Chapter 52: Making Modern War
In this episode, we talk about the super-deadly conflicts that happened between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions: The Crimean War, the U.S. Civil War, the Paraguayan War, and the Taiping Rebellion.
Sources for this episode include:
Andrews, Crispin. “Crimea - the first modern war.” Engineering and Technology. Oct 14, 2013. https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2013/10/crimea-the-first-modern-war
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Vintage. 2014.
Bektas Yakup. “The Crimean War as a technological enterprise.” The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. February 1, 2017. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0007
Browning Jr., Robert M. “‘Damn the Torpedoes.’” Naval History Magazine. July 2014. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2014/july/damn-torpedoes
The Civil War. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ric Burns. Directed by Ken Burns. PBS. 1990.
The Crimean War. Directed by Mick Gold. Total Content Digital. 2018.
Gugliotta, Guy. “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll.” The New York Times. April 2, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html
Littell, John B. “Missionaries and Politics in China--The Taiping Rebellion.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 1928, pp. 566–599.
Martin, Justin. Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted - Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park. Da Capo Press. 2011.
McNeill, William H. “The Industrialization of War.” Review of International Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 1982, pp. 203–213.
Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. PublicAffairs. 2012.
Pastore, Mario. “State-Led Industrialisation: The Evidence on Paraguay, 1852-1870.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 1994, pp. 295–324.
Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. Alfred A. Knopf. 2012.
“Sickness in the Ranks.” Science Museum. May 13, 2019. https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/sickness-ranks
Spence, Jonathan. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. HarperCollins. 1996.
Stewart, Terry. “The Second Opium War”. Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Second-Opium-War/
“The Age of Revolution.” The Story of China. Episode 6. Presented by Michael Wood. BBC Two. 2017.
“The Taiping Rebellion” In Our Time: History. BBC Radio 4. February 23, 2011.
“This Day in History: The destruction of Atlanta begins.” HISTORY. November 13, 2009. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-destruction-of-atlanta-begins
Trager, Glenn A. “Loosing the Dragon: Charismatic Legal Action and the Construction of the Taiping Legal Order.” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 339–367.
Warren, Harris Gaylord. “The Paraguayan Image of the War of the Triple Alliance.” The Americas, vol. 19, no. 1, 1962, pp. 3–20.
Wolf, Luke. “Show 24: The Paraguayan War and the Battle of Tuyutí.” Battlecast. December 30, 2018.
Wolf, Luke. “Show 25: War to the Knife - the Paraguayan War II.” Battlecast. January 30, 2019.
Full Transcript
Reminder: Footnotes and an ad-free stream are available to our Patreon supporters. To sign up, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod.
The so-called Great Peace – between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and the outbreak of the First World War 99 years later – saw huge advancements in military technology, but only a few times when it became necessary to use them. Yet, in the middle of the 19th Century, a series of conflicts would foreshadow the industrialization of war.
In all of human history, there have been few periods that saw more bloodshed than the two decades between the first and second industrial revolutions. Today, I’m going to tell you about four wars fought in the 1850s and 60s; four wars fought in four very different corners of the globe; four wars fought over different issues but all broadly driven by the forces of globalization and industrialization: the Crimean War, the U.S. Civil War, the Paraguayan War, and the Taiping Rebellion.
Not only would these conflicts prove to be shockingly deadly, they would each help reshape the geopolitics of the 19th Century, and they would change the nature of warfare forever.
---
This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 52: Making Modern War
---
Before we get started, let me cover some administrative notes.
First of all: Yes, May turned out to be the month without an episode. This was partly because of the homebuying process and partly because this was a challenging episode to write. (Which I kind of expected – I had been both excited for and dreading this chapter for a long time.) The good news is we’ve found a house and closed on it. So, from here, the schedule should be returning to normal. (Knock on wood.)
Second, let me thank everyone who is supporting this podcast on Patreon, including new patrons Hakim Ahmed, Denis Morgan, Ido Ouziel, and Sebastian Stark, as well as Jim Ankenbrandt, John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Amelia Dunkin, Michele Gersich, Jason Hayes, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Kyrre Holm, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Emeka Okafor, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stansbury, Alex Strains, Ross Templeton, and Walter Torres.
Just a reminder: Everyone who supports the podcast on Patreon gets access to the ad-free version of it. So, if you like the Industrial Revolutions but don’t like the ads, just go to patreon.com/indrevpod to sign up. You can support the show for as little as $1 per month, which not only gets you the ad-free stream, but also bonus content: The footnotes I read at the end of each chapter and the entire archive of bonus episodes. Additional levels of support get you additional perks as well. So, again, check out patreon.com/indrevpod. You can also find the link in the episode notes.
Finally, yes, this is a very, very long episode, which took me two days to record. (Which is why the sound of my voice might change halfway through.) Anyway, let’s get started.
Part 1: “Death Loves a Crowd”
In January 1853, the British ambassador to Russia, (the future Prime Minister) Lord John Russell, was granted an audience with Czar Nicolas I. What Nicolas told him has been translated in different ways, but basically, it went like this: “We have a sick man on our hands. A man who is seriously ill. It will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.”
This sick man of Europe was the Ottoman Empire. As we discussed back in Chapter 32, the power of that great Islamic empire had peaked in the late 1600s and was now viewed as being in rapid decline. Few successful investments had been made in industrialization or economic expansion there. A number of unsuccessful wars left the Ottomans ceding territory to the Russians and Austrians, and a number of revolutions forced them to recognize an independent Greece and an autonomous Serbia.
As for the “necessary arrangements”, the Russians were seeking tacit approval for war against the Turks. “We must come to some understanding,” the Czar told Russell, “…neither should take any decisive step of which the other is not apprized.” On the one hand, a weak Ottoman Empire gave the Russians a great opportunity to expand south. On the other hand, they knew other European powers would want influence in the region, and thus, the fall of the Ottomans would disrupt the delicate balance of power achieved by our old friend Metternich at the Congress of Vienna.
Still, going back centuries, it was unthinkable that Christian nations would ally with Muslims against other Christians. Russia understood this and tried to use it to their advantage. But the British hated the idea of Russia’s power expanding. The UK enjoyed a dominant role in terms of trade with Asia, and the pan-Eurasian Russian Empire threatened that domination. So, they wanted to preserve the balance of power more than they wanted some kind of 19th Century crusade.
No understanding was reached between the UK and Russia. The Russians decided to act anyway.
Under the flimsy pretext of trying to protect Christian sites in the Holy Land, a Russian fleet was sent south across the Black Sea. When they came across a squadron of Turkish ships sheltering in port from bad weather in November 1853, Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov ordered his men to engage. Using a newly-invented weapon – exploding shell guns – they obliterated the wooden-hulled Turkish fleet in under two hours. British Admiral Adolphus Slade, on loan to the Ottoman Navy, sent word back to London, describing this Battle of Sinope as a “massacre.” Soon after, the British joined the Turks in declaring war on Russia.
As surprising as it was for a Christian power to ally with Muslims against other Christians, what was perhaps more surprising was the other power that joined the allied effort: France. I mean, the British and French had been enemies since forever. Many British officers were either veterans of (or, at least, students of) the Napoleonic Wars. But the newly-crowned Napoleon III needed to build some legitimacy for his imperial rule, and what better way to accomplish it than with a new war?
And, as it turned out, the French were vital to the war effort. Their army had, by this point, seen about two decades of fighting in Algeria. French troops were experienced not only in battle but, much more importantly, with the logistics involved in fighting a modern war – doling out medical care to the wounded, sending messages to the front and back, transporting supplies, etc.
Observing the administrative efficiencies of the French camps was a wake-up call to the British. They clearly were behind the times.
As the war dragged on, this was especially clear in terms of who was leading the respective armies. French officers were from diverse backgrounds and promoted by meritocracy. British officers, by contrast, were largely from the aristocracy – and many of them were able to purchase their commissions. Those British officers made some major errors that came at a staggering cost of lost lives.
But it was the Ottomans who really disappointed their allies. Upon arriving in Constantinople – in the lead-up to invading the Crimean Peninsula – many British and French soldiers quickly developed rather racist attitudes toward the Turks, driven in part by Islamophobia but also by the low levels of industrialization they witnessed. They interpreted this underdevelopment through a moral lens, often referring to the Turks as “lazy” in their letters home.
While they were more technologically advanced than the Turks, the Russians too were behind the times. The economic system there would prove unable to meet the needs of this first modern war.
Russia’s calculation for the war was driven, in large part, by the belief that nobody would oppose them. In fact, they figured the Austrians might actually join them – seeing as (a) the Czar recently helped the Austrians put down revolution in Hungary (shout out chapter 47!) and (b) the Austrians would also likely get territorial gains out of such a war. In the end, though, the Austrians stayed neutral.
What made the Crimean War so important to world history was the ways new technologies factored in. This was especially the case with new weapons.
Explosive shells – like the ones used to destroy the Turkish fleet at Sinope – had been perfected in the 1840s by French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans, who was able to add a delaying mechanism so a shell could fire straight at the enemy and then explode upon hitting them.
Thanks to the steamship advancements made by our old friends like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British and French navies were able to quickly sail into the Black Sea with ironclad, propeller-driven warships. France built five Dévastation-class floating batteries to attack Russian naval fortifications.
Among those Russian naval fortification efforts were new sea mines, which they laid across the floor of the Gulf of Finland. Along with their heavily fortified base at Krondstadt, these mines helped the Russians prevent an easy allied victory in the Baltic theater of the war. If the British Navy was able to sail up the gulf and shell the capital of St. Petersburg, it would be game over. But despite repeated approaches, they’d never get that far.
New rifles, like the French Pattern Minié and the British Enfield Pattern were introduced to the battlefield too. They could be fired accurately at a range of up to 400 meters – twenty times the distance of long-guns used in the Napoleonic Wars.
And the older forms of smooth-bore, muzzle-loading cannons were replaced by breech-loading guns. With a twist in the bore, they could fire balls with much greater accuracy. These artillery advancements were critical in the careers of industrialist William Armstrong, our old friend Joseph Whitworth, and our future friend (come the Second Industrial Revolution) Henry Bessemer.
These new weapons made warfare much more deadly. But as it turned out, battle would not be the only deadly condition of this war. It wasn’t even the most deadly. Because, for every soldier who died in battle or from mortal wounds, roughly four died from disease.
Water-borne diseases like typhoid, dysentery, and especially cholera ran rampant in the military camps, hospitals, and transport ships.
Remember: These were still the days before germ theory. Even the John Snow investigation (shout out Chapter 50!) wouldn’t start until the war was already underway. Sick men and wounded men were often cared for in the same cramp, dirty conditions at the hospital in Scutari, a town not far from Constantinople.
This is where the famous Florence Nightingale would arrive in November 1854. Influenced by the ideas of the surgeon there, one James Barry, she came to appreciate the need for better hygiene and ventilation in the hospital. With her medical staff, she started a PR campaign to get the government to take the hospital’s conditions more seriously. Eventually a Sanitary Commission was sent. The toilets, washing facilities, and ventilation were upgraded. They were also able to help reduce overcrowding. Nightingale also introduced strict new rules, including mandatory handwashing at the hospital. Thanks to these efforts, the mortality rate under Nightingale’s tenure there dropped from a shameful 41% to a meager 2%.
After the war, Nightingale returned to England, where she applied the lessons she learned during the war to establish the modern study of nursing, writing a book on the subject and founding a nursing school at St. Thomas Hospital in London.
Then there was the nurse who went to the frontlines, the Jamaican-born Mary Seacole. When the war broke out, she was in Panama, where she practiced medicine and ran a small “hotel.” She made her way to England, where she applied to join Nightingale’s nurses, treating the war wounded. The War Office turned down her application – perhaps because she was Black – so she decided to make her own way there. Seacole went to Crimea itself, setting up her so-called “British Hotel” outside allied-controlled Balaclava, a refuge for “sick and convalescent officers.” She’d treat them not only with her skills as a healer, but also as a cook and an informal quartermaster.
The government also recruited Brunel – yes, Isambard Kingdom Brunel again – to design a hospital which could be shipped to Turkey. Renkioi Hospital, as it was called, was constructed by timber merchants on the Gloucester Docks who happened to be working with a local manufacturer of prefabricated buildings that could be shipped to prospectors in the Australian Gold Rush. All working together with the British and French governments, they built several buildings (“huts” as they were called) that could be transported and erected on site. All in all, the hospital could treat a total of 1,000 patients. They had plans to double that capacity, but the war ended just a few months after it first went into operation.
The Russians had their own medical heroes. The surgeon Nikolai Pirogov organized a team of previously-untrained female nurses – the Sisters of Mercy – to work alongside him, treating the wounded during the long siege of Sevastopol. He would introduce new emergency surgeries to war hospitals, including an osteoplastic method of foot amputation, as well as anesthetic and plaster casts.
The governments also made use of a new technology to help them manage the war from afar. Telegraph lines were installed to relay messages directly from Paris and London to their armies’ respective headquarters in Crimea.
The telegraph also allowed war correspondents to send reports of the war’s progress back to their newspapers within days, rather than weeks or months. For the first time in history, journalists would be able to inform their readers from the frontlines. This was especially significant in Britain, where press freedoms allowed an unflattering portrayal of the war effort to emerge. Reporters like William Howard Russell, writing for The Times, gave citizens some cause for concern and even emboldened some anti-war voices.
The advent of war photography would have a similar effect. Roger Fenton – first inspired by the new trade when he saw photographs on display at the Great Exhibition (shout out Chapter 46!) – went to Crimea in 1854 to document the war. The photographs he took would be put on display in London galleries. Some would be converted into woodblocks so they could be published in the Illustrated London News. While most of his photos were of soldiers or officers at camp, he also managed to get a few landscapes and interiors to show viewers the sites of Crimea. But by far his most famous work was his Valley of the Shadow of Death – a staged photograph of a hillside covered in cannonballs.
After a few months of fighting the Russians in what is now Bulgaria, the Allies sailed for the Crimean Peninsula. There they would seek to take the Russian naval base of Sevastopol, and by extension, take control of the Black Sea. In July 1854, a sloop carrying British and French commanders went looking for a place on the peninsula to land. As they sailed by Sevastopol, they raised their hats to the Russians – a kind of old-school demonstration of courtesy seldom seen in wartime again.
They chose a site north of Sevastopol and landed over 50,000 troops there in September. From there, they marched down to the Alma River, where they encountered nearly 40,000 Russians. The subsequent chaotic battle saw over 9,000 casualties.
As one soldier described it:
“Our men were falling now very fast. Into the river we dashed, nearly up to our arm-pits, with our ammunition and rifles on the top of our heads to keep them dry, scrambled out the best way we could...From east to west the enemy's batteries were served with great rapidity, hence we were enveloped in smoke on what may be called the glacis and could not see much. We were only about 600 yards from the mouths of the guns; the thunder-bolts of war were, therefore, not far apart – and death loves a crowd ... still, nothing but death could stop that renowned infantry.”
Thanks to the superior rifles of the British, and the French soldiers scaling a cliff wall thought to be unscalable, the Russians were pushed back.
From there, they marched not on Sevastopol, but further south to the harbor town of Balaklava, which the British would use to ship in weapons and supplies. The Battle of Balaklava would see far fewer casualties, most of which – on the allied side – came thanks to the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, when a misunderstood order sent 600 British troops in the wrong direction to take on heavy Russian fire.
From there, the allies were able to envelop Sevastopol, but they were not yet able to take it. In a harbinger of what would come in the First World War, the Russians built a sophisticated system of trenches around the city. It would end up being a long siege, lasting nearly a full year.
To help break the Siege, civilian engineers in the UK decided to join the effort by planning a railway from Balaklava to Sevastopol. The Ottomans provided laborers from Croatia and Montenegro to clear the path. They were followed by about 500 skilled navvies from Britain, who laid the track. Operated as it was being built, this 14-mile railway helped transport ammunition to the front lines and wounded soldiers back so they could be shipped to the military hospitals in Turkey. It may have brought the war to a much sooner end.
And while they made their own supply line move faster, the allies also cut off that of the Russians, taking the Straight of Kerch and the Azoz Sea, leaving Sevastopol under-resourced.
On top of all this, the Russian arsenals just could not keep pace with those of the allies. Early on in the war, the UK’s war ministry realized the old network of suppliers in places like Birmingham would never keep pace with the army’s orders. And so, they introduced the so-called “American system of manufacture.” (shout out Chapter 33!) With new management and a new plant with modern machinery set up at Enfield in London, the British arsenal was able to mass produce guns and ammunition faster and with a higher degree of precision. The largely pre-industrial Russian Empire simply could not match it.
To regain the upper-hand, the Russians tried attacking the French and Ottoman positions on the Chernaya River. Despite a numerical advantage, it was a disaster for Russia, which may have seen some 7,000 casualties there. As one French soldier remembered that day, “I once praised the grace of this valley. Now it is covered with corpses, which the nurses are fighting the vultures for…”
After the Battle of Chernaya, an allied victory was basically inevitable. In September 1855, the British and French greatly ramped up their bombardment of Sevastopol. Over 300 cannons fired some 150,000 rounds at the naval fortress, killing between 2,000 and 3,000 Russians per day and basically demolishing the city. After four days, the Russians finally abandoned post.
The war had taken a staggering toll. In only two and a half years, the allies suffered nearly a quarter million casualties – about half of which were French – while the Russians suffered well over half a million casualties.
The effects of the war were perhaps equally staggering. It stunted Russia’s economic development and international prestige for an entire generation. But it would also mark a turning point for the eastern empire. Many Russian elites – including the new Czar Alexander II – embraced modernization as the best means of preventing such catastrophes in the future, including the long-overdue abolition of serfdom and various industrial investments. And we’ll dive more into those stories further down the road.
It also served as a wake-up call to the British, whose rigid, bureaucratic approach to the war – led by an old and generally incompetent aristocracy – significantly hindered their efforts and left their soldiers with a lot of misery. Among other things, the officers had not prepared the army for winter. So, while they got to go home during the cold season, the rank-and-file were left in their trenches in Russia without the proper clothing, leading to many cases of frostbite. By extension, a lot of amputations became necessary when they really shouldn’t have been. When the Liberals eventually took power under Prime Minister William Gladstone, War Minister Edward Cardwell led a series of reforms to further professionalize the military – including, critically, the abolition of commissions-for-sale.
But with the Russians defeated, the UK was secure in its position as hegemon again, dominating trade and imperial aspirations in Asia – critically in China, but more on that later.
The French Empire also sprang back to the prestige of a great power in Europe, although their coming rivalry with the Prussians would soon put an end to that.
And for the Ottomans, it would be only a temporary victory, which cost them about a hundred thousand lives in the process. By the 1870s, they would lose control of their territories in the Balkans anyway, as Slavic nationalists would rise up with the support of their resurgent ally, Russia.
Meanwhile, as the British and French returned to peacetime and industrial development in the late 1850s, they suddenly saw a major disruption to their textile industries – because suddenly their supply of cotton was cut-off, due to a civil war half-way around the world.
---
Part 2: “Appeal Against the Thunder-Storm”
In the heart of Manchester, England – about a block from the City Council building – is a statue of an American president, the one and only Abraham Lincoln. Erected during the First World War, it was gifted by later U.S. President William Howard Taft’s son, as a symbol of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.
It was significant because, at the time Lincoln was guiding the effort to preserve the American union, many Manchester cotton barons were supporting its dissolution. The U.S. Civil War had cut Greater Manchester off from the cotton plantations of the American south. Unemployment skyrocketed in what became known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine, as 60% of the textile workers in the region were let go. Some mills went so far as to fly the Confederate flag.
But in an 1862 meeting at the Free Trade Hall, affected workers rose up to support the Union cause over their own economic interests. They knew that, without the Union, slavery in the American south would continue indefinitely. Their resolution blunted the pressure being put on the British government to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy.
Lincoln wrote to the workers the next year:
“…the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the actions of our disloyal citizens the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterance upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is, indeed, an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”
No war has ever cost as many American lives as the U.S. Civil War – and the history of that war is entirely inseparable from the history of the Industrial Revolution.
By 1861, raw cotton made up 61% of the value of all American exports. The vast majority of cotton processed in Europe was originally planted and picked in the southern U.S. And the vast majority of the labor planting and picking that cotton was done by enslaved African Americans.
To meet the growing cotton demand, southerners sought the westward expansion of slavery, into new states like Arkansas, Texas, and (quite notably) Kansas, where violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Americans broke out in the 1850s.
Which isn’t to say slavery was an especially effective system for producing raw cotton. As a reporter for the New York Times, our old friend Frederick Law Olmsted noted how inefficient it was, and how the slave plantations were surprisingly poor. Like Adam Smith had decades earlier, Olmsted speculated that paid labor would be more economically advantageous, but that the slave owners were stuck in a feudal mindset. They believed it was more gentlemanly to be served by and to rule over others. Of course, this would have been contrary to the democratic values of the young republic, had it not been for white supremacy.
In the northern states, by contrast, productive capacities were accelerating at an explosive pace. There the industrial cities used the latest technologies, the power of steam, and proto-assembly line processes to churn out not only textiles, but clocks and pocket-watches, soaps and chemicals, food staples, tools, and (critically) arms and ammunition. The manufactured goods from among all the Confederate States amounted to a quarter of the value of the goods manufactured in New York State alone. For every mile of railroad in the south, the north had three. Great waves of immigration from places like Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia were driving the population boom in northern cities. For every free man in the south, the north had four. In retrospect, it’s doubtful the south could have ever defeated the north in war, given the north’s overwhelming industrial advantage.
Industrialization might have been driving demand for slave-picked cotton, but it was also driving a movement to abolish the practice of slavery. Mass printing led to a dissemination of abolitionist newsletters, transcribed speeches, and books – most notably, the 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which depicted slavery in such awful and graphic detail that it made Queen Victoria weep. There’s a legend that Lincoln credited Stowe as “the little lady who started this great war.”
Another arguable catalyst for the war was an eccentric nobody from Connecticut, whose failures in life would take him all over the U.S., including to Kansas, where he fought in the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes of the 1850s: John Brown. In 1859, Brown recruited 21 followers to take the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. (Shout out Chapter 33!) He hoped it would inspire slaves in the surrounding area to rise up and, together, they would make war on the country until it abolished slavery. After initial success, the armory was quickly retaken by U.S. Marines. There was no slave uprising. Brown and six of his comrades were hanged.
Although Brown failed, his bold raid inspired awe among other radical abolitionists – and tremendous fear among slaveholders, who had always dreaded the prospect of a slave uprising.
Then came the presidential election of 1860. That November, Americans elected the first ever president from the Republican Party – a lawyer with fairly unremarkable political credentials – Abraham Lincoln.
Among the Republican Party’s principles was abolition. Lincoln himself merely hoped slavery would someday be abolished. In the meantime, he pledged to prevent its expansion west.
But it was enough to set the slaveholders of the south into a knee-jerk panic. As they saw it, Lincoln’s election (along with Brown’s raid) demonstrated that northerners were “avowedly hostile” to their institution. The South Carolina legislature voted to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860. By May 1861, ten more states followed and subsequently formed a confederacy. Despite the fact that nearly three out of four free southerners did not own slaves, the state legislatures themselves were dominated by slaveholder interests. Four states issued declarations explaining their secession and slavery was key in each. As Georgia Senator (and future Confederate Vice President) Alexander Stevenson famously put it in 1861, “Our new government is founded upon… the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
Slavery was the primary reason for the southern states to leave the Union, but it was decisively not the primary reason the northern states fought to keep them in – at least not at first. Northern textile mills enjoyed advantageous access to southern cotton. Whereas Europeans faced tariffs on American cotton, Americans had internal free trade. Without access to tariff-free cotton, it’s plausible the British could have dumped cheap finished textiles on the U.S. market and crippled the domestic industry. It happened elsewhere in the Americas, after all. Additionally, the U.S. had recently started cultivating the prairies of the Midwest, thanks to new farming equipment like the McCormick Reaper and John Deer plough. (Shout out Chapter 33 again!) But the Mississippi River and its steamboats were critical to bringing those agricultural goods to market, and the Mississippi River ran southward, through the Confederacy.
And there was no constitutional basis for states leaving the Union. Whereas the European Union today gives member states a path to exit – like, famously, Brexit – the U.S. has no such mechanism. The north rightfully argued that secession was unconstitutional.
A handful of slave states remained in the Union, but President-Elect Lincoln would watch helplessly for months as state after state left, necessitating an inevitable conflict.
War finally broke out in April 1861, as Confederate soldiers blasted away at a Union garrison stationed at Fort Sumter – off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina – with exploding shells. The garrison shortly surrendered. Militarization then went into full effect on both sides and great armies were mobilized. They finally clashed in northern Virginia that July at the Battle of Bull Run.
New industrial technologies would play a prominent role in the war.
Like they did in Crimea, Minié balls – hollow-based bullets which spun as they left the chamber of a Minié rifle – helped drive up the casualty rate. Originally invented by French artillery officer Claude-Étienne Minié, improved designs would help the armies’ respective soldiers kill from up to a half mile away. Telescopic sights on guns were introduced for the new tactic of sharpshooting. And yet, commanders were still relying on tactics from the bygone days of the musket. Bayonet charges would be ordered with no realistic chance of success. The casualty rates were staggering.
Also like in Crimea, heavy field guns were a common sight. Smooth-bore breechloading guns, such as the Howitzer, helped draw the enemy away from hiding positions. Heavy artillery would also shell towns and cities under siege, leading to destruction not seen in America ever before – nor since.
Some 240 patents were filed for military inventions in 1862 alone. Among them was a new rapid-fire gun invented by the American Richard Gatling. Cranked by a handwheel, its several barrels rotated clockwise as they fired, reloaded, fired, reloaded in constant succession. Adopted that same year by the U.S. Navy, it was the first machine gun.
The Civil War would also feature the first railroad artillery in war. Railroads would become a vital means of moving supplies to the frontlines. Landmines were used for the first time. As they were by the Russians in the Gulf of Finland, sea mines were employed as well. Americans referred to them as “torpedoes”, although they were not the kind of moving torpedoes we know today – hence the expression, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” allegedly ordered by a Union admiral in the Battle of Mobile Bay.
The telegraph became a key weapon in the north’s arsenal. President Lincoln seized northern telegraphic offices for the war effort. The military’s telegraph network carried some 3,300 messages per day along 15,000 miles of electric wire. A telegraph room was installed in the War Office across the street from the White House. By 1862, Lincoln was practically living in that office, sending and reading a flurry of telegraph messages for hours on end. It was a precursor to today’s White House Situation Room. In his position as commander-in-chief, Lincoln could send orders to his generals far away.
The telegraph also helped Americans follow the news of their civil war. Journalists could send cables, which would then be written up and mass-printed in the daily newspapers.
Photographers followed the armies everywhere to make portraits of soldiers which they could proudly send home, capturing their heroism for posterity. These photographers also captured what they could of the battlefields, leading to the first-ever harrowing images of fallen American soldiers. Unlike in Crimea, where photography was relatively limited, over a million photos of the Civil War were produced. Many were destroyed though, due to a sharp drop in demand for them after the war ended. Many glass negatives were instead sold for greenhouses, where the sun slowly burned the images of bloodshed away. But many others we still have as an invaluable visible record of the conflict.
And it wasn’t just images of the soldiers being sent back home. For the first time, the corpses of the slain were being transported back as well. The modern practice of embalming had existed for several decades, but it was seldom used before the 1860s. Now the Army Medical Corps decided to return their slain to their families, and so they commissioned a doctor names Thomas Holmes to embalm the corpses so they could make the journey without decaying. So, it is thanks to the Civil War that embalming is widely used today.
Indeed, there were a great many to send home. The casualty rate of the Civil War was way beyond what most folks imagined it would be. And like in Crimea, many of these casualties weren’t happening on the battlefield. Disease killed twice as many soldiers as fighting did. Farm boys – camped in close quarters with other men for the first time in their lives – were especially susceptible to dying from contagious illnesses.
But inspired by Nightingale’s success in the previous decade, the Americans took decisive action to limit such deaths. A United States Sanitary Commission, led in part by executive secretary Frederick Law Olmsted, cut the north’s disease rate in half, reforming hospital conditions and improving food. Serving and supplying the commission was a massive network of women volunteers, who raised money, knit blankets, staffed hospital ships and camp kitchens, collected care packages, and more. One of these women, Clara Barton (also known as the “Nightingale of America”), was inspired by her service as a nurse in the war to found the American Red Cross.
The south had no such sanitary commission. They had fewer rail and telegraph lines to make such an effort possible. They also had an economic situation spiraling out of control – but we’ll get to that. Still, many homes across the south had to be quickly converted to makeshift field hospitals, where southern women cared for the injured.
Of course, that was far from sufficient. The Union and Confederacy had more than 500 military hospitals between them. On both sides, these hospitals reached industrial-scale care for the wounded. Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia (the Confederate capital), alone contained some 8,000 beds. It was supplied by five soup kitchens, a 400-keg brewery, ice houses, dairy cattle and goats, and a bakery that churned out 10,000 loaves of bread per day.
Disease spread through contagion, but it also spread through infection. It was only during the war that Louis Pasteur would first pasteurize wine. Germ theory had not yet come to fruition. But doctors still knew that open wounds from the battlefield could easily kill a patient if infected. Surgeons would spend hours upon hours sawing through men’s limbs as they cried out in agony. The only thing they could give them was a new pain relief medicine – an opioid solution called morphine. As it turned out though, morphine (like all opioids) was incredibly addictive. And that disease of addiction would stay with many veterans long after the war was over. It came to be known as the soldiers’ disease, and in the second half of the 19th Century, the United States would have the worst opioid addiction rates in the western world.
The Civil War was fought all over the place, but there are really three general places worth noting: Virginia, Appalachia, and the Mississippi River. (And, yes, I know this is a gross oversimplification. Don’t @ me, Civil War fans.)
The Virginia front was the bloodiest, in which the Union’s Army of the Potomac fought a long, drawn-out campaign against the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, under the famous Robert E. Lee. This front was especially contentious because it was fought in the neighborhood of the two capitals – Richmond and Washington, D.C. While most of the fighting took place in (yes) Virginia, it also included forays into the Union states – as far north as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July 1863, before they were turned back. But overall, the Virginia front was essentially a stalemate until 1865. (Again, sorry for the oversimplification.)
The Appalachian front was pretty blocked up by the Confederacy, but it came to fruition later in the war, when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman broke through Confederate forces at Chattanooga before marching onto Atlanta.
It was on the Mississippi the Union would make its first important wins – first by winning some key battles on the eastern edge of the Mississippi River basin. Among them was the Battle of Shiloh, where nearly 24,000 Americans died and another 16,000 were wounded. As the Union army pushed south along the river basin, the Union Navy captured New Orleans at the other end of the river. They moved north, taking other cities, including (critically) Memphis, Tennessee. Finally, Union General Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg, Mississippi on the 4th of July, 1863, after a long siege that saw some 22,000 shells fired into the city. This, along with the Union’s victory at Gettysburg the day before, was a major turning point in the war.
With control of the Mississippi, the Confederacy was split in two, unable to make use of a critical water route. And by this point, the Confederacy was already seeing major problems. Thanks to their industrial prowess, the Union’s steam-driven war ships were able to impose a successful naval blockade of southern ports, preventing the Confederacy from trading with the wider world.
At first the blockade looked precarious. In the early days of the war, Union sailors set one of their frigates ablaze when Confederate forces seized their naval yard in Virginia. The Confederates decided to salvage the ship and converted it into an ironclad steamer, which would be almost entirely submerged in the water and driven by a twin-blade screw propeller. The CSS Virginia became a terrifying vision of the future, able to withstand enemy fire while issuing devastating blows to wood-hull ships.
The Union responded with its own ironclad: the USS Monitor. Built by our old friend, the Swedish-born John Ericsson, it was a masterpiece of 19th Century engineering. Driven by a single steam engine and using two smaller engines to turn the turret gun, it launched in March 1862 and headed for Virginia.
The two ironclads came head-to-head at the Battle of Hampton Roads shortly thereafter. The Virginia obliterated two wood-hulled, sail-driven Union ships the day before. The first – the USS Cumberland – fired on the Virginia with little success, until the Virginia rammed it, smashing the wood hull to pieces and sinking the vessel. Then she shot heated cannonballs at the USS Congress, blowing it to smithereens. But the Virginia could not do the same to the Monitor. The two ships engaged in heated battle, but to no conclusion. After a multi-week standoff, the Confederate Navy gave up and destroyed the Virginia. The odds of breaking the entire blockade were too long.
The great powers of the world all took notice of this very modern naval battle. Britain and France quickly opted to cease construction of wood-hull naval ships. From now on, naval powers would invest in iron and steel. Among them was Brazil – but more on that later.
Britain and France also took note of the economic consequences of the blockade. As the north cut southern cotton off from global trade, it created an immediate and devastating economic crisis in Europe. Cotton prices quadrupled. It was most devastating in northern England, where about half a million lost their jobs and came to depend on public assistance. Unemployed workers rioted in the streets in several towns in 1863. Nearly a quarter million workers were let go in northern France, which soon saw posters reading “Bread or death” go up. The nascent textile industry of Russia was hit especially hard, as Moscow mills limited themselves to a quarter of their former capacity.
Europeans began turning to other cotton-producing regions. Suddenly, farmers in India, Brazil, and Egypt found themselves in quite the seller’s market. Peru’s cotton exports quadrupled. China started selling cotton to Russia. The crisis led the British government to invest in rail construction for India, so cotton grown there could make it to the ports quicker.
British textile manufactures, meanwhile, began mounting greater and greater pressure on their government to intervene in the American conflict. They believed a Confederate victory was inevitable anyway. The UK’s ambassador in Washington pressed the Lincoln Administration to revive shipments from the Mississippi. The administration, meanwhile, understood the implicit threat that the British, French, and other powers could always come to south’s rescue.
Instead, Lincoln changed the war’s objective. On January 1st, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in the states in rebellion. It bolstered the north’s resolve by giving a renewed sense of purpose to the abolitionists. It helped recruit nearly 180,000 Black troops to the cause. When the Union approved Black enlistment, it saw its ranks swell dramatically. By the war’s end, roughly 10% of the Union forces were African Americans.
The Emancipation Proclamation also put moral pressure on the Europeans to back the **** off. Unless they wanted to be remembered for fighting for slavery after they had abolished it in their own empires, they had better look elsewhere for cotton for the time being. As our old friend, John Stuart Mill explained it, “the struggle…was destined to be a turning point, for good or evil…”
As bad as it was for Europeans – even to northern U.S. manufacturers, to a lesser extent – it was nothing compared to the economic devastation done to the American south.
Cotton production in the south fell approximately 90%. Two and a half million bales of the white gold were destroyed – some burned, some left to rot on the wharves. Plantations tried different crops like hemp and opium instead. But without cotton, the south had no collateral with which to sell bonds for the war effort.
With so many of their free men off fighting, production of other goods in the south stalled out. Prices across the Confederacy skyrocketed. As they did, the Confederate government found it more and more expensive to supply their army. The treasury turned to printing more and more money to make up for it. And you can guess what that did – that’s right, it accelerated the inflation.
The Civil War would actually mark an interesting turning point in the history of American money. Before the war, paper currency was issued by individual banks. These bank notes were backed by gold, so theoretically you could exchange a dollar from the Bank of Such-and-Such at the Bank of Such-and-Such and get a dollar’s worth of gold. Mostly, though, you could give people the bank notes you were holding and that was sufficient. But the further away you were from the Bank of Such-and-Such, the less the bank note was worth. If it was a note from a bank in Ohio, and you found yourself in Louisiana, you could still use it to pay for lunch, but it had better be a 50-cent lunch, because that’s all your dollar would trade for there.
With the Civil War moving people all over the country, the treasuries of the two sides had to change that. The British had long given the Bank of England monopoly status for printing bank notes. The Americans were about to do something similar. Banks would still issue their own bank notes, but they’d be printing on the fronts of paper issued by the treasury. The back would include language about how the note was backed by the treasury. In the south, they were printed on grey paper – greybacks. In the north, they were printed on green paper – greenbacks. And we still use greenbacks (albeit, a modernized version) today.
The greybacks were practically worthless. A floating currency from the beginning (i.e. not backed by gold), they rapidly fell in value throughout the war. Counterfeits contributed to the problem, as the printing industry in the south was so primitive. In fact, some counterfeiters got caught because their work was too good.
As their economy collapsed, many southerners lost faith in their new government. Bread riots broke out. Many refused to pay taxes. The north, meanwhile, turned their industrial power toward the war effort and saw a boom. New industries went into operation across the Midwest. In Cleveland, Ohio, for example, there wasn’t a single forge or foundry before the war. By the end of it, 21 were in operation. It set the north up for a great Gilded Age to come – but now I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Lincoln Administration expanded executive authority during the war, as well as the scope of the federal government. For the first time, there would be a national draft and a national income tax.
As the war dragged on into 1864, Grant took control of the army in the east, going head-to-head with Lee. The casualty rate only increased. The Confederates were forced to take refuge in the prosperous town of Petersburg, Virginia where they – like the Russians had at Sevastopol – dug in and built a trench system. The Union shelled the city on and off for months. The Siege of Petersburg foreshadowed not only trench warfare, but the concept of total war.
For most of history, when two armies fought a war against each other, part of the effort was directed at devastating the enemy’s lands. They’d pillage homes, burn fields of crops, and in many cases commit atrocities like rape. But after the Middle Ages, the enlightened despots of Europe more and more kept battles away from civilian populations. Warfare became more refined, more professional, and (in a certain sense) more humane. But with industrialization, these niceties started to be abandoned. The devastations of civilian populations swung back into practice, and on a large, destructive scale.
This brings us back to William Tecumseh Sherman.
With a team of engineers that could build bridges and install rail lines in just a few hours, Sherman brought a truly modern approach to warfare. After taking Chattanooga, Sherman’s army made its way to Atlanta – the railroad hub of the south – where it fought the Confederates in a number of battles before taking the great city in September 1864. Then he issued an order for citizens to vacate the city and for his soldiers to destroy anything that would give aid to the southern cause. Atlanta went up in flames, as the Union systematically destroyed the industrial district and beyond.
Responding to the protests of the Atlanta City Council, Sherman wrote:
“...they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles... The use of Atlanta for warlike purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families. There will be no manufactures, commerce, or agriculture here, for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later want will compel the inhabitants to go... War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace... You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.”
With no Confederate army in the area to fight back, his forces went on a scorched-earth campaign to destroy the south’s means to make war. Headed from Atlanta to Savannah, it went down in history as Sherman’s March to the Sea. They set houses and barns ablaze, leaving little besides chimneys. Rail tracks were targeted to destroy the Confederacy’s supply chains. They’d heat the tracks and then twist them into loops, known as Sherman’s neckties. After taking Savannah, they headed up north and created even more destruction in the Carolinas. In all, more than $100 million in property was destroyed. And everywhere they went, they freed the slaves. In a series of field orders, Sherman promised the land his army confiscated to be redistributed to the liberated African Americans.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Lee was on the run again. The Confederate government was forced to flee Richmond. Civilians set fire to the city, rather than let it fall into Union hands. When the fire reached the arsenal, it more or less blew the city up. Glass was shattered miles away. The images of the ruined city – captured in photographs shortly thereafter – show a uniquely industrial sight of destruction. I’ll share some images of it on social media this month.
From there, 125,000 Union soldiers chased Lee’s 25,000 around Virginia. A Confederate General finally told Lee, “There is no country.” Lee surrendered shortly thereafter in the town of Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th, 1865, effectively ending the war.
For some, it was too much to handle. Six days later, an actor with Confederate sympathies named John Wilkes Booth entered the president’s box at Ford’s Theater and – with a pocket pistol invented and manufactured thanks the advanced American firearms industry – shot Lincoln through the back of the head. It was the first time an American president was murdered. News of the assassination hit the telegraph wires – the entire country learned about it within a day. Lincoln was embalmed so he could be mourned with a massive, national funeral parade. After lying in state under the capitol dome – a project which was completed during the war – his body was transported by rail to stops in several major American cities until it made its way back to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois.
By the time it was over, the U.S. Civil War produced as many as 1.5 million casualties. It took the lives of 2.5% of the population – the equivalent of roughly 8 million deaths if it happened today. Over the course of just two days, more Americans died at the Battle of Shiloh than in all previous American wars combined. At Cold Harbor, an astonishing 7,000 perished in a devastating 20 minutes. It was often ruinous on a local level. Many regiments were made up of young men from the same towns. When those regiments were defeated in especially bloody battles, those towns lost much of their young male populations.
The war had preserved the American Union. Thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution – ratified in the months after the war – it had ended the practice of chattel slavery in the United States.
But while African Americans had been freed, the effort to ensure Black liberation and equality was a failure. As Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, took over the administration, he sought a speedy reunification of the country. The reconstruction efforts to ensure Black citizenship rights, as well as new schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and other aid – meant to provide opportunity to Black and White southerners alike – were largely abandoned in the years to come.
Reparation efforts, including Sherman’s field orders, were reversed by the new president. Thus, lands promised to freed Black farmers were returned to the plantation owners who encouraged secession in the first place. In our need to address the sins of our past, the long American tradition of kicking the can down the road had begun.
Freed African Americans would elect the first Black members of Congress, but they were soon replaced by white supremacists, including former Confederate Vice President Stevenson, who got his old Senate seat back. The Ku Klux Klan was established, and it wreaked a violent terrorist campaign against Blacks across the south. By the end of the century, Jim Crow was going into full effect.
Meanwhile, the Union looked westward. While the army forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral lands in middle-America, Congress passed the Homestead Act, allowing American citizens to claim almost any tract of land they wanted for a few small fees. About 10% of the land mass of the modern United States was settled thanks to this Act. And the Morrill Act established land grants to finance state colleges for agriculture and industrial studies. It was the dawn of America’s state university systems. For the first time in world history, the public would fund higher education to train ordinary farmers and mechanics, building toward an economy of the future. And new railways were planned, including a transcontinental railroad, to link the reunified country to the great wealth to be found in California and the Pacific coast.
More than anything, the Civil War changed the character of the U.S. from an agglomeration of states to a nation, in the sense we think of nationhood today. The millions of soldiers mobilized for war intermixed in their camps. They learned each other’s songs, like “John Brown’s Body” – the tune of which was adapted for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – “Bonny Blue Flag”, “Dixie”, and “Lorena”. These, along with the many written by the prolific Stephen Foster, became the foundations of American music. And the soldiers played each other’s games – card games, dice games, and a new ball game out of New York City known simply as “base”, what we now call baseball.
It’s often said that, before the Civil War, the U and S in “united states” were sometimes left lower-case; that oftentimes the actions of the U.S. were described in the plural tense – the united states are increasing a tariff, the united states are holding an election; whereas today we say the United States is signing a treaty; the United States is putting a rover on Mars. The United States became a singularity. Now, this is not strictly true: the Civil War alone did not accomplish this grammatical shift (it happened gradually over the course of the 19th Century), but the conclusion of the war certainly helped it along. And that grammatical shift reflected a broader truth about how we came to view our national identity – that this country wasn’t just a collection of Virginians and New Yorkers and Texans and Illini and so on; it’s a collection of Americans.
And as these Americans were getting ready for the Second Industrial Revolution, peoples from a different part of the Americas were mobilizing for their own brutal conflict.
---
Part 3: “Overcome or Die”
Back in Chapter 32, we talked about how the newly independent countries of Latin America attempted industrialization, but ultimately struggled to compete with cheap British imports; how they instead built their economies around mining and cash-crop exports that fueled industrialization elsewhere in the world. To the extent that Latin American countries industrialized, it was usually by building railroads and modern ports to accommodate steam ships, helping get those exports out to the global market.
As a result, these new countries found themselves competing with one another for the single-most important resource you could have in this economic system: land. War became a good way to settle these disputes, since the borders of these countries roughly corresponded to the vague political boundaries of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial systems, which weren’t very helpful.
So, from 1820 to 1900, there was almost always a war being fought in South America. Often these were territorial wars, and often they were being fought around the Rio de la Plata. To grossly oversimplify the Platine situation, Brazil and Argentina were playing a decades-long political tug-of-war over Uruguay.
But also in the mix was the smaller, landlocked country of Paraguay. Now, Paraguay was a bit different from all its neighbors. It had been colonized by the Spanish in the 1500s, but almost from the start, the Spanish decided it wasn’t all that important to them. So, the conquistadors, who became the ruling class in Paraguay, assimilated with the native peoples of the country. They’d have Spanish surnames, but mostly they spoke the indigenous language of Guaraní. They adapted to indigenous culture, observed a syncretic version of Catholicism, and generally remained isolated from the outside world.
After achieving independence from Spain, Paraguay came under the rule of the dictator – and yes, that was his title: dictator – José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. An Enlightenment lawyer who held a doctorate in theology, Francia sought to make Paraguay into a utopia, using the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to guide him. Among other things, he outlawed Spaniard intermarriage – thereby forcing racial intermixing to ensure race wouldn’t be a problem in Paraguay the way it seemed to be everywhere else in the world. Francia cut Paraguay off from the rest of the world, enforcing strict borders with its neighbors as they descended into violence. He nationalized the Catholic Church, nationalized half the country’s land, and not only legalized prostitution, but also insisted it was an honorable profession. Francia also brutally enforced his rule and, critically, began building up Paraguay’s military.
Before we continue, I need to point out that everything I’m about to say is based on limited historical records. Paraguayan history is difficult to study because record keeping there was not great in the 19th Century.
After Francia died in 1840, a short power struggle ensued until one Carlos Antonio López took over as Paraguay’s first president. Together with his son, Francisco Solano López, he continued Paraguay’s tradition of centralized, authoritarian government.
The Lópezes also sought to expand Paraguay’s influence and power while maintaining its isolation from outside threats. Foreign loans were rarely taken out. But exports increased significantly – notably, yerba mate and tobacco, and to some extent hardwood and untanned leather from the country’s cattle ranches. There was also some gold and silver mining. Manufacturing was limited mostly to cigars.
Now, these industries in Paraguay were often monopolized by the state, or they took the form of privileges given to the López family and their allies. In fact, in foreign dealings, agents in London and Buenos Aires found it difficult to distinguish between Paraguayan state business and the personal business of the López family. For all intents and purposes, the Lópezes were the state. Paraguay was their fiefdom.
Although Paraguay is landlocked, it has access to global shipping via the mighty Paraná River, which runs through Argentina. After years of demands from the elder López, Argentina finally opened traffic on the Paraná to and from Paraguay in 1852. However, Paraguay refused to make a similar concession to Brazil, which needed access to a Paraná tributary – the Paraguay River – to access its state of Mato Grosso. This is all going to become very important down the road.
While his father was president, Francisco Solano López was sent abroad as a sort of grand ambassador. He travelled all over Europe. During this time, he wound up in Crimea, where he served as a French military attaché. Seeing this modern, industrial war must have been something of a wake-up call to him. If Paraguay wanted to expand its power, it would need to modernize technologically. In London, he purchased his country’s first steam-driven warship and the latest in arms and ammunition. He also hired some engineers to come back to Paraguay with him to industrialize.
Among them was John William K. Whytehead, who seems to have promised more than he could deliver. Paraguay did not have a lot of capital for industrialization. But Solano López directed some of the state’s / his family’s resources toward the modernization effort. He also started taking out foreign loans and increasing the money supply to find the cash they needed.
With this money, Whytehead would build Paraguay’s first iron foundry and, from there, a new arsenal, the country’s first railroad, an expanded port on the Paraná at Asunción, new steamers, and South America’s first electric telegraph.
So, it seems there were probably two motivations for all this:
Improve transport systems to move exports out more easily – cash-crops and natural resources – and
Build a modern military to compete with their neighbors, who they viewed as predatory to those economic interests.
After the elder López died in 1862, Solano López succeeded him as Paraguay’s second president. The country was modernizing. The army had grown to an estimated 28,000 men – more than 5% of the country’s population. And Solano López must have felt like he was in a position to throw Paraguay’s weight around – because then came the Uruguayan War.
Now, we really don’t have time for me to go into it too deeply, but basically, Uruguay was divided between a red faction (the Colorados) and a white faction (the Blancos), which had previously fought each other in a civil war. In that civil war, Brazil supported the Colorados and Argentina supported the Blancos. By the 1860s though, the fragile peace that had been accomplished was fracturing, and the Blanco government was under the attack of the Colorados. Also by this time, there had been a change in leadership in Argentina, and the new government was not going to support the Blancos – in fact, they covertly supported the Colorados. And so, Brazil decided it was a good time to invade Uruguay. This left Uruguay’s Blanco government with only one regional ally: Solano López’s Paraguay.
You see, Solano López was a big believer in Metternich’s approach to international relations: maintaining a balance of power so nobody got too powerful and conquered the whole damn continent. And that was his fear with Brazil and Argentina, that one or the other might become too powerful – putting Paraguay’s sovereignty (and, yeah, his personal fiefdom) in jeopardy.
So, when Uruguay found itself under attack in 1864, Solano López stepped up on their behalf.
This was a really, really bad move.
For one thing, Paraguay had not industrialized to anywhere near where they hoped. After three years of construction, the railroad was only about 35 miles long. The arsenal was using modern machinery and producing an “enormous” amount of ammunition – including both solid and hallow bullets, as well as grenades, and land and naval gun carriages – but not the best guns. The army would rely on smooth-bore cannons and carbines – far less accurate than the new breech-loaders and rifles. And little did Solano López realize just how much his enemies’ forces had industrialized during these same years.
The foundry, they hoped, would serve as a foundation for a new Paraguayan iron industry that could compete with the U.K.s’. But it failed, in large part because they couldn’t find coal deposits in Paraguay to fuel the blast furnaces. Paraguay does have good coal reserves, they just couldn’t be located in the 1860s. And it was this failure at the foundry that put all other efforts to industrialize behind.
For another thing, Paraguay was taking on the most powerful country in South America: Brazil. And if that wasn’t enough, the Colorados soon took control of Uruguay. And together, Brazil and Uruguay would join Argentina to form what became known as the Triple Alliance. Paraguay’s ambitious would be undiminished. They decided to fight ‘em all. I’ve seen it commented that they might as well have declared war on the entire world.
When Brazil sent a ship up the Paraguay River to Mato Grosso in November 1864 – carrying the province’s new executive on board – Paraguay used the moment to declare war. They seized the ship and, about a month later, invaded Mato Grosso, taking several towns. From there, they headed south to relieve the Blancos in Uruguay. When Argentina refused Paraguay access to the Paraná River for this fight, Paraguay declared war on Argentina too.
By May, a secret treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed, agreeing to keep up the fight until Paraguay was defeated and Solano López was removed from power. Then, the allies launched raids on the Paraguayan border, forcing Paraguay into a more defensive position. Despite the overwhelming odds against them, the Paraguayans were able to hold out – thanks in part to their warships on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, thanks in part to the trenches they dug, and thanks in part to the difficulties the allies had organizing their coalition forces.
For nearly a year, the two sides were in a sort of stalemate. Then in April 1866, the allies decided to make a major push into Paraguayan territory. After repelling this invasion at the Battle of Estero Bellaco, Paraguay decided to make its own push into allied territory.
The subsequent Battle of Tuyutí would be the bloodiest in South American history, with nearly 4,000 allied casualties, and an estimated 13,000 casualties for Paraguay.
As one English onlooker described it:
“The allies had the advantage of fighting two-to-one, and their firearms were rifled. The Paraguayans had hardly any rifles, and most of their muskets were flintlocks, like they were attacking the allies from 60 years in the past.”
Despite this crippling defeat, Paraguay fought on. Diplomatic efforts were made, but the allies’ insistence that Solano López be removed from power made a truce impossible.
Then came a catastrophe for the allies. That September, coming up the Paraguay River with some of the most advanced ships and gunboats of the Brazilian Navy, they attacked Paraguayan trenches at Curupayty. Except, most of the Paraguayan forces were not behind the trenches – they were hidden in other positions, blasting away at the allies with just 49 cannons.
This surprising but overwhelming Paraguayan victory was followed by an outbreak of our old friend, Cholera, among allied forces. It would be nearly a year before they could resume the fight.
They would regroup under the leadership of a Brazilian general, the Duke of Caxias, who set about modernizing the allied war effort. He equipped the armies with newer, more accurate firearms, and retrained the troops with them. He upgraded the health care of the field hospitals, insisting on better hygienic practices, and thereby eliminated the spread of cholera. He even employed hot air balloons to fly over the Paraguayan positions, gaining critical insights for a new offensive.
And by this point, Paraguay was in really, really bad shape. Nearly all their professional armed forces had been killed or critically injured by this point. To keep up the fight, Solano López turned to conscripting women for behind-the-scenes operations and children for battle on the frontlines. Perhaps the boldest move came in March 1868, when he sent a fleet of canoes to take on a pair of Brazilian ironclads. Under the cover of night and camouflage, 1,500 Paraguayans (armed with machetes and swords) attacked the Cabral and Lima Barros. By morning, four more Brazilian ships joined the battle, blasting away at the Paraguayans until they surrendered.
Finally, the allies successfully invaded Paraguay. In January 1869 they took over the capital of Asunción, sending Solano López on the run. Thousands more Paraguayans would die in battle throughout the year to come as the allies hunted him down. In March 1870, they finally found him in a camp in the forests of northeast Paraguay. In the subsequent Battle of Cerro Corá, Solano López was shot, but managed to briefly get away. When the allies caught up with him, he made one, final, personal charge. Drawing his sword, he shouted, “I die with my country!” and ran at a Brazilian general. He was shot dead before he could reach him.
There’s an expression in Spanish, “vencer o morir” – it’s a bit like the English expression, “do or die.” It basically means “win or die” or, more accurately, “overcome or die.” And that’s exactly what the Paraguayans had to do in this war – they had to overcome insurmountable odds… or die trying.
Perhaps had it not been for Paraguay’s history of isolation, they might have better understood just how impossible the task of winning that war would be. Perhaps had its executive leadership not been so centrally tied to the Paraguayan identity, they might have given up Solano López before it was too late. Perhaps had it not been for so many officers dying at Tuyutí, they could have stopped their leader from continuing his suicide mission. Perhaps if they had found their coal deposits in time, Paraguay could have industrialized further and gone into the war in a better technological position.
But none of these things happened. The result was a total war that left the Paraguayan state in ruins.
Estimates for the total damage done to Paraguay are all over the place. There are some estimates that Paraguay lost 7% of its population in this war against the Triple Alliance. And that 7% is by far – and I mean, by far – the lowest estimate there is. According to the most common estimates, as many as two out of every three Paraguayans died as a result – two out of three citizens dead, gone! Furthermore, most of the dead were men. As of 1870, women outnumbered men in Paraguay four or five to one. Paraguay was also stripped of about 40% of its territory, which was split between Argentina and Brazil. Economic development in Paraguay was stunted for decades, which has had a lasting impact on the country up to the present day.
And while their populations were much larger than Paraguay’s, the allies lost heavy numbers too – perhaps as many as 200,000 casualties. It was by far the deadliest war in South American history, and one of the deadliest wars in all of modernity.
But it was by no means the deadliest war of these two decades. The longest and deadliest of them all was taking place 12,000 miles away in China.
---
Part 4: The Cries of the People Shake the Earth
In March 1850, the 19-year-old Aisin Gioro Yizhu ascended to the Chinese throne as the Xianfeng Emperor. One Robert Samuel Maclay – an American missionary based in Fuzhou – wrote about it in his diary days earlier:
“Who knows the surprising changes which may mark his reign? Would it not be well for the whole Church to pray that the reign of this emperor may be marked in the world’s history, as the era of Christianity’s complete triumph in China.”
Little could Maclay know how unsettling this prophecy truly was.
For over 200 years, China had been ruled by the Qing Dynasty – a line of Manchu emperors that oversaw some of the highest highs and lowest lows of Chinese history. The Manchus were a minority ethnic group from Manchuria, a region north of China-proper. The Han Chinese majority had long viewed them as foreigners and barbarians. But they conquered China-proper in 1644, overthrowing the Ming Dynasty and claiming the Mandate of Heaven for themselves. From there, they pushed into the mountains of southern China, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia, effectively doubling the size of the Chinese Empire in their conquests.
To legitimize their rule, the Qing invested heavily in the promotion of Chinese tradition – including Confucian ideology and state administration by exam-promoted bureaucrats. To maintain power, of course, it was usually fellow Manchus getting the best positions within that bureaucracy. But from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s it all went pretty well. The economy flourished as trade with the west brought in an abundance of silver.
In fact, things were going so well that the population expanded significantly – nearly tripling by the turn of the 19th Century and continuing to rise from there. But, just like in England, this boom in population had its drawbacks. There wouldn’t be enough land to go around for everyone to farm the way that was traditional in Chinese society. Peasants found themselves struggling.
On top of this, the imperial government struggled to control inflation with all the western silver pouring in. They had trouble collecting taxes. Banditry became a common – virtually constant – problem. Certain secret societies were organized – at first to support Ming restoration against the Qing, but eventually turning to organized crime – the first Triads. The government was also slow to respond to famines and natural disasters. And for many Chinese, it was easy to blame all these problems on the Manchu outsiders who now ruled their kingdom.
And then came the British.
The UK brought two imports at this time that are important for our story today: Protestant missionaries and opium.
As we talked about back in Chapter 32, British traders were selling thousands of tons of opium to the Chinese by the 1830s. The British East India Company and the British government were happy to support this illegal trade, as it was the only way to ensure a trade balance with self-sufficient China, which the UK needed to support its growing manufacturing base. So, when Chinese officials began destroying opium shipments, the British declared war. Exerting the pressures of their industrialized Navy, the British overwhelmed the Chinese.
Finally, in August 1842, representatives of the United Kingdom and the Qing Emperor signed a treaty aboard a British warship anchored at Nanjing.
Known in China as the first unequal treaty, it gave Britain control of Hong Kong, preferred trade status with China, and access to ports across the country (including, critically, Shanghai). China, meanwhile, was forced to pay massive reparations to the British.
And it would be here, in Nanjing, where a massive rebel movement would take over in the next decade. And it was from this city they set up a fanatical new government, led by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ.
Hong Xiuquan was born outside Guangzhou (then known to westerners as Canton) in 1814 to a prominent farming family from the minority ethnic Hakka community. Their clan had been high officials and imperial advisors during the Song Dynasty, but by now, they were reduced to poverty. Still, they had high hopes for Xiuquan, and so they encouraged his education so he could pass the civil service exams and become a state official. He was a highly gifted student, memorizing the histories and the teachings of Confucius so important for imperial service.
By this point, the examination system had become notoriously difficult. As pretty much the only path one had to achieve upward mobility, the exams attracted lots of brilliant students, and fewer than one out of a hundred would actually pass. And if you failed at a provincial level, it would be years before you’d get another opportunity. Hong took the exams and failed, took the exams again and failed again.
After his third failed exams in 1837, Hong suffered a total mental breakdown. He had to be carried home, where he apologized to his family that his life was over. Then, over the next 40 days, he lay in bed experiencing a series of visions, including one in which an old man, wearing a golden beard and a black robe adorned with dragons, told Hong the people of the world “take of my gifts and therewith worship demons.” The man then gave Hong a sword for slaying demons. In other visions, he watched the old man berating Confucius. In another, Hong went demon hunting with an older brother he dreamed he had. His family watched him in these trances as he screamed “kill the demons!” and swung his sword in the air. At one point he woke up and proclaimed himself the Emperor of China.
In time, he recovered. And in 1843, he took the civil service exams once again and failed a fourth time. But that same year, a cousin of his found a piece of Christian literature Hong had lying around. One of those Protestant missionaries had given it to him years earlier, but Hong never bothered reading it. Now, in the wake of his visions, as well as his repeated failures to advance through the traditional channels of Chinese society, Hong had a revelation. He interpreted his visions through a Christian lens and told his cousin what it meant. Hong was the second son of God – the younger brother of Jesus. And he was being called by his father to slay the demons who brought misery to the Chinese people – the Confucians and Buddhists. He then baptized himself and made his cousins, Hong Rengan and Feng Yunshan, his first converts.
Together, they destroyed Confucian and Buddhist iconography and texts, gathered Christian literature, and began preaching to their family and neighbors. They met with various Protestant missionaries, including Scandinavian Lutherans, British Presbyterians, and American Baptists. In 1847, they moved to Thistle Mountain in Guangxi province, where they established the “Society of God Worshippers”. They published a Chinese language Bible, Feng began teaching the locals how to read, and Hong started holding ministries that looked an awful lot like the Baptist tent revivals of the contemporary United States. (Shout out Chapter 45!) By now, their converts were beginning to establish their own churches, recognizing Hong as the son of God and the leader of their faith.
In his travels throughout southern China, Hong also started becoming more and more political. It wasn’t just Confucius he took issue with now – it was the Manchu leaders who had failed China, bringing shame and poverty to their kingdom. As he noted from the book of Isaiah: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.” He explained to his cousin, Fengan, that the Manchus were the “usurpers of China” who “rob their brothers of their estate.”
By 1850, Hong had a couple thousand followers around southern China. But when a blight reduced crop yields that year, word spread that you could prevent hunger by praying to Hong’s God. Additionally, disputes over the region’s limited water resources broke out into acts of violence against the Hakkas, who took refuge with the Society of God Worshippers. Soon, their numbers swelled to ten or twenty (maybe thirty) thousand.
It had gotten to the point that the authorities decided the sect posed a danger to social stability. A magistrate was sent with a small force of imperial soldiers to arrest Hong and his leaders. Hong and the others got away and regrouped in the town of Jintian. When the imperial troops came to attack them at Jintian, 10,000 of their supporters – armed with spears – ambushed the soldiers and beheaded the Manchu commander. This Jintian Uprising kickstarted one of the deadliest wars in all of history.
Ten days later, on January 8th, 1851, Hong announced the foundation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom – Taiping, meaning “Great Peace” – with himself as the Heavenly King of China. Additionally, under the Heavenly King would be a Flank King and four Kings of the Four Directions, including Feng, who was appointed South King. An army was organized and was given five rules: Follow orders; Men and women should be kept separate while moving; Do not make any mistakes; Be fair and harmonious; and perhaps most important of all, Do not retreat from battle.
The Taiping army – soon numbering over 100,000 in strength – moved north, fighting Qing troops and recruiting from among the poor peasantry of China as they went. Over the next two years, they captured towns across the south and built their numbers. Also as they went, they massacred ethnic Manchus, reciting Christian chants as they exterminated Manchu men, women, and children by the thousands – sometimes by the tens of thousands.
By early 1853, the size of the army was estimated at over a million. And that’s when they crossed the Yangtze River and took their biggest prize yet: The ancient city of Nanjing.
Not only was it the place where China suffered the humiliation of signing the unequal treaty with the British, Nanjing had been the southern capital of China under the Ming Dynasty, before the Manchus overthrew them and made Beijing the sole capital of the empire. With this symbolism in mind, Hong declared it the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
He also established a fiercely theocratic framework for the new kingdom. Instead of studying Confucius, those who wanted to become leaders had to study the Bible. Men and women were given equal rights and many women were given high offices of civilian and military responsibilities. Foot-binding was banned, as it would make it more difficult for women to work. However, the sexes were separated, and sexual intercourse was strictly forbidden (even among married couples) until all of China was conquered. Many other vices were prohibited, including opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and prostitution. You could not have slaves or concubines.
But it was a gospel of social and economic justice that attracted so many to the cause. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was established as a classless society. Private property was abolished. Land was to be held by the state and distributed fairly. This also helped their militarization. Every household had to register with the Heavenly Kingdom to get land, and every household had to supply at least one male for the Taiping army.
Meanwhile, this wasn’t the only crisis facing the Qing Dynasty.
Other rebellions broke out across the empire. In the north, hundreds of thousands of poor rebels launched a guerrilla campaign to kill rich landowners and topple the Qing government. Out west in Xinjiang province, Chinese Muslims rose up against Manchu rule as well. Other ethnic minorities in far-south China did the same.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, guess who’s coming back onto the scene? That’s right – the British. Despite the favorable terms they got out of the Nanjing Treaty, they wanted still greater access to Chinese trade. Plus, China was too beset by internal problems to deal with all the piracy happening in their waters, and Britain was sick of it. Most importantly, though, the UK wanted opium to be legalized in China. So, when a British smuggling ship docked at Guangzhou was briefly seized by Chinese officials in 1856, it gave the UK all the reason it needed to start the Second Opium War.
With the conflict in Crimea all wrapped up now, the Royal Navy sailed a warship up the Pearl River and blasted away at Guangzhou. Soon after, they captured and imprisoned the local governor. Britain made their new demands – now even more unreasonable than in ’42 – and suddenly had other colonial powers jumping in to get a piece of the action. France demanded trading rights with China, as did the United States, as did Russia. The imperial government gave in, but later backtracked, and the UK, US, and France pounced.
With their steamers and breech-loaders, the combined Western forces destroyed Chinese Naval forts and moved in on Beijing. Unable to resist the latest examples of modern artillery, the Qing forces were slaughtered and inevitably fled. Attempts at diplomacy kept breaking down. Finally, the imperial Summer Palaces were torched. With the capital surrounded, Qing forces surrendered and agreed to all the Westerners’ demands: Missionaries could preach freely, more ports were opened to foreign trade, and opium was effectively legalized.
So, the Qing government, at this point, is under a lot of pressure. Whether it was from industrial western powers or their own peoples, they seemed unable to get a win. And they lashed out.
While they couldn’t make any inroads to retake Nanjing for the time being, they were able to scour the territory they still controlled and weed out Taiping sympathizers. And with so many of these sympathizers across the country, it meant a campaign of mass-execution. Even the most distant relatives of Taipings were tracked down and massacred. The Qing set up suicide stations, stocked with small weapons like daggers and ropes, so the condemned could do the “honorable” thing and take their own lives so government forces wouldn’t need to waste time hunting them down. In Guangzhou, tens of thousands of Taiping sympathizers were slaughtered in a market square that was converted into a killing ground.
In 1854, a young Chinese man named Yung Wing arrived in Guangzhou from the United States, where he had recently graduated from Yale University – in fact, he was the first-known Chinese graduate of an American university. By this point, Yung had spent so much time in the U.S. he could barely remember the Chinese language. And he was convinced that his homeland could benefit from some American ideas. His hope was to help reform Chinese education along the lines of the American system.
But in Guangzhou, Yung was horrified by what he saw.
“The ground was perfectly drenched with human blood. On both sides of the driveway were to be seen headless human trunks, piled up in heaps… There they were, left exposed to a burning sun… I was told that during the months of June, July, and August of 1855, seventy-five thousand people had been decapitated… This wholesale slaughter [was] unparalleled in the annals of modern civilization, eclipsing even the enormities of blood-thirstiness of Caligula and Nero, or even the French Revolution…”
Yung was so disturbed that he reconsidered working for the government which committed these atrocities. He even contemplated joining the rebels that had kickstarted this devastating conflict – and, before it was over, he would be approached by them. In the end, though, he returned to the United States, where he contracted with an arms manufacturer to help the Qing defeat the Taipings.
Like the Taipings, the Qing forces weren’t yet using modern weapons. But with their simple swords, the executioners were able to work with remarkable efficiency. One witness watched a pair of Qing soldiers behead 63 people in just four minutes. To prove they were distributing punishment effectively, the soldiers also cut off the right ears off the victims and filled chests with these ears to send to the governor general.
The Qing also managed to stop the Taipings’ northward advancement by digging a 45-mile trench just north on Nanjing and circling the city, limiting the Taipings to a single supply line. The empire relied some on various ill-equipped, ineffective standing armies (often organized by ethnic group and led by corrupt commanders) and some on difficult-to-organize local militias across the country. But when a career bureaucrat was given a military command, he ended up creating a counter-insurgency called the Hunan Army, and – with a goodwill campaign they built among the local population – they would grow in numbers much like the Taipings had. Eventually, they would march on Nanjing.
The Taipings, meanwhile, had successfully set up a shadow state within China, ruling over a huge territory from Nanjing down in into Jiangxi Province, and from Wuhan in the west all the way to the Pacific. But they would expand no further.
In 1858 and 59, Hong’s cousin, Hong Rengan, made his way to Nanjing from Hong Kong, where he had spent the past several years working as an assistant to a Scottish sinologist. While in his employ, Rengan learned a lot about western science and politics. Now in the Taiping court, Hong appointed him “Shield King” – a role tantamount to Prime Minister. And although this promotion ruffled quite a few feathers in the Taiping government, Rengan got to work on a plan to win the war and build a more perfect Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
Looking to the U.K. and the U.S. as the models for a successful country, Rengan wanted the new, Taiping-led China to be based on Protestant Christianity and a degree of western-style liberalism. But in addition to these higher treasurers, he believed it was critical that China adopt the so-called middle treasures to be found in the west: steamships, railroads, mechanical clocks and watches, revolving guns, and more. He believed China needed to willingly open its doors to foreign trade, rather than get forced into it on western terms. He called for social welfare distribution, new mining, banks and paper currency, insurance companies, mass-printed newspapers, and a patent system to encourage invention.
But most of these reforms never materialized. Rengan was soon preoccupied with the war effort, breaking the Qing envelopment of Nanjing and pushing eastward into Jiangsu province. Unable to live up to their earlier, southern successes though, their strategy often took the form of something closer to a total war terrorist campaign. As one onlooker described from the safety of British-dominated Shanghai, “The glow of the fires illuminates the sky, and the cries of the people shake the earth.”
The war created substantial internal displacement. Throughout these turbulent years, refugees flooded into British-controlled Hong Kong and Shanghai. And in the refugee slums of Shanghai, cholera broke out. This “foreign disease” – as the Chinese called it – quickly spread throughout China, killing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands.
By this point, Hong was slipping. Even though he had banned stuff like sex and displays of economic inequality, he fathered several children and was enjoying a massive harem, opulent clothing, and being carried around in a litter. He had mostly withdrawn from day-to-day rule of his Heavenly Kingdom, and those who had contact with him could tell he was losing touch with reality. Today, scholars speculate he was suffering from something like schizophrenia.
Hong’s court, meanwhile, was plagued by infighting. Not long before Rengan showed up in Nanjing, the Heavenly Kingdom had briefly come under the control of the East King, before Hong decided to reassert control, ordering the brutal murders of the East King, his family, and his supporters. Rengan, for his part, could never seem to get on the same page as the chief Taiping general.
Things weren’t much better in the Qing court, where the Xianfeng Emperor constantly distracted himself with booze, opium, and concubines. By August 1861, he was dead. Later that year, a palace coup orchestrated by his brother and one of his wives – the now-Dowager Empress Cixi – led her to effectively rule China for the next five decades. We’ll talk more about her at some point down the road. In the meantime, Xianfeng’s brother began diplomacy with the westerners to turn their power on the Taipings.
The Taipings made several overtures to the western powers, hoping to buy gunboats and other modern military technologies from them. Some British and American merchants violated their countries’ neutrality by selling the Taipings cannons, rifles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. In their approaches to western diplomats, the Taipings played to their shared Christianity and shared frustration with the Qing – and for a while it seemed to work. Western newspapers wrote favorably of the revolution in China.
But western military commanders in China believed it was important to stay neutral. They were skeptical of these rebels and their supposedly divine king. But mostly, they were concerned about the Taipings’ prohibition of opium. Like, “If this rebel movement takes control of China, are we going to need to fight another opium war?”
Then the Taipings tried to take Shanghai, understanding how important this newly-booming port city would be to the Heavenly Kingdom’s revenues. Now, they made a point of it not to attack the foreign quarters of the city, leaving the property of western traders in-tact, but it scared the western armed forces into breaking their neutrality. They began selling arms to the Qing forces – the primary benefit of which, the Manchus believed, would be to frighten the Taipings. And in 1862, British, French, and American soldiers and sailors came to the aid of the Qing army.
A couple years earlier, an American adventurer in Shanghai named Frederick Townsend Ward formed a corps of mercenaries to fight the Taipings. Now this band of hooligans became the foundation of the western powers’ war on the Heavenly Kingdom. Military advisors from the UK and France joined the effort. They recruited local Chinese fighters, trained them how to use the modern artillery they brought to the battlefield, and drilled them on the latest in western tactics. After helping repel the Taipings from Shanghai, they marched out into the surrounding areas, retaking the suburbs and villages further out in Jiangsu province. The Qing soon dubbed them the “Ever Victorious Army.”
After Ward died in battle, he was succeeded by a 29-year-old British officer named Charles George Gordon – or, as he’d be remembered after these exploits, Chinese Gordon. A veteran of the siege of Sevastapol, Gordon sought a quicker end to the rebellion with minimal loss of life, winning key battles with a new flanking strategy. He used armed and armored steamboats to take control of the canals and waterways between Shanghai and Nanjing. It was enough to put the Taipings on their heals.
From there, the Hunan Army was able to re-envelop Nanjing – this time, creating a successful siege that cut the Taiping capital off from its supply lines.
The people of Nanjing were now going hungry, and Hong was as erratic as ever. In early 1864, he ordered his people to eat manna – the miracle food God gave the Israelites in the Book of Exodus – by which he meant the weeds around the palace. After eating some himself, he became sick and died a few months later.
Succeeding him was his teenage son. But, by that point, the war was basically over. The Hunan Army was at least half-a-million-strong, blasting away at the rebel capital with western artillery. They tunneled under the walls of Nanjing, filled the tunnels with gunpowder, and blew up a significant portion of the city’s defenses. From there, they stormed the city and massacred an estimated 100,000 loyal Taipings. They let the city burn for nearly a week. When they found Hong’s ashes, they fired them out of a cannon to ensure his remains had no resting place.
The Hunan Army and Ever Victorious Army then disbanded and went home. Skirmishes with small bands of Taiping holdouts would continue into the 1870s, but – for the most part – the war was over. The Qing Dynasty was – for the moment – secure again.
The Taiping Rebellion had been a devastating civil war. It saw not only mass-slaughter driven by ethnic animosities, but also a massive disruption to daily life. Harvests suffered and many went hungry. Cannibalism became common enough that one Taiping official complained about the inflated price of human meat. Those who documented the conflict generally noted that most Chinese people didn’t care who won, so long as the chaos ended sooner rather than later.
By the time it was over, the casualty count dwarfed those of all other wars in this period. The most common estimate is that 20 million people lost their lives as a result of the conflict – whether it was in battle or due to diseases or starvation. Some estimates are as high as 50 million.
What’s amazing about that death toll is that the weapons used in the Taiping Rebellion were mostly pre-industrial. The soldiers attacked on horseback, armed with swords and spears, or shot at their enemies with bows and arrows. Gunpowder was used to blow up city walls and fire old-school matchlock muskets, which hadn’t been used in the west since the early 1700s. But until the western powers intervened in the end, there was nothing of the modern artillery that we heard about in Crimea, the U.S., and the Rio de la Plata.
It just goes to show that you don’t need especially deadly weapons to have an especially deadly war. In fact, one could argue that the more deadly the weapons are, the sooner the belligerents of a war will want to bring it to an end, thereby saving lives that would have been lost. (Well, unless they’re Solano Lopez, I guess.)
But while the war itself wasn’t especially industrial, it was being driven – in large part – by industrial forces far away. The imperial government’s inability to resist western encroachment – particularly the spread of opium by the British – was devastating to the China’s social fabric and economy. And it was deeply embarrassing to the Chinese people, who believed the Manchus had brought great shame upon their once glorious empire.
This would continue into the second half of the 19th Century – what the Chinese called the Century of Humiliation – because while the Taiping Rebellion was over, the problems that plagued China going into it were not.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in the 20th Century, new leaders in China began to interpret the Taiping Rebellion through new lenses. Mao Zedong pointed to the successes of the rebels as proof of the revolutionary potential of the Chinese peasant. And the anti-Confucian, anti-imperialist elements of the story made it a key event in the historical trajectory of China, as promoted by the Chinese Communist Party well into the 1980s.
But in the context of its time, we can see the Taiping Rebellion through another lens too. It was an age in which – not only in China, but all around the world – people with a shared ethnic background, language, and culture began seeking geographic sovereignty on that basis. They didn’t want to be ruled by a far-away people in a weird, agglomerated empire. They wanted their own states for their own nations. It was an age of growing Nationalism – next time, on the Industrial Revolutions.
---
By the way, the very first bonus episode I did was about the so-called Needham Question – the question that asks, “Why wasn’t China – which invented all the great stuff like paper and gunpowder – the country to industrialize and conquer the world?” It’s among the content that you can only get if you become a Patreon supporter. So go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to check it out.
Thanks again!