Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (86 page)

Normality, or at least the appearance of it, was best maintained in Peru, where memories of the Tupac Amaru revolt were still raw, and where the viceroy, Jose Fernando de Abascal, played his cards with skill.22 Elsewhere, 1808 and 1809 were years of conspiracies and coups. The situation was especially acute in New Spain, where the viceroy, Jose de Iturrigaray, was regarded by peninsular officials as too sympathetic to creole aspirations, and was deposed in October 1808 by a group of peninsulares, acting with the connivance of Spanish merchants, landlords and high-ranking clerics. The conspirators, supported by a privately recruited militia, known as the Volunteers of Ferdinand VII, followed up their success by imposing a repressive and reactionary regime which would only serve to stoke the fires of resentment against Spanish domination.23

In 1809 a British observer, possibly James Mill writing under the pseudonym of `William Burke', wrote that `Spanish America is, virtually, independent at this moment.'24 Whether creole hopes for autonomy, however, would tip over into full-blown demands for independence was very much an open question in 1809-10. The situation was changing in both Spain and America with extreme rapidity, and what was unthinkable one day became thinkable the next. On the one hand there were indications of a new receptiveness to creole aspirations in Spain itself, while inside America, on the other hand, there was growing disaffection over the opposition of Spanish officials and Spanish interest groups to those aspirations. At the same time, the loosening of imperial control created opportunities for radicals, especially on the fringes of empire, to spread, and act upon, revolutionary ideas which were now emerging into the open after years of twilight circulation.

In January 1809 the Spanish Junta Central issued a decree which suggested that metropolitan Spain was at last prepared to listen to long-standing American complaints. In the name of Ferdinand VII it affirmed that `the vast and precious dominions which Spain possesses in the Indies are not properly colonies, or fac- torias, like those of other nations, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy.' In order to tighten `the sacred bonds uniting the various dominions', the overseas territories were now to enjoy `national representation', and were asked to send deputies to join the junta Central.21 There was a clear inequality of numbers - nine Americans to thirty-six deputies from metropolitan Spain - but for the first time American representatives had been asked to take their place in a central organ of Spanish government. These were, moreover, to be elected representatives, one for each kingdom. This, too, was a novelty. The elections were to fall to the city councils, and there were lengthy and complicated debates over electoral procedures and over how important a city must be to qualify for the franchise.26

The elections in America were overtaken by the decision of the junta Central to summon a national assembly, and the American territories were duly invited to send deputies to the Cortes that eventually met in Cadiz in the autumn of 1810. These Cortes, entrusted with the task of restructuring the government of Spain, were to embark on an unprecedented exercise - the drafting of a constitution for a nation-state of which an overseas empire formed an integral part.27 The House of Commons had shown no interest when Franklin argued in 1767 that `a fair and equal representation of all parts of this Empire in Parliament, is the only firm Basis on which its political Grandeur and Stability can be founded.'28 Instead it was happy to assume, as Thomas Whately assumed in 1767, that the colonists were `virtually represented' in parliament, and that this was sufficient.29 Now the Regency Council and the Cortes of Cadiz were taking the road that Britain had failed to take, although they were doing so with very little knowledge of the true situation in Spain's American territories. In its place they cherished a blind faith that Spain and America were afflicted by the same ills, and that a `common cure' would do for both.3o

The number of deputies allocated to the American territories was in fact very far from allowing for that `fair and equal representation' that Franklin had demanded for the American colonists in the British imperial parliament. This inequality in their representation was to be a major source of grievance to the Americans even before the Cortes assembled. The Junta of Caracas complained in May 1810 of the `disproportion in the number of deputies to the population of America', and the question of proportionality was promptly taken up, although unsuccessfully, by the American representatives when the Cortes convened. This was a point on which the Spanish deputies were afraid to give ground. Contemporary estimates put the population of Spanish America at between 15 and 16 million, as against a Spanish population of 10 million, and metropolitan Spain could not afford to let itself be outvoted by its imperial possessions.31

Beyond the question of numbers lay the even more intractable question of how to integrate into a nation-state established on the principle of popular sovereignty a number of erstwhile colonies that were now to enjoy juridical parity with the metropolis. The British colonies after winning their independence solved a comparable problem by transforming themselves into a federal republic in which central authority and local autonomy were carefully balanced. Spanish liberals, however, rejected the notion of a republic, which was too closely associated with revolutionary France and its invading armies to be an acceptable solution, and hoped instead to turn their country into a British-style constitutional monarchy. But their instincts were to centralize, and it was not easy to see how centralizing tendencies could be reconciled with American demands for local autonomy, or how the resulting structure could be convincingly articulated into a unitary nation-state in the form of a constitutional monarchy spanning the Atlantic.32

The times, in any event, could scarcely have been less propitious for a novel constitutional experiment of this kind. From early 1810, when it seemed that the entire peninsula was about to fall into French hands, the American territories independently began taking emergency measures to ensure their own survival. The city council of Caracas was the first to act. The captain-general, Vicente Emparan, was looked upon as a francophile who might well deliver Venezuela into the hands of Joseph Bonaparte. The new Regency Council in Spain, for its part, was seen as the instrument of the Consulado of Cadiz merchants, and therefore as a threat to the freedom of trade essential to the survival of Venezuela's export economy. In April 1810 the Caracas council transformed itself into a Supreme junta, and voted Emparan out of office, while simultaneously rejecting the authority of the Regency Council in Spain. It was careful, however, to explain that it was not declaring its independence of the mother country, but was acting to preserve the rights of Ferdinand VII.33

A month later the mercantile and landowning elite of Buenos Aires reacted in much the same way as that of Caracas to the news from Spain, and for much the same reasons, although here the city council was dominated by peninsulares, and the pressure for action in May 1810 came from outside the council. Since the creation of the viceroyalty of La Plata in 1776 and its release from its old dependency on Lima, Buenos Aires had prospered.34 The liberalization of trade had brought growth in the export trade in hides and agricultural produce, although the silver of Upper Peru remained the viceroyalty's principal export. It was with this silver that Buenos Aires merchants paid for the European manufactured goods which they made it their business to distribute through the continent.35

The French occupation of Spain and the establishment of a Regency Council suspected of wanting to promote the restrictive interests of the Cadiz merchants made the creole elite of Buenos Aires, like that of Caracas, fearful for the future. But the successful repulse by the militia regiments of two attempted invasions by British expeditionary forces in 1806 and 1807 had generated a new sense of local pride and self-reliance, while leaving the inadequacy of the viceregal administration painfully exposed. The creole elite, therefore, with the support of the local militia, felt confident enough to bypass the peninsula-controlled city council, establish a junta and overthrow the viceroy.36

Over the summer and autumn of 1810 similar moves for the removal of local governors and officials and the establishment of juntas occurred in Santiago de Chile, Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogota, as a chain reaction developed across the continent. The juntas all claimed, like that of Caracas, to be acting in the name of the people to preserve the rights of their legitimate ruler, Ferdinand VII. The next step, intended to broaden the basis of support for further action, was likely to be the calling of a national congress, as in Buenos Aires in the `May Revolution' of 1810, and in Caracas and Santiago de Chile in March and July of 1811 respectively.37 The Cortes of Cadiz, at least as much as the French and American models, were the inspiration behind the calling of these assemblies.38 Based on a narrow electorate of property-holders, their convocation would allow the creole elites to consolidate their still precarious hold on power while simultaneously speaking the language of popular sovereignty.

Beneath a veneer of legality, therefore, one after another the creole elites of Spanish America were exploiting the weakness of the metropolitan government to grasp at local autonomy. This was still autonomy within the framework of the monarchy and empire, but the framework was now so weak that autonomous provinces would in practice be more or less free to do as they pleased. These years, however, had seen the emergence of constellations of radicals who would be content with nothing less than separation from the Spanish crown and total independence. This was particularly true of Venezuela, where the gilded youth of Caracas responded with enthusiasm to the ideas of liberty enshrined in the French and American revolutions. A minority among the members of the newly founded Patriotic Society, influenced by that veteran revolutionary Francisco de Miranda and the visionary young Simon Bolivar, was now actively working for a free and independent republic. It was under the inspiration of Bolivar's oratory in the national congress that the old creole elite joined forces with the young Patriots on 5 July 1811 to proclaim the independence of Venezuela - the first such declaration in the territories of Spain's American empire. They proceeded to draft a new and nominally democratic constitution on the model of the federal constitution of the United States. Its life, however, was short. The decision taken by the national congress plunged the country into civil war, and within a year the first Venezuelan republic had collapsed.39

The failure of the Venezuelan republic was an early indication of the obstacles on the road that led to genuine independence. From the beginning, strong forces were ranged against movements for autonomy, which looked to many people like mere preliminaries to total separation from Spain. The coup that had been launched in New Spain in 1808 by peninsular Spaniards and creoles closely identified with Spanish interests revealed the strength of these forces. Their subsequent dominance provoked a backlash in October 1810, when Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of the town of Dolores in the Bajio, tolled the church bell to launch what he hoped would become a national insurrection. As massed bands of peasants - Indians and castas - rallied behind the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Hidalgo's southward march, it looked for a moment as if the entire viceroyalty would be swept up in a general rebellion which would put an end to the dominance of the hated peninsulares. But Hidalgo's inability to restrain the indiscriminate violence of his followers, and a programme of social reforms that included the abolition of Indian tribute and of ethnic distinctions, rapidly alienated the creole elite which had at first seen the rebellion as favouring their bid for autonomy. Their fear of social upheaval, as in Peru after the revolt of Tupac Amaru, proved stronger than their dislike of peninsulares, with whom they now made common cause to stem the tide of violence. With the great mass of provincial as well as regular troops remaining loyal to the authorities, Hidalgo's revolt was crushed.40

If alarm at the prospect of ethnic and class warfare held back even those creoles most anxious to free themselves from metropolitan shackles, local and provincial rivalries also obstructed their moves to seize autonomy. The town councils of Coro and Maracaibo, for instance, refused to follow Caracas in 1810 and instead declared their support for the Regency Council in Spain.41 Similarly, the revolution of May 1810 in Buenos Aires was opposed by the rival city of Montevideo in the so-called Banda Oriental - the future Uruguay - and also by the interior provinces of the viceroyalty of La Plata, Paraguay and Upper Peru.42 These regions had their own agendas and their own economic concerns, and were more inclined to rally to the Spanish authorities than to follow a Buenos Aires whose dominance they resented.

Loyalism in Spanish America, as in the rebel British colonies a generation earlier, had many different faces.43 As the reactions of Maracaibo or Montevideo indicated, it contained, as in British America, a strong economic and geographical determinant. In Venezuela the fault-line ran between the mercantile and landowning elite of Caracas and the Indian peasants and pardon (people with some degree of African ancestry) who ranged freely with their animals over the llanos - the grasslands of the interior - and saw the crown as their protector against the growing menace of encroachment by the Caracas landowners.44 In British America the loyalist regions similarly tended to be those regions facing, or already suffering from, the economic and political dominance of richer adjoining areas. Such regions included the Appalachian frontier territories whose thinly settled inhabitants looked to the crown to protect their way of life as hunters, trappers and traders against the advance of close agricultural settlement.45

Geography was far from being the sole determinant of loyalty. As events in the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain suggested, the extent of the ethnic division in Spain's American territories was liable to make loyalists of creoles who might otherwise have been inclined to favour the struggle for autonomy. The fear of social and racial upheaval in a Venezuela where over 50 per cent of the population was of mixed blood and where there were repeated slave rebellions was to act as a similar restraining influence on the Caracas elite in 1812 and 1814.46 But in Spanish as in British America there were many whose loyalism was instinctive, rather than merely opportunistic. Creole patriotism had always been compatible with a deep reverence for monarchy, and, as the British North American experience showed, traditional instincts of loyalty died hard even after the king himself came to be seen as the direct source of the people's ills. When, as in Spanish America, the monarch was not the oppressor but the oppressed, an extra emotional element was added to the fervour of loyalty.