|
Review of: Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America, Basic Books, 1999, 707 pages
The thesis of this enormously
ambitious, in some ways beguiling but fatally flawed book by Kevin Phillips is
that there are strong cultural connections between the English Civil War of
1640-1649, the American War of Independence of 1776-1783 and the Civil War of
the United States of 1861-1865. In each case, the protagonists on both sides
were very much the same kind of people with the same religious beliefs,
political affiliations and economic interests. And rather than representing
three distinct contests, the wars should be seen as the deciding events in a
long process that led from the origins of English Protestantism in the
sixteenth century to the global dominance of the American political and
economic system in the twentieth. Over three centuries, Phillips
argues, similar sides were taken in each of these three wars. On the long-term
winning side were the constituencies of commerce, industry, the maritime
sector, the centers of immigration, the principal cities, low church
evangelical religion, and the proselytizing middle classes. The long-term
losing side was based on landed agriculture, with its feudal remnants and
servitude, its hierarchical and liturgical religion, and its greater ratios of
horsemen, soldiers and cavaliers. "At each point in each nation's history,"
the author writes, "it was a necessity - perhaps it was also a destiny - for
the former to push aside the latter." Ultimately, he wants us to see the
present globalization of liberal-democratic politics and market-driven
economics as both the fulfillment of the English Reformation and the
irresistible emergence of a new imperial community of English-speaking
peoples. "Not since Rome …" are the book's concluding words. In the English Civil War, Phillips
argues, the Parliamentary side was led by Puritans and other low church
Protestants who came predominantly from East Anglia, especially the heartland
counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex plus the adjoining shires of Hertford,
Cambridge, Huntingdon and Lincoln. They were predominantly artisans and small
manufacturers and many had connections to the maritime industries. They were
the first backers of westward expansion, that is, expansion across the
Atlantic. The Puritans who led the exodus to the American colonies of New
England between 1629 and 1640 originated within a circle fifty miles in each
direction from the East Anglian town of Groton, Suffolk. These eastern
counties had traditions of liberty that stretched back centuries. They had
been settled by Angles and Jutes and in the Middle Ages had comparatively
large ratios of freemen and small numbers of servi and villani. This was where
Anglo-Saxon opposition to the Norman invasion had been the fiercest and lasted
the longest. The cavaliers who supported the
king in the Civil War were predominantly high church Anglicans, Roman
Catholics, the aristocracy and rural gentry. Their ethnic background was more
Norman and Celtic than Anglo-Saxon. The heartland of royalist support,
Phillips says, was the north and the west of England. This was where Charles I
recruited his army and raised his standard. The economic base of royalist
support was manorial agriculture, while most soldiers in the king's army were
the labourers and servants of large agricultural estates. The principal
industrialists who supported the king were the holders of royal monopolies.
Royalists and cavaliers were opponents of westward expansion. The War for American Independence,
Phillips argues, should be regarded more as a civil war within the colonies
than as a colonial revolution against the crown. He says American historians
have not done a good job of explaining the actual wartime loyalties and
politics. Once these are seen in terms of British religious and ethnic
tribalisms from the 1640s, many of the gaps can be filled in and the oddities
explained. In 1775-76, Phillips writes, the colonies seethed with seventeenth
century memories, suspicions and analogies. The war was led by New England
Yankees, the direct descendants of the original Puritan settlers. They
reproduced many of the political interests as well as the political geography
of their ancestors. The "powder keg of the American revolution", Phillips
says, was located in counties called Suffolk and Essex (Massachusetts Bay), as
well as in places like Boston, Norwich, Chelmsford, Billerica, Dedham and
Braintree, named by Massachusetts and Connecticut settlers for their East
Anglia hometowns. From New York, south to Georgia, on
the other hand, there were major concentrations of British loyalists and
would-be neutralists. Here were the places, Phillips writes, where the
colonists' struggle might have been lost, and here were the locales in which
the fighting became a bitter civil war. In South Carolina, for example, there
was a civil war in which 103 battles were fought with no one but South
Carolinians on both sides. There was a similar degree of acrimony in
Pennsylvania. The disagreements that led to the
War for Independence show remarkable similarities, Phillips argues, to those
behind the English Civil War. It was a fight over diverging interpretations of
the rights of Englishmen and the British constitution. There were comparable
objections from small producers to the policies of mercantilism and Crown
monopolies. There were protests by Puritans and other anti-episcopalian
dissenters against the monarchical imposition of Anglicanism and Catholicism.
It was also an early version of class warfare in which less prosperous
colonists were hoping to topple their own provincial elites, as well as the
King and his English ministers. Just as the victories of the
Puritans in the English Civil War were not consolidated and, indeed, were to
some extent reversed under the Stuart Restoration, so too was there much
unfinished business at the end of the war of 1776-83, Phillips observes. The
Articles of Confederation negotiated in 1787 left the United States with a
great division between Northern and Southern interests. The federal system
allowed slavery to flourish under political and constitutional protections
unavailable in the British Empire. In the first half of the nineteenth
century, the influence of Yankee New England was diluted by internal political
divisions and by the triumph of southern or Jacksonian democracy, which
controlled the Presidency for forty two of the years between 1801 and 1850. It
was not until the formation of the Republican Party and the election of
Lincoln that the Yankees were in a position to resume the struggle of their
ancestors. By this time, however, there had been waves of Yankee migration
westward from the old New England heartland. This had led to the creation of
what Phillips defines as Greater New England, a cultural region stretching
west through upstate New York, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota to Oregon and
Puget Sound. The American Civil War occurred, Phillips argues, because this
Greater New England was at cultural, religious and political odds with the
Greater South. Phillips claims the South's
population included a high ratio of forbears from the old English western and
northern frontiers as well as from the eighteenth century Celtic borderlands
and mountain redoubts. So, once again, cavaliers and their Celtic-stock allies
were lined up against the descendants of East Anglia. The structure of
self-sufficient farms, shops and manufacturies that was the basis of the
economy of Greater New England was "as incompatible with Southern slavery as
the small-scale Puritan entrepreneurship of England's cloth districts, cheese
towns, lead-mining hillsides and cutlery centers of the 1640s had been with
the late-feudal manor agriculture and royally bestowed wine, soap and coal
monopolies of Stuart England." Phillips argues that these kinds of
religious, cultural and ethnic differences provided the underlying rationale
for the U.S. Civil War. He adds that, by the 1850s, these differences had
stalled commercial progress and economic expansion as the major cultural
groupings sought to defend their own vision of the future of the nation and
sought to prevent their opponents from realizing their own. Once the war started, however, and
there was no Southern presence in Washington, Republican politicians and
Northern capitalists pushed through the Congresses of 1861-65 what Phillips
calls "nothing less than a neo-Hamiltonian revolution". This included a
national banking system, uniform federal bank notes, a vast increase in
national debt, a wide range of new taxes, a record level of tariffs to protect
Northern manufacturers, a northern transcontinental railroad route, and a
Homestead Act that would ensure westward expansion went ahead without slavery.
The Yankee victory in the war unleashed Yankee economic dynamism that would
eventually make the United States the most productive and richest country in
the world.
Phillips argues that each of the
three wars was necessary. Each followed a prelude of at least a decade in
which there had been attempts to resolve the underlying religious, cultural
and economic conflicts between the parties. When politics failed, war broke
out. He acknowledges that there are historians who in each case have claimed
that the resort to warfare was unnecessary and that, had different political
tactics been adopted, violence need not have arisen.
The Phillips thesis is attractive
in several ways. It does not hitch the long-term course of history to a
one-dimensional model based on, say, economics, as most leftist or
quasi-Marxist explanations still do. Phillips weaves religion, culture,
geography, politics and economics into a consistent multi-variable account.
Indeed, he is persuasive in pressing the notion that among the cultural groups
he discusses, it was religion that was the most powerful factor at work,
influencing both the kinds of economic activity its adherents undertook and
their political predilections. This certainly accords much better with the
mentality of the English-speaking peoples from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth centuries than the more familiar economic determinist models. He also makes an energetic attempt
to provide a coherent account of many apparent anomalies in the loyalties on
both sides of the U.S. Civil War, such as why many New Yorkers supported the
South, why much of the upper South was reluctant to join the Confederacy, and
why the Butternut Midwest was as equally disdainful of Northern abolitionists
as of Southern slave owners. Phillips uses his well-established expertise as
an electoral analyst to provide a convincing county-by-county dissection of
the cultural and religious factors and regional loyalties at work in the U.S.
federal elections of the 1850s and 1860s. But none of this is sufficient to
save the thesis. It stumbles badly at its very first hurdle, that of the
English Civil War, and never recovers. Phillips simply hasn't consulted enough
of the research on this topic that has been published over the last twenty
five years. He provides a very short bibliography on the events of 1640-49
that includes five works by the English Marxist Christopher Hill, two by
Lawrence Stone and seven other books published between the 1920s and the
1960s. He is apparently unaware that the work of these authors has been
subject to a sustained process of re-examination since 1975. None of the
revisionists who have played well-publicized roles in this re-examination --
Paul Christianson, Conrad Russell, Anthony Fletcher, Kevin Sharpe, Mark
Kishlansky, Jonathan Clark and several others -- are listed in Phillips's
bibliography, and it appears he hasn't read them. Had he done so, he would
have been forced to reconsider his account of the Civil War and especially the
role of Puritans in it. The Civil War of the 1640s was not
a Puritan revolution, nor did the Puritans have the kind of dominance that
Phillips attributes to them. Anglicans, Presbyterians and even aristocrats
were more politically influential on the Parliamentary side. Moreover, the
Civil War, it is now widely accepted, was not a manifestation of underlying
social forces erupting onto the political terrain. The conflict did not
represent any deep-seated dissatisfaction in the community at large but was
predominantly the product of divisions among royal councillors. The
revisionists have explained the Civil War as the outcome of short-term
political problems, a breakdown in the fiscal system and disagreement over the
forms of the church, which was itself an issue with long antecedents. In other
words, it was neither a manifestation of irresistible cultural and religious
forces nor of progressive ideologies. Rather, it was a conflict among
England's political and religious elites. Had the king and his advisors
managed the early disputes more adroitly, the war need never have happened. Moreover, if Phillips's thesis
about the political geography of seventeenth century England is correct, the
industrial revolution a century later should have been the product of those
intense and grasping Puritan entrepreneurs of East Anglia. Instead, it emerged
primarily in the English Midlands and the north and north-west, the very
regions of the country that Phillips claims had long been the bastions of
feudal agriculture, liturgical religion, royalism and reaction. While interpretations by historians
of the U.S. Civil War remain more diverse than that of its English
predecessor, there is still a healthy body of opinion that supports a not
dissimilar case to that of the Stuart-era revisionists. In America, debates
over issues like slavery and secession went deep into popular culture, as one
would expect in a literate democracy with universal male suffrage, but on the
eve of the war, out-and-out Northern abolitionists and Southern secessionists
were both relatively small groups. Rather than a groundswell of social forces,
it was the decisive actions of a political elite in the lower South that
brought on the war and forced the rest of nation to take sides. No more than
any other of its kind was the U.S. Civil War a product of historical
necessity. The claim that the events of
1861-65 liberated the northern entrepreneurial spirit and allowed the full
flowering of American capitalism is also contentious. While there was
certainly a tremendous growth of industries and cities after the war, the
expansion of railroads actually slowed and historians still debate whether the
war impeded more than it stimulated industrial progress. In other words, the notion that the
English and American Civil Wars were the products of an historic destiny
struggling to fulfill itself runs counter to the findings of what is now the
leading academic opinion about the former and a respectable body of
interpretation of the latter. Phillips's thesis fails to properly address
these alternative explanations. One thing that the contemplation of
history should teach us is that there is no such thing as destiny in human
affairs, there are no outcomes that had to happen or were meant to be. History
is made not by social forces that are irresistible but by men who are
fallible, and most often by political elites acting on information that is
imperfect, producing consequences that are unforeseen. Sometimes they act
wisely, looking to the true interests of their countrymen and drawing on the
best of their cultural and political heritage, sometimes they act dangerously
and foolishly. The resort to warfare has very often been of the latter kind.
And how many more times do we need reminding that throughout the entire course
of Western history the most dangerous and foolish notion of all has been that
a particular people have now assumed the mantle of Rome and are destined to
rule the world.
|
|