From the Archives: The Peasants Are Revolting
2017 is the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, commemorated in Big Fat History Books and innumerable posts by history bloggers. (I did my bit here and here.) There has been a certain somber tone to such commemorations, since the Revolution is tied in our historical memory with Stalinism, gulags in Siberia, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, etc. It's worth remembering that the Russian Revolution was born of deeply rooted discontent. Here's a post from the archives to give us a little context.
Yemelyan Pugachyov
In September, 1773, three months before American colonists dumped tea in Boston harbor, Russian serfs in the Ural mountain region rose up and demanded emancipation from bondage.
Discontent had been brewing among the serfs since 1762, when Tsar Peter III passed legislation that many serfs (mistakenly) interpreted as the first step toward their emancipation. Several months later, Peter was murdered and his wife, later known as Catherine the Great, ascended the throne.
As far as the serfs were concerned, Catherine's rule wasn't so great. One of her first acts on ascending the throne was to annul Peter's legislation. Instead of gaining their freedom, serfs suffered from increasing burdens of compulsory service and imaginative taxation. Serfs were even taxed for wearing a beard. (A sure fire way of solving the financial crisis. Write your congressman today.)
As conditions worsened, rumors spread that Tsar Peter wasn't dead and that he would return to complete the emancipation of his people. Between 1762 and 1774, multiple imposters appeared claiming to be the murdered tsar. (I picture this as a variation on the line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "I'm not dead yet".) The most successful of these pretenders was Yemelyan Pugachev, who led the serf revolt in 1773-4.
Pugachev was welcomed as a liberator by many serfs, who rose in the name of the "true tsar", Peter III. Violent bands of serfs roamed the countryside. Landowning nobles were killed or put to flight. In the end, Pugachev's Rebellion accomplished nothing. Pugachev was defeated by imperial troops a year after the initial rising and sent to Moscow in a cage. He was tried several months later and executed. Without its leader, the revolt collapsed.
Pugachev's only permanent legacy was a historical adventure novella by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter, in which Pugachev is portrayed as a larger than life romantic villain. (Pushkin also wrote a serious history of the revolt in which Pugachev is a thug "with no other merits, except for some military expertise and extraordinary audacity." Poetic license is a wonderful thing.)
Pugachev's Rebellion failed, but discontent among the serfs continued. Russian peasants revolted more than 500 times between Pugachev's defeat and Tsar Alexander II's edict declaring their emancipating in 1861.
Kepler’s Mother: A Scary Story for Halloween
The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.* Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to motion. Physicians explored the structure of the human body. The development of scientific instruments allowed students to see new worlds in a drop of water and scan the skies with a clarity not possible with the naked eye. Natural philosophers (the name used by scientists at the time) began to perform experiments in a way that could be verified by others.**
The seventeenth century was also the height of the European witch trials. Black magic, maleficum, was a capital crime, clearly defined by law. Between 1570 and 1680, roughly 110,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. Most of the accused were women. One of the women accused was Katharina Kepler, the 68-year-old mother of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
The charges against Katharina will sound familiar to anyone who has read accounts of the Salem witch trials. (And probably to anyone who has read accounts of European witch trials as well.) A woman who suffered from a chronic illness accused Katharina of poisoning her. The local schoolmaster reported that the illiterate Katharina constantly pestered him to read letters from or write letters to her famous son, and that on one occasion she entered his house though the doors were locked. A local matron reported, second-hand, that a young seamstress told her that Katherina had roamed the house late at night*** and offered to teach her (the seamstress) witchcraft. She was accused of killing various local animals by magic and of turning herself into a cat. Katherina vehemently denied the charges. The only charges she couldn't plausible deny were 1) being old and 2)being difficult.**** Obviously prime witch material.
Her trial lasted six years.
In 1620, five years after Katharina's ordeal began (!), at the height of his career, Johannes Kepler packed up his family, moved to the city where his mother was on trail, and took over her defense. He dissected the charges in a powerful, and groundbreaking, legal document. He attacked the reliability of many of the witnesses. He pointed out the fact that many of the accused acts--like entering someone's house uninvited--could not necessarily be attributed to witchcraft. And that to do so would make any difficult old woman vulnerable to attack.***** He discussed the differences between natural and unnatural illness in scientific detail, with the authority of one of the great scientists of his age. He pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony. It took almost a year, but he ultimately succeeded in getting his mother acquitted.
Katharina died six months after her acquittal, no doubt worn down by her ordeal
At base, Kepler wasn't that different than the men who tried his mother.**** He believed in magic. The division between magic, religion and science was not clear. Sir Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy and interpreting biblical prophecies as he did on the scientific theorems for which he is famous. William Harvey, who discovered how blood circulates in the body, dissected a witch's toad familiar, looking for the source of its supernatural power. Most witchhunters and demonologists were scholars and rationalists who believed in the importance of direct observation and were concerned with the question of what constituted reliable evidence . The investigation of witchcraft, magic and miracles was a much a part of the scientific revolution as the study of gravity and electricity.
Small comfort for cranky old ladies who liked cats and annoyed their neighbors.
*Or at least shoved it off balance. It takes a while for new ideas about the nature of reality to work their way through society. Consider the existence of the Flat Earth Society.
**It is only fair to point out that many of these breakthroughs had been anticipated by Islamic scientists during the Golden Age of Islam, most notably Alhazen, whose work laid the foundation for the scientific method.
***There is a reason they call them the witching hours.
****In her trial Johannes himself admitted that she "disturbs the whole of her town, and is the author of her own lamentable misfortune."
*****As indeed they were.
******Except for that small detail of being a scientific genius.
Harriet Tubman’s Civil War
Harriet Tubman is famous for leading slaves north to freedom in the decade prior to the American Civil War: acts that required courage, daring, stealth, and organizational skills.* After the Civil War began in 1861, she used the skills she developed as conductor on the Underground Railroad on behalf of the Union Army.
In the early months of war, there was little Tubman could contribute. That changed when Union forces captured Port Royal, South Carolina, which became the headquarters of the Army's Department of the South. It served as a depot for the South Atlantic Blockading squadron and as a base from which to stage attacks on Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville. It also became, by default the largest safe haven for escaping slaves, known as contrabands.
In May 1862, Tubman traveled to the Sea Islands of South Carolina at the request of Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts, who was a rabid abolitionist. She understood that she would be working as a scout. Tubman later reported that someone “changed the program” before she left. When she first arrived in South Carolina, she worked with a group of abolitionists from Boston and Philadelphia, handing out food, clothing, and medical supplies to former slaves. Tubman also helped newly freed women to earn a living by sewing, doing laundry, and baking for Union soldiers—running classes to provide marketable skills for women who had been field hands. At first she drew rations, like the Union soldiers and the female nurses of Dorothea Dix’s Army nursing corps, but she later gave up the privilege because other freedmen saw it as preferential treatment. Instead she earned her own living in much the same way as the women she trained, baking pies and making root beer to sell to soldiers.
Major General David S. Hunter, commander of the South and a fervent abolitionist, had another use for Tubman's skills.** Although the Union controlled the Sea Islands themselves, they did not control the area on the mainland. Hunter needed intelligence about the terrain and enemy troop movements. Tubman had the skills to provide it. She not only worked as a spy and scout behind enemy lines, she also built a network of informants and put together a valuable team of scouts and pilots drawn from the local black population.*** Hunter gave her a pass allowing her to travel freely and claim passage on all government transports.
Tubman's work as a spy and scout provided the information for one of the most dramatic incidents in her dramatic career: the Combahee River Raid.**** In the early morning of June 2, 1863, three gunboats steamed twenty-five miles up the narrow, meandering tidal river, carrying Tubman, 300 black soldiers, and their commander Colonel James Montgomery.***** Working with information provided by Tubman and her informants, their primary task was to destroy the plantations and warehouses that lined the river, thereby depriving the Confederate army of much needed supplies.
At the end of the raid, the steamboats sounded their whistles--by now an established signal that the area was being liberated. Slaves swarmed out to the boats, carrying as many of their belonging as they could manage. Tubman latter said, in a letter dictated to Franklin Sanborn, the editor of a Boston newspaper, "I never saw such a sight. Sometimes the women would come with twins hanging around their necks; it appears I never saw so many twins in my life; bags on their shoulders; baskets on their heads and young ones tagging along behind, all loaded; pigs squealing, chicken screaming, young ones squealing.”
Montgomery sent small boats to the riverbank to ferry the slaves on board, but they soon became overloaded. People clung to the sides of the boats, fearful of being left behind.
Montgomery told Tubman to calm "her" people and assure them that no one would be left. Tubman later told journalist Emma Telford, they "wasn't my people any more than they was his--only we was all Negroes--'cause I didn't know any more about them than he did. So I went when he called me on the gunboat and they on the shore. They didn't know anything about me and I didn't know what to say. I looked at them about two minutes, and then I sung to them." Unlikely as it seems, the unusual crowd control method worked. The crowd calmed down, joined Tubman in song, and released the boats. They rescued 756 slaves without losing a single soldier or slave.
Tubman ended the war working as a nurse in a freedman's hospital.
In 1895, after several years of petitions by Tubman and others, Tubman received a monthly pension of twenty dollars a month--for her work as a nurse, not for her priceless service as a scout and spy. Thirty years after the end of the war.******
*An often under-valued talent
**Hunter was a controversial figure at the time. Soon after his appointment, he issued an order on his own authority freeing all escaped slaves in the Department of the South. He then attempted, also on his own authority, to organize male slaves into military units. When they didn’t volunteer as readily as he hoped, he forcibly inducted them into military units—raising the question of just how free they actually were.
***Isaac Hayward, Mott Blake, Gabriel Cahern, Sandy Sellers, George Chisholm, Solomon Gregory, Peter Burns, Charles Simmons, Samuel Heyward and Walter D Plowden--in case you're wondering.
****Tubman is often described as commanding the raid. Although it broke my heart, I came to the reluctant conclusion that this is not the case.
*****Another hot-blooded abolitionist, Montgomery was one of the most famous "jayhawkers" during the unofficial warfare between abolitionists and pro-slavery activists across the the Missosuri/Kansas border in the eight years before the first southern state seceded from the United States in February, 1861.
******It is only fair to put this in context. No nurses received pensions until the 1890s. And that twenty dollars is the equivalent of $2630 in today's dollars.