On 2 November 1841, the amir’s son Akbar Khan led insurgents into Kabul, where they attacked and killed the British within the town, then besieged the military cantonment. When Akbar tricked the British into negotiations, he personally gutted their envoy. After a defeat at Bibi Mahru, 690 Britons, 3,800 Indians and 12,000 women and children were forced into a retreat from Kabul.
As they passed through narrow defiles, Akbar, deploying masterful Afghan snipers, orchestrated the slaughter of the entire column in eight days. A single survivor, Dr Brydon, staggered into Jalalabad. Shah Shuja turned against the British but was assassinated.
In 1842, two British armies invaded Afghanistan, leaving a trail of destruction and slaughter, and retook Kabul, where they dynamited the bazaar and pillaged the city before departing. Despite the unprecedented loss of 4,500 soldiers, British power had been reasserted, and was confirmed by the fate of the Sikh empire: its maharaja had died during the invasion. In 1849, his son Maharaja Duleep Singh signed the Punjab over to the British. In 1855, the Afghan amir Dost Mohammad agreed to be ‘friends’ with Britain.
The retreat was a disaster, but a small one for a global empire. The lesson was not that Afghanistan was ‘the graveyard of empires’ – an erroneous cliché – but simply that invaders should get in and get out fast, which is what happened in 1842. Afghanistan remained a client state – with a blood-spattered interlude in 1878 – until 1919. Ironically, imperial Britain handled Afghanistan much more wisely than democratic America and Britain in the twenty-first century.
Back in the Mediterranean, Palmerston had successfully saved the Ottoman sultanate from Mehmed Ali and from the Russians. As he sank into senility, fantasizing about an invasion of China, Mehmed Ali, the greatest leader of Egypt in modern times, left an independent state, with a cotton industry and a modern army, that would be ruled by his family into the 1950s.
To the west, another cotton-producing, slave-trading empire under a successful warlord was planning its own expansion.
Into Texas.
AMERICAN WARLORDS: JACKSON’S BULLETS AND SANTA ANNA’S LEG
On 30 January 1835 in Congress, a mad assassin fired two pistols at President Jackson, then aged sixty-seven, and both misfired. Old Ferocious had lost none of his ferocity: he felled the assassin with his cane and would have beaten him to death had he not been pulled off by a fellow frontiersman, Davy Crockett.
The presence of the beaver-hatted Crockett was no coincidence. The member of the House of Representatives was planning his own personal expeditions to seize Texas.
The grizzled president founded his entire career on expansion into British, Spanish and Native American territory. Craggy, six foot one with blue eyes and wild red hair, this tough son of Ulster raised in the Carolinas was a harsh frontiersman and saloon brawler who had two bullets in his body from duels. His men called him Old Hickory, Native Americans dubbed him Sharp Knife and Old Ferocious – and the story of his life was the story of the voracious march of American power. ‘I was born for the storm,’ he said, ‘and a calm does not suit me.’
As a teenager, he fought in the War of Independence; as a young man, he won fortune enough to buy his Hermitage, Tennessee, cotton estate and 150 slaves, yet also adopted a Native American orphan. He defended with his pistols the virtue of his wife Rachel against accusations of bigamy: he killed a man who insulted her. On the frontiers he commanded militias of settlers and their Native American auxiliaries, keen to ‘conquer not only the Floridas but all Spanish North America’. In 1812, when Britain’s harassment of American ships and encouragement of Shawnee resistance led to war, Colonel Jackson struck at Muscogee (Creek) Native Americans who had attacked American colonists, and on 8 January 1815 General Jackson became a national hero by saving New Orleans and routing a British army. During the war, enslaved African-Americans fled to the Seminole Indians and formed their own free community at Fort Negro in Florida. In 1816, Jackson, assisted by Creek auxiliaries, raided Florida, destroyed Fort Negro and defeated the British-backed Seminole.* In 1818, ignoring President Monroe, he finally seized Florida, executing two captured British agents. Spain, coping with Bolívar in south America, sold Florida to the US; Jackson later became governor of the new state. He despised the hifalutin presidents Monroe and Adams, Virginian aristocrats and Massachusetts lawyers, laughing that ‘It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.’
