Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (33 page)

Jury service, the holding of local office, voting for, and membership in, an assembly - all this exposed settlers in British America to a considerably wider range of opportunities in the management of their affairs than were available for the creole population of Spanish America. Spaniards found such active popular participation in matters of government and justice both alarming and odd, to judge from the reactions of one of them whose ship ran aground on Bermuda in 1639. `As in England,' he noted, `authority here is placed in the hands of the humblest and lowest in the Republic, and not entrusted to educated persons having an aptitude for office ... The Judges and Governor appoint twelve persons of the Republic and instruct them to consider all matters and documents in the causes that have been heard in their presence, and to give their verdict. These twelve persons then leave the Sessions house and are conducted by one of the other officials to the church and are there left locked in with orders not to be let out until they have decided the cases. 1106

Authority in Spain's American possessions could certainly not be described as being `in the hands of the humblest and lowest in the Republic'. Instead, it was exercised by royal officials sent out from Spain, together with a select group of creoles. Until the sale of public offices allowed growing numbers of the creole elite to infiltrate the royal administration as the seventeenth century proceeded'107 active creole engagement in government tended to be confined to the running of municipal affairs, and was characterized by a heavy bias towards oligarchical control.

The town of Popayan, the capital of the province of the same name in the kingdom of New Granada, offers a telling illustration of the restricted nature of municipal government, and of the uncertain relationship between a local elite and the royal authorities.10S A town of some 150 permanent Spanish households in the seventeenth century, it had a mixed population of around 2,000 inhabitants, consisting of Spaniards, mestizos, Indians and blacks. Either the provincial governor, as the crown's representative, or, more frequently, his deputy, presided over the meetings of the cabildo, the town council, which consisted in 1612 of eight members - a number that varied over subsequent decades, depending on the readiness of the crown to create and sell new seats on the town council, and citizens to buy. The cabildo was composed of proprietary members who had purchased their seats from the crown, along with three elected members chosen annually by the proprietary members. Election did at least allow for the incorporation into the town's government of prominent newcomers, but control of the wide range of municipal business, both administrative and judicial, rested effectively with a handful of Spanish families who seem to have acquired greater internal cohesion as the century progressed. In principle, open town meetings - cabildos abiertos - could be convened, but only six are recorded for the entire seventeenth century. Yet for all the influence of Popayan's oligarchy at the provincial as well as the municipal level, the cabildo's powers were circumscribed by those of the governor, who had to authorize all but the smallest municipal levies. The degree of its influence therefore depended at any given moment on the oligarchy's success in forging an effective working relationship with the governor and his deputy. Not surprisingly, the ill-defined nature of the relationship between municipality and the imperial government meant that important business was at least as likely to be conducted through private negotiation as through public transaction. It is some indication of the closed, informal and personalized character of Popayan's town government that the cabildo never got round to producing a set of ordinances for the regulation of municipal business.

The extreme opposite of Popayan's method of conducting its business was to be found in New England, where, in spite of the existence of county courts, the town constituted the principal organ of local government. Town meetings of resident householders would take the major decisions, while electing a group of `selectmen' to manage business between the meetings. Seventeenth-century Easthampton, for instance, was a small town on Long Island which, although transferred against its wishes from Connecticut to the province of New York, was shaped by its characteristically New England style of government. 10' Three selectmen, chosen by the householders, looked after the town's business for the year, sometimes with the help of an additional four, while a variety of officials, ranging from the recorder and constables to highway overseers and fence viewers, were responsible for different aspects of municipal life. In all this, Easthampton was typical of New England towns, as it was, too, in its recourse to ad hoc committees to deal with special issues."0 In Spanish America, on the other hand, there is nothing to suggest that government by committee became a way of life.

New England, however, was not all British America, and the degree of popular participation in local government varied substantially from colony to colony. In the Southern Colonies in particular, local government was in the hands of selfselecting members of the planter elite. The city of New York held its first elections for aldermen and assistants in 1686, but the governor and council made the appointments to all the other city offices. Philadelphia, founded in 1681, possessed a broad suffrage, but the city charter of 1691 was modelled on that of closed English corporate towns, with the municipal corporation constituted as a self-perpetuating body, although elections were held annually for sheriffs, commissioners and tax assessors."

Even in seventeenth-century New England the system of municipal government was liable to be less genuinely popular than it appears at first sight. Due deference tended to be paid to social status when it came to appointments, as in Easthampton, where committee memberships and major offices circulated among a small group of citizens, while half the remaining householders held no office at all. 112 Many New Englanders also found themselves excluded from active participation in town life, either because they did not conform to the requirements of church membership, or, as the seventeenth century proceeded, because they lacked the necessary property qualifications."'

Yet the nature of New England's system of town government did much to enhance each town's sense of its corporate identity as a close-knit community, and of the collective responsibility of the householders for the management of civic business. The effect was to place a powerful emphasis on stability, order and the maintenance of religious and moral values inherited from the past, while simultaneously fostering a strong commitment to independence from outside interference. The combination of corporate independence and individual obligation to the upholding of an ideal community was bound to create problems for the royal authorities as soon as they sought to intervene in colonial life. Obstinacy was to become second nature to colonial New England.

The potential for trouble was symbolically illustrated as early as 1634 when John Endecott, who had been the Massachusetts Bay Company's governor of the settlement at Salem, cut the red cross out of the royal ensign, on the grounds that it was a popish symbol. In spite of considerable concern that this would give `occasion to the state of England to think ill of us',114 Massachusetts managed to hold on to its own distinctive flag, shorn of the offending cross, until the last years of the century."' Such a degree of defiance would have been unthinkable in Spanish America once Gonzalo Pizarro's followers, after flaunting the Pizarro arms in place of the royal arms on their banners, had gone down to defeat. There was, however, a stand-off with the royal authorities in Mexico City, which never reconciled itself to the conventional coat of arms conferred on it by Charles V As proud inheritors of the conquered Tenochtitlan, the city authorities appropriated the Aztec emblem of an eagle devouring a serpent and poised on a cactus, which they deftly placed above the new civic arms. In 1642, after eagles and serpents began to proliferate on municipal buildings, the viceroy, Bishop Palafox, took alarm at these idolatrous symbols and ordered their removal from the city's arms. But the serpent-devouring eagle was becoming a potent symbol of Mexico's distinctive identity, and - never entirely suppressed - it would once more come to rest on its cactus during the struggle for independence. 116

Clinging obstinately to its flag, Massachusetts, both insolent and obdurate, was to prove a constant thorn in the side of the Stuarts. Already in the late 1630s, when Archbishop Laud's Committee on Plantations challenged the colony's charter, the General Court warned him that `the common people here will conceive that his Majesty hath cast them off, and that, hereby, they are freed from their allegiance and subjection ...'117 In the event it was to be the English and the Scots in the next few years who would free themselves from `their allegiance and subjection' to Charles I.

The English Civil War and the king's execution in 1649 raised, not only for Massachusetts but for all the colonies, major questions about the exact nature of their relationship with the mother country. Not only did the Civil War sharply reduce the inflow of capital and immigrants to the colonies,"' but it also created fundamental problems of allegiance, and posed questions about the exact location of imperial authority that would hover over the Anglo-American relationship until the coming of independence. No comparable challenge would confront the Spanish empire in America until the Napoleonic invasion brought about the collapse of royal authority in Spain in 1808. The transition from Habsburgs to Bourbons in 1700, which brought conflict to the peninsula, provoked only a few passing tremors in the American viceroyalties.119

For the colonies, as for the British Isles themselves, the outbreak of the Civil War brought divided loyalties.120 Virginia remained faithful to the king and the Anglican establishment; Maryland briefly overthrew its government in favour of parliament, and descended between 1645 and 1647 into a period of turbulence graphically known as `the plundering time';121 and many New England settlers went home in the 1640s to help establish the New Jerusalem in the mother country and join the parliamentary cause.122 But the absorption of the English in their own affairs during the 1640s gave the colonies even more scope than they had previously enjoyed to go their own way. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts made the most of the opportunity to press on with the creation of new settlements and to form a Confederation of the United Colonies of New England for mutual defence. 121 The colonies could not, however, count on being indefinitely left to their own devices. As early as 1643 the Long Parliament set up a committee under the chairmanship of the Earl of Warwick to keep an oversight over colonial affairs.

This committee, although interventionist in the West Indies in response to the activities of the royalists, and supportive of Roger Williams's attempts to secure an independent charter for Rhode Island, was generally respectful of legitimate authority in the colonies. But its activities raised troubling questions about whether the ultimate power in colonial affairs lay with king or parliament. As early as 1621 Sir George Calvert had claimed that the king's American possessions were his by right and were therefore not subject to the laws of parliament.124 This question of the ultimate location of authority became acute after the execution of the king, since several of the colonies - Virginia, Maryland, Antigua, Barbados and Bermuda - proclaimed Charles II as the new monarch on his father's death. Parliament responded to these unwelcome colonial assertions of loyalty to the Stuarts by passing in 1650 an Act declaring that the colonies, having been `planted at the Cost, and settled by the People, and by Authority of this Nation', were subject to the laws of the nation in parliament. 121

When this Act was followed in the succeeding year by the Navigation Act, it must have seemed to the colonies that the Commonwealth represented at least as grave a threat as monarchy to their cherished rights. Parliament's bark, however, proved fiercer than its bite, and Cromwell turned out to be reluctant to interfere in colonial politics. The colonies therefore reached the Restoration of 1660 relatively unscathed. If anything, they emerged with enhanced confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs as a result of the uncertainties of the Interregnum and the impact of those uncertainties on the authority of royal and proprietary governors. Yet the growing economic importance of the colonies to the mother country, both as markets for English manufactures and as sources of supply for raw materials, meant that sooner or later the restored royal government was likely to make an effort to strengthen its authority over its imperial territories. It was in line with the sharpened perception of the colonies' value to England that the Earl of Clarendon urged on Charles II `a great esteem for the plantations and the improvement of them by all ways that could reasonably be proposed to him'.126

Clarendon's concern for the future development of the colonies, expressed in the creation in 1660 of two advisory Councils, for Trade and Foreign Plantations,'' harked back, as might be expected, to the age of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. But it also took into account the new naval and commercial realities of the Interregnum, and the growth of state power under Cromwell, whose conquest of Jamaica represented an important and potentially lucrative reinforcement of the British presence in the Caribbean. The government of Charles II, at once goaded and hampered by its perpetual need of funds, was to inch its way towards the formulation of a more coherent imperial policy, although this was constantly to be undercut by short-term considerations of immediate financial advantage. A government, for instance, that had ambitions to produce a more uniform pattern of colonial administration, had no hesitation in adding to its complexities by simultaneously creating new colonies on a proprietary basis in order to gratify friends and increase its revenues. Carolina, granted to eight proprietors including the future Earl of Shaftesbury, in 1663; New York, handed over to James, Duke of York, in 1664 after its capture from the Dutch; the jerseys, transferred that same year by the Duke of York to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley; and William Penn's settlement of Pennsylvania in 1681, were all set up as charter colonies. Only Jamaica, its long-term status still uncertain after its seizure from Spain in 1655, was incorporated into the English empire in America as a royal colony.