ELITES IN THE NEW STATES: BACKGROUNDS, IDENTITIES, OBJECTIVES
The sweeping demographic changes the Americas experienced in phase 1 had differing impacts on the territories that gained independence in phase 2. As of the 1770s indigenous Amerindians comprised the substantial majority in Spain’s Central and South American possessions.
People of African descent predominated in the Caribbean basin plantation colonies. People of European descent were the majority only in the thirteen bna colonies. In New Spain and Brazil it is likely that none of the three racial/continental categories formed a majority, in large part because sizable numbers were of mixed racial ancestry and socially defined as such.Given the demographic diversity and complexity of these New World colonies, the most striking feature of the political elites who led phase 2’s independence movements is their racial homogeneity. Except for Haiti, nationalist leaders were all from the European settler community. Only in the United States and Haiti did the first generation of powerholders come from a group constituting a majority of the population. In the other cases political power was captured and effectively monopolized by members of racial minority groups.
By the standards of the time the objectives of settler nationalists were quite ambitious and radical: widespread rejection of the monarchical principle that for centuries had been the basis of political legitimacy in Europe; rejection of titled aristocracies with inherited privileges; creation of republican forms of government based, at least in theory, on expressions of popular will; and formation of large political units from separate components of a former empire. The thirteen English- speaking states were able in the 1780s to shift from a loose confederation to a more centrally structured federal system. Composite polities in Spanish-speaking territories were less successful: Gran Colombia lasted from 1819 to 1830, the United Provinces of Central America from 1823 to 1838.
In the one movement not led by settlers, goals and outcomes went far beyond politics. The slave uprising of 1791 in Saint Domingue wrought a social revolution, one of the first in the modern world and arguably one of the most profound in history. Slavery was abolished in practice as well as in law, and the plantation basis of economic production was undermined. The old caste system with whites on top and blacks at the bottom was challenged in the decade following the uprising, then permanently destroyed with the expulsion and massacre of whites shortly after independence. The most far-reaching challenge to the colonial order in the Americas was led by people of African descent.
Perhaps more striking than the political innovations was the limited scope of phase 2 nationalist goals. Even the innovations were hedged about with exceptions and qualifications. The monarchical principle was not universally rejected. Haiti’s first head of state elevated his title from governor to emperor. Between 1811 and 1820 the self-styled King Henri Christophe ruled the northern part of Haiti. Brazil entered the family of nations under an emperor tracing descent to Portugal’s House of Braganza, while the arbiter of Mexico’s independence, Gen. Agustin Iturbide, was formally declared Emperor Agustin I in 1822.
Moreover, settler-led polities calling themselves republics were by no means democracies. In the vast majority of phase 2 cases independence movements were restricted to men of pure European descent. If one goal was to mobilize settler support, another was to keep indigenous, slave, and mixed-blood populations politically demobilized. After independence the franchise was effectively limited to the small portion of the adult population that was male, property-owning, and descended from Europeans. Fear of popular participation in politics figured in Dom Pedro’s decision to proclaim Brazilian independence. A similar motive lay behind independence proclamations in New Spain and the United Provinces of Central America.
A popular revolution in Spain in 1820 had established a liberal constitutional order, raising the prospect of a broadened political base within the colonies and restricted privileges for colonial landowners and Roman Catholic clergy. Declaring independence was a way of preventing imposition of populist reforms from abroad. General Iturbide, the soldier who mercilessly hounded the remnants of Hidalgo’s revolutionary forces, broke ties with Spain in 1821 in order to preserve the societal status quo at home. The junta which in that same year declared independence for Central America openly expressed its fear of the very people on whose behalf it claimed to act: “It was agreed by the Deputation and the members of the honorable cabildo that independence from Spain being the general will of the people, and without prejudice to what the future Congress may decide in regard to independence, the Jefe Politico orders that it be published in order to preclude the dreadful consequences should the general public take this matter in their hands and proclaim it de facto.”12Independence was generally perceived by settler elements as a way of preventing major social and economic changes from taking place. Although slavery was formally abolished in several Spanish-speaking territories shortly after independence, the peculiar institution continued to function with full vigor in the two largest and most populous new states, the United States and Brazil. Slave status precluded citizenship status. Amerindians were effectively if not always formally deprived of citizenship. Among numerous reasons advanced for excluding them were their ignorance of the official language (that is, the language of the ex-metropole); their unwillingness to abandon communal land tenure; and aspects of indigenous culture deemed uncivilized. Denial of citizenship rights to blacks and Amerindians, the very categories most marginalized in colonial society, prevented these groups from gaining access to benefits the new governments offered the white population, benefits such as modest social services and legally secured land titles.
Haiti excepted, the only people who really mattered in polities that broke with Europe in phase 2 were persons tracing descent to that very continent.If anything, independence had the effect of reinforcing race-based social and economic inequalities inherited from the colonial era. In mainland plantation economies dependent upon slave labor, separation from the metropole offered protection from the critiques of an abolitionist movement initially more powerful in Europe than in the Americas. In the United States, southern states retained slavery for eight decades after independence, and for almost three decades after Great Britain abolished the institution throughout the empire (between 1834 and 1838). In Brazil, about half of whose population was enslaved, a serious abolitionist movement developed only in the 1870s. Slavery was not abolished until 1888.13
In territories that had been mixed or occupation colonies, independence ensured continuation of earlier patterns of mobilizing and exploiting indigenous labor. This was the predominant pattern in the Spanish-speaking New World. Criollos who in the colonial era dominated the private profit sector, primarily through titles to land and rights to Amerindian labor, were able by leading independence movements to wrest control of the public sector as well. The legal and coercive mechanisms of government were then used to protect the unequal distribution of private property inherited from colonial days. The next step, which took place during phase 3, was to accentuate inherited inequalities. This was done by undermining legal protection for Amerindian communal property rights while affirming as modern and progressive the property rights of individuals, who in the vast majority of cases were of European descent.14
In the pure settlement colonies that evolved into the United States, a festering grievance since the end of what colonists revealingly termed the French and Indian War (1754-63) was British opposition to settlement west of the Appalachians.
The war succeeded in evicting the French and their thin line of fortifications from the vast territory between Appalachia and the Mississippi. What could be more unacceptable from the colonists’ perspective than Britain’s assignment of those lands to the other enemy, the Indians? Yet this is what occurred in 1763 when King George III issued a proclamation setting the Appalachian ridgeline as a fixed boundary between English settlers and Indians. The king acted to honor commitments made earlier to Indian leaders in exchange for their help against the French. But legally binding agreements rooted in the past were of scant consequence to thousands of forward- looking settlers hungry for land, who after 1763 could take the war’s favorable outcome for granted. It is not by accident that Virginia and Pennsylvania, two colonies with extensive western frontiers and the most accessible routes over the mountains, were prominent opponents of British policies. Such leaders as Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Washington were upset over restrictions on settler access to western lands, which in turn limited profits from land speculation in which many prominent settlers were involved.Independence meant rejection of the letter and spirit of these restrictions. The metropole had tried to balance the interests of colonists and indigenous peoples. The new government reflected the colonists’ interests and ensured the Indians’ exclusion.
In a sense independence permitted settlers to apply west of the Appalachians land alienation policies and practices developed from the earliest years of English settlement along the coast. From the early seventeenth century through Daniel Boone’s pioneering activities in the 1770s to Andrew Jackson’s relocation policies in the 1820s, the most striking feature of settler attitudes and actions toward Amerindians is its consistency.15
In other respects the goals of new-state elites reflected continuity with the colonial past. While valuing economic prosperity, phase 2 elites did not perceive independence as a way to bring about sustained, dramatic increases in a country’s productive base or greatly to increase consumer goods and social services.
This attitude is not surprising. Only a few parts of western Europe were beginning to experience the burst of economic development and technological change associated with the Industrial Revolution. To the extent that European countries served as developmental role models, as of phase 2 they had not yet modeled for themselves, much less for others, how to transform economic life. Neither had their governments developed the array of services associated with the welfare state. And European governments were not as democratic and responsive to societal pressures as they became in phase 3.To the extent that increased national prosperity was a goal, the intellectual trend of the time in the Americas, as in Europe, was to favor initiatives financed and managed by the private profit sector. The doctrine of mercantilism was moving out of favor, laissez-faire and free trade were gaining favor, and Keynesian and socialist ideas favoring a prominent economic role for the state had not yet been articulated. During the colonial period settlers acquired legal title to land. They owned and managed small enterprises servicing the domestic economy. Many nationalist leaders were personally well off before taking leading positions in the public sector. Understandably, they encouraged people of European descent to carry on a long tradition of private entrepreneurship. They did not feel the enormous pressures exerted on leaders of phase 5 new states to use public sector institutions for developmental ends. Nor was failure to preside over a growing economy as likely to count as a reason for forcibly removing political elites from power as it became in countries attaining independence after 1945.
The most innovative New World political system, that of the United States, was an experiment not in expanding and centralizing the public sector but in limiting its scope and diffusing its responsibilities. The architects of the Articles of Confederation and then of the Constitution of 1789, motivated by fear that concentrated political power would be misused, created an elaborate set of checks and balances on the institutions they constructed. Underlying the American Constitution was a high degree of skepticism about what could and should be done to improve human nature. The underlying assumption was that self-interest would continue to motivate citizens, not only in their private lives but also in their involvement in public affairs. Trying to transform citizens into thinking primarily about the general good was deemed inappropriate and too daunting a task for government to undertake beyond providing some public education.