Restoration & Formation of American Empire: Conflicts & Resistance, Lecture notes of History

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Contents Foreword ........................................................................................................................... 5 GB – Earliest times and the Middle Ages ........................................................................... 7 1: From the Earliest Times to the Second Nordic Invasion ............................................... 7 2: The Second Nordic Invasion and the Norman Conquest ............................................. 12 3: Life in Medieval Britain ............................................................................................... 19 GB – The Tudors and the Stuarts ...................................................................................... 23 1: The Tudors, the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Sea Power .............................. 23 2: The Stuart Era ............................................................................................................. 28 3: The Restoration and the First British Empire ............................................................... 34 GB – The 19th century ....................................................................................................... 41 1: The Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution and the Beginning of the Second British Empire ........................................................................................ 41 2: The Second British Empire and Social Reforms ........................................................... 47 3: The Victorian Era and the Great War .......................................................................... 51 USA – The settlement and the American Revolution ......................................................... 55 1: The Colonial Period .................................................................................................... 55 2: The War of Independence ........................................................................................... 61 3: Forming of the New Nation; Westward Expansion and Regional Differences .............. 68 USA – The 19th century ..................................................................................................... 73 1: The Civil War .............................................................................................................. 73 2: Reconstruction, the Closing of the Frontier, and the Industrial Revolution .................. 78 3: The American Empire, Progressivism and Word War I ................................................. 84 The 20th Century in Great Britain and the USA ................................................................. 91 1: The Depression and the Rise of Totalitarianism ........................................................... 91 2: World War II and Great Britain in the second half of the 20th century .......................... 98 3: The USA in the second half of the 20th century ............................................................ 104 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 111 Foreword An Outline of British and American History is an attempt to provide a concise over- view of the major currents in the development of the two English speaking nations. This study focuses on social, economic and intellectual processes that through many centuries shaped life in Great Britain and the United States of America. The overview starts with prehistoric times and traces the growth of England, her transition into Great Britain and later the Empire (Modules 1–3). Subsequently it describes the birth and creation of the American nation and its triumphant progress towards becoming the world’s leading Su- perpower (Modules 4–5). The last 6th Module continues the history of the two nations through the 20th century, highlighting the most important events that have defined con- temporary reality in both countries. Due to its limited scope this outline is by no means comprehensive – what it hopes to achieve is to present and interpret the most basic facts of British and American history and thereby establish a solid foundation for the reader’s further studies into the subjects. 10 The Celts imposed themselves as aristocracy on the conquered Iberian tribes in Britain and in Ireland. Eventually the races mixed but not in the same proportions throughout the island. The physical formation of the island is in fact the key to understanding the racial make- up of its population and the history of its early settlement. The mountain ranges of Wales, North-west England and Scotland provided a natural obstacle for the early invaders pre- venting them from overrunning the whole island in just one go. This is why the inhabit- ants of the so-called Celtic Britain (Cornwall, Wales. The Scottish Highlands) are the de- scendants of the oldest people. They are often called ‘the Celtic Fringe’, but, as a matter of fact, most of them are of pre-Celtic origin – their forefathers were not the fair-haired or red-haired Celts but the dark-haired Iberians. The Celts, like the Iberians, were tribesmen or clansmen. The basis of their society were family ties. The Celtic people did not develop any territorial organization. The bonds of the tribesmen were not with the land but with other clan members. The clans were per- petually at war with one another. Thanks to their use of iron technology, the Celts were better farmers than the Iberians. They grew wheat and oats, and they knew how to make mead (grain fermented with honey). They bred pigs for food, sheep for clothing and oxen to pull the plough. They also bred horses, which were the chief means of barter and sources of wealth. The Celts traded not only with one another but also with other tribes on the island and in Europe. Hunting, fishing, herding, beekeeping, weaving, carpentry and metal work were the chief occupations of the Celtic population. Trade with the continent was important for political and social reasons. The Celts in the South of the island were in close intercourse with their kin in Europe. From them they learnt to use coins instead of iron bars for money.1 When the Britons2 (the Celts on the island) found out that Julius Caesar was marching to subdue their relatives on the conti- nent, they sent over ships and warriors to help their relatives in defense, which was one of the reasons why Caesar decided to invade the island as well. The other reason was the island’s reputation as an important provider of food, and since the Romans needed sup- plies for their own army fighting the Gauls (the tribes occupying the territory of today’s France), the conquest of the island was inevitable. Therefore the Romans did not come with a view to settling; they came to exploit and to govern by right of the superior civilization. In order to achieve their goals, they put a lot of effort to induce their Celtic subjects to assimilate the Latin language and lifestyle. Every possible encouragement was offered to the Celtic chief to make him Roman at heart and to Latinize him, and on that condition he could remain chief of his tribe. This policy had already been very successful in Spain and France where the Romans were long enough to effectively change the languages and the customs of the people. In Britain this method would have been equally effective had the Romans stayed longer. The 1st Roman expedition came in 55 BC, but it was not until one century later that permanent occupa- tion began (AD 43). In AD 409 Rome pulled its last troops out of Britain, and what was 1 Already 150 years BC British tribes in the South of the island had their own gold coinage. 2 The name Britain comes from Greco-Roman word ‘Pretani’ designating inhabitants of Britain. The Ro- mans mispronounced the word and called the island ‘Britannia’. 11 left behind them were three things of enduring value: Welsh Christianity, good roads and a few cities. Initially the Romans intended to conquer the whole island. This seemed to be pretty easy because of their superior, highly disciplined army and because the Celtic tribes were con- tinually at one another’s throats. The Romans established a permanent occupation across the Southern half of Britain where they developed the Romano-Celtic culture. From there they retained control over the upland areas, which were never developed. The Ro- man method of conquest was to build military roads, strategically planned for the whole region. Along them the Romans planned forts garrisoned with regular troops. With the use of forts and roads they could keep oversight in some trouble areas like Wales. Un- like other conquerors of the island, they did not usher in a host of immigrant farmers to replace the native population; they also rarely resorted to indiscriminate slaughter and wholesale destruction. Their chief difficulty was the problem with the northern frontier. The Romans attempted to conquer Scotland (which they called ‘Caledonia’) for over a century but they failed. The Caledonians, the Pictish, and other partly Celtic tribes residing in the inaccessible mountains put up a stiff resistance. There were also frequent rebellions of the Brigantes in the Roman rears, which made the conquest even more difficult. The final limit to the northern frontier was marked by the wall designed by Emperor Hadrian and erected be- tween 122 and 127 AD. No attempt was made to annex Ireland to the Roman territory, and thus the area of Roman occupation corresponds roughly to the territory of modern England and Wales. In the occupied territories the Roman civilization flourished – the villas were plentiful, the cities were becoming larger, the commerce developed (London was the greatest center of trade). North of Hadrian’s Wall, in Dover and Cornwall, tribalism survived in its more primitive form. Again the topography of the island determined the course of history. Owing to the geographical and cultural distinction between the occupied lowlands and unoccupied highlands, when the Roman Empire began to collapse and Roman soldiers started to withdraw, the regions destined to be destroyed by Germanic invaders were the Latin districts, while elsewhere Celtic culture was destined to survive. The fall of the Roman Empire began in the 2nd half of the 4th century. In Britain it was precipitated by the Celtic revival – Celtic raids on Roman territories, both from Ireland and from Scotland, became more frequent and bolder. In the 1st half of the 5th century the defunct Roman Empire was no longer capable of providing security for most of its citizens, especially in such remote outposts of civilization as Britain. The situation was significantly exacerbated by the renewed Anglo-Saxon raids, which between 350 and 400 were particularly severe. The pagan people who invaded the island after the Roman troops had left were the Nordic people: Anglo-Saxon, German and Scandinavian. They spoke allied languages, had the same religion, the same epic poetry celebrating their gods and heroes (such as Beowulf). They also had common art, different from Greco Roman or Celtic, and they observed the same customs in war and agriculture. Most of them were farmers search- ing for better lands to plough, but there were also fishermen, seal hunters, whalers, and pirates among them. Their form of government was superior to the Celts – they were not organized in tribes but in almost feudal societies. The kinship, the natural bond among the members of a clan who supported one another, gave way in the Anglo-Saxon commu- 12 nities to the personal relation of a warrior to his chief, whose personal virtues as well as his noble descent made him the leader. Contrary to the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons had both kingship and aristocracy – their form of government was autocratic kingship, which is a transitional stage between tribalism and fully-fledged feudalism. The military organiza- tion of the Anglo-Saxons was also based not on kinship but on personal attachment and loyalty of all the warriors to the chief who organized the expedition. The bones of these nameless chiefs are still dug up in the so-called early Anglo-Saxon graveyards. There are no chronicles of Anglo-Saxon conquest because, unlike the Romanized Celts, they were illiterate. We owe our knowledge of that period to an English monk Bede who 300 years later described those remote events in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The Saxons, Angles and the Jutes certainly wreaked havoc in the orderly Romano- Celtic world. The Latinized Britons were slaughtered or pushed away to the mountainous areas where the primitive Celtic or pre-Celtic tribes had so far resided. The Anglo-Sax- ons penetrated into the interior of the country through the rivers and the Roman roads, which only hastened the pace of conquest and destruction. King Arthur3 is a half mythical figure that is believed to have led the Celts into battle with the heathen Anglo-Saxons, but in spite of his bravery and impregnable forts and stonewalled cities, the Celts were doomed to be defeated. The reason for that was that the Britons were civilized citizens, not warriors, and once they could no longer depend on the army for protection they were practically helpless when confronted by the fierce Anglo-Saxon warriors. The early Anglo-Saxons differed from the Britons in many respects. For example, they were not city dwellers like the Britons. They lived in large rural townships in log houses, and they tilled the soil in one common field. They could have taken the Roman villas or they could have settled in the Roman towns as soon as they buried the bodies of their previous inhabitants. Instead they left Roman buildings and towns empty and went on with their way of life. Chester, Bath and Canterbury were re-peopled in the course of time. London,4 due to its location at the junction of Roman roads, also managed to sur- vive, thus the good work of Rome was not completely wiped out by the Anglo-Saxon savages. In the course of the 6th century the Anglo-Saxons established a number of kingdoms in the South and East of England whose names still exist in modern names of certain shires (Essex, Sussex, Wessex). These kingdoms were not allies – they were always on the warpath. By the middle of the 7th century three large and powerful kingdoms emerged: Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. The Anglo Saxons were wild people whose destructiveness completely obliterated the Christian religion and the Romano-Celtic language. The Britons, forced to seek refuge among the ‘uncultured’ Celtic tribes in Wales, Cornwall or the Western part of the North- ern uplands, in a span of a few generations, forgot why they had despised the illiterate 3 King Arthur is the hero of a popular legend about how he proved his title to the kingship by withdraw- ing the Sword Excalibur from the rock in which it had been fixed by Merlin, the magician who later be- came his counselor. Arthur’s court was called Camelot and was famous for its Round Table. Other leg- ends connected with Arthur tell about his wife’s Guinevere’s unfaithfulness (with Lancelot) and about the quests to find the Holy Grail. 4 London dates back to Roman times even though its name is of Celtic origin. After the Roman conquest it started to play a crucial role as a port and center of commerce. Roman walls enclosed the area corre- sponding roughly to the city walls in medieval times. 15 to offer. Numerous churches were built on the ruins of Roman villas. Although most of them were eventually pulled down it should be remembered that stone churches were built in England at the time when laity still lived in houses made of wood. In 669 the Pope sent to Britain Theodore of Tarsus who made Canterbury an important center of Latin and Greek culture. He strengthened Roman supremacy over the island, and, after his death, the parish system mushroomed everywhere. The parish, the church and the graveyard become the centre of every village. The Church was on the one hand modern and spiritual, but, on the other, it was aris- tocratic and feudal. To build the Medieval Church with its magnificent architecture, art and scholarship, the peasants had to pay ecclesiastical dues that quickly reduced them to serfage. The Church held the rulers and average people in awe – the clergymen were for- midable people – the only ones who could read or write or make sense of administrative, ecclesiastical and secular laws. Anglo-Saxon kings and lords willingly gave their lands to the Church; some of the kings abandoned their thrones to finish their lives as pilgrims or monks. In return for the land and the dues enforced by the king and his sheriffs, the Church taught nobles jurisdiction that enriched the nobles and the Church itself. In this way the Church promoted feudalism based on an increasingly unequal division of wealth and liberty. The richer and more influential the Church was becoming, the more impov- erished and subjugated the peasantry was. In Anglo-Saxon times the line separating the Church and the State was very thin and blurred. The Bishops were kings’ civil servants, priests sat next to Sheriffs in the benches of Shire courts, where both secular and spiritual cases of malpractice came for verdict. The men of the Church were the first people to write down the laws of Anglo-Saxon kings from the oral tradition. They also helped the kings to make new laws on a large number of important matters. In this way they helped to consolidate royal authority and to centralize the power in each state. The Anglo-Saxon, even though respectful of the clergy and dedicated to the new religion, remained pagan in pure human emotions. Such poems as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and Deor’s Lament bear witness to the popularity of older pagan ethos. Even though all early Anglo-Saxon poetry came through Christian censorship, there is an overwhelming abun- dance of pagan ideals and values in it. Beowulf, for example, praises the faithfulness of the warrior to his lord and his readiness to die in battle. The typical heroes of such poems are roving spirits and reckless buccaneers unrestrained by any religious dogmas. Important dates: 2500 BC – 1300 BC The Iberians 700 BC – 300 BC The Celts 55 BC The 1st Roman expedition of Julius Caesar AD 122–126 Hadrian’s Wall AD 407–410 Roman withdrawal AD 350–1066 The Anglo-Saxon Period AD 601–800 The return of Christianity AD 800–975 The 2nd Nordic Invasion 16 2: The Second Nordic Invasion and the Norman Conquest Near the end of the 8th century the heathen Danes and Norsemen (the Vikings6) were restless again and started to launch attacks on Britain, tempted by the island’s wealth. The Vikings were pirates as well as farmers. At first they only raided the coasts of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but gradually they started to realize that the Anglo-Saxon kings did not have any fleet to protect their realms, and that the whole island was easy prey. War and plunder on the island became the chief business of the Viking nation. The first successful warriors came home with such transfixing news of the island’s riches that the Vikings soon started to perfect plans for permanent occupation. The Saxons considered the Vikings brutes, and the truth was they were barbarians in comparison with the Danes and Norsemen. In the 9th century the Vikings visited various parts of the world (Venice, Constantinople, Spain, Normandy or even North America). Their voyages gave them knowledge of the world and made them skillful tradesmen. When the 9th century was drawing to a close and it was absolutely clear that the Anglo- Saxons could not keep them out, the Vikings started to take over the best farming lands in England. The largest host of Viking immigrants came in the days of Alfred of Wessex. This group was just a small fraction of a large population movement which changed the political map of the whole of Europe. One of the Viking bands established Normandy in Northern France; other bands settled across the Channel in England. By 875 only King Alfred of Wessex held out against the invaders for one sole reason – Wessex was furthest removed from the Vikings’ landing areas. The Vikings warriors were pioneers in a new type of warfare. They used body-armor, which made them immune to the spears of Saxon peasants. They could move in their boats on rivers and sea, launching surprise attacks in distant parts in the country. Fur- thermore after their conquest of Normandy they learnt from the French how to mount horses, and on horseback they were as fast and formidable as in their boats. The twelve years in which the Viking invasion continued gave Alfred the Great (of Wessex) the time to learn to beat the Viking at their game. He reformed his army, organized a mounted infantry made of his vassals, and built permanent garrisons and a fleet. Step by step, he recovered the territories conquered by the invaders where the Vikings, once they settled, started numerous feuds among one another. After he re-captured London, he was strong enough to force the Vikings to accept a treaty. Alfred the Great was a truly great leader. He brought to Wessex learned men and gave refuge to many scholars. He founded the first school for laymen – the sons of noblemen, his future civil servants, thus breaking the Church’s monopoly for learning. After his 6 Viking means ‘warrior’. 17 death, the Crown of Wessex went into the hands of his equally gifted and enlightened successors, who merged the Viking population with the indigenous Anglo-Saxon people. A hundred years after the invasion the memory of the atrocities and interracial wrongs grew very dim and common ethnic roots and customs prevailed. When the Vikings re- ceived baptism almost all differences between them and the Anglo-Saxons were removed. At first the Viking authority was recognized in the east and north of England (between the Thames and the Tees) but gradually the Vikings accepted the rule of the house of Wessex, provided that they could live under their own traditional Danish laws and their earls. Therefore the territories, which they inhabited, were often referred to as ‘Danelaw’. The term was used in the 11th century to indicate an area in which customary law was influ- enced by Danish practice. In fact, the coming of the Danes gave a powerful stimulus to the development of English Common Law.7 The very word ‘law’ is of Danish origin. The Vikings were very apprecia- tive of law and had men especially trained in legal arguments and procedures. The Anglo Saxons took over from the Danes their zeal for legal disputes. During the war with the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons built walled settlements called burghs. In the post-war years these military garrisons and trading centers became also sites of legal proceedings. Soon burghs or boroughs, as they are called today, situated in restored Ro- man cities or in new strategic points (Lincoln, Derby, Northampton, Cambridge among others) became the basic units of municipal (town) administration. In this way England was covered with a network of garrisons and organs of administration similar to contem- porary ones. Contrary to the Anglo Saxons who were pioneer farmers making clearings in the forest to plough the land, the Vikings were city-dwellers and indefatigable traders who made boroughs bustling centers of commerce. Apart from that both Danish and Anglo Saxon farmers continued the strenuous work of deforestation and colonization of new areas. The people of those remote times were still very primitive agriculturists for whom hunt- ing was the main source of food. The state, in the modern sense of the word, did not exist, and work was carried under the leadership of a feudal lord, who provided military protection, economic help and justice. But the lord’s assistance had a very extortionate price – in return for the lord’s protection the peasant had to labor for the lord. Therefore feudalism8 which was the outcome of differentiating the functions of warrior and hus- bandman (farmer) entailed putting limits to individual freedom. On the other hand, the protection of the community and the advancement of agriculture would not have been possible without stratifying medieval society. After the end of tribalism and before the beginning of the state, it was the feudal lord who organized the life of each community. 7 In the course of time Common Law came to designate the law administered by the king’s judges, which was the same regardless of the region. Before Henry II evolved the Common Law in the 12th century, the law differed from one region to another. From the 12th century onwards the king’s judges always used the same law. They were specially trained in the Common Law that was based on Anglo-Saxon and later Norman customs, cases and decisions. It was different from the Civil Law of the Roman Empire or the Common Law of the Church. 8 The word feudalism comes from the French word feu (land held by a lord in return for his service to the sovereign); the tenure of the land that belonged to the king but was used by his vassals was the corner- stone of feudalism. The vassals and the lord were mutually bound – the king had to give his vassals land without which the vassal would not fight for the king. Vassals in turn gave a portion of this land to the knights who were their vassals and owed them military service. 20 proceeded in tandem with the conquest (it lasted 5 years), which accounts for one pecu- liarity of the feudal system that evolved on the island. The Barons owed estates in many different parts of the country, and that fact had several important ramifications. First of all, no Baron possessed more land within a shire than the king. Secondly since the Barons’ possessions were scattered far and wide, the Barons were always busy on their way from one estate to another, which made it impossible for them to consolidate their power, to amass an army and to threaten the king. Although the Normans were the most advanced people of their times on the battlefield, they were as cruel as the wildest savages. Some of the villages whose inhabitants were massacred during the conquest remained deserted for forty years to come. William’s army was relatively small and therefore it ravaged the regions it had no power to hold. The survivors were forced to raise for the victors impregnable citadels from which armed horsemen issued forth to exploit or to slaughter. This large-scale extermination of the Anglo-Saxon population, especially the gentry, settled the question whether a few thou- sand armed-to-the-teeth knights could conquer whole England and coerce her native population to a new way of life. William established in England the Norman system of land tenure. He divided bigger districts into smaller shires and kept the Anglo-Saxon system of sheriffs to counterbalance the power of his Barons. In other words, each shire had its own sheriff, a man of baronial rank to whom William entrusted collecting his taxes and administering his laws. The King did his utmost to tighten his grip of the island, to centralize and secure his power, thus saving England from falling into the chasm of feudal anarchy, prevalent on the continent, where powerful magnates continually conducted a hit-and-run warfare against their rul- ers and other nobles in order to multiply their riches and enhance their influence. In order to ensure his security, William built numerous castles which were garrisons used to subdue the mutinies of his Barons and the uprisings of the Anglo-Saxons. But the church proved to be a far better instrument in upholding the royal authority. People were used to obeying priests, priests to obeying bishops, who in turn obeyed the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King’s right hand. The Archbishop was in practice the head of the king’s government, whereas his tenants-in-chief, the Barons who made his court, were his council. The king consulted them individually or collectively on the issue of the moment, whatever that issue might be. One of William’s greatest reforms was the division of spiritual and secular courts. From then onwards, the Bishops had their own courts, which dealt with clergy’s felonies, wills, marriages and cases of heresy, whereas secular affairs were tackled in royal courts in which English Common Law was observed. This reform set limits to the authority of the church, a friendly but rival power. Without the king’s control over the Church hierarchy, the king could reign but he would not be able to rule. William the Conqueror commanded the country with the help of Archbishop Lanfranc. The King was generous to the church but ever mindful of its pow- er. All his secretaries, judges and most of his civil servants were churchmen rendering services to the Crown. But the cooperation between the Crown and the Church was not always carried out without friction. William Rufus (Rufus means red – the king had red hair and face) was not very pious, and Henry, his younger brother who took the crown after William’s tragic death during a hunting expedition, was the first monarch to get in- volved in an overt struggle with the Church. The reason of his dispute was the question 21 of who should elect the Bishops. After several years of disagreement it was decided that bishops would be chosen by the Church, but instead of paying homage to the Pope they would recognize the authority of the king, on the grounds that they were first of all the king’s vassals who had their lands from the king. This compromise prevented the Church, which was powerful, wealthy and well organized, from wielding complete control over the society. Henry I was a powerful ruler not only of England but also of Normandy. After his death, his daughter Matilda was married to a French aristocrat Geoffrey Plantagenet who ruled another considerable province of France. Their son Henry II took the throne of England in 1154, after 19 years of anarchy, and united under his rule England and western France. He was so powerful that the English Barons accepted him without demur. For Henry II England was another province of the same cultural realm. The Barons still spoke French and cultivated French culture and customs. However, after Henry II be- came king of England some of these customs were radically changed. The Barons were no longer allowed to wage private wars against one another (war was the Barons’ favorite pastime) and they had to pull down unlicensed castles. Gradually the Barons moved into unfortified manor houses where they had to take up more peaceful hobbies such as hunt- ing, agriculture, politics or art. With each decade they were turning more and more into regular country gentlemen. Henry II is also credited with laying the foundations for the jury system11 by making the famous bench of royal judges. After almost two decades of misrule that made every cog in the Norman machinery of state rusted with disuse, he sent these royal judges to every nook of the country to enforce English Common Law. He also stopped some barbarous proce- dures as trial by ‘ordeal’12 or trial by battle.13 He put the royal shield over all, even the most humble subjects, protecting them from the abuse of the church or the lord alike. Henry II was an autocrat but he was just, therefore his subjects did not mind that they were subjected to the will of one man. His reign was associated with the restoration of law and order, which were preferable to general state of chaos which had preceded it. Richard I, Henry II’s son, won the nickname Coeur de Lion (Lionheart). He was a very popular king, maybe because for most his life he was away, taking part in the Crusades.14 The Crusades were not an affair of the state but of the knight errand who could in this way prove his piety and satisfy his greed. Richard was the most famous English knight errand, but he found very few followers in ‘backwater’ England. But indirectly the influ- ence of the Crusades on England (and Europe in general) was great. The Crusades not only made England richer in luxurious goods but also familiar with scientific and philo- sophical ideas, some of which surpassed the art and learning of Europe. 11 The idea of a Jury goes back to the Viking in the Danelaw. Henry II used the jury in the second part of the 12 century. Initially a jury was 12 people chosen by the accused to prove he was innocent. Gradually the role of the jury changed; the members did not testify but judged the evidence given by witnesses. 12 For example a hot iron rod was put on the suspect’s tongue, if he was burned by it he was considered guilty. 13 Men fighting with each other with archaic weapon – the one who won is the one who is right. 14 The Crusades took place in the 12th and 13th century. They were a series of military expeditions under- taken by the countries of Western Europe to restore the Holy Land to Christian rule. 22 During the King’s absence England was ruled by Archbishop Hubert Walter who pro- moted the new middle class – craftsmen and merchants who grew rich on trade with dif- ferent parts of the world. The Archbishop granted charters to various towns under royal jurisdiction, which meant that the towns received the right to be self-governing. Richard did not have a son, and after his death, his tyrannical brother John ascended the throne. The antipathy for John cut across class lines – nobles, merchants and church- men alike disliked him. Under John – notorious for his greediness – everybody had to pay higher taxes. He was also in a state of dispute with the Church because the Pope appointed the Archbishop without his consent. Finally he lost control over Normandy, where some English nobles still had possessions, which further compromised his reputa- tion. When in 1215 he made an effort to recover Normandy and asked his nobles to fight for him, they turned against him and marched to London where they were joined by an- gry merchants. Outside London John was forced to sign Magna Carta, the Great Chart of English Freedom15 – an agreement regulating the relations between the Crown and the upper and middle classes that later came to be regarded as the cornerstone of English civil liberties. The two most important matters covered by this agreement were these: firstly no free man could be arrested and imprisoned except by the law of the land, and when arrest- ed, he had the right to a fair and legal trial; secondly, no taxation could be made without the approval of the council. Although these statements may seem progressive for those times, the Chart gave more freedom to few people in the country (serfs, who were not freemen, did not benefit from it at all and they were the largest class in medieval society). Magna Carta was merely an attempt to exert a degree of control over the king’s actions to prevent him from being a ruthless tyrant. Still it was a turning point in English history because it marked the beginning of the decline of feudalism. In forcing the king to sign this document the nobles for the first time acted not as the king’s vassals but as a self-con- scious class, and the organization of society into classes was typical of modern, not feudal, times. Another extraordinary thing about this mutiny was the unprecedented cooperation between upper and middle classes. For the first time in history people sided with the Bar- ons and against the Crown. The Londoners opened the gates of the city for rebels while the clergy gave them their moral support. Magna Carta therefore showed the potential strength of the middle class and set England on the course to constitutional monarchy, in which the power of the crown is put in the hands of the community at large. John’s son, Henry III, tried to get rid of Magna Carta. The rebellion which ensued under the leadership of Simon de Montfort was even more popular than the previous one, and it also included middle classes of town and country. In 1265 Simon de Montfort sum- moned a council that he called parliament (from the French word parlement, meaning talking shop or discussion meeting) and took over the treasury forcing the king to yield. Even though Simon de Montfort was eventually defeated and killed, the gains of Magna Carta were left intact. Edward I, Henry’s son, learnt the lesson from the two rebellions and tried to strike a happy medium between his father’s adversaries and his own vision of England’s consti- tution. He summoned the first real parliament, based on the idea of representation by not only nobles but also the middle class, which now produced more than fifty percent of the wealth of the country. In 1275 Edward commanded that each shire should send two com- moners as representatives. At first this service was grudgingly born by them – the journey 15 The author of Magna Carta was Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. 25 Scottish King raided England but was defeated, captured and bought off by the French. This incident temporarily put an end to the unrest on the northern frontier and fortified English national pride. The Border War (the feuds and cattle raiding in the territories bordering with Scotland) did not end for good until 1603 when the Union of the English and the Scottish Crown took place. The break-up of the feudal system was an important step on the path towards full nation- al self-awareness. In the late Middle Ages, England started to develop new social classes and a modern social system. There were still serfs, but they more and more emphatically demanded that all men should be free. Those who had already enjoyed freedom were constantly on strike for higher wages. The strikes were no longer directed against feudal landowners but independent farmers, manufactures and merchants, that is, the new mid- dle-classes of the town and the country. The ‘natural economy’, characteristic for a feudal system, was giving way to a ‘money economy.’ In the country the system of monetary payment gradually replaced custom- ary service – money wages and farm leases substituted for the system of servile tenure, which forced the serfs to labor on the lord’s field, not their own soil. Both the lords and independent farmers noticed that hired men working on the field all year around, whose wages were paid from tenants’ rents, were far more efficient than reluctant serfs. In some parts of England, the lords’ customary rights were given up as early as the 12th century, but then the process was frequently reversed in the 13th century when the rapid increase in population made it possible for the lord to drive harder bargains with the peasants, who competed with one another for the lease of the lord’s fields necessary for their own sustenance. Therefore for some time field-service was again more vigorously reinforced by the lords who put it as a prerequisite for the tenure of other lands. But then the tide turned once more due to the Black Death (1348–1349) a terrible plague that decimated the population of the island. One third or maybe even a half of the in- habitants of the island died in just two years. It was not until the 17th century that the population reached the number of four million inhabitants from before the plague. The plague on the land speeded the transition from a society of semi-bondsmen into a society in which all, at least legally, were free. The shortage of men to cultivate the land reduced the value of land and increased the value of labor and put the surviving peasants in a much stronger position. The lord not only found it difficult to find people to work on his land but also was saddled with the land which had been previously in lease and which went back to him because of the death of the families who had farmed it. The peasants, who before had been bound to the soil and could not even leave their village without their lord’s consent, when pressed to fulfill their duties to the lord, started to flee to der- elict villages in some remote part of the shire where jobs were in abundance and nobody asked any questions. In this way the new class of independent yeomen farmers was born. They used the money they earned from the lord to buy their own farms or lease the land from the lord, getting rich on it very fast. Gradually they started to step in the place of the lords, employing landless laborers to cultivate their lands. In this way the gap between the lord and the peasant that characterized the society in the feudal time disappeared, but a new division surfaced: between the yeomen farmers who were employers and wage laborers who were the employed. Of course the abolition of serfdom did not always go unchallenged. In the areas where the lords were particularly recalcitrant in exacting field dues there were occasional acts of 26 violence. The peasants were supported by bands of outlaws (like Robin Hood) hiding in still vast forests. The uprisings were supported by the small clergy, often of peasant ori- gin, and were directed against wealthy churchmen and the upper class alike. The biggest of these rebellions happened in 1381, triggered by the increase of the Poll Tax to three times the previous amount. At first different bands of rebels raided manors and monaster- ies in East England and in Kent, driving nobles, prelates and abbots to the woods from which the outlaws had just emerged. Then a precedent took place – the bands united and marched to London, where, with the aid of the poor of the city, they murdered some of the most unpopular nobles. The force of the uprising shocked the middle class, and Ri- chard II promised to meet their demands, but after the rebels peacefully went home, the king and the nobles plucked up their courage and took a terrible revenge. The memory of the nightmarish four-week revolt lingered with the nobles, making them a bit more responsive to the plight of the poor. After the revolt the movement for the emancipation of the serf continued until the village became a modern community with a squire, who frequently did not have his own farm and lived on lease money, wealthy farmers and craftsmen, and finally farmhands, who were free but landless. When the old feudal system of Sheriffs was replaced with the institution of the Justices of the Peace, local nobles ap- pointed by the king to rule the county18 in his name, the change from feudal to modern society was complete. In the 14th century the town was still an agricultural community very similar to that of the village. The city-dwellers were craftsmen, manufacturers, and merchants who during harvest lay their work aside to work on the fields and meadows which were beyond the city walls. The number of inhabitants of an average town varied from 2.000 to 3.000 people – the number could change dramatically due to not infrequent plagues resulting from the unsanitary conditions. But life in the town was not unpleasant; there were the poor but there were no slums. In towns, like in villages, people were engaged in numerous mutual antagonisms. Wage earners were against merchants and manufacturers, but they could rally, guided by civ- ic patriotism, against all newcomers threatening their common interests, against other towns competing in trade, or against the greatest enemies of all: the lords, bishops and monks who always tried to impinge of the towns’ privilege of self-government. London was the biggest city of all, practically a state within a state. Westminster was two miles away from London and was considered to be the center of royal administration and law. The king, who borrowed money from Londoners, put the richest citizens on par with nobles and protected their monopoly for trade. In 1290 Edward I expelled Jews from England to make it possible for the English middle class to grow. This is probably one of the reasons why anti-Semitism in England was not as strong as in other countries, whose middle classes could not compete with the gifted Jews on equal terms. The main source of wealth, both in the village and in the town, was the production of wool and cloth, which had a tradition reaching back to the times of ancient Britons. Eng- land was a power in wool production – the greatest sheep stocks were counted in thou- sands and every farm had a stock. Initially England exported only wool and produced cloth only for her own market. Gradually, however, cloth became England’s main export. In the reign of Edward II and Edward III the government took control over the nation’s 18 The county is the smallest unit of administration. 27 main industry (second only to agriculture) – the importation of cloth from abroad was prohibited and foreign weavers were encouraged to settle in England under special privi- leges. In the late Middle Ages the production of cloth trebled and England became the main supplier to the world’s cloth market. The development of the cloth trade had many corollaries for England’s economy and social life. It gave rise to the middle class in the town and the village; it alleviated the poverty of the landless proletariat; finally it con- tributed to the growth of the commercial fleet, which went into different corners of the world to sell English cloth. Initially the cloth industry was organized by guilds, associations of merchants, who want- ed to protect their interest against other workers and to guard the monopoly of their trade against other towns. Gradually it became clear that guilds could not cope with the organization of production and exportation. The manufacture in fact required more than one craft – spinning, weaving or dyeing. From these days the English became rich in metaphors connected with the work of Webster. ‘Thread of discourse’, ‘spin a yarn’, ‘unravel a mystery,’ ‘web of life’, ‘homespun’ and ‘spinster’ are just a few phrases whose etymology goes back to weaving. Thus in the late Middle Ages potent forces were reshaping English society and English institutions. Parliament was modernized and the power of commoners representing the new middle class was growing, and the only institution that remained intact outside the reforms was the Church. The Church was as conservative as ever and resented all chang- es, as all of them were aimed at reducing its power. The ever increasing wealth of the Church and its untouchable privileges grated on the nerves of many people – the com- moners, who criticized the corruption of the Church, and noblemen, who were now as well educated as the clergymen and eager to take over the church’s position in the state government. Bishops were ‘ministers’ of state, whereas clergymen of lower rank did all the secretarial work. The Church itself was prey to many inner antagonisms most notably between parishion- ers and high churchmen who were interested more in politics than in the deplorable condition of the Church. The main reason why people hated the Church was the greediness of churchmen. Abso- lution was given for money and the Spiritual Courts that dealt with wills, marriages and sexual irregularities often commuted penance for money, thus practically blackmailing sinners. Parishioners often employed substitutes to run the parish for them, while they indulged in a luxurious life in London, Oxford, or an aristocrat’s house. Ordinary people therefore often turned to traveling Pardoners, selling relics from Rome or to heretical missionaries. Many of them were Lollards and represented the first English religious movement called ‘premature reformation’ because of its resemblance to Protestantism. Lollardy was founded by John Wycliffe, a scholar from Oxford who at the end of the 14th century denied the doctrine of transubstantiation19 and was driven out of Oxford. Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible to English because he thought that everyone, not only clergy, should be able to know it and live by the word of God. He was never al- lowed to publish his Bible and his followers were persecuted, but the popular movement they initiated was never completely wiped out, and in Lutheran times Lollards joined the ranks of the Lutheran movement. Another evangelical force in the nation were friars 19 The belief that during the mass the bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. 30 The Middle Ages have a somewhat unfair opinion as an intellectually barren epoch. Yet it is true that obscurantism in Medieval England reached its apogee when Wycliffe was driven out of Oxford. A hundred years later, in the last two decades of the 15th century, new ideas came to England from Italy, which was the cradle of the Renaissance, based on the studies of ancient culture, literature and science. In England, the Renaissance started with the humanist movement – the ‘New Learning’ of classical Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but it became more than that. Whereas classical studies in Italy were pagan and artistic in character, in England they were combined with Christian piety and civic virtues. The overall aim of the English humanists was not only to reform education, by grounding it in respect for human reason, but to reform the Church herself. The most important repre- sentatives of the movement were Sir Thomas More (the author of Utopia), the Dutchman Erasmus of Rotterdam, and John Colet.1 All of them launched bitter attacks at obscurant- ism and Church abuses in a manner not heard in public since subduing Wycliffe and his priests. Henry VIII was a friend of Colet and More. He was as orthodox as his father Henry VII (he had Lollards burnt as heretics) but, on the other hand, like his advanced friends he disliked monks, disapproved of image and relic worship and accepted the possibility of religious speculation if it was based on the careful study of the Bible. He was a generous patron of men of the Renaissance, and it was said that his court had a better store of learned men than any university. Initially Henry was content to rule the country through Cardinal Wolsey, so his progressive ideas did not interfere with the running of the state. Wolsey was a very skillful statesman and diplomat in whose hands the foreign policy of the Balance of Power2 was for the first time clearly defined. But soon it became clear that Cardinal Wolsey was to be the last churchman to rule over England. Besides the Renaissance, another important development in the reign of the Tudors was the discovery of the New World and opening new ocean routes. Within a span of just a few decades England ceased to be a backwater somewhere on the margins of Europe, and as the new map of the world unfolded, she found herself near its strategic center. In the era of ocean discovery and commerce, the English proved themselves to be not only a sea-going population accustomed to sailing the stormy waters of northern seas, but also skillful tradesmen, who had something to offer to the peoples of the newly discovered lands. While Spain had nothing to send except conquistadors, missionaries and colonists, England had cloth, which was creating new markets in different nooks and corners of the world. Still initially it did not seem that England would be a chief winner at this new game. In the 15th century, Spain and Portugal led the way in ocean discovery: the Portuguese founded an Empire on the coast of Africa, and Spain sent soldiers to subjugate and colo- nize Mexico and Peru. The Pope divided all newly discovered territories between those two European powers by drawing a line from pole to pole, west of the Azores, and stating that all lands to the West of the line belonged to Spain while those to the East belonged 1 Erasmus and Colet taught in Oxford, thus they were often called Oxford reformers. 2 The main aim of this policy, which became the cornerstone of the school of English diplomacy in the following centuries, was maintaining a balance between great European powers such as France or Spain because if any of these great continental states defeated others, England’s position would be threatened. Therefore what the policy boiled down to was playing one great monarchy against another, so that none of them could gain complete supremacy. 31 to Portugal. In this way the Pope barred England’s gate to the New World and doomed her to insular second-rate existence. In this situation Henry VIII decided to build a fleet of fighting ships capable of challeng- ing the mighty Spanish fleet. The Spanish fleet was still made of slave-rowed galleys, similar to those that had sailed the Mediterranean Sea. What is more important, those galleys were not warships, and they were easy prey to pirates. The frequent assaults by pirates intercepting the cargo of gold sailing from America to Spanish ports brought it home to the Spanish that it was imperative to build a fighting fleet. But the English had started to build such a fleet much earlier, and additionally they were pioneers in a new type of sea warfare. The English warships had a completely new purpose and design. They were sailing vessels, not rowed galleys; they were sturdy and agile and had canons. While the Spanish warships were moving platforms on which soldiers were carried to battle, not different from the battles on land, the English warship was a mobile battery of canons ready to give a shattering ‘broadside’ (a simultaneous discharge of canons) which, in the words of E. M. Travelyan, was the operation of war to which British maritime and colonial power owed their existence. The Royal Navy not only was the chief instrument in founding and maintaining the Empire, but first and foremost it saved England from the backlash of Catholic European Powers when she embarked on the course to become a Protestant country. England’s way to Protestantism was long and rather winding. It started with the popular anti-clerical sentiment already very vivid in the late Middle Ages. The powers and privi- leges enjoyed by the priesthood gave offence to the laymen; the wealth of the Church induced in many greedy and ambitious young men a desire to rob the Church of her riches. Among them was the young profligate king Henry VIII, who in his first years of reign managed to squander a sizeable fortune amassed by his thrifty father (£ 2,000,000 – fifteen years’ worth of income). What is more, the king was inspired by the New Learn- ing of Colet and More, who inculcated in him the idea that the monasteries were redun- dant, and he was supported by public opinion, very vocal about the corruption of monks. Finally, the king was rather unsuccessful in trying to pursue the principles of the Balance of Power and his position in European politics was rather weak. That increased his dislike for the Church and the Pope whom he had no power to control. The prelude to Henry’s breach with the Pope was the German Reformation under Martin Luther and John Calvin, which practically stripped the Pope of all religious authority. To make matters worse for the Pope, Rome was besieged by Charles V, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and at the same time the king of Spain. There could have been no better moment for Henry VIII to break with the Papacy. Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrines, once they were proclaimed, immediately became popu- lar in England where they absorbed Lollards into the Protestant movement. The men of the New Learning, however, were not unanimous about the new religious dogmas. Oxford held back, but Cambridge joined the movement. The Cambridge students met in a tavern The White Horse where they discussed Luther’s proposals. These men were nicknamed Germans, but they were genuine patriots who later became the founders of the Anglican Church. Initially the king was opposed to Luther’s ideas and even wrote a book in the defense of the Catholic faith, for which he was rewarded by the Pope with the title the Defender of the Faith, a decision the Pope must have later regretted. However gradually the King 32 started to regard The Reformation and religious upheaval as a solution to many domestic problems. The immediate cause of the break with Rome was the question of divorce with Catherine of Aragon, from whom Henry could not expect any more children. Their only child was princess Mary, and the king wanted a son to secure for England an undisputed succession. There had never been a queen on the throne of England (except Matilda), and he feared a civil war or the rule of a foreign prince consort. It was Cardinal Wolsey’s task to persuade the Pope to give the king the divorce, and the task seemed fairly easy because the Pope had already divorced Henry’s sister Margaret Queen of Scotland, thus proving he was not given to scruples. But the Pope was at Charles V’s mercy and Charles V was Catherine’s nephew and protector. Wolsey’s mission to obtain a divorce fell through, and the king started to ask himself pretty obvious questions: why should he look abroad for consent to do what he wanted? Why not ask the English Churchmen and the Parliament? Thomas Cranmer, one of the ‘Germans’ from Cambridge replaced Wolsey as Archbishop of Canterbury, while Thomas Cromwell became the head of the anti-clerical revolution. In 1531 Henry persuaded the bishops to make him the head of the Church in England, and Parliament put the Royal Reformation into effect, and in just seven years the breach with Rome was complete. Parliament passed the legislation (The Act of Supremacy – 1534) that destroyed all monasteries. Thomas Cromwell prepared a survey of Church property which was the first organized survey since the Doomsday Book.3 Between 1536 and 1539, five hundred and sixty monasteries were closed and their land was sold among the local gentry. This decision proved to be very judicious because when the Catholic reaction4 started on the continent, those who benefited from the dissolution of the monas- teries did not want to see abbots, monks or nuns ever again. In the Universities there was a temporary decline of students (half of them had been monks) but soon the campuses were swelled with gentlemen’s sons. Average people approved of the Revolution even though they sympathized with blame- less Catherine and disliked Ann Boleyn – a flirt whom the King made his next bride. Those who refused to back up the king and repudiate Papal authority through the Oath of Supremacy went to the scaffold, like Sir Thomas More. After the attack on the Church propriety and Abbey lands, Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church proceeded to reform the religion of the English. Relic worship, im- age-worship, giving pardons for money and some popular superstitions were eradicated. What is more important, however, English was introduced as the language of worship. The priests had to recite the mass in English; the Lord’s Prayer, the Articles of Faith and the Commandments were taught in English, and common people finally got to know the Bible. These changes gave impetuous to the English Reformation, and when Catholic Queen Mary tried to undo the Reformation, ordinary people sacrificed their lives for the New Church and the new positive atmosphere it created among believers. But the new Anglican Church was still not protestant. The king passed the Act of Six Articles decreeing death against anyone who denied Transubstantiantion,5 the necessity 3 Doomsday Book – a written record of the ownership and value of land made in 1086 for William the Conqueror in order to asses the size and value of the King’s property and tax the property of others. 4 The Catholic reaction is most frequently described as Counter – Reformation. The Jesuits, whose order was founded in 1534, were instrumental in the Counter – Reformation. 5 The belief that during the mass the wine and bread turn into the blood and body of Christ. 35 ried) Queen Elizabeth. The East India Company started to fight for trade with India. Voyages of discovery resulted in establishing colonies in various parts of the world. Thus Elizabeth, continuing her father and grandfather’s policy, gave a new direction to the expansive energy of the English people. The Tudors not only laid the foundations for the Empire but also mapped out Great Britain. Under Henry VIII, Wales was annexed to England on terms of absolute equality – local Welshmen became JPs (Justices of Peace) and Welsh gentry sent their representatives to parliament. Gradually the Welsh upper classes were becoming English in speech and custom, while the peasants living in moun- tainous regions still spoke the Celtic language, discouraged in the administration and worship (Henry nonetheless allowed the printing of the Bible in Celtic which is why the language managed to survive). However, Henry VIII was not so successful in Ireland where he tried to implement the same policy. Henry first got rid of some powerful Anglo-Irish families that ruled the country and forced the Irish parliament to take him as king. Had he been content with such a status quo, he might have been victorious, but Henry doggedly insisted on subjugating Ireland to the religious revolution. Ireland in Tudor times was a Catholic stronghold; her insular position made her oblivious of the Renaissance or the New Learning, thus Henry’s attempts to take monastic lands gave bitter offence to Irish nationalists. The Jesuits and Spanish started to interfere, seeing in Ireland a foothold from which they could attack England. Thus Eliza- beth was forced to re-conquer Ireland, and she did that with extreme cruelty since her army was not big enough to occupy the island and keep it under control. It slaughtered the Irish tribes and killed the survivors with famine. Protestant colonists were ushered into Ulster, the Northeastern part of the island where the Irish held out the longest. Edmund Spenser, an English poet who took part in suppressing the Irish rebellion so described those who did not perish in massacres: ‘Out of every corner of the woods …[The Irish] came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked like…death. They spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead…happy where they could find them’. This did not, however, make any impression on most of the conquerors, who saw in Ireland a prospective English colony, where cheap land could be acquired and fortunes could be made. Many of them were not that mercenary, seeing the conquest of Ireland as a holy task, whereby the only true religion could be upheld and their patriotism and adora- tion for the Queen displayed. The overall corollary of the conquest was the Irish identifica- tion of the Catholic religion with Irish nationalism and genuine hatred of the English and Protestantism. Since the Irish upper class was abolished, Irish priests became the leaders. While Irish nationalism was closely connected with Catholicism, English nationalism was increasingly associated with the new Protestant faith. When Elizabeth ascended the throne, the majority of the nation were anti-clericals, some of whom were Catholics while others were Protestants. The Catholic reaction, which culminated in the invasion of the Spanish Armada, did a lot to convert some of the anti-clericals to the Protestant religion. When the Queen died in 1603 the majority of English considered themselves ardent Protestants, and they led highly religious lives based on the study of the Bible. The Bible together with the study of classics made England an important center of the Renaissance, famous for Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and Milton. The English Renais- sance flourished beyond the Tudor epoch, through Stuart times and Cromwell’s republic until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, that is much longer than in Europe were it withered quickly under the Jesuits and Spaniards. 36 2: The Stuart Era In the course of the 16th century the medieval system passed away. Cosmopolitan feudal- ism and Christian idealism8 gave way to the new idea of a national state. The royal admin- istration, Common Law, and the national parliament had a unifying effect on the country. The power in the parliament moved from the House of Lords to the House of Commons, representing the richer and more influential middle class. Cloth manufacture spread to all parts of the country and made many towns, especially those with harbors, very im- portant for the economy of the country. Regulation of the trade was no longer an affair of a chartered town or a guild but of the Crown and Parliament. The transition from the medieval to the modern world was completed by the feeling of common patriotism and national pride that cut across social classes and was always associated with the monarch. The Tudors, especially Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, had a metaphysical power over their subjects. They trusted their subjects and were worshipped by them. And they had every reason to do so. The ordinary people were sheltered by the State against all malpractices of clergy and aristocracy. The state provided for the poor. In 1601 Parliament passed the First Poor Law making people in each shire responsible for the poor. The JPs had to raise money for the poor and organize housing and work for them. This law was in operation until 1834. Under Elizabeth the future union of Scotland and England was prepared. In the 16th cen- tury Scotland officially became a protestant country. The Protestant Church in Scotland was called ‘Kirk’, and it was far more democratic than the Anglican Church because it was ruled not by monarchs and bishops but a General Assembly. Such was the situation when Mary ‘Queen of Scots’ returned as a widow from France to rule Scotland. Mary probably would have become the next queen of England if she had not antagonized her Scottish subjects. She married Lord Darnley, then had him murdered and, to everybody’s chagrin, married her husband’s murderer, Bothwell, whereby she was driven out of the country by her Scottish enemies. Elizabeth, who killed Mary, secured before her own death that the crown of England would go to Mary’s son from her second marriage (with Lord Darnley), James VI who in 1603 became James I of England. James I was accepted by the English without much ado. Everybody was happy that the death of the Virgin Queen did not lead to a Civil war or an invasion. Public opinion was unanimous that the union with Scotland was a good thing. Both countries had been Prot- estant for some time, which made them natural allies. But the Scots, especially those in James’s court, were disliked, and it soon became clear that the king himself was not to the English liking. When James became king of England at the age of seventy, he had been the king of Scotland for thirty-six years, and he was successful. He had the Kirk under his control as well as the Catholic nobles. But his experience as ruler of Scotland was of no use in deciphering the political map of England. His mind boggled at the House of Commons – the lawyers and squires perpetually imposing their advice on him and lecturing him on 8 The idea of Christendom as one Common European Civilization. 37 the realm’s laws, while flatly refusing to pay more taxes. In Scotland the only people to oppose the king were the nobles or the preachers who acted through the Kirk, not the middle classes. Soon it became clear that the relationship between the monarchy and Parliament would have to be reconsidered. In the 16th century the powers of Parliament were not clearly defined, but owing to the political and diplomatic talents of the Tudor monarchs there had been no overt conflicts. But James I had neither their knowledge nor their diplomatic skills and he was bound to make a mistake. James I was a good-natured but conceited man, who never allowed himself to be con- vinced that he knew too little of England and her laws to be a successful ruler. The first serious blunder was his reinforcement of the fines for ‘recusancy’ (for refusal to obey official religious dogmas). This unfortunate decision inspired some extreme Catholics to form the so-called Gunpowder plot whose aim was to blow up the buildings of Parlia- ment with the king and MPs in it. At the last moment the plot was revealed and the gov- ernment was not toppled, but since that day (November 5, 16059) Roman Catholics were forbidden to enter public services and were pushed to the margins of political life. Moreover James I, who was a pacifist, utterly neglected the Navy. The peace that ended the war with Spain was obtained at a very low price. The English merchants still could not officially trade with Spanish or Portuguese colonies, and in the absence of any royal sup- port they started to wage private wars. Such illegal wars were nothing new in English his- tory; a scuffle with foreign merchants or pirates was an incident that happened in the life of every honest tradesman. But in Stuart times the royal control over such enterprises was nonexistent, and therefore the English seamen quickly degenerated from the tradition of Drake and Raleigh and became black-flag pirates. To make matters worse for the English merchants, the Dutch started to compete with them with success, reducing considerably the volume of English trade. Pirates raided the English Channel, and the king held Sir Walter Raleigh accountable for the situation and had him beheaded. All that led to a deep resentment against all Stuart monarchs, cherished by mariners and merchants alike. When the second wave of Catholic reaction started with the onset of The Thirty Years’ War (1618) James’s peaceful instincts led him to propose to marry his son Charles to the Spanish infanta, and that idea unnerved nine Englishmen out of ten. Fortunately this Spanish match did not go off, but a marriage a degree less fatal was carried out – Charles was married to Henrietta Maria of France, a zealous Catholic, who became an active agent in converting the English court into her religion and who had disastrous influence on her husband’s policies. When Charles came to the throne in 1625 he had yet another terrible advisor, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who had been the architect of English foreign policy al- ready during the reign of Charles’s father. James’ death liberated Buckingham from the previous king’s peaceful policies, and he started to envisage himself as a great protestant leader. He induced Charles to launch several disastrous war expeditions against France and Spain, which infuriated the House of Commons. The House of Commons had no influence on the king’s foreign policy but indirectly it could be a very effective cog in the conduct of the war because it could refuse to pay higher taxes. The king’s bankruptcy was the reason why the war in France did not 9 Today the day is celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes was the man who was found in the cellars with the gunpowder. 40 highly disciplined and devoted to their commander, who was at the same time their spir- itual leader. Cromwell turned out to be not only a military genius but also a brilliant politician. When the King was taken prisoner, the MPs began to quarrel bitterly with one another. Cromwell’s army marched to London and took control over the Parliament. The army removed by force from the Parliament those MPs who did not wish to have the king beheaded while the remaining Puritan MPs unscrupulously sentenced him to death. In 1649 Britain became a republic called a Commonwealth, and in 1653 it was transformed into a Protectorate with Oliver Cromwell as its Lord Protector. His army first subdued the Scots who stood up for the king after his execution. Then Cromwell marched against the Irish to punish them for the support they gave to the king in 1641. It is estimated that the English killed about 6,000 Irish people12 and these events became an heirloom of hatred for the Irish nation. Europe and English colonies as well as Cavaliers and Presbyterians (the Anglican Church) would not accept Cromwell’s authority. But in just four years the English Navy under Admiral Blake defeated the French, the Spaniards and the Dutch and forced the colonies to give in to Cromwell. Scotland and Ireland were joined to England in legisla- tive and economic union. These successes made England feared and respected abroad. Yet Cromwell’s republic was not entirely successful. Cromwell’s military and imperial achievements simply cost too much. People were fed up with heavy taxes, and in spite of the sale of Crown and Episcopal lands, of the confiscation of half the land of Ireland and high fines put on his opponents, Cromwell was hopelessly indebted. The Protectorate was very unpopular and Cromwell feared to disband his costly army. Cromwellian rule of the sword incensed the country, and in truth it was an impossible situation. Cromwell, con- trary to what might be expected of him, wholeheartedly believed in constitutional monar- chy. He gave ample evidence of that, trying, soon before his death, to come to terms with Parliament that had never been able to agree with him earlier. He also managed to weed out the most radical elements in his army that had continually been working for another revolution.13 Gradually he started to give in to those of his advisors who wanted to revive the monarchy, and who saw in Cromwell the progenitor of a new dynasty. But Cromwell died and his son Richard turned out to be a failure as a leader. After 18 months following Cromwell’s death in 1658 one of the moderate army commanders General Monk took initiative into his hands and called Charles II from exile. The acts and laws of Cromwell’s government were repealed; the monarchy and the House of Stuart were restored. Even though the Republic was abolished, Cromwell left an indelible mark on English re- ligion and culture. Religious persecution was put down and different religious sects mul- tiplied. Puritan work ethics and their all-out war on sin captured the imagination of the English people. But still Puritan rigor and strictness, which entailed closing of theaters, inns or putting an end to the celebration of Easter and Christmas, made the Puritans hat- ed not less than the Laudian clergy that had oppressed the people two decades earlier. In spite of all that political turmoil, the Stuart era was an important phase in England’s progress towards the modern system of Parliamentary government, freedom of person 12 The worst civilian massacres took place at Drogheda and Wexford. 13 The radicals in the army were called „Levellers’; they held very advanced opinions – they wanted the Parliament to be elective body with all men aged over twenty eligible for vote and they demanded reli- gious freedom. 41 and speech, and good local administration. The House of Commons, bolstered by squires, lawyers and merchants, and presided over by eminent statesmen grew into the major gov- erning body of a modern nation. Whereas the majority of the peoples on the continent were subjected to regal absolution, the English were already free of feudalism. Contem- porary French or German peasants were still serfs owing service to their lord and dues to their priest. Many of their contemporaries in England were freeholders who enjoyed parliamentary franchise in shire elections. The social system that evolved in the 17th century laid the foundations for the institu- tions of the British Empire and the polity of the USA. The first English who immigrated to America came from the richest parts of England in the southeast, where the spirit of Common Law and the principle of self-government had been shaping the social reality for centuries. It is not surprising then, that upon arriving in the New World they wanted to transplant on the new soil those institutions and customs that had served then so well. They usually settled in compact communities called townships, which were self-govern- ing and almost entirely self-sufficient. The first waves of immigrants (under James I and Charles I) went to the Bermudas, the Caribbean (called West India) and to the colony of Virginia where the climate offered better conditions for agriculture. In 1620 the first group of Puritans who were later nick- named Pilgrim Fathers established the Plymouth Colony on the north-eastern coast of America. They were small gentry and yeomen farmers driven away from their homes by the Laudian persecution. Their colony was destined to become the germ of New England, as all Puritan colonies were later collectively called. New England imposed in the course of time the law and language on the whole north-American continent. In the North the climate was severe and the soil was thin and stony. Moreover it was covered with dense forests in which dangerous Indians prowled. Every acre of land to plough had to be wrested from nature and guarded against the Redskins. Half of the Pil- grim Fathers died during the first harsh winter; those who survived learnt how to built better houses and how to grow corn (they were aided by friendly Indians). Although they received help from wealthy Puritan lords, squires and London merchants, their life was extremely difficult, full of hardship and danger. But they were very sturdy and brave peo- ple whose perseverance was strengthened by their firm religious devotion and belief that their errand to the New World was a God-appointed mission. Puritan colonies were large homogeneous communities thoroughly dedicated to a zeal- ous religious life. There was no pretence at toleration and those who did not agree with Puritan ideas had to leave. Still Puritan colonies where far more democratic than those in the south, where the old aristocratic system compounded by slavery prevailed. Northern communities were free of slavery and consisted of free landowners most of whom – the full church members – had full political rights. In order to become a full member of the church, which was a prerequisite to receiving franchise, a person had to undergo the so-called conversion, that is a public confession of faith. It was believed that a false con- fession would lead to damnation, therefore few people found the courage to do it. Still the fully enfranchised members made a considerable part of New England’s population, especially in comparison with other non-Puritan colonies. When another host of Puritans, much more affluent, established another colony in Mas- sachusetts (1630) the pace of colonization was significantly hastened. Massachusetts eventually became so big and strong that it swallowed the colony of Plymouth. Boston 42 was the capital of Massachusetts; it was a seaport with fine inlets and fishing areas. In a span of a century it became one of the most important centers of shipbuilding, thanks to the wood found in plenty in New England. American colonies were dependent on their motherland because of some goods that the colonists could not produce themselves. But in political terms the colonies were self-reli- ant and the possibility that they would break away from England was strong from the start. The English colonies, contrary to similar enterprises by other nations, did not origi- nate in acts of state, but of wealthy individuals or companies that wanted to make a profit by trading with far away lands. The relation of the colonies to the Crown was very tenu- ous, to English Parliament non-existent. The political unrest in 17th century England – the Civil War and the Cromwellian republic – annihilated for some years the authority of the Crown and gave the colonists time to nurse their independence. Cromwell, who was Pu- ritan himself, established a good rapport with the colonies and respected their autonomy. Charles II brought the colonies under his control, but since the restoration entailed subju- gation of Puritanism to the Anglican Church, naturally the intercourse between England and New England took a turn for the worse. Charles II continued Cromwell’s imperialist policy. In 1664 England captured from the Dutch New Amsterdam, which became New York and annexed the so-called Middle Colonies (to the south of New England) where a very miscellaneous population lived: the English, Dutch, Swedish, French and Scottish. All these nationalities, representing differ- ent brands of Christian religion (Anglican, Puritan, Calvinist, Roman Catholic, Quaker, Presbyterian), were united under the British flag on terms of absolute equality and with due respect for their customs and beliefs. Thus the incorporation of the Middle Colonies resulted in greater tolerance and religious freedom for all and Puritanism lost a lot of its early militancy. The spirit of self-independence, the Puritan legacy, was fostered by the existence of the frontier, the part of the wilderness where pioneers had just penetrated. The frontiersmen were a hardy and robust population – resourceful, self-reliant and fiercely untrammeled. They were distrustful of any forms of training and authority, and totally ignorant of the manners of Europe. For them aristocratic Europe was just a remote abstraction. The frontiersmen as well as Puritans were natural enemies of England, whereas the more civilized and conservative population living on the coast was more likely to identify with their European ancestors. But most of them also gradually came in line with the Puritans and frontiersmen as it was becoming perfectly clear that England considered the colo- nies’ interests as secondary to her own. The colonies were valued as markets where raw materials could be obtained and finished goods sold. The colonies were expected to re- main subservient and not to compete with the mother country in industry or trade. Such mercantile considerations impinged on the liberties of American colonists, who were very unpatriotic and did not want to pay to England either duties or taxes. 45 Protestants and Puritans were plotting to remove James II from the throne. This sudden Protestant upheaval reminded the people of the hated Cromwellian republic, and once more the tables turned. After the dissolution of the Whig Parliament, the persecution of Puritans resumed with redoubled zeal. When the Whig plot against James II was discov- ered, the fact sealed the doom of the Whig leaders. Many of them were executed and even innocent people perished under the weight of false accusations. In June 1685 the Whigs organized an uprising under the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, who was a Protestant. The rebellion was cruelly quelled by George Jef- freys. He helped to uphold royal authority by harassing defendants and intimidating juries. He hanged and burned three hundred people and sent thousands more as slaves to America. James II’s endorsement for Jeffreys’s vicious actions and the king’s efforts to rule the country by sword (he did not disband the army raised against the rebels) disgusted even the Tories who were in favor of the king’s absolute power but not the king’s tyranny. They were also against James’s efforts to Romanize the country. In 1688 the majority of the nation were united in their wish that James would shortly die and his daughter Mary, married to William of Orange, would deliver the country from the dreadful situation. These hopes were shattered in June when James’s son, the legitimate heir to the throne, was born. There was no chance of a peaceful solution of the problem, therefore a new plot was organized. An invitation signed by Whig and Tory Chiefs was sent to William of Orange and his wife Mary to invade Britain and take the Crown. William of Orange, who had already proved himself to be a courageous commander and successful diplomat, and who victori- ously resisted the French and the English army in the recent war in Holland, decided to take a chance in England. He used the army and navy of Holland to invade the island and chase James II out to France.16 This ‘glorious revolution’ (1688–1689) as it was later named, was bloodless and had the popular support of the common people. Still there was something sinister about the fact that foreign intervention was necessary to liberate the English from James II’s regime. The glorious revolution was in fact nothing less than coup d’etat which put Parliament above the King. It laid down the principle that the Crown derived its authority not from divine hereditary right but from the consent of Parliament. By making William king by choice not inheritance, Parliament created a precedent that made it clear that the king’s authority was grounded in a contract with his subjects represented through the House of Commons. After the Revolution no monarch endeavored to govern contrary to the House of Commons and the long contest between the Crown and Parliament was ended. In 1689 The Bill of Rights (Acts declaring the rights and liberties of subjects) made Britain a constitutional monarchy in which the overall power over the state lies with Parliament, not with the monarch. Another act (1701) also prevented a Roman Catholic from becom- ing king or queen. It specified that after Mary’s death, the Crown would pass to her sister Ann and if she also died childless it would go to a granddaughter of James I married into the German House of Hanover. These agreements were carried out, and they closed the period of civil wars and revolutions and opened an era of toleration and greater liberty 16 From then on the supporters of the deposed king James II and his descendants were called Jacobites. After the death of James II there were two Jacobite rebellions against the Hanoverian Monarchy, both of which failed. In 1715 James’s son James Edward Stewart – the Old Pretender mounted an invasion of Scotland; in 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie – the Young Pretender did likewise. 46 for the individual. In 1695 censorship of the press was repealed. When the Clarendon Code was also abolished, a thousand years of religious wars finally came to an end. But France continued to threaten England. Louis XIV wanted to put James I back on the English throne and therefore war was inevitable. For the English the war had one more aim – to limit French power and curb French expansion. This aim was realized by the strategic genius of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (the antecedent of Winston Churchill) who won several important victories over the French. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ended the war and secured English maritime and commercial supremacy. By gen- eral consent, the year 1713 marks the beginning of English overseas expansion, of a long period of stability and prosperity for England which now was considered a leading Eu- ropean power. When in 1714 Queen Ann died without an heir, the crown of England passed to George I (great grandson of James I) from the House of Hanover. George I was totally ignorant of English customs and could not even speak English. Since he received his political sup- port from the Whigs (Tories wanted to put James II’s son on the throne) he entrusted his prerogatives to the Whig leaders. The appointment of ministers, the patronage of the Crown in Church and state went from the King to the Whig oligarchs. Among them was Sir Robert Walpole, considered Britain’s first Prime Minister. Walpole is credited with the development of the Cabinet form of government. The cabinet was (and still is) a group of ministers presided over by the Prime Minister. He is the chief of the party that won the election and the leading man in the House of Commons. For the twenty-one years of his ministry, Walpole worked out some of the basic principles underlying the work of gov- ernment, like for example the principle of collective responsibility according to which the Cabinet acts unanimously, and even if some ministers do not agree with adopted policies, they can not admit that in public. Walpole drove out of his Cabinet all those colleagues who could not agree with him and thus created an efficient government, whose members were at the same time members of Parliament. They served as a link between the execu- tive and the legislative power, which is still one of the most essential principles of modern British polity. Because of that close connection between the Cabinet and Parliament, and due to the fact that the Cabinet was dependent on the majority in the House of Com- mons, the Power of Commoners increased enormously. England was the only monarchy in Europe whose kings were not absolute rulers and whose citizens enjoyed the freedoms of speech, press and person. These changes in political life would not have been possible without the revolution in thought which had taken place in the Stuart times. In the 17th century the independent study of the Bible led to the proliferation of new non-conformist Churches, such as the Baptists or the Quakers. At the same time a revolution in scientific thinking was taking place.17 Francis Bacon laid the foundations for experimental science by arguing that every scientific theory must be tested by means of experiment. Experimentalism developed in tandem with rationalistic philosophy, putting emphasis on the power of human reason in explaining the laws of the universe. Isaac Newton was a paragon of the new scientific approach, and his study of gravity made him the ‘founding father’ of modern physics. David Hume in the 18th century introduced the idea that people cannot be certain about anything that is not directly taken by their senses. The success of the Glorious Revolution 17 Britain’s oldest and most prestigious scientific society – the Royal Society was founded in 1660 and was granted a royal charter two years later. 47 also resulted in a cluster of new political ideas about the nature and workings of govern- ment. Near the end of the 17th century John Locke, a Whig philosopher, preached that government should be based on the ‘consent of the people’ and that a Parliament that represents those people should have more power than the Crown. All these new ideas paved the way for the Enlightenment in the English literary and intellectual world. In the 18th century the upper class reached its heyday as the generous patron of the arts, sciences and letters. The mansions and houses of the gentry were centers of intellectual life. The upper-class were the first European tourists and their worldliness resulted in bringing to England French literary and philosophic ideas and Italian standards of mu- sic and poetry. In the middle of 18th century the Age of Reason started to give way to The Age of Sensibility, putting stress on emotions rather than reason. Upper class litera- ture continued to be rationalized and academic, but the common people were entertained by gothic stories, ballads and romantic tales. In the last decade of 18th century Romanti- cism was fully in bloom. The 18th century was also the time when a solid basis was provided for the development of the Industrial Revolution. The roads built in Roman times were improved and bridges were reconstructed. The first canals were built to connect great rivers – they were used as a cheap method of transport to carry timber, coal and other materials. Better farming kept people well fed. Various churches competed with one another in the sphere of edu- cation. They opened free schools to teach reading, writing and religion. The Methodist Church, the largest of the Protestant Free Churches, was particularly dedicated to educa- tional work. The religious toleration of the Hanoverian era and the government’s encouragement for private enterprise made it possible for the English to devote all their energies to business- building. Foreign Protestant refugees (French Huguenots, for example) well trained in different crafts and trading swarmed into England, making it the predestined cradle of the Industrial Revolution. England’s political leaders were eager to foster the growth of industries and to enlarge the wealth of the trading Empire, which was usually accomplished at the expense of the French. In India the French were plotting to oust the powerful East India Company by means of political alliances with local princes, just liberated from the influence of the defunct Mogul Empire. In America the French had established the colony of Quebec and through the St. Lawrence River, which provided the only way into the interior of the continent, they controlled the territory south of the Lakes: the Ohio Valley and the Mis- sissippi basin. They planted military posts in crucial strategic points to stop the westward expansion of British coastal colonies. Their aim was to appropriate the land to the west of the posts to the French colonial Empire. The conflict between the French and the English interests frequently led to unofficial wars, which as a rule, were turning to the advantage of Britain. It was otherwise in Amer- ica where the English had real difficulty in coming to terms with the colonists who were unwilling to take up arms and fight for new lands. The colonies were competing with one another, and were frequently torn apart by interior conflicts between the governor representing the interest of the Crown and local assemblies representing the interests of colonists. French Quebec, which was a transplantation of French peasants under the leadership of priests and feudal lords, was a paragon of a highly disciplined and obedient colony. English settlers, on the other hand, had enjoyed considerable freedom from royal GB – The 19th century 1: The Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution and the Beginning of the Second British Empire The war in America lasted from 1775 to 1783, and it ended as a war of Britain against half of the world. The British defended their Empire against France, Spain, Russia, Prus- sia, Holland and Scandinavian powers. Great Britain held on to Canada and India, but the recovery of the 13 colonies that had become the United States of America was impos- sible. One good thing that resulted from the disruption of the First British Empire was putting an end to the system of personal government by the King. The House of Commons was unanimous in the belief that the king’s influence on politics should be diminished. From those days onwards, England has always been ruled by a Cabinet responsible not to the king, but to the House of Commons. Another good thing that came out of the American Revolution was people’s renewed interest in politics and parliamentary proceedings. The two so-far dormant parties, the Whigs and the Tories, were revived, and each of them seriously intended to reform the country and eradicate rampant corruption. The Whigs found leaders in Edmund Burke1 and Charles James Fox; the Tories entrusted their leadership to William Pitt ‘the Young- er’, who was the son of William Pitt ‘the Elder’, Earl of Chatham. His countrymen also decided to put their trust in him, and he became Prime Minister, who, with general public support, rebuilt the Empire, improved the British colonial policy, and reconstituted the finances of the country. There is, however, another less sunny side to William Pitt’s great ministry which is con- nected with the repressive spirit of English political life in times following the bloody 1 Edmund Burke was known as a radical politician who during the American revolution supported the colonists (together with another radical Tom Paine). 52 French Revolution (1789–1799). Initially the English regarded the news about the mas- sacres in France with studied indifference, and only gradually did they become aware of the fact that the French revolution might imbue the English proletariat with similar subversive ideas. The sense of danger was further intensified when the new French Re- public started to spread through Europe promises to give armed assistance to the people of any country willing to topple their old governments. In England there were many im- poverished people who, as the ruling classes quickly realized, had many reasons for being discontent with their lot. When some radicals from the Whig party started advocating the implementation of reforms in order to alleviate the plight of the working people, the first victims of the Industrial Revolution, the conservative politicians panicked, fearing that talks of reform were nothing less than the beginning of an English revolution. The Reformers were silenced and those who dared to brandish the provocative phraseology borrowed from France were even persecuted. Pitt’s government did its best to crush the working classes by making trade unionism illegal. The fear of ‘Jacobinism’ (sympathy with French revolutionaries) almost annihilated all political life in Great Britain. All those who disagreed with Pitt’s oppressive policies retired to their country houses, where alone criticism was permitted. Among them were mostly Whig politicians, those who did not join the ranks of the sup- porters of Pitt’s Tory Ministry. Fox’s party remained in isolation for 30 years to come. The party was against the Tory enthusiasm for the war against the French, but at the same time it also cut itself from the lower class radicalism of Tom Paine2 and William Cobbet. This decimated Whig party became the nucleus of the liberal party of the 19th century. The Whig party, and Charles James Fox in particular, were the keepers of reformatory traditions. With the help of another progressive politician, William Wilberforce, Pitt won the campaign to stop the slave trade and make slavery illegal in the British Empire. In 1807 slave trade became illegal; in 1833 slavery was abolished; Parliament paid £ 20 mil- lion to buy freedom for all the slaves in the Empire. William Pitt was also against slavery but his energies were devoted to leading Britain through the war with Napoleon Bonaparte, which was one of the most terrible ordeals in all of British history.3 In 1793 when the French army seized Holland and Belgium, the considerations connected with the Balance of Power, plus the danger that the French army posed for English shores, prompted the British government to make war on France. The British Navy fought with the French at sea while the powers of central Europe fought Napoleon on land. Needless to say, European powers were not very successful; one by one they were defeated and forced into alliance with France. The Napoleonic wars (1802–1815) were the first wars of the modern type. While in the past the wars were waged to uphold trade routes to wrest from rivals the control of new markets, in the Napoleonic wars commercial struggle itself became the most formidable weapon of war. Both Britain and France tried to put into effect a blockade of each other’s 2 After the French Revolution, Tom Paine wrote a book – The Rights of Man – defending the rights and lib- erties of working classes against monarchs and oligarchs. Charged with treason he had to flee to France to save his life. 3 Five times in history Great Britain fought an all-out war for self-preservation: against Philip of Spain (under Queen Elisabeth); against France of Louis XIV (under William of Orange and Mary); against Napoleon Bonaparte and Jacobeans (under George III); against the German regime in 1914 (World War I); and Hitler (World War II). 55 feared English heretics. An open conflict was averted by Pitt, who divided Canada into Upper Canada with a British population and institutions and Lower Canada containing a French population. In this way the French population reconciled themselves to their place in the British Empire. Australia was first sighted by Portuguese and Spanish navigators in the 15th century. It was explored in the 17th century by the Dutch. Then in 1770 the land was claimed by Captain James Cook. The first settlement there was made not with a view to founding the Empire but as a new place to deport convicts, previously sent to Georgia, now belonging to the US. But gradually wool production started to develop in Australia, and the export of wool provided the cornerstone on which a stable economic system was founded. It cre- ated a new class of politically powerful and capitalistic large-landholding squatters. William Pitt ‘the Younger’ established direct parliamentary control over the East India Company, which by that time had acquired a territorial empire in India. Although the governor of India was an autocrat, he was subject to the ultimate control of the Home Government. The plunder, which had not been infrequent in the earlier times, was stopped, and the activities of the company were transformed from those of a merchant to those of a governor. A system of taxation was imposed and administrative work began. Roads, hospitals and reservoirs of water were built. Therefore in the early part of the 19th century Great Britain was an unquestionable leader in colonization and commerce. The rapid development of the Second British Empire could be only matched by the advance of Americans towards the Pacific Ocean. Pushing the Frontier westward and nation building was for Americans a full-time job, which pre- vented Americans from competing with the British in other parts of the world. Nineteenth century Britain was also the champion of the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated some of the economic and social changes that had been taking part in Britain for some time. In the reign of George III, the population of Britain doubled, but many lost their land through enclosures7 and had to look for new work. Their forefathers, who had lived on the land, had been able to produce almost everything they needed. But this new landless proletariat had to buy food, clothes and everything else. They came flooding into towns in search for a better life, and eventually they became also the recipients of many commodities they themselves manufactured. Lancashire was the centre of the cotton trade and Liverpool was the port from which cotton was dispatched. In the West Midland shires, called the Black Country, were the centers of production of the new fuel – coal, which replaced wood in the iron industry. The Northwestern part of England was where the new industrial districts were situated. The removal of industries into new urban areas caused profound changes in the life of villagers. The introduction of big industrial machines made it necessary to carry out pro- duction in factories, and thus the country became again purely agricultural. During the Napoleonic wars when the blockade made it virtually impossible to import any food, new methods of scientific farming, combined with the great acreage of land under plough (due to enclosures), resulted in a new unprecedented level of productivity that added to the prosperity of landlords and big tenant farmers. 7 Enclosures – common fields belonging to the whole village, where every villager had his own strip of land, and wastes were brought into cultivation by landlords and farmers. 56 But the interests of the peasants were totally disregarded. Deprived of their strip of land in the common field and their crafts, the peasants led a miserable life. The two parties, Whigs and Tories, held different opinions on many things but not on the working classes – both parties were aristocratic and represented the interests of their class alone. The Houses of Parliament were closed to anybody who was not a considerable landowner. Even Justices of the Peace were from ‘great landed’ families. Therefore nobody wished to take up the cudgels in defense of the poor. The government could not cope with the situ- ation and started giving allowances to the poor to keep them alive. Establishing a minimal wage would have solved the problem. Instead the poor were kept on a ‘dole’, while the employers kept wages down, and the system killed any initiative among the village prole- tariat, who made no attempt to alleviate their poverty. Naturally there were many people who were discontent, and for whom a revolution seemed to be a viable option. The danger was averted largely owing to the new religious movement called Methodism, launched by John Wesley. In terms of theology, Method- ism differed very little from the evangelical wing of the Church of England from which it had emerged. In social terms, however, Methodism brought about a real revolution. The Methodist preachers went from one village to another, preaching in the open air and at- tracting masses of poor people, who usually did not go to church. Methodism drew ordi- nary people in closer, more personal contact with God and taught them to be temperate, thrifty and hard working. It persuaded people to accept much social injustice by attracting their attention to religious revival, and therefore some historians have argued that Meth- odism prevented revolution in Britain during the revolutionary decades 1789–1848.8 In the 19th century Methodism grew to be one of the largest non-conformist churches and was frequently criticized for being a kind of muzzle for the working classes and a useful teacher of work-discipline for Victorian employers. It was put down as a religion that encouraged pessimism, repression, guilt feelings, and psychic inhibitions. As the wealth of the country was increasing, the gap between the standard of living of the rich and the poor was growing ever wider. The middle class built great mansions, whose grandeur sometimes surpassed the residences of the gentry. The landed gentry elaborated their manor houses. Towns and cities grew with astonishing rapidity. London was not only the biggest city in Great Britain but also in the entire world. Jerry-building was one of the evils of the Industrial Revolution. There was no attempt at city planning, and the housing built for the working classes was down at-heel and ugly. Jerry-building was one of the most tangible consequences of the policy adopted by sub- sequent governments called Lesser-Faire, which was based on a maximum freedom for individuals and businesses. There was no control over business and no regulation of the economy. It was believed that the economy could regulate itself, and the lower the degree of government intervention, the better was the operation of market forces. The numerous social problems that the Industrial Revolution created made it soon clear that the system of government and state policy must be readjusted. But the Tory govern- ment from 1815 to 1822 was unwilling to implement reforms and to adapt to the new so- cial facts created by the Industrial Revolution. The suppression of the proletariat reached its peak in the Manchester Massacre of 1819 when a mass meeting of cotton operatives 8 The Napoleonic wars were also a factor in preventing a revolution – they turned the nation’s thoughts from a revolution to the need of defeating the French. 57 was cruelly dispersed by the cavalry (11 people were killed, a hundred were wounded). Public opinion, after being solidly Tory since the French Revolution, now began to turn against the Tory government. Britain’s Prime Minister at that time was the victor of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, the only general who ever became a Prime Minister of Britain. He was a High Tory who showed the same disregard for the workers as he had shown for his soldiers. After 1815 when Britain no longer sold clothes, guns and other supplies to the allies, Brit- ish business declined. There were considerable lay-offs and the situation was aggravated by the return of 300,000 veterans who were looking for jobs. The cost of bread rose quickly because the government introduced the Corn Law, making the import of corn unprofitable in order to protect big landowners who grew corn at home. The prices of other commodities doubled, whereas wages remained the same. What brought the Duke of Wellington down, however, was not the growing unpopularity of his government but his surrender to the Catholic Emancipation. The Test Act passed in 1673 prevented Roman Catholics and Non-Conformists from holding state or municipal offices, from being a Member of Parliament, from studying at a university, and from join- ing the military forces. This act was repealed in 1828 in spite of the government’s oppo- sition. A year later Catholics scored still a more remarkable victory. The Irish organized the Catholic Association led by lawyer Daniel O’Connell and wrung from the Iron Duke the right for Catholics to become MPs. At that time the Irish suffered from starvation and posed a danger for the British, whose army had been radically reduced. This explains why the victor of Waterloo was helpless when faced with the determination of the hungry Irish peasants9. In 1830 the time had come when the whole society was sick and tired of living under the constant threat of social uprising, and the talk about reforms became widespread. Even the middle classes believed that the situation in the country was critical and explosive and that social uprising could no longer be avoided only by means of mere repression. In 1830 the Duke of Wellington fell from power and Lord Grey, the leader of the Whig party, became the next Prime Minister. Lord Grey in this youth worked with Fox and helped to transform the Whigs into the Liberal Party. Lord Grey represented the middle class, which, owing to the Industrial Revolution, was much more important than the aris- tocracy. The Liberals placed themselves between the Tories, who believed that Parliament should represent the property owners, and the radicals, who believed that Parliament should represent all people. Lord Grey’s cabinet was aristocratic but nevertheless it was made of the most advanced men in Parliament, and the first reforms it implemented were a profound shock to the Tories who expected much milder propositions. The Reform Act (1832) was almost a political revolution or a ‘new constitution,’ as the baffled Tories complained. It completely changed the electoral system of Great Britain by giving more votes to new densely populated areas in the country (also Scotland and Ireland). Before the reform, the country had been divided into boroughs, districts from which representatives to Parliament were summoned. This old system did not pay heed to the recent changes in the distribution of population brought about by the Industrial 9 The worst ordeal for the Irish was to come. In 1845, 1846 and 1847 there were disastrous potato plagues (potato was the staple food for the poor). One million people had to emigrate to avoid starvation; be- tween 1841 and 1920 another 5 million went (mostly to the USA). 60 tween the French-speaking and English-speaking populations of Canada and gave rise to two rebellions in 1837 and 1838. Consequently Lord Durham, who was sent to Canada as Governor-General advocated one self-government for Canada, so-far divided into the Lower Province and the Upper Province. In the Lower Province the French were in the majority; however, in the whole colony the British, not the French, were the majority and therefore setting up one assembly in practice meant putting executive power in British hands. This plan of swamping the French-speaking population to force it to assimilate was not altogether successful, as Quebec separatism remained a strong factor in Canadian political life.13 Australia, like Canada, was a federation of a number of separate colonies. In the mid 19th century these colonies were self-governing entities, and it was not until the end of the 19th century that they were linked into one economic unit by a railway system. Political union came soon after. Following a series of meetings in the 1890s, six Australian colonies de- cided to become a federation called the Commonwealth of Australia inaugurated on Jan- uary 1, 1901. Australia adopted a written constitution, based on that of the USA. One of the Commonwealth government’s first acts was the introduction of the so-called ‘White Australia policy’, which excluded all colored nations from the continent with the excep- tion of a few Aboriginal survivors living in the central desert areas of the continent. New Zealand, on the other hand, has always been more open to other races. The Maoris, the indigenous people of the two islands of New Zealand, suffered the same fate as In- dians of North America and Aborigines. Before the coming of Europeans, they had lived in mutually hostile tribes, their lifespan had been little more than 30 years, and they had practiced cannibalism. The contact with whites14 brought disease to which the Maoris were extremely vulnerable, and the acquisition of guns made it possible for them to exterminate one another. The decline in the native population went in tandem with an increase of the influx of Europeans, who, unable to solve by themselves their conflicts over the land, demanded British protection. In 1841 the colony was established, and it followed the same path of development as Australia (1852 – a federal constitution, 1856 – representative government). The history of South Africa was in some respects similar to that of Canada and Australia. Like Australia, South Africa was a federation of large and isolated communities, gradu- ally connected by an expanding railway system. As in Canada, the process of colonization and establishment of self-government suffered several setbacks due to the presence of another European nation (the Dutch settlers) that had settled there before the coming of the English. However, there were also some considerable differences between Canada and Australia on one hand and South Africa on the other. In Canada the white population was a majority into which the Indians assimilated. In Australia, the government’s policy closed the continent to the immigration of colored populations, thus also making the whites the majority. But in South Africa, the white population was in the minority. The first stage of British South African history dates back to the Napoleonic wars when the British seized from the Dutch the Cape of Good Hope to protect Britain’s trade routes to the Far East. The Boers, that is the Dutch settlers, were not enthusiastic about British rule, and the influx of the British population into the colony increased the tensions be- 13 In a 1995 referendum, Quebec still voted for separation. 14 The first Christian mission was founded in 1814. 61 tween the Dutch and the English populations, raising questions concerning language, law and customs. Many Boers migrated eastward and northward to found the self-governing republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1868 diamonds were discovered in the Cape Colony, and in the 1880s gold was found in Transvaal. But the exploitation of resources was heavily dependent on outside capital, which gave the British an excuse to intervene, and which finally led to two wars (1880–1881, 1899–1902).15 At the same time, Cecil Rhodes, the owner of a chartered company Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, was developing a new colony ‘modestly’ called Rhodesia. Rhodes was a visionary imperialist, who indefatigably worked towards one single goal – he wanted the British possessions in Africa to stretch from the Cape Colony to Egypt16 in the north of the continent, with a railway going from Cape Town to Cairo. Rhodes’s dedication to expanding the British Empire infuriated the Boers and significantly prolonged the South African War. The Boers lost the war but they taught the British a good lesson. First of all, the Dutch taught the British humility – the war gave a clear picture of the inefficiency of the British army especially when faced with guerilla warfare. The difficulties that the British had to grapple with put an end to the boastful type of imperialism, which made the British think that Britain had been specially chosen by God, whereas all other countries and nations were ‘God’s mistake’.17 On a more practical level, the Boer wars gave an impetus to army reform, which came just in the nick of time, before the World War of 1914–1918. Had the English won the South African War more easily, they might have never won the Great War. The hero of the Boers war Robert Baden-Powell, who used his experiences in these wars to found the Boy Scouts movement. After the war all Southern colonies, except Rhodesia, were federated in the South Afri- can Union. The Boers were restored to their former position; English and Dutch became the two languages of the union. The fair treatment of the Dutch paid off a hundredfold because in World War I, the Dutch remained loyal to the Commonwealth and fought against the Germans in Africa hand in hand with the British. But the British policy in India was not so wise. In 1857 there was a national revolt against British rule precipitated by a military mutiny. This so-called Indian Mutiny (by no means the first Indian mutiny in history) was caused by the British attempts to impose British- style army discipline onto Indian warrior traditions – the famous problem of greasing cartridges with animal fat being symptomatic of more serious and contentious issues.18 The mutineers were defeated by the British and faithful Indian troops, but the hostility between the British rulers and the Indian population never completely died out. Even though the British did a lot of good work in India, building railways, roads, hospitals, wa- ter-supplies and telegraphs, and fighting famine and plague with scientific methods, their 15 The main cause of the South African War for the Dutch was the fact that British businessmen wanted to exploit gold and diamond mines to their advantage. 16 Egypt was invaded by the British in 1882. The British feared that a nationalist uprising in Egypt would put an end to British control of the Suez Canal, the main route to India. The occupation lasted to 1954. 17 An opinion expressed by Mr. Podsnap, a character in Charles Dickens’s novel. 18 The British gave Indians cartridges greased with the fat of the sacred cow and the abhorred pig. 62 autocratic bureaucracy bred a lot of hatred. One of the main reasons of that ill feeling was educating young Indians in English universities, which traditionally laid stress on the political philosophy of freedom as ‘the crown of life’. Thus, as some observed, what the British attempted to do in India ‘was to rear a race of administrators on the literature of revolt’. Thus the contact with Western learning and thought resulted in the Indian desire for independence. In the 19th century India was Britain’s most important colony (‘the jewel in the crown’). But after the war of 1914 its status began to decline and a mass nationalist movement emerged under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1920s the British started to give in to the campaign of civil disobedience organized by Gandhi, and they began to clear the way for Indian self-government. World War II cut short this program of devolution19 and prompted a very fast retreat. British India was divided into separate states of Pakistan (Muslim population in majority) and India (Hindu population in majority). Near the end of the 19th century the British government hoped to bring all the colo- nies into a closer union by creating an Imperial Federation of Colonial Parliaments. This hope was never fulfilled. Most of the colonies had already turned into self-governing dominions20 and started to develop into separate nations. The Second British Empire was in fact an English-speaking league of nations united by the Crown (the British monarch was the head of state in the dominions). It may seem that running Imperial affairs was for the British government of paramount importance, but it was not. The government and the political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, were going through another period of internal reforms and in the words of Benjamin Disraeli21 ‘the wretched colonies’ were only ‘a millstone around [the] neck’. The initiative during this 2nd phase of social reforms was in the hands of the Liberal party, and its new belligerent leader William Gladstone. But the mastermind behind the reforms was John Stuart Mill, the founding father of liberal thought. Mill was a staunch support- er of democracy, advocating women suffrage, and propagating the philosophical doctrine of Utilitarianism that stated that governments should try to produce ‘the greatest happi- ness for the greatest number of people’. In his best-known work On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that people should be free to do what they want if this does not harm others. In Subjection of Women (1869), Mill defended the rights of women.22 The year 1859 wit- nessed the publication of another important book, Darwin’s The Origins of Species that launched a long war between faith and reason. Bishops angrily resisted the suggestion that they are descended from monkeys, and scientists responded that they would rather be descended from monkeys than Bishops; a new movement was gathering momentum whose aim was to modernize the Church. This so-called ‘Christian Socialism’ sought to reconcile theology with knowledge and democracy and to make the society more open- minded. It paved the way for social reforms and reduced conservative resistance. 19 Devolution – transfer of political power from central to local government. 20 A self-governed colony leaves the defense and foreign policy to the mother country, a dominion is a completely free nation that owes loyalty to the crown alone. 21 A premier from 1874–1880 known for saying ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and sta- tistics.’ He was a conservative politician who nevertheless convinced his colleagues to accept some lib- eral reforms. 22 Another important pioneer in the history of feminism is Florence Nightingale, a nurse in the Crimean War, who gave rise to modern nursing and a new concept of women’s place in society. 65 of the middle class to the plight of the most needy. Such books as Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield or Great Expectations show the fate of homeless children and orphans, poor people rotting in prisons for debts or toiling all their life in factories. Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies is a children’s book, which nev- ertheless illustrates the routine violence leveled at children in Victorian times. It describes the story of a little boy who wais forced by his cruel employer to climb inside dark and dangerous chimneys to clean them just because men were too lazy to use long brushes. Such books were instrumental in arousing social conscience of the public and the politi- cians, who more eagerly strove to push social reforms through Parliament. In the 19th century wealth was spreading fast among commercial classes and industrialists in the country. The towns and cities grew and the conditions of life were becoming more and more agreeable. The society was gradually transforming into the modern society of today. The power in the country moved from shires to towns, from aristocracy to the middle class, which through its enterprises generated the wealth in the country. The Vic- torian age was a time of prosperity, peace and security in Britain’s most important foreign relations. The death of Queen Victoria closed that glorious epoch, but as the 20th century commenced, people did not realize that. The beginning of the 20th century brought in many respects the continuation of the 19th century reformatory zeal. From 1907 free school meals were provided to improve the health of poor children. In 1908 the Old Age Pension scheme was launched, which was a reform on a scale beyond precedent. For the first time in history government took re- sponsibility for the old, saving them from homelessness and starvation. Two years later Unemployment and Health Insurance were introduced, and the burden of taxation was shifted on the wealthy. Thus free capitalism of the 19th century was transformed into the welfare state. Both the Conservative and Liberal parties supported this ‘socialist’ orientation in domestic politics, even though liberals were more progressive. They were becoming more and more dependent on labor, and it was becoming increasingly clear that in the new century the working people would become a major factor in politics. In the 1906 elections the Labor Party sprung into existence. For its members social reforms were more important than Imperialism. The party was supported by Trade Unions (of miners, railway and transport workers and other groups’) that at the turn of the century were practically ‘a state within a state’. Another important change on the domestic political scene was limiting the powers of the House of Lords. In 1908, in order to force a liberal government to resign, the con- servative majority in the House of Lords refused to accept the budget of 1909. The Peers turned down the budget also because it intended to increase taxes for the rich landown- ers. The Lords’ veto brought it home to the liberal politicians that the House of Lords could force a general election whenever lords could not agree with the implemented poli- cies. The crisis was averted by George V who threatened to appoint so many liberal peers as to outnumber the conservative peers in the House of Lords. The immediate result of this crisis was the Parliament Act of 1911 changing the Peers’ right to veto from absolute veto to suspensory veto for 2 years. On financial matters the Lords could not veto at all. In this way the Lords can no longer defeat parliamentary acts; they can only delay them and for not more than 2 years. It might have been a good moment to pass Home Rule for Ireland to solve one of the most contentious issues in British foreign policy. Ireland demanded immediate attention, 66 as it was getting ready for a civil war. The hotbed was Ulster, where pro-Irish Sinn Fein was trying to cut the ground from under the Orange Lodges. The only reason why the island did not flare into open warfare was the terrible danger that confronted Great Brit- ain from abroad. At the beginning of the 20th century the Balance of Power in Europe began to crumble. Germany was now united and began to build a military empire based on foundations that could not be shaken. Germany had a bigger population than GB and was the unquestion- able leader in scientific and technical education. German industries were far more effi- cient than English factories – they were a model of administration. Germany produced more steel than GB and it used that steel to build a strong modern navy, which the British started to regard with a certain awe. The Boer wars made the British diplomats realize the importance of European alliances, as almost all countries supported the Boers against the British. This realization brought an alliance with France whose interests were also threatened by the growing power and ex- pansionism of the German Empire. Similar considerations prompted the British to make an alliance with Russia. Thus by 1914 a very dangerous situation had developed. Ger- many and Austria-Hungary made a military alliance (they were called Central Powers) to protect themselves against GB, France and Russia, which seemed to ‘encircle’ them. This was in fact a false impression because in the face of German and Austro-Hungarian restlessness and growing militancy, most European countries including GB were ready to make far-going concessions. There was no attempt at ‘encircling’ or alienating Germany and Austrio-Hungary politically. It was precisely those two countries central geopolitical position that made them ‘encircled.’ What is more Germans enjoyed brandishing their military power, and fear was the chief instrument in German diplomacy. In the years preceding World War I there was one diplomatic crisis after another. The chief storm center was the Balkans, partially incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Hapsburgs. Bosnia was a part of the Empire, whereas Serbia was a free, inde- pendent country. Serbia wished to take over Bosnia and unite all Yugoslavs under the flag of Serbia. The hostility between the two countries – Serbia and Austro-Hungary – was ag- gravated by the Russian support for Serbia and the German support for Austro-Hungary. Serbia was a small but militarily strong country that had won Europe’s respect after her victory over the Turks. Austro-Hungary, not without reason, considered Serbia a threat and was biding its time to crush it under any possible pretext. On 28 June 1914 the Serbians supplied Austro-Hungary with the desired excuse – the Archduke Francis Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo. Russia bound by treaty to defend Serbia, declared war on Austro-Hungary and found itself in a state of war with the chief Austro-Hungarian ally – Germany. The Germans sent ultimatums to Russia and her ally France, which had already been preparing for war. In August 1914 the German armies rolled against France through innocent Belgium that happened to be on the way, and the violation of Belgium’s neutrality swayed the British to go to war. Britain was bound to go to Belgium’s aid by a treaty, but the main reason why Britain decided to fight in this continental war was the fear that war would end in the subjugation of all Europe to the Central Powers. The war quickly escalated into a global conflict. The Turks and Bulgarians rallied with the Central Powers. The Italians sided with the allies and forced a considerable part of the 67 Austro Hungarian army to get engaged in the trench warfare similar to that which had already been taking place in France. Then in April 1917, the Germans conceived and implemented a new tactics depending on the submarine campaign. Their objective was to intercept the supplies that were coming to the British Isles from America, Australia and other parts of the world. The Free Trade Policy had made agriculture unprofitable and turned Great Britain into a completely ur- banized country. People had left for cities, and the fields had been turning back into a jun- gle, but the German submarine warfare put a check on that process and taught the British anew how to use the plough. Great Britain did not starve to death in this blockade chiefly because the US, on whose shipments the submarine campaign impinged, entered the war on the side of the Allies. That gave impetus to Allied efforts to overthrow the German military government. The American adhesion to the war helped to offset the withdrawal of Russia caused by the Bolshevik revolution (1917). The arrival of American troops in France and the offensive in the spring 1918 broke German resistance. Turkey and Bul- garia were defeated, whereas Austro-Hungary disintegrated in a series of revolutions into her component national parts. In November 1918 an Armistice was concluded. World War I was yet another European conflict in which economical blockade (first ef- fected during the Napoleonic wars) turned out to be the most effective strategy. The new feature of the war was trench warfare, which took part mostly in France and consumed millions of lives. The death toll was also increased by the use of chemical gases and tanks. The submarines also proved a formidable weapon. The war exploded the Second British Empire. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa had contributed to the war effort, but when the war ended, each of them pressed for the full recognition of their independence. In Ireland, where the introduction of Home Rule was delayed because of the fear of Protestant uprising and because of the outbreak of the Great War, tension was already mounting. Finally at Easter in 1916 the tension erupted into open violence when Sinn Fein organized an uprising in Dublin. This ‘Easter Rising’ was quelled and its leaders executed, which turned them in the eyes of public opinion everywhere into martyrs. Now the Irish no longer demanded Home Rule. They would not accept anything less than an independent Republic. The guerilla warfare against the British that lasted until 1921 ended with the establishment of the Irish Free State in the South whereas Ulster in the north under Home Rule remained united with Great Britain. The Irish Free State was initially a British dominion, but in 1937 the Irish government declared southern Ireland a republic. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 established a German Democratic Republic, which was treated with a vindictiveness that flew in the face of common sense. The war consumed the wealth of the past century, and public opinion in Britain, fed on the war propaganda picturing Germans as subhuman creatures, wanted Germans to pay. Germany was dis- armed while her neighbors were armed-to-the-teeth. German colonies were overtaken by the Allies or by the Dominions. The reparations demanded from Germany reached fantastic and totally unrealistic levels – their aim was to leave Germany weak and impov- erished for decades to come. The Liberal party that appealed for moderation in dealings with Germany perished under public attack and never fully regained its importance. The Labor party gradually filled the void left by the liberals. 70 olic Queen of Spain, can be seen as an ethnically confused man who introduced ethnic confusion to the entire world. Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, two contemporary Native American writers, so com- mented on the significance of Columbus’s historical act: Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn’t discover America. There were incredibly complex indigenous cultures [in America] – Europe compared to the rest of the world was a very homogenous place. Almost anybody spoke Indo-European re- lated languages and shared the same cosmological worldview and the same general political system. Indians on the other hand, were used to enormous plurality – five hundred cultures, seven hundred languages spoken and many different religions.3 Within a day’s walk of any place, you would encounter another group of people who looked differently, spoke differ- ently and had a different view of men and women. When Europeans came to Indians at first, it was no big deal, you read an account after account of Indians saying ‘Oh yeah, and they came to – and they [Europeans] don’t bathe’. Whereas for Europeans it changed everything. Whose child were Indians in the Adam and Eve scheme? Were they human beings or not? These questions were argued in Spanish universities for 80 years until the Pope said Indians had souls. It changed the European worldview.4 The cultures that Indians evolved were varied and fascinating. None of them advanced to the use of iron or literacy and while their achievements in many respects were strik- ing, generally the Old World outstripped the New World in culture, political and mili- tary organization. Indians still lived in tribes – some of them were hunters, some gath- erers of food, and some farmers. The Pueblo people (territories of to-day’s New Mexi- co and Arizona) were the best-organized communities. They lived in terraced buildings made of bricks (mud and straw dried in the sun). Some of these buildings contained up to eight hundred rooms. The Pueblo people were skillful agriculturists – they grew maze and beans and built irrigation – a network of canals that turned the desert into fields. The Iroquois in the Northeaster part of America were also good agriculturalists, but they also hunted and caught fish; they used birch canoes to sail the rivers and lakes. Like the Pueblo Indians, they had a sedentary lifestyle – they lived in permanent villages, in huts made of wooden logs. The Indians in Northwest America also lived in houses, which they built of planks. Their houses were decorated with totem poles made of tree trunks on which there were cravings illustrating the history of the family who lived in the house. They were also good fishermen, depending on rivers and the Pacific Ocean for food. However, such tribes as the Sioux became the symbol of the Indian way of life. The Sioux lived on the grass plains stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. They did not build any houses but lived in tepees – tents made of buffalo skins. They hunted for buffalos, which provided them with everything they needed – food and mate- rial for clothing and shelter. They followed the great herds of those magnificent animals, packing and unpacking as often as it was necessary. Indeed most Indians were nomads. Their lifestyle was based on constant moving from one place to another. All lifestyles developed by Indians suited the natural environments in which they lived, but the arrival of Europeans obliterated them all. Even though Indians were formidable 3 The historians still cannot agree on the size of the Indian population: estimates vary from 2 million to 18 million inhabitants. 4 Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrtch and Michael Dorris, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994, p. 43. 71 warriors, they were no match for the whites who were coming in increasingly large num- bers with guns, diseases and hunger for land. Luckily for the white intruders the Indians were perpetually on the warpath against their neighbors, and war was their major occu- pation. Bravery in battle was the source of individual prestige for the warrior and of glory for the whole tribe. But constant feuds among the Indian tribes, which did not cease after the arrival of Europeans, made the European conquest plain sailing. The first Europeans to reach the American continent were the Vikings who briefly settled in the territory of later Newfoundland and New England around AD 1000. But the Vi- kings were not able to stay there because the natives were hostile, and the Vikings were not numerous enough to protect themselves. The Spanish were the first Europeans who managed to establish a permanent occupation of the territories in central and Southern America: Hernán Cortes conquered the Aztecs in 1520s; Francisco Pizzaro killed the Empire of Incas in the 1530s. The conquistadors were the first to explore the southern part of North America. Ponce De Léon claimed Florida for Spain. In 1565 the Spanish founded St. Augustine – the first permanent settlement in North America. Hernando de Soto travelled through Texas and Oklahoma to the Mississippi River, whereas Francisco Coronado was the first European who saw the Great Canyon of the Colorado River. As the looted gold started to sail to Spain making it a major European power, other coun- tries, including England, tried to join the Spanish in this colonial enterprise. In 1498 Henry VII sent another Italian sailor John Cabot who landed in today’s Newfoundland and discovered great cod-fisheries. England laid claim to Newfoundland but at that time was too weak to keep it. The French employed Giovanni Verrazano, also an Italian, who landed on Manhattan Island and discovered the estuary of the Hudson River,5 and Jacque Cartier discovered the St. Lawrence River for the French. Those who followed him founded Quebec in 1608 and Montreal in 1642. While the entire 16th century was devoted to exploration, the 17th century witnessed the beginning of the greatest population movement in the entire history of the mankind.6 The first English immigrants came long after the Spanish, and they attempted to colonize Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina in 1585. The first contingent of settlers did not like the island so much that the following year, at their own request, they were carried back home. The next attempt in 1587 was even less successful. England was engaged in a war with Spain (the attack of the Spanish Armada) and forgot about the colonists, and when Sir Walter Raleigh visited the island again, he found that all the colo- nists had vanished. In 1607 the first successful settlement took place. Raleigh established the colony of Virginia in honour of Elisabeth, the Virgin Queen. The first settlers came to Jamestown – first an outpost and later the capital of Virginia – as gold prospectors, but soon they realized that there was no gold in Virginia so they became farmers getting rich on the tobacco crop, which found a good market in England. The colony owed its suc- cess to Captain John Smith. He persuaded the colonists to work in order to survive. He had a knack of handling Indians and one of the most famous episodes of the early settle- ment has an Indian princess Pocahontas cast in the main role. When during one of his expeditions into the wilderness Smith was captured by the Indians, the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas, saved his life by persuading her father to let him go. Pocahontas married a 5 The Verrazano Narrows Bridge commemorates this event. 6 Seventy five percent of people who left Europe settled in the American Continent. 72 tobacco planter and was even presented at the court of James I, but she contracted small- pox while she was waiting for the ship to take her back to Virginia and died. By the 1620s great plantations had already risen along the James River and the popula- tion had increased to one thousand settlers. But founding great plantation dynasties, typ- ical of the southern colonies, would not have been possible without women and therefore a peculiar business developed in Virginia. Women were recruited in England to come to Virginia as brides for sale. The would-be-husbands had to pay 120 pounds of tobacco to marry them and to make homes. Coming to America was not an easy decision to make – the ships taking immigrants to America were small and overcrowded. The journey took from 6 to 12 weeks during which immigrants had to subsist on meager rations. Many of them died during the voyage due to diseases, inadequate food supplies and unsanitary conditions. Many ships were battered by storms; some were lost at sea. Yet maintaining connection with the mother country was essential for the colonists’ surviv- al. From Europe they imported articles that they could not produce. The eastern coastline of North America had many inlets and harbours; great rivers connected the shore with the interior of the country. Only one river – the St. Lawrence – provided entrance into the in- terior of the continent, others offered access only to the coastal plains. There, on the coast- al plains, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and formidable Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains on the other, the colonist stayed for a hundred years. Only trappers and traders dared to cross the mountain ranges and reach the territories that lay beyond. Although the colonists depended on trade with Europe, in many respects they were self- sufficient. The distinctive feature of the English colonies was that they were self-governing. Each colony was a separate entity with its own authorities; almost each had also a super- visor, a chartered company or a nobleman; most colonies had also governors. The British colonies in the 17th century were created not on the initiative of the Crown or Parliament but by private investors, whose chief aim was profit. And thus two colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, were founded by two chartered companies, the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company respectively. New Haven (later a part of Connecticut) was established by rich immigrants, who financed their passage themselves. New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, the Carolinas, New Jersey and Pennsylvania originally belonged to the king who gave these lands to the English gentry. Georgia was a penal colony to which con- victs and outlaws were sent; it served as a bulwark against the Spanish in Florida. Several colonies were simply off-springs of the old colonies. Rhode Island and Connecticut for ex- ample were established by Puritans who were ostracized in Massachusetts, or who had left Massachusetts in search of better lands. New York was at first a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam (founded in 1625) but it was captured by the English in 1664. The chief objectives of colonizing America were dreams of quick profit – if not from gold mines then from agriculture and natural resources. America was covered with dense woods, abounding in food, fuel, raw materials for houses, furniture and ships and profit- able cargo to export. Additionally, the New World was a God-given solution to the prob- lem of the large vagrant population in England adrift due to enclosures, rises in prices and other economic difficulties, and to the problem of ‘second’ sons,7 prisoners and oth- 7 According to English Common Law only the oldest son could inherit property, other sons had to fend for themselves. 75 plantations, where the fish were used to feed the slaves. New England’s ships sailed to ports all over the world and the trade flourished, bringing prosperity to all Puritans. Geography played an important role in shaping the character of each colony. New Eng- land was situated in the northeast of the country, where winters were very harsh and soil thin and stony. The land was covered with thick forests and the work of deforestation was slow and strenuous. Under such circumstances the colonists had to find other means of sustenance than agriculture and they found it in shipbuilding, cod fishing, and trade. They settled in compact townships that imitated the traditional English manor-village – the village was a nucleus around which there were fields formed in strips. The compact- ness of their settlement made possible the village school,14 church, town hall, and in the course of time made New England an urbanized and industrial area. South of New England, where the climate was warm and the soil fertile, a predominant- ly agrarian society developed. The middle colonies were the second great division. They were more cosmopolitan and more tolerant than New England. Pennsylvania had a large population of Quakers who had a talent for business comparable to that of the Puritans’. They also had equally gifted leaders such as William Penn who established the princi- ple of fair dealings with all religions and nationalities, including Indians. Philadelphia was the heart of the colony. New York had a very large Dutch population, which, even through it was under English rule, continued to exert social and economic influence. This colony owed its success to the British governor Richard Nichols, who effected the trans- fer from Dutch to the English authority. Nichols respected Dutch customs and laws and put the Dutch on par with the English colonists. In New York, as in Pennsylvania, agri- culture and trade were the chief business of the people. The third division consisted of five southern colonies: Virginia, Maryland, two Caroli- nas and Georgia. Virginia, as it was mentioned earlier, made money on tobacco crops, but the cultivation of tobacco quickly exhausted the soil and forced the settlers to move into the backcountry. Maryland had a predominantly Catholic population but was not adverse of the settlement of non-Catholic colonists. Both Virginia and Maryland had ar- istocracy made of plantation owners, whose estates were taken care of by slaves. These planters had the best land and most of the political power and were opposed to establish- ing elective governments or respecting personal liberties established by Common Law. The slave labor on which their power was based made competition impossible for small farmers. Therefore small farmers frequently moved into the wilderness to set up farms there. Finally the exodus to the West became such a commonplace phenomenon that the authorities had to yield to the democratic impulses of the people for fear that hardly any- body would stay. Thus the existence of the Frontier – the wilderness into which the white man had just penetrated –made the authorities more liberal. South Carolina and North Carolina specialized in the production and export of rice and indigo. The main port was Charleston, which was also a center of shipbuilding. It is in- teresting that none of the southern colonies had a trading class, as the planters themselves sold and dispatched their products. Therefore from the very beginning of colonization there were profound differences be- tween various parts of the country. The North was growing urban; the South was agricul- 14 Harvard was the first university in America, established in 1636 – just 6 years after the arrival of Puri- tans to Massachusetts. It was modeled on Cambridge. 76 tural and profoundly affected by slavery. Additionally, there was an antagonism between the new communities forming on the Frontier and old, more conservative and prosperous Easterners contemptuously called city slickers. The frontiersmen were self-reliant and in- dependent people, a truly democratic force in this nation just shaping itself. Even though the majority of them spoke English and lived under English laws and customs, the culture they finally evolved was unique. It was an amalgamation of different cultures, modified by the environment and the conditions of the New World. Whereas the frontiersmen were illiterate, uncultured and uncouth, the Easterners did their utmost to uphold their cultural refinement. All New England colonies except Rhode Island provided for compulsory elementary education. Quakers in Pennsylvania offered education to the poor. Besides Harvard University, established in Massachusetts in 1636, two other schools of higher education were established in the colonial period; these were The College of William and Mary (Virginia) and Yale (Connecticut). Other colleges: The College of New Jersey at Princeton, Columbia University (NY) and Rutgers (New Brunswick, New Jersey) were established in the middle of the 18th century. The colonies’ first world citizen was Benjamin Franklin, who lived in Pennsylvania. Fran- klin was a very versatile and talented person who inspired Americans with his from-rags- to-riches success. He started his career as a printer in Philadelphia, but soon he became an important authority in politics and science. He did not finish any school and was a self-educated man, who said, ‘I do not remember when I could not read’. He mastered French, Italian, Spanish and Latin and carried out many scientific experiments, for exam- ple on heat, electricity or lightening. He invented many practical things: a lightening rod, a more efficient stove, bi-focal glasses, the harmonica and many others. He was the only American colonist besides Cotton Mather15 to be honored by a membership in the Pres- tigious Royal Society of England. In America his reputation was founded on his journal- ism – his yearly contributions to Poor Richard’s Almanac.16 Finally Franklin established an academy, which soon grew into the College of Philadelphia and later on the University of Pennsylvania. Therefore it is unjust to see Franklin as a benevolent materialist encour- aging his compatriots to work hard and get rich, as first and foremost, he was a person devoted to doing public good. Besides Pennsylvania several regions had printing presses producing large numbers of books17 and magazines. Even in the colonial period the authors and editors enjoyed free- dom of the press, far greater than that the English were permitted. Such liberty was only possible due to the negligence with which the British government treated the American colonies. As it has already been said, the English government did not take part in founding the American colonies (except Georgia), and only gradually did it assume an authority over these overseas possessions. The colonies were not represent- ed in the British Parliament, but they had their own assemblies, which had to cooperate with governors appointed by the crown. These legislative bodies gradually acquired more and more power in financial matters – no taxes could be levied without their consent, 15 A Puritan minister and writer whose forefathers were founders of New England’s State and Church. With his writing he contributed to sentencing to death women accused of witchcraft in Salem trials of 1692. 16 Almanac – a calendar containing both frivolous and serious information, curiosities, recipes, etc. 17 Books of English authors were published without paying royalties – therefore they were very cheap. 77 no revenue could be spent without their approval. Therefore clashes between Governors, whose salaries depended on these councils, and the colonists were not infrequent. The Governors’ interference was grudgingly born by the colonists, for whom the governors represented interests of foreign manufactures and tradesmen. Very few Americans whole- heartedly identified with the Empire; the process of forging a distinctive American iden- tity had already begun. The British were unaware of the danger that the situation posed. They did not formulate any consistent colonial policy, except that the colonies should supply GB with raw materials and buy from ‘the mother country’ finished goods. But even that principle was poorly enforced. Therefore political independence and self-gov- ernment resulted in the colonies becoming increasingly American rather than English. 2: The War of Independence In 1782 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur published in England his sketches about Amer- ica, entitled Letters from an American Farmer. In the book, which became very popular upon its publication, Crèvecoeur enumerates many characteristics of the American peo- ple. In one of the most famous letters he poses the question: ‘what is then the American, this new man?’ to which he answers: He is either a European or a descendant of a European, hence so strange mixture of blood you will find in no other country […] I could point to you a family whose grandfather was an English man, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new governments he obeys, and the new rank he holds.18 In many respects Crèvecoeur was more perceptive than the colonists who frequently were very conservative people attached to the laws and customs they had imported from the Old World. Yet all their old practices, such as representative government or Common Law with all their guarantees of personal liberty, were becoming increasingly American rather than English. It was the result of the influx of other nations with their laws, customs and traditions, which started the process of the colonies growing away from Britain. This process was speeded up by the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) (known in America as the French and Indian War) that brought about sweeping changes not only in America but also in the entire world. The French were expelled from India and North America, 18 Crèvecoeur, ‘Letter III, What is an American?’ Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition, ed. by George McMichael, Macmillian Publishing Company, New York and London, 1985. p. 394–395. 80 principle the tea tax. Therefore an embargo on British tea continued, but for a while the emotions in the colonies subsided. Only Samuel Adams relentlessly strove to keep up the hostilities, using every possible pretext to bully English authorities. He made speeches and published numerous articulate pamphlets and articles, and finally in 1773 he induced the authorities of Massachusetts to establish a Committee of Correspondence to State the Rights and Grievances and to ‘communicate with other states on the grievances’. Quick- ly these inter-colonial committees mushroomed, and by 1774 three hundred towns had been drawn into the network. Each committee reported to the Boston Committee that provided connection with all the other colonies. These committees became the basis of revolutionary organizations which eventually usurped the power in all colonies. In 1773 Britain supplied Samuel Adams with another pretext for carrying out the anti- British agitation. The powerful East India Company had found itself in a state of bank- ruptcy and the government had to intervene. To save the company the government not only granted it a monopoly on all tea exported to the colonies, but also removed the tax on it to make the price of the company’s tea well under the customary one. In this way the company’s tea could compete effectively with the smuggled tea. The colonies drank enormous quantities of contraband tea, whose import now became much less profitable. To make matters worse the East India Company could sell their tea directly to consum- ers – without any middlemen – and thus many small colonial merchants could be put out of business. The tradesmen joined the patriots, as Samuel Adams’ adherents were now called, and together they did their best to intimidate the agents who were to sell the Com- pany’s tea. The shipments were warehoused or returned, and only in Boston the agents refused to give up. On the night of December 16, 1773 Adams organized a new outrage. A band of men roughly disguised as Indians dumped the cargo of three British tea-ships into the murky waters of the Boston harbor nearly choking them. ‘The Indians’ were doubtlessly Adams’s followers summoned from different Massachusetts’s towns through his committees of correspondence. The event was dubbed ‘The Boston Tea Party’ and it inspired in some colonies an organized resistance to shipments of the East India Compa- ny’s Tea. The news of the Tea Party and similar incidents elsewhere made British public opinion and Parliament unanimous. The Party was condemned as an act of vandalism and every- body expected Parliament to chastise Massachusetts – the unquestionable leader of the revolt. To bring that unruly province to heel Parliament passed the so-called Coercive Acts, whose aim was to crush Boston. The first closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for. The other act passed certain powers of the assemblies to the governor and em- powered the governor to quarter troops wherever he saw fit. Finally the king also signed the Quebec Act, which extended the authority of Quebec into Ohio and Illinois regions. Through the last act was not intended as a punitive measure; the colonists considered it an obstacle to their westward expansion. This act and four other acts that preceded it became known as ‘Five Intolerable Acts’. General Gage, an advocate of firm measures towards the colonies, was appointed a new governor; his task was to enforce the Intoler- able Acts. In the meantime, other colonies fearing the same repercussions turned against Britain and supported Massachusetts. Farmers from the colonies sent provisions to Boston to help Bostonians to survive without their harbor. In all colonies governors and assemblies clashed and there was more and more talk about the necessity of organizing a general in- ter-colonial congress to discuss the crisis. Finally on September 5, 1774, among vast en- 81 thusiasm, the delegates met in Philadelphia defying Gage and his soldiers. Only Georgia did not send her delegates, other colonies sent their brightest politicians. The delegates from Massachusetts were the most radical ones and they were regarded with certain dis- trust, as not all delegates held such advanced views. What this so-called First Continental Congress boiled down to was the question of Parliamentary Supremacy – the delegates repudiated the authority of the British Parliament and the Five Intolerable Acts, once again stating that their union was with the Crown not with the British Parliament, that it had no more rights to pass laws for Massachusetts or any other colony, and that colonial assemblies had to pass laws for Great Britain. The Congress decided also to set up a Con- tinental Association to enforce the policy of embargo on British goods. The Association finished off the work of the Committees of Correspondence in putting an end to what remained of royal authority in the colonies. Indeed one might say that the Committees where the first step towards political union, whereas the Association was the second. The British Parliament’s answer was the Restraining Act also banning all trade between America and other British colonies. By that time Gage was virtually besieged in Boston. As Lord Camden, who tried to warn his fellow MPs against such a radical anti-American course of action, remarked ‘the 10.000 men sent to Boston could only save general Gage from the disgrace (...) of being sacked in his entrenchments’. It was beyond the general’s power to subdue the countryside, where American militia had already been drilling, and stores of munitions had been piling up. Gage did not even dare to arrest the most radical leaders, who aired their revolutionary opinions with impunity and went about their busi- ness right under his nose. Soon most of the governors fled from the colonies and the loy- alists, appalled by these overt preparations for war, tried as best as they could to prepare for self-defense. It was clear that they would have to fend for themselves after George III had poured scorn on a petition sent to him by Philadelphia Quakers begging the King to embark on a conciliatory course of action. The King’s answer was ‘the die is now cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph’. From then on things drifted from bad to worse. On the night of 18 April 1775, spurred by the British Government, Gage reluctantly set out to seize and destroy a military store at Concord. This expedition was to be secret, but miles away people warned by the nightriders knew that ‘the British are coming’. Seventy- five volunteers made an attempt to stop the British at Lexington. The attempt failed, eight Americans were killed, ten wounded. Then the British pushed on to Concord but their mission was also abortive – the stores of munitions had been removed or hidden. The long march back to Boston was a nightmare. The bright read coats of the British Infantry were a good target for American marksmen, and British casualties were heavy. The first blood of the war was shed and so began the American Revolution (1775–1783). At that time the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia. It had hardly opened when it was faced with the news of the open warfare with the British. The Congress passed a declaration entitled ‘Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms’ in which it stated that the British were the enemy against which the American colonies presently would arm to preserve their liberties ‘resolved to die free men rather than live slaves’. The Congress proceeded swiftly to organize the war effort and entrusted the command of the army to a Southerner – George Washington from Virginia. It was important that all colonies should have a stake in the conflict, so, to offset the leadership of Massachusetts, the representa- tive of the largest southern colony was appointed the commander–in–chief. He himself saw his choice as injudicious. He confessed to his friend: ‘From the day I enter upon the 82 command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation’.22 Of course he was wrong. In retrospect he was one of the greatest American leaders, next to Abraham Lincoln, who led Americans through another ordeal – the Civil War almost a century later. Both the American Revolution and the Civil War were two last chapters in the history of the birth of a new nation that had been started by the settlers of James- town, Plymouth and Massachusetts. Still at that time, at the beginning of the Revolution, there were many people who doubt- ed the wisdom of complete separation with England. But even to them it was obvious that the colonies must make their choice, that they could no longer stay half in and half out of the British Empire. Now that it was for Americans an all-out war, it was either victory or total submission. Nobody made it clearer than Thomas Paine the author of the little fif- ty-page pamphlet Common Sense. He persuasively presented two alternatives – the con- tinued submission to a tyrannical king and his anachronistic government or a free, happy and self-sufficient republic based on the new Enlightenment ideas of Montesquieu and Locke. This pamphlet was immensely popular (120.000 copies sold) and did more than anything else to rally colonists to the cause of American independence. It was Thomas Paine’s suggestion to draft a declaration of independence. Even though of- ficially a committee was summoned to produce such a document, in practice the Decla- ration of Independence was the work of one person – Thomas Jefferson from Virginia, the most populous and important state. Jefferson was a child of the European Enlighten- ment, and his political talents were matched with an equally great gift for writing lucid and convincing prose. On the 4th of July 1776 Congress voted the approval of the Decla- ration and the 4th of July became a great American holiday – Independence Day. The most famous passage of the document embraces the most important tenets of the po- litical philosophy of the Age of Reason: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends; it is the right of the people to alter or abol- ish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and or- ganizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem more likely to effect their safety and Happiness...23 Thus, as it can be seen from the above fragment, the declaration not only rested upon particular grievances, which were later enumerated. First and foremost, it appealed to the common people, explaining to them in clear and logical language what they were fight- ing for – which was a dignified place in a democratic society, whose governments would be responsive to that society’s problems and needs. The revolutionary war, which was in fact, a civil war because Americans fought on both sides, lasted for six years. General Howe, now in command of the British army, drove the American rebels out of New York City, but then at Christmas 1776 Washington struck 22 Quoted in Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA, Second Edition, Penguin Books, London, 2001. p. 166. 23 Ibid. p. 175–176. 85 existence two political parties Federalists and Anti-federalists, that is respectively sup- porters and opponents of the new form of government. The constitution was not perfect but it was flexible and worked well. One of the earliest additions was the Bill of Rights, which was later incorporated to the supreme law. The Bill protects citizens against encroachments of the federal government on their personal liber- ties, guarantees all Americans the freedom of religion, press and speech; the right to carry arms and to a fair trial by jury; protection against ‘cruel and unusual punishments’. 3: Forming of the New Nation; Westward Expansion and Regional Differences After the American Revolution the United States entered a long lasting economic boom. When George Washington became the first president of the United States, many of the problems that Americans had to tackle after the Revolution had already been on their way to solution. The population and the volume of trade increased, as well as the price of farm products, which was a very satisfactory development for a country whose main source of revenue was agriculture. The industries, though second to agriculture, also grew steadily. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were beginning to lay foundations for textile manufac- ture; Connecticut was starting to produce tin ware and clocks; New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were producing paper, glass and iron. All these achievements led Thomas Jef- ferson, the Secretary of State in President Washington’s cabinet, to exult that ‘[American] affairs [were] proceeding in a train of unparalleled prosperity’, and ‘that the there [was] not a nation under the sun enjoying more present prosperity, nor with more in prospect’.25 Jefferson was of course right, but still there were some problems that pressed for solution. Even though the Constitution provided a safe compass for the future it seemed to have settled some of these problems only in theory. A whole machinery of state had to be cre- ated, and this task was conferred on George Washington. Under Washington’s leadership Congress created the Department of State (presided over by Jefferson) and of the Treas- ury (presided over by Alexander Hamilton). At the same time the Supreme Court was set up to enforce the Constitution. Between Jefferson and Hamilton there existed a deep personal and ideological antipathy. Hamilton understood the economic forces at work in America and in the world, and he used that understanding to build the polity of the United States. He believed in a close 25 Quoted in The Penguin History of the USA, p. 247. 86 union and a strong national government because only such a government could efficient- ly encourage trade and industry. Jefferson, on the other hand, was an idealist who pre- ferred the United States to remain a loose federation of self-governing states because he feared tyranny and the loss of individual liberty. Jefferson believed that the development of industries and cities would lead to the concentration of wealth and power that would put an end to personal liberty and to the idea of republicanism. Hamilton wanted to cre- ate a class of rich men – merchants, financiers, manufacturers – linked to the government through the national bank and national debt because he knew that they would cooper- ate with the government to make it strong. For Jefferson such a system was undemocratic and inegalitarian, which was true, but Hamilton, who was a pragmatist, did not care. For him human ‘ambition and avarice’ were the most reliable pillars of the state and the art of government was to curb and guide men’s appetites for the benefit of the public. Jefferson was a staunch democrat, whereas Hamilton was a zealous capitalist believing that capital- ism would in the end produce the greatest happiness for all. Jeffersonian and Hamiltoni- an views of life were two antagonistic forces that many later American statesmen tried to reconcile. One of the clashes between Hamilton and Jefferson and their divergent views on American future resulted in a new interpretation of the Constitution. In 1790 Hamilton conceived a plan that proposed that the federal government should pay the debts incurred by individual states in furthering the Revolution. This decision was extremely unpopular. By then the actual holders of national bonds were only spec- ulators who were to be, with no exception, the main beneficiaries of Hamilton’s deci- sion. The reason why he refused to make any concessions (even for the veterans who were paid for their service not with money but certificates sold quickly to speculators) was his belief that to secure national credit and to convince the public of the govern- ment’s financial reliability there must be no exception to the rules of the game. A year later Hamilton proposed to establish a Bank of the United States. By then Hamilton’s uncompromising doggedness had made him many formidable enemies, as he had man- aged to alienate many political leaders, among whom Jefferson provided the strong- est opposition. Hamilton’s supporters (Washington, among others) began to call them- selves Federalists, whereas Jefferson’s followers, who called themselves Republicans, claimed that the national bank was illegal because the Constitution explicitly enumer- ated all the powers belonging to the federal government and setting up a bank was not among them. Hamilton answered that Congress had the power ‘to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper’ for carrying out other powers that had been specifically granted. Those included levying taxes, paying debts, borrowing money, and to perform these functions and all other financial operations a national bank was indispensable. Both Congress and Washington created a precedent by agreeing with Hamilton’s arguments about the explicit and implied powers of the federal government, and founding of the Bank of the United States was one of Hamilton’s greatest achievements. In foreign policy the cornerstone of Washington’s administration was to preserve peace to give the country the time it needed to recover and to build its vital institutions. This pacifist policy was quickly challenged by the French Revolution and the Anglo-French war. Everyone favored neutrality, but neutrality was very difficult to preserve and the American people wondered which side of the conflict to take. The relations with the new revolutionary government in France were strained, the relations with the British govern- ment were even worse. The British still had their troops on American soil, in Fort Detroit and some other posts in the North West, and the markets of the British Empire were offi- 87 cially closed to American trade. Hamilton thought that siding with the British could help to settle these issues. Jefferson argued that France was a great sister-republic to whom Americans owed their loyalty. Finally the American grievances were partially amended by negotiations with the British, who withdrew from the forts, but other matters were left unsettled. When Washington retired after eight years of office his vice-president John Adams, also a staunch Federalist, was elected president, whereas Jefferson became the Vice President. Naturally the two of them were not getting along too well, and by 1800 the President and the Vice President were no longer on speaking terms. In 1800 the tables turned, and Jefferson became the third President of the United States. By then most Americans were fed up with Hamiltonian influence on domestic policies. Under Washington and Adams those policies alienated large groups of people who now wished to see some change. The strong federal government was not dismantled, but new democratic procedures were in- troduced by Jefferson. Jefferson was an idealist and a very successful politician who, un- like the cynical Hamilton, believed in Americans, flattered them and was careful not to trample on people’s toes. Therefore he enjoyed extraordinary favor among his country- men, who preferred Jefferson’s sincere complements to Hamilton’s sharp truths about the depravity of human nature. Jefferson introduced more liberal naturalization laws and more humane laws for debtors and criminals. Jefferson thought that the main business of the American people should be agriculture, and therefore he encouraged westward expansion. Shortly after Jefferson came into of- fice, with just one act, he doubled the territory of the United States. The purchase of Lou- isiana in 1803 was possible after Napoleon had forced the Spanish to cede to him this territory, whereby he sold it to the United States to feed his Exchequer and to put Loui- siana out of the British reach. Napoleon had known that French Louisiana had posed a danger to the young American Republic, and in the face of an impending war with Great Britain he had predicted that Americans would rally with Great Britain for the sole pur- pose – to oust him from Louisiana. Therefore in a pre-emptive move, he sold Louisiana for 15 million dollars. Jefferson who bought it thus secured his reelection for the second term of office (1804).26 During his second term in office Jefferson mainly had to strive to maintain neutrality in the war of Great Britain and France (1803–1815). But his successor James Madison, who in 1809 succeeded the retired Jefferson, found it difficult to tolerate some of the anti- American hostilities. Both French and English warships tried to effect a blockade on the enemy’s harbors, and in this way they interfered with the American trade. American ships were often intercepted, and their cargo was seized. Then in 1810 Napoleon announced that he was going to lift the embargo, and Madison’s administration took his words at their face value. In fact the embargo against the American shipments continued, but grad- ually the conflict with Great Britain came to the foreground. In 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain. In spite of some early successes the war turned to be for Americans a total disaster. An American attempt to invade British-ruled Canada ended in a fiasco, and the American embarrassment was compounded by a very successful British raid against the new capi- 26 The purchase was possible only by obtaining foreign loans which would not have been available if Ham- ilton had not established the National Bank and the credit of the US government. 90 sissippi) relocated to Oklahoma. Before they started on their long trek the white settlers had arrived to trick Indians of their property. The winter when they marched to Oklaho- ma was the coldest since 1776 – at least 1.600 Indian children and old people died due to coldness, starvation and the epidemic of cholera. A similar fate befell Cherokees who long before the Removal Act had realized that in order to survive the encounter with the white man they had to learn his ways. They had changed their life style from that of a Stone Age tribe to a civilized society. They had become successful farmers. They had invented a writ- ten alphabet for their language; they had a printing press and published a weekly newspa- per. In 1827 they had adopted a constitution based on that of the United States’. They had converted to Christianity, went to church and sent their children to school. To no avail. In 1837 and 38 they were driven out of their farms and marched in the dead of winter to Oklahoma. The nightmare lasted over five months; the death toll amounted to more than 4.000 people. The Cherokee called this chapter in their tribal history the Trail of Tears – it was perhaps the most glaring example of the American government’s hypocrisy. The 19th century was the Indian era of defeat, and if Indians had any victories they were usually short-lived and cruelly retaliated. When the government decided to pen Indians in ‘reservations’ because their wandering way of life simply took too much space, the In- dians of the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes rebelled in June 1876. The warriors of the two tribes led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull wiped out an American regiment (225 people). The battle is often called ‘Custer’s last stand’ because General George Custer died in the battle. For the Sioux it was also their last stand. In 1890 among the Sioux began the so- called Ghost Dance Movement. A religious leader persuaded the Sioux that if they kept on dancing a certain dance the dead warriors would rise from the dead and outnumber the whites, thus making it possible for the Indians to sweep the white men away. Such a wish deeply bothered the American government, which sent the army to restore order. On 29 December 1890 the United States soldiers killed more than 200 Indians. Those who did not perish on the spot, died in a blizzard. A year later some of the Nez Perces were forced out of their homes in Oregon. They de- vised a brilliant campaign in defense of their homes. General Sherman said that they fought with almost scientific skill. Finally, however, they were caught near the Canadian border, which, for them, was a border between annihilation and safety. They surrendered and tried to henceforth use diplomacy to get back to their homelands. They received generous prom- ises, which were of course broken. Geronimo was the last Indian chief to organize armed resistance. He was an Apache who fought with the American army for ten years in Arizona (1876–86), then he surrendered and spent the rest of his life as a farmer in Oklahoma. The Allotment Act of 1887 completed Indian expropriation – 86 million acres were tak- en away from Indians. The reservations in which they were closed were poverty-ridden and the Indians died there by ten of thousands of diseases and famine. In fewer than one hundred years since the Declaration of Independence, Americans succeeded in robbing Indians of their land. The settlement in the West proceeded with great haste. Indiana was admitted in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, Alabama in 1819, Main in 1820, Missouri in 1821. In 1845 Texas entered the Union. In 1846 Oregon30 was admitted. In 1848 after the war 30 At first settlers had gone to Oregon by ship round South America and along the Pacific coast. In 1832 they started to travel by land – the route was called the Oregon Trail. 91 with Mexico new areas in the South West were annexed to the Union.31 Around 1845 a New York journalist’s coined a phrase ‘manifest destiny’ which designated American na- tionalists’ claim that America should straddle the two oceans because it was the mission of the American people to bring the entire continent under their control. The extremists demanded that the United States should stretch all the way North to the boundary with Alaska at latitude 54° 40 minutes. The boundary with Canada remained at the 49th paral- lel of latitude, but below it the American hunger for land continued unchecked. 31 The territory seized after the war are today California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colo- rado. 92 95 a system of escape routes for run-away slaves from the South to Canada. The hiding plac- es were called ‘depots’, the guides searching and guiding the fugitives north were called ‘conductors’. The money necessary for the efficient organization of the system was pro- vided by the abolitionists, whose determination and boldness was regarded by the South- erners with growing suspicion. Around that time that feeling was compounded by some violent disputes concerning im- port duties. The North wanted high import duties to protect its young industries from competition with Europe. The South, on the other hand, depended on Europe for import of luxury goods, as well as some necessities. High import duties would raise the price of these commodities significantly. The North, like the South, was predominantly agrarian. Although the towns in the North were growing with unprecedented speed, they were still chiefly commercial, rather than manufacturing centers. But the South completely failed to industrialize and even its agriculture was very backward. Slavery, though extremely prof- itable, in the long run thwarted progress, and each year, in spite of its wealth, the South lagged further behind the rest of the United States. In 1850 that disproportion started to appear as an unbridgeable gap. It was then that John C. Calhoun, a Southern politician and most ardent champion of the Southern way of life, came up with a new doctrine that became known as the ‘states’ rights doctrine’, according to which a state had the right to disobey the federal law if that law harmed that’s state’s interests. The corollary of this doctrine was that the state had a right to secede to protect itself from what it believed was the tyrannous majority. The main opponent of the states’ rights doctrine was Senator Daniel Webster from Mas- sachusetts who warned Americans that, by usurping the power of the Supreme Court to decide whether the federal authorities were right or wrong, the states’ rights doctrine threatened to dismember the entire Union. But the states’ rights doctrine was, in fact, nothing else than rhetoric whose main objective was to pull some wool over the public’s eyes. In fact the Northern majority was ‘tyrannous’ only because it actively opposed slav- ery. Slavery then, appeared as the most important issue in the impending Civil War. In 1857 a new scandal disrupted the nation and brought it closer to upheaval – it was the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott was a slave who sued for liberation on the grounds that he had been taken through a free state and thus, according to law, he was a free man. The Justices, most of whom were Southerners, declared that by entering a slave state again, Scott lost his right to be free. What is more the Supreme Court rashly declared that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, because Congress had not possessed the constitutional right to pass or to enforce it. It was an unasked-for verdict and a pointless provocation because the Compromise was dead anyway. For the Southerners it was a great victory for it justified and sanctioned the existence of slavery in the West. But the North simply regarded it as evidence that the southern conspiracy cor- rupted the Supreme Court. Tempers grew worse and the tension was steadily mounting. The planters more frequently talked about secession but hesitated and might have done so for years to come if it had not been for John Brown. John Brown was an anti-slavery fanatic whose mind was dazzled by the idea of inciting a widespread slave resurrection in the South. He thought that the slaves would revolt against their masters if they were convinced that the North would support them. Then the rebels could be organized into army that would put an end to the ‘peculiar institu- tion’, as slavery was called. He was supported by the abolitionists in the North, who gave 96 him money to carry out this preposterous and unrealistic plan. On 16 October 1859, with 18 followers he captured the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. The next day he was forced to surrender, taken to Charleston, tried for treason and hanged. In his last written words Brown predicted the coming of the bloody Civil War: ‘I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away: but with Blood’3. To many abolitionists Brown became a prophet and a martyr. He himself believed he was an instrument in God’s hands. But many Northerners condemned Brown and his deeds and disowned him as a half-mad criminal. To no avail. The South turned deaf ears on anti-Brown manifestations in a stern belief that the Abolitionists wished to maintain the country’s unity by means of a slave rebellion. While Brown’s raid was the point of no return, the election of Abraham Lincoln4 as the next president was the excuse the Southern die-hards needed in order to break the Un- ion. Lincoln carried the majority of Northern and Western states; he did not carry a sin- gle state in the South. When the news of his election reached South Carolina, the center of the secessionist schemes, the process of disentangling the state from the Union was immediately set going. In state after state conventions were summoned (bypassing as- semblies), during which their union with the US was dissolved. Mississippi, Florida, Ala- bama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas sent their representatives to Montgomery, where a new government was to be set up. Jefferson Davis became the president of the new state called The Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as Confederacy). Those events shook the complacent North that had never really believed in the threat of disso- lution. Abraham Lincoln, sworn as president a month later, announced the secession illegal. On 15 April 1861 the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina that was occupied by the US troops. The first blood of the Civil War was shed. The event put other southern states that still hesitated in an agonizing situation. Vir- ginia, for example, did not consider Lincoln’s election a danger and had been so far loyal to the Union, in which she herself had invested so much good work. But on the other hand, for Virginia, as for other states, their loyalty was first and foremost to the state not the Union. Virginia endorsed the states’ rights doctrine and the vi- sion of the Union as a loose federation, from which she could secede when it suited her. So Virginia joined the Confederacy and Arkansas, Tennessee and North Caro- lina followed. With Virginia went Colonel Robert E. Lee, the most outstanding American commander, who, out of loyalty to his state, refused to become a chief- -in-command of the US army, which was a heavy blow to the Union. The border states: Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, fearing that they would bear the brunt of the Yankee attack, stayed in the Union, which does not mean that they were sincerely loyal because their citizens came flocking into the South to fill the ranks of the Confederate army. The first months of the war were characterized by a state of inertia caused by general unpreparedness of both belligerents. Gradually, however, the economy of the North was readjusted to meet the wartime needs. In material resources and manpower the North’s was much stronger than the South. The North was twice as populous as the South, had 3 qtd. in The Penguin History of the United States, p. 309. 4 Lincoln’s debut on the political scene was in the role of a sworn Abolitionist, who had opposed Southern Senator Stephen Douglas in a memorable series of debates on the issues of slavery. 97 a full command of the sea, expanding industries and a solid financial base (it had a na- tional bank that could borrow the money it needed for the conduct of the war). What the North could not produce, it could purchase abroad. All these were the assets that the South did not possess. However, the South had one great advantage. The initiative was now in the Northern hands because it was the North that wanted to restore the Union, and in order to achieve that goal, the North had to invade the South, while all the South had to do was to hold out, and most Southerners believed that they could do that. Strong though the North was, it lacked skillful military leaders and it lacked a disciplined army. The recruits were poorly trained and there were frequent draft riots and endless desertions. The war was chiefly fought in the Mississippi valley and in Virginia, where the Yankees tried hopelessly to capture Richmond, the new capital of Confederacy. Rob- ert E. Lee and Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson showed great ingenuity in outwitting the Union army generals. The Northern prospects looked slim for a long time to come. Then in February 1862 an obscure West Point graduate General Ulysses Simpson Grant took command of the US army in the West and had some first successes in Mississippi. Moreover on 24 April, a brilliant Naval commander Commodore David Farragut cap- tured New Orleans, so when Grant pushed southwards and in the battle of Vicksburg defeated the strongest Confederate army in the West, the whole Mississippi river was in Union hands. The South was split with Texas and Arkansas on one side and other states on the other. But in Virginia the so called Army of the Potomac5 suffered defeat after de- feat. The morale of Northerners was at its lowest ebb. Still there was the issue of slavery that remained unresolved. Slavery had been the main cause of the war – it had poisoned the political life in America for more than 30 years. Lincoln had already made up his mind to announce that the abolition of slavery was the main aim of the war, but he bid his time, waiting for an appropriate moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Had it been issued in defeat, it would have seemed a desper- ate effort on his part to change the tack of the war by resorting to black help in order to bring down the otherwise invincible South. Thus the president needed a victory and since no decisive, spectacular victory was at hand, he used the battle at Antietam in Maryland (September 17, 1862) as the victory he needed (though the Union army under General McClellan hammered back Lee’s advance – at best the battle was a draw). He gave the Confederacy an ultimatum – the rebel states were to come back to the union by the end of the year, or all the slaves in the Confederacy were to be freed. When the Confederates failed to comply, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, whereby all slaves in the southern states became free people. The news caused a considerable turmoil in the South. Even though the Confederacy tried to suppress all reports of the Proclamation before they reached the interior of the coun- try, the news spread quickly along the slave grapevine with a speed that always amazed the planters. The Black people, who had so far quietly worked on the plantations in- directly contributing to the Confederate war effort, now took to fleeing in large num- bers undermining the entire economic system of the South. They strengthened the union army, becoming invaluable spies and guides. They helped the Yankee prisoners of war to 5 The Union army was named after the Potomac River.