Republics of the New World

The Revolutionary Political Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Hilda Sabato

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889723
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A sweeping history of
Latin American republicanism in the nineteenth century By the 1820s, after three centuries under imperial rule, the former Spanish territories of Latin America had shaken off their colonial bonds and founded independent republics. In committing themselves to republicanism, they embarked on a political experiment of an unprecedented scale outside the newly formed United States. In this book, Hilda Sabato provides a sweeping history of republicanism in nineteenth-century Latin America, one that spans the entire region and places the Spanish American experience within a broader global perspective.Challenging the conventional view of Latin America as a case of failed modernization, Sabato shows how republican experiments differed across the region yet were all based on the radical notion of popular sovereignty--the idea that legitimate authority lies with the people. As in other parts of the world, the transition from colonies to independent states was complex, uncertain, and rife with conflict. Yet the republican order in Spanish America endured, crossing borders and traversing distinct geographies and cultures. Sabato shifts the focus from rulers and elites to ordinary citizens and traces the emergence of new institutions and practices that shaped a vigorous and inclusive political life.Panoramic in scope and certain to provoke debate, this book situates these fledgling republics in the context of a transatlantic shift in how government was conceived and practiced, and puts Latin America at the center of a revolutionary age that gave birth to new ideas of citizenship.

CHAPTER ONE

New Republics at Play

The passages from empire to nationhood forked in ways that required actors to make choices without knowing the certainty of the outcome.

—ADELMAN (2006), 1

AT THE BEGINNING of the nineteenth century, Spanish America was part of the larger three-centuries-old empire built by the Spanish monarchy across the Atlantic. By the late 1820s, most of this territory was no longer under imperial rule; it was in the midst of a transformation that no one then knew—as Jeremy Adelman perceptively remarks in the above cited quote—where it would lead or how it would result. With the advantage of hindsight, we know that by the end of that century fifteen nation-states were in place. No linear or predestined path, however, led from empire to nations, and very much like in other parts of the world, the transition from colonies to independent states was a complex, conflict-ridden, indeterminate process. Narratives of nation building have often portrayed this story as that of the progressive road that, despite many obstacles and difficulties, inevitably led to a happy ending, that of the formation of a new, independent, nation. These views are now subject to heavy criticism, as recent scholarship has produced a whole new set of hypotheses and interpretations on the fall of empires, the history of colonialism, and the formation of nation-states. In the case of Spanish America, teleological narratives of national developments have been displaced by highly elaborate analyses of the different courses followed by the former colonies as they severed their links to the metropolis and sought to shape new polities. Also, historians have eroded the long-standing claims that independence from Spain was the result of an inward liberating energy in each of the future nations-to-be; rather, the crisis of the Spanish monarchy and Napoleon’s invasion of the peninsula was at the core of the ensuing disbanding of the empire.

There is a vast scholarship on those topics that explores and discusses the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula by the French forces in the context of the struggle for power among the main European countries, as well as its multiple consequences for the Spanish and the Portuguese empires at home and overseas. Although the resulting literature provides an indispensable background for this book, in the following pages I will only refer to some of the main arguments and conclusions regarding the final outcome for the American mainland territories under imperial rule: their independence from the metropolis and the ensuing conflicts around the definition of new sovereignties, as well as to the disputes and the choices made regarding the available options for political organization after the severance of the colonial bond.

A Critical Turning Point

The facts are well known. In the midst of intense rivalries among the European powers, and with Napoleon’s France on the move to subdue the Iberian empires, in 1808 an internal dispute within the Spanish royal family that resulted in the displacement of King Charles IV and the crowning of his son, Ferdinand VII, opened the way to the invasion and occupation of the peninsula by a powerful French army, and finally, to the abdication of the novel king replaced by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph (as José I). The demise of the Bourbons triggered the spark for a political process of unforeseen consequences. The king was, by definition, literally the head of the body politic, and the whole edifice of the Spanish monarchy was built upon that principle. Sovereignty was at stake. The uprooting of the legitimate sovereign set off a succession of reactions both in the Peninsula and in the Americas, as different parts of the composite body of the Spanish realm claimed to resume the powers originally bestowed upon their king.

In Spain, local juntas in various places led the resistance against French forces, guerrilla warfare spread all over the territory, and intense political and ideological debates pitted different sectors of the fragmented leadership against each other. Successive attempts at concentrating power on a central authority culminated in the creation of a Supreme Central Junta, formed by delegates from each of the main local juntas, and designated to rule in the name and place of the king. First established in Aranjuez, the Junta was forced to move to Seville, and at the end of 1809, under pressure from the French, to flee to Cádiz where a local rebellion compelled its resignation and the delegation of its authority to a Regency council created in early 1810. Despite the relentless advance of the occupiers, the locals managed to sustain their authority in the southern port of Cádiz, where that same year they convened the Cortes, an assembly meant to represent the whole of the Spanish body politic, which two years later produced a liberal-oriented constitution, a radical novelty in the tradition of the kingdom.

These efforts notwithstanding, the French ruled over most of the country. The Spanish rebels were no match for the formidable French army, and it was only when the English came in as allies of the Portuguese to stop Napoleon in Portugal and the Russian campaign forced the emperor to pull out part of his troops from Spain that the occupation came to an end. In 1814 Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne. In the context of a strong revival of absolutism in Europe, the Spanish king gained the support of most powers, including dominant England, and sought to return to the ways of the Old Regime.

In the meantime, nothing remained the same in America. The power vacuum sparked by the king’s abdication reached the colonies as soon as the news traveled that far. The first reaction headed by local Spanish authorities was to condemn the invaders and confirm fidelity to their displaced king, rejecting all appeals on the part of José I to shift their loyalties. But the question of sovereignty came up soon enough; in the absence of the head, the body parts of the realm, that is, the provinces, “kingdoms,” or “pueblos,” very much like in the Peninsula, started to claim back the sovereign powers once vested upon their monarch. The efforts of the Bourbon administrations, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, to discipline the kingdom and its colonies under their centralized absolutist authority found their limits in the new situation, on both sides of the Atlantic. The old doctrine and traditions that considered the monarchy a composite of bodies, cities, corporations, and kingdoms resurfaced in the midst of the crisis. This revival soon shared the political and ideological stage with other, more recent theories regarding sovereignty and power also opposed to absolutism and to the divine right of kings. All over the empire, the reality of an empty throne set off heated intellectual debates and fierce political disputes, in the midst of a multi-sided display of force, of revolutions and wars that did not end with the restoration of Ferdinand in 1814 but lasted for another ten years.

In an attempt to rein in their imperial possessions, the metropolitan authorities reached out to the American colonies and convened them, in 1809, to choose their own representatives to the Junta Central, a move that opened up an unprecedented electoral process and at the same time fueled debates and claims regarding the place of these territories in the realm. By the time those elections were decided in part of Spanish America, the Junta was dissolved, so that the representatives never joined that body. The colonies were entirely immersed in the quagmire of events shattering the empire, and when the news arrived of the fall of Seville and the forced resignation of the central Junta, uncertainty escalated, authority crumbled, and conflict openly broke out among different groups around sovereignty and power. In various cities across the colonial territory, the locals proceeded to convene their own juntas in the name of the people entitled to recover their sovereignty, just as the provinces had done in Spain. This move had precedents in 1808 and 1809 when similar bodies assembled, with different claims and outcomes, in Mexico, Montevideo, Quito, and Upper Peru,¹ but in 1810 it acquired new intensity and, starting in Caracas and Buenos Aires, expanded throughout the colonial territories. Colonial officers in place lost their role as legitimate authorities, and only the local municipal bodies, the Cabildos, maintained and enhanced their representative character, while the juntas proclaimed their sovereign powers.

Sovereignty

The colonies were in turmoil, well beyond the control of empire. From that point onward, the former territorial units under Spanish rule—viceroyalties and capitanías generales, but also their different parts—entered into a disjointed period of political fragmentation, each of them following a different, often irregular course whose only common denominator was the pervasive immersion in war.

The 1810 revolutionary claim to self-rule was a widespread starting point, but it came in different formats and opened up a vast field for divergence. Apart from the full-fledged reaction against that principle on the part of those in favor of absolutism, two were the main controversial issues at stake: the nature of the new sovereign and the quality of the relationship with the metropolis.

Scholars have long discussed the ideological foundations of the Spanish American claims to self-rule. In recent years, the prevailing views have pointed in the direction of two, noncontradictory, directions: the neoscholastic doctrines and the theory of natural rights, both of which informed the political languages that circulated in Spain and its colonies. The former recovered the principles of the so-called ancient constitution of the Spanish monarchy, prevalent in the times of the Habsburgs but displaced by the Bourbons’ shift toward absolutism. According to its main tenets, sovereignty originally pertained to the various corporate, organic, “natural”—God created—bodies that bequeathed their original powers granted by God in the person of the king, and remained linked to him by the mutual commitments of their pactum subjectionis. The king’s imperium was not unconditional, and under special circumstances, sovereignty could revert to its initial holders. Such was the claim put forward by the provinces in Spain and the colonial territories on occasion of the vacatio regis that followed the French occupation: in the absence of the monarch, the “pueblos” (original communities) recovered their sovereignty.

This proposition found a second source of validation in various theoretical formulations—in circulation since the seventeenth century—based upon the doctrine of natural rights, all of which had conceptual connections with neo-scholasticism but at the same time responded to a different set of notions regarding power and society. As regards the question of sovereignty, the main innovation was the rejection of transcendence in favor of the contractual nature of human association. As a result of the pact that had brought them together, men as individuals created their own authorities to whom they transferred, by consent, their sovereign powers. Relations between government and the governed were ruled by the key principle of consent, and therefore, legitimate authority was never absolute, it was always subject to the control of the people. This principle was formulated not only by the classic names associated with the updating of the theory of natural rights (Gropius, Puffendorf, Wolff, Vattel) but was also part of the political philosophy of John Locke and other founders of liberal thought. It had entered into the vocabulary of the Atlantic revolutions that preceded the Spanish American ones and was openly put forward in the declaration of independence of the United States.

Regardless of the specific theoretical frameworks to which they initially belonged, these notions served to back the claims to self-rule both in Spain and its colonies, and entered into the political languages in rapid transformation during the critical years of the imperial crisis. This was a time when available words did not match the needs of naming; contemporaries attributed novel meanings to old concepts and inserted them in new contexts, altering current languages and shaping new ones that often proved unstable. Sovereignty, with its various meanings, occupied center stage in all of them, so that conflicts regarding authority and power were also disputes about meaning.

In this regard, a key divide would soon come up that proved highly consequential in the years to come: the question of plurality or unity of sovereignty, an issue that surfaced as soon as the first juntas were set up, as well as during the debates that preceded the sanctioning of the Cádiz constitution of 1812. The basic problem was whether the existing kingdom should recognize the plural nature of the realm and therefore grant sovereign powers to each of the natural communal bodies (pueblos, cities, provinces, “republics,” and such) claiming self-rule or whether the kingdom (as a single “nation”) should remain one and its people, as a unitary body, retain the powers once vested upon the monarch. After much debate, the Cortes settled on this second option and thus gave shape to a unified nation in which they included not only the metropolis but also the former colonies. This solution created a powerful antecedent for the disputes that were taking place in America, but the problem persisted, and for decades, the question of how far could the claim to self-rule go was not settled. In fact, in the years to come, in most of the former colonies the issue of competing territorial sovereignties remained one of the main causes of political conflict.

Independence

The second great field for controversy was the relationship of the former colonies to the metropolis. During the early years of the imperial crisis, as we have seen, among the leading sectors of the Spanish American societies there seemed to be a widespread inclination toward expressing loyalty to King Ferdinand and condemnation of the French invasion. In that context, the first steps to establish local juntas did not challenge the fundamental ties with empire; rather, they followed the metropolitan moves in the same direction. This initial consensus, shared by large sectors of the population, soon experienced the impact of the dramatic events in Spain. Starting in 1810, the succession of local movements pursuing self-rule followed new directions, and the issue of the colonial links acquired increasing relevance. The new juntas swore their loyalty to Ferdinand, but at the same time most of them questioned the legitimacy of the Regency council in Spain and of the colonial magistrates in place. Open conflict ensued. The metropolitan government censored these moves, the Spanish magistrates and officials in America insisted on their powers, different sectors of the political, social, and economic elites—which included Spanish-born and American-born “Spaniards”—realigned themselves in favor of or against the juntas’ decisions, and in a short time, a deepening division between loyalists to imperial authorities and those now considered “insurgents” (or “patriots”) split large sectors of the population who took sides in the conflict.² Among the many novelties of those years, the creation of an open public debate nurtured by a newly created press and the circulation of all sorts of rumors, together with the physical presence of sectors of the urban population in plazas and other common spaces, heated the political atmosphere in unprecedented ways.

The colonial relationship was under scrutiny. But downright declarations announcing the severance of the bonds with Spain did not prosper until later. The first formal statements in this regard were formulated by the juntas of Caracas and Cartagena, in 1811, but they were rather exceptional for the time being, and they proved ephemeral, as the loyalists rapidly regained control of those territories and restored them to metropolitan rule.

Talk about “independence” became, nevertheless, more and more audible, yet the term admitted different meanings. This word had acquired new valence after the thirteen North American colonies declared the severance of the “political bonds” with Great Britain, and their decision “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” They were thus pronouncing the “United colonies as Free and Independent states,” and establishing their new status vis-à-vis the rest of the nations of the world. In the context of the Spanish empire, however, the word was used rather freely to refer to various types of proposed arrangements in the relationship with Spain. Thus, “independence” could, for example, denote the affirmation of self-rule of territories that would nevertheless stay within the Spanish “nation” and loyal to the Crown; it could refer to the aspiration of the subordinate regions of a viceroyalty to gain an au...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: New Republics at Play
• Chapter 2: Elections
• Chapter 3: Citizens in Arms
• Chapter 4: Public Opinion
• Chapter 5: The Republican Experiment: An Essay in Interpretation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index