Spain and the Breakdown of the Imperial Ethos: The Problem of Equality

Spain’s dominion in the New World was supported more by ideas than by force of arms. Though based initially on the right of conquest—an a priori right that few Spaniards, even in the late colonial period, disputed—other concepts arose during three centuries to legitimize further Spain’s rule of so many vast lands. This nexus of ideas was complex and can barely be touched upon here. What interests us is the process of the collapse of the imperial ethos. Though ultimately encrusted with centuries of complex ramifications, the concepts of empire were always simple, for they had to be understood by ordinary subjects. The essential simplicity, and, nonetheless, the strength, of these ideas are impressive, as is the way in which Spain, in a period of extreme stress, debunked and disproved them.

The three fundamental concepts of empire in the late colonial era, particularly as they appear in documents that demonstrate Spain’s resistance to independence in America, are: (1) the father king; (2) the ties that bind; and (3) the equality of citizens and of territorial units within the empire. The last concept, which emerged very late in the era and as a direct consequence of the crisis of 1808, is the focus of this article.

The overarching idea was of the empire as a family united under the father king, the rey padre, as he was frequently called in loyalist propaganda. Originating during the Hapsburg era, the idea was based on the legal view that the American territories were the patrimonial property of the king. The “modern” Bourbons had resisted this traditional role, but those living in the colonies “clung to the Hapsburg image of the patriarchal state and resisted the Bourbons’ political philosophy.”¹ The king was señor, or lord, to whom, according to Spanish political philosophy, the nation at some time in the remote past had transferred authority.² He was limited in his exercise of absolute authority by the precepts of Thomism, which required him to rule justly and in the best interest of the people. Also limiting the king’s absolutism was the practice of colonial or peninsular officials of refusing to obey or implement laws or decrees of the crown perceived as being inappropriate to local conditions. This principle of obedezco pero no cumplo can be seen frequently at work in the colonial era.

Though the emphasis was on centralism during the era of Bourbon reforms, the essentially Hapsburg concept of father king, of patrimonial rather than “modern” absolutism, remained paramount.³ So central was the patrimonial authority of father king that one writer has asserted that the overthrow of the royal father figure was “the central and ‘traumatic’ event in all Spanish American history. It represented the acting out of Oedipal desires to slay the father, creating a collective guilt which Spanish America has never overcome. Much of the rebelliousness in modern Spanish American history represents a search for a paternal replacement for the Kings of Spain.”⁴

More enduring perhaps than the concept of the patrimonial king and state was the concept of the “ties that bind,” the cultural unity “of these and those Spaniards”—the belief that Spain was a transoceanic state composed of many states, united by the event of the conquest and of Spain’s having brought civilization to the New World. Many explicitly stated the idea during the independence era, but rarely as cogently as when the Junta Central of Spain wrote the Cabildo of Bogotá in 1809:

As different a source as Simón Bolivar’s “Letter from Jamaica made essentially the same observation: that Spain’s authority over America was founded on these “ties that bind.” In Bolivar’s words, these were “the habit of obedience; a community of interest, of understanding, of religion; mutual goodwill; a tender regard for the birthplace and good name of our forefathers. ”⁶ Much of the royalist propaganda in response to the American uprisings centered on the cultural unity of the empire and its church, the role of Spain as the civilizer of America, and the ingratitude of those who would rebel.⁷

There were many potential and actual weaknesses in the concept of the cultural unity of the empire, not the least of which were the implied, but obvious, disregard for the Indian contribution to colonial culture and the creoles’ lack of parity with Spaniards in church and state bureaucracies. The weaknesses of the concept, however, did not induce Spain to abandon it as an official point of view. The American dominions were not considered equal to the provinces and kingdoms of peninsular Spain, yet semantically, at least, every effort was made to obscure that fact. Formally the American territories were not colonies; they were kingdoms, vicekingdoms, or dominions. Only at the height of Bourbon mercantilist reform did the term “colony” creep into use, and even then it was used chiefly in internal state papers and not as proclaimed official terminology. When the wars of independence erupted in America, the word pacification” was officially decreed for use instead of “reconquest so as not to offend American sensibilities.

The crisis lasting from March to May 1808 seriously wounded the Old Regime in Spain, and, subsequently, the liberal bourgeoisie made a rapid rise to power. The accession of the liberals, whose position was supported by an emerging economic middle class deeply dependent on the preservation of Spain’s monopoly of American trade and symbolized by the principal merchants of Cádiz, brought the dialectical problem of equality to the fore.

Desperate to secure the support of America in the struggle under way in Spain, the liberals spoke out in favor of America’s nominal equality. In the last days before joining the Junta Central, the separate Junta of Seville instructed its delegates to sponsor the liberal position that the overseas provinces be permitted to “have the government of their own provinces in the same manner enjoyed by the Juntas of Spain,” that these American juntas be permitted to propose candidates to be selected by the Junta Central as their viceroys, and that matters of trade and navigation be decided by the juntas in the American ports and in the Spanish ports engaged in American trade. The Junta of Seville’s argument was for regional autonomy, which, it insisted, “is inviolably sacred, since it comes from the people.”⁸ The Junta Central overrode Seville’s attempt to speak for America and consolidated itself by September 1808 as the single government of a free Spain, but in the process, it absorbed and accommodated the liberal thinking of Seville. By January 1809, the Junta Central, still desperate to affirm American support, invited the New World colonies to send delegates to join the Junta Central and announced that Spain, that is, free Spain, no longer considered the overseas dominions colonies, but “an essential and integral part of the Spanish monarchy.” Four months later, the Junta announced its intention to call into session the Cortes and to include representation from America. When, in the following January, the Junta Central collapsed in the face of its own failures and the French successes in Andalusia and Seville, the Regency Council (which replaced the Junta) announced to America the convocation of the Cortes, and added: “From this moment, Spanish Americans, you see yourselves raised to the dignity of free men; … your destinies no longer depend on ministers, viceroys, or governors: they are in your hands.”⁹

The Cortes began its sessions in September 1810, and under pressure from American deputies, proclaimed on October 15 that Spain recognized the “indisputable concept that the Spanish dominions of both hemispheres form a single monarchy, a single nation, and a single family,” and that “natives derived from the said European and overseas dominions are equal in rights to those of this peninsula.”¹⁰ Thus did Spain take its first steps toward declaring the overseas territories equal parts of the monarchy and of recognizing the equality of Americans with peninsulars.

Before proceeding, a critical proviso needs to be made. The terminology of the October 15 decree purposely excluded Blacks and their descendants of full or mixed blood—those “derived from Africa”—from equality. This prohibition was incorporated into the Constitution of 1812, a hallmark of Spanish liberalism, which declared that all Indians, mestizos, castes, and whites were “Spaniards,” but limited the rights of citizenship to “Spaniards who on both sides trace their ancestry to the Spanish dominions of both hemispheres.” This peculiar and subtle distinction generally reflected the American creoles’ own social and cultural prejudices, for while they were prepared to insist on the equality of American whites, and even Indians, with Spaniards, they could not bring themselves to recognize the equality of the colored castes.¹¹

For larger purposes, however, the point is that in 1810 Spain added the principle of equality to the other leading concepts upon which the imperial ethos was based; in so doing, it stumbled into a hopeless dialectical trap. The issue of equality became the cutting edge that would demonstrate to moderate Americans the inherent ideological contradiction of empire, for neither the Constitution and the Cortes, nor after 1814 the restored absolutist regime of Ferdinand VII, would prove able to deal satisfactorily with the issue. Once officially declared, imperial equality could not be withdrawn without doing irreparable damage to political relations between America and Spain. At no point, not even after 1814, was the official principle nullified; neither, however, was it ever implemented, for to have done so would have deprived Spain of important benefits of empire. These benefits were primarily psychological. Spain’s definition of itself and of its greatness was deeply involved with its role as founder of a New World empire.

The view of American substitute and proprietary deputies who took their seats in the Cortes of Cádiz, however, differed sharply from that of peninsular deputies on the matter of equality. Until 1812, most of the American deputies were substitutes, chosen from among the native sons of each territory who were then resident in Spain. In general, they were more influenced by the ideology of liberalism than the proprietary deputies, who traveled to Cádiz from their home territories, and who emphasized the need for domestic reforms in government, administration, and economics. Many substitutes retained their seats in the Cortes in order to fill their region’s complement of numbers.¹² Still, there was an essential continuity and cohesion of demands among all the American deputies up to 1814.

It should be noted that those overseas territories already well advanced along the road to independence or involved in civil warfare, such as the Río de la Plata and Venezuela, did not send proprietary deputies and were represented throughout the extraordinary and ordinary Cortes (until 1814) by their substitutes. What happened in the Cortes cannot be said to have had either a positive or a negative impact upon those territories represented only by substitutes.

The members of the American caucus, at any rate, threw themselves into the struggle to make operational the concept of equality. They concentrated their efforts in two areas: the implementation of political equality, by which they meant full parity in appointment to positions in church and state bureaucracies; and equal apportionment of representation in the Cortes. Less energetically, at first, they pursued equality in trade and commerce.

The struggle to secure equal representation in the Cortes was led by the young liberals José Mejía Lequerica of New Granada and Vicente Morales Duárez of Peru. Since the peninsular population was 10.5 million, while the overseas population was between 15 and 16 million, control of the Cortes rested on the outcome of this matter. The day after the Cortes opened, the Americans made known their expectation of parity in representation. This demand, if accepted, would have doubled the representatives from America since the existing provisions allowed one deputy for each 100,000 inhabitants, while peninsulars had one deputy for each 50,000. The Americans demanded that they receive one deputy for each 50,000, and that the apportionment be based on a count of all free subjects, regardless of caste identity. The peninsular deputies strongly rejected that demand. At issue was the fact that while there were far more Americans than peninsulars, there were far fewer American whites.¹³

The Question of Citizenship

In December 1810, the American deputies produced eleven propositions that came to constitute their basic program in the Cortes. The demands included equality of representation between Spain and the Indies for “natives derived from both hemispheres, Spaniards as well as Indians,” which effectively constituted the Americans’ giving in to the inevitable exclusion of Blacks from apportionment. James F. King believes that some Americans adopted the formula merely as a minimum demand, intending to return to the question of caste representation at a future date. The matter was thus carried over to later debates surrounding the writing of the Constitution.

In the draft constitution presented to the Cortes for discussion in August 1811, Article 1 defined the Spanish nation as “the union of all Spaniards of both hemispheres”; Article 5 defined Spaniards as “free men born and domiciled in the domains of the Spains,” naturalized foreigners, and freedmen at the moment of their emancipation. Thus, all American Indians, mestizos, and castes were proclaimed “Spaniards.” Being a “Spaniard,” however, was not the same as being a citizen. Article 18 proclaimed that citizens—upon whose number apportionment would be based—were “Spaniards who on both sides trace their ancestry to the Spanish dominions of both hemispheres.” In short, the compromise of the October 15 decree in reference to equality was retained as written in the Constitution, over the strong objections of American deputies. Article 22 dealt with persons of African origin as a separate element in the population, proclaiming for them the creation of “a door of virtue and merit” by which the Cortes would grant citizenship—to persons who had given “meritorious services” to the nation and who were of good conduct, legitimately born, married, and exercising some “useful” profession. Article 29 declared that the basis for apportioning representation in Spain and the Indies was “the population composed of those native-born who from both lines are derived from the Spanish domains.” These principles having been accepted, there was no danger in Article 28, which declared that “the base for national representation is the same in both hemispheres,” or in Article 31, which provided that there would be one deputy for every 70,000 enumerated inhabitants in both Spain and America.¹⁴

The refusal of the Cortes to accept equal representation (by means of limiting citizenship rights) provided fuel for the anti-Spanish elements among the creoles, encouraged and justified the revolts breaking out in America, and permanently skewed the outcome of future Cortes debates on all questions affecting American appointments, trade, and pacification. As Peruvian deputy Ramón Feliú observed: “America is no longer … a child who, put to bed with promises, will forget them when he awakens.”¹⁵ Even at its best, Spanish liberalism did not extend to the point of risking Spain’s domination of its colonial territories, and this resulted in the fundamental failure of the vision of the Cortes as it affected American questions. Agustín Argüelles, leader of the peninsular liberals, admitted that he saw as “an insuperable obstacle” a citizenry “that exceeds that of the mother country.”¹⁶ In the course of the debate over representation, the Americans were repeatedly outraged by what they considered the myopic vision of peninsulars living both in Spain and America. José Baquíjano, a Peruvian who sat on the Council of State, said that “the leader of the liberals [Argüelles] reproduced the most contemptible sophisms to argue that the Indians were slaves by nature.” He continued: “One ecclesiastical deputy said, ‘If they [the Indians] are equal in rights, it will be necessary to suppress the tributes, and that is not convenient’; another asked if Americans were white and professed the Catholic religion; and ultimately one deputy, who had extracted his wealth from South America, concluded ‘that it has never been known to what genus of animal the Indians belonged.’”¹⁷

During the continuing efforts to limit the number of citizens, there appeared a memorial from the Consulado of Mexico City. Read in the Cortes on September 16, 1811, the memorial condemned all Americans of the three racial categories as unfit for equal representation in the Cortes. Concluding that Mexico was Spanish by right of conquest, the memorial advocated that the country be represented in the Cortes by designated Spaniards only, and expressed the thought that the only appropriate parallel between the Indian and the Spaniard was that between a “flock of gibbon monkeys” and an advanced urban society.¹⁸ After the reading, the entire American deputation attempted to withdraw from the floor, but was blocked by orders of the president.

From Parity to Economic Equality

Once the question of equality of representation was resolved in a manner prejudicial to the Americans, all other questions in which the interests of Spain differed from those of America followed suit. The two most important expressions of American demands were those presented by the overseas deputies on December 16, 1810, and August 1, 1811. The December 16 presentation comprised eleven fundamental reforms. They were: (1) equal proportionate representation in the Cortes; (2) freedom to plant and manufacture all previously restricted commodities; (3) freedom of trade with allied and neutral powers; (4) free trade with the Asiatic possessions; (5) free trade with any other part of Asia; (6) suppression of all state and private monopolies; (7) free mining of mercury in America; (8) equal rights of Americans, whether white or Indian, to any political, military, or ecclesiastical appointment; (9) distribution of half of the positions in each American kingdom to natives of that kingdom; (10) creation of advisory committees in America for the selection of local residents to be given those public offices; and (11) restoration of the Jesuit order in America.¹⁹

These demands represented a shift in focus. The American demand for implementation of equality began to center around the question of free trade, of economic equality. Each of the demands held implications for the entire empire, yet each was also local, since terms of implementation would differ according to the conditions prevailing in each locality.

All the demands were eventually debated in the Cortes in one form or another, but only three were acted upon favorably, and these were modified or otherwise rendered meaningless. Item 1, as we have seen, was approved on the basis of an incomplete count of inhabitants, and it did not apply to the Cortes that was actually sitting. Item 2 was granted, but it had little impact in a war-torn America. Item 7, the request for free mining of mercury in America, the Cortes partially accepted, granting on January 26, 1811, the privilege of free trade in mercury—that is, the right of anyone who had the capital to import as much mercury as he could from peninsular sources. (This was chimerical since the mines at Almadén were occupied by the French. In 1811 and 1812 there were no mercury shipments to Peru; in 1813 and 1814 large shipments were sent after allied military forces captured reserves held by the French; after 1814, it seems that no further shipments reached Peru.)²⁰ Of the other demands, one (Item 11) was rejected outright in a Cortes vote; three (Items 3, 4, and 5) were delayed pending the collection of further opinion; three (Items 8, 9, and 10) were reserved for later action and then never acted upon; and one (Item 6) was postponed.

Having run up against the immovable obstacle of state and private peninsular interests, some of the American delegates attempted a flanking action, to acquire expanded liberty of commerce for their countries. On August 1, 1811, thirty-three of them presented a report in a closed session of the Cortes, advocating a political reform first suggested by Mexican deputy José Beye de Cisneros. The scheme was that a system of provincial juntas would be established in America and that they would be authorized to open free trade with foreign powers should the metropolis itself fall to French conquest. If this happened, the American countries would then rescue Spain with their own great resources. Mexico, for example, would make massive loans to Spain by mortgaging its mines to the British. This concept was deemed revolutionary and allowed to die on the table without being presented to the full house.²¹

In addition to the general demands of the American delegation, many of the individual deputies, both substitute and proprietary, had received specific instructions from their home provinces, normally drafted by the city councils of their capitals. Their demands can be pieced together by reviewing recommendations for pacification of America submitted by at least thirty-two former deputies after the king’s restoration.²² The request that appeared most often in instructions from the cabildos was for the creation in the local jurisdictions of various new agencies or offices of royal government, such as new audiencias, new viceroyalties, or royal mints. The next most frequent demand involved matters relating to the Indians, mostly either to continue the suppression of the tribute or to reinstate it. Next in line was the demand to lower various taxes, customs duties, and interest rates. Then came requests for the improvement or opening of ports and navigational systems. Ten deputies asked for local agricultural improvements, mining reforms, and a variety of changes in the civil and clerical bureaucracies. Seven deputies wanted the abolition of some royal office, usually of the most local nature. The next most frequent requests were for the establishment of universities or seminaries, city councils, mining tribunals, or professional agencies, or the granting of special distinctions, arms, or titles to home towns and provinces. Nine deputies demanded universities for their home districts; eight asked for new dioceses or archdioceses. Many deputies wanted major public works—roads, bridges, military highways, and fortifications. These individual “wish lists” make it clear that the creoles were prepared to settle for parity of treatment rather than a thorough ideological transformation of the empire; it should be remembered, however, that these lists represented the wishes of those creoles who were prepared to try parliamentary methods for the solution of grievances.

By mid-1811, the Cortes had received a clear statement from the Americans of the political solution to the rebellions then raging in their homelands. All of them advocated equality of career opportunity, free foreign trade, and abolition of internal hindrances to production, while most of them supported provincial autonomy. That was the American political solution; that was what imperial equality meant to them. It expressed the aspirations of a still loyalist creole elite continuously engaged in a contest for influence against the peninsular elites who administered America, but who could not bring themselves to support the homegrown radicalism of lower-class revolt. The creole elite represented a middle position between absolutism and separatism.²³

By switching the focus of their efforts from parity to the free-trade question, the Americans sealed their fate; by refusing economic equality, Spain did the same to itself. Politically, Spain could not give in to the American demands for economic equality. To have done so would have threatened the existence of the empire and the overseas territories from which Spain, according to the Conde de Toreno, derived 55.5 percent of total government revenues in 1810, and 35 percent in 1811. The Cádiz merchants controlled the Cortes, and their survival was basic to that of Spain. José Baquíjano declared that the Consulado of Cádiz was “the absolute dictator of the resolutions of the Regency and the Cortes.”²⁴ The most clear-sighted members of the Cádiz regime understood that there was no room to maneuver, but even they deluded themselves into imagining that such apparent reforms as the decree of individual equality, or else the Constitution itself, would answer the Americans’ demands. The Conde de Toreno, a major leader of the peninsular liberals, recognized, however, that even the Constitution, with its long-term object of increasing centralization in America, was a European enactment suitable mainly to European conditions. He wrote:

This startling confession indeed makes clear that Spain had maneuvered itself into a hopeless political trap. Either the overseas territories were colonies or they were not; Spain, however, had decided to have it both ways, to “charm the spirits” by telling the Americans they were equal while treating them as before.

In a powerful memorial submitted in 1814, José Baquíjano condemned Spain and the Cortes for failing to implement the vast promises of the Constitution. According to Baquíjano, the fault lay not so much in misgovernment, though there was plenty of that, but in unfulfilled promises. The two chief insults of the Cortes, he said, were its refusal to grant equal representation and its refusal to establish free commerce. He declared that “this antipolitical conduct has been the true origin of the desperation of the American peoples; the Cortes never wanted to listen to their complaints, or hear their proposals.”²⁶

Perceptive observers echoed Baquíjano’s thinking, among them José García de León y Pizarro, who served briefly in 1812 as minister of state and returned to that position in 1816-18. He believed that “America should follow the fortune that nature has destined for all those distant possessions separated geographically from their centers; it should emancipate itself.” The moment of separation and the damage it inflicted on Spain, however, were the fault of “inexperience, slovenliness, and blindness” on the part of the rulers of Spain. The Junta Central and the Cortes, he argued, had excited and legitimized American rebellion by proclaiming equality one moment and infringing upon it the next.²⁷ It was not merely that Spain had broken faith with colonial elites; it had raised new hopes that it had no will to satisfy.

The failure to implement economic equality played a role in the discussion of possible British mediation in the American rebellions, discussions that began in May 1811 and continued in a desultory fashion long after the Cortes was dissolved. The British proposed that in return for their involvement, they be permitted free trade with the American territories for at least as long as the mediation effort lasted. Disagreement over the bases of mediation prevailed and always resulted in the negotiations coming to naught.²⁸ The English were quite cogent in their arguments, pointing out that unless the Americans were permitted commercial advantages equal to those of Spaniards, their separation from the metropolis was inevitable. They argued that the pacification of America was as simple a matter as removing the restrictions on colonial commerce. Americans, they said, simply could not be treated as colonials once Spain had declared their equality.

In 1812 the British government proposed as possible bases of mediation that America be granted free foreign trade, equality of appointment to state offices, and the “concession of interim or provincial governments under the viceroys or governors to the cabildos or ayuntamientos.”²⁹ This would have led to genuine equality and the creation of a federative government in the empire. These propositions were submitted to the Cortes for discussion and on July 16, 1812, rejected by a vote of more than two to one. (The American deputies strongly endorsed the proposals, while the European deputies just as strongly opposed them.)³⁰ By the end of the year, Spanish Minister of State Pedro Gómez Labrador informed the British that the publication of the Constitution had completely altered Spain’s relation with America: for the first time, a European nation, he said, had given its colonies complete equality; therefore, no more special favors could be considered. The question of mediation emerged again in 1815 and appeared periodically until 1820, but no final agreement was ever reached.

The Restoration Response to Equality

The restoration of Ferdinand VII to the throne in early 1814 and his May coup, in which he overthrew the Cortes and Constitution and reestablished absolutism, did not, strangely enough, eliminate the concept of equality of the overseas territories. Although a succession of royal decrees throughout the latter half of 1814 ordered the abolition of all constitutional and elected bodies and the restoration of the Old Regime, at no point was there a decree annulling the grant of equality. In November, the king provided for the restoration of all government offices in America to the persons who held them before the Cortes.³¹ Minister of the Indies Miguel de Lardizábal called upon American Cortes deputies still in Spain to submit recommendations on means to pacify America. In response, many of them urged implementation of the concept of equality. Their requests were not, however, acted upon and the reforms they demanded remained unattended during the restoration. Indeed, in the first year of the restoration the basic policy of the king toward America was to do nothing. In this he accepted the advice of Ramón de Posada, a member of the Council of Indies, who suggested: “At the moment all reforms and general means are inopportune. Reforms might be useful, and at times necessary, but despite that they do not fail to be odious.” Posada continued: “This is not the time either to annul or to confirm the inopportune grants and declarations of the Cortes in favor of the Americans.” In a second letter he urged the following policy: “No new taxes, no alleviation of taxes, no grants and declarations, no revocation of those opportunely or inopportunely conceded; keep totally silent about everything.”³² Although it revoked the constitutional system in all its aspects, the absolute regime made no other changes, whether negative or positive. How could the king deny the principle of October 15, 1810, that his dominions “form[ed] a single monarchy, a single nation, and a single family”? Not even the king could tell Americans that they were reduced again to colonial inferiority.

During the restoration, the concept of father king received a massive impetus in official mythology and came to predominate in Spain’s appeals for America to return to loyalty. The Conde de Puñorrostro insisted that Ferdinand’s restoration would end the American rebellions, for “those vassals, through the nature of their climate and their temperament, are docile, submissive, and gentle, and, above all, lovers to the point of idolatry of the name and person of their sovereign.”³³ Minister of Indies Lardizábal asked for reports from Americans about the insurrections and informed them that “His Majesty, once he knows the truth, will place himself in the midst of his European and American children and will bring to an end that discord that never would have happened among brothers except for the absence and captivity of the father.”³⁴ Absolutist periodical El Procurador insisted that “the name of Ferdinand is a magic or mysterious name for all good people.”³⁵

This “love of king” thesis among Spanish policy-makers failed to restore loyalty on the part of the Americans. The restoration was dominated by hardliners and militarists, those closest to Ferdinand and most influential in his councils, whose view that force was “the only thing that [could] suffice in the state to which things had arrived” prevailed.³⁶ It is not surprising that in September 1814 the decision was made to dispatch the expedition of Pablo Morillo to New Granada and Venezuela, or in early 1815 to gather a second large expedition for use against Buenos Aires.

The voices of moderation at court coalesced around Minister of State José García de León y Pizarro. At all times, however, the camarilla was able to prevent the adoption of moderate reforms, and in September 1818, with Pizarro’s dismissal, it succeeded in winning control over the regime.³⁷ The absolutists who surrounded the king and possessed his confidence, urged total opposition to equality of trade. Even Martín Garay, the moderate minister of finance, told the king that adoption of commercial equality between Spain and America would result in a “political monstrosity never before seen in either ancient or modern overseas establishments.” He meant that an empire of equal parts would be no empire. “The Indies,” he continued, “by their situation, state, needs, and relations, have perforce to carry out the role of colonies, … and it is not humanly possible to identify or equalize the colonies with their metropolis, because they and it have different and even contrary objectives, obligations, and functions.”³⁸ A member of the Council of State declared: “I would look upon the decree of free commerce as the same as the emancipation of America and the sentence of our degradation.”³⁹

The debate over equal trade that occurred among the highest policy advisers to the king isolated for the first time and discussed, in however inadequate a way, the fundamental issue of the relationship between America’s colonial status and Spain’s sense of national greatness. The Junta of Pacification pointed out that “the project [of free trade] is bound up historically with … our own [national] preoccupations,” and that Spain was the dependent part. “In effect, much thought is required to combine their [Americans’] liberties with the metropolis’s dependency. To concede them the same privileges as Spain … it would be necessary to be very sure of their loyalty.”⁴⁰ Pizarro bluntly had reminded the king that American pacification was the premier topic, beside which all other questions paled into insignificance, and upon the solution to which the glory of the king’s reign and of generations to come depended. He was convinced that Spain could win great advantages by accommodating itself to American independence and building a new and greater trade relationship, as Britain had with the United States. In the Council of State, Minister of War Francisco Eguía took a decidedly different stance. He branded both free trade and amnesty for liberals and afrancesados treason, and he blocked any discussion of the several proposals for dividing the empire into a confederation of states. In the absolutists’ view, such projects were fatal to the king’s majesty.

The king’s camarilla, in September 1818, finally engineered the removal from court and the exile of Pizarro and his colleagues, thus bringing to an end any hope for acceptance of the concept of equality for America. The new minister of state, the Marqués de Casa Irujo, advised abandonment of all Pizarro’s policies, including the effort to seek European mediation in return for free trade. Foreign trade was always the vehicle of revolution, he said, and the king agreed.⁴¹ Shortly thereafter, the United States and European powers were informed that all foreigners were barred from further contacts with Spanish America and that armed foreigners caught while in the service of the rebels in America would be subject to the same penalties as Spanish nationals.⁴² The only policy left, according to Casa Irujo, was to hasten the outfitting of the great expedition being gathered at Cádiz for dispatch to Buenos Aires, the expedition that in January 1820 revolted and brought down the absolutist regime.

The Constitutional Triennium

During the constitutional triennium (1820-23), a succession of four increasingly radical governments did nothing to advance the cause of American equality, now again officially enshrined in law. Distracted by the effort to make the revolution at home and by the outright hostility and conspiracies of the king to destroy the constitutional regime, the liberals made no important advances except to recognize the need for a negotiated political settlement. In the first weeks of the new regime, the Provisional Junta that ruled before the meeting of the Cortes ordered ceasefires in America and dispatched commissioners to negotiate with the rebels for acceptance of the Constitution. The Junta declared that restoration of the Constitution “equalized in every way the rights of Spanish Americans with peninsulars.” As a result, “the Junta is firmly convinced that the pacification of America is now more the work of politics than of force, and that only the Constitution can reestablish the fraternal bonds of union with the mother country.”⁴³ Yet, the same gap between promise and performance that had paralyzed the first constitutional government in 1812 continued to exist during the triennium.⁴⁴

In much of America it was too late by 1820 to adopt political reforms that would save Spain’s control. Pablo Morillo, writing from Venezuela, advised: “It is nonsense, in my view, to believe that this part of America wants to reunite with Spain and adopt the Constitution. … The American dissidents … have not been fighting to improve the system of government and it is an error to believe that they will ever be agreeable to uniting with the metropolis. They do not want to be Spaniards.”⁴⁵ American deputies to the Cortes once again urged in passionate voices the redress of American grievances, but they met with even stronger resistance than that of 1812. In November 1821, the Council of State urged abolition of trade exclusion, arguing that “free commerce is so much in the natural order of things that only by tyrannical violence can it be withdrawn.” In January 1822, the ministry, in its major pronouncement on the American crisis, urged the Cortes to grant free trade for six years.⁴⁶ The Cortes, however, rejected these and other similar proposals, and ended instead by dispatching a second set of commissioners to “hear” the complaints of America. At that point, American deputies still remaining in the Cortes left Madrid, and one after another of the American countries became independent. After the United States recognized the independence of Buenos Aires, Mexico, and Colombia in March 1822, Spanish Minister of State Martínez de la Rosa dispatched a manifesto to the courts of Europe, declaring that Spain had decided to abandon its exclusive monopoly and that all the actions of the liberal regime since 1820 tended toward an attitude favorable to foreign trade and settlement in America.⁴⁷ Yet, the Cortes had made no such specific decisions and no such laws were enacted. By the last months of 1822, Spain was once again in the grip of domestic crisis as the liberal regime fell apart amid the rivalry of moderados and exaltados and as the king conspired with France for the overthrow of the constitutional system. In January 1823, a French army of 100,000 “Sons of Saint Louis” invaded Spain and restored the absolute regime.

Conclusion

All three of the basic concepts of empire were broken down by the actions of Spain during the independence era. Most damaging to the concept of the “ties that bind” was the decision to dispatch military forces from Spain to suppress the rebellions. José Baquíjano denounced the Cortes for punishing the overseas vassals instead of addressing their grievances. In 1812 Baquíjano had warned that “to make war on vassals is not a triumph or an advantage.”⁴⁸ Bolívar, in the “Letter from Jamaica,” wrote that the war in Venezuela had destroyed the ties that bind, converting Spain from the benign mother into a raging serpent bent on destruction. The Mexican delegation to the Cortes in Spain informed the government as late as August 1821 that the chief cause of the rebellion in Mexico was “the despotism and constant arbitrariness of the government.”⁴⁹ America had outgrown its dependence. The ties that bind had become chains of oppression.

The concept of father king, meantime, had undergone a remarkable transformation. In 1808, the symbol of Ferdinand as el deseado was the strongest single thread holding together Spain’s resistance to Napoleon and, after 1810, the resistance of American loyalists to domestic insurrection. His restoration in 1814 was overwhelmingly popular and there was a near total absence of resistance or reaction to the coup by which he overthrew the Constitution. Yet, by the time Pizarro came to office as minister of state in 1816, the prestige of the king had begun to decline. There were good reasons for the king’s loss of standing. The Conde de Toreno traced the process by which the camarilla gathered around the king on his return to Spain and pointed to “the unwise advice of those who imprisoned his will or gave it a deplorable bias.”⁵⁰ Pizarro blamed all the errors of the royal policy on the camarilla, referring to the members of the clique as “vermin.” Year after year, the king rejected the advice of moderates at home, while he utterly ignored the pleas of the predominant element among loyalist creoles in America. The revolution of 1820 finally disproved the ideology of throne and altar, as the king abjectly requested his American subjects to forgive his error in having overthrown the Constitution in 1814, urging them to remember that “errors in judgment are not crimes.”⁵¹ Then the king spent the rest of the triennium conspiring against his own governments and declaring to the world that he was their prisoner.

It was the declaration of equality and then the failure to implement the concept that most weakened Spain’s hold over the hearts of its New World subjects. It pointed up the inherent ideological contradiction of empire. To paraphrase what Baquíjano said in 1814, the Americans quite rightly demanded: “if we are equal, then treat us that way.” The Americans were forced to recognize that equality was a sham. At the end of 1821 and beginning of 1822, the liberal constitutional government, while still debating a possible American policy, recommended free trade and absolute job equality as essential to the restoration of order in America. The colonists’ grievance over job and economic equality was “converted into a pretext that for some made independence not only plausible but necessary.”⁵² Even the most loyal or inert Americans had only one conclusion to draw. The principle of equality, proclaimed in 1809-10 as the keynote of Spain’s attempt to preserve the empire, had become merely the leading example of Spain’s duplicity. Under both the constitutional and the absolutist regimes, in the name of both liberals and conservatives, the metropolis toyed with the aspirations of those still loyal Americans who were prepared to give it one more chance, throwing away the legacy of American goodwill through the proclamation of impossible and unachievable promises.

Author notes