"Crete the opening wedge": nationalism and international affairs in Postbellum America.

"Thou sobbing captive in a sea of smiles,
Whose fairy sails on sunny errands flee,
Shall the blue waves that bless thy sister isles
Bind on thy brow the curse of slavery?"
--Unattributed (1)

"Oh! what were the projects you made, Mrs. Howe,
When you went where the Cretans were making a row?
Emancipation--civilization--redintegration of a great nation,
Paying no taxes, grinding no axes--
Flinging the Ministers over the banisters.
These were the projects of good Mrs. Howe
When she went where the Cretans were making a row."
--Julia Ward Howe (2)

From August of 1866 to February of 1869, an insurrection against Ottoman imperial rule by Greek Orthodox Christians on the island of Crete drew the attention of Americans from California to Canea and from Massachusetts to Memphis. Although the Cretan Insurrection, as it was often called, may now seem an obscure and trivial foreign affair, Americans readily discussed it and easily invested it with meaning. (3) To uncover why, we must look anew at the relationships between America's North-South sectional conflict, nationalism, and international affairs. Although ongoing sectional strife remained central to American politics and culture after the Civil War, this by no means precluded or even inhibited interest in the world beyond. Instead, even as Americans discussed, debated, and died over Reconstruction, they found themselves searching further afield, as they had throughout the 19th century, for the means to articulate and affirm their rival understandings of their country. (4)

For the last several decades, historians of Reconstruction have neglected foreign affairs--the Cretan Insurrection included--due to an intensive focus on conditions in states, counties, and localities in the eastern United States, especially the South. (5) Certainly, this approach has with great insight and rigor produced a much richer and more balanced understanding of Reconstruction. (6) Yet in the process, our understanding of the broader political culture of Reconstruction, rife with discussions of national and international affairs, has remained underdeveloped. Fortunately, a handful of studies from the past decade have started to uncover the ways in which contemporaries blurred lines between and braided their discussions of the South, the nation, and the world. (7) Building on these, this essay explores the ways in which Reconstruction-era Americans treated sectional, national, and international arenas as overlapping and interrelated spheres of interpretation and action. As American discussions of the Cretan Insurrection demonstrate, the worldviews arrayed against each other during Reconstruction were precisely that. Contemporary Americans did not limit their attention to their locality, state, or country, nor did their perspectives emerge solely from domestic experiences.

Paradoxically, the tendency in Reconstruction historiography to disregard American interest and involvement in events abroad reflects the limited concern it has devoted to nationalism. Eric Foner's landmark study, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, for example, sheds much light on the importance of state centralization during Reconstruction, but notes only briefly the growth of patriotic sentiment among northern Unionists and southern freedpeople. (8) Heather Richardson has stressed that Americans understood Reconstruction through a national paradigm, but the core of her analysis focuses on attitudes towards state centralization and competing notions of political economy. (9) Essential as these works are for anyone grappling with how Americans understood, imagined, or socially constructed their country during Reconstruction, they nonetheless leave much to be done. This inattention to nationalism during Reconstruction is especially striking given the now rich scholarship on its growth and transformation among both Unionists and Confederates during the Civil War. (10)

Fittingly, one of the most provocative insights on the legacy of Civil War nationalism comes from a work addressing its impact abroad. As historian David Potter argued, the Union's eventual commitment to emancipation and its ultimate victory convinced many in America and Europe that dedication to one's nation could serve the cause of liberalism. For Potter, the Civil War was a decisive event that "fused the two great forces of the nineteenth century--liberalism and nationalism" so thoroughly that they became largely indistinguishable. In Europe, this fusion took shape in the context of struggles for independence from monarchical empires, whereas in America the opponents were secessionist slaveholders. But in both cases, nationalism became synonymous with the early-to mid-nineteenth-century liberal faith that freeing men from coercive political and economic relationships would unfetter the forces of material and moral progress. Such liberal nationalists in Europe and America understood themselves to be in battle against reactionaries who embraced stasis, cruelty, and hierarchy. (11) If Potter used the terms "nationalism" and "liberalism" somewhat broadly, so too did his subjects. (12) American liberal nationalists did not actually share identical notions of what constituted freedom, progress, or even a nation among themselves or with Europeans. (13) Yet, many Americans, drawing in part on the heritage surrounding the American Revolution, nonetheless convinced themselves that struggles for national independence in Europe spoke to their own cherished principles. (14)

As the Cretan Insurrection demonstrates, just such a liberal nationalist spirit captivated many in the North after the Civil War. Although the Democrats certainly had liberal traditions, especially concerning free trade, it was the Republicans who took this spirit as their own. (15) A diverse coalition of abolitionists, Whigs, Democrats, and rising machine politicians, many Republicans no doubt welcomed a chance to contrast themselves with malignant reactionaries at home and abroad. In doing so, Republicans could sidestep their own differences and emphasize their belief that the purified United States embodied the interlocking forces of freedom and progress. (16) Republican liberal nationalists found their mantra in "civilization," a word with global currency that they nonetheless tethered to their sectional and partisan understanding of America. (17) "Barbarism," in contrast, described the stagnation and cruelty endemic to societies with coercive, iniquitous, and retrograde ways. (18) Both parochial in their presumptions and cosmopolitan in their sympathies, these Republicans concluded that spreading their institutions and values was a benevolent undertaking. These included not only free labor and elective government, but everything from a humanitarian sympathy for the suffering weak, to commerce and technology, to their gendered, sentimental family values. (19) Whether looking south, west, or abroad, Republicans could lament and disdain "barbarisms" wherever they perceived difference.

Critics of the Republican war effort and often the war itself, northern and southern Democrats asserted a rival definition of American national identity that wedded ideals to a pronounced racism. That Democrats readily invoked American nationalism is hardly surprising. From secession on, the Confederates modeled themselves as the true inheritors of the American Revolution and American identity. (20) Democrats, North and South, moreover, thought of themselves as defending America's established racial and Constitutional order against Republican machinations. (21) This Democratic nationalism was a critical part of a multi-sided and nationwide struggle to define the reunified United States.

This debate concerned not only the collective identity and citizenship of the United States but also its relationship with the wider world. For this reason, interrogating the distinction between things "foreign" and "domestic" should be integral to our understanding of Reconstruction. As Amy Kaplan has shown, these terms are unstable and contested social constructions that deal with the connections between people, places, and states. (22) Reconstruction-era Americans disputed the connotations and implications of these terms, along with the membership and policies of their country, through discussions of events near and far. (23) For Republicans, this broader interest stemmed from their belief that the struggle of "civilization" against "barbarism" transcended borders. They found freedom fighters, sadistic patriarchs, savage warriors, indolent exploiters, and imperial despots at home and abroad. (24) Democrats criticized the global scope of Republican sympathy, yet in doing so they too turned their attention abroad to assert their understanding of America.

The causes of the Cretan Insurrection have been subject to passing disagreement among historians of modern Greece and American diplomacy. (25) Regardless, by the spring of 1866, an assembly of Greek Orthodox Cretans had remonstrated against the governor of Crete, Ismael Pasha, in an appeal to the Ottoman imperial government. Confronting this challenge to his authority and mounting tensions between the island's Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations, Ismael Pasha appears to have opted to confront the assembly of Greek Orthodox Cretans while calling the island's Muslim population into its walled cities for protection. (26) Tensions quickly boiled over into panic and violence. In late August and early September of 1866, the Cretan assembly declared the island's independence and shortly thereafter union with Greece proper. The Ottoman Empire, along with its semi-independent ally Egypt, blockaded the island and sent large armies to subdue the insurrection. The unprepared and lightly armed rebels proceeded to fight an off-and-on guerilla war for two and half years before the insurrection unraveled. While pitched battles did occur, so too did long interludes as the Ottoman and Egyptian forces remained near cities on the coast while the rebels occupied the mountainous interior. Starting with the outbreak of the war, thousands of Greek Orthodox Cretans (27) fled to mainland Greece, the surrounding islands, and nearby mountains. (28)

Despite the intermittent nature of fighting on Crete, a lack of reliable information, and repeated reports of the insurrection s demise, Crete garnered substantial Republican interest. (29) Certainly, there were Republicans who hesitated to embrace the cause of the Cretan rebels and others concerned with developments elsewhere. (30) Public interest in the insurrection, moreover, was never so potent as to move a bedraggled Congress into extended policy debates. The only lengthy speech on the insurrection in Congress was Representative John Shanks's (Republican-Indiana) failed request for official recognition of the Cretan provisional government. Instead, Congress took only the cautious step of issuing Republican-sponsored statements of sympathy for the Cretans. (31) Yet given the burdens of routine business, the consuming battle between Republicans and President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction, the Ottoman Empire's friendliness toward the North during the Civil War, and the American tradition of non-intervention in European power politics, it is noteworthy that Congress took action at all. (32) What is most telling, however, is the confidence with which Republicans presumed a connection between their own allegedly national values and the Cretans' struggle. (33)

A handful of Republicans became deeply concerned with the uprising. Particularly active was the American Consul on Crete, the impulsive and hapless William J. Stillman. Stillman had long supported the causes of European liberation movements and had once run a botched secret mission for Louis Kossuth, the unsuccessful Hungarian rebel against Austrian rule. Stillman's route to Crete began when he returned from Europe at the start of the Civil War to volunteer for the Union Army. Failing the necessary medical examination, Stillman proceeded to secure a diplomatic post in Italy, but after a brief stint in Rome found himself transferred to Crete. There he quickly fell into antagonisms with local Ottoman officials. (34) From the start of the insurrection on, the defiant but increasingly beleaguered Stillman wrote numerous dispatches to the State Department and penned articles for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly. Stillman finally took a leave of absence from Crete in September of 1868 to recover his nerves and take his family to safety, only to see politicking in Washington cost him his post. By the time he left the eastern Mediterranean in the summer of 1869, he was not only impoverished but had lost his wife to suicide, which he attributed to childbirth, stress, and grief for the Cretans. He wrote The Cretan Insurrection in 1870--published in 1874--and later devoted two chapters to Crete in his Autobiography of a Journalist. (35)

Equally prominent was the Boston couple Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe. Samuel, a renowned northern reformer and longstanding philhellene who had served as a doctor and soldier in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1828), assumed the formal leadership of American relief efforts. (36) Despite tensions with her husband, Julia played an active and influential role, especially in mobilizing and organizing relief support. Like Samuel, Julia had an established interest in European liberal movements, and, as author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," she, like her husband, was a leading opponent of slavery and southern secession. (37) The Howes' efforts on behalf of the Cretans began with speeches, a pamphlet, and the organization of fund raising committees in Boston and New York that mustered $37,000 in donations, over 20 cases of supplies, and nearly 400 breech loading rifles. The Howes then sailed to Greece and distributed this aid. Returning to Boston, Julia tried her hand at some poems for Crete and organized another relief fair while the couple published a nearly-monthly magazine, The Cretan. (38)

The Howes' fundraising efforts tapped into a broad base of humanitarian sympathy most evident in the prosperous and developing Republican strongholds of New England, New York, western Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the upper Northwest. (39) In contrast to a business-and Greek-dominated relief fund in London, donations to the Howes' Boston committee came overwhelmingly from individuals with no apparent ties to Crete or Greece. (40) Such noteworthy abolitionists as Gerrit Smith, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the commit tee's treasurer Amos A. Lawrence made contributions of $500, $25, and $200. Less radical Unionists also pitched in. Henry Bellows, a leading conservative clergyman, warmly offered to give Samuel Howe what help he could. (41) George Bancroft, who voted for Lincoln in 1864 but remained at least a nominal Democrat, helped organize fundraising efforts in New York City. (42) Support reached beyond these few notables. The overwhelming majority of donations (roughly 460 out of 571) and over half of the $24,900.41 raised by the Boston committee came from individuals or small groups of individuals, with contributions running from thirty five cents to Gerrit Smith's $500, with a median donation of $10. Many donors to the Boston fund provided their initials or names, but others merely wrote humble or sympathetic messages like "A mite for the Cretans" ($10) and "From one who is well and comfortable" ($20) alongside their donations. Many organized their own charitable events, including a "Concert of the Ladies of Newport," ($526.90) and a "Concert in aid of the Cretans, Harvard Music Asso'n" ($2249.22). With an established role in reform movements, it is no surprise that women featured prominently in these fundraising events as well as on Boston's donor rolls. (43) Upon returning from distributing aid in Greece, Samuel Howe gladly noted the thankfulness of Cretan refugees as they received clothing made and donated by "thousands of New England women and girls." (44) Other donations came from churches, schools, towns, an orphanage, and from as far away as McKendree College in Illinois ($26) and Milwaukee ($25). Though lacking a formal committee, Philadelphia contributed $1739.54 to the Boston fund. Boston's sister committee in America's commercial capital of New York City not surprisingly drew more heavily on businesses. (45) Again, however, small donations made their way in from individuals, a church, a school, and from as far away as Rochester, New York, Fairfield, Ohio, and Dodgeville, Wisconsin.

Republican interest in the Cretan Insurrection reached further still with the help of newspapers, magazines, and lectures. Initially motivated in part by the insurrection's geopolitical significance, Republican papers, including the New York Times, the New York Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and the Sacramento Daily Union, offered front-page coverage when news was available. Leading papers in a business that was vital to American politics and culture, these opinionated dailies quickly integrated discussions of Crete into their constant editorializing. (46) Similarly, prominent magazines including The Nation, Harper's Weekly, and The Atlantic Monthly, covered the insurrection and sought to explain its meaning. Finally, there were the public speeches. Wendell Phillips and Samuel Howe were among the more notable to give speeches in Boston in January, 1867 and March, 1868, while Henry Ward Beecher spoke in New York City in January, 1867. (47) When English author and visitor to Crete J.E.H. Skinner lectured in Chicago in 1868, the Chicago Tribune reported that "Everyone" in his full audience had already "read and heard of" the most dramatic event of the insurrection, the Turkish attack on the Orthodox monastery of Arkadi in November of 1866. (48) Similarly, Stewart L. Woodford, the Lieutenant Governor of New York, gave an "interesting and eloquent lecture on Crete" in Steinway Hall, also in April of 1868, and "was listened to with deep attention by the large audience present." (49)

But it was Stillman who sounded the earliest note of what would be a mounting chorus of Republican sympathy. At the beginning of the insurrection, the Cretan rebels delivered to Stillman an appeal addressed to President Andrew Johnson, which he then sent on to Secretary of State William Seward. Despite Stillman's expectation that the insurrection would prove futile, he stressed to Seward that "every word" of the appeal was "wrung from patriotic hearts by bitter and most unmerited oppression." Stillman added that, if "the people of America" could only see how "a barbarous and licentious soldiery," drove Cretans from their homes, destroyed churches, and "paralyzed" industry, they could not help but be moved. (50) In December of 1866, Stillman again described to Seward how the insurrection had been "conducted with so much heroism and constancy on one side and savage barbarity on the other." As Stillman explained, "The sympathy I ought to feel for a people aspiring to freedom was, thus, much increased by the injustice of the Government and still more by its subsequent barbarity and excessive cruelty." (51) Stillman did not hesitate to conclude that he was moved to sympathy for the rebels because of his "American instincts." (52)

Northern newspapers and magazines similarly stressed the "barbarity" of Ottoman rule and their sympathy for Cretan independence. The Ottoman attack on Cretan soldiers and civilians in the monastery of Arkadi in November of 1866 became the most infamous episode of supposed savagery. In its February 2, 1867 edition, Harper's Weekly provided an overview of the insurrection that dwelt on Arkadi. The Cretans, argued Harper's, were motivated not only by "a common patriotic desire that Crete should be governed by Cretans," but also by a "system of continued cruelties" that had "few parallels on record." Harper's claimed that while both sides fought with intense hatred in the current struggle, it was the Turkish Muslims who were guilty of "slaughtering without mercy to wreak their vengeance." As Harper's explained, the Cretans were "enduring great suffering, and even ending their own lives" to avoid being "borne away as captives of the infidel Moslem." Harper's then explained that "The most tragic event" in this war was the attack on Arkadi and included an account thereof from the Lev ant Herald--an English language paper in Istanbul. The Herald reported that a much larger Turkish force bombarded the monastery and its resilient rebels and refugee women and children for four days. When the attackers finally breached Arkadi's outer walls, the rebel soldiers put up a desperate fight in the courtyard before taking refuge in the cellars, while hundreds of women and children barricaded themselves in the refectory. With these last defenses collapsing, reported the Levant Herald, the remaining insurgents resolved to destroy the monastery, their attackers, and themselves by igniting their store of powder. (53)

Harper's Weekly drove home this depiction of rebel dignity with a "vivid sketch" from a Cretan resident of Istanbul familiar with the monastery (see Figure 1). In it, Cretan soldiers fight in the background while men and women together strain to hold shut the last door between themselves and the Ottoman forces, represented by only an ax blade and a spear point. At the center of the illustration a Cretan woman clutches a naked babe to her body and defiantly stares at the door while Orthodox priests standing near her carry out the decision to ignite the powder. Original authorship of the sketch notwithstanding, its message to Harper's readers was clear. Faced with an unrelenting Turkish on slaught, the Cretan rebels fought bravely and unceasingly. When overpowered, they preferred death to having their women and children fall into the hands of the Turks, long maligned as lustful and cruel. At approximately the same time as Harper's article on Akardi, the New York state legislature passed a concurrent resolution expressing "sympathy for the Greeks, who are now struggling for freedom," and urging "our national government to protest against the barbarous and inhuman system of warfare adopted by the Turks." (54) For many Republican sympathizers, Arkadi was a definitive statement, or as Stewart Woodford described it, "the cry of all Crete for liberty or death." (55)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The fame of Arkadi in America could compel coverage even among skeptics. Although Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper had an insatiable fascination with foreign developments and cultures, it initially derided American interest in the Cretan Insurrection. Leslie's rejected the thought of Protestant sympathy flowing to Greek Orthodox Cretans and argued that, at any rate, America's tradition of non-intervention in European diplomacy left little room for action. (56) Its wariness, however, did not prevent Leslie's from repeatedly covering Arkadi, nor from conceding that the insurrection was "exciting great attention all over the civilized world." (57) Nor did Leslie's abandon coverage of the insurrection after the attack. As it explained nearly a year later, Crete had so "engrossed the attention and enlisted the sympathies of the public" that the paper was "induced" to better cover the insurrection. (58)

In their discussions of the insurrection, Republican liberal nationalists also tapped into their faith in commerce, technology, domesticity, and free labor. Writing for Atlantic Monthly, Stillman repeatedly measured Ottoman misrule through the island's poverty and lack of modern infrastructure. He explained how towns such as Canea suffered from "dilapidation and decay," while the "wretchedness of the roads" and "benighted restrictions" on cabotage stifled farmers. (59) When Stillman came across a bridge that had fallen into disrepair he opined, "Under the Turks, nothing but decay obtains." (60) Stillman similarly argued that once the "Mohammedan blight" was removed from the rural plain of Cydonia, the "prosperity and security" of classical days would return, for only "freedom is wanting now to restore both." (61) The height of the Howes' revulsion was reserved for the alleged Turkish disregard for the sheltering ties of sentimental family life. As Samuel Howe explained it, Turkish treatment of "boys, girls, and women," violated civilized norms and was "often so cruel and so abominable that one can hardly find comprehensible language in which to speak of it." (62) Free labor ideology informed perceptions, as in the New York Times's characterization of the Ottoman Muslims as "vapid and indolent" and Stillman's claim that the Christian Cretan was the island's "only industrious citizen." (63) The Ottomans, in these depictions, destroyed the emotional and economic bonds that drove progress.

The insurrection's geopolitical implications also piqued Republican liberal nationalism. As Republicans were well aware, the Ottoman Empire's grasp on its European provinces was tenuous. In an article titled, "The Eastern Question--Crete the Opening Wedge," the New York Times informed its readers of the "growing significance of the Cretan outbreak," which it believed would spread revolution throughout the Ottoman Empire. (64) A later article, "The Clouds Accumulating--Turkey About to Fall to Pieces," argued that the backward, theocratic empire would soon collapse before the age's "irresistible spirit of progress." (65) The New York Tribune similarly boasted how its foreign correspondents roamed from the capitals of Europe to "Constantinople, where an effete Mohammedanism struggles in vain against the aggressive spirit of Christian civilization." (66)

Yet Republicans also realized that Great Britain and France, seeking to prevent Russian expansion towards the Mediterranean, were powerful backers of Ottoman territorial integrity. (67) Republican sympathizers, therefore, were quick to ridicule Great Britain and France as callous global powers. Samuel Howe argued that Crete had originally been denied independence alongside Greece because European powers, acting like "Asiatic despots," had heartlessly "sacrificed" the island "to propitiate Turkey." (68) The English became the target of much Republican ire, in part no doubt because of traditional American Anglophobia and Great Britain's ongoing diplomatic quarrels with the Union. (69) The Sacramento Daily Union asserted that the English elite had a "habitual indifference to moral and human considerations" and would help sustain "A loathsome, heathen despotism" to prevent Russian expansion. (70) Similarly, when the Sultan went on a diplomatic tour of Europe, a correspondent for the New York Tribune referred to it as a "magnificent farce," in which "enthusiastic Englishmen" had sullied themselves by stooping "down on their knees in the mud before him." (71) Once again Harper's Weekly gave graphic expression to Republican sentiment (Figure 2). Responding to the Sultan's diplomatic visit to England, Harper's issued a political cartoon portraying John Bull stooping to kiss the hand of the Sultan and singing "God preserve thee, Sultan, long;/Ever keep thee from all woes:/May the State and thee be strong,/To dismay and resist thy foes!" The Sultan, meanwhile, whispers to his Grand Vizier, "These infidel John Bulls don't see those little Massacres of their Christian brethren in Crete," while Turkish flags float over a hillside attack on Cretan Christians in the background. (72)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Set against England, the Ottoman Empire, and Great Power diplomacy was the United States. Stillman, for one, stepped beyond his limited consular duties to ask Secretary of State Seward, "May the friends of humanity not hope that America will lead off in a question where no political interest can stain the purity of her motives?" (73) Going further, The Cretan argued that prompt recognition of Cretan independence would "diffuse the lesson throughout Christendom" that America remained an uncompromising and unmatched defender of "freedom, civilization, virtue, and Christianity." (74) Although the Times, like Frank Leslie's, warned against formal American entanglement in the "Eastern Question," it also argued, offering Crete as an example, that America had a unique obligation to master diplomacy. "Untrammeled by the traditional and selfish policy of the old dynasties," claimed the Times, "the friends of freedom and progress throughout the world justly expect from the United States an attitude of intelligent sympathy toward them." (75) The Sacramento Daily Union was more ambitious. It suggested that Europe recognized the Union's newfound strength and reminded readers that European monarchs had long interfered in American affairs. "What if," asked the Union, "the republic should venture to retaliate, and begin to exercise an intervening influence in European affairs in favor of free institutions?" "Which is the infidel?" asks this cartoon from Harper's Weekly (August 17, 1868, p. 528). Surely, claimed the Union, this could bring American diplomacy in line with "the strength and mission of the republic," without necessarily leading to war. (76)

Though the American government declined to take such bold action, Republicans continued to profess national sympathies for the Cretans. The Cretan took President Andrew Johnson, an increasingly bitter opponent of Republican domestic policy, to be the villain behind diplomatic inaction. An address to Congress published in The Cretan argued that supporters of the insurrection had "the right to expect and demand, that, as soon as the existing administration is overthrown, there shall be a radical change of our foreign policy." (77) The Cretan similarly lambasted Johnson's Secretary of State William Seward, a Republican who actually had some sympathy for the Cretans, for failing to recognize the provisional government of Crete. (78) Scorning the administration, the Howes found consolation in their belief that the Cretan rebels were "virtually" recognized "by the American people." (79) "America can save Crete," The Cretan once quipped, "even if Mr. Seward does not buy it." (80)

This was wishful thinking. Not only would America fail to save Crete, but Andrew Johnson was not to blame. Johnson, in fact, had put up no apparent opposition to congressional statements of sympathy for the Cretans; although according to his Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, he signed at least one of them only through inattention. (81) The Howes faced more fundamental difficulties. As with French imperial rule of Mexico and the Ten Years' War in Cuba (1868-1878), Republicans disagreed over policy and in some cases basic points of interpretation. (82) Republicans like Samuel Howe were willing to abandon a tradition of non-intervention in European diplomacy and throw America's weight, whatever it was, behind Cretan independence. One former Union cavalryman with ties to the eastern Mediterranean, Sidney DeKay, even joined the insurrection, where he led a failed attempt to blow a hole in the hull of an anchored Turkish frigate. (83) But while moderate Republican newspapers like the New York Times might laud such valiance, they spurned formal American involvement. (84) Congress, likewise, was unresponsive to Representative Shanks's ambitious call for recognition of Cretan independence. Without constant, reliable, and promising news from Crete, moreover, it was difficult for popular opinion to become more invested in the insurrection. Yet what is remarkable is that Republicans showed no hesitation in discussing Crete, even in the midst of intense domestic political and social strife. This was because the supposed struggle for civilization at the heart of their liberal nationalism itself defied borders. The absence of a simple and rigid divide between foreign and domestic affairs was most apparent in the border-crossing analogies Republicans made as they discussed Crete. (85)

Republicans were quick to refer back to domestic stereotypes and historical symbols when discussing the Cretan Insurrection. Interpretations of the Civil War, for one, came into play. Stillman, for example, stressed the connection to Seward by explaining that he had followed developments in Crete "with no less anxiety than that I felt during our own struggle with the criminal organization of the enemies of Freedom." (86) Likewise, Stewart Woodford, in his speech in New York City, argued that the Cretans were motivated by the same spirit as Garibaldi's Italians and the Union's "citizen soldiery." (87) Similarly, the Howes explained tersely that reports of the insurrection's demise had the "internal marks of having being [sic] written in Constantinople, by a copper-head employee of a republican government," who had espoused "anti-American and despotic ideas." (88) The alleged disregard of the "Turks" for the affective bonds of the sentimental family found expression through comparisons to the Confederate prison of Andersonville. As the New York Times declared, "We are accustomed to shrink from contemplating the miseries of Andersonville; but they were perpetrated upon men--soldiers who had braved the horrors of war." The Times demanded to know, "Shall such horrors go on, and the Christian world stand mute and unprotesting?" (89)

Analogies ranged as far as Mormon Utah and conquered Poland and as near as the South. Samuel Howe wrote that, while Cretan Christians could appeal to local officials, "so might once the unhappy negro in the center of Alabama [may perhaps again] apply to a white justice of the peace against his master!" Likewise, the Turkish rulers suffered under "the curse which slavery brought upon our Southern slavocrats; to wit, the power to make other men do their sweating." (90) To those who thought Crete too distant to be of interest, Harper's Weekly countered that many had once felt similarly about southern slavery. (91) Differences mattered too. Stillman, focusing on prosperity, lamented a Cretan waterfront that resembled New York harbor but supported only a "tumble-down town." (92) The Cretan routinely equated the "Turks," with their allegedly insatiable lusts and disdain for the family, with Mormons. (93) It claimed, for example, that "The English Government, the quondam champion of the slave Confederacy, sees fit to be also the champion of a Mormon Empire." (94) And The Cretan could only hope that America would cease indirect support for the "Mohammedan and Mormon slavocrats in the east" as it had its support for the "Southern slavocrats." (95) Then there were comparisons to other European nationalist movements and to Native Americans. When explaining how the "barbarous nature of Turkish warfare" had produced so many Cretan refugees, Samuel Howe noted that, "Even the Polish peasant did not thus fly before Russian armies; and the only parallel is to be found among barbarians, or savages on our own frontier." (96) Representative Shanks went further and argued that the Ottoman forces, desperate to subdue the Cretans, massacred them with a "cruelty of which is without parallel even among the annals of the Apache." (97)

Paradoxically, even as these analogies blurred the distinction between things foreign and domestic, they reaffirmed the Republicans' sense of national mission. So assured of their purpose in the world, Republicans rarely questioned whether there were alternative paths to freedom, progress, or human welfare in general. The result was a tension within their own beliefs concerning the foreignness of the Greeks. Certainly, there was little doubt about the Turks, who, as the supposed embodiment of barbarism, were despicably foreign to the Republicans' allegedly national instincts. Describing the Greeks as independent, diligent, intelligent, and cultivated, Republicans rarely took Greek particularities as manifestations of barbarism. (98) Instead, as leading abolitionist Wendell Phillips argued, Cretan distinctiveness merely underscored claims to independence and union with Greece proper. As he asserted before a sympathetic Boston audience, "Crete stretches her arm across the Atlantic, and asks us to protest against Europe, and to advocate the American idea that every nation has the right to govern itself." (99) Yet, occasionally Republicans undercut their own presumed affinities with the insurrection by criticizing the Greeks, especially for having a Monarch and an established, non-Protestant church. (100) It was none other than Julia Howe who upon returning home jokingly mentioned her work "Flinging the Ministers over the Banisters." (101) One cannot help but wonder whether some Greeks similarly doubted the depth of ideological accord when Samuel Howe used relief funds to establish industrial schools where refugees would be saved from idleness. (102) Yet even in the face of cultural differences, Republicans generally maintained a faith in the Greek potential for American progress. As The Cretan wrote of refugee children at those American-run schools:

  they will be imbued to some extent with American ideas. Every scholar
  will grow-up with a knowledge of, and partiality for, our people and
  for our institutions. They will be half Americans. They will be
  native missionaries from this generation to succeeding ones. (103)

Given such beliefs, it is not surprising that at least a few northern sympathizers concluded that American control of Crete would serve just as well, if not better, than its union with Greece. A flyer addressed to "the people of the United States" by one New York National Reconstruction Club proposed exactly this. Following the not uncommon practice of referring to Crete by its old Venetian name Candia, it urged the United States to acquire the island. Doing so would provide a naval and commercial outpost in the Levant, which, the flyer argued, would soon be largely free from Ottoman control. Acquisition of the island would also mean a territory "in which we may establish American Institutions." Believing erroneously that the Ottoman government could not defeat the insurrection, the Club asserted that it would be glad to sell the island. "Let us acquire Candia," the flyer confidently suggested, "our commerce requires it, our mission among the Nations demands it." (104)

Democrats, North and South, also interpreted the Cretan Insurrection and particularly Republican interest in it. The Constitution of Atlanta, the New York World, the Richmond Enquirer and Sentinel, and the Daily Memphis Avalanche were among those who challenged Republican understandings of the insurrection. For Democrats, Crete became a means of expressing both their sectional grievances--particularly against Radical Republicans--and a rival strain of nationalism that wedded ideals to a rigid and pronounced understanding of race. While Republicans no doubt harbored racial prejudices, the concept of race generally remained loosely defined and latent in their discussion of the insurrection. Democrats, in contrast, stressed the irrevocable superiority of specific peoples and the obligations of northerners to their fellow "whites" in the South.

The Constitution was a particularly spirited critic, focusing its derision on "Yankee" humanitarian sympathy. When Charles Sumner introduced a congressional resolution expressing sympathy for the Cretans, The Constitution described his Senate foreign relations committee as having, "resolved itself into a universal sympathetic society." The "Radical party," it further complained, "sheds tears over the down-trodden everywhere, and its wailings for the distressed go forth into the uttermost parts of the earth." The Constitution lamented that underlying this sympathy was a belief that, "all are bound by a common brotherhood." "No stretch of distance," argued The Constitution, "can annihilate [the Radical party's] tender feelings for suffering humanity." (105) The Constitution further accused the Radical Republicans of moralistic arrogance. At the heart of the Radicals' "transcendental faith" was its claim "to be the missionary through which the world shall be converted from heathenism to its progressive ideas." (106) Boston, home of the Howes, attracted a heavy dose of criticism. She was, claimed The Constitution, "the center of this great moral solar system," and "arrogates to herself the lead in all schemes" to uplift the oppressed people of the world. (107) As The Constitution described it, Boston's perspective was that, "she being the center of the universe, all must obey." (108) The New York World similarly criticized what it saw as the self-righteous grandstanding of the "Cretan Committee" in New York City. It suggested that the committee forgo the cause of Crete and in stead raise funds to save a group of now-destitute missionary settlers who had left Maine for Palestine in 1866. While mocking these "Main-iacs who left the land of lumber" as religiously fanatical "Yankees of the Yankees," the New York World still believed that as fellow white Americans, the "Main-iacs" deserved aid. The World, however, douhted that Republicans would take up an issue that was "not a tempting one for orators." (109) Over a year later the World argued that Bostonians were too in love with themselves to grasp the complexities and dangers of the Cretan insurrection. (110)

Democrats further alleged that Republicans were hypocritical. Most obviously, they now supported an act of rebellion. After explaining to its readers that Boston was now home to "a paper devoted to the cause of the rebel Cretans," The Constitution cautioned its readers not to be alarmed. Even "cold and stoic Boston," The Constitution explained with derision, "has a heart; and even rebels are touching it to tenderness and tears." (111) Like Republicans, Democrats explained Crete through analogies to their domestic experiences. The New York World, for one, suggested that, "Being copperheads in respect to Crete," Republicans sympathizers should "show consistent courage in their opinions, and become copperheads also in respect to the South." (112)

Yet the perceived hypocrisy ran deeper still, for Republicans not only sympathized with rebels but did so despite their domination of the South, which purportedly matched and exceeded Turkish tyranny and cruelty. The Daily Memphis Avalanche was sure that even the Radical Republicans could not honestly expect the rest of the world to ignore "the fact that the North is doing to the South of this country just what Turkey is trying to do to Greece." Like Turkey, claimed the Avalanche, the North sought to "strip a gallant race of the rights of self-government" and impose its own ideas at bayonet point. (113) The New York World mocked the Republicans' attempts to get Americans "to discriminate in a question of legitimate rule between New Englanders in black satin waistcoats holding sway in Washington, and Turks in green silk Turbans exercising dominion at Constantinople." (114) The Richmond Enquirer & Sentinel went further, alleging that, despite all the "usual gabble about the inhumanity of Russia to the Poles, the Turks towards the Greeks and the Cretans, &.c., &c.," only the Radicals had been so cruel as to surrender a conquered people to mercies of their former slaves. (115)

Democrats claimed that they, and not Republicans, shared a bond with the Cretan rebels. Responding to the call for aid from The Cretan, The Constitution noted that southerners could not help but sympathize with the Cretans, for "Their condition is too much like our own." Both had fought long, brutal wars for their independence, and both remained under the control of another power. Referring to a Turkish military commander in Crete, The Constitution asserted that, "A dozen or so Oma Pachas came upon us from their Turkish strong-holds, a few years since, with fire and sword, reducing us to skin and bones, until we languish in our native nudity." (116) And surely, The Constitution later surmised, the Senate's statement of sympathy would meet with disregard from the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on the prominent Radical Charles Sumner much as the Howes vilified Andrew Johnson, The Constitution argued that Turkey would no doubt "delicately direct the attention as well as the sympathies of Mr. Sumner" to the South. For it was in Sumner's own country, claimed The Constitution, where "insults and outrages, tyrannies and oppressions of which the [sic] Crete never dreamed" continued. (117) The New York World, referring to the congressional Republicans' assertion of control over Reconstruction, went even further once the Ottoman Empire offered clemency in mid 1868. "In what striking contrast is this action of the Grand Turk," exclaimed the World, "to that of the Rump Congress with their insurrection." (118)

Of particular concern to Democrats was the seeming disregard of Republicans, especially Radicals, for racial hierarchies. (119) Democrats, in fact, ignored Republican prejudices and conflated Republican liberal nationalism with racial egalitarianism. According to The Constitution, Boston's "generous nature was such" that she anticipated "that period when some of the lower orders of being, through her benign influences, shall assume a place in the family of man." (120) The Constitution was convinced that this "meddlesome disposition of the Radical" underlay interest in both the Cretan Insurrection and the Reconstruction of the South. The Constitution described how, "Whilst expressing in one breath the canting, sycophantic sympathy for the [sic] poor Crete, in the very next they propose a dark and damning scheme for the introduction of civil war in the South, by the arming of negroes against the whites." The Radicals, The Constitution claimed, would continue to interfere with racial hierarchies until they made "the chain of brotherhood universal" and gathered "into its welded links all the different races of men, giving them the same cast, language, law, government." (121)

For Democrats, Republican sympathy for Crete was most aggravating because it underscored this lack of racial fidelity. In contrast to Ottoman rule of Crete, The Constitution stressed that southern whites suffered from wrongs that were "offered to, visited upon, and erected over a people of the same race" as and "kindred in tongue" with their oppressors. (122) The Daily Memphis Avalanche decried how the same people "who would enslave eight millions of their own race and color in order to control the votes of three millions of blacks who know nothing of liberty ... are shedding tears over the struggle of Greece!" (123) Similarly, the New York World, in reference to the missionary settlers in Palestine, stated its suspicion that Radicals in Congress would not come to their aid precisely because they were white. (124)

Distant though it was, Crete became a part of Democratic interpretations of the United States and their place in it. It allowed Democrats to lament the destruction of the Old South and deride what they understood to be contradictory and self-righteous nationalism of the Republicans, especially the Radicals. Democrats believed, moreover, that the Republican desire to remake the South in accordance with its own ideals reflected an ideology whose boundless ambitions were clearly evident in sympathy for Crete. Most worrisome to Democrats was the apparent Republican disregard for the racial hierarchy that was the foundation of the old southern social order, Democratic identity, and--according to the Democratic press--the nation. The sense of betrayal was in tense enough that The Constitution felt it could justly "warn" Bostonians that "as their eyes wander sorrowfully and their hearts heave pathetically towards the distant Cretes," they should "remember, occasionally, their own self-created Crete in our midst." (125)

The Civil War left an enthusiastic faith among many Republicans that the United States now embodied the twin liberal goals of freedom and progress. Far from asserting that different peoples might pursue these in distinctive ways, post-bellum Republicans found the embodiment of "civilization" in an idealized understanding of their own society. The result was a genuine but often unreflecting concern over "barbarism," which Republicans could perceive whether looking to the South, the West, or abroad. Republicans, moreover, not only looked outwards but explicitly connected these regions through analogies that elaborated their sense of what it meant to be northern, American, and civilized. From Crete we can only speculate on the broader implications of this facet of post-bellum political culture. Yet it is worth noting that Republican concern for "barbarisms" elsewhere could both reinforce the drive to reconstruct the South and, perhaps in the right circumstances, provide alternative outlets for those energies. (126)

Democrats countered Republicans by asserting their own sympathy for the Cretan Insurrection. In the process, they claimed that the United States was a country dedicated to liberty but delimited by race. In their interpretation, the Cretans and the former Confederates were racially superior rebels who sought freedom from the imperious sway of outsiders. For Democrats, however, the former Confederates faced a more galling situation, for their oppressors had supposedly betrayed and subordinated a portion of their own race and nation for the sake of destroying a distinction foundational to social order and identity. Democrats, like Republicans, found in Crete the means to articulate and affirm their understanding their nation and their place in it.

Reconstruction has long been studied as unfolding within the eastern United States. Certainly, this focus has been immensely fruitful. Yet, Reconstruction-era Americans, for all their concern for conflicts within and between the North and South, never questioned the existence of nor abandoned their focus on national identity. Though their ongoing discussions about "America" were quintessentially domestic, they also motivated a constant concern over the wider world.

Department of History Columbia, SC 29208

ENDNOTES

The author would like to thank the several scholars who have read or heard earlier drafts of this paper, his colleagues and adviser at the University of South Carolina, and the editor and anonymous readers of the Journal of Social History.

(1.) Excerpt from an unattributed, undated poem, titled "Crete," available in, Samuel Gridley Howe, "Appeal" (n.p., 1867). The Brown University Library notes that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow donated the pamphlet, hut he is unmentioned in the document itself.

(2.) Excerpt from an untitled, undated poem by Julia Ward Howe, available in, Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliot, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (Boston and New York, 1916), 281-2.

(3.) Scholars have yet to offer a thorough investigation of the extent and causes of American interest in the Cretan Insurrection. Although its comparison of American reactions with the generally less sympathetic British response is helpful, Emmanuel E. Marcoglou's, The American Interest in the Cretan Revolution, 1866--69 (Athens, 1971) explores a limited stock of writings and has but a slight grasp on the cultural and political currents shaping American perceptions. A. J. May, "Crete and the United States, 1866-1869," journal of Modern History 16 (1944): 286-93; James A. Field, Jr., America and the Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 (Princeton, 1969), 317-23; and Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801-1876 (Cambridge, MA, 1956), 282-87, all focus on Americans in the Eastern Mediterranean. Although Angelo Repousis, "Greek-American Foreign Relations from Monroe to Truman," Ph.D., Temple University, 2002, 186-230, offers the most thorough account of American relations with Greece during the Cretan Insurrection, it fails to fully situate American discussions of the insurrection in the context of the sectional conflict.

(4.) See Mark M. Smith "The Past as a Foreign Country. Reconstruction, Inside and Out," in Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York, 2006), 117-40; and Jay Sexton, "Toward a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848-1877," American Nineteenth Century History 5 (2004): 50-77, especially 68. Helpful on the outward looking nature of 19th-century Americans are Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York, 1963); and Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006).

(5.) A number of important comparative studies, of course, are central to this literature.

(6.) Excellent guides to changing interpretations of Reconstruction include Eric Foner, "Reconstruction Revisited," Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 82-100; Brown, ed., Reconstructions; and "Part III" of Lacy K. Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Maiden, MA, 2005).

(7.) For reviews of this literature, discussion of older studies, and prospects for further research, see Mark M. Smith "The Past as a Foreign Country"; and Jay Sexton, "To ward a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848-1877." See also, Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Heathet Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, 2007); Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction {Baton Rouge, 2007); Sven Beckert, "Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cot ton Production in the Age of the American Civil War," American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1405-38; and Dale Roger Steiner, "To Save the Constitution': The Political Manipulation of Foreign Affairs During Reconstruction," PhD, University of Virginia, 1973.

(8.) Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), especially, xxiv, 23-7, 29-30, 230-9, 278-9,288-89,410,494-5. On the tensions between state centralization and American nationalism see Peter Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War (New York, 2003), 60-1, 62-3; and David Donald, Liberty and Union (Boston, 1978), 214-19.

(9.) See, for example, Richardson, West from Appomattox, 4-7.

(10.) Key studies on Civil War nationalism from the last twenty years include, but are by no means limited to: Peter Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War; Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, 2000); Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North, (Lawrence, KS, 2002); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature in the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge, 1988); Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: the Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Chapel Hill, 2005). These studies offer insights on Reconstruction but, with the exception of Rubin, necessarily do so briefly. Works like, Edward J. Blum, Reftyrging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge, 2005), are also helpful but selective.

(11.) David M. Potter, "The Civil War in the History of the Modern World: A Com parative View," in his The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge, 1968), 287-299, esp. 298; see also Donaldson Jordan and Edwin J. Pratt, Europe and the American Civil War (Boston, 1931), 259-267; Bender, A Nation among Nations, 121-130; James M. McPherson, " 'The Whole Family of Man': Lincoln and the Last Best Hope Abroad," in his Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York, 3996). Southern slaveholders, in fact, often understood themselves to be managing freedom and guiding progress, not standing against them; see Eugene Genovese, Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia, SC, 1991). Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedrnen, and Southern Whites, also examines nationalism and international developments during Reconstruction, but through a slightly different framework.

(12.) The definition of liberalism offered above clearly differs from the one common to studies of the American Revolution and the Early Republic. For critical introductions to this extensive literature, see James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse," Journal of American History 74 (1987): 9-33; and Daniel T Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," ibid. 79 (1993); 11-38. State activism was not yet an integral part of liberalism.

(13.) For the changes to and contest over the meanings of "freedom" and "progress," see Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998); and Arthur Alphonse Ekirch, Jr., The Idea of Progress in America, 1815-1860 (New York, 1951). On the similarities and connections between a variety of self-identified British and American liberals, see Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New Brunswick, NJ, 1989); Ernest May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York, 1968); and Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Tramatlantic Reform (Chapel Hill, 2007). On the multiple ideas involved in 19th-century British and American liberalism, see ibid., 8-11.

(14.) Dexter Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 1 (Cam bridge, 1993), 46-53; Sexton, "The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multi lateral Initiative of 1875," Diplomatic History 30 (2006): 335-365, especially 340; Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848-1852 (Columbia, MO, 1977), especially 110.

(15.) Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion, 238-350, 403-418. On British Liberal sympathies with the Republicans during the Civil War Era, see ibid., 269.

(16.) Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford, 1995); William Brock, An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction, 1865-1867 (New York, 1963), 212, 242-48; Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion, xvii, xxxv, 217-8, 221, 234, 347, 408-12; Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 29; Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York, 1996), 34-5; Susan-Mary Grant, North over South, 97; Mitchell Snay, "Freedom and Progress: The Dilemma of Southern Republican Thought during Radical Reconstruction," American Nineteenth Century History 5 (2004): 100-114.

(17.) Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of 'Civilization in International Society (Oxford, 1984).

(18.) With the exception of Gordon H. Chang, "Whose 'Barbarism'? Whose 'Treachery'? Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States-Korean War of 1871," Journal of American History 89 (2003): 1331-65, these terms have received little analysis for the period of Reconstruction. On other periods, see Walter L. Williams's forceful, 'The United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism," The Journal of American History 66 (1980): 810-831; Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of North America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, 1965); Ekirch, The Idea of Progress in America; Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilisation: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000).

(19.) Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives in America's Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, 2006), especially 16-17; William Leuchtenbutg, "Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1952): 483-504, especially 500-504; Brock, An American Crisis, 246.

(20.) Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 14; Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge, 2003), 30-37; Parish, The North and the Nation, 129-14; John Hope Franklin, "The North, the South, and the American Revolution," Journal of American History 63 (1975): 5-23; and Susan-Maty Grant, "Making History: Myth and the Construction of American Nationhood," in Geoffrey Scliopflin and George Hosking, eds., Myths and Nationhood (New York, 1997).

(21.) Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983), 256-58; and Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, J 860-1868 (New York, 1977), 27, 70-71, 189, 193, 241. Many Free Soilers and future Republicans also endorsed a racial nationalism, see George Frederickson, The Block Image in the White Mind, chapter 5.

(22.) See Amy Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 1-12. This insight forms only one part of Ka plan's provocative analysis. Her broader mission is to free scholarship from the imperial conceit that metropolitan power brings order with it. She argues instead that imperial conquest not only wreaks havoc, as W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out long ago, but that the presumption of imperial order rests on a false sense of clarity in the divisions between "metropolis and colony, colonizer and colonized, national and international spaces, the foreign and the domestic" (p. 13). For Kaplan, the prospect of the breakdown of these divisions haunted Americans and thereby shaped their culture. Empire, by which Kaplan means a diffuse process of expansion and entanglement, destroyed boundaries even as Americans sought to firm them up, and was therefore inherently anarchic. For a critique, see Anders Stephanson, "Imperial Pursuits," Diplomatic History, 28 (2004): 581-86.

(23.) On the contested nature of post-bellum diplomacy, see Jay Sexton, "The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875," Diplomatic History 30 (2006): 335-365, especially 336.

(24.) Williams, "United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation"; Katz, From Appomattox to Monmartre, 131-4; Paola Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity (Athens, GA, 2005), 116-24; Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, 12-14.

(25.) For contemporary English-language accounts, see William J. Stillman's The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8 (New York, 1874) and J.E.H. Hilary's Rougking it in Crete in 1867 (London, 1868), which differ on the causes and significance of the insurrection. More recent studies also disagree; see George Georgiades Arnakis's introduction to his edited version of Stillman's Cretan Insurrection, published as American Consul in a Cretan War (Austin, 1966), 13-18; May, "Crete and the United States, 1866-1869," 287; Domna N. Dontas, Greece and the Great Powers, 1863-1875 {Thessalonike, 1966), 63-68; and Douglas Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923 (London, 1972), 107-110.

(26.) See Stillman's less neutral, Cretan Insurrection, 50-51, 55; and Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 109-110.

(27.) For brevity's sake, hereaftet referred to as Cretans.

(28.) Amakis, American Consul in a Cretan War, 17-21.

(29.) On the lack of reliable information, see M.D. Kalipothakes to Hermann J. Warner, Aug. 27, 1867, #148, and Phillips Brooks to Greek Relief Committee, Oct. 27, 1867, #153, in The Cretan Letterbook, Samuel Gridley Howe Papers, Perkins Institute, Watertown, MA; George Mountfort to Frederick William Seward, Feb. 11, 1868, William Henry Seward Papers, University of Rochester, Rush Rhees Library; "Foreign," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 19, 1867, p. 275; "The East," New York Times, Feb. 5, 1867, p. 8; and E. Joy Morris to Secretary of State Seward, 28 Nov. 1866, in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives Executive Documents, no. 38, Revolution in Candia, 39 Cong. 2 sess., p. 17. On reports that the insurrection had ended, see, "The Cretan War," New York Times, June 11, 1867, p. 1; "Foreign News," Harper's Weekly, Aug. 17, 1867, p. 515; "Cretan War Ended!" The Cretan, Dec. 1868, p. 3. With no telegraph lines running to Crete, news often trickled in through the mail; see, for example, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 18, 1868; April 3, 1868; May 26, 29, 1868; and June 10, 1868, all on the front page.

(30.) Groups in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, politely declined invitations to start fundraising committees to aid Cretan refugees; see letters 12, 16, and 17 in the Cretan Letterbook. Other foreign affairs also captured Republican attention; see, for example, Butler, Critical Americans, 103-105, 106-109.

(31.) Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 1 sess., July 19, 1867, p. 727; ibid., 2 sess., July 20, 1868, p. 4253, July 21, 1868, p. 4283, July 25, 1868, p. 4488; and May, "Crete and the United States, 1866-1869," 290-292. For criticism of the limited congressional support, see The Cretan, "Crete and Congress," July 1868, 1; "The Subjugated Nationalities of European Turkey," 2; and "The Senate Cretan Resolution," ibid., Aug. 1868, 2-3.

(32.) Marcoglou, The American Interest in the Cretan Revolution, 31-37; Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 318; Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 3 sess., January 7, 1869, p. 246; and also, ibid., 2 sess., June 22, 1868, p. 3363.

(33.) That Republican liberal nationalism drew on longstanding facets of American culture is apparent in the continuities between their reactions to the Cretan Insurrection and American responses to the Greek War of Independence (182 1-1828); see Repousis, "Greek-American Foreign Relations from Monroe to Truman," chapters 2 and 5.

(34.) See Stillman, Autobiography of Journalist, vol. 1, 142-162,331-332,372-74; vol. 2, 377-81,383-386. Stillman's stance on southern slavery is difficult to ascertain, but by the time he wrote his autobiography he oscillated between romanticizing it and condemning it; see ibid., vol. 1,284,288-9.

(35.) Autobiography of a Journalist, vol. 2, 449-50, 454-56, 457-8, Stillman to Seward, September 22, November 16, December 6 and 31, 1868, and March 6, June 10, and July 11 and 19, 1869, all available in Arnakis, Articles and Despatches from Crete; and Stillman, Cretan Insurrection, 59-60. In the 1890s Stillman developed negative racial attitudes towards Greeks and other Southern Europeans; see ibid., 431-2; and Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 156-162.

(36.) See Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, 43-48, and chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6. Samuel Howe, it should be noted, endorsed scientific theories of racial difference; see Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 160-64.

(37.). Julia Howe, Reminiscences, 218-19, 228-30, 252-59, 261-63, 264-7, 269-77.

(38.) "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," The Cretan, April 1868, p. 2; "Appeal for the Cretan Fair," ibid.. May 1868, p. 4; Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819-1899, 312-3, 320-21; S. G. Howe to A. A. Lawrence, Feb. 20, 1867 (two letters) and March 1, 4, 6, 1867 and A. A. Lawrence to the Subscribers of the Greene Rifles, Feb. 22, 1867, Box 21, Papers of Amos A. Lawrence, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; S. G. Howe to Peter Ralli & Co, May 11, 1867, Autograph Notes on a Journey to Greece: Rome, 17 Apr 1867-Boston, 11 Feb 1868, vol. 1, Howe Family Manuscripts, Harvard University Library, Houghton; and Julia Ward Howe Diary, Oct. 30, 1867, Nov. 20, 29, 1867, Dec. 7, 31, 1867 (vol. 4), and Jan. 24, Feb. 14-16, 21, 24, March 1, 17, and April 6, 11, 14, 18 (vol. 5). The Americans who visited Greece and Crete during the insurrection warrant further study.

(39.) Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 11-39, 106-7; and William Brock, An American Crisis, 242-48.

(40.) Data on donations to the London relief fund are available in "Candian Refugees Relief Fund," #74, Cretan Letterbook. Even a conservative estimate of Greek donations to the London fund, based on the donors' names, has the Greek share of the total revenue (in pounds) at 51 percent (3669/7172), with non-Greek business donations constituting another 24 percent of the total (1713/7172). Samuel Howe commented on the predom inance of Greek merchants in the London relief fund; see his, The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers (Boston, 1868), 12. Data on donations to the Boston and New York City relief funds, discussed below, are available in ibid., 53-64.

(41.) Henry W. Bellows to S. G. Howe, January 11, 1867, #45, Cretan Letterbook.

(42.) Repousis, "Greek-American Foreign Relations from Monroe to Truman," 200-1; Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The intellectual as Democrat (New York, 1984), 268281; and "Help for the Cretans," New York Times, January 20, 1867, p. 8

(43.) Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill, 1998). Even if one presumes all anonymous and initialized donation came from males, roughly one out of eight (79/571) donations to the Boston committee came from women or groups of women, compared to roughly one out of twenty (12/204) for the London committee.

(44.) Samuel Howe, The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers, 41.

(45.) Nearly 70 percent of the $12,364.01 came from 60 different businesses, a small number of which appear to be Greek.

(46.) Mark W. Summers, The Press Gang: News and Politics, 1865-1878 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 1-6,9-21.

(47.) "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," 2-3; "Intervention," The Cretan, May 1868, p. 2; Richards and Elliot, Julia Ward Howe, 260-61; Samuel Howe, "An Appeal to the People of the United States to Relieve from Starvation the Women and Children of the Greeks of the Island of Crete" (Boston, 1867); and "Aid for the Cretans," New York Times, Jan. 27, 1867, p. 8. The Howes also spoke at the Cooper institute in New York on January 26, 1867, see "The Cretan Meeting," New York World, January 26, 1867, p. 4.

(48.) "The Island of Crete," Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1868, p. 2.

(49.) "Crete," New York Times, April 24, 1868, p. 5; Stewart L. Woodford, Crete: An Address (Albany, 1868).

(50.) William J. Stillman to William Seward, Aug. 18, 1866, available in Arnakis, Articles and Despatches from Crete, 35-7.

(51.) William J. Stillman to William Seward, Dec. 29 1866, no. 35, p. 3, 5, Despatches from Crete, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, National Archives, Washington, D.C. See also, "Letter from Dr. Howe," The Cretan, April 1868, p. 8.

(52.) William J. Stillman to Wiliam Sewatd, Aug. 18, 1866, in Amakis, Articles and Despatches from Crete, 35. Edward Morris, a former Whig Congressmen and the American Minister to Constantinople during the insurrection, as well as A.S. York, the American Consul on the Greek island of Zante, and Mr. Rousseau, an American diplomat in Vienna, expressed similar sentiments; see Morris to Seward, Aug. 28, 1866 and Nov. 2, 1866, House of Representatives Executive Document, Revolution in Candia, 7-8, 13; A.S. York to William Seward, Jan. 11, 1867, Despatches from Zante, General Records of the State Department, RG 59; and "Foreign," Daily Memphis Avalanche, Jan. 17, 1867, p. 2; Repousis, "Greek-American Foreign Relations from Monroe to Truman," 186-230; May, "Crete and the United States," 289-91. U.S. naval officers visiting Gteece also demonstrated "American" sympathy, sec James E. Montgomery, Our Admiral's Flag Abroad. The Cruise of Admiral D.G. Farragut (New York, 1869), 412-14, 432-3.

(53.) "The War in Crete," 68-9.

(54.) U.S. Congress, House of Representatives Miscellaneous Documents, Sympathy for the Greek: Concurrent Resolution of the Legislature of New York, expressive of sympathy for the Greeks, who are now struggling for freedom, no. 58, 39 Cong., 2 sess; see also, ibid., Resolutions of the legislature of Maine expressing sympathy for the Cretans in their struggle for independence, no. 9, 40 Cong., 2 sess.

(55.) Woodford, Crete, 18.

(56.) See "Our Interest in the Levant," Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, Oct. 20, 1866, p. 66.

(57.) "Attack upon the Convent of Arkadi, Crete," ibid., March 2, 1867, p. 372; see also "The Convent of Arkadi, Crete, at the moment of the assault and explosion," ibid., Feb. 16, 1867, pp. 340-1.

(58.) "The Cretan Question," ibid., Oct. 12, 1867, p. 50.

(59.) "Cretan Days," Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1867, pp. 533-39; ibid., Mar. 1868, p. 326-27; see also "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," 2-3.

(60.) "Cretan Days," ibid., Aug. 1868, p. 226; see also "The Subjugated Nationalities of European Turkey," 1-2.

(61.) "Cretan Days," Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1867, pp. 533-535, 538-539. See also ibid., Aug. 1868, p. 222; and "Cretan Liberty and Cretan Commerce," The Cretan, May 1868, P. 7.

(62.) "Letter from Dr. Howe," 8; see also "The Turks and the Cretans," New York Times, Aug. 11, 1867, p. 4; "The Cretan War," New York Tribune, reprinted in the Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 1, 1867, p. 3; Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of VS. Culture, 23-50.

(63.) "The Clouds Accumulating--Turkey About to Fall to Pieces," New York Times, January 31, 1867, p. 4; "Cretan Days," Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1868, p. 224. For a more critical view, see Karl Blind, "Hellenic Nationality in the East," Putnam's Magazine, Nov. 1869, p. 568.

(64.) "The Eastern Question--Crete the Opening Wedge," New York Times, Oct. 16, 1866, p. 4.

(65.) "The Clouds Accumulating--Turkey About to Fall to Pieces," 4. See also Harper's Weekly, "The Eastern Question," Jan. 18, 1868, p. 35.

(66.) "Our Foreign Correspondents," New York Tribune, Oct. 16 1866, p. 4.

(67.) A. J. May, "Crete and the United States, 1866-1869"; "The Appeal of Crete," Harper's Weekly, Feb. 2, 1867, pp. 66-67; "Europe Ready for an Explosion," Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 7, 1867, p. 4.

(68.) "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," 2-3; see also "The Clouds Accumulating--Turkey About to Fall to Pieces," 4; Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 3d sess., January 7, 1869, p. 244. The Great Powers did, in fact, make some effort at mediation; see Maureen M. Robson, "Lord Clarendon and the Cretan Question, 1868-9," The Historical Journal 3 (1960): 38-55.

(69.) William Brock "The Image of England and American Nationalism," Journal of American Studies, 5 (1971): 225-245.

(70.) "The Eastern Question," The Sacramento Daily Union, Nov. 3, 1866, p. 2.

(71.) "The Cretan War," republished in Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 1, 1867, p. 3.

(72.) "Which is the Infidel," Harper's Weekly, Aug. 17, 1867, p. 528; see also "The Tragedy of Crete," Aug. 31, 1867, p. 547. For a scholarly look at British opinion, see Ann Pottinger Saab, "The Doctors' Dilemma: Britain and the Cretan Crisis, 1866-1869," Journal of Modern History 49, supplement (1977): D1383-D1407. In 1876, of course, William Gladstone became a leading critic of Ottoman suppression of Bulgaria; see Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion, 218-220. Some Republicans lauded Russia, a Union ally and Ottoman rival; see, as one example, "The Prayer of the Greeks," Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 2, 1866, p. 2.

(73.) William J. Stillman to Seward, Dec. 29, 1866, Despatches from Crete, General Records of the Department of State.

(74.) "Cretan Liberty and Cretan Commerce," 6.

(75.) "American Diplomacy," New York Times, Sept. 19, 1868, p. 4.

(76.) "The Prayer of the Greeks," 2.

(77.) "To Members of Congress," The Cretan, April 1868, p. 1.

(78.) On Seward, see Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 318; "Our Government and the Cretans," New York Times, February 6, 1867, p. 4. On The Cretan's criticism, see also "Policy vs. Statesmanship.--Diplomacy vs. Wisdom.--Government vs. Justice," May 1868, p. 1; "The Subjugated Nationalities of European Turkey," 2; "Crete and Spain," Dec. 1868, p. 2.

(79.) "Crete and Spain," 2.

(80.) "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," 2-3.

(81.) See July 23, 1867, in Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, 3 vols. (Boston and New York, 1911) vol. 3, 138-9, and Sept. 1,1868, ibid., 425.

(82.) Glyndon Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967), 489-91, 496; Thomas Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York, 1969), 351-55; Sexton, "The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875," 338-45.

(83.) Skinner, Roughing it in Crete, 207-211, 212-15; Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 319.

(84.) "An American Officer Fallen in Crete," New York Times, Oct. 7, 1867, p. 4.

(85.) On border crossing analogies, see also Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 116--24.

(86.) William J. Stillman to Seward, Dec. 29, 1866, Despatches from Crete, General Records of the Department of State.

(87.) Woodford, Crete, 14.

(88.) "Cretan War Ended!" 3; see also "The Turks and the Copperheads," New York Times, Jan. 23, 1867, p. 4.

(89.) "The Turks and the Ctetans," 4; see also, "Crete," Harper's Weekly, Jan. 23, 1869, p. 51.

(90.) "The Subjugated Nationalities of European Turkey," 1, 2.

(91.) "Crete," Harper's Weekly, Jan. 23, 1869, p. 51.

(92.) "Cretan Days," Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1868, p. 222; see also "Cretan Liberty and Cretan Commerce," The Cretan, May 1868, p. 7; and "The Clouds Accumulating--Turkey About to Fall to Pieces," 4.

(93.) On the equation of Mormons, Turks, and slaveholders, see Leonard J. Arrington and John Haupt, "Intolerable Zion: The Image of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century American Literature," Western Humanities Review, 22 (1968): 243-60, especially 246, 248. Though it is often forgotten, Congressional Republicans undertook the reconstruction of Mormon Utah alongside that of the southern states. For helpful insights into this neglected topic, see essays by Gustive Larson and Poll in, Poll, ed., Utah's History (Provo, 1978); Sara Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, 2002), especially 55-65; and Stephen Cresswell, Mormons & Cowboys, Moonshiners & Klansmen: Federal Law Enforcement in the South & West, 1870-1893 (Tuscaloosa, 1991).

(94.) "The Situation in Crete," 7; see also, "The Cretan Cause," The Cretan, July 1868, p. 4; "Mormonism in Turkey," ibid., p. 5; "Turkish Massacres.--Official Statistics," ibid., Oct. 1868, p. 2; and Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 3 sess., January 7, 1869, p. 246.

(95.) "Prospectus of the Cretan," The Cretan, Aug. 1868, p. 4.

(96.) "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," 3; see also "Schuyler Colfax and His Fenian Friends," New York Times, May 8, 1867, p. 5.

(97.) Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 3 sess., January 7, 1869, p. 244

(98.) "Cretan Days," Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1868, p. 224; "The Subjugated Nationalities of European Turkey," 1; Edward J. Morris to Secretary of State Seward, Sept. 29, 1866, House of Representatives Executive Documents, Revolution in Candia, 10-11.

(99.) "Intervention," 2. See also, "The Greek Race," The Cretan, July 1868, p. 3; Edward. Morris to Secretary of State Seward, Sept. 29, 1866, in House of Representatives Executive Documents, Resolution in Candia, 10-11.

(100.) See Julia Howe, From the Oak to the Olive. A Plan of a Pleasant Journey (Boston, 1868), 173-4, 222-233; Julia Ward Howe Diary, vol. 5, February 7, 1868, Howe Family Papers, Harvard University Library, Houghton; and S.G.W. Benjamin, "Historical Sketch of Crete," Harpers New Monthly Magazine, May 1867, 758-64; but also "Crete," Harper's Weekly, Jan. 23, 1869, p. 51.

(101.) Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliot, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (Boston and New York, 1916), 281-2.

(102.) "The Cretan Refugees and their American Helpers," 3-4; "The Cretan Industrial Schools at Athens," The Cretan, July 1868, p. 7; "Our Schools in Athens," ibid., August 1868, p. 5-6.

(103.) "American Influences Abroad," 3.

(104.) Available in Charles Keating Tuckerman to Frederick William Seward, Jul. 1,1867, William Henry Seward Papers, University of Rochester, Rush Rhees Library.

(105.) "Canting Sympathies" Constitution, July 31, 1868, p. 2. See also "Foreign versus Home Philanthropy, "Constitution, June 19, 1868, p. 2. On the antebellum origins of such accusations, see Joel Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New York, 1985), 166-189.

(106.) "Foreign versus Home Philanthropy," 2.

(107.) Ibid.

(108.) "Canting Sympathies," 2.

(109.) "Work for the Cretan Committee," New York World, Feb. 1, 1867, p. 4.

(110.) "A Bostonian War in the East," ibid., June 10, 1868, p. 4.

(111.) "Foreign versus Home Philanthropy," 2. Republicans described such accusations as superficial; see, as one example, "Cretan Liberty and Cretan Commerce," 6.

(112.) "The Cretan Meeting," 4.

(113.) "Editorial," Memphis Daily Avalanche, Feb. 21, 1867, p. 2.

(114.) "The Cretan Meeting," 4.

(115.) "Unparalleled Cruelty," Richmond Enquirer & Sentinel, Nov. 18, 1867, p. 2; see also "The Effects of Reconstruction," ibid., Dec. 17, 1867, p. 2.

(116.) "Foreign versus Home Philanthropy," 2; see also "The Cretan Meeting," 4-

(117.) "Canting Sympathies," 2.

(118.) "Turk or Christian," New York World, May 9, 1868, p. 4.

(119.) See also Rubin, A Shattered Nation, 162-3.

(120.). "Foreign versus Home Philanthropy," 2.

(121.) "Canting Sympathies," 2.

(122.) "Canting Sympathies," 2.

(123.) "Editorial," Memphis Daily Avalanche, February 21, 1867, p. 2. See also "Editorial," ibid., February 22, 1867, p. 2.

(124.) "Work for the Cretan Committee," 4.

(125.) "Foreign versus Home Philanthropy," 2.

(126.) See the insightful comments in Gordon, The Mormon Question, 119-120.

By David Prior

University of South Carolina