Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (87 page)

Whereas native British officials were relatively few and far between in the prerevolutionary colonies, there was a hard loyalist core of Spanish officials in Spain's American territories. There were also many Spanish troops and officers in the military establishment in the Indies, although by 1800 European wars and the problem of sending troop reinforcements through British-controlled waters had drastically reduced their number. By the beginning of the new century, Spanish officers, who until 1770 had been in the majority, constituted no more than 36.4 per cent of the total officer corps, with creole officers now predominating. Only 5,500 of the 35,000 men in the army of America were natives of Spain.47 The church hierarchy had experienced a similar process of Americanization over recent decades, but just over half of the American prelates in the second half of the eighteenth century were still Spanish-born, and these occupied the richest and most influential dioceses.41

Alongside Spaniards holding high positions in church and state in the Indies, there were many recent immigrants from Spain, especially in the mercantile community, whose prime affiliation was still likely to be to the country of their birth. Lima alone, with a total population of some 55,000, had 10,000 Spanish residents in 1820.49 The prominence and wealth of many of these peninsulares, and the influence which some of them enjoyed with their fellow Spaniards in the royal administration, made them an exposed and vulnerable group. Yet the widespread antipathy to the gachupines did not necessarily rule out an alliance of convenience between them and sections of the creole elite in troubled times. The terror provoked by Hidalgo's insurrection inspired the formation of just such an alliance in New Spain. When the Cortes of Cadiz convened in September 1810 there was still a chance that the shaky edifice of Spain's empire of the Indies might yet be sustained, as Britain's American empire could not be sustained, by a mixture of loyalty and fear.

The most effective grave-diggers of empire are usually the imperialists themselves. The Cortes of Cadiz proved as incapable as the British House of Commons of finding an adequate response to the concerns of the Americans. They could, however, claim a greater justification for their failure. With Spain engaged in a desperate struggle for national survival, the Spanish deputies could not afford to run the risk of losing essential American revenues with which to fight the war. This inevitably limited their room for manoeuvre when confronted with American demands. In particular it meant that American requests for the extension of free trade were consistently rejected. `No disposition exists here', the British ambassador to the Cortes, Henry Wellesley, wrote from Cadiz in July 1812, `to make any commercial concessions, even for the important object of tranquillizing America.'S0 Concessions on this front would have further reduced revenues that were already shrinking as a result of troubled conditions in America, although the dominance of the Consulado of Cadiz over the Cortes meant that the lack of any `disposition' to make commercial concessions was persistently reinforced by the strength of vested interests."

For all the expressions of sympathy coming from liberal Spanish deputies, the American question proved a continuous source of conflict in the debates that eventually culminated in the approval of the new Spanish constitution of 1812. The American representatives naturally saw the Cortes as an opportunity to right long-standing wrongs. Here was the chance to secure for themselves not only control over their own economic activities, but also the equitable share of appointments to offices in church and state which, as the creoles constantly claimed, had been denied them since the earliest years of colonization. 52 They were members of a generation that had felt the full impact of the Bourbon reforms. As a result, they instinctively tended to see the history of Spain's record in America through the distorting lens of their own experience. For them it was a history of 300 years of oppression by an imperial power that had consistently sought to deprive of their proper rights and rewards the descendants of Spaniards who had conquered and settled the land through blood and toil. Theirs was an interpretation of the past that ignored the considerable degree of control acquired by the creoles over their own societies during a long stretch of Spanish rule - a control that had only been seriously challenged in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Now, in the Cortes of Cadiz, they saw their opportunity to redress the balance of an alleged three centuries of tyranny, misunderstanding and contempt.

Liberal-minded Spanish deputies, on the other hand, came to Cadiz with a different agenda, which had little place for, or interest in, American concerns. For them, misgovernment began at home. They looked on the Cortes not, as the Americans looked on them, as a traditional forum for the discussion of grievances and the redress of wrongs, but as a genuinely revolutionary assembly that would set about the task of reconstructing the Spanish nation on the firm constitutional foundation of the sovereignty of the people.53

This Spanish nation spanned the Atlantic, but the presence of the American deputies in the Cortes of Cadiz immediately raised the awkward question of who exactly constituted the `people' of America. No census existed for the overseas territories, and deputies were therefore forced to rely on the estimates contained in the work of Alexander von Humboldt, partially published in French and Spanish between 1806 and 1811.54 It was thought that of the 15 or 16 million inhabitants of the American territories, some 6 million were Indians, 6 million were castas, and the remainder creoles or Spanish residents." This demographic pattern inevitably propelled the racial question to centre stage. It was in the interest of the American deputies to swell the numbers of those entitled to enjoy full political rights in order to give America parity of representation with Spain in the Cortes. Yet as creoles they were not about to jettison their own predominance over other ethnic groups in the name of a factitious equality. For their part, liberal Spanish deputies spoke with enthusiasm the language of equality, but would not contemplate a system of representation that gave the American deputies a majority in the Cortes over metropolitan Spaniards. Each side therefore had its own strong sectional interests to uphold.

The issue was eventually resolved by compromise and dishonourable deceit. The first article of the 1812 constitution proclaimed the fundamental principle that `the Spanish nation is the union of all Spaniards of both hemispheres'. The definition of `Spaniards' in article five was drawn so widely as to include Indians, mestizos, castas or castas pardas (defined as those with some element of African ancestry) and free blacks.56 Slaves were excluded. It turned out, however, that not all `Spaniards' were deemed to be equally Spanish. Creoles, Indians and mestizos were to have, at least in principle, the same entitlement to representation and participation as metropolitan Spaniards, but members of the castas pardas, whose black ancestry carried with it the taint of servility, saw their rights whittled away as the constitution proceeded. Even if deemed `Spaniards' they were not to be classed as `citizens', although it was open to individuals to apply to the Cortes for letters of citizenship if they satisfied certain criteria, like good conduct and meritorious service.

Nobody in fact knew what proportion of the population of Spanish America fell under the heading of castas pardas. They formed a substantial part of the population of the Antilles, Venezuela and the coastal regions of Peru, and a still appreciable one in Chile, the La Plata provinces and New Spain, where the 1812 census, carried out in accordance with the new constitution, registered some 214,000 persons of African blood out of a total population of 3,100,000.57 Here, as elsewhere, so many of them had by now been assimilated into the increasingly mixed Indian and white population that one American deputy felt able to assert that no fewer than 10 million of the 16 million inhabitants of Spain's empire of the Indies possessed some element of African ancestry. It was assumed, however, that the effect of their exclusion would be roughly to equalize the participating populations on the two sides of the Atlantic, thus opening the way to the acceptance of parity of representation for Spain and America in future meetings of the Cortes.58

The discrimination against people of African ancestry was reinforced by the failure of attempts in the Cortes to abolish either slavery or the slave trade. The constitution of the United States had notoriously side-stepped the issue of slavery, although Section 9 of Article 1 opened the way to the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, after a twenty-year interval.59 Under the influence of British pressure and the British example, the slavery question was discussed in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1811, but the Cuban representatives played the same role as the southern delegates to the American Constitutional Convention and succeeded in closing off the issue.60

If the new Spanish constitution, like that of the United States, was silent or equivocal on matters relating to the black population, it was, at least in principle, far more generous where the Indians were concerned. It was only in 1924 that the United States extended citizenship to the entire North American Indian popula- tion.61 But in their approach to the Indians, as elsewhere, the Cortes, through ignorance or a refusal to face unpleasant facts, were remote from American realities. The nominal concession of full citizenship rights did nothing to alleviate the lot of the Indians, and, if anything, worsened it. Equality meant an end to the system of legal protection they had hitherto enjoyed, leaving them still more exposed to creole exploitation.62 At the same time, the abolition of the traditional Indian tribute payments, on which the viceregal administrations of New Spain and Peru were dependent for a substantial portion of their annual revenues, threatened to paralyse their operations and drove them to look for alternative forms of contribution that could well bear more heavily on Indian communities than the tribute they replaced.63

The gulf between the high-minded intentions of the Cortes of Cadiz and the practical results of its deliberations only served to intensify the disillusionment of American populations which already by 1810 had begun to despair of the mother country. In proclaiming the peoples of Spain and America a single nation with a common constitution, the Cortes had, at least in principle, moved - in ways that the British parliament was never prepared to move - in a direction that would logically end in the creation of a federal structure. As a body in which two-thirds of the members were Spanish, however, the Cortes showed no inclination to accept the implications of their own actions. From the beginning they displayed an arrogance in their attitude to America which alienated those they had hoped to attract. In Chile a leading patriot, Juan Martinez de Rosas, told the opening session of the national congress of 1811 that the Americans had been summoned to attend the Cortes in an insulting manner and would therefore not attend.64 Similarly, the unwillingness to make concessions over trade or appointment to offices made it painfully obvious that some members of the new and egalitarian Hispanic nation considered themselves more equal than others.

Even where the reforms instituted by the Cortes were acceptable to many Americans, there was a strong possibility that the royal authorities in the Indies would be unwilling to implement them. Jose Fernando de Abascal, as viceroy of Peru, did everything in his power to obstruct those reforms of which he disapproved, winning in the process the support of creoles and peninsulares who disliked the new liberal policies emerging from Cadiz and feared the social and political upheaval that they were likely to provoke. The natural result was to polarize opinion in the viceroyalty, reinforcing conservative attitudes on the one hand and liberal attitudes on the other .61

Yet for all the deficiencies of the Cortes and the attempts of local officials to obstruct or delay the implementation of reform, the constitution of 1812 - proclaimed and accepted throughout America - opened the way to major political and constitutional change, peacefully achieved. Effectively it transformed Spain and its American possessions into a single nation-state, based on a much wider franchise than that of the Anglo-American world, since it included no literacy or property requirements. All adult males were given the vote, other than those of African descent, together with members of the religious orders, domestic servants, public debtors and convicted criminals.66 The effect of this was to place 93 per cent of the adult male population of Mexico City on the electoral register for 1813.67

A massive process of decentralization now began, under a new system of representative government, which, given time and good will, might have accommodated creole aspirations for home rule without destroying the structure of Spain's monarchy and empire. All cities and towns with more than a thousand inhabitants were given their own ayuntamientos, and America was divided into twenty provincial deputations, or governments - six, for instance, for New Spain - which effectively meant the end of the system of omnicompetent viceregal administration. These ayuntamientos and deputations were to be representative bodies, voted into office by a much expanded electorate, although there was widespread confusion as to who was actually entitled to vote. While Indians and mestizos, as `Spanish' citizens, were at least nominally included in the franchise, the exclusion of blacks and mulattoes, on whom the militia regiments were heavily dependent, led to ugly incidents.68 Women, too, who had traditionally been able to vote if they headed a household, found themselves disenfranchised under a system in which men voted not as heads of households but as individuals.69

During 1813 and 1814, large parts of Spanish America - although primarily those that were still under the control of royalist authorities - embarked on a vast electoral exercise, which was conducted amidst considerable confusion, and with varying degrees of impartiality.70 Inevitably, the creole elites tended to dominate the electoral process. Yet now, for the first time, large numbers of Spain's American subjects found themselves pitchforked into some form of political participation. While Indian communities had continued all through the colonial period to engage in often vigorous elections for their local officials'71 creole town councils were essentially self-perpetuating oligarchies, offering little or no scope for wider citizen involvement. Some modification of this occurred in the course of the Bourbon reforms, at least in New Spain, where in the 1770s a form of municipal election was introduced into a number of towns in an attempt to limit the power of the oligarchies and reduce corruption.' It was also true that Spanish Americans were used to elections for confraternities and other corporate bodies, but the contrast with the North American colonies, with their relatively wide franchises and their long tradition of elections for representative assemblies, remains striking. The fledgling United States were considerably better prepared for popular politics than the new provincial units into which the Cortes of Cadiz had divided Spain's American territories.