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Anderson and Cayton are a pair of smart
historians who write with exceptional clarity and force. They also
share expertise in the earlier centuries of American history, but
here they undertake a broad survey of five centuries of the North
American experience of war in refuting the general American belief
that we are a peaceful people.
The authors are among that embattled corner of
academic historians who perceive reality in terms of empirical
research and the contingent nature of acts and their consequences.
To avoid losing in the sweep of five long centuries the contours of
the historical forest amidst the countless trees of empiricism and
contingency, they have anchored their narrative in the lives of a
few prominent individuals. The deep implication of Samuel Champlain,
William Penn, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and
Douglas MacArthur in the issues raised by American war makes them
strong choices to humanize a multigenerational survey. But there are
risks with this method, especially that something important will
fall through the biographical cracks. The Mexican general Santa Anna
is employed to breach one obvious crack, between the demise of
Andrew Jackson and the arrival of U.S. Grant; Santa Anna’s long
career also allows the authors to stretch the narrative
geographically to fit their subtitle. And to fill another,
inevitable crack in a narrative that moves from the past into the
present, they draw briefly on the career and memoirs of Colin Powell
in their epilogue.
History is not biography, so this is a bold but
shaky framework for their story. Alternative choices—Cortés,
Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Houston, W.T. Sherman,
A.T. Mahan, Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, William Westmoreland, Donald
Rumsfeld—suggest another version. But that other version might not
be as different in the hands of these authors as we might imagine,
because they develop the broader context of each life—and war—with
great skill and conviction. At times one has the sense of reading a
very good textbook of American history, and some readers of military
history may grow impatient with lengthy digressions well beyond
anything recognizable to them as military history. And their
biographical choices hold up well, characters centrally important in
the wars of their maturity, as well as usefully turning up in both
youth and old age to have some interesting role in the last war and
the next.
It is then a book about wars, not battles or
strategy or operations, and it interests itself especially in the
motives and guiding ideas behind American wars, and in wars’ legacy
in terms of postwar conditions and of how collective memory gives
meaning to each war. These concerns—motives and ideas, postwar and
memory—function as threads running through five centuries, stitching
the biographical framework to their authors’ sense of historical
reality, which is a reality of actors making choices, and of
consequences that invariably fail to conform to the intentions of
the actors. Anderson and Cayton retell old stories, and read
well-worked evidence, with fresh eyes from their perspective that
war has been a crucially important part of North American history,
and not a peripheral aspect of a predominantly political, economic,
or socio-cultural saga.
Their emphasis is on a continuity whose nature is
caught by the book’s subtitle: empire and liberty. From Champlain to
Bush, the cord holding all the threads and characters together is
the relationship between military action and notions of freedom.
Champlain’s colony was too weak to hope for more than a free and
profitable trade with his native neighbors, but the peaceful
exchange of goods drew the French into endless conflict with the
enemies of those neighbors, and over time the dynamics of that
connection produced an empire stretching from the Gulf of St.
Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. From the pacific intentions of
William Penn to the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, war was seen by
many Americans as an unhappy necessity in the defense or extension
of liberty, or both. Even a war of naked expansion, like the Mexican
War, was cast in terms of defending the freedom of the newly annexed
republic of Texas, lately a large part of the Republic of Mexico,
and the liberation, if possible, of the oppressed people of Mexico.
All wars entail a certain amount of hypocritical cant, and a large
measure of self-delusion, but the North American variety seems
exceptional for the consistent reliance over centuries on a single
idea—that the extension of liberty justifies the use of military
force, however cruel and destructive. Exporting democracy to Iraq is
nothing new.
Santa Anna provides a proving exception. From the
class revolt of 1810 onward, the main issue for Mexico was internal
disorder, which was suppressed—most effectively by Santa Anna
himself—only by curtailing liberty. Mexican regimes had no interest
in liberating anyone beyond their frontiers nor in extending their
territorial control; keeping domestic order and defending their
already vast territory was challenge enough. So, was the contrasting
Yanqui pattern of thought and military behavior more situational
than ideological? The authors do not address the question raised by
their own comparative example.
Perhaps the other available case for comparison,
that of Canada, neglected by the authors once they have finished
with Champlain, can be helpful. The Anglophone population of Canada
is a direct result of the American Revolution, when thousands of
“loyalist” refugees fled the nightmare of a republic independent of
British protection to what are today the Maritime provinces and the
province of Ontario. They brought with them a lightly conservatized
version of the same so‑called “Whig” ideology that undergirded the
thought expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Within this
“new”, anglicizing Canada, the original French people of Quebec
posed a problem. Governing both English and French from London
proved difficult. During the War of 1812, pro-American collaborators
were another problem in “Upper Canada” (Ontario), and a few had to
be summarily hanged. Revolts broke out during the 1830’s in both
Ontario and Quebec, but London chose to focus on the problem posed
by the French. Thinking very much like Yankees, royal inquisitors
could not imagine any choice between expulsion and assimilation. The
Quebec French were too numerous and well entrenched to be expelled,
so assimilation was deemed to be the solution. The same kind of
thinking characterized humane Americans pondering their own problem
with the Indians: expulsion was violent and unjust, so assimilation,
the underside of liberation, must be the right answer, and similar
binary logic dominated enlightened American thinking about enslaved
African-American slavery. Assimilation invariably failed, in Canada
and the United States, but as Canada expanded westward in tandem
with U.S. expansion, it did so without much military force and in
time the obvious third choice emerged—coexistence—an option that
slowly and pragmatically came to apply as well to the
ever-troublesome problem of Quebec. During the same decades, a
comparable distaste for coercive measures brought about a devolution
of imperial control, giving Canada effective autonomy without
enduring a war of independence. Of course the big difference in the
United States was that leaving very large areas, like north Georgia
and east Tennessee or Oklahoma or much of the Dakotas, as Indian
land was unthinkable. And in this comparison there is also the issue
of discrepant levels of power; as a Canadian author once explained
to a Harvard audience, the main difference between Canada and the
United States is that south of You is Mexico, but south of Us is
You.
The case of Canada, however interesting, can
prove nothing. The peculiar situation of the United States (at least
until the last century)—remote from Europe, a vast and temperate
territory luring farmers, speculators, and miners ever onward, and a
weakening if annoying native resistance to these mobile
Americans—combined readily with the ideas pronounced in the
Declaration of Independence to create a “liberation theology” that
seemed eminently realistic and flexibly applicable to every American
resort to war. By 1900 there was no way to disentangle national
belief from the conditions of national life. War after war had
confirmed the moral and strategic rightness of the doctrine.
* * *
While the book has an argument, that wars in
North America since the onset of European colonization have been
bound up with ideas of liberty and liberation—enemies in these wars
seen as lacking the quality vital to peaceful behavior—the authors
do not belabor the evidence to make their case. Instead, the
argument emerges readily from the biographical structure of the
book, from the words of the principal subjects and their
contemporaries. Most of the general story is familiar to the reader,
who can relax and attend more closely to the particulars, of how
Grant as an ex-Army officer and a struggling Illinois farmer
regretted his participation in the “wicked” Mexican War and thought
slavery only emerged as an issue with the annexation of Texas and
the war that followed—in no sense a political radical, but
thoroughly fed up with a Federal government dominated by the
slaveholding faction in the Democratic party, though he himself had
voted for James Buchanan in 1856. Of how Woodrow Wilson justified
American entry in 1917 into the world war by saying we were the
champions of the rights of mankind, while at that moment U.S. troops
occupied portions of Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama,
Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Philippines. And of how MacArthur stood
before the Philippine Congress in 1945 and said that nothing but the
American “passion for liberty” had propelled them to victory over
Japan. The general argument may have a few small holes in it, which
the reader can look for, while enjoying a well-crafted excursion
through familiar territory along with fresh observations of
well-known figures of the military past—and present.
The University of Michigan
johnshy@umich.edu |
