Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (72 page)

The reformers, however, showed alarming signs of being unwilling to play the old game, as the intransigent reaction of the New Granada authorities to the Quito riots made all too clear. In the more politically sophisticated creole community of New Spain, Jose de Galvez's visitation between 1765 and 1771 provoked similar alarm. Taken in conjunction with the expulsion of the Jesuits, his attitudes and behaviour provided eloquent evidence of the new spirit that prevailed in Madrid. He had come with a clear mandate for reform, and the reform included plans for sweeping administrative changes, that would effectively put an end to the management by creoles of their own affairs. In 1768, in line with the experiment introduced in Cuba four years earlier, he proposed a new system of government for the Mexican viceroyalty, which would be divided into eleven intendancies, thus bringing it into uniformity with the administrative system established by the Bourbons in Spain. The plan envisaged the disappearance of the 150 district magistracies - the alcaldes mayores - which had allowed creoles to gain control of large areas of local government, with consequent opportunities for the exploitation of the Indian population.119

At the same time as Galvez was drawing up his scheme for the undercutting of local interests through the professionalization of the American bureaucracy, ministers in Madrid were considering the government of the Indies in the light of reactions in the Indies to the expulsion of the Jesuits. On 5 March 1768 an extraordinary council, presided over by the Count of Aranda, president of the Council of Castile, met to discuss ways of strengthening the ties between Spain and its American possessions at a time when the expulsion had subjected them to heavy strain. The Council of Castile's two attorneys, Campomanes and Jose Morino, the future Count of Floridablanca, drew up the report.120 The tenor of their proposals was reminiscent of those put forward in the 1620s by the countduke of Olivares for the closer integration of the Spanish Monarchy,121 but while it still carried overtones of the age of composite monarchy, the temper of the document belonged to the new age of the unitary state.

Where Olivares had written of the need to end `the separation of hearts' between the various kingdoms of the Monarchy,'22 the committee was concerned with the problem of how to induce the king's vassals in the Indies to `love their mother, who is Spain', when they lived at such a distance from her. Nothing was being done to make them `desire or love the nation', and there was little chance of this happening as long as they saw the peninsulares crossing the Atlantic to enrich themselves at creole expense. `Those countries', said the report, `should no longer be regarded as simple colonies (pura colonia) but as powerful and considerable provinces of the Spanish Empire.' One way to treat them as such was to bring over young creoles to study in Spain, reserve places in the Spanish administration for them, and establish a native American regiment in the peninsula. At the same time the policy should be maintained of

always sending Spaniards to fill the principal posts, bishoprics and prebends in the Indies, but appointing creoles to equivalent offices in Spain. This is what would strengthen friendship and union [the words might have come straight from the Count-Duke's pen] and [an eighteenth-century touch] would create a single national body (un solo cuerpo de nacion), with the creoles over here as so many hostages for the retention of those lands under the gentle dominion of His Majesty123

This and the other proposals in the report were approved by the council, which saw them as a device for binding the Indies to the mother country with ties of mutual interest `in order to make this union indissoluble'. The Indies were, in effect, to become provinces of Spain, and, as a further measure of integration, it was proposed that each of the three American viceroyalties, together with the Philippines, should be allowed to appoint a deputy to join those of Castile, Aragon and Catalonia in the standing body, or diputacion, which had taken the place of Cortes now defunct. The object would be for them `to confer and humbly represent suitable measures for the utility of those dominions'. This was the nearest that an absolute monarchy could permit itself to come to the suggestions being entertained in London for the inclusion of American representatives in the House of Commons.

Impelling the 1768 report was the fear, always latent in Madrid as in London, that the American territories might at some moment attempt to break loose. A few months earlier the fiscal attorney of the Council of the Indies had remarked that `although they have been the most peaceful of our dominions since their discovery, it is never wise to assume that they are entirely safe from the danger of rebellion. 12' But could the plans for closer integration now being discussed in Madrid quieten the unrest of the creoles by addressing their complaints? It soon became apparent that they could not.

With Galvez missing no opportunity to display his contempt for the creoles, there was a growing suspicion in New Spain that Madrid had embarked on a systematic policy of filling the higher judicial and administrative offices in the viceroyalty with peninsular Spaniards. At present, six of the seven judges of the Mexican Audiencia were creoles.125 Were those born and bred in New Spain no longer to hold positions of trust in their own land? In 1771 the Mexico City council commissioned one of the creole judges, Antonio Joaquin de Rivadaneira y Barrientos, to draw up an official protest for submission to the crown.126 Rivadaneira responded with an eloquent statement of the creole case for preferential treatment in appointment to office - a statement that moved beyond the standard argument, endlessly repeated since the sixteenth century, that such treatment was owed them by virtue of their descent from the conquerors and first settlers of New Spain.

Any attempt, Rivadaneira warned, to exclude `American Spaniards' from high office `is to seek to overturn the law of peoples. It will lead not only to the loss of America but to the ruin of the state.' `Natural reason', he argued, and `the laws of all kingdoms' dictated that `foreigners' should not hold offices to the exclusion of natives. `European Spaniards', even if sharing the same sovereign, should be considered foreigners `by nature, if not by law' - a prudent qualification in view of the fact that the Indies had been constitutionally incorporated into the Crown of Castile by right of conquest. `The truth is that while these people may not be considered foreigners in the Indies from a constitutional point of view, in fact they do not derive their identity from the Indies. They have their homes, their parents, their brothers and sisters, and all their ties in Old Spain, not in New Spain.' As a result, `they regard themselves as transients in America whose prime purpose is to return wealthy to their own home and their native land.'

An awareness of the constitutional objections to his case had driven Rivadaneira to resort to the argument from `nature' - an argument couched in terms of incipient national identity, and in this respect more radical than any yet advanced by the North American colonists. He had in effect turned Spaniards' criticisms of creoles against themselves. It was not the creoles but the Spaniards who were the `foreigners', ignorant of the land they had been sent out to rule and stayed to exploit. Innate loyalty and political prudence, however, made him also well aware of the need to avoid any suggestion that Spanish Americans were determined to split the Hispanic community in two. `We cannot cut out the Europeans altogether. This would mean seeking to maintain two separate and independent bodies under one head, something of a political monstrosity.' But there was an element of bathos when he went on to ask: `do they have to receive all the higher appointments?'

Rivadaneira was engaged in a difficult balancing act. On the one hand he had to affirm the essentially Spanish character of the creoles, while at the same time he had to establish their right as natives of their patria to be the real masters in their own land. By placing so much emphasis on the patria, however, in an attempt to counter the relative weakness of their constitutional case, the creoles ran into problems that could be at least temporarily evaded by the North American colonists, who were similarly wrestling with the implications of a dual identity. British Americans could dwell on the constitutional rights to which they considered themselves entitled as Britons, while turning a blind eye to the presence of Indians and black slaves in their midst. But the presence of other races, and especially of large indigenous or mixed populations, was less easily ignored by Spanish creoles intent on defending their patrias against metropolitan attack. Metropolitan Spaniards had persistently flung at the creoles the charge that they had not only degenerated in an American environment but had also been contaminated by continuous miscegenation. Rivadaneira therefore had to protect his flank by preserving a sharp differentiation between creoles and Indians, `born to poverty, bred in destitution, and controlled through punishment'.

His words only serve to underline how the creole patria had been constructed as essentially the preserve of those who had conquered and settled it, men and women of incontestable Spanish lineage. `We have to make it clear', he wrote, ,that America consists of a large number of Spaniards whose blood is as pure as that of Spaniards from Old Spain.' In the face of Spanish disparagement of all things American, the creole claim to purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), with all the resonance those words enjoyed in the Hispanic world, carried a heavy weight of psychological baggage. It might be deployed in support of the same underlying argument about the fundamental unity and equality of metropolitans and colonials, but it went well beyond the purely symbolic character of John Dickinson's proud boast that `every drop of blood in my heart is British."27 For the creoles of Spanish America, blood, in the most literal sense of the word, was the source of rights.

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.

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.