Comment on this story

A speculative French invasion, and the first postwar anti-U.S. insurgency

by Jack Neely

The war in Iraq quietly passed a grim milestone a couple of months ago. It has been more costly, in American combat deaths, than the Spanish-American War. If you don't count deaths due to disease, our invasion of Iraq is now the eighth-deadliest war in U.S. history.

If things go better than they have been lately, it may rise no higher on that list. We'd have to suffer about 1,000 more combat deaths to reach the carnage of the War of 1812 or the Mexican War, and many thousands more to rival Vietnam or Korea. But with no end in sight, you have to wonder.

What's the matter with these people? we say. Don't they know we're trying to help them?

We figure we would respond differently. If foreign invaders occupied America to show us a new and better way, we'd be good, and obey. We'd put up with whatever indignities they imposed on us in hopes of a better world to come. Maybe most of us would.

Consider this scenario, based on a couple of plausible circumstances. In the 1770s, the American anti-monarchy movement was a minority. If a few key figures had lost their nerve, or their heads, America could easily have crossed into the 1790s under the thumb of a progressively insane ruler.

Meanwhile, France, where modern Democracy has its deepest roots, would have spawned its Revolution. The home of Rousseau was more polarized, its intellectuals more insistent, its ruler more absolute. The French Revolution, unlike the American one, was inevitable. By the 1790s, France was a Republic.

So, say America passed into the 1790s still British; and say the Republican French decided colonial America would be better off as a democracy. So they invaded.

Many Americans, grateful to get King George off their backs, would have helped the French beat Britain in America. There would have been visible celebration in the streets. French lithographers would have sold engraved scenes of Americans hauling down statues of George III and kicking them with their hobnailed boots. Many Americans would have told the French they were grateful to have them here. French hearts would have swelled with French pride.

The occupying French forces would have said all they wanted to do was give Americans this wonderful French gift of democracy. Someday, the French might have said, we Americans could be like the French. They would have said they were doing us a big favor, and perhaps they would have been sincere about that.

But some Americans might have suspected that the French had ulterior motives, that they really were after our fabled natural resources. Misunderstandings would have been inevitable. The French soldiers who occupied every American town didn't understand English; they shouted at us in French. Because their intelligence wasn't always perfect, they sometimes ransacked the homes of innocent people, arresting some harmless farmers and shopkeepers. Sometimes, by accident, the liberating French killed some of us.

Some Americans might have been uncomfortable with the fact that the French Republican leadership, while wonderfully democratic, was atheist. Some Americans might have condemned the occupiers as “infidels”—as, literally, they were.

Say the French occupation of America went on like this for a year, as they kept promising we'd have our own French-style government.

You and I both know some folks who would have taken pot shots at them. I'm not saying they would have been right to do so. But a casualty rate of 50 deaths a week might have been on the low side.

Of course, there are big differences between the colonial Americans and the post-traumatic Iraqis. Unfortunately, most of the differences suggest that it would have been much easier for the French in America in 1794 than for the Americans in Iraq in 2004. Even under British rule, the American colonists already had experience with democracy, after all, and an expectation that we had individual rights. It wouldn't have been nearly as foreign a concept to us then as it is to the people of Iraq today.

I was in the barbershop the other day, and a man came in holding a newspaper photograph of American bodies hanging from a bridge. It was so barbaric, he said, that we should just bomb the hell out of the place; those people don't even deserve any more respect.

I'm grateful President Lincoln didn't think that way. My ancestors might have been obliterated. When pro-Union saboteurs burned bridges in East Tennessee, Confederates hanged them. Some they hanged here in Knoxville. Two men remembered to history as Hensie and Fry were hanged in Greeneville, and the Confederate War Department suggested in a printed order, “It would be well to leave their bodies hanging in the vicinity of the burned bridges.”

And there Mr. Hensie and Mr. Fry dangled for several days. The East Tennessee & Virginia passenger rail, which ran from Knoxville to Bristol, ran within a few feet of their bodies. For several days, passengers found it amusing to lean out of their cars and whop the corpses with canes. The two alleged saboteurs remained suspended there as visceral examples of what happens to pro-U.S. agents, until decomposition spoiled their value to the rebel war department, whereupon they were relieved of duty.

As I was sitting there in the barber chair, I recalled that maybe I don't need to come up with some French scenario. It did happen here.

The Civil War, which had something to do with introducing modern democratic principles by force to a nation that had been accustomed to its own brand of tyranny, didn't end very soon after the losing armies were defeated. The killing went on for more than three decades after the announced end of major combat operations. The Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues, and various other armed bands of disgruntled former Confederates targeted both freed blacks and whites who were cooperating with the Republican Reconstruction efforts. They strung up the bodies of the U.S. invaders and their local allies, soldier and civilian alike, from trees and bridges, sometimes left them there to look at for a while. No one knows with any certainty how many died during that period, but it was certainly in the thousands; 10,000 is one educated guess. They called it the White Terror.

These terrorist groups prefigured the Sadr insurgency and Baathist militants in Iraq by 130 years. Anti-Reconstruction insurgents likely killed more Americans in the postwar South than have all Islamic terrorists in history, including Sept. 11, 2001.

They were plenty bad, but no worse than other defeated and humiliated peoples. It has happened all over the world, over and over. It's what human beings tend to do when they're being invaded by foreigners.

When I first brought up that troubling comparison early last year, hoping the aftermath in Iraq wouldn't be half as bad as it was in the South, I was still hopeful that the administration knew a good deal more about the postwar prospects than I did.

April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18 © 2004 Metro Pulse