Chapter III

The English-speaking American colonies developed in comparative peace and tranquillity, except for Indian wars on the frontier, internal religious quarrels, and difficulties with their own harvests down to the close of the Puritan Revolution in England and the accession of Charles II in 1660. During the whole reign of Charles I, and later under Cromwell, the internal difficulties of the English State were so great, that no further attempts were made to interfere with the gradual growth of the colonies, or to check the spread of self-government. During the same period, Russia passed through its first and most terrible internal crisis; a crisis always to be known later as “the time of troubles,” and which was destined to fix immutably the political foundations of the country as an independent state.

The aim of Ivan the Terrible was, as we have seen, to throw off the grip that Poland and Sweden held on the Baltic; and to destroy the power of Lithuania, which still, in alliance with a band of freebooters, the Zaporogian Cossacks, held fast to the outlets of the Dnieper in the Black Sea. There was also danger from the Tartars of the Crimea, which must be reckoned with. Russia was therefore committed to war on three of four sides; only on the side of Siberia could Moscow’s sway be carried peacefully beyond the Urals. Ivan, as we have seen, was checked in his ambitions to free the shores of the Baltic, though he won notable victories in the Crimea, opening up the Caspian, and overrunning a great deal of Siberia. But his chief troubles were internal, and sprang from the feudal organization which had hitherto supported the Princes of Muscovy on their thrones.

The chief powers, next to the Czar himself, were the great landowning nobles, the boyars. It was this class alone that could vote taxes, support campaigns with their serfs, send their sons to take part in the state service. It was this class that now began to behave as the corresponding class had done centuries before them in Western Europe. They more and more attempted to put a check upon the power that was falling into Ivan’s hands. The Czar of Muscovy had, unfortunately, no middle class or merchant class to fall back upon, and so was forced either to trust the boyars or no one. The example of Poland was always before Ivan’s eyes. That warlike and once powerful kingdom was continually sinking into anarchy and impotence, thanks to the greed and independence of its gentry. After every reign there had followed an interregnum, and the kingship was so shorn of power that it practically had none left except that of punishing criminals, and making war. Several of Ivan’s leading nobles, suspicious of his growing autocracy, were now tempted into leaning towards Poland; and many of the former independent cities, notably Novgorod, were going in the same way. The fruits of freedom were becoming tempting to the Russians now that they had lost them. In this situation Ivan struck, and struck hard with such effect that his reign was ever after remembered as a time of terror. He established a secret police, chosen and paid by him personally, who were sworn to support the Czar at the cost of their lives, and by this means, systematically destroyed all the boyars who showed signs of independence. Tortures, murders, spyings, assassinations were the order of the day. Even the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, venerated in Russia as no man, protested against the régime of terror that Ivan set up, but paid for his protest with his life.

Unfortunately, Ivan’s system proved workable only so long as there was a strong and ruthlessly determined man at the head of affairs to control it. As he left no successor, the leading boyars at his death decided to offer the control of affairs to one of their number, Boris Godunov. Boris was undoubtedly as suspicious of their power as Ivan had been, but utterly unable to do without it, and so the country rapidly fell into a condition of internal revolt directed and engineered from Poland. During the period of utter anarchy that followed, Poland might have acquired complete control over Russian affairs, had it not been for internal jealousies among the boyars themselves, and for the attitude of the Orthodox Church, which obscurely sensed and supported the popular demand for a Russian Czar, born in Russia. After Polish forces had vainly besieged the Kremlin itself, after Swedish troops had been called in to restore order, after the country had been overrun by looting bands of Don Cossacks from one end to the other, in 1613 there came at last peace. The boyars sank their differences sufficiently to elect Michael Romanov to the throne, and the influence of Poland, always hated and loathed by the Russians, came to an end.

During these years, and increasingly under the first years of the new Romanov dynasty, the chief social phenomenon in Russia was the growth of serfdom. Serfdom had always existed, undisturbed from the Middle Ages, on the estates of the great landowners. These estates were continually increasing, as Ivan himself followed the policy of making enormous grants of crown land and peasants to the gentry he favoured. But as the country expanded and pushed its way over the Urals to Siberia, and into the Crimea to the Caspian, it became common for serfs to seek relief from intolerable conditions and burdens by escaping eastwards into freedom. This process became chronic throughout “the time of troubles.” Instead of fighting for some of the numberless pretenders of the time, or waiting to be ravaged by the Cossacks, the serfs simply abandoned their estates and went off to the frontier. Every Czar during “the time of troubles” attempted to deal with this problem. Strong decrees forbade the transfer of serfs from any of the estates of the Church, the Crown, or the Service gentry. Still stronger decrees made flight a criminal offence to be punished by lashing and branding; at first five years were given as a time-limit during which runaways could be hunted out, then ten, finally in 1646 the time-limit was abolished, and any fugitive became an outlaw. Meantime the practice of selling peasants apart from the estate, simply went on despite the law against it, and had finally to be legalised in 1675. The peasant had no power of redress, being forbidden to bring any complaint against his master except that of state treason; the master could beat him, starve him, force him to work like a dog for the state taxes, which were continually increasing, and he must still submit. The process was not the same as slavery, but was clearly even more cruel in its effects than slavery. A bad crop, an epidemic, or an outbreak of trouble among the rebellious Cossacks of the Southeast frontier was enough to literally ruin thousands of peasants. And since the peasant could not fly without becoming an outlaw, the subsequent history of Russia down to the nineteenth century is punctuated with constant and perpetual serf rebellions and peasant risings.

The Russian government system of degrading its own independent peasantry down to the level of chattel slaves, was closely paralleled by the gradual growth of a dependent slave class within the nominally free American colonies. Negro slaves were brought into the Virginia Colony as early as 1619. Without their aid it is probable that the great tobacco plantations could not have been run at a profit. But the rapid extension of territory which tobacco-planting entailed led to the first outbreak of revolutionary class war in America in 1676. The occasion was an outbreak of trouble with the Indians on the northern frontier, which by that time had reached the Potomac. A rising of the Susquehannahs led to a demand on the part of the colonists for an armed force to destroy the Indians. The Governor, Berkeley, refused and proposed to build forts. But the colonists under Nathaniel Bacon simply refused to obey; and this struggle soon became a conflict between the old conservative and royalist landowning gentry and the newly arrived poorer settlers of the frontier. It was quelled; but over-production of tobacco in the years that followed led to much burning of tobacco, and a gradual transformation of Virginia, the most English in spirit of all the colonies, into a revolutionary democracy. In the Carolinas, where rice and cotton became the chief crops, negro slavery flourished better; and with the spread of American territory into the Mississippi Valley, it became rooted as an institution, despite the fact that, theoretically, it was in conflict with the spirit of the people.

The New England colonies on their part did not need any urging to become thoroughly rebellious to England’s authority. Charles II on his return to the throne in 1660 had already concluded to make them more amenable to the common usages of England. These usages comprised a respect for the established church, which had never been recognized in Massachusetts, and toleration for the Quakers (whom Charles personally favoured) who had been repeatedly fined, whipped, and made to suffer banishment at the hands of the sectaries of Boston. In 1676 Charles’ agent, Randolph, recommended that the Massachusetts charter be declared forfeit. This was done in 1684, and all the New England charters followed suit. Charles died before he could show the full scope of his intentions, but under James II, the whole of the New England region, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut fell under the sway of a single governor, who was to rule without an assembly, with the aid of a council. A meeting house in Boston was to be set apart for the Church of England. The governor whom James appointed, Andros, met with opposition from the outset. The people refused to pay the taxes which their own old assemblies had voted, now that they were demanded by Andros acting alone. Rebellion was rampant throughout New England and in New York, where Andros governed through a deputy, Francis Nicholson. The rebellion came to a head when in November 1688 the government of James II fell in England itself, and was succeeded by that of William of Orange, in which the Parliament and the Whig party of the middle class finally triumphed over the old loyal aristocracy. From that time on, the American colonies were resolutely bent on self-government, and in New England and Virginia at least, on pushing back the Indians, and gaining control of the interior, in which the French were now hoping to build up a great overseas empire. Between them lay the recently founded colony of Pennsylvania which alone, through the Quakers, took up a pacific attitude towards England. Southwards there was more loyalty in the newly-founded Carolinas; but there was also a semi-feudal agrarian society that, sooner or later, would challenge the North.

2

We have now come to the year 1688, which marks a turning point in American Colonial History, with the advent of the Whig oligarchy founded by the mercantile class, and supported by William III and the new House of Orange. In the same year, or a little later, Peter the Great who had been nominally ruler of Russia since 1682, finally got the power in his hands, by crushing the Streltsy and exiling the Regent. Henceforth the two countries were to run their course of development side by side.

It may be that the kind of reader whose mind is absorbed in statistics, will here object: “There is really no parallel between a few insignificant English-speaking colonies, planted on the far side of the Atlantic, and consisting in 1690 of only two hundred thousand souls, with a frontier running only fifty miles away from the seaboard, and the older, more populous, if largely unformed realm of Muscovy.” But history teaches that the mere size of a country has nothing whatever to do with its importance in the story of human development. If size and power to wage war were the sole criterion of importance, the Roman Empire might logically be considered as having given more to humanity at large than the whole of Ancient Greece and Judea. We know that this is not so. Ancient Greece and Judea were each in their way more spiritually important than Rome for the original ideas that they gave to the common stock; and already in America, as in Russia, an original idea was at work, which was profoundly to influence Europe. It is as creators of new values that these two countries should be studied and understood by the historian; not as economic, geographic, and political entities. If we consider them purely under the latter heading, they have been of somewhat less importance to Europe and the world at large, than the South American Republics.

The years that had passed in Russia since 1613, when the Romanov line first came to power, up to Peter’s full accession in 1689, were important chiefly as witnessing a fresh consolidation of power about the representatives of this new dynasty. Poland, which had been the chief enemy, pursued its path of disintegration into its component atoms, under the feudal system still in vogue. It was nominally ruled by an assembly of its gentry, which had the power of electing the King. Unfortunately the decisions of this national assembly had to be unanimous. In case the national assembly disagreed with any one of the delegates from the innumerable local assemblies, the delegate in question could interpose a free veto on any decision taken. The minority had also the right of combining for the sake of resistance against the majority, with the result that the whole country was continually racked by threats of civil war. Poland in short had carried the principle of feudal rights out to their logical end in a complete states’ rights government. It was in the same unhappy position as the American colonies themselves, in regard to its own central government, but unlike the American colonies, it had no body of independent merchants to fall back upon as a rallying point in its internal struggle. It consisted of nothing but the great landed proprietors who had become separate military establishments, intensely jealous of each other, and the peasants, who were in a worse condition even than the Russian peasants, inasmuch as their masters had full control of their labour, could parade them for extra work, could force them to buy their necessaries from them, refused their rights to make contracts, fixed their wages, and had over them the absolute power of life and death. All export trade was in the hands of the gentry and all rights of sitting in the local and national assemblies. The only exceptions were the despised Jews who had become the money-lending class, and were equally hated of noblemen and peasants.

Against decaying Poland, Russia had step by step built up a great empire. But the Empire was worthless to her, unless she could obtain foreign tools and arms, trade and an outlet to the sea. Under the Romanovs the first great efforts were made to acquire these essentials. Arms were imported, first from Sweden, later from Germany. A whole colony of Saxons, Dutchmen, and other foreign artisans were brought to Moscow and established in the so-called German Suburb. In 1647 a western system of drill was introduced and foreign instructors were brought in to train Russian regiments. Articles of western luxury made their appearance: clocks, velvets, stone houses to replace wooden huts, schools, and theatres which gave plays in foreign languages. But transport was still difficult, bad, and toilsome, much in the same condition as it was and remained on the American continent up to the advent of the Industrial Revolution in 1840. The only difference was that the American colonies lay far apart, settled in river valleys running down to the coast, and separated by great stretches of uninhabited country, whereas in Russia, Moscow was still at the centre of affairs. The result was that in America’s case, each colony lived largely on its own specific products. Cotton and rice came from the Carolinas, tobacco from Maryland and Virginia, iron from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, furs from New York, fish and pine timber from New England. Trade abroad was more important than trade at home. In Russia the whole volume of trade--Siberian minerals and furs, Volga grain, Baltic pine, Persian carpets,--rolled and ebbed through the single heart of Moscow and its outlying city-states, bound together not by roads but by rivers.

In neither country was there anything resembling a system of education, or any independent development towards general culture. In this respect indeed the American colonies for all their inferiority in numbers and scale, were ahead of the Russians. The Old Church Slavonic, which was for conversational or writing purposes totally dead, was still used for all Church services. The ecclesiastics were almost the only learned class, and the attempts of the Romanovs to reform the Church books merely led to the violent schism of the “old believers” who came to hold Peter himself as the Antichrist. The educated classes aimed to speak German or French, and despised their own language. Schools there were none, and most education was to be sought abroad. In the American Colonies, on the other hand, the desire for native education manifested itself early. Harvard College was incorporated as early as 1650; in Virginia, William and Mary followed in 1693; Yale in 1701. True, this education in the colonies had for the most part been inaugurated for the sole purpose of training candidates for the ministry, and had a strongly Puritan and theological tinge; but most Americans at least acquired an ability to speak and write good English, and some smattering of Latin.

Meantime, in both countries, the throes of establishment were safely over, and the first great expansion of effort rapidly followed. The expansion was an expansion of land surface and population in America; the latter increasing from two hundred thousand in 1690 to one and a half millions in 1760. In Russia it was an immense expansion of power, reacting on everyone from the Czar to the humblest serf. Peter himself was, after Ivan the Terrible, the first great military leader the Russians discovered, and he made good at last the claim to the Baltic, and therefore to the open sea, against the country that was now, under the successors of Gustavus Adolphus, mistress of that ocean: Sweden. Meantime, in America, the colonies were not allowed to settle back into complete enjoyment of their local liberties, won and ratified by King William’s Government. During the next sixty years (1690-1750) they were to take part in no less than four wars, each waged against the power that had succeeded in penetrating further than any other into the true heart of the American continent: France.

From the time that Champlain in 1603 had come into the St. Lawrence Valley and had established Quebec as a trading post controlling the furs of this region, down to the settlement of the mouth of the Mississippi in 1718, and the later establishment of St. Louis and Natchez as trading posts controlling the traffic of the great interior valley, the French had been by far the most active power in the exploring of the interior of the American continent. In contrast with the English who had clung conservatively to the seaboard, they had boldly penetrated the very heart of the country; in contrast with the Spanish who had cared for nothing but the evidences of mineral wealth, and had ruthlessly warred upon and decimated the Indians, the French had attempted to live on terms of friendship with the native tribes, and had sought for the basis of their sway in the great wealth of fish, furs, and game the country possessed. The St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi had each in turn felt the impress of the French effort, and had there been any fever of colonization to back the hardihood of the French explorers, traders, and Jesuit missionaries, it is possible that to-day the French language, rather than the English tongue, might be the common speech over most of the United States. Unfortunately there was little disposition on the part of the French people to migrate to the new world. A mere meagre handful, some three thousand in all, including the fisheries of Nova Scotia, held the whole of Canada in 1660; in 1750 about six thousand persons inhabited the whole Louisiana territory. The French could not be induced to come and settle in the newly discovered territory; their own local instincts of traditional loyalty to their provinces, and their own internal stability, which have made of France the most economically self-contained country in Europe, forbade. But the mere existence of French trading posts throughout the St. Lawrence and Great Lake territory, the vague but shadowy grip that France had established upon the whole hinterland of the American continent, frightened King William and his ministers, and coincided with their determination to break the contemporaneous claim of France to leadership in Europe itself. There resulted the wars called King William’s War, 1690-1697, Queen Anne’s War, 1701-1713, King George’s War, 1745-1748, and the great French and Indian War which beginning in 1753 ended with the complete annihilation of all of France’s dreams of foreign empire in the Treaty of Paris of February 1763.

The outcome of all these struggles was to leave the English masters of the American continent from the Gulf of Mexico to Labrador and westward to the Mississippi, including in their domain the chain of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence basin. France retired from the American continent, leaving Spain--who had vainly allied herself with her in order to stop the English from invading Florida,--to keep a shadowy tenure on the western bank of the Mississippi. During the last phases of this conflict, the first great series of wars, except for Indian campaigns, waged on the American continent, Pennsylvania which had hitherto been pacific under the Quaker ascendancy, ranked itself alongside of the other colonies in the effort to break the French grip upon the headwaters of the Ohio. This was accomplished thanks largely to the persistence of one man, Benjamin Franklin. Meantime, Virginia had shown that in a young officer of militia, George Washington, it possessed a notable Indian fighter. Each colony in turn had raised a local militia to carry on the struggle to its triumphant success. Thus England had at last, through the alliance with the newly-born kingdom of Prussia, triumphed over France, destroyed her fleet, and succeeded in shaking off her hold on India as well as America. But in order to do this England had created something that was to be of the utmost danger to her as time went on. She had created American solidarity. Exactly as Peter the Great by his personal effort, created Russian solidarity.

3

The subsequent history of both countries moves along the lines we have already been tracing. Peter the Great’s most important achievement was not so much his successful wars against Sweden and Turkey, nor his establishment, as “a window looking on Europe,” of a new capital on the shores of the Baltic, but the creation of a new state-bureaucracy to take the place of the dominance of the old nobility, a state-bureaucracy bound by self-interest to support his system, and which completed its task by assimilating the old Orthodox Russian Church (which had hitherto been independent, under its own Patriarch) into the state-machine, under the direct control of a Procurator of the Holy Synod. By this act, Peter destroyed the last possibility of a moral opposition to his rule, and fixed the system of autocracy beyond possibility of change as the only political form possible to Russia, subject solely to the chance that his successors might not possess the same force of character that he had displayed. Peter, in short, assimilated European statecraft, only to become more powerful than Europe. Meanwhile the American colonies, separated completely from each other by large tracts of waste country, and still more separated by differences of soil, religion, and social organization, found a rallying point in the feeling that the great western territory west of the Appalachians was to be theirs, and were, at the same time, provided by England with a force not only to conquer it but to assert their own independence, in the shape of a local militia. This force removed the last hope that England could hold the country by a display of military power, inasmuch as in New England, where the administrative centre was the township, the militia could be turned out at a moment’s notice. Henceforth the South, whose administrative unit was the county, dropped back in the race for the supreme headship of the American continent. England, by creating a New England, had sown the seeds of her own downfall.

During the years that followed, while the great Virginia planters were living on enormous feudal estates, worked by small armies of slaves, and disregarding or despising the fringe of poorer squatters and settlers that to westward were already pushing across the Appalachians, the New England merchants and backwoodsmen were engaged in a struggle with England that went on for years before exploding in an outbreak of open revolution. The first phase of the struggle was over the Navigation Acts, whereby England after 1650 had striven to control the growing trade with the Colonies. By the most severe of these Acts nothing could be shipped in or out of the Colonies except by English or Colonial vessels, and the Colonies themselves were forbidden to trade with any other power except England. This prohibition did not affect the Southern planter aristocracy, inasmuch as they had no manufactures, and no shipping, and sent out their agricultural products mainly and regularly in English vessels to England, obtaining therefrom, even in Washington’s day, their clothes, tools, and equipment. But the New England colonies, unagricultural and mercantile, opposed the Navigation Acts, necessarily. They had already become shipbuilding powers, and regularly exported enormous quantities of dried fish to Spain, Portugal, the West Indies, obtaining in return quantities of Spanish-grown cane sugar to be turned into New England rum, which again was exchanged for slaves in Africa, tea in China, silks and spices in the East. New England was growing into a competitive shipping and mercantile power alongside of England, so the Navigation Acts were continually being evaded in the Northern Colonies. The second phase of colonial opposition arose over taxation, notably over the taxation of tea which particularly affected the Northern Colonies. The story of the Boston Tea Party is too well known for me to have to refer to it. The last phase arose over the general bureaucratic meddling with the affairs of the colonies, expressed in the Stamp Act. In all these underground struggles, the New England Colonies took the lead, with the Southerners a bad second, and it is from this date that we must look to the New Englanders with their completely commercial morality, their Yankee cunning, and their fanatic dissenting Puritanism, as most expressive of the direction in which America was travelling.

Thus while the drift of American sentiment gradually coalesced and hardened against England, more and more strayed from the ordered control of the Virginia planter aristocracy to the radical experimentalism of the New England merchant group, the drift of Russian sentiment was hardening in favour of Peter’s foreign-modelled civil service and military establishment. In both cases a radical and arbitrary minority was beginning to control the sluggish and conservative majority. Underground, in South Russia particularly, smouldered the popular feeling against the innovations of Peter and his successors. It could do nothing because it lacked the weapons wherewith to fight. Peter had taken good care to keep the army loyal to him. But during Peter’s reign it burst out in the revolt of the Old Believers; and in Catherine the Great’s period, which covered the years when the American Colonies made their successful stand against England, it exploded on the south-east Volga frontier among the Cossacks, in the open class-war rebellion of Pugachev. Both Russia and America came into power by building up systems of government that rested upon a profound inner dualism. The dualism in America came from a struggle between the aristocratic, agrarian, and conservative South, and the democratic, mercantile, and independently-minded North and East. In Russia it sprang from the opposition between the brilliant and sceptical state-machine, pursuing its warlike ambitions even further into Europe, and the inert, superstitious mass of the peasantry, particularly of the lower Volga region, which was groaning under the weight of taxes necessary to keep the state-service going, and unable--thanks to serfdom--to retaliate except by open rebellion.

We have already pointed out that there exists a parallel between Egypt and Babylonia, in Russia and America. Here again that parallel must be alluded to. As in Babylonia, the state-religion was at the outset composed of a series of regional cults, only welded later by military force into the universal worship of the central Babylonian sun-and-war-god Marduk, so in Russia the force of dissenting regional sentiment contended against the deliberate state-policy of making the Czar central autocrat of all the Russias and sole head of the Church. As in Egypt, the religious struggle was between the sun-god, Ra of the North, whose symbol was a golden disk, and the vegetation-god, Osiris of the South, whose symbol was the tree of life, so in America there was always tension between the agricultural South and the industrial, gold-worshipping North. Russia could only keep going so long as the Czar was victorious; America could only keep going so long as the two divergent sections of its people fused into one. Unless we keep these differences in mind we cannot understand either country. And it is only by meditating upon them that we can fully understand all the world-transformations that were historically to come into being from the creation of Russia and the United States.

The process that we have been following culminated in Catherine the Great and in Washington. These two historical and contemporary figures not only represent immense landmarks in human history, but are symbolical for long into the future, up to the threshold even of our own day, of the power that is Russia, and is America. In studying them as completely representative of the inner development we have been following, we become witnesses of a phenomenon not common to human history; the rise of two cultures side by side. This had happened before in antiquity in the parallel growth of the Babylonian-Assyrian and the Egyptian civilisations, which were, like Russia and America in later times, river countries, and which were divided by the land-bridge of Palestine and the Arab peninsula from each other. The later powers, Russia and America, faced each other across the whole world, and where Russia depended upon Europe for intellectual leadership, arms and appliances, America depended on Europe for physical support, and eventually for political independence itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the period we have now to study; the period of Catherine in Russia, of Washington in America. Where Catherine interested herself at the outset of her reign in Voltaire and Rousseau, wrote plays herself in the French vein, was a brilliant leader of theoretical intellectualism, many-sided and fascinating at the outset, and ended as an ageing tyrant; Washington, the typical American of his time, was a plain, blunt, country squire, intensely practical, not particularly brilliant, with but one idea in his mind, the free expansion of the colonies westward, who, despite himself, was dragged into the current of Rousseauism and Voltairism practised by such spirits as Paine and Jefferson, and ended as a retired moderate and a private citizen. No more startling divergence could be found between countries so similar geographically and climatically. There is something even more interesting, psychologically and symbolically, in the fact that Catherine the Great was a woman who had begun as a needy adventuress without a drop of Russian blood in her veins, while Washington was a man who began as a wealthy landowner of the most conservative and long-rooted Virginian aristocracy. In both cases, the situation found the one figure that could control it. In order to conquer Europe, Russia had to find someone relentlessly efficient, utterly unsentimental, theoretically advanced, but so profoundly imbued with the desire to increase personal prestige as to be unwilling to bate a jot of power; this was Catherine. In order to prevent the separation from Europe from becoming a mere revulsion to anarchic chaos, America had to find someone broad-mindedly tolerant, aristocratically reserved, practical in outlook, so steady of purpose as never to be swayed by any personal misfortune. This was Washington. Catherine’s reign (1762-1796) led to the final destruction of Poland, brilliant military victories over Turkey, terrible peasant misery at home, and the establishment of Russia as the greatest military power threatening the whole of Europe; Washington’s period of ascendency as General and President (1776-1797) led to complete independence from England, immense expansion westwards, an ever-widening rift between the agricultural South and the commercial North, and the final establishment of America as a power completely isolated, and determined to seek no further “world-entanglements,” but to create its own political destiny.