Dire enough though Lincoln’s accounting of the state of contemporary law and society in America was in his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, there was, in fact, a somewhat more abstract argument into which his doom and gloom forecasts fitted in turn. In order to understand why the United States was so especially vulnerable to a kind of internal erosion – far more, he argued, than to an external invasion by the combined forces of half the world – Lincoln accordingly directed his audience to consider the peculiar circumstances which surrounded and described its basic existence. On the one hand, as he had previously asserted, the United States of America was entirely without peer. No other country, in his estimation, was as blessed in terms of, “Extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” And no other nation could boast of possessing, “A system of political institutions [,]” which were more conducive to, “The ends of civil and religious liberty [.]” The American republic was unique in these respects. Sui generis. In a class by itself. But, on the other hand, the American people were not so different from most others. The Founders, in Lincoln’s estimation, had been, “Hardy, brave, and patriotic,” but they were now almost wholly departed. The institutions which that greatest of generations had labored to construct were now in the hands of those who knew not what it meant to hazard their very lives in the name of liberty. Great things may yet have loomed in America’s future, of course, provided that the American people endeavored to remember their origins. But it was equally possible, so far as Lincoln was concerned, that a kind of forgetfulness might set in among the inhabitants of the American republic, and that the same petty ambitions and small-minded lust for power which caused Americans to cluck their tongues when gazing out upon the larger world might yet cause the beneficiaries of the same to spoil the American experiment.
In seeking to explain in detail the
precise cause of his anxiety – why it was he felt it possible that the greatest
enemy which America might face going forward were her own citizens turned
against her – Lincoln laid out what was essentially a kind of formula of
American nationhood. The American republic, he explained, was indeed a strange
a glorious thing. A group of lawyers, and merchants, and soldiers, and farmers
living in the provincial backwater of one of the world’s most powerful empires
had not only taken up arms against their colonial masters in an attempt to
defend the liberties which the believed to be their collective birthright, but
they then proceeded to establish a government grounded upon notions of
individual sovereignty wholly unlike anything the world had yet seen. If these
insurrectionaries succeeded, Lincoln, avowed,
They were to be immortalized; their
names were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and
mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted though all time. If they failed
[however], they were to be called knaves, and fools, and fanatics for a
fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten.
There was everything to lose, in short, and everything to gain. And while the cause of American liberty inarguably attracted some of the brightest minds and noblest spirits of the age, there existed no guarantee whatsoever of their success. The American experiment was truly that.
Of course, Lincoln went on to explain, the efforts of the Founders indeed bore fruit. “The experiment is a success,” he stated, “And thousands have won their deathless names in making it so.” But while succeeding generations had thus been permitted to reap the benefits of the Founder’s accomplishments – both in terms of the Revolution itself and in forging the institutions and the norms of American republicanism – this triumph carried with it an unexpected downside. “The game is caught,” Lincoln explained, “And I believe it is true that with the catching end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.” Why should this have been a problem? Why should anyone in America have despaired that the hard work of forging a nation had already been done? Lincoln’s answer was exceedingly simple. “New reapers will arise,” he asserted,
And they too will seek a field. It is
to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of
ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they
do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as
others have done before them. The question then is, can that gratification be
found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others?
Most certainly it cannot.
What this would
seem to mean, in essence, was that while the American republic was wholly
unique in its form and function, Americans themselves were just as human as
anyone else. Some of them, to be sure, would find contentment enough in what
Lincoln described as the essential duty of the American people. Namely, to
transmit the, “Political edifice of liberty and equal rights,” which the
Founders had wrought, “Unprofaned by the foot of an invader […] and undecayed
by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that
fate shall permit the world to know.” Many people, he went on to observe, “May
ever be found whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress,
a gubernatorial or a presidential chair [.]” But others, belonging to what
Lincoln described as, “The family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle [,]”
would not be satisfied so easily.
Some people, Lincoln asserted, were
bound to think so highly of their own abilities that they would ever fail to
find satisfaction in, “Adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected
to the memory of others.” An ego such as this, he continued, “Denies that it is
glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of
any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and
if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or
enslaving freemen.” To be sure, it was exceptionally unfortunate that such
personalities should have to exist at all. That some people, though all their
needs are satisfied, should nevertheless lust after greater wealth, and power,
and prestige is nothing less than a fundamental tragedy of the human condition.
But it could also hardly be described as a fault of American society or
American culture that such people should come to exist among the population of
the American republic. This, as Lincoln astutely observed, was simply the way
of the world. Where it fell to Americans to exert themselves was rather in
recognizing this lamentable reality and then in taking such steps as might
prevent its worst effects. It can happen here, he stressed to his
audience. The operative question, therefore, was, are we going to let it?
There were other questions, mind,
that Lincoln sought to answer in turn, doubtless in anticipation of those who
would call his argument flawed or faulty. If the United States was as
vulnerable to internal corruption as Lincoln claimed, for example, why hadn’t
it imploded at some earlier point in its existence? What was so different about
the 1830s that hadn’t also been true of the 1810s and 1820s? There were, as far
as Lincoln was concerned, two answers to these questions. The first, he
explained, was essentially external in nature. For many years, it seemed, from
the origins of the Revolution in the 1770s to the final years of the 1810s and
the beginning of the 1820s,
The jealousy, envy, and avarice
incident to our nature and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and
conscious strength, were […] in great measure smothered and rendered inactive,
while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge,
instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against
the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest
principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant, or to become the
active agents in the advancement of the noblest of causes—that of establishing
and maintaining civil and religious liberty.
Nation-building, of
course, often seeks to make use of common enemies and common threats in order
to define and solidify shared identities and foster a sense of solidarity and
community where none formerly existed. Lincoln’s identification of Britain as a
common enemy by which otherwise disparate American communities knitted
themselves together over the course of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries accordingly makes for a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. With Britain
standing in as an omnipresent threat that was perfectly willing to exploit
internal weaknesses and possessed of the resources necessary to make good on its
ambitions, it indeed stood to reason that individual American who might otherwise
have attempted to manipulate the communities to which they belonged in the name
of personal gain instead either stifled their desires or actively aided in
promoting the stability and security of the nascent the American republic. They
did not do so out of charity, to be sure. The personal threat which they
identified in Great Britain merely coincided with the threat that Britain posed
to the United States as a whole. Nevertheless, their ostensibly self-serving
efforts undeniably aided in, “Establishing and maintaining civil and religious
liberty.”
Lincoln was also correct, it must be said, when he observed that the state of affairs engendered by the perception of an ongoing British threat, “Must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.” Great Britain had indeed represented perhaps the single greatest existential menace to the sovereignty and security of the United States of America during the earliest period of the latter’s existence. Not only had the British government of the day fought long and hard over the course of the 1770s and 1780s to prevent the Continental Congress from succeeding in its attempt to secure the formal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from the larger British Empire, but subsequent British administrations thereafter attempted to destabilize the nascent American republic by a variety of means. Weapons, supplies, and shelter, for example, were provided by the British to many of the native communities either residing on the western frontier of the United States or who had been displaced by the Revolution and sought refuge in British Canada. These selfsame communities then used these resources to conduct a long-running harassment campaign against American settlements in what is now the Midwest, both for the purpose of revenging themselves upon those who forced them off of their ancestral lands and in service of a British desire to destabilize the security situation in territory which they had only recently been forced to cede to the United States. As this campaign was unambiguously being aided the ongoing presence of British military personnel at certain fortifications in the Great Lakes region – fortifications which had legally been ceded to the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) – there could be no uncertainty on the part of the American republic and its inhabitants whom it was they still had to fear.
During this same period in the 1780s and 1790s, while trade between Great Britain and the American republic had mostly resumed after the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), a number of significant economic and diplomatic disputes either lingered or emerged which made it abundantly clear that Britain was not yet wholly reconciled to the existence of an independent American polity. Disagreements, for one thing, were very common across the length of the newly established boundary between Britain’s remaining North American possessions and the nascent United States. Americans strayed into British territory, British strayed into American territory, and armed confrontation was at time only narrowly avoided. At the same time, Britain also continued to restrict American access to its possessions in the West Indies, continued to refuse compensation to Southerners whose slaves had been enlisted by the British and later transported to places like Nova Scotia and the British Caribbean, and continued to capture American sailors on the high seas whom it claimed were actually deserters from the Royal Navy. Some of these issues were settled with the signing of the Jay Treaty in 1795, to be sure, notwithstanding significant internal disagreements between competing factions within the domestic American political sphere. But even the shared desire on the part of British and American authorities to keep the United States out of what was at that point an ongoing conflict between Great Britain and Revolutionary France was not enough to fully settle relations between the world’s only English-speaking nations. Britain still seemed willing to dismiss certain American concerns, and this dismissal had the effect of both uniting Americans in a sense of shared outrage and prompting them to seek redress by whatever means they felt were necessary.
The War of 1812 (1812-1815) inarguably represented the apotheosis of this drawn-out period of simmering national resentment. Though Anglo-American trade relations had more or less been settled by the terms of the aforementioned Jay Treaty, Britain continued to impress American sailors in an effort to shore up its navy as its war with the French Republic gave way to a war with the French Empire, it continued to arm and provide shelter to native tribes in the Great Lakes region, and it broadly continued to treat American sovereignty as something which it could respect or ignore as the circumstances seemed to demand. Following a number of naval engagements – one in 1807, another in 1811 – during which British and American vessels fired on one another and sailors on one or both sides were killed, political pressure within the United States Congress built to such a degree that war was finally declared at the behest of the outwardly anti-British and pro-French Democratic-Republican Party in June of 1812. As the demands which the incumbent Madison Administration sent to the contemporary British government had already been met by the time that the aforementioned war declaration was made, however, the resulting conflict was substantially purposeless from the outset. British troops seized Detroit; American troops razed the capital of Upper Canada at York; British troops put the city of Washington to the torch; American troops decisively defeated an attempted British invasion of Louisiana. Back and forth it went, month after month, for a full two and a half years. And when a peace treaty was finally signed in the city of Ghent in 1815, matters were settled almost exactly where they had previously stood. The British, it was true, did finally agree to compensate Southern slave holders for their lost property claims, and the United States did pledge to aide the British in stamping out the international slave trade. But no territory changed hands, the British made no explicit promises as to their position on impressment, and British Canada continued to offer safe haven to native peoples who had been forced out of the Midwest. The status quo, as they say, was more or less antebellum.
And yet, for all that the War of 1812 had seemingly been fought for no purpose, something substantial did change as a result of this selfsame conflict. The American people, to be sure, did come away from the war newly encouraged by their ability to hold one of the most powerful empires in the world to a stalemate. They also seemed to derive no small amount of satisfaction from having pushed back against their former colonial overlords and emerged from the resulting tussle unscathed. The results of this buoyed sense of national wellbeing were significant, not the least of which was the beginning of the end of the two-party system that had existed since the middle 1790s. But as significant, arguably, was the change which the War of 1812 heralded in terms of the Anglo-American relationship. Great Britain and the United States did not immediately become allies, of course. Nor were all of the issues which had contributed to the heightened tensions of the 1790s and 1800s immediately resolved. But the mood on both sides had perceptibly shifted. While some Americans continued to regard Britain with suspicion and hostility, the American government’s approach to its British counterpart became decidedly less antagonistic in the years after 1815. Just so, while many sectors of British society continued to view the United States and its people as uncultured and provincial, successive British governments tended to approach the American republic with something more like respect than dismissal over the course of the 1820s and 1830s. Disputes most definitely still arose between the two, but arbitration soon emerged as the favored tool of resolution.
In 1817, for example, at a time when the dust from the War of 1812 had only just settled, an exchange of letters between Richard Rush (1780-1859), Acting Secretary of State, and Sir Charles Bagot (1781-1843), British Minister to Washington, led to the signing of a disarmament treaty whereby both parties agreed to severely limit the number and size of military vessels stationed on the Great Lakes. This initial step towards establishing a demilitarized border between the United States and British Canada was expanded upon substantially by a second treaty signed the following year in London. As negotiated by American Minister to France Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), the aforementioned Richard Rush, President of the Board of Trade Frederick John Robinson (1782-1859), and Privy Councilor Henry Goulburn (1784-1856), the Treaty of 1818 – also known as the London Convention – at once settled a number of lingering disputes between the parties involved and sought to preempt cause for further disagreement by setting out a number of basic principles and guidelines. The United States was granted the right to fish off the coast of British Newfoundland, commerce regulations set in place in 1815 were ratified for a further decade, and an arbitration mechanism was even set up for the purpose of adjudicating any remaining property disputes that had not been addressed by the Treaty of Ghent. More important than any of these measures, however, were the terms of Article II and Article III. According to the former, the boundary between the United States and Britain’s various colonial possessions in North America west of Upper Canada was to run along the length of the 49th parallel from the northwestern tip of Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. At which point, accordingly to the latter, sovereignty over the “Oregon Country” – comprising what is now southern British Columbia and the entire state of Oregon – was to be shared for a period of no less than ten years.
The fact that the parties involved in the London Convention were able to agree to joint occupation of the Oregon Country is really nothing short of extraordinary. In 1814, recall, British troops sacked the city of Washington and set fire to both the White House and the United States Capitol. And yet somehow, by 1818, both governments believed it possible for British subjects and American citizens to live in the same jurisdiction without either nation claiming exclusive sovereignty over the lot. There were bound to be disagreements over land, over the fur trade, or just as a result of people being people. But for some reason, in spite of the fact that less than five years prior the two had been at war, American and British authorities mutually agreed that sharing this swath of potentially valuable territory was both possible and desirable. Granting that there would yet be further cause in the decades to come for the two sides to readdress certain aspects of their bilateral relations, 1818 ought to nevertheless be understood as a major turning point in the history of Anglo-American affairs. Having been antagonists for decades following the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from the larger British Empire, the United States and the United Kingdom had by the 1820s become something more like respectful – if at times still slightly wary – collaborators.
Indeed, when President James Monroe (1758-1831) went so far as to declare in his penultimate State of the Union Address in 1823 that the Americas were no longer to be the subject of European colonization efforts, the government of Lord Liverpool (1770-1828) reacted with quiet approval. Aimed, as the so-called “Monroe Doctrine” was, at preventing Spain from attempting to reassert its authority over the recently established republics of South and Central America, British authorities saw nothing but profit in the notion that the United States would endeavor to keep South American markets open to ongoing British trade. It had not been Monroe’s intention to speak or to act in such a way as to benefit the United Kingdom’s financial interests, most assuredly, but it would also seem eminently likely that he would not have been displeased at the prospect. Notwithstanding their long and often tumultuous relationship up to that point, the United States and the United Kingdom had by the 1820s arrived at a state of mutual respect and cooperation. This state of affairs continued with few interruptions well into the 1830s, thereby seeming to amply justify Abraham Lincoln’s aforementioned assertion in 1838 that Britain no longer served as a unifying threat in the eyes of the American people.
No comments:
Post a Comment