Crete the Opening Wedge - International Affairs and American Worldviews During Reconstruction

“Crete the Opening Wedge”: International Affairs and American Worldviews during Reconstruction “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 the spring of 1869, an insurrection by Greek Orthodox Christians on the island of Crete against Ottoman imperial rule 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, contemporary 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, the nation, 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 for the means to articulate and affirm their rival understandings of what kind of country they could and should create. 4 1 Historians of Reconstruction have neglected foreign affairs—the Cretan Insurrection included—due to an intensive focus on social, economic, and political conditions in states, counties, and localities in the eastern United States, especially the South. Certainly, this approach has with great insight and rigor produced a much richer and more balanced understanding of Reconstruction. 5 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. 6 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: worldviews. Contemporary Americans did not limit the scope of their interest to their locality, state, or country, nor did their perspectives emerge solely from domestic experiences. In fact, the terms “foreign” and “domestic” were themselves part of a debate, central to the political culture of Reconstruction, over what America was, who was a citizen, and what were the proper relationships between insiders and outsiders and the United States and the world. 7 Paradoxically, the tendency in Reconstruction historiography to disregard American interest and involvement in events abroad reflects the limited attention 2 it has devoted to nationalism. Eric Foner, for example, dedicates but a handful of pages of his landmark study, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, to note the growth of nationalism among northern Unionist during the war and southern freedpeople during Reconstruction. 8 The continued lack of interest is especially striking given the now rich scholarship on the transformation and intensification of nationalism among both Unionists and Confederates during the Civil War. 9 While some studies of Civil War nationalism do conclude with insightful sections on Reconstruction, they necessarily treat the period briefly. 10 So too there are studies that look at the transformation of national identity from the end of the Civil War until the turn of the century but, given their chronological breadth, they are necessarily selective in their treatment of Reconstruction. 11 In fact, one of the most provocative insights on the legacy of Civil War nationalism comes from a work addressing its impact abroad. As David Potter has 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 causes of freedom and progress. 12 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 independence struggles against monarchical empires, whereas in America the opponents were secessionist slaveholders. But in both cases, nationalism became synonymous with the contemporary liberal faith in and quest for material and moral progress along with freedom from coercive political and economic 3 relationships among men. Such liberal nationalists in Europe and America understood themselves to be in battle against reactionaries who embraced stasis, cruelty, and hierarchy. 13 If Potter’s essay uses the terms “nationalism” and “liberalism” somewhat broadly, this in part reflects contemporary usage. American liberal nationalists did not actually share identical notions of what constituted freedom, progress, or even a nation among themselves or with Europeans. 14 Yet, many Americans nonetheless convinced themselves that struggles for national independence in Europe embodied the same principles as the war to preserve the Union. 15 As the Cretan Insurrection demonstrates, a liberal nationalist spirit captivated many in the North after the Civil War and can be roughly associated with supporters of the Republican Party. 16 Many Republicans, in fact, believed that with its domestic reactionaries chastened, the United States now embodied the principles of liberalism. The mantra of these Republican liberal nationalists was “civilization,” a word that signified to them the interlocking forces of freedom and progress. “Barbarism,” in contrast, described the stagnation and cruelty endemic to societies mired in coercive, iniquitous, and retrograde ways. 17 Believing that their new America represented “civilization,” Republicans concluded that spreading its institutions and values was a humanitarian enterprise. These institutions and values included not only free labor and elective government, but everything from modern technologies, to “commerce,” to their gendered, sentimental family values. As Republicans understood the cause of freedom and progress through an idealized version of their own lives, their 4 humanitarianism proved prone to contempt and outrage. 18 Whether looking south, west, or abroad, Republicans could lament and disdain the presence of “barbarisms” wherever they perceived difference. Democrats, in both the North and the South, espoused an alternative American nationalism. Despite their aversion to forced reunion, Democrats had few qualms over asserting a rival definition of American national identity, one that wedded ideals to a pronounced racism. As Drew Gilpin Faust, Peter Kolchin, and others have pointed out, the Confederates modeled themselves as the true inheritors of the American Revolution and American identity. 19 It is therefore unsurprising that, once back in the Union on uncertain terms and with an equally uncertain future, ex-Confederates and their northern allies could turn to the language of American nationalism. This Democratic nationalism was a critical part of a multi-sided nationwide struggle to define the mission and membership of the reunified United States. 20 As Kolchin has argued, focusing on both former slaves and former masters, “What was at sake in the Reconstruction struggle was not only what it meant to be a southerner, but also what it meant to be an American.” 21 This debate concerned not only the collective domestic identity and citizenship of the United States, but also America’s relationship with the wider world. Understanding Reconstruction therefore requires that we attend to how historians and contemporaries employed the distinction between things “foreign” and “domestic” with great care. As Amy Kaplan has shown, this distinction is an unstable and contested social construction that deals with the relationships 5 between people, places, and states. 22 Too often, Reconstruction historiography neglects developments abroad when contemporaries followed them closely and anxiously. For Republicans, this broader interest stemmed from their belief that the struggle of “civilization” against “barbarism” transcended national borders. They found freedom fighters, sadistic patriarchs, savage warriors, indolent exploiters, and imperial despots at home and abroad. 23 Democrats were critical of the global scope of Republican sympathy, yet they too turned their attention abroad to assert their understanding of America. ____ The causes of the Cretan Insurrection have been subject to passing disagreement among a small number of historians of modern Greece and American diplomacy. 24 Regardless by the spring of 1866, an assembly of Greek Orthodox Cretans had remonstrated against the Ottoman governor of Crete, Ismael Pasha, in an appeal to the government of the Ottoman Empire, or the “Sublime Porte.” Confronting this challenge to his authority and mounting tensions between the island’s Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations, Ismael Pasha appears to have opted to confront the assembly of Greek Orthodox Cretans while calling the island’s Muslim population into the walled cities for protection. 25 Tensions quickly boiled over into panic and violence. On August 28, 1866 the Cretan assembly declared the island’s independence and shortly thereafter union with Greece proper. The Ottoman Empire, along with its quasiindependent ally Egypt, blockaded the island and sent large armies to subdue the insurrection. The poorly prepared and lightly armed rebels proceeded to fight an 6 off-and-on guerilla war for two and half years. While pitched battles did occur, so too did long interludes as the Ottoman and Egyptian forces remained near cities in the coastal perimeter while the rebels occupied the mountainous interior. Starting with the outbreak of the war, thousands of Greek Orthodox Cretans fled to mainland Greece, the surrounding islands, and nearby mountains. 26 Despite the intermittent nature of fighting on Crete, a lack of ready information, and repeated reports of the insurrection’s demise, Crete garnered substantial Republican interest. 27 Certainly, there were Republicans who hesitated to embrace the cause of the Cretan rebels, and others concerned with developments elsewhere. 28 But Republican sympathy for the Cretan Insurrection was common, developed with remarkable ease, and could be intense. Central to Republican concern, as evinced in personal and official correspondence, newspaper editorials, petitions to Congress, fundraising events, poems, and public lectures, was the belief that the Cretan Insurrection was a struggle for freedom and progress against a barbaric empire. Although official American support for the Cretan Insurrection never went beyond some cautious statements of sympathy, on the level of both public rhetoric and personal conviction, many Republicans believed that the Cretan Insurrection spoke to American principles. 29 A handful of Republican humanitarians and diplomatic officials became deeply concerned with the uprising. Particularly active were the American consul on Crete, William J. Stillman, the New England philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe, and his wife, Julia Ward Howe. Stillman not only wrote of the insurrection in his diplomatic correspondence with the State Department, but also 7 for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly. After Stillman left the eastern Mediterranean in the summer of 1869, he wrote The Cretan Insurrection in 1870 – published in 1874 – and later devoted two chapters to Crete in his Autobiography of a Journalist. 30 The Howes’ efforts on behalf of the Greek Orthodox Cretans began with speeches, a pamphlet, and the organization of fundraising committees in Boston and New York that mustered $37,000 in donations, over 20 cases of supplies, and nearly 400 breech loading rifles. The Howes then sailed to Greece and distributed this aid. Returning to Boston, Julia Ward Howe tried her hand at some poems for Crete and organized another fair while the couple published a nearly-monthly magazine, The Cretan. 31 As with other Republicans, the underlying force shaping Stillman’s and the Howes’ reaction to the Cretan Insurrection was their faith that it was a fight against an exploitative and retrogressive despotism. American press coverage of the insurrection facilitated Republican interest. Initially motivated in part by the insurrection’s significance in Europe geopolitics, the New York Times, the New York Tribune, the Chicago Tribune and the Sacramento Daily Union all offered front-page coverage. 32 News from Crete could slacken for weeks at a time, but leading newspapers offered detailed accounts of developments when information, however unreliable, was available. Leading magazines including The Nation, Harper’s Weekly, and The Atlantic Monthly, also discussed the insurrection. Public lectures further sustained interest. Wendell Phillips and Samuel Gridley Howe were among the more notable to give speeches in Boston on January, 1867 and March, 1868, while 8 Henry Ward Beecher spoke in New York City at a meeting presided over by the mayor in January, 1867. 33 The Chicago Tribune reported that the English author and visitor to Crete, J. E. H. Skinner, lectured before a full house at the Christian Union Institute in April of 1868. Skinner had to explain some of the basic geographical features of Crete, but his audience already knew of the most dramatic events of the insurrection. The Tribune reported that “Everyone had read and heard of” a Turkish attack on the Orthodox monastery of Arkadi in November of 1866. 34 Similarly, Stewart L. Woodford, the Lieutenant Governor of New York, gave an “interesting and eloquent lecture on Crete” in Steinway Hall, also in April of 1868, and “was listened to with deep attention by the large audience present.” 35 William J. Stillman sounded the earliest note of what would be a mounting chorus of Republican sympathy in his diplomatic dispatches to the State Department. Like other Republicans, he depicted a cruel, coercive, and retrogressive Ottoman Empire. At the beginning of the insurrection, the Cretan rebels delivered to Stillman an appeal addressed to President Andrew Johnson, which Stillman then sent on to Secretary of State William Seward. Despite Stillman's expectation that the insurrection would prove futile, he stressed to Seward that “every word” of the appeal was “wrung from patriotic hearts by bitter and most unmerited oppression.” Stillman added that, if “the people of America” could only see how “a barbarous and licentious soldiery,” drove Greek Cretans from their homes, destroyed churches, and “paralyzed” industry, they could not help but be moved. 36 9 In December of 1866, Stillman again described to Seward how the insurrection had been “conducted with so much heroism and constancy on one side and savage barbarity on the other.” Stillman explained: “The sympathy I ought to feel for a people aspiring to freedom was, thus, much increased by the injustice of the Government and still more by its subsequent barbarity and excessive cruelty.” 37 Stillman did not hesitate to conclude that he was moved to sympathy for the rebels because of his “American instincts.” 38 Northern newspapers and magazines also stressed the “barbarity” of Ottoman rule and their sympathy for Cretan independence. The Ottoman attack on Greek Orthodox Cretan soldiers and civilians in the Monastery of Arkadi in November of 1866 became the most famous episode of supposed savagery. In its February 2, 1867 edition, Harper’s Weekly provided on overview of the insurrection that dwelt on Arkadi. The article explained that Crete had been “the theatre of many bloody attempts” on the part of the Greek Orthodox Cretans to achieve their independence from Ottoman rule. These Cretans, argued Harper’s, were motivated not only by “a common patriotic desire that Crete should be governed by Cretans,” but also by a “system of continued cruelties” that had “few parallels on record.” Harper’s claimed that while both sides fought with intense hatred in the current struggle, it was the Turkish Muslims who were guilty of “slaughtering without mercy to wreak their vengeance.” As Harper’s explained, the Greek Orthodox Cretans were “enduring great suffering, and even ending their own lives” to avoid being “borne away as captives of the infidel Moslem.” Harper’s then explained that “The most tragic event” in this war was the attack on Arkadi, and included an account of the attack from the Levant Herald – an 10 English language paper in Istanbul. The Herald reported that the much larger Turkish forces bombarded the monastery and its force of resilient rebels and innocent women and children for four days. When the Turkish forces finally breeched Arkadi’s outer walls, the rebel soldiers put up a desperate fight in the courtyard before taking refuge in the cellars, while hundreds of women and children barricaded themselves in the refectory. With these last defenses collapsing, explained the Levant Herald, “the insurgents after a short council,” resolved to blow themselves up. 39 Harper’s Weekly drove home this depiction of rebel dignity with a “vivid sketch” from a Cretan resident of Istanbul familiar with the monastery (see Image 1). In it, Cretan soldiers fight in the background while Cretan men and women together strain to hold shut the last door between themselves and the Ottoman forces, represented by only an axe blade and a spear point. At the center of the sketch, a Cretan woman clutches a naked babe to her body and defiantly stares at the door, while Orthodox priests standing near her carry out the decision to ignite the rebels’ store of powder. Whether the sketch was originally drawn by a Greek Orthodox, an American, or someone else, its message to Harper’s readers was clear. Faced with an unrelenting Turkish onslaught, the Cretan rebels fought bravely and unceasingly. When overpowered, they preferred death to having their women and children fall into the hands of the Ottoman forces. At approximately the same time as Harper’s article on Akardi, the New York state legislature passed a concurrent resolution expressing “sympathy for the Greeks, who are now 11 struggling for freedom,” and urging “our national government to protest against the barbarous and inhuman system of warfare adopted by the Turks.” 40 The fame of Arkadi in America could compel coverage even among skeptics. Although Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper supported Reconstruction, and although it had an insatiable fascination with foreign affairs and foreign cultures, it initially derided American interest in the Cretan Insurrection. Leslie’s not only rejected the claim that the Greek Orthodox Cretans deserved Protestant sympathy, but went further to note that, even if such a claim were valid, America’s policy of non-intervention in European affairs left little room for action. 41 Its wariness, however, did not prevent Leslie’s from repeatedly covering Arkadi in its illustrated European news section, nor from conceding that the insurrection was “exciting great attention all over the civilized world.” 42 Nor did Leslie’s abandon coverage of the insurrection after the attack. As it explained nearly a year after Arkadi, Crete had so “engrossed the attention and enlisted the sympathies of the public” that Leslie’s was “induced” to better cover the insurrection. 43 In doing so, all Leslie’s could do was question to how civilized the Greek Orthodox Cretans really were and caution, in a later column, that American entanglement abroad would cause “The fathers of the Republic” to turn “uneasily in their graves.” 44 Despite manifest cultural differences, Republicans regularly alleged that Greek Orthodox Cretans had virtues Americans could appreciate. Writing of his travels around Crete for the Atlantic Monthly, Stillman described the peasants of the Apokorona valley as a “hardy and independent breed, warlike to a degree.” 12 Similarly, the adjoining mountainous region of Sphakia was always the “abode of the bitterest resistance to local tyranny.” 45 S. G. Howe praised Greeks as “the most intelligent, active, and cultivated” of the Christian races under Ottoman rule. 46 Since the Greeks were rarely considered a “barbaric” people, whatever distinctiveness they had suggested to Republicans that they should be united in their own independent nation. Wendell Phillips stated clearly how the Greek’s foreignness actually justified American sympathy. “Crete stretches her arm across the Atlantic,” he explained, “and asks us to protest against Europe, and to advocate the American idea that every nation has the right to govern itself.” 47 The Howes and others described the “Turks” as foreign in more damning ways. While the “Turks” had once been “brave, warlike, and enterprising” during their medieval expansion, argued S. G. Howe, they had become a “ferocious race” disinclined to cultural progress. "[U]nder the demoralizing influences of Mahometanism” and polygamy, the “Turks” then became totally incapable of advancement. 48 The height of the Howes’ revulsion was reserved for the alleged Turkish disregard for the affective bonds of sentimental family life. As S.G. Howe explained it, Turkish treatment of “boys, girls, and women,” violated civilized norms and was “often so cruel and so abominable that one can hardly find comprehensible language in which to speak of it.” 49 Similarly, believing that the “Turks” survived by exploiting the industrious Greek Orthodox, the New York Times casually characterized the “Turks” as the “vapid and indolent” antithesis of the ideal free laborer. 50 Likewise, Stillman claimed in the Atlantic Monthly that the Christian Cretan was “the only industrious citizen.” 51 The inclinations of the 13 Ottomans, in these characterizations, were to destroy the emotional and economic bonds that propelled civilization. In their discussions of the insurrection, Republican liberal nationalism also tapped into a longstanding faith in commerce and technology. Sympathizers claimed that, given freedom from Ottoman rule, Crete would begin to flourish economically. Writing for Atlantic Monthly, Stillman elaborated on how Ottoman misrule could be measured in the island’s poverty and lack of modern infrastructure. He explained how towns such as Canea suffered from “dilapidation and decay,” and offered little entertainment during the summer other than smoking “a nargile on the Marina, studying primitive civilization the while.” 52 Stillman also noted how the “wretchedness of the roads,” combined with “benighted restrictions” on cabotage, prevented farmers from profitably selling their produce. 53 When Stillman came across a bridge that had fallen into disrepair he opined, “Under the Turks, nothing but decay obtains.” 54 The rural plain of Cydonia, he contended, was “capable of sustaining a much larger population than it now supports, if the Mohammedan blight were off it.” Stillman hoped it might return to its “prosperity and security” of classical days, for only “freedom is wanting now to restore both.” 55 Discussions of the insurrection’s geopolitical significance became another avenue for Republicans to assert their version of American nationalism. For decades the Great Powers of Europe had jockeyed for control in the eastern Mediterranean before a weakening Ottoman Empire. 56 Republicans appreciated this in their own self-congratulatory ways. In an article titled, “The Eastern 14 Question—Crete the Opening Wedge,” the New York Times informed its readers of the “growing significance of the Cretan outbreak,” which it believed would spread revolution throughout the Ottoman Empire. 57 A later article, “The Clouds Accumulating–Turkey About to Fall to Pieces,” argued that the backwards Turkish Empire would soon collapse under the forces of progress in southeastern Europe and sympathy from the west. 58 The New York Tribune similarly boasted how its foreign correspondents roamed from the capitals of Europe, to “Constantinople, where an effete Mohammedanism struggles in vain against the aggressive spirit of Christian civilization.” 59 Despite their faith that the Ottoman Empire was near collapse, Americans also recognized that England and France might support the Ottomans to prevent Russian expansion. 60 Republicans depicted England and France as callous global powers capable of understanding only their own strategic interests. In fact, claimed Samuel Gridley Howe, Crete had not been granted independence alongside Greece in 1832 because “European diplomats, just as indifferent to her rights as Asiatic despots had been, cruelly decreed that she must be sacrificed to propitiate Turkey.” 61 England in particular became the target of much liberal nationalist ire. 62 The Sacramento Daily Union asserted that the English elite had a “habitual indifference to moral and human considerations” and would help sustain “A loathsome, heathen despotism” to prevent Russian expansion. 63 Similarly, when the Sultan went on a diplomatic tour of Europe, a correspondent for the New York Tribune referred to it as a “magnificent farce,” in which “enthusiastic Englishmen who went down on their knees in the mud before him.” 64 Once again Harper’s 15 Weekly gave graphic expression to liberal nationalist sentiment (Image 2). Responding to the Sultan’s diplomatic visit to England, Harper’s issued a political cartoon portraying John Bull stooping to kiss the hand of the Sultan and singing “God preserve thee, Sultan, long;/Ever keep thee from all woes:/May the State and thee be strong,/To dismay and resist thy foes!” The Sultan, meanwhile, whispers to his Grand Vizier, “These infidel John Bulls don’t see those little Massacres of their Christian brethren in Crete,” while Turkish flags float over a hillside attack on Cretan Christians in the background. 65 Set against England, the Ottoman Empire, and Great Power diplomacy in Republican writings was the great liberal nation of the United States. Stillman, for one, proved willing to step beyond his limited consular duties to advise Seward to take action on behalf of the Cretans. After noting how Turkish “barbarities” had drawn attention to the conflict, he suggested to Seward that benevolent influence abroad would be a source of national glory. Stillman then asked Seward, “May the friends of humanity not hope that America will lead off in a question where no political interest can stain the purity of her motives?” 66 The Howes also believed that American diplomatic recognition of the Cretan rebels, if granted soon, would “diffuse the lesson throughout Christendom” that America remained an uncompromising and unmatched defender of “freedom, civilization, virtue, and Christianity.” 67 Frustrated by the limited and contradictory reports coming from Crete, the New York Times became critical of American diplomats in the East. Though the Times, like Frank Leslie’s, warned against formal American entanglement in the “Eastern Question,” it also argued 16 that America had a unique obligation to master diplomacy. “Untrammeled by the traditional and selfish policy of the old dynasties,” claimed the Times, “the friends of freedom and progress throughout the world justly expect from the United States an attitude of intelligent sympathy toward them.” If the Times both urged caution and demanded sympathy, it was in large part because it believed influence of freedom and progress was already “irresistible.” 68 The Sacramento Daily Union was more ambitious. It suggested that Europe recognized the Union’s newfound strength and reminded readers that European monarchs had long interfered in American affairs. “What if,” asked the Union, “the republic should venture to retaliate, and begin to exercise an intervening influence in European affairs in favor of free institutions?” Surely, claimed the Union, this could bring American diplomacy in line with “the strength and mission of the republic,” without necessarily leading to war. 69 If the American government failed to take action to aid the rebels, Republicans still felt a national tie to Crete. For the Howes, the limited actions of the American government reflected only Andrew Johnson’s ignorance of popular sentiments. As they argued in an address to Congress published in The Cretan, supporters of the insurrection “have the right to expect and demand, that, as soon as the existing administration is overthrown, there shall be a radical change of our foreign policy.” 70 And if Seward had failed to recognize the provisional government of Crete after two years of fighting, the Howes found some consolation in their belief that it was “virtually” recognized “by the American people.” 71 Moreover, while European powers had strained their own consciences 17 by exerting themselves in the power politics of the Eastern Question, Americans had shown their sympathy through democratic action. American people, claimed the Howes, were also “doing a great deal… by the moral force of our ideas and institutions.” 72 “America can save Crete,” quipped The Cretan, “even if Mr. Seward does not buy it.” 73 Wishful though such thinking was, it was emblematic of the ease with which Republicans discussed foreign and domestic developments together. The supposed struggle between civilization and barbarism that sat at the center of the Republicans’ notion of America’s national mission itself defied borders. What resulted was a complex relationship involving the distinction between civilization and barbarism on the one hand and the distinction between things foreign and domestic on the other. The absences of a simple and rigid divide between foreign and domestic affairs was apparent in the border-crossing analogies and comparisons Republicans made as they discussed Crete. 74 Republicans were quick to refer back to domestic stereotypes and historical memories when discussing the Cretan Insurrection. Interpretations of the Civil War, for one, were quick to come into play. Stillman, for example, stressed the connection to Seward by explaining that he had followed developments in Crete “with no less anxiety than that I felt during our own struggle with the criminal organization of the enemies of Freedom.” 75 Similarly, the Howes explained, tersely, that reports of the insurrection’s demise had the “internal marks of having being [sic] written in Constantinople, by a copper-head employee of a republican government,” who had espoused “anti-American and 18 despotic ideas.” 76 The alleged disregard of the “Turks” for the affective bonds of the sentimental family found expression through comparisons to the Confederate prison of Andersonville. As the New York Times declared, “We are accustomed to shrink from contemplating the miseries of Andersonville; but they were perpetrated upon men—soldiers who had braved the horrors of war.” The Times demanded to know, “Shall such horrors go on, and the Christian world stand mute and unprotesting?” 77 Republicans made still further references to the practices of slave holders, Mormons, and Native Americans. S. G. Howe wrote that, while Cretan Christians could appeal to the local government, “so might once the unhappy negro in the center of Alabama [may perhaps again] apply to a white justice of the peace against his master!” Likewise, the Turkish rulers suffered under “the curse which slavery brought upon our Southern slavocrats; to wit, the power to make other men do their sweating.” 78 To those who thought Crete too distant to be of interest, Harper’s Weekly countered that many had once felt similarly about southern slavery. 79 If the Cretan rebels were made familiar through analogies, the “Turks” became only more different. The Cretan routinely equated the “Turks,” with their allegedly insatiable lusts and disregard for the family, with Mormons. 80 It claimed, for example, that “The English Government, the quondam champion of the slave Confederacy, sees fit to be also the champion of a Mormon Empire.” 81 And The Cretan could only hope that America would cease indirect support for the “Mohammedan and Mormon slavocrats in the east” as it had its support for the “Southern slavocrats.” 82 Comparisons to Native Americans also 19 worked to bring Cretan conditions home. When explaining how the “barbarous nature of Turkish warfare” had produced so many Cretan refugees, S. G. Howe noted that, “Even the Polish peasant did not thus fly before Russian armies; and the only parallel is to be found among barbarians, or savages on our own frontier.” 83 Paradoxically, even while these analogies blurred the distinction between things “foreign” and “domestic,” they reaffirmed the Republican’s sense of national mission. These Republicans ardently believed that the extension of their “American” institutions and values was a humanitarian cause. Not surprisingly, the spirit of this Republican liberal nationalism found zealous expression in The Cretan. As it said of Cretan refugees at temporary, American-run schools in Greece: they will be imbued to some extent with American ideas. Every scholar will grow up with a knowledge of, and partiality for, our people and for our institutions. They will be half Americans. They will be native missionaries from this generation to succeeding ones. 84 A flyer addressed to “the people of the United States” by one “New York National Reconstruction Club” went further still (see Image 3). Following the not uncommon practice of referring to Crete by its old Venetian name Candia, it urged the United States to acquire the island. Doing so would provide a naval and commercial outpost in the Levant, which, the flyer argued, would soon be largely free from Ottoman control. Acquisition of the island, however, would also mean a territory “in which we may establish 20 American Institutions.” Believing erroneously that the Ottoman government could not defeat the insurrection, the Club asserted that the Porte would be glad to sell the island. “Let us acquire Candia,” the flyer confidently suggested, “our commerce requires it, our mission among the Nations demands it.” 85 ______ Democrats, North and South, also interpreted the Cretan Insurrection, and particularly Republican interest in it. The Constitution of Atlanta, the New York World, the Richmond Enquirer and Sentinel, and the Daily Memphis Avalanche were among those who challenged Republican understandings of the insurrection. For Democrats, Crete became a means of expressing both their sectional grievances – particularly against Radical Republicans – and a rival strain of nationalism that wedded freedom to a rigid and pronounced understanding of race. While Republicans no doubt harbored racial prejudices, race itself remained loosely defined and largely latent in their discussion of the insurrection. For Democrats, in contrast, race signified the irrevocable superiority of specific peoples and the obligations of northerners to their fellow “whites” in the South. The Constitution was a particularly spirited critic, focusing its derision on “Yankee” humanitarian sympathy. When Charles Sumner introduced a congressional resolution expressing sympathy for the Greek Orthodox Cretans, The Constitution described his foreign relations committee as having, “resolved itself into a universal sympathetic society.” The “Radical party,” it further complained, “sheds tears over the down-trodden everywhere, and its wailings for 21 the distressed go forth into the uttermost parts of the earth.” The Constitution lamented that underlying this sympathy was a belief that, “all are bound by a common brotherhood.” “No stretch of distance,” argued The Constitution, “can annihilate [the Radical party’s] tender feelings for suffering humanity.” 86 The Constitution further claimed that Radical Republican sympathy for the Cretan Insurrection stemmed from moralistic arrogance. At the heart of the Radicals’ “transcendental faith” was its claim “to be the missionary through which the world shall be converted from heathenism to its progressive ideas.” 87 Boston, home of the Howes, attracted a heavy dose of criticism. She was, claimed The Constitution, “the center of this great moral solar system,” and “arrogates to herself the lead in all schemes” to uplift the oppressed people of the world. 88 As The Constitution described it, Boston’s perspective was that, “she being the center of the universe, all must obey.” 89 The New York World also criticized what it saw as the self-righteous grandstanding of the local “Cretan Committee.” It suggested that the committee forgo the cause of Crete and instead raise funds to save a group of now-destitute missionary settlers who had left Maine for Palestine in 1866. While mocking the settlers as “Main-iacs who left the land of lumber” only to demonstrate the falsehood of northern self-sufficiency, the New York World still believed that as fellow white Americans, the “Main-iacs” were deserving of aid. The World, however, doubted that Republicans would take up an issue that was “not a tempting one for orators…” 90 Similarly, the World noted over a year later that if Bostonians were “half as much in love with truth as themselves” they would perhaps recognize the complexity and dangers of the insurrection. 91 22 Democrats further alleged that the actions of Republicans were hypocritical. Most obviously, they now supported an act of rebellion. After explaining to its readers that Boston was now home to “a paper devoted to the cause of the rebel Cretans,” The Constitution cautioned its readers not to be “startled.” Even “cold and stoic Boston,” The Constitution explained with heavy derision, “has a heart; and even rebels are touching it to tenderness and tears.” 92 Like Republicans, Democrats explained Crete through analogies to their domestic experiences. The New York World, for one, suggested that, “Being copperheads in respect to Crete,” Republicans sympathizers should “show consistent courage in their opinions, and become copperheads also in respect to the South.” 93 For Democrats the perceived hypocrisy ran deeper still, for Republicans not only sympathized with rebels, but did so despite their domination of the South, which purportedly matched and exceeded Turkish tyranny and cruelty. The Daily Memphis Avalanche was sure that even the radicals of the North could not honestly expect the rest of the world to ignore “the fact that the North is doing to the South of this country just what Turkey is trying to do to Greece.” Like Turkey, claimed the Avalanche, the North sought to “strip a gallant race of the rights of self-government” and impose its own ideas at bayonet point. 94 The New York World mocked the Republicans' attempts to get Americans “to discriminate in a question of legitimate rule between New Englanders in black satin waistcoats holding sway in Washington, and Turks in green silk Turbans exercising dominion at Constantinople.” 95 The Richmond Enquirer & Sentinel, went further to allege that, despite all the “usual gabble about the inhumanity of Russia to the 23 Poles, the Turks towards the Greeks and the Cretans, &c., &c.” only the Radicals had been so cruel as to surrender a conquered people to mercies of their former slaves. 96 Democrats claimed that they, and not Republicans, shared a bond with the Cretan rebels. Responding to the call for aid from The Cretan, The Constitution noted that southerners could not help but sympathize with the Cretans, for “Their condition is too much like our own.” Both had fought long, brutal wars for their independence, and both remained under the control of another power. Referring to a Turkish military commander in Crete, The Constitution asserted that, “A dozen or so Oma Pachas came upon us from their Turkish strong-holds, a few years since, with fire and sword, reducing us to skin and bones, until we languish in our native nudity.” 97 And surely, The Constitution surmised, the Senate’s statement of sympathy would meet with disregard from the Ottoman Empire. Turkey would no doubt “delicately direct the attention as well as the sympathies of Mr. Sumner” to the South. For it was in Sumner’s own country, claimed The Constitution, where “insults and outrages, tyrannies and oppressions of which the Crete [sic] never dreamed” continued. The New York World went even further once the Ottoman Empire offered the Cretan rebels clemency in mid 1868. “In what striking contrast is this action of the Grand Turk,” exclaimed the World, “to that of the Rump Congress with their insurrection.” 98 Of particular concern to Democrats was the seeming disregard of Republicans, especially Radicals, for racial hierarchies. 99 Democrats, in fact, ignored Republican prejudices and conflated liberal nationalism with racial 24 egalitarianism. 100 According to The Constitution, Boston’s “generous nature was such” that she anticipated “that period when some of the lower orders of being, through her benign influences, shall assume a place in the family of man.” 101 The Constitution was convinced that this “meddlesome disposition of the Radical” underlay interest in both the Cretan Insurrection and the Reconstruction of the South. The Constitution described how, “Whilst expressing in one breath the canting, sycophantic sympathy for the [sic] poor Crete, in the very next they propose a dark and damning scheme for the introduction of civil war in the South, by the arming of negroes against the whites.” The Radicals, it seemed, would continue to interfere with racial hierarchies until they made “the chain of brotherhood universal” and gathered “into its welded links all the different races of men, giving them the same cast, language, law, government.” 102 For Democrats, Republican sympathy for Crete was most aggravating because it underscored this lack of racial fidelity. In contrast to Ottoman rule of Crete, The Constitution stressed that southern whites suffered from wrongs that were “offered to, visited upon, and erected over a people of the same race” as and “kindred in tongue” with their oppressors. 103 The Daily Memphis Avalanche decried how the same people “who would enslave eight millions of their own race and color in order to control the votes of three millions of blacks who know nothing of liberty… are shedding tears over the struggle of Greece!” 104 Similarly, the New York World, in reference to those “Main-iac” settlers in Palestine, stated its suspicion that Radicals in Congress would not come to their aid precisely because the missionaries were white. 105 In reply to Republican liberal 25 nationalism, Southern whites and Democrats invoked the ideas of a nation bounded fundamentally not only by ideals, but also by race. Crete became a powerful metaphor in Democratic interpretations of the United States and their place in it. It allowed Democrats to lament the destruction of the Old South while deriding what they understood to be contradictory and self-righteous nationalism of Republicans, especially Radicals. Democrats believed, moreover, that the Republican desire to remake the South in accordance with its own ideals reflected an ideology whose boundless ambitions were clearly evident in sympathy for Crete. Most worrisome to Democrats was the apparent Republican disregard for the racial hierarchy that was the foundation of southern social order, Democratic identity, and – according to the Democratic press – the nation. The sense of betrayal was intense enough that The Constitution felt it could justly “warn” Bostonians that “as their eyes wander sorrowfully and their hearts heave pathetically towards the distant Cretes [sic],” they should “remember, occasionally, their own self-created Crete in our midst.” 106 _____ The Civil War left a profound faith among many Republicans that the United States was now a nation embodying the twin liberal goals of freedom and progress. Far from asserting that different peoples might pursue these in distinctive ways, post-bellum Republicans assumed that their institutions and values exemplified “civilization.” As their interest in the Cretan Insurrection demonstrates, these beliefs impelled Republicans to understand developments in the South, the nation, and the world as part of a larger struggle against the cruel, 26 hierarchical, and retrogressive forces of “barbarism.” Republicans, moreover, did not merely describe the insurrection in the same language that they used to criticize domestic “barbarisms”: they made the connection explicit. Comparisons between the alleged characteristics of “Turks,” southern slaveholders, Native Americans, Mormon polygamists, and European imperialist, elaborated Republican notions of what it meant to be “civilized” and therefore, “American.” From Republican interest in Crete we can only speculate on the broader implications regarding the period of Reconstruction. Yet it is worth noting that Republican concern for “barbarism” abroad – and no doubt out West – could both reinforce the values underlying efforts to reconstruct the South and provide alternative outlets for those energies. Though the Republican Party was founded in large part as an antislavery party, its underlying values did not limit the attention of its supporters to the South. With the right circumstances, Republican attention could wander without jeopardizing their sense of mission. For many Republicans, moreover, confrontations with racially-othered barbarians likely proved easy to digest. Democrats countered Republicans by asserting their own sympathy for the Cretan Insurrection. In the process, they claimed that the United States was a country dedicated to liberty but defined by race. In their interpretation, the Greek Orthodox Cretans and the former Confederates were racially superior rebels who sought freedom from the imperious sway of outsiders. For Democrats, however, the former Confederates faced a more galling situation because their oppressors were supposedly people of the same race and nation. Worse still, in the 27 Democratic interpretation, these northerners forsook southern whites precisely for the sake of uplifting and empowering an inferior race. Democrats, like Republicans, found in Crete the means to articulate and affirm their understanding their nation and their place in it. Reconstruction has long been studied as unfolding entirely within the eastern United States. Certainly, the longstanding focus on plantations, southern counties, eastern states, and Washington, D.C. has brought to the fore many of the pivotal battlegrounds in the changing social, political, and economic order in America. Yet, contemporaries, for all their focus on conflicts within and between the North and the South, never questioned the existence of nor abandoned their focus on national identity. Though these ongoing discussions about “America” were quintessentially domestic, they also motivated a constant concern over the proper relationship with foreign peoples, places, and states. 28