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

by John H. Elliott

  32 Westover House, Charles County, Virginia, (1732). The seat of the Byrd family of Virginia, Westover, was built by William Byrd II to replace his father's house overlooking the James River. A red-brick mansion, built in the classical style of the houses Byrd had seen in England where his father sent him for his education, it was one of the first of the new manor houses built by the eighteenth-century Virginia gentry - houses that, however handsome, could not compete in scale and grandeur with those of the English aristocracy on which the Virginian elite sought to model itself.

  33 William Williams, Husband and Wife in a Landscape (1775). William Williams (1727-91) was an English painter who sought to make a living in America, where he painted somewhat naif conversation pieces for colonial families in imitation of those being made in England for the nobility and gentry. In Philadelphia he befriended the young Benjamin West, who in turn would move to England to become the first native-born British North American to acquire fame as an artist.

  34 Jose Mariana Lara, Don Matheo Vicente de Musitu y Zavilde and his Wife (late eighteenth century). Rural tranquillity for the creole elite in late colonial New Spain. Don Vicente and his wife were the owners of a sugar mill near Cuautla.

  35 Jan Verelst, Portrait of Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row. The Five Nations enter the world of international diplomacy as they manoeuvre between Britain and France. In 1710, when the English colonists were anxious to secure help from the mother country to conquer French Canada, they persuaded this Mohawk chief and three fellow Mohawks to go on an embassy to London to advance their cause. The four `Indian kings' made a great impression and were enthusiastically received at court. It was also hoped that the ambassadors would be sufficiently impressed by what they saw in England to persuade the rest of the Iroquois Confederacy to join the attack. In the event, many Iroquois volunteers joined the English expedition mounted against New France in 1711, but it ended in disaster at the mouth of the St Lawrence even before the attack was launched.

  36 Bishop Roberts, Charles Town Harbour, watercolour (c. 1740). By the time the harbour of Charles Town (the future Charleston) was depicted in this watercolour by a resident artist, the city had become a flourishing Atlantic port. The rice grown on the plantations of South Carolina was shipped from here to Europe and the West Indies. The colony's rice exports paid for the imported luxury goods eagerly sought by the planter elite for the adornment of their mansions and persons.

  37 Anon., The Old Plantation, watercolour (c. 1800). The survival of African culture in a New World environment. Plantation slaves, probably from a South Carolina plantation, appear to be celebrating a wedding with music and dancing.

  38 Henry Dawkins, A North-West Prospect of Nassau Hall with a Front View of the President's House. An engraving of 1764, which shows the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton University) eighteen years after its foundation in 1746.

  39 Paul Revere, The Boston Massacre. This engraving, with its dramatic depiction of the moment on 5 March 1770 when a party of eight British soldiers turned their guns on a hostile crowd, circulated widely through the colonies and helped inflame the passions that would lead to revolt.

  40 Anon., Union of the Descendants of the Imperial Incas with the Houses of Loyola and Borja (Cuzco, 1718). The painting commemorates a double union between the Inca and Spanish elites. On the left, St Ignatius Loyola's nephew, Don Martin Garcia de Loyola, governor of Chile, who was ambushed and killed in the Araucanian wars in 1598, and his wife, Dona Beatriz, the daughter of Sairi Tupac, who succeeded to the imperial rights of the Incas. Beside them is St. Ignatius holding the constitutions of the Jesuit Order. Above them to the left are shown the bride's parents, along with Tupac Amaru I, in the centre, who was executed by the Spaniards for rebellion in 1572. In the foreground on the right, the daughter born of this marriage, Dona Lorenza, is depicted with her husband, Don Juan de Borja. The bridegroom was the son of St Francis Borja, who stands behind him holding his emblem, a skull. The painting, depicting marriages that had occurred more than a century before, testifies to the pride of the eighteenthcentury nobility of Cuzco in their ancestral past.

  41 William Russell Birch, High Street from the County Market Place, Philadelphia, engraving (1798). One of twenty-nine views of post-revolutionary Philadelphia, engraved by a British artist who arrived in America in 1794. The engravings were intended to serve as an advertisement 'by which an idea of the improvements of the country could be conveyed to Europe'. They give a lively impression of the handsome and prosperous city in which the First and Second Continental Congresses were convoked, and the Declaration of Independence signed.

  42 Patriots and Liberators 1. George Washington (1732-99) painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796.

  43 Patriots and Liberators 2. Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), miniature on ivory of 1828, after a painting by Roulin.

  While British and Spanish American colonists in the later decades of the eighteenth century shared a growing disillusionment with their mother countries and with the Old World itself, the British proved to have a more impressive armoury of ideological weapons at their disposal for resisting the political assault that now confronted them. The population of the British colonies had long enjoyed access, through books, pamphlets and other forms of ephemeral publication imported from England, to a wide spectrum of political opinions. These ran from the high Tory opposition views of a Bolingbroke, through the orthodox doctrines of a Whig establishment comfortably settled on the constitutional foundations established by the Glorious Revolution, to the radical and libertarian doctrines of the seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen and their reformulation by eighteenthcentury publicists like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.1° These divergent approaches to the ordering of politics and society were readily available because the fault-lines created by the upheavals of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution still ran through the British Atlantic community. Each time the tectonic plates shifted there would be a new eruption of political and religious debate.

  There was little scope for such public debate in the more controlled environment of the Spanish Atlantic world. An unpopular royal minister, like Esquilache, might be overthrown by the action of the Madrid mob, but there was no opportunity in the Spain of the 1760s for a John Wilkes to emerge and mount a sustained challenge to authority through the spoken and written word. Lacking the ammunition provided by a metropolitan literature of opposition, creoles who were critical of royal policies therefore remained dependent on the theories of contractualism and the common good propounded in medieval Castilian juridical literature and the works of the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics. During the first half of the eighteenth century the Jesuits updated this scholastic tradition by assimilating to it the natural law theories of Grotius and Pufendorf,ii but the political culture of the Hispanic world lacked the benefit of rejuvenating injections provided, as in Britain, by parliamentary and party conflict.

  The opportunities for informed political discussion in the American viceroyalties were also narrowed by local constraints. Following the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, a royal decree forbade the teaching of doctrines of popular sovereignty as expounded by Francisco Suarez and other sixteenth-century Jesuit the- ologians.12 The censorship of books was a further obstacle. It was normal practice in the Spanish Indies that no book could be printed without the granting of a licence by viceroys or presidents of the Audiencias. Such a licence would only be issued after its contents had been approved by the local tribunal of the Inquisition." Even if the process of inquisitorial vetting was often perfunctory, and the system of licensing by the civil authorities was open to corruption, bureaucratic controls inevitably impeded the circulation of ideas in a continent where vast distances and problems of transportation made inter-regional communication laborious and slow.

  The British colonies, too, were subjected to constraints on publishing, although these were weakened by the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act in England. The instructions issued to royal governors authorized them to exercise super
vision over the public press, while colonial assemblies, although frequently in conflict with the governors, had an inclination to support them when it came to controlling publications which might be similarly subversive of their own powers and privileges. Printers, too, tended to tread warily, since they were in competition for the lucrative post of government printer in their respective colonies.

  When legislation or more informal kinds of pressure failed, the authorities could still make use of the law on seditious and blasphemous libel. Resort to the courts, however, brought with it no guarantee of success. Massachusetts juries were notoriously reluctant to prosecute in cases of seditious libel, and in New York skilful advocacy and a populist jury produced a `Not guilty' verdict in 1735 in the trial of John Peter Zenger for material printed in his Weekly Journal. Although the authorities showed no inclination to abandon recourse to censorship in the wake of the Zenger verdict, the outcome of the case illustrated the effectiveness of a defence strategy that linked freedom for printers, publishers and authors with the wider cause of liberty. While a free press might not yet be a natural right, at least it had become a natural right in waiting, and one that was explicitly recognized some thirty years later when the Massachusetts House of Representatives declared in 1768 that `the Liberty of the Press is a great Bulwark of the Liberty of the People.' As the events of the 1760s and 1770s were to show, the existence of a jury system furnished the British colonists with a potential weapon for resistance to royal power that their Spanish American counterparts lacked.14

  Not surprisingly, the more favourable conditions in the British colonies for the reception and dissemination of information gave them a substantial advantage over Spain's colonies when it came to the founding of newspapers and periodi- cals.ls In New Spain a semi-official monthly gazette, the Gaceta de Mexico, first briefly established in 1722, was relaunched in 1728 and survived until 1742. Lima too had its own gazette from 1745, but periodical publications in Spanish America continued to be irregular and ephemeral throughout the century.16 By contrast, the British colonies, where the first newspaper, the weekly Boston News-letter, was founded in 1704, were already supporting twelve newspapers by 1750, although the first daily papers would only appear after the end of the War of Independence.'7

  In spite of their heavy London content, these newspapers, while reinforcing a sense of local and regional identity, helped simultaneously to encourage intercolonial mutual awareness by reprinting scraps of information from other colonial papers.18 Improvements in the internal postal services worked to the same effect. Benjamin Franklin, as postmaster in Philadelphia from 1737and colonial deputy postmaster general from 1753, increased the frequency of services, and managed to reduce the time for delivery and reply between Philadelphia and Boston from three weeks to six days.19

  As the political atmosphere grew tense during the 1750s and 1760s, the flow of news through the colonies made it easier to fashion a common response to acts of perceived British injustice. The activities of printers, publishers and postmasters - and Franklin was all three at once - widened the opportunities for envisaging a British colonial America as a single body politic with a shared concern for liberty. Newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets provided material for lively discussion in taverns and coffee-houses, and in the dining clubs and societies that sprang up in the cities of the eastern seaboard in the pre-revolutionary years. It was by incessantly talking politics in the taverns and coffee-houses of Boston that Samuel Adams cut his teeth as a revolutionary.20

  As the Stamp Act crisis developed, newspapers, voluntary associations and the boycott of British goods all involved widening sections of the colonial population in the process of political debate. In Spain's American possessions, on the other hand, distance and size made it much harder to fashion, or even envisage, anything approaching the degree of co-ordinated response found in the British colonies. The surface area of the empire of the Indies was more than 5 million square miles. Spanish South America alone covered nearly 3.5 million square miles, as against the roughly 322,000 of the thirteen mainland colonies of British North America.21 It took two months to travel overland from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile, and nine months by horse, mule and river transport from Buenos Aires to the port of Cartagena in New Granada.22 While the printing press made the Atlantic crossing soon afer the beginnings of colonization, even so important a city as Santa Fe de Bogota, the capital of New Granada, did not acquire a press of its own until the late 1770s.23 With local newspapers rudimentary or non-existent, and inter-colonial trade still to receive the impetus that would follow the introduction of `free trade' in the years after 1774, there was no frequent or rapid network of communication between the various viceregal and provincial capitals.

  The problems involved in mobilizing and co-ordinating resistance over large areas of territory were therefore of an entirely different order to those likely to be experienced in the mainland territories of North America. Here, for all the diversity of the colonies, their bickering and rivalries, there existed the potential, and to some extent the means, for rallying the white population across colonial boundaries to defend a common cause. Whether this would in fact happen would depend both on the actions of the British government following the repeal of the Stamp Act, and on the capacity of the colonists themselves to sink their differences and find a common will to resist.

  If they did so - and it would not be easy - it would be around a set of common assumptions and beliefs. These assumptions and beliefs were deeply rooted in the experiences of the early colonists, but gathered shape and cogency over the decades before the crisis of the 1770s. The process, however, was inevitably complicated by the diversity of background and religion of the colonial population in a society where immigration was not officially confined, as it was in Spanish America, to persons of a single nationality or religious faith. If the open nature of British American society as compared with that of Spanish America made for the easier circulation of news and ideas and a greater freedom of debate, it also had the disadvantage of raising the general level of disputatiousness.

  Yet while its diversity made the white population of British America contentious, its members were at least united in their fundamental conviction that the transatlantic lands in which they or their forebears had settled offered them the prospect of better lives than those they had lived, or might have lived, in Europe. They were the inhabitants of a genuinely New World - a world whose very newness promised them the freedom to worship as they wished, or, alternatively, not to worship at all; the freedom to settle and work a plot of land and keep the profits of their labour for themselves; the freedom to live their lives as they liked, without the need to defer to those whose claims to social superiority rested solely on the accident of birth; and the freedom to choose, reject, and hold accountable those in positions of authority.

  These were precious freedoms, and the nature of eighteenth-century British Atlantic culture was such as to reinforce rather than undermine them. Politically, it was a culture firmly grounded in the principles of the Revolution Settlement of 1688-9, which had enshrined as central to the British constitution the virtues of representation, freedom from the exercise of arbitrary power, and (limited) religious toleration. Intellectually, it was a culture increasingly infused with preEnlightenment and Enlightenment notions of the supreme importance of reason and scientific observation for unlocking the secrets of the universe.

  The heroes of the story were Newton and Locke. Once Newton's conceptualization of the laws of the universe, and Locke's political, educational and philosophical theories had been absorbed in their homeland, they automatically came to form part of British Atlantic culture, even if their reception and acceptance on the American side of the Atlantic involved something of a time-lag. Before the 1720s few in America had apparently read, or even seen, Locke's two Treatises of Government, and it seems to have been primarily his reputation as a philosopher that brought his political theories to such public attention as they received in the follow
ing two or three decades.24 By the 1720s and 1730s, however, his moral philosophy and the new science were winning increasing numbers of adherents both among the professional and business classes in the Northern and Middle Colonies, and the slave-owners of the South. The Virginian planter, Landon Carter, inherited from his father the 1700 folio edition of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and his annotations show him quite prepared to engage in debate with `this great man'.25

  The new notions naturally provoked opposition from the redoubts of orthodox religion. Tensions had already surfaced in later seventeenth-century New England, where the founding of Yale College in 1701 was intended to counter the dangerously latitudinarian tendencies of Harvard. As the new ideas and approaches became more diffused, so the religious opposition became more vocal. Conservative Calvinists on the one hand and evangelical revivalists on the other inveighed against deists and sceptics who subverted the truths of religion. Splits in the Presbyterian church led to the founding in 1746 by New Light Scottish Presbyterians of an interdenominational institution, the College of New Jersey, the future Princeton University (fig. 38). Anglicans responded in 1754 by founding King's College, which would later become Columbia University"

  In spite of the resistance to innovation, by 1750 the moderate Enlightenment, pragmatic and inquiring, had largely triumphed over Protestant scholasticism in the colleges of America. The leaders of revolution in the 1770s were formed in its mould.27 Their mental world was characterized by a new, and generally more secular, rationalism based on scepticism and doubt; a belief in the capacity of the individual and society to achieve progress through an understanding of the laws of a mechanistic universe designed by a benevolent Creator; a confidence that human industriousness and the application of scientific knowledge could harness the forces of nature for human benefit; and, as a corollary, the conviction that it was incumbent on governments, drawing their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, to protect life, liberty and property, and enhance the happiness and prosperity of their peoples.