Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (73 page)

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.

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 reference 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.