When Russia Was the Little Guy (They’re so Cute When They’re Small): The Time of Troubles

The Time of Troubles (The period of Russian history, not the fictional event in the Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons setting where the gods of Toril were forced to walk the earth in mortal form, or some shit like that.) was the period of Russian history immediately following the death of Tsar Feodor I, son and successor of Ivan the Terrible, and the rule of the first (and almost only) Tsar of the Godunov dynasty.

Knowing that Ivan was nicknamed the Terrible, I don’t need to go into too much detail about him; although I’ll probably still give more than you need or want to know (I can’t turn it off, people). Ivan started out his reign well by consolidating all the Russian principalities under his rule, proclaiming himself Tsar of All the Russias. He then snatched up some of the successor Turko-Mongol khanates that had split off of Russia’s former masters of the Golden Horde. You’d think an expansive state would be a good thing. It might have been, except for Ivan going crazy after the death of his wife, turning into the kind of extremely brutal dictator only a madman can be, then topping it off by picking a losing fight with his western neighbors, and murdering his one good son and heir apparent, also named Ivan.

This left his good-natured but simple, possibly developmentally disabled son, Feodor, in charge. Feodor, by all accounts was a nice guy who loved to have the church bells rung, giving him the nickname Feodor the Bellringer. Nice, but not what was needed for a nation whose power had been spread out like too little peanut butter over too much bread. This left Feodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov in charge, first as regent, and then as elected Tsar, after Feodor’s death in 1598.

Now here’s a detail that will be important later. Feodor had a younger half-brother, Dmitry, the son of Ivan the Terrible’s fifth, although some sources say seventh or eighth wife. So, you’d think by rights, Dmitry should have inherited the throne after Feodor’s death? Two details prevented that. One was a peculiarity of the Orthodox Church, that every man is issued a holy punch-card for wives with only three spaces in it. Ivan had exceeded his punch-card, so in the eyes of the Church, Dmitry was a bastard. The second detail was a little more final, since plenty of bastards have been legitimized throughout history; Dmitry was dead. He had been exiled by Godunov while Feodor was still Tsar, and sure, Feodor loved his little brother, but he had bells that needed to be rung. While in exile, Dmitry had an “unfortunate accident”, stabbing himself in the throat by falling on a knife during an epileptic seizure. Yeah. Right.

Boris was an effective ruler for the most part, doing what he could to secure stability for the Russian state, but he could not do much about the eruption in Peru of the volcano Huaynaputina in 1600. The 1500 people directly killed by the volcano’s eruption got off lucky compared to the possibly two million Russians – one third of the population -- who died of starvation and illness during the volcanic winter-induced famine which lasted from 1601-1603. Following on that, in 1605, Boris died, leaving his 16 year old son as Tsar Feodor II.

As part of inheriting Russia, Feodor II inherited a whole handful of political enemies who had never been happy that Boris had been elected Tsar. This is where Dmitry becomes relevant again, because in 1600, some dude had come forward claiming that Dmitry hadn’t cut his own throat with a knife during an epileptic seizure. He knew this because he was the real Dmitry, who had been smuggled out of the reach of bad old Boris Godunov before he could be done in. Some people in the court found his claim convincing. Boris of course ordered his arrest. Undead Dmitry, not being totally stupid, fled west to Russia’s neighbor, the largest nation in Europe at the time, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Now, I could write a whole other post on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but we’ll just leave it that Poland and Lithuania, united by sharing the same head of state since the late 1300s had formalized that situation by effectively becoming a united nation in 1569. Oh, yeah, and their heavy cavalry wore actual wings into battle. Yep, big feathered wings; they were definitely the most bad-ass cosplayers in Europe at the time.

At this point, the man who is known to history as False Dmitry I (that’s foreshadowing) gained the backing of the powerful Polish noble house of Wiśniowiecki. Together, they concocted a plan to invade Russia while it was still in a weakened state. This conspiracy began casting about for support, bringing more Polish nobles on board, and even gaining the nominal backing of the Vatican who hoped to make inroads into Orthodox Russia. However, the Polish-Lithuanian ruler, Sigismund III (who was actually of Swedish origin), was at the time busy trying to reclaim the throne of Sweden from his uncle, who had taken it from him a few years earlier. Plus the Ottoman Turks were causing all kinds of trouble on his southern border. With all that on his plate Sigismund couldn’t commit to backing Dmitry, so the Wiśniowieckis, decided to launch an invasion on their own.

Their filibuster army, composed of personal troops and mercenaries, marched into Russia in 1605, capturing towns and picking up Russian supporters as they went. They did well at first, but their loss to Russian forces at their second major battle might have undone the invasion if not for the chaos resulting from the sudden death of Boris Godunov. Within a month the people of Moscow, and the leaders of his armed forces, revolted against Feodor II, going over to the false Dmitry.  Feodor and his mother were arrested and eventually strangled to death. Dmitry was crowned as Tsar.

Things seemed to be going well, so of course they had to go south. Dmitry was a weird Tsar. He associated with Catholics and Protestants, planned reforms to modernize Russia, restored rights to serfs; the guy didn’t even wear a beard. What a freak. All of this soon turned many Russians against him. The final straw was when he made plans to marry the daughter of a prominent Polish noble, Marina Mniszech, later called Marinka the Witch by Russians. Unlike tsarinas up to that point, Marina did not convert to the Orthodox Church, retaining her Catholic faith. That was too much, and many of Russia’s nobles, led by an exile who had been allowed back in under the new regime, Vasily Shuisky, staged a coup, murdering Dmitry and 2,000 of his Polish followers in a city-wide massacre. Marina managed to escape.

Shuisky was crowned as Tsar Vasily IV, but Russia’s nobles were soon dissatisfied with him, and damn if wouldn’t you know it, here came another Dmitry. Now, you’d think that after Shuisky had displayed False Dmitry I’s corpse publicly, had him cremated, and then fired the ashes out of a cannon in the direction of Poland, people wouldn’t have fallen for False Dmitry II so easily. But hope springs eternal, or maybe more aptly, there’s a sucker born every minute.

This second false Dmitry, like the first, acted like a Tsar. He was seemingly well-educated and fluent in a Russian and Polish. He soon had enough of a following to gain the attention of Jerzy Mniszech, Marina’s father, who welcomed back his “son-in-law” and gave him his full support, as did many of the other Polish nobles who had supported the first false Dmitry. With the raising of another army, and False Dmitry II at its head, they were soon near Moscow, ready to “reclaim” his throne. This is where things get really complicated.

Tsar Vasily had earlier signed an alliance with the Sigismund III’s uncle, that bastard who had stolen the Swedish crown from him. Sigismund wasn’t having any of that and decided it was time to get involved in all this Russia hoo-ha. So he marched his army into Russia, besieging the city of Smolensk. With that, many of False Dmitry II’s Polish followers deserted him to join up with Sigismund. False Dmitry II and his Polish wife ran for their lives. Then another Polish noble went rogue, saying in effect to the Russians, “Hey! Haven’t you guys had it with these fake Dmitries? How about a real prince, huh?! How about electing Prince Władysław of Poland-Lithuania! He’ll be a tsar you can all get behind!” You would think this would have worked beautifully, and it did for a second. I bet you’re thinking now, “You’ve got to be kidding me!?  You’re going to spring False Dmitry III on us!?” No, I’m not. Not because there’s not a False Dmitry III in this story, because there is. But first, Sigismund had to mess up the sure thing of his son’s election to the Tsardom by Russia’s nobles. He refused to let Władysław have the keys to the car, and decided he was going to drive this baby himself.

Sweden of course said, “Bullshit to that!” and promptly invaded Russia also. Cue False Dmitry III. He had managed to gather an army of Cossack supporters and capture the city of Pskov, which is why he is most well known, since even he didn’t want to be known as False Dmitry III, as the Thief of Pskov. While they initially supported his claim, Swedish support for him soon dried up, and they put forward the second son of their king as a candidate for Tsar. Nobles in northern Russia were agreeable to this but the young prince’s mother refused to let him leave Sweden after her husband died soon after. His older half-brother, now Sweden’s king, and also at the time up to his elbows in dead Danes on Sweden’s western border, had no interest in his younger brother being the reigning monarch on a throne that he himself wanted.

Russia was in chaos. Swedish troops occupied the north, Poles occupied Moscow, the Russian nobles, who had deposed and exiled Vasily IV were now busy trying to stick knives in each other’s backs, Cossack revolts rose and fell, Ottoman vassals -- the Crimean Tatars -- raided from the south, and the people were starving and oppressed. It was time for a dude from humble origins to step up.

Kuzma Minin was a prosperous butcher in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow, was a stand up guy. When the merchants of the city decided to raise a volunteer army in the style of one previously raised by the nobleman Prokopy Lyapunov, naturally, Minin was the guy they wanted in charge of organizing things. Lyapunov’s army had been somewhat successful against the invaders until he overplayed his hand, reinstating some of the harsh laws against the serfs that had been relaxed and breaking his agreement with the Cossaks in his army, who proceeded to kill him.

This second people’s army, raised by Minin was put in the charge of another noble, Dmitry Mikhaylovich Pozharsky. Unlike Lyapunov, Pozharsky had always supported the more legitimate players in the Time of Troubles. He had helped elect Boris Godunov and then Vasily IV. He had fought against False Dmitry II and rebel factions who threatened to tear Russia apart. It was while he was recovering from wounds gained in an attempted uprising in Moscow against the Polish occupiers that he was approached by Minin and his fellow merchants with the offer of command. Pozharsky agreed to lead the army, but only on the condition that Minin assisted him. With that settled, they proceeded in a leisurely manner toward Moscow, but within a year, Fall of 1612, they were outside the walls of the city where they defeated a Polish army come to reinforce and provision the occupiers. Within a month of that battle, the Poles barricaded in the Kremlin had enough of starving and agreed to surrender in return for safe passage. Pozharsky was a devout man, the molasses-like pace of his volunteer army having been slowed even further by his frequent stops and devotions at holy sites along the way. Apparently though, his Christian principles didn’t extend to Polish occupiers, as they were slaughtered almost to a man when they left the Kremlin.

The Poles still held Smolensk and the Swedes were still in the north, and the struggles to drive them out wouldn’t end for years to come, but Moscow was once again in the hands of Russians, who would elect a Russian Tsar; one who wasn’t some fake dude named Dmitry. Mikhail Romanov was elected by the assembly of Russian nobles as the new Tsar, and his family would rule Russia until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Minin, the humble butcher, was made a noble and awarded an estate around Nizhny Novgorod. Pozharsky was also awarded land, and given the title “Savior of the Motherland”. He served Russia against the Swedes, Poles and Ottomans for another quarter century but managed to die peacefully in his bed in 1642.

To commemorate the liberation of Moscow and the end of the Time of Troubles, Russia celebrated Unity Day up until 1917, when it was replaced with a celebration of the communist-led October Revolution. In 2005 Putin reinstated Unity Day as a national holiday. To coincide with this, the film 1612, directed by Vladimir Khotinenko and commissioned by the Kremlin, opened. The film has predictably received some controversy, being considered a pro-Putin propaganda piece (say that fast six times) by his opponents. Lord knows, I can’t abide that mass-murdering, conniving sumbitch, but I’ve seen 1612 and it’s not a bad action/adventure film. It’s got some of the same plot of A Knight’s Tale, and isn’t very historically accurate, but if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that when you see it.

The Grebo-Republic of Maryland War

            To understand the causes of the war between the Kru language-speaking Grebo people and the Republic of Maryland, a war about which we know almost no details, we only need to look at one institution: slavery. But before we get into that though, who the hell are the Grebo people and what was the Republic of Maryland?

            The first question is a little more easily answered so I’ll start there, although it’s not as cut and dried as it seems. See, when we, and by “we” I mean nation-states influenced primarily be western European culture; you know, white people. Yes, when we historically encountered other people, we were primarily motivated by the desire to steal their land, their natural resources, and in the case of Africa, their bodies. Only the live ones though. It was only in the 20^th century that western civilization discovered the value to be extracted from dead Africans by way of pointing out to the descendants of slaves how lucky they are to live in a country where they don’t get their arms chopped off with machetes for speaking the wrong language. There’s just the perfectly acceptable risk of being killed by police officers for not following their hastily shouted orders to the letter. But I digress.

            Although it’s a little more complex than this, on a basic level, humans tend to organize themselves into groups based on which language they speak, until they can fragment into smaller groups based on things like whether they prefer Star Trek or Star Wars, or what their favorite beer is, and this is true of the Kru-speaking peoples of Western Africa, who inhabit a region now composing parts of the coasts of Liberia and the Ivory Coast. It was once known as the Pepper Coast for the melegueta pepper that grows there. Fun fact: the melegueta pepper is part of the ginger family. Do not get it confused with the malegueta pepper which is an actual pepper. Apparently, people do that all the time.

            Another fun fact, which relates to our story, we’re a little fuzzy on the origin of the word ‘Kru’ to refer to this language group. It’s not a word that occurs in that or any other local language. Because of their knowledge in seafaring and navigation of the local waters individual Kru were frequently hired as crewmen by European ships that traded in the area. Another name used for these Kru sailors and the group as a whole at the time was Krumen. The best guess by linguists is that by this association the word ‘crew’ became ‘kru’ and stuck. To further complicate things, the Grebo people, who are a sub-group of the Kru, located on the southern point of that cultural group’s range, are still called Krumen to this day in the Ivory Coast. What’s most important to this story though is that the Kru were sailors, and also notable for their stubborn resistance to outsiders and captivity. The latter made the Kru horrible candidates for slavery, but the former made them much sought after for employment by captains of the slave ships which did their business in West Africa, and later by the British ships as part of the West Africa Squadron that patrolled those same waters in an effort to eradicate the slave trade. As far as can be told from accounts of the time, the Kru took a mercenary approach, and didn’t much care for which side they worked, as long as they were paid.

            Now on to the Republic of Maryland, which if you’ve never heard of it, don’t be surprised. I hadn’t heard of it until a month ago and my main hobby is knowing obscure historical shit like this. The Republic’s origins are rooted in the fact that as far back as slavery existed in the United States and earlier Colonial America, there were slave owners who for whatever reason freed slaves. These freed black men and women then had to integrate into a largely racist and hostile white society. Right or wrong, this integration wasn’t an easy thing for either side. It’s not surprising then that at some point, someone had the brilliant plan of “returning” free blacks in America to an Africa that most of them never knew, and overwhelmingly didn’t want to go to. The vehicle for this brilliant plan was the American Colonization Society, conceived of, naturally, by two white dudes, Charles Fenton Mercer and the Reverend Robert Finley. Both were opposed to slavery, but nevertheless felt, for various reasons most of us today would recognize as racist, that free black people could not integrate into American society. And they weren’t alone; the founding meeting of the Society included such American luminaries as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock of finding out that the idea of Back to Africa that Bob Marley sang about was started by white people.

            This wasn’t an unpopular idea at the time, at least for white people. It would continue to be so through the American Civil War and even later. Many people devoted to the abolition of slavery thought along similar lines to Mercer and Finley. The British had been doing it in Sierra Leon since the late 1700s, notably with escaped American slaves who were given their freedom in return for military service and then "given" land in Africa. Add to the feelings of abolitionists the fact that many slave-owners thought that having free blacks around might give “bad ideas” to enslaved blacks and you end up with one of the kookiest political alliances this country has ever seen.

            Once the ball got rolling everyone was on board. State legislatures passed adopted resolutions in support of colonization, church groups raised money, and individual state chapters of the Society were formed. By 1819 the Society had enough support to get Congress to fund the colonization effort to the tune of $100,000, and in 1820 the first colonization ship sailed with 88 free blacks and 3 white Society agents. This was the basis for what would eventually become the nation of Liberia.

            So, “Republic of Maryland” you’re impatiently thinking or muttering under your breath. Okay, then, I’ll get to it. One curious result of how the Society was organized was how in many cases individual state chapters started their own colonies, funded through local donors who were in some cases rich plantation owners who didn’t want a bunch of “uppity” free blacks around to give their slaves ideas about freedom. A map of the Pepper Coast in the 1830s shows colonies established by chapters in Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania (working together), Louisiana, Mississippi, and of course Maryland.

            The impetus for the Maryland colony was a notable event in United States history, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which took place in neighboring Virginia in 1831. If you don’t know much about this event and its leader, you should. Nat Turner was born a slave and lived his whole life in the part of southern Virginia where the revolt took place. Unlike the vast majority of slaves and many whites of the time, Turner was literate. He was also, like Joan of Arc, highly religious and had visions which he said were from God, and which told him he had been selected for an important mission.

            According to his confession, which was written down by a local lawyer who represented some of slaves in the trials following the end of the rebellion, his mission was laid out to him in 1828 while working in his master’s fields:

"I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first."

            Turner waited for God’s next signal to begin to make plans in secret for his fight “against the Serpent”, and in February of 1831 it came in the form of a solar eclipse. After several months of preparations he received his final signal from God on August 13 in the form of an atmospheric disturbance that may have been the result of an eruption of Mount St. Helens in what was then known as the Oregon Country. Nine days later the rebellion began, with Turner and his closest associates killing his master, his master’s wife, nine-year-old son, and a hired hand while they slept. From there the rebellion spread to neighboring plantations where more slaves joined until they numbered about seventy. As they went they gathered arms, and most important to the story of the Republic of Maryland, killed almost all the white people they found as they went with the final tally being about sixty dead, men, women and children. As a result, white people totally freaked out.

            Even though a company of militia put down the revolt within two days, everywhere in the surrounding counties of Virginia and North Carolina, reports of phantom rebel slave armies roaming the countryside came in. Thankfully our modern society is past constructing hysterical fantasies about menacing black people.

            Turner had escaped and would remain free for two months until he was finally captured, and in another similarity to Joan of Arc, tried and executed in an absolutely medieval manner; he was hung, flayed, beheaded, and quartered. If you’re unsure what the last one is, it means cutting the body into four parts, typically to be distributed to the four quarters for display as a warning. Of course Joan of Arc was eventually made a saint and is revered in France, whereas it is still routinely pointed out in comments on the internet when discussing the possibility of a plaque to memorialize the rebellion that we can't do that because Nat Turner was “. . . the guy that led a slave insurrection where scores of people were murdered including women and children.”

            The state, through trial and execution, and militia action killed about 150 slaves, while totally-not-hysterical mob violence killed at least another 200, the vast majority, if not all of whom were innocent of any involvement in the rebellion. Some were even slaves who had saved their masters from the rebels. Lynchings across the South in areas not in proximity to the rebellion killed an unknown number of innocent slaves and free blacks, as the violence continued for the next few weeks. Suspicion of free blacks was at an all time high, which was particularly acute in Maryland, a slave state, but the one which had the largest population of free blacks.

            With demands from the white public that something should be done, the Maryland Legislature went into action. A Maryland State Colonization Society had been formed earlier in the year after a visit to Baltimore by the son of Robert Finlay, but the organization lacked funds. With their mission clear, the legislature passed a law granting $20,000 to establish, and $10,000 annually to support, a colony in Africa made up of all the free blacks of Maryland; with no exceptions. Any free black not wanting to go to Africa was just plain out of luck. It was Africa or GTFO. This was later amended to allow individual free blacks to stay if they could find a white person of “good character” to vouch for them.

            With this plan in place, ships carrying free black colonists from Maryland sailed to Monrovia in 1831 and 1832. Monrovia was the main colony for the national Society and had been growing for over a decade. However, after these two voyages, due to some disagreements between the Maryland State Society and the national Society, Maryland decided to establish a seperate colony. In 1834 a third ship sailed, picking up many of the prior colonists in Monrovia and finally reaching their intended destination at Cape Palmas. There they purchased land from the Grebo and other local tribes, and began farming and building homes.

            If you look back at that 1830s map of the Pepper Coast, you can see a string of colonies stretching from Monrovia in the northwest down to the Maryland Colony centered on the town of Harper at Cape Palmas. But if you look closely you’ll notice a string of communities labeled as “Kroo Towns” nestled between the line of Society colonies ending with the Louisiana Colony and the Maryland Colony. From this it appears that the Maryland Colony stood out in its isolation from the other colonies.

            In 1838, only four years after the establishment of the Maryland Colony, and with oversight by the administrators of the Society lessening, the other colonies united as the Commonwealth of Liberia.  This could be seen as a gesture of beneficence and trust by the national Society, but we can’t overlook the fact that the Society running out of money also probably had something to do with it.

            The Maryland Colony chose to remain separate, not joining the Commonwealth. It still received a yearly stipend from the Maryland state legislature, and was perhaps not as pressed for cash. Another factor was the desire of the Maryland State Society to retain its monopoly on trade with the colony, which would not be the case if the Maryland Colony joined Liberia. In 1841 the Maryland State Society, for various reasons decreed that though they would still control most of the affairs of the colony, it was on a paper a sovereign state.

            By 1846 the American Colonization Society was bankrupt and the following year Liberia declared its full independence as the Republic of Liberia. The Maryland colony, known as Maryland in Africa by this time, continued down the gradual road to full independence but it wasn’t declared so until 1854 when it became the Republic of Maryland.

            Here’s where we finally get into the war, and there is some disagreement, because some sources cite the cause of the conflict between the Republic of Maryland and the Grebo to have been due to the Republic disrupting the slave trade, while others put it down to “imprudent conduct” on the part of the Republic’s last governor, Boston Jenkins Drayton.

            Though the export of slaves had been suppressed by Britain and the United States since the early 1800s, it was still carried on by ships which smuggled enslaved Africans to markets in Cuba, where they were baptized and given Spanish names. Some of these were “re-exported” to the United States by smugglers in an act that was legally equated with piracy. The last known slave ship to reach the United States was the Clotilde which landed in Mobile, Alabama in 1859. The captain, having heard that federal authorities were aware of his smuggling operation hurriedly unloaded the Africans and burned the ship to the waterline to destroy the evidence. Despite the illegality of the act, most of the captive Africans were held as slaves and remained in that state until the end of the Civil War six years later resulted in their emancipation. A small group however, who became the subject of legal wrangling between the government and Timothy Meaher, the man who had financed the smuggling venture, remained on land owned by him at Magazine Point, north of Mobile. Retaining their language and customs from the region of Ghana they had been taken from, they were left on their own to survive as best they could. After emancipation they remained on the land at Magazine Point which became known as Africatown and remained distinct until the early 20^th century.

            Despite the experience of the Africans of Africantown, when taken by anti-smuggling forces, most often, whether Cuban or African, freed slaves were “repatriated” to Sierra Leon or Liberia, where they joined the free black colonists.

            Whether the cause of the war was over the slave trade or something Governor Drayton did, open conflict broke out between the Republic and the Grebo by December of 1856. The one detail of the war we do know is that an expedition sent by the Republic against the Grebo resulted in a defeat and loss of twenty-six lives and some artillery pieces. With the loss of that strategic advantage and being severely outnumbered by the Grebo, Governor Drayton appealed to the Republic of Liberia for aid. A Liberian force arrived in Cape Palmas and the Grebo chiefs were persuaded to sign a treaty to resolve the dispute.

            The funds from the state of Maryland that had sustained its independence had long dried up and with the writing on the wall, the Republic of Maryland led by Drayton determined in a popular vote that the best course of action was to appeal to Liberia for annexation. In April, 1857 the Liberian Legislature welcomed the County of Maryland to their Republic. Maryland County is still part of the Republic of Liberia, as is Grand Kru County to their west, whose inhabitants still primarily speak the Kru language.

The Quasi-War with France: Do You Want a Quasi-War, Because This Is How You Get a Quasi-War?

            So what’s to do when you’re a newly-founded nation, who has just revolted against and kicked the crap out of your former colonial master, the most powerful country in the world? Why not be a total dick toward and pick a fight with the country who was your best ally in your revolt. It’s . . . the Quasi-War (with France).

            First, let’s get out of the way the question as to whether or not the United States would exist without the help of France. I’m not given to speaking in sureties often; it’s a big, wide world and almost anything can happen, but I’m about a hundred percent damn sure that the American Colonies’ rebellion against the British Crown would not have succeeded without the help of the French.  Rugged, plucky individualists Americans were and remain, but that don’t mean jack shit if you don’t have the money to field an army. As much as a certain segment of the 2^nd Amendment-Patriot-nutjob crowd who smoked too much weed while watching Red Dawn WAY too many times in high school wants to believe that they’ll hold off a tyrannical Army following the orders of some hypothetical Kenyan Islamo-Marxist American dictator, that dog just ain’t gonna hunt.

            Without the steady supply of war materials bought at discount by the Colonies through a shell-company set up by France (with the cooperation of Spain and a nod from the Dutch) the early phase of the American Revolution would most likely have fizzled out. As importantly, these arms and other supplies allowed America to defeat a British army at Saratoga in 1777, which convinced France to go all in.

            Fast forward to October 19, 1781 at Yorktown, and you’ve got British Brigadier General Charles O'Hara surrendering to General George Washington and French commander, Lieutenant General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau. The allied army there was composed of about equal numbers of French and American soldiers. Lord Cornwallis, the British commander at Yorktown had pled off that he was too sick to surrender himself. Yep, sick of getting his ass kicked. O’Hara offered his sword to Rochambeau, who shook his head and indicated he should give it to Washington. Washington waved him off also and had him hand it to Major General Benjamin Lincoln, Washington’s second in command. I think those three guys worked that sick burn out beforehand.

            So what could mess up this great bromance America had with the French to the point that less than 20 years later they were engaged in a ‘quasi-war’ with them? The answer: a revolution, a load of bad debt, some Olympic-level assholery, and a whole mess of butt-hurt.

            In 1794 a revolution in France overthrew the monarchy, and the new French Republic (the first one; they’re currently on their fifth) went to war with just about everyone in Europe, including Great Britain.

            America, still with major British trade interests, decided to stay out of it, and negotiate a new trade treaty with our former enemy, which debatably violated our standing Treaty of Alliance with France. France was of course outraged. They were also broke. The debt they had gone into to fund America’s revolution had been a large factor in tanking their economy, which was a major, if not THE, contributing factor that led to their revolution.

            To top it off, America, operating on the principal that “we owed money to the Kingdom of France, not the Republic of France” refused to keep paying on the debt they had worked up buying all those discounted muskets and canon. This was a fine bit of lawyerly rhetoric on America’s part that would call down the unholy wrath of any Congressional Select Committee nowadays. Remember that when you start yapping about Freedom Fries and that kind of shit. The French people were the best friends America had and America stabbed them in the back. It was a total dick move on their part, so it’s no surprise that the French got dickish back.

            France was like, “Okay, if you won’t pay us, we’ll just take it out of your ass some other way”, and began issuing letters of marque to privateers, who seized American merchant ships to sell off. Not a bad move considering America pretty much had no navy to speak of.

            In 1795 America paid off its debt to France with the help of a high-flying financier, James Swan. Swan was a veteran of the American Revolution from Boston who had made out during the war, but soon ended up in debt and fled to France. After making a killing in France he returned to America where he worked out a deal where he would privately assume the debts owed to France at a slightly higher interest rate. He then resold them at profit to debt speculators. He would eventually end up back in France in debtors’ prison.

            But the damage to French relations was already done, and when the US sent a new ambassador to France in 1796, they refused to receive him. President John Adams, probably because they didn’t have Twitter back then, had to address Congress, and tell them that America might want to start thinking about getting ready for a defensive war with France.

            Congress was already split into two parties. Not surprisingly, the split was mainly about the same shit the current two parties are still arguing about now; how much power the federal government should have. The Federalists, led by President Adams were on the side of more power, and a standing military force. The Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson were in favor of less power and no standing army or navy. The latter fact coincidentally left America wide open to having their shipping raided with impunity.

            Opinions on France were also split along party lines, with the Federalists favoring a closer relationship with Great Britain, viewing the French Republic as a bunch of dangerous radicals. The Democratic-Republicans, taking more of an ideological stance, wanted closer ties to France. Congress was at an impasse.

            The straw that broke the camels back though, was something called the XYZ Affair. It had started in 1797 when America sent a commission to France to see if the whole diplomatic brouhaha could be resolved. The French diplomats the commissioners were to negotiate with refused to receive them until they were offered some pre-set conditions, including a sizeable loan and hefty bribe. Things went back and forth, with President Adams trying to keep it hushed up, hoping to avoid demands for war from the more hawkish members of his party, but like they always do, rumors got out.

            In a rare bipartisan move, the Democratic-Republicans, not believing that things were as bad as rumor said, united with the hawkish faction of the Federalist Party and demanded Adams released all the communications from the commission. When they were released, the hawks were like, “Yeah! WAR!!!” and the Republicans were like, “Man! That did not work out the way we wanted it to!”

            It looked like America was going to war with France. There were two problems though: The first was that President Adams refused to ask for a declaration of war against a country that on paper were still our allies. Well, that turned out to be not that big of a problem. America was already in a de facto state of war with France. On July 7, 1798 Congress annulled our Treaty of Alliance with France and authorized attacks on the privateers without formally declaring war. Thus the name, Quasi-War. The second, more practical problem, as I mentioned previously in a couple of places, was that America had no real navy. All they had was the ancestor of the Coast Guard, which they hadn’t even bothered to give a name to, referring to it by the catchy phrase: “the system of cutters”. Cutters referred to the type of ship utilized by the “system”. They were small, fast, lightly-armed vessels outfitted with the express purpose of chasing down smugglers and slave traders. They worked for the Treasury Department in something like a contract arrangement.

            Luckily though, in 1794 Congress had already commissioned some frigates to protect our shipping in the Mediterranean and Atlantic against the pirates of the Barbary States of North Africa. But when America established treaties with them in 1796, it triggered an amendment (attached by the Republicans of course) which halted funding and construction. President Washington, realizing that having a bunch of half-completed frigates lying around was bullshit, talked Congress into funding the most completed three of the six to be finished. Despite this agreement, from 1796-1798, wrangling over budgetary issues and whatnot still had kept any of them from being completed. Now, facing an undeclared war with France, America needed to get those frigates finished fast. But even before our formal non-declaration of war with France on July 7, 1798, Congress, in a fit of foresightedness, had authorized the creation of a US Navy which was authorized to command the “system of cutters”, and buy and outfit merchant ships to attack the French.

            With those problems resolved, it was time for some action. The first took place the same day as the American revocation of the treaty and authorization to engage in combat. A French privateer, Croyable had been preying on shipping on the Mid-Atlantic coast. Unfortunately for them when they boarded and robbed one ship, leaving it to go on its way, its captain relayed the approximate location of the French privateer to the commander of one of the US Navy’s retro-fitted merchantmen, Delaware. The commander was Stephen Decatur, Sr., whose son, Stephen Decatur, Jr. would go on to win fame as a hero of the Barbary Wars and War of 1812 as well as infamy for dying in a duel with a fellow naval officer in 1820. Delaware handily defeated and captured Croyable off of Egg Harbor on the New Jersey coast. The privateer was sold to the US Navy and renamed Retaliation.

            The first action between heavier warships took place in February, 1799 when the frigate USS Constellation, which had finally been finished, fought and captured the faster, better-armed French frigate L’Insurgente in the Caribbean after a dramatic chase through a storm.

            In the naval actions that followed, the US Navy came out much better than the French, only losing one ship, Retaliation, which had been captured from the French in the first place, and was recaptured by the Americans before the end of the quasi-war anyway. By my reading that left America up one ship they didn’t have before. Don’t go breaking out the champagne yet though, because despite these impressive victories, between 1,800 and 2000 American merchant ships had been captured by the time peace was agreed upon. We’ll generously call it a draw.

            In 1799, in the middle of the Quasi-War, a coup in France had replaced the Directory, the republican government the United States had been so careful not to go to official war with. One of the leaders of the coup was a Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been picked by the other coup leaders to be the strong right military arm of the new government. The coup established the executive authority of the government in three consuls, with legislative power in the hands of three assemblies and the Senate. Napoleon was of course in the position of First Consul, with the position of Second and Third Consuls being filled by some dudes you’ve never heard of. Tell you what; I’m gonna do those guys a solid and give you their names. The Second and Third Consuls of the provisional Consulate, which lasted until a new constitution was written were respectively (like it matters) Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Roger Ducos. Sieyès had been the main leader of the coup and had wanted to be named the head of the government but was outmaneuvered by Napoleon and ended up in crappy Second Consul place. Sieyès was a guy who knew which way the wind was blowing though, and totally knuckled under to Napoleon. Sieyès and Ducos resigned their positions for leadership roles in the Senate, and once the constitution was voted on in a plebiscite, with 99% of Frenchmen voting in favor, supposedly, the Second and Third Consul positions were filled by Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun. You’re welcome, obscure dead French guys!

            Anyway, being more pragmatic than the previous government, the Consulate, aka Napoleon, realized that their navy could not hold out in a war against the British Royal Navy and the growing power of the American Navy. It was time for the French to deal, and deal they did. The Treaty of 1800 formally ended hostilities between France and the US as well as formally dissolving the Treaty of Alliance with France that Congress had already abandoned without France’s agreement in 1798. Private American ship owners got all their ships back and France got guaranteed fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland and Gulf of St. Lawrence.            By that time of the treaty Napoleon had consolidated his power enough that two months later when a royalist assassination attempt was used as an excuse to clean out the Assemblies of any political opponents. This left the Senate, which was well on the way to becoming a rubber stamp for the First Consul, as the supreme legislative power. Surely nothing bad that could keep Europe in a constant state of war for the next fifteen years was going to happen.

The Toledo War: Maumee Dearest

            Bloodless wars; you know them, you love them -- the Pork and Beans War, the Anglo-Swedish War of 1810-1812, and the Huéscar-Denmark War. I would have included the Pig War, but as a friend pointed out, the pig was a casualty. But what about the wars that aren’t exactly full-on wars, but someone does get hurt; what about history’s ALMOST bloodless wars?

            Usually, they’re like the above; some stupid pissing match that got out of hand and evolved into the fight over the watering hole between the ape-men from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except instead of a black monolith teaching them how to use a bone to kill each other, followed by Also sprach Zarathustra playing really loudly, it was “Well, sheriff, we’d been drinking and waving our guns around at them Michigander sumbitches, when . . .” That’s right, long before “The Game” as Wolverines and Buckeye’s fan refer to their long-standing football rivalry, there was *cue Also sprach Zarathustra* . . .  the Toledo War.

            The roots of the Toledo War lie in a simple mistake of geography. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 (There are like, a million treaties of Paris), which ended the American Revolution in the home team’s favor, ceded the lands east of the Mississippi River, south of Canada, north of the Ohio River, and west of the Appalachian Mountains, to the United States. That may sound cut-and-dried, but it was actually pretty nebulous and lacking in enough detail that there followed for decades, more treaties, border disputes, and other assorted unpleasant situations that are too numerous to mention here.

            One I will mention though, because it has some parallel to our main story, is the dispute over the Erie Triangle, that little triangular jag of land in western Pennsylvania that pokes up above the 42^nd parallel north, and gives that state more than what would have been the roughly five miles of access to Lake Erie it would otherwise have had. At the end of the American Revolution, it turned out that there was no clear claim to that area. Pennsylvania and New York were the primary entities who wanted it, but based on original colonial grants, Connecticut, and Massachusetts threw their hats in the ring too. Pennsylvania had the most to lose, having already paid the Iroquois Confederacy for the land in 1789, and then separately, the Seneca Nation, a constituent of the Confederacy, in 1791. Both of these sales were in violation of the Contract Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits individual States from contracting treaties with foreign powers. By 1792, the federal government, fed up with the bickering, got each state to set their claims aside, and then, mainly to get Pennsylvania to shut up about a separate boundary dispute, sold the land to them for 75 cents an acre. Yay! Congress does its job! Problem solved, pretty much peacefully. Not so with the Toledo Strip.

            In 1835, at the time of our little history tale, the Toledo Strip was a 5 to 8 mile wide section of land disputed between the state of Ohio and what was then the Michigan Territory, although the argument had been going on for some time before that.

            When the Northwest Territory was organized, the Congress of the Confederation (the U.S, was operating under the Articles of Confederation at the time, not the Constitution) already planned for the Territory to eventually be split into between three and five states, depending on what Congress would decide in the future. As part of this it was stipulated that if they were to decide there should be five states instead of just three, that the southern boundary for the northern two would be “. . . an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan.” Problem was no one really knew where the southerly bend of Lake Michigan was.

            By the time Ohio was applying for admission as a state in 1802, people had a better idea where that location was, and unfortunately it would give the important lands at the mouth of the Maumee River to one of those hypothetical future two northern states, as outlined in the Northwest Ordinance. Ohio was having none of that, so when they wrote the draft constitution to be submitted to Congress, they changed the language to clearly define the northern border as being well north of the Maumee. The record of the Congressional committee tasked with reviewing the constitution clearly recognized the change, but decided to kick the can down the road and leave the matter unsettled. After all, nobody was going to draw blood over the matter.

            By 1812 there was a town at the mouth of the Maumee, eventually to be named Toledo, which considered itself part of Ohio and wanted the matter resolved. The Ohio legislature asked Congress to finally pick up that can, and after a brief delay due to the War of 1812, a survey was commissioned. That survey found that even though the border provisions laid out at the formation of the Michigan Territory in 1807 used the original language of the Northwest Ordinance, the border was definitely, positively, with one-hundred percent surety, north of the Maumee’s mouth. Given that the Surveyor General who had commissioned the survey was a former governor of Ohio, the governor of the Michigan Territory had problems with this and commissioned a survey of his own, which found that the border was south of the Maumee. Congress kicked the can further down the road, and settlers from both sides continued to establish communities in the disputed lands.

            To further increase tensions, when Michigan began trying to apply for statehood, the Ohio Congressional delegation blocked all its efforts. Enter Stevens T. “The Boy Governor” Mason, member of a family with close political ties to President Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory himself. In 1831, when Mason was 19, Jackson appointed him to the position of Secretary of Michigan, replacing his father, who Jackson was sending to Mexico.  The territorial governor at the time was rarely in Michigan, so this effectively made Mason the acting governor, and he went at it with a vengeance, continuing to push for Michigan’s admission as a state. By 1834, Mason, now at least legally able to vote, was made territorial governor in fact.

            The next year, Ohio upped the ante by setting up county governments in the Toledo Strip. This was too much for Mason, who passed an act making it a crime for anyone trying to organize any Ohio county or municipal government in the disputed lands, and gave orders to the Michigan militia commander to arrest any Ohioan who dared to break the new law. The Ohio Legislature, at the request of Governor Robert Lucas, organized a militia of its own. Lucas and his militia moved into position in the town of Perrysburg, 12 miles southwest of Toledo. Mason responded by occupying Toledo with his Michigan militia. Shit had just got real. What could go wrong?

            President Jackson, finally stirred from his normal routine of fighting duels and obsessively organizing his Cherokee scalp collection, or whatever else that crazy bastard got up to, asked his Attorney General for a legal opinion. Jackson needed the support of Ohio, even then a swing state, in the upcoming election of 1836 if his Democratic Party was to stay in power, and was sure that Attorney General Benjamin Butler would give an opinion in Ohio’s favor. After all, Jackson had named a fort crucial to the removal of eastern Indians during the Trail of Tears after Butler. That should have made them BFFs 4-Ev-R. Bros before arcane border disputes and all that.

            Butler, to Jackson’s chagrin, gave an opinion favoring Michigan. I can’t find any record of the epic flip-out Jackson must have had, but the fact his pet parrot had to be removed from his funeral for its nonstop, extremely loud cursing is a hint as to what happened. That and the fact that repeatedly screaming “FUCKETY-FUCK-FUCK-FUCKKKKK!!!” at the top of your lungs is called “throwing an Old Hickory”. One of the above statements is not true. I’ll leave you to guess which one.

Jackson sent representatives to try and arbitrate the dispute, and they called for a compromise whereby another survey would be made and the residents of the strip would be allowed a referendum where they would decide which state they wanted to belong to. Governor Lucas agreed to the compromise, but Mason refused to submit, threatening to arrest anyone in the Strip who voted in what he saw as an election that was being rigged by Ohio.

            Lucas, still thinking the matter was settled sent surveyors into the Strip, and they were eventually set upon by Michigan militia, who -- according to which side you believe -- either fired at the survey party, or fired their guns into the air to scare them. Nine of the surveyors were arrested by the Michiganders.

With shots fired, tension ramped up even more. Harassment of partisans of each side by those of the other followed. Both legislatures responded by passing bills to prove who had the bigger dick. Michigan newspapers taunted Ohio newspapers. Things were bad.

            In July the war claimed its first and only casualty when Michigander Deputy Sheriff Joseph Wood went to the home of Major Benjamin Franklin Stickney to arrest him under Mason’s Pains and Penalties Act. Stickney was an interesting guy, something of a polymath, and a staunch Ohio partisan, although he had once been a leading figure for the Michigander cause. Also something of an eccentric, he name his sons One and Two. During the brawl that ensued, one of Stickney’s sons, Two, stabbed Sheriff Wood with a penknife and made his escape to Ohio. Two’s father and his brother One were arrested. Sheriff Wood survived the stabbing. Insert your own Abbott and Costello joke here.

When Governor Mason demanded Ohio turn over Two for trial, Governor Lucas told him to get stuffed. Mason, thinking Jackson would help him out, asked the President to put the entire matter before the Supreme Court. Jackson declined, perhaps not wishing to expand the purview of the Supreme Court to boundary disputes.

Realizing Mason was the main impediment to any kind of compromise, the Ohio Congressional delegation asked Jackson to remove him as territorial governor. Doubtless fed up with Mason acting a little too much like, well, Andrew Jackson, the President shit-canned Mason, replacing him with John S. “Little Jack” Horner. No kidding, the dude’s last name was Horner and he was nicknamed “Little Jack”. As if that wasn’t enough problems for the poor guy, his commitment to a compromise infuriated Michiganders so much that they greeted his arrival in Ann Arbor by burning an effigy and throwing vegetables at him.

As the dispute dragged into 1836, in the biggest F-U they could think of, Michiganders, despite Congress’ refusal to accept it, voted for their draft state constitution and elected Mason as governor, along with one representative to Congress. The legislature selected two senators. When the Michigan Congressional delegation arrived in Washington, D.C.  they were greeted with hostility by a Congress that refused to allow them to take their seats. In answer Congress passed a bill that would allow Michigan its statehood, but only if it surrendered on the matter of the Toledo Strip. In return for doing so it was offered a sizeable chunk of land on the Upper Peninsula; land that was then part of the just-months-old Wisconsin Territory. Michigan’s special convention convened in Ann Arbor, and not pleased with being offered what they saw as a bunch more worthless trees than they already possessed, all the way on the other side of Lake Michigan, they rejected the deal.

What finally convinced Michigan to give in later in the year was essentially what did in the Soviet Union. Defense spending is a bitch if you don’t have the income to support it. After keeping the state militia on a war footing for almost a year, Michigan was broke, and as a territory was not eligible for a share of the large surplus in the U.S. Treasury that was to be distributed among the states. In a second special convention, which became known as the Frostbitten Convention, the delegates accepted the offer, and the Toledo War was effectively over, one non-fatal penknife stabbing and all. Most importantly, they got some of that sweet, sweet surplus money. Not a bad score.