The unstable combination of religious and political diversity enhances the impression of British America as an atomized society in a continuous state of turmoil. At first sight this appears truer of the Middle Colonies and the Chesapeake than of New England, where the collective values and ideals of a covenanted people had struck deep roots, and where the magistrates continued to take with extreme seriousness their duty to support the church and ensure that the people remained true to the terms of the covenant. Yet even New England had never been the tranquil society which its own historians liked to depict, and the collective discipline of a godly state was always fragile and precarious.116
The turmoil and confusion, however, also reflected the vitality of New World Protestantism, made up as it was of unresolved tensions - between institutionalized authority and the free movement of the spirit, between the aspirations of individuals and those of the group with which they had entered into a voluntary association. These tensions offered the prospect both of continual spiritual turmoil and of no less continual spiritual renewal as the pendulum of religious life swung between institutional attempts to impose discipline and spontaneous outbursts of revivalist enthusiasm imbued with millenarian hopes.
In so far as the tensions were capable of resolution, they would find it in the shared biblical culture that was the foundation of religious life in British North America. The Bible was to be found everywhere - in the libraries of Virginian gentlemen, and in the households of New England, which might possess it in two formats, `great' and small. 117 Since the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge held the monopoly printing rights, colonial printers were not allowed to publish it, although the newly founded press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exploited a loophole in the legislation to produce in 1640 the first printing of what was to be the extremely popular `Bay Psalm Book'.151 Virginia had no permanent printing press until 1730 and, like New England, imported its Bibles, along with much other religious literature, from England.159 If the high cost of book imports kept sales down, the Bible was an overwhelming priority. The language and the culture of the colonies were infused with biblical references and turns of phrase, and white children in eighteenth-century Virginia would use Bibles for their reading primers.160
A biblical culture encouraged literacy and gave an impetus to schooling, both private and public. Behind the laws passed in Virginia and New England in the 1640s for the promotion of schooling there may well have lurked an anxious preoccupation with the upholding of standards of civility in a remote and savage environment'161 but religion was integral to civility. `If we nourish not learning,' wrote John Eliot as plans for the foundation of Harvard College were being mooted, `both church and commonwealth will sink.'162 The prime responsibility for the training of the young lay with the family, as the Massachusetts statute of 1642 made clear in reminding parents and the masters of servants of their duty to ensure that the young were able `to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country'. Further legislation in the same decade ordered that each family should engage in weekly catechizing, but also made provision for formal schooling in every town of over fifty families. 161
The early commitment to education in New England and Virginia, as reflected in their legislation, left an enduring legacy,164 but its effects are difficult to measure. In Virginia, where schooling was so difficult to organize, literacy among white males, as measured by the ability to sign rather than simply make a mark, rose from 46 per cent in the 1640s to 62 per cent around 1710.165 In New England, by the same criterion, 60 per cent of adult men and 30 per cent of adult women were literate in 1660, although this form of measurement would class as 'illiterate' many who, if they could not write their names, may well have learnt the rudiments of reading.166 By 1750 literacy in New England would approach 70 per cent among men and 45 per cent among women - exceptionally high figures by the standards of contemporary Europe.167 Unfortunately, no literacy figures are available for the creole population of the Spanish American viceroyalties. Letters from sixteenth-century settlers writing home to friends and relatives make a point of emphasizing the opportunities for immigrants who could read and write;161 but for all the efforts of the Jesuits it seems doubtful whether, even in the cities, where education was at its strongest and literacy was seen as a means of social ascent, literacy rates among creoles approached those attained in the British colonies by the late seventeenth century.
A biblical culture obviously provided the mass of the population with a strong incentive to achieve an entry into the world of print. A member of the party of Spaniards shipwrecked on Bermuda in 1639 noted how `men, women, youths, boys and girls, and even children all carry their books to church' for Sunday morning and evening services. It is impossible to know how many of the congregation were actually able to follow on the printed page the passage read aloud by the minister, but the sight was a novel one to the Spaniard, who was impressed by the `silent devoutness' of the congregation. 169
If the surprise expressed by the shipwrecked Spaniard testifies to Hispanic ignorance of the character of the Protestant society that was emerging in British North America, British North Americans were at least as ignorant of the Hispanic societies to the south of them. Contacts between the two worlds were becoming more frequent, especially as clandestine trading relations developed with the Spanish Caribbean islands; and the founding of South Carolina meant that a group of British settlers now found themselves closer to Spanish St Augustine than to the Chesapeake settlements of their own compatriots. `We are here in the very chaps of the Spaniard,' wrote a settler to one of the Carolina proprietors, Lord Ashley, the future Earl of Shaftesbury. 170 But greater proximity did not necessarily bring with it a greater understanding.
Mutual perceptions had been shaped by stereotyped images developed over the course of a century of Anglo-Spanish conflict and were liable to be periodically reinforced by some new incident or publication. 171 Oliver Cromwell, whose antiSpanish attitudes were those of an Elizabethan gentleman, was encouraged in his ambitious Western Design by Thomas Gage, whose The English-American first appeared in 1648, and was subsequently republished three times before the end of the century.172 Partly no doubt to reinforce his credentials as an enthusiastic convert from Rome to Anglicanism, Gage misleadingly presented Spanish America as a fruit ripe for the picking. But he also gave a vivid first-hand account of life in New Spain - the first such account of any substance to come from a non-Spanish source. His descriptions of convent life were appropriately lurid, and amply confirmed Protestant assumptions about the scandals and depravity of the Roman church.
One New Englander who owned a copy of Gage was Cotton Mather.173 Reading the book, Mather could hardly fail to be struck by the contrast between the sobriety of his own society, for all the many failings that he so constantly lamented, and the episodes of wickedness and debauchery retailed by Gage in the course of his travels in central America, where `worldliness' was `too too much embraced by such as had renounced and forsaken the world and all its pleasures, sports, and pastimes'.'74 To a man of Mather's spirit, the contrast could only have opened up a vista of new opportunities. `I found in myself', he wrote in 1696, `a strong inclination to learn the Spanish language, and in that Language transmitt Catechisms, and Confessions, and other vehicles of the Protestant-Religion, into the Spanish Indies. Who can tell whether the Time for our Lord's taking possession of those Countreys, even the sett Time for it, bee not come?""
In due course, after the Lord had wonderfully prospered him in his undertaking, Mather wrote and printed a tract, La religion Pura, designed to bring the light of the gospel to the peoples of that benighted Spanish world.176 In 1702, after he had been `much engaged both in public and private Supplications, that the Lord would open a way for the Access of His glorious Gospel into the vast regions of the Spanish America', he received with excitement the news of the Grand Alliance against Bourbon France and Spain, with the commitment of the English and the Dutch to make themselves
the masters, if they could, `of the Countreys and Cities under the Dominion of Spain in the Indies'.177 The day of redemption was surely close at hand.
Mather's hopes were not, after all, to be realized. There was more resilience in Spain's American possessions than he, or the Protestant world in general, could appreciate. Nor were all the comparisons necessarily to the advantage of the British colonies. Uniformity of faith had given Spanish America, for all its social and ethnic diversity, an inner cohesion that still eluded the British colonies. But could a society based on uniformity of faith adjust to new ideas? On the other hand, could a society with a diversity of creeds achieve stability? As the eighteenth century opened, the test was yet to come.
CHAPTER 8
Empire and Identity
Atlantic communities
On 20 October 1697, Samuel Sewall, who shared the hopes of his friend and fellow Bostonian, Cotton Mather, for the speedy conversion of Spain's dominions in America, went to Dorchester to wait on the Lieutenant Governor: `breakfast together on Venison and Chockalatte: I said Massachuset and Mexico met at his Honour's Table." This gastronomic encounter of British and Spanish America at a Massachusetts breakfast table was a small, but symbolic, indicator of a larger process of transformation that was by now well under way: the creation of an integrated Atlantic world. It was a world in which the rivalries of European states increasingly impinged on the colonial societies of the Americas, and in which new relationships, both transatlantic and hemispheric, were being forged in response to the combined, and frequently conflicting, requirements of trade and war.
The accelerating process of contact and conflict within the framework of a developing Atlantic community sprang from developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century were marked by profound shifts in the international balance of power. In the Americas, which found themselves caught up in the consequences of those shifts, they saw the consolidation of colonial societies as distinctive polities with their own unique characteristics - characteristics that differentiated them in important ways from the metropolitan societies that had given birth to them, and gave rise to fundamental questions of identity which would become increasingly insistent during the opening decades of the eighteenth century.
The massive change in the relationships of the great powers of Europe in the middle years of the seventeenth century was succinctly summarized by the English publicist and political theorist, Slingsby Bethel, in his The Interest of Princes and States (1680):
Formerly the affairs of Christendom were supposed to be chiefly swayed by the two great powers of Austria (wherein Spain is understood) and France: from whom other Princes and States derived their Peace and War, according to the several parties they adhered unto. But now the puissance of the former being so much abated, that it deserves no rank above its Neighbours, France of the two remains the only formidable Potentate, of whose greatness, all Princes and States are as much concerned to be jealous, as formerly they were of Austria.2
The revolts of the 1640s in Catalonia, Portugal, Sicily and Naples had shaken the Spanish Monarchy to its core. While it eventually managed to weather the storm, although at the expense of the permanent loss of Portugal and its overseas empire, its `puissance', as Bethel observed, was `much abated'. The signing of the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, which ended almost 25 years of Franco-Spanish conflict, marked the emergence of the France of Louis XIV as the dominant military power in Europe. `Having now got the advantage of Spain,' wrote Bethel, France was aiming to `improve it to an universal monarchy, as Spain formerly designed.' Great Britain and the Dutch Republic were understandably anxious. They had not fought for so long against Spanish world domination simply to exchange one tyrannical Roman Catholic power for another as the arbiter of Europe.
New confirmation of Spain's loss of global supremacy was to be found in the terms of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Madrid of 1670, in which, for the first time, Spain officially conceded full British `sovereignty, ownership and possession' of ,all the lands, regions, islands, colonies and dominions, situated in the West Indies or in any part of America' held at that time by `the King of Great Britain and his subjects'. This included Jamaica, seized by Cromwell fifteen years before.' The New World monopoly conferred on the Iberian monarchs by Alexander VI in 1493 thus lost its last shreds of international legitimacy While the Spanish crown might still retain the bulk of its possessions on the American mainland, and the treasure fleets continue to return year after year to the Iberian peninsula with impressively large cargoes of silver, there was a widespread impression that Spain itself was in terminal decline.
Foreigners, following in the path of the Spanish arbitristas, made their own diagnoses of what had gone wrong. `Spain', wrote Slingsby Bethel, `is a clear demonstration that Mis-government, in suffering all manner of Frauds, and neglecting the Interest of a Nation, will soon bring the mightiest Kingdoms low, and lay their honour in the dust.'4 In the eyes of Bethel and other contemporary British observers, misgovernment included a failure to grasp the nature of the relationship between population, prosperity and liberty. As Bethel pointed out with reference to the recent successes of the Dutch and the English, `industry and ingenuity are not the effects of the barrenness of a country, oppression of the People, or want of Land ... but the effects only of justice, good laws and Liberty's The Spaniards had flouted the essential principles of good government by disregarding this fundamental truth, and were paying the inevitable price.
If Spain in the sixteenth century had furnished the model to be followed, now in the later seventeenth it was the model to be shunned. The encouragement of commerce, so neglected by the Spaniards, was coming to be seen as central to Britain's true interest. With the encouragement of commerce went a growing appreciation of the potential value to the mother country of its transatlantic colonies, although not everyone was persuaded of this. The pamphlet entitled A Discourse of Trade published by Roger Coke in 1670 feared that England was set on the same ruinous path as Spain. `Ireland and our Plantations', he wrote, `Rob us of all the growing Youth and Industry of the Nation, whereby it becomes weak and feeble, and the Strength, as well as Trade, becomes decayed and diminished ...'6 Sir Josiah Child found himself having to launch a counter-attack against `gentlemen of no mean capacities', like Coke, who argued that `his Majestie's Plantations abroad have very much prejudiced this Kingdom by draining us of our People; for the confirmation of which they urge the example of Spain, which they say is almost ruined by the Depopulation which the West-Indies hath occasioned." Far from weakening a nation, overseas plantations augmented its strength, although Child found himself wrestling with the problem of New England, notoriously unable to supply the mother country with those raw materials and commodities that justified colonies in the eyes of good mercantilists.
In practice, however, the new wealth brought to the metropolis in the second half of the seventeenth century by the rapid growth of the colonial market, and the economic stimulus provided by a buoyant transatlantic trade, spoke louder than any number of economic tracts.' The genuine if erratically pursued concern of later Stuart governments to regulate the colonial trade and reorganize colonial administration9 was a measure of the degree to which the American settlements were beginning to assume their place in the national consciousness as imperial outposts integral to the development of England's power and prosperity.
Britain's empire was therefore to be a maritime and commercial empire. As such it came to think of itself as the antithesis of Spain's land-based empire of conquest, the alleged cause of its ruin. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, in securing the Protestant succession in England and confirming its character as a parliamentary monarchy, contributed new layers of religious and political ideology to this dawning imperial vision. Commercial enterprise, Protestantism and liberty were now to be enshrined as the mutually reinforcing constituents of a national ethos which, in the long and exhausting wars against the popish tyranny of Louis XIV, wou
ld win the ultimate sanction of military success. Piece by piece, the various components of an eighteenth-century ideology of empire were being fitted into place. 10
The Glorious Revolution and its aftermath - the forging by William III of his grand anti-French coalition, and the global conflict with France culminating in 1713 in a peace settlement at Utrecht which set the seal on British claims to supremacy on the high seas - had profound if ambiguous consequences for the transatlantic colonies." It was only right that subjects of the crown who had settled overseas should enjoy the many benefits of an empire of liberty. Consequently there would be no Stuart-style attempts to interfere with the system of representative government operating through colonial assemblies, although continuing uncertainty over the relative powers of governors and assemblies would leave ample scope for conflict in the years ahead.'2
In general, the government of William III looked more benignly on the Caribbean colonies than on the mainland settlements, if only because of the growing importance of the sugar interest, and the need to assist the plantations as they sought to defend themselves against French attack.13 But it proved unable to tackle effectively the continuing problem of the survival of the proprietary colonies. Even in Massachusetts, the imposition of a royal governor under the new charter of 1691 was accompanied by a compromise which left the legislature in a potentially stronger position relative to the governor than that enjoyed by the assemblies of other royal colonies.14
Yet, even as the colonies were confirmed in their possession of institutions and liberties conforming to the broad principles of the Revolutionary Settlement, the growing recognition of their economic value to the imperial metropolis encouraged an interventionism from London in the management of trade that pointed to the potential for future conflict between the requirements of an empire of commerce and an empire of liberty. In the years immediately following the Glorious Revolution, the crown was too preoccupied with its domestic and international concerns to pursue a consistent policy towards the American settlements. But the creation in 1696 of the Board of Trade and Plantations in succession to the Lords of Trade was evidence of its determination to tighten London's control over the transatlantic trade. This seemed all the more necessary at a time when the diversionary effects of the war with France had made it easier for Scottish and Irish shipowners to break into the English monopoly created by the Navigation Acts, and sail directly to the Chesapeake and Delaware."
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 38
