Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (90 page)

By the time the Philadelphia Convention met in 1787, the situation had changed. At least 18 of the 55 delegates to the Convention had spent a year or more of their lives abroad as grown men.107 If, however, the Spanish American leaders had seen more of the world before launching their revolutions than their North American counterparts, it is not easy to assess the impact on them of their foreign experience. In so far as it confirmed their impressions of the archaic character of the imperial power to which they owed allegiance, it is likely to have encouraged them to turn their backs on their inherited political culture and seek to build anew. Where British Americans, proud of their British constitutional traditions, sought to purge their inherited political culture of the corrupting elements introduced by power and privilege, and adapt it to new purposes within the broad context of universal rights, Bolivar turned first to universal principles to construct on the ruins of a collapsing Spanish empire a new nation of new men. 10'

Yet as Bolivar and his fellow liberators soon came to discover, this ambition was not easily realized in the inhospitable landscape of Spanish America. First, they had to liberate an entire continent, and not merely, as in British America, the corner of a continent. Having accomplished this in the face of ferocious resistance and almost impossible geographical odds, they then had to build a new political order on the slenderest of foundations. Although the Spanish empire possessed the superficial unity given it by a common culture, there was no way in which its territorial integrity could be conserved in the wake of emancipation. Even in Britain's more compact American empire, the rebels had failed to carry with them the West Indies and Canada, and only an ingenious constitution, together with a tacit agreement to ignore the fundamental question of slavery, had prevented further fragmentation.

The difficulty of preserving any semblance of unity in Spain's liberated empire was compounded not only by its vast scale and extreme physical and climatic diversity, but also by the strength of the local and regional traditions that had developed over three centuries of imperial rule. The administrative and juridical boundaries delimiting viceroyalties, Audiencias and lesser territorial units had hardened sufficiently to provide a focus for the development of loyalties to a host of patrias more sharply defined than the generalized American patria which the rebels sought to liberate. Bolivar dreamt of replacing the old and discredited Spanish Monarchy with a pan-American continental union, or - failing this - an Andean confederation comprising Venezuela, New Granada, Quito and Peru. But he discovered to his disillusionment that no amount of constitutional tinkering could hold together a union of territories so historically and geographically diverse. Once the danger from Spain was removed, his Greater Colombia of Venezuela, New Granada and Quito was torn apart by local loyalties. The same fate befell the Federation of United Provinces of Central America, created in 1824.

The thirteen British colonies, although widely diverse in character, had joined together in 1776 in a common act of defiance against the British crown. Their battle for independence, conducted under the aegis of a shared constitutional body, the Congress, and waged by a shared Continental Army, had accustomed them to working together, and had created a network of personal acquaintance and friendships that transcended state and local boundaries. By the time the battle had been won, the transition to a more lasting union, although still difficult to achieve, was at least within the bounds of practical politics. The Spanish American colonies emerged into independence without having gone through a comparable educational experience of close and continuing collaboration in a common cause. Not only did independence come to them at different times and in different ways, but the liberators - Bolivar, San Martin, Santander, O'Higgins - working on a vast continental canvas, found it difficult to co-ordinate their efforts, or set aside their rivalries.

As the transcontinental Spanish imperial system foundered, and attempts to replace it with a number of federal unions broke down, the challenge confronting Spain's former colonies was to transform themselves into viable nation-states. But a sense of nationhood was an elusive concept, more prone to generate rhetoric than encourage an engagement with reality. The pronouncement in Mexico's Act of Independence that `the Mexican nation, which for three hundred years has had no will of its own, nor free expression, emerges today from the oppression under which it has lived', was no doubt intended to resonate down the ages.109 Yet what continuities linked the empire of Montezuma to that of Iturbide, and were they strong enough to give cohesion and direction to an ethnically diverse society now suddenly cut loose from its traditional moorings?

Creole patriotism was woven out of religion and history - or, more specifically, a selective interpretation of the past - and provided at least some of the elements that could be used to create a new sense of national identity. Mexico, with its strong historiographical tradition and a religious symbol, in the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who commanded the loyalties of wide sections of the population, was better placed than the majority of the new states to fashion itself as a nation. Everywhere, however, there were tensions between centralizing aspirations and local patriotisms. These were especially acute in regions, such as the viceroyalty of La Plata, where Bourbon reformers had redrawn the boundary lines, incorporating older jurisdictional units like the Audiencia of Las Charcas, or Upper Peru, which in 1825 broke free from the grasp of Buenos Aires to proclaim itself the independent republic of Bolivia. Old loyalties ran deeper than new political geography Everywhere, too, creole patriotism was closely identified with the interests of privileged elites bent on exploiting the break with Spain to tighten their grip on power. This limited its ability to generate a genuinely national consciousness in new states whose republican constitutions, by contrast, spoke the contemporary language of universal rights and gave at least nominal representation to social and ethnic groups traditionally regarded as inferior."o

State-building itself proved a difficult, elusive and time-consuming task. The wars of independence had destroyed political institutions elaborated over 300 years of imperial rule. For all its failings, the Spanish imperial state had created an indispensable framework for colonial life, as the British imperial state in North America had not. Royal decrees emanating from Madrid might he ignored or subverted, but the imperial administrative apparatus was an overshadowing presence, which could not be indefinitely ignored. Where the disappearance of the imperial state from British America left individual colonies to manage their own lives much as they had before, the disappearance of the Spanish imperial state therefore left a vacuum that the successor states were ill prepared to fill.

Although the creole societies of Spanish America had enjoyed a substantial degree of effective autonomy, at least before the advent of the Bourbon reforms, this was exercised in particular by city councils dominated by small, self-perpetuating oligarchies, and had constantly to be mediated through negotiation with the agents and institutions of the crown. The absence of representative bodies like the assemblies in the British colonies meant that there was no provincial legislative tradition, and little practical experience of local representatives gathering to discuss and frame policies in response to common needs. The summoning of deputies to the Cortes of Cadiz and the convoking of elections over wide areas of territory in 1813 and 1814, however, marked the beginnings of an important change in the political culture of Spanish America. Not only did the new electoral arrangements enable a newly enfranchised populace to participate for the first time in the political process, but they also meant that those chosen to represent the American territories in the Spanish Cortes gained valuable experience of parliamentary procedure and debate. This could later he turned to account, as it was in Mexico, where former representatives to the Cortes of 1810-14 and 1820-2 returned from Europe to play an important part in the building of the new Mexican state. "

The experience of active political representation, however, came very late in the day, and the pool of experienced legislative talent on which the new states could draw would seem to have been substantially smaller than that available for the construction of the United States. This is likely to have reduced the chances of constructing governmental systems capable, as in the United States, of turning to creative purpose the tension between the centralizing and separatist tendencies inherent in the colonial tradition. Instead, a series of federalist movements in the 1820s - in Mexico and central America, Gran Colombia and Peru - mounted a challenge to potentially authoritarian regimes which laid claim to the centralizing traditions of the old imperial state. Under the banners of either centralism or federalism, the old creole family networks fought among themselves over the division of the spoils. As they did so, the new states descended into anarchy, and all too often the only escape from anarchy appeared to be the surrender of legitimacy to a strong-armed caudillo. Only Chile, with a closely interlocking creole elite, was able to achieve reasonable stability, on the basis of a strongly centralized government and the perpetuation of the hierarchical social order of colonial times.11'

If British America enjoyed a smoother transition to independence than Spanish America, fortuitous as well as structural elements would seem to have played their part. While federalists and anti-federalists were still bitterly disputing the character and extent of the powers to be exercised by the central government of the new republic of the United States, the energies and attention of Europe were diverted by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. These brought unexpected bonanzas to the United States.

At the time of its birth, the security and prosperity of the republic depended heavily on decisions being taken in London, Paris and Madrid. Ignoring the terms of the peace settlement, Britain showed no inclination to evacuate its military positions along the lakes in the Northwest. As long as it retained them, there was a danger that it might reconstitute its alliances with the Indian peoples, who stood in the way of American expansion beyond the Appalachians. Similarly, Spain's closure of navigation of the Mississippi to citizens of the United States in 1784 reduced the viability of the Mississippi and Ohio valley settlements by depriving them of access to the sea.

The descent of Europe into war, however, provided a welcome opening for American diplomacy. The Jay treaty of 1794 secured the evacuation of Britain's Northwestern forts, and in the following year Spain agreed, under the Pinckney treaty, to accept the 31st parallel as the boundary between the United States and Spanish Florida, and open the Mississippi to American shipping.113 Spain itself inspired little respect among the leading figures in American political life, but behind Spain there loomed the shadow of post-revolutionary France. Napoleon's ambitions seemed limitless, and there was a growing apprehension that he planned to use Louisiana, once Spain restored it to French sovereignty, as a launching-pad for the reconstitution of France's former American empire. The situation was saved by the failure of a large French expeditionary force to suppress the slave revolt on Saint Domingue, and the resumption of war with England after a brief interlude of peace. Any plans for the restoration of French America now had to be abandoned, and Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 delivered into the hands of the United States almost half a continent. However tenacious the resistance put up by the Indian peoples of the interior, nothing could now thwart the national enterprise on which the peoples of the new republic were embarking - the building of a continental empire, an `empire of liberty'.

The Napoleonic wars brought not only new prospects for westwards expansion, but also new prospects for the expansion of America's international trade. Although the Jay treaty was fiercely denounced by Republicans as once again subordinating the United States to British commercial and maritime dominance, the European demand for American grain to feed its hungry peoples and the British demand for the cotton of the southern states combined to open up new opportunities for American merchants, farmers and planters. The commercial infrastructure inherited by the republic from the colonial period was strong enough to allow United States merchants and shippers to capitalize on American neutrality to become the carriers to the belligerent powers of Europe. A dramatically expanding Atlantic trade in exports and re-exports brought a new prosperity to the mainland, revitalizing the eastern seaboard and providing employment for a growing population.114

The international conjuncture proved considerably less favourable to the Spanish American republics at the moment of their birth. Napoleon had now been defeated and peace had returned to Europe. In the intervening period, the Spanish Atlantic trading system had collapsed, and the Peninsular War had ravaged the economy of metropolitan Spain. In the aftermath of emancipation, trade between Spain and the new Spanish American republics almost disappeared, whereas Britain rapidly resumed trading relations with its former colonies after they won their independence."' Instead, with their economies shattered by years of war and civil disorder, the new states, still groping for political stability, found themselves on the fringes of an international trading community that wanted their markets but did not want their produce. They also found themselves overshadowed by an increasingly confident and assertive United States, to which Mexico would lose half its territory between 1845 and 1854.116

The new republics, too, found themselves saddled with a colonial legacy, both political and psychological, that made it difficult for them to adjust to their new situation. Governed for three centuries by a bureaucratic and interventionist state, they instinctively sought to re-create after independence the system of government with which they were familiar. Strong central control seemed in any event necessary to prevent the spread of anarchy. Liberal elements in the new societies might aspire to throw off the shackles of the past, but they too needed an administrative apparatus that would enable them to realize their dreams.