Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (85 page)

The concessions forced upon Charles IV to secure the support of the French failed to yield the expected results. The war with Great Britain, which continued until 1802 and was then renewed in 1804, proved a disaster for Spain. In February 1797 its fleet was defeated at the battle of Cape St Vincent, and the British seized the island of Trinidad, off the Venezuelan coast. The blockade of Cadiz by the British fleet made it impossible for Spain to keep the American market supplied, and Madrid was compelled to open Spanish American ports to neutral carriers. Again United States traders were the great beneficiaries, supplying wheat, flour and other commodities to the Spanish Antilles, Venezuela and New Granada. The new protectionist system launched by Madrid under the deceptive flag of `free trade', and intended to make the peninsula the metropolis of a great commercial empire on the British model, had effectively collapsed.'°

While economic control of the Indies was slipping irrevocably out of Spanish hands, more than a decade of almost continuous warfare placed the finances of the Spanish crown under intolerable strain. Both in Spain and in the Indies the wealth of the church and of religious and charitable institutions proved an irresistible attraction to a near-bankrupt state. An encouraging precedent existed in the seizure of Jesuit property on both sides of the Atlantic in 1767. In 1798 the crown decreed the disentailment and auction of church property in peninsular Spain, the resulting funds being used to consolidate loans to meet the costs of war. In 1804, following the renewal of war with England, this Law of Consolidation was extended to charitable funds in Spanish America. The measure aroused intense anger. Over large parts of America, church assets were integral to the working of the credit system, and the new law meant in effect the forced sale of large numbers of private estates and businesses as proprietors were compelled by the withdrawal of credit to redeem the capital value of their loans. Not all regions were equally affected, but New Spain, where mining and other enterprises were heavily reliant on credit and where the viceroy Jose de Iturrigaray energetically enforced the royal order, was especially hard hit. By the time the decree was revoked five years later enormous damage had been done. Mining, agriculture and trade had all been drastically affected, and parish priests and clergy living on interest from loans saw their livelihood gone. Already undermined by the regalist policies of Charles III, the church-state alliance, the central pillar of the elaborate edifice of Spain's empire of the Indies, was beginning to totter."

In spite of increased revenues from the Indies, which constituted a fifth of the Spanish treasury's receipts in the period between 1784 and 1805,12 the Spanish state was now struggling to keep afloat. Its finances were heavily mortgaged; the combination of harvest failures and depression in Spain's war-damaged economy was generating fresh social tensions; and Godoy's government was in disarray. In March 1808 he was overthrown in a palace coup and Charles IV was forced to abdicate in favour of his son and heir, Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias. But Napoleon had had enough of his unreliable Spanish ally. As French forces moved on Madrid, the new king, Ferdinand VII, was lured to France, where he joined his parents and Godoy in exile at Bayonne. On 10 May he too was forced to abdicate. When Napoleon subsequently transferred the crown to Joseph Bonaparte, there was no longer an uncontested source of legitimate authority in Spain and its empire of the Indies.

The overthrow of the Bourbons and the French occupation unleashed a popular uprising which plunged the peninsula into years of chaos and war that would only end with the defeat of the French and the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814. Not only metropolitan Spain but also its overseas empire were confronted with a crisis of unprecedented proportions. With a power vacuum at the very centre of the imperial government in Madrid, where did legitimate authority lie? To some extent, Spain's American empire had been faced with a comparable problem on the death of Carlos II in 1700, but the problem had been quickly transcended as the overseas viceroyalties fell into line behind Carlos's legally designated successor, Philip V But the situation this time was very different. Joseph Bonaparte was a usurper; Ferdinand VII was in exile; and, as Jefferson had written in 1787, `there are combustible materials there and they wait the torch only.' Would the overthrow of the dynasty prove to be the torch?

The collapse of royal power in the Hispanic world precipitated a very different kind of crisis from that which faced Britain's American colonies in the 1770s. The Spanish American crisis of 1808 was brought about by the absence, not the exercise, of imperial authority. In this sense it was closer to the situation created in the English Atlantic world by the execution of Charles I. But although the regicide of 1649 and the subsequent transfer of imperial authority to the people in parliament posed serious constitutional and practical problems for colonies that owed their existence to royal charters, the policies pursued by the imperial government under the Commonwealth and Protectorate were sufficiently respectful of established institutions and interests to prevent violent confrontation, even with those colonies which had proclaimed their loyalty to the dead king's son.13 The transition was further eased by the willingness of the new regime to abide by the largely non-interventionist approach of its predecessor to the internal affairs of the colonial societies. Moreover, the Cromwellian government spoke a language of national power which they could both understand and respect.

The peoples of Spanish America, on the other hand, had lived for centuries under a royal government which was traditionally interventionist in principle, if not always in practice. They had grown accustomed to conducting their lives by reference to the royal authority, however ineffectual it might often have been. Now suddenly that authority was gone, and they found themselves drifting rudderless on an ocean of uncertainty. Nor could they expect metropolitan Spain to come to their rescue. The country was in chaos, and the ships that arrived from Spanish ports at irregular intervals brought conflicting messages and tardy news of a war that was going from bad to worse.

As the people of Spain took up arms, a number of regional and local juntas sprang to life in the peninsula to organize popular resistance against the French. In September 1808 these juntas were co-ordinated with some difficulty into a Junta Central, which took refuge in Seville after the French capture of Madrid. As French forces moved southwards into Andalusia in January 1810, the junta again fled, this time to Cadiz, which was sheltered by the protective power of the British fleet. Here the junta dissolved itself in favour of a Regency Council acting on behalf of the exiled Ferdinand VII, the deseado, the longed-for king.

Although the Regency Council was a conservative body, it was dependent on the mercantile oligarchy of Cadiz, which was politically liberal, although tenacious in its determination to cling to what remained of its privileged position in the American trade. Under pressure from the Cadiz elite, the Regency Council went ahead with plans already set in train by the junta Central for the convocation of a great national assembly, or Cortes, in which deputies from Spanish America were also invited to participate. The Cortes assembled in Cadiz on 14 September 1810 and were to remain in session until the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814.14

With the king in exile, and metropolitan Spain apparently on the point of being engulfed by the tide of the French advance, the four viceroyalties and nine presidencies and captaincies-general which constituted Spain's American empire were thrown back on their own devices. In contrast to the British American colonies, these diverse territories had no colonial assemblies to act as potential alternative sources of leadership if royal authority were challenged or collapsed. The cabildos of major cities, like Mexico City, Lima and Bogota, traditionally put forward claims to speak on behalf of the wider community, but these claims were liable to be contested by rival town councils, and there was no generally accepted forum for the discussion and resolution of problems of common concern to the territory as a whole. Not surprisingly, therefore, in 1808 different territories adopted different ad hoc solutions to the problem of legitimacy - solutions which reflected the balance of local forces in societies already under strain from the tensions created by ethnic diversity and by the antagonism between creoles and peninsulares.

Yet it was the search for legitimacy rather than aspirations after independence that initially dictated the course of events. The instinctive reaction, in Spanish America as in metropolitan Spain, was to resort to the principle that, in the absence of the legitimate monarch, sovereignty reverted to the people. This was the principle that legitimized the juntas that had sprung into life in the peninsula when the monarchy was overthrown. When `the kingdom found itself suddenly without a king or a government', declared the supreme junta of Seville in 1808, `... the people legally resumed the power to create a government."' As news of events in Spain trickled across the Atlantic, the Americans followed the Spanish example. Following the arrival of letters in Caracas in July 1808 ordering the authorities to take the oath of allegiance to Joseph Bonaparte, the city council urged the captain-general to set up a junta to decide on the course of action to be taken.16 Similarly, the councils of Mexico City, Bogota, Quito and Buenos Aires would all see in the formation of provisional juntas acting in the name of Ferdinand VII an appropriate mechanism for ensuring the legitimation of authority through the assertion of the popular will.''

There was, however, in America as in Spain, an inherent tension between the absolutist traditions of Bourbon monarchy as legitimately represented by the exiled Ferdinand VII and a doctrine of popular sovereignty which, although rooted in medieval Hispanic constitutionalism, was in the process of acquiring the colouring and characteristics of a new and very different age. The reforming ministers of Charles III had persistently sought to remould the aggregated territories of the old Habsburg monarchy and their privileged corporations into a unitary nation-state subordinate to a benevolent but all-powerful monarch.18 In the peninsula the incipient sense of Spanish nationhood that ministers had tried so hard to inculcate was dramatically transmuted by the French invasion into the full-blooded nationalist response of a mass uprising. But at the same time the crisis of legitimacy created by the events of 1808 gave those sections of Spanish opinion which had assimilated revolutionary French and American notions of popular sovereignty an unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct on liberal foundations the antiquated edifice of old regime Spain. Their instrument for the process of reconstruction would be the Cortes of Cadiz, which enthusiastically set about endowing Spain with a written constitution that would hold monarchical power in check. Ferdinand in his exile might still be an unknown quantity, but a liberal Cortes and an absolutist dynasty were infallibly set on a collision course.

In America, the attempts of Charles III's ministers to encompass his New World subjects within the framework of the unitary nation-state had proved counter-productive. The imposition of unpopular fiscal measures and the replacement of creoles by peninsulares in offices which they believed belonged to them of right had merely heightened traditional resentments against the mother country. Denied participation in the Bourbon nation-state on an equal basis with the peoples of metropolitan Spain, the creoles were confirmed in their belief that they had been rejected by the community to which they had always thought they belonged. In British America the colonial elites had felt a similar sense of rejection when confronted by the assertive nationalism emanating from the metropolitan centre in the triumphalist years of Britain's victory over France. For reasons they failed to understand they had been excluded from the victory feast.19

The British colonists, however, had not gone as far as their Spanish American counterparts in developing a historically based creole patriotic mythology into which their sense of injustice could be incorporated. Unable to win redress for their grievances by asserting their claims to their hereditary English privileges, they turned in exasperation to the invocation of their natural rather than their historic rights. The consciousness of a distinctively American identity that eventually emerged in the thirteen colonies was less a cause than a consequence of revolution, the outcome of their shared experience of war and nation-building as they sought to establish a republic dedicated to the consecration and diffusion of those natural rights.

By contrast, renewed metropolitan pressure since the mid-century on the creoles of Spanish America had reinforced an existing sense of distinctive identities already well rooted in time and place. By 1808 a new generation of Spanish Americans had begun to pick up the new international language of universal natural rights, but the predominant language remained that of a plurality of creole patriotisms, operating within the traditional framework of the Spanish imperial monarchy. These local patriotisms, however, were too circumscribed, both socially and geographically, to have created by 1808 genuinely `national' movements aspiring to independence from Spain.20 Socially they hardly extended beyond the creole elite, leaving only the most notional space for the other ethnic groups. Geographically they tended to be confined to the leading cities and their hinterlands. Even within the larger-sized administrative units created by Spanish imperialism, local patriotism proved dangerously divisive.

The question posed by the catastrophe of 1808 was whether creole patriotism could still be contained within the framework of the imperial monarchy once legitimate authority had collapsed. Spurred by hostility to France and to Godoy, who had appointed several of the peninsular officials currently in office'21 creole elites across America responded initially to the news from Spain by rallying to the cause of Ferdinand VII. At the same time, however, they saw in the crisis their chance to reverse the unpopular royal policies of recent years, like the Law of Consolidation, and secure a degree of control over their own affairs which would effectively amount to self-government. As they began to talk of sovereignty reverting to the people in the absence of the king, and organized town meetings and juntas to chart the way forward, their behaviour inevitably provoked confrontations with royal officials and peninsulares, who feared that Spain's American empire would soon go the way of Britain's, and who were desperate to cling to the remnants of metropolitan authority.