The Transformation of the World (116 page)

Samuel Johnson, the English man of the Enlightenment, already expressed amazement that the loudest calls for freedom came precisely from slave owners.
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Some of the founding fathers of the United States continued to own slaves (although George Washington set all of his free), and the Constitution of 1787 as well as subsequent amendments remained silent about the issue. Only in Haiti—and nowhere else after it—did a program of racial nondiscrimination, and then of slave emancipation, acquire a direct meaning for people who became active in the revolution. Blacks and coloreds suffering under a rigid system of oppression adopted the ideas, values, and symbols of the French Revolution, trying to find a place for themselves in the new world of “color-blind” citizenship that it had proclaimed in 1794.
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Hence, the reintroduction of slavery unleashed an apocalyptic liberation war in 1802–3. And the persistence of colonialism everywhere
outside Haiti maintained for another century and a half the contradiction between legal norms of equality and its refusal in actual practice.

Latin America and North America Compared

The intellectual impact of the principles of 1776 and 1789 was unbounded in time and space.
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Almost everywhere (perhaps with the exception of Japan), people in all subsequent epochs have appealed to liberty, equality, self-determination, and human and civil rights. A countercurrent in Western thought, from Edmund Burke down to the French historian François Furet, reversed the polarity and identified Jacobin radicalism as the wellspring of “totalitarian democracy” (to quote Jacob L. Talmon, for whom Rousseau was the arch villain), and more generally of any form of political fanaticism or fundamentalism. The
immediate
global effects, in terms of actual interaction, were considerably more limited; they ended, as we have seen, before the borders of Russia.
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In China the French Revolution had no real resonance until 1919, and even then, for good reason, the anti-imperial struggle of the North American colonies aroused greater interest; the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) liked to think of himself as the George Washington of China. In India, some opponents of the British hoped in vain for French support, while the British for their part cleverly played on fears of a French invasion as a pretext for the preventive conquest of large parts of the Subcontinent under Richard Wellesley (brother of Arthur Wellesley, tested in the Napoleonic wars and named Duke of Wellington in 1814).
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The greatest impact of the French Revolution outside or on the fringes of the Atlantic area came about through Napoleonic military expansion in the Middle East, beginning with the invasion of Egypt in 1798. The occupation there broke the centuries-old power of the Mamluks and created space for new individuals and groups to seize power after the French withdrew in 1802. The Ottoman Empire was a proven and once again important partner for the British, offering security in the eastern Mediterranean. Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), who had coincidentally come to the throne in the epoch-making year of the French Revolution, failed in his attempt to curb the influence of the conservative military janissaries and to overcome their blanket opposition to reforms; this was achieved only two reigns later, under Mahmud II, in 1826. Nevertheless, under the pressure of intense diplomatic and military activities, Selim embarked on modernization of the Ottoman army. Iran followed soon after with a similar program. But nowhere in the Islamic world, or anywhere else in Asia or Africa, did the French Revolution trigger independent revolutionary movements from below.
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How does Latin America fit into this picture?
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It was the fourth of the regions bordering the Atlantic to be drawn into the Age of Revolution, but its actual involvement varied from area to area, and only detailed studies of individual regions and cities seem to yield an adequate picture.
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In North America the colonies that would later form Canada stayed loyal to the British Crown. The slave colonies of the Caribbean remained quieter than Saint-Domingue, and the
course of events varied there even among the French islands. In contrast, one of the most striking features of Hispanic America (Brazil went its own way under an offshoot of the Portuguese Crown) was the complete collapse of the Spanish colonial empire on the mainland. Within the space of a few years, a huge entity broke up into a mosaic of independent republics. The Spanish nation-state itself was in many respects an outcome of this disintegration—a process, best described as the “independence revolutions” (in the plural), which was the last of the great transformations in the Atlantic space. Its dating to the years between 1810 and 1826 is fairly uncontroversial.
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All three of the major revolutions may here serve as a point of reference. Haiti inspired fear wherever slavery played a large role, and especially where free colored people (paradoxically known in Hispanic America as
pardos
or “light browns”) began to develop political goals of their own. Though less an example than a warning, Haiti did serve as a safe haven for rebels against Spain. As for the French Revolution, it was rather limited as a model since the leaders of the Hispanic American independence revolutions were mostly Creoles, that is, whites of Spanish descent born in the New World. Typically they belonged to the affluent upper strata of society, as landowners or members of the urban patriciate or both. However sympathetic they might be to the early liberal aims of the French Revolution, such people viewed Jacobin radicalism as a threat and were chary and suspicious about the (sometimes indispensable) arming of the popular masses.

The potential for large-scale protest action had already been demonstrated in the uprising of 1780–82 led by José Gabriél Condorcanqui, the self-styled Inca Túpac Amaru II. A few years after the Pugachev Rebellion in Russia, this in some ways similar event at the other end of the world rested on a broad but loose coalition of diverse forces and tapped the sources of a self-assertive popular culture. It, too, was directed against (and brutally suppressed by) the Spanish rulers, but its motives did not entirely coincide with the Creole oligarchic striving for autonomy. The size of the revolt, best gauged from the number of casualties, was certainly impressive: it probably claimed the lives of some 100,000 Indians and 10,000 Spanish.
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So, for the “liberators” of Latin America, Jacobinism and the
levée en masse
held few attractions. Nor could they rely on revolutionary support from France, since the decisive years of the freedom struggle were during the Restoration period following the end of the Napoleonic Empire.

The link between the transformations in France and Latin America was at the level of power politics more than revolutionary substance. Moreover, we must go back to the 1760s, where the roots of both the North American and the Latin American revolutions lie. In that decade, for related but distinct reasons, the British and Spanish states simultaneously tried to tighten the leash on their American possessions by strengthening and reforming the apparatus of colonial rule, so that the colonies would be more economically useful to the mother country. Britain under its new king, George III, failed woefully in this ambition after just a few years. Spain under Carlos III (r. 1759–88) was at first more successful, or
anyway encountered much less resistance from the colonists. The Spanish system of rule in the Americas had always been more homogeneous and centralist, and so it was easier for capable administrators to implement reforms; and the South American Creoles were less densely woven into the antiauthoritarian discourse of the Enlightenment, and less accustomed to expressing their will in representative bodies. For these and many other reasons, the Spanish colonial system did not break down in the same way that the British system did in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In fact, it managed to hold on until Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 brought down the Bourbon Monarchy itself.

Whereas the North American revolt targeted an imperial government that was increasingly seen as unjust and despotic, the critical junctures in Hispanic America arrived at a time when there was a vacuum at the center of the empire.
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Two tendencies then came to the fore: on the one hand, local Creole patriotisms were much more prominent here than particular colonial identities in British North America; but on the other hand, there was a will to retain a looser political association with Spain, albeit within a new liberal-constitutional order. In a sense this was the mirror image of past development in North America. The “Creoles” (as they may be safely called) in the thirteen rebel colonies of North America still felt largely British at the beginning of the conflict, and it took quite a while for many of them to replace this solid identity with a still rather shaky American one.
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Their resistance was therefore directed more against the real and symbolic figure of the king than against the boundless claims of the Parliament in London, which imposed arbitrary taxes on Americans without offering them more than a hollow pretense of representation.

In the Spanish case, the formation of a separate identity was more advanced. Yet, with the reactionary King Ferdinand VII a prisoner of Napoleon, the Hispanic American Creoles placed high hopes in the nonroyal government in the unoccupied part of Spain. The core of this was the Cortes that met at Cadiz in September 1810, Spain's first modern national assembly, which from the beginning was thought of as representing the whole Hispanic world, including the colonies.
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The Cortes, which obviously had few Spanish Americans among its members, proved as stubborn on some issues (e.g., trade policy) as the British Parliament had a few decades before. An imperial federation, though perfectly conceivable in theory, could not be realized outside the framework of absolutism, and the Cortes also omitted to abolish slavery or the slave trade and, more generally, to take a stand on the problems of multiethnicity in the Americas. Nonetheless, Spain's early (and for the time, thoroughgoing) experiment with the rule of law habituated the Creoles both to the practice of a written constitution (the Spanish Constitution of 1812 became the formal model for proliferation in nineteenth-century Latin America) and to extensive male participation in politics free from such restrictions as a property-based suffrage.

Emancipation was much less of a linear process than in North America. The region was larger, the logistics more difficult, the town-country opposition
sharper, and royalism stronger; and Creole divisions were often so great that they came close to civil war. Spatially, various armies and militias fought a number of independence wars that were only loosely related to one another. Temporally, two periods of war came in succession.
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First, the whole new departure on both sides of the Atlantic was nullified overnight in May 1814 with the return of the neo-absolutist Ferdinand VII. It was only in the military resistance to a subsequent (and initially successful) attempt at reconquest that the liberation struggle led by men such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Bernardo O'Higgins reached its heroic climax.
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In 1816 it looked as if Spain had events under control, except in Argentina. The rebels were forced into the defensive in many parts of the continent; the imperial reaction was delivering its prisoners over to tribunals. But then the royal regime evinced its own inherent weaknesses and inconsistencies and squandered the last vestiges of loyalty and legitimacy it might have possessed.
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A second phase gradually got under way, in which caudillos—warlords whose power rested on the war booty they made available to their armed bands and civilian followers, and who had little time for state institutions—already began to play an ominous role. All in all, the revolutionary process was socially far more multilayered than in North America, where it did not include peasant rebellions and popular uprisings within the elite revolution—uprisings which, as in rural Mexico, often served to defend a way of life under threat rather than to oppose the Spanish presence per se.
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The last series of military victories in countries south of New Spain/Mexico had to do also with Spanish weakness, since there was little enthusiasm in the army for a
reconquista
, and without the army's presence in Europe the liberals would not have been able to force King Ferdinand to restore the Constitution in 1820. These new upheavals in Spain delayed the sending of fresh expeditionary troops. The recourse of the Spanish to French counterinsurgency methods, of which they had only recently been on the receiving end, shows once again a learning curve at work in the revolutionary Atlantic.

Finally, the international context. Unlike the North American insurgents after 1778, the Hispanic American freedom fighters lacked military support from outside, even from the United States. No other great power intervened directly in events, as had briefly happened in Haiti. The Royal Navy flung a protective cover over the Atlantic, but the decisive military confrontations took place entirely between Creoles and representatives of the restored Spanish monarchy. On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that at the beginning, in 1810, the fear that France might seize the Spanish colonies played a major role; no one in Latin America was eager to become a Napoleonic subject once the Spanish monarchy ceased to exist. In later phases, “private” backing was not unimportant. British and Irish soldiers and volunteers fought in various theaters (there were more than 5,300 of them in South America between 1817 and 1822),
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US governments tolerated the action of American freebooters against Spanish ships, and British merchants provided some financial support, seeing it as a good long-term investment to open up new markets.