THE SLAVE TRADE 237 the colonies, already sufficiently unruly, and it accustomed English administrators to regard all colonists as inferiors, a stigma which rankled until the War of Independence. Before the end of the Protectorate it was apparent that the attempt to emigrate large numbers of white men to the West Indies had broken down. Jamaica remained short of men for a generation to come. Antigua was another island whose exploitation was desirable for strategical reasons, for it contained the best harbours in the Lesser Antilles for careening warships. Here again English settlers did not come forward freely, and the Government encouraged any foreigners to go there provided they were Protestants. Actually a few Norwegians took advantage of the offer.1 To some extent the deficiency was made good by the fact that Barbados and Bermuda were becoming overcrowded and that their unwanted inhabitants were ready to go pioneering in newer colonies. But the real mercantilist remedy lay in the negro slave. Slaves crossed the ocean in increasing numbers in the decade before 1660. After that date the movement grew into a flood, swamping first the West Indies and then the American Plantations, and providing the greatest material gain and the worst moral deterioration in the record of the old colonial Empire. The organisation of the slave trade, like certain other branches of oceanic administration, was, during the Interregnum, the subject of experiments which led to no successful results, but which nevertheless yielded experience whereon the Restoration was to found a definitive policy. A basis existed in the Guinea Company incorporated in 1630.2 At that date the number of negroes purchased by the English colonies had been unimportant, and the Company's trade had been chiefly in gold, ivory and vegetable products. During the Civil War, the Company's monopoly had been extensively infringed by English interlopers, whilst the Dutch had grasped the principal share in the nascent business of supplying negroes to the English Plantations. Commonwealth policy demanded that the Dutch should be ousted, and as a first step the Council of State interfered in the dispute between the Guinea Company and the interlopers. As has been explained, the latter were powerful in the Puritan ranks, and special monopolies, particularly those of royal foundation, were unpopular. The Commonwealth therefore sought in 1651 to impose a compromise, by which the Company was to enjoy a monopoly of the trade from Sierra Leone to Cormantin on the Gold Coast, and all the remainder was to be thrown open. Years of misfortune followed, and by 1657 the Guinea Company had lost all its stations and most of its shipping to attacks by Prince Rupert, the Dutch and the Danes. At this juncture Cromwell, who was then reviewing the affairs of the East India Company, decided to place the Guinea interests under its 1 C.O. 1/12, no. 68 (iii). 2 See Scott, W. R., Joint Stock Companies, 11, 14-17. control for five years. In this way the Guinea Company of 1630 came to an end, and the temporary nature of the new expedient left it open for a later Government to make a more solid contribution to the problem of management. From a review of the imperial statesmanship of the Interregnum certain permanent results may be traced. The intrusion of the Dutch into the economy of the Empire was checked but not completely ended. The means for their exclusion was provided, but it was left for the Restoration to put it into full operation. Here Cromwell's strongly Protestant policy conflicted with the desires of the mercantile interest, but Charles II was to be restrained by no such considerations. Towards Spain the Protectorate maintained an attitude in continuity with England's policy in the past, although a new departure, of alliance rather than enmity, might well have been instituted. The Dutch, with greater insight into the ambitions of France, were preparing to make this departure; but Cromwell was drawn into the alliance with Mazarin which produced the Peace of the Pyrenees and the beginning of the great age of French ascendancy. Cromwell's French alliance, however, was always tinged with suspicion. Had he lived ten years longer he would very probably have reversed it, and it is unjust to condemn him for the way in which others continued the work which he laid aside at the age of fifty-nine. The treaty of 1654 with Portugal produced a permanent effect, the modern English alliance with that country, which proved a great asset in the naval wars and mercantile competition of the eighteenth century. It also definitely closed a period of estrangement which had endured since the reign of Henry VIII. In the internal affairs of the Empire the Navigation Acts, disputable as their effect may have been, marked a new and permanent departure, clearly distinguishable from the colonial regulations of the early Stuarts. The latter had been directed chiefly to the increase of English revenue; but the Commonwealth Acts were primarily designed for the advancement of sea power, from which the newer mercantilist doctrine taught that an increase of wealth would follow. Out of Cromwell's West Indian transactions sprang the emigration policy which did so much to shape the destiny of the old Empire; and out of the series of administrative experiments of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate emerged the permanent commercial element in the conduct of imperial affairs. And from the two West India expeditions of the Interregnum dates the continuous employment of the Navy as a link of empire. In general it may be said that, for good and ill, the policy of the Interregnum confirmed the foundation of imperial unity upon an economic basis. CHAPTER VIII THE COLONIES AFTER THE RESTORATION, 1660-1713 THE story of the old colonial Empire can be viewed in two aspects: the one, the development of the Empire as a unity, with administrative departments, political regulations, and Acts of trade and navigation; the other, the growth of the colonies as separate organisms with peculiar aspirations and interests, inhabited in time by communities nationally distinct from the people of the parent State. The second of these aspects during the half-century after the restoration of Charles II forms the chief subject-matter of the present chapter. The bonds of empire are described elsewhere; here we are concerned with the centrifugal forces destined to burst them. The greatest of these forces was the divergence of national development. The colonists under Charles I were true Englishmen, the great majority born in England. They were at variance with the mother country on many matters, but they understood her, and she understood them; thought flowed in the same channels on either side of the Atlantic. There followed twenty years, from 1640 to 1660, during which the young communities lost touch with the old. Until the Battle of Worcester the colonies followed their own devices with scarcely a pretence of control from home; and thereafter the Puritan statesmen contented themselves with a formal allegiance, a somewhat perfunctory observance of the Navigation Acts, and an almost complete colonial autonomy in internal affairs. The imperial policy of the Interregnum was more a promise than a performance, a promise which had to await settled times for its fulfilment. Meanwhile a colonial-born generation arose, still mingled with home-bred immigrants, but constituting a growing element in the population and open to few of the contacts existing in times of peace. The Restoration renewed some of these contacts, but not the greatest of all, the continued emigration in due proportion of the home population. Englishmen, it is true, still went overseas, but the emigrants were nearly all of peculiar classes not representative of the nation as a whole, whilst much of the new settlement was accomplished not by them but by the internal migrations of the colonists. There was, after the Restoration as before it, a favourable field for the growth of specialised local types. Two causes contributed to national divergence, the introduction of foreigners into the colonies, and the difference of the colonial environment from that of the mother country. The former was important but must not be exaggerated, for a vigorous nationality can assimilate considerable foreign strains without being radically affected. Environment was a much more powerful agent of change, and manifested itself in many forms. Climate, diseases, food and drink dictated novel habits of daily life; occupations unknown in England introduced new economic problems and called for independent thinking; in colonial society the presence of black slaves or white bondservants or uncivilised natives, and the absence of a hereditary upper class, altered the gradations known at home and opened responsible positions to men who would have had little share in the framing of public opinion had they lived in England; and in some communities religion moulded citizenship, and it was religion of a type not tolerated on the English side of the Atlantic. The list of environmental factors might be extended, but the above instances are sufficiently suggestive. In the several colonies they varied in their proportionate effects, but in all they exerted an influence upon the corporate character. New immigration was scanty, there were hardly any of the present-day contacts provided by easy travel, quick mail services, literature and political speech-making, and as the generations passed the colonists were moulded more and more by their surroundings and less by the dimming memories of the England their fathers had left. Those memories themselves became in time a dividing force, for the mother country was in no static condition; she was moving rapidly along lines of her own. The third generation of New Englanders thought of old England as the land quitted by the Pilgrim Fathers, the land of Shakespeare and the early Stuarts; but the reality, the England of William III and Anne, of Addison and Swift and Defoe, of stockjobbing and journalism, was widely different. Environment therefore produced divergent characteristics. The English of the mother country developed in one direction, their cousins overseas in many others, and varying colonial types arose, having in common only this difference from the parent stock. This was the problem of statesmanship which the old Empire scarcely recognised and never solved. Charles II and his advisers found much colonial business awaiting their attention, and they made a vigorous effort to consolidate an Empire whose cohesion had loosened under their predecessors. Their decisions led to important consequences in the established colonies and to rapid expansion in new directions. To consider the different fields in the order of importance which statesmen attached to them it will be necessary to begin with the West Indian Plantations, whose richest unit, Barbados, ranked as "the principal pearl in His Majesty's crown". In the Lesser Antilles, the Caribbee Islands granted to the Earl of Carlisle by Charles I, an urgent problem demanded settlement. The proprietary rights had been in abeyance since the outbreak of the Civil War at home, with the result that the colonists had long ceased to pay the proprietor's dues and had come to regard themselves as freeholders. During this period the colonial society had been trans THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 241 formed. Before 1640, when tobacco had been the staple crop, there had been a large number of petty planters employing a few white bondservants apiece. These planters had been poor and of little political weight, and had had no elective Assembly. The introduction of sugar planting had consolidated the small holdings into large estates owned by a comparatively few rich men who were substituting negro slaves for indentured servants. The majority of the dispossessed tobacco planters fell to the status of employees or re-emigrated to try their fortunes elsewhere; white immigration declined, and with it the numbers of the white population; and the wealthy plantation owners, some of whom lived in England, whilst all had business connections there, formed a powerful oligarchy able to make their influence felt at court and to rule the islands through the elected Assemblies which during the Interregnum had everywhere taken root. In the first generation the planters had been at the mercy of an absolute proprietor. By 1660 they felt strong enough to resist the revival of the proprietorship and believed that they would do better as immediate subjects of the Crown. The Crown nevertheless had obligations to the proprietorship, the second Earl of Carlisle having fought as a royalist and suffered for the cause. At the crisis of his fortunes he had leased half his rights to Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, who had joined the royalist side when it offered little prospect of advantage. In 1660 Carlisle and Willoughby urged their claim and secured a provisional recognition, but as Carlisle died without issue his rights passed to the Earl of Kinnoul. The planters' spokesmen resisted strongly, and other parties became clamorous: the creditors of Carlisle, who claimed payment out of the proprietary revenue; the Earl of Marlborough, whose family had been assigned a pension from the same fund; and the descendant of Sir William Courteen, the original founder of the Barbados colony. The planters' contention was that the proprietary patent had been invalid from the outset, since Barbados and St Christopher had been colonised before its issue; and that even if good it should be forfeited for tyrannical and illegal use. The Earl of Clarendon, to whom fell the task of effecting a settlement, believed that this contention would be vindicated by a trial at law, but he saw also that the other claimants had a moral right to satisfaction. After a patient investigation he imposed a compromise in the following terms. Kinnoul and Willoughby surrendered the patent into the King's hands. His Majesty then abdicated all proprietary rights on condition that the planters, through their Assemblies, should vote a permanent revenue. Willoughby was to receive half this revenue and to be governor of the islands for the remaining seven years of his lease. The other half was to provide pensions for Kinnoul and Marlborough and to pay off the creditors of the deceased Earl of Carlisle, the Courteen claimant alone receiving nothing. The entire revenue CHBEI 16 |