Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (69 page)

Government policy in the years following the Peace of Paris, however, lacked consistency of direction. The Quartering Act of 1765, specifying the services to be provided to the troops, was a typically botched piece of work, precipitating conflicts with colonial assemblies and unrest and violence in New York.6' British ministers, having decided that something must urgently be done, give the impression of acting without having thought through their policies or calculated the impact on colonial sensibilities of measures that would inevitably challenge deeply ingrained practices and assumptions. Charles III's ministers in Madrid, by contrast, showed greater wisdom in their first moves to bring change to America. The pilot project successfully carried through in Cuba by the Count of Ricla suggests at once a more systematic approach to reform in the Indies, and a greater consistency in its implementation.

The greater coherence of Iberian reformist policy in America can be partly attributed to the presence of a dominant figure in the affairs of the Indies over a long stretch of time. The volatility of British domestic politics in the 1760s, and running disputes between the President of the Board of Trade and the Secretary of State for Southern Affairs, left American policy in an uneasy limbo. As Lord Chesterfield observed in 1766: `if we have no Secretary of State with full and undisputed powers for America, in a few years we may as well have no America.'62 It was only in 1768 that a new office of Secretary of State for the Plantations was created, with the Earl of Hillsborough, a hard-liner in his approach to the colonies, as the first holder of the office. For all his American expertise, the Earl of Halifax was never given the opportunity to evolve into a Jose de Galvez, who made his career by identifying himself with the cause of reform, first in America itself during his visitation of New Spain between 1765 and 1771, and subsequently in Madrid, as secretary for the Indies.

With a team of like-minded officials to support him, Galvez displayed an unrelenting commitment over more than two decades to the reconstruction of a system of government that he regarded as antiquated, corrupt and ineffectual.63 He found an America in the hands of old-style local officials, the corregidores and alcaldes mayores, and left it in the hands of new-style bureaucrats, the intendants. He found, too, a transatlantic commercial system straining under the rusty machinery of Habsburg regulation, and oversaw its replacement by a new and modernized version that was to operate under the famous ordinance for `free trade' - comercio libre - of 1778.

Yet for all the drive and determination of a powerful minister backed by a resolute monarch, there were also strong underlying political and ideological forces pushing the Spanish reform programme forward. Unlike Britain, powerful in its new-found economic and maritime strength, Spain was a country convalescing from a long period of debilitating weakness. While the slow process of recovery was by now under way, there was still far to go. Royal officials who spoke the new language of political economy, like Jose del Campillo,64 or the rising star of the royal administration, Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes,65 had left the king and his ministers in no doubt of the fundamental importance of the Indies and the American trade to that process. The political and administrative recovery of the Indies was a sine qua non for the internal and international recovery of Spain. The continuity which this assumption gave to Madrid's American policy over the following decades was reinforced by the continuity in office or in positions of influence of ministers who might differ in their ideas and approaches, but who were all committed to the goal of reform both in the Indies and in Spain itself - not only Galvez, but also the three principal ministers of the reign of Charles III after the fall of Esquilache, the counts of Aranda, Campomanes and Floridablanca.

Reform in the peninsula had been directed over half a century to removing the obstacles to the creation of a powerful state capable of generating the wealth and mobilizing the resources that would enable it to hold its own in a ruthlessly competitive international system. In the eyes of the crown and its advisers this entailed the dismantling of much of the old order inherited from the Habsburgs. It meant the suppression of the old regional laws and institutions, and the dissolution of the Habsburg corporate society with its immunities and privileges - privileges which, in the view of Madrid, impeded the effective exercise of royal authority and obstructed the development of agriculture, trade and industry, the prerequisite of national power and prosperity. All private interests were to be subordinated to the common good - the bien coma n66 - and every group in society must be subjected to a uniformity of dependence on the crown. `As a magistrate', wrote Campomanes in 1765, `I cannot abandon the bien comun, hide the abuses that obstruct it, or fail to call on the support of the laws against them, and if some of these laws have fallen out of use or have been forgotten, to propose their renewal or improvement.'67

The sole object of loyalty was henceforth to be the unified nation-state - the cuerpo unido de nacion68 - embodied in the person of the monarch. In place of the regional patriotisms of the Habsburg composite monarchy, a new and genuinely Spanish patriotism was required. In the words of the famous Aragonese exponent of Enlightenment doctrine, Benito Jeronimo Feijoo (1676-1764), `the patria ... which we ought to value above our own private interests is that body politic in which, under a civil government, we are united beneath the yoke of the same laws. Thus Spain is the object of the love of the Spaniard.'69

In a campaign designed to extend state control over every aspect of public life, the church, with its enormous wealth and its corporate rights and immunities, inevitably came to occupy the attention of the reformers. In practice, regalist policies were nothing new, and had long been pursued by the Habsburgs, but they were resumed with a new vigour by the ministers of Charles III, who launched a determined assault on clerical privilege in their efforts to complete the work begun by the Concordat of 1753 and ensure the clear subordination of the church to the throne.

The American church had a somewhat different relationship to the crown from that of the church in Spain. Royal control of ecclesiastical appointments under the Patronato had made it a dependent, if not always reliable, junior partner in the government of the Indies. Questions of clerical immunity and of the excessive wealth of bishops and cathedral chapters, however, were universal in the Hispanic world. In the Indies, as in Spain, both the church and the religious orders could be represented as impediments to the effective exercise of a royal power operating in the name of the `common good'. From the 1760s to the end of the century colonial officials therefore worked with varying degrees of success to curtail or abolish the immunities of the American clergy, while an obedient episcopal hierarchy sought to raise the level of ecclesiastical discipline, using provincial councils as the instruments of reform.70

The religious orders, for their part, presented special problems in the Indies, as a result of their pre-eminent position in the work of evangelization. Bourbon reformers, with their regalist notions, had little love for independent-minded members of religious communities enjoying a semi-autonomous status, and were therefore inclined to support the efforts of the bishops and the secular clergy to limit their influence. A new impetus was given to the campaign that had been waged since the late sixteenth century for the secularization of the parishes, a process that the religious orders systematically opposed in the courts .71 By the 1760s they found themselves on the defensive, and in 1766 the Jesuits, the most powerful and intransigent of them all, finally lost their long legal battle against paying the 10 per cent of tithes on the produce of their properties, which the laity and the other orders paid to the cathedral chapters.72

This setback to the Jesuits in Mexico was to be overshadowed by the catastrophe that overtook the entire order in the following year, when Charles III, following the example of the kings of Portugal and France, decreed its expulsion from all his dominions. He had his own reasons for disliking the Jesuit order, which he saw as a dangerously powerful international organization unamenable to royal control, and which he suspected, with some reason, of being in collusion with the interest groups involved in the recent overthrow of his reforming minister, Esquilache.73 A decree, however, that was warmly welcomed by adherents of the philosophy of the Enlightenment also received the support of `Jansenist' elements in the Spanish church, which questioned the value of the religious orders and looked to a pastoral clergy and an internalized religion for spiritual reformation. This more austere form of Spanish Catholicism, which found its architectural and visual counterpart in the replacement of exuberantly ornate baroque church decoration by simple neo-classical interiors, was well suited to the temper of a regime that expected the church to confine itself to spiritual concerns, unless or until otherwise directed by the crown.74

The expulsion decree of 1767, dramatic as it was for metropolitan Spain, left a still more gaping hole in the fabric of Spanish American life. The enforced departure of some 2,200 Jesuits, many of them creoles,71 meant the abandonment of their frontier missions, including the famed Indian communities in Paraguay. The order owned a total of some 400 large haciendas distributed through New Spain, Peru, Chile and New Granada. This massive amount of well-managed real estate was now transferred to the crown, and eventually from the crown to private pur- chasers.76 In addition, the expulsion produced a major upheaval in the educational system of Spanish America, where Jesuit colleges had formed generation after generation of the creole elite, and it deprived the Indies of dedicated pastors and teachers, many of whom would carry with them to Europe a deep nostalgia for the world they had left behind them. Their precipitate departure provoked immediate and violent outbreaks of protest. Jose de Galvez, busy with his visitation of New Spain, used the newly arrived regiments to crush the riots, hanging 85 of the ringleaders, and condemning hundreds more to imprisonment.77 While the immediate protests might have been stifled, the long-term repercussions of the expulsion were to be as revolutionary as the decree that drove the Jesuits out.

There could have been no better symbol of the ruthless determination of the Caroline reformers to break decisively with the past than the expulsion of the Jesuits. When taken in conjunction with the administrative and fiscal reforms now gathering pace, it suggested to anxious creole elites that the world was fast changing around them. At the heart of that world had been an apparently stable relationship between the crown and its American subjects, governed by the predictability that came from the belief that each party to the relationship would abide by the rules. Now suddenly the very foundations of that relationship appeared to be crumbling. Far away to the north, the no less anxious subjects of the British crown were reluctantly arriving at the same conclusion.

Ministers in Madrid and London were taken aback by the strength of colonial reactions to what seemed to them to be their entirely justified measures for fiscal and administrative reform. A comment made in 1766 by the fiscal attorney of the Audiencia of Quito was as applicable to the American subjects of George III as to those of Charles III of Spain: `there is no American who does not reject any novelty whatsoever in the management of taxation.'78 The words were written with feeling. Quito in 1765 was the scene of the first great outbreak in Spanish America of violent protest against the Caroline reform programme - an urban insurrection that dwarfed in length and intensity the Mexico City food riots of 1692.79

In conformity with the programme for increasing American revenues, although apparently acting without direct orders from Madrid, the viceroy of New Granada, Pedro Messia de la Cerda, gave instructions for the removal of the administration of the alcabala sales tax and the brandy monopoly from the hands of private tax-farmers. Instead, it was to be taken over by royal officials, whose loyalty and dedication would, he hoped, substantially increase the returns to the treasury. The effect of this proposed reform was to unite in opposition to the new measures a large number of disparate social groups in the city. The creole elite saw its economic interests directly affected by the changes. This was especially true of landowners who grew the sugar that was distilled into brandy. The elite also bitterly resented any attempt by the authorities to introduce fiscal innovations without prior consultation with the city council. For their part, householders, small tradesmen and artisans would be hit by more rigorous collection of the sales tax at a time of acute depression in the local textile economy, which had long been suffering from foreign competition and was further hit by the influx of cheaper, European, cloths at the end of the Seven Years' War. With the encouragement of members of the clergy and the religious orders - the Jesuits, among others, had sugar-producing estates - and with the approval of the Audiencia, the city council decided to resort to the old Hispanic tradition in times of trouble of convening an expanded town meeting - a cabildo abierto - in which representatives of different sections of the urban community would have the opportunity to air their views.

Acting, again following tradition, in the name of the public good - a bien comi n conceived rather differently from that put forward by royal ministers - the meeting resolved to oppose the reforms and petition the viceroy to this effect. De la Cerda had no intention of changing his plans. His officials, having successfully introduced the changes to the brandy monopoly, proceeded to push ahead with the scheme for taking the alcabala into administration. On 22 May 1765 large crowds, mostly mestizo in composition, came out onto the streets from the dif ferent barrios, or quarters, of the city, probably encouraged by clerics and members of the creole elite. There were no troops in the city, the militia companies were conspicuously invisible when their presence was needed, and the crowds, which were joined by Indians, ransacked and destroyed the alcabala office.