RELATIONS AMONG INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS

Termination of formal rule within the vertical structures of empire was accompanied by a rise in horizontal contacts among the new states. In the vast majority of cases these contacts had the intent and effect of accelerating the drive for independence in territories still under metropolitan rule.

Phase 2 offers many instances of the observation effect. The American Declara­tion of Independence, the Continental Army’s defeat of a European great power, and formation of a federal government based on a carefully crafted written constitution were noted with great interest elsewhere in the New World. Among the troops sent by France to fight for American independence were mulattoes from Saint Domingue, who later took part in overthrowing that colony’s slaveholding aristocracy. The Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, known to posterity as “the morning star of the Spanish American Revolution,” also fought in the American Revolution. Miranda’s visit to the United States in 1783-84 and Bolivar’s travels there almost a quarter century later only intensified each man’s desire to liberate Spain’s colonies. “In the years before and after 1810,” writes John Lynch, “the very existence of the United States excited the imagination of Spanish Americans, and its embodiment of liberty and republicanism placed a powerful example before their eyes.”¹⁶ Manuel Garcia de Sena of Venezuela and Miguel de Pombo of Colombia circulated translations of Thomas Paine’s writings, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S.

If there was a Washington in the North land,

We have many Washingtons in the South;

If arts and commerce have prospered there—

Courage, fellow countrymen:

Let us follow their example.¹⁸

As the drive for liberation from Spain gathered momentum, developments in one part of its far-flung empire influenced other parts. In the impassioned prose of the Dominican Republic’s Declaration of Independence of 1821,

From Cape Horn to the Californias the contest rages ardently and fiercely, for the incomparable blessing of Independence: everywhere does the decrepit Lion of Spain fly terrified, leaving the land unoccupied, to the vigorous prowess of the youthful Lion of America. The political horizon now exhibits the dawn of a great day for the Sons of Columbus; which will shine forth by degrees, as the smiling Aurora of Independence, to all America.... When the most remote and obscure People unite with one accord, to secure the incalculable advantages of this new life, would it become the first Colony of the New World to stand aloof in this heroic struggle?¹⁹

Phase 2 furnishes ample evidence of the direct influence effect, stemming from actions by government officials and by individuals operating largely on their own. American ships aided Toussaint during his undeclared war with France in the 1790s. “It is doubtful,” writes David Brion Davis, “whether Haitian independence could have been achieved without American arms and recognition.”²⁰ Haiti in turn gave refuge to Bolivar on two occasions when his prospects were at their lowest ebb. Haitian president Alexandre Petion supplied the South American liberator with arms, munitions, men, and printing supplies to carry on his struggle in Venezuela.

Most significantly, the military campaigns that ended Spain’s mainland rule repeatedly cut across colonial boundaries. In Peru, San Martin’s forces from the south evicted the viceroy’s troops from Lima, while troops from the north led by Sucre fought victoriously at Ayacucho. South America’s wars of national liberation were fought by a truly transcolonial cast of characters. General Sucre’s career is revealing. Born in Venezuela, he fought in what became Venezuela, Colombia, Ec­uador, and Peru, then became Bolivia’s first president.

Horizontal influences can have the reverse effect, independence in country A inhibiting or blocking movement toward a similar result in country B. This pattern characterizes the first two instances of decolonization: the United States in relation to Canada and Haiti in relation to other Caribbean islands.

Several events during and after the American Revolution gave inhabitants of Britain’s provinces to the north cause for alarm. In the revolution’s first year the Continental Congress dispatched troops to conquer Canada. The invaders captured Montreal and tried unsuccessfully to take Quebec City. As expected, they were op­posed by troops and civilians loyal to the British Crown. Unexpectedly, the Ameri­cans failed to win support from the francophone population, which only a few years earlier had been conquered by the British. A plausible explanation is that British governors had taken care not to interfere with the language, religious practices, and property rights of their French-speaking subjects. The invaders seemed far more likely to insist on spreading their alien Anglo culture throughout Canada.

At war’s end between forty thousand and sixty thousand Loyalists, expelled from the thirteen states, moved north.

Events in phase 2 led many Canadians to conclude that their southern neigh­bor posed a security threat. If Canadians could assert political and cultural claims within the British Empire, they could satisfy their goals while retaining external protection from the neighbor’s expansionist ambitions. Thus the war that separated Britain from its thirteen colonies helped strengthen its ties with bicultural Canada.²³

The prolonged, bloody slave uprising in Saint Domingue, culminating in the slaughter of whites remaining after independence, profoundly affected political evo­lution in the Caribbean. Slaveholders elsewhere were obsessed with fear that slaves working for them would follow Haiti’s example. Any constraints a metropole might impose on dominant economic interests in its plantation colonies were minor com­pared to the populist danger from below.²⁴ Colonists therefore preferred to maintain the colonial status quo. The metropole, they reasoned, could supply troops to repress serious uprisings while offering a safe haven for whites returning home should uprisings succeed. The observation effect of developments in Haiti is probably the principal explanation for delayed decolonization in the part of the Americas with the longest European presence.

By an unintended irony of history the negative observation effects of the first and second anticolonial revolutions in phase 2 contributed to peaceful decoloniza­tion in phase 5. For reasons just noted, Great Britain was able to retain control of Canada and numerous Caribbean islands. People from the British Isles inhabited these territories. Their presence abroad posed delicate questions for nineteenth­century imperial policy makers. What could be learned from the thirteen North American colonies that might prevent loss of other New World possessions? When kith and kin in Canada and the Caribbean demanded political rights, could their demands be accommodated in such a way that the British tradition of settler self- government was compatible with imperial rule? When people in Canada and the Caribbean who were not of British descent wished to participate in political life, could their demands be accommodated in such a way that civil war based on lan­guage, religion, or race was avoided, while at the same time the metropole’s eco­nomic and strategic interests were safeguarded?

The first, tentative answers to these questions awaited developments in phase 3. Such documents as the Durham Report (1839) provided both the constitutional and the moral-philosophical basis for the British Empire’s evolution toward the British Commonwealth. The latter contained institutions, procedures, and values that could be reshaped to form the Commonwealth, an organization of sovereign English- speaking states that by phase 5 was spread throughout the globe.

New World colonies retained by Britain—in large measure because of the negative observation effects of the American and Haitian revolutions—constituted the testing grounds for experiments in peaceful, evolutionary, pragmatic transfers of power from metropole to colony in the twentieth century. Decades after precedent­setting experiments with settler self-government were launched, experiments pat­terned on these precedents would be carried out in Asian and African colonies of occupation. There the beneficiaries of transferred power would be not kith and kin but indigenous people of color.