Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (89 page)

Independence came to Spanish America some forty to fifty years after it came to British America, and in very different circumstances. It would not have come, or come in the form that it did, without the American Revolution to the north. As George Canning observed when looking back in 1825 on the events of the preceding forty years, `the operation of that example sooner or later was inevitable', although in his opinion the mistaken policies of the metropolis helped to make it so. `Spain,' he continued `untaught by the lesson of the British American war, has postponed all attempt at accommodation with her Colonies until their separation is now irretrievably established.'87 But Spain found itself in a much less favourable position than Britain at the outbreak of the struggle for independence, and independence, when it came, was the consequence less of metropolitan pressure on the periphery of empire than of collapse at its centre. Not the Declaration of Independence but the armies of Napoleon set in motion the process that would culminate in the emancipation of Spain's empire of the Indies.

It was a process that proved to be devastatingly costly in terms of societies disrupted and lives destroyed, and the new Iberian America that arose from the ashes of the old Spanish Empire was to live with the consequences of this for generations to come. In the North American War of Independence acts of brutality had been perpetrated by both sides, with soldiers in the British armies engaging in wide-scale rapine and plunder, some of it the result of deliberate policy. Lord Rawdon, a young British officer, wrote in 1776: `I think we should (whenever we get further into the country) give free liberty to the soldiers to ravage it at will, that these infatuated creatures may feel what a calamity war is.'88 The rebels, for their part, gave short shrift to the loyalists.89 But British America was never subjected to the kind of massive campaign of terror and destruction conducted in Venezuela by the royalist commander Juan Domingo Monteverde. Nor did the hostility between rebels and loyalists in the British colonies lead, as it did in Venezuela, to full-scale civil war between the colonists themselves. British commanders like General Sir Henry Clinton hesitated to unleash loyalist forces to wage campaigns of terror that could only serve to alienate those sections of the population whose hearts and minds they needed to win.90

In Spanish America, and notably in Venezuela, the savagery of civil war was enhanced by the extent of the ethnic divisions, which all too easily came to overshadow what had begun as a domestic dispute within the Hispanic community. While the ethnic question was always present in North America, it played a less prominent part in the British-American War of Independence than in the conflicts in Spain's colonies, where non-white or mixed populations predominated. In Peru, for instance, of the 1,115,000 inhabitants in 1795, only 140,000 were whites. The remainder consisted of 674,000 Indians, 244,000 mestizos and 81,000 blacks of whom half were slaves.91 While many of the non-whites sought to steer clear of commitment in these internal Hispanic disputes, it was difficult to avoid being sucked into the conflict, given the extent of drafting and recruitment by both sides. With many militia regiments made up of blacks and mulattoes, the loyalties of their creole commanders could be decisive in determining whether they fought as rebels or royalists. Both sides armed the slaves, and Indians formed the majority of the soldiers in the royalist army in Peru.92

The British crown made no concerted effort to mobilize Indians or blacks, in part at least out of a justifiable fear that this would alienate the white population whose loyalty it hoped to recover or preserve. When defending the ruthlessness of Bolivar's `war to the death' in the United States Congress, Henry Clay would ask rhetorically: `Could it be believed, if the slaves had been let loose upon us in the south, as they had been let loose in Venezuela; if quarters had been refused; capitulations violated; that General Washington, at the head of the armies of the United States, would not have resorted to retribution?'93 Shortage of manpower did, however, compel an initially reluctant Congress and General Washington to accept slaves into the ranks of the Continental Army, with the offer of freedom in return. But when the British moved their war effort to the south in 1779, the southern colonies were understandably resistant to the idea of defending themselves against attack by arming their slaves.94

Apart from any risk involved in supplying arms to slaves, their diversion into military service meant an inevitable loss of labour on plantations and estates. As a result of the recruitment or the flight of slaves, production on many haciendas in Peru was abandoned as the conflict reached a climax, adding one further element of disruption to an economy already disrupted by naval blockade and the shortage of mercury supplies for the refinement of silver from the mines.95 Although seven years of war in North America brought widespread economic dislocation and social distress, with levels of income and wealth at the outbreak of the war possibly not reached again until the early nineteenth century,96 it is hard to believe that the British colonies suffered anything like the level of destruction reached in Spanish America, where the conflict was frequently not only more savage, but also much more prolonged. Even if some parts of the Spanish American world, like the cities of central Mexico, managed to remain `islands in the storm''97 others were subjected to almost continuous battering over a decade or more.

It is not only the intensity of the internal divisions and the obstinacy of metropolitan Spain in refusing to relinquish its tight grasp on its empire which explain the length and ferocity of the wars of independence. When the British colonies revolted, active involvement by the European powers in the form of French and Spanish intervention against Britain notably shortened the length of the struggle the rebels would otherwise have faced. The international conjuncture a generation later proved less favourable to the winning of independence by the Spanish American rebels. Although Francisco de Miranda, Bolivar and other rebel leaders met with a warm reception on their arrival in London, there was no question of Britain coming forward with military or naval help for their independence movements once Britain and Spain had become allies in the struggle against Napoleon. Trade - those lucrative Spanish American markets on which British eyes had been fixed for so long - was, and remained, the overriding concern of British foreign policy. While London was happy, and indeed anxious, to mediate between Spain and the rebels in the hope of restoring the peace and stability essential for trade, this was officially as far as it would go.98 It was therefore left to mercenaries and adventurers, like Admiral Cochrane and his captains, or the officers and men who took service under Bolivar after the ending of the Napoleonic wars, to provide the vital British contribution to the independence of Venezuela and New Granada, Chile and Peru.

For its part, the young republic of the United States might have been expected to lend support and encouragement to movements for the establishment of fellow republics in its own hemisphere. Yet while political circles did indeed engage in lively discussion about the potential advantages of Spanish American independence to the United States, generalized sympathy - tempered by characteristic Anglo-American scepticism about the capacity of Spanish Americans to govern themselves - was no more translated into decisive assistance than it was in Great Britain. Not only did the new republic lack the military strength to intervene in support of the insurgents, but the overriding preoccupation of the administration during the period of the Napoleonic Wars was to steer clear of actions liable to provoke military and naval confrontation with a Britain that was now allied to Spain. Although after 1810 it was sending consular agents to South America to protect its growing commercial interests, the United States therefore held back from giving official recognition to the new republics. National self-interest remained here, as in Great Britain, the order of the day.99

Lacking the active assistance of foreign powers, Bolivar, San Martin and their fellow insurgents were consequently compelled to mount and sustain campaigns which depended heavily on their own inner resources and powers of leadership. Since their invading armies were faced with strong resistance and could count on only limited local support, they were perpetually struggling to mobilize reluctant populations that were deeply divided by ethnic and social antagonisms. As a result, the process of liberation became a grinding struggle, which inevitably gave victorious military leaders a commanding influence in the task of nation-building that followed emancipation. In this respect, the winning of independence by Spanish South America contrasted sharply with the winning of independence by the British colonies. Here a Congress reasonably representative of different sectional interests retained general control, however inefficiently exercised, over the colonial war machine. At the same time it had chosen in General Washington a supreme commander who displayed a rocklike adherence to the tenets of the political culture in which he had been educated - a culture that looked on standing armies as instruments of tyranny, and insisted on the subordination of the military to the civil authority (fig. 42).

During the colonial period, authority in Spanish America was and remained pre-eminently a civil authority, although the Bourbon reforms, in extending the fuero militar to members of the colonial militias, had to some extent made the military a corporation apart. Along with military titles and uniforms, exemption from civilian jurisdiction had become one of the great attractions of service in the colonial militias for the sons of the creole elite.100 The militias themselves may not have provided much more than a rudimentary military experience, but they constituted a natural breeding-ground for future leaders of the independence movements, in part because they brought young creoles into contact with Spanish officers who had imbibed some of the spirit and attitudes of the European Enlightenment. They fostered, too, a corporate spirit nurtured by resentment at the way in which creoles found themselves excluded from positions of command in the regular regiments, in spite of the changes that occurred during the 1790s as Spain's European wars reduced the number of native Spanish officers who could be spared for service in America. By the time the wars of liberation began, creole officers were well placed, through their local influence and their command of the colonial militia regiments, to exercise considerable influence over the course of events. The collapse of the civil authority and the breakdown of law and order gave ambitious officers an opportunity to seize the initiative on behalf of either the insurgents or the royalists, and provided the occasion, and the pretext, for an Iturbide to irrupt on to the stage.

The liberators of Spanish America, however, were far from being the products of a narrow military culture, and several had received an extensive and wide-ranging education. Simon Bolivar, who joined the militia at the age of fourteen, came from one of the wealthiest creole families in Caracas and received a private education which made him an enthusiast for the works of the philosophes, and above all of Rousseau (fig. 43). Manuel Belgrano, the son of a rich Buenos Aires merchant, was given the best education to be had in his native city before being sent to Spain to study law at Salamanca, Valladolid and Madrid.101 While Iturbide, like Washington, had never crossed the Atlantic, not only Belgrano, but also Miranda, Bolivar, San Martin and Bernardo O'Higgins all spent at least some of their formative years in Spain, either to pursue their education or to receive professional training in a military academy.

Once in Europe they were exposed, like Belgrano, to the ferment of ideas brought about by the impact of the French Revolution. `Since I was in Spain in 1789', he wrote in his autobiography, `at a time when the French Revolution was causing a change in ideas, particularly among the men of letters with whom I associated, the ideas of liberty, equality, security and property, took a firm hold on me, and I saw only tyrants in those who would prevent a man, wherever he might be, from enjoying the rights with which God and nature had endowed him.'102 Enthused by the ideals of liberty and equality, and impressed by the potential of a now fashionable political economy, they would set the world to rights. In Spain they experienced, like North Americans in England, the arrogance with which an imperial power treated mere colonials. They also saw for themselves the defects of a society condemned by the philosophes for its superstition and its backwardness. Those of them who, like Miranda, Bolivar and O'Higgins, also travelled to England can only have been struck by the sharpness of the contrast between the sluggishness of their own mother country and the dynamism of a society in which industry and commerce flourished, and freedom was the norm.103

The extent of their European experience distinguishes the liberators of Spanish America from the leading actors in the American Revolution, with the notable exception of Benjamin Franklin. George Washington had never travelled further abroad than to the West Indies, and was later described by John Adams as having seen too little of the world for someone in his 'station'.104 These, however, were the words of a man who himself had seen nothing beyond North America before 1778, the year in which, at the age of 42, he was sent by Congress on a mission to Paris to secure French support. This would later enable him to look back on the revolutionary period with the superiority of a man who, in contrast to Washington, had indeed by that time seen something of the world. Of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence, six had been born in the British Isles, and five of the six were still young when they or their families moved to America.'05 Twelve of the remaining 49 spent some time in the British Isles. Most of these, like three of South Carolina's four representatives, were sent to England for their schooling or for study at the Inns of Court. The most travelled among them, apart perhaps from Robert Treat Paine, a Massachusetts merchant whose voyages included a trip to Spain in 1751, appears to have been the one Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration, Charles Carroll of Carrollton in Maryland, who was educated at the Jesuit College of St Omer, and spent sixteen years in England and continental Europe before returning home. 106