When Americans formally declared their independence from Great Britain in the summer of 1776, they faced the prospect of doing something few thought possible: governing the full extent of much of what had been Britain’s mainland North American colonies. This meant much more than governing the small towns and farming villages huddled along the eastern seaboard of North America. It also meant controlling the North American hinterland, something no European power had done with any real success. North America’s continental backcountry stretched from the Appalachian mountains in the east to the Mississippi River to the West; from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the South, to the Great Lakes to the North, more than five thousand square kilometers in total. For over a century, European powers – primarily France, Spain and Great Britain – had battled for control of the regions’ lucrative supply of furs, animal hides, medicinal plants, Native American slaves, and other trade goods. But as would be typical of later colonial struggles on other continents, this contest simply made the region that much more difficult to govern.
In exchange for valued trade goods, Europeans introduced firearms, domestic animals, and alcohol. These goods, in turn, reshaped Native American societies, fostering a devastating long-term dependence on European trade. But the other side of these long-term costs was the short-term expansion of several powerful Native American confederacies – most notably the Iroquois, in what is now upstate New York. Through their control of European trade, these groups empowered themselves at the expense of both Europeans and smaller Native bands, many of which had already been displaced by European colonists to the East. They also deftly pitted European powers against each other for military and diplomatic advantage. The end result of these developments was that by the middle of the eighteenth century inland North America was less stable than it had been a half-century earlier. Even the culminating event of this long descent into instability – what Europeans call the Seven Years War and Americans refer to as the French and Indian War – only superficially resolved this enduring and incessant struggle for control of inland North America.
With the formal conclusion of that war in 1763, the British would be the sole European imperial power east of the Mississippi River and north and east of the Great Lakes. France, which had claimed most of what became Canada, the Great Lakes area, most of the Mississippi River Valley, and much of the Ohio River Valley, was now almost entirely banished from mainland North America. Spain, which had controlled East Florida and most of West Florida (territory stretching west along the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River), now claimed only Louisianan, a former French possession stretching North and West along the western shore of the Mississippi River. Even with these massive territorial gains, only the most naïve and detached statesmen could conceive of this settlement as an unalloyed British victory. It was one thing for a relatively small nation with the world’s most powerful navy to defend its island possessions; altogether another for it to control a vast continental hinterland.
The fragility of Britain’s new and very tentative American hegemony was tested almost immediately. In the spring of 1763, an Ottawa leader called Pontiac led a general Native American rebellion that began in the eastern Great Lakes and spread through the Ohio River basin to the Appalachian Mountains. In less than a year, Pontiac and his allies had taken control of most of the British outposts in these areas. Infighting and British diplomatic manipulations eventually brought the rebellion to an end. But its lessons were unmistakable. Anything like a lasting peace in North America would require a delicate diplomatic and socio-economic balancing act. The autonomy of Native confederacies would have to be protected; the land-hungry European immigrants flooding into eastern North America would have to be kept out of Indian lands; and some system of governance would have to be devised to manage the new territories. Despite an array of initiatives, including the ambitious Proclamation of 1763, the British government was never able to achieve a satisfactory political order in its newly acquired hinterlands. The colonial backcountry remained as chaotic and unstable as ever.^[1] Those within the British government were quick to recognize the problem, although many of them held firm to the view – so characteristic of the age of Enlightenment – that the problem was institutional. As the colonial administrator Thomas Pownall explained in 1768,

The several changes of territories, which at the last Peace took place in the Colonies of the European world, have given rise to a new system of interests... This system of things ought... to be actuated by a system of politics, adequate and proportionate to its powers and operations: But... we see that all which is proposed as measures, is by parts, without connection to any whole, by temporary expedients, and shiftings off of present dangers, without any reference to that eventual state of things, which must be the consequence of such measures, and such expedients; much less by reference to that eventual state of things, by which the true system ought to be framed, and actuated.^[2]

Chaos would reign, Pownall was telling his readers, until Great Britain could devise a coherent and systematic mechanism to govern its colonies. Inconsistency, bureaucratic paralysis, official obliviousness, and the privileging of politics over the long-term welfare of British subjects would all culminate in disaster. And that is indeed just what happened. Britain lost its mainland colonies in no small measure because of its inability to craft a coherent, consistent governing mechanism for its new continental acquisitions.

* * *

None of these facts were lost on the members of the Continental Congress as they contemplated independence from the British Empire in 1775 and early 1776. Indeed, one of the great impediments to independence was the fear that leaving the Empire would mean leaving the vital protections it afforded. No longer would the Americans be able to rely on England to protect its seaborne trade or to prevent other European powers from reclaiming territories lost in the recent war. “To escape from the protection we have in British rule by declaring independence,” wrote John Dickinson, one of Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Continental Congress, “would be like Destroying a house before we have got another, in winter, with a small family; then asking a neighbor to take us in and finding he is unprepared.”^[3] The Americans, Dickinson was saying, might just find themselves helplessly exposed and vulnerable. Similarly, Britain’s problems on the North American continent would become America’s. There was little to suggest that America could do what Britain and every other European power had failed to do in the backcountry. Making matters worse, as Dickinson implied, the new United States lacked the military, commercial, and financial might needed to counter intrusions by other European powers seeking to regain territories lost in the Seven Years War.
As they looked toward independence, in other words, Americans found themselves looking over the edge of a terrifying precipice. Defenders of independence recognized that for the former British colonists to do what no European state had ever done, they would have to devise some radical new way to imagine empire, particularly the ever-troublesome inland empire. The eighteenth-century world was full of examples of sea-born empires: from antiquity to the rise of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, occidental states had empowered themselves through control of the seas. But with the partial exception of Rome – whose spectacular collapse was detailed so magnificently in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which appeared in 1776 – no European power had ever mastered an inland territory as extensive as that of eastern North America.
Russia was the one notable exception to this rule and Americans were not slow to notice it as they faced their own imperial future. Partly because it was ambiguously situated between Occident and Orient, Russia often existed on the far periphery of the European map of the early modern world. But Americans, desperate for an education in empire building, could not afford to ignore the early modern world’s one great continental empire.
What Americans saw when they looked at the Russian Empire was not an entity to emulate, but rather one to surpass. It was an astoundingly audacious perspective and on the eve of Independence it was being articulated by the most important propagandist for independence, the famed corset maker-turned pamphleteer, Thomas Paine. In what became the most widely read political pamphlet to date, “Common Sense”, Paine made the case for independence. And among his chief objects was countering the claims of Dickinson and other skeptics. America, Paine proclaimed, need not cower in fear. It could become a truly continental empire and it could do so as no nation, not even Russia, had ever done. For America had within its compass the full constellation of resources necessary for imperial greatness. No nation in existence, Paine explained to his countrymen, had a comparable combination of natural resources and advantageous geographic circumstances. For “the vast empire of Russia is almost shut out from the sea; wherefore, her boundless forests, her tar, iron, and cordage are only articles of commerce.” That is, although the Russian empire is able to produce the goods needed to furnish a powerful navy, she has nothing like the American coastline – with its abundant harbors and ports from which to extend its commerce and launch its navy.^[4]
From the very beginning, then, Americans approached the Russian Empire less as a model to be emulated than as a kind of imperial other, an entity whose affinities with the American empire would be downplayed and whose differences – or at least who’s putative differences – would be amplified. That both empires would be largely continental empires, that they both evolved through the subjugation and extermination of Native peoples, that both depended on large pools of bound labor, and that both struggled for much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to counter their positions on the cultural margins of Europe – these obvious commonalities were of little importance to Americans in the Revolutionary era. Far more important was finding ways to do what Russia had done well – achieve control of a vast hinterland – without falling prey to the despotic tendencies that seemed so characteristic of Russian government.
No American better exemplified this somewhat myopic posture with respect to Russia than the famed Connecticut traveler John Ledyard. During the years 1787 and 1788, as Americans struggled with the ratification of their first (and only) national constitution, Ledyard traversed virtually the entire Russian Empire, from its farthest western boundaries to the far-eastern city of Yakutsk. During the course of this journey, he produced a journal and correspondence, glosses of which found their way into American print media in the late 1780s and 1790s. This material consists in large measure of Ledyard’s reflections on the character of the Russian empire and its peoples, reflections that illuminate Ledyard’s unique experiences, but that also suggest more general Revolutionary-era thinking about empire.^[5]
Ledyard’s discussion – particularly its suspicions of luxury and its hostility to political corruption and coercive modes of governance – very clearly draws on the vocabulary that animated the American critique of the British Empire on the eve of independence. But it also suggests more general, perhaps more profound, concerns that would be critical for the creators of American empire. At the center of those concerns was the problematic and uncertain relationship between race or ethnicity (“nation” as it was most commonly called in eighteenth-century vernacular) and empire. Could a republican empire such as that the Americans were attempting to create also be an empire of many distinct nations or peoples? The experience of the British in North America clearly suggested that a monarchical empire could not be so constituted. But Americans, particularly Thomas Jefferson, had begun arguing that republican empires would be different. The universality of human nature, Jefferson believed, would overcome whatever superficial divisions environment, language, belief, or ethnicity imposed upon humanity. But the key to unlocking this fundamental human commonality was liberty. It was liberty, an “empire for liberty” as Jefferson called it, that dissolved the tensions and misunderstandings arising from superficial cultural difference. The opposite form, an empire of despotism, merely perpetuated and exaggerated these differences. Throughout his writings, Ledyard struggled with this equation, looking constantly for proof that what distinguished the Russian Empire from the a burgeoning American empire was not so much its immense variety of peoples or its sheer size but rather despotic government. That is, he struggled to reassure himself that size and ethnic diversity produced conflict and division only when coupled with despotism – a form of government that inhibited natural human morality and, in turn, amplified superficial cultural differences.^[6]
Ledyard’s was not a unique struggle. Perhaps the most prolific eighteenth-century Anglophone student of Russia, William Tooke, chaplin to the merchants of the British Russian Company at St. Petersburg, observed that precisely because of its extraordinary diversity Russia and its imperial domain constituted a novel and difficult political problem. Where European states had over time absorbed and diluted ethnic and linguistic difference, Russia appeared to have done no such thing. In his three volume View of the Russian Empire, During the Reign of Catharine the Second, Tooke explained that in all the countries of Europe, “the dominant nation has in a manner swallowed up the conquered people; and the individuality of the latter has, in the course of some centuries, by insensible degrees, been almost entirely lost.” In contrast, “in Russia dwell not only some, but a whole multitude of distinct nations; each of them having its own language... retaining its religion and manners [and] bearing in their bodily structure, and in the features of their faces, the distinctive impression of their descent, which neither time nor commixture with other nations have been able entirely to efface.” As if to make the Empire’s lack of ethnic and racial definition more tangible, Tooke further emphasized the difficulty of defining the Empire in space. It was, in his view, a big, burly mess, lacking clear boundaries and at its farthest reaches dissolving into loosely defined frontiers, populated by “various tribes of almost savage, nomadic, or, in one word, uncivilized nations.” Russian government, that is, had done little to bring any unity or definition to the empire.^[7]
For Ledyard, the ill-defined nature of the Russian empire, the confused and confusing boundaries and borderlands, and especially the uncertain relationship between ethnicity, language, culture, religion, skin color, and status made for a cruel, corrupt mix. And although Ledyard appears to have maintained a kind of Jeffersonian faith in the universality of human nature and, in turn, the possibility that nation and empire could somehow become one, his writings suggest a certain anxiety about the prospects for such a convergence, anxiety that reveals itself in an unending struggle to explain the unruly world of imperial Russia as the result of despotic government, not cultural incommensurability. For the prospects of republican empire, at least as read through Ledyard’s observations of the Russian empire, ultimately depended on an enlightenment faith in the universality of human nature and, in turn, the presumption that governments, not peoples, determined the character of empires. Hence, the corruption and immorality Ledyard saw across Imperial Russia was in his mind not the result of the extraordinary ethnic diversity of imperial Russia, but of the failures of Russian government, particularly its failure to liberate itself from an Oriental disposition towards despotism. A government in which the governed are somehow enfranchised, whether as republican citizens or represented constituents of a constitutional monarchy, would encourage a natural human morality to transcend whatever human difference empire might encompass.
The Russian Empire was an ideal counterpoint for this enormously idealistic – some might say naïve – imperial vision. For not only did its people lack any real sense of community or commonality, but in the view of Ledyard and most other enlightenment-era commentators, the habit of ordinary Russians from the lowliest serf to the most elevated aristocrat of referring to their subordinates as slaves and their superiors as masters was not merely rhetorical. In the view of most European observers, these people were essentially enslaved and, as such, vivid exemplars of the very culture of dependency Jeffersonian empire sought to overcome. If, as the historian Peter Onuf has written, Jeffersonian empire “would be sustained by affectionate union, a community of interests, and dedication to the principles of self-government Jefferson set forth in the Declaration of Independence,” above all the idea that government would derive its influence and “‘just powers from the consent of the governed,’” Russian empire did precisely the opposite. It was sustained entirely by force and intimidation, by morally corrupting cruelty, and by monarchical despotism of a sort not even the most radical republicans could accuse the British government of employing. Nonetheless, much like ancient Rome, the case of Russia provided an instructive example of the perils of unbridled government power and the general moral decline so many republicans feared was infecting the British Empire. Authoritarian and corrupt regimes produced authoritarian and corrupt empires; republican regimes produced republican empires. For Ledyard, the lesson was as obvious as it was for Jefferson. The problem Americans faced was not empire, but bad empire.^[8]

* * *

Ledyard’s experience in Russian dominions was an unintended consequence of a series of failed entrepreneurial schemes to exploit the North American Pacific Coast fur trade.^[9] Having failed to graduate from Dartmouth College and failed in careers in the law and ministry, in March of 1774 he sailed for England in search of wealthy relatives. Instead of finding these, he was forced into the British army and eventually enlisted to serve as a marine corporal on Captain Cook’s fateful last Pacific Voyage (which Ledyard publicized with his A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and in Quest of a North-West Passage published in 1783).
After the conclusion of the expedition in October of 1780, Ledyard was posted on a British man-of-war and sent to the rebelling American colonies. He eventually deserted the Navy to write his account of the Cook Voyage – the first book copyrighted in the United States. And in the spring of 1783, Ledyard approached Robert Morris, the Revolutionary financier for possible financial backing for a Northwest-Coast fur-trade venture, but after initially agreeing to pay Ledyard a retaining fee, Morris pulled out of the deal (The Empress of China, the first U.S. ship to trade in Asia, arrived in Canton in 1784 partly with Morris’s backing).
Ledyard eventually traveled to L’Orient and Paris in search of support for his business plans, and even formed a brief partnership with the Revolutionary naval commander John Paul Jones, but all to no avail. By February of 1786, he had abandoned the fur trade and turned his attention to a new quest: crossing North America from West to East alone and on foot, a project endorsed by the American envoy to France, Thomas Jefferson.
Ledyard and Jefferson appear to have met in France in the summer of 1785 and in both his biographical sketch of Meriwether Lewis written in 1813 and his 1821 Autobiography, Jefferson claimed credit for initially suggesting to Ledyard the idea of a journey across North America from west to east via the Russian far east.^[10] He wrote a series of letters of introduction for Ledyard, endorsing the latter’s character and his planned journey. But Jefferson’s introductory letters as well as those of the Marquis de Lafayette failed to convince Catherine the Great to permit the American traveler to traverse her empire. Ledyard thus elected to travel aboard a British merchant vessel to the American Northwest Coast. Customs authorities, however, seized the vessel and Ledyard returned to his initial plans, hoping that upon arrival in St. Petersburg, he would be able to persuade the Empress to grant him passage through her dominions. In the summer of 1787, he began a journey that was supposed to take him overland from Stockholm to St. Petersburg and east more than five thousand miles across the vast expanse of Russia’s eastern empire to Okhotsk. From there, he planned to travel aboard a Russian fur-trading vessel to the coast of Alaska and commence his vast, cross-continental journey. Ledyard never obtained an official passport from the Empress, but with the assistance of the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas and a minor Russian postal official, he obtained adequate papers to begin his journey.
Upon arriving in Yakutsk in September of 1787, local authorities warned that any attempt to make the less than 500 mile leg of his journey to Okhotsk would mean certain death. Frustrated by the delay, Ledyard joined the expedition of a fellow veteran of Cook’s final voyage, Captain Joseph Billings. Billings had been appointed by Catherine II to survey the far northeastern reaches of her territory and was passing through Yakutsk on a provisioning mission. In the company of Billings and his men, Ledyard retraced his steps back to Irkutsk where he was subsequently arrested by Russian authorities and expelled from Russian dominions. Ledyard claims to have been given no good reason for his expulsion, but it seems clear that the powerful fur trader Grigorii Shelikhov had grown suspicious of Ledyard and initiated his expulsion.^[11]

* * *

Much of Ledyard’s journal describes his several month residence in Yakutsk. What is most striking about these reflections is the sheer diversity they reveal, a level of diversity at least comparable to what Ledyard would have experienced on the North American frontier (where he had spent time while a student at Dartmouth College, then a tiny outpost on the New England frontier). In Yakutsk alone, Ledyard would likely have found exiled Russian nobility, Russian Orthodox priests, probably exiled Polish nobleman and military personnel, Greek merchants, French, Swedish or German authorities employed by Catherine II, Cossack slave traders and indigenous Yakut herdsmen and trappers. He also would have encountered Native Kamchatkans, enslaved by Cossack fur traders through debt-peonage, and transported westward, to work as house servants or teamsters. In some ways, this collection of peoples resembled inhabitants of the American frontiers of the former British Empire. Race, consumer goods, language – all of the markers that defined people closer to the imperial center became fluid and confused as one moved to the geographic fringes of the Empire. In a certain sense, Ledyard seemed to find this state of affairs reassuring, indicating as it did the meaninglessness of superficial social and ethnic distinction. What was puzzling to Ledyard was that, much like what many observers found on the North American frontier, it did not produce any sort of natural virtue. Rather, despite the rampant violations of metropolitan social categories and ethnic norms, the Russian Far East seemed to retain much that republican critics found repugnant about European metropoles.^[12]
To begin with, as he traveled across Russian dominions, Ledyard had observed “a gentle gradation in which I passed from the height of civilized Society at Petersburg to incivilization in Siberia.” That predictable gradation was revealed in a gradual shift in skin color from the “fair European to the Copper-coloured Tartar.” This correlation between civility and fairness of skin color appeared to collapse though in the rough world of the Russian frontier. For there one found “the same variety of skin colour among the Tartars in Siberia as among the other Nations of the Earth.” That is, in the Russian Far East, this correlation between lightness of skin color and levels of civility dissolved. These Tartars (as Ledyard called all non-Europeans in the Russian Empire) were not simply “copper-coloured,” but widely varied in their complexions. And part of the reason for this, at least in the frontier towns limning the empire, was simply intermarriage. In Irkutsk, Ledyard observed “4 children descended of a Tartar & Russian Parents were alternately fair & dark complexioned.” And in Yakutsk, “the commandant shewed me. . . a Man descended of a Yakutee Father & Russian Mother & the son of this man. I remark that the colour of the first descendant is as fair as that of the second, & that this colour is as fair as the Russian mother.” After just one generation, children of mixed-race parents lost their Yakut complexion. No familiar physical trait, that is, distinguished aboriginals and mixed bloods from Euro-Russian colonials.^[13]
Further complicating the ethnic and racial composition of Yakutsk was the presence of Cossack traders and military personnel. While most Cossacks were descended from ethnic Russians, Ledyard nonetheless associated them with the ethnic Tartars. The latter was simply an eighteenth-century catchall for Turkic peoples, North Asians, and others whose features and skin color suggested Asian lineage. Perhaps because their existence was generally limited to the fringes of the Russian Empire, Ledyard and other commentators associated the Cossacks with these non-Europeans, despite their obvious European lineage. To accommodate this inconsistency, Ledyard divided the Tartars into three classes distinguished by the relative darkness of their complexions. The third and lightest of these were “fair complexioned Tartars which I believe include the Cossacs.” Ledyard’s thinking here was consistent with the more general eighteenth-century racial map of the world. European commentators typically associated the Cossacks with ancient Turkic conquerors of the Nogai Steppe and the Caucasus Mountains. Voltaire, for instance, observed that “their life is entirely similar to that of the ancient Scythians and the Tartars on the shores of the Black Sea.” Ledyard may also have been confused by the Cossacks’ social position in the Russian Far East. As a contemporary English visitor to the region, Martin Sauer, noted, Yakutsk “was the first town, in which I observed the officers from the highest to the lowest ranks form the poorer set of inhabitants; while the Cossack Sotniks and the Pyat Desetniks were the most affluent.” In Yakutsk, that is, the ordinary correlation between ethnicity and status appeared reversed. Far from being a marginal minority group, the Cossacks of Yakutsk had risen to prominence. Sauer explained that “a Cossack at Irkutsk is employed, by the governor and chief officers, in the most contemptible drudgery, such as cleaning the stable, scowering the kitchen, making fires, & c. At Yakutsk his is of more consequence, and finds employment as translator and emissary... He lives in this part of the world like an independent chief, keeping Yakutsk laborers to assist his wife in all domestic drudgery, fishing, cutting wood, & c.”^[14]
Contributing to the absence of any clear correlation between skin color or ethnicity and social status was yet another factor. Much like the frontiers of the British Empire in North America, so the frontier of the Russian Empire appeared to have a leveling effect on its European inhabitants. “The Russ & [indigenous] Yakutee live together here in harmony & peace,” Ledyard explained, “& without any difference as to national distinction, or of Superiority and Inferiority.” Further, although the Russians had been in Yakutsk for more than a century and a half, “the Yakutee made no alteration in his manners or dress,” yet “the Russians have conformed themselves to the dress of the Yakutee.” Far from initiating any progressive civilizing process, in other words, Russian dominion seemed to have had a neutral effect on indigenous peoples and a reverse effect on its Euro-Russian subjects. In the colonial world into which Ledyard was born, the latter phenomenon took its most alarming form in Anglo-American captives among Native Americans who refused repatriation. As Benjamin Franklin explained, “when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” These former captives quickly tired of the restrictions and demands imposed by Anglo-American society and returned to the supposedly consensual and loosely ordered communities of their Native captors. On the Russian frontier, however, little about the indigenous habits of Europeans could be explained by the libertarian ways of indigenous peoples.^[15]
In some sense, if Ledyard’s depiction of Yakutsk and its environs bears any comparison to the North American frontier, it is not to the often idealized societies of Native peoples and their white converts, but to Johnson Hall, the semi-feudal upstate New York plantation of Sir William Johnson. This British Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies created a strange amalgam of indigenous and European, a place where gentility, servitude, slavery, and hierarchy mingled with sweat lodges, native clothing and indigenous religious practices. And all of this cultural mingling occurred within a community whose ethnic bounds were bewildering in their complexity. In addition to the various native peoples who lived in and around Johnson Hall, there were Johnson’s own métis (Indian-white parentage) children, sixteen black slaves, and more than fifty white laborers of indeterminate origin. Much as in Yakutsk, whatever cultural distinctions might ordinarily distinguish people of such widely varying lineages were muted at best. Johnson, for instance, had his slaves wear modified Iroquois clothing and he referred to his mustee (African-Indian parentage) servant as Pontiac. For European visitors, the whole scene was disappointing. Far from a primitive world of Native peoples and natural civility, they encountered fluid ethnic mingling and uncertain identities. As one visitor in the early 1750’s recalled, Johnson “had Indian chiefs dine with him several times. Their attire was the same as white people, and for the most part they conversed in English. This disappointed me, because I wished to sit at table with genuine Indians in blankets and leggings and talking nothing but their gibberish through an interpreter.”^[16]
To a certain extent, then, one must acknowledge that Ledyard’s experience at the fringes of the Russian Empire simply echoed the realities of early-modern frontiers more generally. To travel from the imperial center to the edges of empire was not to experience a steady dissipation of the trappings of civilization, but rather to witness a mix of indigenous and European, a mix that produced unfamiliar social hierarchies and unfamiliar markers of status. As might be expected, for Ledyard, this state of affairs did not disprove the pieties of eighteenth-century ethnography such as the idea that skin color and levels of civility were correlates. Rather, it produced an insistent struggle to understand the frontiers of empire in terms of familiar categories of peoples and familiar stages of historical development. Perhaps the most striking expression of this conservatism in Ledyard’s thought is the suggestion that, despite its obvious diversity and complexity, the Russian Empire was ultimately quite uniform.
The chief manifestation of this, in Ledyard’s view, was an attachment to luxury. Everyone within the Empire, whether Russian or Yakut, whether prominent or base, seemed seduced by the feminizing frivolities that in Western Europe were widely presumed to be the domain of the upper classes – and, equally, the source of their moral degradation.^[17] To Ledyard, there was no sense within Russian dominions that consumption was the prerogative of the elite or that sumptuous pleasures somehow subverted human nature. Everyone, whatever their station, appeared eager and free to indulge the collection of carnal impulses that produced an appetite for luxury. “I have frequently observed in Russian villages – obscured and dirty, mean and poor,” Ledyard wrote, “that the women of the peasantry paint their faces profusely both red and white. I have had occasion from this, and many other circumstances I shall mention to suppose that the Russians are a People, who have been very attached to luxury.” It was one thing to wear makeup; altogether another to indulge in such a frivolity when one is otherwise craven and debased. Ledyard went on to assert that the Asian inhabitants of southern Siberia were equally inclined toward extravagance and indulgence. Whether “the Grand Signor [or] him who pitches his tent on the wild frontiers of Russia & China… they deviate less from the pursuit & enjoyment of sensual pleasure, than any other people.” Even at the farthest reaches of Empire this general taste for luxury was evident. The peoples of Yakutsk “live in all the excess of Asiatic luxury joined also with such European excesses as have migrated hither.” That is, the people of Yakutsk enjoyed not merely the material productions imported from the West, but also the sumptuous goods of the East. Ledyard’s perceptions were not unique. In a magazine article published in Philadelphia in 1792, the author explained to readers that “the luxury of [Russian women’s’] cloathing among the inferior class, would astonish... All their cloathing is of silk or cotton, of the most brilliant colours, never of woollen or linen, although Russia has those commodities in great plenty. These remarks will also apply to Siberia, except for a very few who inhabit the most retired villages.” The market forces that afforded material distinctions in the Anglo-Atlantic world thus seemed not to apply in the Eurasian world. For what was exotic in Britain or America was commonplace in the Russian Empire. But this did not change the social and moral impact of such goods. Instead of clouding the judgment of a remote class of aristocrats, it clouded the judgment of a vast otherwise widely diverse populace. For Ledyard the most striking consequence of this was a general societal inability to discipline consuming impulses and, in turn, a compulsion towards “thieving.”^[18]
Ledyard was endlessly interested in what he perceived to be the dishonorable and dishonest ways of the peoples of the Russian Empire. At a birthday party in Yakutsk, he observed “a melange of character I have seen in no other society, but this peculiar difference[:] that there is no particle of honesty or honour in the mixture.” “If Mercury was the God of theft among the Ancients,” he declared, “the Russians ought to enroll him in their mythology.” For even after lavishing him with the most extraordinary hospitality, tables filled with every conceivable food and drink, his Russian hosts seemed inclined nonetheless to steal from Ledyard. “I wish I could think them as honest as they are hospitable.”^[19]
In the end, the real problem with the Russian Empire was not so much the prevalence of luxury goods and the confused nature of the social and ethnic landscape; the real problem was government, government that left its people intoxicated by their basest impulses and provided no reward for moral virtue. Coursing through Ledyard’s thinking on empire, and really Jefferson’s as well, is a familiar enlightenment problem: what is the origin of human morality and how can that morality be cultivated and elicited from ordinary people? For Ledyard and many of his European intellectual contemporaries the answer was sociability facilitated by commerce. As Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson famously recognized, trade facilitated sociability and that sociability in turn elicited from human beings a latent sense of love, compassion, and sensibility.
Free commerce and its beneficent effects were impossible in authoritarian states. For in their very struggle to maintain authority, they impose disciplinary regimes totally incompatible with commerce and sociability. Perhaps nothing was more indicative of this pattern than law enforcement. For Russians had not, in the minds of many eighteenth-century observers, grasped the fundamental shortcomings of medieval systems of punishment and law, systems that privileged public display over individual reform. Far from dissuading observers from immoral behavior, such displays merely chilled their senses and left them incapable of basic human compassion. For example, Abbé Jean Chappe d’Auteroche, the French geographer and Astronomer and author of Voyage into Siberia (1768) observed that because Russian criminals are exposed to public viewing, “the habit of seeing these unhappy people at length destroys sensibility; and... I am persuaded that the disagreeable sight of such a number of wretches in chains as are met with in most of the towns of Russia, has contributed much to produce that ferocity and savageness of character so remarkable among the inhabitants of this realm.” This callousness seemed to be expressed most shockingly in the cruelty of Russian punishment – something western European observers described in often lurid, pornographic detail. Chappe d’Auteroche recounted looking out his window to see,

“two Russian slaves pulling a girl of fourteen or fifteen years of age by the arms; she was tall and well made. By her dress, she appeared to belong to some good family. Her head dressed without a cap, was reclined backwards; her eyes, fixed on one person, pleaded for mercy; which her beauty should seem to have insured her, independent of her tears. Nevertheless, the Russians led her into the middle of the yard, and in an instant stripped her to the waist; they then laid her prostrate on the ground, and placed themselves on their knees; one of them holding her head tight between his knees, and the other, the lower part of her body: rods were then brought, which they continued constantly applying on the back of this girl, till some one cried out, Enough. This unfortunate victim was then raised, so disfigured that she was scarcely to be known; her face and her whole body being covered with blood and dirt. This severe punishment led me to imagine, that the young girl had been guilty of some very flagrant offence: some days after I learned, that she was a lady’s waiting-maid; and that her mistress’s husband had ordered her to be punished in that manner, on account of some neglect.”

Precisely because it was devoid of sentiment and benevolence, such arbitrary and severe public punishment did little to curtail disorder and crime; it merely fostered the very absence of social affection and attachment that made such cruelty possible in the first place.^[20]
For Ledyard, the problem was not simply the mode of punishment upon which the Empire relied, it was also the very laws that made that punishment necessary. Russian laws, he explained, are “mostly penal laws” or “negative instructors; they inform people what they must not do and affix no reward to virtue.” They seemed designed solely to protect the state from the people; and did little to protect the people from the state. This in turn left the people with no unifying moral code, a factor that contributed to the nebulousness of the Russian Empire itself. No single positive value brought unity or differentiated subjects of this empire from those of the Asiatic empires to the south. Obedience alone unified the peoples of the Empire, much as it did, Ledyard assumed, the other peoples of the Orient. As he explained, “a citizen here fulfils his duty to the laws if like a base Asiatic he licks the feet of his superior in rank.”^[21]
Ledyard’s thinking here is consistent with much eighteenth-century political thought, particularly the idea that Eastern empires tended to be governed by force rather than the rule of law. According to the common enlightenment-era view, such polities may afford their people access to exotic goods and physical luxuries, but in doing so, they foster a passive, feminine spirit, a spirit that leaves their subjects idle, weak, and unable to resist the advances of potentates and power mongers. The latter are thus left free to usurp the institutions of governance, transforming them from benevolent caretakers of the people into mechanisms for absolute power. For as a wide range of writers warned, luxury was the handmaiden of despotism. “We do indeed import gorgeous silks, and luscious sweets from the [East] Indies,” the English cleric and schoolmaster Vicesimus Knox observed about his own society, “but we import, at the same time, the spirit of despotism, which adds deformity to the purple robe, and bitterness to the honied beverage.”^[22] For such luxuries, so the reasoning went, leave consuming classes addicted to base, carnal pleasures, eclipsing any natural affection for fellow human beings. It is one thing when only the wealthiest classes suffer the moral lassitude produced by luxury. It is altogether another when entire societies fall prey to the stultifying effects of short-term pleasures.

* * *

Upon notifying Ledyard of his expulsion from their dominions, Imperial officials ordered two soldiers to escort him back to Europe. After several weeks traveling with his escorts, Ledyard arrived at the Russian-Polish borderlands. The region was a thicket of disputed boundaries and ethnic mingling, in part because of the first of three late eighteenth-century partitions of Poland. In the 1772 Treaty of St. Petersburg, Russia, Austria, and Prussia agreed to annex large swaths of Polish territory as a means of maintaining the fragile balance of power in the region. The result of all this was, in part, an exodus: Polish Jews forced West, back into what territory Poland still claimed; Polish peasant refugees, fleeing civil war, often to the Ukraine, where they had been pushed by agents of Catherine the Great, ever-determined to counter Russia’s ceaseless labor shortage; Polish noblemen sent to Siberia; and other Poles drafted into the Russian army to fight the Turks. In the aftermath, observers found the Russian-Polish frontier a strangely lifeless kind of place, with villages deserted and fields lying fallow.^[23]
Ledyard describes his own experience with this boundary zone in terms of the people he met – people who seemed somehow adapted to such a desolate landscape. At the town of Mogliëv, he was taken by his Russian escorts to a point on the Drut River, from which he crossed into Poland and entered the small town of Tolochin, in present-day Belarus. Upon entering the town, Ledyard writes that he was led to the home of a local Jew. For Ledyard, it was fitting that his first encounter upon leaving Catherine the Great’s dominions would be with Jews, for such people would inhabit the liminal territory at the edges of ill-defined empires. “Not being permitted to enter the dominions of a [Russian] people more destitute of principle than themselves,” he explained, “they hover about its boundaries here in great numbers.” Of no consequence was the fact that this boundary was barely six years old, or that many of these people had been driven from their homes by the incessant civil war that plagued Poland. In Ledyard’s mind, there was a natural convergence between the margins of empires and social marginality; it made sense, that is, to find living in a town like Tolochin, a Jewish population banished from Russia, but confined to a nation lost in civil and religious war. Ledyard had found himself, he explained, on “the uncertain boundary of a Queen on the one hand, whose rapacity of Empire is boundless, & on the other by a [Polish] people who I strongly suspect of all the Vices of indolence & vanity.”^[24] In some sense, that is, the western boundary of the Russian Empire, much like its eastern counterpart, was no boundary at all. It merely distinguished the formal claims of Russia’s female ruler from the informal. For, in the end, the passive and corrupt peoples of Poland were de facto part of the Russian empire. In their very lack of morals and civility, they had, like the other peoples of the Russian Empire, given themselves over to despotism.
Ledyard’s assessment of Russia’s western boundary points to an additional factor in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American view of the Russian Empire: its female ruler. For Ledyard, her boundless “rapacity of Empire” was merely another side of the “unprincely malice [that] made a prisoner of me when I had almost got out of her vast Dominions.”^[25] That “unprincely malice,” Ledyard implies, was a sort of female capriciousness – a capriciousness that did to the sovereign what the sovereign’s government did to her subjects: it eroded any sense of compassion and reason that might have been manifest in a more controlled and morally grounded ruler. Hence, in his mind, Ledyard was banished from Russia not because he posed a security risk or because he had violated the law, but because the Empress was incapable of a dispassionate assessment of his purpose; pure jealousy and crude animosity animated her policy. It was a view widely echoed in the American press. The American Magazine of October 1788 explained that Ledyard was arrested because of the “jealousy of the Russian Court;” the New York Magazine; or, Literary Repository of September 1791 explained that he was expelled “without any reason given;” and The Time Piece and Literary Companion of July 1797 recounted that “Ledyard, the celebrated traveller, after having treversed the continent of Europe and Asia, on foot, and experienced the tyrrany of the late Russian She Bear, Catherine, by whom he was sledged out of the Russian dominions, got out of her clutches on condition of not returning on penalty of being hanged.”^[26]
Catherine the Great’s supposed capriciousness is consistent with another distinguishing quality of her empire: its simple nebulousness. In its very form, that is, the Empire seemed to mirror the irrationality and incivility of its ruler and people. Indeed, at some level, the Russian-Polish border was, for Ledyard, merely a small-scale expression of a problem that defined the Empress’s entire dominion. Nothing about it suggested any kind of real coherence. It was at once rational and irrational; savage and civilized; European and Asian; luxuriant and base; tightly bound in its mechanisms of discipline and yet completely undisciplined. The cohesive parts of a national body politic that some commentators imposed on the British Empire seemed simply not to apply to the Russian Empire. There was little, that is, that suggested the sort of defining order Thomas Pownall attributed to Empire in his 1752 Principles of Polity, being the Grounds and Reasons of Civil Empire:

“The modelling of the people into various orders and subordinations of orders, so that it be capable of receiving and communicating any political motion, and acting under that direction as a whole is one which the Romans called by the peculiar word Imperium, to express which particular group or idea we have nor word in English, but by adopting the word Empire. Tis by this system only that a people become a political body; tis the chain, the bonds of union by which very vague and independent particles cohere.”^[27]

Far from being modeled into any kind of coherent set of social orders, the peoples of the Russian empire existed as a confusing amalgam of peoples and boundary lands with no real order, either geographical or social. The Empire was to the body politic what a malformed body was to the body physical. And much like the malformed physical body, so the malformed body politic reflected the confused inner-faculties of bodily government. Instead of the moral faculties of the people, it is the sovereign who dictates the form and character of the body politic. And if the sovereign is distorted or corrupt, so too the body politic. This would be especially so in despotic regimes where no laws, magistrates or other governing institutions mediate between king and people and the inebriating influence of court culture reached far beyond the court itself.

* * *

At some level, it must be said, Ledyard’s perspective on the Russian Empire echoes more general criticisms of the Anglo-European ancien regime. Luxury, corruption, moral decay, a peasantry as debased as its leaders – all of these can be found in eighteenth-century British social commentary about Britain and especially England proper. Even so seemingly distinct a notion that the Russian Empire failed to preserve orderly and evident divisions of status can be found leveled against the British. Consider, for example, the following lament for a lost English countryside by the Welsh Squire, Matthew Bramble, in Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphrey Clinker (1771):

“The tide of luxury has swept all the inhabitants from the open country – The poorest squire, as well as the richest peer, must have his house in town, and make a figure with an extraordinary number of domestics. – The gayest places of public entertainment are filled with fashionable figures; which, upon inquiry, will be found to be journeymen tailors, serving-men, and abigails, disguised like their betters. In short, there is no distinction or subordination left – The different departments of life are jumbled together – The hod carrier, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican, the shopkeeper, the pettifogger, the citizen, and the courtier, all tread upon the kibes of one another: actuated by the demons of profligacy and licentiousness, they are seen every where rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, and crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption...”^[28]

This could just as well have been Ledyard or any number of other commentators writing about the Russian Empire. What is important about Ledyard is thus not his originality as an observer of empire. He reflected a broadly assimilated Anglo-American critique of empire, a critique that did not just inform the thinking of American statesmen and politicians but that also shaped attitudes of writers, travelers, fur traders and others on both sides of the Atlantic. And that critique was not a critique of empire per se, but of corrupt, despotic empire.
That the ingredients of Ledyard’s thinking were not particularly original, though, should not obscure the fact that his observations were unique. No American of his generation had penetrated the farthest fringes of the vast continental empire of Russia. And that empire presented the American observer with a comparative perspective on empire that raised vitally important issues for the young United States. In Russia, unlike Britain, Americans could view a continental empire rather than an oceanic one. In Russia, they could view an empire dependent on trans-continental trade and the assimilation of a large indigenous population, much as a new American empire would be. And most importantly, in the Russian Empire they could bear witness to what in fact, if not in theory, would be the most vexing problem for America’s imperial republicans: if, as Thomas Pownall suggested, empire was a system for ordering people in clear gradations to achieve political ends, what of the uncertain geographical limits of empire where social status exists in alien forms? For more than one hundred years, Yakutsk had been a Russian colonial outpost and yet, as Ledyard observed, little about it suggested the march toward civilization that so many thinkers of the age assumed was an inevitable, if not always positive, consequence of colonization. Much like that of the North American backcountry, the social structure of the Russian imperial periphery was confused and jumbled; order itself seemed absent. Law, identity, money, birth, race – none of these seemed to produce any kind of identifiable social gradations.
But whatever similarities imperial Russia and frontier America may have had were unimportant for Ledyard. What ultimately mattered to him had little to do with the shared social and cultural forms of the Russian and American backcountry. It had to do, once again, with government. In reflecting this fact, Ledyard’s observations of the Russian Empire represented a reassuring demonstration that despotism produced thieving, licentious, and immoral people, whether those people occupied the empire’s farthest reaches or its imperial center and whether it concerned the most remote Yakut hunter or the Empress Catherine herself. A new American government, founded on enlightened principles, would thus produce a new kind of empire, an empire of fundamentally moral beings at even its farthest frontier reaches. Had Ledyard been more interested in the commonalities of Imperial Russia and the new United States, their vast inland frontiers, their extraordinary ethnic and racial diversity, their large indigenous populations, or their dependence on unfree labor, perhaps he would have presented a less stark contrast and would be better known. Instead of simply a purveyor of familiar enlightened truisms he might have been more sensitive to the perils of American expansion. He might have recognized, for instance, that far from yielding a new enlightened order in the North American backcountry, the republican Revolution produced only more chaos of a considerably bloodier sort than anything Ledyard saw on the frontiers of the Russian Empire. And, as it eventually would for so many Americans, this might have left him less sanguine about human nature. But in the end Ledyard was limited by what he thought he knew about society and government. Little of this prepared him for a world of independent citizens, citizens who defined themselves less by enlightened values than by convenient rubrics of whiteness.^[29]
The point suggests one additional implication for Ledyard’s travels. While he himself was unable or unwilling to recognize the similarities between the United States and Russia, we contemporary historians would do well to avoid making similar mistakes. Aside from offering more evidence against remaining vestiges of an “exceptional” view of American history, they provide new perspectives on the American backcountry. As much an extension of Anglo-American empire, these regions might just as well be viewed as an extension of a series of vast, interconnected regions stretching from the United States and Canada across the Bering Strait to the Russian Far East and Siberia. More than just the frontiers of the British or Russian Empires they might be viewed as a single interconnected subject for historical inquiry, a Pacific analogue of the Atlantic World. In his very determination to cross boundaries, Ledyard the traveler suggests ways his modern readers might do the same.