Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (78 page)

Yet the colonial elites had good reasons for proceeding with caution. Outright confrontation with the imperial power would not only be damaging to trade but could well produce upheavals in societies where the rapid growth of population, the influx of new immigrants, and the restrictions imposed by the Proclamation Line on westwards expansion, provided standing opportunities for outbreaks of social and political unrest. In 1764 Scots-Irish immigrants, the `Paxton Boys' of Pennsylvania, attacked the Christian Indians in the settled areas and then marched on Philadelphia, accusing the assembly of not protecting them from Indian border raids. In New York's Hudson County the pent-up discontents of tenants against their landlords erupted in 1766. In the two Carolinas in the 1760s and early 1770s, the backcountry settlers - the `Regulators' - exasperated by the failure of the colonial legislatures to provide law and order in the borderlands, took the law into their own hands and turned on their legislatures and the local agents of authority. In the northern seaport cities, where the presence of soldiers and the lack of employment in the post-war years added new elements of volatility, street brawls could easily turn into mob riots and disrupt an always fragile civic order.16

While colonial elites had been eagerly adopting the characteristics of eighteenth-century English aristocratic life-styles, they had long been aware, even in the more stable colonies of New England and the south, that they could not count on English-style deference from their social inferiors. Back in 1728 William Byrd, on a tour of South Carolina, noted how the residents, many of them small property-holders, `were rarely guilty of Flattering or making any Court to their governors, but treat them with all the Excesses of Freedom and Familiarity's' If colonists arrived from the British Isles or the continent with their deferential instincts still intact - and those most resentful of enforced deference may well have been among the most eager to up stakes and emigrate - the opportunities and conditions of life awaiting them on crossing the Atlantic militated against the survival of such Old World attitudes. Access to the ownership of freehold land was a great social leveller. In a society where two-thirds of the white population owned land, it would be hard to sustain indefinitely the notion of deference to rank, even if rank itself was being vigorously asserted by the upper echelons of colonial society.58

The value placed by the evangelical revival on the individual may also have helped to subvert the notion of a deferential society.59 Although rank, precedence and deference still ran through the fabric of colonial societies '60 appearances could be deceptive. The elites who found themselves staring into the abyss in 1774 as they contemplated the alarming prospect of conflict with Britain, were uneasily aware that any precipitate move on their part might be the signal for their inferiors to throw over the remnants of deference and plunge the community into anarchy.

The awareness was especially acute among the elites of the Middle and Southern Colonies. All of them had assimilated the ideas and the rhetoric of Whig constitutionalism, and New York and Pennsylvania had been pioneers in appropriating the language and the methods of the opposition groups in England to provincial politics.61 In so doing, they paved the way to a future based on coalition-building and party-political organization. At this moment, however, the two colonies held back. The Quaker ethos in Pennsylvania, and a strong Anglophile tradition in New York, militated in the minds of the dominant groups against a final break with Britain. But above all, having constructed with difficulty a form of coalition politics that would hold together their religiously and ethnically fragmented societies, they feared the chaos that was likely to ensue as imperial issues intruded into provincial politics and dissolved the coalitions on which public order, and their own power, rested.62

The Southern Colonies, no less imbued with notions of liberty than the Middle Colonies, also had reasons to fear the future. While the presence of large slave populations helped bring greater cohesion to white society than was to be found in the Middle Colonies, even if that society was structured on hierarchical foundations, it also raised the spectre of mass slave uprisings in the event of political upheaval. As perhaps the most Anglophile of all the colonies, South Carolina, in particular, had cause to emphasize its loyalty. From the middle years of the century the sons of the planter and merchant elite were making their way in growing numbers to England to complete their education, and the closeness of trading ties with England encouraged the Charles Town elite to ape the ways of London.63

Of all the southern colonies, it was Virginia that was most likely to risk the present for the sake of an uncertain future. Not only was its elite steeped in the Whig tradition, but it had achieved a level of social stability still lacking in colonies of more recent foundation.64 in the event, the role of the planters of Virginia would be crucial in deciding whether Massachusetts would receive the support for which it urgently appealed in the summer of 1774. The decision of a group of Virginian colonial leaders, subsequently endorsed by a convention of planters, was to stand shoulder to shoulder with Massachusetts. If the king should attempt to `reduce his faithful Subjects in America to a State of Desperation', they would forcefully respond.61

Their expression of support, which was accompanied by a decision to revive the defunct association of 1769 for the non-importation of British goods, may at some level have been influenced by financial strain. Tobacco had been afflicted by severe marketing problems since the middle of the century, and plantationowners had run up huge debts to British middlemen and merchants. Although indebtedness was a fact of life in this colonial world, George Washington for one had been sufficiently preoccupied by his accumulating debts to look for more profitable alternatives to tobacco planting, and to convert to wheat instead.66 Yet if personal and financial frustration were conducive to a spirit of rebelliousness, the resolve shown by the Virginia planters in confronting the imperial crisis was deeply rooted in the culture of the agrarian society in which they had been raised.

As the beneficiaries, and to some extent the victims, of a particularly demanding form of export culture liable to sudden fluctuations, Washington and his fellow planters were naturally well accustomed to calculating risks. To avoid the shipwreck of their fortunes they had always had to keep a close eye on the management of their plantations, conscious that their reputations rested on their ability to meet their obligations to their inferiors and the community at large. Their vast estates identified them in their own eyes with the great British landowners, overlooking the inconvenient fact that the estates of British landlords were not worked by slaves. In the same vein, they saw themselves as a benevolent natural aristocracy, whose right to rule derived not only from their wealth but also from their intelligence and learning.67 While proud of the horses in their stables, many of them were no less proud of the books in their libraries. Yet if their reading in history and the classics encouraged them to envisage themselves in the stern and virtuous mould of republican Romans, it was primarily as the historic guardians of English liberties on the model of the Whig aristocrats that they now faced the world. In their eyes the America of 1774 was on the brink of 1688.

The Virginian elite, whose leadership was to be critical to the successful defiance of the British crown in the 1770s, seems to have had no contemporary equivalent elsewhere in the Americas in the way it combined the practical experience of local self-government and the personal management of great estates with a selfconscious awareness of its inherent duty to defend a set of values that it saw as fundamental for the survival of the community at large. Long before a republic had come to be envisaged, the royal governor, Robert Dinwiddie, described members of Virginia's House of Burgesses as `very much in a Republican way of thinking'.68 Theirs was a republicanism avant la lettre, inspired by civic consciousness - what Landon Carter called `Social Virtue'69 - and a sense of participation in a grand tradition.

Far away to the south, in Venezuela, another slave-holding class of plantationowners had reacted to its own moment of crisis twenty years earlier in a very different way. Cacao haciendas were more easily managed than tobacco plantations. Leaving them to be run by overseers, the owners of the large plantations lived not on their estates, like the Virginia gentry, but in handsome town houses in Caracas, with large household establishments and an army of slaves. Here they served as members of the cabildo, engaging in municipal politics and participating in the usual rituals of Spanish American urban life. Their income, and with it their social status, depended on the profits earned from the sale of their cacao, large quantities of which were exported to Mexico, the Antilles and metropolitan Spain.70

In the 1730s and early 1740s, however, cacao prices collapsed, in part at least because of the new controls and regulations instituted after the creation in 1728 of the first of Spain's new monopoly companies, the Royal Company of Guipuzcoa. The company was run by Basque merchants who used their monopoly to acquire a stranglehold over the Venezuelan economy, forcing down the price of cacao, while forcing up the price of the European imports carried in their ships. Some at least of the larger planters fell heavily into debt, but it was the smaller planters, many of them recent immigrants from the Canary Islands, who were the principal sufferers. In 1749 bands of cacao farmers and rural labourers marched on Caracas in protest against the Company's economic domination. Led by a local official, Juan Francisco de Leon, they enjoyed at least the covert support of many of the large planters. An open meeting of the Caracas cabildo voted overwhelmingly against the government-supported monopoly. But as the royal governor of Venezuela fled Caracas, and resistance threatened to turn into rebellion, the leading families of Caracas pulled back.71

Although they sympathized with the protest, the great plantation-owners were primarily swayed by fears of a slave revolt. As a result of their long experience in the cabildo of negotiating with royal officials, moreover, they may also have sensed that their disagreements with the Basques could be resolved in the traditional manner by mediation and legal manoeuvring.'2 A royal judge, accompanied by troops, was sent from Santo Domingo to undertake an inquiry, and was followed by a new governor, who arrived from Cadiz with reinforcements of 1,200 men. The extent of the opposition persuaded him to offer a general amnesty, and with the Basque monopoly temporarily suspended, peace was restored. His successor, however, arrived in 1751 with instructions to restore the company's monopoly and ensure the submission of Caracas. Leon and other leaders of the revolt were hunted down by the troops, many were executed, and Leon himself was sent to Spain to stand trial. The authorities subsequently demolished the Leon family house in Caracas, and had salt scattered on the ruins as a mark of infamy. Repression, it seemed, had won the day, but the royal authorities, in one of those juggling acts at which they were so practised, proceeded to impose restraints on the company's monopoly and create a junta to regulate cacao prices on an annual basis. In this more acceptable form the company maintained its nominal monopoly status until the crown rescinded its contract in 1781 as part of its new policy of free trade.

The Virginia planters, firmly committed to what they saw as fundamental principles where liberty was threatened, were a more intransigent body than their Venezuelan counterparts. Their natural instincts were not to negotiate but to stand up for their rights, and their defiant stance in the summer of 1774 helped to stiffen opposition throughout the colonies. Between them, Massachusetts and Virginia made a formidable alliance, but it was by no means assured of success when the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774. Many of the 55 delegates, like Joseph Galloway, the most powerful figure in Pennsylvania politics, were deeply worried by the threat of a general breakdown of order. A lawyer with a deep respect for the British constitution, he submitted to the Congress what in retrospect appears as a last-ditch attempt at an accommodation between the colonies and Britain, in the form of a proposal for an organic union: `the colonies ... most ardently desire the establishment of a Political Union, not only among themselves but with the Mother State ...'73 It was the same plea for treatment on an equal footing that the creoles of Spanish America were making, and involved the establishment of a common colonial legislature which would act in concert with the British parliament for all legislation affecting colonial life.

Galloway and his Pennsylvania delegates were widely distrusted in the Congress, but the narrowness of the vote by which his `Plan of Union' was defeated suggests how strong the desire remained to avoid a total rupture with the mother country.74 The Congress, however, had assembled in Philadelphia to petition for redress of grievances, and the delegates were determined to push ahead with a clear statement of colonial rights.75 While the Grand Committee appointed by the Congress was still at work drafting a Bill of Rights and List of Grievances, the delegates agreed on 20 October 1774, after difficult discussions, to set up a Continental Association that would impose a more wide-ranging embargo on trade with Britain than any yet attempted. Non-importation of British goods was to go into effect on 1 December 1774. Non-consumption would follow on 1 March 1775, and non-exportation to Britain on 1 September of that year. Local `associations' would enforce a policy common to all.

The rich associational life of the cities of British America - richer, it is to be suspected, than that of contemporary Spanish American cities, for all their religious confraternities - now proved its value. Across the colonies a network of voluntary groups sprang into action to organize the new stoppage of trade.76 These local associations formed part of a wider movement that was already well under way, whereby colony after colony experienced a dramatic shift in the location and balance of power. Royal governors, together with the proprietary governors of Pennsylvania and Maryland, watched helplessly as their authority dissolved before their eyes. As elections were held across the colonies for Association committees, members of the old elites observed with consternation the eruption of popular elements into political life. The new committees, acting in the name of Congress, set about tracking down dissidents to the non-importation agreement, and offenders found themselves exposed to summary justice by an angry populace. The old dominant groups, like Joseph Galloway and his cautious colleagues in the Pennsylvania Assembly, saw themselves under growing pressure from insurgency in the streets. Imperial and local politics had become hopelessly intertwined, and each colony was embarking on revolution in its own way."