Through the Eighteenth-Century Midwest with This Guy Named Sabrevois, Part Five

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Sabrevois concludes his jaunt around the Great Lakes with a description of the Maumee River, which he follows to its headwaters at Kekionga and then across that portage to the Wabash. The Maumee was quite shallow, which may explain why it was an expensive water transport route in the early modern era, and it presented “continuous marshes” for the first 20 or 30 miles upstream from Lake Erie. It was, however, richly populated with waterfowl, so much so that in the spring “one cannot sleep on account of the noise made by their cries” (p. 375). Halfway up the river, 60 or 70 miles from its mouth, Sabrevois points out The Glaize, “the place of clay,” where bison used the clay banks as a wallow. 75 years later the Northwest Indian confederacy would build its settlements, plant its crops, and hold its meetings at this site; its occupation by Anthony Wayne (1794) dealt that confederation a heavy blow.

At the head of the Maumee River, 60 leagues (approximately 120 miles) from Lake Erie, was the town of the Miamis, the principal members of the Miami confederacy. Sabrevois puts their population at “400 men,” which, assuming he means “fighting men,” translates to a total population of 1,600 – 2,000. Across a three-league portage from the Maumee flowed the headwaters of the Wabash River, which Sabrevois here confuses with the Ohio. This is understandable if one knows that colonial French cartographers referred to the lower Ohio River as the Wabash. On the actual Wabash River resided the Weas, who by Sabrevois's reckoning were the larger part of the Miami confederacy: 1,000 – 1,200 men, or 4,000 – 6,000 people overall, residing in five towns (Ouiatenon, Peticotia, Les Gros, Peangnichia, and one other). He does not mention that the Weas and Miamis may have been offshoots of the neighboring Illini, or that by 1718 they outnumbered their “elder” brethren to the west.

Sabrevois was perhaps tiring by this point in his memoir, because his descriptions of the Miamis' and Weas' lifeways are repetitive and reminiscent of his descriptions of other Lakes Indians. Both peoples raised corn and other crops, both adorned themselves with vermilion, both preoccupied themselves with “gaming and dancing” (375). In both nations women wore ample clothing and men very little - presumably Sabrevois refers to summer attire. Regarding the Miamis, Sabrevois adds that the men wore many tattoos, that men's and women's garments were principally of deerskins rather than cloth, and that men punished adultery by cutting off their wives' noses. The author notes that only the Miamis had this punishment for adultery, and only applied it to women, though we may note that the Chickasaws had a similar practice by the 1760s – perhaps Chickasaw men borrowed it from their Miami allies? Sabrevois, who is uninterested in gendered violence, presumably includes this detail to let travelers know when they are in Miami communities rather than Illini or Wea ones. Of the Weas, the lieutenant says that their fields were very extensive and that one of their towns had a fortified enclosure with a very clean interior, covered in a layer of sand “like the Tuileries” (376).

Sabrevois's choice of ethnological details helps explain the purposes this memoir was to serve. The lieutenant was writing not as an ethnographer but as an imperial functionary, and he intended, I think, for his document to be used by other French colonists, especially traders and officials. In discussing various Indian nations he provides details of clothing, tattoos, and games not to provide local color, but to help French travelers distinguish between Indian nations whose people physically resembled one another and often spoke similar languages. Such distinctions were important for Europeans who needed to know whether the people they visited were French allies. Sabrevois counts the male population of each Indian nation as a kind of military inventory, to let French officials know how many gunmen they could potentially raise from each of those nations in wartime. Sabrevois's interest in Indian subsistence and food supplies, finally, was not intended as a reflection on Native Americans' civility, but rather an indication of how easily various communities could feed French travelers. In sum, his memoir is an instrument of empire: a device allowing officials and traders to operate more freely in territory claimed by the French monarchy, describing waterways and available food supplies (both domesticated and wild), identifying distinctions between different Indian nations with whom one might wish to trade (or whom one should avoid), and counting Native American men who might rally to the French colors in wartime.

Such is the case with nearly all historical documents; the purpose for which they were written is vastly different from the purposes to which the historian wishes to put them. Such is arguably the case with all writing: the author cannot know or control his or her readers' interaction with their finished work. Would Jacques-Charles Sabrevois have been amused, puzzled, or horrified by the uses to which later ethnohistorians have put his memoir? And does that really matter?

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Mister Sabrevois, Part Four

(For the previous post in this series, see here.)

The Illini are a very large collegiate drinking team that occasionally watches team sports and goes to a few classes. They derive their name from the Illinois or Illiniwek Indians, who in the seventeenth century were one of the largest Native confederations in the Great Lakes region. They were still a powerful nation in 1718 when Sabrevois wrote his survey of Midwestern Indians, and thus he devotes several pages of his memoir to them and to their kinsmen, the Miamis (of whom more in the next and last post of this series).  

Sabrevois takes us southward along the west bank of Lake Michigan, passing the Mascouten and Kickapoo towns "on the bank of a river whose name I have forgotten" (I assume it's the Milwaukee), en route to the Saint Joseph River. The lieutenant mentions in passing that the Mascoutens' and Kickapoos' customs resemble the Mesquakies' - not surprisingly, they were often military allies of the Fox Indians – though he adds that they still use bows and arrows to hunt and that some of their hunters can "run down the stag afoot" (372). Arriving at the Saint Joseph River, which he claims was abandoned by its Indian inhabitants during the Fox War (only temporarily, if so) he notes the valley's excellent soil, abundant wild birds, and wild grapes. "It is the best region in all that country." (373) Sabrevois does not suggest that the French colonize the region, instead advising his superiors to induce the Miamis to return there.

Sabrevois then hops a short distance westward to the towns of the Illiniwek on the Illinois River, near the French post of La Roche. They have about "400 men," translating to 1600-2000 people overall, in these settlements, and retain many of their old material customs. They use bows and arrows, wear deerskin clothes and bison robes (as well as garments woven from bison hair), and adorn themselves with elaborate tattoos – "all sorts of figures and designs" (374). The lieutenant does mention that they make excellent "powder horns," indicating they do have gunpowder and, presumably, firearms, obtained in trade with the French.  

Further down the Illinois River are the Illiniwek communities of Pimitoui and Cahokia, 50 leagues from La Roche; 30 leagues further still stands Kaskaskia, the "most prosperous nation among all the savages," whose people are numerous and "industrious." The Illiniwek in these communities, or some of them at least, have adopted French customs: they raise French melons and wheat, as well as cattle, pigs, and chickens; have constructed three mills, one of them horse-driven, to produce flour; and many in Kaskaskia have become Christians. Sabrevois is uninterested in Native American women, so we must rely on Sophie White's Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians (U. of Pennsylvania, 2012) and Susan Sleeper-Smith's "Women, Kin, and Catholicism" (Ethnohistory 47 [Spring 2000]: 423-52) to inform us that most of these converts were women married to French traders. They became Christian converts, in many cases, to join themselves to new religious kinship networks (i.e., godparents). They raised their communities' crops and livestock, allowing their French husbands to trade, hunt, smoke, and behave, in short, like Illinois Indian men. Given that Illinois women also wore French textiles and dressed according to a modified European style, we may conclude that photos of University of Illinois women posing as "Princess Illiniwek" while wearing stereotypical Plains Indian garb are perhaps not 100 percent historically accurate.

**

The above image, "Princess Illiniwek (Idelle Stith, Oct. 26, 1943)" is courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives and is used with their kind permission.

A Letter to the Class of 1988, from One of Your Future Selves

My high school class is holding its twenty-fifth reunion this summer, and unfortunately, due to a conflict with a professional conference, I will probably not be able to attend. I thought instead I might reflect on the extent to which the world has changed - and not changed - since 1988, and to put my reflections into the form of a letter, slightly snarky and occasionally vague (though easily deciphered by 2013 observers), from my 43-year-old self to all of the seniors with whom I graduated. What mostly emerges from these reflections is a reminder that it is very difficult to predict the future, particularly when it comes to politics. (Technological changes are a little easier to predict.) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked some years ago, "Who in 1940 would have guessed that the next three presidents after FDR would be an obscure back-bench Missouri senator, a lieutenant colonel in the army, and a Harvard undergraduate?"

Anyway, here's the letter:

**

Dear Students of the Class of 1988:

Hello there. It's one of your classmates, reporting, in a virtual-time-traveling/wishful-thinking sort of way, on the changes that have occurred in the world since your graduation a quarter-century ago.  While I can't be too precise about the events of the last 25 years (that would spoil all the surprises for you), I can say that most of what happened in the world in the 1990s and 2000s was beyond the power of all but the craziest futurologists to predict.

1) No, we haven't had a nuclear war, nor have we been conquered by the Soviet Union. Actually, we call it "Russia" now, and it's smaller than it was in your day.

2) As you might have guessed if you have been following Mr. Gorbachev's career for the past few years, the Cold War is over. The bankers won.

3) Our current Worldwide Existential Threat is global warming, which many of you are going to hear about for the first time this summer (1988). Some people deny it exists. Let me note that summer temperatures in Australia now reach the 110s and 120s (Fahrenheit), and the Arctic Ocean is nearly ice-free for part of the year.

4) Japan has not become the world's leading economy. China is going to be taking that role, unless they poison all of their air and water first.

5) Sub-Saharan Africa was pretty messy in the 1990s, with a frightening genocide in one country and a war in another country that has killed over three million people.  Currently, though, the continent is experiencing 5 percent annual economic growth, and there's a big amateur film industry in Nigeria, of all places.

6) Also, South Africa has changed somewhat since 1988. Mostly peacefully, mostly for the better.

7) There is still no cure for AIDS, but we have drugs that make the disease manageable, and there are subsidies to provide them to poor people.

8) There is also no cure for cancer, though we have a vaccine against one common form of it.

9) The American manned space program is dormant at the moment. There is an International Space Station but it receives its supply and crew via Russian space craft. On the other hand, we have several robot cars on Mars.

10) Speaking of outer space, Pluto isn't a planet anymore (astronomers have relabeled it a "Kuiper object.") To replace it, we have discovered over 100 planets orbiting other stars. None are Earth-like, but we'll keep looking.

11) Futurologists predicted that one day every American would have in their home a machine that played TV programs, movies, music, and games, and acted as a videophone. We now have such machines – we call them "computers." Perhaps you've heard of them?

12) Okay, maybe you need more explanation. Many if not most Americans use a communications technology called the "Internet" to download entertainment and send messages and video images from their computers. Also from their "wireless devices." Also from their "phones." (There are phones today that have 100 times as much computing power as your home computers.)

13) We don't call them "videophones," by the way; we call them "Skype," after the Estonian technology company that developed the software. Yes, Estonia is a real country.

14) You can probably guess who the next president after Ronald Reagan is going to be. After him, the next three presidents will be a) the governor of a Southern state, who will be impeached for having oral sex in the White House, b) a man who will start a war with a Middle Eastern country because of daddy issues, c) a 27-year-old who's going to start law school this fall.

15) Ronald Reagan is no longer alive, which should come as no surprise because he's already 135 years old. Perhaps his most lasting legacy is economic inequality: in 2010, the top one percent of the U.S. population had six times as much wealth as the bottom 80 percent.

16) Elvis is still dead. So is his son-in-law, Michael Jackson. No, I'm not making that up.

17) The top-grossing movie of the 1990s will be a film about the Titanic by a man who currently directs sci-fi action movies. The top-grossing movie of the 2000s will be a sci-fi action movie about giant blue people, directed by the same guy.

18) Assuming you're reading this in June 1988, the top-selling music album in the United States today is by a British pop singer who is currently one month old.

19) As for our class, we're all (I think) still alive, out of jail, mostly employed, mostly content. Life goes on.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years: Conclusions

(For my summary of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, see here.)

Perhaps the most important general theme in Graeber's book is the historic interrelationship between debt, religious obligation, and violence. Graeber describes a very old, if complicated, relationship between violence and debt: indebtedness frequently led to enslavement, the breakup of families, and the redefining of people as things, and indebted merchant-adventurers engaged in violent or morally opprobrious pursuits in order to keep ahead of their own interest payments. Public debt, while it is not much older than the modern nation-state, is similarly linked to state violence: the nation-state created public debt to finance its war machine, and the modern state that cannot cheaply borrow money is one which cannot defend itself.  Conversely, however, the modern state with lots of military bases and nuclear weapons can usually “persuade” its creditors to keep the money spigot open.*

The relationship between debt and moral obligation, however, has changed repeatedly in the last 5,000 years; as recently as the Medieval era, several of the world's largest religions (Buddhists, Muslims, Christians) either stigmatized debt or downplayed it as a distraction from one's religious debts. It is only in the more materialistic early modern era that we (by which I mean “Westerners and their twentieth-century imitators”) have come to see human beings as mere bundles of rationalized economic capacities and interests, and debt and compound interest as engines of positive progress. The notion that an individual, particularly a wage laborer, can free him/herself of debt, is even more recent: Graeber argues it only became possible for large numbers of workers when the governments of industrializing countries enlarged their money supply in the 1800s.** Westerners subsequently began to assume that individuals could free themselves of debt through hard work and thrift, and that therefore debtors must be lazy, profligate, and immoral. Since 1970, however, as wages stagnated and as governments around the world dismantled progressive tax codes and social safety nets, this idea has become much harder to sustain. (One of my colleagues continues to defend thriftiness, of a sort, by distinguishing between “bad” debt, like consumer debt, and “good debt,” like student loans and mortgages. The collapse of the Western housing market in 2008 and the explosion of high-interest student loans in the United States makes even this ideological crutch a rickety one.)

It is past time, Graeber concludes, to change the way Westerners and other industrializing societies view private debt. The notion that debtors are immoral rather than unlucky is quite a recent one, and therefore subject to change. State-sponsored debt relief is an old and morally well-grounded institution, practiced by governments both ancient (Sumerian city-states, Egyptian pharaohs) and modern (American state governments in the 1780s), and justified by several world religions' traditions, like the Jewish practice of jubilee. It is also a good economic policy: people crippled by debts they cannot avoid incurring, like medical debt or student loan debt (which American students can only avoid if they accept the likelihood of long-term unemployment), cannot become good customers for American businesses.

Perhaps, though, we need to take an even more radical approach, and question not only the legitimacy of debt, but the legitimacy of capitalist values. Modern capitalism, Graeber observes, mandates continual productive growth in order to allow investors (and workers) to stay ahead of their debts. In practice, this now means that workers need to slave away at multiple jobs just to stay financially afloat, societies need to promote the continual expansion of consumer demand and consumer debt, and businesses need to exploit their workers and destroy the environment. Some of us, I think, assume toil, debt, and consumerism are worthwhile social goods, insofar as they keep the rabble under control. People who are exhausted by mindless work, held down by debt, and drugged by television and junk food are less likely to cause trouble for the ruling class. (George Orwell made these observations, substituting radio for television, in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.) But not all of us agree with this, and even if we did we cannot allow businesses to keep damaging the environment unless we aim at collective suicide.

We must stop, Graeber argues, promoting hard work as our highest socioeconomic good. Graeber says he'd like us to stop criticizing the “undeserving poor,” those who produce little but don't do their neighbors much harm.  He also argues that it is much more humane, and much more typical of human societies until very recently, to value leisure and collective celebration over one's “career.” My own experience is that there are some people in capitalist countries, like teachers and airline pilots, who really do like their jobs, but for the vast majority of workers there is nothing to be gained from extra effort. Since the 1970s gains in worker productivity have all gone to the top decile of salary-earners, and even losing one's job has had much more to do with stupid corporate managerial decisions than with one's own ineptitude. We should be placing more value on our relationships and our hobbies, shifting away from a consumerist lifestyle that turns people into hoarders, and making “I resolve to do less” a more common workplace slogan. "Better living through laziness" may not have the same ring as "Workers of the world, unite!", but it's likelier to appeal to those of us in the slacker generation, and less likely to kill the planet than seven billion people living by the code of "Root, hog, or die."

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* I'm not sure how valid this argument is. The Soviet Union had a huge army and thousands of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and yet this didn't stop European banks from threatening to cut off its credit if Gorbachev tried to suppress the Eastern European revolt in 1989. The United States' ability to borrow money cheaply, which Graeber attributes to our being armed to the teeth, actually has more to do with our large, relatively secure tax base and the federal government's disinclination, until quite recently, to default.

** Graeber is incorrect when he attributes industrial-era inflation to deliberate government policy. Eric Hobsbawm observed (in The Age of Capital, 1848-1875) that this was instead due to the huge nineteenth-century gold strikes in California, Australia, and South Africa. Otherwise the general tendency in industrializing countries was toward deflation, which would have made life more difficult for debtors and workers.

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(Above image via StrikeDebt Chicago and StrikeDebt Tucson.)

Debt: The First 5,000 Years: A Review, of Sorts

In an earlier post on Hope for the 99 Percent (or words to that effect), I argued that today's workers need to focus on accumulating wealth and improving their educations, and not expect any assistance from the state, except in the form of minimal social-insurance payouts. What I did not say, because I hadn't thought to say it at the time, is that it is rather difficult for modern workers to accumulate wealth because they are usually heavily in debt, and difficult for them to educate themselves without accumulating additional debt. Indebtedness, it would seem, is one of the principal factors keeping the 99 Percent down and ensuring that wealth continues to flow upward to our oligarchs. That debt would appear inescapable, unless we make some effort to restructure it (at much lower interest rates) or abolish it. To do so, I think we first need to ask how legitimate modern private debt actually is. Perhaps the best place to start answering this question is David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I read last year and will now endeavor to review.

The long blog entry that follows is my summary of Graeber's powerful, but rather convoluted, argument. In a future blog post, I will provide some analysis of the book and of Graeber's suggestions for how we can move forward from our current socio-economic mess.

**

Graeber, as an anthropologist, avoids approaching the problem of debt with the assumptions of an economist. In the early chapters of his book, he notes that modern debt involves a double fiction: the idea that people who contract a debt are autonomous equals, implying that people who cannot pay their debts brought their problems on themselves, and the idea that a creditor has a feudal right of dominion over a debtor until the debt, plus interest, is paid. Debt also depends on the ability of creditors and debtors to enumerate their obligations precisely, using monetary values; this in turn depends on the invention of money. The double-fiction of equality and absolute dominion, however, could not apply to pre-modern (or “heroic”) societies, like the Celts or the African Lele. These societies were usually hierarchical, and they could readily conceive of social obligations between dependents and lords; indeed, a lord's or patriarch's honor stemmed from his control of the bodies and labor of others. However, they did not accept that lords had absolute control over their dependents: they could not readily sell their bondsmen, female relatives, or children. Heroic societies understood the concept of a medium of exchange, and of placing a monetary value (measured in oxen or precious metals) on people and their labor, but in practice they only allowed elites to exchange people or their labor for other people, and only to strengthen existing human relationships or pay blood debts. 

States interfered with these arrangements when they introduced currency and open markets, which, Graeber provocatively argues, were largely a byproduct of the creation of professional armies in the so-called “Axial Age” (800 BCE – 600 CE). A state could most efficiently supply its armies by taxing its subjects, then stipulating that they had to pay the tax with money, which they could obtain by selling goods or services. Money usually took the form of precious metals because they were portable and easy to steal – Alexander's armies, for example, looted the equivalent of $285 billion from the temples and palaces of Persia. Once currency, taxes, and markets came into being, however, it became possible to convert labor and social obligations into goods and money; it thus became possible for even non-elite persons to buy human beings, either as slaves or debt-peons. (Debt peonage, a modern reader might argue, was voluntary, but in fact people were usually driven to it by hunger, misfortune, or taxes.) Elites found this threatening to their honor, one of the reasons, Graeber unhappily observes, that Greek aristocrats began confining women to the home (to demonstrate that their bodies still belonged to their husbands). Peasants, of course, found this more personally threatening, and would periodically revolt or flee. Early states proved less interested in preserving the honor of elites than in preventing rebellion or defection by debt-ridden peasants. Some did so through periodic debt amnesties, a practice that preceded the Axial Age: the Sumerians, who invented interest-bearing debts, also invented the concept of debt forgiveness; Egyptian monarchs also used debt amnesties, and in fact a piece of one of their second-century stele announcing a general debt amnesty became the Rosetta Stone. Other states, like the Roman Republic and the ksatriya republics of early India, avoided peasant revolts by recruiting peasants into their armies, paying them sufficient wages to avoid indebtedness, and relying on war captives for labor. The latter solution, we should note, merely externalized the problem, and perpetuated the connection between debt, violence, and enslavement.

The Axial Age also gave rise to several religions which opposed usury or offered indebted peasants an otherworldly escape from debt. These religions became pervasive and influential in the Middle Ages (600-1400). Chinese Buddhists argued that the most important debts were those owed to one's parents and to the universe itself, and that these were only payable through temple donations, but also that such donations would permanently cancel existential debt. Muslims, while they honored trade and enabled it through sophisticated credit arrangements, forbade usury and were skeptical of the value of physical money. Medieval Christians were both anti-debt and anti-trade, but they did develop the idea of the merchant adventurer, who was willing to use bravery and violence to open new markets.

In the early modern era (ca. 1450-1971), Europeans' drive to conquer the world was financed by the aforementioned merchant adventurers, whose primary economic pursuits were bullion (most of which they exported to China and India), weapons, slaves, and drugs (coffee, sugar, tobacco, opium). Theologians and scholars came to accept usury, with Protestants leading the way and Catholics following a short distance behind. By the 1700s Europeans argued that humans were motivated primarily by interest, which is etymologically related to the concept that “money [must] never cease to grow.” European states had also come to harness this concept of interest by creating national debts, which yielded regular dividends for the state's wealthy creditors, and national banks, whose notes could circulate as money – an important consideration in an era when elites had come to distrust fiat money and private credit, but could not always obtain the gold and silver they did trust.  From these sources. Graeber argues, came modern capitalism, an ideological structure placing morality, money, and state power at the service of the idea that economic output must always grow, no matter the cost. And “it is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor” (Ch. 11). European capitalists' incessant need for labor drove the African slave trade, the enserfment of Eastern European peasants, and colonial regimes' use of taxes to draw commoners into debt peonage. Debt and interest forced capitalists to create an economy that would always grow, and in turn they forced free persons into debt or bondage to provide the labor necessary to realize that vision. Only at the very end of the period, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did European states and capitalists begin to create a limited wage-labor economy wherein workers could accumulate enough money to imagine themselves free of debt.

By the mid-twentieth century, though, the only thing that backed state currency was state debt, which in turn was backed by the state's war-making power. The United States' current economic power is based on its dollar's position as the world's reserve currency; on the inability of countries holding dollars to exchange them for gold; on the ability of the U.S. to project deadly force anywhere in the world; and in the use of dollars to purchase oil. (I highly doubt, incidentally, Graeber's assertion that Saddam Hussein's switch to the Euro to denominate oil sales was a cause of Operation Iraqi Freedom; George W. Bush and his advisers weren't that calculating. Well, maybe Dick Cheney was, and screw him.) Meanwhile, the idea that workers could accumulate enough money and assets to propel themselves into the middle class, never a widespread one beyond a few industrialized countries, was abandoned in the 1980s, as conservative governments smashed labor unions, adopted tight-money monetary policies, and allied themselves with evangelical Christians who endorsed their policies as divinely-inspired. Workers were now offered the opportunity to enrich themselves through speculation (401ks, for instance) and debt (mortgages, credit cards, student loans, microcredit), but that opportunity vanished, probably for good, in 2008, leaving behind only the idea that there were no alternatives to capitalism, that individual debt was a sin, and that a person's worth could be measured in commodities. There is nothing natural, however, about this grim state of affairs; it is instead the product of centuries of violence, which ripped normal human obligations from their social context and transformed them into arithmetical equations of debt and interest.

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Coming soon: Graeber's concluding remarks and my own thoughts.

(Images above are of the cover of Graeber's book, the Rosetta Stone, and an eighteenth-century ceramic painting of European trading factories at Canton, from the collection of San Jose State University.)

Habetis Papam

The election of a new pope, regardless of what the Holy Spirit might think, is a world-historical event. It is a relatively rare occurrence: there have only really been four popes in this blogger's lifetime (if one excludes the short-lived John Paul I), and only seventeen since the independence of the United States. The pope also heads an institution of rare longevity (nearly 2,000 years), is at least the nominal spiritual leader of more than one billion Catholics, and has the power, if he waves at you on parade, to allow sex without sin.

I was a bit disappointed, of course, that the new pope chose not to resume the nomenclatural progression first observed by Eddie Izzard and set aside by Benedict: “First we had Pope John, then Pope Paul, then Pope John Paul. The next pope will be John Paul George...and I think we see where they're going with this.”

(I title this short post “habetis papam” rather than “habemus papam” because I am not a Catholic, so this pope isn't really mine to have. I prefer to say “habemus papadum,”* particularly at the outset of a good Indian dinner.)

* Or "habemus papadas," but that doesn't sound as funny.

The War That Came Early, Drank All the Booze, Fell Asleep under the Coffee Table

Apropos of my recent (I thought well-deserved) trashing of Millard Fillmore, my grad-school friend Chris Paine argued that had Zachary Taylor lived, and Fillmore not succeeded him in 1850, the Civil War would have started ten years early, and the North would have lost. I was prepared to concede the first point, which Mark Stegmeier made pretty persuasively (in Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850 [Kent State U. Press, 1996]). Prof. Stegmeier believes the flashpoint of an early American Civil War would have been Santa Fe, capital of the former Mexican province of New Mexico, whose post-Mexican-War ownership was disputed by the state of Texas and the U.S. government. In 1850, as Southern whites threatened secession over California statehood, and Congress deadlocked on a package of compromise bills, President Taylor sent 600 federal soldiers to Santa Fe. Governor Bell of Texas organized his own military expedition, and Southern politicians and newspapers endorsed Texas's claim and threatened war in the event of a clash between Texan and U.S. forces. The final Compromise of 1850, which Fillmore signed, included a peaceful resolution of Texas's boundary dispute with New Mexico. Coupled with some horse-trading about slavery in the Mexican Cession, this quieted Southern hot-heads and prevented a war. Taylor, however, opposed much of the Compromise and would have rejected it if he had lived; he probably also would have started a war with Texas, which several of the more bellicose Southern states would surely have joined.

I was less inclined to believe that the South would have won an early conflict with the Union, because, however underdeveloped the North's factories and railroads were in 1850 compared with their 1860 counterparts, the determinative factor in the war of 1861-65 was not industry but manpower, and in 1850 the free states already had twice as many people as the slave states. Fergus Bordewich's book America's Great Debate (Simon and Schuster, 2012), however, disabused me of the idea that the North's demographic advantage would have been enough to win a war with the South. What would have mattered most of all in such a war, Bordewich argues, was the willingness of large numbers of free-state or slave-state men to fight, and Northerners simply weren't very interested in fighting for the Union in 1850 (pp. 393-394). In 1861, by contrast, thousands of free-state men were eager to stomp Southern whites' guts out, thanks to a decade of "Slave Power" outrages: the vicious over-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lecompton Constitution, the Dred Scott decision, and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner. In 1850, martial keenness was all on the southern side of the Mason-Dixon Line: Southern whites had contributed tens of thousands of troops to the Mexican War, and many were threatening violence if California entered the Union as a free state or Texas didn't get to annex most of New Mexico. The North had more people, but not necessarily more willing soldiers, than the South.

If war had broken out between the states in 1850, it would have started in Texas and spread eastward as some of the slave states announced their secession and seized federal forts and arsenals. I suspect the seceding states would be pretty much the same crew that first left the Union in 1860-61: the Deep South states from Texas to Florida, plus Georgia and South Carolina, and possibly including Tennessee (which had strong ties to Texas) and Arkansas. I also suspect there would have been some resistance by federal soldiers to the seizure of their posts, as President Taylor, unlike Buchanan ten years later, would probably have ordered his men to defend their positions. It's hard to determine how the rest of the war would have unfolded, but I think that one could draw an analogy between the Civil War of 1850 and the War of 1812: reluctance on the part of Union men to enlist, several states (chiefly the slave states remaining in the Union) disaffected to the point of mutiny, increasing difficulty passing war-finance measures in the Union Congress, and, on the tactical side of things, a lot of small battles around the borders of the region the U.S. was trying to conquer, but little territory changing hands.

I can't see the secessionists gaining any of the advantages in the 1850s that might have delivered a knock-out blow to the Union in the 1860s war: European recognition or capture of the Union capital. The British government (which had a Liberal plurality in the early '50s) was only mildly interventionist, the French were under the unstable Second Republic until late 1851, most other European governments were uninterested in American affairs, and the Confederates would have found it difficult to take Washington if, as I suspect would have been the case, Virginia had nominally remained in the Union (as a de facto neutral). One particular political event, though, would have helped bring an early end to the conflict, and that was the presidential election of 1852. Absent an early Union victory it is unlikely that a Whig candidate for president could have won election in the U.S., even if (especially if) Whig incumbent Zachary Taylor decided to stand for another term. The new Democratic president would owe much of his political support to Democratic grandees in those slave states still in the Union, few of whom would have wanted the war to drag on, and would be under great pressure to negotiate with the rebels. I suspect the new president would have arranged an armistice with the secessionists in 1853 and a peace treaty in 1853 or '54, granting them their independence (perhaps with an empty clause allowing the seceded states to re-enter the Union in future) with provisions for the repayment of Southerners' debts and for the return of runaway slaves (both of which would have been dead letters, as with their counterparts in the Anglo-American treaty of 1783).

What of the war's aftermath? Here I think Bordewich is right to paint a bleak picture of American prospects. The United States would not go on to become a world power by the early twentieth century, if ever. Even given favorable trade terms with the new Southern confederacy, the Union would not have the same access to cheap Southern raw materials (timber, iron, coal, cotton) that helped fuel the industrial expansion of 1865-1900. The confederacy probably would have been able to conquer and hold New Mexico and make it difficult for the Union to send settlers, administrators, or troops to Oregon and California during the war; I suspect Californians and Oregonians would have considered seceding from the Union themselves, and there's a small chance that Britain would seize California during or after the conflict, using "the protection of British interests" as the pretext. (California had several hundred million dollars in gold to serve as the real motive.) As for the confederacy itself, life would remain much the same there after the war as before for a very large percentage of the population – namely, African-American slaves. Some slaves would have been able to escape during the secession war (as during the Revolution and the War of 1812), but it's unlikely that, given the limited opposition to slavery in the North in 1850, the Union Congress would have passed Confiscation Acts mandating the freeing of runaways, or that many Union generals would have done so on their own. I can, however, see free states in the Union refusing to return runaway slaves to rebels or allow slave-catchers into their territory after the war, and abolitionists maintaining an Underground Railroad into the free states of the Union.

Beyond the borders of the old United States, a secessionist victory would certainly have had significant consequences. The 1850s historically saw a number of American filibustering expeditions against Central America and Spanish Cuba, and while few of these would have occurred during the secession war, there is little reason to assume that citizens of the newly-independent Southern confederacy would not have attempted to expand their nation southward by military conquest. The confederate government might even have quietly backed some of these expeditions, since expanding the domain of American slavery was important to many white Southern leaders; with state backing, private efforts to grab Nicaragua or part of Mexico or might have succeeded. Meanwhile, as the war would have disrupted the domestic American slave trade - the U.S. government would not have allowed those slave states which stayed in the Union to export slaves - the confederates would probably also have tried to reopen the African slave trade, either directly or using Brazil (which continued to import African slaves until 1870) as an intermediary. The Southern confederates' support in Britain, if any, would have shrunk as a result.

Speaking of Britain, it is less likely that the British government would have endorsed dominion status for Canada, at least not as early as 1867, if it had not been worried about the possibility of a powerful United States conquering the Canadian colonies or luring them into the American Union. And it seems equally unlikely that, if Napoleon III had decided (as he did in our continuum) to put Maximilian on the Mexican throne in 1861, he would have been sufficiently intimidated by the weakened United States - or the confederacy - to withdraw his support for a Mexican empire. The Monroe Doctrine might well have been a dead letter in the aftermath of our early Civil War.

On the positive side, there would not have been any re-enactors of this Civil War.  Thank heaven for small favors.