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

by John H. Elliott

  Following his restoration, the king was bombarded by representations from his American subjects, still hopeful for the reforms that the Cortes had denied them. But, as so often had happened in the past, the representations received careful consideration only to be shelved.78 With the Spanish state bankrupt, the crown was desperately in need of its American revenues, and it was counting on the effectiveness of its local representatives and the innate loyalty of the Americans to restore the status quo that had existed before 1808. Now that Morelos had been driven on to the defensive in New Spain, and Viceroy Abascal had stamped out rebellion in Chile, Quito and Upper Peru, Madrid assumed that the old order in the New World would rapidly be restored. Ferdinand's advisers showed little or no awareness of how profoundly times had changed. Six years of turmoil and constitutional upheaval in Spain itself, the breakdown of authority over large parts of America, the rise of a more informed public opinion with a new taste for liberty, and heavy pressure from Great Britain and the United States, eager to capture valuable American markets - all this made a return to the past impossible.

  Madrid's expectations of a rapid return to normality were belied by continuing revolt in Buenos Aires and New Granada, and by the persistence of bloody civil conflict in Venezuela, in spite of - and in part because of - the harshly repressive activities of royalist forces under the command of Captain Juan Domingo Monteverde. In the autumn of 1814 the newly restored Council of the Indies recommended the despatch of an expeditionary force from Spain to restore order and crush the rebellions. In February 1815 an army of 10,500 men under the command of a Peninsular War veteran, Field Marshal Pablo Morillo, set sail from Cadiz. His arrival in Venezuela and his counter-revolutionary campaign, which included the confiscation of the estates of creoles associated with the patriot cause, among them Bolivar, wrecked the chances of a negotiated solution to the problem of America.79

  The restoration of the monarchy in Spain, therefore, which might have paved the way for reconciliation between the American territories and Madrid, proved to be the catalyst for movements aimed at winning outright independence. Ferdinand VII's American army, like that of George III, only succeeded in exacerbating the problem that it was sent to cure. It was now a question of which party could persist longer on its chosen course - a bankrupt Spanish monarchy which had opted for repression, or groups of insurgents determined to fight to the end for the cause of independence.

  By 1816 the royalist cause, backed by military power, appeared in the ascendant. In Chile, the Patriot army was decisively defeated in October 1814 by royalist forces descending from Peru; in New Spain, a year later, Morelos was caught, defrocked and executed; and by the end of 1816 Morillo's army had recovered control over most of Venezuela and New Granada. The remoteness of the La Plata region offered at least temporary protection from royalist attempts to recover it, but even here by 1816 the cause of independence was in serious trouble. The newly instituted regime in Buenos Aires proved incapable of asserting its authority over Paraguay, which had declared its own independence in 1811, or over the Banda Oriental, which was later to evolve into an independent Uruguay. One after another the military expeditions that it despatched to Upper Peru were driven back; and although a congress in Buenos Aires proclaimed the 'independence of the United Provinces of South America' in July 1816, the provinces of the Argentine interior, resolutely opposed to domination by the portenos of Buenos Aires, proved to be very far from participating in the unity. By this time, Spain was planning to send a military expedition to the River Plate, and the movement for independence threatened to unravel.80

  The subsequent five years, however, were to see a spectacular reversal of fortunes, brought about in large measure by the courage, skill and persistence of a handful of revolutionary leaders who were not prepared to abandon their struggle for independence. In the southern half of the continent the breakthrough for the independence movement came with Jose de San Martin's creation of an army of the Andes. In 1817 his forces struck westwards from Mendoza, hazardously making their way across the mountains in a bold attempt to break the power of the royalists and their hold over Lima. With his victory at Maipo, outside Santiago, on 5 April 1818 San Martin effectively freed Chile, only to find on entering Peru that its creole population showed no enthusiasm for liberation from Spain.81

  Away to the north, Simon Bolivar, having fled with other patriot leaders to Jamaica from New Granada in the spring of 1815, sought to rally support for the cause of independence in his famous `Jamaica letter' of 6 September. Defeated once again by royalist forces in his attempt to raise rebellion in his native Venezuela in the summer of 1816, he embarked at the end of the year on yet another, and this time successful, bid to liberate the continent. Forging an army of creoles, mulattoes, and slaves to whom he offered emancipation in return for conscription, he was gradually able to move over to the offensive. A brilliant campaign for the liberation of New Granada culminated in victory over the royalist army at the battle of Boyaca, north-east of Bogota, in May 1819. Bolivar then turned on Morillo's forces in western Venezuela, and entered Caracas in triumph in June 1821.

  Now that the liberation of his homeland had been achieved, he could turn his attention to winning independence for Quito and the viceroyalty of Peru. In the struggle for Quito, his most faithful commander, Antonio Jose de Sucre, was victorious in May 1822. Peru, the greatest prize of all, still awaited Bolivar. Effectively marginalizing San Martin, he defeated the royalist army at Junin in the summer of 1824. The creoles of Peru, ambivalent to the end, were at last brought face to face with the challenge of independence when Sucre decisively defeated the one remaining Spanish army on the continent at the battle of Ayacucho on 9 December.82

  For all the skill and daring of San Martin, Bolivar and other insurgent leaders, their eventual triumph also owed much to Spanish weakness and ineptitude. The royalist forces in America were heavily over-extended, and financial problems in Spain made it difficult, or impossible, to send reinforcements when they were needed. When an expeditionary force of 14,000 men was finally ready to embark at Cadiz for the recovery of Buenos Aires, a section of the troops under the command of Major Rafael Riego mutinied early in 1820, and demanded a return to the 1812 constitution. The revolt turned into a revolution, the constitution was restored, and for the next three years, before a French invading force restored the status quo, Ferdinand VII found himself acting in the unaccustomed and uncongenial role of a constitutional monarch.83

  Ironically, the restoration of a liberal regime in Spain was to prove the prelude to the independence of those regions of the American mainland that had not yet been lost. In its early stages the new administration in Madrid, deeply absorbed in domestic problems, was unable to pay more than fitful attention to the American question, and when it did so it showed no greater understanding of American realities than its 1810 predecessor. The Cortes approved a law in September 1820 depriving the officers of colonial militias of the privilege they had enjoyed since 1786 of trial by court-martial for non-military offences. Simultaneously, news crossed the Atlantic that the Cortes were also planning to curtail the privileges and property rights of the church. In the face of these threats to their corporate rights, creoles and peninsulares in New Spain sank their differences and joined in a fragile coalition to make common cause against Madrid. A group of army officers and clerics began to lay plans for independence from Spain.84

  The independence of Mexico was achieved by conspiracy, and not by revolution or a prolonged war of liberation. The social and ethnic violence unleashed by the unsuccessful rebellions of Hidalgo and Morelos in the preceding decade stood as a dreadful warning to the elite of New Spain. Although willing to contemplate the nominal abolition of caste barriers in order to neutralize the dangers of social conflict, its aim, like that of the leaders of the British American Revolution, was to achieve home rule with a minimum of social upheaval. This was to be a counter-revolution designed to defend an established order in church and state no longer guar
anteed by its traditional protector, the Spanish monarchy.

  The forces of political and social conservatism found their champion, or their instrument, in Agustin de Iturbide, a creole officer in the royalist army who had been ruthless in repressing the earlier revolts. Iturbide and his fellow conspirators prepared the ground well. Under the Plan of Iguala of February 1821 - a constitutional scheme carefully crafted to appeal to different sections of the society of New Spain - Mexico was proclaimed a self-governing Catholic and constitutional monarchy. In those instances where royalist forces did not defect to the rebels, they showed little inclination to resist. Independence in Mexico therefore rode to an almost bloodless triumph on the back of counter-revolution. Iturbide, as the hero of the hour, possessed the prestige and military authority to assume the leadership of the newly independent state. In quick succession he was proclaimed president of the Regency, and then - evoking an Aztec past which the creoles had appropriated as their own - the first emperor of a Mexico now metamorphosed into a `constitutional' empire. If he was no Bolivar, he was also no Washington.

  In the meantime, what remained of Spanish government in America was disintegrating, and even Santo Domingo, Spain's first island possession in the New World, declared its independence in December 1821.85 Mexico's break from Spain was followed by that of Guatemala and the other central American territories. By the end of the decade, of the once proud transatlantic empire of Spain only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained. Like the planter elite of the British West Indies in the later eighteenth century the Cuban elite calculated that it would lose more than it stood to gain by independence. Not only had it been shaken by the savagery and the success of the slave revolt of 1791 in Saint Domingue (Haiti), but it had prospered in the years after 1790 from the opening of the island to international trade and its growing sugar exports to the United States.86 The experience of Virginia to the contrary, plantation economies based on slave labour were not the natural breeding-grounds of elite revolt.

  The emancipation of America: contrasting experiences

  Independence came to Spanish America some forty to fifty years after it came to British America, and in very different circumstances. It would not have come, or come in the form that it did, without the American Revolution to the north. As George Canning observed when looking back in 1825 on the events of the preceding forty years, `the operation of that example sooner or later was inevitable', although in his opinion the mistaken policies of the metropolis helped to make it so. `Spain,' he continued `untaught by the lesson of the British American war, has postponed all attempt at accommodation with her Colonies until their separation is now irretrievably established.'87 But Spain found itself in a much less favourable position than Britain at the outbreak of the struggle for independence, and independence, when it came, was the consequence less of metropolitan pressure on the periphery of empire than of collapse at its centre. Not the Declaration of Independence but the armies of Napoleon set in motion the process that would culminate in the emancipation of Spain's empire of the Indies.

  It was a process that proved to be devastatingly costly in terms of societies disrupted and lives destroyed, and the new Iberian America that arose from the ashes of the old Spanish Empire was to live with the consequences of this for generations to come. In the North American War of Independence acts of brutality had been perpetrated by both sides, with soldiers in the British armies engaging in wide-scale rapine and plunder, some of it the result of deliberate policy. Lord Rawdon, a young British officer, wrote in 1776: `I think we should (whenever we get further into the country) give free liberty to the soldiers to ravage it at will, that these infatuated creatures may feel what a calamity war is.'88 The rebels, for their part, gave short shrift to the loyalists.89 But British America was never subjected to the kind of massive campaign of terror and destruction conducted in Venezuela by the royalist commander Juan Domingo Monteverde. Nor did the hostility between rebels and loyalists in the British colonies lead, as it did in Venezuela, to full-scale civil war between the colonists themselves. British commanders like General Sir Henry Clinton hesitated to unleash loyalist forces to wage campaigns of terror that could only serve to alienate those sections of the population whose hearts and minds they needed to win.90

  In Spanish America, and notably in Venezuela, the savagery of civil war was enhanced by the extent of the ethnic divisions, which all too easily came to overshadow what had begun as a domestic dispute within the Hispanic community. While the ethnic question was always present in North America, it played a less prominent part in the British-American War of Independence than in the conflicts in Spain's colonies, where non-white or mixed populations predominated. In Peru, for instance, of the 1,115,000 inhabitants in 1795, only 140,000 were whites. The remainder consisted of 674,000 Indians, 244,000 mestizos and 81,000 blacks of whom half were slaves.91 While many of the non-whites sought to steer clear of commitment in these internal Hispanic disputes, it was difficult to avoid being sucked into the conflict, given the extent of drafting and recruitment by both sides. With many militia regiments made up of blacks and mulattoes, the loyalties of their creole commanders could be decisive in determining whether they fought as rebels or royalists. Both sides armed the slaves, and Indians formed the majority of the soldiers in the royalist army in Peru.92

  The British crown made no concerted effort to mobilize Indians or blacks, in part at least out of a justifiable fear that this would alienate the white population whose loyalty it hoped to recover or preserve. When defending the ruthlessness of Bolivar's `war to the death' in the United States Congress, Henry Clay would ask rhetorically: `Could it be believed, if the slaves had been let loose upon us in the south, as they had been let loose in Venezuela; if quarters had been refused; capitulations violated; that General Washington, at the head of the armies of the United States, would not have resorted to retribution?'93 Shortage of manpower did, however, compel an initially reluctant Congress and General Washington to accept slaves into the ranks of the Continental Army, with the offer of freedom in return. But when the British moved their war effort to the south in 1779, the southern colonies were understandably resistant to the idea of defending themselves against attack by arming their slaves.94

  Apart from any risk involved in supplying arms to slaves, their diversion into military service meant an inevitable loss of labour on plantations and estates. As a result of the recruitment or the flight of slaves, production on many haciendas in Peru was abandoned as the conflict reached a climax, adding one further element of disruption to an economy already disrupted by naval blockade and the shortage of mercury supplies for the refinement of silver from the mines.95 Although seven years of war in North America brought widespread economic dislocation and social distress, with levels of income and wealth at the outbreak of the war possibly not reached again until the early nineteenth century,96 it is hard to believe that the British colonies suffered anything like the level of destruction reached in Spanish America, where the conflict was frequently not only more savage, but also much more prolonged. Even if some parts of the Spanish American world, like the cities of central Mexico, managed to remain `islands in the storm''97 others were subjected to almost continuous battering over a decade or more.

  It is not only the intensity of the internal divisions and the obstinacy of metropolitan Spain in refusing to relinquish its tight grasp on its empire which explain the length and ferocity of the wars of independence. When the British colonies revolted, active involvement by the European powers in the form of French and Spanish intervention against Britain notably shortened the length of the struggle the rebels would otherwise have faced. The international conjuncture a generation later proved less favourable to the winning of independence by the Spanish American rebels. Although Francisco de Miranda, Bolivar and other rebel leaders met with a warm reception on their arrival in London, there was no question of Britain coming forward with military or naval help for their independence movements once Britain and Spain had become
allies in the struggle against Napoleon. Trade - those lucrative Spanish American markets on which British eyes had been fixed for so long - was, and remained, the overriding concern of British foreign policy. While London was happy, and indeed anxious, to mediate between Spain and the rebels in the hope of restoring the peace and stability essential for trade, this was officially as far as it would go.98 It was therefore left to mercenaries and adventurers, like Admiral Cochrane and his captains, or the officers and men who took service under Bolivar after the ending of the Napoleonic wars, to provide the vital British contribution to the independence of Venezuela and New Granada, Chile and Peru.

  For its part, the young republic of the United States might have been expected to lend support and encouragement to movements for the establishment of fellow republics in its own hemisphere. Yet while political circles did indeed engage in lively discussion about the potential advantages of Spanish American independence to the United States, generalized sympathy - tempered by characteristic Anglo-American scepticism about the capacity of Spanish Americans to govern themselves - was no more translated into decisive assistance than it was in Great Britain. Not only did the new republic lack the military strength to intervene in support of the insurgents, but the overriding preoccupation of the administration during the period of the Napoleonic Wars was to steer clear of actions liable to provoke military and naval confrontation with a Britain that was now allied to Spain. Although after 1810 it was sending consular agents to South America to protect its growing commercial interests, the United States therefore held back from giving official recognition to the new republics. National self-interest remained here, as in Great Britain, the order of the day.99