Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (11 page)

In the Antilles, to their amazement, the Spaniards encountered for the first time peoples who did not live in cities," but as soon as they reached mainland America they found themselves on more familiar ground. Here once more was an urban world with some resemblances to their own. The great pre-Columbian cities - Tlaxcala, Tenochtitlan, Cuzco - reminded them initially of Spanish and European cities, like Venice or Granada, and provided further evidence that they were now in a world that boasted a higher level of civilization than that of the Antilles. Cortes wrote of Tenochtitlan: `The city is as big as Seville or Cordoba ... There is also one square twice as big as that of Salamanca.'S9 No English settler on the thinly settled North American seaboard would have been able to draw such parallels between Indian centres of population and Norwich or Bristol. No doubt on closer inspection the resemblances between the European city and these Indian cities or ceremonial complexes of Mesoamerica and the Andes proved to be not quite as great as the conquistadores assumed in the first flush of enthusiasm. But the very existence of large Indian population centres on the American mainland confirmed Spanish preconceptions about the relationship between cities and civilized living, and offered an additional inducement to the construction in Spain's new American possessions of an essentially urban civilization.60

The town, indeed, was to become the basis for Spanish dominion in America. Occasionally it might be a pre-Columbian town, remodelled to conform to Spanish styles of living, as happened with Cuzco or with the Mexico City that arose from the ruins of Tenochtitlan. Usually it was a new foundation. But either way it offered the Indians clear evidence of the determination of the conquerors to put down roots and stay, just as it also offered clear evidence to the conquerors themselves that the crown wanted them to abandon their restless ways and establish a stable society, in accordance with metropolitan norms. It is enough to look at the ordinances for the `good government' of New Spain, issued by Hernan Cortes in 1524, to see how the earlier experience of anarchy in the Antilles had etched itself into the consciousness of those responsible for the establishment and preservation of Spanish dominion in the Indies. The ordinances insist that the conversion of the Indians made it essential that the Spaniards should stay put, and not `every day be thinking of leaving, or returning to Spain, which would destroy these lands and their inhabitants, as experience in the islands settled up to now has shown'. To achieve this, all those who possessed Indians were to promise to stay put for the next eight years; the married men among them were to bring their wives over from Castile within a year and a half, while the remainder were to marry their mistresses within the same period; and Indian-holding inhabitants of all the cities and towns of New Spain were to establish households in the towns to which they belonged.61

The town was therefore to provide the setting for the stable family life without which effective long-term colonization was regarded as impossible. It was also to act as the essential agency for the distribution, settlement and control of the land. Cortes himself, on first arriving in Hispaniola from his native Extremadura, was told by Governor Ovando's secretary that he should `register as a citizen, by which he would acquire a caballeria, that is, a building lot and certain lands for cultivation'.62 This was standard practice - the allocation of a building lot, along with an additional grant of land, with free possession,63 on the outskirts of the town. Following the system established by Ovando in Hispaniola in 1503, which itself drew on practices developed in metropolitan Spain during the Reconquista, the leading citizens of the towns of mainland America were also assigned Indians in repartimiento or encomienda.

Over large parts of Spanish America the encomienda became the chosen instrument for satisfying the demand of the conquerors for a share of the spoils, in the form of Indian tribute and services, and at the same time for discouraging them from laying waste the land and moving on in search of more plunder. In arranging for the deposito or repartimiento of Indians among his restless followers, Cortes took the first steps in mainland America towards the establishment of what was to become the fully fledged encomienda system.64 He assigned encomiendas to 300 of his men - about 40 per cent of the survivors of the army that captured Tenochtitlan, and about 6 per cent of the total European population of the Indies at that time.65 Pizarro followed suit in 1532 when he made the first depositos of Peruvian Indians among his companions in San Miguel de Piura, before leaving for his encounter with Atahualpa in Cajamarca. The accompanying documents, which made it clear that these grants of Indians constituted rewards for services, specified what were to be the essential characteristics of the encomienda in its initial stages - the obligation of the Indians to perform labour services for those who held them in deposit, and the obligation of the depositories to instruct their Indians in the Christian faith, and to treat them well.66

The crown subsequently ratified the grants made by Pizarro, as it had previously ratified those made by Cortes, and by the 1540s there were some 600 encomenderos in the viceroyalty of New Spain, and 500 in Peru.67 This suggests that a New World feudal aristocracy was already in the making, but the encomienda would evolve in ways which were to disappoint the high hopes of the conquistadores. Deeply concerned by the maltreatment and brutal exploitation of their Indians by many of the encomenderos, and then by the horrifying decline in the size of the Indian population, the crown sought, with varying degrees of success, to transform the heavy labour services of encomienda Indians into the payment of tribute. In its determination to prevent the rise of a European-style aristocracy, the crown also struggled to prevent the automatic perpetuation of encomiendas through family inheritance. Although rebellion by the settlers in Peru and widespread opposition in New Spain forced it to revoke the notorious clause in the New Laws of 1542 by which all encomiendas were to revert to the crown on the death of the current holder, the transmission of the encomienda from one generation to another was never to become automatic. The crown remained the master.68

Above all, the encomienda remained what it had always been - a grant of Indians, not of land. When land was abandoned by the Indians, it reverted to the crown, and not to the encomendero to whom the Indians had been assigned.69 But although in principle the encomienda had nothing to do with land-ownership, encomenderos and their families were well positioned to take advantage of expanding opportunities as colonial societies developed and the urban population increased. Obliged by law to live in towns and cities, and not in the areas where they held their encomiendas, the encomenderos were precluded from becoming a European territorial aristocracy living on their estates.

In spite of these constraints, their privileged status, their social influence, and the income provided by their encomiendas would enable the shrewder among them to purchase large tracts of land which their heirs would one day develop for stock raising or cereal production to minister to the needs of rapidly expanding towns. In accordance with metropolitan usage, however, there remained strict limitations on land-ownership in Spain's American possessions. The possession of land was conditional on its occupation or use, although, in accordance with Castilian law, the subsoil remained the inalienable possession of the crown;70 property-owners could set up boundary markers, but were not allowed to fence off their estates - in contrast to British America, where fences were visible symbols that land had been 'improved';71 shepherds and others were allowed free passage across private estates; and woods and water remained in common ownership.72

The outcome of the process by which encomenderos and other privileged and wealthy settlers could acquire landed property would be the emergence of what was to be the classic Spanish American model of a colonial society built on the twin foundations of the city and the rural estate, the estancia or hacienda, which varied considerably in size and function according to local circumstances. In some areas, like the Oaxaca region of Mexico, there were medium or small-sized rural holdings, although the development of the mayorazgo or entail system, transmitting property as an inalienable inheritance to a single heir, gave an impulse to the long-term concentration of smaller holdings into large estates.73 But the city remained central to the enterprise, with 246, or nearly half, of the encomenderos of New Spain registered as householders, or vecinos, of the new Mexico City. The remainder became householders in newly created towns which sprang up in the wake of the conquest.74 In response to the legal requirement that encomenderos and others should also be vecinos, there was a rush to found and build such new towns in the first post-conquest decades in New Spain and Peru. By 1580 there were some 225 towns and cities in the Spanish Indies, with a total Hispanic population of perhaps 150,000, at a low estimate of six to a household.75 By 1630 the number had increased to 331,76 and many more were to be founded in the eighteenth century.

Already before Philip II's famous ordinances of 1573 on the situation and layout of New World towns," these towns had acquired the distinctive features which were now belatedly decreed as the norm: a plaza mayor, bordered by a church and civic buildings, and a regular pattern of streets on the grid-iron plan, which Ovando had adopted when he rebuilt Santo Domingo after the cyclone of 1502. There were good European precedents for this grid-iron or chequer-board pattern, not least among them the camp city of Santa Fe, from which Ferdinand and Isabella besieged the Moorish stronghold of Granada. Rectilinear town planning had the sanction, too, of the Roman architectural writer Vitruvius and had been made fashionable by Renaissance architectural theory.78 But the fundamental simplicity of the grid-iron plan, and ease of layout and construction, made it eminently transferable to a Hispanic colonial society that was in a hurry to re-establish the convivial familiarities of the urban existence it had left behind in Spain.

The rectilinear cities of Spanish colonial America, with their monumental civic and religious buildings and spacious streets, extended outwards into indefinite space. With no city walls to block the vistas (other than in coastal cities threatened by foreigners, or in dangerous frontier regions),79 they proclaimed the reality of Spanish domination over an alien world. They also had the desired effect of anchoring a potentially restless settler population, and giving a much-needed stability to the new colonial society in process of formation.

By the early seventeenth century the English were well aware of the urban pattern of Spanish settlement in the Indies, and perhaps, too, of the Spanish American model of urban design. In 1605 George Waymouth produced a set of plans, both rectilinear and radial, for a colonial town in North America, although these fanciful designs seem to have owed more to Renaissance theory than to Spanish practice.80 In 1622, however, the Virginia Company, desperate to save the struggling English colony after the recent Indian onslaught, made a direct reference to the Spanish system of colonization by means of cities in a letter of instructions to the Governor and Council of Virginia. Insisting on the importance of the colonists staying together in order to defend themselves against Indian attacks, the letter continued: `... In which regard, as also for their better civil government (which mutual society doth most conduce unto) we think it fit, that the houses and building be so contrived together, as may make if not handsome towns, yet compact and orderly villages; that this is the most proper, and successful manner of proceedings in new plantations, besides those of former ages, the example of the Spaniards in the West Indies doth fully instance . ..'81

But the settlers of Virginia proved recalcitrant. It had long since become clear that the local Indian population would produce neither the tribute nor the labour force that could form the basis of a Spanish-style encomienda system, although the Virginia Company initially seems to have envisaged something very similar when it gave instructions in 1609 that tribute should be collected from every tribal chieftain in the form of local commodities, like maize and animal skins, and that a specified number of Indians should perform weekly labour services for the colonists." The Indians, it transpired, were not prepared to co-operate. There remained the land, and once the rich potential of tobacco planting became apparent, the attractions of land occupation and ownership proved irresistible. The Indians remained a threat, and in the wake of their attack in 1622 the settlers embarked on overt anti-Indian policies, forcing them off their land in the lower peninsula. By 1633 a six-mile long pale had been constructed, leaving 300,000 acres cleared of Indian occupation.83 More forts and blockhouses were built after another Indian attack in 1644, and the frontiers of settlement were pushed inexorably forward into Indian territory. As the Indian threat diminished, so too did the need for the settlers to live together in communities on the Jamestown model. As a result, the colonial society established in Virginia was to he characterized by that very dispersal of the settlers which the council of the Virginia Company had sought to prevent in 1622.

With large river-front plantations spreading west and north along the waterways, the Virginian response to space differed not only from that of the colonists of Spanish America but also from that of the New Englanders who were simultaneously establishing their colonies to the north.84 There were almost no towns in Virginia and the Chesapeake margins, as London officials observed with annoyance and visitors with surprise.85 The society of colonial Virginia was to be one of isolated farms and of great estates - but great estates that differed from the haciendas of Spanish America in having resident owners. Where the landowning oligarchy of New Spain and Peru lived in the cities, that of Virginia lived on its estates; and when its members met each other on public occasions, they did so not in towns, but in court houses and churches which stood dispersed through the rural landscape, located at points where residents of the county could enjoy equal access to their facilities."d