Cavalry versus Warships: A French Experiment

Most of us in the history biz, I suspect, have our favorite historical battles. Classicists might celebrate Thermopylae and Cannae, and modernists might fondly recall the ridges of Gettysburg and the bloody street of Stalingrad. My own tastes often run to the absurd, so give me instead a military encounter that borders on the ridiculous: the Second Battle of the Texel (22 January 1795), one of the very few naval battles won by a cavalry charge.

I exaggerate, but not by much. During the winter of 1794-95, French troops invaded Holland in support of Dutch republican rebels - and to grab more territory and resources for the French Republic. In January French commanders decided to take advantage of the weather by seizing an ice-bound Dutch naval squadron. The ships in question lay off Texel Island in the frozen Marsdiep strait. Dutch rebel admiral Jan de Winter took a body of cavalry and horse-drawn artillery across the ice, and sent ahead a detachment of hussars (heavy cavalry) to intimidate his adversaries.

The Dutch squadron commander, Hermanus Reintjes, remained unimpressed. His heavily-armed ships retained enough mobility to target and destroy De Winter’s horsemen, and in any event he knew the war would be decided by French forces on the mainland, not on Marsdiep. The Dutch government ships thus ignored the rebel cavalry, whose "charge" inflicted no damage except, perhaps, to the hussars' own dignity. A few days later the Captain Reintjes learned that rebel forces had taken the national capital, and he quietly surrendered his fourteen ships and 850 guns. De Winter got his bloodless victory and its attendant glory. That he received no lasting fame says a lot about historians' and history-readers' bloodthirstiness. Most of us don't see a battle as memorable unless it soaks the ground in blood.  

Source: Kat Eschner, “Only Time in History When Men on Horseback Captured a Fleet,” Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Jan. 2017.

Some Notes on U.S. Presidential Elections and Foreign Interference

The Wall Street Journal reported on September 20 that Donald J. Trump, president of these United States, recently called the president of Ukraine to ask him for a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden. Mr. Biden has business ties to Ukraine and, more importantly, is the son of former U.S. vice-president Joe Biden, currently a leading Democratic candidate for president. DJT allegedly threatened to withhold American military aid from Ukraine (which has in recent years had a spot of bother with Russia) unless he got what he wanted. It is not the first time Mr. Trump solicited foreign aid in a presidential election. Should he win re-election and make good his threat to seek a third term*, it won’t be the last.

Such solicitations remain rare in American political history. French minister to the U.S. Pierre Adet did attempt to swing the 1796 presidential election in favor of the Francophile Thomas Jefferson, but did so without Jefferson’s approval and without success. The Confederate States of America would surely have welcomed the election of Democrat George McClellan to the presidency in 1864, but, so far as I know, the CSA spent no resources to ensure Lincoln’s electoral defeat. Nearer our own time, Ronald Reagan’s campaign allegedly offered covert military aid to Iran in return for its retaining American hostages until after the 1980 election. A 1993 Congressional investigation into the so-called “October Surprise” conspiracy found no persuasive evidence.

Does history repeat itself? Sure hope so.

Prior our present Reign of Error, only one U.S. presidential candidate deliberately sought foreign assistance with his election bid: Richard Nixon. (Surprise!) In 1968 Nixon believed that a successful peace accord between North and South Vietnam would help the incumbent party’s candidate, Hubert Humphrey, win the presidency. Through intermediary Anna Chennault, he persuaded the president of South Vietnam to withdraw from peace talks with the North, implying that the RVN government would get a better deal from him than from the Democrats. Instead they got seven more years of war while Nixon got the White House. That Richard Nixon’s presidency ended poorly should hearten those critics of President Trump who hope that history, in this case, will keep repeating itself.

DJT deserves some back-handed credit, I suppose, for revealing the weakness of the safeguards against foreign electoral interference in the U.S. Constitution. The framers of that document did worry that “foreign powers” might seek “to gain an improper ascenden[cy] in our councils…by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union” (Federalist 68). They provided against such interference through the emoluments clause, making it illegal for federal office-holders to receive remuneration or patronage from other sovereigns; through the restriction of the presidency to “natural-born” citizens; and through the institution of the Electoral College, whose members’ good judgment would prevent a foreign potentate’s stooge from winning election. All of these protections proved useless against the Man from Mar-a-Lago. The emergence of political parties turned the Electoral College into a rubber stamp; fanatical primary voters and vote-suppressing state legislatures now play a vastly larger role in choosing presidents. Jus soli electoral qualifications have proven no guarantee of loyalty to the United States, as the hundreds of thousands of American-born men who fought for the Confederacy demonstrated. The emoluments clause hasn’t stopped DJT from raking in money - probably millions of dollars - from foreign governments making use of his real estate. Another clause of the Constitution, identifying bribery as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” hasn’t stopped President Trump from soliciting a bribe, in this case valuable political campaign services, from a foreign government, in this case Ukraine. That clause also identifies bribery as grounds for impeachment, which has proven a clumsy and ineffectual instrument of presidential removal, except in the case of…Richard Nixon. What an odd coincidence.   

* The Constitution currently prohibits twice-elected presidents from seeking another term, but as we’ve noted Mister Trump and his followers have little but contempt for that document.

Painting the Mailboxes Green

Cumann na nGaedheal** is the short answer to the question “What became of the Pro-Treaty faction from Michael Collins after Johnathan Rhys Meyers killed Liam Neeson?” It’s not a popular question to ask. We all like tales of war and revolution, but few of us take an interest in these upheavals’ messy aftermath. Personally I find fascinating the clearing of rubble (literal and metaphorical), the mundane but creative tasks of state building, the challenges of legitimizing the new order, and the tragic tendency of successful revolutionaries to turn authoritarian and destroy their legitimacy. Most people have rather less interest in the dreary work of reconstruction and compromise.

1923 campaign poster (historyjk.blogspot.com)

In the case of the Irish Revolution, this work fell to the members of Sinn Fein who supported the 1921 treaty with Britain, the so-called “Treatyites.” Following their brief but bloody civil war with the anti-Treaty faction, these colleagues of Michael Collins organized themselves into Cumann na nGaedheal, the ruling party of the new Irish Free State. CnG’s critics later claimed that the party merely “painted the mailboxes green” and otherwise left the old administration in place. They exaggerated, though it's certainly true that the new government retained the colonial-era British legal system and civil service, and also true that Cumann na nGaedheal sometimes seemed more interested in the symbolism than the substance of sovereignty. Officials of the new regime stamped "Irish Free State" on as many documents and as many crates of produce as they could, and organized a delegation to every international meeting and body that would have them. Britain had forced the Treatyites to swallow the indignity of a loyalty oath to the King, and accepting the status of a dominion rather than an independent nation. Cumann na nGaedheal used what one might call "counter-symbolism" to claim that they considered Ireland sovereign, despite their nigh-unacceptable concessions to the Crown.*

More substantively, the party sought to preserve the Free State's independence by digging it out from under wartime debts and keeping the peace. The latter meant demobilizing the civil-war-era army and creating a new, unarmed police force, the Garda, which remains one of CnG's most enduring achievements. The former meant raising taxes and cutting public salaries, neither of which ensured the party's long-term popularity. Debt relief also explains the concession that made William Cosgrave's government more unpopular than any other: accepting as permanent the provisional boundary between the six counties of Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. The Free State had agreed in the much-maligned Treaty to assume a share of Britain's debt payments, to the tune of fifteen or twenty million pounds sterling per year - about 60-80 percent of the Free State government's entire budget. British officials offered in 1925 to cancel this crippling debt in return for a boundary favorable to Northern Ireland, and Cosgrave and his partisans agreed. Irish Republicans never forgave them.

One is tempted to see in Cumann na nGaedheal's debt-phobia the penny-pinching of provincial peasants, but the party's fears instead grew from realism. Well-read statesmen knew that in the previous half-century a number of countries, from Egypt to Mexico, had suffered foreign invasion or lost their independence due to unpaid foreign debts. Keeping the Free State out of hock was in their view essential if the Irish were to preserve what little independence they enjoyed.

Internationalism informed not just the Treatyites' fiscal conservatism but their political conservatism. In the early 1930s Cumann na nGaedheal officials viewed with great alarm the Republican revolution in Spain, which replaced a Catholic monarchy with a left-leaning, anti-clerical republic. Fear of a similar development in Ireland contributed to the Dail's passage of the 1931 Public Safety Act, which allowed the government to outlaw communist and republican political organizations. Cosgrave and his colleagues had formerly viewed the Free State as a compromise between colonial rule and an independent republic, and many if not most saw an Irish Republic as a desirable goal. The Spanish Republic soured many on republicanism, much as the French Revolution turned many Anglo-American moderates against democracy. A true republic, CnGers feared, might fall prey to communist agitators and turn on the Church, which the Free State depended on to run its schools and orphanages. Staying within the British Empire and under its monarchy no longer looked like a bad deal.

When Collins and his colleagues brought the Free State Treaty before the Dail (the Irish Parliament) in 1922, they famously said it would give Ireland "the freedom to achieve freedom." Ten years later Collins's colleagues preferred the status quo to the freedom they had once sought. Fear, of debt and violence and evil "Reds," became their preferred means of motivating the electorate and garnering their support. By 1932, however, Irish voters had come back to the view that a new state must be built on aspirations rather than apprehensions. They gave the government to Eamon de Valera's anti-Treatyite party, Fianna Fail, and Cumann na nGaedheal fell into such deep obscurity that I haven't yet figured out how to pronounce its name.**


Sources: Donal Corcoran, The Freedom to Achieve Freedom (Gill and Company, 2013); Richard Killeen, A Short History of the Irish Revolution (Gill Books, 2007); Jason Knirck, Afterimage of the Revolution (Wisconsin, 2014); Ciara Meehan, The Cosgrave Party (Royal Irish Academy, 2010)




* The Free Staters even tried to turn dominion status against the mother country by suggesting that Ireland, Canada, and the other dominions gang up on Britain, essentially turning the Commonwealth into a collective security agreement against political aggression from London. It didn't work.

** I think it's "Cuhm an n'yell," but maybe not.