Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (37 page)

The social implications of this state of affairs were all too clear. Who was in command if all could give commands? At the top of a hierarchically ordered society there should have been a titled aristocracy. But the titled nobility itself did not participate in the conquest of Spanish America, and the crown, in its determination to prevent the development of a New World aristocracy, was for a long time to be extremely sparing in the granting of American titles. It was reluctant even to elevate the conquistadores to the status of hidalgos in reward for their services, and it was only after much agitation among the conquerors and their heirs, who saw themselves being displaced in the granting of offices and favours by new arrivals from Spain, that Charles V agreed in 1543 that those who had actually participated in the conquest of Mexico should be classed as `first and principal conquistadores', and by virtue of this should be entitled to preferential treatment.64

If the first conquerors, many of them transformed into encomenderos, constituted at least an embryonic `natural aristocracy' of Spanish America, it proved to be an aristocracy that had great difficulty in staying the course. Attrition rates, as a result of death or return to Spain, were high. Only 45 per cent of the encomiendas granted in New Spain are known to have stayed in the family line beyond the first recipient,65 and the initial `natural aristocracy' would require continuous replenishment by later arrivals who possessed the money or the connections to acquire land and encomiendas, or to marry the widow or the daughter of an encomendero or `first conquistador'. The same was true of Virginia, where the death rate was devastatingly high among the first settler gentlemen.

Even in New England, where there was a much better chance than in the Chesapeake colonies or the Antilles of perpetuating the family line, the social order looked deficient and truncated by English standards. Few settlers had English titles, but painstaking efforts were made to retain such titular honours as existed. Deference was, and continued to be, a characteristic of New England life, but as time went on the niceties of English usage began to disappear, and Gent., at first a relatively rare indicator of social rank, came into wider use in the later years of the seventeenth century as an indicator less of rank than of personal virtue.66 New England, with its emphasis on a spiritual calling, was particularly propitious ground for waging a successful fight against the notion that honour was defined by lineage - a fight that was being fought right across Early Modern Europe. `Pardon me', wrote Cotton Mather in 1701, `if I say, any Honest Mechanicks really are more Honourable than Idle and Useless Men of Honour. Every man ordinarily should be able to say, I have something wherein I am occupied for the good of other men.'67

Hierarchies, then, if they were to be re-created, were likely to develop in ways that would differentiate them from those of the mother country. Too few members of the upper ranks of either Castilian or English society settled in the New World to allow of any simple replication, and New World conditions themselves, by offering unexpected opportunities for wealth and advancement to many who had little chance of either in the homelands they had left, created the potential for a social fluidity surprising to those accustomed to the more rigid hierarchical structures of Europe.

This fluidity found its counterpart in the eager pursuit of status symbols which would help to maintain distinctions of rank in societies where the dividing lines were all too easily blurred. The holding of public office conferred an obvious cachet, and the same was true of military command. In seventeenth-century British America, always on the alert against an Indian attack, military titles became a popular form of deferential address, just as the lure of a military title would induce many a young Spanish American creole to join the ranks when the militias were placed on a more regular footing in the eighteenth century.68 At least the trappings of hierarchy remained pervasive in the British colonies until the coming of the Revolution, even if the notion was being hollowed out from within. In Virginia in the middle years of the eighteenth century a young clergyman recorded his alarmed reaction to the arrival of his patron: `When I viewed him riding up, I never beheld such a display of pride in any man.... arising from his deportment, attitude and jesture; he rode a lofty elegant horse ...'69 In the plantation society of the southern regions of British America, as in the hacienda society of rural Spanish America, the man on horseback still held the upper hand.

For all the arrogance of his power, the developing character of life in America none the less raised a continuing question over how long the man on horseback would remain firmly seated in his saddle. Inequality abounded in the colonial societies of America, and where inequality abounded, so also did resentment. Settlers who had come to the New World to improve their lot were unlikely to resign themselves uncomplainingly to a life of subordination when open spaces and new opportunities beckoned. Freshly arrived indentured servants were understandably desperate to throw off the shackles of servitude. In British America in particular there was an anti-deferential counter-current, born both of Old World religious and ideological inheritance and New World circumstance. This countercurrent ran in parallel with the trend to the emergence and consolidation of elites. But in Spanish America, too, as oligarchies tightened their hold, the dispossessed and the disadvantaged found ways to make their voices heard.

In 1675, the year that saw the opening of King Philip's War between Algonquian-speaking Indians and the New England colonists, hostilities also erupted between Susquehanna Indians and aggressive and insecure frontiersmen in the Virginia-Maryland border region. The former governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley (fig. 17), who had been restored to the governorship on the return of Charles II from exile, was unsympathetic to the frontiersmen and had no wish to see the colony involved in a full-scale Indian war. The backcountry settlers, however, had other ideas. Many of them poor planters, they wanted land, and they wanted protection from Indian attacks. With Berkeley refusing to mobilize the colony's resources in their support, they had to rely on themselves and their muskets. But they needed a leader. They found him in the 28-year-old Nathaniel Bacon.

Cambridge-educated, quick-witted and plausible, Bacon - a member of the well-connected East Anglian family of that name - had been packed off to Virginia by his father in the previous year after the exposure of his involvement in a swindle. Although taken up by Berkeley, who appointed him to the Virginia council within a few months of his arrival on the grounds that he was a gentleman of quality, he fell out with his patron after Indians murdered his overseer on his James River estate. A group of armed volunteers, determined to settle accounts with the Indians, turned to him for leadership with shouts of `A Bacon! A Bacon!', and in defiance of the governor's orders he led an expedition of reprisal, which ended in the butchering of numerous Indians. Berkeley responded by declaring him a rebel.70

Although the two men subsequently patched up their differences, relations remained tense, and the meeting of the Virginia assembly at Jamestown in June 1676 provided the occasion for a showdown. Berkeley was deeply unpopular in the colony that he had governed for too long. There were innumerable complaints of his allegedly pro-Indian policies and of the oppressive burden of taxation imposed during his long tenure of the governorship, and there were many who resented the way in which he and his friends dominated the political life of the colony. The frontier settlers, exasperated by the failure of the government to assist them against the Indians, saw their salvation in Bacon, who marched on Jamestown on 23 June at the head of 400 armed men.

As Berkeley fled, Bacon gathered widespread support for his defiance of the governor. Many gentry and burgesses, as well as the populace at large, wanted a reform of government, together with a campaign against the Indians that would make the border areas secure. Yet, for all his cleverness and charisma as a leader, Bacon found it increasingly difficult to control the more hot-headed of his followers. As lawlessness spread, the rebels put Jamestown to the torch, and sacked Berkeley's own plantation, Green Spring. Then suddenly, at the end of October, Bacon died of dysentery. With the unexpected death of its leader, the rebellion faltered and collapsed. When three royal commissioners, accompanied by a regiment of redcoats, reached Virginia from England in February 1677, they were horrified to find that a vengeful Berkeley had already carried out a string of executions on his own initiative. In April, Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, the commissioner in command of the regiment of English troops, ordered Berkeley to surrender his powers. Shortly afterwards the humiliated ex-governor sailed for home, where he died before he could put his case to the king.

Bacon's intentions remain controversial, although his primary concern seems to have been to persuade the king to sanction fundamental reforms in the colony's government rather than make a bid for Virginian independence, as his enemies alleged.71 But beneath the political disaffection lay a deep social resentment, as Bacon's `Manifesto' makes clear: `... Let us trace these men in Authority and Favour to whose hands the dispensation of the Countries wealth has been committed; let us observe the sudden Rise of their Estates compared with the Quality in which they first entered this Country Or the Reputation they have held here amongst wise and discerning men, And let us see wither [whether] their extractions and Education have not bin vile, And by what pretence of learning and vertue they could [enter] soe soon into Imployments of so great Trust and consequence ... '72 Bacon, although himself a newcomer to Virginia and the immediate recipient of favours from the governor, was lashing out against a new elite.

During the middle decades of the century a new ruling class had indeed been emerging to replace the vanished group of gentlemen who constituted the first leaders of the colony but had failed to transmit their leadership to a second generation. Along with thousands of indentured servants, a fresh wave of emigration beginning in the 1640s had brought to the Chesapeake disinherited cavaliers and younger sons of landed families from the losing side in the Civil War, many of them encouraged to emigrate by Sir William Berkeley, himself a prominent social figure whom Charles had selected for the governorship of Virginia in 1642. The new influx of immigrants also contained men of mercantile and business origins, like William Byrd, many of them connected by marriage with the landed gentry of southern and eastern England, and already possessing financial interests in the Chesapeake. These men formed part of a growing business community that spanned the Atlantic, and could call on substantial funds as they sought to establish themselves in colonial life. It was out of this group, reinforced in the early years of the Restoration by a further influx of younger sons of gentry families, who went on to marry into planter families surviving from the first generation of settlers, that the new elite was forged.73

This elite, acquiring and extending tobacco plantations, and taking over the management of local government, may well have been tainted by its associations with mercantile wealth, but it hardly looks as if it was composed of men of `vile' extraction and education, who so aroused Bacon's wrath. There were few, if any, former indentured servants in its ranks. Possibilities certainly existed, although more in Maryland than Virginia, for indentured servants - originally for the most part unskilled and illiterate rural labourers or artisans - to acquire land after securing their freedom, but most of those who succeeded in doing so became at best modest independent planters, and many sank back into poverty as tobacco prices began to fall sharply in the 1660s.74 The effect of economic depression was to harden the social divisions and fuel the resentments on which Bacon capitalized as he embarked on his rebellion. The bulk of his army was made up of discontented free men `that had but lately crept out of the condition of Servants' .71

While Bacon's attack was partly directed against that section of the new elite which was monopolizing local office, it had as its particular target a group who themselves were the object of hostility from these same local office-holders - the ruling clique of the governor and his council. The friends and relatives of Governor Berkeley, many of them drawn from the ranks of the new elite and benefiting from his patronage, had come to constitute a hated oligarchy, which was held responsible for corrupt practices and high taxation at a time of war with the Indians and widespread economic distress. Essentially this was a revolt for the restoration of good government and fundamental English rights rather than for the subversion of the social order, although increasingly extreme measures adopted by Bacon during the course of the rebellion, including the freeing of servants and black slaves recruited into his army, eventually cost him the support of most of his planter allies.76

The report delivered by the commissioners to Charles II placed the blame for the rebellion squarely on the misgovernment of Berkeley and his ruling clique. Their judgment gave the king and the Privy Council the opportunity they had long been awaiting to attempt some restructuring of Virginia's administration in ways that would ensure greater royal control. In particular, the assembly was induced to grant the king in perpetuity an export duty on tobacco to help defray the costs of government." In future, Virginia's elite would need to tread more cautiously, showing a greater sensitivity on the one hand to pressures emanating from Whitehall, and on the other to the wishes of a populace which had made its voice heard, and had been prepared to resort to arms against an oppressive and avaricious oligarchy in defence of the rights of free-born Englishmen. A vote by the assembly to limit the privilege of wealthy planters to tax-free labour suggested that the elite had learnt its lesson.78