"Crete the opening wedge": nationalism and international affairs in Postbellum America.(SECTION I EXTENDING SOCIAL HISTORY: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, HUMOR)

 
"Thou sobbing captive in a sea of smiles, 
Whose fairy sails on sunny errands flee, 
Shall the blue waves that bless thy sister isles 
Bind on thy brow the curse of slavery?" 
--Unattributed (1) 
 
"Oh! what were the projects you made, Mrs. Howe, 
When you went where the Cretans were making a row? 
Emancipation--civilization--redintegration of a great nation, 
Paying no taxes, grinding no axes-- 
Flinging the Ministers over the banisters. 
These were the projects of good Mrs. Howe 
When she went where the Cretans were making a row." 
--Julia Ward Howe (2) 

From August of 1866 to February of 1869, an insurrection against Ottoman imperial rule by Greek Orthodox Christians on the island of Crete drew the attention of Americans from California to Canea and from Massachusetts to Memphis. Although the Cretan Insurrection, as it was often called, may now seem an obscure and trivial foreign affair, Americans readily discussed it and easily invested it with meaning. (3) To uncover why, we must look anew at the relationships between America's North-South sectional conflict, nationalism, and international affairs. Although ongoing sectional strife remained central to American politics and culture after the Civil War, this by no means precluded or even inhibited interest in the world beyond. Instead, even as Americans discussed, debated, and died over Reconstruction, they found themselves searching further afield, as they had throughout the 19th century, for the means to articulate and affirm their rival understandings of their country. (4)

For the last several decades, historians of Reconstruction have neglected foreign affairs--the Cretan Insurrection included--due to an intensive focus on conditions in states, counties, and localities in the eastern United States, especially the South. (5) Certainly, this approach has with great insight and rigor produced a much richer and more balanced understanding of Reconstruction. (6) Yet in the process, our understanding of the broader political culture of Reconstruction, rife with discussions of national and international affairs, has remained underdeveloped. Fortunately, a handful of studies from the past decade have started to uncover the ways in which contemporaries blurred lines between and braided their discussions of the South, the nation, and the world. (7) Building on these, this essay explores the ways in which Reconstruction-era Americans treated sectional, national, and international arenas as overlapping and interrelated spheres of interpretation and action. As American discussions of the Cretan Insurrection demonstrate, the worldviews arrayed against each other during Reconstruction were precisely that. Contemporary Americans did not limit their attention to their locality, state, or country, nor did their perspectives emerge solely from domestic experiences.

Paradoxically, the tendency in Reconstruction historiography to disregard American interest and involvement in events abroad reflects the limited concern it has devoted to nationalism. Eric Foner's landmark study, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, for example, sheds much light on the importance of state centralization during Reconstruction, but notes only briefly the growth of patriotic sentiment among northern Unionists and southern freedpeople. (8) Heather Richardson has stressed that Americans understood Reconstruction through a national paradigm, but the core of her analysis focuses on attitudes towards state centralization and competing notions of political economy. (9) Essential as these works are for anyone grappling with how Americans understood, imagined, or socially constructed their country during Reconstruction, they nonetheless leave much to be done. This inattention to nationalism during Reconstruction is especially striking given the now rich scholarship on its growth and transformation among both Unionists and Confederates during the Civil War. (10)

Fittingly, one of the most provocative insights on the legacy of Civil War nationalism comes from a work addressing its impact abroad. As historian David Potter argued, the Union's eventual commitment to emancipation and its ultimate victory convinced many in America and Europe that dedication to one's nation could serve the cause of liberalism. For Potter, the Civil War was a decisive event that "fused the two great forces of the nineteenth century--liberalism and nationalism" so thoroughly that they became largely indistinguishable. In Europe, this fusion took shape in the context of struggles for independence from monarchical empires, whereas in America the opponents were secessionist slaveholders. But in both cases, nationalism became synonymous with the early-to mid-nineteenth-century liberal faith that freeing men from coercive political and economic relationships would unfetter the forces of material and moral progress. Such liberal nationalists in Europe and America understood themselves to be in battle against reactionaries who embraced stasis, cruelty, and hierarchy. (11) If Potter used the terms "nationalism" and "liberalism" somewhat broadly, so too did his subjects. (12) American liberal nationalists did not actually share identical notions of what constituted freedom, progress, or even a nation among themselves or with Europeans. (13) Yet, many Americans, drawing in part on the heritage surrounding the American Revolution, nonetheless convinced themselves that struggles for national independence in Europe spoke to their own cherished principles. (14)

As the Cretan Insurrection demonstrates, just such a liberal nationalist spirit captivated many in the North after the Civil War. Although the Democrats certainly had liberal traditions, especially concerning free trade, it was the Republicans who took this spirit as their own. (15) A diverse coalition of abolitionists, Whigs, Democrats, and rising machine politicians, many Republicans no doubt welcomed a chance to contrast themselves with malignant reactionaries at home and abroad. In doing so, Republicans could sidestep their own differences and emphasize their belief that the purified United States embodied the interlocking forces of freedom and progress. (16) Republican liberal nationalists found their mantra in "civilization," a word with global currency that they nonetheless tethered to their sectional and partisan understanding of America. (17) "Barbarism," in contrast, described the stagnation and cruelty endemic to societies with coercive, iniquitous, and retrograde ways. (18) Both parochial in their presumptions and cosmopolitan in their sympathies, these Republicans concluded that spreading their institutions and values was a benevolent undertaking. These included not only free labor and elective government, but everything from a humanitarian sympathy for the suffering weak, to commerce and technology, to their gendered, sentimental family values. (19) Whether looking south, west, or abroad, Republicans could lament and disdain "barbarisms" wherever they perceived difference.

Critics of the Republican war effort and often the war itself, northern and southern Democrats asserted a rival definition of American national identity that wedded ideals to a pronounced racism. That Democrats readily invoked American nationalism is hardly surprising. From secession on, the Confederates modeled themselves as the true inheritors of the American Revolution and American identity. (20) Democrats, North and South, moreover, thought of themselves as defending America's established racial and Constitutional order against Republican machinations. (21) This Democratic nationalism was a critical part of a multi-sided and nationwide struggle to define the reunified United States.