Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (38 page)

Yet although Bacon's revolt shook Virginian society to its foundations, the new social order in process of formation during the middle decades of the century emerged largely unscathed from the upheaval. Property qualifications for voters, rescinded when Bacon was in command, were restored by the assembly in 1677. If the poor white population lost their votes, however, they still kept their guns, and this was something the elite could not afford to forget.79 Meanwhile, changing economic and social conditions in the two decades following the rebellion altered the dynamics of a society in which turbulence had formerly seemed endemic, and opened the way to a tacit, although initially fragile, accommodation between the rich and the poor in Virginia's white community.

The rise in tobacco prices after 1684 brought a new prosperity, which gradually improved the lot of the landless freemen who had responded in such numbers to Bacon's call to arms.80 Legislation imposing chattel bondage on imported Africans had been initiated by the Virginia assembly in the 1660s, and as the planters turned more and more to the import of black slaves in preference to increasingly expensive white indentured servants,81 the balance and composition of the colony's population began to change. In the 1690s, with the import of servants from England declining, the majority of Virginia's whites were Virginiaborn for the first time in the colony's history.82 The native American population of the Chesapeake region was rapidly dwindling - the process no doubt exacerbated by the hunting down and enslavement of Indians by Bacon and his men, and by the decision of the assembly in 1682 to lump together imported Indians and blacks as slaves for life, whether or not they became converts to Christianity."

By now, Virginia was looking to Africa for its slaves at least as much to its traditional supplier, Barbados. In the 1680s some 2,000 Africans were landed in the colony.84 In earlier years the free black population had lived and worked side by side with the white labouring force, but as the number of blacks increased, to reach perhaps 10,000 - some 15 per cent of Virginia's total population85 - by the end of the seventeenth century, the assembly embarked on efforts to reduce the number of free blacks by forbidding masters to free their slaves unless they agreed to transport them out of the colony.86 The assembly also sought to drive a wedge between whites and blacks by denouncing miscegenation and its consequences. Virginians were on the way to being classified by the colour of their skin.

Around 1700, therefore, a new dividing line emerged in Chesapeake society - a line in which the social antagonisms separating white from white were eclipsed, although by no means obliterated, by a growing racial divide between white and black. During the course of the following years, white Virginian society slowly began to acquire something of the cohesion it had lacked for so long. A common white male culture was emerging, based on a number of shared points of reference - gambling, horse-racing, cockfights and the tavern. This was to become a patriarchal society, under the leadership of an elite which took its duties of hospitality seriously, looked with a paternal benevolence on social inferiors, and accepted the need to let them assert their rights as free-born men when it came to election time.87

As dynastic marriages cemented the ties between leading families like the Byrds, the Carters and the Beverleys, Virginia in the opening decades of the eighteenth century entered on a prolonged era of stability, guided by a closely knit group of substantial planters who saw no incompatibility between speaking the language of liberty and holding large numbers of slaves. The need to maintain a common front against the interfering ways of royal governors helped to keep the principal families united among themselves.88 But it was the rapid spread of slavery that created the conditions for this new age of stability and for the dominance of the wealthy elite that presided over it. Privileged and underprivileged whites were brought together by their common contempt for blacks, and by fears that at any moment they might have to close ranks in the face of a mass uprising of slaves.89

Chesapeake society was following in the wake of the slave societies of the British Caribbean islands, although oligarchy here became even more entrenched. After a comparable period of turbulence the big sugar planters of Barbados, the Leeward Islands and Jamaica succeeded both in reaching a political accommodation with the government in London and in consolidating their dominance over the social and political life of their islands.90 Both in the islands and in the southern mainland colonies large-scale investment in slaves reinforced the wealth and power of the top stratum of the planter class at the apex of hierarchically structured societies linked by ties of deference and subordination. 91 The ways in which this elite used or abused its wealth and power would vary with both place and time. Cultural cross-currents might, as in eighteenth-century Virginia, come into play to check the inherent tendency to indulge in conspicuous consumption, but all these elites shared an acute concern with honour and reputation.92 By the early eighteenth century nearly every Virginian family with any claim to status had obtained its coat of arms.93

If a hierarchical order emerged in the plantation societies of the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, it was a relatively simple hierarchical order when compared with that which emerged in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. The black-white dichotomy of a largely agrarian world of planters and slaves saw to this, even if the dichotomy was complicated by the presence of a population of poor whites, and by the emergence in the Caribbean of a significant intermediate sector of free blacks and mulattoes. There were, too, groups of subservient Indians in the Chesapeake region. Over large parts of Spanish America, on the other hand, the coexistence and interbreeding of different ethnic groups in a much more urbanized environment than that of the British plantation societies was reflected in the construction of a social order of far greater complexity.

Although the Spanish crown had set itself firmly against the creation of a New World nobility, it was otherwise concerned to replicate the hierarchical and corporate system of social organization on which peninsular society was based. Only an organic society headed and regulated by the crown - a society in which each element recognized, and kept, its proper place - offered the security of a durable political and social order that patterned the divine. But in the Indies this proved much more difficult to achieve than in Spain itself, partly because of the crown's own reluctance to validate the social pretensions of the conquerors, and partly because of the difficulties encountered by the conquerors and encomenderos themselves in perpetuating their lines and consolidating their position as a natural elite.94

The creation of a clear-cut hierarchical order was further complicated from the first days of settlement by the presence of large Indian populations, which would be endowed with a distinctive corporate identity as a repi blica de los indios. Nominally, therefore, two parallel social orders coexisted, one Spanish and one Indian, with its own hereditary nobility. This nobility was juridically entitled in Spanish eyes to the special treatment and privileges accorded to the nobility of Spain; and although, particularly in New Spain, the Indian nobility and its rights were whittled away during the course of the sixteenth century, a society of orders was considered as integral to the Indian republic as conceptualized by the Spaniards as it was to the republica de los espanoles.

In other respects, however, theory and practice soon parted company, as the barriers between the two republics began to break down, and growing numbers of Indians moved into the cities. Here they found themselves living alongside a growing Spanish population made up of first settlers, new immigrants and their descendants, who naturally saw themselves as members of a conquering race, even if they themselves had not participated in the conquest. The superior status of these settlers of Hispanic descent, who first began to be known as criollos in the 1560s,95 was recognized in their exemption from the payment of taxes - the privilege enjoyed by nobles and hidalgos in Spain. It was this privilege that set the creoles apart from the tribute-paying Indian population, although many of them lived no better than their Indian neighbours.

The obsessive pursuit by the creoles of the outward marks of social distinction, including the title of don, reflected their deeply felt need to mark themselves out as belonging to the society of the conquerors and to place themselves on an equal footing with the upper strata of the colonial social hierarchy. `Any white person,' wrote Alexander von Humboldt at the end of the colonial period, `even though he rides his horse barefoot, imagines himself to be of the nobility of the coun- try.'96 Yet whiteness, like nobility, was to acquire its own ambiguities in a society where nothing was quite as it appeared on the surface.

By the later years of the seventeenth century, although the creoles retained their tax-exempt status and still nominally formed the society of conquest, the old distinctions between conquerors and conquered were coming to be blurred by racial intermingling and were being overlaid by new distinctions thrown up by the confusing realities of an ethnically diverse society. What became known as a society of castas was in process of formation - casta being a word originally used in Spain to denominate a human, or animal, group, of known and distinctive parentage.97 The mestizos born of the unions of Spanish men and Indian women were the first of these castas, but they were soon joined by others, like mulatos, born of the union of creoles with blacks, or zambos, the children of unions between Indians and blacks. By the 1640s some parish priests in Mexico City were keeping separate marriage registers for different racial groups.98

As the combinations and permutations multiplied, so too did the efforts to devise taxonomies to describe them, based on degrees of relationship and gradations of skin colour running the full spectrum from white to black. In the famous series of `casta paintings', of which over 100 sets have so far been located, eighteenth-century artists would struggle to give visual expression to a classificatory system designed to emphasize and preserve the social supremacy of a creole elite that felt threatened by contamination from below, even as it found itself dismissed as degenerate by officials coming from Spain. The elaborate efforts of these artists to depict in sets of exotic paintings family groups representing every conceivable blend of racial mixture and colour combination look like a doomed attempt to impose order on confusion (fig. 15).99 In the `pigmentocracy' of Spanish America, whiteness became, at least in theory, the indicator of position on the social ladder.100 In practice, however, as time went on there were few creoles to be found without at least some drops of Indian blood, as newly arrived Spaniards (known to the creoles as gachupines) took pleasure in proclaiming.

Colonial society, like that of metropolitan Spain, was obsessed with geneal- ogy101 Lineage and honour went hand in hand, and the desire to maintain both of them intact found its outward expression in the preoccupation with limpieza de sangre - purity of blood. In the Iberian peninsula, purity of blood statutes were directed against people of Jewish and Moorish ancestry, and were designed to exclude them from corporations and offices. In the Indies the stigma reserved in Spain for those `tainted' with Jewish or Moorish blood was transferred to those with Indian and African blood in their veins. In effect, limpieza de sangre became a mechanism in Spanish America for the maintenance of control by a dominant elite. The accusation of mixed blood, which carried with it the stigma of illegitimacy - compounded by the stigma of slavery where there was also African blood - could be used to justify a segregationist policy that excluded the castas from public offices, from membership of municipal corporations and religious orders, from entry into colleges and universities and from joining many confraternities and guilds.102

Yet the barriers of segregation were far from being impassable, and were the subject of heated debate within colonial society..103 In New Spain at least it was possible to remove the taint of Indian, although not African, blood over the course of three generations by successive marriages to the caste that ranked next above in the pigmentocratic order: `If the mixed-blood is the offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian, the stigma disappears at the third step in descent because it is held as systematic that a Spaniard and an Indian produce a mestizo; a mestizo and a Spaniard a castizo; and a castizo and a Spaniard a Spaniard."04 Genealogies could be constructively rewritten to conceal unfortunate episodes in a family's history, and retrospective legitimation could be purchased for dead relatives.'05

There were other ways, too, of circumventing the rigidities of a social ranking based on the colour of one's skin. A royal decree of 1662 relating to the mixedblood society of Paraguay did no more than recognize realities when it stated that `it is an immemorial custom here in these provinces that the sons of Spaniards, although born of Indian women, should be treated as Spaniards. 1106 Where mestizos were both legitimate and white, or nearly white, their chances of being passed off as creoles, with all the social advantages that this implied, were greatly improved. Already from the late sixteenth century it was possible for mestizos of legitimate descent to purchase from the crown a certificate classifying them as `Spaniards', which meant that their descendants would have access to institutions of higher learning and to the more profitable forms of employment.107 In the seventeenth century the so-called gracias al sacar permitted even mulattoes to move from black to white.10' This kind of legalized ethnic flexibility, facilitated by the crown's perennial shortage of funds, was almost unheard of in Anglo-American colonial society. Only in Jamaica, it seems, was formal provision made for the social ascent of mulattoes, following legislation in 1733 to the effect that `no one shall be deemed a Mulatto after the Third Generation ... but that they shall have all the Privileges and Immunities of His Majesty's white Subjects on this Island, provided they are brought up in the Christian Religion.""