Penguin History of the United States of America (46 page)

He enjoyed appearing on the stage, he found, and making and spending large sums of money; but he yearned for something better than tawdry exploitation. At length he saw his way. He would present an open-air show from the real West: the dreams of town-boys, fed by dime novels, would now be satisfied by something better. And the world which he had lived in and loved would have a last moment of glory.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
was a runaway success for fifteen years or more. It made millions, and it played not only in America but in Europe: Queen Victoria loved it, and everywhere crowds flocked to see it. It was really a circus, but like none that had ever existed before. It was crammed with legendary goodies: buffalo, bucking broncos, Indian scouts, and Indians: among others, both Red Cloud and Sitting Bull made appearances in the show. There were: Annie Oakley, the best shot in America; living representations of Custer’s last stand and a cattle round-up; an attack by outlaws on the Deadwood Stage Coach; a train of prairie schooners; Indian dances; and above all, Buffalo Bill himself. As the show opened, a torrent of horsemen would pour into the ring: Indian braves – Sioux, Araphos, Cheyennes; Texas rangers, cowboys, Mexicans, gauchos; detachments from the US cavalry and artillery; also, when they could be got, cossacks, Arabs, British Lancers, German troopers, French chasseurs; they would enter thunderously, but with perfect discipline, following their banners, and then, when all was ready, the music would quicken, and Cody himself would ride in, tall, strong and graceful, his long curls flowing, and, doffing his sombrero to the audience, would announce ‘a congress of the rough riders of the world’. Later in the show he would gallop into the ring accurately shooting glass balls tossed into the air by another horseman, and he took an active share in many other parts of the performance; but his real contribution was his own appearance. Looking at Buffalo Bill in his buckskin coat with his ready gun and admiring his matchless horsemanship, customers could feel that they had seen the West in action. He stood not only for his own career but for the whole romance of winning a continent. He had seen and done what Easterners could only dream of, and when they cheered him they were acknowledging not only his personality and performance, but something larger and more impalpable: something that would be a part of the meaning of America for ever. The hunters of Kentucky were in his train; the courage, faith and endurance of the pioneers, men and women, were manifest in the vision he displayed to the stay-at-homes; they might
even glimpse some of the truth of the still remoter world of the Indians.

His end was sad. The show outstayed its welcome, for Buffalo Bill could not afford to retire. He had no head for business, and was an easy, generous spender; and then, he was a booster of the West. Like so many other men of the time he was convinced that every prospect in the Rockies was pleasing; he carried the message far and wide; but his own investments, even when they were sound in principle, never paid off for him. Racked with pain from an untreated prostate gland; heavily in debt to the man who had taken control of the Wild West from him; old, fat and inclined to drink too much, he yet dragged himself through his last performances, with undaunted courage and optimism. Tomorrow was always going to bring the pot of gold, yet he did not even have the satisfaction of Daniel Boone: he was still a debtor when he died, in January 1917, at Denver, Colorado.

His legend survived these later disappointments. He was buried on Lookout mountain outside Denver, and the place became a shrine; yet his true memorial was to be made of celluloid. He had played with film in his last years, and some footage still survives showing Buffalo Bill as a scout riding through the underbrush on the alert for Indians; but the greatest days of the movie Western still lay ahead. Nevertheless it was Cody who had first indicated to what dramatic heights and power the myth of the West might be raised, and how it might best be displayed; and he did it in the simplicity of a boyish heart, which had always longed for wonders, for centaurs. When he died, he, and cowboys, Indians, fur-traders, pioneers, Long Hunters, were one with those legendary creatures.

Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally

President George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

President Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801

By the Eternal! I’ll smash them.

President Andrew Jackson, 1832

After a year or two of their new government, Americans felt able to congratulate themselves on its complete success. They were beginning to enjoy just that solid economic progress for which they had hoped in vain under the Articles of Confederation. Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State
¹
in President Washington’s Cabinet, summed it up best:

In general, our affairs are proceeding in a train of unparalleled prosperity. This arises from the unbounded confidence reposed in it by the people, their zeal to support it, and their conviction that a solid Union is the best rock of their safety, from the favourable seasons which for some years past have co-operated with a fertile soil and a genial climate to increase the production of agriculture, and from the growth of industry, economy and domestic manufactures; so that I believe I may say with truth, that there is not a nation under the sun enjoying more present prosperity, nor with more in prospect.

This passage shows that Jefferson could reason like an economist when he chose to do so; why he did not choose to do so more often, and why, in enumerating the causes and nature of America’s prosperity, he did not mention commerce, or the wise measures of the Washington administration, will presently be made clear. For the moment, it is enough to note that he was right. The United States was entering on a long-lasting economic boom. A few statistics should make its dimensions plain. The population went from just under four million in 1790 to just over eight million in 1814. Exports, worth $20 million in 1790, were worth $61 million in 1811, the last full year of peace with Britain. In the same period imports rose from $23 million to $53 million. It is difficult to be both precise and accurate as to prices, but it seems clear, from the data available,
²
that in spite of fluctuations the price of farm products went up by between 50 and 100 per cent between 1790 and 1814 – very satisfactory for a nation still overwhelmingly committed to agriculture. And in these years work began on the extremely difficult but extremely important problem of transport, which had to be solved if America was to realize her economic potential. Beginning with the Lancaster Road, in Pennsylvania in 1792, turnpikes
³
were built everywhere to supplement the rivers; and in 1807, portentously, Robert Fulton launched the first steamboat. All promised very well. It is not surprising that the New York Stock Exchange was founded as early as 1792.

Even the news of revolution in Europe did not, at first, alarm. ‘The close of the eighteenth century… shall teach mankind to be truly free,’ said a New Hampshire clergyman complacently. ‘The freedom of America and France shall make this age remarkable.’ True, in a way; but the underlying optimism of such remarks would nevertheless be severely tested, and any assumption that the new Constitutional system, which made American prosperity possible, would enjoy an easy, quiet infancy was quickly destroyed. France slid from revolution into the gulf of war, where all the other European nations soon joined her. French armies drove north and east; the revolutionary convention decreed the beheading of Louis XVI; a month later Britain went to war. She and her allies soon showed themselves unable to resist France effectively on land, but at sea it was the old story. Once more the Royal Navy closed the ports of Europe by blockade; once more it carried British soldiers to the conquest of West Indian islands and to death from yellow fever; once more its principal fleets met those of France, Holland and Spain and, luckier this time than in the War of American Independence, defeated them decisively, one by one, in a series of great sea-battles. The implications of all this for the United States were unpleasant and inescapable.

To be sure, there were those who argued that Europe’s distress was
America’s advantage, pointing to the enormous increase in the value and extent of America’s carrying trade on the Atlantic, as the commerce of the belligerents and their colonies sought the security of a neutral flag; pointing also to the purchase of the immense territory of Louisiana in 1803, which Napoleon, who had forced the King of Spain to give it up to him, relinquished chiefly because he had no hope of retaining it in the war with Britain that was about to resume. These are weighty arguments, but it will not do to forget that Europe’s distress was also America’s disadvantage. The great wars were to loom as a threat to the prosperity, the solvency, the political independence and tranquillity of the United States as long as they lasted. Nor, in the end, could America even stay at peace.

This struggle between foreign powers could so much affect so remote a neutral as the United States only because in many respects the work of the war of independence was incomplete. Vital American interests were still involved in relations with Britain, and British policy from 1793 onwards was necessarily determined, in this matter as in all others, by the priorities of national survival and the quest for final victory. Good relations with the United States were scarcely even a secondary objective. Britain still did not take the new republic seriously; forgetting all the lessons of the Revolution she assumed that in the last resort the Yankees had too much at stake to risk a conflict with her; besides, with no navy and next to no army, America did not seem a very formidable foe. This was to overlook the fact that the Americans were mostly devoted patriots, who would be prepared to put up with a good deal in the interests of peace and in the hope of securing a decent settlement of their differences with Europe; but who had ambitions of their own and who would certainly not forever swallow insults and injuries. National honour was not a mere phrase to them; it meant their determination to be respected and left alone in the enjoyment of their hard-won rights. It would have been well for John Bull if he had grasped this.

Instead, from the moment war began, he harried American shipping. As a neutral, the United States had the theoretical right to trade with all other nations; in practice Britain, dominant on the Atlantic, allowed only such traffic as suited her. Nor did the French waste much solicitude on the interests of a feeble bystander. So the British tried to strangle American trade with France; France sent out privateers to interrupt American trade with Britain.
⁴
The manpower needs of the navy drove desperate British officers to dangerous excesses. They boarded American ships in quest of British subjects, either deserters or merely seamen employed by the Americans; too frequently they carried off US citizens, ignoring their
protests, to service in British warships (conditions in which were so bad as to generate widespread mutiny in 1797). They had the less scruple in daring the hostility of the United States because of their resentful memories of the American Revolution and because they believed that they were defending the liberty of the world against French tyranny. American ships trading to enemy ports were seized as prizes of war; American goods were confiscated.

America’s leaders, from George Washington downwards, were anxious to avoid war, if possible, and contrived to do so for nineteen years. But their response to the long crisis was at first complicated by an ideological division within the United States itself. Some men took the British view: the French Revolutionaries were bloodthirsty fanatics whose lunacy, unless checked, would destroy the foundations of civilized society. Some took the French view: corrupt monarchies were vainly resisting the heroic efforts of those engaged in bringing to birth a new order of liberty, equality and fraternity. As has been so common in American history, few on either side knew much about the countries whose merits they were debating. Neither side overbore its opponents for very long. In 1793 a tactless envoy, still remembered as ‘Citizen Genet’, hoping to bring the United States into the war on the French side, stirred up wild enthusiasm for his cause, until his many indiscretions provoked a swing of opinion in the opposite direction. By 1798 – 9, such was French behaviour (including, in the XYZ Affair,
⁵
an attempt to extort bribes from American envoys) that it looked as if the United States was going to fight France. At the last moment a kind of settlement was achieved with the French republic’s new ruler, General Bonaparte; and then for a short time (1801 – 3) war ceased in Europe.

These experiences amply vindicated George Washington’s warnings, in his Farewell Address, against getting embroiled in foreign quarrels; warnings endorsed by Jefferson, when in 1801 he became President, in a famous phrase: ‘Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.’ Unhappily this principle was easier to state than to secure, as had already been shown, and was now to be shown again. Britain and France, to their own detriment, were not interested in peace and commerce with the United States; they started to fight each other again in 1803, and subordinated every consideration to the most short-sighted notions of doing each other injury. This was particularly foolish in the British case. To be sure, America’s neutral flag was a refuge for French maritime commerce, and in various ways British trade suffered grievously from American competition, which injured the war effort. On the other hand, the United States was now Britain’s best customer; Americans were on the whole drawn to the British side of the great quarrel (Mr Jefferson, in particular, had no time for Corsican dictators); imports from America
were of the greatest importance to rising British industrialism, and added to Britain’s war-making capacity. Put at its crudest, peace with America on any terms was cheaper and less troublesome than war. Yet in the end, by British fault, war it was to be. The Americans did everything they decently could to avoid it, although the provocation was as endless as it was unreasonable. In 1807 a British frigate, the
Leopard
, opened fire on an American frigate, the
Chesapeake
, which was suspected of harbouring British naval deserters.
Chesapeake
fired only one shot before surrendering, having endured twenty-one casualties and having sustained twenty-two shots in her hull. The British took off four deserters. This incident provoked intense indignation in the United States and led President Jefferson to try what commercial warfare would do, since he was not ready to try the real thing. In December 1807, Congress passed into law an embargo, which amounted to a self-blockade: America was to have no commercial dealings with any foreign country until her rights were recognized and respected. It was a bold early experiment in what would nowadays be called sanctions; unfortunately it was also a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. The United States suffered far worse than her customers, and it was found that enforcement required ever more rigorous, authoritarian, un-American methods. So early in 1809 Congress passed an Act repealing the embargo, which Jefferson reluctantly signed two days before leaving office. A toothless Non-Intercourse Act was substituted.