Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (91 page)

The consequence was the survival into the era of independence of longestablished attitudes and practices inherited from the old political order which tended to reduce the capacity of the new republics to respond to the economic challenges of a new age: government interventionism that was either arbitrary or inclined to favour the sectional interests of one group in society at the expense of another; a plethora of overlapping laws and an excess of regulation; continuing discrimination against the castas, in spite of all the egalitarian rhetoric; and old-style reliance on patronage, kinship networks and corruption to secure economic advantages and influence the decisions taken by a state that was too closely modelled on the pattern of the old. The effect was to inhibit innovation and entrepreneurial enterprise, with results that became all too apparent as the nineteenth century advanced. Around 1800 Mexico produced more than half as many goods and services as the United States. By the 1870s the figure was down to 2 per cent."'

Unlike the former American dependencies of Spain, the United States had favourable winds behind them as they set out on their voyage into uncharted seas. Their population was growing by leaps and bounds - from 3.9 million in 1790 to 9.6 million in 1820118 - their economy was buoyant, and westwards expansion offered unlimited possibilities for the investment of energies, resources and national enterprise. Deep divisions over the scope, character and direction of the new federal republic may at moments in the 1790s have raised the spectre of civil war, but the curtain on the Federalist era was rung down peacefully in 1800 with the election of Jefferson to the presidency and a formal transfer of power which showed how firmly the new republic had been grounded on the principle that the will of the people must prevail. In the new Spanish American republics it would take much more than a single election to dispel the notion that membership of the social elite carried with it automatic entitlement to the exercise of political power.

The upsurge of prosperity, the opportunities for westwards expansion and the democratization of America in the age of Jefferson all helped to release individual energies for participation in the great collective enterprise of constructing a new nation. The first post-revolutionary generation was coming into its own, innovative, entrepreneurial, and infused with optimism over the prospects of its country.119 The society in process of creation would not, as the Federalists had feared, descend into chaos under the impact of mob rule. But neither, as Jefferson and his Republican friends hoped and expected, would it transform itself into the virtuous agrarian republic of their dreams.

With the consolidation of the Union and the building of a new society came a developing sense of national identity. This was reinforced by the war of 1812-14 with Great Britain over neutrality and trade - a war which vindicated the conception of the United States as God's Republic, and gave it a new set of heroes and a future national anthem in `The Star Spangled Banner'. In holding off the British the Americans saved their Revolution, and the spectre of imperial reconquest was finally removed.120

Yet the sense of national identity coalescing around the young republic was neither all-inclusive nor universally shared. For all its successes this was, and remained, a partisan and faction-ridden society. While foreign observers were impressed by the character and extent of its democracy, its egalitarian spirit and the totality of its rejection of secular and ecclesiastical controls, it still excluded many who lived within its borders. Suffrage, although in process of extension in state constitutions, remained largely the preserve of a white male population, to the exclusion not only of women and slaves, but also of American Indians and many free blacks.121 Above all, the old fault-line between North and South was becoming more pronounced as the boom in cotton exports clamped slavery more tightly on the southern states.'22 In turn, an increasingly strident abolitionist response drove the South back on itself, leaving the field open for northern society to dictate the values and aspirations that would shape the self-image of the new republic, and with it the image that it would offer to the world.

Those values and aspirations - a spirit of enterprise and innovation, the pursuit of individual and collective improvement, the restless search for opportunity - would come to constitute the defining characteristics of an American national identity. They were values which conflicted at least in part with those of the traditional honour culture of the South. 12' They were alien, too, to the inherited culture of the newly independent states of Spanish-speaking America, where constitutions articulated in terms of universal rights sat uneasily with societies in which the old hierarchies had not lost their hold. But it was the possession of those values that would allow the new American republic to make its way, with growing confidence, in the ruthlessly competitive environment of an industrializing western world.

In the early 1770s, J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, who won fame a few years later with his Letters of an American Farmer, wrote an unpublished `Sketch of a Contrast Between the Spanish and the English Colonies'. `Could we have a perfect representation', it began, `of the customs and manners of the Spanish Colonies, it would, I believe, exhibit a most astonishing contrast, when viewed in opposite to those of these Provinces. But they have kept their country so invariably shut against all strangers, that it is impossible to obtain any certain and particular knowledge of them." Yet Spanish obfuscation and his own ignorance did not inhibit Crevecoeur from delivering a series of summary judgments, which cast an unflattering light on Spanish America when contrasted with the British colonies to the north.

Crevecoeur's comparison, such as it was, paraded a cluster of stereotypes, with religion given pride of place. It was sufficient to compare a Quaker congregation with `the more gaudy, more gorgeous Spanish one of Lima, coming out of their superb churches glittering with gold, irradiated with the combined effects of diamonds, rubies and topazes, ornamented with everything which the art of man can execute and the delirious imagination of a voluptuous devotee can devise or furnish'. Instead of reading the biographies of so many saints `whose virtues are useless to mankind', the inhabitants of Lima and Cuzco should study the life of William Penn, who `treated the savages as his brethren and friends' when he arrived in Pennsylvania, `the Peru of North America'.

Writing more generally of British America, Crevecoeur found that `from the mildness and justice of their laws, from their religious toleration, from the ease with which foreigners can transport themselves here, they have derived that ardour, that spirit of constancy and perseverance' which had enabled them to `raise so many sumptuous cities', display so much `ingenuity in trade and arts', and ensure `a perpetual circulation of books, newspapers, useful discoveries from all parts of the world'. `This great continent', he concluded, `wants nothing but time and hands to become the great fifth monarchy which will change the present political system of the world.'

What, then, of Spain's American possessions? `The mass of their society is composed of the descendants of the ancient conquerors and conquered, of slaves and of such a variety of castes and shades, as never before were exhibited on any part of the earth, which it appears never can live in a sufficient degree of harmony, so as to carry on with success extensive schemes of industry ... In South America this oppressive government is not at all calculated to raise; 'tis more immediately adapted to pull down. It looks on the obedience of few as much more useful than the ingenuity of the many ... In short, that languor which corrodes and enervates the mother country, enfeebles also those beautiful provinces ...'

Crevecoeur's indictment of Spain and its American territories, which itself was no more than a banal encapsulation of the prejudices and assumptions of eighteenthcentury Europe, still resonates today. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the republics constructed on the ruins of Spain's American empire only served to underline the flaws and deficiencies mercilessly singled out by Crevecoeur. The history of independent Latin America came to be seen as a chronicle of economic backwardness and political failure, while any achievements were underplayed or dismissed.

Some of the economic and political deficiencies identified by both foreign and Latin American commentators were a consequence of the international conjuncture and the balance of global forces in the two centuries that followed the winning of independence from Spain. Some were the consequence of the struggle for independence itself, a struggle so much more bloody and prolonged than that waged by North Americans against their British `oppressors'. Others derived from the distinctive geographical and environmental features of a vast and infinitely variegated land-mass, while still others can properly be traced back to the particular cultural, social and institutional characteristics of the colonial societies and their imperial ruler.2

It is one thing, however, to single out specific features of Spanish American colonial society, like endemic corruption, as casting a baleful shadow over the history of the post-colonial republics, and another to issue a blanket indictment of `the Spanish inheritance' as the root cause of their tribulations and failures. In many respects the indictment is no more than a perpetuation into the postcolonial era of the grand narrative of `the Black Legend', whose origins can be traced back to the early years of overseas conquest and colonization.' Constructed out of the atrocity stories that accumulated around the behaviour of Spain's armies in Europe and of the conquistadores in America, it subsequently received a powerful injection of anti-Catholic sentiment as Protestant Europe struggled to hold Spanish power at bay. During the course of the seventeenth century, as the image of a global power aspiring to universal monarchy was replaced by that of a vulnerable colossus, Spain acquired those connotations of backwardness, superstition and sloth that Enlightenment Europe took such delight in condemning. These were the images that impressed themselves on the minds of the leaders of the independence movements, who took solace in blaming the Spanish legacy for their failure to realize their own exalted ideals. For Bolivar, Spain had created societies that were constitutionally incapable of benefiting from the fruits of liberty.4

The infant United States, on the other hand, seemed destined to success from birth. Even before the British colonies broke free, Crevecoeur and his contemporaries were prophesying a glowing future for societies that appeared to meet all the criteria of the Enlightenment for the achievement of individual happiness and collective prosperity. Writing five years after the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Pownall, a former governor of Massachusetts who at first supported Lord North's policy in the House of Commons but subsequently became an enthusiastic advocate of the new United States, spelled out in his typically convoluted phraseology the characteristics of the new republic and its citizens:

In America, all the inhabitants are free, and allow universal naturalization to all that wish to be so, and a perfect liberty of using any mode of life they choose, or any means of getting a livelihood that their talents lead them to ... Where every man has the free and full exertion of his powers, and may acquire any share either of profit or of power that his spirit can work him up to, there is an unabated application; and a perpetual struggle of spirits sharpens the wit and trains the mind ... They are animated with the spirit of the New Philosophy. Their life is a course of experiments; and standing on as high ground of improvement as the most enlightened parts of Europe, they have advanced like Eagles, they commencing the first efforts of their pinions from a towering advantage.'

As the eagle began to soar in the nineteenth century, so the qualities identified by contemporaries as promising a spectacular flight for the fledgling republic were validated and reinforced. An idealized British America, whose indigenous and African peoples were too easily air-brushed out of the picture, presented a striking contrast to its earthbound Iberian counterpart. A relatively benign colonial legacy in one instance, and a predominantly malign one in the other, appeared the key to an understanding of their very different destinies.

The retrospective reading of the histories of colonial societies inevitably conceals or distorts aspects of a past that needs to be understood on its own terms, rather than in the light of later preconceptions and preoccupations. To see societies in the context of their own times rather than from the privileged vantagepoint afforded by hindsight is not to excuse or mitigate their crimes and follies. As the fate of the indigenous peoples and imported Africans makes all too clear, the records of New World colonization by both Britons and Spaniards are stained by innumerable horrors.

A scrutiny of the record of the two imperial powers in the light of contemporary, rather than later, assumptions, attitudes and capabilities suggests that Spain possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages commonly associated with the role of the pioneer. As first comers to America, Spaniards enjoyed more room for manoeuvre than their rivals and successors, who had to content themselves with territories not already occupied by the subjects of the Spanish crown. Since the lands seized by Spain included large settled indigenous populations and rich mineral deposits, this dictated an imperial strategy that had as its aim the bringing of Christianity and European-style `civility' to these populations, and the exploitation of their mineral resources, in line with the not unreasonable contemporary equation of precious metals with wealth.

As first comers, however, the Spaniards were faced with enormous problems, and had few precedents to guide their responses. They had to confront, subdue and convert large populations of whose very existence Europe had hitherto been unaware. They had to exploit the human and natural resources of the conquered territories in ways that would ensure the viability of the new colonial societies they were in process of establishing, while simultaneously ensuring a steady flow of benefits to the metropolitan centre; and they had to institute a system of government that would enable them to pursue their imperial strategy in lands that were spread over an immense geographical area, and were separated from the home country by a sea voyage of eight weeks or more.