Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (84 page)

Nothing came of Aranda's proposal, which had as little chance of implementation as Lord Shelburne's despairing attempt in the preceding year to save Britain's North American empire by reconstituting it as a consortium of independent states, each with its own assembly but still subject to the crown - a proposal that earned from Franklin the scathing retort that `surely there was never a more preposterous chimera conceived in the brain of a minister."" Madrid was in no mood to retreat from empire. A strong military establishment and a continued but judiciously applied programme of reforms seemed to be the best way of avoiding the fate that had overtaken Britain's American possessions. This remained Charles III's chosen policy up to the time of his death in 1788 on the eve of the French Revolution.

Yet it remained an open question how long the ministers in Madrid could hope to hold the line in a world swept by revolutionary winds. By now, as Madrid feared, a handful of Spanish American creoles were beginning to think the previously unthinkable. Among them was Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan who had joined the Spanish army as an infantry captain. Appointed aide to the Spanish commander in Cuba, he fought against the British in Pensacola and helped the French fleet to reach the Chesapeake Bay and provide the support which would enable Washington to secure the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Miranda later described his reactions to the settlement negotiated between the Comuneros and the royal authorities: `When I realized on receiving the Pact of Zipaquira how simple and inexperienced the Americans were, and on the other hand how astute and perfidious the Spanish agents had proved, I thought it best to suffer for a time in patience until the Anglo-American colonies achieved their independence, which was bound to be ... the infallible preliminary to our own."" If Miranda's was the voice of the future, the curtain was finally descending on a repetitive and long-running drama - the drama of confrontation followed by accommodation that had enabled Spain to retain its empire of the Indies for nearly 300 years.

The Articles of Confederation which bound the rebellious North American colonies together into a precarious Union were agreed by Congress, after intense debate, in November 1777. Union did not come easily. The intensity of local loyalties had traditionally militated against inter-colonial collaboration, and numerous boundary disputes, like those which pitted Virginia against its neighbours for control of Indian territory west of the Alleghenies, fanned the flames of rivalry. There were, too, deep social, political and ideological divisions within each of the newly united states over the character of the republic that was now to be established.

Resistance and revolution had both encouraged and brought into positions of prominence radical elements in the various colonies, motivated not only by hostility to continuing British rule but also by resentment at the dominance of traditional elites. These radicals, deeply engaged in framing their own state constitutions, had no intention of replacing one centralizing authority - that of the King of England - by another, the Congress of the United States. The new Confederation must be firmly grounded on the rights of individual states and the principle of popular sovereignty, and, for some at least, this sovereignty had to be `popular' in the most democratic sense of the word. Against these populist radicals were ranged those more conservative elements in society, not least from among the mercantile and planter elites, who were horrified by the outbreaks of mob violence that had accompanied the Revolution, viewed with deep concern the prospect of `democratic' rule in the new republic, and were convinced of the need for a strong executive, both to prosecute the war of independence to a successful conclusion, and to maintain political and social stability once the war was won.1

Given these deep differences, it is not surprising that it took until March 1781 for the Articles of Confederation to be ratified by all thirteen states. The western land question in particular proved enormously contentious, with states that had no western land claims anxious to ensure that newly settled territories should form part of a genuinely national domain. A combination of hard bargaining and the pressures of war eventually brought the recalcitrant states to heel, with Maryland taking up the rear. The approval of the Articles formally endowed the new republic with a national government. Reflecting the balance of political forces during the revolutionary years, however, the `national' element in the Confederation set up by the Articles was weak in relation to the federal element. As the new republic found itself confronted by the enormous problems of the post-war era - a heavy burden of debt, a depreciated currency, widespread social unrest, and the unresolved question of expansion to the west - there were growing doubts about its long-term prospects for survival. The states were drawing in again on themselves, and Congress, its reputation in decline, was proving increasingly powerless to mediate disputes and halt the general process of drift. Each new problem that emerged in these immediate post-war years appeared to strengthen the force of the conventional argument that a republic could only be viable so long as it was small.2

Those Americans who gave thought to the future of their country as one in which a kingless people would live together in harmony on a continental scale were driven by the logic of events to realize that they were faced by a challenge of even greater magnitude than that of overthrowing British rule. Their revolution would not be complete until they had succeeded in devising a new political order in which the claims of the component states to sovereign rights and of individuals to their fundamental liberties would be balanced by the creation of a central executive strong enough to regulate matters of mutual concern and to defend American interests on the international stage. In the years after the winning of independence this challenge was to exercise the most creative minds in the new republic, and not least that of James Madison, who had become keenly aware, while representing his home state of Virginia in the Congress, of the weaknesses and inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation.

The balance of forces in the Congress had favoured those elements in the society of revolutionary America determined to secure in perpetuity the rights of the states by granting a bare minimum of powers to the central executive. The 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention which met in Philadelphia in May 1787, on the other hand, were of a background and temperament that tended to predispose them towards a strengthening of the national government. For Thomas Jefferson, scrutinizing the list of names in Paris, where he had been posted as the minister of the new republic, the Convention was `an assembly of demigods'.3 Largely drawn from the political elite of their states, most of the delegates had been associated with the Revolution in one way or another, and between them they had accumulated an impressive range of political experience at both the local and the national level. Of the 55, 42 had served at one time or another in Congress,4 and in spite of their intense loyalty to their own state, many of them, like Madison, had come to see the overriding need for a more effective system of government.

The task that Madison set himself was to replace the Articles of Confederation with a constitution that would establish a strong national government, but one that was firmly based on the foundation of genuine popular sovereignty. The task inevitably required much squaring of the circle. Hard and often acrimonious bargaining was required to hammer out often painful compromises between competing interests. The most successful of these compromises was the provision whereby representation in the lower house of the legislature would be apportioned on the basis of population, while in the upper house the states would enjoy equal votes. The least successful was on the hopelessly divisive issues of slavery and the slave trade. Any attempt to abolish slavery would effectively strangle the union at birth, and the overriding concern at this moment was to keep the republic alive and ensure that its vital organs were strong enough to let it breathe and grow This could only be achieved by a series of deals in which the continuation of slavery was obliquely confirmed by a number of sections in the articles of the new constitution. For purposes of representation in the House of Representatives, slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person, and a further period of twenty years' grace was allowed before Congress would return to the issue of the slave trade.' Evasiveness in this instance was the prerequisite for survival.

Having appropriated the name of `Federalists' for themselves, those who favoured a strong national executive took their case to the people in the great national debate over the ratification of the proposed new constitution in 1787-8. In the hard-fought struggle between Federalists and anti-Federalists, it was the Federalists who prevailed. With its ratification by the ninth of the thirteen states, New Hampshire, in June 1788, the new constitution officially became the law of the land, although four states, including Virginia and New York, were still holding out. But when both these major states agreed to ratification a few weeks later, although by narrow majorities, the battle was won.

When it came to choosing the first president of the new republic, the choice was foreordained. One figure, the hero of the war of independence, towered above the rest. The election of George Washington in March 1789 conferred dignity on the institution of the presidency while guaranteeing moderation and common sense in the exercise of its powers. Above all it linked, in the person of a renowned and universally respected individual, the revolutionary struggle against the British to the great constitutional experiment on which the newly established United States of America was now well and truly embarked.

In 1787, while the Federalists and anti-Federalists in North America were fighting each other for the soul of the new republic, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to the secretary of the American delegation in London: `You ask me if any thing transpires here on the subject of S. America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only.'6 His assessment, however, proved premature. In New Granada and Peru the fires had been effectively extinguished, and in the central regions of the viceroyalty of New Spain no figure emerged to light the torch of rebellion when harvest failure and a devastating shortage of food provoked widespread social disruption in 1785-6.7 Although the North American example encouraged a few radicals like Francisco de Miranda to dream and conspire, the Spanish crown seemed to have succeeded in damping down the combustible materials, and had emerged from the conflagrations of the early 1780s with its authority reaffirmed.

With the confidence given them by the sense of a crisis overcome, Jose de Galvez and his colleagues in Madrid pressed ahead with their restructuring of the old administrative system, extending administration by intendants to Peru in 1784 and to New Spain in 1786. Galvez himself died in 1787 but ministers continued to pursue the programme of reform, and most notably the reform of the transatlantic trading system which had been inaugurated by the proclamation of `free trade' in 1778. In this they were responding to continuing pressures from the peripheral regions of the Iberian peninsula for a foothold in a commercial system long dominated by the Consulado of Cadiz. Statistics suggesting that the ten years since the promulgation of the decree had seen a threefold expansion in colonial trade were sufficiently encouraging to persuade them to extend the system to Venezuela in 1788, and then in the following year to New Spain.

In reality the trading system remained heavily protectionist, in spite of its gestures towards the now fashionable economic liberalism. Yet for all its limitations it did afford greater latitude to Iberian and Spanish American merchants conducting business outside the old monopolistic structure. It also helped to stimulate economic activity in hitherto marginalized regions of the Indies, although simultaneously generating new inter-colonial rivalries as different provinces competed for a share of the expanding opportunities.'

The fiscal and economic rewards which Madrid anticipated from the latest phase of the reform programme were, however, soon offset by the impact of war. Spain would pay a high price for its intervention in the American War of Independence. Trade was disrupted by the English naval blockade, ships were lost and businesses paralysed. New wars brought further disruption in the 1790s. Charles III died at the end of 1788, and the new reign of Charles IV was overshadowed almost from the start by the outbreak of revolution in France. In the spring of 1793 revolutionary France declared war on Spain, shortly after Charles IV had dispensed with the services of the last of his father's team of ministers, the Count of Aranda. The royal favourite, the young and politically inexperienced guards officer Manuel Godoy, now became first secretary of state. The new war brought Spain into uneasy partnership with Great Britain, whose maritime supremacy was resented and feared by Madrid. It also had the effect of cutting off the supply of French products traditionally re-exported by Spanish merchants to the Indies, opening the lucrative Spanish American market to penetration not only by British merchants but also by those of the United States.

Godoy's anxieties over the threat to Spain's American empire from British naval and commercial power persuaded him of the need to change tack. In October 1796 Spain joined regicide France in an offensive and defensive alliance against Great Britain. French support was to come at a price. In 1800, at the treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain agreed under pressure from Napoleon to restore Louisiana to the French, although Charles IV, anxious about the growing power of the United States and its implication for the future of the Floridas, only accepted the transfer on condition that Louisiana was not subsequently relinquished to a third party. In 1802 Spain duly transferred Louisiana to French rule, but in the following year Napoleon reneged on his promise and sold it to the United States. Thanks to President Jefferson's opportune negotiation of the Louisiana purchase the new republic had doubled its territory at a stroke, weakening in the process Spain's already precarious hold on the Floridas, which would eventually be ceded to the United States in 1819, and opening the road to the colonization of the American interior.9