Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (88 page)

Yet while there was no substantial tradition of popular participation in the political process, the dramatic events of the past two decades had the effect of politicizing growing numbers of people, especially in the cities. This was particularly true of New Spain, where the educational reforms promoted by church and crown during the second half of the eighteenth century had produced a society sufficiently literate for the written word to shape and sway opinion, even in relatively remote communities.73 With freedom of the press decreed by the Cortes of Cadiz, reports of the Cortes debates were widely followed, both inside and outside the peninsula, and Havana became a major centre for the publication and distribution of Spanish political news. In America there was an upsurge in the regional printing of pamphlets and newspapers, with a single day's issue of the Diario de Mexico in 1811 enjoying a print run of 7,000 copies. Yet even following the publication of the Cadiz constitution in the New World, freedom of the press remained precarious. It was not difficult for the authorities, as in New Spain, to suspend the operation of the decree, although printed matter originating in Spain, Britain and the United States still continued to keep Spanish American populations abreast of new developments both in Europe and in their own hemisphere.74

The more informed people became about events in Spain, however, the greater was their disillusionment with the response of the Cadiz Cortes to American complaints. At the same time, conditions in America itself were proving unfavourable to effective American representation in the new, regular, Cortes that were due to be inaugurated in October 1813. Venezuela, Buenos Aires, Chile and New Granada all declined to participate in the elections for deputies.'s Even if other parts of the continent hesitated to follow the Venezuelan example in proclaiming independence, disaffection and insurgency were spreading. In New Spain, where Hidalgo's rebellion had been crushed in January 1811, another priest, Jose Maria Morelos, took over the leadership of the defeated rebellion, and - exercising greater control than Hidalgo over his troops - launched highly effective guerrilla operations into the Mexican heartland. Under such conditions, it was often difficult to proceed with the elections to the Cortes under the new constitution, and even where deputies were elected, the authorities in some instances intervened to prevent them from travelling to Spain. Only 65 Americans - of whom a mere 23 had been elected under the new constitutional system - therefore took part in the sessions of the new Cortes, which were abruptly terminated in May 1814, following the return of Ferdinand VII to a peninsula now liberated from the occupying armies of the French.76

No event had been more eagerly anticipated than the restoration of Ferdinand VII to his throne, and no event was to be more cruelly disillusioning for those already disillusioned by the failure of the Cortes to satisfy American demands. The new regime annulled all the acts of the Cortes of Cadiz, and abolished the liberal constitution of 1812. The reaction was soon to extend from Spain to America, where the large majority had shown themselves initially happy to welcome the return of the king. Although a determined minority would by now be content with nothing less than full independence from Spain, the difficulties faced by insurgents across the continent suggest that a broad mass of opinion would have been satisfied with some form of autonomy within the structure of the empire. Veneration for the person of the monarch ran deep, not least among the Indian population of New Spain, where, during the years of his captivity in France, Ferdinand had allegedly been glimpsed in a black coach travelling across the Mexican countryside and urging the people to follow Hidalgo in revolt. Such was the mystical faith in a messianic king that some of the insurgent leaders understandably feared that the news of his return to the throne would undermine Indian support for their rebellion."

Following his restoration, the king was bombarded by representations from his American subjects, still hopeful for the reforms that the Cortes had denied them. But, as so often had happened in the past, the representations received careful consideration only to be shelved.78 With the Spanish state bankrupt, the crown was desperately in need of its American revenues, and it was counting on the effectiveness of its local representatives and the innate loyalty of the Americans to restore the status quo that had existed before 1808. Now that Morelos had been driven on to the defensive in New Spain, and Viceroy Abascal had stamped out rebellion in Chile, Quito and Upper Peru, Madrid assumed that the old order in the New World would rapidly be restored. Ferdinand's advisers showed little or no awareness of how profoundly times had changed. Six years of turmoil and constitutional upheaval in Spain itself, the breakdown of authority over large parts of America, the rise of a more informed public opinion with a new taste for liberty, and heavy pressure from Great Britain and the United States, eager to capture valuable American markets - all this made a return to the past impossible.

Madrid's expectations of a rapid return to normality were belied by continuing revolt in Buenos Aires and New Granada, and by the persistence of bloody civil conflict in Venezuela, in spite of - and in part because of - the harshly repressive activities of royalist forces under the command of Captain Juan Domingo Monteverde. In the autumn of 1814 the newly restored Council of the Indies recommended the despatch of an expeditionary force from Spain to restore order and crush the rebellions. In February 1815 an army of 10,500 men under the command of a Peninsular War veteran, Field Marshal Pablo Morillo, set sail from Cadiz. His arrival in Venezuela and his counter-revolutionary campaign, which included the confiscation of the estates of creoles associated with the patriot cause, among them Bolivar, wrecked the chances of a negotiated solution to the problem of America.79

The restoration of the monarchy in Spain, therefore, which might have paved the way for reconciliation between the American territories and Madrid, proved to be the catalyst for movements aimed at winning outright independence. Ferdinand VII's American army, like that of George III, only succeeded in exacerbating the problem that it was sent to cure. It was now a question of which party could persist longer on its chosen course - a bankrupt Spanish monarchy which had opted for repression, or groups of insurgents determined to fight to the end for the cause of independence.

By 1816 the royalist cause, backed by military power, appeared in the ascendant. In Chile, the Patriot army was decisively defeated in October 1814 by royalist forces descending from Peru; in New Spain, a year later, Morelos was caught, defrocked and executed; and by the end of 1816 Morillo's army had recovered control over most of Venezuela and New Granada. The remoteness of the La Plata region offered at least temporary protection from royalist attempts to recover it, but even here by 1816 the cause of independence was in serious trouble. The newly instituted regime in Buenos Aires proved incapable of asserting its authority over Paraguay, which had declared its own independence in 1811, or over the Banda Oriental, which was later to evolve into an independent Uruguay. One after another the military expeditions that it despatched to Upper Peru were driven back; and although a congress in Buenos Aires proclaimed the 'independence of the United Provinces of South America' in July 1816, the provinces of the Argentine interior, resolutely opposed to domination by the portenos of Buenos Aires, proved to be very far from participating in the unity. By this time, Spain was planning to send a military expedition to the River Plate, and the movement for independence threatened to unravel.80

The subsequent five years, however, were to see a spectacular reversal of fortunes, brought about in large measure by the courage, skill and persistence of a handful of revolutionary leaders who were not prepared to abandon their struggle for independence. In the southern half of the continent the breakthrough for the independence movement came with Jose de San Martin's creation of an army of the Andes. In 1817 his forces struck westwards from Mendoza, hazardously making their way across the mountains in a bold attempt to break the power of the royalists and their hold over Lima. With his victory at Maipo, outside Santiago, on 5 April 1818 San Martin effectively freed Chile, only to find on entering Peru that its creole population showed no enthusiasm for liberation from Spain.81

Away to the north, Simon Bolivar, having fled with other patriot leaders to Jamaica from New Granada in the spring of 1815, sought to rally support for the cause of independence in his famous `Jamaica letter' of 6 September. Defeated once again by royalist forces in his attempt to raise rebellion in his native Venezuela in the summer of 1816, he embarked at the end of the year on yet another, and this time successful, bid to liberate the continent. Forging an army of creoles, mulattoes, and slaves to whom he offered emancipation in return for conscription, he was gradually able to move over to the offensive. A brilliant campaign for the liberation of New Granada culminated in victory over the royalist army at the battle of Boyaca, north-east of Bogota, in May 1819. Bolivar then turned on Morillo's forces in western Venezuela, and entered Caracas in triumph in June 1821.

Now that the liberation of his homeland had been achieved, he could turn his attention to winning independence for Quito and the viceroyalty of Peru. In the struggle for Quito, his most faithful commander, Antonio Jose de Sucre, was victorious in May 1822. Peru, the greatest prize of all, still awaited Bolivar. Effectively marginalizing San Martin, he defeated the royalist army at Junin in the summer of 1824. The creoles of Peru, ambivalent to the end, were at last brought face to face with the challenge of independence when Sucre decisively defeated the one remaining Spanish army on the continent at the battle of Ayacucho on 9 December.82

For all the skill and daring of San Martin, Bolivar and other insurgent leaders, their eventual triumph also owed much to Spanish weakness and ineptitude. The royalist forces in America were heavily over-extended, and financial problems in Spain made it difficult, or impossible, to send reinforcements when they were needed. When an expeditionary force of 14,000 men was finally ready to embark at Cadiz for the recovery of Buenos Aires, a section of the troops under the command of Major Rafael Riego mutinied early in 1820, and demanded a return to the 1812 constitution. The revolt turned into a revolution, the constitution was restored, and for the next three years, before a French invading force restored the status quo, Ferdinand VII found himself acting in the unaccustomed and uncongenial role of a constitutional monarch.83

Ironically, the restoration of a liberal regime in Spain was to prove the prelude to the independence of those regions of the American mainland that had not yet been lost. In its early stages the new administration in Madrid, deeply absorbed in domestic problems, was unable to pay more than fitful attention to the American question, and when it did so it showed no greater understanding of American realities than its 1810 predecessor. The Cortes approved a law in September 1820 depriving the officers of colonial militias of the privilege they had enjoyed since 1786 of trial by court-martial for non-military offences. Simultaneously, news crossed the Atlantic that the Cortes were also planning to curtail the privileges and property rights of the church. In the face of these threats to their corporate rights, creoles and peninsulares in New Spain sank their differences and joined in a fragile coalition to make common cause against Madrid. A group of army officers and clerics began to lay plans for independence from Spain.84

The independence of Mexico was achieved by conspiracy, and not by revolution or a prolonged war of liberation. The social and ethnic violence unleashed by the unsuccessful rebellions of Hidalgo and Morelos in the preceding decade stood as a dreadful warning to the elite of New Spain. Although willing to contemplate the nominal abolition of caste barriers in order to neutralize the dangers of social conflict, its aim, like that of the leaders of the British American Revolution, was to achieve home rule with a minimum of social upheaval. This was to be a counter-revolution designed to defend an established order in church and state no longer guaranteed by its traditional protector, the Spanish monarchy.

The forces of political and social conservatism found their champion, or their instrument, in Agustin de Iturbide, a creole officer in the royalist army who had been ruthless in repressing the earlier revolts. Iturbide and his fellow conspirators prepared the ground well. Under the Plan of Iguala of February 1821 - a constitutional scheme carefully crafted to appeal to different sections of the society of New Spain - Mexico was proclaimed a self-governing Catholic and constitutional monarchy. In those instances where royalist forces did not defect to the rebels, they showed little inclination to resist. Independence in Mexico therefore rode to an almost bloodless triumph on the back of counter-revolution. Iturbide, as the hero of the hour, possessed the prestige and military authority to assume the leadership of the newly independent state. In quick succession he was proclaimed president of the Regency, and then - evoking an Aztec past which the creoles had appropriated as their own - the first emperor of a Mexico now metamorphosed into a `constitutional' empire. If he was no Bolivar, he was also no Washington.

In the meantime, what remained of Spanish government in America was disintegrating, and even Santo Domingo, Spain's first island possession in the New World, declared its independence in December 1821.85 Mexico's break from Spain was followed by that of Guatemala and the other central American territories. By the end of the decade, of the once proud transatlantic empire of Spain only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained. Like the planter elite of the British West Indies in the later eighteenth century the Cuban elite calculated that it would lose more than it stood to gain by independence. Not only had it been shaken by the savagery and the success of the slave revolt of 1791 in Saint Domingue (Haiti), but it had prospered in the years after 1790 from the opening of the island to international trade and its growing sugar exports to the United States.86 The experience of Virginia to the contrary, plantation economies based on slave labour were not the natural breeding-grounds of elite revolt.