The Anti-Slavery War of 1834 - An Alternate History Thought Experiment

 

The interactions this summer of the political scene and the pandemic presented the 4^th of July to me differently this year.  I found it difficult to carry on with my annual watching of the film musical “1776” knowing that it would meaning watching the Southern colonies hold American Independence hostage to their ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery.  Which sent my mind to work on a thought problem exercise of “What if the Continental Congress failed to agree upon the Declaration of Independence?” 

Historian Niall Ferguson wrote in “Virtual History” that in doing alternate history, it is important to make the smallest possible alteration that will lead to the greatest changes.  Guided by that thought, the simplest possible change from which to launch this thought experiment is -   

·         The Continental Congress rejects the proposed Declaration of Independence over the issue of slavery in early July, 1776.  The Southern delegates begin withdrawing from the collapsing Congress and returning home beginning with the two Carolinas.  Georgian, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware reluctantly complete this withdrawal during August as the British Army drives Washington out of New York.

Washington’s attempted Christmas attack at Trenton is a dismal failure.  The General is killed trying to rally his rear guard covering the shattered army’s attempted retreat to its boats.  General Henry Knox drowns attempting to get the American artillery back across the river under fire.  After action criticism focused upon too complicated a battle plan and reliance upon militia against professionals with both Hessian and British reinforcements.

In January, a Commission is mandated by the Crown to offer the American rebels pardons (with some exceptions including John Adams), to allow judges to serve on condition of good behavior, and to promise to discuss colonial grievances (except the Quebec Act) in exchange for a cease-fire, the final official dissolution of the Continental Congress, the re-establishment of the pre-war (traditional) colonial assemblies, the acceptance of Lord North's Conciliatory Proposal and compensation for the Loyalists adversely affected by the war. 

Patrick Henry – exiled (friends in Virginia, which stays loyal, intercede)

Samuel Adams – arrested and brought to London for trial and execution (hanged, drawn, and quartered)

John Adams – arrested and brought to London for trial (hanged, drawn and quartered – after his brother Samuel)

Thomas Jefferson – arrested and brought to London for trial and execution (hanged, drawn, and quartered, the last of all)

Benjamin Franklin – eludes capture (rumored to have been engineered by friends in Britain) and lives out his days in Paris

Thomas Paine – eludes arrest in the American colonies, reaches Europe and by staying on the move, eludes arrest until 1789 when he is arrested in France and imprisoned.

This leaves the 13 American colonies under British rule.  Crown policy limits them to the area between the Atlantic and the main crest of the Appalachian Mountains.  The territories beyond the mountains are reserved for the various Native American tribes.  The colonies continue to see immigration though less than in our timeline because there is less available ‘free’ land.

Without the debt burden incurred in supporting the American struggle for independence and without the example of that successful revolution, France does not face the pressures leading to revolution in 1789 – buying it some time.

Now we begin to run into what I call ‘the multiple body problem’ – the farther removed we are from our point of alteration in history, the more unknowns accumulate. 

Unanswered Questions:

·         Without a French Revolution and the following wars between France the rest of Europe, what conflicts may have occurred in Europe and on what scale?

·         What further reforms might France’s Royalist Army introduce (not to mention the French Navy)?

·         The Holy Roman Empire survives and it and Russia are both eyeing the weakening Ottoman Empire’s holdings around the Black Sea and in the Balkans. 

·         What revolutionary movements might emerge where in Europe and with what degree of success?

However, we can anchor our alternative timeline on two other points from our history:

1 May 1807 – The Slave Trade Act 1807, officially An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire. Although it did not abolish the practice of slavery, it did encourage British action to press other nation states to abolish their own slave trades and it would require an end to the trade between Britain’ slaveholding colonies in North America and the Caribbean and their African sources.

The invention of the Cotton Gin in 1794 by the Colonial American inventor Eli Whitney supported the expanded cultivation of cotton in the southern colonies, sustained by the supply of labor in the form of enslaved Africans brought to the colonies and sold to the growing number of planters.  The trade is in part financed by investors and speculators throughout the colonies (concentrated in New York and Boston) who have few other outlets of investment in the colonies.  Financial investment activity in the American colonies tended to follow patterns established in London but focused almost entirely on the colonies including some investment in the trade with the African coast until 1807. 

With Spain still holding Florida and the Gulf Coast to Louisiana as well as all lands west of the Mississippi River, Spain and Portugal became unofficial beneficiaries of the ongoing slave trade, needing the profits to support their respective wars as they attempted to hold on to their colonial empires in the Americas.  Slaves from Africa are shipped through Florida and the Gulf Coast up to and around New Orleans and then sold to planters inland.  Cherokee efforts to adopt “civilized” ways meant that they too are adopting plantation agriculture using enslaved Africans for manpower.

From 1776 then through 1807, we come to 1833:

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73) abolished slavery in parts of the British Empire, effective 1834 – one year after passage. This Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, with the exception of "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company" including Saint Helena.

The Act provided for payments to slave-owners. Historically, the amount of money to be spent on the payments was set at "the Sum of Twenty Million Pounds Sterling” to pay out for the loss of the slaves as business assets to the registered owners of the freed slaves. In 1833, £20 million amounted to 40% of the Treasury's annual income or approximately 5% of British GDP at the time. To finance the payments, the British government took on a £15 million loan, finalized on 3 August 1835, with banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore; £5 million was paid out directly in government stock, worth £1.5 billion in present day. The money was not paid back by the British taxpayers until 2015, when the British Government decided to modernize the gilt portfolio by redeeming all remaining undated gilts. The long gap between this money being borrowed and its repayment was due to the type of financial instrument that was used, rather than the amount of money borrowed.

Historically, half of the money went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain. The names listed in the returns for slave owner payments show that ownership was spread over many hundreds of British families,[28] many of them (though not all) of high social standing. For example, Henry Phillpotts (then the Bishop of Exeter), with three others (as trustees and executors of the will of John Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley), was paid £12,700 for 665 slaves in the West Indies, whilst Henry Lascelles, 2nd Earl of Harewood received £26,309 for 2,554 slaves on 6 plantations. The majority of men and women who were paid under the 1833 Abolition Act are listed in a Parliamentary Return, entitled Slavery Abolition Act, which is an account of all moneys awarded by the Commissioners of Slave Compensation in the Parliamentary Papers 1837–8 (215) vol. 48.

Here is another point at which our history and this alternate history collide.  In our history, there were over 2 million slaves in 1830.  At rates approximately the same as noted above – this could cost the British Crown thirty million pounds.  Such an expense might

1) stop the abolition movement in its tracks;

2) result in less generous payments to the owners of slaves, possibly bankrupting some owners; or,

3) a determined Government in London could seek another process for abolition of slavery.

But even with the fullest historical rate of compensation, the planters in the southern American colonies might consider resisting the Crown.  After all, they seceded in 1861 with even less a definitive threat of abolition.

In this timeline they are not facing the might of the British Empire that defeated Napoleon, but a military power relatively little changed from that which defeated the attempted American rebellion just over 50 years earlier – with some technological improvements.  I see this as a conflict much on the scale of our timeline’s War of 1812 with armies made up of brigades.  Native American allies for both sides would number perhaps a 1,000 total, parceled out in 2-300 hundred per “field army” and used as scouts and screens against the other side’s scouts.

It would not be unreasonable to suppose that a coalition might emerge between genuine abolitionists in the other colonies and those individuals in the ‘northern’ colonies who still hold grudges against the southern colonies for sabotaging independence in 1776.  Such a coalition might offer strong support to the Crown in a conflict aimed at eliminating slavery in North America. 

My personal casting of the Major Characters for this drama follows:

Commander in Chief, British Forces – (London) – General Rowland Hill, 1st Viscount Hill

Colonial Secretary (London) – Sir George Murray (1772-1846)

Governor-General of British North America and Lieutenant Governor of Lower Canada – General the Right Honorable The Lord Aylmer (1775-1850)

Commander, Royal Naval force for the North American Expedition (sailing from Cork) – Admiral Thomas Cochrane

Commander, British Expedition to North America – General Sir Charles James Napier (1782-1853)

Commander of American Colonial forces - General Winfield Scott (June 13, 1786 – May 29, 1866) senior American militia commander, he served as a general in the United States Army from 1814 to 1861, most experienced member of British forces of American birth (Virginia).

John Quincy Adams (July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, and diarist who served as Royal Governor of Massachusetts from 1825 to 1835.   He was the eldest son of John Adams (executed after the failure of the American Revolution in 1777).  His widowed mother, Abigal Adams, was determined to see that John Quincy’s prospects would not be tarnished by his father’s fate and lobbied diligently on his behalf until her death in 1818.  His career was further facilitated by evolving British attitudes towards both the failed revolution and by the economic growth of the colonies.  This changing attitude reflected in part the influence of the romanticized version presented in the novels of James Fennimore Cooper, often called “the American Sir Walter Scott”.  Adams was a key figure in supporting the abolition of slavery after the 1833 act, rumored to be in part driven by a desire to punish the Southern slave states for their ‘betrayal’ of his father in the Continental Congress.

Candidate for command of the Southern rebels:  Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American soldier and statesman born in the colonial Carolinas.  Here I am considering geography and an altered life experience in this alternate timeline as leaving Jackson more amenable to being a defender of slavery even if this Jackson chooses to consider the struggle to be one against the overreaching parliament across the Atlantic versus the ‘yeoman farmers’ of the Americas.

 

 

Author James Bradley on a Sea Cruise

The Imperial Cruise, A Secret History of Empire and War, James Bradley, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, © 2009 James Bradley ISBN: 978-0-316-01400-7

That handful of people who read my book reviews may have noticed that I frequently make distinctions regarding non-fiction works that are something other than histories, and memoirs that are not autobiographies. James Bradley’s latest book again raises the need to make such a distinction as he presents the reader with a well-researched account of a little known historical episode – the 1905 voyage of the largest official U.S. delegation ever sent abroad (at least before the advent of modern summitry and bilateral joint commissions!).

From July to September 1905, then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft led seven (of 90) senators and twenty-three (of 386) congressman (plus presidential wild child Alice Roosevelt) on a trans-Pacific tour, stopping in the new U.S. territories of Hawaii and the Philippines, in addition to Japan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. The author’s principal purpose is to explore how President Roosevelt’s actions with regard to the Pacific Ocean and the Far Eastern countries set into motion events that would led to the climactic battle of Iwo Jima between the forces of the United States and Imperial Japan (the subject of the author’s first book, Flags of Our Fathers).

However, this is not a history, having more the tone of an expose, especially given the author’s criticism of a number of TR’s biographers. It could be argued, in fact, that in this book Bradley was channeling a 19th Century muck-racking journalist, a type with whom the principal subject of his book, Theodore Roosevelt, would have been very familiar. The author’s TR only superficially resembles that figure normally depicted and recognizable in other histories and biographies as well as, for example, in films such as “The Wind and the Lion” and “Newsies”, or even as parodied in the “Night at the Museum” films or the play/film “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

This is evidently the very point that Bradley wants to make, Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t necessarily so. Much of what Bradley presents here with regard to Roosevelt’s ties to Japan and his racial attitudes is not new, at least not to academic historians nor even to a number of his contemporary critics, but much of it is likely to surprise the general reader. Theodore Roosevelt was very much a product of his times and even more so of his family and upbringing, as the author makes amply clear in his early chapters. The first part of the book also makes evident the degree to which Roosevelt could claim to be a self-made man in both person and reputation. Bradley’s Teddy comes across as every bit as image conscious as his younger cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though the older Roosevelt did not face the technological challenges of radio and film that confronted FDR.

The fact that Roosevelt shared the racial attitudes of many of his peers is not news, especially to the historians who have explored his punitive decisions against Black soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment after they clashed in a racially charged atmosphere with the white sheriff and other residents of Brownsville, Texas in the summer of 1906. [I can only conclude that the author deliberately skipped over Taft’s infamous turn of phrase when as Governor of the Philippines he referred to “our little brown brothers” in assuring then President McKinley that they would not be ready for self-government in 150 years.] Nor is it likely to surprise the more attentive readers to find that the United States government in this period (and not uniquely in its history) often said one thing and then did something other than what it had previously committed itself to do. Today one can read these attitudes expressed in Theodore Roosevelt’s own words by looking up his works accessible via Google Books. (Those interested in TR’s Japanese friend, Baron Kentaro Kaneko, will also find many of whose writings available for reading today via Google Books, among other resources.)

Unfortunately, Bradley keeps stumbling over bad history. It may be that in his apparent determination to deliver a black and white case he has skipped over the reality that most historically controversial episodes come in shades of grey rather than stark black and white, or in the recent catchphrase, “it’s complicated.” In one example he states that President Polk decided that the Rio Grande marked the border between Mexico and Texas, as the latter became the newest state in the United States, instead of “the internationally recognized border between Mexico and the United States…the Nueces River.”

The reality is more complicated. After his defeat at San Jacinto by Sam Houston’s army, Mexico’s dictator General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna signed the Treaty of Velasco which recognized the independence of Texas and placed the border between Mexico and the new Republic of Texas on the Rio Grande River. However, a new government in Mexico rejected this treaty because it was signed while Santa Anna was being held captive and because he had been deposed while absent from Mexico City pursuing his war in Texas. With the border thus in dispute in the absence of any agreement between Mexico City and what it considered a rebellious province, the issue is further complicated by the fact that Britain, France, and the United States recognized the newly independent Republic of Texas, such action at the very least implying recognition of the claimed border along the Rio Grande River. Most historians today would at the very least the situation with the words “it’s complicated.”

In a second example, Bradley recounts how the United States came to liberate the Philippines only to keep it as a U.S. governed territory in the far Pacific Ocean. He summarizes the Battle of Manila Bay as a turkey shoot between the modern steel ships of Admiral Dewey’s U.S. Asiatic squadron and “Spain’s creaky, wooden ships conveniently tied up in a row” to be smashed “into kindling.” Again, the reality is “complicated” since while the U.S. force was clearly superior, five of the six Spanish ships lost were in fact steel hulled vessels. Furthermore, the two protected (armored) cruisers Isla de Cuba and Isla de Luzon were scuttled by the Spanish as it became clear that there was no escaping defeat at the hands of a larger and more capable American force.

Despite some passing moments of historical weakness, James Bradley has presented us with an interesting and challenging rebuff of some American historical myths, and may spark some profitable debate among historians as well as his general readership. His account of how during this period the U.S. and the American people related to Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States, as well as how the governments of the US, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Cuba, among others, interacted with each other offers some useful insights for today as Americans adapt themselves to the continuing rise of China in a rapidly changing Far East and Pacific community.