Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (35 page)

Throughout the colonial period there was to be a persistent tension between the traditional image of the ordered society and the social practices and arrangements arising out of the conditions of conquest and settlement. No doubt in Europe too there were wide disparities between theory and practice, especially in periods like the sixteenth century when economic change brought accelerated social mobility. But, in general, social change in Europe would be contained and absorbed by the society of orders, which would only begin to be eroded in the late eighteenth century under the double impact of the French and Industrial Revolutions.' In America, it remained an open question whether the society of orders could even survive the Atlantic crossing, and, if so, whether it could be reconstituted in ways familiar to those who came from Europe.

Not everyone, however, necessarily wished for such an outcome. In the course of the great social and religious upheavals in sixteenth-century Europe, what passed for dangerously radical and egalitarian doctrines had risen alarmingly to the surface. In the Tyrol, Michael Gaismayr had put forward proposals for a drastic reordering of society along evangelical communitarian lines,' and the Anabaptists introduced forms of communal organization in Munster which were ruthlessly suppressed by the forces of law and order in 1535. In spite of the tragedy of Munster, Anabaptists, Hutterites and other splinter religious movements managed to keep egalitarian doctrines alive,7 while the popularity of Thomas More's Utopia ensured that visions of an alternative organization of society based on community rather than hierarchy would not be lost from view With the forces of repression in the ascendant in Europe, where better to establish a more just and egalitarian society than in the New World of America?

Although Bishop Vasco de Quiroga did indeed attempt to found communities inspired by Utopia on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro in the mid-sixteenth century,' this was communal organization for the Indians, and not for European colonists. There is no indication that Spanish immigrants were infected by egalitarian or communitarian ideals. They came to better themselves - to `be worth more' (valer mas) in the language of the day - and to be worth more meant acquiring not only wealth, but also social status and honour, as understood and approved by the home societies to which many of them hoped one day to return.9 Perhaps a quarter of the 168 men who followed Francisco Pizarro at Cajamarca could lay claim to some trace of gentle birth, but not one of them was legitimately entitled to use the prefix don, still nominally reserved in Castile for those with relatively close ties of lineage to the titled nobility." Usage in the Indies, however, rapidly conferred the title of don on the leading conquistadores even before some of them received titles or offices from the crown, and within a generation the prefix was sufficiently common for the Mexican chronicler Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza to complain, no doubt with considerable exaggeration, that mere cabin boys and sailors would style themselves `don Fulano' as soon as they set foot on American soil." Status - not its abolition - was the aspiration of Spanish settlers in the Indies.

If egalitarian notions were to take root in America, this was more likely to occur in the British than the Spanish settlements, because the natural carrier for such notions was Protestant sectarianism. The leaders of the Puritan emigration to New England were well aware of this, and were haunted by the memory of Munster and fears of levelling.12 John Winthrop and his colleagues were concerned that reports of any levelling tendencies or communal experiments would discredit their fledgling Bay Colony in the eyes of its supporters in the home country, and were quick to stamp on the first signs of social or religious subversion. The unorthodox religious opinions of Anne Hutchinson, with their subversive message that God revealed Himself directly to the elect, were all the more dangerous because she was not only a woman but a woman of standing, as the wife of a substantial Lincolnshire merchant, with whom she had arrived in Boston, along with their eleven children, in 1634. The social esteem she enjoyed among the Boston women who gathered in her home for inspirational meetings compounded the challenge that her antinomian teachings presented to the Puritan clerical establishment. Subjected to a civil trial before the Massachusetts Bay General Court, and then to a trial by the Boston church, she was expelled from the colony in 1638.13

The proximity of a neighbouring settlement established on the principle of liberty of conscience - Roger Williams's new colony of Rhode island, where Anne Hutchinson took refuge - inevitably added to the fears of the Massachusetts ministers. Rhode Island appeared to exemplify the breakdown of all social cohesion which in their eyes followed ineluctably from insistence on spiritual equality and the absence of ministerial control, and the colony was deliberately excluded from the Confederation of New England set up in 1643 for regional defence.14 Worse still, the English Civil War opened a religious Pandora's box, releasing into the world a host of a crazed notions with dangerously radical intent. Winthrop noted in his journal for 1645 how the Anabaptists `began to increase very fast through the Country here, and much more in England, where they had gathered diverse Churches, and taught openly ..."s Although Cromwell might suppress the Levellers, the damage had been done.

The effect of strict religious control in Massachusetts was simply to encourage settlers and new immigrants to settle in colonies more tolerant of dissenting opinions - not only Rhode island, but also Maryland, which was openly accepting of toleration, and Virginia, where the Anglican establishment continued to be weak. Quakers began arriving in America in the 1650s, bringing with them notions and practices which seemed to represent a direct assault on the established foundations of family discipline, codes of honour and a society based on rank. How could society continue to function if hats were not doffed? Yet Quakers came to develop their own form of family discipline, even if it was one that conferred more authority on women in the household than was conventionally acceptable. When William Penn founded his colony of Pennsylvania in 1681, it became clear that spiritual egalitarianism was not after all incompatible with the demands of social hierarchy.16

In the early years of colonization the principal threat to a family-based society grounded in hierarchy and deference came, not from egalitarian doctrines imported from Europe, nor even from the notions of religious dissent that were beginning to permeate the Protestant world of the British colonies, but from the raw facts of life, death and patterns of immigration in the new societies. Of all the societies, British and Spanish, that established themselves in the New World of America, only that of New England managed in the early stages of settlement to replicate something approaching the family structure of the society from which the colonists were drawn. With nearly half its immigrants women, and a preponderance of immigrants travelling in family groups," there was a good chance from the beginning that the accepted forms of family life could be reconstituted with reasonable fidelity in the relatively benign climatic environment of New England. The early settlers, however, saw things differently, and parents were deeply concerned that their children would succumb to the savagery of the forest world that surrounded them unless Christian and civilized values were inculcated from an early age by rigorous schooling.18

In the Chesapeake, with its overwhelmingly male immigration and its mortality rate of perhaps 40 per cent within two years of arrival,19 the establishment of Old World patterns of family life came much more slowly and would be infinitely harder to achieve. Spanish America was affected by similar problems of acute gender imbalance among white settlers until the later years of the sixteenth century. The Spanish crown, concerned to promote stability in the settler community and prevent destitution in Spain, ordered that wives left behind in Spain should join their husbands in the Indies, and that unmarried men should find themselves wives.20 The settlement of the Indies, however, would leave a trail of broken marriages, together with many prosecutions for bigamy.21

The early stages of settlement of British and Spanish America were therefore marked by the development of household structures which responded more to the dictates of demography and environment than to cultural differences. The northeastern colonies of British America were a world on their own - a world of essentially nuclear families, with high survival rates for children (fig. 14), and an average life expectancy of around seventy for those who reached adulthood. With land relatively abundant, and an inheritance pattern in which the house or farm was left to only one son, siblings were expected to leave the family home on marriage and set up on their own. The result was a community of separate households tied together by the relationships of an extended family network.22 Servants were integrated into the family households, which were run on firmly patriarchal lines, and the status of wives, as in England, was strictly subordinate, although colonial conditions seem to have produced a certain flexibility, at least in practice, where their legal and property rights were concerned .21

In the Chesapeake and the Antilles, and throughout Spanish America, there was a much greater initial fluidity in social and household arrangements than there was in New England. With white women in short supply, and with such a large proportion of the Chesapeake population consisting of young male indentured servants who would need time to accumulate sufficient capital to establish a household, men married late, if they married at all. In southern Maryland, even in the second half of the seventeenth century, over a quarter of male testators died unmarried.24 Illegitimacy rates in the Chesapeake were correspondingly high, with female servants particularly at risk, and when couples did marry the marriage was likely to be cut short by the early death of one or other of the partners. Second marriages were frequent, with widows enjoying a relative latitude for manoeuvre, while the many children who lost one or both parents moved into a world in which they were dependent for their support, and such education as they received, on an extended network of relatives, friends and neighbours.25 There was a sharp contrast, therefore, between New England, with its tight parental control and its inherent tendency to generational conflict, and the shifting kaleidoscopic world of sexual and family relationships in the southern colonies.26

A similar looseness of arrangements prevailed in the Spanish colonial world, especially in the early stages of settlement. Here, too, illegitimacy rates were very high, largely as a consequence of illicit unions between Spanish men and Indian women. As a result, the word mestizo became virtually synonymous with `illegit- imate'.27 The early absorption of many of these mestizo children, and especially the boys, into the father's household28 could be no more than a palliative to the growing problem of how to integrate the mestizos into Spanish American colonial society. A comparable problem was to be presented in the British Caribbean islands and the southern mainland colonies by the mulatto children resulting from illicit unions between the colonists and black women drawn from the rapidly growing African labour force. Here the problem would be brutally solved by their largely automatic incorporation into the ranks of the slaves. The plantation complex could conceal a multitude of sins, although, as a group, the Caribbean planters may have shown a higher degree of paternal responsibility than their fellow planters on the mainland, perhaps influenced by the very smallness of the white minority in a largely black population.29

No doubt the haciendas that developed in the American viceroyalties created just as many opportunities as the British plantations for sexual profligacy and abuse; and the growing inequalities of Spanish American colonial society and the absence of effective religious or social control over Spanish-Indian sexual liaisons meant that, even with the reduction of the gender imbalance in the Hispanic community as more female immigrants arrived from Spain, the numbers of mestizo children continued to increase. Spanish American society, however, developed an important instrument for the preservation of social cohesion, in the form of compadrazgo, or co-godparenthood. This form of ritual kinship, although important as a method of social bonding in Andalusia, took on a new and vigorous life in the initially atomized world of colonial America. By creating a relationship of mutual trust and reciprocity between the godparents themselves, as well as between the godparents and their godchildren, it could bridge both social and racial divides, blurring the dividing lines and adding a useful integrating element to societies that were all too prone to fragmentation. 30

If godparenthood acted as a stronger force for social cohesion in Spanish than in British America, both worlds placed a heavy reliance on the power relationships inherent in patriarchal authority - husbands over wives, seniors over juniors, masters over servants - to maintain the family household as the basic unit of society and to hold the forces of social dissolution in check. The members of the Virginia Assembly showed themselves as keen as the New England ministers to assert and reinforce the authority of the master of the household, and to ensure that he fulfilled his responsibilities in disciplining, instructing and watching over the conduct and morals of those entrusted to his charge.31 The English common law that was adopted, and where necessary adapted, by the colonial societies, provided scope for this, not least by placing so much economic power in the hands of husbands and fathers. Wives were financially dependent on husbands; widows, although entitled to something like a third of their husband's real and personal estate, could find, at least in much of New England, that their right was not absolute; and the distribution of property among the children was dependent on the decision of the father, unless he died intestate.32

Castilian law, too, as embodied in the Siete Partidas, made strong provision, especially in the fourth Partida, for parental, and particularly paternal, authority, known as patria potestas, which went further than its equivalent in the AngloAmerican world by giving parents legal authority over their adult children until the time of their marriage.33 But both law and custom in Castile favoured women in ways that the English common law did not. Daughters inherited equally with sons a mandatory share of the estate, known as the legitima, and widows took back on the deaths of their husbands not only their dowries, and the sum known as the arras or bridewealth which the husband promised on marriage, but also half any property gains made jointly by the spouses.34 In the control and division of assets, therefore, peninsular society possessed a tradition of equity between the sexes, even if this was tempered in the sixteenth century by the growing recourse of wealthy families to the use of primogeniture and entail (mayorazgo) to counter the inherent tendency in a partible inheritance system towards the fragmentation of the family estate.