Civilization: The West and the Rest (22 page)

Life in England had been hard for Millicent How and Abraham Smith. The Atlantic crossing had been fraught with peril and they were doubtless aware that significant numbers of immigrants to the North American colonies did not survive the first year or two of ‘seasoning’. But here was an incentive to run those risks. In England property rights were secure, but property was held in a few hands. (In 1436 between 6,000 and 10,000 families of nobles and gentry had owned around 45 per cent of the land; the Church 20 per cent; the Crown 5 per cent.) But in America even the lowest of the low had the chance to get a first foot on the property ladder. This was the essence of the headright system, also introduced in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It was a system that made perfect sense in colonies where land was plentiful and labour in short supply.
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As Locke observed in his ‘Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interests’: ‘Most nations in the civilized parts of the world are more or less rich or poor, proportionably to the paucity or plenty of their people and not the sterility or fruitfulness of their lands.’ Rival empires – like the Spanish and Dutch – did not make ‘any improvement by planting; what they do in the East Indies being only by war, trade, and building of fortified towns and castles upon the seacoast, to secure the sole commerce of the places and with the people whom they conquer, not by clearing, breaking up of the ground, and planting, as the English have done’.
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Not only was this active planting of land an economically superior form of imperialism. It also legitimized the expropriation of land from indigenous hunter-gatherers. In Locke’s words: ‘As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.’
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Indian hunting grounds were, by this definition of private property,
terra nullius
– ownerless land, ripe for development. This was a charter for expropriation.

Every land transaction since the arrival of the first settlers is recorded in the North Charleston Conveyancing Office, including all the small plots granted to the men and women who had fulfilled the terms of their deed of indenture. Millicent How and Abraham Smith were duly given, respectively, 100 acres and 270 acres of land, to keep or sell as they saw fit. They had indeed arrived – not only economically
but also politically. For Locke had made it clear in his ‘Fundamental Constitutions’ that in Carolina it would be landowners who held political power. If you were a man like Abraham Smith – although not a woman like Millicent How – and owned 50 or more acres of land, then you could vote as well as sit on a jury. With 500 acres you could become a member of the Carolina assembly or a judge. And, crucially, as a voter, a juryman or a member of parliament, you had one and only one vote, regardless of whether you owned the minimum number of acres or a hundred times that amount.

This property-owners’ democracy had a homespun start. The first elected representatives of Carolina originally met upstairs at number 13, Church Street, a modest Charleston house. Yet institutions like this were to be the launching pad for a revolution in government. The English Crown had laid the foundations of its American empire simply by granting rights to trading companies. Though governors were royally appointed, there was an assumption that the colonists should have their own representative assemblies, which followed logically from their origins as chartered companies. And indeed, they wasted little time in establishing such bodies. The Virginia assembly met for the first time as early as 1619. By 1640 eight such assemblies existed in the British colonies, including Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Connecticut, Plymouth and New Haven as well as Barbados.
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No such institutions existed in Latin America.

The key, in short, was social mobility – the fact that a man like Abraham Smith could arrive in a wilderness with literally nothing and yet within just a few years become both a property-owner and a voter. In seven out of thirteen future American states on the eve of the American Revolution, the right to vote was a function of landownership or the payment of a property tax – rules that remained in force in some cases well into the 1850s.

In the Spanish colonies to the south, land had been allocated in a diametrically different way.

In a
cedula
(decree) dated 11 August 1534, Francisco Pizarro granted Jerónimo de Aliaga and another conquistador named Sebastián de Torres a vast domain – an
encomienda
– called Ruringuaylas, in
the beautiful valley of Callejón de Huaylas in the Peruvian Andes. The valley was fertile, the mountains full of precious ore. The question facing de Aliaga was how to exploit these resources. The answer was quite unlike the one devised by John Locke for North America.

At first it was not land that was being given to de Aliaga and Torres; technically, it was just the labour of the 6,000 or so Indians who lived here. Unlike in British colonies like Carolina, where acres were widely distributed, in Spanish America it was the right to exploit the indigenous people that was granted to a tiny elite. Previously, they had worked for the Inca Emperor under the
mita
system. Now their lot was to work for the Spaniards. It was essentially a tribute system – and tribute took the form of toil. The Indians were de Aliaga’s to direct as he pleased, whether to plough the land or to dig gold and silver out of the mountains. This system changed only slightly with the introduction in 1542 of the
repartimiento de labor
, which imposed royal control over the allocation of native labour in response to reports of abuse by the
encomenderos
. (Torres was in fact murdered by some of his Indian workers because of his cruelty.)
Encomiendas
were not granted in perpetuity to a man and his heirs; under Castilian law, the land on which they stood remained the property of the Crown; they were not even supposed to be fenced. Only slowly did they evolve into hereditary haciendas.
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But the ultimate result was that the conquistador class became the idle rich of America. The majority of people were left with only tiny plots of land. Even among Spanish immigrants, the
encomenderos
were a minority, perhaps as few as 5 per cent of the Hispanic population in Peru.
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Because, despite the depredations of disease, indigenous labour remained relatively abundant – population density in 1700 in the three leading Spanish colonies was several times greater than in the British mainland colonies – the Spaniards felt no need to import indentured labour from Europe on a large scale. Indeed, from the early sixteenth century the Spanish government went out of its way to restrict migration to its American colonies.
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Under Spanish rule, as a result, there was none of the upward mobility that characterized British America.

Spanish rule also meant Roman Catholicism, which was not all bad – it was the Dominican missionary Fray Pedro de Córdoba who
first exposed the appalling abuse of the indigenous peoples under the
encomienda
system – but fundamentally a monopoly of another sort. North America, on the other hand, became home to numerous Protestant sects; dissent and diversity were among the organizing principles of British settlement. This had its shadow side (the Salem witchcraft trials spring to mind), but the clear benefit was the creation of a society of merchants and farmers committed to religious as well as political freedom. In article 97 of his ‘Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’, John Locke made clear the extent of the British commitment to religious toleration:

Since the natives of that place, who will be concerned in our plantation, are utterly strangers to Christianity, whose idolatry, ignorance, or mistake gives us no right to expel or use them ill; and those who remove from other parts to plant there will unavoidably be of different opinions concerning matters of religion, the liberty whereof they will expect to have allowed them, and it will not be reasonable for us, on this account, to keep them out; that civil peace may be maintained amidst diversity of opinions, and our agreement and compact with all men may be duly and faithfully observed; the violation whereof, upon what presence soever, cannot be without great offence to Almighty God, and great scandal to the true religion which we profess; and also that Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion may not be scared and kept at a distance from it, but, by having an opportunity of acquainting themselves with the truth and reasonableness of its doctrines, and the peaceableness and inoffensiveness of its professors, may, by good usage and persuasion, and all those convincing methods of gentleness and meekness, suitable to the rules and design of the gospel, be won over to embrace and unfeignedly receive the truth; therefore,
any seven or more persons agreeing in any religion, shall constitute a church
or profession, to which they shall give some name, to distinguish it from others [emphasis added].

It took remarkable self-confidence, after so many years of bitter religious conflict in Europe, to envisage a society in which just seven people could legitimately start a new church. These profound differences between the civil societies of colonial North and South America
would have enduring consequences when the time came for them to govern themselves independently.

In 1775, despite all the profound economic and social differences that had developed between them, both North and South America were still composed of colonies ruled by distant kings. That, however, was about to change.

On 2 July 1776 a large crowd gathered on the steps of the old trading exchange in Charleston to hear South Carolina’s government declare the colony’s independence from Britain. It was the first to do so. Some forty years later Spanish rule was ended in Latin America. Yet while one revolution cemented the democratic rights of property-owners, and brought into being a federal republic that within a hundred years was the world’s wealthiest country, the South American revolutions consigned all of America south of the Rio Grande to two centuries of division, instability and underdevelopment. Why was that?

Both the Spanish and the British empires experienced crises in the late eighteenth century. The increased regulation of transatlantic trade by the imperial authorities and the high cost of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) paved the way for colonial revolts. Those that broke out in Britain’s American colonies in the 1770s had their counterparts in Spain’s: Túpac Amaru II’s Andean Rebellion of 1780–83 and the Comunero Revolt in New Granada (present-day Colombia) in 1781. But when independence was claimed by thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies, it was the reaction of a self-consciously libertarian society of merchants and farmers against what they saw as an over-extension of imperial authority. It was not only the hoary old question of taxation and representation that caused what can legitimately be seen as a sequel to the British Civil War of the 1640s.
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Significantly, land played a vitally important part in the American Revolution. The British government’s attempt to limit further settlement to the west of the Appalachians struck at the heart of the colonists’ expansionist vision of the future
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– a vision of manifest larceny that was especially
dear to property speculators like George Washington.
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When the government in London struck deals with the Indian tribes during the Seven Years’ War, Washington assumed they were mere wartime expedients. He was appalled when the Indians were effectively confirmed in their lands by the royal proclamation of 1763:

I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians [he wrote to his future partner William Crawford in 1767]. It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying the lands. Any person … who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it. If you will be at the trouble of seeking out the lands, I will take upon me the part of securing them, as soon as there is a possibility of doing it and will, moreover, be at all the cost and charges of surveying and patenting the same … By this time it may be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land. You will consequently come in for a handsome quantity … [But] keep this whole matter a secret, or trust it only to those … who can assist you in bringing it to bear by their discoveries of land.
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In 1768 Washington acquired 45,000 acres of present-day Mason, Putnam and Kanawha counties in what is now West Virginia; he was also a direct beneficiary of the subsequent forcible ejection of the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo tribes from the land south of the Ohio River. But in his eyes the Quebec Act of 1774 made matters worse, by not only expanding what had been French Canada into present-day Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, but also guaranteeing freedom of worship to Francophone Catholics.
Small wonder the rebellious New Englanders bracketed it, along with the four punitive measures passed following the Boston Tea Party, as one of the ‘Intolerable Acts’.