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American Insurgents
A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism
Richard Seymour
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American Insurgents
A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism
Richard Seymour
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About This Book
"Seymour's obsessively researched, impressive first book holds its place as the most authoritative historical analysis of its kind."â Resurgence
All empires spin self-serving myths, and in the United States the most potent of these is that America is a force for democracy around the world. Yet there is a tradition of American anti-imperialism which gives the lie to this mythology. Richard Seymour examines this complex relationship from the Revolution to the present-day.
Richard Seymour is a socialist writer and runs the blog Lenin's Tomb. He is the author of The Liberal Defense of Murder. His articles have appeared in the Guardian and New Statesman.
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Chapter One
Revolution and Anti-Imperialism: The Internal Foes of Empire
I would not care if, tomorrow, I should hear of the death of every man who engaged in that bloody war in Mexico, and that every man had met the fate he went there to perpetrate upon unoffending Mexicans.
âFrederick Douglass, 1849
A Republic or an Empire?
The American Revolution began as a crisis in the British Empireâa crisis, first, of administration, then of legitimacy, and at last of authority. It was a crisis in an era in which capitalism was already the dominant mode of production in the Anglophone world, and in which nation-states were becoming the dominant form of territorial organization. The British Empire was the vector through which capitalism and its philosophical justifications had been implanted in the New World, and it was as capitalistsâsouthern slavers, northern merchants and producersâinfluenced by its attendant liberal ideology that the colonists embarked on a process of revolution and nation-building.1
At first blush, it seems astonishing that they did so. In the mid-eighteenth century, America was still a colonial backwater. The metropole, Great Britain, was ascending to world dominance, but colonial America lacked the urban centers, riches, cultural development, and elaborate political system that characterized its master. Yet, by the 1770s, many of the colonists were ready to believe that they had unique virtues that endowed them with the means to create a radical, republican future.2
This undertaking was prompted when the British Empire began a period of internal reorganization following the Seven-Year War ending in 1763, in which Britain had defeated Bourbon France and gained territories in North America as a result. The imposition of various direct taxes was of significance less because of the revenue being extracted than because, as Robin Blackburn puts it, âit was based on unilateral metropolitan fiat.â3 The wealth of colonial America had grown stupendously, and many of its denizens were aggravated by the arbitrary power of the crown, which held up commerce and sacrificed efficiency to royal prerogative. Lacking representation in Parliament, by 1772 they began to form committees of correspondence, which were the seeds of later forms of self-government known as Provisional Conferences. The continued arrogant assertions of the crown, known as the Intolerable Acts, radicalized the colonists. By 1775, the crown was at war with the colonies and the following year the colonists formally declared their independence with a strident assertion of their natural and legal rights, drawing on the political philosophy of the liberal Enlightenment. This remarkable self-assurance included, however, a powerful dose of imperial pretension.
The literature of dissident colonists considering the question of independence from Britain spoke of, in the phrase of the revolutionary James Wilson, âan independent Empireâ or, in the words of George Washington, a âfledgling,â ârising empire,â which would soon âhave some weight in the scale of Empires.â Ebenezer Baldwin sermonized that âthese Coloniesâ could be âthe Foundation of a great and mighty Empire.â4 When Baldwin spoke, he contrasted the âEmpire forming in British Americaâ to those âother great Empiresâ forged by âuniting different nations under one government by Conquest.â America was different, comprising a âsingle People used to the Enjoyment of both Civil and religious Liberty.â It was a nation, one that would grow up under the âfriendly Auspices of Liberty.â5 It was, as Gordon Wood phrased it, an âEmpire of Liberty.â6
Yet the âAuspices of Libertyâ could acquire a decidedly threatening hue for those obstructing their expansion. And expansion, necessarily entailing constant military aggression, was a constitutive component of the American project of nationhood. The westward drive that followed the revolutionâthe Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the âIndian removals,â the Mexican-American War, the filibustering to the south, the early military adventurism in East Asia, and the bid after 1898 for a global empireâall hark back to this early expansionism. The source of this expansionism can be located in the social formations making up the postrevolutionary American polity. Specifically, as mentioned, there were three dominant groups: southern slaveholding plantation farmers; northern industry; and northern mercantile capital. It is a matter of some contention whether antebellum slavery in the United States was actually capitalist, but less so that its method of growth required the continual expansion of the number of slave laborers, and the concurrent expansion of territory allotted to plantationsâtendencies intensified by soil exhaustion. This is chiefly why the South was the most aggressively expansionist component of the Union. The existence of a large and expanding slave bloc inhibited industrialization and posed challenges to the dominance of industrial capital in the North, thus leading to competition between the respective sectors for territory, a logic that persisted through the Civil War. At the same time, between these blocs was a large mass of petty commodity producers, who sought freedom in the land to the west and thus constituted another drive to expansion.7
This is not to claim that each of these territorial aggrandizements was inevitable. As this book aims to show, empire was contested at every step, and each episode of imperial metastasis was embedded in distinct political, cultural, geographical, and economic logics. But the motors to expansion were structural. Moreover, the legitimizing discourses of expansion and empire derived directly from Americaâs ambiguous revolutionary legacy and the national mythologies that arose from it.
It was upon this ambiguity that the future of America as both a republic and an empire turned. Both imperialists and anti-imperialists in the future would appeal to the revolutionary legacy to validate their perspectives.8 At the center of that ambiguity was the question of slavery and racist oppression. If, for some, the revolution was a quest to begin a wholly new kind of society founded on republican principles, its success would have been impossible without the support of the slaveholding South, which saw revolution as a preemptive strike in defense of slavery against the antislavery movement taking root in the English working class. In the new republic, the slave South dominated the national state, the military, and the judiciary. It was in the South that Jeffersonian republicanism flourished. And the South was in general the most expansionist, aggressive component of the new nation, the site of the most violent waves of ethnic cleansing, and the source of much filibustering south of the border.9
Aside from slavery, American nationalism was founded in part on the principle of âclearingâ so-called Indian Country and annexing it. Benjamin Franklin, who used terms like ânationâ and âempireâ as synonyms, had warned the British as early as 1751 that a âprinceâ who âacquires new territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the Natives to give his own People Roomâ should be considered the father of his own nation. During the revolution itself, Native Americans, black slaves, and many poor workers sided with the Britishânot for love of king and country, but often from hatred of the âpatriotâ landowners or out of fear of what an âindependent empireâ would mean for them. Native Americans, who had already suffered the ravages of war and disease as a result of colonization, had been attempting to form independent nations to defend themselves against the European interlopers. As a result, their initial attitude to revolutionary war was one of studied neutrality, resistant to being drawn into a war that did not concern their interests. By the end of the war, however, the majority of Native Americans had been enlisted to fight on the English side in a series of ad hoc treaties promising the protection of their territorial rights. The British crown had, for the sake of stability in the colonies, long attempted to restrict the westward movement of European colonists, and was now using these âsavagesâ to impede the freedom of the colonists. This grievance was duly cited in the Declaration of Independence.10
Though rebelling against an empire, the revolutionaries were not necessarily in rebellion against the principles of empire. The aim in deposing British rule was to build markets and develop the emerging economyâto create an independent center of capital accumulation. But this required the ongoing exploitation of slaves and the continued extermination of Native Americans. The auspices of liberty were not for everyone. Yet the point was, and is, that they could be. The same Enlightenment ideology that had been formative of many of the revolutionaries was also the original source of anti-imperialism and antiracism. The tension between the officially democratic ideology of the United States and the reality of racial tyrannyâwhich some have called âHerrenvolk democracyââwould play a key role in future American wars.11
The War of 1812, Indian Revolts, and Slave Rebellions
Was the War of 1812 an imperialist war? The war between the United States and the British Empire was ostensibly caused by the British imposing blockades on American trade with France, with which Britain was at war. On the face of it, then, it was a war for âfree trade,â rooted in maritime competition with the former colonial master. The British, it was charged, were engaged in the harassment of neutral American shipping in the Atlantic. In light of such abuses, it could be seen as a Second War of Independence, protecting Americaâs national rights from colonial abridgement. Yet, it is no secret that the maritime states of the Union, which had the greatest interest in quelling any such abuses, were the least ready for war with Britain. Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. The southern and western states overwhelmingly favored it. The material benefit sought, perhaps, was less the rights of sailors than the cession of Canada and the Floridas to protect the South and prevent external powers from using Spanish Florida to incite slave rebellions. The war was thus an exercise in territorial expansion.
Senior American statesmen and military personnel have long sought to dominate Canada, which they thought could easily be taken. For example, General Andrew Jackson, fresh from Indian hunting, had told James Madison that with a militia of twenty-five hundred he could bring back Quebec. It was not a question of seeking an alliance with the populations of those territories and inviting them to join the United States. Their views were largely irrelevant. It was a question of conquest.12
The war met with stiff opposition from congressmen on moral, constitutional, and commercial grounds. Massachusetts congressman Daniel Webster argued that the use of the draft showed that Americans would not enlist to fight for the conquest of Canada, or could not be paid by an exhausted treasury if they did, and that its imposition was a violation of the Constitution. The secretary of war, he maintained, was demanding a tyrannical principle, that the federal government should have a right in peace or war to force people to part them from their families and impress them into the regular army. This was the âfabric of despotism,â an arbitrary and limitless power from which Americans had expended blood and treasure to be free.
John Randolph, a Virginian who feared the contraction of statesâ rights, charged that the war was a retreat from the Jeffersonian republicanism that he assumed the Republican Party stood for, concentrating power too strongly in the executive. The Republican Party was based largely on slaveholders, small agrarian producers espousing a (racialized) democratic ideology, in contrast to Federalism, which was built on prerevolutionary Toryism and based on the northeastern business class and bankers. While the latter had been created specifically around the idea of forging a national bank and paying off the debts incurred during the revolutionary war, the former opposed such centralization of authority. Yet opposition to the war was most strongly expressed among Federalists. Republicans, particularly in the South, overwhelmingly supported the war. John Calhoun, the South Carolina Republican later known as an arch-slaver, made something of a debut as a young politician in rallying to the defense of the war. Samuel Taggart, a Federalist from Massachusetts, argued that war was both unjust and unwise. It was an âoffensiveâ war, entailing âthe invasion of foreign territory, to which no one pretends we have any right, unless one to be acquired by conquest.â He argued for the freeing up of commerce to solve the nationâs difficulties and keep it in prosperity, and that war would threaten such liberty. He also doubted that the war would be as easy as many anticipated.13
This opposition was radicalized throughout the war and led at one point to a sustained antiwar event, the Hartford Convention lasting from December 1813 to January 1814, at which delegations largely comprised of Federalists went so far as to raise the prospect of secession and expelling western states from the Union. The Hartford Convention sought to revise the Constitution, so that states deprived of federal funding could withhold taxes from the federal government and spend it on their own defenses. This meant keeping a separate army, which may well have led to separate sovereignty.
The immediate cause of this was that the British had succeeded in imposing a blockade on the East Coast, and the Federalists were infuriated by the impact on commerce and profits, especially as President Madison refused to fund the costs of their defense because of their refusal to submit their militias to executive control. The Napoleonic wars had represented an unprecedented opportunity for US maritime traders to become very richârepresenting a neutral power, they could supply foodstuffs and other goods to all sides. This was a make-or-break moment for the Federalists. Their political fortunes had long been in decline. As a party largely representing elites, they had too narrow a base to command electoral pluralities as the party system was consolidated. A brief revival for the Federalists in the first two years of the war showed that some franchised opinion was deeply worried by the war, particularly in the northeast. The conclusion of the war would ultimately finish off the Federalists as a serious force in American politics.14
The dissidence of the âresponsible classâ of bourgeois white males was naturally centered on the protection of the civil liberties that they enjoyed as privileges with respect to their racial âinferiors,â on the freedom of trade and commerce from which they could reap what Taggart called âgolden harvests,â andâfor Republican opponentsâon the protection of statesâ rights, which ensured that slavery would be maintained. It is also true, and not insignificant, that the supporters of war argued that success would shore up the nationâs fragile republican institutions rather than enfeebling them, by dealing a decisive blow for their international standing. Jeffersonâs own argument was that the health of republican institutions depended in part on the expansion of territory to be cultivated, as this would ensure the continued dominance of industrious commercial farmers.15 Nonetheless, the moral element of their critique, that the United States should not engage in conquest and that its armies should be mobilized solely in defense, were what raised it above a purely sectional, self-interested argument. Were such principles adhered to, the United States would have committed far fewer injustices and slaughtered many fewer people. And even the âwhites onlyâ version of political and civil liberty contains within it an emancipatory kernel that is capable of expanding to include the hitherto excluded. Anti-imperialists of later ages consistently articulated more or less radical variants of these same principles.
Still, opposition also came in far more unsettling forms for th...