As a result of the raid and the abortive revolt some of Johannesburg’s most substantial inhabitants were in gaol, where they became one of the sights of the town and were duly called on by distinguished visitors, including Mark Twain. Five of the conspirators were sentenced to death, including Colonel Frank Rhodes and John Hays Hammond, a wealthy American mining engineer. Part of the beam of the gallows used by the British to hang the five rebels at Slachter’s Nek was brought out, and it was suggested that it would be appropriate to hang the conspirators from it. However, the British and American governments moved to save their people: Jameson was eventually turned over to the British government for punishment while the others were given heavy fines only. Both Jameson and Rhodes were ordered to testify before a Select Committee of the House of Commons.
When Jameson gave his evidence he said, “I know perfectly well that as I have not succeeded the natural thing has happened; but I also know that if I had succeeded I should have been forgiven.” He was right and everyone knew it. All Britain would have cheered, considering his action only a neat bit of needful skulduggery. There was much criticism of the Select Committee. Still, it resulted in Jameson being sent to prison for a few months and Rhodes being strongly condemned. Its report stated: “Whatever justification there might have been for the action on the part of the people of Johannesburg, there was none for the conduct of a person in Mr. Rhodes’ position.”
SCOUTS: THE EYES OF THE ARMY.
What was Rhodes’s position? The difficulty was that he held too many positions. If Rhodes as simply a wealthy man had helped the uitlanders, this would have been understandable and excusable; if, as a director of the British South Africa Company, he had mobilized an armed force on the border in case of emergency, he might have been praised for his foresight; if, as prime minister of Cape Colony, he had, like Robinson and Chamberlain, simply closed his eyes to the planned revolt and failed to warn either his neighbour or his own government, this would have been overlooked; and if, as head of De Beers, he had permitted the company’s resources to be used to further the aims of the revolutionists, it is doubtful if the shareholders would have protested. But doing all these things in all his capacities at the same time was too much. It was this which The Times called the “unjustifiable character of Mr. Rhodes’s action.”
Rhodes refused, in spite of his lawyer’s entreaties, to implicate Chamberlain and the British government, as he could easily have done. In December 1896 his career was at its nadir. He had been forced to resign from all his public offices and to give up most of his directorships; his brother, through trying to help him, had lost his commission in the British army and was in a Transvaal gaol; his friend Jameson was a convicted criminal. In addition, there was trouble in Rhodesia—the Mashona were in revolt—and his house at the Cape, Groote Schuur, which he loved, burned to the ground. He also suffered from ill health: malaria, influenza, and heart trouble. He had suffered a fall so great that he would never completely recover from it. Yet, he woke up his friend Albert Grey one night and asked him if he had ever considered how fortunate he was to be an Englishman.
The Jameson Raid had a profound effect upon the Boers. They were alarmed to discover that the uitlanders presented not only an internal threat but an external danger; war seemed again a possibility. Some of their gold, they decided, had best be spent for arms. Forts were constructed at Johannesburg (which the uitlanders believed were designed to control them), and expenditures for arms and equipment were increased fivefold; most important of all was the purchase of modern Mauser rifles, to replace their old Martini-Henrys, and some of the finest artillery made in Europe.
Kruger’s handling of the Jameson Raid raised his prestige enormously. John Merriman said, “President Kruger . . . now occupies without dispute the leading position in South Africa. His faults are forgotten in admiration of his success and the conviction that both in diplomacy and in war he is more than a match for the English.”2
The raid also brought the two Boer republics closer together. As M. T. Steyn, soon to be president of the Orange Free State, said: “After the Jameson Raid it was clear to me that the fate of the Free State, whether we wished it or not, was tied up with that of the Transvaal for better or for worse.”3
And so the explosive powder of mutual distrust and enmity was prepared. So too was the portfire of uitlander discontent left smouldering. The man who put the fire to the powder and blew up South Africa was Alfred Milner, ably assisted by his superior, Joseph Chamberlain, and his opponent, Paul Kruger.
5
MOVING TOWARDS WAR
“It is the British race which built the Empire, and it is the undivided British race which can alone uphold it.... Deeper, stronger, more primordial than material ties is the bond of common blood, a common language, common history and traditions.” Such was the firm-seated belief of forty-three-year-old Sir Alfred Milner in 1897 on the eve of his departure from England to take up the posts of governor of Cape Colony and high commissioner for South Africa.
He was an extraordinary man, Alfred Milner. Few felt indifferent towards him; he aroused intense hatred in some and the warmest admiration in others. Jan Smuts, after meeting him for the first time, told his wife that “there is something in his very intelligent eyes that tells me he is a very dangerous man.” He referred to himself as “a civilian soldier of the Empire.” And this he was. Yet many remarked on his un-British personality—he seemed more German than English—and his contempt for democratic processes. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, soon to be head of the Liberal party, regarded him as an opinionated and dangerous man of doubtful judgement.
As a boy he had attended school in Germany, and at King’s College, London, he proved to be a brilliant student, taking prizes in classics, history, and literature and at eighteen winning the first scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. There he won four successive scholarships, took a first class in literae humanaires, and was elected to a fellowship at New College. He has been described at this period as “tall, dignified, and grave beyond his years . . . eager to organize rather than to influence, and fearful to give generous impulses full rein.” He had already decided that marriage would interfere with a career and that he would postpone it until he retired, a resolution which, like all his other resolutions, he kept.
He refused a tutorship at New College and went instead to London to study law, being called to the bar in 1881. Finding no success at the law, he turned to journalism and worked for the Pall Mall Gazette, floundering as do many promising young men looking for the right career. He ran for Parliament and was defeated. Then he accepted a position as secretary to George Goschen, who in 1886 became chancellor of the exchequer in Salisbury’s ministry, and in this capacity he displayed such an extraordinary grasp of finance that in 1889 Goschen obtained for him the post of director-general of accounts in Egypt. Here, for the first time, he prospered. Three years later Goschen brought him back to England to become chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, and in another three years he was knighted (KCB).
When Joseph Chamberlain offered Milner the posts of governor of Cape Colony and high commissioner for South Africa, Milner was delighted and told his friend R. B. Brett (later Viscount Esher) that “though I know perfectly well that I may break my neck over it, I am wild to go.” On 5 May 1897 this financial expert arrived in South Africa and went to work applying his genius to its very human problems. South Africa never recovered from the experience.
His first nine months in office were spent learning Dutch and Afrikaans, studying the local problems, and struggling, he said, “against the temptation to say anything of substantial importance.” Then in a private letter to Chamberlain dated 23 February 1898 he gave as his considered opinion that “there is no way out of the political troubles in South Africa except reform in the Transvaal or war. And at present the chances of reform are worse than ever.”
To conclude that a country neighbouring a British colony must change its ways or Britain would have to go to war
was a violent reaction to the situation existing in South Africa. To understand how Milner arrived at such an extraordinary conclusion it is necessary to look beyond the facts and fantasies concerning the position of the uitlanders in the Transvaal to the set of attitudes which Milner brought with him to South Africa. To believe, as Milner did, that the British were natural rulers and that British rule was the best rule was a common enough belief among the British; throughout the world self-assured Englishmen ruled over people of other races and other cultures. To believe, as Milner did, that other races or people of other cultures ought not to rule over Englishmen, that it was not right that they should do so, that it was somehow morally wrong—this was a new conception of the imperial doctrine, a conception which, as such a situation had never before occurred (at least in modern history), had never before been examined. Milner now demanded that it be examined, and his own conclusion was already fixed: Englishmen must not be ruled by others.
Although in an excellent position to promote his viewpoint, or rather to embody his attitude in policy and thus provoke war, Milner needed the support of his chief. Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) had been appointed colonial secretary only six months before the Jameson Raid. In the ten years he held the post he was to give it an importance it had never before assumed and never would again. With his monocle ever screwed in his eye and an ever-present orchid on his lapel he looked every inch an aristocrat, but in fact he came from a prosperous middle-class family of business people and he himself had been a successful screw manufacturer before entering politics at the age of thirty-eight. He was thrice married; by one wife he had a son who became prime minister and by another a son who became chancellor of the exchequer. He was called “Pushful Joe” and “Imperial Joe” and, of course, a good many other less complimentary names. Sir Hercules Robinson considered him “dangerous as an enemy, untrustworthy as a friend but fatal as a colleague.”1 Queen Victoria, however, thought him “sensible,” and he was immensely popular with jingos, for he came to personify the imperial ideal. When he took office as colonial secretary he claimed to have two important qualifications for the post: “These qualifications are that, in the first place, I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen . . . and I believe that there are no limits to its future.”2
He was, then, a man after Milner’s heart; but Chamberlain was, as Milner was not, a shrewd politician aware of the political sensibilities of his countrymen; he also knew that it was he who would have to answer to his colleagues and to Parliament for Milner’s actions. Chamberlain asked Milner to come home and explain his views.
During Milner’s absence from South Africa his place was taken by Major General William Butler (1838-1910), commander-in-chief of the British forces in South Africa. Butler was a curious speciman of Victorian soldiery. He had seen much active service in West Africa, Egypt, the Sudan, and Canada (where he had recommended the formation of the Northwest Mounted Police), and he had also served in Burma, India, and with Wolseley in South Africa. Like many Victorian officers, he loved war and thought “a battle by far the most exciting and enthralling of all life’s possibilities to its mortals.” Yet the only campaign in which he had taken part that he thought morally defensible was the Gordon Relief Expedition—and that was a failure. Although he had little formal education, he possessed a brilliant mind, and he was one of the most literate of the Victorian generals, the author of more than a half-dozen books and a friend of Victor Hugo. Butler was a man of strong opinions, and he was not hesitant in expressing them, even when they were unpopular. Of his lack of tact, General Evelyn Wood once said, “That he was generally right in his conclusions does not indicate that he always went the right way of obtaining them.”
Butler arrived in South Africa shortly after Milner left, and the two men did not have an opportunity to confer. Butler wrote later: “I went out blindfolded to South Africa in 1898; the bandages soon fell off.” Like Milner, he carefully studied the problems he found, but he arrived at diametric conclusions: he believed that South Africa needed “a rest cure and not an operation.” He was undoubtedly right, but he also saw that, in spite of anything he might do, the surgeons would have their way. Never modest, he later wrote: “I was able to judge of a possible war between us and the Boers with a power of forecast of a quite exceptional character.”
What was there about the problems in South Africa that led men to consider such a drastic solution as war?
Both sides wanted a united South Africa, though, of course, they differed in their ideas of who should dominate it. For the Boers, an Afrikaner South Africa seemed a distant aspiration; for the British a united but British South Africa seemed not only desirable but a possible and even necessary goal. There was much talk of the need to maintain British paramountcy, though no one was quite sure exactly what this meant or why it was necessary. It was with this idea in mind that the British had included the vague phrase about suzerainty in the preamble to the Pretoria Convention. It had been omitted from the London Convention, but with curious logic the British now maintained that the preamble to the earlier document was assumed to be part of the later one. There was much official correspondence about this, and Milner noted that the word “suzerainty” had “a curiously maddening effect” on the Boers.
The concept of an imperial mission, of the desirability—the nobility even—of one nation assuming suzerainty over another, or of one nation arrogating to itself a position of paramountcy in a part of the world containing other nations, is today an unpopular one. Yet it was commonly held prior to World War I. Englishmen believed in the “white man’s burden,” in what was regarded as the heavy, thankless duty of civilised men to rule and teach all lesser, more inferior races. L. S. Amery espoused these ideals but noted that not quite everyone felt this way and that there existed “a notion . . . that nationalism is in itself a desirable thing and that, apart from all question of political principle, it is in some unexplained way identical with political liberty.... Little sympathy is bestowed on the great peoples rightly struggling for mastery, for the supremacy of higher civilization and higher principle.”
Lofty principles are often not formulated until after war has been declared, and so it was with the Anglo-Boer War. It was a week after hostilities had actually begun that Chamberlain told the House of Commons why Britain was fighting:
We are going to war in defence of principles—the principles on which this Empire has been founded, and upon which alone it can exist.... The first principle is this—if we are to maintain our existence as a great power in South Africa, we are bound to show that we are both willing and able to protect British subjects everywhere when they are made to suffer from oppression and injustice. . . . The second principle is that in the interests of the British Empire, Great Britain must remain the paramount Power in South Africa.
So much for lofty principles. Some of the specific principles sound somewhat curious in relation to the grander ones. Chamberlain declared that Britain must “protect British subjects everywhere,” but to demand that British subjects be permitted to become citizens of a republic was a curious extension of the protection.
The uitlander mine owners—known as Randlords—complained of corruption, and certainly this existed (although often it was the Randlords themselves who did the corrupting), and they particularly objected to a dynamite monopoly granted by the Transvaal government which made it necessary for them to pay dearly for this needed article. Uitlanders also complained of high taxes, and a bill to impose a modest 5 percent tax on mining profits was cited as “an indication of how far the rights of arbitrary taxation might be carried.” (Today the tax is computed on a complicated formula but is close to 60 percent.) They complained, too, that there were not enough English schools and that the language of the laws and of the courts was the language of the country. All of these ills could be cured, they felt, if only they were given the franchise—the right to vote—and they were convince
d of their right to demand it.
The reluctance of the Boers to give the uitlanders the franchise was understandable—“For the little sheep my door is always open,” said Oom Paul Kruger, “but the wolf I mean to keep out”—but they were unsophisticated in their methods. Before 1882 only one year’s residence had been required before an immigrant could become a citizen; then the requirement was raised to five years. In 1890 fear of the uitlander vote caused the volksraad to raise the residency requirement to fourteen years, and the clamour grew. Uitlanders ground out a continuous stream of complaints and did their best to turn minor incidents into models of oppression.
Among the uitlanders it was much resented that all public officials were Afrikaners, and it was particularly galling that the Boer policemen, called Zarps (after the initials of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek Politie), whom they considered corrupt and inefficient, should be permitted to arrest Englishmen. Of the provocative incidents which helped lead the way to war, none was more celebrated than the Edgar case, though it is difficult to see why. On the night of 18 December 1898 a powerfully built Englishman, Tom Edgar, fighting with another Englishman, beat him severely. The Zarps arrived and Edgar fled. The police pursued him to his home; there he resisted arrest, and in the scuffle he was shot and killed. As General Butler said, “Had this drunken brawl occurred in any other city in the world out of the Transvaal it would have occasioned no excitement outside of the people immediately concerned in it.” But the uitlanders at once seized the incident as an example of police brutality. Indignation meetings were called, a petition to the Queen was prepared, and dozens of letters and telegrams were dispatched to British politicians and officials. It somewhat detracted from the case as a propaganda vehicle that the policeman’s name was Jones, but when his trial resulted in acquittal it was hailed as an example of the lack of justice to be found in the Transvaal courts of law.
Great Boer War Page 5