Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (76 page)

The British colonies, too, were subjected to constraints on publishing, although these were weakened by the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act in England. The instructions issued to royal governors authorized them to exercise supervision over the public press, while colonial assemblies, although frequently in conflict with the governors, had an inclination to support them when it came to controlling publications which might be similarly subversive of their own powers and privileges. Printers, too, tended to tread warily, since they were in competition for the lucrative post of government printer in their respective colonies.

When legislation or more informal kinds of pressure failed, the authorities could still make use of the law on seditious and blasphemous libel. Resort to the courts, however, brought with it no guarantee of success. Massachusetts juries were notoriously reluctant to prosecute in cases of seditious libel, and in New York skilful advocacy and a populist jury produced a `Not guilty' verdict in 1735 in the trial of John Peter Zenger for material printed in his Weekly Journal. Although the authorities showed no inclination to abandon recourse to censorship in the wake of the Zenger verdict, the outcome of the case illustrated the effectiveness of a defence strategy that linked freedom for printers, publishers and authors with the wider cause of liberty. While a free press might not yet be a natural right, at least it had become a natural right in waiting, and one that was explicitly recognized some thirty years later when the Massachusetts House of Representatives declared in 1768 that `the Liberty of the Press is a great Bulwark of the Liberty of the People.' As the events of the 1760s and 1770s were to show, the existence of a jury system furnished the British colonists with a potential weapon for resistance to royal power that their Spanish American counterparts lacked.14

Not surprisingly, the more favourable conditions in the British colonies for the reception and dissemination of information gave them a substantial advantage over Spain's colonies when it came to the founding of newspapers and periodi- cals.ls In New Spain a semi-official monthly gazette, the Gaceta de Mexico, first briefly established in 1722, was relaunched in 1728 and survived until 1742. Lima too had its own gazette from 1745, but periodical publications in Spanish America continued to be irregular and ephemeral throughout the century.16 By contrast, the British colonies, where the first newspaper, the weekly Boston News-letter, was founded in 1704, were already supporting twelve newspapers by 1750, although the first daily papers would only appear after the end of the War of Independence.'7

In spite of their heavy London content, these newspapers, while reinforcing a sense of local and regional identity, helped simultaneously to encourage intercolonial mutual awareness by reprinting scraps of information from other colonial papers.18 Improvements in the internal postal services worked to the same effect. Benjamin Franklin, as postmaster in Philadelphia from 1737and colonial deputy postmaster general from 1753, increased the frequency of services, and managed to reduce the time for delivery and reply between Philadelphia and Boston from three weeks to six days.19

As the political atmosphere grew tense during the 1750s and 1760s, the flow of news through the colonies made it easier to fashion a common response to acts of perceived British injustice. The activities of printers, publishers and postmasters - and Franklin was all three at once - widened the opportunities for envisaging a British colonial America as a single body politic with a shared concern for liberty. Newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets provided material for lively discussion in taverns and coffee-houses, and in the dining clubs and societies that sprang up in the cities of the eastern seaboard in the pre-revolutionary years. It was by incessantly talking politics in the taverns and coffee-houses of Boston that Samuel Adams cut his teeth as a revolutionary.20

As the Stamp Act crisis developed, newspapers, voluntary associations and the boycott of British goods all involved widening sections of the colonial population in the process of political debate. In Spain's American possessions, on the other hand, distance and size made it much harder to fashion, or even envisage, anything approaching the degree of co-ordinated response found in the British colonies. The surface area of the empire of the Indies was more than 5 million square miles. Spanish South America alone covered nearly 3.5 million square miles, as against the roughly 322,000 of the thirteen mainland colonies of British North America.21 It took two months to travel overland from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile, and nine months by horse, mule and river transport from Buenos Aires to the port of Cartagena in New Granada.22 While the printing press made the Atlantic crossing soon afer the beginnings of colonization, even so important a city as Santa Fe de Bogota, the capital of New Granada, did not acquire a press of its own until the late 1770s.23 With local newspapers rudimentary or non-existent, and inter-colonial trade still to receive the impetus that would follow the introduction of `free trade' in the years after 1774, there was no frequent or rapid network of communication between the various viceregal and provincial capitals.

The problems involved in mobilizing and co-ordinating resistance over large areas of territory were therefore of an entirely different order to those likely to be experienced in the mainland territories of North America. Here, for all the diversity of the colonies, their bickering and rivalries, there existed the potential, and to some extent the means, for rallying the white population across colonial boundaries to defend a common cause. Whether this would in fact happen would depend both on the actions of the British government following the repeal of the Stamp Act, and on the capacity of the colonists themselves to sink their differences and find a common will to resist.

If they did so - and it would not be easy - it would be around a set of common assumptions and beliefs. These assumptions and beliefs were deeply rooted in the experiences of the early colonists, but gathered shape and cogency over the decades before the crisis of the 1770s. The process, however, was inevitably complicated by the diversity of background and religion of the colonial population in a society where immigration was not officially confined, as it was in Spanish America, to persons of a single nationality or religious faith. If the open nature of British American society as compared with that of Spanish America made for the easier circulation of news and ideas and a greater freedom of debate, it also had the disadvantage of raising the general level of disputatiousness.

Yet while its diversity made the white population of British America contentious, its members were at least united in their fundamental conviction that the transatlantic lands in which they or their forebears had settled offered them the prospect of better lives than those they had lived, or might have lived, in Europe. They were the inhabitants of a genuinely New World - a world whose very newness promised them the freedom to worship as they wished, or, alternatively, not to worship at all; the freedom to settle and work a plot of land and keep the profits of their labour for themselves; the freedom to live their lives as they liked, without the need to defer to those whose claims to social superiority rested solely on the accident of birth; and the freedom to choose, reject, and hold accountable those in positions of authority.

These were precious freedoms, and the nature of eighteenth-century British Atlantic culture was such as to reinforce rather than undermine them. Politically, it was a culture firmly grounded in the principles of the Revolution Settlement of 1688-9, which had enshrined as central to the British constitution the virtues of representation, freedom from the exercise of arbitrary power, and (limited) religious toleration. Intellectually, it was a culture increasingly infused with preEnlightenment and Enlightenment notions of the supreme importance of reason and scientific observation for unlocking the secrets of the universe.

The heroes of the story were Newton and Locke. Once Newton's conceptualization of the laws of the universe, and Locke's political, educational and philosophical theories had been absorbed in their homeland, they automatically came to form part of British Atlantic culture, even if their reception and acceptance on the American side of the Atlantic involved something of a time-lag. Before the 1720s few in America had apparently read, or even seen, Locke's two Treatises of Government, and it seems to have been primarily his reputation as a philosopher that brought his political theories to such public attention as they received in the following two or three decades.24 By the 1720s and 1730s, however, his moral philosophy and the new science were winning increasing numbers of adherents both among the professional and business classes in the Northern and Middle Colonies, and the slave-owners of the South. The Virginian planter, Landon Carter, inherited from his father the 1700 folio edition of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and his annotations show him quite prepared to engage in debate with `this great man'.25

The new notions naturally provoked opposition from the redoubts of orthodox religion. Tensions had already surfaced in later seventeenth-century New England, where the founding of Yale College in 1701 was intended to counter the dangerously latitudinarian tendencies of Harvard. As the new ideas and approaches became more diffused, so the religious opposition became more vocal. Conservative Calvinists on the one hand and evangelical revivalists on the other inveighed against deists and sceptics who subverted the truths of religion. Splits in the Presbyterian church led to the founding in 1746 by New Light Scottish Presbyterians of an interdenominational institution, the College of New Jersey, the future Princeton University (fig. 38). Anglicans responded in 1754 by founding King's College, which would later become Columbia University"

In spite of the resistance to innovation, by 1750 the moderate Enlightenment, pragmatic and inquiring, had largely triumphed over Protestant scholasticism in the colleges of America. The leaders of revolution in the 1770s were formed in its mould.27 Their mental world was characterized by a new, and generally more secular, rationalism based on scepticism and doubt; a belief in the capacity of the individual and society to achieve progress through an understanding of the laws of a mechanistic universe designed by a benevolent Creator; a confidence that human industriousness and the application of scientific knowledge could harness the forces of nature for human benefit; and, as a corollary, the conviction that it was incumbent on governments, drawing their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, to protect life, liberty and property, and enhance the happiness and prosperity of their peoples.

More slowly, and in the face of more entrenched resistance, Enlightenment ideals were also finding adherents in the Hispanic world. While the advent of the Bourbons gave an impetus to the renovation of Spanish intellectual life, which had already shown glimmerings of revival in the later years of Carlos 11,2' new ideas, especially if they were foreign, were all too likely to fall foul of the church, the Inquisition and the universities. This antagonism set the scene in the peninsula for a prolonged struggle between traditionalists and innovators, with the innovators gaining ground in the middle years of the century, especially after Charles III's accession in 1759.29 This metropolitan struggle was replicated on the other side of the Atlantic, where, however, the inherited traditions of baroque scholarship still showed themselves capable of creative innovation.30 Scholasticism was powerfully entrenched in the more than twenty universities of Spanish America, but as early as 1736 the Jesuits of Quito were teaching Descartes, Leibnitz and Spinoza.31 Jesuit dominance over the education of the sons of the creole elite meant that by the middle decades of the century modest pockets of Enlightenment were to be found in all the major cities of the Indies, and in the long run even the universities would prove more accommodating to innovation than their peninsular counterparts.

In spite of these advances, the Spanish American Enlightenment lagged behind its British American equivalent, and its impact would only begin to be widely felt during the last two decades of the century, partly as a result of the additional spur applied by royal officials impatient with the slow pace of change. It was an Enlightenment, too, that lacked the dimension of political dissent. In British America the conjunction of moderate Enlightenment principles with those inculcated by a British political culture imbued with notions of liberty and rights was to prove a heady mixture.

During the early years of the reign of George III that political culture was in process of transformation. Britain's victories in the Seven Years War and its commercial and maritime dominance had generated a more aggressive nationalism, British as well as English, that pointed towards more authoritarian styles of imperial management.32 The rhetoric of this British nationalism might be the rhetoric of liberty, but at the same time it seemed to the Americans (as the British were now increasingly inclined to call the colonists),33 that this was a rhetoric from which they were deliberately being excluded. Simultaneously, recent political developments in Britain itself were raising questions, in British as well as American minds, about the degree to which freedom was indeed entrenched in a country that gloried in its self-image as the homeland of liberty.34

In the young George III Britain had acquired a `patriot king' who aspired to transcend and extirpate the traditional party divisions that had bedevilled political life during the reigns of his two Hanoverian predecessors. With the downfall of the Old Whigs after forty years of ascendancy, British politics - and with it political debate - acquired a new vigour and fluidity. The alleged attempt of the crown to reassert powers that it had lost in the Glorious Revolution and reinstate a Stuart tyranny provided a rallying-cry for Whig politicians who had lost out in the struggle for power, and allowed them to claim that the English liberties won in the seventeenth-century struggles were once again imperilled. At the same time, there was growing resentment, both in London and the provinces, at the corruption of public life resulting from aristocratic dominance and the system of patronage and influence that had developed during the Whig ascendancy. This resentment stimulated a movement for parliamentary and governmental reform, associated on the one hand with the popular politics of John Wilkes and his followers, and on the other with the dissenters, and the adherents of the radical version of the Whig tradition which traced its ancestry to the seventeenth-century `Commonwealthmen' - notably Milton, Harrington and Algernon Sidney - and their eighteenth-century successors.