Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (41 page)

Yet, as the uprisings in Boston and New York showed, even small cities could become breeding-grounds for unrest and insurrection. Seaports, with their transitory populations of sailors and immigrants, were especially vulnerable. But for those immigrants who had moved to the New World in the expectation of a better life, disillusionment could be bitter, and all the more so if they arrived imbued with the radical ideas that had risen to the surface in England during the revolutionary years of the mid-seventeenth century. Privilege and hierarchy, they soon discovered, had crossed the Atlantic too.

For all the disappointment and disillusionment, however, both the political culture of British North American societies and their urban arrangements offered more latitude to the discontented than was to be found in their Spanish American equivalents, where the populace could do little more than take to the streets with cries of `Long live the king and down with bad government!' The concept of `English liberties' was a powerful one, and sufficiently flexible to allow substantial room for judicial and political action. The revolutionary upheavals in seventeenth-century England had encouraged wide-ranging public debate over fundamental issues, and in the process had helped to consolidate in the British Atlantic community a strong sense of the people's rights.

In North America the notion of a degree of popular participation in government found practical expression at the provincial level in the elections to assemblies, in which suffrage requirements of £40 freeholds were apparently low enough, or at least liberally enough interpreted, to allow a majority of free adult males in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania to exercise the right to vote.146 Relatively wide urban electorates that had grown accustomed to participating in assembly elections were likely to find ways of making their voices heard, even where, as in New York and Philadelphia, they were initially faced with largely closed systems of city government. If they found their wishes blocked, they could take to the streets side by side with the unenfranchised, to demand proper recognition of their rights as a free people.

The effect of the overthrow of unpopular governors in Boston and New York in 1689 was to reinforce the people's sense of their own power, and consequently to strengthen their claims to a more active role in the making of decisions which would affect their lives. In September 1693 a Connecticut magistrate, Samuel Wyllys, was sufficiently alarmed by the strength of the new demands to express the hope that the new monarchs would `please to declare that persons of mean and low degree be not improved in the cheifest place of civill and military affairs, to gratifie some little humors, when they are not qualified nor fit for the King's service'. The proper rulers of the colony, in his view, were `persons of good par- intage'.147 The turmoil in Boston politics during the first two decades of the new century, however, made it clear that, as in New York, `persons of good parintage' could no longer count on having everything their own way. 141 Others, of less good parentage, were becoming insistent that they, too, should have a share of power.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century in British North America, therefore, ideas and practice had jointly set in motion a dynamic that, once unleashed, could mount a powerful challenge to the exercise of power and privilege by the few. It is hard to detect, in the hierarchical society of Spanish America, forces capable of mounting a comparable challenge to the power of oligarchy. In June 1685 the Rye House plotter, Colonel Richard Rumbold, went to the scaffold in London after making an eloquent speech which found its place in the radical tradition of the British Atlantic community. While paying due deference to the wisdom of a God who had ordered different stations in society, he also uttered words that would not be forgotten: `None comes into the world with a saddle on his Back, neither any Booted and Spurr'd to Ride him.' Nearly a century and a half later Thomas Jefferson would write in the last letter of his life: `The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. 114' British Americans had succeeded, sometimes in spite of themselves, in creating a society in which the booted and spurred could no longer take for granted a divine right to command.

For Protestants and Catholics alike, America held a special place in God's providential design. `The overruling Providence of the great God', wrote Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine, in 1702, `is to be acknowledged, as well in the concealing of America for so long a time, as in the discovering of it, when the fulness of time was come for the discovery . . .' For Mather the coincidence of the discovery with the `Reformation of Religion' in Europe was part of God's providential plan. With America now revealed, `the Church of God must no longer be wrapped up in Strabo's cloak; Geography must now find work for a Christiano-graphy in regions far enough beyond the bounds wherein the Church of God had, through all former ages, been circumscribed ...'i

That same `Reformation of Religion', which was central to the Protestant story of the redemption of the human race, also helped Catholics to locate the conquest and colonization of America within their own alternative story of the unfolding of God's design. Giovanni Botero, in his highly influential Relazioni universali of 1595, declared that it was divine providence which brought about the rejection of Columbus's proposals by the kings of France and England, whose countries would subsequently fall prey to the supreme heresy of Calvinism. Instead, God placed America in the safe hands of the Castilians and the Portuguese and their pious monarchs.' Franciscans engaged in the evangelization of the Indies made an even closer association between the conversion of the New World and religious upheaval in the Old. Luther and Cortes, asserted Fray Geronimo de Mendieta, had been born in the same year. No matter that his dates were wrong. Hernan Cortes was the new Moses who had opened the way to the promised land, and the losses suffered by the church to heresy in Europe had been offset by the winning of innumerable souls in the new lands he had conquered for the faith.'

Mendieta, who stood in much the same temporal and psychological relationship to the first evangelists of New Spain as Mather to the first settlers of New England,' represented a late flowering of a spiritual Franciscan tradition which located America, as the Puritans would seek to locate America, in both time and space. The twelve Franciscan `apostles' who, at the request of Hernan Cortes, embarked on the enormous task of winning the peoples of Mexico to the faith, were the heirs to an apocalyptic tradition permeated by the eschatological ideas of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, Joachim of Fiore. In Joachimite prophecy, the first two ages, those of the Father and the Son, would be followed by a third age, the age of the Holy Ghost. This third age, as the Franciscans saw it, was about to dawn. The New Jerusalem would be established on earth, and the conversion of the world would be the prelude to its end.'

In this scheme of things, as interpreted by the Franciscan apostle, Fray Toribio de Benavente - known as Motolinia, `the poor one', by his Nahua flock - America was to be the theatre in which the great drama of salvation was played out. According to Motolinia, the twelve apostles, as the sons of the `true Israelite, St. Francis', came to Mexico `as to another Egypt, not hungering for bread but for souls, which are to be found in abundance'. The Indians, to whom they were bringing the Christian evangel, had been struck down for their sins by plagues more cruel even than those that once afflicted Egypt - by the diseases that accompanied the conquest, and by the heavy labour and tributes imposed by the conquerors. But the evangelists had come to lead them on their exodus out of the land in which their souls had been held in pharaonic captivity by the devil.6 As these redeemed people embraced the true faith with simple fervour, it would become possible - and indeed was already becoming possible - to restore the church of the apostles in its pure and primitive form. In this Franciscan `Christiano-graphy', to borrow Cotton Mather's term, America thus became a supremely sacred space, with the conversion of the Indians presaging the imminent coming of the age of the Holy Ghost.

This millennial vision of the first Franciscans was by no means universally shared, even among members of the Franciscan Order itself. Not only was there scepticism about the sincerity of the mass Indian conversions, but there were those like the Dominican Las Casas who held firmly to the Augustinian doctrine that salvation was not for the masses but was reserved for the elect.7 Spanish America, however, was large enough to provide the setting for a variety of holy experiments. In the 1530s, in a bellicose region of Guatemala that was to be rechristened Verapaz, Las Casas launched his own ultimately abortive experiment for the peaceable winning of the Indians to the faith, placing them directly under royal rule and keeping the encomenderos at arm's length.' It was in this decade, too, that Vasco de Quiroga, the Bishop of Michoacan, set up his famous `pueblohospitals' of Santa Fe, on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. An important source of inspiration for these Indian communities, in which religious indoctrination was combined with six hours a day of labour for the common weal, was Thomas More's Utopia, which Quiroga had read with admiration. But alongside this humanist vision, Quiroga also shared the Franciscan ideal of the restoration in the New World of the primitive Christian church.'

As the sixteenth century drew to a close, millenarian expectations among the friars were on the wane, and just as Mather was to lament the `declension' of New England from the high ideals of its pioneering generation, so Mendieta looked back in bitterness on the fall of the Mexican New Jerusalem, corrupted and destroyed by the vices of the conquerors.1° But in fact the most ambitious of all holy experiments in Spanish America was yet to come, undertaken by the Jesuit Order among the unsubdued Guarani Indians in the remote jungle borderlands between Brazil and Paraguay. Here, from 1609, the Jesuits began to establish their famous mission settlements, after obtaining from the royal authorities a prohibition against the entry of Spanish colonists into the region, like that secured by Las Casas for his Verapaz experiment."

In their aspiration to control both the spiritual and the temporal activities of the Indians who inhabited them, these Jesuit mission settlements resembled the reducciones - the village communities created by Viceroy Toledo's forcible relocation of the Peruvian Indians in the later sixteenth century. But, unlike the reducciones, these communities were unconnected with encomiendas, and Indians paid their tribute through the Company of Jesus directly to the king. The exclusion of encomenderos and other Europeans, which owed at least as much to the remoteness of the region as to any royal prohibition, allowed the Jesuits to conduct their holy experiment on their own terms. In their period of maximum prosperity, in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, the thirty communities, covering some 100,000 square kilometres, had a population of perhaps 150,000 Guarani Indians who had been persuaded to abandon their previous semi-nomadic existence and to live tightly disciplined lives regulated by the liturgical calendar and strictly supervised by the Jesuits.12 Economically self-supporting, and organized to defend themselves against raids by the bandeirantes from neighbouring Brazil, these proved themselves to be viable communities over a period of a century and a half, yielding the Jesuits both a healthy income and a rich harvest of souls. But, as transformed by a European imagination nourished by Jesuit newsletters, they were to be much more than this. The Jesuits, it seemed, had created nothing less than a Utopia in the forests of America.

The Jesuit `state' of Paraguay, as interpreted by the Europe of the Enlightenment, represented the secularization of a spiritual ideal. But, as with the other holy experiments conducted on American soil, the spiritual and the secular were closely intertwined. Spiritual communities withdrawn from the world were, by their nature, exemplary communities holding out an alternative vision of how the world might be if it would only change its ways. It was the peculiarity of these exemplary communities of Hispanic America, beginning with the millennial kingdom of the Franciscans in New Spain and culminating in the Jesuit `state' of Paraguay, that they all revolved around the conversion of the Indians, in fulfilment of what were seen as the spiritual obligations inherent in God's choice of Spain to conquer and settle these pagan lands. By contrast, the Indians were marginal to the greatest holy experiment in British America, the creation of Puritan New England as a `city upon a hill'.

It was of course true that the conversion of the Indians had figured on the agenda of the English since the beginnings of settlement - although it was to be conversion, argued Robert Johnson in his Nova Britannia of 1609, not in the Spanish manner `with rapier's point and musket shot ... but by fair and loving means, suiting to our English natures ...'13 This was the animating spirit behind Eliot's `praying villages', the Protestant answer to the Jesuit missions, and the most visible reminder of a continuing if erratically pursued commitment to the propagation of the gospel on American soil.14 There was no doubt that the spiritual and moral well-being of the Indians formed part of God's providential design for the English settlement of America, as Cotton Mather noted in relation to the report of the healing of a Christianized Indian in Martha's Vineyard, whose withered arm was restored through prayer. Quoting with approbation the words of a fellow minister, `who can or dare deny but that the calling of those Americans to the knowledge of the truth, may seem a weighty occasion to expect from God the gift of miracles?', he added his own triumphant conclusion: `Behold, reader, the expectation remarkably accommodated!"5