Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  This fluidity found its counterpart in the eager pursuit of status symbols which would help to maintain distinctions of rank in societies where the dividing lines were all too easily blurred. The holding of public office conferred an obvious cachet, and the same was true of military command. In seventeenth-century British America, always on the alert against an Indian attack, military titles became a popular form of deferential address, just as the lure of a military title would induce many a young Spanish American creole to join the ranks when the militias were placed on a more regular footing in the eighteenth century.68 At least the trappings of hierarchy remained pervasive in the British colonies until the coming of the Revolution, even if the notion was being hollowed out from within. In Virginia in the middle years of the eighteenth century a young clergyman recorded his alarmed reaction to the arrival of his patron: `When I viewed him riding up, I never beheld such a display of pride in any man.... arising from his deportment, attitude and jesture; he rode a lofty elegant horse ...'69 In the plantation society of the southern regions of British America, as in the hacienda society of rural Spanish America, the man on horseback still held the upper hand.

  Social antagonism and emerging elites

  For all the arrogance of his power, the developing character of life in America none the less raised a continuing question over how long the man on horseback would remain firmly seated in his saddle. Inequality abounded in the colonial societies of America, and where inequality abounded, so also did resentment. Settlers who had come to the New World to improve their lot were unlikely to resign themselves uncomplainingly to a life of subordination when open spaces and new opportunities beckoned. Freshly arrived indentured servants were understandably desperate to throw off the shackles of servitude. In British America in particular there was an anti-deferential counter-current, born both of Old World religious and ideological inheritance and New World circumstance. This countercurrent ran in parallel with the trend to the emergence and consolidation of elites. But in Spanish America, too, as oligarchies tightened their hold, the dispossessed and the disadvantaged found ways to make their voices heard.

  In 1675, the year that saw the opening of King Philip's War between Algonquian-speaking Indians and the New England colonists, hostilities also erupted between Susquehanna Indians and aggressive and insecure frontiersmen in the Virginia-Maryland border region. The former governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley (fig. 17), who had been restored to the governorship on the return of Charles II from exile, was unsympathetic to the frontiersmen and had no wish to see the colony involved in a full-scale Indian war. The backcountry settlers, however, had other ideas. Many of them poor planters, they wanted land, and they wanted protection from Indian attacks. With Berkeley refusing to mobilize the colony's resources in their support, they had to rely on themselves and their muskets. But they needed a leader. They found him in the 28-year-old Nathaniel Bacon.

  Cambridge-educated, quick-witted and plausible, Bacon - a member of the well-connected East Anglian family of that name - had been packed off to Virginia by his father in the previous year after the exposure of his involvement in a swindle. Although taken up by Berkeley, who appointed him to the Virginia council within a few months of his arrival on the grounds that he was a gentleman of quality, he fell out with his patron after Indians murdered his overseer on his James River estate. A group of armed volunteers, determined to settle accounts with the Indians, turned to him for leadership with shouts of `A Bacon! A Bacon!', and in defiance of the governor's orders he led an expedition of reprisal, which ended in the butchering of numerous Indians. Berkeley responded by declaring him a rebel.70

  Although the two men subsequently patched up their differences, relations remained tense, and the meeting of the Virginia assembly at Jamestown in June 1676 provided the occasion for a showdown. Berkeley was deeply unpopular in the colony that he had governed for too long. There were innumerable complaints of his allegedly pro-Indian policies and of the oppressive burden of taxation imposed during his long tenure of the governorship, and there were many who resented the way in which he and his friends dominated the political life of the colony. The frontier settlers, exasperated by the failure of the government to assist them against the Indians, saw their salvation in Bacon, who marched on Jamestown on 23 June at the head of 400 armed men.

  As Berkeley fled, Bacon gathered widespread support for his defiance of the governor. Many gentry and burgesses, as well as the populace at large, wanted a reform of government, together with a campaign against the Indians that would make the border areas secure. Yet, for all his cleverness and charisma as a leader, Bacon found it increasingly difficult to control the more hot-headed of his followers. As lawlessness spread, the rebels put Jamestown to the torch, and sacked Berkeley's own plantation, Green Spring. Then suddenly, at the end of October, Bacon died of dysentery. With the unexpected death of its leader, the rebellion faltered and collapsed. When three royal commissioners, accompanied by a regiment of redcoats, reached Virginia from England in February 1677, they were horrified to find that a vengeful Berkeley had already carried out a string of executions on his own initiative. In April, Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, the commissioner in command of the regiment of English troops, ordered Berkeley to surrender his powers. Shortly afterwards the humiliated ex-governor sailed for home, where he died before he could put his case to the king.

  Bacon's intentions remain controversial, although his primary concern seems to have been to persuade the king to sanction fundamental reforms in the colony's government rather than make a bid for Virginian independence, as his enemies alleged.71 But beneath the political disaffection lay a deep social resentment, as Bacon's `Manifesto' makes clear: `... Let us trace these men in Authority and Favour to whose hands the dispensation of the Countries wealth has been committed; let us observe the sudden Rise of their Estates compared with the Quality in which they first entered this Country Or the Reputation they have held here amongst wise and discerning men, And let us see wither [whether] their extractions and Education have not bin vile, And by what pretence of learning and vertue they could [enter] soe soon into Imployments of so great Trust and consequence ... '72 Bacon, although himself a newcomer to Virginia and the immediate recipient of favours from the governor, was lashing out against a new elite.

  During the middle decades of the century a new ruling class had indeed been emerging to replace the vanished group of gentlemen who constituted the first leaders of the colony but had failed to transmit their leadership to a second generation. Along with thousands of indentured servants, a fresh wave of emigration beginning in the 1640s had brought to the Chesapeake disinherited cavaliers and younger sons of landed families from the losing side in the Civil War, many of them encouraged to emigrate by Sir William Berkeley, himself a prominent social figure whom Charles had selected for the governorship of Virginia in 1642. The new influx of immigrants also contained men of mercantile and business origins, like William Byrd, many of them connected by marriage with the landed gentry of southern and eastern England, and already possessing financial interests in the Chesapeake. These men formed part of a growing business community that spanned the Atlantic, and could call on substantial funds as they sought to establish themselves in colonial life. It was out of this group, reinforced in the early years of the Restoration by a further influx of younger sons of gentry families, who went on to marry into planter families surviving from the first generation of settlers, that the new elite was forged.73

  This elite, acquiring and extending tobacco plantations, and taking over the management of local government, may well have been tainted by its associations with mercantile wealth, but it hardly looks as if it was composed of men of `vile' extraction and education, who so aroused Bacon's wrath. There were few, if any, former indentured servants in its ranks. Possibilities certainly existed, although more in Maryland than Virginia, for indentured servants - originally for the most part unskilled and illiterate rural labourers or artisans - to acqui
re land after securing their freedom, but most of those who succeeded in doing so became at best modest independent planters, and many sank back into poverty as tobacco prices began to fall sharply in the 1660s.74 The effect of economic depression was to harden the social divisions and fuel the resentments on which Bacon capitalized as he embarked on his rebellion. The bulk of his army was made up of discontented free men `that had but lately crept out of the condition of Servants' .71

  While Bacon's attack was partly directed against that section of the new elite which was monopolizing local office, it had as its particular target a group who themselves were the object of hostility from these same local office-holders - the ruling clique of the governor and his council. The friends and relatives of Governor Berkeley, many of them drawn from the ranks of the new elite and benefiting from his patronage, had come to constitute a hated oligarchy, which was held responsible for corrupt practices and high taxation at a time of war with the Indians and widespread economic distress. Essentially this was a revolt for the restoration of good government and fundamental English rights rather than for the subversion of the social order, although increasingly extreme measures adopted by Bacon during the course of the rebellion, including the freeing of servants and black slaves recruited into his army, eventually cost him the support of most of his planter allies.76

  The report delivered by the commissioners to Charles II placed the blame for the rebellion squarely on the misgovernment of Berkeley and his ruling clique. Their judgment gave the king and the Privy Council the opportunity they had long been awaiting to attempt some restructuring of Virginia's administration in ways that would ensure greater royal control. In particular, the assembly was induced to grant the king in perpetuity an export duty on tobacco to help defray the costs of government." In future, Virginia's elite would need to tread more cautiously, showing a greater sensitivity on the one hand to pressures emanating from Whitehall, and on the other to the wishes of a populace which had made its voice heard, and had been prepared to resort to arms against an oppressive and avaricious oligarchy in defence of the rights of free-born Englishmen. A vote by the assembly to limit the privilege of wealthy planters to tax-free labour suggested that the elite had learnt its lesson.78

  Yet although Bacon's revolt shook Virginian society to its foundations, the new social order in process of formation during the middle decades of the century emerged largely unscathed from the upheaval. Property qualifications for voters, rescinded when Bacon was in command, were restored by the assembly in 1677. If the poor white population lost their votes, however, they still kept their guns, and this was something the elite could not afford to forget.79 Meanwhile, changing economic and social conditions in the two decades following the rebellion altered the dynamics of a society in which turbulence had formerly seemed endemic, and opened the way to a tacit, although initially fragile, accommodation between the rich and the poor in Virginia's white community.

  The rise in tobacco prices after 1684 brought a new prosperity, which gradually improved the lot of the landless freemen who had responded in such numbers to Bacon's call to arms.80 Legislation imposing chattel bondage on imported Africans had been initiated by the Virginia assembly in the 1660s, and as the planters turned more and more to the import of black slaves in preference to increasingly expensive white indentured servants,81 the balance and composition of the colony's population began to change. In the 1690s, with the import of servants from England declining, the majority of Virginia's whites were Virginiaborn for the first time in the colony's history.82 The native American population of the Chesapeake region was rapidly dwindling - the process no doubt exacerbated by the hunting down and enslavement of Indians by Bacon and his men, and by the decision of the assembly in 1682 to lump together imported Indians and blacks as slaves for life, whether or not they became converts to Christianity."

  By now, Virginia was looking to Africa for its slaves at least as much to its traditional supplier, Barbados. In the 1680s some 2,000 Africans were landed in the colony.84 In earlier years the free black population had lived and worked side by side with the white labouring force, but as the number of blacks increased, to reach perhaps 10,000 - some 15 per cent of Virginia's total population85 - by the end of the seventeenth century, the assembly embarked on efforts to reduce the number of free blacks by forbidding masters to free their slaves unless they agreed to transport them out of the colony.86 The assembly also sought to drive a wedge between whites and blacks by denouncing miscegenation and its consequences. Virginians were on the way to being classified by the colour of their skin.

  Around 1700, therefore, a new dividing line emerged in Chesapeake society - a line in which the social antagonisms separating white from white were eclipsed, although by no means obliterated, by a growing racial divide between white and black. During the course of the following years, white Virginian society slowly began to acquire something of the cohesion it had lacked for so long. A common white male culture was emerging, based on a number of shared points of reference - gambling, horse-racing, cockfights and the tavern. This was to become a patriarchal society, under the leadership of an elite which took its duties of hospitality seriously, looked with a paternal benevolence on social inferiors, and accepted the need to let them assert their rights as free-born men when it came to election time.87

  As dynastic marriages cemented the ties between leading families like the Byrds, the Carters and the Beverleys, Virginia in the opening decades of the eighteenth century entered on a prolonged era of stability, guided by a closely knit group of substantial planters who saw no incompatibility between speaking the language of liberty and holding large numbers of slaves. The need to maintain a common front against the interfering ways of royal governors helped to keep the principal families united among themselves.88 But it was the rapid spread of slavery that created the conditions for this new age of stability and for the dominance of the wealthy elite that presided over it. Privileged and underprivileged whites were brought together by their common contempt for blacks, and by fears that at any moment they might have to close ranks in the face of a mass uprising of slaves.89

  Chesapeake society was following in the wake of the slave societies of the British Caribbean islands, although oligarchy here became even more entrenched. After a comparable period of turbulence the big sugar planters of Barbados, the Leeward Islands and Jamaica succeeded both in reaching a political accommodation with the government in London and in consolidating their dominance over the social and political life of their islands.90 Both in the islands and in the southern mainland colonies large-scale investment in slaves reinforced the wealth and power of the top stratum of the planter class at the apex of hierarchically structured societies linked by ties of deference and subordination. 91 The ways in which this elite used or abused its wealth and power would vary with both place and time. Cultural cross-currents might, as in eighteenth-century Virginia, come into play to check the inherent tendency to indulge in conspicuous consumption, but all these elites shared an acute concern with honour and reputation.92 By the early eighteenth century nearly every Virginian family with any claim to status had obtained its coat of arms.93

  If a hierarchical order emerged in the plantation societies of the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, it was a relatively simple hierarchical order when compared with that which emerged in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. The black-white dichotomy of a largely agrarian world of planters and slaves saw to this, even if the dichotomy was complicated by the presence of a population of poor whites, and by the emergence in the Caribbean of a significant intermediate sector of free blacks and mulattoes. There were, too, groups of subservient Indians in the Chesapeake region. Over large parts of Spanish America, on the other hand, the coexistence and interbreeding of different ethnic groups in a much more urbanized environment than that of the British plantation societies was reflected in the construction of a social order of far greater complexity.

  Although the Spanish crown
had set itself firmly against the creation of a New World nobility, it was otherwise concerned to replicate the hierarchical and corporate system of social organization on which peninsular society was based. Only an organic society headed and regulated by the crown - a society in which each element recognized, and kept, its proper place - offered the security of a durable political and social order that patterned the divine. But in the Indies this proved much more difficult to achieve than in Spain itself, partly because of the crown's own reluctance to validate the social pretensions of the conquerors, and partly because of the difficulties encountered by the conquerors and encomenderos themselves in perpetuating their lines and consolidating their position as a natural elite.94

  The creation of a clear-cut hierarchical order was further complicated from the first days of settlement by the presence of large Indian populations, which would be endowed with a distinctive corporate identity as a repi blica de los indios. Nominally, therefore, two parallel social orders coexisted, one Spanish and one Indian, with its own hereditary nobility. This nobility was juridically entitled in Spanish eyes to the special treatment and privileges accorded to the nobility of Spain; and although, particularly in New Spain, the Indian nobility and its rights were whittled away during the course of the sixteenth century, a society of orders was considered as integral to the Indian republic as conceptualized by the Spaniards as it was to the republica de los espanoles.

  In other respects, however, theory and practice soon parted company, as the barriers between the two republics began to break down, and growing numbers of Indians moved into the cities. Here they found themselves living alongside a growing Spanish population made up of first settlers, new immigrants and their descendants, who naturally saw themselves as members of a conquering race, even if they themselves had not participated in the conquest. The superior status of these settlers of Hispanic descent, who first began to be known as criollos in the 1560s,95 was recognized in their exemption from the payment of taxes - the privilege enjoyed by nobles and hidalgos in Spain. It was this privilege that set the creoles apart from the tribute-paying Indian population, although many of them lived no better than their Indian neighbours.