The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (52 page)
Authors: Matthew White
Panthay Rebellion
Death toll:
1 million
1
Rank:
46
Type:
religious uprising
Broad dividing line:
Han (Confucian) vs. Hui (Muslim)
Time frame:
1855–73
Location:
Yunnan Province
Major state participant:
Qing China
Major quasi-state
participant: Nanping Guo
Who usually gets the most blame:
too little known for that
Another damn:
Chinese peasant revolt
Economic factor:
silver
T
HE SILVER MINES IN THE INTERIOR SOUTHERN PROVINCE OF YUNNAN WERE
gradually being exhausted. In the winter of 1855, several Han miners abandoned their depleted mine and tried to get jobs at a still-active mine run by Chinese converts to Islam, called Hui. Despite the fact that there is no difference between Hui and Han other than religion, this difference is enough to have built up generations of resentment. When the Han miners were turned down for jobs, hundreds of local Han went on a rampage through the Muslim community and tried to seize its mines. Some 700 Hui families were assaulted, their livestock stolen, their homes burned, their people killed. The Qing government ignored this until the Hui retaliated with their own attacks against the Han. Now the government ordered severe reprisals to punish the Hui. Han militia under the local magistrate hunted and slaughtered 2,000 to 3,000 Muslims of all ages and genders.
The Hui community rallied under the leadership of Du Wenxiu, who declared the independent Kingdom of the Pacified South (Nanping Guo). Ruling as Sultan Suleyman, Du established his capital in Dali (Xiaguan). As Hui armies became larger and more organized, the rebellion spread, and the Hui overran the major city of Kunming in 1863.
Ominous signs and portents began to appear in the war zone. The rats of Kunming started to appear in daylight, running around wildly and falling down dead. Apparently, in the chaos of the rebellion, the rats of Yunnan connected with the rats of upper Burma near the headwaters of the Salween River, which had long been one of the major centers of bubonic plague. In 1871, people began dying in Kunming, and armies and refugees were soon spreading the plague throughout Yunnan.
In 1894, the epidemic arrived at the ports on the Gulf of Tonkin and spread quickly across the globe on steamships and railroads. This was the start of bubonic plague’s third pandemic, which killed 13 million people over the next few decades, mostly in Asia. The third pandemic only lightly brushed against the West, mostly in seaports; however, infected fleas easily hitched a ride inland, and the plague established new foci all over the world among previously untouched rodent populations, such as the squirrels of the American West, where it waits for another opportunity to break out.
2
For a long time, the Manchu rulers of China were too busy reeling from the Taiping Rebellion to worry about the lesser treason of the Hui, but after the Taipings were all dead, Beijing was able to deal with the Panthay Rebellion. The rulers appointed the experienced and ruthless Cen Yuying as governor-general of rebellious Yunnan. He systematically reduced the Kingdom of the Pacified South and slaughtered the traitors. As the imperial armies closed in on the capital, Sultan Du Wenxiu attempted suicide with a heavy dose of opium, but it failed and he fell into the hands of the Qing field general, Yang Yuke. Du begged his captors to show mercy on his people, and they agreed.
Then they changed their minds. Massacres started in Dali three days later. Du was executed. Eventually Cen and Yang sent ten thousand pairs of ears to Beijing as proof of their victory.
3
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Rank:
65
Type:
ideological civil war
Broad dividing line:
North vs. South
Time frame:
1861–65
Location and major state participant:
United States of America
Major Quantum state participant:
Confederate States
Who usually gets the most blame:
southern slaveholders
Another damn:
war of trenches and idiotic frontal assaults
Economic factors:
cotton, slaves
Summary
The debate over slavery in the United States became so intense that the old political alliances shattered. Both political parties split into northern and southern wings, and four presidential candidates ran in the 1860 election. When Abraham Lincoln of the anti-slavery Republican Party was elected, the slave states of the South stomped off in a huff. As the renegade states were setting up their independent Confederacy, they seized federal property all across the South, climaxing with the April 1861 bombardment of the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which officially opened hostilities.
Recruitment and training took awhile, but by spring of 1862, the two sides had big new armies manned, equipped, and ready for glory. A glacial advance brought the Union army from Washington to within a few miles of the rebel capital of Richmond, Virginia, when the new Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, attacked and drove them back in the Seven Days Battle, a rolling firefight across several counties east of Richmond (July 1862). Suddenly, the war picked up speed. For the next year, the land between the two rival capitals saw a bloody seesaw of offensives, without either side gaining an advantage. A new federal attack southward was stopped at Manassas (August), followed by a rebel attack northward that was stopped at Antietam (September). Then two federal thrusts were stopped at Fredericksburg (December) and Chancellorsville (May 1863), followed by a rebel attack that was stopped at Gettysburg (July 1863). Tens of thousands of dead soldiers littered the battlefields around Virginia.
“It was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earthwork lined with infantry,” one Confederate general recalled. “We were very lavish of blood in those days.”
3
West of the Appalachian Mountains, however, the war progressed solidly southward, with each confrontation resolving in favor of the federals. In the same years that the eastern war had rolled back and forth, federals in the west under Ulysses S. Grant had captured two entrenched rebel armies (Fort Donaldson and Vicksburg), stood off a determined counteroffensive (Shiloh), scattered a third army in panic (Chattanooga), and consolidated control over the Mississippi River and several key railroads.
In 1864, Grant took command in the east to break Lee’s army, and the conflict quickly became a war of attrition. Throughout May and June, the rebel army in Virginia was ground down and pushed back into siege lines at the railroad junction of Petersburg, while the last major Confederate army in the west was battered and cornered in Atlanta. After several months of sniping, bombardment, direct assaults, and flanking attacks, these rebel armies were pried loose from their trenches and destroyed.
Legacy
The Civil War was a battle between two competing visions of America—one defined by nationality (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) against one defined by ideology (all men are created equal). This is probably the central conflict of American history, and if you understand this war, you will be a long way toward understanding the United States.
Obviously, the main outcome of the war was the freeing of the slaves, but that was coming down the road anyway. A war of some sort was probably inevitable—not many slave-owning countries avoided it—but even at its most stubborn, the United States would not have held onto slavery much longer than Cuba (1886) or Brazil (1888).
More remarkable were the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, granting full citizenship and equal protection under the law to the former slaves. No one would have dared to suggest these before the war, but with the nationalist definition of America defeated and the ideological definition triumphant, the supermajorities necessary to vote these into law were easy to find.
The entire political structure of the country was rebuilt by these amendments. Before the war, the individual states were autonomous and not bound by the federal Bill of Rights. This worked to the advantage of local elites, not only allowing blacks to be enslaved but also allowing free blacks to be expelled or disenfranchised. State governments were free to support an official religion or prohibit publication of unpopular ideas.
Then the Fourteenth Amendment made the states subordinate to the federal government on matters of human rights for the first time, an ideological victory that has annoyed conservatives for a century and a half. Although the partisans of a nationalist definition of America have gradually and grudgingly expanded their definition of American to include occasional non-whites, non-Anglo-Saxons, or non-Protestants, the conflict still shapes American political debate. Should English be America’s official language, or merely its most common? Is America a Christian nation, or just a nation with a lot of Christians? Every time the Fourteenth Amendment is used to impose federal jurisdiction over criminal rights, education, employment, capital punishment, or religious favoritism, we hear echoes of the Civil War.