The task that Madison set himself was to replace the Articles of Confederation with a constitution that would establish a strong national government, but one that was firmly based on the foundation of genuine popular sovereignty. The task inevitably required much squaring of the circle. Hard and often acrimonious bargaining was required to hammer out often painful compromises between competing interests. The most successful of these compromises was the provision whereby representation in the lower house of the legislature would be apportioned on the basis of population, while in the upper house the states would enjoy equal votes. The least successful was on the hopelessly divisive issues of slavery and the slave trade. Any attempt to abolish slavery would effectively strangle the union at birth, and the overriding concern at this moment was to keep the republic alive and ensure that its vital organs were strong enough to let it breathe and grow This could only be achieved by a series of deals in which the continuation of slavery was obliquely confirmed by a number of sections in the articles of the new constitution. For purposes of representation in the House of Representatives, slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person, and a further period of twenty years' grace was allowed before Congress would return to the issue of the slave trade.' Evasiveness in this instance was the prerequisite for survival.
Having appropriated the name of `Federalists' for themselves, those who favoured a strong national executive took their case to the people in the great national debate over the ratification of the proposed new constitution in 1787-8. In the hard-fought struggle between Federalists and anti-Federalists, it was the Federalists who prevailed. With its ratification by the ninth of the thirteen states, New Hampshire, in June 1788, the new constitution officially became the law of the land, although four states, including Virginia and New York, were still holding out. But when both these major states agreed to ratification a few weeks later, although by narrow majorities, the battle was won.
When it came to choosing the first president of the new republic, the choice was foreordained. One figure, the hero of the war of independence, towered above the rest. The election of George Washington in March 1789 conferred dignity on the institution of the presidency while guaranteeing moderation and common sense in the exercise of its powers. Above all it linked, in the person of a renowned and universally respected individual, the revolutionary struggle against the British to the great constitutional experiment on which the newly established United States of America was now well and truly embarked.
In 1787, while the Federalists and anti-Federalists in North America were fighting each other for the soul of the new republic, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to the secretary of the American delegation in London: `You ask me if any thing transpires here on the subject of S. America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only.'6 His assessment, however, proved premature. In New Granada and Peru the fires had been effectively extinguished, and in the central regions of the viceroyalty of New Spain no figure emerged to light the torch of rebellion when harvest failure and a devastating shortage of food provoked widespread social disruption in 1785-6.7 Although the North American example encouraged a few radicals like Francisco de Miranda to dream and conspire, the Spanish crown seemed to have succeeded in damping down the combustible materials, and had emerged from the conflagrations of the early 1780s with its authority reaffirmed.
With the confidence given them by the sense of a crisis overcome, Jose de Galvez and his colleagues in Madrid pressed ahead with their restructuring of the old administrative system, extending administration by intendants to Peru in 1784 and to New Spain in 1786. Galvez himself died in 1787 but ministers continued to pursue the programme of reform, and most notably the reform of the transatlantic trading system which had been inaugurated by the proclamation of `free trade' in 1778. In this they were responding to continuing pressures from the peripheral regions of the Iberian peninsula for a foothold in a commercial system long dominated by the Consulado of Cadiz. Statistics suggesting that the ten years since the promulgation of the decree had seen a threefold expansion in colonial trade were sufficiently encouraging to persuade them to extend the system to Venezuela in 1788, and then in the following year to New Spain.
In reality the trading system remained heavily protectionist, in spite of its gestures towards the now fashionable economic liberalism. Yet for all its limitations it did afford greater latitude to Iberian and Spanish American merchants conducting business outside the old monopolistic structure. It also helped to stimulate economic activity in hitherto marginalized regions of the Indies, although simultaneously generating new inter-colonial rivalries as different provinces competed for a share of the expanding opportunities.'
The fiscal and economic rewards which Madrid anticipated from the latest phase of the reform programme were, however, soon offset by the impact of war. Spain would pay a high price for its intervention in the American War of Independence. Trade was disrupted by the English naval blockade, ships were lost and businesses paralysed. New wars brought further disruption in the 1790s. Charles III died at the end of 1788, and the new reign of Charles IV was overshadowed almost from the start by the outbreak of revolution in France. In the spring of 1793 revolutionary France declared war on Spain, shortly after Charles IV had dispensed with the services of the last of his father's team of ministers, the Count of Aranda. The royal favourite, the young and politically inexperienced guards officer Manuel Godoy, now became first secretary of state. The new war brought Spain into uneasy partnership with Great Britain, whose maritime supremacy was resented and feared by Madrid. It also had the effect of cutting off the supply of French products traditionally re-exported by Spanish merchants to the Indies, opening the lucrative Spanish American market to penetration not only by British merchants but also by those of the United States.
Godoy's anxieties over the threat to Spain's American empire from British naval and commercial power persuaded him of the need to change tack. In October 1796 Spain joined regicide France in an offensive and defensive alliance against Great Britain. French support was to come at a price. In 1800, at the treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain agreed under pressure from Napoleon to restore Louisiana to the French, although Charles IV, anxious about the growing power of the United States and its implication for the future of the Floridas, only accepted the transfer on condition that Louisiana was not subsequently relinquished to a third party. In 1802 Spain duly transferred Louisiana to French rule, but in the following year Napoleon reneged on his promise and sold it to the United States. Thanks to President Jefferson's opportune negotiation of the Louisiana purchase the new republic had doubled its territory at a stroke, weakening in the process Spain's already precarious hold on the Floridas, which would eventually be ceded to the United States in 1819, and opening the road to the colonization of the American interior.9
The concessions forced upon Charles IV to secure the support of the French failed to yield the expected results. The war with Great Britain, which continued until 1802 and was then renewed in 1804, proved a disaster for Spain. In February 1797 its fleet was defeated at the battle of Cape St Vincent, and the British seized the island of Trinidad, off the Venezuelan coast. The blockade of Cadiz by the British fleet made it impossible for Spain to keep the American market supplied, and Madrid was compelled to open Spanish American ports to neutral carriers. Again United States traders were the great beneficiaries, supplying wheat, flour and other commodities to the Spanish Antilles, Venezuela and New Granada. The new protectionist system launched by Madrid under the deceptive flag of `free trade', and intended to make the peninsula the metropolis of a great commercial empire on the British model, had effectively collapsed.'°
While economic control of the Indies was slipping irrevocably out of Spanish hands, more than a decade of almost continuous warfare placed the finances of the Spanish crown under intolerable strain. Both in Spain and in the Indies the wealth of the church and of religious and charitable ins
titutions proved an irresistible attraction to a near-bankrupt state. An encouraging precedent existed in the seizure of Jesuit property on both sides of the Atlantic in 1767. In 1798 the crown decreed the disentailment and auction of church property in peninsular Spain, the resulting funds being used to consolidate loans to meet the costs of war. In 1804, following the renewal of war with England, this Law of Consolidation was extended to charitable funds in Spanish America. The measure aroused intense anger. Over large parts of America, church assets were integral to the working of the credit system, and the new law meant in effect the forced sale of large numbers of private estates and businesses as proprietors were compelled by the withdrawal of credit to redeem the capital value of their loans. Not all regions were equally affected, but New Spain, where mining and other enterprises were heavily reliant on credit and where the viceroy Jose de Iturrigaray energetically enforced the royal order, was especially hard hit. By the time the decree was revoked five years later enormous damage had been done. Mining, agriculture and trade had all been drastically affected, and parish priests and clergy living on interest from loans saw their livelihood gone. Already undermined by the regalist policies of Charles III, the church-state alliance, the central pillar of the elaborate edifice of Spain's empire of the Indies, was beginning to totter."
In spite of increased revenues from the Indies, which constituted a fifth of the Spanish treasury's receipts in the period between 1784 and 1805,12 the Spanish state was now struggling to keep afloat. Its finances were heavily mortgaged; the combination of harvest failures and depression in Spain's war-damaged economy was generating fresh social tensions; and Godoy's government was in disarray. In March 1808 he was overthrown in a palace coup and Charles IV was forced to abdicate in favour of his son and heir, Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias. But Napoleon had had enough of his unreliable Spanish ally. As French forces moved on Madrid, the new king, Ferdinand VII, was lured to France, where he joined his parents and Godoy in exile at Bayonne. On 10 May he too was forced to abdicate. When Napoleon subsequently transferred the crown to Joseph Bonaparte, there was no longer an uncontested source of legitimate authority in Spain and its empire of the Indies.
The overthrow of the Bourbons and the French occupation unleashed a popular uprising which plunged the peninsula into years of chaos and war that would only end with the defeat of the French and the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814. Not only metropolitan Spain but also its overseas empire were confronted with a crisis of unprecedented proportions. With a power vacuum at the very centre of the imperial government in Madrid, where did legitimate authority lie? To some extent, Spain's American empire had been faced with a comparable problem on the death of Carlos II in 1700, but the problem had been quickly transcended as the overseas viceroyalties fell into line behind Carlos's legally designated successor, Philip V But the situation this time was very different. Joseph Bonaparte was a usurper; Ferdinand VII was in exile; and, as Jefferson had written in 1787, `there are combustible materials there and they wait the torch only.' Would the overthrow of the dynasty prove to be the torch?
The collapse of royal power in the Hispanic world precipitated a very different kind of crisis from that which faced Britain's American colonies in the 1770s. The Spanish American crisis of 1808 was brought about by the absence, not the exercise, of imperial authority. In this sense it was closer to the situation created in the English Atlantic world by the execution of Charles I. But although the regicide of 1649 and the subsequent transfer of imperial authority to the people in parliament posed serious constitutional and practical problems for colonies that owed their existence to royal charters, the policies pursued by the imperial government under the Commonwealth and Protectorate were sufficiently respectful of established institutions and interests to prevent violent confrontation, even with those colonies which had proclaimed their loyalty to the dead king's son.13 The transition was further eased by the willingness of the new regime to abide by the largely non-interventionist approach of its predecessor to the internal affairs of the colonial societies. Moreover, the Cromwellian government spoke a language of national power which they could both understand and respect.
The peoples of Spanish America, on the other hand, had lived for centuries under a royal government which was traditionally interventionist in principle, if not always in practice. They had grown accustomed to conducting their lives by reference to the royal authority, however ineffectual it might often have been. Now suddenly that authority was gone, and they found themselves drifting rudderless on an ocean of uncertainty. Nor could they expect metropolitan Spain to come to their rescue. The country was in chaos, and the ships that arrived from Spanish ports at irregular intervals brought conflicting messages and tardy news of a war that was going from bad to worse.
As the people of Spain took up arms, a number of regional and local juntas sprang to life in the peninsula to organize popular resistance against the French. In September 1808 these juntas were co-ordinated with some difficulty into a Junta Central, which took refuge in Seville after the French capture of Madrid. As French forces moved southwards into Andalusia in January 1810, the junta again fled, this time to Cadiz, which was sheltered by the protective power of the British fleet. Here the junta dissolved itself in favour of a Regency Council acting on behalf of the exiled Ferdinand VII, the deseado, the longed-for king.
Although the Regency Council was a conservative body, it was dependent on the mercantile oligarchy of Cadiz, which was politically liberal, although tenacious in its determination to cling to what remained of its privileged position in the American trade. Under pressure from the Cadiz elite, the Regency Council went ahead with plans already set in train by the junta Central for the convocation of a great national assembly, or Cortes, in which deputies from Spanish America were also invited to participate. The Cortes assembled in Cadiz on 14 September 1810 and were to remain in session until the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814.14
With the king in exile, and metropolitan Spain apparently on the point of being engulfed by the tide of the French advance, the four viceroyalties and nine presidencies and captaincies-general which constituted Spain's American empire were thrown back on their own devices. In contrast to the British American colonies, these diverse territories had no colonial assemblies to act as potential alternative sources of leadership if royal authority were challenged or collapsed. The cabildos of major cities, like Mexico City, Lima and Bogota, traditionally put forward claims to speak on behalf of the wider community, but these claims were liable to be contested by rival town councils, and there was no generally accepted forum for the discussion and resolution of problems of common concern to the territory as a whole. Not surprisingly, therefore, in 1808 different territories adopted different ad hoc solutions to the problem of legitimacy - solutions which reflected the balance of local forces in societies already under strain from the tensions created by ethnic diversity and by the antagonism between creoles and peninsulares.
Yet it was the search for legitimacy rather than aspirations after independence that initially dictated the course of events. The instinctive reaction, in Spanish America as in metropolitan Spain, was to resort to the principle that, in the absence of the legitimate monarch, sovereignty reverted to the people. This was the principle that legitimized the juntas that had sprung into life in the peninsula when the monarchy was overthrown. When `the kingdom found itself suddenly without a king or a government', declared the supreme junta of Seville in 1808, `... the people legally resumed the power to create a government."' As news of events in Spain trickled across the Atlantic, the Americans followed the Spanish example. Following the arrival of letters in Caracas in July 1808 ordering the authorities to take the oath of allegiance to Joseph Bonaparte, the city council urged the captain-general to set up a junta to decide on the course of action to be taken.16 Similarly, the councils of Mexico City, Bogota, Quito and Buenos Aires would all see in the formation of provisional juntas acting in the name of Ferdinand VII an
appropriate mechanism for ensuring the legitimation of authority through the assertion of the popular will.''
There was, however, in America as in Spain, an inherent tension between the absolutist traditions of Bourbon monarchy as legitimately represented by the exiled Ferdinand VII and a doctrine of popular sovereignty which, although rooted in medieval Hispanic constitutionalism, was in the process of acquiring the colouring and characteristics of a new and very different age. The reforming ministers of Charles III had persistently sought to remould the aggregated territories of the old Habsburg monarchy and their privileged corporations into a unitary nation-state subordinate to a benevolent but all-powerful monarch.18 In the peninsula the incipient sense of Spanish nationhood that ministers had tried so hard to inculcate was dramatically transmuted by the French invasion into the full-blooded nationalist response of a mass uprising. But at the same time the crisis of legitimacy created by the events of 1808 gave those sections of Spanish opinion which had assimilated revolutionary French and American notions of popular sovereignty an unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct on liberal foundations the antiquated edifice of old regime Spain. Their instrument for the process of reconstruction would be the Cortes of Cadiz, which enthusiastically set about endowing Spain with a written constitution that would hold monarchical power in check. Ferdinand in his exile might still be an unknown quantity, but a liberal Cortes and an absolutist dynasty were infallibly set on a collision course.
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 63
