Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (40 page)

Spanish America, by contrast, had from its very beginnings been subjected to processes that pushed the colonists in the direction of uniformity rather than diversity. While the different regional origins of the conquistadores pointed to an initial diversity, this diversity was submerged in the common enterprise of conquest and colonization. Regional differences were pared away in a `conquest culture', as the exigencies of conquest and settlement impelled a process of selection and simplification, whether of material objects, like ploughshares, or of cultural and linguistic traits.13' This first process of homogenization was succeeded by another, as royal officials imposed a common administrative apparatus across the continent.

Although differences would soon begin to develop as the new colonial societies established themselves and made the necessary adaptations to local conditions, there remained an underlying social and cultural unity that was reflected in the character of the emerging elites. A member of the elite of Mexico City would have had no great difficulty in adjusting to life among the elite of Lima. Civic institutions were identical; the forms of worship the same. The story was different in British America, where differing local backgrounds, differing motives for emigration and differing religious beliefs and practices created a mosaic of communities settled at a diversity of times and in a diversity of ways. With little or no conquest process and no over-arching structure of intrusive royal government to impose unity on diversity, each colony was left free to develop in its own distinctive fashion. The result was a great gulf in character and life-style, especially between the New England colonies and those of the Caribbean and the Chesapeake. There was neither similarity, nor sympathy, between New England's Puritan establishment and Virginia's gambling and horse-racing gentry elite.112

Yet even a society, like that of New England, which clung fast to the beliefs and practices of its founding fathers, found itself inexorably subjected to the challenge of change. A successful entrepreneur like John Pynchon of Springfield, Massachusetts, would build a handsome mansion for himself which immediately singled him out from his fellow citizens, many of whom had become his employees or looked up to him as their patron.133 Observing with alarm the changes going on around them, and contemplating with distress the corrupting effects of riches and the loss of civic virtue, the New England clergy of the second generation thundered out their jeremiads - the political sermons that cast the history of their settlements into a narrative of decline. While at one level these were sermons of despair, they were also rallying-calls to action, designed to recall the second and third generation to the spiritual errand that had inspired the thoughts and actions of their forefathers, and had marked out New England for its providential destiny. 114

As New England society grew more complex, it was natural to wonder whether the spirit that had animated the errand into the wilderness could successfully be transmitted from one generation to the next. The creation of a close-knit community of the godly was, and remained, a powerful ideal. But from the first years of the Massachusetts Bay settlement there had been tensions between the Puritan leadership of the community and merchants who, even if they counted themselves among the godly, were liable to chafe at the restrictive authoritarianism of the ministers. In the second half of the seventeenth century, as Boston became a thriving port, and New England was increasingly integrated into the expanding commercial economy of the British Atlantic, the tensions multiplied. Where the clergy had gloried in New England's isolation, which they saw as a continuing guarantee of the purity of its mission, the merchants saw the future of New England in terms of closer ties with the mother country, on which they depended for investment and trade.135

These merchants, marrying into each other's families, were coming to form a distinctive and influential group in New England society, just as, half a century or so earlier, Mexican and Peruvian merchants with transatlantic trading interests had evolved into a distinctive and influential group in the colonial societies of New Spain and Peru. 116 In the two Spanish viceroyalties this mercantile elite, while never fully assimilated into the upper echelons of society, managed to imbue them with something of its own concern for enrichment through investment in mining, trade and real estate. But at the same time it all too quickly assumed many of the more restrictive characteristics of the corporate and hierarchical society that surrounded it. The Consulados of Mexico City and Lima, to which the leading merchants belonged, were exclusive, self-perpetuating corporations, occupying their own area of protected space in oligarchical societies of interlocking families closely bound by ties of patronage, clientage and interest to the dominant institutions of church and state.

While the New England merchants had to contend with the Puritan establishment, they were not enveloped, like their Hispanic counterparts, by a powerful existing complex of families drawing their wealth from land and office. This gave them a greater freedom of manoeuvre, not only to impart something of their own values to society, but also to influence its character and its political direction, by offering a different form of leadership with a distinctive set of priorities. From the standpoint of the Puritan establishment these merchants may have acted as the precipitants of `declension', but by the final years of the seventeenth century they were beginning to emerge as the leading actors in an alternative narrative - a narrative, not of declension, but of progress and development.

This new mercantile elite, developing alongside the more traditional New England elite of respected professionals - lawyers, doctors, government officials and ministers of religion - was far from constituting a monolithic bloc. Some of its members were attracted by the Anglicanism of the Restoration Settlement, and complained bitterly of their disenfranchisement under a Puritan regime. Others remained Congregationalists, but Congregationalists who shared the desire of their Anglican colleagues for a more open and tolerant society, which they regarded as essential for the promotion of trade.137 By the later years of the seventeenth century this loosely united group of merchants was therefore acting as a catalyst for change in New England society, challenging the political importance of church membership, and making its first priority the maintenance of a close and continuing relationship with the authorities in London.

Yet the merchants of Boston and their colleagues elsewhere would have a struggle to impose their own values on New England society and orientate public policy in ways conducive to business enterprise. On the one hand they were faced with the admonitions, exhortations and denunciations of influential ministers, like Cotton Mather, who deplored the new social mobility and the greedy pursuit of profit that accompanied it.138 On the other, they were faced with an undertow of popular resentment as disparities of wealth became more marked.

Boston politics were still in large measure deferential in the later seventeenth century, with the most important offices being filled by persons of wealth and social standing.139 But the city's elite could never afford to take matters for granted. Decisions were taken by majority vote on a large range of civic issues at regularly convened town meetings, which were open to all the city's inhabitants, irrespective of social and economic status or sex. Challenges, both to individuals, and to policies favoured by the elite, could therefore come at any moment. If Bostonians still accorded due respect to status, they remained wary of individuals whom they suspected of attempting to manipulate or monopolize power.

On 18 April 1689 the city erupted in revolt as news arrived of the successful landing of William of Orange in England. In a concerted movement of armed protest, led by magistrates, merchants and preachers, and supported by militias from the neighbouring towns, the population rose and overthrew the hated government of Sir Edmund Andros in a bloodless revolution.140 Detestation of popery and tyranny had momentarily united all sections of Boston society, but the unity did not last. The overthrow of Andros was followed by popular demands for wider participation in the decision-making process, and an interim government had difficulty in maintaining control in the uneasy period during which the colony impatiently awaited news of its fate from the authorities in London.

The elite itself was divided over the form of government that was to replace the ill-fated Dominion of New England. The majority wanted a return to the old Bay charter, but the new government of William III had other ideas. In spite of tenacious resistance by the colony's representatives in London, the new royal charter granted to Massachusetts in 1691 curbed the autonomy hitherto enjoyed by the colony, along with the power of its Puritan establishment. For the new class of wealthy Boston merchants, however, the new charter possessed many attractions. By guaranteeing liberty of worship to all but Roman Catholics, and transforming the governorship of the colony into a royal appointment, it offered the promise of stability, tolerance and prosperity under benign royal rule.

The events of 1689-90 in Boston brought to the surface social antagonisms and resentments which, although largely contained, made it clear that the elite could not automatically count on the passive acquiescence of the mass of the inhabitants. Men of property warned darkly of `levelling' tendencies, which all too easily could plunge the city into anarchy.14' The anxieties felt by the Boston establishment over the dangers of mob rule could only have been enhanced by the news of more violent upheavals in New York, another seaport city boasting a vigorous merchant class that had made its wealth in the Atlantic trade. In New York social and religious tensions were compounded by antagonism between the English and the Dutch.142 The city's population, a mosaic of different creeds and nationalities, had little more in common than a detestation of popery. The city differed from Boston, too, in lacking a tradition of participatory politics. Not surprisingly, therefore, when the authority of James II's lieutenant-governor, Colonel Francis Nicholson, was challenged by the local militia and his government collapsed, it proved impossible to reach any consensus on what should happen next.

The void was filled by a militia captain, Jacob Leisler, a former soldier of the Dutch West India Company, a fanatical Calvinist, and now a middling merchant. He and his fellow militia captains set up a committee of public safety which took it upon itself to proclaim William and Mary king and queen. Although the Leisler regime could lay claim to having saved New York from popish tyranny, it was living on borrowed time. It lacked legitimacy, in spite of a letter from William III, received in December 1689, which, as read by Leisler, gave him authority to run the government. The heavily Dutch composition of his new city council inevitably aggravated the already sharp tensions between the English and the Dutch. At the same time, while the leading New York families, Dutch and English alike, resented the dominance of this upstart merchant, Leisler himself was being pushed from beneath by artisans and labourers. These had earlier vented their feelings by attacking the town houses of wealthy city merchants, and they saw in the new regime a chance to end government by oligarchy.

With the city deeply divided and its politics radicalized, the position of Leisler looked precarious by the time that William III's new governor arrived in the spring of 1691. His enemies were quick to claim that the city had fallen into the hands of the mob. Tried on trumped-up charges of treason, Leisler and his son-in-law, Jacob Milborne, were executed, and the old elite returned to power. But Leisler's legacy lived on. His friends and partisans rallied to the memory of their martyred leader, who remained as controversial in death as in life. For the next two decades Leislerians and anti-Leislerians would fight bitter battles to win control of the city government. The factional tradition of popular politics in New York had been well and truly launched.

Even if in 1689-90 events took a different course in Boston and New York, the uprisings in the two cities had several points in common. In both of them, the trigger for action was provided by the crisis into which the British Atlantic community had been plunged by the policies of James II and the invasion of England by an army of liberation under William of Orange. This great imperial crisis, perceived in terms of a cosmic struggle against tyranny and popery, was played out in miniature in the transatlantic colonies, where it naturally became embroiled with political and religious conflicts at provincial and local level. It came at a time of sharpened social antagonisms, as elites strengthened their hold over local and municipal life, only to find themselves being simultaneously challenged, on the one hand by new mercantile wealth, and on the other by a growing underclass resentful of the dominance of the privileged few. The resentment, which a few years earlier had exploded into rebellion in the Virginia of Berkeley and Bacon, was particularly acute in the urban environment of the Atlantic seaport towns, where growing profits from trade and the accelerating pace of social change combined to nurture a sense of relative deprivation.

By the standards of Spanish America these towns were still very small. Mexico City at the time of its insurrection in 1692 had a population of at least 100,000.143 Boston, by contrast, had some 6,000 inhabitants, New York City 4,500, and Philadelphia, founded in 1681, a mere 2,200.144 Nor, in spite of the presence of free and enslaved blacks, did their populations have anything like the ethnic complexity of a Mexico City or a Lima, where the whole spectrum of colour and castas was on daily display in the crowded streets and market-places (fig. 20). If the North American towns had their poor, their poverty was relative by the standards of contemporary England'14' and it is doubtful whether anybody starved. There was certainly none of the grinding poverty of Mexico City, where a sudden sharp increase in the price of maize could make the difference between life and death.