Democracy or Empire?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Francis Jennings is the author of the newly published "The Creation of
America: Through Revolution to Empire" (Cambridge Press) which
argues--according to the back cover--that "In the standard presentation of
the American Revolution, a ragtag assortment of revolutionaries, inspired
by ideals of liberty and justice, throw off the yoke of the British empire
and bring democracy to the New World. In place of this fairy tale, Francis
Jennings presents a realistic alternative: a privileged elite, dreaming of
empire, clone their empire from the British." Jennings is also the author
of the indispensable "The Invasion of America", a study of the barbarian
European genocide against the civilized inhabitants of the Western
Hemisphere. The following passage is from chapter 29 of "The Creation of
America".]

A historian has written that "in the United States it is almost a heresy to
describe the nation as an empire. [But] the founders so regarded it."
Euphemisms are so common that some empirical data are required to give
meaning to them.

In 1750, some Virginia gentlemen formed the Ohio Company to sell and settle
lands in the Ohio Valley. They sent young George Washington as their troop
commander against French resistance that flamed into the Seven Years War
and was succeeded by "Pontiac?s War." In 1783, the same George Washington
conceived his newly fledged nation, newly triumphant against Britain, as a
"rising empire."

This was more than a flight of rhetorical fancy. The treaty of peace with
Britain would give to the United States vast territories extending westward
to the Mississippi River. Washington personally claimed large tracts of
land in the West (as it was then), and when he later became president, his
policies aimed straight at legalizing and organizing them.

 So early as 1754, Benjamin Franklin proposed A Plan for Settling Two
Western Colonies "between the Ohio and Lake Erie." His much-noticed Albany
Plan of Union was motivated in part by the less-noticed purpose of
establishing "one or more new colonies," which could be supported jointly
by the old colonies "united under one governor general and grand council,
agreeable to the Albany Plan."

During his years in London, Franklin lobbied in behalf of a company in
which he shared, to secure a charter for the western colony dreamed of in
1754. As negotiator of the peace treaty with Britain in 1783, he secured
the western boundary of his new nation at the Mississippi River.

While the statesmen wrangled over legalities, hordes of lesser folk
streamed westward. The histories speak of them as "settlers" in a customary
dismissal of that category for "Indians," but the Indians conceived
otherwise and they took up arms to resist the invaders of their
territories. In Europe, when one nation pushes successfully past the
boundaries into a second nation, the event is dubbed "conquest." In
America, "territorial expansion was primarily opportunist and defensive."
Whether a conflict is defensive depends on the standpoint of the observer.
As the United States expanded, Indians thought that they were being
defensive. (It is relevant that the Virginia gentry regarded the settlers
as squatters.)

A wry historian has remarked:

"American foreign policy has a vocabulary all its own, consciously ? even
ostentatiously ? side?stepping the use of terms that would even hint at
aggression or imperial domination, and taking refuge in abstract formulae,
stereotyped phrases, and idealistic cliches that really explain nothing....
Parrot?like repetition of these abstractions and other generalities
produces an emotional reflex which assumes that American diplomacy is
?different?, purer, morally better than the diplomacy of other powers.
There is a strong pharisaical flavour about American diplomacy, easily
detected abroad but generally unrecognized at home. No doubt it is a part
of the cult of nationalism."

It needs only be added that the same comments apply to nationalist American
histories.

It follows that one must look past such comments as Jack M. Sosin?s "The
early history of America is the story of the peopling of a continent" or
Bernard Bailyn?s title "The Peopling of British North America". What the
Revolutionaries intended, regardless of the skittishness with which they
approached the subject in phrases like "the conquest of the wilderness,"
was conquest of the native peoples who had previously settled and peopled
the continent, and acquisition of their lands.

Cohn G. Calloway says it concisely: "The American revolutionaries who
fought for freedom from the British Empire in the East also fought to
create an empire of their own in the West."


Louis Proyect
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