Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  Long before the imperial innovations of the 1760s the notion of the patria had been well rehearsed in the Spanish American territories - much more so than in British America, even if, on the classical analogy of the patria, there was some talk here too of `country', as applied to individual colonies.121 The ambivalence running through the petition of the Mexico City council reflects the ambivalence in combining loyalty to the Hispanic community with loyalty to the patria. Traditionally that community had been defined in terms of a composite monarchy, in which the patria possessed its rights on the basis of a contract agreed with the monarch - a contract which, at least in the eyes of creoles, placed their territories on an equal footing with the other kingdoms and provinces of the Spanish Monarchy. Even if that claim had never been fully accepted by Madrid as far as its American possessions were concerned, practice - as distinct from theory - had given it some validity over the course of a century or more.

  Now the practice, as well as the theory, was in the course of being rejected by royal ministers. Mexico City's petition fell on deaf ears. By a decree issued in February 1776, the crown ordered, in accordance with the proposals of the extraordinary council of 1768, that `to strengthen further the union of those kingdoms and these', creoles should be recommended for clerical and judicial positions in Spain. At the same time, a third of the posts in American Audiencias and cathedral chapters should be reserved for creoles. Consequently, peninsular candidates could be appointed to the remaining two-thirds. The Mexico City council immediately protested, and once again its protest was ignored. 121

  Creoles, still thinking in terms of the consensus political culture of a composite monarchy, now found themselves faced with the authoritarian responses of an absolutist regime. As Madrid sought to strengthen its grasp on its American territories in the 1770s and 1780s, the scope for conflict was obvious. But the authoritarianism of the Bourbon monarchy did not, in the last resort, preclude the possibility of manoeuvre and compromise. It was always possible for the crown to jettison an unpopular minister or dismiss an over-zealous official without permanently diminishing the authority of a monarch cast in the role of the benevolent protector of his subjects. No great constitutional principle was at stake. With an absolute parliament, on the other hand, matters were different. In spite of themselves, Britain and its American colonies had become inextricably involved in that most intractable of all forms of conflict, the conflict over competing constitutional rights.

  CHAPTER 11

  Empires in Crisis

  In the space of ten years, between 1773 and 1783, a series of convulsions transformed the political landscape of the Americas. In British America the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 opened a new and dangerous phase in the deteriorating relationship between Britain and its mainland colonies, that would descend in the next two years into rebellion and war. The colonists convened their first Continental Congress in September 1774. In April 1775 British troops and colonial forces clashed at Lexington and Concord. The first shedding of blood was followed by the summoning of the second Continental Congress, the proclamation by the British crown that the colonies were in rebellion, the colonists' Declaration of Independence of 1776, and a war in which thirteen mainland colonies, assisted by France and Spain, would emerge victorious when Britain recognized their independence as a sovereign republic in 1783. The crisis that overtook Britain's empire in America over these years proved nearly terminal.

  Political convulsions, however, were not confined to North America. In South America, rebellion came to both Peru and New Granada in the early 1780s. Unlike the revolt of Britain's mainland colonies, neither Tupac Amaru's Andean rebellion of 1780-2, nor the `Comunero' revolt, which first erupted in the New Granada town of Socorro in March 1781, were to result in independence from the imperial power. Both revolts were suppressed, and another generation would pass before Spain's possessions in central and southern America would follow in the footsteps of the British American colonies. In Spanish America, unlike British America, the crisis was contained.

  Both these crises of empire were played out against a background of shifting ideas and ideologies. Comparable forces were operating in favour of change in the two colonial worlds, although at the same time there were profound differences - logistical, structural, human - between them, creating very different patterns of action and response. In neither instance was a break between colonies and metropolis a foregone, or even initially a desired, conclusion. But once it occurred in British North America, unexpected possibilities would begin to present themselves to Spanish Americans too.

  Ideas in ferment

  The revolution that impelled the thirteen mainland colonies of North America to break their bonds of loyalty to the British crown in 1776 was a revolution of disappointed expectations. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War, the Britain which they had supported on its road to victory failed to behave in the way that their image of it had led them to expect. Where were the gratitude and generosity to which their wartime sacrifices entitled them? Could such men as Grenville and Townshend really be representative of the nation they had been taught to revere as the cradle of liberty? What had become of that perfectly balanced British constitution, with all its checks and balances, when a legislature that had gloriously overthrown tyrants itself became tyrannical? Why did the king, the natural protector of his peoples, not assist them in their hour of need?

  These agonizing questions burned their way into the minds of innumerable British Americans in that critical decade 1765-75. They were questions that brought them face to face with unpleasant realities, and impelled them towards personal decisions of a kind which, a few years earlier, they could never have dreamt that they would be called upon to face. Living at a time of far-reaching intellectual, cultural and social change, some of them responded to the pressure of unfolding political events by clinging to old certainties, while others were driven by temperament, conviction or circumstance to look for salvation to the new

  Among the creoles of Spanish America, too, the policies of the king's ministers provoked a sense of outrage and deep disillusionment. The expulsion of the Jesuits had come as a devastating shock, and the determination of the ministers to press ahead with unpopular reforms threatened to turn the creoles' world upside down. The sense of loyalty to the monarch was deeply ingrained in the overseas subjects of Charles III, but in the 1760s and 1770s, in the Spanish as in the British Empire, it is possible to detect a process of psychological distancing between the American territories and the mother country.

  There is a difference, however, between distancing, and reaching the decision to snap the bonds of empire. Traditionally, separatism was always more feared by royal ministers in Madrid and London than discussed, or even contemplated, by the overseas settlers and their descendants. When the fiscal attorney of the Council of the Indies observed of Spain's American territories in 1767 that `it is never wise to assume that they are entirely safe from the danger of rebellion',' he was merely the latest in a long line of ministers and officials consumed with similar anxieties since the days of the Pizarro rebellion in Peru, or indeed since Cortes conquered Mexico.

  Similar preoccupations were to be found in Whitehall. When the Earl of Sandwich prophesied in 1671 that within twenty years New Englanders would be `mighty rich and powerful and not at all careful of their dependence upon old England',2 he was voicing fears already expressed at the time of the Puritan migration in the reign of Charles I. Such fears were reinforced by analogies with Greek and Roman colonization made by seventeenth-century politicians and officials in the light of their reading of the histories of classical antiquity and the works of contemporary political theorists.

  In his Oceana (1656), James Harrington compared colonies to children passing through different stages of development: `For the colonies in the Indies', he wrote, ,they are yet babes that cannot live without sucking the breasts of their mothercities'; but he would be surprised if `when they come of age they do not wean themselves'. The re
ference to `mother-cities' was no doubt inspired by Athens and Rome. The American colonies were more properly the offspring of a `mother country'. The expression helped to popularize the image of colonies as children, wayward or disciplined, but still under tutelage as they made their way to adulthood.' What would happen when they reached it? In one of the radical Whig papers of 1720 to 1723 assembled under the title of Cato's Letters, and widely read in colonial North America, John Trenchard argued that the colonies would in due course grow up, and could not then be expected `to continue their subjection to another only because their grandfathers were acquainted'. Partnership, not parental discipline, would be needed to preserve the family relationship.'

  By the 1750s there was a growing belief in Whitehall that, unless discipline were soon applied, colonies that had grown so rich and populous would choose the path of separation. Ministers were strengthened in this belief by what they regarded as colonial recalcitrance during the Seven Years' War. In addition, they feared that the effect of the conquest of Canada would be to weaken the ties of dependency, perhaps fatally, since the colonies would no longer see any need for British military protection against the French. According to the Board of Trade in 1772, one of the intentions behind the 1763 Proclamation Line and its policing by British garrisons was `the preservation of the colonies in due subordination to, and dependence upon, the mother country'.'

  As questions about the strength and permanence of the imperial relationship came to be openly discussed in Whitehall and aired in British pamphlets and the press, it was hardly surprising if suspicions grew among the colonists themselves that a conspiracy was afoot to deprive them of their liberties. How else to explain the new coercive policies? Once they began to sense that the imperial government was motivated by the fear that Britain stood in danger of losing its American empire, the notion of independence, which had been the last thing on their minds at the start of the Seven Years War, began to emerge on the horizon as a cloud, still no bigger than a man's hand, but a portent of the future. When this happened, the fears of Whitehall were on their way to becoming self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The absence of open discussion in Madrid on the crown's American policies reduced the chances of a comparable reaction in the Hispanic world, if only because there was less information in the public domain on the attitudes and intentions of ministers. Yet the creole population was affected by something of the same sense of alienation felt by the British colonists, and for much the same reasons. Not only were Madrid's policies alarming in themselves, since they seemed to betray a total misunderstanding of what the creoles believed to be the true nature of their relationship with the crown, but they were accompanied by a general disparagement of all things American that was far from new,6 but was all the more disconcerting because it now came dressed in the fashionable garb of the European Enlightenment.

  In a volume of his Histoire naturelle, published in 1761, the great French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, had represented America as a degenerate, or alternatively as an immature, world, whose animals and peoples were smaller and weaker than their European counterparts. The same year saw the partial publication in French of the Travels through the North American colonies of a Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, in which he followed tradition by depicting the settlers as a population that had degenerated in the American climate. Cornelius de Pauw, in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains, published in 1768, was even more disparaging, and two years later the Abbe Raynal produced a virulently anti-American `philosophical history' of European settlements and trade in the Indies.7

  Faced with this bombardment, it is not surprising that British and Spanish Americans should have considered themselves under siege from a Europe that claimed to be enlightened. The slanders and misconceptions abounding in works written by authors most of whom had never even set foot in America provoked the ire of Benjamin Franklin, and drew responses from Spanish American creoles that ranged from the bombastic to the erudite. The polemic continued for the best part of a generation, to the accompaniment of reverberations that echoed around the Atlantic, and provided a noisy, but significant, background to the political battles of the age.

  American Jesuits in their European exile hurried to the defence of their lost American patria, most notably Francisco Javier Clavijero, who was scathing in his denunciation of `the monstrous portrait of America painted by Pauw', and sought in his Historia antigua de Mexico (1780-1) to prove that neither the birds, nor the animals, nor the inhabitants of America were in any way inferior to their European equivalents.' In North America Thomas Jefferson, composing his Notes on the State of Virginia just as Clavijero was publishing his History of Mexico, scrutinized and refuted the facts and figures with which Buffon sought to prove the inferiority of American flora and fauna, and mounted a spirited defence of `the race of whites, transplanted from Europe', who had been condemned by Raynal as failing to produce `one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science'. Given the relative youthfulness of these transatlantic societies, Jefferson argued, and the size of their populations, how fair was the comparison with France or England? And what of Franklin, `than whom no one of the present age has made more important discoveries'?9

  If such responses suggest an understandable sensitivity to denigration by illinformed or prejudiced European commentators, they also point to the turning away of the New World societies from the Europe that had engendered them. In the end, attack proved to be the best form of defence. The New World's youthfulness, which European critics liked to adduce as a source of weakness, could be depicted instead as its greatest source of strength. Where the Old World stood for the past, the New World stood for the future. American innocence offered a standing rebuke to European corruption, American virtue to European vice. These contrasting images imprinted themselves on collective creole consciousness. Under their influence, the leaders of revolution, first in British, and later in Spanish America, would find it easier to distance themselves from their mother countries and break the emotional and psychological bonds of empire.

  24 The Mass of St Gregory (1539). Feathers on wood. This piece of Mexican featherwork, commissioned for presentation to Pope Paul III by Montezuma's nephew and son-in-law, the Spanish-appointed governor of San Juan, Tenochtitlan, illustrates the survival of pre-conquest techniques of craftsmanship, and their rapid adaptation to the requirements of the post-conquest world. `Every day', wrote Las Casas, they make images and altarpieces and many other things for us out of feathers ... And with no prodding on our part, they make borders for chasubles and capes . . .' According to the legend a doubting St Gregory saw Christ present himself bodily on the altar at the moment of the host's consecration. Indigenous feather-workers would have based their design on a European print.

  25 A culture of display. Exterior view of the church of Our Lady of Ocotlan, Tlaxcala, Mexico (c. 1760).

  26 A culture of restraint. Interior of Christ Church, Philadelphia (1727-44).

  27 Cristobal de Villalpando, Joseph Claims Benjamin as his Slave (1700-14). One of a set of six canvases depicting scenes from the biblical story of the life of Joseph, and painted by the creole artist Cristobal de Villalpando (c. 1649-1714). Villalpando's work betrays the influence of the great Venetian masters and of Rubens, whose dynamic compositions would have been known to him primarily through engravings.

  28 Potosi silver used for ornamental purposes. Silver gilt tray (1700-50), probably from Upper Peru, and characteristic of the rich and intricate work of Andean craftsmen.

  29 Miguel Cabrera, Portrait of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1750). The best of the many posthumous portraits of the unique American poetess, the tenth muse'. Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-95), born out of wedlock to a creole mother, grew up as an exceptionally precocious child, interested in all branches of learning, including mathematics. At the age of sixteen she was given a place in the viceregal court in Mexico City, where for five years she served as lady-inwaiting to the wife o
f the viceroy, the marquis of Mancera, before taking her vows in 1669 as a nun in the convent of San Jeronimo, where Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and other leading Mexican writers and scholars would pay her visits. Her many poems and theatrical pieces made her the most famous poet of her age in the Hispanic world. Eventually silenced by clerical pressure, she sold off for charity the books that surround her in this portrait, and engaged in acts of penance and mortification which may have hastened her death in the Mexico City epidemic of 1695.

  30 Peter Pelham, mezzotint Portrait of Cotton Mather (c. 1715). Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the son of Increase Mather, a Boston minister, and himself a minister in his turn, was the most important figure in the intellectual life of the New England of his age. A prolific author, he was faced with the challenge of reconciling the new science to the old theology, and the struggle took its toll.

  31 Portrait of Don Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, from his Mercurio volante (1693). A poet, mathematician, historian and geographer, Siguenza y Gongora (1645-1700), appointed professor of Mathematics and Astrology in the University of Mexico in 1672, was a gifted scientist and astronomer, and a man of encyclopaedic learning who, like his New England contemporary, Cotton Mather, sought to find a way between the new experimental philosophy and the teachings of the church.