Hi, welcome back. I'm gonna use this presentation to just talk a little bit about what liberalism meant in the 1860s when it was reaching its zenith of popularity. Liberalism is really about the open-minded pursuit of progress. You can see this theme we've been developing in a lot of the presentations in this course, growing out of the commercial revolutions, the democratic revolutions. The sense — we're overthrowing ancient dogmas, we're overthrowing fossilized tradition. We're now in a dynamic age where things are constantly changing. We have to be open to scientific ideas, open to new things. We need to enlarge our community, to include a lot of people who will become part of our nation. The state is gonna have an important role in advancing progress. That set of ideas we might associate with liberalism as was understood by Europeans in the middle of the 1800s. Again, very different from the way the term liberal is used in American political life today. So, big symbols of the triumph of liberalism in the middle of 1860s. First of all, the victory of the Union in the American Civil War. The United States survives as a more unified Republic. United States instead of being seen as a plural noun, United States are will increasingly in the later 1800s turn into the singular noun. The United States is the United States. Instead of the United States believe, the United States believes. Here's a brief map that just gives you a sense of the course of the American Civil War, the different campaigns. The actual course of the war is deeply influenced by water ways, the Union Navy pressuring the Confederates at different points, trying to restrict that Confederate trade in cotton which was the way in which the Confederates got money and could buy more arms. The Union Navy capturing the critical harbor of New Orleans and working its way up the Mississippi River, working its way down the Cumberland rivers but then eventually prepares itself for the Overland defensive driving into the heart of the Confederacy here in 1864. And then the other campaign in the east, mainly fought back and forth in Northern Virginia between Richmond and Washington with neither side increasing a decisive result but as the Confederacy increasingly undermined by its losses in the west and then finally bled white and brought to defeat in the spring of 1865. At the same time, the Confederacy is brought to defeat. Slavery is abolished in the entire United States by constitutional amendment. And the conjunction of these events are really wonderfully portrayed in the new movie Lincoln that came out at the end of 2012. In Europe, a principal symbol of tradition and traditional beliefs was the Catholic Church and the power of the pope. And the pope suffers some significant reverses during the 1860s. First, there's the creation of the state of Italy itself, changing a peninsula in which the pope had also been a territorial ruler to one in which his domain becomes more purely that of the Spirit. I showed you this map earlier. This is just a map showing the reunification of Italy in which the last gasp of the Papal States is narrowed to this domain right here which finally falls the new Italian Kingdom, which will make Rome its capital, confining the papacy to Vatican City, a little enclave inside the city of Rome. Another big political shift is the overthrow of the French Second Empire and the creation of a new French Republic, the Third Republic, in 1870. Now, if you're getting confused a little bit about the numeration of these empires and republics, a brief review; there's a French first republic that's created after the overthrow of King Louis XVI at the beginning of the 1790s. So, you have the first French republic, that's in the 1790s, French Revolutionary era. Then comes the First French empire, the one created by Napoleon Bonaparte when he crowns himself emperor in 1804 that last till 1815. And then the monarchy comes back, until the monarchy was overthrown, finally, in 1848. Then comes the Second French Republic. The Second French Republic lasts from 1848 into the 1850s. When the Second Republic is overthrown by the Second Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, who became known as Napoleon III, ruled France in this Second Empire until 1870 when the Republic comes back into being. It's now the Third French Republic and it will remain in power until 1940. The French Republic is also created out of a violent internal upheaval inside Paris, the revolt of the Paris Commune, in which mobs of Parisians attack some of the symbols of the old order, especially the Catholic Church, reminiscent of some of the bloodiest days of the 1790s. In the Paris Commune, for instance, the revolutionary forces captured a number of Catholic Bishops. This is a contemporary illustration, a fusion of photography and painting, that shows the execution of some of those bishops, at least one of whom had actually been going out of his way to help the poor before a firing squad. Most of the French people were appalled at the atrocities committed by the commune arms. And when the Paris Commune was put down, there were thousands of execution of the communards by the new French Republic, which is determined to bind up France's wound, symbolize the unity of the new French nation state, and make its peace with the Catholic Church with the men of property in the middle class and also with the symbols of the French state, like the army. Within the newly created German Empire, I mentioned a couple of presentations ago, that its leader the chancellor von Bismarck found himself in a clash with the Catholic Church over whether state or the Church would control some of the key institutions of public life. That's a battle the German Empire and its culture war mainly wins. Another aspect of the triumph of liberalism was the end of slavery in the United States Civil War and the end of slavery throughout all the European-dominated world. Slavery finally being abolished in Brazil in the late 1880s. Take a look at this illustration. This man is Samuel Crowther. Crowther was from Yoruba, which is mainly encompassed in the present-day state called Nigeria. Crowther was captured and enslaved. He was freed by British naval vessel in 1821, then enforcing its new prohibitions against the slave trade. Thus free, he actually became educated in the Anglican Church. He's ordained as an Anglican minister in the 1840s. He'll become a bishop in the Anglican Church and will lead the way in translating some of the Holy Bible into the Yoruba language. Here he is shown in his vestments, someone who's helping to spread Christianity in Africa and becomes part of liberalism's civilizing mission. Another aspect of the traditional world and its use of labor was not just slavery, but also the practice of serfdom, a vestige of the feudal era which persisted in the Russian empire on into the 1800s. What is serfdom? Serfdom is when instead of owning the laborers, you own the land, but the laborers are forcibly tied to the land. They can't leave the land. So if you buy the land, you effectively have also bought the people, you bought the labor that goes with the land, these people who are tied to it. Here's a scene in the Russian Empire of the 1700s. The remnants of a nobleman's estate are being sold off. You see the painting discarded in the foreground, other things. Nobles are gathered around examining the different items of the estate that are for sale. They're deciding what they're going to bid on these different items. One of the items that's being auctioned off in the remnants of that man's estate are actually the people who go with some of the land. Those are the serfs on the right-hand side of the painting. The serfs are waiting to discover who will buy the land and who will become their new master. Serfdom was abolished in the Russian Empire by the Czar Alexander II who was, therefore, known as the great emancipator. The end of serfdom in the Russian Empire, the end of slavery in the European and Atlantic world, and the end of serfdom will be seen as another symbol of the rise of liberalism. For the entire European and Atlantic world, the very center of liberal beliefs was Great Britain in the 1860s. And the British themselves are leading the way in reforming their own political system. One kind of reform is finally letting most of the British men vote. The two key reform bills that extend the franchise to most British men are passed in 1832 and 1867. The very personification of the cause of reform is the British politician and frequent prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone was also an important figure in the United States, a British liberal ideas were very much part of the conversation among literate people in the United States as well. Here's a wonderful drawing made in the middle of the 1870s that gives you some sense of Gladstone hard at work as a reformer. Gladstone was fond of good, vigorous exercise – chopping firewood. So here he is, ax in hand, taking on some deadwood. Over here on the left, he's getting ready to chop down Turkish misrule in places like the Balkans which he doesn't like. Right here, Gladstone is getting ready to take on that word says drink. You can see the somewhat inebriated-looking tree there. Then he may turn to the rotten House of Lords. You can see the rather terrified tree awaiting the axeman's work. And then over here on the right, he'll also take on that tradition-bound Welsh Church. Nothing also better captures new beliefs and the need to come to grips with science than the role of Charles Darwin and Darwin's ideas. His book "The Origin of Species" that puts forward his theory of evolution is published in 1859. In the 1860s, every literate person in the European and Atlantic world is debating Darwin's beliefs. It's a fierce debate because, of course, Darwin is arguing that human beings are descended from earlier forms of mammals like primates. In other words, people are descended from apes through a long sequence of biological evolution, of adaptation. So Darwin's ideas present some real challenge for Orthodox faith, for people who believe that human beings were created directly by God in His image. Darwin himself was not trying to challenge Christianity, but he knew that his writings were going to offend a lot of traditional Christian belief. Here's a caricature that captures a lot of the contemporary debate about Darwin, as Darwin's ideas are caricatured as saying that human beings really are just a modified form of ape. Darwin's ideas capture the public imagination so much that they become a metaphor for how to think about human progress of many kinds. Part of Darwin's argument is that you see all this variety of species because species are adapting and, over many generations, there is a process of the survival of the fittest, that certain variations that tend to be more successful become more dominant. That idea is so captivating, it becomes a metaphor for how to think about economies, how to think about businesses, how to think about societies, how to think about the fates of different kinds of peoples, so that the American Indian is fading away and the Anglo-Saxon race is taking over North America as kind of the working out of some inevitable biological plan. It's very difficult to understand the beliefs of people in the 19th century without understanding that the most progressive people among them are people who are seized by this metaphor that they think is being driven by the latest discoveries in science. By the way, Charles Darwin himself never endorsed these sorts of uses of his work as, say, prescriptions for economics or prescriptions for politics. He really regarded himself as a zoologist, as a botanist, looking at the work at hand. But obviously, his ideas were so powerful that they took on a force of their own. So, by the end of the 1860s, we could pick a day like 1870, 1871, there's really a sense in the European world and all the worlds influenced by the European world that a new consensus is forming. Everyone wants to think of themselves as being enlightened. People want to think of themselves as being open-minded, ready to consider ideas of progress, ready to embody those ideas in these new nation-states. Liberalism becomes all things to all men. We've seen the popularity of liberalism is the general belief that almost every state needs to have now a constitution that embodies the social contract between what government owes to its citizens in exchange for what the citizens have to do and what the elements are of public order. The notion that every country needs to have a constitution is so widespread that by, say, 1871, there are only three states left in Europe that don't have constitutions: The German Empire, the new Italian state, even the Ottoman Empire by the early 1870s has a constitution. Indeed, there will be a constitution adopted in Japan as well. What we'll then see, as we get more into the 1870s and the 1880s, is that this consensus around liberal ideas will lead to a period of strong division and reaction as political beliefs splinter again. We'll talk about that next time. See you then.
