and military leaders about the Soviet Union and its foreign policy in an exceptionally hostile spirit are quite typical of the current attitude of American ruling circles toward the USSR…. The primary goal of this anti-Soviet campaign of American “public opinion” consists of exerting political pressure on the Soviet Union and forcing it to make concessions. Another, no less important goal of the campaign is a desire to create an atmosphere of a fear of war among the broad masses who are tired of war, which would make it easier for the government to take steps to maintain the great military potential in the US.

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

By Kristie Flannery

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)

After WWII: George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”

by Mark A. Lawrence

During the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union formed a powerful partnership to defeat Nazi Germany. Their alliance did not, however, extend to a shared vision of the postwar world order. While U.S. leaders envisioned an open global economic system that would assure American access to markets and resources around the world, leaders in Moscow wanted to clamp down on parts of Europe and Asia in order to prevent the reemergence of hostile nations along the Soviet Union’s borders. In the closing phases of the war and especially in the first tumultuous months following the end of the fighting, U.S. and Soviet leaders increasingly clashed over a range of issues, especially the status of eastern Germany, Poland, and other parts of eastern Europe. The prospect of a new and dangerous geopolitical rivalry so soon after ending the fascist threat caused anger and anxiety among American leaders, who struggled to understand Soviet motives.

The Soviet Union after WWII (via Wikimedia Commons)

In February 1946, officials in Washington asked the U.S. embassy in Moscow why the Soviet government was failing to cooperate with American plans for the postwar international order. On the receiving end was George Kennan, a career foreign service officer who had risen to be the second-ranking American official in Moscow. Kennan replied with an extraordinary 5,300-word cable later dubbed the “long telegram.” Kennan drew on his long experience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to lay out a distinctive view of Russian history and culture. You can read excerpts of his message below:

George F. Kennan, 1947

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum”, November 1920 (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smoldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability….

Soviet poster titled “American freedom”, 1950 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to cope with this force [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face…. I cannot attempt to suggest all answers here. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve – and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:

(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventurist. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw – and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

(2) Gauged against western world as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which western world can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.

(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another…. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and – for the moment – highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.

Image of US Embassy in Moscow (Via Wikimedia Commons)

International History and the Global United States: More to Read

by Mark A. Lawrence

Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson, editors, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations (Houghton Mifflin, 5^th edition, 2002). This pathbreaking collection, widely assigned in undergraduate classes, blends primary-source documents with excerpts from scholarly works that take contrasting positions on key interpretive questions. In this way, the book gives students a sense of scholarly debates along with a small amount of original material to use in assessing them.

Jussi Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, editors, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford University Press, 2003). As the title suggests, this collection has a relatively narrow chronological focus – just the Cold War years from the 1940s to 1989. But it is admirably broad in other respects, collecting material from numerous countries and blending high-level policy documents with reminiscences by ordinary people.

Michael D. Gambone, editor, Documents of American Diplomacy (Greenwood Press, 2002). This collection contains an impressive 167 documents reaching from the Declaration of Independence to the Clinton presidency. All of the classics of American decision-making are here, making it an excellent choice for anyone trying to track down documents of indisputable significance.

Mark Atwood Lawrence, editor, The Vietnam War: An International History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2014). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Mark Lawrence, this book collects documents from just a single episode in the history of U.S. foreign relations – the Vietnam War. But it brings together material from the United States with documents from Vietnam, China, and elsewhere.

Jeremi Suri, editor, Foreign Relations of the United States Since 1898 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Jeremi Suri, this book collects approximately 50 documents, nearly all of them American. It’s one of the best brief collections for classroom purposes.

The Global United States

By Mark A. Lawrence

For many students, the most exciting thing about history is not the scholarly monographs that we spend years researching and writing and they are often expected to read. Rather, many students are most intensely drawn to the study of the past by reading and analyzing primary sources – the original documents that constitute the raw material of history.

Primary documents can sweep us into the past, giving us direct access to the words, cadences, biases, insights, and passions of remote historical actors. History comes alive, and voices whisper across chasms of time, space, and perception. In the best case, such material can enable students to make their own judgments about the past and to weigh the claims of scholars.

To promote the study of primary source material in my field, the history of U.S. foreign relations, I teamed up with two colleagues over the last few years to compile a volume of documents that we hope will inspire students to delve further into the subject.

The book, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, encompasses about 125 years of history. It charts the rise of the United States from a peripheral, comparatively weak power in the late nineteenth century to the pinnacle of its military, diplomatic, and cultural influence in the early twenty-first. How and why did this momentous transformation occur? Who resisted and why? What were the attitudes of foreign nations as the United States became a great power of the first order and then surpassed them all?

Via 228 documents, the book helps answer these questions by inviting readers to consider the opinions and pronouncements of some of the people who took part in American policymaking and witnessed the American rise to power. Other historians have published collections of primary-source material on American foreign relations before. But our collection is new and different in at least three respects.

800px-The_Administration's_Promises_Have_Been_Kept — 1900 campaign poster celebrating American imperial expansion

First, the book covers a relatively long period of time. Whereas most document collections focus on particular segments of this period, especially the Cold War, our book reveals and explores continuities across the larger flow of time, including the recent post-Cold War years. In fact, the collection features two chapters on the period since 1989, enabling readers to consider contemporary dilemmas faced by the Bush and Obama administrations in light of historical experience.

Second, the collection reflects key recent trends in the study of U.S. foreign relations. In recent decades, diplomatic historians have increasingly called into question the tendency among an older generation to write histories of U.S. policymaking on the basis of U.S. sources alone. Scholars should strive for a truly international kind of history that sets U.S. behavior within an international context and, by making use of foreign archives, views the United States through the eyes of foreign governments and peoples. Diplomatic historians in recent years have also called into question the field’s traditional focus on elite policymakers. Increasingly, scholars have recognized the need to take account of popular opinion and the influences of powerful people outside of government.

ellington6b — Duke Ellington in the Soviet Union, 1971. Ellington and his orchestra encountered a vibrant – if still partially underground – jazz scene and played with Russian musicians in both official and unofficial capacities. The band leader’s Soviet tour followed the announcement of the upcoming and historic trip to the USSR by President Richard Nixon, a pianist and avid jazz fan.

Our book takes account of both of these critiques of diplomatic history. To be sure, we include many documents reflecting the views of elite American policymakers – presidential declarations, policy memoranda, diplomatic dispatches, are still important sources. But we intermingle this kind of material, which has been the sole focus of nearly all the existing document readers in U.S. foreign relations, with two other kinds of documents: some reflecting foreign perceptions of the United States and others reflecting the opinions of Americans outside policymaking circles – clergymen, cartoonists, musicians, novelists, polemicists, and others.

Third, the book features relatively tight thematic coherence. There is, of course, an infinite number of documents that could reasonably have gone into our book. We handled the problem of over-abundance partly by building each chapter around a single interpretive question that guided our selections. Our chapters are not, that is, mere compilations of important documents related to a general topic or time period – the usual approach in document books. Rather, the chapters contain documents reflecting various perspectives on an interpretive problem that scholars have identified as crucial to understanding U.S. foreign relations. For example, the chapter on the great Cold War crisis of the early 1960s asks why the East-West conflict became so dangerous at that particular time. The chapter on the 1990s, asks how the United States reoriented its foreign policy following the collapse of the enemy that had given shape and purpose to American diplomacy for decades.

Coca-Cola_Morocco — Coca Cola in Morocco

Following this approach, we place conflicting points of view in dialogue with one another to show the development of particular sets of ideas over time. While this approach means that we pass over some important questions, it does, we hope, enhance the book’s appeal by giving the chapters a clear logic and flow.

Whether we have achieved our goals is for readers to decide. But one thing that I and my co-editors – Jeffrey A. Engel of Southern Methodist University and Andrew Preston of Cambridge University – can say for sure is that the book was no small undertaking. Although all three of us pursued other projects at the same time, locating, selecting, editing, and writing introductory material for 223 documents took far longer than we had anticipated – nearly a decade, in fact.

But we’re pleased with the end result, and we hope that innumerable students – and perhaps other readers interested in America’s foreign relations – will use it in the years ahead to find inspiration for the study of history.

Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark A. Lawrence, and Andrew Preston, eds., America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

Mark Lawrence’s suggestions for Further Reading can be found here.

Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines

By Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin

(This article was originally published on The Conversation)

People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 hundred years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t.

Slavery has been in the news a lot lately. Perhaps it’s because of the increase in human trafficking on American soil or the headlines about income inequality, the mass incarceration of African Americans or discussions about reparations to the descendants of slaves. Several publications have fueled these conversations: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic Monthly, French economist Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century, historian Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and The Making of American Capitalism, and law professor Bryan A. Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

As a scholar of slavery at the University of Texas at Austin, I welcome the public debates and connections the American people are making with history. However, there are still many misconceptions about slavery.

I’ve spent my career dispelling myths about “the peculiar institution.” The goal in my courses is not to victimize one group and celebrate another. Instead, we trace the history of slavery in all its forms to make sense of the origins of wealth inequality and the roots of discrimination today. The history of slavery provides deep context to contemporary conversations and counters the distorted facts, internet hoaxes and poor scholarship I caution my students against.

Four myths about slavery

Myth One: The majority of African captives came to what became the United States.

Truth: Only 380,000 or 4-6% came to the United States. The majority of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed by the Caribbean. A significant number of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies by way of the Caribbean where they were “seasoned” and mentored into slave life. They spent months or years recovering from the harsh realities of the Middle Passage. Once they were forcibly accustomed to slave labor, many were then brought to plantations on American soil.

Myth Two: Slavery lasted for 400 years.

Popular culture is rich with references to 400 years of oppression. There seems to be confusion between the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1440-1888) and the institution of slavery, confusion only reinforced by the Bible, Genesis 15:13:

Then the Lord said to him, ‘Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.’

Listen to Lupe Fiasco – just one Hip Hop artist to refer to the 400 years – in his 2011 imagining of America without slavery, “All Black Everything”:

[Hook]
You would never know
If you could ever be
If you never try
You would never see
Stayed in Africa
We ain’t never leave
So there were no slaves in our history
Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn’t he
See I fell asleep and I had a dream, it was all black everything
[Verse 1]
Uh, and we ain’t get exploited
White man ain’t feared so he did not destroy it
We ain’t work for free, see they had to employ it
Built it up together so we equally appointed
First 400 years, see we actually enjoyed it

A plantation owner with his slaves. (National Media Museum from UK)

Truth: Slavery was not unique to the United States; it is a part of almost every nation’s history from Greek and Roman civilizations to contemporary forms of human trafficking. The American part of the story lasted fewer than 400 years.

How do we calculate it? Most historians use 1619 as a starting point: 20 Africans referred to as ”servants” arrived in Jamestown, VA on a Dutch ship. It’s important to note, however, that they were not the first Africans on American soil. Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not as slaves but as explorers together with Spanish and Portuguese explorers. One of the best known of these African “conquistadors” was Estevancio who traveled throughout the southeast from present day Florida to Texas. As far as the institution of chattel slavery – the treatment of slaves as property – in the United States, if we use 1619 as the beginning and the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment as its end then it lasted 246 years, not 400.

Myth Three: All Southerners owned slaves.

Truth: Roughly 25% of all southerners owned slaves. The fact that one quarter of the Southern population were slaveholders is still shocking to many. This truth brings historical insight to modern conversations about the Occupy Movement, its challenge to the inequality gap and its slogan “we are the 99%.”

Take the case of Texas. When it established statehood, the Lone Star State had a shorter period of Anglo-American chattel slavery than other Southern states – only 1845 to 1865 – because Spain and Mexico had occupied the region for almost one half of the 19th century with policies that either abolished or limited slavery. Still, the number of people impacted by wealth and income inequality is staggering. By 1860, the Texas enslaved population was 182,566, but slaveholders represented 27% of the population, controlled 68% of the government positions and 73% of the wealth. Shocking figures but today’s income gap in Texas is arguably more stark with 10% of tax filers taking home 50% of the income.

Myth Four: Slavery was a long time ago.

Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved. Do the math: Blacks have been free for 149 years which means that most Americans are two to three generations removed from slavery. However, former slaveholding families have built their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not been privy to because enslaved labor was forced; segregation maintained wealth disparities; and overt and covert discrimination limited African-American recovery efforts.

The value of slaves

Economists and historians have examined detailed aspects of the enslaved experience for as long as slavery existed. Recent publications related to slavery and capitalism explore economic aspects of cotton production and offer commentary on the amount of wealth generated from enslaved labor.

My own work enters this conversation looking at the value of individual slaves and the ways enslaved people responded to being treated as a commodity. They were bought and sold just like we sell cars and cattle today. They were gifted, deeded and mortgaged the same way we sell houses today. They were itemized and insured the same way we manage our assets and protect our valuables.

Extensive Sale of Choice Slaves, New Orleans 1859, Girardey, C.E. (Natchez Trace Collection, Broadside Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History)

Enslaved people were valued at every stage of their lives, from before birth until after death. Slaveholders examined women for their fertility and projected the value of their “future increase.” As they grew up, enslavers assessed their value through a rating system that quantified their work. An “A1 Prime hand” represented one term used for a “first rate” slave who could do the most work in a given day. Their values decreased on a quarter scale from three-fourths hands to one-fourth hands, to a rate of zero, which was typically reserved for elderly or differently abled bondpeople (another term for slaves.)

Guy and Andrew, two prime males sold at the largest auction in US History in 1859, commanded different prices. Although similar in “all marketable points in size, age, and skill,” Guy commanded $1240 while Andrew sold for $1040 because “he had lost his right eye.” A reporter from the New York Tribune noted “that the market value of the right eye in the Southern country is $240.” Enslaved bodies were reduced to monetary values assessed from year to year and sometimes from month to month for their entire lifespan and beyond. By today’s standards, Andrew and Guy would be worth about $33,000-$40,000.

Slavery was an extremely diverse economic institution; one that extrapolated unpaid labor out of people in a variety of settings from small single crop farms and plantations to urban universities. This diversity is also reflected in their prices. Enslaved people understood they were treated as commodities.

“I was sold away from mammy at three years old,” recalled Harriett Hill of Georgia. “I remembers it! It lack selling a calf from the cow,” she shared in a 1930s interview with the Works Progress Administration. “We are human beings” she told her interviewer. Those in bondage understood their status. Even though Harriet Hill “was too little to remember her price when she was three, she recalled being sold for $1400 at age 9 or 10, “I never could forget it.”

Slavery in popular culture

Slavery is part and parcel of American popular culture but for more than 30 years the television mini-series Roots was the primary visual representation of the institution except for a handful of independent (and not widely known) films such as Haile Gerima’s Sankofa or the Brazilian Quilombo. Today Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is a box office success, actress Azia Mira Dungey has a popular web series called Ask a Slave, and in Cash Crop sculptor Stephen Hayes compares the slave ships of the 18th century with third world sweatshops.

From the serious – PBS’s award-winning Many Rivers to Cross – and the interactive Slave Dwelling Project- whereby school aged children spend the night in slave cabins – to the comic at Saturday Night Live, slavery is today front and center.

The elephant that sits at the center of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened — we are still living with its consequences.

Daina Ramey Berry receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a Public Voices Fellow with The Op-Ed Project.

Further reading:

Articles about slavery on Not Even Past

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Image credit – O’Sullivan, Timothy H, photographer. Five generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. Beaufort South Carolina, 1862. [, Printed Later] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98504449/.