Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (70 page)

Once the weakness of the authorities had been exposed, the confidence and the radicalism of the protesters increased. The viceroy had chosen a peninsular Spaniard to introduce the Quito reforms, and strong anti-Spanish feelings began to rise to the surface, with placards being posted demanding the expulsion of all the peninsulares in the city. On St John's night, 24 June, a party of armed citizens headed by the corregidor and including peninsular Spaniards tried to reassert control by firing on the crowd, killing two young men. As the news spread, large numbers swarmed into the streets and congregated in the Plaza Mayor, where they attacked the palace of the Audiencia, the citadel of royal authority. The rioters were now in control, and the Audiencia, under pressure, had no choice but to order the expulsion of all peninsular Spaniards who were not married to creoles. The expulsion decree was read out in a public ceremony in the Plaza Mayor, and the crowd celebrated its victory with shouts of `Long live the king!'

The royal government in Quito had effectively collapsed, and although the Indian communities in the immediate countryside remained quiet, the unrest spread southwards to the city of Cuenca, and northwards as far as Popayan and Cali. In Quito itself order was maintained by an increasingly precarious coalition of plebeian leaders and prominent creole citizens, who were becoming alarmed at the level of violence. By degrees, as the coalition crumbled, the urban patriciate and the Audiencia recovered control. When royal troops sent by the viceroy from Santa Fe de Bogota finally entered the city in September 1766 they met with no resistance. The Audiencia, which had been so closely identified with the collapse of royal authority, was purged, and early in 1767 the brandy monopoly was restored. The crown had no intention of forgoing a valuable source of revenue, or of abandoning its reforms.

The Quito rebellion was an anti-tax revolt, which temporarily united the different strata of urban society in a common cause. It provided an outlet for the strong anti-Spanish sentiments that ran through so much of colonial society in eighteenth-century Spanish America, but if some of the rebels envisaged full autonomy for the kingdom of Quito there was no general intention of overthrowing royal government. The insurrection, however, was also a form of constitutional protest, in the conventional constitutionalist style of the Spanish Monarchy. Even if the American viceroyalties had no representative assemblies, the cities had their cabildos, and creole patriciates expected to be consulted by the authorities before innovations were introduced. In the absence of such consultation, the calling of a cabildo abierto, which extended the process of deliberation to embrace the urban community as a whole, was the logical next step in the organization of protest, and a preliminary to organized resistance.

Since the resistance on this occasion was to a reform programme that Madrid planned to extend to all its American territories, it could be regarded as presaging a general opposition throughout the continent. Quito, however, was a remote city in the Andean highlands, living in a world of its own. Although the kingdom of Quito had been incorporated into the viceroyalty of New Granada when it was re-established in 1739, it retained a substantial degree of autonomy and was some eight to ten weeks' travelling distance from New Granada's capital of Santa Fe de Bogota. If anything, its links were closer to Lima and to the viceroyalty of Peru, to which it had formerly belonged.80

Given the city's remoteness, the events in Quito might have seemed a localized phenomenon, and one likely to have only limited repercussions. News, however, had a way of percolating through the Hispanic world, and it duly reached New Spain, where, in the autumn of 1765, rumours of an increase in taxes provoked an assault by the populace on soldiers in the garrison of Puebla.81 More significantly, in Spain itself the rebellion provided yet another argument for use by the enemies of Esquilache. Already highly unpopular for his monopoly of power and office, his radical reforming policies, and his dictatorial ways, he could now be accused of pursuing a programme that threatened to lose Spain its American empire. 12 In so far as the accusation played its part in the movement that led to his overthrow on 23 March 1766, the uprising in Quito marked the moment at which events in America first began to influence Spanish domestic politics. Spanish ministers were starting to find, as British ministers were also finding, that the Atlantic was narrower than it looked.

In Spanish America itself, however, the varied timing of the reforms, depending on the region involved, helped reduce the chances of co-ordinated resistance by colonial populations across jurisdictional and administrative boundaries. The general visitation of Peru, for instance, by Jose Antonio de Areche, the natural sequence to that of New Spain by Galvez in the 1760s, would only begin in 1777. This staggered approach to reform, a logical consequence of the vast areas of territory to be covered, gave the Spanish imperial authorities an advantage over their British counterparts when it came to responding to opposition, as the 1765 Stamp Act crisis in the British Atlantic community was to demonstrate.

Although early responses in the British colonies to Grenville's measures were muted, they provoked a groundswell of uneasiness. The plans for the rigorous enforcement of customs duties under the 1764 Sugar Act were deeply disturbing to merchants all down the Atlantic seaboard, and Governor Bernard of Massachusetts reported that `the publication of orders for the strict execution of the Molasses Act has caused a greater alarm in this country than the taking of Fort William Henry did in 1757 ... the Merchants say, There is an end of the trade in this Province."' But the concern extended far beyond the mercantile community, badly hit by the post-war slump.84 The colonies had emerged from the war proud of their contribution to a victory which had seen the glory of the British Empire - their empire - raised to unparalleled heights. Looking back more than half a century later to the early years of the war and the arrival of General Amherst and his redcoats in Worcester, Massachusetts, on their way to Fort William Henry, John Adams wrote: `I then rejoiced that I was an Englishman, and gloried in the name of Britain."' Now, at the moment of triumph, after the colonists had played their own part by raising some 20,000 men a year and paying half the cost themselves,86 they saw their contribution to victory disparaged, a standing army stationed on their soil, and new revenue-raising measures being introduced without prior consultation or approval by their own elected assemblies.

News of the Stamp Act spread through the colonies in April and May 1765, around the time when the people of Quito were deciding to take the law into their own hands against the fiscal measures being imposed by the Spanish authorities. Initial responses were again muted, but on 29 May, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Patrick Henry made the electrifying speech in which he argued for the passage of five resolutions outlining the House's constitutional objections to the Act. 17 Like the petitions put forward by the creoles in Spanish America, who used the historical argument of their descent from the conquistadores and first settlers to justify their claims to rights contested by the Spanish crown, so the Virginia resolutions also argued from history in favour of the colonists' rights:

Resolved, that the first Adventurers and Settlers of this his Majesty's Colony and Dominion of Virginia, brought with them, and transmitted to their Posterity, and all other his Majesty's subjects since inhabiting in this his Majesty's said Colony, all the Liberties, Privileges, Franchises and Immunities, that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain.88

By including `all other his Majesty's subjects', this resolution was nominally more all-inclusive than comparable Spanish creole assertions of their historical legitimacy, but it did not include two-fifths of Virginia's population, its 200,000 black slaves.

It was the fifth resolution, subsequently rescinded by the House of Burgesses but spread through the colonies by newspapers and gazettes with the addition of two spurious resolutions to the original five, that provoked uproar in the House and an upsurge of excitement far beyond it:

Resolved Therefore that the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony and that every Attempt to vest such Power in any Person or Persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.

Here was a direct challenge to the right of the British parliament to tax the colonies, and a challenge mounted, moreover, in the name of British as well as American liberty. As such, it provided a rallying cry for protest, and it was in Boston on 14 August 1765 that direct action first followed on protest.

Boston's population of some 16,000 was around half that of Quito, estimated at 30,000 in this period.89 Boston, too, had been badly affected by sluggish economic conditions, exacerbated at the beginning of 1765 by what John Hancock called `the most prodigious shock ever known in this part of the world' - the collapse and flight of a merchant banker, Nathaniel Wheelwright, with whom small-scale merchants, shopowners and artisans had deposited their money.HO The Boston riots, like those of Quito that summer, were the work of a well-orchestrated mob, whose leaders, the Loyal Nine - soon to rename themselves the Sons of Liberty - were acting with the connivance or collusion of members of the civic elite.91 The Loyal Nine were largely artisans and shopkeepers, the kind of people badly hit by the depression and the banking collapse. As in Quito, the first target of the rioters was the office from which it was expected that the hated new tax would be administered, and this was followed by the ransacking of the house of the designated stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver, who promptly resigned a post to which he had not yet received his official appointment. Twelve days later, the mobs turned their attention to the houses of the comptroller of customs, the register of the vice-admiralty court, and the wealthy lieutenantgovernor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. Running through the acts of looting and violence, as in Quito, was the animosity of the impoverished against rich citizens, some of whom had grown substantially richer on the profits made during the war by military contracting and other activities. According to the governor, Francis Bernard, `a War of plunder, of general levelling and taking away the distinction of rich and poor', was only narrowly averted.92 He himself retired to the safety of Castle William. With no regular soldiers stationed in Boston there was nothing he could do. British imperial authority in Massachusetts was as impotent as Spanish imperial authority in New Granada, but where the latter would eventually get its way, the former failed to do so.

The reasons for this were various, and were related to both local and wider colonial circumstances, and to the metropolitan context. Whereas the highland economy of Quito, although possessing remote access to the Pacific through the port of Guayaquil, left it relatively disconnected from the outer world, Boston was a normally flourishing port city, a busy hub of inter-colonial and transatlantic trade, closely and influentially connected with the other mainland colonies and those of the West Indies. It was also, as William Burke described it in his Account of the European Settlements in America, published eight years earlier, ,the capital of Massachusetts bay, the first city of New-England, and of all North America'." The Massachusetts interior did not always march in step with its bustling capital, but on this occasion the city radicals effectively persuaded the colony's freehold farmers, with their `very free, bold, and republican spirit', of the justice of their cause. `In no part of the world', wrote William Burke, `are the ordinary sort so independent, or possess so many of the conveniences of life.'94 Flaunting their independence and flying their flag in the name of liberty - the birthright of every subject of the British crown - they united with the citydwellers in an expression of outrage that resonated through all colonial America. Its effectiveness was revealed as rioting spread to other cities, and groups calling themselves Sons of Liberty sprang up in colony after colony.

Whether the different colonies could actually co-ordinate their opposition to the Stamp Act remained an open question. The emergence of a popular press during the preceding decades had raised the level of awareness in individual colonies of what was happening in the others, but the past record of inter-colonial cooperation had not been impressive, although the shared struggles and triumphs of the Seven Years War are likely to have fostered the sense of a wider American community to which all the colonies belonged. Eventually nine of the thirteen colonies attended the congress specially summoned for New York in October 1765. This itself was a remarkable display of unity, and all the more so since three of the absentees, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, were prevented from participating by the refusal of their governors to convene assemblies for the election of delegates.95

While the delegates to the Stamp Act Congress were anxious to reaffirm their loyalty to the British crown in the statement they prepared to draft on colonial rights and privileges, they were equally anxious to affirm their conviction that powers of taxation over the colonies were vested exclusively in their own elected assemblies. They accepted that legislation in matters of trade rested with parliament in London, but were faced with the awkward fact that Grenville's measures raised the problem of deciding where trade regulation ended and the levying of new taxes began. With opinions divided over tactics and wording, the final statement was inevitably somewhat ambiguous, but its general tenor was clear. Americans, by virtue of their rights as Britons, could not and should not be subjected to taxation voted by a British parliament in which they were not represented.

One lesson suggested by the Stamp Act Congress was that there was more to unite than divide the colonies. In the words of Christopher Gadsden, the representative of South Carolina: `There ought to be no New England men, no New Yorker, &c., known on the Continent, but all of us Americans ...'96 Resistance to the Stamp Act, spreading - although in largely muted form - to the West Indies'97 helped to strengthen ties of solidarity, enhancing a sense of American identity among people loudly proclaiming that they were Britons to the core. This community of feeling and action bridged social as well as inter-colonial divisions. Social groups that were disaffected or had hitherto played little or no part in colonial politics now became active participants in the cause of liberty. `Such an Union', wrote John Adams triumphantly, `was never known before in America.'98