Читать книгу Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz - Страница 11

No one quite knew what to do with Louisiana—nor, indeed, where precisely it was. The French colonial claim of that name, dating from 1699, more or less coincided with the borders of the Great Plains (though the term was not used), and the borders were left intentionally vague so as to leave room for hypothetical future expansion. In truth, control over space was a mere act of cartography, and to name this particular space after Louis XIV was about as practical as Galileo naming Jupiter’s moons after the Medici. The territory was so little known that one could not define it with any prominent features of the topography. Thus authors were reduced to the indefinites of symbolic space. Take, for instance, Du Pratz in 1763: Louisiana was “that part of North America which is bounded on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the East by Carolina . . . and by a part of Canada; on the west by New Mexico, and on the north by parts of Canada, in part it extends without assignable bounds to the terra incognita adjoining Hudson Bay.”² Exactly the same ambiguity applied to all the other parameters—Carolina, New Mexico, Canada. The equation was not meant to be solved. Anyway, by 1763 the question was moot; France was defeated, and her possessions were divided, east of the Mississippi (i.e., Quebec) to Britain, west of the Mississippi (i.e., Louisiana) to Spain. This defined the eastern border and made the western border unimportant. (Louisiana was now merely the name of another Spanish colony, just like Texas to its West.) Not that any of this really mattered to the Indians or the bison—the true inhabitants of the plains—whose life was dominated by another, more real geography of the spread of horses, guns, and smallpox. In Europe, however, the spaces of the American continent took on dramatic dimensions. Returning in 1800 from his failed Egyptian expedition—where he tried to derail the British Empire through the East—Napoleon decided to attack from the West. Napoleonic pressure returned Louisiana to the French, a base from which to disrupt British power in Canada and in the Caribbean. No more luck for Bonaparte here than in Egypt, though; a slave revolt in Haiti made the French position in the Caribbean tenuous. Meanwhile American diplomats, worried about the presence of the bellicose French at the mouth of the Mississippi, inquired whether New Orleans could be leased. Napoleon, quickly reconsidering his position, retroactively made the entire operation into a real estate investment. He offered the territory to the Americans, all for 15 million. The Americans, by no means naive themselves, then obtained excellent conditions of payment, the entire sum paid in American public debt. In 1803, when the transaction was made, almost nothing changed hands. Napoleon sold the Americans the promise of space and was paid with the promise of money.³

Absurd as they might seem, early-day colonial claims were not irrational. Inside the phantom territories staked by such claims, real interests were protected. This was the trader’s colonialism that made its big profits not by covering areas but by connecting points: a plantation, a mine, a market, a port. The spatial commodity exploited is distance. Sumatra is very distant from Italy, Peru is very distant from China, Jamaica is very distant from France. Pepper, silver, and sugar, crossing such distances, multiply enormously in value. By gaining control over this network of shipping from procurement to consumption, one obtains a tremendous source of profit and power.⁴ In this type of colonialism, then, perimeters of influence were meant to enclose not a space but a series of points, and details of border and control over space were irrelevant.

Distance would always remain valuable, and it still is: the value of the sweatshop is a function of its distance from its clientele. The geographic distance allows a vast separation between the extremes of poverty and affluence. Connecting these two extremes is crucial to the contemporary world, as it has always been to colonialism. However, in the nineteenth century, a new kind of colonialism emerged: not the trader’s but the investor’s colonialism. The investor does more than connect: he invests and develops, turning as much as possible of a land into usable resources. This new colonialism, then, would be the investor’s colonialism—based on the profits to be made out of intensive production on a vast scale. The spatial commodity for this colonialism is not distance alone but also area itself. Thus borders would now be defined, and their interiors thoroughly controlled. And this was to happen now, following America’s acquisition of the West. In the nineteenth century, America led the way to the world in making the transition from the trader’s to the investor’s colonialism. In taking up the Louisiana claim, America entered, without knowing it, not only a new space but, more important, a new way of handling space. This would ensue in ever-widening cycles of violence.

It started with Texas. A Spanish territory in 1803, Texas came to be part of the newly independent Mexican state in 1822. Its many colonists from the United States took a dim view of the antislavery position of the Mexican government. They fought for their freedom to own slaves—gradually drawing the United States itself into their protection, which, in the brief war of 1847, finally led to the United States being in possession of the West.

At this point, the countdown began for the American Civil War. The issue is this: Land, alone, does nothing for humans. It has to be used in some definite way: cultivated; grazed by animals; mined; built. Each land use determines a different ecology and thus a different society. To reach for land is to try to extend a certain social order into it to the exclusion of others. Decisions are painful, especially when different social orders coexist already. To open new lands is therefore to open old wounds; America’s wound, of course, was slavery. This land use was based on extensive agriculture in large fields, poor in technology, rich in the unskilled, coerced labor of draft animals and enslaved humans. It was most profitable in the global products of classical trader’s colonialism: sugar, tobacco, cotton. It assumed little investment and much transportation. Contrast this to the land use of the farmstead, where a paterfamilias would govern a large family and its livestock to make a living from a land intensively cultivated, partly for internal consumption, partly for the sale, to nearby urban centers, of high-quality produce. This is based on cheaper transportation, but more intensive investment. From the census of 1860, we can take the following two questions: (A) the numbers of acres of improved land (irrigated, fenced, etc.) on the farms; and (B) the number of acres of unimproved land on the farms. A vote for Lincoln was directly correlated to the ratio of A to B. Connecticut had nearly three improved acres of land for each unimproved acre; South Carolina had nearly three unimproved acres of land for each improved acre. This was the divide defining the Civil War.

We can mark the big divide as follows: between a northern country, where fields were controlled by the intensive use of the fence, and a southern country, where fields were controlled by the intensive use of the whip. At issue, in other words, was not just the moral sentiment of abolitionism—which, it is only fair to say, did greatly move many Americans—but the realities of control. The North wanted to see an America with acre after acre of improved land supporting both families and urban centers, all inspired by the intensive economy of the northern American town. The plantation owners of the South wanted to prevent just this outcome of an America governed by the cities of the North. The South needed to grow, demographically, just as the North was growing, and the South needed new slave states, if only to have new slave state senators.

Now the settling of the plains themselves gained a new urgency. It was progressing apace; the bison were retreating, and the railroad was beginning to send its branches west of Chicago. The continental rail project—to connect California with the East, gathering all the West along the way—exacerbated the sectional strife and got stymied by it. The decision about a route for this train would be, symbolically as well as practically, a decision about which part of the nation had first claim to the West. Hence no decision could be made. Nor could any explicit political decision be made for the settlement of the plains. Yet throughout this all, American agricultural practices were brought into Kansas and the entire Plains, changing the land and driving away the bison and the Indians. In Kansas, Southern and Northern farmers faced one another in what became throughout the 1850s a bloody skirmish, a prelude to the Civil War. Simultaneously, the West was being integrated into the East, and the South was breaking away from the North—and the two processes were one.

To repeat: there was a fundamental asymmetry between North and South. Northern farms were outposts of agricultural production sent out by an urban, industrial economy; this is ultimately why intensive farming made sense for them. Southern farms were all the South really had. Like the entire Caribbean area, the South was all, essentially, no more than an outpost of Europe. The sectional divide was thus a relic of the trader’s colonialism, of a time when America was made up of discrete entities serving separate European functions. With its railroads, with the explosion of its urban life, the North was now ready to become its own center, and the center for the entire continent. More than this, the North was ready to become the center of the continent as a continent, the entirety of its land being developed for the support of Northern cities. This was why Southerners felt threatened, and why they lost. When Lincoln came to office in 1861—a president whom Southerners perceived, somewhat falsely, to be a Free-Soiler—and when the South finally seceded, the war was fought not merely to resume an American system. The war, instead, created such a system. Now it was to be, for the first time, a single structure, with a single center based in America itself, on the northern Atlantic seaboard—all intensively developed. The war started because there was a West to incorporate, and it ended with the West—as well as the South—both incorporated into capitalist America.

In Lincoln’s Congress—the Southern filibusterers now having seceded—all the gridlocked issues of the 1850s were pushed into motion. The main goal was to develop land in the West; the main tool the government had at its disposal was land in the West. Thus the curious nature of the legislation, offering uncharted lands to those who would chart them. The Pacific Railroad Act established a northern route for the railroad, offering its developers, as incentive, 6,400 acres of western land (more would be decreed in the future) for each mile constructed. Meanwhile, toward the foundation of state colleges, the Morrill Act gave western land at the rate of 30,000 acres for every senator and congressman each state had. These colleges, let us remember, were primarily supposed to produce agricultural experts—which, in the early years, is what they largely did. Funded by the intensive cultivation of land, their intellectual production served to intensify agriculture further. Finally, the Homestead Act was the crucial legislation that set out the basic form of settlement for the West. The act promised each individual settler, following five years of residence and improvement, 160 acres of land. This envisaged small-scale, intensive family farming. The railroad, agricultural science, Northern farming families—all were expected to replicate soon, on the Great Plains, the economic achievement of the North.

This was all enacted in 1862 in Washington, D.C., while not far off, Americans were dying in numbers—and ways—unimagined. The Civil War was the fourth cycle of violence unleashed by Louisiana, following Texas, Mexico, and Kansas, but nothing had prepared for what happened now. It was as shattering to contemporary Americans as World War I would later be to Europe. It was strange and frightening; while warring, war itself was changing. No one knew iron could wreak such havoc. Ironclads, introduced in 1861 by the South and soon mass-produced by the North, made wooden military ships obsolete overnight. Railroads allowed the concentration, never seen before, of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Rifles—an invention assembled together during the 1850s—changed the space of battle itself. If you impart spin to a bullet by shooting it through a rifled, or spiral-grooved, barrel, it gains in precision and thus in effective range. The smoothbore musket had a range of not much more than a hundred yards; the rifle had one of about six hundred, covering a space thirty-six times greater. From 1862 onward, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers amassed by the railroad carried with them rifles instead of muskets. Iron made battles larger: the rifle made the field of killing greater, and the railroad enlarged its reach in terms of human population. A soldier could be drafted in Boston, within a few weeks arrive in Pennsylvania, and there become tangled in an area of tens of square miles of unremitting violence—the worst of them all, the field of Gettysburg, where more than 50,000 were killed over three days’ fighting in July 1863. Death was agonizing; rifles were at an interim stage of technology, forceful enough to get the bullet inside the body even at long range, but not quite forceful enough (as twentieth-century guns would be) for the bullet to exit the body following impact. Civil War bullets typically rested inside the flesh, ensuring inflammation and, in most cases, painful death.⁵ All in all, more than 600,000 Americans died in the four years of the war. The brutality of the frontier skirmish—the Indian wars, Texas, Mexico City, Kansas—returned, magnified many times over, to the centers of American civilization. I will return to this dialectic of frontier and center—the brutality of the first returning to haunt the latter—in the next chapter.

Not that the American frontier skirmishes ever stopped. The Civil War had its Indian War built into it. Indeed, some tribes made the wrong tactical decision, siding with the South—particularly in the Indian Territory. This was very convenient for the North, as ultimately it would allow the federal government to discontinue the grant of any territory to the Native Americans. But the same was true everywhere. The skills, the brutal attitudes, and the technologies developed in the Civil War were seen in the West as well. Even as the Civil War was still raging, rifles shot more bison than humans.

These were the cycles of violence: from the Texans’ war against Mexicans, through the Mexican-American War, and then through the North-South skirmish, particularly at Kansas, came the Civil War itself; and this led immediately to further cycles of violence, aimed now at the Indian and the bison. In November 1864, General Sherman was marching from Atlanta to the sea, everywhere proclaiming the cause of liberty. Just then, far to the West, the Cheyenne Indians were invited by the American settlers to come to Sand Creek, Colorado. The Cheyenne were promised that they could hunt there, but on November 29 they were hunted themselves. Local Colorado militia forces surprised the Cheyenne in their tents, and all were killed—hundreds of men, women, and children. Skin cut off a dead body had an enormous fascination for the killers of the West, and the scalps of Cheyennes were now displayed, to applause, in Denver’s public theater.⁶

Such excesses were indeed less common, and an outcry took place when news reached further east. But America did not really have an alternative Indian policy. To start with, the main piece of official policy were forts garrisoned across the West to protect the growing railroad and the concomitant agricultural settlements. In topological terms, then, the Great Plains were a plane surface, across which points (garrisons and settlements) were connected by lines (railways and trails), the surface as such still belonging, in a sense, to the Indian and the bison. Precisely this topology was to be changed. The bison—the basis for the Indians’ way of life—were being finished, and the Indians were urged to settle down, to get out of the way. Instead of Euro-Americans being confined to points on the surface, the Indians were to be reduced to their points—the reservations—the entire surface now becoming European. This was the enlightened alternative to Sand Creek. Indians, on the whole, realized they had no other option, but many resisted. They had moved to the plains from the East, generations ago, because their agriculture was failing under European pressure; they had taken to hunting because, with their resources, successful agriculture on the plains was impossible. They suspected they were being condemned to a life of destitution, and they were right. But all their courage and equestrian skills notwithstanding, the Indians had no chance. With the typical advantages of guerrilla fighters—better mobility, knowledge of the land—surprise and individual successes were always possible, most spectacularly at Little Bighorn, when on June 25, 1876, Colonel Custer was caught and killed with his force of 220 soldiers. But in fact, these were already the last moments of Indian resistance. They had nothing to roam the plains for. The bison were now dead, replaced by railroads and farmers. As the Indians retreated to their pitiful reservations, the cow began its trek north of Texas, eventually to introduce there an economy based in Chicago. And this, finally, was the culmination of American history in the nineteenth century. Texas led to Mexico, which led to Kansas, which led to the Civil War, upon whose conclusion America could move on to destroy the Indian and the bison. The final act in the subjugation of the West was under way: the transition from bison to cow.⁷ This was the immediate consequence of the Civil War: the West was opened for America—and America had filled it with cows.

We are getting near the invention of barbed wire, then. So let us focus our attention on western cows, at the moment when they replace the bison. Was this, in reality, a deep transformation at all? The answer is complicated. At first glance, the new order could be said to be no more than a shift of species and of race: bison replaced by cows, Indians replaced by Euro-Americans. Neither shift, in itself, involved, at first glance, a dramatic change.

Take first the animals. The Texas longhorn cow, instead of the herds of wild bison, now roamed the plains. We should not be misled. When one thinks of a cow, what comes to mind are, perhaps, dairy cows seen in European fields—heavily bred and disciplined so as to produce a breed as docile as a spaniel. But the longhorn was different—in fact, could not survive otherwise on the open plains. The ancestors of these cows had gone wild after being brought to America by Spanish colonizers. The same happened to many domesticated species brought to the New World. Animals, let loose on a new continent, outgrew their European past, indeed, their European masters. The local ecology had little to resist the new species, and a few escapees would be enough to establish a huge population, gradually shedding its domesticated habits.⁸ Beyond the limited domain of European settlement and domestication, a penumbra of feralized animals could be seen on the American continent. Here were wild horses—as many as two million of them—famously contributing to the last stage of Indian life.⁹ So, to a lesser extent, were wild cows. In the 1870s, they were just being brought back to the fold, and the Texan breed was still remarkable in its ferocity. Nearly self-sufficient, they were thus not totally unlike the bison that they had replaced.

As for the Indians—for the last century subsisting almost exclusively by hunting the bison—they too were replaced by a breed not quite unlike them. Euro-American men, mounted on horses, gathered and herded the cows, roaming the same plains as the Indians did, following the same constants of grass and water, living in similarly small bands with little attachment to settled community. Life on the plains, then, did not change much.

The essential ecological structure was in a sense preserved as well. The sun’s energy was stored up by grass. The grass was consumed by vast numbers of large bovines. These in turn were herded and killed by small bands of humans. At first, perhaps, not quite as many as the bison; the bison population is now estimated to have peaked at about 30 million near the beginning of the nineteenth century, while cattle numbered perhaps over 11 million by 1880. But then again, the rise of the cow came after a long period of degradation, as overroaming, human impact, and ecological catastrophes gradually reduced the capacity of the plains to carry bovines. Taking a longer view, we can say that the bovine population (i.e., either bison or cows) started from around 30 million at the beginning of the nineteenth century, collapsed to perhaps 15 million in the 1860s before the final onslaught on the bison herd, then bottomed out in 1880 at 11 million before climbing back to nearly 24 million by 1900. The death of the bison was in a sense merely a crisis of transition from one bovine ecology to another.¹⁰

Bovines, far more numerous than any other mammals, continued to dominate life on the plains. They were dominant also in the sense that they governed space, at least locally. Just as the bison did, cows roamed freely most of the time—and just as the bison did, cows did it all under the surveillance of small bands of humans. Finally (and here is the essence of the continuity) the cows, like the bison before them, accounted for the presence of the humans. Everything about human life on the plains was built around the protection of bovines for the sake of their future killing, just as it had been since the start of the Indian hunting experience on the plains. In a sense, the American West had to start from somewhere, so it started from where the Indians left off. There was nothing better to be done with the land.

Below the ecological continuities, however, ran deep differences, most obvious in the nature of the killing. The basic structure of the history of the Great Plains was the evolution of methods for killing bovines. In fact, killing a bovine is not an easy thing to do. A bison, in particular, is a swift, agile animal. Of course, the bison did not evolve to be protected from humans, but it had enough experience with wolves and other mammal predators to teach it caution. Prehistoric Indians could hardly face a bison and try to kill it; it would, quite sensibly, run away. This was the bison’s mistake: it should, of course, have turned around and tried to ram the Indian, but the bison never realized how much weaker humans are than wolves. Thus the Indians could elaborate their method of killing. It worked like this. First, the hunt was at the level of bands—a band of Indians gathered together against a band of bison (single bison or small groups would not be affected by the method I describe). The bison would be frightened, literally, out of their wits. The humans egging the bison on would gradually herd them along a predetermined route. There they reached a precipice (the plains, in fact, do have their hills). The bison, being closely packed, could not change direction at the last moment. Most if not all would fall over the brink, which, even if not very high, would suffice to shock them so that they could be done away by the band. Notice that all tribe members participated in the exercise, which was almost pastoral, rather than hunting, in nature.¹¹ Then, in early historical times, dramatic changes took place, and the Indian hunting method changed completely. With the horse—rapidly made available on the plains during the eighteenth century—equestrian hunters could now outrun the bison and kill it from horseback. Note the advantage: killing was possible all year long, not only during the rutting season (when bison would form their great bands). Note also that, now being more capital intensive, so to speak, killing a bison became more specialized and involved a division of labor. The Indian women, with a lesser contribution to food procurement, developed the specialty of making robes from bison hides into something of a manufacture business. Soon Euro-American merchants, reaching up the river on the Mississippi, would prompt the Indians to kill bison specifically for the purpose of robe making.¹² Finally there came better guns, and in particular the much more precise rifles, invented in the 1850s and used, as we have seen, to great effect in killing humans, too. Armed with these, Euro-Americans overwhelmed the bison—already decimated by Indian overkill. Now the killing of the bison was more capital intensive (you needed to own a rifle), but almost labor free. There was no problem whatsoever in getting the bison into rifle range, so that the plains practically became bison-killing factories, with rifles for machines. The hunt peaked in 1872, and the plains were practically clean of bison by 1883; according to one estimate, more than 5.5 million bison were killed in the peak years of the early 1870s alone.¹³ At this point, division of labor as well as capital investment went one step further. The Euro-Americans were killing bison not to eat their meat but to transport the unprocessed hides east. The bison, killed by the products of American machinery, were further processed by this machinery—and then became part of it. The bison hide was processed by the American tanning industry to produce, in particular, the strong belts required for running factory machines.¹⁴

The cow brought this process to its logical end. We have seen how the bison, in the final stage of its existence, stopped being consumed or processed on the plains; the cow was not even killed on the plains. The plains merely transported the cows now and gave them whatever meager nourishment would sustain them through the process. A cow would typically begin its life in Texas; herded north, it would roam under the guidance of humans somewhere in the plains, then be herded again eastward (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for there, briefly, nearer a major center of slaughter (Chicago itself, or some urban center further east). This last stage of care was necessary because of the immense hardship the cows had just been through. Walking the entire American Midwest, often under inclement weather and in inhospitable terrain, was an experience reflected by the animals’ physical state—and so in their commercial value. To make them more profitable, therefore, they were allotted a brief period of comfort before death, as if to compensate for the months and years of deprivation. Finally, however, the animal would be brought into a city to be killed there, its carcass processed and then finally consumed. During this process, many humans would be involved: usually more than one group of cowmen and farmers, freight train personnel and retailers, farmers again, and then a butcher, leading finally to the consumer.

Horse, steamboat, gun, railroad—as each tool of control over space reached the plains, a further step was made toward capitalism. Now, finally, capitalism was reached. The prehistoric bison hunt represented a precapitalist economy, with the killing limited by humans’ precarious hold over their environment. The historic bison hunt by Indians represented the unstable interface of capitalist and precapitalist economies. With relatively little division of labor and thus a huge profit margin for the merchants, greed overcame reality. Extremely vulnerable in this exchange, becoming ever more dependent on American merchants, the Indians were driven to overkill and to ruin the basis for their way of life. At this point, with hardly a life left in the bison herd, Euro-American hunters, representatives of a more sophisticated capitalist system, came in to exploit what was for them merely a valuable, if dwindling, natural resource. The handling of cows, finally, represented a fully capitalist economy, with sharp division of labor. Killing was now made fully calculated and economical. There was more revenue in a cow than in a bison, but less of a profit margin: more thought, therefore, would go into the cow’s killing. The cow economy—as well as the cow ecology—would not have the simplicity of structure that the plains had at the times of the bison.

This new complexity had two aspects. First, the biological dominance of cows in respect to other nonhuman species would soon be challenged: land would be used not only for the feeding of cows but directly for agriculture. Second, and related, the relationship of cows with humans was much more one-sided than bison-Indian relations had ever been. Of course, the Indians were dominant enough relative to the bison; they could kill hundreds and hundreds of them with great ease. But, after all, the bison was also the great imponderable of Indian life on the plains, the beast whose numbers and appearances were to be determined by forces beyond human control. For capitalist America, nothing was supposed to be beyond human control.

What is control over animals? This has two senses, a human gain, and an animal deprivation. First, animals are under control as humans gain power over them—most importantly, as humans gain control over animals’ biological cycle (procreation, growth, and death). Such control transforms biological patterns into marketable commodities: this is the essence of domestication. Second, animals are under control when they are deprived of their powers of activity. To survive, an animal must develop a certain control over its environment: it can move, trace food, graze or kill. To complete the control over the animal—to reduce it to a mere passive member in a fundamentally human society—is the other side of control over animals. Where they cannot be domesticated, then—that is, when they cannot be reduced to mere passive members in an otherwise human society—animals have to be kept away or destroyed. When all animals have been either subdued or destroyed, a share of land has been cleared from animal power and brought fully under human control. The fact is, control over animals is rather like control over humans: you can either make them do what you like them to do or else get them out of the way. This is how societies are made: human societies as well as the larger, multispecies societies that humans have created.

Now, large animals living in large social groups—the kind, that is, of most direct value to domestication—combine the considerable force of each member to create, in their herds, a powerful social organism. Thus they pose an especially difficult task in trying to bring them into human society. Facing the bison, the human problem was stark, and the solution adopted by Europeans was very simple, that of extermination.

But even with fully domesticated animals, it takes a considerable amount of effort to set up a constant counterforce so as to keep the animals at bay. Even domesticated animals, after all, are still alive. And so they would, unless specifically controlled, go where they want, eat what they want. Hence the problem of subduing the cows on the plains. It was to solve this problem that barbed wire was invented.