Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840: Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements 3030985334, 9783030985332

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Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500−1840 Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements Edited by

m igu e l da n ta s da c ru z

Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840

Miguel Dantas da Cruz Editor

Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840 Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements

Editor Miguel Dantas da Cruz Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal

ISBN 978-3-030-98533-2 ISBN 978-3-030-98534-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Introduction: Atlantic Petitionary Traditions and Developments Miguel Dantas da Cruz

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Part I Petitionary Practices and Brokers in the Early Modern Atlantic World 2

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Some Reflections on Voice and Authority in the Construction and Operation of Long-Distance Empires and Their Successor States in the Americas Jack P. Greene

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Petitions in the Dutch Atlantic and the ‘Absence’ of a Dutch West India Interest, c. 1600–1800 Joris van den Tol

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Petitions to the Courts of Appeal in Portuguese America and the Protection of Rights (c. 1750–1808) Andréa Slemian

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Petitions to Correct Revolutionary Rumours: The City Council of Santafé Bogotá and Madrid’s Agentes de Indias, c. 1780–1795 Álvaro Caso Bello

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Part II Petitioning and Colonialism 6

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Indigenous Petitioning in the Early Modern British and Spanish New World Adrian Masters and Bradley Dixon Debitage of the Shatter Zone: Indoctrination, Asylum, and the Law of Towns in the Provinces of Florida Amy Turner Bushnell “We Are All French”: Race, Religion, and Citizenship in Petitions from Senegal, 1760s–1840s Larissa Kopytoff

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Part III Revolutionary Ruptures and the Path to Mass Petitioning 9

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Petitioning as Constitution-Making: Revolutionary Massachusetts and the American Confederation James F. Hrdlicka

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Action at a Distance: Petitions and Political Representation in Revolutionary France Adrian O’Connor

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Petitioning by Riot in Spain and the Origins of Modern Mass Petitioning Diego Palacios Cerezales

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The Petitionary Wave of the First Portuguese Liberal Revolution (1820–1823) Miguel Dantas da Cruz

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Bushnell Amy Turner holds a Ph.D. in Colonial Latin American History from the University of Florida, with fields in Early Modern Europe and Historical Geography. Author of The King’s Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury, 1565–1702, and Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida, she is at work on two book manuscripts: “The Indomitable Nations: Patterns of Security, Autonomy, and Domain in the Indian Americas” and “Quaker Odyssey: Jonathan Dickinson’s Shipwreck and Misadventures in Florida, 1696–1697.” She is affiliated in retirement to the Brown University History Department and the John Carter Brown Library. Caso Bello Álvaro received a Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation entitled “The Agentes de Indias: Transatlantic Lobbying, and the Representation of Spanish-American Interests in Madrid, c. 1776–1820.” He was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Latin American History at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s History Department. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins’ Program for Latin American Studies, and a Level 1 Associate Researcher with Uruguay’s National Research Agency (Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación). da Cruz Miguel Dantas is an Assistant Researcher at Instituto de Ciências Sociais of Universidade de Lisboa, where he has taught since 2017. He was a research fellow at John Carter Brown Library (Brown University) and at Universidade Federal Fluminense. He has published

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extensively on the history of the Portuguese Atlantic World, exploring the social dimensions of warfare and the formation of Portuguese imperial imaginaries. He is currently studying the petitionary drives of the nineteenth-century Liberal Revolutions. He participates in several international projects, such the RESISTANCE: Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires. He organizes and coordinates several permanent seminars. Dixon Bradley is an Assistant Professor of early American and Native American history at the University of Memphis. His book manuscript, Republic of Indians: Empires of Indigenous Law in the Early American South, explores how seventeenth-century Indigenous peoples from Florida to the Chesapeake embraced the status of imperial subjects and vasallos (vassals), and pushed for incorporation with Europeans in hybrid polities in which they had a say and were instrumental in creating. Greene Jack P. is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., USA. He has written many books and papers on the history of colonial British America, the American Revolution, and the early modern British Empire, including, most recently, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (2010), Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2013), Creating the British Atlantic: Essays in Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (2013), and Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (2016). His latest book is an edition of James Knight, The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica [1746] (2021). Hrdlicka James F. is a Lecturer in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Colonists, Citizens, Constitutions: Creating the American Republic (Scala Arts, 2020), a companion volume to exhibitions hosted by the NewYork Historical Society and the Museum of the American Revolution. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Kopytoff Larissa earned her Ph.D. in African History at New York University. She teaches in the Department of History at the University of South Florida. Her research explores citizenship and nationality in Africa,

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colonial law and administration, and mobility within and across imperial boundaries, with an emphasis on the French empire. Masters Adrian is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Tübingen. He is currently completing his co-authored monograph The Radical Spanish Empire with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Harvard University Press, 2020) and pursuing multiple lines of research, including the system of petitioning in the Habsburg Spanish Indies, as well as racemaking and knowledge-production in Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines. O’Connor Adrian is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida. He is the author of In Pursuit of Politics: Education and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (2017), as well as numerous articles on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He is also editor of the peer-reviewed journal, The Historian. Palacios Cerezales Diego Ramon y Cajal Researcher, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. I have published widely on the history of popular politics, policing, and social movements in continental Europe in the modern era. His most recent work includes: “France Speaks! Petitioning for Louis-Napoleon in 1851.” French Historical Studies 43, no. 3 (2020): 421–450; “Petitioning for Empire in Napoleonic Europe.” Journal of Modern European History 18, no. 1 (2020): 96–114; “ReImagining Petitioning in Spain (1808–1823).” Social Science History 43, no. 3 (2019): 487–508. Slemian Andréa is an Associate Professor, History Department, Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP, Brazil), where she has taught Colonial History since 2011. Her research interests are in the judicial culture of Latin America between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a comparative emphasis on courts and legal proceedings. She has also written about the process of independence and state-building in America, particularly in Brazil. van den Tol Joris obtained his Ph.D. on lobbying in relation to Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) at Leiden University in 2018. The book based on his dissertation research, Lobbying in Company, was published with Brill in 2020. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Postdoc at Harvard University’s history department on an NWO Rubicon fellowship. Together with two colleagues he also wrote a book on the economic and political ties between the Dutch Central Bank and slavery in the nineteenth century

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that was published by Leiden University Press in 2022. From October 2021, he is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queens’ College in Cambridge, and from January 2022 a Marie Curie Fellow at Cambridge University. He has published on petitions in relation to the Dutch colonies in Brazil, New Netherland, and Taiwan and on smuggling.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Backside of a petition with signatures that crossed provincial boundaries and with women signing in their own name, from 1650 (Source NL-HaNA, 1.01.02 inv. nr. 5762, 29-July-1650) Example of a round-robin from 1652 (Source NL-HaNA, 1.03.02, inv. nr. 5-I , 15-Oct-1652) Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), 654/680, Dibujo 260. Una mujer andina, falsamente acusada de amancebamiento por el cura, pide justicia al alcalde nativo (Source The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, GKS 2232 4° [or “4to” or “quarto”]: Guaman Poma) Genealogical chart tracing John Uncas’s right to the sachemship from the Mohegans’ appeal to the Privy Council in 1770. Mohegan Indian Tribe of Connecticut, Old John Uncas and the greater part of the tribe of Moheagan Indians, by Samuel Mason their guardian, appellants… (London: 1770) (Source Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Atlantic Petitionary Traditions and Developments Miguel Dantas da Cruz

Scholarship on Atlantic history always emphasises the importance of comparisons and connections between empires and across political borders. Historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Jack P. Greene, among others, have argued for an interpretative framework that goes beyond the

This work was supported by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.—within the framework of the contract programme prescribed by numbers 4, 5, and 6 of article 23 of the D.L. 57/2016 of August 29 and changed by Law 57/2017 of July 19. The author received additional funding from his institution’s strategic project (UID/SOC/50013/2019). The author would like to express his gratitude to Richard Huzzey, Andréa Slemian and to the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions to previous versions of this text. He would also like to thank Rhian Atkin for her extraordinary revision, which greatly improved the text. M. D. da Cruz (B) Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_1

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narrow parochial interpretations of the past. The various monographs, collective volumes, and textbooks that have been published in the last 30 years have explored and compared structures and institutions, society and culture, war and trade, social dynamics and political representation.1 At the heart of Atlantic history and all of its scholarly outputs is the idea of negotiation and the underlying rejection of an ominous and unresponsive state that controls and micromanages the lives of all those living in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.2 This methodological perspective matches the historiographical developments taking shape concurrently elsewhere, which have emphasised some of the same principles. The scholarship produced in the wake of Bartolomé Clavero and António Manuel Hespanha has uncovered the legal precepts that structured early modern societies, especially in Southern Europe and in the Iberian empires.3 The centrality of the corporatist worldview, the jurisdictional culture, and the fragmentary nature of power in those societies all conveyed the same sense of unceasing negotiation between subjects and monarchs. Surprisingly, one of the main features of this ongoing negotiation has been constantly underestimated: petitions. Reflecting on his prior work, historian Jack P. Greene observes in his contribution to this volume: “Neither in thinking through that essay4 nor in my earlier study of British imperial political relations and constitutional practice, however, did I address the question of how petitioning functioned in the creation and maintenance of these negotiated authorities”. Petitions are often missing from attempts to identify the inner workings of the Atlantic World, including in encyclopaedic efforts to systematise the historiographical field. The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History and the Encyclopedia of The Atlantic World, 1400–1900, for example, do not contain a single entry on petitions. As this volume will show, petitions were as indispensable for imperial administrations as they were for early modern European countries. They were crucial for political states that largely governed in a reactive rather than a proactive manner, and often only by consent. States were more concerned with upholding rights and privileges than they were with suppressing them. The English Parliament, for example, actually emerged as a legislature out of incoming petitions with common complaints.5 Petitions, petitiones, petições, pétitions were integral to the fabric of every expanding monarchy with imperial polities, and therefore they are crucial and privileged sources from which to reconstitute the history of the Atlantic world and its dynamics. Yet petitions seldom receive specific

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attention in the narratives of that historiographical field. One has the sense that they are ubiquitous but illusive; their presence is often more implicit than explicit. Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840: Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements revisits these communicational devices, exploring their role in everyday interactions as well as in revolutionary moments. The volume attempts to connect the dots between the petitionary practices of different European countries, some of their colonies, and some of their successor states, in the specific political landscape of the Atlantic. The volume addresses the common and often simultaneous experiences of these polities with the evolution of petitioning, which includes the transition from the premodern “Petition-and-Response” model to the modern mass-mobilisation model.6 The Atlantic basin had a unique experience with petitioning, which was partly dictated by common features that did not converge elsewhere in the same timeframe. These included the uses of shared petitionary practices (with their roots in Greco-Roman heritage), the almost simultaneous imperial expansions and colonisation, and the reverberations of the Age of the Democratic Revolutions , to use the suggestive, albeit outdated, expression of Robert Palmer.7 However, it should be noted that petitioning is not exclusively an Atlantic or a Western trait. Far from it. Petitioning is one of the oldest ways of addressing authorities, making it one of the oldest forms of political participation and representation. In fact, petitioning has been with us since the invention of writing,8 and it played important roles in Ancient Egypt and China, in Classical Greece and Rome, in Byzantium and the Arab World9 ; and it seems destined to remain for the long term. The right to address political representatives is, for example, protected in old legal documents such as the 1688 Bill of Rights, which enshrined earlier protections dating from the thirteenth century; the same right is embedded in new documents, such as the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000). The perception that petitionary practices, supposedly associated with impoverished and low-aspiring societies, no longer had a place in our modern world has proved to be a precipitated assessment.10 If anything, we can speak of a revival of petitionary culture across many regions of the world. The advent of e-petitioning has made the persistence of petitionary practices into the future even more likely, although much has changed as far as those practices are concerned. The study of this almost timeless system of communication was, however, hampered for a long time. As recently as 1997, Peter Blickle

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recognised how little we knew about petitions.11 There were intellectual and methodological obstacles that were difficult to surpass. The prevalent Marxist analysis was quick to dismiss any signs of popular intervention in the political process, and petitioning was always a form of participation.12 Scholarly interest has been mounting over the last decades, and this is partly due to the widespread adoption of less top-down approaches to history. As was recently pointed out, it is also partly due to the crises in liberal democracies, which make “the examination of alternative popular forms of representation and participation timely”.13 Social scientists and historians have come to realise that something so ubiquitous, filling endless shelves of royal archives, must have played an immense role in the life of early modern populations. The body of work on the wide use of petitions in several regions has been increasing significantly in recent years, and includes research on India, China, Turkey, or North America, among others.14 This has further encouraged wide-ranging and comparative explorations of the evolutionary history of petitionary practices.15 As a region frequently well served by scholarship, Europe has been receiving attention as well, through collective initiatives that also try to take advantage of modern digital humanities.16 Premodern petitioning had a direct relation with the sacred world, mirroring the act of praying.17 In Europe the nomenclature of these subscriptional documents evolved mainly from Latin. They had many designations, from petitions and gravamina to supplications and representations, with vernacular variations in each language. The word “petition” eventually became dominant only after 1800. Petitions played multiple functions, normally falling into two major categories: petitions for grace or favours, and petitions for justice,18 which was the primary task of early modern monarchs. They could be verbal, which was frequently the case when the ruler personally attended his/her subjects, or they could be written. They could be sent to the Crown, to local magistrates, to the Church, and to other civil or religious authorities. They could be used to request royal grants or rewards, to ask for forgiveness or pardons, and to apply for licenses, jobs, or offices. They were also used in the judicial system, for example, to demand redress for wrongs committed by others. This volume of essays takes a relatively flexible view of what constituted a petition. As with many other similar research initiatives, it recognises the variations by which people have petitioned through time, from secretive court appeals and poor relief requests to modern, public, political mass petitions, but it also chooses to highlight the common features and

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historical continuities. At the same time, it uses the Atlantic world as a backdrop; as a location where petitionary practices first became associated with political revolutions and mass movements, both in the Americas and in Europe. In principle, anybody could petition, and even if these petitions were often rejected they should not be ignored, because to do otherwise would undermine the tacit understanding that one’s problem would be always heard. Petitions had to be submitted correctly, though. For example, to achieve its goals a petition should be clear about who or which authority was being addressed.19 For the same reason, petitioners also had to set the stage for their requests, describing in the worst possible light the unfairness of their present ordeal. The rulers were duty-bound to hear these complaints. Some of them, like the duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I (1519–1574), even wanted to maintain a close relationship with their subjects and intervened personally in legal situations.20 There was a duty and also a vested interest in engaging with subjects or citizens, which is why premodern states established ever-expanding administrative structures to receive and respond to petitions. They developed bureaucratic archival procedures to keep records of government interactions with the population. According to David Zaret, instead of calling them an instrument of contention, premodern petitions were more like “an instrument of state”.21 It is generally understood that concessions, or at least the likelihood of concessions, released stress from society. Peaceful petitioning would act as a safety valve, mediating the relation between rulers and subjects through longstanding and widely recognisable ritualised procedures, even after princes stopped meeting with their subjects personally. The ability/right to look for redress or petition the ruler would prevent tension from accumulating and ultimately degenerating into social upheaval. There were, however, limitations on the right to petition, namely with regard to collective petitions. In pre-revolutionary France, where the petitionary culture was not very strong to begin with,22 collective petitions were not allowed. In other parts of Europe, the use of collective petitions remained controversial, even if not formally forbidden.23 After the petitionary rampage of the 1640s, the English government enacted the 1661 Act Against Tumultuous Petitioning. There was an underlying suspicion of a broad social movement that was capable of organising and making demands beyond traditional corporative lines. In particular, petitions submitted by a socially heterogeneous group always raised concerns,

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unlike, for example, those that were submitted by a guild of artisans. Generally, the public also abstained from going too far. In early modern England, according to Mark Knights, the population was always hesitant about using petitioning as a form of public pressure. The population always feared accusations of sedition or “tumult”.24 This is why some scholars reject the idea that petitions could function as safety valves. They may have been more like powder kegs with great potential to agitate and mobilise people,25 and monarchs were acutely aware of the disruptive power of unattended petitions. On the imperial front, petitions were a permanent feature of the administration of colonial America. In a forthcoming article, Benjamin Schneer, Tobias Resch, Maggie Blackhawk, and Daniel Carpenter argue that the meetings of early legislatures in North America were mainly determined by incoming petitions.26 Petitions also came to underpin metropolitan rule. They were a legitimating factor for distant governments that were otherwise unable to ensure the obedience of scattered overseas communities of settlers. Yet they were also the means by which distant subjects influenced imperial policy. The right to petition represented the continuum between metropolitan legal culture and colonial practices, but with a massive difference: unlike their metropolitan counterparts, the colonists and settlers could shape their own regulatory framework, often from the ground up. The destruction of the previous, pre-Columbian entities and their legal configurations meant that the demands of settlers, sojourners, and indigenous peoples would constitute the starting point for thousands of royal decrees enacted by the Habsburgs in Madrid to regulate local life in the new Spanish imperial outposts. According to Adrian Masters, the ravages of settler colonialism, the collapse of many indigenous polities and social structures, the fraught nature of cultural encounters, and central governments’ inability to unilaterally influence conditions on the ground would have given petitioners the power to enact profound social, legal, and conceptual transformations.27

Petitions were a shared trait of subjecthood that went beyond different political and juridical cultures. Spanish America may have had less robust representative institutions than British America, but the right to petition was at least as prevalent in Mexico as it was in New England.

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Petitions were also used explicitly or implicitly to claim loyalty. In the New World, this was of the utmost importance given the persistence of European disputes about sovereignty over some territories. Hence, the right to petition, if wisely used, provided additional opportunities to negotiate with the monarch in favourable terms. Ultimately, the metropolitan government had to acquiesce in order to keep its overseas subjects satisfied and completely loyal. The Portuguese case offers particular insights: the Pernambucan settlers who revolted against the Dutch in 1645, and some of their descendants who toppled the Portuguese governors in 1688 and again in 1710, were quite ambiguous about their intentions in their interactions with the Crown.28 They purposely played with metropolitan fears of betrayal. Colonial subjects, just like their European counterparts, also took advantage of bureaucratic, multi-layered administrative structures. They were no different from the petitioners of Tuscany, who used supplications to circumvent the ordinary court system and access their overlord directly.29 Petitioners could address metropolitan governments with complaints about local or colonial administrators, often stopping any proceedings that these colonial authorities intended to conduct against them.30 Communication lags that were characteristic of the age of sail meant that final decisions would frequently take several years to be made, sometimes to the benefit of the petitioners. In the event of a major territorial rearrangement in the colonies, the petitionary system of the new imperial power helped the new subjects to interact more easily with their new European overlords. Hannah Weiss Muller showed how the French-speaking Catholics of Canada took advantage of English petitionary practices in the wake of the Seven Years War, when Canada changed hands.31 Petitionary channels fostered by these multi-layered structures of imperial administrations contributed to the formation of the political imaginary of settlers, with significant consequences for the survival of the empire, as the essay in this volume by Jack P. Greene shows. Although the settlers in the English colonies lobbied and petitioned the Parliament for exemptions from trade restrictions, subsidies, and issues related to the colonies’ “external” affairs, they engaged mainly with the Crown. Petitions for military or naval assistance and complaints about the behaviour of royal officials in the colonies, as well as petitions for all the other matters concerning the “internal” governance of the settlements (issues that went beyond the jurisdiction of the colonial assemblies) were invariably sent to

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the Crown. To some extent they were following the letter of the law: the 1688 Bill of Rights declared the right of subjects to petition the monarch, and not Parliament, which created uncertainty, leaving these subjects unable to exert pressure in Westminster.32 However, as Greene writes, this bilateral relation gradually confirmed in the eyes of the settlers the role of the Crown as the principal, if not the only, point of contact between the colonies and the metropolis. Only in the 1760s, when Parliament attempted to interfere in the domestic affairs of the colonies did the interaction increase, with the settlers petitioning Westminster. Their petitions, however, mainly conveyed the colonies’ rejection of Parliament’s ambition to legislate for them. Once considered a dry and antiquated field of research, the history of administration has been enjoying a resurgence in several academic spaces (unfortunately, less so in the influential Anglo-American scholarship). People are actively resuming the study of institutions, but not as centres of inaccessible and discretionary power. Rather, their focus is on interactions, and therefore ultimately on petitions. The essay by Andréa Slemian is an excellent example of this kind of research. She outlines the many instruments of litigation that subjects would have had at their disposal in the Relação do Rio de Janeiro, the supreme court of appeal in colonial Brazil. Several petitionary documents were commonly used in this judiciary system, which was much more responsive than we have been led to believe by the legitimising narratives of the burgeoning national states of South America. Indeed, some leading historians continue to identify such responsiveness exclusively with the Anglo-Saxon judicial world.33 Slemian’s essay also shows that colonial subjects often preferred to follow extrajudicial pathways, as these were less expensive than taking matters to court through ordinary judicial proceedings. Slemian contends that we should go beyond the traditional locus of early modern petitionary activity: grace and justice. Often, she claims, people were trying to uphold their “rights”, even when these were not strictly declared. All empires established institutions like the Relação do Rio de Janeiro in the New World. Institutions such as audiencias were key features of what have been called polycentric monarchies.34 This was never enough, though. To address the monarch, settlers far removed from the metropolis would have to find someone to represent them and, in many cases, to present their petitions. The role of overseas interest groups in the imperial capitals, whose agents would lobby for favourable policies, is well known, particularly in the English empire.35 At a certain point, these informal

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agents and brokers were officially recognised in the Spanish world, too. There were so many self-identifying agents acting on the behalf of overseas subjects that Madrid established the office of agentes de Indias. From 1779 onwards, they had the exclusive right to represent the imperialrelated business. As the essay by Álvaro Caso Bello shows, they often wrote, re-wrote, dictated, and frequently signed and presented petitions. They filled a need that was created by the end of face-to-face interactions with the monarch. However, these socially informed professionals “con mano en la corte” did much more. The agentes de Indias exerted constant pressure in Madrid’s oficinas to achieve their clients’ aims. After all, their livelihood depended on their ability to keep their colonial clients happy. At the same time, they ensured that overseas petitioners were not snubbed by influential rivals who were often of superior social standing. Caso Bello’s essay also reveals the potential of this avenue of research for the broader subject of petitionary practices on an imperial scale. The more marginalised groups in the colonies were quick to adopt European petitionary practices, taking advantage of the deep-rooted precept that everybody could petition, irrespective of social status, origin, race, gender, or wealth. The new indigenous subjects of Charles V started to write directly to their new overlord as early as the 1520s. As Adrian Masters and Bradley Dixon suggest in their essay for this volume, the conventional mechanisms of “self-abasement and appeal to hierarchy resonated across cultures”. Throughout North, Central, and South America, people addressed the authorities in ritualised procedures that shared some of the same features as the petitions of their European counterparts. In North America, pleas were spoken and charged with emotional displays of grief and suffering. In South and Central America, indigenous cultures engendered multilevel petitionary practices to work within the hierarchical structures of imperial administration. Claims were often presented on parchment. The adoption of European petitionary culture had its drawbacks for Africans and Indigenous Americans, though. It paved the way for further European encroachment, binding these groups to imperial power and institutions, weakening their autonomy, and ultimately jeopardising their way of life.36 Yet, in spite of the hardships they endured with violence and epidemics, they persevered, sometimes strategically using the same communicational devices—petitions—that the settlers used to increase their authority. In the words of Masters and Dixon, “these peoples did more than perish, flee, or resist through violence. Many hundreds of

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thousands of non-European communities also turned strategically to petitioning”. Oppressed by colonial authorities, indigenous people crossed the Atlantic to pursue the redress of their grievances before the monarch, and they even sought to reshape imperial policies, sometimes with great success. The essay by Amy Turner Bushnell on the Indians of La Florida shows how the indigenous people of the shatter zone co-opted the King and the Church for their local causes, obtaining new sources of military and spiritual power. Such tactics would persist in other colonial settings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the 1920s, the Iroquois of Grand River, Ontario, were appealing to the League of Nations in an attempt to circumvent the hostility of the Canadian government.37 While trying to reshape policy, the indigenous people who crossed the ocean formed communities of justice-seekers in the capitals of early modern empires, especially in Madrid. There, they shared mutually intelligible experiences and ideas, and they also underwent a sort of acculturation process.38 As Masters and Dixon underline, petitioning also contributed to the development of new, broader identities throughout the empire. For example, one would claim to be speaking in the name of wider communities of the continent, sometimes going beyond the corporative layout of society or the reference points of pre-conquest identities. In other words, petitionary practices seem to have contributed substantially to the formation of new “imagined communities”, to use Benedict Anderson’s now widely established formulation.39 It was the Age of Revolutions that changed everything, both in Europe and in its dwindling American colonies and new African territories. While the Indigenous Americans saw their previous capacity to intervene in the legislative process being wiped out by the revolutionary parliaments and the new liberal elites in the emerging states of the Western Hemisphere (for example, in 1837, the United States Congress explicitly denied slaves the right to petition), the African entrepots of some European powers started to dabble with new ecumenical ideas of nationhood and citizenship. Larissa Kopytoff shows how black and mixed-race people from French Senegal used their self-proclaimed Frenchness in their petitions in an effort to ensure economic rights. Yet they also stretched the official boundaries of their national identity when they petitioned for the protection of their Muslim traditions, which were not compatible with French Law.

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The final section of this volume is devoted principally to the impact of the revolutionary age on petitionary practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emergent ideas of political representation did not reduce the role of petitions; far from it. Susan Zaeske argued that, for a long time, petitioning continued to be seen by many as a more powerful tool of intervention and participation than voting in the early nineteenthcentury USA, albeit less direct (a statement recently seconded by Henry Miller),40 and this trend largely persisted until the 1940s. Maggie Blackhawk argues that petitions to the United States Congress continued to offer a reliable method of public engagement until after the Second World War. Petition processes formed an integral part of congressional law-making process.41 During the nineteenth century, the majority of people in Europe and North America did not yet enjoy the right to vote, which meant that petitioning remained the only available option for political action. It should come as no surprise that the use of this old communicational device was enshrined in the key documents of the new constitutional order. The right to petition was included in the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1791, in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, also of 1791, in the 1812 Spanish Constitution, and in the 1822 Portuguese Constitution. At least some of these constitutional documents were clearly influenced by the petitions of ordinary people, as James Hrdlicka suggests. His essay challenges the prevalent view that the federal Constitution of the United States of America was a corrective instrument, hammered out by elites who were fearful of the more democratic tendencies of the 1770s–1780s state constitutions. The 1787 constitutional arrangement had much more popular support than we have been led to believe. The masses of ordinary citizens were not disengaged bystanders, and their views, which were conveyed in numerous petitions, correlated with the final document. With their petitionary imputations they demanded an effective government, by which they meant a government that, above all else, defended its citizens from foreign invasions. Hrdlicka’s chapter confirms what has been argued about the upsurge in petitioning across nearly every sector of US-American society during the revolutionary period.42 Revolutionary France is mostly known for the cahiers de doléances, yet, as Adrian O’Connor shows, popular engagement with the new representatives of the people went far beyond what Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff have called “officially solicited petitions”.43 The many thousands

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of spontaneous petitions that were sent to Paris show the determination of the French to will their way into the emerging national discussion. O’Connor’s essay hints at the sudden “parliamentarisation of Popular Contention”, which was already happening in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, although in a more gradual fashion.44 One generation later, the petitionary activity of the late 1820s in Colombia was so disruptive that it ultimately compromised the fate of the longawaited Convention of 1828, which was intended to reform the original Constitution of 1821 and to pacify a country overwhelmed with separatist uprisings. It was the increasing relationship with the dynamics of mass mobilisation and popular politics that transformed the traditional role of petitions in the Atlantic world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the words of Henry Miller, “Petitioning was transformed across Western Europe and North America”.45 Certainly, petitioning had been an instrument of collective pressure in England since the mid-seventeenth century. At the same time, there was the invention of signatory list technology, which could be deemed a process of partial “democratisation” or a precursor of “democratisation” (though it is not without controversy).46 In the Low Countries, where signatory lists had been used as a recruitment device since the end of the sixteenth century, this resulted in long-lasting political and economic consequences. For example, according to Joris Van den Tol, the adherence of the people of the Netherlands to such practices explains why a permanent imperial interest group like the London East India Company was never established as part of the Dutch pursuit of empire. David Zaret even argues that early modern petitions, especially printed petitions to be signed collectively, played a major role in the formation of a popular public sphere in England47 —an assertion that challenges Habermas’s argument of an eighteenth-century process that was driven by elites. It is, however, hard to overlook the depth and range of novelties that were introduced in petitionary practices during the nineteenth century. Proletarianisation and urbanisation, the parliamentarisation of political life, and partisanship transformed the social landscape in which people petitioned or looked for redress.48 What was once a mainly individual or corporative form of participation was now being firmly linked to public gatherings, campaign organisations, and ultimately, to political parties. These were the new repertoires of contention that Charles Tilly discusses

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and that changed the role of petitioning, which came gradually to be coopted by the demands of mass politics.49 The present volume deals with this transformation in the essays by Miguel Dantas da Cruz and Diego Palacios Cerezales. The first of these situates the 1820s petitionary wave in Portugal within the long history of petitioning. Cruz seeks to establish whether the movement was mostly associated with traditional forms of addressing authorities (for example, poor relief) or whether it should be situated within modern-day forms of protest. The essay by Diego Palacios debates the lineage of the Spanish petitionary practices during the Age of Revolutions, which seem to have derived as much from disorderly traditions of protest as they did from humble and private forms of petitioning. The petitionary activity that ensued in the wake of the revolutionary movements definitely caused problems for the new political regimes, especially when this activity was not aligned with the new liberal mainstream. It should be remembered that petitioning could be used as a tool to uphold traditional order. In a period when popular support was becoming a political benchmark even in the eyes of absolutists, petitions could bestow popular legitimacy on more conservative or reactionary ideas.50 Naturally, the representatives—the liberal elites—in the new political forums tried to quell the excesses of such public manifestations, although they also did not relinquish the opportunity to use mass petitions when it favoured them: obviously, they conveniently recognised these petitions as expressions of broader sentiments that legitimised their positions. As Henry Miller has written, during the early nineteenth century, “petitions allowed individual parliamentarians, parties, or factions to claim public backing on particular issues”.51 One of the methods used by representatives to restrict petitioning— especially mass petitioning—was to accuse petitioners, canvassers, and campaigners of intimidating tactics and forgery (the forging of signatures) to artificially inflate the support for their cause.52 The essays by Adrian O’Connor and Miguel Dantas da Cruz examine some of the proposals to restrict the right to petition or to limit the number of signatures in a petition, both in France and in Portugal. In the former country, while there were attempts to restrict the right to petition to active male citizens (adult men who reached certain income thresholds), the Le Chapelier law of 1791 limited collective petitions to representing only individual signatories. In Portugal, a generation later, there were proposals that recommended the rejection of unsigned petitions or the prohibition of

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collective petitions. In a way, these new political regimes were showing signs of being as restrictive regarding the right to address the highest authorities as the supposedly absolute monarchs that preceded them. To be sure, these political regimes had to cope with a type of petition that bore little resemblance to the familiar, deferential, and individual petitions of earlier periods. These new petitions were public, they challenged the status quo directly, and they often were conceived in the context of threatening mass gatherings. By linking petitionary experiences with the dynamics of the Atlantic world, this volume hopes to cast a different light both on the Atlantic world and its inner workings and major developments, and on the history of petitions, which until now has tended to be studied in terms of specific national contexts. While many subjects remain to be explored, the angles we have taken in this endeavour, which include empire building, revolutionary experiences, and the beginning of mass politics, at least provide a blueprint for further thematic explorations in this inexhaustible field of research.

Notes 1. Among others, see Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1994); Jack P. Greene and Philip Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Bernard Bailyn and Patricia Denault (eds.), Soundings in Atlantic History. Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500– 1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); John Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). See also the encyclopedias and dictionaries: Joseph C. Miller (ed.), The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); David Head (ed.), Encyclopedia of The Atlantic World, 1400–1900: Europe, Africa, and the Americas in an Age of Exploration, Trade, and Empires (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017). 2. Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy (ed.), Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Miguel Dantas da Cruz, “Atlantic History and Other

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4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

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Approaches to Early Modern Empires: a Conversation with Jack P. Greene”, Ler História, 75 (2019), pp. 231–50. Clavero and Hespanha were prolific and highly influential scholars. Among their leading publications, see Bartolomé Clavero, Tantas Personas Como Estados (Madrid: Tecnos, 1986), and Freedom’s Law and Indigenous Rights. From Europe’s Oeconomy to the Constitutionalism of the Americas (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2005); and António M. Hespanha, Poder e Instituições na Europa do Antigo Regime (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1984), and As Vésperas do Leviathan. Instituições e poder político (Portugal, séc. XVIII) (Coimbra: Almedina, 1994). The essay he mentions is “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities, pp. 2–24. J.R. Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924–1327 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 294–97, 333–35, 340–44, 355–59. On premodern petition-and-response models, see David Zaret, “Petitionand-Response and Liminal Petitioning in Comparative/Historical Perspective”, Social Science History, 43, no. 3: the transformation of petitioning (2019), pp. 431–51. Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964). Lex H. Voss, “Introduction”, International Review of Social History, 46, Supplement 9: Petitions in Social History (2001), p. 2. Serena Connolly, “Petitioning in the Ancient World”, in Mark W. Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd, and Anthony Musson (eds.), Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2009), pp. 47–63; Denis Feissel and Jean Gascou (eds.), La Pétition à Byzance (Paris: Centre de recherché d’histoire et civilization de Byzance, 2004); Benjamin Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Samuel Stern, “Petitions from the Maml¯ uk Period (Notes on the Maml¯uk Documents from Sinai)”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 29, no. 2 (1966), pp. 233–76; Geoffrey Khan, “The Historical Development of the Structure of Medieval Arabic Petitions”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 53 (1990), pp. 8–30. Rohit De and Robert Travers, “Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia: Introduction”, Modern Asian Studies, 53, no. 1 (2019), pp. 1–2. Peter Blickle, “The Common People and the Process of State Formation: Some Conclusions”, in Peter Blickle (ed.), Resistance, Representation and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 335. Andreas Wurgler, “Voices from Among the ‘Silent Masses’: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe”, International

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14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

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Review of Social History, 46, Supplement 9: Petitions in Social History (2001), p. 11. Henry Miller, “Introduction: The Transformation of Petitioning in the Long Nineteenth Century (1780–1914)”, Social Science History, 43, no. 3: the transformation of petitioning (2019), p. 409. See, for example, the collection “Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia”, published by Modern Asian Studies, 53, no. 1 (2019); HoFung Hung, Protest with Chinese Characteristics. Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid Qing Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Yuval Ben-Basat, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine (London: Tauris, 2013); and Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). Zaret, “Petition-and-Response and Liminal Petitioning”. See, for example, Brodie Waddell (ed.), Addressing Authority in Early Modern Europe. An Online Symposium on Petitions and Supplications in Early Modern Society (2016), https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress. com/2016/11/01/addressing-authority/, or Brodie Waddell (ed.), The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England, https://petitioning. history.ac.uk/. See also the project Petitions and Petitioning from the Medieval Period to the Present, a partnership between the University of Durham, Birkbeck, University of London, and Leiden University, led by Henry Miller. David Nicholls, “Addressing God as Ruler: Prayer and Petition”, The British Journal of Sociology, 44, no. 1 (1993), pp. 125–41. Cecilia Nubola, “Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age”, International Review of Social History, 46, Supplement 9: Petitions in Social History (2001), pp. 36–39. Voss, “Introduction”, p. 6. Nubola, “Supplications between Politics and Justice”, p. 39. Zaret, “Petition-and-Response and Liminal Petitioning”. Benoît Agnes, “Le pétitionnaire universel: les normes de la pétition en France et au Royaume-Uni pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 4 (2011), pp. 45–70. Martin Almbjar, “The problem with early modern petitions: safety valve or powder keg?”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 26, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1013–39. Mark Knights, “‘The Lowest Degree of Freedom’: The Right to Petition Parliament, 1640–1800”, Parliamentary History, 37, no. 1, Supplement: Pressure and Parliament: From Civil War to Civil Society (2018), p. 19. Almbjar, “The problem with early modern petitions”.

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26. Benjamin Schneer, Tobias Resch, Maggie Blackhawk, and Daniel Carpenter, “The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions: Petitions and Standing Committee Formation in Colonial Virginia and the Early U.S. House”, Journal of Politics, conditionally accepted. Working Paper. 27. Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98, no. 3 (2018), p. 379. 28. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, A Fronda dos Mazombos. Nobres contra mascates—Pernambuco (1666–1715) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995), p. 274. 29. James E. Shaw, “Writing to the Prince: Supplications, Equity and Absolutism in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany”, Past & Present, 215, no. 1 (2012), p. 57. 30. Ravi de Costa, “Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48, no. 3 (2006), p. 671; Voss, “Introduction”, p. 6. 31. Hannah Weiss Muller, “From Requête to Petition: Petitioning the Monarch Between Empires”, The Historical Journal, 60, no. 3 (2016), pp. 659–86. 32. Knights, “The Lowest Degree of Freedom”. 33. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (London: Profile Books, 2012), p. 305. 34. Pedro Cardim, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez, and Gaetano Sabatini (eds.), Polycentric Monarchies How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). 35. Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 36. Costa, “Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions”, p. 674. 37. Costa, “Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions”, p. 682. 38. José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2018), pp. 106–20. 39. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions, 1983). 40. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caroline Press, 2003), p. 3; Henry Miller, “Introduction”, p. 410.

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41. Maggie Blackhawk, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State”, The Yale Law Journal, 127, no. 6 (2018), pp. 1537–38. 42. Schneer, Resch, Blackhawk and Carpenter, “The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions”, p. 2. 43. Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “Officially Solicited Petitions: The ‘Cahiers de Doléances’ as a Historical Source, International Review of Social History, 46, Supplement 9: Petitions in Social History (2001), pp. 79–106. 44. Charles Tilly, “Parliamentarization of Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834”, Theory and Society, 27, no. 2/3 (1997), pp. 245–73. 45. Henry Miller, “Introduction”, p. 410. 46. See, for example, Carpenter, Democracy by Petition. I would like to thank one of the reviewers for reminding me of this issue. 47. David Zaret, “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution”, American Journal of Sociology, 101, no. 6 (1996), pp. 1497–555. 48. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 360–70. 49. Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 65–75. 50. Henry Miller, “Introduction”, p. 417. 51. Henry Miller, “Introduction”, p. 420. 52. Daniel Carpenter and Doris Brossard, “L’éruption Patriote: French Canada at the Epicenter of the Nineteenth-Century Petitioning Explosion”, Social Science History, 43, no. 3 (2019), pp. 453–85.

PART I

Petitionary Practices and Brokers in the Early Modern Atlantic World

CHAPTER 2

Some Reflections on Voice and Authority in the Construction and Operation of Long-Distance Empires and Their Successor States in the Americas Jack P. Greene

“The Ground upon which all Government stands... is the consent of the people”—Sir William Temple

Over the past three or four decades, petitions to state authorities have turned out to be a gold mine for historians and literary scholars. In much the same way as my generation of historians relied on notarial archives, parish records, estate inventories, import–export returns, and legal and court documents to produce major advances in social, demographic, and economic history, members of a later generation, pursuing a

J. P. Greene (B) Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_2

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richer and more ample understanding of past cultures, have found petitions an especially valuable source, using the snapshots they offer to flesh out and illuminate not just the civic but also the social, cultural, and performative dynamics of eras and spaces for which the documentary record is otherwise sparse. In the process, they have considerably amplified understanding of a wide range of subjects involving gender, status, family, labour, and interracial relations. That petitions can also be used to enhance our understanding of the formation and operation of polities at all levels of government, from states and empires down to the theoretically subordinate polities within them, is amply indicated in the chapters distributed throughout this volume. My focus in this one will be on the role of consent as it functioned in the construction and operation of long-distance empires and their successor states in America from the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth century. More specifically, I will examine the relationship between consent and authority in intraimperial relations. The keywords in my long title are thus consent, people, voice, authority, construction, long-distance, and successor, most of which I will attempt to explicate in the analysis that follows. In this exercise, I will be building upon the insights of late twentiethcentury state formation literature on the coalescing national states of late medieval and early modern Europe, with its emphasis on their composite organization and negotiated character,1 as well as my own efforts in the early 1990s to apply those insights to the functioning of long-distance and transoceanic empires in the Americas. Subsequent studies of European state consolidation have focused strongly upon the evolutionary emergence of the fiscal state largely as a result of the necessity to raise funds for defensive or offensive wars. In the process, I would suggest, they have given insufficient attention to another fundamental aspect of state formation, notably the various ways in which emerging states established their authority among the populations under their governance. How far and in what ways did they depend on the consent of those populations to sustain and extend their legitimacy? How should those consensual elements underlying state authority be conceptualized? In endeavouring to grapple with such questions, I shall be calling upon three very different kinds of sources: first, the mid-twentieth-century theoretical work by the American economist Albert O. Hirschman; second, the late seventeenth-century ruminations of the English political analyst Sir William Temple; and third, the recent and a rather extensive corpus of highly sophisticated scholarship on petitioning in late

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medieval England. My reliance on English sources should not be taken as an imperial move. Rather, it can be attributed almost entirely to my narrow historical competence and my inferior language skills. I regard the English as neither a model for developments in other language entities nor as superior to them. The relationship between consent and authority is a subject that played out differently in each separate polity according to endogenous and exogenous temporal influences upon inherited and existing traditions and governing practices. More often than not, comparative history is most useful in its identification of the manifold variations from one context to another in ways to manage the same general problem.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Nearly a half century ago, the economist Albert O. Hirschman published a short volume entitled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States,2 in which he elaborated a conceptual scheme that quickly became highly influential among economists and other social scientists. Having devised this scheme to explain consumer behaviour in market societies, Hirschman went on to speculate at some length about its utility for the analysis of relations within other sorts of social and political organizations. To simplify his basic point as it relates to governance, he posited that the opinion of the governed was an important variable in determining the viability of governments, congruity between the expectations of the governed and the performance of their government ordinarily translating into Loyalty and incongruity leading either to Exit, for those to whom it was available, or to Voice, for those who had it. As Hirschman himself was careful to point out, the Exit option is relatively unavailable for traditional or “primordial human groupings,” such as family, tribe, or state, to which people belong by birthright, and for that reason need not be considered here.3 However, it is worth noting that, whether because of attraction or repulsion, the extensive exodus of Europeans to America since the end of the fifteenth century represents a rich field for the analysis of the operation and effects of Exit and the actions in the Americas of those who voluntarily exited Europe during the early modern era are a central focus of this chapter. Hirschman’s concept of Voice is much more relevant to the analysis that follows. Except in those congealed despotisms in which the state has such a complete monopoly of force and the resources to sustain it that

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it can largely stifle dissent, most states have a range of established practices through which the governed may exercise Voice, including voting, petitioning, lobbying, negotiating, mobilizing, protesting, and resisting. Such practices permit individuals, small groups, and collective entities within the state to express, on the one hand, proposals for individual, local, provincial, or national improvement and, on the other, objections to maladministration, bureaucratic ineptitude or neglect, abuses of power, invasions of corporate or individual rights, irregular or differential justice, or outright repression. When the demands of the governed cannot be met through any of these practices, riot, rebellion, or secession become possible avenues for the expression of Voice.4 A more capacious analytical concept than Consent, voice thus invites consideration of a broad spectrum of possible interactions between the governed and their governments, ranging from Consent to Dissent, and in this chapter it will function as a catch-all category for all sorts of popular participation in governance. My suggestion here is that it is useful to think of petitioning, as so many contributors to this volume have done, as an exercise in Voice that by affirming the legitimacy of the authority and the capacity of the petitioner to act upon requests, eschews or effectively puts in reserve the use of the Exit option. But to emphasize the presence of Voice in state formation and political relations begs the important question of the differential enjoyment of Voice within virtually all political societies. If, nowadays, the apathetic, passive, and otherwise disengaged refrain from exercising Voice, in medieval and early modern European societies large proportions of the inhabitants were either, like women, children, the unfree, the unpropertied, and the dissenting religious, prescriptively excluded from many exercises of Voice or, like adult propertied unmarried women, severely limited by the custom in their access to many of its venues. Among those who did have access to Voice, moreover, that access varied according to their status in the polity, those connected to the existing regime having much more chance of influencing public action or policy than those who did not.5

Authority and Opinion: A Symbiotic Relationship To turn to a much earlier source, Sir William Temple (1628–1699), an accomplished diplomat and political advisor who retired to private life following the failure of Charles II to buy into his scheme for reorganizing

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royal administration during the exclusion crisis of the late 1670s, may be best known for his penetrating analysis of Dutch social and political life in his 1673 Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands 6 and for initiating the quarrel between the ancients and moderns in England in an essay on that subject in the 1680s. Much more useful to me in understanding the working of the early modern English political system, however, is his fifty-page “Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government.”7 Written in 1672 but not published until 1680 in a collection of several of his tracts on a variety of subjects, this essay seems to have attracted little attention from his contemporaries, but between 1693 and 1814 was published in at least eighteen London editions of his writings and was present in many North American and West Indian libraries. Lacking the heft of contemporary theoretical works by the most prominent English political theorists of his day, Temple’s essay has generated only limited interest among modern historians of political thought, and that interest has tended to focus on his categorical rejection of the theory that government originated in a social contract of the kind successively suggested by Richard Hooker (1593), Thomas Hobbes (1651), James Harrington (1656), and John Locke (1690), and his contention that government instead grew out of the patriarchal family, each successful one of which turned itself into a “little state” and by a coalescing process joined other families to form bands, tribes, or some other sorts of polity that eventually combined to establish a state or kingdom that was in essence itself little more than “a great family.” The very word, nation, Temple wrote, “properly” signified “a great number of Families, derived from the same Blood, born in the same Countrey, and living under the same Government and Civil Constitutions.”8 However, in sharp contrast to his contemporary, Sir Robert Filmer, the apologist for absolute monarchy whose Patriarche, or the Natural Power of Kings was published in 1680, the same year as Temple’s essay,9 Temple emphatically rejected the idea that the patriarchal kingdom was the product of divine selection. At first glance, Temple’s tract might seem to have little relevance for a book on petitions in early modern empires and revolutionary states. For one thing, the word petitions never appears in it, much less any consideration of their function as a device for the expression of Consent by metropolitan and overseas subjects. For another, despite the fact that European transatlantic colonization had been going on for nearly two centuries by the time Temple wrote, it never addresses the issue of how European states might resolve the massive problems involved in extending

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their authority over the long-distance polities that had sprung up in the Americas and how Crown subjects there might express their opinions and consent. But it has two attributes that powerfully recommend it to my consideration here. First, unusual for an Englishman of his era, he exhibits considerable appreciation and respect for the constitutions of other European states and thereby constitutes an implicit invitation to comparative analysis. Almost certainly, Temple wrote this text to spell out for Charles II the inherent dangers in his flirtation with the absolutist aspirations of contemporary continental monarchs, particularly Louis XIV, and to remind him of the importance of the consensual elements in English governing traditions. But he clearly intended his analysis to be universally applicable. If, as he posited, the problems of creating and maintaining an effective government were, like human nature itself, “the same in all times and places,” the systems of governance and constitutions devised to solve those problems varied considerably from one place to another. As was evidenced by the “several Customs, Educations, Opinions, and Laws” that “Form[ed] and Govern[ed] the several Nations of the World,” he wrote, every country seemed to have constructed a polity that was “bounded by Laws” and a constitution fitted for its own situation, a constitution that had been refined over time, repeatedly reinforced by usage and custom, to which the inhabitants had become so thoroughly habituated that, whenever they had been “sometimes led out of it by persuasions, and sometime Beaten out [of it] by force,” they “commonly” returned to “the old Channels” by restoring their “natural constitution or something near to it.” The result was that each country had “generally in all times” exhibited its own distinctive form of government, which it routinely transplanted to new territories that came under its jurisdiction through conquest, annexation, or, presumably, colonization.10 Second, as the most thorough and penetrating contemporary discussion I have ever encountered on the foundation, formation, and function of authority in all governance and its symbiotic relationship to custom and opinion, Temple’s extended dilation on this subject is useful for directing our attention to the important consensual dimensions of early modern states. Basing his analysis upon his own extensive historical readings and his own observations of the nature and operation of modern states, Temple posited that there were only “two general kinds of Government in the world,” one “exercised according to the Arbitrary commands and will of some single Person,” and the other operating “according

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to certain Orders or Laws introduced by agreement or custom, and not to be changed without the consent of many.” Both sorts came in many “particular” varieties, the first “differ[ing] according to the dispositions and humors of Him that Rules, and of them that obey,” and the second “according to the quality or number of the Persons upon whom is devolved the authority of making, or power of executing Laws.”11 Temple associated the first of these with thinly inhabited, economically undeveloped, and extensive polities in intemperate regions in which the scattered population, enervated by heat or cold, preoccupied with their fields and herds, and without stimulus to examine either the “nature or the tenure of Power and Authority,” grew “tamer, and fitter for servitude” and passively submitted “to the will of him they found in Power, as they” did “the will of Heaven, and consider[ed] all changes of condition that happen[ed] to them under good and bad Princes, like all good or ill Seasons that happen with the Weather and the Air.” By contrast, the second sort, exhibited by all the major states in Europe, was common to thickly inhabited and temperate regions and frequently found its origins in cities where men, having more opportunity to sharpen their wits by conversation and become “reasoners in matters of Government,” were much “harder to be subjected” and, many of them having grown rich and powerful, were also “more intent” on securing their property and positions from “Arbitrary Power” and contrived “to be governed by Laws and Magistrates of their own choice.” Usually devised by a few wise men, tested by experience, and constantly evidencing their “public utility,” these laws, Temple wrote, not only protected citizens “in the enjoyment of their Possessions, and observance of their Institutions” and enabled them to remain “free” states, but also enabled the more successful of them to extend “themselves into mighty Dominions,” as trade supplied them with the wherewithal to vanquish their enemies and conquests brought the lands, spoils, and slaves that enabled them to become “Great” and over time arrive “at the ancient name of Kingdom, or Modern of Empire.”12 Yet, and this is Temple’s principal point of emphasis, neither of these kinds of government could “be raised or upheld without the influence of Authority,” a concept that implied publicly acknowledged legitimacy and which he regarded as “the foundation of all ease, safety, and order, in the Governments of the World.” To some extent, he acknowledged, rulers, whether kings, princes, or governing elites, could enhance their

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authority by cultivating and exemplifying three virtues or attributes associated with effective governance: wisdom, which made men “judg[e] what are the best ends, and what the best means to attain them”; “Goodness” or virtue, which made “men prefer their Duty and their Promise, before their Passions or their Interest”; and valor, which promised “protection to those who want[ed] either heart or strength to defend themselves.” To a lesser degree, eloquence, a noble appearance, claims of divine favour, piety, and a splendid lifestyle in “great Palaces, with numerous attendance, much observance, and rich habits differing from common men,” also helped in creating and sustaining the authority of those who possessed them.13 Far more important in strengthening and confirming authority, in Temple’s view, was the “force of custom and opinion,” which he regarded as “the true grounds and foundation of all Government.” The very best governments, he declared, were those that had “been longest received and authorized in a Nation by Custom and use; and into which the humours and manners of the people run with the most general and strongest current.” Derived from “the reverence” for “an Authority under which they and their Ancestors” had “for many Ages been born and bred,” from a sense of satisfaction with “the ease, plenty, and safety they enjoy[ed] in their present circumstances,” and from a conviction that the government had the capacity to handle future challenges, “the consent of the people, or the greatest and strongest part of them,” he declared, was the “ground upon which all Government stands.” The more a government was “founded upon the love and esteem of the People” and enjoyed the positive “consent of the greatest number of the People,” he observed, the more it could count on their “willing obedience” and “their desires and resolutions to support it” and the more it rested on the firmest and “broadest bottom” and was most secure and stable.14 Popular regard, then, was not only an essential element in establishing “Authority in all Civil Bodies,” but also a necessity for its continuation. Consent, in Temple’s view, empowered authority. As he neatly summarized this point in an italicized aphorism: “Power arising from Strength, is always in those that are governed, who are many: But Authority arising from opinion, is in those that Govern, who are few.” Although Temple nowhere explicitly confronted the questions of what precisely he meant by the phrases “those that are governed” and “those that Govern,” or who exactly were included in the term people, on whose opinions he places so much weight, the very concept of people as he used it implied a degree

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of civic competence that did not include any of the traditionally excluded categories. Moreover, he acknowledged that those who governed were usually confined to the “great persons” who occupied “all [the] great Offices and Councils” and that this custom “with length and time” often grew “to pass for a Right” that set such people apart from the rest of the civically empowered inhabitants.15 Such differentiation, however, did not, for Temple, undermine or qualify his insistence that the “Interest of those that Govern” and those who “are Governed... ought ever be the same.” A successful ruler, he noted, took pains to govern “by the affections, and according to the opinions and interest of his people; or the bulk of them (that is, by many degrees the greatest or strongest part of them)” and “according to ancient Customs, which are the original Laws (and by which... private inheritance and Common Justice is directed and establish).” By such behaviour, they insured that their “Governments were rooted in the general affections, esteem and interests of the Nation.” By contrast, rulers who did not scruple to violate “these ancient Constitutions” or to ignore “the interests of the people” and pursued instead “the passions and interests of particular men” in the government that were “contrary to those of the people” risked “alienating the affections” and “losing the [favourable] opinions of the people,” inviting in their stead popular “disesteem, dissatisfaction, or indifferency,” and inducing “a general change of opinion” that would lead to the erection of a new authority more attuned to “the general humour and bent of the People.” “In effect,” Temple concluded, “all Government may be esteemed to grow strong or weak” as the rulers’ respect for the people’s opinions and interests seemed to wax or wane.16

Petitions, Authority, and the Public in Medieval England For an understanding of how petitions operated to enhance the consensual and participatory character of the early modern English state, we can turn to a bountiful and quite recent historical literature on medieval petitioning. Taking advantage of a new availability of petitions long housed in the National Archives in London, several scholars, the most prominent of whom are probably Gwilym Dodd17 and W. Mark Ormrod,18 have analysed in considerable detail the petitioning process as it emerged and took coherent shape during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tracing the expansion and regularization of petitions “as a recognisable

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process of complaint and remedy” to “Edward I’s inquiries into ministerial corruption and his mobilisation of Parliament as a high court in which his subjects might seek access to royal justice and grace,”19 this work has provided abundant and solid information on every aspect of English petitioning, including its origins, extent, forms, concerns, scope, and role in expanding royal authority and contributing to the development and perpetuation of the English parliamentary system. This literature has shown that the dramatic increase in what Ormrod has referred to as “the complaint culture of late medieval England,” as “evidenced by bills and petitions from the late thirteenth century onwards,” was itself “a function of the greater opportunities offered by the crown for the peaceful resolution of private disputes and of the higher expectations of public order that were thus engendered.” Meeting a “need to provide means by which those whose problems were unsolvable by normal routes through the courts... or required the application of royal grace could gain access to the king’s personal discretion and dispensation,” the idea “that a problem might be solved if only one could get the king’s attention” soon precipitated what Dodd has called “the precocious appetite of contemporaries to access the grace and authority of the king” and an impressive increase in petitions that the Crown, lacking “the resources to become the sole source of dispute resolution in the realm,” soon began routinely referring to Parliament as the only suitable forum for their processing, with the result that petitioning rapidly acquired constitutional status and became “deeply rooted in the political culture of the later Middle Ages.”20 Initially addressed to the Crown, which always reserved the right to rule on them, but eventually often directed to Parliament itself, petitions quickly fell into a rough pattern of differentiation into categories, private and common. Private petitions were a “mixture of complaints and requests,” with the complaints tending “to relate to injustices which could not be readily resolved through common law process,” and the requests usually representing “the applicant’s desire to obtain some form of royal favour, such as a grant, office, or pardon.” Named individuals acting singly or in small groups accounted for the greater proportion of private petitions, but a significant number of them came “in the name of local communities: monasteries, counties, towns, villages, professional groupings, and so on.” A common petition, by contrast, “did not simply concern the interest of single private parties but claimed to speak in the name of, or was deemed to be of interest to the generality of the king’s

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subjects” and to raise “specific issues that had wider implications for the realm and its government.” A significant number of these common petitions professed to represent “formally or informally constituted groups within the king’s dominions described as commune, common people, commonality, etc.,” many of them being submitted “in the name of county communities and incorporated cities and towns,” where “a formal assembly–the county court, the mayor’s court, etc.” served as “the authorizing agency” but many other organized groups, including especially merchants, were also frequent petitioners. Whereas “private petitions, when granted, resulted in an instrument of government which usually only affected the petitioner,” common petitions “for the public good,” if accepted by the Crown, often formed the basis of statutory legislation, a process, Ormrod assures us, that was “well under way by the middle of the fourteenth century.”21 The substantive issues raised by these petitions fell mostly into one or the other of six broad categories: (1)“business requests for royal grants (of property, privilege or franchises)”; (2) pardons; (3) licences; (4) “actions within the legal system”; (5) “justice where royal claims or rights injured a private party”; and (6) “the remedy of wrongs committed by others of the king’s subjects.” In addition, what Anthony Musson and Ormrod refer to as “franchise-holders” were also especially sensitive about any infringement of their franchise rights, which, in contemporary parlance, were “known as liberties” and kept a sharp look out for any breaches in “the law and custom of our realm.”22 By fostering a much deeper appreciation “of the range and scale of parliamentary business over the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” these studies of Parliament’s expanding role in handling petitions have thrown much new light on “the development of parliamentary process, and the emergence of what would later be called the House of Commons” and have at the same time made it clear that, in accounting “for the underlying endurance of the parliamentary system” in England, “parliament’s contribution to the ordinary running of medieval government” was at least as important as “the Crown’s need for taxation and the Commons’ desire for remedial legislation,” its role “in addressing such a wide variety of local grievances and requests” having become so beneficial to both the king and his subjects as to render it “an indispensable part of [English] political life.” “Taken together,” Alan Harding has remarked, “the series of parliamentary petitions, statutes, and royal judicial commissions” made “local justice... the first great subject of political discussion

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between the king and the people at large” and “a great new means of political communication flowing now from localities to government.”23 What makes this body of work especially important for the line of argument of this chapter is its attention to the question of what the increasing use of petitions can tell us about the English political process and, more particularly, the consensual role of petitioning in extending and solidifying the authority of the medieval English state. Indeed, it depicts a situation that represents an almost perfect demonstration of the working out, in a specific context, of Sir William Temple’s later speculations about the relationship between consent and authority in successful governance. On the one hand, parliamentary hearings of petitions provided a forum for voicing local grievances, for identifying common problems “worthy of the attention of the polity and the crown,” and for mobilizing “a range of constituted” and “pragmatic communities” to “assert the wider and greater commonness of their agendas,” thereby both inviting “the full and active participation of the broader political community of the realm” and acknowledging a high degree of public agency in shaping “political discourse” between Crown and community and in local and national governance. On the other hand, the same process functioned to make Parliament “a facilitator of royal government and justice” by enabling the “king, through parliament,” to offer “arbitration on a much wider scale, and to a much broader selection of his subjects, in cases which could not be resolved because of the shortcomings and limitations of common law procedure.”24 Emphasizing the extent to which the petition, “more than any other device,” exposed the “fundamental principle of mutuality and reciprocity upon which [English] medieval government was founded,” Dodd explains fully “how the reach of royal authority could be led by local ‘consumer demand’–driven by the imperative to have a supreme authority to arbitrate in disputes and coordinate government processes.” Depending “on the strong and decisive application of royal authority to ensure stability and security in their lives,” petitioners “appealed to the king’s authority because they needed it to protect their land, livelihood, and person,” and, however much they may have desired “to preserve local independence from royal interference,” they quickly abandoned it “when individual or collective interests could be enhanced by soliciting the intervention of the Crown.” As Dodd puts it, “the projection of royal power into the localities [thus] came about by specific invitation of the king’s subjects.”25

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Moreover, as far as the larger English public was concerned, the “system of private petitioning” encouraged both “local people to make an open bid to define and articulate public opinion on their own terms” and Parliament to define “government as something in which the king’s subjects were themselves actively involved.” “In this way,” Dodd notes, “the parliamentary petition not only furnished parliament with a greater sense of inclusiveness” but “also helped contemporaries [to] accept, and identify more closely with the processes of central government and to embrace the idea that legitimate government and the authority on which it stood required “the full and active participation of the broader political community of the realm.”26 If “petitioning in parliament [thus] provided for direct contact between the king and his subjects,” it “also played to the distinct advantage of the Crown, particularly when it wished to address misdemeanours of unscrupulous royal officials or disruptive members of the aristocracy who might otherwise try and block the course of justice locally.” “Just as the petition allowed supplicants direct access to the Crown, so too they” opened up “a dialogue between the monarch and the broader spread of his subjects.” Providing “the king with direct access to information on conditions in the localities, without his necessarily having to rely on the counsel of his nobles,” and allowing him “to pinpoint local difficulties and focus... resources into resolving them,” petitions thus presented “the king with the opportunity to shape policy and guide government action as a result of ‘counsel’ from his ‘ordinary’ subjects.”27 These developments also contributed to define, explicitly, and reinforce an “underlying assumption that the king, and more generally the Crown, should act in accordance with a broadly agreed [upon] set of conventions which aimed to safeguard the rights, and especially the property rights of the individual.” In “the implementation of medieval government,” Dodd reminds us, “the principle of accountability was central,” the “legitimacy of the king’s power” resting “on the expectation that he should act within the strictures of a broad accepted moral and legal code.” Which, to put it into Temple’s formulation, is to say that the Crown derived its authority and exercised its responsibilities in accordance with the opinion not just of the king himself or “the views of his chosen advisers and senior judges, but also by the presence in parliament of a large proportion of the political community. More so, perhaps, than any other forum in which petitioners might approach the Crown, according to Dodd, Parliaments generated a

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sense of obligation on the part of the king to attend to the needs of his subjects.”28 Paralleling and reinforcing this symbiotic relationship between the spread of royal authority and an expanding role for public opinion through the petitioning system was the expansion of royal justice during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. By offering “a wider range of people” a “multiplicity of remedies and procedures that had become, and remained, open to all the king’s free (and even some of the unfree) subjects,” this development ultimately turned royal justice into “a consensual system reliant on high rates of participation by a wide variety of people acting as judges, jurors and litigants” and made the “influence of such ‘public opinion’ upon judicial evolution... greater than ever before” and more enduring.29 When they use terms like broader political community or public, of course, these authors do not mean to imply that they are inclusive of all adult inhabitants. They are well aware that the judicial system was thoroughly “stacked against the unfree” and that, “although early modern Parliaments received petitions from many and various groups of people who had no claim to the franchise” and little civic standing, the petitions most likely to succeed “were precisely those that self-consciously reserved the right of signature for men of substance who qualified as electors,” a situation that continued to “characterize English political life at least until the end of the eighteenth century.”30 I have called attention to these findings on the English medieval petitioning process for two reasons. The first is my conviction that a mimetic impulse at work in the formation of empires and their component polities predisposed participants to recreate the institutions and traditions with which they were familiar and adapt them to new situations or environments. If true, this point suggests that we pay close attention to the spirit and the flesh of source states and cultures. The second is that the juristic culture of “active citizenship which animated and empowered large numbers of ordinary people” that took shape between the late thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries continued to characterize the English state throughout the early modern era.31 Petitions continued to be a major device for communicating public opinion to the Crown and both houses of Parliament throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his study of the expansion of the public sphere, David Zaret has analysed the sharp rise in political petitioning starting during the early years of the English Civil War,32 and

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reaching massive proportions with the petitioning campaigns that started with the mid-1770s debate over whether Britain should go to war with dissident American colonies to force them to obey metropolitan statutes and proclamations, and subsequently used in the contest over Britain’s continued involvement in the African slave trade. James E. Bradley has shown that during the American crisis more than 50,000 people signed petitions either for or against coercion, in the process demonstrating that the “English people were politically informed, constitutionally astute, and deeply concerned about the authority of the British government, on the one hand, and the rights of their American brethren, on the other.”33 At the same time, many people otherwise continued, as they had since the middle ages, to be “direct participants” in “the judicial institutions and processes typical of the common law.” As “constables, jurors, witnesses, and litigants, or just as mere spectators in courts,” and whenever they served on juries, acted as officials or in posses to enforce law, or otherwise “shared in the decisions of government,” they functioned as “citizens, as well as subjects” and as a demonstration of “the basic historical principle of the constitution that the community freely consented to major acts of power over life and possessions.” Among the English public, as legal historian David Lemmings has remarked, this system of “grass-roots participation in legal processes determining issues of life and property was taken for granted and valued explicitly because it betokened freedom, consent, and equity, virtues that respected the dignity and interests of ordinary people, as well as the imperatives of authority,” and because it encouraged a deep sensitivity about “rights under law” that underlay the public’s widespread conviction that “their forms of government” provided them with “a unique blessing that was denied to less fortunate people[s].”34 To be sure, Lemmings has also made a persuasive case for the proposition that during the last half of the eighteenth century Great Britain experienced “a major change in the legal order,” as the proliferation of legislation shifted several areas of law enforcement into executive hands over which the broader public had little control and moved the state ever deeper into a legal culture of command and ever farther away from the consensual and participatory “culture of law that had been the very essence of the early modern [English] state.” Representing “a significant departure from the traditions of citizen service and popular representation enshrined in the common law,” this development, had, by “the end of the eighteenth century,” rendered “the institutions and processes of

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government much less accessible” and participatory than they had been over the previous 500 years and less “intelligible than they had been a hundred years previously.”35 But, this new legal culture of command showed little immediate presence in British overseas colonies. On the contrary, the older common law system with its traditions of wide popular participation and its association of authority with consent was the one that Englishmen brought with them to America beginning with the first settlement in Virginia in 1607 and that their progeny ever after continued to regard as the foundations of the constitutions they created to govern relations in the new polities they built there. Just as it had served as “an incorporative force in early modern England, creating and intensifying links not only between individuals, but also between the communities of parish, county, and realm,” so in the dispersed and distanced polities established in America it provided a cherished link between colonies and metropolis that identified the colonies and their inhabitants as distinctively English, a link that demonstrably evidenced their inclusion in the wider English imperial world.

Transplantations: Consent and Authority Within and Over America If, as Temple has instructed us, authority is founded on opinion, longdistance colonization created a serious problem in state building with two related dimensions: how to establish and secure authority within distant polities and over them. Distance rendered anything more than a nominal incorporation into an existing system of authority impossible. How could voice and consent be exerted by subjects at such a great remove? How could the rights enjoyed by the possessing classes in metropolitan societies be secured for faraway settlers? As I pointed out long ago in my monograph, Peripheries and Centre, a study of constitutional development in colonial British America, the English state simply did not have either the financial or the coercive resources to play an active role in resolving these problems and so had little choice but to leave it to the settlers themselves to create and pay for the establishments of provincial arenas of authority that would take full responsibility for organizing, defining, and paying for their government, encouraging immigration, creating a labour force, building economic and social infrastructures, and taking care of their own defence against indigenous resistance and subsequent projects for indigenous removal. The result was that settlers in every English colony took

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the lead in creating new arenas of authority that, like the metropolitan system of authority with which they were familiar and which they sought to reproduce in America, would be consensual and would provide male property holders with the same rights to security of property and civic participation enjoyed by the possessing classes in the metropolis.36 As I also demonstrated, however, the problem of securing metropolitan authority over the colonies was far less tractable and became a serious issue during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, as Crown authorities, increasingly aware of the potential economic and strategic value of American empire, initiated a campaign to enhance metropolitan authority over the colonies. Immediately, these initiatives encountered serious and effective resistance on the part of provincial leaders intent on keeping control over the semi-autonomous arenas of authority they had built and over which they presided. The resulting impasse created a problem that revolved around the question of how authority was distributed in a large extended polity composed of many distinctive and semi-autonomous polities. This problem was resolved in practice through an intermittent but often recurring series of negotiations between the metropolis and the colonies that led to the gradual emergence of a working imperial system in which each colonial polity had a great deal of authority over its internal governance, while the metropolis had authority over external matters pertaining to the entire empire, such as commercial regulation and defence against rivals in the competition among European states for empire. Theoretically, however, this problem was never resolved to the satisfaction of the two involved parties, one in the peripheries and the other in the centre.37 To introduce a volume of my collected essays in the mid-1990s, I wrote a short article in which I explored from the perspective of then recent literature on European state formation, the possible relevance of some of my findings about the British Empire to the analysis of all the major European American empires during the early modern era. In this essay, I called for the creation of a new, consensual model of empire that would stress “the peripheral as well as the central contributions to the negotiated authorities by which those empires seem to have been governed.” Such a model, I suggested, should be based on an awareness of the composite nature of the European states involved in the formation of imperial polities and of the systems of indirect rule that characterized those states and should proceed from a recognition that the establishment of private enclaves of settler authority usually preceded

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metropolitan efforts to impose central control and that the process of colonization invariably involved the proliferation of such enclaves, even in those polities, such as the French, in which imperial centralization was most successful. Such a model, I proposed, should also acknowledge that fiscal resources were never sufficient, not even in the Spanish case, to support the bureaucratic, military, and naval machinery necessary to impose central authority from above without the consent or acquiescence of the dominant, self-empowered possessing classes in the peripheries, and that, to obtain the consent or cooperation of those classes, metropolitan officials had little choice but to negotiate systems of authority with them, a process that produced varieties of indirect rule that at once set boundaries on central power, recognized the rights of localities to varying degrees of self-government, and ensured that in normal circumstances metropolitan decisions affecting the peripheries would consult or respect local opinion and interests.38 Neither in thinking through that essay nor in my earlier study of British imperial political relations and constitutional practice, however, did I address the question of how petitioning functioned in the creation and maintenance of these negotiated authorities. Moreover, in several subsequent essays making the case for settler agency in the construction of colonial constitutions and laying out the cogency of the ideology of what I have come to call settler constitutionalism that advocated the exclusive rights of provincial legislatures to legislate for the domestic affairs of the colonies I paid no serious attention to the role of petitions in voicing opinion and constructing authority. My approach also neglected a considerable amount of evidence that settler legislatures, from the very beginning, explicitly claimed the right to petition as well as the right to tax and legislate—all rights that the Crown subsequently conceded when, starting in the mid-1620s, it slowly drifted into a process of assuming the nominal direction of one colony after another. Especially from the perspective supplied from the papers presented in this volume, my lack of attention to petitions represents a serious omission. A cursory examination of the subject makes it clear that in the English colonies as well as in the metropolis, petitions were an important venue for the exercise of Voice, the expression of public opinion, and the acknowledgement of the authority of the body to which the petition was addressed at all three levels of government, the local, the provincial, and the imperial. At the local level, in town, county, or parish, face-to-face interactions among the citizenry, and the operation of grand

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juries responsible for bringing violations of local norms and proposals for improvement to the attention of magistrates, may well have rendered the use of formal written petitions less necessary. The subject has been little studied.39 However, at the provincial level, legislatures throughout the colonial era were flooded with petitions requesting favourable legislation and redress of grievances. Only one serious modern monograph, Raymond C. Bailey’s Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in EighteenthCentury Virginia, has so far addressed this subject for any colony. But its findings are instructive for the insights they provide into the consensual and participatory nature of British provincial governance. The process of petitioning, it concludes, “provided an open and frequently utilized channel of communication between the people and the provincial government” that enabled the public, occasionally even those “who were disenfranchised by the voting requirements,” to take “an active participatory” role in the political process. That role, moreover, was also highly effective, a “significant amount of legislation, concerning a wide variety of topics both great and small, originating directly in response to... petitions.”40 No doubt, similar investigations for other colonies would lead to the same conclusions. At the next level, colonial mercantile and other interest groups in England sometimes joined with the colonial agents that many colonies paid to represent them in negotiations with metropolitan authorities to petition or lobby Parliament for exemptions from trade restrictions, subsidies to encourage the production of new export items, or other matters relating to the colonies’ “external” affairs, an area upon which Parliament had been legislating since the middle of the seventeenth century in the face of slowly diminishing objections from the periphery. But petitions from colonial legislatures on such matters as requests for military or naval assistance, complaints about the behaviour of governors or other royal officials in the colonies, and other matters concerning the “internal” governance of the colonies routinely went only to the Crown, a practice that at once affirmed the Crown’s longstanding conviction that it was the principal point of contact between colonies and metropolis and reinforced the colonial belief that Parliament had no role to play in the domestic governance of the colonies. Only in the 1760s, when Parliament tried for the first time to tax for revenue and legislate for the internal affairs of the colonies, did the colonies begin to petition Parliament directly and then only to deny that Parliament had any authority in such matters. These

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denials constituted a solid demonstration that, in the opinion of colonials, Parliament had not yet managed to establish its authority in these areas, and Parliament’s summary rejection of their petitions did nothing to change most colonial minds. In the mid-1770s, after thirteen of the British colonies decided to pursue the exit option and establish their political independence and to create a national government to help them achieve and protect that independence, the use of petitions at every level of government continued unabated. So deeply embedded in colonial political culture was the petitioning process that independent successor states had no choice but to continue it, and petitioning remained one of the main venues for communicating public opinion to governing authorities and for acknowledging—in effect, authorizing—their authority. In the new United States, as well as throughout the rest of the English-speaking world, this feature of consensual governance continued to provide one way of voicing public opinion and confirming the authority of government. How, precisely, the petitioning process worked in this new independent and republican world is a subject that, as this volume so thoroughly and vividly illustrates, is worth serious investigation of the kind historians of medieval England have given to their area of study. Hopefully, the explanatory framework I have developed here, stressing the relationship of voice and consent in the creation of authority may be of some use in such a project. In closing, I want to make explicit what has been largely implicit in these ruminations on the role of petitioning in the transatlantic Englishspeaking world, which is that the explanatory framework I have elaborated on this occasion may very well be useful for investigating other areas of that settler world, whether Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Dutch. As an engaging exercise in comparative historical analysis, such a project could not only submit Hirschman’s and Temple’s theories to further testing but also draw out the similarities and differences among what might be called the several national styles or modes of colonizing in the Americas. By usefully analysing the consensual dimensions of Iberian political thought and the importance of consent in the construction of authority in the independent states and nations of Latin America, the Argentine historian José Carlos Chiaramonte has already made a start on such a project.41 An important problem here is whether in imperial domains where formal representative government was missing, petitions did not take its place and perform its function in local and provincial governance, as well as in the consensual constitutional processes through which American polities

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expressed their opinions and acknowledged the limited authority of the metropolitan states to which they were attached by bonds of affection and by enormous respect for their inherited civic traditions.

Notes 1. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD990 to 1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) provides the most comprehensive treatment of this subject. On the English case, see Michael J. Braddock, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 3. Hirschman, Exit, pp. 76, 97–98. 4. Hirschman, Exit, pp. 58, 77. 5. See Jack P. Greene, “The Symbiotic Relationship between Liberty and Inequality in the Cultural Construction of Colonial British America and the United States: An Overview,” American Political Thought, 3 (Fall, 2016), pp. 549–66. 6. Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1673). 7. Sir William Temple, “An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government,” Miscellanea (London, 1680). 8. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 65–66, 68. 9. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarche, or the Natural Power of Kings (London, 1680). 10. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 45–47. 11. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 47–48. There seems to be no systematic study of the nature and use of the concept of authority for early modern England, but see Robert Zaller’s rich study, The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007). 12. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 52–53, 76–77, 79. 13. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 55–58, 82. 14. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 54, 83–85. 15. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 54, 58–59, 77. 16. Temple, “An Essay”, pp. 58–59, 72, 77–78, 84–85, 88. 17. Gwilym Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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18. W. Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd, and Anthony Musson (eds.), Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance (York: University of York, 2009); Ormrod, “Murmur Clamour and Noise: Voicing Complaint and Remedy in Petitions to the English Crown, c. 1300-c. 1460,” in Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, pp. 135–55; W. Mark Ormrod, Helen Killick, and Phil Bradford, Early Common Petitions in the English Parliament, c. 1290-c. 1420 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 2017); Anthony Musson and W. M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1999). 19. Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, pp. 9, 141. 20. Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, pp. 7–9, 141; Dodd, Justice and Grace, p. 317; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, p. 9. 21. Dodd, Justice and Grace, pp. 1–3; Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, pp. 1–2, 136, 152–63. 22. Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, p. 7; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, p. 8; Alan Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 180, 184. 23. Ormrod, Killick, and Bradford, Early Common Petitions, pp. 1–2; Dodd, Justice and Grace, p. 9; Harding, Medieval Law, p. 185. 24. Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, pp. 154–55; Dodd, Justice and Grace, pp. 6, 321, 323. 25. Dodd, Justice and Grace, p. 319. 26. Dodd, Justice and Grace, pp. 322–324. 27. Dodd, Justice and Grace, p. 319–322. 28. Dodd, Justice and Grace, p. 320. 29. Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, pp. 8–9, 159–60. 30. Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, p. 138; Ormrod, Dodd, and Musson, Medieval Petitions, p. 2. 31. David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 183. 32. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 217–65. 33. James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions to the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon. Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986), pp. 3–15. See also, Joanna Innes, “Legislation and Popular Participation 1760–1830,” in David Lemmings (ed.), The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, N.J.: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 102–32.

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34. Lemmings, Law and Government, pp. 2–3, 5–6. 35. Lemmings, Law and Government, pp. 2, 8, 11, 174–175, 179. 36. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in he Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). 37. Greene, Peripheries and Center. 38. Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Pres, 1994), pp. 2–24. 39. But see, for a clear report on how county governance worked in colonial Virginia, Gwenda Morgan, The Hegemony of the Law: Richmond County, Virginia, 1692–1776 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989). 40. Raymond C. Bailey, Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 166–67, 173–74. 41. José Carlos Chiaramonte, Nation and State in Latin America: Political Language during Independence (Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2010).

CHAPTER 3

Petitions in the Dutch Atlantic and the ‘Absence’ of a Dutch West India Interest, c. 1600–1800 Joris van den Tol

In October 1652, three men—Jasper van Heussen, Jacob Hamel, and Abraham d’Azevedo—crossed the Atlantic from Brazil and arrived in the Dutch Republic. They had left the Dutch West India Company’s (WIC)

Much of this article is based on the research I did for my dissertation as part of Cátia Antunes’ NWO VIDI research project ‘Challenging Monopolies’ at Leiden University. Furthermore, it builds on research that was paid for through a Fulbright Fellowship at the New Netherland Institute in Albany, NY, and funding from the LUF. A more elaborate analysis of some of the material discussed here can be found in my book Lobbying in Company: Economic Interests and Political Decision Making in the History of Dutch Brazil, 1621–1656 (Leiden 2020). J. van den Tol (B) Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_3

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colony in Brazil to express the needs of the colony which was facing a shortage of even the most basic necessities and military equipment. The Portuguese co-colonists had started a revolt against the “Dutch occupation” in 1645 and the situation had become increasingly worrisome since then for the WIC. It was the task of the three men “to present the miserable and pitiful state of the country and the people”, and “to request the necessities and means that would release this misery”.1 A lobby campaign of this scale would obviously be costly and neither the delegates themselves nor the High Government in Brazil had the means to pay for such a mission. Thus, the people in Recife, Pernambuco, organised a voluntary collection where everybody donated as much as they could afford to support these delegates during their mission in the Republic.2 The delegates submitted more than thirty petitions to different political bodies in the Dutch Republic from October 1652 until May 1654, when the news came that the WIC had surrendered the colony to the Portuguese in January. These three men are in more than one way very typical. They were three of many who crossed the Atlantic to petition in the Dutch Republic. This demonstrates that Dutch colonial policy was neither exclusively a metropolitan affair, nor a limited to the colony as the result of metropolitan negligence or in defiance of metropolitan control.3 Moreover, the delegation of the three men was comprised of one Jew and two Christians—another element that made this group ordinary rather than extraordinary. Petitioners often formed alliances that crossed boundaries of religion, ethnicity, class, gender, or geography.4 Collecting signatures on petitions was an effective way to achieve this and offers an alternative to a more formal and permanent imperial lobbying done by the London West India Interest. In order to explain the absence of a Dutch equivalence to the London West India Interest, this chapter compares and contrasts petitioning practices in the Dutch Americas and the Dutch Republic between 1600 and 1800 to show the trans-Atlantic influence of interest groups. This research is primarily based on petitions from archives related to the WIC colonies in Brazil and North America, and petitions presented to the States General in The Hague. An important difference in the source base between the Dutch Republic and the WIC Atlantic colonies is that petitions in the colonies have mostly only survived as copies in the minutes of colonial councils, while petitions in the Republic are often preserved as originals.

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Studies of political influence and lobbying strategies in the Atlantic World can be traced back to the early 1920s when Lilian Penson published on the formation of a “West India Interest” in eighteenthcentury London.5 She identified three groups that lobbied together in London; agents from the colonies, merchants trading to the colonies, and London-based plantation owners. Scholars focusing on the Dutch Atlantic have built on this and wondered if there was anything comparable to the London West India Interest on the other side of the North Sea.6 The answer that there was not, has been explained by three main reasons: diverging provincial interests, a merchant-dominated political class, and the importance of compromises in the political nature of the Republic. The Dutch Republic was made up of several provinces with their own provincial political bodies; the provincial States. Each province sent a delegate to the collegiate body of the States General which decided on supra-regional issues such as military defence and international diplomacy. Some provinces, such as Holland or Zeeland, were quite urbanised and their provincial states were dominated by cities. Other provinces, such as Groningen or Overijssel, were more rural and their provincial states were dominated by landed nobility. Another important difference between provinces, was that some, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, and Groningen, were located along the sea, while the others were “land provinces” and more focused on trade on rivers than on the sea. However, these are not the divergences used to explain the absence of West India Interest formation in the Dutch Republic. Instead, the argument is that the States of Zeeland was more invested in the colonial trade, while the States of Holland defended the interests of merchants of the intra-European trade. It is true that parts of the Zeeland economy depended heavily on the colonial trade.7 That is, however, insufficient to explain a different interest in trade policy in the Dutch Republic. In the first place because the European and colonial trade were intertwined; European commodities flowed into the Atlantic, and Atlantic commodities were essential in the intra-European trade. The increase of trade in colonial commodities contributed to opening up trade to the German Rhine area for instance.8 Secondly, either province held just one vote in the States General and could easily be outvoted by the other provinces. The third reason this explanation is insufficient is that commercial interests did not limit their advocacy to provincial boundaries. The second explanation for the absence of a Dutch West India Interest, the domination of merchants in the political class, is also insufficient.

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Firstly, because merchants could only dominate the provinces where cities had a significant share of the vote. Although some merchants indeed became regents and also acquired seigneurial lands through purchase or marriage, this was mostly limited to the province of Holland. Secondly, the interests of a Baltic grain merchant did not necessarily overlap with the interests of a merchant in Virginia Tobacco. People did not hold the same beliefs on the basis of being a merchant. The third explanation, the importance of political compromise in the Dutch Republic stemming from its decentralised structure, is equally insufficient. Not only was a unanimous vote only required in limited cases, but also does a decentralised structure fail to logically explain the absence of an organised West India Interest. Political compromise does not make a political body immune for the influence of petitions of interest groups. Moreover, the decentralised structure would suppose a radically different political element in the Dutch Republic compared to the political world in the colonies where provinces were absent. This was not the case. Merchants from St. Eustatius, for example, organised on the basis of their shared geographical location and common economic interests, and their organisation was characterised by “a shifting, and often multireligious, ethnic, and national membership” which included the Dutch elite, Jews, creoles, and non-Dutch merchants.9 The influence of colonial inhabitants on colonial policies has been well-established and went beyond just petitions as it encapsulates other forms of interactions such as bargaining and negotiation.10 Compared to petitions in Europe, those submitted in the rest of the world have largely been overlooked.11 The case studies that exist demonstrate the diverse coalitions that petitioned the colonial government on a wide range of topics as well as the global presence of the practice.12 Petitioning was just one form of interaction between the colonial ruler and the inhabitants. Just like in Europe, many of the interactions within the colonies can be characterised as a form of negotiation.13 In contrast to many forms of negotiation, however, petitioning emphasises the unequal nature of the exchange. A negotiation suggests that both parties have something to give. Petitioning, however, is typically deferential and often results in an exchange from the addressee to the petitioner but not vice versa. Petitions from the colonies to the metropole as well as petitions in the colonies highlight the active participation of colonial inhabitants on the rules that governed much of their lives. The centre–periphery relations

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are often described in terms of defiance in the periphery. This defiance took different forms. Changing circumstances, for instance, could force local authorities to obey, but not comply with, instructions from Europe.14 Alternatively, local autonomy derived from settler-dominated colonial authority structures, together with geographical distance from the centre as well as weakness of metropolitan coercive resources.15 Moreover, merchants as well as planters either ignored or evaded European regulations through smuggling or other illicit practices.16 The study of petitioning demonstrates that all these colonists were not passive bystanders merely responding to European or colonial regulations, but that they actively tried to shape and influence these rules. The selforganising networks that characterised the economic activity in the Atlantic world can be found in the petition alliances.

Collecting Signatures In order to influence the decision-making process with petitions, one of the strategies was to collect signatures on petitions. A so-called petition drive, or canvassing a petition, was the most important innovation in petitioning the seventeenth century. At the end of the sixteenth century, even petitions with many supporters contained no signatures when they were presented. The famous Petition of Nobles of 1566, where hundreds of members of the nobility of the Habsburg Low Countries requested more religious tolerance from the Governor Margaret of Parma, is a good example of this. Notwithstanding the claim that in one province more than 40,000 people were willing to sign the petition, and that after the petition was presented its initiators travelled to different provinces to acquire signatures, the original petition contained no signatures when it was presented.17 By the 1640s, petitions with fifty or more signatures were nothing out of the ordinary, and by the eighteenth-century petitions reached hundreds of signatures—and even several thousand when supporting the Patriot movement in the 1780s.18 People calling themselves ‘Patriots’ demanded a great number of constitutional reforms, the most radical of which was the introduction of “true” representative government at the local level of government.19 The first to organise petition drives were people living in cities and religious communities. One reformed religious group in the Dutch Republic, the Remonstrants, is even named after the petition (or remonstrance) signed by 44 petitioners which they submitted in 1610.20 An early

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example of a petition drive within a city is from 1608, when sixty Amsterdam merchants successfully petitioned against a prohibition on the use of cashiers in financial transactions. Eventually, this contributed to the establishment of the Exchange Bank of Amsterdam (Amsterdamsche Wisselbank).21 Religious communities that organised a petition campaign within a city could reach even larger numbers; in 1628, around 250 Amsterdam men and women following the aforementioned Remonstrant religion, petitioned—initially unsuccessfully—for permission to practice their religion in a church.22 The adherent structure of these groups facilitated easier organisation as people lived relatively close together and/or met regularly for a religious service. As petitions with multiple signatures became more numerous from the 1640s onwards, petitioners started collecting signatures beyond city walls or provincial lines. A 1650 petition requesting permission to open up the trade to the Guinea coast in Africa demonstrates this clearly. The order of signatures in combination with the evidence of different ink and quills on the petition supports the theory that the petition was circulated in different cities in the province of Holland, travelled to the province of Zeeland before it was submitted to the States General in The Hague in Holland.23 Apart from crossing geographical boundaries, the petitioners also crossed boundaries of gender as women put their signatures on the petition. Not as the “widow” or the “wife” of a man, but in their own name. Petitions from soldiers returning from Brazil in the 1650s show that petitioners also crossed boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and class.24 Petition drives and canvassing allowed interest groups to collect signatures from individuals beyond the adherent group and to increase and demonstrate support. Expanding the base in this way was an important benefit of collecting signatures on a petition compared to the power to advocate interests by corporations such as guilds25 (Fig. 3.1). The increased frequency of group petitions with multiple signatures in the Republic in the 1640s was mirrored in the Atlantic colonies of the WIC. In 1644, a group of eleven enslaved Africans petitioned together for manumission in the WIC colony in North America, and in 1645 in Brazil “a large number of [indigenous] Brazilians” from areas far and wide in the colony appeared in a governmental meeting and “delivered a written petition”.26 In a special Diet discussing affairs involving the Portuguese population in Dutch Brazil in 1640, the WIC colonial leadership received a petition signed by fifty Lusophone people from Pernambuco, Paraíba, and Itamaracá.27 In 1653, a series of signed petitions by almost twenty

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Fig. 3.1 Backside of a petition with signatures that crossed provincial boundaries and with women signing in their own name, from 1650 (Source NL-HaNA, 1.01.02 inv. nr. 5762, 29-July-1650)

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people in New Netherland in North America brought together signatures from people from various villages on Long Island as well as from the town of New Amsterdam on Manhattan.28 Some of these people spoke English, while others—especially those from New Amsterdam— spoke Dutch. Because only the copies of petitions have survived in the minutes, it is not possible to trace the route of the petitions in colonies like it can be done in the Republic. However, considering that someone else had canvassed “door-to-door” on a political issue in New Amsterdam in 1649, it is not impossible petitioners would have employed a similar strategy.29 Like in the Republic, collecting signatures in the colonies allowed petitioners to expand their base by crossing perceived boundaries such as geography, language, or ethnicity. What did these signatures mean? People did not sign a petition lightly. When the Compromise of Nobles started collecting signature for their aforementioned petition of 1566, one person in an Amsterdam inn allegedly “had scruples about putting his signature on this paper”, even though he supported the cause and later proved a strong advocate.30 In other instances where signers might feel scruples about putting signatures under a request or petition, this was solved by signing in a circle or so-called “round-robin” to avoid exposing the leader.31 The minutes of the New Netherland leadership discussing the 1653 Anglo-Dutch petition further show the weight a political body could attribute to signatures on petitions. In its response to the petition, the council scolded some of the Dutch signers of the petition, who should have been more careful than “to sign what an Englishman has drafted, as if there was no one of Dutch origin intelligent enough and capable to draft a petition”.32 Furthermore, in the hotly debated issue of free trade to Brazil in 1637, there were 56 WIC investors from Zeeland who signed a letter of credence delegating their voices to three delegates.33 The investors acted in response to their opponents who showed up with seventeen people at the meeting.34 This letter of credence allowed the delegate to take support from one petition to the next and the signatures showed strength in numbers when they were not physically present. Early modern Dutch merchants are also known to have collected signatures on petitions in support of certain candidates when there was a vacancy in an overseas consular posting.35 It is in the seventeenth century that a signature on a petition starts to replace physical presence. It is uncertain, however, if this practice spread to or from other documents, what the relation between the oral and the written is exactly, or if it stemmed from a larger share of literacy in the

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population. In any case, a signature meant support, the order of signatures mattered, and so did the numbers of signatures on a petition (Fig. 3.2). However, once the effect of petition drives became evident and it became used more widely, the practice did not replace petitioning by corporations or other organisations. Petitions with a combination of signatures of individuals, groups, and corporations existed as well as petitions with no signature whatsoever.36 By 1623, the States General introduced legislation that required all petitions presented to them to have at least one signature. Clearly this did not have the desired effect, because resolutions confirming this requirement were passed also in 1628 and 1646.37 As late as August 1650, the States of Zeeland refused to resolve on a particular petition until the petitioners signed their request.38 Although there is no evidence of a similar requirement in the Atlantic colonies, there were regulations that limited the fee agents could ask for drafting, delivering, and recommending a petition. This relatively modest

Fig. 3.2 Example of a round-robin from 1652 (Source NL-HaNA, 1.03.02, inv. nr. 5-I , 15-Oct-1652)

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price between 12 and 25 stivers meant that petitioning was accessible to many people.39 It was not necessary to collect (multiple) signatures on petitions to achieve policy change, but it was an important innovation. This made the collection of signatures part of the argumentation; the implicit argument that there was numerical support added weight to the request. The argument that a petition’s requested policy benefited the “common good” had been a common trope since at least the Middle Ages. Collecting signatures added another layer that supported such a claim. Collecting signatures allowed petitioners to expand their base and simultaneously to demonstrate popular support. This was not yet a form of “democratisation”, but it was a form of socialising the petitioning practice.40 It was a practice that quickly gained popularity and that showed a similar transAtlantic development of modest numbers in the mid-seventeenth century to hundreds or thousands of signatures by the end of the eighteenth century.

Petitioning Across the Atlantic The majority of the petitions presented to colonial leadership concerned local affairs. Requests in these petitions ranged from excise allocation for public works, or regulations on overnight storage of sugar, to the creation of an army company comprised of Africans.41 However, not all cases were addressed to the right body. In some instances, this meant that the petitioners were referred to a lower body—such as a local câmara (chamber) in Dutch Brazil. In other instances, it meant that the case was forwarded to Europe to be resolved by an appropriate authority in Europe. An example of this is the petition by Portuguese plantation owners to legalise the enslavement of the indigenous population of Brazil. The petition landed on the desks of the High Council in Recife, which forwarded the request to the Board of Directors in the Dutch Republic. Despite strong opposition initially, the WIC’s Board of Directors eventually allowed the enslavement of indigenous workers in 1642.42 Another option was to cross the Atlantic in person and to deliver grievances in person in the Dutch Republic. Crossing the Atlantic took several weeks and the journey was not free of dangers. A recurring theme in travel journeys is the expression of relief after safely passing the waters frequented by Barbary Coast corsairs. Storms, such as the one in 1631 that sank De Oranjeboom and killed

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more than a hundred of its passengers and crew, further added to the risk of early modern Atlantic crossings, as did hostile navies in times of war.43 Apart from the dangers, it was also a costly undertaking. Notwithstanding, it happened several times that one or more people crossed the Atlantic to petition. The petitions resulting from these journeys can be divided into three categories. Firstly, those recommended, or even undertaken by, the colonial leadership. Secondly, those resulting from disagreement with the colonial leadership. And thirdly, those stemming from allegiance to a European power. The petition campaign by Jasper van Heussen, Jacob Hamel, and Abraham d’Azevedo mentioned in the introduction is an example of the first category. However, most requests from the colonies to the Dutch Republic were not delivered by a person crossing the Atlantic. Petitions presented in Brazil that fell under the authority of the WIC Board of Directors were forwarded and “recommended favourably” by the colonial leadership. In 1640, for instance, different captaincies requested permission for the establishment of a bishopric or vicar-general. Despite the favourable recommendation, the Board of Directors, rather than denying it outright, did not respond. This prompted the petitioners to try again two years later.44 There is no evidence it was permitted this time. In other instances, such as the petitions by the localities of Iguaraçu and Mauritsstad to appoint a solicitor to their câmaras to streamline the local petitioning process, the Board of Directors resolved favourably.45 Hendrick Haecxs is a well-documented example of someone travelling to the Republic to petition. He was a member of the High Government (highest political council in Brazil). When this council felt that their written requests for military assistance to quell the Portuguese insurgence were not sufficiently answered, it decided to send one of its own to the Republic to report on the issue in 1647. Haecxs kept a detailed diary of his campaign, which describes his visits to the WIC leadership, the States General, the States of Holland, and the Stadtholder.46 The mission led to some tension between Haecxs and the Company directors and their semipermanent lobby delegation in The Hague. Did the people in Brazil not appreciate the efforts made by the directors? The directors had to leave “their houses and families for six, eight, even ten weeks at a time”, to visit “the States General and the Stadtholder night and day” in an attempt to rescue Brazil.47 They also wondered if Haecxs “was of the opinion that his presence and soliciting with the High-Mightinesses48 could possibly have more effect” than what the directors were doing.49 Evidently, it was

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not appreciated that the colonial government sent a delegate directly to the Republic, surpassing the usual chain of command. The second category of people crossing the Atlantic to petition, were those seeking redress for grievances from the colonial government. When Adriaen van der Donck, and people around him, disagreed with the policies of Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant and the rest of the colonial leadership in New Netherland, they first tried to petition the colonial government. When that led to nothing, Van der Donck started writing an appeal (vertoog ) to the States General. Outraged by this, Stuyvesant had him arrested and tried. Although this court case has been lost, it is certain that Van der Donck was released at some point, because he travelled to the Republic in the company of two allies not long after. Apart from submitting petitions, he also published a book with his opinion on the state of New Netherland.50 Stuyvesant sent his secretary, Cornelis van Tienhoven, on the next ship to defend the colonial leadership’s viewpoint to the States General. Not just Van der Donck and Van Tienhoven petitioned the States General. Many others who felt they were wronged by the Director-General supplied petitions in The Hague in that fall of 1649. The committee that received all these petitions sided with Van der Donck, called the current colonial leadership “wrong”, and proposed a new governance structure with more influence for the citizens of the colony.51 Crossing the Atlantic to petition, offered the colonists a way of appealing decisions of colonial leadership. Solving disagreement this way was a (predominantly) implicit threat found in more colonial petitions. The petition campaign of Antonio Paraupaba in the 1650s is an example of the third category of trans-Atlantic petitions; those stemming from allegiance manifestations. In wars fought in the colonies, the WIC relied on alliances with indigenous groups.52 These groups, like other soldiers and many non-military Europeans in the colony, swore an oath of loyalty to the Company and the States General. Antonio Paraupaba belonged to the Potiguar, who had allied themselves with the Dutch against the Portuguese. When the WIC surrendered Brazil to the Portuguese in 1654, the indigenous allies felt abandoned. Remembering the brutal treatment by the Portuguese during the revolt, they feared to be enslaved or murdered by their new lords. Many focused their anger at remaining WIC officials, but Paraupaba travelled to the Dutch Republic to petition the States General and to remind them of their alliance.53 He had received an education in the Dutch Republic in the early years of the colony to cement the alliance between the Dutch and the Potiguar.

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His ambition with his petition campaign was to convince the regents in the Republic to send military assistance to help the Potiguar resist the Portuguese. He petitioned twice; the first time in August 1654 and a second time in April 1656. He asked for military assistance for the “miserable nation” of indigenous Brazilians because of their “loyal service”, “sustained misery”, and “more importantly because of the connection of true faith” between the States General and the people in Brazil.54 The second time, he attached the translation of an intercepted letter from Juan Fernando Viero in Paraíba in Brazil to Marcos Rodrigues Stinoque in Lisbon. Viero asked Stinoque to start lobbying for the Portuguese King’s military assistance immediately as the black and indigenous population had started a rebellion against the Portuguese. He added that it was “unseemly” that these “Mulattos and Negros” were creating a sense of disquiet, demanding the return of the Dutch “to be free of all the oppression and murder they experienced daily”.55 This unusual phrasing in combination with the information on the low number of soldiers available for defence leaves room for the interpretation that this was a fake letter intended to persuade the Dutch that reconquering Brazil would be an easy and honourable mission. When the two petitions and the—probably staged—letter resorted no effect, Paraupaba had his petitions and the letter printed by Henricus Hondius and distributed as a pamphlet in 1657.56 This had equally little effect, which should not be considered a personal failure or as a demonstration of the limited clout of Paraupaba. A comparable petition to restore Dutch rule in New York in 1667, three years after the transfer of power to the English, signed by seventy prominent merchants had equally little consequence.57 As can be seen from the examples of Paraupaba and Van der Donck, the Dutch Republic offered the opportunity to print the petition or related material to increase the audience and potentially influence public opinion and pressure decision makers.58 Plans for a printing press in the colonies were discussed, but there is no evidence that it ever materialised as only a manuscript pamphlet has survived from the seventeenth-century Dutch Americas.59 In contrast to England, printing petitions was not common practice in this period in the Dutch world. Although printed petitions have survived, this was overwhelmingly a literary genre of pamphlets never intended to be presented to a governing body. Only from the 1670s onwards can the first printed petitions be found in the archives.

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Even Paraupaba’s printer, Henricus Hondius, petitioned in manuscript to become the official government printer in 1669.60 Crossing the Atlantic offered petitioners the opportunity to make sure their petitions were received, discussed, and resolved by the States General. This option was available to many individuals including Dutch colonists such as Haecxs, Sephardic Jews such as d’Azevedo, and the indigenous population such as Paraupaba. The diversity of petition alliances mirrored the diversity of the Dutch Atlantic which was not just the Atlantic of the WIC, but an aggregate of self-organising networks operating within and alongside the Company structures.61

Conclusion As people crossed the Atlantic, they took petitioning practices with them. The earliest evidence of collecting signatures on petitions emerged in the Dutch Republic, but more or less at the same time petitioners in New Netherland and Brazil started doing the same. Collecting signatures was a tool on both sides of the Atlantic that allowed petitioners to expand their base as well as demonstrate the support for the petition. Putting a signature on petition allowed someone to demonstrate support without physically being present at its delivery. While petitions with more than 100 signatures remained an anomaly in the seventeenth century, the number of signatures steadily increased—reaching thousands by the end of the eighteenth century. A similar increase in the number of signatures on colonial petitions happened, though the still relatively modest colonial populations meant that it reached a ceiling at a lower absolute number. The comparable practices of petition drives in the Dutch Republic and the WIC colonies across the Atlantic demonstrate the exchange of political practices. The introduction of a signature drive predates the introduction of printed petitions. Printing petitions has been heralded as an important innovation for the English practice of petitioning and helping to organise petition drives.62 However, a similar argument cannot be made for the Dutch Republic. This difference seems to stem primarily from the political situation in both countries. Not only was the number of MPs in England larger than the number of delegates in the Dutch Republic, but a petition needed to be presented by an MP instead of a petitioner. Printing was an affordable way of increasing the number of copies of a petition, and a larger number of copies helped to reach more MPs and thus increase the

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chance that a petition was discussed. The political system in the Dutch Republic did not require a similar scale and thus printing petitions was introduced later than canvassing petitions. What petitioning practices in the WIC’s American colonies and the Dutch Republic further had in common was that they were accessible a wide variety of people. There were petitions from enslaved people in the colonies, there were petitions from the indigenous population on both sides of the Atlantic, and a variety of non-Dutch used petitions for access to the political bodies. Moreover, petitions allowed people to create petitioning coalitions that transcended boundaries of ethnicity, class, gender, and geography. People came together based on their shared interests to influence and shape the rules and regulations that governed their lives. Moreover, the Atlantic was a conduit for people in the Americas that wanted to advocate their interest in the Dutch Republic. What does this mean for the understanding of a possible West India Interest in the Dutch Republic? First and foremost, there was indeed not something comparable to the professionalisation of the West India lobby like in England. However, more importantly, this chapter has argued that petitionary practices developed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic and that people very easily crossed to lobby for their interests. The possibility of collecting signatures allowed petitioners to create flexible alliances based on shared interests. This flexibility compared with the comparable practices between the Dutch Republic and the Dutch Americas created a situation that did not necessitate the foundation of a permanent West India Interest in the Republic. Thus, the flexibility, accessibility, and comparability, rather than the divergent provincial interests, the importance of compromise, or merchant-dominated political bodies, better explains the absence of a permanent Dutch West India Interest.

Notes 1. “aldaer voor te dragen den miserabilen ende jammerlijcke toestant van dese landen ende volckeren ende voorts uwe Ho:Mo: te versoecken de gerequireerde secoursen ende middelen waervoor eenmael uijt dese miserie mochten verlost werden”, Nationaal Archief in Den Haag (NLHaNA), 1.01.02 Archieven van de Staten Generaal, inv. nr. 5763, 15-Oct-1652 Letter from the High Government to the States General. 2. NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01 Archieven van de oude WIC, inv. nr. 67 , 12-Aug1652 Letter from the High Government to the Board of Directors [scans 198–199].

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3. For an overview of recent scholarship on the Dutch Atlantic, see W. Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); W. Klooster and G. J. Oostindie, Realm between Empires: The Second Dutch Atlantic, 1680–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). 4. J. van den Tol, Lobbying in Company: Economic Interests and Political Decision Making in the History of Dutch Brazil, 1621–1656 (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 5. L. M. Penson, “The London West India Interest in the Eighteenth Century”, English Historical Review, xxxvi no. cxliii (1921); A. J. O’Shaugnessy, “The Formation of a Commercial Lobby: The West India Interest, British Colonial Policy and the American Revolution”, The Historical Journal, 40, no. 1 (1997); A. Gilbert Olson, “The Virginia Merchants of London: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Interest-Group Politics”, The William and Mary Quarterly, 40, no. 1 (1983). 6. P. C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery, and Emancipation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 9, 95; H. den Heijer, “A Public and Private Dutch West India Interest”, in G. J. Oostindie and J. V. Roitman (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680– 1800 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014); H. den Heijer, “Het Recht van de Sterkste in de Polder. Politieke En Economische Strijd Tussen Amsterdam En Zeeland over de Kwestie Brazilië, 1630–1654”, in D. Bos, M. A. Ebben, and H. te Velde (eds.), Harmonie in Holland: Het Poldermodel van 1500 Tot Nu (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2007). 7. G. de Kok, “Cursed Capital: The Economic Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Walcheren around 1770”, TSEG/Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 13, no. 3 (2016). 8. P. Brandon and U. Bosma, “De betekenis van de Atlantische slavernij voor de Nederlandse economie in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw”, TSEG/Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 16, no. 2 (2019). 9. J. V. Roitman and H. Jordaan, “Fighting a Foregone Conclusion: Local Interest Groups, West Indian Merchants, and St. Eustatius, 1780–1810”, TSEG/Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 12, no. 1 (2015), pp. 99. 10. A. Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98, no. 3 (2018); A. Irigoin and R. Grafe, “Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path to Empire and Nation Building”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 88, no. 2 (2008); C. Daniels and M. Kennedy, Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York/London: Routledge,

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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2002); J. P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1994). L. Heerma van Voss, Supplement 9 of the International Review of Social History: Petitions in Social History (Cambridge, 2001), xlvi. J. J. S. van den Tol, “Chinese Petitions to the Dutch East India Company: Gambling on Formosa”, in T. Weststeijn (ed.), Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounters Between the Chinese, the Dutch, and Other Europeans, 1590–1800 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2020); B. J. Dixon, “‘His One Netev Ples’: The Chowans and the Politics of Native Petitions in the Colonial South”, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, no. 1 (2019); J. K. Ocko, “I’ll Take It All the Way to Beijing: Capital Appeals in the Qing”, The Journal of Asian Studies, 47, no. 2 (1988). R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Elisabeth Heijmans, The Agency of Empire: Connections and Strategies in French Overseas Expansion (1686–1746) (Leiden: Brill, 2019). J. L. Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 5, no. 1 (1960). Greene, Negotiated Authorities. D. Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. xvii; W. Klooster, Illicit Riches: The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998). For the petition: NL-HaNA, 1.11.01.01, inv. nr. 1925. See also: F. Deen, Publiek Debat en Propaganda in Amsterdam Tijdens de Nederlandse Opstand: Amsterdam ‘Moorddam’ (1566–1578) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), p. 69. M. R. Prak, “The People in Politics: Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic Compared”, in M. C. Jacob and C. Secretan (eds.), In Praise of Ordinary People: Early Modern Britain and the Dutch Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 152–154. For more on the Patriot movement, see: S. R. E. Klein, Patriots Republikanisme. Politieke Cultuur in Nederland (1766–1787) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995); W. Velema, Republicans. Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2007). M. de Vries, “Vierenveertig Handtekeningen”, in K. Holtzapffel and M. van Leeuwen (eds.), De Remonstrantie 400 Jaar (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Meinema, 2010). J. G. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis der Wisselbanken (Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1925), Vol. I, pp. 12–17.

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22. Stadsarchief Amsterdam (NL-AsdSAA), 612 “Archief van de Remonstrantse Gemeente”, inv. nr. 290, “Stuk bevattende handtekeningen van remonstrantsgezinden (…). (1628)”; H. C. Diferee, Drie Eeuwen Kerkgeschiedenis (Amsterdam: N.V. van Holkema & Warendorf’s uitgevers-mij, 1930), pp. 97–98. 23. NL-HaNA, 1.01.02 inv. nr. 5762, 29-July-1650, petition by the main and lesser investors of the WIC. 24. See different petitions from November 1566 in this folder: NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5766. 25. Compare to M. R. Prak, “Corporate Politics in the Low Countries: Guilds as Institutions, 14th to 18th Centuries”, in M. R. Prak et al. (eds.), Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power and Representation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); M. R. Prak, “The Dutch Republic as a Bourgeois Society”, BMGN , 124, no. 2–3 (2010). 26. For New Netherland: A. J. F. van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649 (Baltimore, 1974), IV, 212–213; M. Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland”, The Journal of Negro History, 65, no. 1 (1980), pp. 38–39. For Brazil: “Sijn ter vergadering verschenen een groot getal Brasilianen van alle de aldeas uijt deser gantse conqueste, ende hebben overgegeven dese schriftelijke remonstrantie”, NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr 70 [scan 1209]. 27. NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 68 [scans 1396–1399]. I would like to thank the editor of the book for pointing out that these territories were separate proprietary captaincies during the Portuguese rule before the arrival of the WIC. They continued to be separate identities after 1654. This says something about a petition that crossed political lines in Brazil. These people that had limited contact with each other before 1631–37, congregated to produce this petition. 28. New York State Archives (US-nar), A1809, Council Minutes 1652–1654, 5, pp. 160–165. The villages were Gravesend, Flushing, Middelburgh, Heemsteede, Amesfoort, Breuckelen, and Midwout. 29. A. van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Nederland: Weghens de Ghelegentheydt, Vruchtbaerheydt, en Soberen Staet Desselfs (’s-Gravenhage, 1650), p. 46. 30. G. Brandts, Historie Der Reformatie, en andre Kerkelyke Geschiedenissen, in en Ontrent de Nederlanden, Tweede Druk, Vol. I (Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz Hendrik en Dirk Boom, 1677), I, p. 319. 31. M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 235. 32. US-nar A1809, Council Minutes 1652–1654, 5, p. 169. 33. NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5754, 04-Feb-1637 Letter by the Zeland main investors to the States General.

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34. NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5754, 30-Jan-1637 Reasons WIC directors Amsterdam. 35. For an example from 1625, see for example: K. Heeringa (ed.), Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van den Levantschen Handel (’s-Gravenhage, 1910), Vol. I, pp. 504–505. 36. NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5768 [1670] Petition of the main shareholders of the WIC to the States General [scans 108–116]. 37. C. Gehring, Council Minutes 1655–1656 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 42. 38. Notulen van de Ed: Mog: Heeren Staten van Zeeland d’Anno 1650 (n.p.: n.p., 1650), p. 123. 39. For Brazil: NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 68 [scans 1498–1502]; for New Netherland: C. Gehring, Council Minutes 1655–1656 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 42. 40. See also: D. Carpenter, “Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression”, Perspectives on Politics, 14, no. 3 (2016), pp. 700–723. 41. Respectively, US-nar A1809, Council Minutes 1652–1654, 5, pp. 145– 146; NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 68 [scans 1400–1429]; NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 70 [scans 1524–1525]. 42. J. J. S. van den Tol, “1642: De Portugese Slavenlobby in NederlandsBrazilië”, in L. H. van Voss et al. (eds.), Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland (Amsterdam: Ambo|Anthos, 2008). 43. E. Kloek, “Jans, Maritgen”, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/ URL: data/MaritgenJans [01/06/2020]. 44. NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 69 [scan 1122]; see also F. L. Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998), pp. 279–280. 45. NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 68 [scan 1424]; NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 9 [scans 5–6]. 46. S. P. l’Honoré Naber, “Het Dagboek van Hendrik Haecxs, Lid van den Hoogen Raad van Brazilië (1645–1654)”, Bijdragen En Mededeelingen van Het Historisch Genootschap Utrecht, 46 (1925). 47. l’Honoré Naber, “Het Dagboek van Hendrik Haecxs”, pp. 226–227. 48. The members of the States General. 49. l’Honoré Naber, “Het Dagboek van Hendrik Haecxs”, p. 241. 50. van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Nederland. 51. J. Jacobs, “De Frustratie van Adriaen van der Donck, Kolonist in NieuwNederland”, Holland, 31 (1999), pp. 77–80. 52. M. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012).

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53. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, pp. 179–182; L. Hulsman, “Brazilian Indians in the Dutch Republic: The Remonstrances of Antonio Paraupaba to the States General in 1654 and 1656”, Itinerario, 29, no. 1 (2005). 54. “dat het u Hoogh Moghende ghenadighlijcken wille ghelieven, ten insichte van alle die ghetrouwe diensten, uytghestane miserien ende ellenden van die rampsalighe Natie, ende voornamentlijck om den bandt des waeren Gheloof, tusschen u HooghMoghende ende haer ghemeen”, NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5766, 6-Apr-1656 Petition of Antonio Paraupaba. 55. “willen liever wesen onder de Hollanders als onder syne Majesteyt, om vry te zijn van soo veele oppressien ende doodt-slaegen die haer daghelijcx worden aenghedaen (…) soo is ‘t niet behoorelijck dat weynighe Molatten ende Negros ons onrustig maecken”, NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5766, 6-Apr-1656 Letter from Viero to Stinoque dated 22 September 1655. 56. A. Paraupaba, Twee verscheyden remonstrantien ofte vertogen overgegeven aen de Heeren Staten Generaal door Antonio Paraupaba (Den Haag, 1657). 57. NL-HaNA, 1.01.02, inv. nr. 5768, Petition of 70 merchants to the States General. 58. J. Pollmann and A. Spicer, Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands: Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke (Leiden: Brill, 2007); F. Deen, D. Onnekink, and M. H. P. Reinders, Pamphlets and Politics in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2011); C. E. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing and Political Culture in the Early Modern Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1987). 59. NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 26, fol 110r; NL-HaNA, 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 60 [scan 1]. 60. NL-HaNA, 3.01.04.01, inv. nr. 1371/II, [1670?] Petition by Jacobus Scheltus; NL-HaNA, 1.01.02 inv. nr. 7490, 20-Sept-1669 petition by Henricus Hondius. See also Reinders, who argues that the “Disaster Year” 1672 witnessed the first printed petitions M. H. P. Reinders, Gedrukte Chaos: Populisme en Moord in het Rampjaar 1672 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2010). 61. G. J. Oostindie and J. V. Roitman, Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014). 62. D. Zaret, “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution”, American Journal of Sociology, 101, no. 6 (1996).

CHAPTER 4

Petitions to the Courts of Appeal in Portuguese America and the Protection of Rights (c. 1750–1808) Andréa Slemian

At the end of the 1840s, José Antonio Pimenta Bueno introduced his work Apontamentos sobre o processo criminal brasileiro, as follows: Fortunately for us, the procedures outlined in Fifth Book of the Ordenações are no longer in force,1 with the despotic powers of ministers, arbitrary penalties, torments employed to force false confessions, secret procedures, the impossibility of conducting a defense, the mystery and the arbitrary rule of tyranny! The virgin heart and the noble passions of Brazilian youth will no longer be discouraged and degraded by such inquisitional procedures, barbaric ideas, and repulsive sensations.2

A. Slemian (B) Universidade Federal de São Paulo—CNPq (PQ-2), São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_4

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The message could not be clearer: following the 1830 Criminal Code and the 1832 Code of Criminal Procedure for Lower Courts, both promulgated shortly after Brazil’s declaration of independence from Portugal, the despotism that had prevailed until then come to an end. Pimenta Bueno, the future Marquis of São Vicente, was not just any commentator. He had held important political positions in the Brazilian Empire which was conceived as a constitutional monarchy. The same type of discourse had gained significant space at the moment of independence due to the association of the legal system that had existed until then with the “absolutist” and “despotic” Portuguese past. Most thought that this should be replaced as soon as possible by a liberal regime (even if this desire was concealed in the hearts of many). This reading had an immense impact on the discourse constructed about the past in Portuguese America and left profound marks on the historiography, above all Brazilian, related to the forms of justice in the colony. Misrule and the imprimatur of time converted the teleological rationale expounded in Pimenta Bueno into historiographical cannon, especially in Brazilian historiography, and has marked the way the forms of justice in colonial Brazil have been understood. Abuses of power, widespread impunity, the tyranny of the authorities, corruption, and so on had always populated the themes and even the imagination of this history. This began to change in the 1980s, when Brazilian historians took an interest in new social agents, most especially because of a new appreciation of legal sources and the analysis of the strategies employed by actors, notably slaves and Afro-descendants, in defense of their rights.3 Moreover, this has remained relevant ever since, especially in relation to criminal themes. More recently, analyses which emphasize the ways in which justice works, such as what is proposed here, have allowed the revision of some biases in the reading of the colonial past. This change in attitudes did not happen on its own. For several decades now, the historiography on the Ancien Régime has been going through a process of revision with regard to the understanding of the Iberian and Ibero-American worlds. Under the influence of the seminal work of Richard Kagan, historians have come to accept that litigation, in its multiple forms, was much more prevalent in the early modern societies than had been imagined.4 Even if the uses of judicial institutions varied in accordance with time and context, early modern litigation has become a matter of increasing interest to specialists, in terms of its broad diffusion across society and the strategies employed by actors.5 Much has

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been gleaned from studies that have sought to unveil mechanisms for conflict resolution and justice, other than courts and judges, which passed through intermediate authorities and/or various forms of social consensus at the local level. From the current day perspective, this universe seems relatively haphazard; but one must treat this idea with caution and understand the greater capillarity of the spaces of justice that existed at that time—a world in which justice “employed,” that is to say “fed” many people.6 This historiographical change occurred alongside a renewal of studies of the critical history of law, which had a profound impact on ways of conceiving the world before the state building process.7 Specifically in relation to justice, its centrality in the conception of the administration of traditional monarchies is well known to us today and was reproduced in the Americas throughout the colonial period. To govern was, above all else, to administer justice, and more precisely to ensure that each member of society received their due according to their social position—since the members of this society saw themselves as being naturally unequal. This key function of administrating justice fell primarily to the king, who then delegated it to his agents to act on his behalf at a central or peripheral level (by delegation of jurisdiction). This was the institutional cement with which the relationship between the sovereign and his subjects was built over the centuries. Thus, justice, understood in a broad sense and as one of the primary raisons d’être of the administration, helped establish strong links and a sense of legitimacy for the regime. Judicial and extrajudicial agents and spheres have increasingly been seen as key elements to a renewed understanding of institutional history. They also demonstrate the permeability between the early modern spaces of justice and social life. For Portugal and Portuguese America, this historiographical agenda had, and continues to have, an impact, benefiting from a burgeoning interest in what was once considered a dry field of research: the history of administration.8 This scholarly confluence has helped us foresee the prevailing legal culture of rights, although we still have a long way to go. Despite their central role in the administration of justice in colonial Brazil, the Tribunais da Relação (“Courts of Appeal”) have yet to be the subject of any detailed study focused on the complex universe of this culture of rights.9 These courts had the fundamental role of representing the king himself, through his desembargadores (judges of courts of appeal) and ouvidores (a type of magistrate) who had the jurisdiction to make decisions in the name of the king. As a result, these Courts did much

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more than preside over ordinary law cases in a higher court (apelações and agravos 10 ). They brought together a series of actions of an extrajudicial nature, normally triggered by petitions submitted by the king’s subjects. The aim of this text is to analyze these extrajudicial petitions. First, because existing research has privileged judicial processes, while these petitions have been much less studied. However, as will be shown here, the range of petitions can show how the Tribunal da Relação’s action had greater permeability than is currently supposed. In addition, we will argue that these petitions were submitted by the subjects in defense of their rights, not only for graces or mercês. Many of these were complaints in which those submitting them requested, amongst other things, that they not be arrested before judgments, bail, or to appeal or summon someone. When approved by the Court, these requests generated royal provisions. Equally significant were the more simplified forms that these cases took, which were processed in a kind of a chamber of writs (called Mesa Grande) within the scope of the Court that will serve as our privileged observation point. In order to portray how these petitions represented a vigorous universe of actions that went far beyond those usually known and studied, it was decided to first scrutinize their institutional paths and afterward to examine certain selected cases and their plaintiffs. In relation to this, it is essential to bear two issues in mind. First, the ubiquitousness of the petitionary system. Petitions addressed to the king which passed through the various offices of the court were an essential element of the colonial legal world. Second, the divergence between the lack of strict and thorough codification and the expectations of the petitioners. In spite of what nineteenth-century scholars said, the early modern legal structure was seen as the guarantor of subjects’ rights: to be recognized, rights did not need to be strictly declared (either by way of a constitution, code or writ as happens today), since they were legally guaranteed as prior and inherent to the condition of each person or body.11 The forceful discourse that sought to legitimize national states during the course of the nineteenth century did its part to demonize this tradition and, as shown above, went on to prosper in independent Brazil. Although not entirely within the scope of this essay, the deconstruction of this discourse will also allow us to revisit the historiographic construction which condemned the Iberian and Ibero-American world to the eternal periphery of the history of political forms, discourses, and practices, as shown by Jorge Canizares.12

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Garantista—as this form of guaranteeing rights was called—does not mean democratic, since we are speaking of a deeply unequal society. Rather, to the contrary, the constant silent movements to recognize rights had amalgamated the social and symbolic links between subjects and the monarchy over the centuries. They thus served to maintain the status quo through the creation of the very “pact” that was frequently called for by colonials during their tense negotiations with authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as the king depended on his subjects, so they depended on him to assert their rights on the ground. Given that the American territories enjoyed considerable autonomy in relation to Portugal—some historians even dubbed them “republics”—the Courts were able to play a special role in strengthening the colonial order within a logic of recognition of rights.13

What Court Are We Talking About? In 1751, a Tribunal de Relação (Court of Appeal) was established in Rio de Janeiro, thereby breaking the monopoly of the Tribunal de Relação in Bahia, which dated to the previous century.14 The justification for its implementation was related to the increasing importance enjoyed by the central and southern regions of Brazil following the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the late 1690s, as well as the new crown policy aimed at expanding the existing judicial network in these overseas dominions. As a royal court, it could receive appeals and not only outranked the colonial judicial authorities but rather brought their jurisdictions together under its aegis.15 The regulations governing the court’s operations were much the same as those that had existed in Bahia since its creation in 1609.16 Among the ten magistrates to serve on the bench, some were responsible for appeals and agravos , there was an ouvidor for civil matters, another for crime, a judge for matters related to the crown, a prosecutor, and a chancellor. The chancellor’s role was to endorse the court’s decisions by application of the royal seal, which meant these decisions were issued in the name of the king. The chancellor was also responsible for overseeing the bailiffs, among other duties. In American territory, he held the same powers as the judge of the highest court in Portugal (Casa da Suplicação) and dealt with matters related to the Desembargo do Paço (a type of royal council based in Lisbon), where all permits and writs granted in the name of the king were processed. The chancellor verified all the letters and sentences

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issued by the desembargadores, such as “letters and writs of pardon, as well as those pertaining to justice and finance, signed by the governor,” as well as “letters of execution of the fines set forth in the sentences.” As a result, within the Court, the chancellor was a member of the so-called Mesa Grande, a specific chamber of writs/orders, where extrajudicial matters were handled. The matters handled by the Mesa Grande are of particular interest for the purposes of this essay. The latter consisted of the chancellor, another appeals court magistrate (the longest serving judge of agravos ), and the governor of the captaincy, which confirms the peculiar character of the decisions taken by the Mesa Grande. It received and processed petitions, appeals for pardon and for the commutation of sentences, requests for bail, and so on. The Mesa also enjoyed the power to decide on each such case. An analysis of the Tribunais da Relação reveals the multiplicity of paths to justice, as well as its own scope and complexity. As a court of appeal, it also dealt with all matters pertaining to the administration of justice. As with similar bodies in Spanish America (the Audiencias ), this multifarious role had not come about by accident. The first Tribunal da Relação established in Bahia was created during the Iberian Union and took its inspiration from its Iberian counterparts; its institutional practice provides evidence of a shared Iberian and Ibero-American legal culture that allows us to speak of a common tradition, notwithstanding a certain difference of context.17 The Audiencias were established in the Americas in the sixteenth century and also operated as Chancelleries.18 In Spain and Portugal, they accumulated several functions, but in the New World they were even more important because they were the main space of the personification of the king in the colonial territories. In addition to the judicial measures linked to ordinary proceedings, they dealt with cases that pertained to specific jurisdictions (widows, orphans, etc.) and those linked to royal officers and matters considered of great relevance. This was the result of the historical formation of the Iberian courts of appeals, where activities and agents converged under the higher courts, providing a model for the Portuguese Tribunais da Relação. In the Spanish world, the Audiencias had played a role since their creation in the protection of certain rights by issuing extrajudicial rulings, for which they included members of the government (viceroys, captains-general and/or governors). Such rulings were issued in the form of writs or orders that conferred a benefit on a given person and were issued only by courts or agents who had the authority to act on

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behalf of the king; the very powers that would go on to be vested in the Mesa Grande.19 The practice of the higher courts or magistrates issuing permits and writs in the name of the king for the protection of the rights of his subjects is by no means an Iberian specificity. As an expression of the forms of administration of justice and of the relationship between kings and their subjects, the practice goes back centuries. They have some similarity with traditional English writs, which are royal orders addressed to a local court so that petitions could be quickly satisfied by way of remedying an unfair act or providing protection to a plaintiff in the event of false accusations (thus giving rise to habeas corpus ).20 According to Raoul van Caenegem, writs became “instruments of fair government,” “executive” measures that were often preferred by subjects to taking matters to court through ordinary judicial proceedings.21 The legitimacy of the writ as an instrument derives from the idea that rights should be preserved by historical tradition, that they are intrinsic and should be understood as prior and inherent to the condition of each subject, and had to be upheld by the king. The presence of such a system in the Iberian world would later—and only later—be seen as extraneous due to the idea that common law is defined in opposition to civil law, thereby underpinning subsequent historiographical portrayals of the two legal worlds as radically distinct. The constitutionalism of the nineteenth century—based on the centrality of law whereby the guarantee of rights came to depend on the will of the legislator—had a strong impact in Latin America and has tended to retroactively expunge this point shared by both legal traditions in the past.22 Pimenta Bueno’s overwhelming declaration cited at the opening of this article is a paradigmatic example of the phenomenon. Similar judicial mechanisms are known from a specific tradition of studies of the protections of rights in Spanish America—especially in Mexico.23 Amparo, as it was called, could be requested in the colonial period from an authority where an individual had suffered a grievance at the hands of a third party. It is hard to classify it because it covers an extremely broad range of petitions to magistrates and even to supreme courts for extrajudicial guarantees. Carlos Garriga labels the granting of amparo, as did contemporaries, as “ordinary writs,” in other words, a formal act of recognition by the court of petitions without any procedural measures.24 According to Garriga, these petitions could be really extremely varied. At the end of the eighteenth century around seventy types of rulings resulting from petitions could be identified: complaints

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about judges, complaints about other authorities, appeals, land recognition requests, extension of terms, appeals to higher courts, and so on. These petitions were varied and recurrent. Many came from indigenous populations and were not only directed at the Audiencias .25 This theme has been widely neglected in relation to Portuguese America. In fact, there is a tendency, vis-à-vis the whole Iberian world, to frame these types of petitions as pleas for clemency or graces (graça)26 because they are related to the power of the monarch to concede certain benefits to his subjects (such as reduced sentences) outside the scope of the ordinary justice system. This power was also delegated to royal councils and courts. Legitimized by the discourse of devotion and fear of God, the graça expressed the monarch’s power of discretion to grant subjects’ requests, independent of the expression of a specific right. It played a central role in justice administered by monarchs and was not given out for free, since it comprised an exchange of services very typical of the tradition of vassalage, as has been widely analyzed by the historiography. However, petitions submitted to the higher courts could follow other two paths, parallel to requests for graça, whose understanding is crucial to prove the capillarity of the legal culture at the time. One, much more known, was procedural (judicial) involving petitions about disputes or litigation directly related to judges and courts; the second one was related to government, which could be brought before the courts and which tended to be resolved extra-judicially, in other words, without knowledge of the details of the case.27 Obviously, this scheme was not fully Cartesian, and one could always try out the other possibility if questions submitted to a non-judicial decision ended up, in contemporary eyes, touching on rights that called for ordinary procedural routes. It might also be that a party could feel aggrieved by a decision made by a judge or the courts and would, therefore, direct appeals to government officials. Petitioners would certainly weigh in the courses of action available to them in an environment where the possibility of petitioning against others or in favor of themselves was always open. The petitions examined here may be framed in this second group, of extra-judicial solutions, although there is no doubt that they were part of what was broadly conceived as justice in this world, as discussed above. In the case of Spain, the legal historiography calls them acts of “government in matters of justice,” indicating a non-judicial decision taken by magistrates together with government authorities in defense of rights (amparos ), possessory interdicts, or appeals.28 In relation to

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Portugal, António Manuel Hespanha presents them as a special category of “petitions for graça in matters of justice” giving rise to writs aimed at changing legal situations (emancipation, clemency, legitimation, registration of donations, the concession of possessory interdicts) or related to the situation of court clerks.29 Graça, in this instance, implies, as always, the monarchical degree of discretion, as in the Spanish case. Referred to as “letters of privilege” or “letters of benefits,” petitions for graça were handled by the chancellor and covered a range of matters including appeals, petitions for freedom from imprisonment, and bail bonds, requests for dismissal or extension of a deadline, requests that a royal ruling not be enforced, petitions for emancipation, authorization to demarcate sesmarias (lots of land), warrants for official residences, confirmation of judges, practicing licenses for lawyers and such other matters as provided for in the broadly and dispersed normative tradition.30 There is a certain proximity between these writs and ordinary legal measures, highlighted by the fact that some of them were indeed part of ordinary lawsuits. They comprised a range of 8798 writs, issued between 1752 and 1808 by the Tribunal da Relação of Rio de Janeiro, analyzed by this research.31 As the century advanced, they tended increasingly to resemble routine legal measures. This may be evidence of a trend toward formal simplification as an aspect of Enlightenment reforms expressed by a search for greater standardization of procedures. However, before considering any hypotheses that this text does not intend to resolve, let us examine these petitions in greater detail.

What Petitions Were These? In the seminal work of Gregorio Martins Caminha, Tratado da forma dos libelos, first published in the sixteenth century (and which remained in print until the nineteenth century), various forms of petitions were cited as having a role in the protection of rights.32 These ranged from requests to appeal to the courts (by presenting their justifications) to others asking for access to inheritance of a deceased person, requests for a defendant to remain at liberty while a court case was underway (the so-called cartas de seguro), petitions asking for the intervention of higher authorities in cases of irregularity or partiality of lower-court judges, requests for the legitimacy of a child to be recognized, and requests for protection to be given to a disfavored plaintiff.33 Although Martins does not describe the

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possible pathways of redress, it is clear that the protection of rights was frequently sought via extrajudicial means. Petitions submitted to the Mesa Grande of the Tribunal da Relação were by and large similar to the ones presented above. Without depending on ordinary judicial lawsuits or an investigation of the facts, these petitions originated from writs or rulings laid down by the Mesa on behalf of petitioners, as provided for in a long tradition of government acts submitted to justice.34 Such petitions cannot, therefore, be described as mere requests for privileges or graça. Even though some of them could be considered within the scope of an ordinary trial—such as appeals—many were accepted as complaints and/or querelas (a type of lawsuit). For our purposes, it is worth examining the latter briefly. In a long tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages, querelas were complaints referred to a higher authority when, for some reason, an ordinary appeal was inadmissible.35 In the eighteenth century, they appeared in Portuguese doctrine as a mechanism of accusation or because of a grievance suffered by a third party, and were directed to a competent authority.36 Abundantly used in the Ancien Régime, where querelas were de rigueur for making complaints against individuals and authorities, the querela procedure was simpler, faster, and more affordable than ordinary proceedings (it is worth noting that criticism of the courts is much older than can be imagined).37 As a result, it was extrajudicial and cases could be solved without a lawsuit properly. One of the measures in which its provenance based on queixas/querelas is most evident was the carta de seguro. This was an ordinary writ resulting from a petition asking that a party accused of an offense remain at liberty while the case was being heard. Cartas de seguro went back centuries in Portugal, and some writers treat them as specific to the Portuguese world.38 As the doctrine has shown, petitions soliciting cartas de seguro fell into two types: negative, in which the defendant denied an accusation and the magistrates assessed the reasons for said denial without taking evidence; and confessional in which defendants explained the reasons for an event in order to substantiate his claim to retain his freedom.39 The Tribunal da Relação was only responsible for granting extensions to cartas de seguro, after the originals approved by local ouvidores had expired. The justification stipulated in the petition was almost invariable: a case remained unresolved, and while waiting for the judgment, the accused wished to remain at liberty. These cartas were described as livrar-se solto do crime and for the period studied a total of 1630 were

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granted—which suggests that they may have been even more common at the local level approved by the ouvidores . In short, they guaranteed the bearer’s right not to be incarcerated by any authority until the charge against him was proven. They have a certain similarity to habeas corpus writs and other types of common law writ. Similar, but not identical, were petitions for bail also dealt with the issue of being freed from imprisonment. These differed from cartas de seguro in that they were requested after someone had been arrested and sought that person’s release pending the final decision on the case.40 Although many of these cartas de seguro had their roots in ordinary lawsuits, many others resulted from querelas . It should be noted that, at the time, prison was not regarded as a punishment.41 Placing someone in jail served different purposes, such as prevention, in the case of those who represented a danger to public order, or protection, in the case of those who were subjected to a threat. It was even used for suspects accused of absconding while the investigation of a case to which they were partly involved was in progress. Both cartas de seguro and bail were instruments that involved amparo (protection) against misuse of authority. It was not uncommon for some petitions to point out “errors of office” committed by some or other officials or judges. Other petitions sent to the Mesa Grande touched specifically on abuses by those involved in administering justice. An emblematic example is the petition submitted by the residents of Paracatu, Minas Gerais, in 1753, which called for measures to be taken against the “serious damage” resulting from abusive fees charged by lawyers.42 The petitioners claimed that the lawyers had “taken eternal possession of court documents” and asked the king to order that a “book” be created in which they could register complaints against the lawyers. They requested penalties for the lawyers as well. This petition resulted in a writ that such a book should be made available to correct the wrongs suffered by the population. Additionally, the Mesa Grande also ordered that the same measure be applied in respect of all of the vilas (a type of village or small town) in the region. Among many other examples, it is worth noting the petition of João Pedro da Cunha, a graduate of the University of Coimbra, who requested in 1766 an extension to his carta de seguro in relation to a crime that an ouvidor had charged him with having committed while he had served as a juiz de sesmarias (a judge who dealt with land issues).43 Petitions for appeal often asked for recognition of rights that could not be granted by a lower-level authority. It comes as no surprise that

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these were, in effect, appeals against the decisions of lower-level judges. Although, this type of petition frequently alleged insufficient time to make an ordinary appeal or procedural errors by one of the parties involved, many of the claimed rights may have been previously denied. For example, two slaves requested that the Tribunal da Relação quash a ruling made against them in response to an appeal filed by their father in São Paulo.44 Both claimed that the court had ruled in favor of their initial plea that their freedom be granted, but that their father had then appealed the decision at the local court of second instance and had managed to have the first ruling overturned (which probably means that the two were the children of a slave-owner who had fathered them with one of his slaves). After the death of their father, they requested that the ruling derived from his appeal be annulled (restitutio in integrum) and that the case records be forwarded to the Tribunal da Relação. They complained that they were held in “cruel captivity,” as “poor, rustic, and miserable” as could be.45 This petition reveals that even when related to a court case petitions could come before the Mesa Grande. Two recurring measures, citar e demandar (“summons and demand”) and provas de direito comum (“evidence of ordinary law”) were mostly used for debt collection. The former occurred frequently during the period in question. A large proportion of them relate to cases where an accused party is in prison and the request is for the plaintiff to continue prosecuting the case nonetheless. It was not uncommon for defendants to be in jail for crimes involving financial matters. One such case was Manoel Fernandez Marquez, who was tried for the crime of diamond smuggling in 1795, but, interestingly, the plaintiff had to request a royal writ before being able to summon him.46 “Evidence of ordinary law” cases were intended to recognize an accusation as legitimate so that a case could be continued. Both types could lead to trials that could languish in the courts, so the option of applying for a (much quicker) tribunal writ meant that a quicker resolution was sought. The Mesa Grande also issued writs related to donations or graça in the name of the king. Most of these were requests for emancipation or a “supplement” of age, not involving defendants (voluntary jurisdiction). This gave applicants the right to act for themselves (being deemed to have reached the age of majority), essential to be able to marry or own goods or a business. The Mesa also issued more than a few rulings approving requests for pardon or commutation of sentences issued in ordinary trials. The fact that, like a typical Ancien Régime institution, the Tribunal da

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Relação brought together different actions and agents, clearly demonstrates that petitions with different contents could be handled using uniform institutional procedures. To understand these well, it is necessary to examine them jointly. Finally, it seems to us essential to reflect on those who requested these writs, bearing in mind that this came at a cost, although one that was lower than what would be spent on an ordinary trial. From the information we have about the petitioners, it is very difficult to draw a precise social profile of them; nonetheless, some assertions can be made by reference to the content of their petitions. As far as assets were concerned, they tended to be modest and the petitioners were middling to low economic status (indeed, it was sometimes alleged that the petitioners were “poor”). Trivial situations, such as cattle rustling, the theft of food, goods, timber, or firewood, and the illegal occupation of lots of land were recurrent offenses. Similarly, one of the commonest grounds provided in petitions for release from imprisonment concerned the prejudicial effects of imprisonment on the petitioner’s business. This was the case of João da Fonseca, who was imprisoned in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1761, in response to a querela filed against him by one Ignacia de Mora and her slaves.47 They accused him of having stolen a “negrinha crioula” (black girl), the daughter of one of Mora’s female slaves, while Fonseca defended himself by claiming to have bought her. He petitioned the Court for bail (for which he paid 50,000 réis ), alleging not only that he was innocent, but that his shoemaking business would suffer serious economic losses if he was sent to prison. There were significant differences in social status among such petitioners. This can be seen in the case of Antonio Bernardo dos Santos of Minas Gerais, who also requested a bail bond (for which he paid 200,000 réis), claiming that he had been the victim of false accusations related to a gunshot injury.48 He employed the same justification as João da Fonseca, “serious economic losses,” but unlike Fonseca, dos Santos was the owner of a factory manned by 30 slaves. As far as imprisonments were concerned, there were many cases of slaves who, together with their owners, submitted petitions requesting to remain free because they had not committed the crimes attributed to them. This was key to upholding the right of their owners to keep them working. In this sense, a particular and not especially typical case seems of interest due to the people asking for protection. In 1761, Maria do Espírito Santo and her daughter Leonor requested bail from the Court,

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denying the accusation that they had beaten and wounded “some female slaves.”49 The accusation had been made by a parda forra (a freed female slave) who, while not one of the victims, could possibly have been related to them. The case did not appear to have been new. In their petition both women stated that they had both already been fined by a local judge, and that having appealed to the Tribunal da Relação, they were no longer in a financial position to continue with the case. They also claimed that they had not initially been arrested as they had requested a carta de seguro, which had only just expired. In their defense, they said they were “poor women” who had no more than a daughter and a granddaughter to support them. They managed to get out of jail, but there is no denying that their case provides clear evidence of a litigious culture in which a freed slave could file such a complaint with serious consequences for colonists. As the examples above show, petitions in relation to a diverse range of matters could be handled by the Mesa Grande in the same way, namely through the issuing of writs in response to requests from petitioners, without the specifics of the cases being considered. It would also be an oversimplification to present such writs as mere cover for impunity, as Pimenta Bueno believed and as has become a commonplace in historiography that sees nothing in Brazil’s past but arbitrariness and authoritarianism. They depict an environment infested by litigation involving the participation of a multitude of social agents, shedding light on their concerns. Obviously, the inequality in colonial society played a fundamental role in marking social differences, but analysis of this inequality reveals nothing less than yet another social battlefield.

Final Considerations After the arrival of the Royal Family in Brazil in 1808, the Tribunal da Relação became the Portuguese court of last resort (Casa da Suplicação), now in the Americas. The duties of the Mesa Grande would now be handled directly by the Desembargo do Paço, the king’s highest council also transferred to the New World. As we have pointed out above, petitions of this type were increasingly integrated into daily court business as the eighteenth century advanced. The Mesa Grande would disappear from its place in the Tribunal da Relação following the subsequent constitutional arrangements. Moreover, the latter would itself be reformulated in

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1834 and its extrajudicial functions reduced (in other words, its functions related to the governance of justice). Nonetheless, the mere fact of bringing its existence to light must go some way to tempering the usual version of the colonial past, as typified by the citation with which we began this article. As in other contemporary areas, Portuguese America was able to provide spaces for litigation and petitioning and enjoyed a legal culture that excelled in particular ways of protecting and supporting its subjects. Issues such as abuse of authority, coercion, and petty tyranny must be seen in the light of a world in which it was possible to petition against them. The colonial world had its limits, though. The “republics” of local government, in the same way as in the Old World, were guided by a recognition of the rights of subjects by monarchs in the name of social order. In America, and especially Brazil, forced labor exponentially increased the intrinsic contradictions, as is well known. However, our analysis reveals that even those from humble backgrounds could fight for protection: the writs cited here show that there was room for people of middling or even poor means to seek redress with their trivial petitions. Perhaps these were who most strongly helped to produce the colonial fabric, a space of antithesis of the rebellions that sought to bring the struggle for their rights to the fore. An illusion, perhaps, but not one greater than that of the national state that would later be born with its discourse to speak on behalf of everyone.

Notes 1. The Ordenações Filipinas (Philippine Ordinances) were approved in 1603 as a compilation of the legislation of the kingdom of Portugal. 2. J. A. Pimenta Bueno (Marques de São Vicente), Apontamentos sobre o processo criminal brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Empreza Nacional do Diario, 2ª. ed., 1849, 1857), p. II. 3. S. Schwartz, “A historiografia recente da escravidão brasileira”, in Escravos, roceiros e rebeldes (Bauru: EDUSC, 2001). 4. R. Kagan, Lawsuits and litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 5. B. Gainôt, Histoire de la justice. France, XVIe-XXIe siécle (Paris: Gallimard, 2009); M. Dinges, “El uso de la justicia como forma de control social en la Edad Moderna”, in J. Fortea, J. Gelabert, T. Mantecón (eds.), Furor et rabies. Violencia, conflicto y marginación en la Edad Moderna (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2002), pp. 47–68; M. Van der

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

Heijden, G. Vermeesch, “The uses of justice in global perspective, 1600– 1900,” in The uses of justice in global perspective, 1600–1900 (Routledge: Londres, New York, 2019), pp. 1–22. As suggested by P. Alonso in Orden procesal y garantias entre Antiguo Regimén y constitucionalimo gaditano (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2008). The bibliography on this subject is extensive. Notable works include P. Costa, Iurisdictio (1969) (Firenze: Centro di Studi per la Storia del Pensiero Giuridico Moderno, 2002); and B. Clavero, Antidora. Antropologia católica de la economia moderna (Firenze: Centro di Studi per la Storia del Pensiero Giuridico Moderno, 1991); for the Portuguese world, A. M. Hespanha, As vésperas do Leviathan. Instituições e poder político. Portugal séc. XVII (Coimbra: Almedina, 1994). P. Cardim, “La jurisdicción real y su afirmación en la Corona portuguesa y sus territorios ultramarinos (siglos XVI-XVIII)”, in F. Aranda, J. D. Rodrigues (eds.), De Re Publica Hispaniae (Madrid: Silex, 2008), pp. 349–388; João Fragoso, Nuno Monteiro (orgs.), Um reino e suas repúblicas no Atlântico. Comunicações políticas entre Portugal, Brasil e Angola nos séculos XVII e XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2017). The most important studies include S. Schwartcz, Burocracia e sociedade no Brasil colonial (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979); A. and M. J. Wehling, Direito e justiça no Brasil colonial: o Tribunal da Relação do Rio de Janeiro (1751–1808) (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo/Recife: Renovar, 2004). In the Portuguese world, agravos were a type of appeal, used when apelações could not be made. C. Garriga, “Gobierno y justicia: el gobierno de la justicia”, Cuadernos de Derecho Constitucional (Madrid: Consejo General del Poder Judicial, 2008). J. Canizares, Católicos y puritanos en la colonización de América (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2008). We have sought here to soften the strength of Hespanha’s assertions made in “A constituição do Império português. Revisão de alguns enviesamentos correntes”, in J. Fragoso, Bicalho, Gouvêa (eds.), O Antigo Regime nos trópicos (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001), pp. 163–188. Created in 1609, it was “re-established” in 1652, Schwartz, Bureaucracy and Society, p. 199. A. and M. J. Wehling, Direito e justiça; N. Camarinhas, Juízes e administração da Justiça no Antigo Regime. Portugal e império colonial (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/FCT, 2010). Regimento de 13 de outubro de 1751, Colleção da Legislação Portugueza (Lisbon: Typografia Maigrense, 1830), pp. 484–502.

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17. C. Garriga, A. Slemian, “‘Em trajes brasileiros’: justiça e constituição na América ibérica (c. 1750–1850)”, Revista de História, 169 (2013), pp. 181–221. 18. See, amongst others, the works published in F. Barrios (eds.), El gobierno de un mundo. Virreinatos y Audiencias em la América hispanic (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha/Fundación Rafael del Pino, 2004). 19. J. J. C. Pereira e Souza, Esboço de hum dicionário jurídico, theoretico, e practico (Lisbon: Typographia Rollandiana, 1827), II, p. 408. 20. The bibliography on this matter is extensive, see amongst others: R. Walker, The constitucional and legal development of habeas corpus as the writ of liberty (Stillwater: Oklahoma State University, 1960); W. Duker, A Constitucional History of Habeas Corpus (Westport-London: Greenwood Press, 1980); B. Mian, English habeas corpus: law, history and politics (San Francisco: Univ. of California-Hastings College of the Law- Cosmos of Humanists Press, 1984); P. Halliday, Habeas corpus. From England to Empire (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). 21. R. C. Van Caenegem, The birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge University Press, 1973), especially “Royal writs and writ procedure”. 22. J. H. Merryman; R. Pérez-Perdomo, The civil law tradition (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007). 23. A. Lira, El amparo colonial y el juicio de amparo mexicano (antecedentes novohispanos del Juicio de Amparo) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972); M. C. Padron, Evolucion del juicio de amparo y del poder judicial federal mexicano (México: Porrúa, 1990); J. Barragán, Algunas consideraciones sobre los cuatro recursos de amparo regulados por las Siete Partidas (Guadalajara: Pandora Editorial, 2000). 24. “Las Audiencias: la justicia y el gobierno de Indias”, F. Barrios (ed.), El gobierno de un mundo, pp. 711–793. 25. In this volume, B. Owensby, Empire of law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); M. Novoa, The protectors of Indians in the Royal Audience of Lima. History, careers and legal culture, 1575–1775 (Leiden-Boston: Brill-Nijhoff, 2016); J. C. Puente Luna, Andean cosmopolitans. Seeking justice and reward at the Spanish Royal Court (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). In this volume, see: A. Masters, B. Dixon, “Indigenous Petitioning in the Early Modern British and Spanish New World”. 26. B. Clavero, “Justicia y gobierno, economia y gracia”, in Real Chancelaría de Granada (2006), pp. 121–148; A. M. Hespanha, La gracia del derecho: economía de la cultura en la edad moderna (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1993). 27. Garriga, “Gobierno y justicia”; J. Arrieta, “Justicia, gobierno y legalidad en la corona de Aragón del siglo XVII”, Estudis: Revista de Historia Moderna, no. 22 (1996), pp. 217–248.

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28. These rulings “are nothing more than the governmental manifestation of the supreme power of justice that the highest courts exercise in the name in the name of the king: that it to say, they provided protections for rights that were, in the event of a lawsuit were declared by law” (Garriga, “Las Audiencias”, 2014), p. 84. 29. A. Hespanha, História das Instituições. Épocas medieval e moderna (Coimbra: Almedina, 2004), p. 337. 30. Hespanha, História das Instituições, pp. 361–363. 31. Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Tribunal do Desembargo do Paço – Registro de Provisões, Cartas e Alvarás da Relação do Rio de Janeiro 1752–1808 (ANRJ-TDP). Códice 24, 16 volumes. 32. J. M. da Costa, Tratado da forma dos libelos, das allegações judiciais, do processo do Juízo Secular, e Seu Ecclesiastico, e dos Contratos, com suas Glosas, do licenciado Gregorio Martins Caminha (Coimbra: Officina dos Irmãos, e Sobrinho Ginioux, 1764). 33. Idem, p. 125s. One of the examples that Caminha presents is quite significant: it is a petition in which the plaintiff found himself facing a land dispute with a nobleman and who was aware that everyone in the town was related to him. He asked for another judge to be brought in to hear his case, in the name of protection (p. 133). 34. In addition to the Mesa Grande’s power to receive and dispatch petitions, it also chose those who were to serve as city councilors and made rulings on judicial matters related to the crown and the Church. Regimento (Statute) 13 October 1751, paragraph 53, p. 493. 35. A. Barbosa, Repertoruim iuris civilis et canonici (Lugduni, Ioannis-Antonii Huguetan & Guillielmi Barbier, 1668), p. 313; Garriga, Gobierno y justicia, p. 79. 36. Pereira and Souza, Primeiras linhas sobre o Processo Criminal (Lisbon: Typografia Rollandiana, 1820), Chapter 3, “On Querelas. A querela is a complaint filed by an individual in a competent court in relation to a criminal fact for reasons of private or public interest” (p. 34); “It differs from an ordinary complaint in which a party filing an ordinary complaint is obliged to substantiate it, whereas a party filing a querela must only report to the magistrates such knowledge as he possesses” (p. 35). 37. P. Alonso, “El solemne orden de los juicios la lentitud como problema en la historia del proceso en Castilla”, Anuario de la Facultad de Derecho, no. 5 (2001), pp. 23–54. 38. M. H. Leitão, Do direito lusitano. Dividido em três tratados. Agravos. Cartas de Seguro. Inquirições (1745) (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009); A. M. Hespanha, Como os juristas viam o mundo. 1550-1750. Direitos, estados, pessoas, coisas, contratos, ações e crimes (Lisbon: Create Space, 2015).

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39. In Gregorio Martins’ treatise (JM da Costa, Tratado da forma dos libelos, p. 132) the carta de seguro makes an appearance in the petição de carta de seguro confessativa com defeza (“petition for a confessional carta de seguro with a defense”) in which an alleged crime is described together with arguments about the real course of events as well as the reasons behind the petitioners’ part in the occurrence. 40. A. V. Cabral, Practica judicial, muyto util, e necessária para osque principiaõ os officios de julgar … (Coimbra: Na Officina de Antonio Simoens Ferreira, 1730). 41. In the event that a party was imprisoned, a corresponding reduction in the sentence was possible. A. Aguero, Castigar y perdonar (Madrid: CEPC, 2008), p. 256s. 42. ANRJ-TDP, v. 1, fl. 8–8v. 43. ANRJ-TDP, v. 4, fl. 33. 44. ANRJ-TDP, v. 4, fl. 19v–20. 45. At the time, the conditions of “rustic” and “miserable” were understood as conferring a right to protection. Hespanha, Imbecilitas (São Paulo: AnnaBlume, 2010). 46. ANRJ-TDP, v. 12, fl. 41. 47. ANRJ-TDP, v. 3, fl. 198–198v. 48. ANRJ-TDP, v. 3, fl. 258v–259v. 49. ANRJ-TDP, v. 3, fl. 386.

CHAPTER 5

Petitions to Correct Revolutionary Rumours: The City Council of Santafé Bogotá and Madrid’s Agentes de Indias, c. 1780–1795

Álvaro Caso Bello

In May 1795, a petition made its way to the desks of the Spanish Secretary of State Affairs on behalf of the city council of Santafé (presentday Bogotá), the viceregal and Audiencia (appeals’ court) seat of New Granada. The document brought up important points related to the alleged participation of members of the local council in events that had transpired almost a year earlier in the city. On the morning of August

Á. Caso Bello (B) Program for Latin American Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Canada e-mail: [email protected] University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_5

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19, 1794 several broadsheets (pasquines ) critical with the Spanish regime appeared throughout the Santafé. The pasquines , authorities presumed, had been posted in the cover of darkness the previous evening. As a consequence of this event, a whistle-blower denounced to authorities that a wider conspiracy inspired by French revolutionary ideas was underway. Dissent seemed to be spreading like wildfire to other cities in New Granada where authorities reported similar instances of public protest.1 Back in Santafé, Viceroy José de Ezpeleta took decisive action and, alongside the Spanish-appointed Audiencia, initiated proceedings against the presumed conspirators. Some were swiftly imprisoned and eventually sent to stand trial in Spain. Among the accused were men who served, or had served, terms in the locally selected municipality. Consequently, some city councillors took to attacking the judicial procedures as illegitimate and part of a conspiracy spearheaded by European-born Spaniards. This latter group controlled much of the crown-appointed positions, and were accused of trying to discredit the loyalty of those born in the Americas to the monarchy.2 In its archival context, the May petition defending Santafé’s locals against the accusations of Spanish authorities bore certain peculiarities. The document stands out from other materials in a voluminous dossier (expediente) for its good calligraphy, and for it being inscribed in fresh sheets of stamped paper valid for the years 1794–1795. This contrasted with the often more crammed, less legible, writings in a re-stamped paper that were sent to Spain from across the Atlantic—and that, as such, sometimes appear to have been damaged in the passage. Unlike most documents dated and signed in Santafé and bundled together with the May petition, the latter one was dated in Madrid had only one person as its signatory. The lone signatory of the May petition, in addition to closing with the traditional formula “to Your Majesty asks,” included another phrase found across many documents in archives of the Spanish-speaking world: “en virtud de poder” or “by virtue of power [of attorney].” This pointed at the fact that the petitioning party, the city council, approached “Your Majesty’s feet” through a legally authorized proxy.3 The signatory of the petition did not betray much of his identity beyond a male name, “Saturio Ángel,” and the family name “de Velasco.” When contrasted with other sources in the massive dossier opened around Santafé’s allegedly pro-French conspiracy, the name at the bottom of the petition does not call to mind the cast of actors that repeated themselves

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in accusations and counter-accusations: the members of the Audiencia, the creole vecinos of Santafé, the yearly selected aldermen, the young conspirators imprisoned. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the petition’s lone signatory was not one of Santafé’s sons. At least in this case, the scions of local elites did not travel to Madrid to defend the local’s honour against the authorities’ accusations. Instead, the signatory’s name could be found in one of the annual guides (guías ) to litigation and more generally, claims-making in Madrid. According to a guide for 1794, Saturio Ángel de Velasco, the petition’s signatory, lived in the Spanish capital. His quarters were located in the calle (street) de Cantarranas, not far from the eastern edge of the city’s urban core marked by the paseo del Prado. By 1794, Saturio’s name could be found on this guide alongside those of other twenty-nine men under a category of practitioners labelled as “Agentes del Número de Indias with royal title given by His Majesty.”4 Saturio Ángel de Velasco’s name and the transcribed dossier were collected by historian José Manuel Pérez Sarmiento’s historical documenta on the “precursor” movements of Colombia’s independence. There, Saturio Ángel’s name can be seen interspaced alongside other, more celebrated individuals in the nation-state’s history of independence like creole savant Antonio de Nariño. While the petition’s content itself has not been thoroughly seen as a proto declaration of independence, its inclusion in this canon of documents make it part of the evidence once mobilized to point to the increasing divergence between Santafé’s creole élites—and by analogy, of other similar groups in the Americas—and the Spanish regime. Upon closer inspection, this document relates to a different trajectory. One that is not revolutionary in the sense of rupture, but that was crucial in holding the Spanish global polity together. Namely, that of the resort of subjects to petitioning “at Your Majesty’s feet” in Madrid as a way to air grievances, and in the process obtain a patchwork of rights-as-privileges through particular bills (reales cédulas issued at a party’s request). This chapter reveals how turning to a member of the official corps of royally titled Agentes de Indias on the part of Santafé’s city council was part of a strategy to disarm the accusations of subversion, instead of a revolutionary move. Taking a prospective approach to Santafé’s petitions, this chapter shows that Saturio Ángel de Velasco, someone with little to none first-hand experience of New Granada in general and these events in particular, had an outsized role in transmitting a version of events more favourable to the Santafereño locals than the one pushed by Spanish appointees. The view that Saturio conveyed, moreover, was

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heavily informed by his experience in the metropole. Likewise, it was probably shaped by the professional pressures he faced as a practicing Agente. In turn, this essay shows that documents regarded as part of a cache of writings precursor to independence were, in actuality, produced by people like the Agentes who were far from dissident actors in the Hispanic world.5

“From the depths of the Empire, they write to the King”6 Documents submitted “at Your Majesty’s royal feet” with a supplicatory tone like the one Saturio Ángel de Velasco submitted were far from exceptional in the Spanish-speaking world.7 Analogous documents fill thousands of archival boxes and bundles preserved in archives and collections on both sides of the Spanish-speaking Atlantic. To this point: it is the very ubiquitous nature of such supplicatory or petitionary documents that has made them a valuable source in all subfields of colonial Spanish-American history instead of a subject matter in themselves. Petitioning the monarch for what subjects wanted to receive was a central part of the Spanish conception of kingship. This reinforced the royal person at the centre of distributive justice. Such tenets were rooted on the modelling of the monarch after Christ. Much like Christ called on his disciples to ask to receive—“Omnis enim qui petit, accipit” Mt. 7: 7–8—those who did not ask for the monarch’s favour were unlikely to receive it. In turn, as historian Jean-Pierre Dedieu put it, subjects “asked incessantly.”8 They asked to receive favourable rulings, grants and privileges allocated by the institutions both the farthest and the closest to the physical presence of the sovereign in Iberia. If subjects of the Spanish crown “asked incessantly” well into the nineteenth century, the question of whether just asking was enough to actually receive was very much an open one. In this regard, the supplicatory vernacular was so ubiquitous that it is worth asking which documents were not petitions. This question exceeds the limits of this study. One could accept an eighteenth-century definition that claimed that a petition, narrowly understood, was the clause that performed the ask in a given writing. Therefore, there could be memoriales or representaciones — terms often conflated with petitions—that were not petitions. Conversely there could be some documents that fit a petitionary framework simply by including the “ask.” More fundamentally for the purposes of this essay,

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the question remained as of how to mount an effective ask—one that lead to actual receiving what the demanding party wanted. By mid-seventeenth century it was already evident that the growing size and diversity of the realms of the Spanish crown and the multitudes they contained posed challenges to petitioners. This was particularly true for those who wished to mount an ask before the Monarchy’s institutions based on the Iberian Peninsula but lived in the Americas or Asia. The placing of fragments of royal authority on crown appointees in the Americas was key in creating a “polycentric Monarchy.”9 Nonetheless, certain aspects remained the preserve of Madrid’s institutions for the Indies. These included a wide-array of “offices, pensions, nobility titles, decorations … matters of rank, declarations of age majority, the authorization to break up primogeniture entails,” and final appeals in litigation.10 These many rulings and grants were not distributed spontaneously; instead, those who wanted to receive had to ask for them. What was more, the fact that the political and social architecture of this world was built on a naturally presumed inequality, legitimized the unequal treatment of the subjects’ demands. Any visitor to Spanish and Spanish-American archives has seen many boxes of documents with supplicatory documents that remained unanswered. As Simona Cerutti has argued for other European contexts, even if petitioning was greatly extended, these documents often received an unequal treatment and, frequently, very disparate answers.11 Given such built-in inequalities, plus other logistical and practical difficulties, the “petition and response system” in the Spanish metropole—one in which, according to some characterizations, “the king” emitted legislative answers to petitions from vassals from the Indies—hardly worked spontaneously. At least since midseventeenth century, there were many more actors working behind the scenes on behalf of the petitioning subject and the responsive king.12 Certainly, the performance of the ask did not guarantee a response, and less so a favourable one. In turn, assuming that their demands would not be treated equally and spontaneously be responded to, peoples on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic devoted energies to effectively mount their asks. This included, but also exceeded, the very crafting of a petitionary writing in terms of materiality and content. Taking an expression of early modern Spanish parlance, this broader process has been described as “solicitación” instead of the more narrowly defined petición.13 In any place of the Spanish world where subjects could ask something from royal alter egos, systems emerged to aid claimants or petitioners

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to mount their demands. Some of these systems were regulated, others were not. Benchmarks and obstacles faced by claimants varied greatly depending on place, the petitioners’ background, and what was ultimately demanded. In sites where speakers of indigenous languages were the majority of petitioners, legal and paralegal practitioners emerged to translate their demands into the increasingly formulaic Castilian legal vernacular.14 In other sites, the task of “solicitación” was mostly related to the follow-up of a given lawsuit or claim as it made its way through the “Cretan labyrinth” of lower and appellate courts.15 Each tribunal, Council, or Secretariat was staffed with layer upon layer of personnel. Claimants and their legal representatives saw these officials as potentially swaying their claims in one way or the other. Petitioners resorted to specialist practitioners in places proximate to them and where they could wield power locally. Arguably, then, the resort to specialists in navigating the labyrinths of offices and personnel was even more justified for peoples in the Americas when it came to push their demands through the metropole’s upper layers. Already in the seventeenth century, officials in Madrid’s Council of the Indies began noting the presence of practitioners specialized in moving the petitioners’ interests forward within the institution. Historian Guillaume Gaudin notes how one of the Council of the Indies’ Undersecretaries in the 1640s took to creating a list of these men and dubbed them as “agents.” The matters managed by the self-appointed Sherpas of the Castilian metropole went beyond litigation—strictly defined, as it was, by procedural rules. Unlike lawyers and attorneys (abogados and procuradores ) in narrowly defined forums of litigation, these agents (agentes, solicitadores de negocios or agentes de negocios ) had a more capacious job description. Sometimes they acted as coordinators of a larger team of men that could include lawyers, notaries, printers, and attorneys, associated with discharging a task trusted to them. In other cases, they acted as standalone practitioners with a few aides such as scribes. This capacious portfolio of tasks that an agent could perform on behalf of an interested party led Gaudin to define agents as “professionals of the solicitación.” Some became akin to specialists in Indies-related matters that distant clients wished to push for in Madrid’s oficinas.16 Agents were not only available to help those far removed from Spain to mount an effective ask “at Your Majesty’s Royal Feet.” They could also be useful to travelling unacquainted with the metropole’s sinews of

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power. In either case, those who wanted a royal pronouncement issued in Madrid, could resort to agents who “make a living out of corresponding and running agencies on behalf of vassals from the Indies.”17 Assuming that writing to the king from New Granada would hardly suffice to counteract the officials’ claims about subversion, the next section shows how Santafé’s aldermen turned to Madrid-based agents to make their voices heard.

When Writing from Afar Is Not Enough: The Agentes de Indias and Santafé’s Rendering of the pasquines Conspiracy For the Santafereño aldermen, the question of how to ensure that their version of the pasquines incident made it to “Your Majesty’s feet” was of utmost importance. Surely, they could write to the king from afar. But, as noted in the previous section, ensuring that their informative or supplicatory writings made it to the metropole, and that they were considered by authorities, was a whole different matter. Moreover, eighteenth-century viceroys and other crown appointees faced less communicative challenges when rendering their version of events. This factor, arguably, made Santafé’s need to respond to the accusations all the more pressing. In the worst-case scenario, not only individuals allegedly involved in the revolutionary plot would be prosecuted and convicted. A broader crackdown could be justified if the highest royal officials became persuaded that “Santafé has adopted the principles of France: that Santafé is a town of rebel heretics.”18 An ever-growing governing apparatus in Madrid and changes in the division of labour within it further advanced the idea that proxies were a necessity for distant claimants. The complexifying of Madrid’s oficinas in the seventeenth century was related to the rise of the first specialist agents. Similarly, as new offices came to be in the eighteenth century, the place of these practitioners was further solidified. How to navigate the expanding and changing—both in scope and personnel—units in Madrid’s governing institutions was a pressing issue for interested parties or particulares. Unlike crown appointees in the Americas who enjoyed a preferential system of communications with authorities, particulares did not have the assurance that their writings would make it to “the king.” When communicating in an official capacity, crown appointees such as viceroys and

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judges used the vía reservada. Letters sent through the vía reservada ended before the desks of the various portfolio-specific state secretariats (secretarios de Estado y del despacho): State, Royal Treasury, War, Navy, and Indies. The secretaries at the helm of each division had the privilege of dispatching personally with the king. In contrast, the city council of Santafé was considered as an ordinary, non-crown-related, party. As such, its matters, even if received or reviewed by the Secretaries, were catalogued as a particular business (asuntos de parte). As such, they often merited the involvement of another body: that of the Council of the Indies.19 This division of labour in Madrid likely affected how the Santafereños thought of making their case in Spain. If the crown appointees’ version of events would likely be seen ex officio by authorities, the aldermen had to ensure that theirs was also considered. Added to these deliberations there were other factors to consider. These included the perceptions and attitudes of Madrid’s officialdom towards outsiders in general and parties from the Indies in particular.20 Spanish-American residents of the metropole claimed a growing official hostility against them. Ideas about the relative effectiveness of Madrid outsiders as advocates for interests from the Indies also compounded with the very real costs and risks of travels to Spain. Ultimately, all these factors shaped the Americanos ’ proclivity to turn to established agents in Madrid. Until the late 1770s, the question of who were the best court agents was somewhat of an open secret. Letters and far-flung networks influenced the perceptions of who were the most effective agents for those in the Indies. Word travelled fast and far. Certain men came to be held as influential in Madrid—“con mano en la corte” as it was said in an idiosyncratic expression of the 1700s—and their reputations became known in the Americas.21 People increasingly thought that having an influential agent improved the chances of the petitioners’ success. In 1778, the crown intervened in the question of who the most suitable Madrid-based agents were. It did so by sanctioning a list of thirty preapproved and officially vetted Agentes de Indias. While framed as largely inconsequential by historians, the measure likely steered the representation of Spanish-American interests towards the thirty royally titled Agentes.22 In 1795, officials deemed the thirty men as insufficient to process the volume of business from the Americas, and they expanded it to fifty. One of the Agentes ’ main privileges was the fact that their names and addresses were advertised through the

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circulation of the royal law that proclaimed them as title holders. Advertisement also came through by way of widely circulated printed guides to Madrid. The power of the law of Agentes to steer colonial clients to beneficiaries of these titles is perhaps best encapsulated by one example. One day in March 1779 the aldermen in the city council of La Plata, present-day Sucre (Bolivia), gathered to choose a new proxy in Madrid. Upon receiving the list of thirty Agentes, issued 237 days earlier, La Plata’s aldermen decided that they would choose their new man in Madrid from those in the official list.23 When the pasquines alleged conspiracy became known, the aldermen in Santafé did not immediately take to changing their representation in Madrid. Later events show that the Santafereños could have taken to appoint a creole lawyer from New Granada and longtime resident of Madrid as their proxy. Instead, the municipality chose to preserve the good offices of Saturio Ángel de Velasco. Indeed, almost simultaneously to the pasquines conspiracy, Saturio had presented two different petitions on the municipality’s behalf. Within four days in June 1794 Saturio, a member of the group of title-holding Agentes, petitioned in favor of the municipality and denounced the Spanish-appointed Audiencia.24 When and how Saturio came to represent Santafé’s municipality remains somewhat nebulous. In 1792, he had obtained some private bills exempting a Spanish merchant who resided there, one Vicente Rojo, from serving in the municipality. Two years earlier, in January 1790, Saturio had been awarded a title as Agente. Likely through his connections to Rojo or to other individuals with ties to Santafé’s municipal council, by mid-1794 Saturio had obtained a power of attorney to represent this city in the Spanish metropole. Over the next year, Velasco became involved in Santafé’s defence in the case of the pasquines and in that of the individuals accused in the conspiracy. Two months after the pasquines ’ incident, a lawyer and alderman in Santafé’s city council took to writing to a counterpart in the metropole. The alderman in question was creole lawyer José Caicedo y Flores. In his writings to Madrid, he alleged that the aborted plan for rebellion in 1794 was, actually, a fabrication by the European Spaniards. The lie’s purpose, Caicedo argued, was to serve as an excuse for the Europeancontrolled Audiencia and viceroy to clamp down on local creole élites. For everything had started with the “false [self-]denunciation” by “European Spaniard” and militiaman José Arellano. Arellano had turned himself to authorities and alleged that he had been part of a wider plot to subvert

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public order.25 This triggered the Audiencia’s reaction that had ended up with several local lawyers, students, and some former members of the municipality in prison. The most notorious indicted was Antonio de Nariño, who stood accused of having translated and privately printed copies of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. In his letter, Caicedo asked his correspondent in Madrid to set in motion a defence of the local interests in the metropole. Caicedo wanted to “have the Agente,” in all likelihood Saturio Ángel de Velasco, to “write a petition” defending the municipality and the creoles’ standing more broadly. The document should be “comprehensive of what I have told you, asking from His Majesty” a declaration that overruled the Audiencia’s proceedings against the falsely accused conspirators.26 The very presence of Saturio Ángel de Velasco presenting petitions on Santafé’s behalf in 1794 revealed that the municipality did not trust that its writings from afar would make it to “Your Majesty’s feet.” By asking his Madrid correspondent, a lawyer called Juan Antonio Rubio Plaza, to have the city’s Agente produce a writing, Caicedo’s request lends further credibility to the notion that writing from afar was not enough. Caicedo furnished his correspondents in Europe with evidence to substantiate their writings. It is also likely that Caicedo or someone else with ties to the municipality gave money to pay for the expenses of Santafé’s men in Madrid. If the agents did not receive money upfront, they would have requested for retroactive payments of honoraria and expenses incurred in the follow-up of the municipality’s affairs. Certainly, writing and lodging a petition were only the first steps of a longer process that transpired within the metropolitan oficinas. In the case of one of the petitions Saturio presented in mid-1794, there were, at least, seven different steps that transpired after the Agente lodged his original petition. Each step of this process merited could merit a follow-up by the Agente by showing up in person to the Council of the Indies’ offices. After 242 days, the Council decided in favour of one of Saturio’s petitions at Santafé’s behest. But the documents transmitting these favourable royal decisions were not issued spontaneously. Saturio had to approach the Council and obtain several copies of these documents. He also had to pay the proper taxes and, in all likelihood, additional tips to the Council’s staff. He later sent these documents across the Atlantic through different mail routes. This way it would be ensured that at least one copy reached the interested party at whose request the crown’s institutions had issued a ruling.27

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By March 21, 1795, Caicedo’s original correspondent, Juan Antonio Rubio Plaza, presented a first petition on the pasquines matter. This document stands out as it reveals how people in Madrid could modify the language of documents sent from the Americas. Rubio Plaza’s writing only made elliptical references to Caicedo’s letters. The document argued that authorities’ accusations were geared at trying to “stain” the city’s credentials of loyalty to Spain. Such “bad reputation,” according to Rubio Plaza, had then been “extended all over Europe” and was blown out of proportion. The petition then, “limited” itself to “request from Your Majesty’s supreme authority, the timeliest remedy” to bring “calm and happiness to the souls of the principal inhabitants of that kingdom [New Granada], and to the kingdom in general.”28 By May 1795, Rubio Plaza presented a much longer petition that transcribed more literally some of Caicedo’s expressions. By reproducing Caicedo’s language verbatim, this writing ended up being more harshly worded and contrasted with Rubio Plaza’s previous petition.29 Two days later, Saturio Ángel de Velasco, who had remained largely silent after his interventions on Santafé’s behalf in 1794, resurfaced. Hence, in May 1795, he followed suit and presented the petition referenced at the top of this essay.30 Juan Antonio Rubio Plaza was not an Agente but he probably knew Saturio. By petitioning on his own, Rubio Plaza could have intended to lay claim to the role of Santafé’s sole or main agent in Madrid. In the process of so doing, he might have wanted to lay the groundwork to claim some form of compensation from working on Santafé’s behalf. Saturio’s intervention, two days after Rubio’s, points at the fact that he could have felt threatened in his status as the municipality-funded proxy in the metropole. Not the least, because Saturio, and other of his peers, were, by then, on their heels regarding potential competition in the field of representation of overseas’ interests in Spain. Days before Saturio’s May petition, on April 21, 1795, the crown announced the allocation of twenty additional titles of Agentes de Indias. Like other Agentes, Saturio would have been intent on preserving the municipal business of Santafé as part of his larger practice. Competition among Agentes for municipal mandates was certainly not unheard of. Saturio would have wanted to receive a decent honorarium paid for by the municipal funds. By petitioning authorities soon after Rubio Plaza did, Saturio displayed his skills to his clients in Santafé while trying to preserve their trust. This, in the face of one concrete competitor, Rubio Plaza, and an expanded field of Agentes who could have wanted to bring on a city like Santafé as a client.

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Saturio Ángel de Velasco’s petition was shorter than Rubio’s and largely devoted to discredit the insurrection’s denouncer, José de Arellano. Arellano had already been the subject of criticism. Caicedo, and Rubio echoing him, took issue with Arellano’s “false denunciation.” A particular point of the ire for Caicedo was the fact that Arellano was allowed to walk away “free.” In contrast, the Audiencia had taken a hard-line approach towards his alleged accomplices, younger men who were mostly law students. Caicedo had also denounced Arellano’s unreliability—a claim that was further sustained by notarized testimonies that attacked his personal qualities. On his end, Saturio repackaged some of these ideas in terms that would further vindicate the honour and conduct of Santafé’s locals. The Agente presented the matter of the pasquines as the work of Arellano, a mastermind who “seduced” other “youths” into cooperating with him. The language employed by Saturio was distinctive. The Agente emphasized Arellano’s “malice” and presented him as a person of “libertine life, vagrancy, and excessive debts” who instigated turmoil to improve his personal fortune. That way, Saturio distanced Santafé’s local citizenry from the conspiracy. Not only this, but it also allowed him to put some distance between the “author of the pasquines,” Arellano, and the “innocent youths” who had fallen prey to his promises.31 Saturio’s vindication of the alleged accomplices was an effective tactic not only from the municipality’s perspective but for that of his other clients. Simultaneous to his involvement in the municipality’s defence, Saturio also sought to obtain the release from prison of one of the accused, law student Enrique Umaña.32 Only a few days before presenting the May 13 petition, on April 22, 1795, Saturio approached authorities in Spain with a writing defending don Enrique’s conduct as commissioned by his father, Ignacio Umaña. The younger Umaña had been rounded up by authorities in the aftermath of Arellano’s denunciation. In his defence of Enrique, the Agente also positioned the matter of Arellano’s unreliability front and centre. In the opening lines of his writing on behalf of the Umañas, Saturio accused Arellano of seeking, by his false denunciation (“impostura”), to involve “that noble city and its in habitants in the horrible crime of rebellion.” Saturio’s petition on behalf of Enrique Umaña was also reinforced by the documents he received on behalf of the city of Santafé, for the writings the Agente received from Ignacio, Enrique’s father, were far less detailed than the information Saturio mobilized in the younger Umaña’s defence. Overall, the two

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petitions, the one on behalf of the Umañas and that in defence of Santafé, reinforced one another.33 The fact that Saturio petitioned on behalf of Enrique Umaña was not entirely surprising. Locals in Santafé could have steered Ignacio Umaña to trust Saturio given his previous work on behalf of the city and of certain vecinos.34 Men involved in the municipality’s defence before the Audiencia in Santafé, like lawyer José Caicedo, were also immersed in seeking the younger Umaña’s release from unjust imprisonment.35 Agentes, on their end, were used to representing more than one client at once and did not see a conflict of interest in so doing. The tactic of differentiating the city from Arellano and his accomplices worked. In December 1795, a declaration from Manuel de Godoy, the Spanish Secretary of State affairs and royal favourite, observed that the king largely contented himself with the explanations given by Saturio. The pasquines had brought up “maxims that in these times have disturbed the peace of so many peoples,” but the crown did not confound the actions of “some individuals” with those of “such city is loyal, faithful, and loving of its sovereign.”36 These words were a sign of the acceptance of the messages transmitted by locals in Santafé, and finetuned in Madrid by its proxies. The crown, however, did not concede to some of the more vitriolic points made by Caicedo. In particular, authorities did not grant that Arellano’s accusations were false. Madrid also refrained from condemning the Audiencia’s proceedings as unjust. It did, however, accept the type of damage control done by Saturio. Namely, the tempering of the harshest ideas about the state of affairs in New Granada.37 Despite these successes, Saturio’s petitions and tactical adjustments were not as far-reaching as people in Santafé, like José de Caicedo, would have wanted. Indeed, Caicedo seemed to push for the involvement of New Granada-born lawyer and Madrid resident Joaquín Dareche y Urrutia as a replacement for the other proxies.38 Ultimately, Caicedo aspired to himself defend Santafé at His Majesty’s feet, something that he did not accomplish.

Concluding Remarks: Madrid, the Agentes, and Spanish-American Petitioning People like Saturio Ángel de Velasco do not fit neatly into the usual narratives of the age of revolution in the Spanish Americas. Such accounts often still see in the pasquines conspiracy a forerunner of later dissent

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and independence. Those who figure more prominently in these histories are the likes of Antonio Nariño, creole savant, dissident, and future leader of independent Cundinamarca. Retrospectively, a focus on those like Nariño is warranted given his later role in the independence movements of New Granada. But in the immediate aftermath of the alleged conspiracy, it was men like Saturio Ángel de Velasco, with little to none first-hand experience of New Granada or the Americas, who had an outsized role in transmitting a version of events more favourable to Santafé’s locals. In discharging his regular occupation, and in doing so in a somewhat self-interested manner, Agente Velasco advanced arguments that simultaneously benefited the municipality and Enrique Umaña.39 The Agente’s defence of his clients without disavowing the crucial tenets of the Spanish Monarchy, can be seen as deescalating the conflict surrounding the pasquines .40 By foregrounding Saturio Ángel de Velasco’s involvement in the longer arc of the pasquines ’ episode, this incident appears under a new light. While it is unavoidable to think of the mutual accusations between Santafereños and Spanish appointees as anticipating the kind of tensions that would come to head during the years of the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy, it is also hard to disentangle the Agentes from the resolution of this episode. The Agentes ’ involvement also advances a new view of how authorities configured their vision of America from Madrid. One that not only includes the usual high-ranking ministers or the monarch— either literally or figuratively—but also characters like the Agentes, and other intermediaries, who were essential for Spanish-American petitions to make it to the Monarchy’s authorities.

Notes 1. Viceroy Ezpeleta to the governors of the viceroyalty of New Granada, Santafé, September 5, 1794, in: José Manuel Pérez Sarmiento, (ed.), Causas célebres a los precursores: Derechos del hombre; Pesquisa de sublevación; Pasquines sediciosos, vol. 1 (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1939), pp. 225–26. 2. A summary of these events in: Anthony McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics Under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 285–93. Newer works on this include: Georges Lomné, “1794, ou l’année de la ‘sourde rumeur’, la faillite de l’absolutisme éclairé dans la vice-royauté de Nouvelle-Grenade,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 365 (September 1,

5

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

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2011), pp. 9–29. Fear of French-inspired conspiracies was widespread extending, for instance, as far as Buenos Aires on the other end of South America: Lyman L. Johnson, “The French Conspiracy of 1795: Paranoia and Opportunism on the Eve of Independence in Buenos Aires,” in Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt, and Jane Rendall (eds.), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 101– 20. Similar pasquinades or publicly-posted critiques were a device shared in various urban rebellions across the Spanish Americas: Sergio Serulnikov, “Violence, Resistance, and Intercultural Adaptations,” in Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen S. Fine-Dare (eds.), The Andean World (Routledge, 2018), p. 180. On the role of rumors and communications on the spreading of ideas and news about presumed rebellions see: Cristina Soriano, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Saturio Ángel de Velasco on behalf of Santafé in the kingdom of New Granada, Madrid, May 13, 1795, in: Pérez Sarmiento, Causas célebres a los precursores, 1939, 1, pp. 329–35. While citing the edited version for better pagination purposes, I consulted the original documents available through the online Portal de Archivos Españoles (pares.mcu.es), kept in: Archivo General de Indias [hereafter: ES-AGI], Estado, 55, no. 1. Guía de Litigantes y Pretendientes Para El Año de 1794 (Madrid, 1793), pp. 28–30. Justo Cuño Bonito, “Esperando a Nunca Jamás: El Inicio Del Fin En La Dominación Española En La Nueva Granada, 1794, 1810,” in Ivana Frasquet (ed.), Jamás Ha Llovido Reyes El Cielo … De Independencias, Revoluciones y Liberalismos En Iberoamérica (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2013), pp. 145–68. “Du fin fond de l’Empire ils écrivent au roi.” Jean-Pierre Dedieu, Après le Roi: essai sur l’effondrement de la Monarchie Espagnole (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2010), p. 9. The traditional formula was: “a V.M. sup.ca ”. Dedieu, p. 9. Expression borrows from: Pedro Cardim et al., (eds.), Polycentric Monarchies How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). Dedieu, Après le Roi, p. 9. Simona Cerutti and Massimo Vallerani, “Suppliques, Lois et cas dans la normativité de l’époque moderne, Introduction,” L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques. Revue électronique du CRH , no. 13 (June 12, 2015), https://doi.org/10.4000/acrh.6545. Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste

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13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

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Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 98, no. 3 (2018), pp. 377–406. Guillaume Gaudin, “Un acercamiento a las figuras de agentes de negocios y procuradores de Indias en la Corte,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. Nouveaux mondes mondes nouveaux - Novo Mundo Mundos Novos - New world New worlds, October 2, 2017, https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevom undo.71390. Examples of these practitioners in: Victor Gayol, Laberintos de justicia: procuradores, escribanos y oficiales de la Real Audiencia de México (1750– 1812) (Zamora [Michoacán]: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2007); Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Renzo Honores, “Presence and Use of Pragmatic Legal Literature in Habsburg Peru (16th–17th Centuries),” in Otto Danwerth and Thomas Duve (eds.), Knowledge of the Pragmatici: Legal and Moral Theological Literature and the Formation of Early Modern IberoAmerica (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), pp. 131–50. Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 55–57. Gaudin, “Un acercamiento a las figuras de agentes de negocios.” On this specific official: Guillaume Gaudin, El imperio de papel de Juan Díez de la Calle: Pensar y gobernar el Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVII (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2019). This document, by José Agustín de los Ríos, is available in: Juan Manzano, “Un Documento Inedito Relativo a ‘Cómo Funcionaba El Consejo de Indias,’” Hispanic American Historical Review, 15, no. 3 (1935), p. 327. The city of Santafé to the king, Santafé, 14 October, 1794, Pérez Sarmiento, Causas célebres a los precursores, 1 (1939), p. 342. Margarita Gómez Gómez, Actores del documento: oficiales, archiveros y escribientes de la Secretaría de Estado y del Despacho Universal de Indias durante el siglo XVIII (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2003); Margarita Gómez Gómez, “La nueva tramitación de los negocios de Indias en el siglo XVIII: de la ‘Vía del Consejo’ a la ‘Vía reservada,’” in Feliciano Barrios (ed.), El gobierno de un mundo: virreinatos y audiencias en la América (Cuenca: Fundación Rafael del Pino-Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, 2004), pp. 203–50. Cristóbal del Hoyo y Solórzano [Marqués de Villa San Andrés], Carta Del Marqués de La Villa de S. Andrés y Vizconde de Buen-Passo, Respondiendo a Un Amigo Suyo Lo Que Siente de La Corte de Madrid ([Madrid?], 1740), pp. 151–52.

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21. The expression, used to characterize an early eighteenth-century agent is reproduced in: Ascensión Baeza Martín, “Creación y reformas de un oficio inestable: El regente del tribunal de cuentas de México (1708–1781),” Temas americanistas, no. 27 (2011), p. 11. 22. Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial, p. 92. 23. Biblioteca y Archivo Nacional de Bolivia [BO-ABNB], Escrituras Públicas [EP], 334, Power of attorney from the municipality of La Plata, La Plata, March 9, 1779. 24. The petitions: ES-AGI, Santa Fe, 718, n. 25, and, 722, n. 31. 25. Caicedo to Rubio Plaza, Santafé, 19 October, 1794, Pérez Sarmiento, Causas célebres a los precursores, 1939, 1, p. 279. 26. Caicedo to Rubio Plaza, Santafé, 19 October, 1794, Pérez Sarmiento, 1, p. 282. 27. ES-AGI, Santa Fe, 718, n. 25. 28. Rubio Plaza on behalf of Santafé, Madrid, 21 March, 1795, Pérez Sarmiento, Causas célebres a los precursores, 1939, 1, pp. 273–74. 29. Rubio Plaza on behalf of Santafé, Madrid, 11 May, 1795, Pérez Sarmiento, 1, pp. 297–329. 30. Velasco on behalf of Santafé, Madrid, May, Pérez Sarmiento, 1, pp. 329– 35. 31. Velasco on behalf of Santafé, Madrid, 14 May, 1795, Pérez Sarmiento, 1, pp. 329–35. 32. On the involvement of law students and lawyers in the pasquines conspiracy: Victor M. Uribe-Uran, Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia, 1780–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp. 39–44. 33. Velasco on behalf of Umaña, Madrid, 22 April, 1795, José Manuel Pérez Sarmiento, (ed.), Causas célebres a los precursores: Derechos del hombre; Pesquisa de sublevación; Pasquines sediciosos, vol. 2 (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, n.d.), pp. 211–17. I consulted the original manuscript documents on the Umaña case through PARES: ES-AGI, Estado, 56B, n. 1. 34. Ignacio de Umaña’s power of attorney for Saturio Ángel de Velasco, Santafé, 14 November, 1794, Pérez Sarmiento, 2, p. 221. 35. Pérez Sarmiento, 2, pp. 228–29. 36. Godoy to Santafé, San Lorenzo, 29 December, 1795, Pérez Sarmiento, Causas célebres a los precursores, 1939, 1, p. 356. 37. The city of Santafé to the king, Santafé, 14 October, 1794, Pérez Sarmiento, 1, p. 342. 38. Dareche’s first petition from 8 December, 1795, might have influenced Godoy’s declaration of fidelity of Santafé. The document had a more adversarial tone than Velasco’s and was broader in scope—it collapsed issues brought up by the Agente such as the Audiencia’s resurfacing of

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“forgotten” cédulas to the points made about the treatment of Umaña and other of the young accused whose legal guarantees, it was argued, were violated. Pérez Sarmiento, 1, pp. 431–54. 39. As much is insinuated in the criticism of Agentes by creole lawyer, Madrid resident, and aspiring representative of Santafé, Joaquín Dareche y Urrutia. Dareche on Santafé’s behalf, Madrid, 16 April, 1796, ES-AGI, Estado, 55, n. 1. 40. Spanish authorities even received, albeit did not seem to respond favorably, reports that, for instance, called on an increased military presence in New Granada to preempt future rebellions: Javier Laviña, “Ilustración y Reacción En La Nueva Granada,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de La Cultura, no. 16–17 (1989), pp. 88–89.

PART II

Petitioning and Colonialism

CHAPTER 6

Indigenous Petitioning in the Early Modern British and Spanish New World Adrian Masters and Bradley Dixon

Old World societies devastated and displaced countless peoples throughout the lands they called the “New World.” Amidst epidemics and violence from European-descended communities, indigenous peoples did more than perish, flee, or resist through violence. Many hundreds of thousands of non-European communities also turned strategically to petitioning Western officials, councils, and monarchs for redress, with outcomes varying from sweeping victories to total rejection. This chapter provides an overview of indigenous petitioning in what by the 1700s were the New World’s two most populous European dominions: the Spanish and British monarchies. It only briefly considers pre-conquest indigenous

A. Masters (B) University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] B. Dixon The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_6

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practices of subject–ruler communication, and does not explore petitioning among populous and geopolitically important sovereign peoples who were contemporaries of the British and Spanish, such as the Comanche or Mapuche. It also does not consider the important French and Portuguese dominions, to say nothing of other smaller European counterparts. Recognizing that “Indians” variously mastered, contributed to, and consciously rejected European legal and social impositions through petitioning opens up fundamental questions about the nature and outcomes of these encounters. Petitioning was often a result of indigenous hardship, mediated through often-predatorial Old World practices of linguistic and legal translation. It also engendered substantial imperial reforms, as well as many great intellectual works, many now esteemed among the world’s finest. The process of petitioning transformed those who engaged with British and Spanish systems of justice, even as these supplications helped structure the very categories of the “Native” and the “indio.”1 In fact, these supplications even enabled indigenous communities and individuals to co-create many imperial legal categories. Peoples facing both Spanish and British domination thus shaped these two European empires, and in the process, were themselves transformed.

Native Petitioning in the Pre-Conquest New World Supplications for justice had a long history in the world Europeans called the “Americas.” In Native political cultures, where reciprocity and social harmony were often cardinal virtues, injured parties seeking relief often made dramatic shows of their degraded condition, often begging and crying to attract a higher power’s favor in hopes of restoring social equilibrium.2 In modern-day Arkansas in 1541, the cacique (chief) of Casqui and a group of blind men purportedly entreated the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto to heal them. The cacique “begged him to do him the favor” while the “blind men immediately rose and with great earnestness begged this of.”3 In Tulla, a messenger arrived before Soto petitioning for mercy, “weeping bitterly, and coming to the governor cast himself at his feet.”4 Such stories resonate with later accounts in widely different settings. To appear more “pitiful and deserving of protection and assistance,” a group of Dakotas cried and heaped clothes on a party of French traders in one typical incident from the seventeenth century

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pays d’en haut. British colonists in 1670s South Carolina related how coastal Natives seeking aid against their inland enemies “stroaked vs on ye shoulders with their hands saying Bony Conraro Angles.”5 These cases show how while the word “petition” is now virtually synonymous with a written instrument seeking redress from a superior for grievances, among indigenous cultures in what is today North America, these acts were often spoken pleas that included elements of gift-giving, ritual, and emotional display. Although alphabetic writing marked a significant change in technique, these supplications’ self-abasement and appeal to hierarchy resonated across cultures, helping forge a common political language between Natives and British colonizers, as well as between indios and Spaniards.6 Further south, complex hierarchical petitioning systems structurally overlapped with Old World practices to an even greater extent. During the fifteenth century the Mexica and Tetzcoca of Anáhuac established elaborate judicial institutions.7 Spaniards’ accounts of these Mesoamerican systems varied, but clearly stated that indigenous rulers allowed both commoner macehualli and noble pilli abundant sources of redress and reward—perhaps more than late medieval England and Venice.8 A sixteenth-century codex describes daily operations in one of Tenochtitlán’s main judiciaries, the tecalli, as follows: every day, before the judges [tetecuhtin], they received a line of complaints from the wing of the people [the commoners], carefully they listened...to what they referred to in what was written in the [litigants’] paintings.9

Other Mexican councils and magistracies dealt separately with affairs relating to noblemen, finance, war, the priesthood, merchants, and elite students, and throughout their urban and rural dominions had both permanent and ad-hoc officials to resolve lesser issues.10 While subjects rarely succeeded in bringing their petitions and accompanying paintings to the tlatoani or supreme authority such as Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, the cihuacoatl or second-in-command also heard their appeals. Lastly, larger communities could send legal agents to negotiate with the tlatoani over tribute.11 The only city in Anáhuac to rival Tenochtitlán’s elaborate justice was allied Tetzcoco.12 The Tetzcocan Juan Bautista Pomar described the workings of Lord Nezahualcoyotzin’s (1402–1472) “royal magistracy (audiencia real )” which adjudicated lawsuits “relating to all sorts

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of litigants, regardless of their status.”13 The Tetzcocan don Fernando Alva de Ixtlilxochitl later described this court’s spellbinding turquoiseand-gold-laden halls, its undying bonfires, and its dizzyingly elaborate judicial departments, in which the judges “heard all litigation, both civil and criminal.”14 In other Mesoamerican areas, petitioning might involve hierarchical but still elaborate ceremonies, as it did in the Yucatan.15 The Inca lords of Tihuantinsuyo had similarly complex arrangements. Their camachicoc, or governing junta, was divided into four to rule the realm’s four imperial quarters, and each subdivision had committees for war, justice, and production.16 The sovereign Incas’ foremost aristocratic advisers, the capac apacona, heard governors’ reports, which likely relayed many provincial commoners’ complaints. When commoners did reach the potentate’s ear, it seems to have been heavily hierarchical and ritually degrading process. Andean chronicler Guaman Poma, who claimed his father served as a camachimoc viceroy, stated that the sovereign favored the defenseless but refused to speak to them except through a courtier, lest his person be abased.17 Friar Martín de Murúa stated regarding the sixth Inca Roca that “when the Indians spoke with him, they looked to the ground….on their knees, and before they began to speak they begged for permission, and often were so dumbfounded they could not speak, and when they did, did so in very soft voices.”18 Under some circumstances, provincial commoners may have communicated somewhat more directly with the Inca. Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León noted that “when in times of peace the Incas visited their realms…they merrily heard those who approached them with complaints, remedying and punishing those who had committed injustices.”19 Similarly, argued Cieza and Inca scholar Garcilaso de la Vega, subjects individually and collectively communicated with local curaca and tocricoc officials on issues concerning both local injustices and imperial policy.20

The Viceregal and Colonial Contexts of Indigenous Petitioning By the time indigenous subjects sighted the first Christian intruders, many indigenous subjects had been engaging often in hierarchical oral petitioning for centuries (in Mesoamerica, these pleas might include written evidence as well). In Anáhuac and Tihuantinsuyo the Christians found systems not too different from their own. In late medieval England petitioning before an array of officials was ubiquitous, and the practice

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remained robust on the eve of British overseas expansion. Castilian vassals petitioned by an even greater extent than the British—by the hundreds of thousands.21 The Spanish initially offered few venues for indigenous petitions under explorer-conquistadors like Columbus, Cortés, and the Pizarros. Emperor Charles V and his Council of the Indies increasingly replaced conquistador-governors and opened new channels of justice. By the late 1520s indigenous subjects began to write the Crown directly for privileges, reforms, and adjudication. The Emperor also instituted Castilianstyle audiencias or High Courts in Mexico and Peru. In 1530s MexicoTenochtitlán, High Judge Vasco de Quiroga, his peers, and four elder Nahua statesmen reported working “at night and at day, and during any hour” responding to indigenous petitions, many by individuals seeking emancipation from both Spaniards and indio lords.22 Between the late 1530s and 1600 viceroys received innumerable indio petitions. Viceregal scribes issued thousands of edicts in response to petitions of indigenous elites, communities, orphans, the unjustly enslaved, widows, and others. On at least 143 occasions during this period, 250 or more india women successfully prompted Mexican viceroys to adopt new measures. Many indios in Peru also petitioned often, although fewer archival traces remain. In the 1570s the Peruvian viceroy reported “the natives of these realms” constantly sought “a very great infinity of edicts.”23 Viceroys also appointed field justices called corregidores , as well as their regional superiors, the alcaldes mayores, for this purpose. Since 1516, bishops could answer indio petitions and dispatch lieutenants to the countryside; however, by the late 1500s the Protectorship became an urban viceroy-controlled civil office which provided first-instance responses to indio requests before sending cases to the corregidores . By the mid-1500s the viceroys of Mexico and Peru created yet another avenue for indio petitioning—the defensores de indios or Indian Defenders (who eroded bishops’ power). These officials remained in place in the early 1800s, and one study of their work in Quito suggests they helped indios win 60% of their petitions and lawsuits.24 On at least three thousand occasions in the sixteenth century, Mexican viceroys also delegated commissioners to deal with specific Spanish and indio land disputes, tribute investigations, public works, conflicts of jurisdiction, investigations of officials, and inquiries into local crimes. During periodical royal audits or visitas, many indios also accused officials

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(including Spaniards but also their own cacique lords) of wrongdoing, negotiated tax burdens, denounced idolatries to weaken their rivals, and shaped local policies to their benefit.25 Indio officials could themselves answer petitions. Caciques often read and heard indio complaints. From indigenous commoners’ vantage points these caciques were perhaps the most visible of all community officials. Viceroys frequently intervened to curb their considerable power, generally in response to local communities’ petitions. On at least 200 occasions in the 1500s, Mexican viceroys punished caciques with temporary replacement by a juez visitador, a type of indigenous official, who took over community affairs for extended periods of time.26 In more extreme cases, viceroys permanently stripped caciques of their jurisdictions, leaving them with aristocratic prerogatives and appointing gobernadores or indigenous governors to rule instead.27 Indigenous municipal councils could also respond to petitions, especially regarding local judicial disputes, minor criminal cases, and community land distribution. Generally speaking, these municipalities proliferated starting in central Mexico (1530s), in Oaxaca (1550s), the Yucatan (1580s), and later in New Granada and Peru.28 A less intricate array of British colonial institutions played similar roles in North America. On the coasts where the English first colonized, power gradually moved from Native council houses to colonial council chambers. This transformed both the direction of complaints and the practices of petitioning. As more colonizers seized land in Tsenacommacah (Virginia), Ossomocomuck (coastal North Carolina), and the lands of the Ninnimissinuok (in what is now Southern New England) the volume of disputes between them and Natives dramatically rose. British colonial governments enjoyed (or at least often asserted) a greater independence from royal authority than did the Spanish. Consequently, most Native people in North America petitioned colonial governors, councils, legislatures, and even local courts.29 Structures of legal redress for Natives varied from colony to colony but shared some general characteristics. In New England, colonial authorities fought hard to keep Native petitions from crossing the Atlantic. Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay regarded Native attempts to circumvent them as affronts to their charters. While early agreements with Natives implied their sovereignty, over time the colonies insisted that Natives such as the Wampanoags submit to them.30 In the South, treaties established the avenues for petitioning and there, too, its path stopped not with the king

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but with his putative representative, the governor. In Virginia, the draconian 1646 Articles of Peace allowed special Native delegates to cross into the colony to meet with the governor, usually when tensions arose. The 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation again directed Native petitions against colonists’ trespasses and abuses—and even disputes among themselves— “to His Majesties Governour, by whose Justice and Wisdom…such Difference shall be decided.”31 Colonies periodically formed special tribunals to hear Native complaints. In South Carolina, the colony’s proprietors formed a commission to hear and act on “the Petitions & requests or ye Substance of them to you made by Indians,” although slavers soon dominated and subverted it.32 A 1707 law established the Board of Commissioners of the Indian Trade, which by 1710 was hearing in-person petitions from numerous Natives. These protested everything from wrongful enslavement to beatings, thefts, and colonial traders’ swindles. In North Carolina, where the governor’s council heard most appeals from Natives, a 1715 law similarly appointed commissioners to resolve frontier disputes.33 When colonial administrations disregarded treaty guarantees or insisted that Natives submit to their sovereignty, the Crown became the judge of last resort. Even though the ability to petition—all the way to the king—was theoretically a fundamental part of British subjecthood, colonial governments, especially in New England, sought to restrict such trans-Atlantic appeals for everyone, including Natives. The Crown might surmount these difficulties by deputing commissioners to rove through the colonies collecting subjects’ complaints, including those of Natives. These investigators’ practices resemble the Spanish viceregal audit inquiries quite closely, as did the ways indigenous peoples used them. Natives used visits from the commission as opportunities to affirm their allegiance to the Crown and invite its protection from rapacious colonists and presumptuous colonial governments.34 A royal commission visited New England in 1664–65. In 1677, Charles II dispatched a special commission (and more than a thousand British soldiers) to relieve suffering subjects in Virginia, including Natives following Bacon’s Rebellion.35 When certain land disputes between the Mohegan Nation and Connecticut became acute, Queen Anne appointed another commission in 1704. Further commissions met throughout the eighteenth century until the matter finally reached the Privy Council in 1773. (The Privy Council ruled against the Mohegans.) (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2)36

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Fig. 6.1 Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), 654/680, Dibujo 260. Una mujer andina, falsamente acusada de amancebamiento por el cura, pide justicia al alcalde nativo (Source The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, GKS 2232 4° [or “4to” or “quarto”]: Guaman Poma)

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Fig. 6.2 Genealogical chart tracing John Uncas’s right to the sachemship from the Mohegans’ appeal to the Privy Council in 1770. Mohegan Indian Tribe of Connecticut, Old John Uncas and the greater part of the tribe of Moheagan Indians, by Samuel Mason their guardian, appellants… (London: 1770) (Source Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library)

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Natives sometimes sought the aid of the Crown more directly. Despite officials’ efforts, many petitions made it across the Atlantic, where they often received more favorable consideration. Indeed, various submissions and “articles of peace” which officials negotiated with Natives required the signatories to leave open the door for royal appeal.37 In the seventeenth century, the Stuarts promoted the Crown’s role as an “umpire” between Native and colonial governments.38 The king’s will, according to one 1680 petition from Weunquesh, sachem of the Narragansetts, was that “the heathen and Natives of the Land: Should njioy Common justice and Equiti as well as the Rest of your subiects in thees parts.”39 This knowledge often spurred Natives to cross the sea and head for London. John Wompas, a Harvard-educated Nipmuc sailor and land speculator, managed to have his petition regarding his right to sell land heard at the Court. He prompted a 1679 royal declaration instructing colonies to administer impartial justice in their own jurisdictions, and thus sparing “poor Indians” the necessity of perilous (and expensive) voyages to the metropolis.40 Natives nonetheless continued to cross the Atlantic against incredible risks. Nearly a century later, Mashpee Wampanoag schoolteacher Reuben Cogenhew carried a petition against Massachusetts Bay’s restrictions upon his community to the Court. He arrived only after his ship’s captain attempted to enslave him, shipwrecking in the Caribbean, and being forced to serve in the Royal Navy.41 His petition succeeded, keeping Massachusetts interference at bay for a generation.

Frontier and Urban Petitioning, Social Transformation, and Self-Fashioning Petitioning formed a common matrix of judicial practices throughout the New World, where similar indigenous, British, and Spanish procedures could enable new social connections. In the borderlands, multiple systems of redress often overlapped, structuring encounters between indigenous peoples as well as with European monarchies. In the early eighteenthcentury Southeast, for instance, the Yamasees and Apalachees pursued redress of their grievances first in Spanish Florida and then in British South Carolina.42 Indeed, these Natives’ experiences with Spanish practices may have encouraged them to frequently petition the British. In such cases, individuals could weave through multiple mutually intelligible systems, even while crossing the borders of rival polities.

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Many indigenous justice-seekers traveled into the metropolitan hearts of the empire. There, new and challenging social dynamics unfolded. From as early as 1501 to the 1800s, London and Madrid welcomed important indigenous diplomatic missions, and hosted many individual and group justice-seekers. By one estimate, approximately 175 Native captives, performers, diplomats, and petitioners traveled to London beginning in the early 1500s—including Cree, Dene, Lakota, Odawa, Ojibwe, Mohawks, Mohicans, Salish, and Seneca peoples. It is thus possible to speak of an “Indigenous London” even before the rise of the British Empire itself.43 In the sixteenth century, Seville became a hub both of indigenous enslavement and indio response. As Nancy van Deusen has powerfully shown, over 100 indio men and women engaged in litigation to win their freedom, seeking to define themselves before House of Trade and Council of the Indies officials as un-enslaveable and different from indios of the Portuguese Indies.44 Madrid, even more so than London or Seville, was host to hundreds of justice-seeking indios at any given time.Some married Spanish women and paraded the city with entourages of slaves and servants. Many became destitute, begging for alms or dying in debtors’ jails. Others still—even from places as disparate as Peru, Quito, Mexico, and the Philippines—met at the Court and traded information and advice with one another.45 Mutual intelligibility formed not only among go-betweens in the borderlands, but in peoples’ encounters in European capitals. Throughout the Spanish Empire, indio justice-seekers dwelling in major cities and the Court for long periods often found themselves socially transformed. Many became ladino, or fluent in Iberian customs.46 “Acculturation” did not merely erase pre-conquest indio practices; it often prompted subjects to strategically reimagine certain differences as assets. For instance, litigious indios learned to use the special social capital of their lineages and ethnicities, oral histories, glyphic imagery (pinturas ), and cord-writing (quipus ) when making truth claims and seeking privilege.47 Indios’ quests for justice, and the forms of socialization which this process demanded, unchained not only reform, but strategic self-fashioning.

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The Indigenous Shapes of European Colonial Legal Orders Indigenous justice-seekers petitioned and traveled not only to vent grievances, but to change their empires’ policies and fundamental rules. In the Spanish Empire, the legacies of indio petitions are vast. Indios could prompt indigenous and (less often) Spanish municipal actas, the acuerdos of audiencias , viceregal mandamientos, and reales cédulas or royal decrees—many of sweeping importance.48 For instance, the partindio Arequipa clergyman Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera demanded full equality with Spaniards “in the voice of all the Indians and mestizos of America.” The resulting 1697 royal law—the famous Decree of Honors—equated noble mestizos and indios to “the noble gentlemen of Castile,” meaning they could hold offices which had previously been Spanish-only.49 Ordinances (ordenanzas ), the monarchy’s most formal pieces of positive legislation, could also bear the imprint of indigenous petitions. Indigenous municipalities could draft their own Ordinances and petition the viceroy for his ratification, as the governor and leaders of Xochimilco did in 1553. That year, the laborers (macehuales ) of Cholula collaborated with the town’s elite municipal leaders to produce hybrid Ordinances. Similarly, don Diego García de Palacio’s 1583 audits in the Yucatan’s countryside produced Ordinances partly responding to the complaints of Mayan commoners, including women.50 British colonialism’s peculiarities, with its mixture of royal colonies, private charters, and proprietaries, also allowed Natives to shape a “patchwork of different styles of government and jurisdictions” and their multiple bodies of law.51 In the British colonies the results were more modest than those in the Spanish Empire. Natives in both empires nevertheless succeeded in changing elements of both viceregal and colonial policy.

Shaping Indigenous Status Through Petitioning Petitioning was an important arena in which indio and Native status were determined. The very act of seeking redress could impact how Europeans understood indigenous groups as within or beyond their dominions. In the British Empire, Natives’ status as subjects was up for debate, and scholars today dispute whether either Natives or British authorities took

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the idea of their subjecthood seriously, despite colonial and metropolitan professions of equal justice.52 By contrast, since the early 1500s Spanish imperial subjects never doubted that indios were full vassals like the Castilians, Basques, Aragonese, and others.53 Seeking redress forced individuals and groups to conceptually reimagine their self-identities under imperial rule. Some indigenous declarations stretched an imagined ethnic unity far beyond pre-conquest arrangements, effectively reifying the indio legal category. For instance, large groups of indigenous peoples might claim to be speaking on behalf of the “natives of the provinces of the Indies” and “the Indian nation.”54 By the 1600s and 1700s these petition-driven assertions of a wider self-identity were pervasive in Peru and Mexico. Nonetheless, petitioning could also enable indigenous peoples to both wield and recraft concepts of European provenance.55 Many indigenous conceptual groupings, such as the ethnonymic Mexica, Tlaxcalteca, Cañaris, and Huancas, clearly respected pre-conquest realities and were quite socially concrete.56 In this way, the Spanish accepted and incorporated indigenous legal categories. Many others coined innovative terms, such as “indios conquistadores ”—Indian conquistadors. Others still engaged in self-fashioning which strategically presented who the indio was; while some indios used bold language emphasizing nobility and valor, others adopted the stance of defenseless orphans and miserables.57 From petitioning arose many contradictory policies defining indios as sweeping groups and small collectives, as meek and brave, and with countless other tactical gradations. Petitions also allowed indios to define others. Because many communities faced the misdeeds of dependents and slaves of abusive Spanish conquistadors, merchants, clergy, and officials, hundreds of indio supplications aimed at non-indio subjects “outsiders.” In 1585 the caciques of Tlaxcala prompted a royal decree barring “Spanish vagabonds among the Indians…[and] Levantines, Greeks, Portuguese, [and] other nations.”58 In 1595 the indios of Jocotenango, Guatemala, won a decree banishing “Spaniards, mestizos, blacks, and mulatos.”59 At the viceregal level, indios dominated this differentiation process.60 An often identical process played out in British dominions; for example, in the 1760s the Narragansetts and Mohegans “resorted to racial tactics”—for instance, the Mohegan Zachary Johnson alleged the intrusion of “interlopers from other tribes and stragling Indians and Molattoes.”61 In many ways, indios and Natives were major participants alongside Spaniards, Englishmen, and others in constructing the New World’s regimes of human difference.

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Intermediaries, Translators, and Intellectuals These global petitioning cultures could not have thrived without intermediaries. Translators were often very important for petitioners, for Spanish remained a minority language until the end of Crown rule. By the early 1500s Indies officials at the town, city, and High Court levels in Mexico and Peru provided indios with free translators. Solicitors, lawyers, procurators, and notaries also enabled Indies justice to function smoothly, though many distrusted their tendency to encourage drawn-out litigation. While trials and privilege petitions were generally long, complex, and expensive, however, petitioning for reform could be straightforward and affordable, as salaried pro bono procurators offered help in most major Spanish courts. Friars and other Spaniards might assist indigenous justiceseekers as well.62 Lastly, a significant number of indigenous men mastered writing, crafting petitions for themselves and others.63 Scholars are increasingly recognizing many indio petitioners as intellectuals. Prominent treatise-writers Francisco Tenamaztle, Pablo Nazareo de Xaltocan, Bartolomé de Alva, Juan Zapata, Diego de Torres, Cristóbal Choquecasa, Juan de Cuevas Herrera, Gabriel Fernández Guarache, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, Vicente Morachimo, and Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, among many others, are joining the roster of nowrenowned scholars such as Diego Muñoz Camargo, Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.64 Indigenous women occasionally sponsored exhaustive petitionrelated chronicles and genealogies, as did doña Isabel Moctezuma in the 1530s.65 On the British side, eighteenth-century writers and petitioners such as the Creek Mary Musgrove, the prolific Mohegan cleric Samuel Occom, and the Pequot Methodist William Apess, among others, are being reevaluated as intellectuals as well.66 Apess’s book Indian Nullification (1835) is a powerful continuation of the tradition of Indigenous political activism and petitioning in North America, one where the petitions “correspond[ed] to formal messages from one nation to another that were delivered with wampum” and other mnemonics, including birchbark scrolls.67 Hundreds of other examples from throughout both empires leave little doubt that petitions could constitute intellectual works of great creativity, rather than groveling, formulaic appeals to higher powers.

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Petitioning During the Age of Revolutions and Liberal Era Petitioning simultaneously reflected indigenous peoples’ resourcefulness and the deep traumas which European colonists and officials wrought upon them. By the late 1700s, the era which scholars call the “Age of Revolutions,” these frustrations began to erupt. In the Spanish Empire, indigenous privilege-seekers, not radical reformists, were the first to revolt. Two centuries after sixteenth-century Andean vassals won privileges and reforms through petitions, their descendants continued to pressure the Crown to honor their claims to nobility and communal governance. Don José Gabriel Condorcanqui, better known as Tupac Amarú II, traveled to Lima in 1777 to petition for pro-indio labor reforms and to finalize his lawsuit against a rival over the title of the last legitimate Inca. When officials rejected his claims, he led a massive popular uprising against all Spaniards throughout the Andes, which nearly toppled viceregal power.68 By the late 1700s, not only elite indios but also communities (el común de indios ) began to violently assert their sovereignty.69 In the British American colonies, local elites’ betrayal of Native supplications had perhaps even more explosive outcomes. In New York’s Hudson Valley, the Wappinger people petitioned Whitehall to protect their lands from colonial speculators, no doubt spurring anti-British sentiment among colonists.70 Nations east of the Appalachians resorted increasingly to petitioning colonial governments to protect their small enclaves from colonists, with grave consequences. In 1768 the Cherokee successfully petitioned the Virginia House of Burgesses to strip Thomas Jefferson of a massive Kentucky land grant (also angering George Washington in the process). This temporary victory “poisoned the relationship between Virginia gentlemen and the government of Britain.”71 Liberals’ continental hostility toward indigenous interests was not only due to land disputes. As open war between liberals and monarchists erupted, indigenous peoples often allied with the relatively more benevolent British and Spanish monarchies. The triumphant revolutionary legislatures punished a range of monarchist Natives and indios, from the Mashpee in Massachusetts, to the Tlaxcallans in Mexico, to countless other local cases throughout the former viceroyalty of Peru. Centuries of privileges and reforms which Natives and indios had petitioned for were swept away in the new liberal order.72

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Liberal constitutionalism almost always gravely undermined indigenous interests. In the American context, the 1787 Constitution’s all-white liberal constitutional framers ensured few or no special protections for indigenous peoples, although petitioning at both federal and state levels remained a major strategy for Indigenous peoples.73 In contrast with the Spanish imperial legislative system, in which indios could shape certain key policies, the emerging liberal order was governed by strongmen and parliamentary elites who greatly curtailed indigenous avenues for shaping law and society. During the Spanish Empire’s early 1800s power vacuum, the short-lived 1812 Constitution of Cádiz spoke of indigenous subjects, and many present argued for citizenship for non-whites, but did not include their voices, save for a sole Inca delegate from Peru.74 Subsequent framers shaped Spanish American constitutions to their interests and against those of the largely conservative indios, setting the stage for two centuries of land seizures, institutional discrimination, and cultural devastation.

Parting Reflections on the History of Indigenous Petitioning This exploratory essay has only briefly traced some outlines of the massive history of indigenous petitioning in the early Spanish viceregal and British colonial New World. Indigenous, Spanish, and British subjects all shared common cultures of petitioning before the early modern conquests, and as indios and Natives many adapted to European dominion, petitioning in the borderlands and especially urban centers of justice in ways that reinforced mutual intelligibility. Indios and Natives did not always fight, flee, or drag their feet under European rule, but were often its co-architects, shaping its policies, the status of others, and their own conceptual and social standings. Much remains for scholars to discover in this relatively new field of inquiry. Pre-conquest indigenous societies’ subject-lord communication is virtually uncharted territory, and demands careful polity-by-polity research. Another even more daunting undertaking also lies before historians: a comparative and interconnected overview linking pre-conquest petitioning practices to those of Spanish, British, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Comanche, Mapuche, and other powers, from pre-conquest eras to the present. These future investigations into indigenous petitioning promise to revolutionize how we understand phenomena scholars once

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considered the exclusive domains of Europeans—but which in reality bear the imprints of centuries of tenacious and resourceful indigenous petitioners.

Image Section William Sherwin, Het aanbieden van een petitie aan de Engelse staatssectretaris, ca. 1654 (London: Henry Mills, 1673)

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Backside of a petition with signatures that crossed provincial boundaries and with women signing in their own name, from 1650 (Source NL-HaNA, 1.01.02 inv. nr. 5762, 29-Jul-1650)

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Example of a round-robin from 1652 (Source NL-HaNA, 1.03.02, inv. nr. 5-I , 15-Oct-1652)

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Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), 654/680, Dibujo 260. Una mujer andina, falsamente acusada de amancebamiento por el cura, pide justicia al alcalde nativo (Source The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, GKS 2232 4° [or “4to” or “quarto”]: Guaman Poma)

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Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), 770/784, Dibujo 292. Un honrado principal andino redacta un pleito a nombre de un indio tributario (Source The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, GKS 2232 4° [or “4to” or “quarto”]: Guaman Poma)

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Genealogical chart tracing John Uncas’s right to the sachemship from the Mohegans’ appeal to the Privy Council in 1770. Mohegan Indian Tribe of Connecticut, Old John Uncas and the greater part of the tribe of Moheagan Indians, by Samuel Mason their guardian, appellants... (London: 1770) (Source Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library)

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Notes 1. This chapter refers to British indigenous subjects as Natives and their Spanish counterparts as indios, in keeping with the legal fictions within which European societies overseas operated. 2. Kathryn Hermes, “The Law of Native Americans, to 1815,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Law in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2008), p. 34. 3. The Gentleman of Elvas, The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543, (eds.), Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Edward C. Moore, 2 vols. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 115–116. 4. Elvas, DSC I, p. 126. 5. Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 61; “Mr. Carteret’s Relation,” 1670, in Langdon Cheves (ed.), The Shaftesbury Papers (Charleston: Home House, [1897] 2010), pp. 165–166. 6. Recent scholarship emphasizes mutual intelligibility and even similarities between Indigenous and European legal concepts in North America. Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); For hierarchical ideas, see the cacique of Quigaltam’s speech to Soto, in Kathleen Duval, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists at the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011), p. 43; For hierarchy and rank in New England, see Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005), p. 12; For examples of Europeans posing as paramount chiefs in Virginia, see Robin Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South (New York: Cambridge University, 2013), p. 102; For a New England case, see Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 27; For Spanish Florida, see Paul Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University), p. 57. 7. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana. México: Casa de Antonio de Spinosa, 1571, 73v, 37r, and 94r, respectively. 8. Lane F. Fargher and Richard E. Blanton, “Revenue, Voice, and Public Goods in Three Pre-Modern States”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, no. 4 (2007), pp. 848–882. See also the 1530s writings of the President of Mexico, AGI, Patronato 184, R.21. 9. Fernando Flores García, “La administración de justicia en los pueblos aborígenes de Anáhuac”, Revista de la Facultad de Derecho de México, 57 (1965), pp. 81–124, here p. 101. 10. Flores García, “La administración”, pp. 81–124, 97–103.

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11. Pedro de Ahumada, AGI, Mexico 367, 13r-v. See also AGI Mexico 96, N.7. For approximations of the Mexica’s original justice categories, Miguel León Portilla, “Ramírez de Fuenleal y las antigüedades mexicanas,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, 8 (1969), pp. 9–50, here pp. 32–33. 12. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500–2010. Russ Davidson, trans. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010), pp. 11–13. 13. Benson Library Latin American Collection, JGI XII-16, Relación de la Ciudad de Tezcuco, 33v–34r. 14. Obras históricas de don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Tomo I (ed.), Alfredo Chavero (México: Secretaría de Fomento, 1891), pp. 177–178. 15. William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Caroline Cunill, “El pensamiento político maya en el Yucatán del siglo xvi: reflexiones sobre can y than, ‘la plática’, ‘la palabra’,” Estudios de cultura maya, 52 (2018), pp. 117–137. 16. Garcilaso de la Vega, Primera Parte de los Comentarios Reales (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 160), pp. 41–42. 17. Dänische Königliche Bibliothek: GKS 2232 4º: Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica (1615), 367r, as well as 341r–346r. See also Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica el Perú (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2005), p. 329. 18. Martín de Murúa, Historia general del Pirú (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 33r. 19. Cieza de León, Crónica, p. 344. 20. Cieza de León, Crónica, pp. 340–344. Garcilaso de la Vega, Primera Parte, pp. 41–42. 21. Gwilym Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University, 2007); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University, 2000); Yanay Israeli, “Petitions, Justice, and Royal Authority in Late Medieval Castile,” Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2017, p. 114. 22. Fernando Muro Romero, and José Ignacio Rubio Mañé, El virreinato, Tomo I, 2nd ed. (Mexico: UNAM, 1983), p. 29, Sergio Quezada, Pueblos y caciques yucatecos, 1550–1580 (Mexico: Colegio de México, 1993), pp. 60–67; Armando Mauricio Escobar Olmedo, Vasco de Quiroga (Ávila: Gran Duque de Alba, 2016), pp. 87 and 295; Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University, 2008). 23. Laura Semboloni. “Los mandamientos virreinales en la formación del orden jurídico político de Nueva España, 1535–1595,” Jahrbuch Für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, 48 (2011), p. 162; For Mexican

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mandamientos, see Archivo General de la Nación, México (AGNM), Sección Virreinal, Indios 2–6.2. For Peru, see Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), Mss. 3044, 44v. 24. Carmen Ruigómez Gómez, Una política indigenista de los Habsburgo: el Protector de Indios en el Perú (Madrid: ECH, 1988), pp. 49, 61, 84; Alonso Peña Montenegro, Itinerario para párrocos de indios (Madrid: Pedro Marín, 1771 [1688]), Trat. 2 § §VIII, IX, X, pp. 506–513; JoséJuan López-Portillo, ‘Another Jerusalem:’ Political Legitimacy and Courtly Government in the Kingdom of New Spain (1535–1568) (Brill: Leiden, 2017), pp. 135–138; Ruigómez Gómez, Una política indigenista, pp. 67– 68. Charles Cutter, The Protector de Indios in Colonial New Mexico, 1659–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1986), p. 15. Javier Iván Saravia Salazar, “Evolución de la protectoria de indios en el Virreinato peruano. Siglos XVI–XVIII,” Ph.D, Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2012, p. 53; For a similarly positive appraisal, Mauricio Novoa, Protectors of Indians in the Royal Audience of Lima (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 232. 25. Lara Semboloni, La construcción de la autoridad virreinal en la Nueva España, 1535–1595 (Mexico: Colegio de México, 2014), p. 107; Ismael Sánchez Bella, Las visitas generales en la América española (Siglos XVI– XVII) (Barañaín: Universidad de Navarra, 1991); José Miranda, El tributo indígena en la Nueva España durante el siglo XVI , 2nd ed. (México: Colegio de México, [1952] 2005), pp. 115, 137, 294, 319–321; Germán Colmenares, La Provincia de Tunja en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, 3rd ed. (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, [1970] 1997), pp. 6–8, 38–43, 56– 67, 98, 199–273; Garci Díez de San Miguel, Visita hecha a la provincia de Chucuito. ed. Waldemar Espinoza Soriano (Puno: MERU, 2013); Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, Huaraz: Poder, sociedad y economía en los siglos xv y xvi (Lima: Universidad de San Marcos, 1978); Cristóbal Landázuri, Visita y numeración de los pueblos del Valle de los Chillos 1551–1559 (Quito: Marka, 1990); Juan Manuel Pérez Zevallos, La visita de Gómez Nieto a la Huasteca, 1532–1533 (Mexico: CIESAS, 2001); José Augusto Gamboa., El cacicazgo muisca en los años posteriores a la Conquista (Bogotá: ICAH, 2010), pp. 247–253. 26. Stephen M. Perkins, “Macehuales and the Corporate Solution: Colonial Secessions in Nahua Central Mexico,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 21, no. 2 (2005), pp. 277–306, here 286; Gamboa, El cacicazgo, p. 353; For one such community revolt, Archivo General de la Nación, Colombia, Encomiendas 15, ff.173r–174v. For Mexico, AGNM, General de Partes 2, exps. 809; 899; 962; 1023; 1294; Indios 1, exps. 259; 304; Indios 2, exp. 356; Indios 3 exps. 211; 300; 674; 766; 814; 952; Indios 4 exps.16; 29; 48; 76; 78; 92; 93; 101; 132; 140; 141; 146; 148; 186; 192; 201; 210; 254; 271; 282; 496; 800; 880; 881; Indios 5 exps. 159; 160;

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28.

29.

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174; 230; 862; 884; Indios 6.1 exps. 24; 88; 111; 116; 148; 311; 363; 390; 393; 400; 413; 415; 447; 494; 499; 500; 507; 545; 548; 600; 641; 646; 664; 670; 671; 682; 703; 768-bis; 806; 836; 847; 848; 862; 881; 896; 916; 930; 1029; 1046; 1140; 1164; 1173; 1181; 1182; Indios 6.2 exps. 4; 218; 311; 321; 322; 400; 511; 627; 689; 809; 837; 839; 851; 937; 948; 1002; 1005; 1010; 1054; 1057; 1079; 1081; 1087; 1089. James Lockhart, Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (Stanford: Stanford University, 1991), p. 10; Silvana Elisa Cruz Domínguez, Nobleza y gobierno indígena de Xilotepec (siglos xv– xviii) (México: FOEM, 2012), p. 133; Perkins, “Macehuales,” p. 286; Bradley Benton, The Lords of Tetzcoco: The Transformation of Indigenous Rule in Postconquest Central Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2017), pp. 139–154. Rebecca Horn, Postconquest Coyoacán: Nahua-Spanish Relations in Central Mexico, 1519–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997), p. 25; Robert S. Haskett, “Indian Town Government in Colonial Cuernavaca,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 67, no. 2 (1987), pp. 203–31, here 203–207; James Lockhart, Frances Berdan, and Arthur J.O. Anderson, The Tlaxcalan Actas (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1986), pp. 35– 65; Sergio Quezada, Maya Lords and Lordship, trans. Terry Rugeley (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2014), pp. 78 and 94; Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky, The Mixtecs of Oaxaca: Ancient Times to the Present (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2013), pp. 168–169. Gamboa, El cacicazgo muisca, p. 374; and Jorge Iván Marín Taborda, “Vivir en policía y a son de campana,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Seville: Universidad Pablo de Olavide, 2017), p. 253; José Carlos de la Puente Luna, “En lengua de indios y en lengua española: cabildos de naturales y escritura alfabética en el Perú colonial,” pp. 51–113, in Visiones del pasado. Reflexiones para escribir la historia de los pueblos indígenas de América, Ana Luisa Izquierdo de la Cueva (ed.), (Mexico: UNAM, 2016), 55n.5; For Cuzco, see Lilly Library, Latin American Mss. Peru, 1535– 1929 Series- Manuscript materials Box 4 [henceforth LL.Lat.Am.Mss.4], “Registro de elecciones…de la parroquia de San Sebastián”. See, for example, Michelle LeMaster, “In the ‘Scolding Houses’: Indians and the Law in Eastern North Carolina, 1684–1760,” The North Carolina Historical Review, 83, no. 2 (April, 2006), pp. 193–232. For an overview of treaty-making, see Jeffrey Glover, Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); For a discussion of the evolution of Native status in New England, see Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Yasuhide Kawashima, Puritan Justice and the

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33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

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Indian: White Man’s Law in Massachusetts, 1630–1763 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). William Waller Hening (ed.), The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619, vol. 1 (New York, 1823), p. 325; King of England, “Article XVIII,” in Articles of Peace Between the Most Serene and Might Prince Charles II…and Several Indian Kings and Queens (London: Bill, Newcomb, and Hills, 1677), p. 14. “Instructions for the Commissioners,” May 17, 1680, A.S. Salley, Jr. (ed.), Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina, 1663–1684, vol. 1 (Atlanta: HCSC, 1928), p. 101; L.H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 65. For the records of the Commissioners see W.L. McDowell (ed.), Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, September 20, 1710–August 29, 1718 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1955); Bradley J. Dixon, “‘His one Netev ples’: The Chowans and the Politics of Indian Petitioning in the Colonial South,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 76, no. 1 (2019), pp. 68–69. Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, ch. 2, especially 56–58. James Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University, 2012), pp. 103, 118–133. Craig Yirush, “Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case, 1704–1743,” Law and History Review, 29, no. 2 (2011), pp. 333–373; Paul Grant-Costa, “The Last Indian War in New England: The Mohegan Indians v. The Governour and Company of Connecticut, 1703–1776,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2008. King of England, “Article I,” Articles of Peace, p. 5; Natives understood the “ladders of authority.” Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, pp. 56– 57. The phrase is Rhode Islander John Eastman’s but Natives seem to have shared the sentiment. Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, p. 194. Narragansett Sachems and “Squa Queen” of the Narragansetts, UK National Archives, Kew, CO 1/44, no. 49. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Dropped Out of Harvard, Sold His Birthright, and Conned the King of England (New Haven: Yale University, 2018), p. 214; Alden T. Vaughn, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (New York: Cambridge University, 2008), p. 106. Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University, 2006), pp. 52–53; Craig Yirush, “‘Chief Princes and Owners of All’: Native American Appeals

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to the Crown in the Early-Modern British Atlantic,” in Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University, 2011), pp. 142–145; See also Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, pp. 176–177; For more on the challenges facing petitioners to the Crown Pulsipher, Swindler Sachem, p. 143. For the Yamasees’ history of defiance, see Amy Turner Bushnell, “Living at Liberty: The Ungovernable Yamasees of Spanish Florida,” in Denise I. Bossy (ed.), The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2018), pp. 27–53; After the Yamasee War, many of that nation headed to San Agustín in Florida, where their petitions proved instrumental in establishing the town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé. See Jane Landers, “Yamasee-African Ties in Carolina and Florida,” in ibid., pp. 180–181; For Apalachee petitions in South Carolina, see John H. Hann, Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), pp. 297–301. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, p. xi; Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2014). Coll-Peter Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University, 2016), p. 3. Nancy van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 1– 29, 36, 54–55, 119–129. Kelly McDonough, “Indigenous Rememberings and Forgettings: Sixteenth-Century Nahua Letters and Petitions to the Spanish Crown,” Native American and Indigenous Studies, 5, no. 1 (2018), pp. 69–99; Muro Orejón, “La igualdad”; Caroline Cunill, “El uso indígena de las probanzas de méritos y servicios: su dimensión política (Yucatán, siglo XVI)” Signos históricos, 16, no. 32 (2014), pp. 14–47; José de la Puente Brunke, “Notas sobre quejas de curacas en el siglo XVII,” Anuario de estudios americanos, 55, no. 2 (1998), pp. 450–473. For wealthier indigenous residents, AGI, Indiferente 1418, “Don Juan Astubarcay,” January 11, 1599 (two petitions). For debtors, José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), esp. p. 139. For encounters, see, for example, AGI, Indiferente 1414, “don Pedro de Toledo,” May 17, 1596 in which a Moctezuma requested a military habit citing the Council’s treatment of his part-Inca acquaintance don Martín de Ampuero. Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans, pp. 16, 106–115. John F. Chuchiak IV, “Writing as Resistance: Maya Graphic Pluralism and Indigenous Elite Strategies for Survival in Colonial Yucatan, 1550–1750,” Ethnohistory, 57, no. 1 (2010), pp. 87–116.

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48. John Preston Moore, The Cabildo in Peru Under the Hapsburgs (Durham: Duke University, 1954), pp. 78–80. See also see Lockhart et al., The Tlaxcalan Actas, pp. 35–65. For Peru, LL.Lat.Am.Mss.4. 49. Antonio Muro Orejón, “La igualdad entre indios y españoles: la real cédula de 1697,” Estudios sobre política indigenista española en América (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1975), pp. 365–386; Miguel Luque Talaván, ‘“Tan príncipes e infantes como los de Castilla’. Análisis histórico-jurídico de la nobleza indiana de origen prehispánico” Anales del Museo de América, 12 (2004), pp. 9–34. 50. Newberry Library: Ayers Ms. 1121, 348r–355r, 356r–360r; Visita de Diego García de Palacio a Yucatán, 1583 (ed.), Inés Ortíz Yam and Sergio Quezada (Mexico City: UNAM, 2009), pp. 52, 109, 213, 251. 51. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University, 2006), p. 118; Richard J. Ross, “Spanish American and British American Law as Mirrors to Each Other,” in Thomas Duve and Heikki Pihlajamäki (eds.), New Horizons in Spanish Colonial Law: Contributions to Transnational Early Modern Legal History (Berlin: Max Planck Institute, 2015), pp. 9–28; Yirush, “Claiming the New World,” Law and History Review, p. 371. 52. Metacom or, King Philip, for instance, saw himself as equal to colonial officials and “even to the king.” See Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, p. 98; Yirush, “Claiming the New World,” p. 368; The Crown may have been moved by realpolitik, of course. See Pulsipher, Swindler Sachem, p. 215; For a colonial profession of “equal Justice” for Natives, see Colony of Virginia, Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Colony of Virginia, From 1662, to 1715, vol. 1 (London: John Baskett, 1727), p. 65. 53. Queen Isabel made this explicit in her 1504 testament; AGI, Patronato 1, N.5; AGI, Patronato 170, R.20, 1r. 54. BNE, Mss. 3042, 220r, AGI, Indiferente 1412, 1595, AGI, Indiferente 640; Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans, p. 188; Luis Miguel Glave, “La gestación de un programa político para la nación indiana (1645–1697),” Revista andina, 56 (2018), pp. 9–100, esp. 57. 55. Owensby, Empire, pp. 1–11. 56. Brian P. Owensby, “Pacto entre rey lejano y súbditos indígenas: Justicia, legalidad, y política en Nueva España, Siglo XVII,” Historia Mexicana, 56, no. 1 (2011), pp. 59–106; R. Jovita Baber, “Categories, SelfRepresentation and the Construction of the Indios,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 10, no. 1 (2009), pp. 27–41; Udo Oberem, “Los Cañaris y la conquista española de la Sierra ecuatoriana, otro capítulo de las relaciones interétnicas en el siglo XVI,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 63 (1974), pp. 263–274, here 263; Jaime Valenzuela Márquez, “Indígenas andinos en Chile Colonial- Inmigración, inserción espacial,

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57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

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integración económica y movilidad social (Santiago, Siglos XVI–XVII),” Revista de Indias, 70, no. 250 (2010), pp. 749–778. Luis Miguel Glave, “Memoria y memoriales: la formación de una liga indígena en Lima (1722–1732),” Diálogo Andino, 37 (2011), pp. 5– 24; Tamar Herzog, “The Appropriation of Native Status: Forming and Reforming Insiders and Outsiders in the Spanish Colonial World,” Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History, 22 (2014), pp. 140–149; Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk (eds.), Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2007); Thomas Duve, “La condición jurídica del indio y su condición como persona miserabilis en el Derecho indiano,” pp. 3–33, in Un giudice e due leggi (ed.), Mario G. Losano (Milan: Giuffrè, 2004); McDonough, “Indigenous Rememberings,” p. 71. AGI, Mexico 1091, L.11, 203r. See also Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 98, no. 3 (2018), pp. 377–406. AGI, Guatemala 395, L.6, 386r. Of 167 16th viceregal decrees barring mestizos from rural communities which also list the petitioners responsible, 119 attribute the complaint to indios; AGN Mercedes 2 to 5.2, 7, 8; Reales Cédulas Duplicadas 1; Ordenanzas 2; General de Partes 1 through 5; Indios 2 through 6.2; Lilly Library Ayer Collection Ms. 1121. David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2010), p. 104; This included appeals to Christianity as well as race. Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University, 2012), pp. 104, 174. Nuestro Pesar: Nuestra Aflicción: Tunetuliniliz, tucucuca, trans. Christopher H. Lutz and Karen Dakin (eds.), (Mexico: UNAM, 1996) and Owensby, Empire, p. 47. For translators, Caroline Cunill and Luis Miguel Glave Testino (coords.), Las lenguas indígenas en los tribunales de América Latina (Bogotá: ICAH, 2019); Caroline Cunill, “Justicia e interpretación en sociedades plurilingües: el caso de Yucatán en el siglo XVI,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana, 52 (2015), pp. 18–28; Mark Lenz, “Los intérpretes generales de Yucatán: hombres entre dos mundos,” Estudios de cultura maya, 33 (2009), pp. 135–158; For lawyers, Mirow, Latin American Law, p. 20; Cutter, The Protector, p. 7; See also Renzo Honores, “Litigiosidad indígena ante la Real Audiencia de Lima, 1552–1598”. Tesis de licenciatura, Lima: PUCP; For complaints made in the era, see AGI, Mexico 22, N.72; see also AGI, Lima 121, “Vra voluntad;” AGI, Patronato 171, N.2, R.1. For indigenous scribes’ writings, see John F. Chuchiak,

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“Maya Scribes, Colonial Literacy, and Maya Petitionary Forms in Colonial Yucatán,” pp. 159–184, in Text and Context: Yucatec Maya Literature in a Diachronic Perspective. Antje Gunsenheimer, Tsubasa Okoshi Harada, and John F. Chuchiak (eds.) (Bonn: Shaker, 2009). See also Agnieszka Brylak, “Some of Them Just Die Like Horses. Contact-Induced Changes in Peripheral Nahuatl of the Sixteenth-Century Petitions from Santiago de Guatemala,” Journal of Language Contact, 12, no. 2 (2019), pp. 344– 377 and Justyna Olko, “Alphabetic Writing in the Hands of the Colonial Nahua Nobility,” Contributions in New World Archaeology, 7 (2016), pp. 177–198. 64. For an overview of this erasure, Kelly S. McDonough, The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2014); Dragana Mirkovic, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness Under Spanish Rule, 1532–1825 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2001); Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the ‘Lettered City:’ Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010); Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (eds.), Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham: Duke University, 2014); Gonzalo Lamana, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2019); For Tenamaztle, see Miguel León-Portilla, Francisco Tenamaztle (Mexico City: Diana, 2005); For Nazareo, AGI, Mexico 168 N.119 and N.120; For Torres, AGI, Patronato 196, R.16; Diego Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala (ed.), Luis Reyes García (Tlaxcala: CIES, 1998), pp. 38–51; Roberto Choque Canqui and Luis Miguel Glave, Mita, caciques y mitayos (Sucre: ABNB, 2012); José María Navarro, Una denuncia profética desde el Perú a mediados del siglo XVIII (Lima: PUCP, 2001). 65. AGI, Patronato 181, R.8 and AGI, Patronato 245, R.3. Karen B. Graubart, “Self-Representation and Self-Governance in Early Latin America,” in Yolanda María Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias (eds.), The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898) (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 57–70. 66. Drew Lopenzina, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period (Albany: State University, 2012); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008); Silverman, Red Brethren, p. 104; and Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening; Steven C. Hahn, The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), pp. 167–168, 203–231; Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, pp. 190– 210; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native

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67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

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History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2001), pp. 237–253. Brooks, Common Pot, pp. 9–10, 224 (quote). Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2002), pp. 32– 34; Charles Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2014), pp. 26–30. S. Elizabeth Penry, The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford: Oxford University, 2019). Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005), pp. 50– 56; Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University, 2010), p. 26; Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), pp. 68–70. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999), pp. 5–6; Mandell, Behind the Frontier, pp. 80–81 and passim; For Natives petitioning for changes in colonial policy, see Dixon, “‘His one Netev ples,’” pp. 52–53. Donald M. Nielsen, “The Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833,” pp. 359– 378, in Alden T. Vaughan (eds.), New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans ca. 1600–1850 (Boston: Northeastern University, 1999); For indigenous monarchist petitions in wartime New Granada, Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University, 2016), pp. 130–143. Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petitioning: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), esp. ch. 5; See also, Micah Pawling, “Wabanaki Homeland and Mobility: Concepts of Home in Nineteenth-Century Maine,” Ethnohistory, 63, no. 4 (2016), pp. 621–643. James F. King, “The Colored Castes and American Representation in the Cortes of Cadiz,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33, no. 1 (1953), pp. 33–64, here 37; Samuel Alcides Villegas Páucar, “Las cortes de Cádiz y la cuestión indígena, 1808–1814,” Revista de Antropología, 5, no. 5 (2007), pp. 199–220, here 202–210.

CHAPTER 7

Debitage of the Shatter Zone: Indoctrination, Asylum, and the Law of Towns in the Provinces of Florida Amy Turner Bushnell

Florida, at the eastern end of North America’s Spanish Borderlands, has the legajos to prove a three-century Spanish pedigree and the sites to show Paleoindian habitation 14,550 years ago. The upper third of the peninsula is part of the forested area known to archaeologists as the Eastern Woodlands, where polities took the form of land-based micro-sovereignties that we used to call chiefdoms , but are learning to refer to as towns.1 By the thirteenth century BCE, any place in Southeastern North America

The original version of this chapter was revised. An incorrect word has been updated in the Online abstract of this Chapter. A. T. Bushnell (B) John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, USA e-mail: [email protected] Department of History, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_7

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where agriculture or marine resources favoured fixed or seasonal settlement, the unit of government had become the self-governing head town.2 Larger towns might control more territory and have more satellites than smaller ones, but every head town possessed its own land base and succession system and conducted its own diplomacy, guarding its reputation for being treaty-worthy. Towns that shared a cultural, linguistic, and geographic heritage might on occasion form a league to address a common problem and let the fighting men win honour, but once the problem had been dealt with, the league dissolved and the towns resumed their autonomy. They were not place-bound, for a town was not a site, but a geopolitical entity—a group that retained its corporate identity as it moved about within its territory, emigrated to a vacant quarter, or joined forces with its neighbours to pool defences and connections. By definition, the autonomous towns of the Eastern Woodlands denied states the right to govern them.3 In European terms, they upheld the Law of Towns (ius municipium) against the Law of Nations (ius gentium). The Law of Towns in service in the Southeast was a set of agreements and practices based upon local customs, precedents, and petitions and dignified by a tradition of debate and consensus.4 Custom with the force of law protected a town’s right to move from site to site within its territory, taking advantage of renewable soils, woodlands, wetlands, flint grounds, and clay deposits, or escaping an insect infestation, without fear of losing its fallow resources to a neighbour. Towns had the right to hive, establishing daughter towns for their surplus population, or to create client communities upon which to draw for seasonal labour or defence. When they chose, towns could unite and function as a nation, for the Law of Towns contained inter-town protocols to reduce friction when it came time to formalize trade, enforce boundaries, regulate grasslands, woodlands, hunting grounds, or seasonal migration, cover manslaughter, repel invaders, or coordinate grants of asylum. But polities that had witnessed the decline of Cahokia were not tempted to wield power like the Dakota Sioux, Comanches, or League of the Iroquois.5 The indigenous inhabitants of Florida, at the southern edge of the Mississippian Moundbuilders, were among those who preferred for nationhood to be limited and temporary. They had been perfecting their social patterns for millennia when, in 1513, Juan Ponce de León showed up on the Gulf coast with a licence to hunt Lucayans on the island of “Bimini”, if he could find it. A short time later, Florida entered written history as a grand Spanish claim, stretching around the Gulf to New Spain and up the Atlantic coast to Newfoundland. The equanimity with which Spain received the serial deletions of New France, New England, New Netherland, and Virginia from this Greater Florida suggests that the

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claim was more of an imperial gambit than a serious effort to establish a presence in eastern North America. Examples of the Law of Towns are discernible through the lens of the petition, defined as a communal request laid before a higher authority to inspire a legal solution. Two that figure importantly in Florida are the request for friars and the petition for asylum. If written versions of them are scarce in the documentary record, oral ones, detectable through hearsay as often as depositions, were equally valid. In terms of advancing or contracting the king’s domains, these were legal instruments two and three, for one that was not a petition preceded them. For most of the sixteenth century, Spain’s wars of conquest in the Indies had, by royal order, been prefaced by a public reading of the Requerimiento, a legal instrument designed to change the listeners’ status from that of people who had never heard the Gospel to that of a people who had heard and rejected it, placing themselves in a category of alien infidels upon whom Spaniards could declare a “war of fire and blood” enabling them to enslave their captives, non-combatants included. The Requerimiento was a lawyer’s device. Soldiers (and Englishmen, although their “just war” arguments were similarly utilitarian) scoffed at the notion of a pause before battle to invite thousands of massed warriors to change sides. Yet subsequent conquistadores went through the motions (at a safe remove) and saw them notarized. In the fifty years that Spanish Florida remained a “tierra reputada por guerra viva”, after Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded the municipality of St. Augustine in 1565, the Requerimiento must have seen service frequently.6 To the dismay of career officers and soldiers on the Florida frontier, Felipe II (1556–1598), with his Ordenanzas para los Nuevos Descubrimientos, Conquistas y Pacificaciones (1573), gave notice that conquests by the sword were out of favour, replaced by a discourse of Pacification and conquests by the Gospel, initiated by a formal request for friars. The function of this second legal instrument, like the first, was to provide a defensible basis for expanding the king’s realms overseas. Bureaucrats would distribute the rewards of Pacification to towns with a resident doctrinero, and missionaries would rank higher than fighting men.7 By the end of the sixteenth century it had become clear that, for all of the entradas charged to assess the possibilities of the “island” of Florida, Spaniards had identified no Natives suitable for addition to the king’s realms except those occupying the upper third of the peninsula and adjoining areas of present Alabama and Georgia—a town-sustaining

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region that historians call “La Florida” to distinguish it from the State. None of the peoples south of this region had the granaries or the labour reserves to make their friendship militarily or economically worthwhile, although initially the Calusas of south Florida were strong candidates, with their sea power and their sedentism based on marine resources. With conquests by the sword in disrepute, the only way to enlarge the king’s domain and provide the presidio with a hinterland of fighting men and farming women was to persuade the lords of the land to turn their towns into centres of Roman Catholic indoctrination. On a frontier more strategic than extractive, such as Florida, the Spanish accomplished this by means of the colonial compact, which was both reciprocal and conditional.8 By raising a cross and requesting a friar, the leaders of a town enlisted two powerful allies, the king of Spain and the god of Spaniards, gaining access to new sources of military and spiritual power. By opening their ports and hinterlands to a new source of trade, they obtained desirable goods for their own use and kept the paths open to other towns. And by an annual exchange of gifts, with caciques receiving the clothing and weapons of men of rank, or hidalgos , they confirmed an exclusive relationship between a Republic of Indians and a parallel Republic of Spaniards that both sides hoped would be lasting, even if their concepts of possession and sovereignty were not an exact match.9 By eliciting requests for friars, the maritime presidio of St. Augustine hoped to develop a hinterland. It was not easy to secure a foothold in a liberty-loving world, where the default for indigenous government was the Law of Towns. Governor Pedro de Ybarra (1603–1610) once found it necessary to warn a Franciscan, “These people are not conquered like those of New Spain”.10 But once a handful of doctrineros could speak a Native language, it became possible to form a mission province. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Florida had three language-based provinces, having first established a string of doctrinas in the lengua of Guale on the coast and sea isles of present Georgia, then in the lengua of Timucua across the upper third of the peninsula, and finally in the lengua of Apalache above the Gulf. Together, presidio and hinterland composed the colony known as las provincias de la florida, which boasted a royal governor and a branch of the royal treasury, with royal officials to administer the yearly situado, a cluster of subventions from the defence funds of the royal treasury in Mexico City, the Crown’s having laid on the Viceroyalty of New Spain the expense of supporting the colony’s military

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and missionary personnel, defending its population, and underwriting the gifts that kept the proud Southeastern towns within the presidio’s sphere of influence.11 During the so-called Mission Period, in those towns that elected to take a saint’s name, town government continued with little change. The señores naturales de la tierra, or “natural lords of the land”, simply added the laws of God and the king to the ancient Law of Towns, and together, principales and hereditary caciques kept track of their town’s lands, fields, public works, labour force, granaries, connection to the sacred, and military exercises as they had before. If a Spaniard encroached upon their hunting grounds, food reserves, or manpower, the rulers of the Republic of Indians could sue for justice with the aid of the protector de indios , a court-appointed spokesman, the court in this case being the governor or his deputy. The Republic of Spaniards, for its part, was governed by the laws of God and the king, plus the municipality’s customary law, interpreted by a cabildo consisting of the governor and the treasury officials, in the role of padres de la patria. Theoretically, every town of Native Christians had, of its own accord and free will, made a request for friars and indoctrination, sealed by baptism and compadrazgo, or godparenthood. In practice, the first of a town to be baptized were the hereditary cacique and his family, who received valuable gifts from their Spanish sponsors and often took their surnames. The town itself was favoured with a saint’s name, a doctrinero who was also a priest of the Mass, and, from the patrimony of the king, a baptismal gift of a thousand pesos worth of religious ornaments, vestments, and bells. Those converts whose doctrinas were the earliest to achieve universal baptism were known as “Old Christians”, a term of privilege and honour equivalent to primeros pobladores. Baptism carried the obligation of confessing to the priest of one’s home parish during Lent each year. Every doctrinero kept a padron, or annual census, and the governor used his count of single males who had “complied with the Church” to assess the labour levy—initially two weeks a year of paid labour in St. Augustine.12 Requests for friars, the second legal instrument, were often bourne to the governor and the padre provincial by the friars themselves. In the hands of interested parties, invitations could be engineered, retracted, or falsified, and on their way up the chain of command, oral responses could morph from nuanced and conditional into enforceable commitments. Although the validity of a request could presumably be checked against

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counts of Christian caciques , doctrinas, doctrineros, and neophytes, not to mention births, marriages, and burials, the frequency with which towns managed to rid themselves of unpopular friars, if only by decamping without notice and leaving him to fend for himself, suggests that it was unwise for authorities under pressure to advance a frontier to treat informed consent as a mere formality. The colonial compact was both reciprocal and revocable: Conditional on both sides. Spain promised to defend its allies, keep them in trade goods, including firearms and ammunition, and maintain the flow of status-marking gifts, particularly the expensive clothing that was a prerogative of the rulers of the Republic of Indians. The fund called the gasto de indios that paid for these gifts was over and above the yearly subvention for the support of soldiers and missionaries. If, for whatever reason, the money ran short, the presidio’s relationship with the towns came into question, for the caciques could annul the compact for non-fulfilment.13 Only an inexperienced governor would propose, as Damián de Vega Castro y Pardo (1638–1645) did in 1639, to pay “the heathen in the woods” (in this case, Chiscas) to chase down fugitive Christians and return them to their towns and responsibilities.14 The provinces may have reached their demographic apex in 1649, the first year of the typhus or yellow fever.15 A list of how La Florida’s missions stood in 1655 enumerates 70 doctrineros, 38 doctrinas, and some 26,000 Christian Indians.16 InTimucua and Guale, many towns with declining populations chose to combine. England’s invasion of Jamaica in 1655 brought pirates to the seaways and ports of the Gulf and western Caribbean and, in Timucua, triggered a rebellion and outmigration that almost emptied the province.17 England followed up its capture of Jamaica by encouraging pirates to attack Florida’s outlying settlements and supply ships. After a pirate out of Jamaica sacked St. Augustine in 1668, and rumours flew that the English contemplated planting a settlement only a few days north of Guale, Queen Regent Mariana of Austria took action, increasing the number of soldiers in the garrison and funding a Vauban-style shellstone fort to stand guard over a city that had got by with wooden ones for a hundred years.18 During the construction of the Castillo de San Marcos, three labour camps took shape outside St. Augustine, one for each of the provinces. Informed that Florida Indians were weakly and died for no reason, the Queen Regent ordered that the labourers be provided

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with friars who knew their languages and could confess them without an interpreter.19 The founding of Charles Town in 1670 heightened concern. Bishop Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón came to Florida in 1675 determined to revive the faltering mission provinces and to found new ones. With these goals in mind, he wrote to the Queen Regent about an aged cacique who had walked a hundred leagues to entreat Governor Pablo de Hita y Salazar (1675–1680) to send his people a preacher of the Gospel.20 Three years later, 23 newly minted Franciscans disembarked in St. Augustine, eager to convert the Chacatos to the west of Apalache province, the Apalachicolos to its north,21 the Mayacas and Jororos of central Florida,22 and the Yamasees filtering into Timucua and Guale.23 The interns quickly received a dose of reality. Until they could preach and hear confessions in an Indian tongue, they were little more than a drag on other missionaries. Their party, delayed for six months in Cartagena, had run up a debt to a “benefactor” of 4000 pesos at 8 per cent interest, which despite the Order’s vow of poverty, the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in St. Augustine was expected to retire. And the caciques whose requests for friars had so moved the bishop and the queen had reassessed the situation and decided that what they really wanted were guns.24 Apalachicola’s autonomous towns had long been connected to La Florida by ties of amity and trade, but for Governor Juan Márquez Cabrera (1680–1687) this was not enough. He pushed the caciques to accept Christianity, and they resisted. In 1685 five caciques travelled from Apalachicola to St. Augustine to inform the governor in person that “as far as asking for friars, they had never found themselves with that intention, but that if God ever wanted them to be Christians they would let him know”. Pointedly, they warned Márquez Cabrera not to send friars across their borders, because they did not control the paths in the woods, and their young men might commit some outrage.25 Florida’s sphere of influence was contracting. What the five caciques did not say was that their five towns were being courted by traders from Carolina and that they wanted no friars around to report on them to St. Augustine. Charles Town’s emissary to the Apalachicolos, Dr. John Henry Woodward, was as welcome as the friars were not. He learned Indian languages and customs, and the good news that he brought to the Southeast was not the Gospel, but trade.26 The petition for asylum, the third legal instrument, was a regular feature of the Law of Towns, and the refugee pueblo a time-honoured

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Southeastern institution. Customarily, people fleeing a scene of havoc or avoiding an expected attack headed towards a town with superior defences, asked to be taken under its wing, and accepted their place as a client community in the host town’s orbit. They were not powerless, for there was precedent on both sides.27 Refugees fled to a town on which they had a claim of kinship or reciprocity or were prepared to create one. To give an example, in 1675 the confederated towns of the Towasas, west of Apalache, welcomed refugee Chacatos, who were Christians from the western missions. Twenty years later, the situation was reversed and the Chacatos gave sanctuary to the Towasas, who stayed with them for ten or twelve years, never electing to convert.28 That prolonged a connection could lead to coalescence, a relationship that Patricia Galloway described for the Choctaws and James Merrell for the Catawbas.29 Once the peril had passed, petitioners who were unwilling to submerge their communal identities or, obeying the matrilineal, matrilocal customs locked into the Law of Towns, lose their sons to marriage, could go home and rebuild or pioneer in a new place, where it was they who would exercise the rights of founders. The host town had its own expectations. While the petitioners might suggest a town site, the hosts made the assignment, manning a post on their borders or filling a niche in their economy. Chacatos were known for their skill with horses; Tocobagas were valued as pilots and boatmen; and Yamasees were excellent tanners.30 As a client community, the petitioners were expected to bolster the host town’s population, follow its rules, pay it a token tribute, and take the path of war beside it. These early petitions for asylum went unrecorded unless they happened to be painted on a hide, a common form of record-keeping in the Southwest, where the hide was buffalo. That it had a deerskin parallel in the Southeast is known thanks to a single documentary reference, a letter by don Patricio de Hinachuba, cacique of Ivitachuco in Apalache, about a Spanish-led raid on some Chacato traders, which he claimed was a matter of record, the gamusas (deerskins) having been painted in the town of Ayubale.31 None of these priceless Southeastern hide paintings has survived. But given the reputation of Southeastern orators, we may be sure that the petitioners made eloquent presentations, that the caciques and principales of the prospective host town listened attentively, and that everyone present had a chance to influence the outcome. European traders and envoys who chafed at the pace of Indian deliberations were unaware that they were viewing Native government in action, with time-honoured rules of procedure and decorum.32

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Few petitions for asylum would have enjoyed the luxury of formality. More often, people were displaced without warning and fled without adequate food or clothing, distraught about family members who were captured, missing, or unable to travel. People living in a “land of constant war” were forced to cope with the structural violence of warfare: Higher rates of communicable disease due to crowding and poor sanitation; subsistence stress, due partly to the destruction of crops, foodstores, and livestock, and partly to fear of venturing outside the palisade to cultivate the outfields or to hunt, fish, forage, or gather firewood; and finally— inscribed like malnutrition on the skeletons of women, children, and the enslaved—signs of domestic violence. Archaeologists studying structural violence in thirteenth-century bluff towns 110 miles north of Cahokia find young women to be “the most negatively affected age/sex category living behind palisade walls”.33 The Spanish interpreted petitions for asylum as requests for religious sanctuary, or “fleeing to the sacred”, and most of those who applied to Spanish Florida for refuge, whether they were Indians escaping slave raiders or Africans escaping slavery, understood that they were expected to couple their plea for asylum with a request for friars. If no Franciscan could speak the refugees’ language, nor any of the refugees speak Spanish, the concept may have been difficult to get across, yet some of the petitioners clearly felt that keeping their interactions with Spaniards to a minimum was in their best interest. In the Southeast, what definitively de-coupled the petition for asylum from the request for friars was the Shatter Zone. Once the mission provinces were engulfed by militarized slave raiding and expansion went into reverse, the pretence that a refugee pueblo was simply another doctrina became less and less credible.34 Between 1660 and 1720 up to 50,000 people were robbed of their freedom in the Indian Southeast, and many more were killed. In the words of historian David J. Silverman, “the slave trade and the gun frontier marched hand in hand”, as a succession of Indian slave raiders terrorized their neighbours with English guns. First in line were the Iroquoian Eries from the Great Lakes, known in Virginia as the Rickahockans, in Florida as the Chichimecos, and in South Carolina as the Westos. In the early 1680s a faction of Carolinians called the “Goose Creek Men” set the Savannahs on the Westos, then the Catawbas on the Savannahs. In 1685 the lure of firearms drew most of the Yamasees out of Florida, turning them into slavers, and in the same year pulled the Apalachicolas northward to Ochese Creek (from which they took the

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name of “Lower Creeks”) and made slavers out of them. The War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714) gave the Carolinians cover to attack the allies of their enemies, finishing off the Florida missions, which they did with the help of Yamasee, Creek, and Cherokee gunmen. By 1711, Florida had so few Indians left that it was no longer worth the raiding, and the Shatter Zone moved west to Louisiana.35 Retold from the side of the missions, the story is more disturbing. When in the 1670s Yamasee refugees began appearing in Guale, obscuring its rate of depopulation, they chose that province because their language and the Guales’ were mutually intelligible and they considered themselves related. Harassed by pirates and slavers, the Guales and their Yamasee friends moved slowly southward down the sea isles towards St. Augustine, but as Spain fell behind in the arms race, they faced a painful choice. They must either turn to Spain’s enemies for arms and ammunition or become the prey of those who did. When in 1685 the Yamasees made their decision and headed northward to the Savannah River, many Christian Guales went along.36 Timucua Province had been reeling under the blows of disease, rebellion, and fugitivism since the 1650s and was happy to add Yamasees to its population. Largest element of the refugees set in motion by the Shatter Zone, the Yamasees were unwilling to turn Catholic en bloc, but Governor Márquez Cabrera, relieved to have anyone occupy abandoned townsites or wrangle the cattle of deserted ranches, did not insist, for as he put it, Yamasees went where they pleased. One group of refugees familiar with Spanish customs accepted a friar when they were assigned to the former mission site of San Antonio de Enacape, part of Bishop Calderón’s “New Province” for Mayaca and Jororo, but being a people who did not take orders, they refused to plant corn, or restore Enacape’s church and convent, or work on a Spanish ranch, preferring to hunt and gather. When they saw that their friar, Fray Bartolomé Quiñones, was preparing to leave them, Caciques Matheo and Francisco were unperturbed, but when Fray Bartolomé boxed up the town’s sacred ornaments and bells and rafted them downriver to Salamototo, where the king’s road from Apalache to St. Augustine crossed the St. Johns River, they brought suit with the help of Domingo de Leturiondo, Florida’s protector de indios , charging their friar with taking it “ill that they let infieles come and mix with Christians”, but “they could not . . . refuse to receive them, being one and alike their vassals”. They could always get another friar, the caciques said, but the king had given the bells “to their town and no other”. The Yamasees’

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wandering habits might be unacceptable to Franciscans, but they knew their rights.37 In the 1680s, the rate of population decline in Timucua was accelerated by slave raiders, targeting isolated mission towns one by one. Waiting until the men of a town were absent, the raiders would round up the working-age women and boys, a dozen here, half a dozen there, and drive them bound to Carolina. In the 1690s, the increase in the number of pirate attacks and slave raids, coupled with shortages in guns and ammunition, showed the caciques of all the provinces how little they could count on the presidio. The towns of Old Christians no longer asked the governor’s permission to reinforce their populations with refugees and migrants. They informed him of their actions and received ex post facto approval of their arrangements during the Visita, a yearly inspection of one or two provinces by an appointed Visitador who went from town to town hearing complaints and resolving disputes. The written report of the 1694–1695Visita of Apalache and Timucua by Joachín de Florencia, contained in the Residencia of Governor Laureano de Torres y Ayala (1693–1699), preserves what may have been a typical contract between a Christian town and a group of non-Christian refugees. The Chacatos’ occupation of a site less than a league from San Luis de Tamale, head town of Apalache, was a fait accompli. What the contract spelled out were the hunting and foraging rules: (1) The Chacatos might join San Luis in its bear hunts, but they could not hunt bear on their own, and the choice cuts were to go to San Luis. (2) The Chacatos might join San Luis in the harvesting of grapes and nuts, but they were not to harvest them on their own. (3) The “white bird” was off-limits to everyone.38 Each in its own way, the provinces prepared for war. In Apalache, the larger towns built defence works, while the smaller ones consolidated or moved nearer to the fort at San Luis.39 Guale, closest to the presidio, learned the folly of trusting Spaniards when Governor Laureano de Torres y Ayala diverted the money sent to build a watchtower on their northern border and used it in St. Augustine to finish the seawall.40 During the War of Spanish Succession, marked by two invasions of Florida led by Colonel James Moore of South Carolina, whole towns were captured and delivered into slavery, and other whole towns surrendered to become subjects of the English king, living in client communities and serving as burdeners to Protestants—“men without God”, said the Catholic Indians. The large Apalache town of Ivitachuco made a deal with the enemy. Its cacique, don Patricio de Hinachuba, paid Moore off with

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cartloads of foodstuffs and church ornaments. None of the Apalaches who survived the horrors of the invasion wanted to remain in the wreckage of their province, and the people of Ivitachuco considered two alternatives: Either strike out for Mobile or Pensacola (a difficult trip, for a column burdened with old people and young children), or occupy a fortified townsite in a safer place and take their chances on being able to strengthen the palisade and preserve enough food to withstand a siege before their enemies could arrive in force. The latter was the choice that don Patricio made, conducting his people, their baggage, their livestock, and their friar over a hundred miles from Apalache to the old Timucuan site of Abosaya, rich in fruits of the land and wild cattle.41 But the relief that the governor had promised them was intercepted. Refugees once more, the Ivitachucans made their way with don Patricio to St. Augustine and took their place under the guns of the fort with other pueblos of Old Christians. There they were soon outnumbered by the “Costas” from the Wild Coast below St. Augustine, who poured across La Florida’s southern border to take their chances with Spaniards. The Costas refused to plant maize, or repair their chapel, or teach their language to anyone who wished to indoctrinate them, yet they clamoured for baptism. Arguing that they had “fled to the sacred”, the Franciscans baptized the adults in extremis, and godparents stepped forward to “gratify” them with gifts. But once the threat abated and their staple foods came in season, the Costas slipped away to resume their foraging way of life.42 In the early eighteenth century, Timucua was fit only for detachments of soldiers sent to hunt wild cattle and make tasajo, or dried beef, for the presidio.43 The hinterland sat empty, scoured by slave raiders into a despoblado. But it had much to offer in the way of savannahs, lakes, springs, fruit trees, and cimarrón livestock, and as the level of violence decreased, bands of Creeks began to run cattle on the old fields west of the St. Johns River. More migrants than refugees, they asked no one’s leave to repopulate Timucua, and by the 1760s they answered to the name of Seminoles. Fugitive slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas joined them, and a new kind of refugee pueblo was born: Self-freed African Americans from warrior cultures, living as clients of an Indian town.44 The British made peace with the Seminoles in 1765, acknowledging, as the Spanish had and would again, that these descendants of Creeks and their African allies controlled the interior of Florida from the St. Johns to Pensacola, with the exception of two or three fortified ports left open for

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the sake of trade. The Seminoles sold cattle to the presidio through a free Black cattleman.45 Meanwhile, in the environs of St. Augustine, petitions were turning into demands. When a band of Yuchis came to the city in 1748, bearing the plume of a white heron to show that they came in peace, they did not ask Governor Manuel de Montiano (1737–1749) for asylum, nor yet a friar. Their fields had been dry for two years, but they did not ask him to pray for rain. What they wanted were clothing and guns, and Montiano warned the Crown that their friendship would go to anyone who could supply them.46 The measure of freedom that Spain extended in Florida to fugitive slaves was a function of hostilities in Europe. When Spain was at peace with Great Britain, the king of Spain obligated himself to reimburse the owners of slaves to whom St. Augustine gave asylum, and when the fund for that purpose was exhausted, the price of manumission was converted into a mortgage that could be retired by a term of service in the governor’s house. When Spain and Great Britain were at war, the governor was able to offer immediate freedom, and more slaves “fled to the sacred”. The town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, founded in 1738, was a doctrina that doubled as a fortified refugee pueblo, its being in the runaways’ interest to request a friar and build a fort. The first idyllic “free Black town” of Mose lasted for little more than a year; the second Mose, for eight, from 1755 to 1763. The legend of freedom beyond the border was lasting, but as the interior developed into a haven for Indian and free Black ranchers, and as more fugitives fled to Seminole corrals and compounds than to Spanish doctrinas, freedom and the Gospel were gradually disassociated.47 The request for friars had been used to build a domain, and the petition for asylum, to dismantle one, but as Native people came under merciless assault, many of them decided that keeping their families safe was what really mattered. Native survivors of the wars for empire who trekked southward to reoccupy the savannahs and old fields of Florida’s lost provinces might recall with nostalgia the beauties and rigours of Catholicism, but they would never again trust Spain’s promises. Amy Turner Bushnell Refugee Pueblo F. October 31, 2021

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Notes 1. Jessi J. Halligan, et al., “Pre-Clovis Occupation 14,550 Years Ago at the Page-Ladson Site, Florida, and the Peopling of the Americas”, Science Advances, II, no. 5 (13 May 2016), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC4928949. For a defence of replacing terms like chiefdom and tribe with town, league, and nation, and a discussion of micro-sovereignty and indigenous law in northern South America, see Forrest Hylton, “‘The Sole Owners of the Land’: Empire, War, and Authority in the Guajira Peninsula, 1761–1779”, Atlantic Studies, XIII, no. 3 (2016), pp. 315–44. 2. On the connection between foodways and levels of autonomy see Amy Turner Bushnell, “Patterns of Food Security in the Pre-Hispanic Americas”, in Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 31–55. 3. For a bracing description of the phenomenon see James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 4. According to Thomas E. Sheridan, “most Native American groups lived in autonomous local communities”. See “The Limits of Power: The Political Ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest”, Antiquity, LXVI (1992), pp. 153–71 (p. 165). Katherine A. Hermes argues in “The Law of Native Americans, to 1815”, in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (eds.), The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. I: Early America (1580–1815) (New York: Cambridge, 2008), pp. 32–62 (p. 33) that jurispractices in autonomous Native American communities in New England “were not subject to arbitrariness or to change without formal discussion. They encompassed mechanisms for resolving disputes that were time-honored and consistent”, and they “remedied wrongs... in ways that were bound by rule”. 5. Kathleen DuVal finds that the Osage “never invested their chiefs with the power to command their people”, and that “each of the twenty-four clans had the power to go to war without consulting other Osages”, “CrossCultural Crime and Osage Justice in the Western Mississippi Valley, 1700– 1826”, Ethnohistory, LIV, no. 4 (2007), pp. 697–722 (p. 705). 6. On the requerimiento see Amy Turner Bushnell, “Spain’s Conquest by Contract: Pacification and the Mission System in Eastern North America”, in Michael V. Kennedy and William G. Shade (eds.), The World Turned Upside Down: The State of Eighteenth-Century American Studies at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2001), pp. 289–320.

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7. On conquests and pacifications, see Amy Turner Bushnell, “‘A Land Renowned for War’: Florida as a Maritime Marchland”, in Viviana Díaz Balsera and Rachel A. May (eds.), La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), pp. 103–16; idem, “Réquiem por los conquistadores de menor fama: honor y olvido en una periferia marítima” in Raquel Chang-Rodríguez (ed.), Franqueando fronteras: Garcilaso de la Vega y La Florida del Inca (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2006), pp. 87–97, esp. p. 88. 8. On the colonial compact, see Amy Turner Bushnell, “‘These people are not conquered like those of New Spain’: Florida’s Reciprocal Colonial Compact”, in Jane Landers, guest ed., 500 Years of Florida History–The Seventeenth Century, special issue of Florida Historical Quarterly, XCII, no. 3 (Winter 2014), pp. 524–53. 9. Max Deardorff reports in “Republics, their Customs, and the Law of the King: Convivencia and Self-determination in the Crown of Castile and its American Territories, 1400–1700”, Rechtsgeschichte—Legal History, Rg 26 (2018), pp. 162–99 (p. 181) that the “Two Republic” model is being replaced in colonial historiography by a realization that “each incorporated township constituted its own republic”. For a statement of the earlier position see Amy Turner Bushnell, “Ruling the Republic of Indians in Seventeenth-Century Florida”, in Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley (eds.), Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Gregory A. Waselkov, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 195–213. 10. Gov. Pedro de Ybarra to Fray Benito Blasco, St. Augustine, 7 Dec. 1605, SD 232, AGI. 11. Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 74 (1994). 12. Bushnell, Situado and Sabana, pp. 34–35, 70–71, 121–23. The elements of a request for friars and the follow-up were simple, judging from the experience of a Maya village in the Yucatán. In 1605, a delegation from the village of Tiul went to the Spanish city of Campeche to ask for Franciscan friars to teach them, a gift of Christian images and ornaments, and the site of Cahuichi, which had “two good wells”. Having received an image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception as a gift from the provincial governor, they went with a friar and a Spanish captain to their chosen site, where they immediately began to build a church. When it was ready, the friar cut the men’s long hair, dressed them in white cotton shirts and breeches, preached a sermon, and had them kneel and swear obedience to Philip III and the law of God. The captain smashed their idols and

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14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

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verified the reducción, and the friar wrote that the “Maya of Cahuichi had been reduced and converted ‘by faith, not arms’”. See John F. Chuchiak IV, “‘By Faith, Not Arms.’ The Role of Franciscan Reducciones and the Frontier Mission Experience in the Subjugation of the Maya Hinterland of Colonial Yucatán, 1602–1672,” Swedish Missiological Themes, 91, no. 2 (2003), pp. 215–48 (pp. 215–18). Amy Turner Bushnell, “‘Gastos de Indios’: The Crown and the ChiefdomPresidio Compact in Florida”, in Salvador Bernabéu Albert (coord.), El Gran Norte Mexicano: Indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la historia (Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009), pp. 137–63. Gov. Damián de Vega Castro y Pardo to the Crown, St. Augustine, 22 Aug. 1639, ramo Gobierno: Santo Domingo, legajo 225 (SD 225), Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI). Jane Landers, “The Geopolitics of Seventeenth-Century Florida”, in Landers, guest ed., 500 Years of Florida History, pp. 480–90 (p. 483). The 1655 mission list can be found in Juan Díez de la Calle, Noticias sacras i reales de los dos ymperios de las Indias occidentales de la Nueva España (1659). Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, Mss 3023, 3024. See also John E. Worth, Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida (2 vols., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), Vol II: Resistance and Destruction, pp. 161–65. John H. Hann, “Demographic Patterns and Changes in Mid-Seventeenth Century Timucua and Apalache”, Florida Historical Quarterly LXIV , no. 4 (April 1986), 372–92; John E. Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An 18th-Century Spanish Retrospective on Guale and Mocama, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 75 (1995). Luis Rafael Arana and Albert Manucy, The Building of Castillo de San Marcos (N.p.: Eastern National Park and Monument Association, 1977). Bushnell, “A Land Renowned for War”, pp. 109–11; Queen Regent Mariana, Decree, 24 Dec. 1673, SD 235/100, AGI. Lucy L. Wenhold, trans., “A 17th Century Letter of Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón, Bishop of Cuba, Describing the Indians and Indian Missions of Florida”, [1675], Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, XCV, no. 16 (1936). On the Chacatos and Apalachicolos see John H. Hann, The Native American World Beyond Apalachee: West Florida and the Chattahoochee Valley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), pp. 28–51, 79– 136; Alejandra Dubcovsky, Information and Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 128–55.

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22. John H. Hann, “The Mayaca and Jororo and Missions to Them”, in Bonnie G. McEwan (ed.), The Spanish Missions of La Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 111–40. 23. Keith Ashley, “Yamasee Migrations into the Mocama and Timucua Mission Provinces of Florida, 1667–1683: An Archaeological Perspective”, in Denise I. Bossy (ed.), The Yamasee Indians from Florida to South Carolina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), pp. 55–79; Amy Turner Bushnell, “Living at Liberty: The Ungovernable Yamasees of Spanish Florida”, in Denise I. Bossy (ed.), The Yamasee Indians from Florida to South Carolina, pp. 27–53. On the difficulty of converting wandering peoples see idem, “The Sacramental Imperative: Catholic Ritual and Indian Sedentism in the Provinces of Florida”, in David Hurst Thomas (ed.), Columbian Consequences, 3 vols. (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), Vol. II: Archaeology and History of the Spanish Borderlands East, pp. 475– 90; idem, “‘None of these wandering nations has been reduced to the faith’: Missions and Mobility on the Spanish-American Frontier”, in James Muldoon (ed.), The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 142–68. 24. Miguel Abengojar [Abengozar], Madrid, 3 July 1681, SD 226/79, AGI; Cristóbal de Viso, [Franciscan] Commissary General of the Indies, to don Francisco de Altamira y Angulo, 14 July 1682, SD 235/117, AGI; Bushnell, Situado and Sabana, pp. 145–46; idem, “These people are not conquered”, pp. 548–51. 25. Declaration by five caciques from Apalachicola, St. Augustine, 20 Sept. 1681, Enclosure A in Gov. Juan Márquez Cabrera to the Crown, St. Augustine, 7 Oct. 1682, SD 226/95, AGI. 26. Dubcovsky, Information and Power, pp. 128–55. 27. John E. Worth, “The Yamasee in West Florida”, in Denise I. Bossy (ed.), The Yamasee Indians from Florida to South Carolina, pp. 309–38; idem, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast. 28. Gregory A. Waselkov and Philip J. Carr, “On the Edge of the Edge: Late ‘Protohistoric’/‘Early Historic’ Displaced People on the Northern Gulf Coast.” Mid-South Archaeology Conference, Oxford, MS, 2017, pp. 1–12 (pp. 1–2). 29. Patricia Kay Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 30. Amy Turner Bushnell, “How to Fight a Pirate: Provincials, Royalists, and the Raiding of San Marcos de Apalache”, in Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak (eds.), Pirates, Jack Tar, and Memory: New Directions in American Maritime History (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 2007), pp. 11–25 (p. 14).

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31. Cacique don Patricio Jinachuba to alferez don Antonio Ponce de León, Hivitachuco, 10 April 1699, SD 863/22, AGI. 32. Michelle LeMaster, “In the ‘Scolding Houses’: Indians and the Law in Eastern North Carolina, 1684–1760”, North Carolina Historical Review, 83, no. 2 (April 2006), p. 205. 33. Amber M. VanDerwarker and Gregory D. Wilson, “War, Food, and Structural Violence in the Mississippian Central Illinois Valley”, in G. D. Wilson and A. M. VanDerwarker (eds.), The Archaeology of Food and Warfare: Food Insecurity in Prehistory (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), pp. 75–105 (pp. 76–84, 99–100). 34. Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 89–115; Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall (eds.), Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 35. David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 59–70. 36. For town relocations in Guale see Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast; John H. Hann, “Twilight of the Mocamo and Guale Aborigines as Portrayed in the 1695 Spanish Visitation”, Florida Historical Quarterly, LXVI, no. 1 (July 1987), pp. 1–24. 37. Bushnell, “Living at Liberty”, pp. 32–33. 38. Hann, The Native American World beyond Apalachee, pp. 28–50, (pp. 47– 48). 39. Bushnell, Situado and Sabana, pp. 171–80; idem, “Patricio de Hinachuba: Defender of the Word of God, the Crown of the King, and the Little Children of Ivitachuco”, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, III, no. 3 (July 1979), pp. 1–21; John H. Hann, Apalachee: The Land between the Rivers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), pp. 231–34. 40. Bushnell, Situado and Sabana, p. 171. 41. Bushnell, “Patricio de Hinachuba”, pp. 7–14. 42. Fray Joseph Bullones to Gerónimo Valdés, Bishop of Cuba, Havana, 13 Aug. 1728, SD 865, AGI; Hann, “Twilight of the Guale and Mocamo Aborigines”; Bushnell, “Patricio de Hinachuba”, pp. 14–16; idem, “Escape of the Nickaleers: European-Indian Relations on the Wild Coast of Florida in 1696, from Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal”, in Richmond Brown (ed.), Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 31–58.

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43. Amy Turner Bushnell, “The Menéndez Márquez Cattle Barony at La Chua and the Determinants of Economic Expansion in SeventeenthCentury Florida”, Florida Historical Quarterly, LVI, no. 4 (April 1978), pp. 407–31, (pp. 430–31). 44. Brent R. Weisman, “The Plantation System of the Florida Seminole Indians and Black Seminoles during the Colonial Era”, in Jane G. Landers (ed.), Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 136–49. 45. Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 212–17; James W. Covington, The British Meet the Seminoles: Negotiations Between British Authorities in East Florida and the Indians, 1763–68 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961); Susan R. Parker, ‘The Cattle Trade in East Florida, 1784–1821’ in Landers (ed.), Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, pp. 150–67. 46. Gov. Manuel de Montiano to the Crown, St. Augustine, 15 March 1748, SD 845/66 and SD 2541/81, AGI. 47. Jane Landers, “Yamasee-African Ties in Carolina and Florida”, in Denise I. Bossy (ed.), The Yamasee Indians from Florida to South Carolina, pp. 163– 90.

CHAPTER 8

“We Are All French”: Race, Religion, and Citizenship in Petitions from Senegal, 1760s–1840s Larissa Kopytoff

Throughout the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, debates about what it meant to be French consumed France and its colonies. Political figures and institutions of state in Paris weighed in; so, too, did individuals and communities throughout the French empire, from the Caribbean to West Africa to the Indian Ocean. In the French settlements of coastal Senegal, black and mixed-race men

The author would like to thank the organizers of the 2019 conference on Petitions in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions—Miguel Dantas da Cruz, Isabel Corrêa da Silva, and Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro—and the conference participants. Special thanks to Adrian O’Connor, Miguel Dantas da Cruz, and the anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions. L. Kopytoff (B) Department of History, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_8

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and women, including both Christians and Muslims, made their voices heard in these debates in a variety of ways, including through the drafting of collective petitions to France and French officials in Senegal. Petitioning was common in early modern Europe, and in European colonies, serving as an established form of communication—indeed, sometimes the only one available—through which people from all ranks of society could address political authorities. By the late eighteenth century, collective petitioning, also referred to as mass petitioning, had become widespread throughout the Atlantic World. Henry Miller writes that collective petitioning became “a way to expand and claim citizenship,” particularly important for those, “such as women and unenfranchised men, whose inclusion within the political nation was questioned, contested, and ambiguous during the long nineteenth century.”1 For the African inhabitants of Senegal, collective petitions were integral to their interactions with the French state and reflected their active role in claiming space within the French body politic. This essay examines two sets of petitions from Senegal, the first from the 1760s through 1780s and the second from the 1830s and 1840s. They may appear, at first glance, to have little in common: the petitions from the 1700s presented economic grievances, expressing frustration with trade monopolies, while the nineteenth-century petitions called for the French colonial government to establish a Muslim tribunal in Senegal. Yet in both sets of texts, the petitioners described themselves as French, and sometimes as French citizens. Their appeals implicitly acknowledged a degree of French authority in Senegal, and the petitioners emphasized the protection France offered them regardless of their race or religion. They used their access to the French language, and to French cultural norms and administrative practices, to further their claims—even when, as in the second set of petitions, they argued that they had the right not to be considered fully French. In doing so, these men and women both appropriated and challenged notions of what it meant to be French in a revolutionary Atlantic world.

The French Empire and Senegal in an Age of Revolutions France changed dramatically between the 1760s and the 1840s, as the French Revolution took the country from monarchy to republic to Napoleon and the first half of the nineteenth century brought it back

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to monarchy and then, briefly, to republic again.2 The French empire changed, too, during this period, with France’s large-scale losses in the Seven Years’ War; Saint-Domingue’s independence as Haiti in 1804, following more than a decade of war; the military conquest of Algeria, beginning in 1830; and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a growing French presence in West Africa, anchored in Senegal. During these decades, debates about the rights of French subjects gave way to debates about the rights of citizens and, in France’s colonies, about the rights of colonial subjects and citizens. Histories of France and its empire often treat the revolutionary and post-revolutionary decades as a gap between a “first” (early modern) French colonial empire, under the Ancien Régime, and a “second” (modern) one, in which Algeria serves as a prequel of sorts to the largescale imperial expansion of the Third Republic after 1870. However, French overseas empire-building did not stop, or even pause, during this period; rather, France both re-evaluated existing imperial projects and sought out new ones.3 Naomi J. Andrews and Jennifer E. Sessions have argued that the “relative neglect” of this period has obscured the degree to which “people across the empire saw in the uncertainties of the period opportunities and obligations… to reimagine the relationship between France and its colonies.”4 This reimagining is particularly visible in those colonies which found themselves within both the “first” and “second” French colonial empires, such as Senegal. The French established a fort on the island of Ndar, at the mouth of the Senegal River, in 1659; it would become the colonial settlement of Saint-Louis. France soon granted the Compagnie du Sénégal, a French chartered company, a monopoly on the export of slaves from the Senegal River. The company was responsible for the administration of the town, maintaining the French fort, and overseeing trade and policing.5 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the French possessions in Senegal—Saint-Louis and the island of Gorée—were small but fast-growing settlements under the management of company officials.6 While the majority of the inhabitants of both towns—likely between 60 and 70%—were enslaved, the towns were also home to communities of free Africans who traded in slaves and gum, including the signares (African women with property and high social standing) and a growing mixedrace, or métis, population.7 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Saint-Louis and Gorée became casualties of the repeated conflicts between France and Britain. During the Seven Years’ War, France lost its control

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of Senegal to Britain, regaining Gorée in 1763 and Saint-Louis in 1783; Britain again occupied French Senegal in 1809, during the Napoleonic Wars.8 The political instability of European rule during this period served to solidify the power of the free Africans in the towns, who came to be known as habitants. “Habitants” does not translate simply as “inhabitants”: they were free persons of colour, Africans, and members of the métis community; they owned property and slaves, and some had a degree of French education. Hilary Jones writes that, while the term initially referred to “[t]hose who lived in close proximity to the [French] fort, called l’habitation,” over time it came to mean, more broadly, those men and women “who acquired capital and could enter into business for themselves,” including the descendants of African Catholics, interpreters, and signares.9 Many were connected to the small metropolitan French population of coastal Senegal through family ties or business connections, and they provided links between trade networks along the coast and up the Senegal River. Guillaume Aubert has described Senegal’s habitants as “exceptions within the French Atlantic World” who “formed an economic and social elite with significant political and judicial powers.”10 By the 1750s, most of the slaves in Saint-Louis were owned by habitants, rather than by trading companies, and the habitants’ wealth and influence would only grow in the following decades.11 Though France regained control of Senegal in 1817, the French presence in the region at the time did not extend much beyond Saint-Louis, Gorée, and a few trading posts along the coast and the Senegal River. In the following decades, France sought to make Senegal a profitable part of a growing, nineteenth-century empire, not a remnant of a shrunken, eighteenth-century one. The colony saw new administrative, political, and judicial institutions, as well as a great deal of experimentation on the part of French merchants and government officials, who oversaw the expansion of trade in gum and groundnuts as well as a number of (largely unsuccessful) plantation and settlement schemes.12 During the second half of the nineteenth century, military campaigns firmly extended France’s reach throughout eastern Senegal and beyond. By the end of the century, Senegal had become the administrative centre of France’s West African empire, a position it would hold until its independence in 1960. By bridging any gaps—real or perceived—between “first” and “second” French colonial empires, Senegal provides us with a study of how France’s relationship with its colonies was reimagined and remade during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era.

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Claiming and Defining Frenchness in Late Eighteenth-Century Senegal In the late eighteenth century, revolutionary ideas—about nation, citizenship, and race; about economies, empires, and colonies; and about the relationship between state and society—circulated throughout the Atlantic World. Few in France at the time were concerned with the small trading posts and enclaves of West Africa, which appeared to offer little of the wealth, or the contentious politics, of France’s plantation colonies. Saint-Domingue, with approximately half of all the slaves in the French empire, understandably dominated discussions about the place of enslaved and free blacks—and of colonies in general—in late Ancien Régime France. By the 1790s, Saint-Domingue dominated the discussions about the place they would have in the revolutionary project and the new republic, and about the boundaries of the French nation more broadly.13 The relative lack of attention to Senegal did not mean, however, that the habitants did not participate in those discussions; they did, including through numerous petitions to the French state and its representatives in Senegal. In 1763, the habitants of Gorée wrote to the Ministry of the Marine to voice their concerns about the reestablishment of a French presence in Gorée after five years of British occupation.14 They expressed frustration that they did not yet have access to free trade, as had been promised by the French government. In Lorelle Semley’s analysis of the letters and petitions from Senegal during this period, she writes that the habitants “cleverly pledged allegiance to the French regime, yet deployed language evoking justice and even humanity to challenge French colonial policies on the ground.”15 This balancing act—with the petition capable of expressing both subservience and subversiveness, at times simultaneously—reflects what David Zaret has described as the petition’s “uneven transition from a venerable instrument of state into an instrument of protest” over the course of the long nineteenth century.16 Alongside the habitants’ expressions of loyalty to France and assertions that they were—and should be considered—French, the letters and petitions during this period make clear that the habitants believed they merited better treatment by France because of that status. A group of habitants on Gorée, writing to the Ministry of the Marine in 1772, stated that “We are French, our fathers always have been,” and assured the Ministry that, during the recent British occupation,

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“our hearts never ceased to desire the moment that would reunite us with France.”17 Another letter from the habitants of Gorée—this one in response to a French plan to colonize Cayenne, and likely written in the 1770s—complained about the monopolies granted to trading companies in its appeal for free trade.18 Here, the habitants explicitly placed themselves within the French body politic when they declared that “Africans make good Frenchmen.” As Semley writes, the habitants did not claim to be French instead of African; instead, they “potentially expanded what it might mean to be French.”19 The habitants’ insistence on their identity as “Frenchmen” did not preclude them from making use of petitions during the British occupations. In Saint-Louis, the habitants submitted a petition in 1759, in French, complaining about British officers commandeering habitant property, and another in 1775, in English, complaining of poor treatment—including the enslavement of free Africans and the illegal seizure of property—at the hands of Colonel Charles O’Hara, who had been appointed by the British to oversee the small colony.20 The habitants recognized petitions as a useful tool with which to express their dissatisfaction to, and about, political authorities, regardless of which European power claimed control of Senegal. In April of 1789, the habitants of Saint-Louis prepared a Cahier de Doléances , a register of grievances to be sent to France. The government of King Louis XVI had requested the cahiers, along with the election of deputies to the Estates General, which was to convene for the first time since 1614.21 Described by Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff as “officially solicited petitions,” the cahiers arrived from throughout France and its colonies in the spring of 1789, intended to guide the newly elected deputies.22 Like many other cahiers—and like the letters of the 1760s and 1770s discussed above—this petition focused primarily on the economic rights and privileges of French subjects. This cahier stands apart from those from within France itself, though, because its signatories were, for the most part, free persons of colour. Describing themselves explicitly as “Habitants du Sénégal,” they voiced their grievances against the “odious” privileges of the Compagnie du Sénégal, with its monopoly on the trade in gum and slaves in the region.23 Asking for the right to participate openly in the export trade, the habitants again proposed that they should be considered the equals of any other French subjects.

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Notably, the cahier also included a direct statement on the role of race and descent in determining who was French, and who therefore had the right to engage with the French state: “Blacks or mulattos,” the habitants wrote, “we are all French as it is the blood of the French that runs in our veins.”24 In this “officially solicited petition,” the habitants not only emphasized the practical benefits of being defined as French, but they also argued that they could participate in defining themselves as French. We do not know how the habitants’ assertions about the “blood of the French” running in their veins were greeted in France, but the cahier was discussed by the National Assembly’s Committee on Agriculture and Commerce in 1791, and the company’s monopoly was, indeed, revoked.25 Although they did not know it at the time, in their letters and petitions Senegal’s habitants were calling attention to ideas that would soon be hotly contested throughout France and its empire. Who defined themselves as French, and on what grounds? What rights were due to those who were considered French, and how could they interact with or make claims on the state? What was the role of race in shaping the contours of the French nation? While the habitants argued in the 1770s that “Africans make good Frenchmen” and, in 1789, that race should not preclude one from being French, it remained unclear what exactly was necessary for those in French territories or colonies “to be French.” What did soon become clear was that race would be central to the struggles to redefine and reimagine France during the revolutionary era; this was perhaps most visible when, in 1794, the decree abolishing slavery in the French empire stated that “men living in the colonies, without distinction of colour, are French citizens.”26 In these petitions, we see that, even before 1789, Senegal’s habitants were making claims on the French state—and making clear that they sought to define themselves, rather than waiting to be defined by the state, as French. Over the course of the 1790s, the language available for those claims would change, as would the implications of asserting Frenchness, once citizenship was at stake. While the revolutionary era did not immediately and visibly transform Senegal in the late eighteenth century in the way it did France, or Saint-Domingue, it altered conceptions of nation and citizen throughout the French empire in fundamental ways. Among these was the notion that, as Adrian Carton has written about French India (whose inhabitants also used petitions to claim rights, in the 1790s), “the meaning and contours of Frenchness were being clarified in colonial settlements” as well as in Paris.27 In the habitants’ petitions,

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we see Frenchness being clarified with explicit reference to race; in the following decades, that process would continue with explicit reference to religion, and to the question of whether one could be fully French as well as Muslim.

To Be Both French and Muslim The first few decades of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of French institutions to Senegal, including an administrative council and a judicial system.28 Some were intended primarily for the population from metropolitan France; others were meant to apply to all who lived in the areas under French control. Among these efforts to link France more closely with its West African settlements was the extension of the French civil code to the region. In November 1830, a local decree from the governor stated that the colony was to be “considered… an integral part of the metropole, and… every free born person living in Senegal or its dependencies enjoys, in the colony, the rights granted by the Civil Code to French citizens.”29 Three years later, a French law declared that “[e]very person born free or having legally acquired their liberty in the French colonies shall enjoy civil rights and political rights.”30 That this 1833 law explicitly included freed slaves, and not only those who were born free, made clear that French civil law in the colonies was not intended to apply only to those of metropolitan origin. In Senegal, it immediately prompted questions about its applicability to the Muslim inhabitants of the coastal towns—and, by extension, about the compatibility of French citizenship rights with Muslim law.31 There were sizable Catholic communities in Saint-Louis and on the island of Gorée, but the majority of the African inhabitants of Senegal were Muslims, whose civil affairs—such as marriage, inheritance, and filiation—were governed by Muslim law. Yet French jurists, as well as many political figures and colonial administrators, considered Muslim law to be incompatible with French civil law.32 Some argued that French law did not allow particular Muslim customs, including—and mentioned most often by colonial officials in Senegal—polygamy, while others stressed that, as a matter of principle, French citizens could not simply choose to be governed by some other set of laws. Adherence to French civil law was considered a defining characteristic of the French citizen. What would it mean to be French if not to be governed by French law?

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In 1832, Muslim notables in Saint-Louis petitioned the French colonial government for the establishment of a state-sanctioned Muslim tribunal, which would have jurisdiction over their civil affairs. It appeared that the decree extending the French civil code to Senegal had prompted concerns that inhabitants of Saint-Louis—a town that was becoming, increasingly, both administratively and culturally French—would lose their access to Muslim courts. After the 1833 law, those concerns only grew: additional petitions, in which Muslim notables explicitly argued that they should not be subject to the civil code, followed in 1843, 1844, and 1847.33 The petitioners were influential members of the community, Islamic scholars as well as local chiefs and merchants, who wielded political and economic influence in Saint-Louis and the surrounding region.34 In their form, the documents carefully followed the conventions of French letterwriting, properly and formally addressed to “Monsieur le Gouverneur.” The petitions were not written only in French, though, but in both French and Arabic, with the French text on the right side of each page, the Arabic on the left. Furthermore, the vast majority of the signatures are in Arabic; other spaces for signatures are each filled with an X, or another symbol, likely denoting that the signatories were not literate. Whether signalling a challenge to French authority or simply reflecting Senegal’s diverse populations, these signatures make clear that the petitioners did not see a demonstration of their knowledge of the French language as an essential part of claiming rights within the French empire. Rather than stressing that they were, or should be considered, French—as the habitants had in the petitions of the 1700s—these petitioners emphasized the distance of Senegal’s Muslims from France, arguing that they should not be subject to French law as they already had their own legal traditions and institutions, rooted in Islam. “[I]n no case should the Muslims of Saint-Louis be subject to civil laws that are contrary to their religious laws,” they wrote, voicing the concerns about conflicting civil and religious obligations that lay at the heart of their repeated requests for a tribunal.35 Furthermore, they claimed, no one had ever intended for them to be fully subject to French law. Acknowledging that, when the civil code was promulgated in Senegal, “no exception, no distinction was made for Muslims,” they asked whether that meant that “we are subject to French civil law in all respects?” Their answer: “Certainly not, and no one has argued so.”36

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Though the petitioners declared that they should not be considered French with respect to civil law, they framed their arguments within the context of the French empire, comparing themselves to other Muslims under French rule. Citing the recent conquest of Algeria, the 1832 petition asked for “a special jurisdiction” that would provide “the same judicial guarantees available to Algerians”—where the population had access to tribunals governed by Muslim law.37 The 1843 petition also makes explicit reference to French rule in Algeria, stating directly that “we ask to be given the rights granted to the Muslims of Algeria.”38 In comparing themselves to other “French” Muslims, such as those in Algeria, the Muslims of Saint-Louis appear to have been well aware of the broader, empire-wide lens through which their petition would be seen in Paris. And, while their request for a state-sanctioned tribunal implicitly recognized a degree of French authority in Senegal, the Muslim notables of Saint-Louis made clear that they did not take this to mean that they should necessarily fall under French law. In 1857, France did create a Muslim tribunal in Saint-Louis, though debates about the compatibility of French and Muslim law would continue for decades, without a clear resolution.39 The tribunal was central to French attempts to cultivate an image of relative tolerance towards Islam and towards (certain, politically useful) Muslim leaders in West Africa. The idea, however, did not originate with the French; it was the product of repeated requests, in the form of petitions, in which the Muslim inhabitants of Saint-Louis voiced their own ideas about what it meant to be both French and Muslim in Senegal.40

Conclusion The revolutionary era in the Atlantic World presents us with moments when French politics and society were being repeatedly remade, when the expansion of a new French empire was underway but not yet a foregone conclusion, and when the possibilities and limitations of being French in the colonies were very much in flux. In the late eighteenth century, French interests in Senegal were focused on trade, and the habitants’ petitions reflect their desire to continue to participate in and exert control over France’s profitable economic activities. By the 1830s, it had become clear that France was interested in Senegal’s possibilities not merely as a trading post but as a full-fledged colony. The petitions from the Muslim notables of Saint-Louis reflect their growing concerns that France

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intended to make Senegal French—politically, legally, culturally—in ways that its inhabitants might not want. Citizenship intersected with other markers of difference, including race or religion, prompting different communities to voice their claims on France in different ways. The 1789 Cahier de Doleances had insisted upon the habitants’ being French despite their race: “We are all French,” they declared, as they asked for more control over the colony’s economic system. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Muslim notables of Saint-Louis appealed to the authority of the French state in order to carve out a space in Senegal that was not fully French. In asking for France to establish a Muslim Tribunal, they stressed that being French in Senegal was not necessarily what France declared it to be. They did not simply seek to make their own claims on France; they reimagined the boundaries of Frenchness and how it could be used. Struggles over citizenship would shape Senegal’s relationship with France through the end of the colonial era, emerging in debates about emancipation, voting rights, military service, marriage practices, and civil law, among other arenas.41 And the role of race and religion, and of blackness and Islam, in particular, are visible in the contested contours of French identity today, both in France and its former colonies.42 The legacies of the ideological landscape in which the habitants and Muslim notables of Senegal petitioned France—in which they sought to both claim and redefine Frenchness in a revolutionary Atlantic world—are, in many ways, still with us.

Notes 1. Henry Miller, “Introduction: The Transformation of Petitioning in the Long Nineteenth Century (1780–1914),” Social Science History, 43, no. 3 (2019), p. 422. 2. The French Second Republic (1848–1851) was short-lived, but its impact on the French empire was significant: it oversaw the abolition of slavery in all French colonies, as well as the (temporary) extension of political representation to French colonies. France had previously abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1794, with Napoleon reintroducing it in 1802. Though the Second Republic was soon replaced by Napoleon III’s Second Empire, this abolition would be maintained, on paper if not always in practice.

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3. Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750–1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 4. Naomi J. Andrews and Jennifer E. Sessions, “Introduction: The Politics of Empire in Post-Revolutionary France,” French Politics, Culture & Society, 33, no. 1 (2015), p. 3. 5. The Compagnie du Sénégal (Company of Senegal) was one of many French chartered companies established in the seventeenth century. It took over the operation of some French territories from the Compagnie française des Indes occidentales (French Company of the West Indies) in 1673; a second incarnation, called the Compagnie royale du Sénégal (Royal Company of Senegal), was established in 1694, followed by a third one in 1709. Over time, the company began to profit from the trade in gum as well as slaves. Gum (sometimes called gum senegal or gum Arabic) had many uses, most notably as a thickener in textile printing; its value increased dramatically over the eighteenth century, and control over the gum trade in Senegal could mean a virtual monopoly over the trade in Europe. On the Compagnie du Sénégal, see Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1993), an expanded reprint of his classic 1958 work of the same title. 6. Martin Klein writes that the population of Saint-Louis grew from 1401 inhabitants in 1758 to about 9000 in 1819. On the island of Gorée, 1044 inhabitants in 1767 grew to 3268 in 1810. The total number of Europeans in the two towns remained very small throughout this period; as late as 1838, there were 21 Europeans on Gorée and 122 in SaintLouis. See Martin A. Klein, “Slaves, Gum, and Peanuts: Adaptation to the End of the Slave Trade in Senegal, 1817–48,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 66, no. 4 (October 2009), p. 896. 7. A classic work on the signares is George E. Brooks, Jr., “The Signares of Saint Louis and Goree: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal,” in Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (eds.), Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), pp. 19–44. For a recent exploration of the signares within an Atlantic World context, see Emily Clark and Hilary Jones, “Transatlantic Currents of Orientalism: New Orleans Quadroons and Saint-Louis Signares,” in Emily Clark, Ibrahima Thioub, and Cécile Vidal (eds.), New Orleans, Louisiana, and Saint-Louis, Senegal: Mirror Cities in the Atlantic World, 1659–2000s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), pp. 191–209. On the métis community of Saint-Louis, see Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

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8. While Britain gave up control of Gorée in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, it refused to relinquish its hold on Saint-Louis, hoping to use the town and its access to the Senegal River as a base for further expansion in West Africa. France recaptured Saint-Louis from Britain in 1779, though the town was not formally ceded to France until 1783. On the British presence in Senegal during this period, see Christopher Leslie Brown, “1763 and the Genesis of British Africa,” in James M. Vaughn and Robert A. Olwell (eds.), Envisioning Empire: The New British World from 1763 to 1773 (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 109–128. 9. Jones, The Métis of Senegal, p. 29. 10. Guillaume Aubert, “‘Nègres ou mulâtres nous sommes tous Français’: Race, genre et nation à Gorée et à Saint-Louis du Sénégal, fin XVIIe - fin XVIIIe ,” in Cécile Vidal (ed.), Français? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole (XVIe-XIXe siècle) (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2014), pp. 125–126. 11. James Searing describes the period between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution as “the golden age of the habitants.” James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 114. Also see James F. Searing, “The Seven Years’ War in West Africa: The End of Company Rule and the Emergence of the Habitants,” in Mark Danley and Patrick Speelman (eds.), The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 263–291. Similarly, Michael David Marcson describes the period between 1758 and 1789 as being characterized by “the rise of the habitants.” Michael David Marcson, European-African Interaction in the Pre-Colonial Period: St. Louis, Senegal (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1976), p. 45. 12. See Jenna Nigro, “Colonial Logics: Agricultural, Commercial, & Moral Experiments in the Making of French Senegal, 1763–1870” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2014); Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire, Chapter 4. 13. Similarly, historical scholarship about the reach and appropriation of French revolutionary rhetoric in the empire has focused largely on SaintDomingue and the Haitian Revolution. See Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); Carolyn E. Fick, “The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era,” Social History, 32, no. 4 (2007), pp. 394–414; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 14. For the 1763 letter, see Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-enProvence, France (hereafter ANOM), Colonies E 338, Pierre François

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

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Guillaume Poncet de La Rivière, gouverneur de Gorée (1763/1775), pp. 71–76: “Les habitants a de l’Isle de Gorée à Le Duc Le Choiseul, Paris de France Ministère et Secrétaire de la Guerre et de la Marine,” 1763. Cited in Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 108. According to Semley, 16 of the petition’s 35 signatories were women. Semley, To Be Free and French, p. 88. David Zaret, “Petition-and-Response and Liminal Petitioning in Comparative/Historical Perspective,” Social Science History, 43, no. 3 (2019), p. 433. ANOM Colonies C6 16, Mémoires des habitants de Gorée, 26 December 1772. See Aubert, “‘Nègres ou mulâtres nous sommes tous Français’,” p. 137. For the 1770s letter, see ANOM Colonies E 238, “Réponse des habitants de Gorée à la demande de M. Armeny de Paradis pour les engager à passer à Cayenne,” 1770s. Semley writes that at least half of the 14 signatories were women. See Semley, To Be Free and French, pp. 88–92. Semley, To Be Free and French, p. 91. On the 1775 petition, see Marcson, “European-African Interaction,” pp. 58–60. The petition can be found in the Public Records Office, London, CO 267/1, 29 August 1775. On petitions in revolutionary France, see Adrian O’Connor’s contribution to this volume. Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “Officially Solicited Petitions: The ‘Cahiers de Doléances’ as a Historical Source,” International Review of Social History, 46, Supplement 9: Petitions in social history (December 2001), pp. 79–106. Dominique Lamiral, L’Affrique et le peuple affriquain considérés sous tous leurs rapports avec notre commerce et nos colonies (Paris: Dessenne, 1789), p. 20. Lamiral, L’Affrique et le peuple affriquain, p. 2. See Aubert, “‘Nègres ou mulâtres nous sommes tous Français’,” pp. 125–147. The cahier does not appear anywhere in the archives; it appears, printed, in Lamiral’s L’Affrique et le peuple affriquain. Though it has been suggested that Lamiral alone authored the document, scholars have noted that the cahier bears the hallmarks of an habitant petition, and the language and sentiments expressed in the cahier are similar to those of previous petitions from Senegal’s habitants. On questions about the authorship of the petition, see Jones, The Métis of Senegal, pp. 207–37, and Marcson, “European-African Interaction,” pp. 70–71. Pierre Augustin Roussillou, “Rapport de M. Roussillon, au nom du comité d’agriculture et de commerce, sur le commerce du Sénégal, lors de la séance du 18 janvier 1791,” in Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 -

8

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

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Première série (1787-1799): Tome XXII - Du 3 janvier au 5 février 1791 (Paris: Librairie Administrative P. Dupont, 1885), pp. 319–321. “Décret no 2262 de la Convention nationale, du 16 pluviôse an II de la République française, une et indivisible qui abolit l’esclavage des Nègres dans les colonies,” in Collection générale des loix, proclamations, instructions, et autres actes du pouvoir exécutif: Tome 17 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1794). Adrian Carton, “Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792,” French Historical Studies, 31, no. 4 (Fall 2008), p. 583. See H. Oludare Idowu, “Assimilation in 19th Century Senegal,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 9, no. 34 (1969), pp. 194–218, and Mamadou Diouf, “The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of the Originaires of the Four Communes (Senegal): A NineteenthCentury Globalization Project,” Development and Change, 29 (1998), pp. 671–696. Archives Nationales du Sénégal, Dakar, Senegal, 1A2, “Arrêté du Gouverneur en conseil rélatif à l’application du code civil français à la colonie du Sénégal et de ses dépendances avec les modifications réconnus nécessaires et promulgation du dit code ainsi modifié,” November 5, 1830. See also ANOM Senegal VIII-4bis, “Application du code civil français à la colonie du Sénégal et dépendances avec les modifications reconnues nécessaires.” “Loi du 24 avril 1833 concernant le régime législatif des colonies,” in Bulletin des Lois du Royaume de France, IXe Série, 1ere Partie, Tome V, no. 94 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1833), p. 124. Debates about the rights of French Muslims arose during the French Revolution as well; see Ian Coller, Muslims and Citizens: Islam, Politics, and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), especially Chapter 3. On the perceived incompatibility of French and Muslim law in the context of French colonialism, see Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), especially Chapters 6 and 8. See Dominique Sarr and Richard Roberts, “The Jurisdiction of Muslim Tribunals in Colonial Senegal, 1857–1932,” in Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts (eds.), Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991); Ghislaine Lydon, “Obtaining Freedom at the Muslims’ Tribunal: Colonial Kadijustiz and Women’s Divorce Litigation in Ndar (Senegal),” in Shamil Jeppie, Ebrahim Moosa, and Richard Roberts (eds.), Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and Post-colonial Challenges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 136–137. On debates about the Muslim tribunal in 1848, after the last of the petitions discussed

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35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

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here, see ANOM Senegal VII-23bis, Conseil d’Administration, Séance du 21 Octobre 1848: Au sujet de l’établissement d’un tribunal musulman à Saint-Louis. See Bernard Schnapper, “Les Tribunaux musulmans et la politique coloniale au Sénégal (1830-1914),” Revue Historique du Droit Français et Etranger, 39 (1961), pp. 91–92, and David Robinson, “France as a Muslim Power in West Africa,” Africa Today, 46, no. 3/4: Islam in Africa (Summer–Fall 1999), pp. 109–111, for a discussion of the signatories of the 1843 petition. ANOM Senegal VIII-14bis, À Monsieur le Gouvernor, Saint-Louis, December 1843. Op. cit. This argument was not as straightforward as they presented it, as the explicit statement in the 1833 decree that the civil code was to apply to freed slaves, as well as to those who were born free, made clear that it was not intended to apply only to those from metropolitan France. Bernard Schnapper, “Les Tribunaux musulmans,” p. 91. On Muslim tribunals in Algeria, see Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). On French citizenship in Algeria, see Laure Blévis, “Les avatars de la citoyenneté en Algérie colonial ou les paradoxes d’une catégorisation,” Droit et societé, 2, no. 48 (2001), pp. 557–581. ANOM Senegal VIII-14bis, À Monsieur le Gouvernor, Saint-Louis, December 1843. Ironically, while these petitions compared the situation of Muslims in Saint-Louis to that of Muslims in Algeria, by the late nineteenth century Muslims in Saint-Louis would gain political rights not available to Muslims in Algeria. The argument that adherence to French civil law was the defining characteristic of the French citizen—and that citizenship might, therefore, be denied to Muslims, in particular—would be raised repeatedly throughout the colonial era, in Senegal, Algeria, and elsewhere. The issue was debated at length in the early twentieth century, when a 1916 law declared the inhabitants of Senegal’s “four communes”—Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque—to be full-fledged French citizens without mentioning the tension between French citizenship and Muslim law. See Larissa Kopytoff, “French Citizens and Muslim Law: The Tensions of Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Senegal,” in Richard Marback and Marc W. Kruman (eds.), The Meaning of Citizenship (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), pp. 320–337. Lydon, “Obtaining Freedom at the Muslims’ Tribunal,” pp. 136–137. See Frederick Cooper, Citizenship Between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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42. On these ongoing debates, see Chouki El Hamel, “Muslim Diaspora in Western Europe: The Islamic Headscarf (Hijab), the Media and Muslims’ Integration in France,” Citizenship Studies, 6, no. 3 (2002), pp. 293–308; Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall (eds.), Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

PART III

Revolutionary Ruptures and the Path to Mass Petitioning

CHAPTER 9

Petitioning as Constitution-Making: Revolutionary Massachusetts and the American Confederation James F. Hrdlicka

Recovering the voices and perspectives of non-elites remains a major goal for scholars of the age of revolutions. In the field of American history, especially vibrant debates have focused on popular attitudes toward the era’s constitutional developments. What kind of political system did “ordinary” Americans—those who did not write famous treatises or leave behind volumes of personal correspondence—hope to see established in the wake of Independence? To what extent did the period’s constitutional settlements, and the new federal regime they collectively instituted, actually reflect the aspirations and further the interests of the majority? A common conclusion is that a large proportion of ordinary Americans either positively resisted or, at best, regarded with ambivalence

J. F. Hrdlicka (B) School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_9

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the United States Constitution of 1787. In historian Gordon S. Wood’s classic account, Americans celebrated the state constitutions they created in the 1770s and early 1780s as the true fulfillment of the Revolution’s republican principles. State governments, most Americans assumed, embodied the sovereignty of the people and were ideal instruments for carrying out the popular will. But by the mid-1780s, a cadre of political elites felt that these state governments were proving all too effective at fostering dangerously democratic impulses. It was this realization, Wood argues, that inspired the movement to reform the loose continental Confederation that Americans had forged during the War of Independence (1775–1783). A new federal Constitution would create a truly national government with the power to curtail the abuses—especially those related to property rights—that overzealous Americans were perpetrating within their respective states. Surely, average Americans did not embrace such an “intrinsically…aristocratic document,” as Wood calls the Constitution.1 Scholars of the neo-progressive school similarly depict an American populace at odds with the proponents of a federal union. During the Confederation era, these historians argue, democratic state governments responded to grassroots demands for greater political equality and economic justice. Then, in the words of Michael A. McDonnell, “Negotiating a now well-documented deceit, [a] small group of distinguished elites met in Philadelphia and, without any authorization, drafted a radically different plan of government to the Articles of Confederation.” McDonnell further argues that the Constitution “was not, after all, the logical culmination of the process of war and peace that had been set into motion by the declaration of independence.” In fact, “the Constitution that was hammered out and adopted was erected in the face of, and because of, popular and widespread forces and feelings that were opposed to it.”2 According to this view, the extant evidence reveals that non-elite Americans longed for a political outcome very different than the one foisted on them. They were ultimately forced to accept a form of government in profound tension with the one their revolutionary-era experiences had led them to desire. The United States Constitution, still in effect today, foreclosed viable alternatives that, to many Americans at the time, appeared far more democratic and preferable.3 Even scholars of state-formation and the international context of the American founding tend to reinforce the notion that the federal union

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appealed primarily to elites and disproportionately served their interests. Building a fiscal-military state, ensuring the nation’s credit- and treaty-worthiness, facilitating foreign investment, earning respect from the European arbiters of “civilization”—all these goals can appear, at least at first glance, rather tenuously connected to the daily lives and desires of average Americans.4 Those historians who wish to argue that the Constitution ultimately benefitted the majority of the populace, and that the populace recognized and welcomed those benefits, must therefore present more compelling evidence that popular views of government were, in fact, compatible with—or even crucial spurs to—the period’s climactic political reforms.5 Petitions provide such compelling evidence. As sources, they are far from perfect. The voices and perspectives of non-white, non-male Americans remain greatly underrepresented. But as in other early modern polities, petitions offered a large proportion of ordinary inhabitants the opportunity to express how they wanted their governments to operate. Communities and inhabitants of every type communicated news of their situations to provincial (and then state) magistrates in the hope of evoking favorable responses. Indeed, British colonial governments and their Revolutionary successors depended on this flow of information. Authorities could not afford to ignore petitions based solely on the relative status of their authors. As sources for popular political ideas in Revolutionary America, petitions are valuable precisely because most focused on practical issues grounded in the petitioners’ evolving experience of governance. The remarkable array of issues raised in petitions reminds us that people of this era considered a complex and interlocking set of concerns. We must strive to view this past world holistically, to recover the expectations and deeper assumptions held by the populace at large. Petitions and petitioning reveal nothing less than the ultimate foundations of a regime’s legitimacy; they are sophisticated expressions of constitutional thought. Consider, for instance, the petitions written by towns and individuals in one important state, Massachusetts. Among other things, they reveal a widespread demand for protection—and a profound disgust with governments unable, for whatever reason, to provide it. Inhabitants had always expected authorities to be responsive to their pleas for protection. Ensuring protection became far more difficult, however, once Massachusetts was no longer part of the British Empire, the world’s foremost fiscal-military power.6 With the onset of the Revolution, the newly independent state government attempted to function as inhabitants

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expected, making enough of a response, to enough petitions for protection, to maintain its standing as the people’s guardian, worthy of their continued allegiance. Moderate successes on this score occurred alongside devastating failures. In the course of a long War of Independence, an individual state like Massachusetts discovered the hard limits of its capacity to shield the populace from the forces of a powerful imperial foe. As a result, some inhabitants made the calculated and understandable decision to reject the state government’s authority. Meanwhile, an analogous process was playing out between the state and the government of the American Confederation. In these years, the Confederation Congress met Massachusetts’ appeals for assistance and support largely with inaction and silence. And because Americans often formulated their ideas about what comprised legitimate and effective government at one level by drawing analogies with their experience of governance on other, more local levels, the Confederation government’s failure to provide even a semblance of protection was an ominous sign for its future prospects. The Confederation appeared increasingly illegitimate by the standards Massachusetts petitioners articulated when assessing the government of their own state. These ordinary Americans knew that this incapacity on the part of the Confederation directly threatened their chances of enjoying peace and liberty. Absent significant reforms, self-preservation might soon demand rejecting Congress’ authority and repudiating membership in the Confederation itself. In petitions, then, we find a key to understanding the deep sources of popular support for the movement to establish a more tightly integrated political community of continental dimensions—the polity proposed in the United States Constitution of 1787. In Massachusetts, the start of revolution and war against British forces did not require inhabitants to abandon their existing constitutional framework or mode of governance. Indeed, Massachusetts colonists initially resorted to militant resistance in April 1775 not to overthrow their traditional form of government but to preserve that form against Parliament’s attempts to alter it.7 In July 1775, as reconciliation with the king remained the stated goal, Massachusetts officially resumed government according to its 1691 charter. Representatives from incorporated towns sat in a lower House while an elected Council of twenty-eight provincial elites comprised an upper chamber. This legislature was called the General Court. With the crown-appointed governor having “vacated” his office, the Council also exercised the executive powers outlined in the charter.

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This arrangement continued until the implementation of the independent state’s first constitution in October 1780.8 Petitioning had long served as an essential technology of governance in Massachusetts.9 Although many inhabitants could count on their elected representatives to convey their perspectives and defend their interests in the Boston statehouse, all Massachusetts inhabitants—especially those whose towns chose not to pay to send a member to the General Court— needed another way to communicate with authorities throughout the year. In peacetime, most town petitions addressed practical concerns: applications for town incorporation; settlement of local ecclesiastical, jurisdictional, and electoral controversies; the apportionment of taxation. When a petition arrived in Boston, it typically received a reading before the Speaker of the House assigned a committee of three or so members to deliberate on it.10 Committees could dismiss the petition outright or order it “to lie” for the present, often with little chance of it being reconsidered. If a committee found the petition worthwhile, it could recommend that it be considered alongside similar petitions touching on the same issue. These petitions would inform pieces of general legislation. If the petition had merit but was of private or local concern, the committee would recommend a specific monetary grant or course of action that the entire General Court would then resolve.11 War led to a dramatic increase in the number of petitions in Massachusetts. Military mobilization demanded a constant stream of interactions between authorities and the populace.12 The state government implemented all its policies and made all its requisitions for money and troops by acting through the towns, relying on over 200 sets of local magistrates to comply with orders and fill assigned quotas. But townships varied so greatly in their populations, states of development, geographical situations, wealth, interests, and—as we will see—security risks that almost any general policy enacted by the General Court was bound to affect towns differently. Inhabitants assumed that the General Court wanted feedback about how governance was playing out on the ground and that state authorities would take actions, permit exceptions, and adjust demands according to the situation. By granting a request, petitioners argued, the General Court would only be furthering the true intent of its legislation. No one would benefit if a town tried to implement a policy or law obviously unsuited to its circumstances, if it tried to shoulder a burden clearly beyond its capacities, or if it failed to bring to authorities’ attention any threats to the collective security.

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Making their cases effectively therefore required petitioners to articulate fundamental assumptions and principles which resonated with their fellow inhabitants throughout Massachusetts. Pleading narrow selfinterest or offering idiosyncratic rationales would almost certainly guarantee rejection. Petitioners situated themselves, rhetorically, in the context of the larger political community. Once fellow inhabitants stepped back and viewed the situation with a wider lens, the logic went, they would recognize both the reasonableness of the petitioners’ requests as well as the long-term benefits that would accrue to the state as a whole if authorities looked after the well-being of all citizens, however, remote their locations or “peculiar” their circumstances. Appeals for special treatment or intervention were persuasive only if they appeared to reinforce a shared constellation of political values—values that, given an unpredictable future in which comparable misfortune and hardship might eventually strike one’s own part of the body politic, everyone had a vested interest in upholding. Collectively, then, petitions presented a consensus understanding of how the political system was supposed to operate. For this reason, they can serve as a guide to the era’s vernacular thought.13 Indeed, those who wrote petitions on behalf of towns ranged in status from elite to humble, a fact illustrated by the degrees of formal literacy apparent in the manuscripts. Wealthier, more urbane men tended to win elections as magistrates in the older, larger, and more cosmopolitan towns. But in Massachusetts’ many poorer, more remote, or newly settled communities, where pronounced social stratification had not yet emerged, the year’s officers could be practically indistinguishable from the mass of their neighbors.14 In this era, of course, the pool of inhabitants eligible to serve in these official capacities consisted solely of white males. Although African Americans and women could and did successfully petition in Massachusetts, they were not asked or permitted to contribute to petitions written on behalf of towns. At best, their interests and desires regarding such issues were taken to be in harmony with those of the broader community—an assumption always open to question. This important caveat aside, petitions which betrayed their authors’ lack of refinement do not appear to have been at any significant disadvantage with the General Court, provided they followed the genre’s well-known conventions and made compelling cases. The reason is clear: especially in wartime, state authorities needed to sustain the confidence and voluntary compliance of all parts of their jurisdiction. Prompt, meaningful responses to petitions could enhance the Revolutionary regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of

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its inhabitants. Failure to address serious issues, however, could lead the populace to slide into destructive apathy or even defection. Petitioning thus did not necessarily imply inhabitants’ hostility to authorities. On the contrary, petitioners assumed the existence of a strong government capable of responding effectively to their needs. In their petitions, inhabitants of Revolutionary Massachusetts demanded protection. Those living in the small Maine settlement of Gouldsboro stated the idea clearly in 1781: “That Allegiance & protection are Reciprocal,” they wrote, “is so well Establish’d, they are so Interwoven together & so Dependant on each other that a separate Existance wou’d be a Solecism.”15 The feudal resonances of the idea notwithstanding, republican authorities as well as monarchs needed constantly to warrant the allegiance of those living within their jurisdictions. The protection-allegiance covenant lay at the heart of any social compact. For the government of Revolutionary Massachusetts, maintaining popular confidence that the state could shield inhabitants from danger was the first step in constituting the body politic—a community whose potential bounds announced themselves in the petitions sent to Boston. Year after year, the General Court considered a steady stream of petitions from exposed communities. Through incessant effort, authorities managed to seem responsive enough, to enough people, to maintain a tenuous foundation for further constitutional development. Massachusetts inhabitants felt vulnerable to attack throughout the war. Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 and British forces remained besieged in Boston until their evacuation in March 1776. Although the principal armies moved beyond Massachusetts’ borders, the British remained close, occupying such places as New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. A British army marched south from Canada in 1777 and met defeat at Saratoga, New York, near the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Just as concerning, the British Royal Navy remained active in the waters off the state’s extensive and well-settled coastline. The approximately 50,000 inhabitants of Massachusetts’ Maine counties—York, Cumberland, and Lincoln—lived within easy striking distance of British vessels based at Halifax, Nova Scotia. For many isolated settlements, the war added urgency to the search for provisions and war-related supplies. Far from claiming self-sufficiency, inhabitants immediately petitioned provincial authorities for help. The Cumberland County Committee of Correspondence admitted that its “Towns have in General heretofore been negligent in providing Arms and

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Amunition according to Law,” but it now asked for as many of those articles as could be spared.16 The inhabitants of Frenchman’s Bay “beg[ged]” for “Arms and amonition,” promising in return always to consider themselves “Bound” to the revolutionary government.17 Machias, a remote but strategically vital settlement in far eastern Maine, petitioned for supplies. It informed the Provincial Congress (the temporary body that governed until the General Court’s resumption in July 1775): “you are our Guardians, and we rejoice and glory in being Subject…you are all our dependance, and if you Neglect us, we are ruined.”18 Massachusetts’ government also authorized units of “seacoast men” to guard vulnerable communities. It did so in response to widespread demand. Berwick’s inhabitants, for example, predicted that they would be “incapable” of defending “themselves, Wives, Children and properties, should a descent be made by the Kings Troops.” They asked if the Provincial Congress “would be pleased” to make arrangements for guards.19 In late June 1775, the Provincial Congress approved guards for various coastal counties, ranging from 500 for Essex to 100 for Bristol.20 In subsequent years, the General Court tried to anticipate protection demands by passing a resolution specifying the locations and numbers of seacoast men. In January 1776, with British forces still occupying Boston, it authorized 1200 such guards. It reduced this number in November, and subsequent annual resolves of this type usually authorized a few hundred guards for the year. An October 1780 resolve reduced the number to just over 100.21 But no one appears to have considered these decisions as set in stone. Towns felt free to propose that additional forces be deployed, arguing that, once the General Court received up-to-date information, it would make necessary and prompt adjustments. The assembly was not going to approve the Cape Cod town of Truro’s extravagant request for “two or three field peces and five Hundred Solders.”22 Yet it gave serious consideration to more reasonable suggestions. In March 1776, Yarmouth informed the General Court that it viewed the “small number of men to guard our sea Coasts” authorized the previous year “as a Great favour done them by your honours.” It asked for similar assistance for the coming year.23 Dorchester, Milton, Braintree, Weymouth, and Hingham together made a strong case for a regiment of guards on the grounds that with the Continental Army recently departed, the area now lacked security.24 The General Court saw fit several times to raise large numbers

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of guards for Boston.25 In March 1778, Dartmouth asked for relief. An accompanying letter by a militia colonel explained that “The People here seem greatly dissatisfied that the Court afford them no more assistance” and urged that “the Court grant them some Protection.”26 The General Court quickly arranged for a significant force of guards and artillerists to be stationed there.27 On other occasions, towns took defensive measures on their own and relied on the government to sanction their efforts and reimburse them. After all, a common line of reasoning ran, inhabitants could not always be expected to await authorization before taking necessary precautions. Some communities, such as Harpswell, initially raised guards “at their own Cost” and petitioned for them to be retained and their number augmented by the government.28 The Essex County town of Manchester would have “put into pay a Sufficient Number of Men to guard and defend it”—if it could afford to. Yet this “would be a Burthen greater than we are able to bare,” inhabitants explained, and they asked authorities to place a company on the provincial payroll.29 In early 1776, the selectmen of Rehoboth, in Bristol County, reported that people there had been animated “by the First prinisabels of Human Nature To defend [them]selves” and had accordingly “Erected a breast Work on An Eminance” at a cost of £103. The General Court thought Rehoboth’s claim possessed enough merit to dispatch a committee to review the works. Unfortunately for the town, the committee reported that the breastwork along the Ten Mile River may have helped defend Providence, Rhode Island, but “contributes little or nothing to the security of Rehoboth.” It recommended that “this Colony ought not to defray any expence which has arisen by erecting said fortification.” The committee did recommend that guards be stationed in the vicinity, however.30 Newburyport made a similar request. It had taken various steps to defend its harbor, measures inhabitants did not consider “foolishly lavish” and which had been “prompted…under the sudden Apprehension of immediate Danger, when Delays would have Negated the Intention of our Endeavours.” In support of their claims for reimbursement, Newburyport inhabitants noted that they could not “without great Distress support alone our own Defence, while we contribute in equal proportion to our Abilities to the Defence of others.” They also reminded the General Court that “all the other provincial Assemblies

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on the Continent,…are providing for the Security of their Seaports & Inland Frontiers.” If the General Court failed to approve reasonable measures adopted in good faith, such petitions implied, then it would be, in effect, discouraging local inhabitants from taking steps to protect themselves in the future—the very opposite of what a legitimate government was supposed to do. The General Court took no immediate action on Newburyport’s March 1776 petition; a future tax abatement, akin to a reimbursement, remained a possibility.31 Newburyport repeated its request and the town’s persistence probably contributed to the General Court’s decision to send a committee to view the town’s defenses. Another committee simultaneously traveled south to Plymouth.32 Such constant and meaningful interactions between inhabitants and the General Court, even when they did not fully satisfy all parties, reinforced a belief that every town formed part of a larger political community. The selectmen of Gloucester expressed a widely held assumption about government when, in the course of successfully requesting more seacoast men for their “protection,” they told the General Court: “we flatter ourselves it is with the political, as with the natural body—if one member suffers, the attention of all the others are employed to administer to its relief.”33 The state government’s effort to attend to the security needs of towns allowed it to retain enough legitimacy in the eyes of many inhabitants to proceed with other such vital functions as raising troops, collecting taxes, and writing and ratifying a state constitution—all of which required the populace’s cooperation. The General Court did not aim—or need—to grant every petition it received. Indeed, Massachusetts towns, ever vigilant that their neighbors might try to exaggerate their hardships and shirk their shares of the collective burdens, demanded that the government exercise judicious discretion. By doing so, authorities would guarantee that they possessed the resources and the capacity to respond rapidly and effectively to legitimate threats. Despite its best efforts, the Massachusetts General Court proved powerless to prevent more concerted displays of British military might. The destruction of the town of Falmouth by British warships on October 18, 1775—an act of retaliation for hostilities initiated by the militiamen of Machias—severely damaged the state government’s reputation as an effective “guardian of the people.” After giving residents some time to evacuate, four British vessels fired on the Maine town for nearly eight hours, destroying 130 houses, several public buildings, and numerous ships in the harbor.34 Falmouth’s destruction shocked observers throughout

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Massachusetts and the General Court spent subsequent years attempting to regain the people’s trust. The government’s most conspicuous opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to deliver protection occurred in 1779 when petitions began to arrive warning of the British occupation of Penobscot Bay, a strategic point along the Maine coastline. In June, Falmouth’s committee wrote that the British “are already at Penobscott” and intended to “annex as great a part of the Province of Main, as possible.”35 A petition from a group of Lincoln County towns demanded that the General Court deliver “the Necessary protection, which we, in common with the other parts of the State, have a right to expect” or else the inhabitants would be forced “to make for ourselves the best terms we can.”36 The British had already started to administer oaths of allegiance.37 In response to such ominous reports, the General Court promptly authorized a major expedition to recover Penobscot. It approved a force of 1500 militia and nearly forty ships total, many of them private cargo or transport vessels that, fatefully, would be insured by the state.38 The situation seemed too pressing to consult Congress and, at any rate, no one seriously expected that distant body would be able to take any action, especially on short notice. One Continental frigate joined the expedition. When the flotilla set sail on July 19, state authorities could congratulate themselves for organizing an impressive response to a significant security threat. The incompetence of the Massachusetts commanders, along with the indiscipline of the militia, which had not been recruited to its authorized strength, resulted in a badly coordinated operation. Approximately 700 British troops and three sloops held off Massachusetts forces for more than two weeks, enough time for a powerful British naval force to arrive and annihilate the entire American fleet on August 14. Most of the surviving militiamen scattered and made their way home on foot.39 The General Court’s bid to deliver protection had failed. The sad affair signaled the state’s inability to defend all inhabitants and ensure their incorporation within the body politic anytime soon. The British remained at Penobscot for the rest of the war and even began to implement plans for a new loyalist colony there, “New Ireland.”40 Massachusetts’ subsequent efforts in the region only revealed its weakness. For a time in 1780, militia commander Peleg Wadsworth declared the coast of Lincoln County to be under martial law and, acknowledging British power, designated all inhabitants of the islands in or near Penobscot Bay as “neutrals”

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in the conflict.41 The purpose of Gouldsboro’s March 1781 petition, in which inhabitants reminded the General Court that “Allegiance & protection are reciprocal,” was to request that state authorities treat them as neutrals as well.42 In January 1783, Lincoln County inhabitants were still reporting widespread submission to the enemy and rumors that the British intended to expand their “Government” farther west. Petitioners remained “disheartened as we have no Protection,” and tellingly requested “Continental troops” to defend them.43 The Penobscot expedition prompted serious reflection about the nature and capacity of the American Confederation that Massachusetts had helped constitute. Ideally, Continental forces would have been powerful enough to deter the British from even attempting their occupation of Maine. Given the demands on the Continental Army and Navy elsewhere in 1779, however, Massachusetts observers did not condemn Congress or General George Washington for failing to provide direct protection at that time. The more relevant test of the Confederation’s character would come in the course of its response to Massachusetts’ request that the costs of the Penobscot expedition be placed on the Continental account, to be paid by all the states collectively. The loss of so many vessels insured by the General Court put the state in debt to the tune of over £1,730,000 in the currency of the day.44 Using the same logic that had already occurred to inhabitants in towns over the course of the war, the General Court petitioned Congress for a reimbursement.45 Massachusetts’ request resembled those drafted by numerous towns that had, on their own initiative, taken decisive and necessary (but expensive) actions to defend themselves in the face of dire threats—measures that were plausibly in the interests of the entire continental political community. By sanctioning reasonable actions of this kind—by agreeing that the part’s extraordinary burden ought to be borne by the whole—Congress would be promoting collective security and enhancing its own reputation as the guardian of the American people. Congress’ handling of Massachusetts’ Penobscot claim revealed the Confederation’s inherent flaws. No one expected Congress to issue Massachusetts a quick payment, as the king-in-parliament had done in the wake of the province’s even more ambitious, self-initiated 1745 expedition against the French fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island.46 But Massachusetts officials did hope that the state’s petition would be considered and settled in a fashion reasonably analogous to how the General Court heard petitions from towns or individuals. Instead, the General

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Court and Massachusetts’ delegates to Congress spent the duration of the Confederation’s existence unsuccessfully trying to get a definitive ruling on the matter. The process began auspiciously enough, with Congress assigning a committee to consider the state’s petition.47 Yet in November 1779 Congress denied Massachusetts’ proposal to keep in-state the full quota of Continental taxes it had just been assigned, which would have provided temporary financial relief until Congress could officially rule the Penobscot costs a Continental expense.48 Massachusetts’ delegates turned their efforts to persuading Congress that the expedition truly had been in the interest of the Continent.49 James Lovell scoured Congress’ journals for resolves on whose basis Massachusetts could claim positive authorization for undertaking a venture of this sort, but he concluded that Massachusetts “can only go upon the Reason and Justice” of its “Claim to be reimbursed.”50 “Reason and Justice” proved persuasive enough for the state to win a positive but minor ruling in April 1780, when Congress approved Massachusetts’ conditional retention of part of its Continental tax quota. As Lovell and Samuel Holten emphasized, however, “the main Point relative to the Expences on the Penobscot Expedition was left undecided.”51 Congress still had not determined whether the cost would be assumed by the Continent. Massachusetts’ Penobscot claim then got folded into the general issue of the settlement of all state accounts. The problem appeared intractable, with many states signaling their intentions to prevent acceptance of other states’ claims until their own were approved. In 1783, James Madison wrote of Massachusetts, “The expedition to Penobscot alone interests her.”52 More years passed. When Massachusetts delegate Rufus King addressed the General Court in October 1786, he explained how entangled the Penobscot claim remained with those of the southern states.53 A year later, with a committee to settle accounts nearly a reality at long last, Samuel A. Otis expressed concern that the committee’s composition would be “so cooked” that “the Penobscott business,…will be thrown out.”54 By then, the Philadelphia convention had been adjourned for over a month. Only in 1793 did the United States Congress, under the new federal Constitution, agree to accept the remainder of the state’s Penobscot expenses.55 With the Confederation constitutionally incapable of processing such requests, states were strongly discouraged from taking proactive steps in the common interest. Massachusetts officials knew they could not rely on

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Continental forces to address security threats such as the British presence at Penobscot. Just as fraught with long-term consequences for the protection of every part of the United States, however, was the absence of any clear criteria by which states could confidently promote collective security. If no reliable method existed in the Confederation for pursuing claims, then states would be left with only two options. They could undertake large ventures anyway and risk burdening their constituents with unsustainable levels of debt likely to produce internal dissension. Or they could become risk-averse and refuse to adopt such measures, even when that meant reneging on their duty to protect parts of the political community. Either way, the legitimacy of the state government lay imperiled. The body politic would be weakened and potentially reduced in size as authorities deemed some parts of it too difficult or costly to protect. The point, then, is not that Massachusetts was upset that its Penobscot petition had been rejected. The larger problem was that it had not been decided at all and might never be. As we have seen, inhabitants did not expect or desire that every claim by every petitioner be granted in full. The General Court rejected petitions all the time. Of greater importance was that state authorities rendered decisive verdicts in most instances and granted enough requests to sustain in inhabitants a belief that they lived in a coherent political community that operated according to easily discernable principles of governance. The government’s legitimacy hinged on its capacity to deliver credible protection to all members of that community. The key question remained: would Americans eventually apply the same standards of legitimacy—those they applied to their own state governments—to the government of the Confederation? If allegiance and protection were reciprocal, then Americans in every state surely would start to wonder what they were receiving in return for their compliance with Congress’ requests for troops, taxes, and implementation of other policies. Petitions contain some of the era’s most insightful commentary about government. They reveal ordinary Americans recognizing that, far from representing an aberrant set of circumstances that made fairly evaluating a regime impossible, war in fact served to highlight the political system’s strengths and weaknesses with the greatest clarity. Protection comprised the government’s most fundamental duty; the capacity of authorities to deliver it determined the limits of the body politic. The state’s capacity to provide protection, in turn, depended on the regime possessing a host of other characteristics that petitions also identified. When the General

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Court assigned quotas of men and money needed to sustain military mobilization, for instance, Massachusetts petitioners demanded that such collective burdens be apportioned equitably across the political community. Quotas were much more likely to be seen as equitable if they were first proposed by elected representatives, who would then be willing to adjust them in response to reasonable requests from affected communities. The successful drafting and popular ratification in 1780 of a new state constitution endowed Massachusetts’ government with greater legitimacy and increased its ability to command the populace’s compliance. The government of the Confederation, in contrast, was constituted and operated in starkly different ways. Exercising the limited authority granted by the states in the Articles of Confederation, Congress simply did not function in a manner similar to that of any state government. It was not responsive, often lacking so much as a quorum to do business. It could not be equitable, granting equal representation to all states regardless of their populations or contributions. It had no capacity to enforce its demands, which states routinely ignored. Congress could deliver no serious degree of protection to those political communities, the states, ostensibly under its remit. The Confederation government, therefore, hardly resembled the legitimate government described in Massachusetts inhabitants’ petitions. These rich sources implore us to expand our view of what counts as popular support for comprehensive constitutional reform. Petitions, it is true, did not propose the specific political settlement ultimately outlined in the United States Constitution. Yet that makes them no different than the writings of the most ardent elite proponents of a new federal union. James Madison himself, the Virginian later designated the “Father of the Constitution,” had in these years only the most rudimentary ideas of exactly how to strengthen the union. As he made his way to Philadelphia in 1787, Madison did not know, for instance, how a national government could ensure state compliance with its laws—the power on which all other reforms depended.56 Petitions written by ordinary Americans, like Madison’s writings, express clear understandings of what governments needed to deliver even as they necessarily refrained from identifying the particular constitutional form that might enhance government’s capacity to deliver it.57 But even on this score, the mass of ordinary citizens deserves much of the credit for dictating the constitutional solutions Madison and his colleagues eventually put into form. Thanks in part to petitioning, the

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elites in Philadelphia debated with full knowledge of how governance actually worked within each state. They knew what made government legitimate and effective in the people’s eyes—at least in the eyes of those fellow politically empowered white males who in this period were assumed to speak for “the people.” It was no coincidence, then, that the United States Constitution took on a basic form strikingly similar to that of most state constitutions, Massachusetts’ 1780 constitution foremost among them: a bicameral legislature, composed of representatives from incorporated communities, as well as an executive who was commander-in-chief of the military forces Congress was authorized to raise. In its broad outlines, such an arrangement on a continental level made intuitive sense to Americans who had recently ratified a similar system for their own state. The scale may have been different but the problems and solutions were similar. If the United States was constituted and functioned more like a single body politic, its government would be more capable of preserving the political community to the satisfaction of its constituent members. Most Americans who embraced the federal Constitution were not cosmopolitan elites obsessed with democracy run amok and determined to realize a radical nationalist vision for the United States. They were ordinary citizens of various backgrounds who, through practical experience, recognized that prosperity and security in any local community depended on the stability, strength, and legitimacy of the broader polity. Just as the inhabitants of a given town were unlikely to thrive without an effective state government, so too would inhabitants of Massachusetts find it challenging or even impossible to pursue happiness amid the Confederation’s failure to address issues of continental concern. The inevitable sharp debates over specific aspects of the new federal regime, especially those that would potentially favor some regions, states, or classes of individuals more than others, did not overshadow the many consequences, anticipated and felt by all, that flowed from the structural transformation of governance deftly inaugurated by the United States Constitution.58 For all the distinctive features of their history, Americans were driven by many of the same imperatives also animating other peoples throughout the Atlantic World. It is no surprise, then, that American innovations in constitution-making—spurred by the need to establish and legitimize a new regime—would soon be taken up and adapted in those parts of Europe and the Americas undergoing revolutionary upheavals of their own.59 Constitution-making proved a transferable political technology

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because of its potential to respond to the demands and meet the expectations of those most attuned to the realities of governance. It was those ordinary voices—frequently conveyed through the venerable process of petitioning—that underlay the period’s most momentous constitutional developments.

Notes 1. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998 [orig. 1969]), pp. 393–518, esp. pp. 411, 437, 466. Quote on p. 513. 2. Michael A. McDonnell, “War and Nationhood: Founding Myths and Historical Realities,” in Michael McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances Clarke, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage (eds.), Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), pp. 32, 33. 3. Michael A. McDonnell, “War Stories: Remembering and Forgetting the American Revolution,” in Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (eds.), The American Revolution Reborn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 9–28; Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: AntiFederalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 81–120; Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a neo-progressive interpretation of Massachusetts, see Van Beck Hall, Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780–1791 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). 4. Examples include Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); David M. Golove and Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “A Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,” New York University Law Review, 85, no. 4, pp. 932–1066; David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Alison

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5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); George William Van Cleve, We Have Not A Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). Notable studies that attempt to explain the Constitution’s popular appeal include Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); Christopher Collier, All Politics Is Local: Family, Friends, and Provincial Interests in the Creation of the Constitution (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003); Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2007). For how Massachusetts benefitted from imperial protection in wartime, see James F. Hrdlicka, “‘The Attachment of the People’: The Massachusetts Charter, the French and Indian War, and the Coming of the American Revolution,” The New England Quarterly, 89, no. 3 (Sept. 2016), pp. 384–420. David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (New York, 1975), pp. 7–8. James F. Hrdlicka, “War and Constitution-Making in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1754–1788,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Virginia, 2016. See David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 87–92; Adrian Chastain Weimer, “The Resistance Petitions of 1664–1665: Confronting the Restoration in Massachusetts Bay,” The New England Quarterly, 92, no. 2 (June 2019), pp. 221– 62. For petitioning in British America more generally, see Alison Olson, “Eighteenth-Century Colonial Legislatures and Their Constituents,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept., 1992), pp. 556–67; Raymond C. Bailey, Popular Influence on Public Policy: Petitioning in EighteenthCentury Virginia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979); Alan Tully, William Penn’s Legacy: Structure and Politics in Provincial Pennsylvania, 1726–1755 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 99– 100, 188–89; George Edward Frakes, Laboratory for Liberty: The South Carolina Legislative Committee System, 1719–1776 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), pp. 27–28. John A. Schutz, Legislators of the Massachusetts General Court, 1691–1780: A Biographical Dictionary (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), pp. 36–37, 39, 50–53, 55, 62–64.

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11. The degree to which the Massachusetts General Court organized its business around responding to petitions, as well as the manner in which it incorporated the ideas and often the specific language of petitions into resulting legislation, reveals striking parallels with, for instance, the Spanish imperial system described by Adrian Masters. See Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 98, no. 3 (2018), pp. 377–406. Comparative scholarship on petitioning suggests deeper commonalities among early modern governments, despite their differences. 12. Olson, “Eighteenth-Century Colonial Legislatures,” p. 557 estimates that the Massachusetts General Court received an average of 257 petitions per year between 1760 and 1765, a period that includes the final years of the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Massachusetts petitions for the Revolutionary period are found in Massachusetts Archives (Mass. Arch.) Volumes 180–89, 206–39, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, Massachusetts. For a study of another state that makes extensive use of wartime petitions, see Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 13. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 155 and also pp. 117, 149–50, 153, 156, 174. See also James Farr, “Conceptual Change and Constitutional Innovation,” in Terrance Ball and J.G.A. Pocock (eds.), Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 15–18. 14. Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university Press, 1976), pp. 23–62, 172–82. 15. Petition of Francis Shaw and Others, Mar. 9, 1781, Mass. Arch., 187: pp. 57–58. 16. Petition of Cumberland County’s Committees of Correspondence, 25 May 1775; L. Kinvin Wroth (ed.), Province in Rebellion: A Documentary History of the Founding of Massachusetts, 1774–75 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 2447–48. Hereafter PIR. 17. Petition of Frenchman’s Bay Inhabitants, 26 June 1775, PIR, p. 2451. 18. Petition of Machias Inhabitants, 25 May 1775, PIR, pp. 2465–67. 19. Petition of Berwick Freeholders and Inhabitants, 31 May 1775, PIR, p. 2443. 20. Journal of the Third Provincial Congress, 28 June 1775, PIR, p. 2342. 21. See Acts and Resolves…the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1918), 19, pp. 189–92, 654–55, 700, 900–1; Acts and Resolves…the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1918), 20, pp. 240–41, 329–30, 575–76;

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Acts and Resolves…the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1922), 21, pp. 315–16, 656. Hereafter A&R. Petition of the Committee of Truro, 25 Dec. 1775, Mass. Arch., 180, pp. 266–66a. Petition of the Selectmen of Yarmouth, 20 March 1776, Mass. Arch., 180, p. 359. Petition of the Inhabitants of Dorchester, Milton, Braintree, Weymouth, and Hingham, 9 April 1776, Mass. Arch., 180, pp. 396–97. See also A&R, 19, p. 423. A&R, 19, pp. 931–32; A&R, 20, pp. 570–71; A&R, 21, pp. 141–42. Petition of the Committees and Inhabitants of Dartmouth, 16 Jan. 1778, Mass. Arch., 183, pp. 362–66 (quote on p. 365). A&R, 20, pp. 240–41. Petition of Harpswell Selectmen et al., 8 July 1775, PIR, pp. 2454–55. Petition of Manchester Selectmen et al., 3 June 1775, PIR, pp. 2468–69. Petition of Selectmen of Rehoboth, 8 Jan. 1776, Mass. Arch., 180, pp. 282, 282b. Petition of the Committee of Newburyport, 14 Mar. 1776, Mass. Arch., 180, pp. 350–50b. The petition was assigned to a committee on 10 April 1776. On April 1, 1776, the General Court had resolved it would reimburse the Newburyport committee nearly £1000 for fitting out two vessels at the Court’s request. See A&R, 19, p. 306. Petition of Newburyport, May 1776, Mass. Arch., 181, pp. 1–2; Report of Committee, 17 May 1776, Mass. Arch., 137, pp. 92–95. Petition of the Selectmen of Gloucester, 1 April 1782, Mass. Arch., 188, p. 3. Gloucester received guards later that year. See Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780–1797, 11 vols. (Boston, 1890–97), 2, p. 262. Hereafter A&L. James S. Leamon, Revolution Downeast: The War for Independence in Maine (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 68–73. Petition of the Committee of Falmouth, 22 June 1779, James P. Baxter (ed.), Documentary History of the State of Maine, 24 vols. (Portland, 1869–1916), 16, p. 298. See also Petition of the Inhabitants of Newburyport, 23 June 1779, DHSM , 16, pp. 308–9. Petition of the Delegates of Several Towns in Lincoln County, 24 June 1779, Mass. Arch., 185, pp. 314–15. Mass. Arch., 145, p. 64. See Leamon, Revolution Downeast, p. 107. A&R, 21, pp. 90–92, 93, 104–5, 114. Leamon, Revolution Downeast, pp. 106–17. Leamon, Revolution Downeast, pp. 105–6, 174–77. Leamon, Revolution Downeast, pp. 123–25.

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42. Petition of Francis Shaw and Others, 9 March 1781, Mass. Arch., 187, p. 58. See also Leamon, Revolution Downeast, pp. 131–34. 43. Petition of Field Officers, Selection, and Inhabitants of the 4th Regiment of the Eastern Department, Jan. 1783, Mass. Arch., 188, pp. 190–91. 44. Board of War Account, 23 Sept. 1779, Mass. Arch., 145, p. 201. By 1788, after revaluation of the currency and partial consolidation, the figure stood at £116,000. See Samuel A. Otis to Nathan Dane, 29 Oct. 1788, Paul H. Smith and Ronald M. Gephart (eds.), Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, 26 vols (Washington, 1976–2000), 25, p. 446. Hereafter LDC. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 205 states that the amount totaled $387,000 and unsympathetically argues that it was a “debatable claim” motivated by Massachusetts’ selfish “desire to secure possession of the area.” 45. Petition to Congress, 22 Sept. 1779, Mass. Arch., 145, pp. 171–72. 46. See William Pencak, War, Politics & Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981), pp. 129–33. 47. Samuel Holten to the Massachusetts Council, 15 Oct. 1779, LDC, 14, p. 79. 48. Samuel Holten to the Massachusetts Council, 11 Nov. 1779, LDC, 14, p. 174; Worthington Chauncey Ford (ed.), Journals of the Continental Congress, 34 vols (Washington, DC, 1904–36), 15, p. 1273. Hereafter JCC. 49. Massachusetts Delegates to the Massachusetts Council, 16 Nov. 1779, LDC, 14, pp. 203–4. 50. James Lovell to Samuel Adams, 21 Mar. 1780, LDC, 14, p. 528. In 1778, Congress had authorized the Massachusetts Council to organize an attack (which was never attempted) against Nova Scotia. See Henry Laurens to the Massachusetts Council, 23 May 1778, LDC, 9, p. 734. 51. James Lovell and Samuel Holten to the Massachusetts Council, 17 Apr. 1780, LDC, 15, p. 46. For Congress’ deliberations and decisions on Massachusetts’ renewed proposals, see JCC, 16, pp. 339–41; James Lovell to Samuel Adams, 9 Apr. 1780, LDC, 15, pp. 25–26. The state was permitted to retain $2 million of its Continental quota. The permanent retention of this sum was conditional on Congress’ approval of Penobscot as a Continental expense. 52. Notes of Debates, 26 Feb. 1783, LDC, 19, p. 740. See also James Madison’s Notes of Debates, 27 Mar 1783 and 17 Apr 1783, LDC, 20, pp. 116, 197. 53. Rufus King’s Address, 11 Oct. 1786, LDC, 23, pp. 587–88. See also, Rufus King to Timothy Pickering, 8 May 1785, LDC, 22, p. 387; Rufus King to Samuel Holten, 21 Nov. 1785, LDC, 23, p. 21; Nathan Dane to Samuel Phillips, 20 Jan. 1786, LDC, 23, pp. 99–100.

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Samuel A. Otis to Nathan Dane, 29 Oct. 1788, LDC, 25, p. 446. Leamon, Revolution Downeast, p. 118. See Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government, pp. 272, 285. On the relationship between responsiveness and state capacity, see Peter S. Onuf, “Democratic Detours,” Reviews in American History, 36, no. 2 (June 2008), pp. 186–93. 58. Studies that explore the influence of the early national federal government include Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Edling, Hercules in the Cradle. 59. The classic study is R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–64).

CHAPTER 10

Action at a Distance: Petitions and Political Representation in Revolutionary France Adrian O’Connor

Introduction Article six of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, issued by the National Constituent Assembly of France in August 1789, famously declared that the “Law is the expression of the General Will,” and that “every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation.” It was an ambitious pledge in a country of roughly 27 million people. It was also, from the start, a tangle of tremendous democratic promise, maddening ambiguity, and internal tensions.

The author would like to thank Miguel Dantas da Cruz, the organizers and participants in the Petitions in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions conference, the press’ anonymous readers, Micah Alpaugh, Robert Blackman, Jennifer Heuer, Larissa Kopytoff, and Sophia Rosenfeld for their comments and suggestions on variations of this chapter. A. O’Connor (B) Department of History, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_10

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Were the citizens being invited to participate in the formation of the Law or of the General Will? In either case, how and where were they to participate? What sorts of participation did it envision or permit, and what were the intended limits of such popular political engagement? How were immediate and mediated political participation—or political action and political representation—expected to relate to one another? In short, what did the revolutionaries of 1789 promise, at what did they aim, and what was it to look like in practice? In 1789 and after, the French revolutionaries tried to fashion a system of representative government out of an absolute monarchy’s collapse, meaning that their experiment in collective self-governance was undertaken in light of and amidst widespread crises and contestation. New forms of political engagement were imagined and adopted while old forms were rejected, reformed, or refashioned to suit radically new circumstances. This is famously true of the popular mobilizations and revolutionary journées, but it is also true of the more formal (and less dramatic) practices of political administration and communication.1 This last issue was particularly important. Maintaining a relationship between the deputies and their constituents would require attention to the mechanisms by which information was transmitted between the two, not only from the government to the people but also from the people to their representatives. This was a point upon which the representatives’ legitimacy was thought to depend, though it required efforts and abilities beyond their control: the effective communication of political opinions, ideas, and information would depend not only upon the deputies’ desires and decisions, but also the citizens’ literacy, engagement, and inclination, as well as their acquisition and mobilization of certain rights and freedoms, especially the freedom of expression, the freedom of assembly, the right to vote, and the right of petition. While less famous than the others listed here, the right to petition was recognized by the revolutionaries as an essential element of representative government. Petitions struck a balance among the citizens’ standing, the deputies’ dignity, and the government’s administrative and legislative authority. Guaranteeing the right of petition preserved the legislators’ legitimacy by safeguarding the citizens’ prerogative to address their representatives, ensuring the people a point of access into the deputies’ deliberations even when they were not present in the halls of power.

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And yet, the deputies of the National Assembly would also come to recognize that the right of petition was more complicated than it first appeared. This was true of the generic boundaries distinguishing a petition from other forms of political correspondence or communication and of the procedural norms that would guide its exercise in practice. Who could petition, and how, and when, and to whom were all questions to be addressed, and the answers to those questions were understood to be indicative of the principles, tensions, and priorities shaping the new government. Similarly, it remained to be seen if citizens would embrace petitioning as a means by which to engage the new political administration. Would they recognize the deputies as legitimate authorities to whom one might direct a petition, and where would petitioning fit within the larger repertoire of popular political participation?

Defining Representation In the face of severe and prolonged financial crises, Louis XVI was forced in 1788 to call the Estates-General into session for the first time in 175 years, thus marking a suspension of the monarchy’s supposedly “absolute” powers.2 Elections were held across France in March and April of 1789, and deputies were selected to represent each of France’s three orders (the clergy, nobility, and commoners) and to meet in Versailles that May. To ensure that the deputies would serve as “reliable spokesmen” for their constituents’ concerns and desires, each deputy would bring to Versailles a record of his constituency’s grievances and requests (the cahiers de doléances ), allowing for those requests to then be re-presented to the royal administration as part of the Estates-General’s consultative function.3 Along with the cahiers, many constituencies also sent their representative with a “special” mandate to focus on a particular task or a “binding” mandate identifying positions that the deputy was obliged or forbidden to adopt after he arrived in Versailles.4 The Estates-General convened in early May, and its members quickly came into conflict over matters of procedure and principle, as deputies argued over whether their credentials ought to be verified in common or separately by order. These disputes reflected larger disagreements about the nature and purpose of the body being convened in Versailles, disagreements that would paralyze the Estates-General through May and into June 1789, calling into question the institution’s ability to function, much less address the crises facing France.5 On 17 June, after lengthy debates

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about the deputies’ role as representatives, and about what it is they represented (the individual estates, the French people, the French nation, or some other body or bodies), the deputies of the Third Estate sought to break the deadlock by proclaiming themselves the National Assembly, transforming the rhetorical and institutional terms on which political representation would be realized.6 Three days later, those deputies swore an oath to remain in session until they had established a new constitutional government for France. By the end of June, Louis XVI had recognized the Assembly’s existence and legitimacy. In light of these revolutionary developments—which transformed the consultative body of the Estates-General into the legislative body of the National Assembly—the deputies had to navigate anew the tension between each deputy’s relationship to his constituents, on the one hand, and the deputies’ deliberative and legislative responsibilities, on the other. It was clear that the cahiers with which the deputies had arrived were both too numerous and too disparate in their concerns to serve as a blueprint for reform, and the limiting mandates under which the deputies had come to Versailles threatened to paralyze the Assembly’s efforts to address new and evolving concerns. Both the Assembly’s freedom to act and its representative legitimacy hung in the balance, each seeming to complicate and undercut the other.7 These issues were taken up during a series of contentious debates in the first week of July 1789. The result was a vote indicating that the Assembly would proceed with its legislative and constitutional business despite the limiting mandates with which some deputies had arrived in Versailles.8 This vote—which is often (though misleadingly) described as the “nullification” of the mandates—freed the Assembly to undertake the work of national and constitutional “regeneration” and, at the same time, marked a clear shift in the legitimating source of the Assembly’s actions, from the cahiers and concerns of the represented to the debates and decisions of the representatives themselves.9 And yet, as Robert Blackman has shown, the Assembly did not actually reject binding mandates; instead, the deputies declared that while individuals among them were bound by the mandates they had received from their constituents, those mandates would not be permitted to disrupt or delay the Assembly’s work.10 The mandates remained an issue for each deputy to work out with his constituents and his conscience, but were no longer an impediment to the legislature’s operation. This solution preserved the constituents’ views

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as an important and legitimizing force in revolutionary politics even as it allowed the deputies to proceed with the business of national governance. In this context, maintaining the bonds that tied deputies to their constituents—and so legitimized them as representatives—emerged as both an ideological and a practical problem. The transmission of news, the formulation and communication of opinions, and the receipt and incorporation of those opinions into the Assembly’s deliberations and decisions required time and resources, neither of which were easy to come by in the tumultuous early years of the French Revolution. The deputies would have to make decisions about issues that had not been foreseen when the cahiers were drafted, and the demands for legislative action were too pressing for constituents across France to be informed and consulted on each matter. Nonetheless, both the deputies and their constituents were committed to the idea that citizens had to be informed of their government’s debates and decisions and that the government had to be informed of and responsive to the needs and views of its citizens. Official publications as well as newspapers and the pamphlet press could be counted on to keep citizens informed of the Assembly’s undertakings, but it was correspondence, the printed or hand-written letter, and the droit de pétition that would keep the deputies abreast of their constituents’ desires, concerns, and priorities.11

Writing and the New Regime Michelet writes in his History of the French Revolution that “The convocation of the Estates-General… is the true era of the birth of the people. It called the whole nation to the exercise of its rights. They could at least write their complaints, their wishes, and choose the electors.”12 While it is easy, and tempting, to read this last sentence with an almost ironic emphasis on the “at least,” it is more profitable to emphasize the relationship between writing and the “birth of the people,” between epistolarity and political presence. On this point, the cahiers de doléances served as a critically important precedent, one that democratized and legitimized the political epistle as an instrument of representative government.13 As venues for the public airing of ideas or grievances that were open to people traditionally excluded from the institutions and avenues of public debate or decision-making, the cahiers helped to solidify a new model of political participation, one that would continue to influence the means and modes of French governance long after the Estates-General

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had become the National Assembly. As Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff have argued, the cahiers were important to the French citizenry for a number of reasons, not least of which was the contrast between the “openness” of the cahiers and the generally “constrained” politics of the Ancien Régime: This first convocation of the Estates-General in 175 years provided an opportunity that was unique for almost all of those who took part, and, if only for this reason, was generally prized. The government not only permitted ordinary people to express their views on matters of public policy for the first time in their lives, it was even expected to be responsive to their views, as these were recorded in the cahiers, and advocated by their elected deputies.14

While not as romantic or dramatic as Michelet’s “calling of the nation to the exercise of its rights,” the point seems roughly the same: that the preparation and submission of the cahiers de doléances did more than establish a particular and temporally circumscribed opportunity for popular political participation; it also created an expectation that such channels would be both open and important in the years to come. The cahiers’ importance was reaffirmed in the Assembly during the spring and summer of 1789, as deputies referenced them to legitimize (or delegitimize) prospective positions that they endorsed (or disavowed).15 Even as their practical relevance waned after June and July 1789, the cahiers continued to serve as an important precedent and point of reference, helping to establish expectations about citizens’ relationship with the new political institutions and suggesting ways in which that relationship might be preserved.16 This precedent was evident in the deputies’ attention to the political role of correspondence and the citizens’ “droit de pétition,” a right that the deputies recognized as early as July 1789, though it was not codified until the Assembly’s law on municipal government of 14 December 1789.17 The essential role of petitions in any representative government was stressed by Charles Antoine Chasset, a lawyer and former mayor of Villefranche, who argued in November 1790 that the law on municipal government had neither created nor granted the right of petition, but merely recognized a right that existed anterior to the decree, a right that was inherent in any civil association.18 And yet, even as the deputies agreed that the right of petition was critically important, questions about

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the nature of this right, and its purpose, limits, and practical consequences, would spark debate throughout the period of the constitutional monarchy.

Defining Petitions and Petitioners The petition is, as Yann-Arzel Duvelle-Marc has noted, a polyvalent entity; it is at once a material, sociological, and legal object.19 It is also a political encounter—the presentation and introduction of the petition by the petitioner to the petitioned—and a genre, the literary and generic attributes of which mediate and condition the relationship it both presumes and asserts.20 As a form of “semi-direct [political] participation,” the petition preserves the citizens’ voice as a critically important element of the political process and recognizes the Assembly’s competence as the nation’s legislative body.21 In this, the right of petition reflects well the broader conditions of representative government. Deputies and citizens agreed that the right of petition was central to the legitimacy of the new representative government, but this consensus masked divisions about what petitions were and how they were supposed to work. Indeed, disagreements emerged—both before and after the law on municipal government—about whether the right of petition was a natural or a political right, whether it applied to collective bodies or only to individuals, and about the Assembly’s obligation to respond or react to the petitions that it received. As these issues indicate, the right of petition was intimately related to other political and personal rights being debated and discussed, including the freedom of assembly or association and the freedom of expression. This was evident on 1 December 1789, when the National Assembly debated a measure, proposed by the constitutional committee, that included provisions for popular oversight of municipal officials and procedures by which administrative error or neglect might be brought to light. The proposal stipulated that citizens preparing petitions or addresses could not assemble in groups larger than thirty unless they had received permission to do so in advance. The moderate Alexis-François Pison du Galand protested that such a requirement fatally undermined the rights of petition and assembly, and was tantamount to a pre-emptive declaration of martial law. Honoré de Mirabeau echoed these concerns, repeating an argument he had made in October 1789 that the people must have the right to assemble in whatever number they wanted to exchange ideas,

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views, and insights, provided that they did so peacefully and without arms. The only restriction that Mirabeau thought the Assembly could legitimately place on the gathering of would-be petitioners was to limit the number who then came forward for the petition’s presentation.22 His fellow deputies were not convinced, though, and when the right of petition was formally recognized on 14 December 1789, it was subject to a number of restrictions and conditions. Article sixty-two of the law read: “Active citizens have the right to gather peacefully and without weapons in special assemblies to write addresses and petitions, whether to the municipal authorities, to the departmental or district administrations, to the legislative body, or to the king, under the condition that they inform municipal authorities of the time and place of their gathering and that they deputize no more than ten citizens to bring their addresses or petitions forward for presentation.”23 In addition to limiting the number of people who could present a petition, the law also seemed to restrict the right of petition to active citizens (adult males over the age of twenty-five who paid taxes equivalent to the wages earned by a labourer for three days of work) and to make their assembly to exercise that right contingent upon approval from municipal officials. These limitations were largely ignored in practice, as “passive” citizens (those who did not meet the criteria for active citizenship), were routinely recognized and allowed to present their petitions to the revolutionary authorities, even at the bar before the National Assembly. As both precedent and principle, though, the text mattered, for the law of 14 December had simultaneously recognized and restricted the right of petition in ways that would shape subsequent debates over the politics of petitioning in the early years of the Revolution. These issues became the focus of a heated debate in May 1791, when the constitutional committee proposed further legislation regarding the right and its limits. The discussion was prompted by a request from the Department of Paris that the Assembly establish regulations for petitions and for the hanging of public posters or notices. Speaking on behalf of the constitutional committee, Isaac René Guy Le Chapelier identified the right of petition as a central point of distinction between representative and despotic regimes, claiming that one could plead or beg under a despotic government and, under extraordinary circumstances, perhaps even present a grievance, but one could not petition a despot. Under a free constitution, one never had to beg, as the right of petition had given citizens an avenue by which to pursue reforms or address problems.24

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To that point, Le Chapelier’s presentation was of a kind with other deputies’ earlier statements about the role of petitions in representative government. But Le Chapelier’s vision actually differed considerably from Mirabeau’s and Chasset’s. Not only did his proposal restrict the right of petition to “active” citizens, but he described it as a right that was held by individuals and could not be delegated, meaning that petitions could not be submitted by collective entities and each petitioner had to personally sign his name to the petition. As Le Chapelier noted, these limitations were in keeping with the earlier law on municipal government. In this case, however, it was clear that the law would prevent political clubs, societies, or associations from petitioning collectively, an issue that drew immediate condemnation from some of the Assembly’s most outspoken deputies.25 The radical deputy (and later mayor of Paris) Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve spoke immediately after Le Chapelier, asking why a right as sacred and basic as the right of petition required eighteen articles to establish, arguing that “the right of petition is nothing more than the right to… present a request in the appropriate legal form.”26 Taking issue with the requirement that petitioners be active citizens, he asked if the Assembly intended to prevent an entire class of citizens from representing themselves in legally sanctioned forms. He also returned to the distinction between grievances and petitions (noted by Le Chapelier), arguing that while the former focused on a person’s private concerns or affairs, the latter had to do with general laws and the affairs of the nation, and so the proposed restriction would effectively cast some citizens out of the national political community and put them back under the yoke of despotism. This effect was exacerbated, he claimed, by the requirement that each petitioner affix a signature to the text, and he noted that many— perhaps even most—adults in France could not sign their name, and so they too would be excluded from the practical exercise of this right. Pétion de Villeneuve’s concerns were echoed by Maximilien Robespierre and, after the discussion was adjourned to the following day, by the Abbé Henri-Baptiste Gregoire as well. Robespierre repeated the aforementioned argument that the right of petition was a natural, rather than political right, and so the Assembly was proposing to take away citizens’ rights even as it pretended to establish them. He noted that the law would impose the greatest inconveniences on the poorest and most vulnerable citizens, calling the proposed restrictions “injurious to

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humanity.”27 In defence of political clubs and societies as potential petitioners, he wondered how somebody could have a right as an individual, but then be incapable of exercising it in concert with others.28 Similar points were raised by Grégoire, who wondered why the deputies were afraid of an expansive and inclusive right of petition, given that the right had to be mobilized through a legally prescribed set of practices. He noted that denying people the right of petition was likely to steer them towards other, less peaceful, modes of political participation.29 Finally, the liberal nobleman Emmanuel Marie Michel Fréteau asked if the committee really intended to exclude all women—including widows—from the right of petition.30 These arguments were at least partially successful, and the proposed legislation was amended to recognize the right of petition for all individuals—not just for active citizens—though the exclusion of collective bodies and associations was maintained.31 The restrictions that this law placed on the right of petition were soon tested when Julien Raymond led a group of five commissioners aiming to secure an audience before the Assembly and to speak on behalf of the free black and métis populations of the French colonies, Saint-Domingue in particular.32 In arguing that the commissioners ought not to be received, the deputy Louis-Simon Martineau drew on the limiting language of the recent law. He argued that what the commissioners offered to present was not a petition on behalf of the colonial population of Saint-Domingue (of whom, Martineau claimed, they were not legitimate representatives), but merely a letter from five individuals living in Paris. At the same time, he disparaged their letter as having been dictated by a political club that was using the commissioners as a misleading porte-parole. In short, he sought to dismiss Raymond and his colleagues as both illegitimate and disingenuous petitioners. Charles-François Bouche, a deputy from Aix-en-Provence, countered that both the right of petition and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen compelled the deputies to hear the commissioners’ report and appeal. Similarly, the moderate Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély wondered how the Assembly, having just recognized the right of petition a few days earlier, could now refuse to receive petitioners who sought to speak on a subject of such general concern.33 In the end, Raymond and his fellow commissioners were recognized and allowed to speak, providing an emotionally charged moment in the Assembly’s path towards recognizing the legal equality of free blacks in Saint-Domingue.34

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In the debates of May 1791, the Assembly expanded its earlier codification of the right of petition, recognizing that every citizen had the right to send a petition to the appropriate authorities. But what could the citizen reasonably expect in response? Even as the deputies debated the relationship among petitions, public assemblies, and representative petitioners, the soldier-deputy Edmond-Louis-Alexis Dubois-Crancé noted that “the right of petition is the most sacred right of the nation and the true palladium of liberty; but it is not enough for people to have the right of petition…. [as] this right will be illusory if the administrative bodies to which the petitions are addressed are not compelled to respond.” He then proposed an amendment that would require authorities to respond to petitions within one week, signalling whether the petition had been successful (including notification of the actions being undertaken in response), unsuccessful (along with the reasons for its rejection), or, if the issue was beyond that body’s jurisdiction, letting the petitioner know where he or she should present the petition for consideration.35 This, however, would have committed the authorities to an immense amount of additional work, a problem that the deputies would in fact face (as is discussed below). Dubois-Crancé’s proposal was mocked for this reason by the nobleman Hippolyte-Jean-René de Toulongeon, who commented sarcastically: “You have just given the right of petition to every citizen, to women, to children, to minors, and to strangers. Now you want to require administrative bodies to respond to the English, and the Spanish, of both sexes and of every age.” To the benefit of future historians—if not the petitioners themselves—the deputy Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat found something of a middle ground with his proposal that administrators maintain a register of the petitions presented to them and issue a certificate acknowledging receipt and presentation of each petition. The amendment was sent back to the committee for review.36 Ultimately, the right of petition enshrined in the Constitution of 1791 reflected the ambivalence of the deputies’ position. The constitution guaranteed the “freedom to address individually-signed petitions to the constituted authorities,” thereby incorporating the expansive vision of legitimate petitioners (à la Pétion de Villeneuve) and the restrictive language of petitioners as individual signatories (from Le Chapelier). The constitutional requirement that petitions be individually signed would spark further debates about the rights of the illiterate and about the role of political clubs and administrative bodies in generating and presenting petitions, each of which represented a point where the right of petition

210

A. O’CONNOR

was entangled with broader questions about the nature and purpose of the political collective. Among the deputies, however, the more pressing problem was not how to ensure that people could actually exercise their right to petition, but how to deal with the deluge of petitions raining down on them from across the nation.

Drowning in (Paper)work The problem, as it emerged, was neither ideological nor “metaphysical,” as the conservative Bon-Albert de Beaumetz had described the debate over petitions in May 1791.37 It was, instead, practical. The receipt of so many petitions and reception of so many petitioners was overwhelming the deputies, eating up their legislative sessions and preventing them from getting anything else done. In response, the deputies established a Comité des péitions in October 1791, though still they did not clarify just what was and was not a petition; indeed, as Maria Betlem Castellà i Pujols notes, this committee became the depository for pieces of correspondence that were not addressed specifically to another committee or brought directly to the full Assembly, serving instead as a “filter” for the flood of letters making their way to Paris.38 Even with this filter in place, though, the deputies struggled to handle the petitions and petitioners that did come before the bar, and they took steps to balance the constituents’ right of petition with the Assembly’s need to control its legislative and deliberative agenda. In dealing with the flood of petitioners and correspondents who sought to address the Assembly, the deputies found themselves restricting the category of “petitioners” to those individuals who were presenting “réclamations individuelles,” or personal grievances, which the Assembly would hear. In so doing, they distanced petitions from the representational logic by which Pétion de Villeneuve had argued that the right of petition should be recognized for all citizens, not just “active” citizens; namely, that petitions were a mechanism by which citizens raised issues of concern to the polity as a whole and thereby helped to focus and establish the general will. Instead, the right of petition was restricted here to the articulation of individual grievances. The deputies then redefined presentations related to “general objects of public utility” as “addresses,” which would be sent to one of the Assembly’s sub-committees for review, consideration, and re-presentation in summary or report form.

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The place of petitions in the Assembly’s proceedings was winnowed further still on 3 December 1791, when the Girondin deputy Pierre Vergniaud noted that there was a distinction between the right to petition and the right to present one’s petition in person, echoing a point that the royalist Antoine Joachim d’André had made eleven months earlier.39 Vergniaud claimed there was a distinction between petitions for which the speaker’s presence before the deputies was desirable and others that could be communicated just as effectively in writing alone. In light of these distinctions, he proposed that before a petition be presented to the Assembly, the petitioner should be asked the nature of the petition; if it was particular to that person, he would be heard out; if it was of a more general nature, it would be sent on to the relevant committee. The very next petitioner, a M. Vallier, said that his petition related to the manufacture of assignats, the paper currency introduced by the revolutionary government in December 1789; it was decided that his proposal was of general rather than individual interest. As a result, it was sent on to the finance committee and he was thanked for his efforts, but he was not given the opportunity to present his petition in person.40 Even as they imposed these new limitations and procedural distinctions, however, the deputies continued to find themselves besieged by popular correspondence. Indeed, just three days after Vergniaud’s proposal was approved by the Assembly, Jean-François Delacroix, deputy from the Eure-et-Loir, impatiently complained that people were confusing the right of petition with the right of address, even though they had been through this at least “twenty times already.”41 They returned to the problem less than two weeks later, on 17 December, when Delacroix again complained that “the addresses, petitions, and grievances multiply and follow upon one another so quickly that they absorb all of our sessions.”42 He proposed again that addresses of general or legislative interest be sent to committees, and that individual petitioners be admitted to the bar only on Sundays, and even then that they be instructed to keep their presentations short and to the point. The deputies agreed, and his measure was approved. Nonetheless, they found themselves complaining about the same issues again on 29 and 31 December.43 Clearly, the traffic in petitions, addresses, grievances, and requests was more than the deputies could manage. Just what is it they were facing? A torrent of paper and persons. The letters alone were enough to overwhelm the Assembly’s administrative offices. We can get a sense of this from the registers of letters received

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during the periods of the Constituent and Legislative assemblies, which are preserved in the French national archives.44 Of course, many of the pieces received and then recorded in these registers were not formal petitions, though as the deputies themselves recognized, the boundaries separating one genre of political epistle from another were imprecise and porous; ruminative addresses often contained legislative suggestions or requests, just as procedural updates from municipal or departmental authorities often included pleas for aid or assistance. In the end, it was not the taxonomic features of petitions that mattered, but the petition’s place within a larger economy of epistolary political communication and state operation.45 The Assembly’s registers include almost 50,000 entries, putting the traffic in correspondence in the same ballpark as the cahiers de doléances in terms of size, if not intensity. The actual number of pieces received is surely much higher, not only because these records are incomplete, but also because there were circumstances under which the notaries or scribes would consolidate many submissions under one heading, especially when an event or issue gave rise to a spike in letters on a particular issue, as happened after the nationalization of church lands in November 1789.46 Given this shorthand, a complete count of the letters and pieces of correspondence received is impossible, though it seems safe to say that it was well above the 55,000 entries that I estimate would be found were we to have all of the registers for these years. This epistolary bombardment arrived not all at once, but piece-bypiece and day-after-day, and these registers are an important reminder of the materiality of the process of petition, receipt, and response, and of the incredible allocation of resources, time, attention, and ink that these entries represent, both inside the Assembly and, even more so, among the correspondents. The registers’ size and uniformity are also reminders that the workings of revolutionary representation were at once novel and, at least for some, tedious, as we see in the doodles with which notaries would sometimes decorate the registry’s margins. For example, on the first page of entries for 14 August 1790 (a day on which 102 entries were to be recorded), the sketch of an angry face peers out from between two entries regarding state properties and finances, a thumbnail sign of our scribe’s desire for distraction amid the tedium of his work.47 Here was the revolutionary fonctionnaire, doodling away the monotony of revolution, reminding us that the complement to revolutionary journées,

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impassioned speeches, and the guillotine was a revolution of bureaucratic responsibilities, administrative requirements, and mundane labours. The letters weighing so heavily on this notary’s time came from an array of correspondents across France. There were, of course, many letters from local political actors or representatives, political institutions, and other such correspondents engaged in the “official” business of the state. There were also many letters from political clubs and groups, sociétés, institutions, and other such corporate and quasi-corporate bodies. In addition to these institutional or semi-institutional correspondents, there were letters sent by groups of citizens writing as collective signatories to a common piece of correspondence (sometimes including a note attesting to the presence and support of others who could not sign their names). Then there were letters—many, many letters—from individuals, men and women who sought a letter writer’s audience with the National Assembly. By 1792, roughly 50% of the entries in the Assembly’s register recorded correspondence sent by individuals, many of whom made reference to article six of the Declaration of the Rights of Man or to the Assembly’s recognition of the droit de pétition, using the Assembly’s own principles and promises to legitimize the author’s voice and views. These figures indicate a widespread sense that the government was thought to be, or at least was expected to be, responsive to the input or demands of individual citizens. They also illustrate the importance of the written word as a mode of political participation. If people were writing to the National Assembly in revolutionary France, it’s because that had become the place to write. Also, and more to the point here, if people were writing to the National Assembly, it’s because that was how one made oneself present in the Assembly, even when you could not be there in person.

Conclusion These records call to mind the words of an anonymous pamphleteer who sent a sixteen page pamphlet entitled Appel à l’opinion publique sur l’éducation nationale to the National Assembly in late 1791; its author claimed that “[f]or every individual living under a system of representative government… the art [of reading and writing] should be considered the fundamental source of his moral existence, and so truly indispensable.”48 He argued that widespread acquisition of the ability to read and write

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was indispensable not only for individuals, but for the preservation and perfection of the constitution, the legitimacy and viability of the newly established government, and for the well-being of the nation that that government was supposed to represent. Along with these skills, citizens would have to develop the habit and inclination to participate in political affairs, and to do so in ways that were conducive to the functioning of a representative political order. The petition was central to this process. Coming at the end of what Jürgen Habermas described as the “century of the letter,” the written word was essential to the idea of modern representative government and to the idea that the bonds tying representatives to their constituents could be preserved even once those deputies were busy with the work of representation.49 For the petition to fulfil its promise, though, work had to be done on both ends: the deputies had to fashion procedural and bureaucratic mechanisms with which to handle the thousands of letters, petitions, and addresses they were receiving, and citizens had to demonstrate that they could contribute informed and informative voices to the national discussion. Bringing together the deputies’ debates over petitions and political representation with the registers of the petitions and addresses actually received reminds us of the material, logistical, and communicative work required for representative governance to preserve its essential character. The author of the Appel à l’opinion publique sur l’éducation nationale may have been unusually self-aware about the relationship between representative government and popular literacy, but his view is not for that anomalous. If anything, his text offers both an apt statement and a clear example of how citizens sought to give themselves presence—what its author called their “moral existence”—in revolutionary politics: through the written word. The thousands upon thousands of petitions and pieces of correspondence recorded in the Assembly’s registers demonstrate that this was an opportunity of which citizens across France were well aware, and suggest that many of those citizens saw themselves as active participants in the establishment of a political order in which the law might really be an expression of the general will.

Notes 1. On the journées, see Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795 (Cambridge:

10

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

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Cambridge University Press, 2014); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Vivian R. Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). François Furet, “The Monarchy and the Procedures for the Elections of 1789,” The Journal of Modern History, 60 (1988), p. S60; see also Ran Halévi, “The Monarchy and the elections of 1789,” Journal of Modern History, 60 (1988), pp. S79–97. On the mandates, see Beatrice Fry Hyslop, A Guide to the General Cahiers of 1789, With the Texts of Unedited Cahiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789– 1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 121–148. Robert H. Blackman, 1789: The French Revolution Begins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 92–114. Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des Pouvoirs: la Souveraineté, le Peuple et la Représentation, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 60. Blackman, 1789, pp. 145–170. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 244–245; Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies & Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 2002), pp. 152, 163, passim. Blackman, 1789, p. 170. On the role of the press, see Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press June, 1990), p. 3, passim. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. by Charles Cocks (Chicago, 1967), p. 83 [emphasis added]. On private letter-writing and political organization among elites in the “Age of Revolutions,” see Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Corresponding Republics: Letter Writing and Patriot Organizing in the Atlantic Revolutions, circa 1760–1792,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2011). Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 128. Blackman, 1789, pp. 145–146. Yann-Arzel Durelle-Marc, “Nature et origines du droit de pétition,” La revue administrative: numéro spécial: L’individu face au pouvoir: les pétitions aux assemblées parlementaires (2008), p. 53. Op. cit., pp. 55–56.

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18. M. J. Mavidal et M. E. Laurent (eds.), Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Recueil Complet des Débats Législatifs & Politiques des Chambres Françaises, Première Série (1787 à 1799) (Paris: Société D’ Imprimerie et Librairie Administratives et des Chemins de Fer Paul Dupont, 1884) [hereafter AP], Tome 20, pp. 354–355. 19. Durelle-Marc, “Nature et origines du droit de pétition,” pp. 47–49. 20. On the entanglement of generic norms and political culture, see PerlRosenthal, “Corresponding Republics,” pp. 21–22, passim. 21. Durelle-Marc, “Nature et origines du droit de pétition,” p. 49. 22. AP, T. 10, pp. 345–346. 23. AP, T. 10, p. 567. 24. AP, T. 25, pp. 678–682. 25. This was part of Le Chapelier’s broader anti-corporatist agenda; Le Chapelier led the push to abolish guilds, trade unions, and other corporate bodies, realized in the June 1791 law subsequently known as the Chapelier Law. 26. AP, T. 25, pp. 682–684. 27. Op. cit., pp. 691–692. 28. Op. cit., p. 684. 29. Op. cit., pp. 687–688. 30. Op. cit., p. 692. 31. Op. cit., p. 693. 32. AP, T. 26, p. 65. 33. Op. cit., pp. 65–66. 34. Raymond’s speech is detailed in AP, T. 26, pp. 66–69. 35. AP, T. 25, p. 693. 36. Op. cit., p. 693. 37. Op. cit., p. 689. 38. Maria Betlem Castellà i Pujols, “Métamorphoses d’un comité: le Comité des pétitions et de correspondance sous la Convention nationale,” Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française 3 (2012), p. 2. 39. AP, T. 35, p. 593. For d’André’s speech of 6 January 1791, see. AP, T. 22, p. 52. 40. AP, T. 35, p. 594. 41. AP, T. 35, p. 600. 42. AP, T. 36, p. 172. 43. AP, T. 36, pp. 596–597, and AP, T. 36, p. 711, respectively. 44. Archives nationales de France [hereafter AN], C/II/* 7–C/II/* 16. 45. On paperwork and the culture of the state, see Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York, 2012). 46. The records for 21–30 June 1790 and for the months from September to December 1791 are missing from the registers. In the wake of the National Assembly’s nationalization of church lands in November 1789,

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the state undertook an inventory of those lands. Doing so meant soliciting and then receiving surveys and letters from churches, parishes, and local administrators across France. This meant hundreds of pieces of correspondence and, for the scribe, hundreds of virtually identical entries. By early February 1790, it was not unusual for 40% or more of correspondence received on a given day to be related to church lands and nationalization. By the end of that month the secretaries had stopped recording the submissions related to church lands individually, instead noting them in a single entry that did not indicate how many letters were being thus “recorded.” 47. AN, C/II/* 11, p. 223. 48. AN, F/17//1309, dossier 1, no. 9, Appel à l’opinion publique sur l’éducation nationale [1 November 1791]. 49. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1989), p. 48. On the importance of letter writing to the Enlightenment and eighteenth century culture, see John W. Howland, The Letter Form and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).

CHAPTER 11

Petitioning by Riot in Spain and the Origins of Modern Mass Petitioning Diego Palacios Cerezales

Petitions by Other Means “Within the confusion of a vast people”, said First Secretary of State Manuel Godoy in 1801 “it is commonplace that some people mistake the means they should use to expose their grievances without disrespecting those who immediately govern them”.1 He was referring to disturbances in Valencia. Crowds had taken control of the streets, declaiming against the new recruitment policies. The guilds of the city refrained from supporting the royal magistrates, while people stoned militia detachments and packed governmental buildings with shouting and menaces. The clashes between rioters and troops, moreover, resulted in the killing of four Valencians. Yet, the disturbances dragged on. After three weeks of disorder, the royal government caved in, dismissing their delegate in Valencia and halting recruitment for good. According to Godoy’s spin,

D. Palacios Cerezales (B) Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_11

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the king had acted upon a petition from his loving subjects. The crowd’s unruly means had been merely a formal mistake, a minor misdemeanour.2 Godoy accepted that rioting was a kind of disorderly petition. In contrast, many political writers of the Age of Revolution considered petitions in opposition to rioting and revolt. According to a commonplace understanding, petitions were a safety valve and an open recourse under paternal and representative governments. In contrast, riots sparked under despotic situations.3 The liberal law professor Ramón Salas, for example, made the point by contrasting petitioning in London and rioting in Constantinople. For his example to stand, he expediently overlooked that the 1780 Gordon Riots in the British capital, with seven days of violence and more than 300 deaths, had been sparked by a crowd of petitioners angered by Parliament rejecting their claims.4 In the same vein, historians of social movements often deal with rioting and petitioning as discrete forms of action. They understand modern petitioning campaigns as new practices crafted upon traditional deferential petitioning.5 Riots and petitions, however, belonged together. Paraphrasing Clausewitz, rioting was petitioning by other means. Riotous petitioning was a highly scripted behaviour that shared with deferential petitioning the expectation of benevolent behaviour on the part of the rulers. Rulers were expected to listen and consider the grievances of their subjects. As Frederick the Great, commenting on Plutarchus, agreed, there was no use for a King who did not consider his subjects’ petitions.6 In line with Godoy’s words cited above, this chapter argues that in many instances, crowd action, sometimes violent, was not an alternative course of action we should pit against petitioning. It was a form of petitioning. Both the deferential forms of petitioning and the forceful ones relied on the same understanding of the paternal duties of those in power. This interpretation resonates with recent revisionist trends. Martin Almbjär has invited us to discard the idea that in Early modern Europe petitioning was a safety valve. Despite its long pedigree in political theory and its revival by the theories of the juridification of conflict, the metaphor of the safety valve fails to recognise that, more often than not, collective petitions and open revolt were the flesh and the bone of conflictual interactions between the rulers and the ruled.7 Moreover, in her survey of early modern instances of resistance, Cecilia Nubola follows Wolfgang Kaiser in highlighting that violent action within episodes of social conflict “should not be interpreted as an interruption of political

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communication”, nor as a rejection of entering into a reciprocal relation in which both sides have highly codified expectations regarding the behaviour of the other part.8 This chapter further radicalises these claims by analysing a string of instances in which rioting and petitioning were discussed and practised as modulations of the same relationship between rulers and subjects. Furthermore, instead of highlighting the potential for revolt lurking behind petitioning, I find that petitioning by riot, despite displaying disobedience, often stressed the recognition of the sovereign and reinforced a normative expectation upon its paternal behaviour. The umbilical relationship between rioting and petitioning, moreover, was not undone by the emergence of modern politics during the Age of Revolution. By forgetting this link, we may be unable to make sense of a wide array of political experiences. First, the irruption of the language of natural rights during the Age of Revolution did not disconnect forceful action and petitioning. Instead, it triggered a reconfiguration of the relationship between the two that underpinned the classic forms of revolutionary politics: the “sacred” right to petition was one of the wells from which French revolutionary journées, and Spanish pronunciamientos and juntas drew the arguments for their justification. Second, nineteenth century mass petitioning campaigns were as much a development of the humble traditional forms of petitioning—the standard argument found in the literature—as a taming of the public riotous ones. The mass gathering of signatures did not just turn petitions public; the signatures also composed a virtual demanding crowd. In other words, a tame riot. While this text is mostly built upon the material on metropolitan Spain, the main traits of the configuration of the relationship between rioting and petitioning were shared across a transnational cultural space, both in Europe and the Americas. The argument will therefore bring to the table some connected developments.

Resignation, Clogged Channels and Forceful Petitioning Eighteenth-century Spain shared with most of Europe and the Atlantic world the same norm that the rulers should always be open to hearing the grievances of their subjects.9 Under the form of representaciones, suplicaciones, memoriales , peticiones and instancias [applications], individuals, guilds, councils and communities conveyed their needs and hopes, requested favours and sought the redress of grievances. Petitioning in

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imperial Spain was not as institutionalised as in model absolutist countries such as Denmark, for example, but it was a ubiquitous practice.10 A distillation of the constitutional framework of absolutist Spain regarding the conflictual interaction between the rulers and the ruled can be read in El Vasallo Instruido [the educated vassal], a manuscript Fray Finestrad wrote in the aftermath of the Comuneros revolt of 1781 in New Granada, today’s Colombia.11 The author highlighted that all the subjects of the King had at their disposal all kind of means for communicating their “representaciones ”, “by means of a supplication, yet not by reckless threats”; first they had to address themselves to the lower magistrates and councils. Afterwards, “in case their grievance or injustice was not heard”, they could appeal to a superior court or council, or apply directly to his Majesty using the via reservada. Once they had put these means in motion, they had to await for the final Royal determination “with resigned and subordinated resignation[sic]”. As Finestrad explained, “no vassal [was] barred from making supplications, representations and applications”. The only forbidden course of action was “absolute resistance”, in which the vassals took the liberty of acting as if their interpretation of what was right or just was superior to the higher authority’s.12 The problem with Finestrad’s explanation was that it presupposed that the communication channels were open and that subordinate authorities behaved according to the principles of paternal care he predicated of the Crown. The counterclaim that communication was clogged, unavailable, or that evil councillors monopolised the king’s ears, could thus justify rioting and resistance.13 Moreover, such a claim would not contradict the paternalistic understanding of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Resistance and violence could be construed as a means of making one’s voice louder, thus awakening the ruler’s conscience of the need for him to display his paternal care. Identifying rioting as a communicative display was handy for both the rioters and the authorities. The former could justify their violent means, while the latter could dress their surrendering to violence and coercion as a paternal grant of favour after having been made aware of the needs of their subjects. Charles II’s words to the crowd that had stormed his Palace during Madrid’s 1699 riots are revealing of this script: “Pardon me […], because I had no knowledge of your needs”. He then granted cheaper bread and the substitution of Madrid’s corregidor [chief magistrate].14 The 1766 wave of rioting “against Esquilache” that began in Madrid in March, and then affected more than 60 other places, was condoned

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by its apologists with recourse to the topic of the breakdown of communication. “We, the troublemakers of Madrid” said some verses, “agreed to make our requests with insistence, with ohs! and shouting”.15 They were petitioning by other means. One of the anonymous “tribunes” who spoke in the name of ‘the people of Madrid’ explained the same idea in a letter to the city’s corregidor: “claiming our rights was not a crime, but informing the sovereign… Not even the means were improper, because there was no alternative; because the ears were deaf to our complaints, which we so often had expressed fruitlessly”.16 The so-called “humble petition” [humilde representación] which widely circulated in the name of “The Mutiny of Madrid” highlighted the lack of communication as well, in order to justify crowd action: “The most invincible obstacle even for the best of kings, is that knowledge does not come from the eyes, but from the ears”, said the text. Often, moreover, kings were surrounded by bad councillors and were, by their high condition, not in “familiar communication” with the kingdom.17 During the rioting in Madrid, the continuity between taking to the streets and petitioning was made evident by the behaviour of the crowd as well. No doubt that violence abounded. Clashes between rioters and the Wallonian Guard ended in bloody rituals of retribution. The rationale to the whole movement, however, was the channelling of the grievances towards the King. In the heat of the second day of rioting, a friar put himself forward as a mediator. After calling the attention of the crowd by several rites of penitence, he asked the multitude what “their requests to the King were”. According to one witness, everybody wanted to answer at the same time and requested different things, and as it was impossible to understand them because of all the shouting, he told them to nominate one to speak in the name of them all. By the agreement of many, a churchman came forward, and the said churchman said what the people were petitioning for, to which the friar noted that they had to write it down in a memorial, which they immediately did […].18

The list of grievances, including the dismissal of Esquilache, the right to wear the traditional dress, a reduction in the prices of bread and olive oil, the withdrawal of the Wallonian Guard from Madrid and the end of the new policies regarding the free-trade of grain, was accepted by the King. “My children, I grant everything you are requesting very willingly”,

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told Charles III to the multitude that had packed the palace courtyard, “And I thank you for the affection towards me you are displaying”.19 The King further enshrined the idea that the three days of rioting had been a kind of disorderly petition: “I would have granted the same favours whenever and wherever the cries of the people had reached me”.20 To save face, the Crown had to present the concessions as emanating from the free will of a paternal ruler “Answering the representation made […] in the name of both the council and the supplications of the people”.21 The success of the riots in Madrid signalled an opportunity for petitioning by riot all over Spain. In many towns, the content of the placards posted suggests that some local elites were part of the same conspiracy against the Italian ministers of Charles III that had fuelled discontent in Madrid.22 Notwithstanding, in many other towns the news from Madrid prompted the locals to gather together and mobilise according to their own grievances, either bread prices, seignorial obligations or the corruption of some local magistrates.23 Like in Madrid, crowds either compelled the local rulers to reduce the price of bread or, in the case of local magistrates and seignorial privileges, they forced their dismissal and then sent deputations to the King asking for the recognition of the new situation. Tobarra’s local authorities, for example, promised the crowd that “they would concede everything you are requesting, provided it agrees with justice”.24 The people then called in a notary to write down their petitions. The restoration of control over the situation both in Madrid and the provinces was not done without repression, including nine executions in Zaragoza, the public exhibition for months of the heads of the executed and the expulsion of the order of the Jesuits.25 Moreover, once the new government was in place and the garrison reinforced, the guilds, the nobility and the religious corporations of Madrid were coerced to make a pledge disavowing the means used during the riots. Notwithstanding, the personal reputation of the King involved that the concessions he had made in Madrid, including the amnesty of the rioters, were upheld. In contrast, all concessions and amnesties made across Spain by local magistrates were rolled back. Nonetheless, the same decree undoing all those concessions considered that the rioting had been a vehicle for the expression of real grievances or, at least, plausible ones. The means of the crowd had been illegal, but they expressed noteworthy concerns and signalled that the commoners had not means to control local abuses. The rioting thus resulted in a major reform in local government. It mandated that

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in every town of more than 2000 inhabitants the people would nominate, by universal male suffrage, several deputies [síndicos personeros ] to the local council “to allow all neighbours to have knowledge about […] how decisions regarding supplies are made”.26 The link between the rioting and reform underlined that representation, petitioning and rioting belonged to a continuum and that rioters often expressed legitimate grievances. This link was again enshrined in the 1774 legislation “on popular commotions and hustles”. The arguments in the reports that preceded the 1774 royal decree expressed unequivocally that the vassals didn’t have the right to resist the authorities and that their grievances always had to be addressed to the available magistrates.27 Moreover, like in 1766, the decree made it clear that any concession made to violent crowds was invalid. However, it also decreed that, if the multitude calmed down, obeyed the magistrates and dispersed without violence, the same magistrates had to receive individuals that were part of that crowd “to listen to their claims, and promptly remedy everything that may be convenient and just”.28 Again, crowd action was recognised as an unfortunate means of expressing legitimate grievances. The openness of the communication channels was key to legitimacy. Sometimes logistical circumstances were cited to justify rioting as a complement to petitioning. In the case of the island of Lanzarote, the slowness of the means of communication made the “poor” islanders prevent a popular governor from embarking and leaving the island, as he was to be posted somewhere else. They wanted the petition for him to stay to reach the higher authorities overseas before the replacement was effected.29 Moreover, demands put forward through rioting sometimes succeeded, at least in part. In many localities, the dialogue between magistrates and potential crowd violence maintained an equilibrium regarding prices, wages, excises, mill rights or corvees. After Barcelona’s 1773 conscription riots, a negotiated management of the recruitment ensued.30 In the same city, the 1789 bread riots succeeded in reducing prices.31 In Jerez in 1792, a concentration of about 4000 rural journeymen compelled the local authorities to roll back a lengthening of their working hours. The chief magistrate justified the case before the Council of Castile, arguing that the concession was valid “because it had just been a supplication made by rude people”.32 In the case of Valencia’s 1801 conscription riots, already mentioned in the introduction, petitioning happened simultaneously by institutionalised

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means, with several guilds addressing the authorities, and by popular disturbance. Further discontent sparked in Valencia, moreover, when the Intendente [governor] asserted that the guilds had given their support to the new recruitment system, which they protested they had never done. The misrepresentation of the guilds’ position reverberated the idea of the evil middlemen shielding the Crown from true popular sentiment. Minister Godoy did not fail to use that trope to justify his U-turn. He argued that at the beginning he had been misinformed “by the bad faith of those who intervened in this business”. Once the truth had come forward by means of the petitions, he became favourable to granting them.33 The recruitment system was rolled back, the excise was halved and the Intendente and the military commander were suspended. In the same proclamation cited at the beginning of this chapter, Godoy exculpated the rioters and argued that no “offence against the dignity of the Crown” had been committed. He prompted the King to answer favourably to the grievances of Valencia’s guilds and publicly dismissed the gravity of crowd action “because the rudest usually speak louder and give its character to the whole movement”.34 Like in 1766, the success of the rioters in Valencia in 1801 encouraged people of several localities in the vicinity. They took to the streets and pushed forward their own claims, often rooted in long-standing lawsuits pitting communities against lords. Again, crowd action and petitioning happened together, with people banding in the streets and shouting “long life to the King!”. They wrote down their grievances regarding food prices and seignorial duties, stormed public buildings and forced local magistrates to acquiesce to their forceful requests. Godoy’s idea that what the crowds were doing by means of shouting and intimidation was a kind of disorderly petition underpinned even the long-winding questions the prosecutor asked the witnesses: What do you know about the noisy disturbance in Alcora on the night of last September 24, during which some people forced all good neighbours to take to the streets by means of stoning their doors and windows and sounding a seashell horn, armed with sticks, firearms and stones, not letting anyone to stay behind and […] forced the Governor to march with them to the town hall and called a notary and made the following petitions [peticiones ]: to our knowledge: that all tithes will be paid following the old custom […] All neighbours will be free to mill their grain [and olives] wherever it pleases them; that the new pottery factory will pay for the

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communal wood it burns in its furnaces […] the magistrate representative of the Lord [alcalde mayor letrado] will not seat at the council meetings and will not take part in deliberations about the communal land and the day labourers’ pay; that the naming of new magistrates should be done with the assent of the people; […]?35

In the same vein, during those disturbances local magistrates often invited the crowd to take part in council meetings and to hand in their demands following an orderly process. Like in 1766, these subsequent riots were duly repressed. After a first round of hangings, however, most of the rioters were pardoned.36 We may agree that not every popular disturbance was a petition by other means. Retributive action and foot riots often followed a different logic, with crowds acting in substitution of the authorities. Rioting was closer to petitioning when the mobilisation coerced the authorities to accept the requests. On some other occasions, the connection was done after the fact: the rioters practised direct action and afterwards petitioned the recognition of the validity of their actions. What is important to retain here is the structure of relationships that in many instances gave meaning to crowd action being understood as a form of petitioning: the crowd acted, but they also projected the idea that justice was on their side and that crowd action was a communicative device by means of which a paternal authority was made aware of the needs and circumstances of its loyal subjects.

Revolution and the Language of Rights As now abundant historiography demonstrates, if petitioning was widespread in the Old Regime, the Age of Revolution further enhanced its status. Collective resistance, crowd action and petitions played a significant role during the Atlantic revolutions. Besides, these practices were hinged on the idea of the sovereignty of the people.37 The right to petition featured in the English Bill of Rights, the Scottish Claim of Right, the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution—associating it to freedom of speech and of assembly—and, of course, in all French constitutions. This affirmation of petitioning as a citizenship political right, moreover, was coloured with the affirmation of the goodness of the widespread participation in politics. Petitioning was hailed as one of the means the common

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citizen could use to take part in the open dialogue in the public sphere, which was supposed to guide legislative and administrative action.38 In practical terms, some things did not change much. For example, the French Martial Law of 21 October 1789 set a framework for controlling popular disturbances that embraced the idea that rioters might be expressing legitimate concerns. Mirabeau, champion of the proposal, highlighted that the new law was “fit for a government that respects the people and freedom, by means of offering the assembled discontents a legal means to have their complaints heard and request the redress of their grievances”.39 In accordance with this, the Martial Law made provisions for the use of force by the authorities if needed, but it also ordered the municipal officers: [to] ask the assembled people to explain the issue that has prompted their coming together, and the grievance they want to be redressed. [The people will be authorised] to name six of them to expose their claims and address their petitions, and then be required to peacefully disperse.40

This mechanism, as it is patent, did not depart much from the Spanish legislation of 1774 cited above which, despite dealing with vassals and not with citizens, also encouraged them to disperse peacefully and present their grievances in a formal manner. Crowd action was still understood as petitioning by other means.41 In Spain, revolutionary politics prolonged the old-regime traditions of petitioning by riot. The disturbances in Barcelona in 1773 or Valencia in 1801, in which guilds took part in council meetings well beyond their recognised corporate remit, had foreshadowed the 1808 local and regional juntas that coordinated the grassroot efforts against the Napoleonic invasion. These juntas stepped in after the capture of the King. They were usually composed of a selection of local elites from the military, the higher civil service, the clergy and the nobility, even if very often they also included deputies put forward by the commoners.42 Juntas were thus regionally grounded ad hoc coordinating committees that took charge of the government in extraordinary times. In 1808 many juntas justified their birth as an answer to the petitions of the people. The right to petition became a discursive tool to justify their stepping in as supreme authorities in the absence of the King. Similarly, the convocation of the Cortes in 1810 was often vindicated as an answer to a shower of petitions:

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petitions [representaciones ] signed by a great number of citizens, petitions of the provincial juntas ; […] all of them anxiously petitioning for the convocation of Cortes.43

Juntas were both an answer to the petitions of the people and a representative body that petitioned the regency in their name. In tandem with pronunciamientos , juntas became a central feature of the Spanish revolutionary tradition. And both were umbilically linked to petitioning.

Pronunciamientos Pronunciamientos , like riots, also can be understood as petitions by other means. Riego’s 1820 pronunciamiento has been identified as the first successful crystallisation of this form of action, which became key in nineteenth-century Spanish, Mexican, Portuguese and, in different degrees, other Latin American countries’ politics.44 Albeit sometimes pronunciamiento has been used as synonymous to coup d’état, historians have for a long time identified key differences.45 The word pronunciamiento [pronouncement] refers to the declarative character of the action, similar to grito, or manifestación. Whereas a coup d’état is a forceful taking of control of the government, a pronunciamiento was a rebellion that, like riotous crowd action, expressively requested the paternal intervention of the higher authorities. Moreover, pronunciarse was not something only the military did; juntas were often the hub in which the pronunciamiento took place. From 1820 onwards, provincial juntas often formed to initiate or to adhere to a pronunciamiento. As Will Fowler proposes, pronunciamientos were a tool for a “forceful negotiation”. Instead of assaulting power, the groups initiating the pronunciamiento expressed their demands and relied on receiving “copycat pronunciamientos of allegiance from other garrisons and communities”.46 In Spain, pronunciamientos also expressed the normative behaviour expected from the crown, paternal care for the wishes of the people. Making the Crown “see”, was, like in 1766, key. The actors were different, and leaders displayed their identity in public, but the conventions underlying the pronunciamientos were alike those of old-regime riots.47 Pronunciamientos were petitions. A petition drive collecting signatures, that is, the form of petitioning that was going to dominate under well-institutionalised representative systems, was construed as a means of making widespread support visible. The same was done, more

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expressively, by military units, local councils and juntas declaring themselves in disobedience, and adhering to a common list of grievances. A list of signatures could be construed as an embodiment of public opinion. The same happened with widespread rebellion. General Porlier’s proclamation in his fateful 1815 pronunciamiento, for example, rehearsed the same themes we saw in the Esquilache riots fifty years earlier: “We are forced by necessity, because the king is constantly surrounded by [evil] councillors […] and truth cannot reach the king’s ears. [Truth] can only reach him if it is presented in such a manner that conveys respect, so we have made the terrible but indispensable resolution of making our claims weapons in hand […]”.48 Riego’s proclamations in 1820, in contrast, called his soldiers to fight despotism and reclaim the constitution but were not formal petitions. The petitionary choreography, nonetheless, was enacted by means of prompting other military units and local councils to express their support and “convince the King of the feelings of the Nation”.49 Many of the mirror pronunciamientos that finally added up towards the defeat of absolutism, moreover, were dressed as petitions and repeated the classic petitionary themes. In Corunna, in February 1820 “the people of this city, following the impulse of [Riego’s] army, which many Andalusian pueblos have followed, has openly declared their wish, naming a Junta to rule […] in the interim the other provinces make their declarations known […]”.50 The idea that the local pronunciamiento and the formation of juntas followed a petition by “the people” was commonplace. In Saragossa, the junta was set up “by the insistence of the people”. In Barcelona “the greater part of the people crowded the square by the Palace of the Captain-General requesting [pidiendo] the publication of the Constitution”. The manifesto of the junta of Zaragoza, which tried to calm down revolutionary zeal, explained that the “goal of the people and the troops was to balance the king’s spirit towards making Spain happy, which is no doubt what he wishes”, adding that “many are the pueblos of Spain expressing their wishes […] and expecting the goodwill of the King”. The theme of the evil councillors keeping the King unaware of the needs, grievances and wishes of the commoners also appeared in several manifestos. According to one published in Corunna, the juntas would be in charge until “the King, expelling from his counsel the individuals which have seduced and deceived him, recovers his full freedom and takes an oath to the constitution […]”.51

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On 3 March 1820, once it became evident that the situation was out of control, the King tried to meet the demands half-way, but he finally caved in and promised to take an oath to the constitution. On the subsequent Manifesto of the King to the Spanish Nation, Ferdinand VII followed his forefathers in dressing his conversion to constitutionalism as a free response to a petition from his subjects. The King explained that the restoration of absolutism in 1814 had been the result of him being persuaded “by everything he saw and listened” that “the resurrection of the old system of government was the general suffrage [of the Nation]”. Now, in 1820, by means of the pronunciamiento “you have made me understand your wish regarding the reestablishment of the 1812 Constitution […] I have listened to your suffrages and, like a tender father, I have condescended […]”.52 Juntas and pronunciamientos disregarded the legal channels. Instead, they created new situations that the Crown had to deal with. Their practitioners, nevertheless, could rely on the same unwritten conventions that justified eighteenth-century petitions-by-riot: they were forcefully removing the obstacles that prevented the King from discovering the needs, grievances and wishes of his subjects, and thus they were helping him to fulfil his own benign intentions. According to the underlying understanding, riots, juntas and pronunciamientos alike were extraordinary means that made the beneficial effects of petitioning possible.

The Just Limits of Petitioning Juntas y pronunciamientos were practised by liberals and by royalists alike and became the classic features of the nineteenth-century Spanish revolutions. During the liberal triennium (1820–1823) a string of royalist pronunciamientos aimed at dispelling the idea that the people loved the Constitution, thus making the King aware of the supposedly true sentiment of the people. Moreover, once the grip of the liberals over the person of the King became apparent, a regency council was set up in Urgel, mimicking the one set up when Ferdinand was in the hands of Napoleon. This body presented itself as an answer to a popular petition: “everybody clamoured for the installation of a head, of a supreme government, that gathering your spirits […] in the name of your King, would restore his sovereignty […]”.53 An expansive understanding of the right to petition, thus, helped to legitimise many forms of resistance and contributed to obstructing the

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institutionalisation of representative government. Royalist mobilisation, the formation of juntas by rebel liberal elites in several towns, radicalled crowds imposing their will on local and national governments and episodes of military disobedience, were all justified as manifestations of the right to petition. In face of this, the politicians and public writers who tried to stabilise the constitutional regime pushed forward the idea that petitions had to be endorsed by lists of signatures, not by menacing crowds: “Have 20, 30 or one thousand citizens agreed to write an exposition to the authorities? Have they signed it?” explained the newspaper El Censor “Let then two or three deputies hand it respectfully […] not riotously in mass and with menacing gestures […]”.54 Signatures were a less menacing prospect than crowds and bayonets. Like the French petitioning legislation of 1791, the Spanish February 1822 law “On the just limits of the right to petition” and its sister law “On the limits of the right to petition for the military” tried to curb the excesses.55 The wording of these pieces of legislation, however, also reproduced the idea that, juntas and pronunciamientos were petitions by other means. The just limits’ law determined that it was “illegal to convene juntas gathering together different authorities to present petitions or take decisions relating to businesses that do not belong to them” and that “Petitions and acclamations cannot be used to plebiscite public offices”. The law directed at the military imposed the dismissal of “The Chiefs and Officers of any rank who, with the force under their command, support petitions made by violent means, such as mutiny, rioting or tumult” and also to those who refused to “lend support to the competent Authority” when asked to control any such tumultuous petition. The problem, again, was linked to the means.56 These pieces of legislation, alongside the public discourse supporting them, tried to reinforce the institutionalisation of petitioning within a stable representative government. Representative government, responsiveness, free press and accessible and impartial courts all promised to keep the channels of communication and representation open. Such an institutionalisation, however, remained precarious, and Spain would thus live through decades of political exclusion, resistance, rebellion, civil war and revolution. In contrast to forceful petitioning, coups and civil wars disregarded the tacit agreement regarding the formal subordination to the Crown. One ultra-royalist manifesto from 1825 already broke with Ferdinand VII, arguing that after having freed him from the liberals in 1823, they

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had lost all their confidence on him because he had not acted upon their petitions.57 Notwithstanding, more contained conflicts still rehearsed the old theme of the forceful display of the needs and hopes of the nation. In 1836, the manifesto by which queen regent Maria Cristina caved in in the face of the protracted chain of rebel juntas , pronunciamientos and direct bullying by the sergeants of her guard, was exemplary in this respect: Spaniards! At the beginning, the aspect and character presented by the latest events persuaded me that those were just isolated movements, born out of private interests and passions [...]. While these impressions lasted, my duty was to maintain the established order [...] in conformity to what I believed it was the general opinion among you. [...] And I would have carried on, had not intervened a more expressive and general manifestation by you, which finally displayed your desires in their full extent.58

In a similar vein, in many towns, the chain of tax, conscription and bread riots that accompanied the 1854 revolution followed a similar script to those of 1766 and 1801. This time the crowds empowered the local juntas and counted on them to formalise and channel their petitions towards the provisional government in Madrid. When in 1855 more than forty localities gathered signatures and petitioned requesting the end of conscription, many also argued that they were just formalising the petitions that had moved them to play their part in the 1854 revolution.59 History being as much as about persistence than it is about innovation, we may say that the umbilical relationship between crowd action and petitioning was well alive.

Transnational Resonances Despite the singular elements of the Spanish case, the cluster of petitioning practices by other means cannot be understood as a national peculiarity. In different modulations, petitioning by other means underpinned revolutionary political experiences across the world. I cannot be exhaustive here, but I may recall some examples to buttress this affirmation. In the case of France, not only armed petitionary crowds besieged and stormed the National Assembly in several occasions, but there were also many instances of electoral sections and local and departmental councils petitioning regarding political matters, thus overstepping their administrative remit and using the right to petition as a rallying cry for

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disobedience. In Mexico, forceful petitioning became a key element in political life, even in absence of a paternal crown.60 In Portugal as well we may find blends of armed coercion and petitioning. During the September 1836 revolution, for example, Lisbon’s National Guard dressed their armed mobilisation as a humble petition. As they said in their September 10 manifesto, signed “in the barracks of the Carmo”: The citizens who have the honour to address this respectful supplication to your Majesty, fully persuaded that your Majesty wishes nothing so much as the felicity of the Portuguese nation, anxiously await on the spot where they are now stationed, that your Majesty will benignantly accept their request.61

Likewise, queen Maria II’s answer did not depart from convention. After being persuaded that there were no troops available to contain the move, she restored the 1822 constitution. Her manifesto explained that she had “agreed with the representations many citizens had addressed to [her], alongside other expressions of the national opinion”.62 In the case of the Kingdom of Naples, the 1848 revolution also highlighted the continuum between petitioning and revolutionary action. Against the backdrop of a right to petition that had recently been enshrined as a citizenship right, the 13 March 1848 Riot Act depicted the action of revolutionary crowds as an unconstitutional means of petitioning: Considering that for some days past, and especially to-day, it has been attempted to exercise this right by means of numerous assemblages, acts of violence, printed placards, and seditious manifestoes […] Considering that the public desire manifested by petitions and by deputations calls for prompt measures of prevention for the maintenance of the constitutional system; […] decrees as follows: I. It is forbidden to present petitions in an unconstitutional form […] III. Should an illegal assemblage take place, it shall be called upon to disperse three times by the authorities, […]. IV. After being three times called upon, should they not disperse, it shall be lawful to make use of the public force to effect their dispersion.63

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Conclusion In early modern and modern Spain, and across many other settings, collective disobedience, open resistance, aggressive imposition by the crowd—in short, rioting—was practised and justified as a form of petitioning. Rioters often explained their behaviour by denouncing the failure of the institutional settings that would have allowed them to choose a more peaceful form of petitioning. The same idea served local authorities, and even the Crown, when, after losing control of the situation, they yielded to the rioters’ requests, thus displaying their concessions as paternal shows of attentiveness. Riots, juntas and pronunciamientos were petitions. Without forceful petitioning shaping revolutionary forms of action, moreover, we would hardly be talking about the Age of Revolution. Taking this realisation seriously invites rethinking some readymade assumptions regarding the genealogy of modern mass petitioning. Historians of social movements, like myself, have too easily accepted that modern petitioning evolved from conflictual uses of the traditional deferential forms of petitioning, in association with the growing role of the public sphere.64 This chapter, in contrast, invites us to discard any linear understanding of the centrality of the gathering of signatures. Crowd action and violence were an integral part of the history of petitioning. The Age of Revolution did not just witness a trend towards modern style petition drive campaigns led by organised canvassers. The prolongation and reconfiguration of the key conventions that underpinned riotous petitions shaped this age as well. By paying attention to the legislation about riots and petitions produced in revolutionary contexts in France, Spain or Naples, moreover, we may propose that the affirmation of the public mass petition was more than an evolution of deferential and reserved practices of petitioning, now becoming public. It was also a taming and institutionalisation of the forceful and thus, already public, riotous petitions.

Notes 1. Gaceta extraordinaria de Madrid, 5/09/1801, p. 985. 2. Manuel Ardit, Revolución liberal y revuelta campesina: un ensayo sobre la desintegración del régimen feudal en el País Valenciano (1793–1840) (Barcelona: Ariel, 1977), pp. 98–119.

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3. Classic deployments of this theme for the Spanish case in Bartolomé Gallardo, “Sobre el derecho de representar, inseparable de la libertad civil”, in La Abeja Española (Cádiz: Imprenta Patriótica, 02/12/1812). 4. Ramón Salas, Lecciones de derecho público constitucional (Madrid, 1821), pp. 87–91. Mark Knights, “The 1780 Protestant Petitions and the Culture of Petitioning”, in Ian Haywood and John Seed (eds.), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 5. For a critical survey, David Zaret, “Petition-and-Response and Liminal Petitioning in Comparative/Historical Perspective”, Social Science History 43, no. 3 (2019), pp. 431–51. 6. Frederick the Great of Prussia, “Political Testament (1752)”, Carlile Aylmer Macartney (ed.), The Habsburgh and Hohenzollern dynasties in the seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 334. 7. Martin Almbjär, “The Problem with Early-Modern Petitions: Safety Valve or Powder Keg?”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 26, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1013–39. 8. Cecilia Nubola, “Operare La Resistenza. Introduzione”, in Cecilia Nubola and Andreas Würgler (ed.), Operare la Resistenza: Suppliche, Gravamina e Rivolte in Europa (Secoli XV –XIX) (Bologna: Societa Editrice il Mulino: Duncker & Humblot, 2006), p. 14. 9. Henry Miller, “Introduction: The Transformation of Petitioning in the Long Nineteenth Century (1780–1914)”, Social Science History, 43, no. 3 (2019), pp. 409–29. 10. Diego Palacios Cerezales, “Re-imagining Petitioning in Spain (1808– 1823)”, Social Science History, 43, no. 3 (2019), pp. 487–508; Dedieu, Après le roi. Essai sur l’effondrement de la monarchie espagnole (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2010), pp. 9–11. On Denmark, Tomas Munck, “Petitions and ‘Legitimate’ Engagement with Power in Absolutist Denmark 1660–1800”, Parliaments, Estates & Representation/Parlements, États & Représentation, 38, no. 3 (2018), pp. 378–92. 11. Fray Joaquín de Finestrad, El vasallo instruido en el estado del Nuevo reino de Granada y en sus respectivas obligaciones, in M. González (ed.) (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2000 [1789]), pp. 186–7. 12. Finestrad, Vasallo, p. 206. Carlos Garriga also cites the principle that vassals “only had the glory to obey” in Carlos Garriga, “La enfermedad política de Cataluña: en torno a la Diputación de los Colegios y Gremios de Barcelona (1773–1775)”, Anuario de historia del derecho español (1997), pp. 721–48. 13. Dedieu, Après le roi. Essai sur l’effondrement de la monarchie espagnole, p. 45. 14. Teófanes Egido, “El motín madrileño de 1699”, Investigaciones históricas: Época moderna y contemporánea (1980), pp. 253–94.

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15. “Acuerdo de varios habitantes de Madrid. Romance”, in Jacinta Macías Delgado (ed.), El motín de Esquilache a la luz de los documentos (Madrid: CEPC, 1988). 16. [El pueblo de Madrid y por él su Tribuno], “Copia de la carta dirigida en la noche del día 4 de abril de 1766 al caballero corregidor de Madrid”, in Macías Delgado (ed.), El motín de Esquilache a la luz de los documentos (Madrid: CEPC, 1988). 17. [Motín Matritense], “Humilde representación”, in Macías Delgado (ed.), El motín de Esquilache a la luz de los documentos (Madrid: CEPC, 1988). 18. “Relación del motín contra Esquilache”, in Macías Delgado (ed.), El motín de Esquilache, pp. 164–5. 19. “Relación”, p. 183. 20. Spain Under the Bourbons, 1700–1833: A Collection of Documents (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 135. 21. Bando del 26 de marzo de 1766, en Macías Delgado, El motín de Esquilache, p. 177. 22. Carlos E. Corona Baratech, “Los motines en la Gobernación de Alicante en abril de 1766”, Anales de Literatura Española (1983), pp. 103–32. 23. Laura Rodriguez, “The Spanish Riots of 1766”, Past & Present, 59, no. 1 (1973), pp. 117–46. 24. Pedro Losa Serrano and Ramón Cózar Gutiérrez, Conflictividad social en el mundo rural: los motines de Tobarra y Liétor en 1766 (Olías del Rey: Azacanes, 2002), p. 111. 25. José Luis Gómez Urdáñez, “Mano dura y cuerda tirante. La cara cruel de la España Ilustrada del Siglo XVIII”, in Jesús Astigarraga and Usoz Javier (eds.), Bajo el velo del bien público. Estudios en homenaje a Guillermo Pérez Sarrión (Zaragoza: Instituto Fernando el Católico, 2020), pp. 151–69. 26. Auto acordado de 5 de mayo de 1766. 27. Carlos Garriga, “La constitución fundamental de la nación española. En torno a la Pragmática preventiva de bullicios y conmociones populares de 1774”, in Julio Pardos Martínez (ed.), Historia en fragmentos: estudios en homenaje a Pablo Fernández Albaladejo (Madrid: UAM, 2017). 28. Pragmática sanción de 17 de abril de 1774. 29. Antonio Bethencourt Massieu, “La asonada de la ‘pobrera’ en Lanzarote en 1789: Reflexiones socio-políticas”, Anuario de estudios atlánticos (1988), pp. 445–76. 30. Garriga, “Enfermedad”, pp. 721–48. 31. Enric Moreu-Rey, Revolució a Barcelona el 1789 (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1967). 32. Cit. in Jesús Manuel González Beltrán, “‘Es gente que vive de sus brazos…’. Trabajadores agrícolas en la Andalucía del siglo XVIII”, Historia Social, 56 (2006), pp. 3–29. 33. Gaceta extraordinaria de Madrid, 5 de septiembre de 1801, p. 983.

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34. Op. Cit., p. 985. 35. AHN Consejos 51533, exp 3. Providencias Audiencia de Valencia (1801), f116. 36. Ardit, Revolución Liberal, p. 119. 37. William H. Sewell, “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille”, Theory & Society, 25, no. 6 (1996), p. 841. 38. See Adrian Connor’s chapter in this volume. 39. Marquis de Mirabeau, “Discours 14 octobre 1789 [on the Martial Law]”, Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur. Vol 2, mai 1789–novembre 1799 (Paris, 1840), p. 61. 40. Loi Martiale, 21/10/1789, tit. V. 41. Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 42. Richard Hocquellet, “Local Elites and Patriotic Uprising: The Composition of the Juntas Provinciales in 1808”, Historia y Politica (2008), pp. 129–50, Ronald Fraser, Napoleon’s Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War, 1808–1814 (London: Verso, 2007). A longer view in Antonio Moliner Prada, Revolución burguesa y movimiento juntero en España (Lleida: Milenio, 1997). 43. La Abeja Madrileña, 1, 16/01/1814: 1. 44. Tim Fowler, Forceful Negotiations: The Origins of the Pronunciamiento in México (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 45. Miguel Alonso Baquer, El modelo español de pronunciamiento (Madrid: RIALP, 1983). 46. Tim Fowler, Independent Mexico: The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna, 1821–1858 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Kindle loc 596. 47. Here I disagree with Alonso Baquer, but mainly because he takes the Aranjuez riotous coup of March 1808 as the model for old regime rioting, which it was not. Alonso Baquer, El modelo español de pronunciamiento, p. 21. 48. “La Junta Nacional de Galicia a la Nación española [1815]”, in Manuel Rodríguez Alonso (ed.), Los manifiestos políticos en el siglo XIX (Barcelona: Ariel, 1998). 49. Antonio Quiroga, “Memorial en nombre del Ejército Nacional al Rey (07/01/1820)”, in Benigno Morales (ed.), La víctima del despotismo, o la España en cadenas (Tolosa: Imprenta de la Ciudad, 1820). 50. Marqués de Miraflores, Documentos a los que se hace referencia en los apuntes histórico-críticos para escribir la historia de la Revolución de España (London: Taylor, 1834), p. 72. 51. de Miraflores, Documentos, pp. 78–9.

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52. José Luis Comellas, Los realistas en el trienio constitucional (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1956). 53. Diario de Urgel, 22/03/1822. 54. “Motines y asonadas”, El censor, periódico político y literario, 61, 29/9/1821. On this, Palacios Cerezales, “Re-imagining Petitioning”, pp. 500–3. 55. On France, see Adrian O’Connor, ‘Action at a Distance’ in this same volume. 56. Colección de los decretos y órdenes que han expedido las Córtes general y extraordinarias desde su instalación (Madrid: Impr. Real, 1822), pp. 262– 5. 57. The true authorship of this manifesto, which circulated widely, is debated. The rebel Agraviados of 1827 returned to make their manifestos in the name of the King. Julio Aróstegui, “El manifiesto de la Federación de los Realistas Puros (1826). Contribución al estudio de los grupos políticos en el reinado de Fernando VII”, Estudios de historia contemporánea I (1976), pp. 119–85. 58. “La Reina Gobernadora a la Nación Española”, in Rodríguez Alonso (ed.), Los manifiestos políticos en el siglo XIX (Barcelona: Ariel, 1998). 59. Diego Palacios Cerezales, “Ejercer derechos: reivindicación, petición y conflicto”, in María Sierra and M. Cruz Romeo Mateo (eds.), Las culturas políticas de la España liberal, 1833–1874 (Zaragoza: Marcial Pons, 2014). 60. Fowler, Independent Mexico. 61. João Augusto Marques Gomes, Luctas caseiras: Portugal de 1834 a 1851 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1894), p. 201. 62. Decree 10/09/1836, Portugal, Colecção oficial de legislação portuguesa (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1837). 63. Translation found in UK Parliament, Correspondence Respecting the Affairs of Italy: From January to June 30, 1848, Vol. II (London: Harrison and Son, 1849), p. 223. 64. Zaret, “Petition-and-Response”, pp. 431–51.

CHAPTER 12

The Petitionary Wave of the First Portuguese Liberal Revolution (1820–1823) Miguel Dantas da Cruz

Introduction The bases of the Constitution decreed the right of Petition that each citizen has to present any claims to the Cortes (the new National Parliament) and that the same Cortes must address these claimants, as indeed it

This work was supported by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.—within the framework of the contract programme prescribed by numbers 4, 5, and 6 of article 23 of the D.L. 57/2016 of August 29 and changed by Law 57/2017 of July 19. The author received additional funding from his institution’s strategic project (UID/SOC/50013/2019). The author would like to express his gratitude to Rhian Atkin for her extraordinary revision, which greatly improved the text. M. D. da Cruz (B) Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_12

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has been practicing with the utmost care, even extending its sessions for hours. However, this measure has not produced the desired effect, given the multiplicity of petitions submitted….1

This excerpt is part of a longer parliamentary intervention made during the session of 17 July 1821 that stressed an ongoing problem faced by the newly elected liberal representatives: the unmanageable volume of petitions sent to the first Portuguese liberal Cortes. The author of the intervention, the representative Maurício José de Castelo Branco Manuel, could not disguise his concern with the petitionary wave that swept through Portugal for a brief but decisive, transformative, and dramatic period. The Portuguese not only were losing their rich American territories after the independence of Brazil; they also were trialling their first liberal experience. This essay revisits the petitionary movement of unparalleled proportions that erupted in 1820 and lasted for just under four years (1820–1823), during which period the country dealt with new ideas about political representation and political participation. The representative Maurício José de Castelo Branco was not alone in his fear of an undesirable destabilisation of regular parliamentary life, which could ultimately damage the image of the new regime. Other representatives were also concerned with the effects of the overflow of petitions, with Borges Carneiro even going as far as to recommend the rejection of every unsigned petition.2 The solution proposed by Castelo Branco was not so drastic. In his view, the liberals needed to maintain public satisfaction with the new regime. After all, they could not be completely sure about the security of their foothold in Portugal. “If things continue in this way, and the number of petitions and projects is always increasing”, Maurício José argued, “then there will certainly be greater trouble and dissatisfaction among the People”. Some of the petitioners might even have thought that they were being deliberately overlooked by the Cortes, which, according to Maurício José, would be completely at odds with the spirit of the new institution. A feeling of abandonment among the general population was to be avoided at all costs. No personal sacrifice on the part of the newly elected representatives would be too great: “this August Congress is firm and possessed of the most ardent desire to promote the good of the Nation, and it is ready to undertake the greatest sacrifices and labours”, he added. Hence, Maurício José proposed that parliamentary proceedings be rescheduled in order to accommodate sessions for petitions and other subscriptional

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documents that were submitted to the Cortes. The representatives were invited to reserve two periods of three hours each week—Saturday being one of the reserved days—to read and consider the merits of the requests, claims, and grievances that they received. This petitionary wave that created significant difficulties for the new regime is not ignored in contemporary scholarship on the Portuguese Liberal Revolution. The Portuguese academy was late in giving it attention, though. Thousands of petitions remained forgotten and ignored for the remainder of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century. Petitions exposed too much of the political unrest in early nineteenth-century Portuguese society to be tackled by the nationalist historiography of the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974). They represent a troublesome past that was in conflict with the supposedly virtuous traditions that the Estado Novo highlighted. With the exception of the work of Albert Silbert3 dedicated to agrarian conflicts, the petitionary wave of 1820–1823 only came to be explored in detail in the late 1970s and the 1980s, by Miriam Halpern Pereira, Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, and José Subtil, among others.4 Some important inroads were certainly made in that period. We came to understand, for example, how pervasive and divisive certain issues were becoming in Portuguese society, beginning with land impositions and commercial monopolies. More importantly, the research of the late twentieth century hinted at a sudden, albeit temporary, “parliamentarisation” of popular politics, to use Charles Tilly’s interpretation.5 Just as had been happening in Great Britain for a long time, demands, grievances, and claims were now directed to the National Parliament—the Cortes—as the new centre of the Portuguese polity. Yet the underlying meaning of this “parliamentarisation”, which implied the devaluation of traditional centres of power, was not fully appreciated as far as petitionary culture and practices are concerned. Moreover, none of those authors was interested in studying petitions per se, as an instrument of political participation or political representation with a long-standing tradition. In other words, none of them tried to identify whether these petitions were mainly associated with traditional forms of addressing authorities, or whether they were related to new repertoires of protest in the sense that Charles Tilly outlines.6 Although they are far from unanimous in their analyses, numerous historians and social scientists, starting with Tilly, have distinguished between modern petitioning, which is related to mass protest, and early modern petitioning, which was more restricted to single events

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(and which has also continued into the contemporary period, although frequently under different denominations). Petitioning, which has been with us since the invention of writing, at least, was always a form of political participation.7 It also became a structural component of every empire. New overseas subjects, irrespective of their social standing, race, or gender, participated in imperial petitionary systems to convey their interests and grievances to their overlords.8 One might argue that petitioning acted as a safety valve: a peaceful means of communication between any authority and its subjects, although the peacefulness and predictability of that interaction through petitions have been contested more recently.9 However, at some point petitioning became an instrument of collective pressure and mass protest as well, as a way to engage with the public sphere. It also began to convey a new language of broader political rights. This seems to be the case with Spain during the Age of Revolutions, for example. As Diego Palacios recently showed, the petitionary experiences of early nineteenth-century Spain hinged on new ideas of sovereignty, national consciousness, and citizens’ rights.10 In the United Kingdom, by contrast, the Age of Revolutions did not play such a dramatic role, and therefore there are fewer differences between early modern and modern petitions. The English and British parliaments had been dealing with large-scale petitions, with thousands of signatures, since the 1640s.11 No other early modern institution faced such challenges. The transition to the nineteenth century was nevertheless marked by a phenomenal increase in the volume of public petitions to that Parliament, initially as a means of circumventing other restrictions that were imposed on the press during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. During this time petitions became massive, presenting millions of signatures. A system of classification of the petitions that were presented in Great Britain has been put forward by Peter Jupp. According to him, these public petitions fall into three different categories. They could be “constitutional”, that is, they were spontaneous responses to single issues that may have been brewing at a local level; and they could be “institutional” petitions, which were produced by pressure groups and campaign organisations. While the former was tolerated, if not incentivised by MPs, the latter was seen as an undesirable way of destabilising parliamentary activities. The third category also relates to petitions that were used as a

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platform for political movements but in this case, the movements were less organised and frequently connected with public meetings.12 Such sophisticated conceptual developments were never attempted in relation to Portugal, or indeed, in relation to any other places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, we know that Portugal was firmly in line with other countries in Europe as far as petitionary practices were concerned. By the 1850s, the country had adopted the new repertoires of mass mobilisation. Diego Palacios, in particular, has written about massive collective petitions organised by campaigns that had a truly national scope. However, we do not know exactly when the new petitionary practices began to be incorporated into the Portuguese repertoire of protest. This essay follows in the footsteps of Palacios’s work, and seeks to establish whether those changes coincide in time with the arrival of liberalism in Portugal, the transformative role of which is normally—and correctly— assumed. In other words, this essay attempts to situate the petitionary wave of the early 1820s within the long-term evolution of petitionary practices, starting with the unprecedent parliamentarisation of popular politics. It examines whether this wave constituted a significant steppingstone in a country that already had a strong petitionary culture during the early modern period, and it searches for signs of what we might call superior levels of organisation or intentional engagement with public opinion. The essay uses Zaret’s proposal on the formation of the public sphere to look for tangible links between the opinions conveyed by petitioners and the broader public discussions and debates taking place in civil society of the 1820s.13 It also endeavours to identify the presence of a lexicon of rights that was brought forward by the Age of Revolutions, and of the emerging nationalistic world view that was so dominant in the first Portuguese liberal revolution. This essay deals with these issues in an exploratory fashion and carves a path for a future, broader research project that would allow a deeper exploration of these sources and provide a more comprehensive understanding of what was at stake in Portugal and the Portuguese Empire in the early 1820s for the large swathes of the population who voiced their opinions through petitioning.

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Petitions and the Sudden Parliamentarisation of Portuguese Politics We do not have a complete picture of the number of petitions that were reviewed in the new political forum. Many were lost and others misplaced in the Portuguese Parliamentary Archive or in the archival collections of other Old Regime institutions such as the Desembargo do Paço, the highest court of the monarchy. In any event, unofficial suggestions that there were more than ten thousand of these subscriptional documents do not seem exaggerated. Some of them were sent directly to the Soberano Congresso (Sovereign Congress), as the Cortes were christened. It is amazing how quickly and en masse the population resorted to this new channel of communication to convey its claims. This is another example of the role played by petitions for the development of legislatures throughout history, as identified in other studies.14 The new political forum was perceived immediately as a space with which to engage, even before the first meeting of the representatives took place in January 1821. People and institutions started to send petitions and other papers in the final months of 1820, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. There were, however, many petitions that were sent to other destinations, namely the monarch, as had been the case for centuries, and which found their way into the Cortes. This suggests a level of political and institutional rearrangement. Many people continued to do as they had always done, but the Cortes, taking advantage of the King’s absence in Brazil since 1808, willingly assumed the role of the monarch. The Cortes, that is, the National Parliament, became the centre of popular politics, even if in some cases this was unintentional. It should be noted that this was not the first time a central platform that formally represented the country and its social bodies had played such a role. The Cortes of the Old Regime, where the Nobility, the Clergy, and representatives of the cities gathered, had a procedure by which they received petitions, which were called capítulos extraordinários. There was, however, an underlying institutional framework that limited access of the lower strata of society to the Cortes: only the formal representatives of the cities and the representatives of the guilds could petition in the national forum.15 Individuals or unrecognised groups did not have a voice in the early modern Cortes, where a mediaeval world view persisted that was completely at odds with modern-day philosophies that

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centred on the individual. In the early modern Cortes, the guiding principles of the corporative society were strictly observed, which meant that only recognised bodies were represented.16 Obviously, petitions, individual or collective, could always be submitted—and they were, in fact, constantly—through the regular, ordinary, institutional channels of the tribunals, courts, councils, and secretaries. The early modern Cortes stopped gathering at the end of the seventeenth century and the interactions—as constrained as they were— between the top monarchical institution and the population, which were based on petitions, naturally stopped. Access to the monarch via the political body that represented the country was no longer possible after 1698. Portuguese subjects continued to engage with the Crown through the tribunals, courts and councils, even if this was now in a less public format. No one, with the exception of those involved, for example in a judicial quarrel, knew the details or circumstances of the procedures. There was no public disclosure, no printed press, and no public opinion to consider. With the Revolution of 1820, all of this changed. Unlike the petitions and representations of the Old Regime, the subscriptional documents submitted to the new liberal Cortes were not discussed behind closed doors. They were discussed in a public forum that published the records of its sessions. Any subject, however minute, immediately received public exposure, and could even become newsworthy if it were taken up by the rapidly expanding free press. Along with the petitions, the representatives of the 1820s also received more than a thousand proposals and memórias (memoranda), all proclaiming their intentions to help the Cortes establish the constitutional system. According to Isabel Nobre Vargues, the proposals for reform that were sent to the parliament show an unreserved desire on the part of citizens to participate in what was called at the time the “regeneration” of Portuguese society.17 The same author asserts, not without justification, that this desire to participate was the main feature of burgeoning sense of Portuguese citizenship between 1820 and 1823.18 Miriam Halpern Pereira, a Portuguese specialist in the history of the 1820 Revolution whose work focuses on its economic dimensions, argues that “The petitionary movement reflects the emergence of a consciousness of citizenship”.19 The bottom-up political impulse was welcomed and even encouraged by the Cortes. A system of interaction was established that favoured the sudden parliamentarisation of popular politics, which might not have

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happened if they had chosen a different pathway. Had the representatives opted for an alternative internal regulation, the opportunities for presenting petitions and other papers would have been diminished considerably. And there was a chance to do exactly that: to pursue a different direction. In the latter months of 1820, a project to regulate the inner workings of the institution that was being convened (the Cortes) was proposed and published. If adopted, this proposal would have changed the levels of interaction between the Cortes and the population during the early 1820s. Joaquim José da Costa Macedo (1777–1867) was the author of that regulatory proposal, which was called Projeto de regimento das Cortes .20 He was a leading figure in Portuguese public life during the first half of the nineteenth century. Costa de Macedo was a very competent bureaucrat, who had worked for the Portuguese administration in several capacities since 1794, in the twilight of Iberian Absolutism. At the same time, Costa de Macedo was a consummate intellectual and a productive historian who had dedicated several works to the Portuguese imperial expansion. He rubbed shoulders with leading intellectuals of the period such as Alexandre Herculano (1810–1877), with whom he had a long-lasting historiographical disagreement. He was an active member of the Portuguese Academy of Sciences (Academia das Ciências), and he abandoned public life only in 1857, when he stepped down as the head of the Torre do Tombo archives (now the Portuguese National Archives). His 1820 proposal reveals his up-to-date knowledge of constitutional debates of the period, and he makes frequent reference to Benjamin Bentham and the 1812 constitution of Cadiz as benchmarks to be aspired to and adapted. Costa de Macedo’s proposed regulation describes in detail the circuits of communication in the Cortes. The proposal addresses the preparation of papers to be submitted to the national assembly, their reception by the president of the Cortes, who would announce them to the representatives, as well as their eventual submission to one of the parliamentary commissions (articles XC–XCII). The proposal also considered the deliberative process and the co-ordination between the president of the Cortes, the selected commission, and the author/s of the representation, who might be called upon to explain their arguments in person (article XCIII). Costa de Macedo did not overlook the question of the publicization of these procedures, and he went as far as to propose the publication of lists of the rejected representations (articles CI–CIII). At the same time, the proposed regulation also shows what

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can only be described as the desire to limit interactions between representatives and the public; this was a desire that Costa de Macedo did not hide. Although he accepted that everybody had the right to address the national parliament, he also asserted that every paper should implicate the author. He suggested that the author’s name, address, and profession should be included in every document (article LXXXVI). The reason, which he explains at the end of his proposal, was the need to create some sort of accountability among the population.21 Furthermore, each subscriptional document should be certified by a public notary, otherwise it would not be eligible for consideration (article LXXXVII). Had this proposal been adopted, the power of the public to address the Cortes would have been significantly reduced. The petitionary wave would have been impossible and parliament would not have become the main stage for popular politics. Additionally, Costa de Macedo rejected the right to petition collectively (article LXXXVIII), drawing his inspiration from long-standing conventional wisdom. The right to petition collectively, which was the most menacing form of petitioning, had been controversial everywhere in Europe.22 Portugal was no exception. As in other places, the ability to protest in a cooperative fashion raised suspicions. Costa de Macedo stated that: No good comes from admitting representations signed by a large number of People, and it could result in much harm […] Legislative Power, in order to work successfully, must consider, not the number of signatures, but the strength of the arguments. Everyone knows the tortuous means used by certain parties insidiously to extort a large number of signatures: therefore the vote of the factious, substituting for the opinion of the signatories, swells and appears in public cloaked with a veil of the common will. (p. 63)

The underlying fear of the manipulation of public opinion is evident. It was not only the “number of signatures” that concerned him. He feared the broader repercussions of any issue that was brought to the fore by disgruntled individuals acting as a group. However, the Cortes did not adopt the prescriptive regulation of Costa de Macedo, who reiterated earlier attempts by the Portuguese absolutist governments to restrict the range of issues about which one could

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complain to the monarch. The Cortes adopted a smaller and more flexible code to deal with the public instead. The Projecto de regimento para o governo interior das Côrtes Geraes provided much less information about bureaucratic procedures and the paper trail of petitions. It stated that all papers, proposals, memoranda, and representations must be received by one of the four secretaries of the Cortes. The secretaries were elected from the pool of representatives every three months, and they controlled the bureaucratic system, channelling these papers to those who would review them.23 We know that petitions and other documents were supposed to be read in the Cortes, but we also suspect that some of them were not presented in the plenary sessions. There was some sort of a selection process, which was essentially controlled by the acting secretaries. Their role must be highlighted, since, in a way, they set the agenda for the Cortes. After their presentation to the representatives, petitions were then sent to one of almost 50 parliamentary commissions where they were discussed in detail. The wave of petitions to the Cortes in the 1820s was certainly not repeated. This sudden but temporary parliamentarisation of popular politics was made possible by the unforeseen use of a traditional right. Petitionary culture remained crucial in nineteenth-century Portugal, though. Petitions even played a role in the return of absolutism in the second half of the 1820s, with supporters of this ideology encouraging the indiscriminate collection of signatures, among other strategies, as a way to show the vast level of support for the return of Miguel I (1801–1866).24 Later, and as in many other countries, Portugal witnessed the advent of massive collective petitions with a national scope, that were organised through political campaigns, and which sometimes prompted the appearance of counter-campaigns. This was the case of the 1858 attempt to expel the French Sisters of Charity from Portugal. The petition in defence of the nuns collected more than 30,000 signatures. At the same time, as Diego Palacios has shown, the use of mass petitions was supplemented by other forms of political participation, such as the holding of public meetings.25 During the nineteenth century, petitioners had two routes by which to submit their complaints and requests. On the one hand, they sent petitions to the monarch, although this no longer took place through old-regime institutions like the Desembargo do Paço, which had been extinguished in 1834, but through the Secretary of State.26 The schedule of the Secretary’s clerks shows that people did use this channel, while it also reveals that this modern institution continued to occupy the majority

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of its time in dealing with particular interests, and not with the implementation of top-down public policies. On the other hand, petitions could also be submitted directly to the legislative branch, the Cortes, which was re-established definitively with the victory of the liberals in 1834. In fact, in 1857 the Lower House (Câmara dos Deputados ) instituted a box (Caixa de Petições ) in which petitions could be deposited and were then analysed by the parliamentary commission for petitions.27

Playing with Public Opinion The relation between the formation of the public sphere in Portugal and the petitionary wave of the 1820s is another aspect that must be considered. We tend, correctly, to associate the rise of the public sphere in Portugal with the upsurge of the printed press that accompanied the end of censorship, and before that with changes in social practices. Historians such as Ana Cristina Araújo and Maria Alexandre Lousada have shown how the growing number of coffee houses, taverns, inns, and Lojas de Bebidas (drinks shops) fostered an environment of debate and exchange of ideas that were sometimes virulent.28 This had been happening since the 1770s and became commonplace in the last decade of the eighteenth century, to the despair of the police force and its famous superintendent Inácio de Pina Manique, who was continuously on the lookout for freemasons, whether real or perceived. Changes in political participation took place against the backdrop of a burgeoning public sphere, meaning that tangible links can be identified between the petitions submitted to the Cortes and the ongoing public debates in the country. There is clear evidence of petitions that overtly engaged with what may be called the hot topics of the day. One excellent and common example is the use of the protectionist argument, which had become a very public issue by the late 1810s and early 1820s. A growing restlessness had been brewing since the 1810 treaty with the United Kingdom, which opened the Portuguese markets, in both Europe and Brazil, to British industrial goods. Several national producers were unable to place their products in the marketplace at competitive prices, and were made bankrupt by competition. This was commonly known and abundantly divulged by the press.29 It certainly provided a favourable economic and social backdrop for the 1820 Revolution and it continued to feed endless parliamentary debates about the need to impose some kind of protectionist measures. So, it is hardly surprising

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that the retailers of several Portuguese cities who were engaged in a bitter conflict with a growing mass of unregulated peddlers drew on the public outcry against the unchecked consumption of foreign goods in their petitions. They accused the peddlers of hurting national industry and commerce by selling British goods throughout the country. For example, the body of merchants of Guimarães wrote that “This economic activity [peddling] was and has always been the total ruin of national commerce; the Law forbade it, but the indolence of the government and the corruption of the magistrates used to allow anything in times past”.30 These petitions received some positive feedback in the Cortes, although not unanimously so. The representative Sarmento Queirós said that “The Manchester and Liverpool Manufacturers certainly cannot have better Agents and Commissioners” than the peddlers. He also added that “without them [peddlers and flea markets] we would certainly have saved most of the large sum of millions of cruzados that Great Britain, especially since the unfortunate Treaty of 1810, has taken from us in exchange for four worthless cotton rags”.31 At the same time, these petitions went beyond references to the damage caused to Portuguese general economic interests. The attacks focused on the identities attributed to people.32 They took advantage of the inherently exclusionary and fast-developing national consciousness to attack those who were perceived as foreigners, as the peddlers often were. At the least, they were strangers to the villages they visited to sell their goods. The merchants tried to stoke fear that the men and women who arrived in provincial towns would commit all kinds of crimes against property or people.33 The retailers and their champions intentionally coupled the crime wave that was overwhelming rural areas, and of which everybody was aware, with the presence of these strangers, who were identified sometimes as stranded Spanish soldiers from the previous war, and sometimes as people of the Romani ethnicity (Ciganos ). Interestingly, the peddlers also used the language of national sentiments to plead their cause. They proclaimed themselves to be true Portuguese who happened to peddle their wares in the streets, and they claimed that they had no other choice than to sell their products in a less than legal way. According to a petition signed by more than 50 peddlers, all the jobs had been taken by foreigners, even in the dockyards, where immigrants from Galicia (North-western Spain) were commonly recruited. They were clearly playing with the representatives’ perceptions and urge to protect Portuguese national interests. After all, the

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1820 Revolution was essentially a movement to restore national pride and autonomy. The peddlers even called for the dismissal (and expulsion) of these foreigners.34 Nationalist sentiments were also drawn on for other reasons. For example, one memorandum that sought to convince the Cortes not to relinquish its rights over Brazil as the latter country headed towards independence, played with the anti-Brazilian arguments that had been spreading through the country. The memorandum sought to increase pressure on the Cortes, which were already subject to intense criticism in the press, and ultimately to convince the representatives to send an expeditionary force to the South Atlantic. The document uses the same kind of inflammatory rhetoric that often characterised journalism. For Captain Joaquim Luís de Fraga (the author of the document), as for the editors of some liberal newspapers, the Brazilians were an immature and feeble people that was not ready for independence or able to resist an invasion. He also tried to scare the leading Brazilian interest groups in Lisbon. He stated that if the white elites of Brazil failed to come to terms with their European “ancestors” and compromise with the old metropolis, they would be slain by their African slaves and the indigenous peoples.35

Petitions, Organisation, and Mass Mobilisation Were there signs of coordinated mass movements in the early 1820s? No, probably not. Certainly not, if we adopt the parameters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to identify what constitutes a mass movement. That understanding may change with future research, but based on what we know today, the petitions of the 1820s had a very traditional layout in the sense that they were restricted in their scope. They might have been public, in the sense that they engaged with a public forum and had journalistic exposure, but the majority of these petitions tackled issues of individual or local interest. Even those that dealt with what can be described as modern political issues spawned from local situations.36 Additionally, a large number of them seem to have been conveyed by the traditional channels of the Old Regime—namely the municipalities or guilds—which also suggests the presence of a conventional world view rather than a shift in the repertoires of protest. In a way, these petitions resembled the petitions of the 1780s by disgruntled Portuguese farmers fighting against their seignorial overlords and the burdens of their tax obligations. In the 1780s, as in the 1820s,

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there was significant canvassing for signatures with the aim of showing the broad level of support for what was being demanded, and, in the 1780s, these petitions were apparently successful in curbing some aristocratic privileges.37 People did go beyond their municipalities in 1820s though, and sometimes they coordinated actions at the regional or provincial level. For example, the town councils of the Douro valley and the wine producers from the same region collectively petitioned the Cortes to request more freedom to sell their wine. Yet it should be noted that the request touched on an old problem: the monopoly granted by the Marquis of Pombal to the Companhia Geral da Agricultura das Vinhas do Alto Douro.38 Further south, some municipalities in the Alcobaça region coordinated their efforts in a similar way against the seignorial landlord, a monastery. The high taxes owed to the monastery had been a longstanding problem. The petitions from Alcobaça in 1820s were written and prepared by the same person, which certainly attests to a significant degree of coordination.39 The apparent absence of larger-scale efforts like those from the Douro and Alcobaça regions could be attributed to a less-than-vibrant understanding of modern politics. However, one might also attribute the lack of broader efforts at coordination to the traditional political architecture of the kingdom. Unlike other countries in Europe, Portugal did not have a tradition of intermediary political bodies. Municipalities had always interacted directly with the crown official. During the Old Regime there was virtually nothing between the central administration, its institutions, and the municipalities. There was no provincial or regional mediation. This probably conferred significant levels of autonomy on local authorities and local/municipal elites during the Old Regime. However, this also meant that there were no reference points of the influential political bodies at the provincial level that could be relied upon once people had the opportunity to vent their grievances under the new liberal regime. If there had been, then such political bodies might have played that coordinating role on a broader scale in the 1820s. We need to move forward to 1855 to find the first collective petition of truly national proportions, which was a campaign against a new tax policy organised by several groups among the political opposition. The petition collected approximately 35,000 signatures and emerged in a political environment that was marked by the divisive debates on the lawfulness of public meetings that were taking place in parallel.40 Large gatherings of

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people could be, and often were, construed as a form of intimidation and of unacceptable public pressure. Unsurprisingly, the authorities in mid-nineteenth-century Portugal preferred to see discontent channelled through other devices like petitions, even mass petitions. Yet there are undeniable novelties in the petitionary wave of the 1820s. The degree to which people mobilised and responded to the new political environment, even if for diverse reasons, was definitely unprecedented. We should not downplay the intensity of participation which saw several hundred collective petitions submitted in such a short period of time. Although people had different aims and were pulling in multiple directions, there is a sense of common urgency of which everybody seems to have been aware, and this points to the formation of a general, even if disjointed, consciousness. Sweeping new measures were decreed by the Cortes that generated broad outcries that went far beyond regional boundaries. For example, when the Intendência Geral da Polícia (the police department created during absolutism) arrested several men for selling forbidden products, the response did not relate only to this incident. The petitioners knew that others in the country were suffering from the same problem, and so they spoke for everyone, using the new language of rights. Even if they were led by different individuals and groups, some issues became the centre of political actions with a broader territorial scope. People in a certain region were aware that they were dealing with the small-scale consequences of a broader national issue that involved the same factions in other parts of the country. And, due in large part to the open nature of the new regime, they could follow their adversaries’ activities. The liberals also reinforced the awareness of the general population when they ordered economic surveys to be realised throughout the country, thus bringing hidden conflicts to the forefront of national politics and making everything more public.

Adopting the New Language of Rights The petitionary movement of the 1820s had another novel aspect: the widespread adoption of a shared language of rights, which can be traced back to earlier revolutionary insurrections in France and Spain. This feature might not make the petitionary movement of the 1820s a fullblown mass movement, at least according to Charles Tilly’s definition, but it certainly marked a profound contrast with previous practices. There was a clear change in the repertoires of protest.

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As observed above, the petitions of the 1820s shared some features with the rural petitions of 1780, starting with their principally local scope; as far as we know, they also replicated some of the same issues. However, unlike their 1780s counterparts, the petitions of the 1820s employed a rather different language, denouncing what would have been unthinkable for the previous generation. Even if some Portuguese liberals decried the French Revolution as an extreme and riotous event, they adopted the burgeoning idea of civil equality, or equality before the law, that emerged from France. They were also well inclined towards the 1812 Spanish constitution, which locked in some of the revolutionary ideas of 1789 and provided a political framework for the Portuguese Cortes. The petitions of the 1820s show that the embracing of civil equality and a rhetoric of civil liberty was widespread, and it certainly was not confined to the deputies in the Cortes, and to journalists or polemicists. We do not know for how long this new world view had been burgeoning among the population at large, although it is clear that the defence against the second Napoleonic invasion in 1809 was marked by radical upheavals that scared the Portuguese Regency. Yet even if the spread of a more radical world view among the population was a very recent development, and even if some manifestations of such views were helped or dictated by politicised procuradores (legal agents), the petitioners showed remarkable decisiveness when faced with the opportunity to use those challenging ideas. The petitioners were also outspoken. For the most part, petitioners did not even attempt to camouflage their words. There were, for example, forthright attacks on feudalism, and not only with regard to specific aspects of it, but to the whole system, as was the case with the citizens of Vila Alva, a small village in the Alentejo province, who requested the protection of the “Legislative Assembly”. All eleven of the illiterate petitioners—they all signed with a cross—decried their condition and “claim[ed] their rights based on slavery as children of the feudal system”.41 Sometimes, the contemporary language is conveyed in a particularly poignant fashion, which reveals the involvement of trained procuradores who helped the petitioners to put their message onto paper. The peddlers, whose conflicts with the retailers are described above, are a particularly interesting group in this respect. Their petitions are full of forceful expressions that leave no doubt about the spread of new revolutionary ideas. One petition from a group in Lisbon that was aggrieved by the fact that

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all their merchandise had been seized, stated that “we, as citizens, want what is given to us by our Constitution, which is that the law be equal for everyone”.42 In another petition, the women who peddled goods in the streets of Lisbon went even further. They claimed that “the same law and the same judicial system must be the same for all, without exception”, adding that “the Law is the same for all, in that there are no distinctions and that the present epoch put an end to that illusion, that deceit”. Further on, they implicitly reminded the representatives of their own obligations, writing: “distinguished and illustrious gentlemen, Equality is the beacon by which all must be regulated, for this Sovereign and Illustrated Congress will never allow the opposite because it is governed by its merciful intentions”.43 Sometimes, new language and new concepts were used to defend entrenched professional classes and to uphold their interests or even their traditional rights, sometimes paradoxically. This was certainly the case for some traditional guilds, which tried to couple the new language of legal equality with the legitimacy of the old corporative structure.44 Sometimes, though, the petitioners took a stance that went beyond their local problem, and used this new language to make broader demands for equality, as was the case with of the stallholders of fairs and town markets. They spoke for each and every one of their profession: The Sovereign National Congress is addressed by a number of very aggrieved stallholders who sold goods, both national and foreign, in the markets of this Kingdom. They complain of the attack that is being perpetrated directly, not only on their Freedom as Citizens, but also on the Basis of our Constitution, which provides for so much Equality, rights of the population, and in being so solemnly declared, every Citizen enjoys the same prerogatives.45

Occasionally, petitions would also approach more complex notions of freedom, connecting the general concept with the idea of economic liberty. One petition from a group of peddlers who also seemed to be speaking in the name of a broader community stated that: “The Portuguese are a free people, but what does this freedom consist of if they are prohibited from the means of earning a living”.46 These are just a few examples of the thousands of petitions that have gone largely unexplored, and which dealt with a variety of issues, such as the development of the Portuguese national consciousness that was

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rooted initially in anti-British and anti-Brazilian sentiments, or the role, place, and rights of military officers in the new liberal society. Such specific features would become critical in the next few years, following the independence of Brazil and with endless political coups led by the army.

Final Remarks The foregoing discussion is a preliminary and largely exploratory attempt to deal with the Portuguese petitionary wave of the 1820s in its broadest scope. Previous studies, although they are irreproachable, have very different ambitions. Some deal with specific issues and conflicts that were emerging in Portuguese society in the early nineteenth century and that were reflected in the petitionary movement. Others explore the evolution of political representation in nineteenth-century Portugal. In this study, we have sought to place the petitionary wave of the 1820s in a broader scholarly perspective, taking advantage of more recent theoretical developments. The central aim was to situate this wave in the broader history of petitionary practices. We wanted to find some sort of an answer—even if only provisional—for the underlying question that has not been addressed until now: was this petitionary movement mostly associated with traditional forms of addressing authorities, or can we classify it within modern-day forms of protest? Can we, at least, discern signs of the new repertoires of protest that would become commonplace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? There is substantial information still to review and numerous sources yet to uncover, but we can argue that the petitionary wave of the 1820s represents a new phase in Portuguese national politics and in Portuguese petitionary practices. Even if we cannot detect mass movements or canvassing of truly national scope, we can definitely identify collective petitions that went beyond the local scope, that claimed to represent the broader population, and that attempted to mirror the interests of the broader “imagined community”, to borrow the term from Benedict Anderson. Petitioners certainly engaged with the hot topics of the day, explicitly incorporating the ongoing debates in their messages. This broader awareness is palpable, and, in this regard, the petitions of the 1820s reveal a departure from previous petitionary practices. We can also detect a sudden but effectively temporary parliamentarisation of popular politics. This kind of parliamentarisation, fostered by the 1820

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Revolution and its petitionary drive, would not be repeated. The legislative branch would never again have its activity so heavily dictated by incoming petitions. It is possible to argue that the 1821–1823 Parliament itself was simply an institutionalisation of the petitionary process, as has been speculated in other scholarly forums in relation to the United States Congress.47 We also observed that things might have gone in a different direction had the representatives selected a less interactive mode of dealing with the population. The representatives could have simply redirected all petitions to the traditional bodies, which continued to function. The adoption of a shared language of rights was widespread, as was previously noted. We should, however, look closely at the outspokenness of the people involved. Often, there was no attempt to mince words or to moderate criticisms. In fact, petitions mirrored the style of the polemicists in the press. In a sense, we may even argue that the petitionary wave lent an additional layer of radicalism to the Revolution, which would later be weaponised against the 1820s liberals.

Notes 1. Maurício José de Castelo Branco Manuel. Session of 17 July 1821. Arquivo Histórico Parlamentar (hereafter AHP), Câmara dos deputados; Diversos (expediente da secretaria); sections I and II, Box 123, packet 84, n. 333. 2. José Subtil, “A comissão de justiça criminal e as cortes constituintes e ordinárias (1821–1823)”, Anais, Série história, 1 (1994), p. 171. 3. Albert Silbert, Le problème agraire portugais: au temps des premières cortès libérales, 1821–1823 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). 4. Miriam Halpern Pereira, Negociantes, Fabricantes e Artesãos, Entre Velhas e Novas Instituições – A Crise do Antigo Regime e as Cortes Constituintes de 1821–1822 (Lisbon: Edições João Sá da Costa, 1992); Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, “Lavradores, frades e forais. Revolução liberal e regime senhorial na comarca de Alcobaça (1820–1824)”, Ler História, 4 (1985), pp. 31–87; and José Subtil, “A comissão de justiça criminal e as cortes constituintes e ordinárias (1821–1823)”, pp. 169–249. 5. Charles Tilly, “Parliamentarization of Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834”, Theory and Society, 27, no. 2/3 (1997), pp. 245–273. 6. Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7. Andreas Wurgler, “Voices from Among the ‘Silent Masses’: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe”, in Lex

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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Heerma van Voss (ed.), Petitions in Social History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 11. Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98, no. 3 (2018), pp. 377–406. Martin Almbjar, “The Problem with Early Modern Petitions: Safety Valve or Powder Keg?”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 26, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1013–1039. Diego Palacios Cerezales, “Re-imagining Petitioning in Spain (1808– 1823)”, Social Science History, 43, no. 3: the transformation of petitioning (2019), pp. 487–508, 505. Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 3. Peter Jupp, The Governing of Britain, 1688–1848: The Executive, Parliament, and the People (London: Routledge, 2006). David Zaret, “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution”, American Journal of Sociology, 101, no. 6 (1996), p. 1521. Maggie Blackhawk, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State”, The Yale Law Journal, 127, no. 6 (2018), p. 1558. Pedro Cardim (forthcoming), “As Cortes e a representação política no Antigo Regime”, in Pedro Tavares de Almeida. António Manuel Hespanha, História das Instituições – Época Medieval e Moderna (Coimbra: Almedina, 1982), p. 205. Isabel Nobre Vargues, A Aprendizagem da Cidadania em Portugal (1820– 1823) (Coimbra: Minerva, 1997), p. 222. Vargues, A aprendizagem da Cidadania em Portugal, p. 222. Miriam Halpern Pereira, “Introdução Geral”, in Benedicta Duque Vieira (ed.), O Problema Político Português no Tempo das Primeiras Cortes – A Crise do Antigo Regime e as Cortes Constituintes de 1821–1822 (Lisbon: Edições João Sá da Costa, 1992), p. 5. Joaquim José da Costa Macedo, Projeto de Regimento das Cortes (Lisbon: Officina Rodrigues Galhardo, 1820). Joaquim José da Costa Macedo, Projeto de Regimento das Cortes (Lisbon: Officina Rodrigues Galhardo, 1820), pp. 62–63. Almbjar, “The Problem with Early Modern Petitions”. Projecto de regimento para o governo interior das Côrtes Geraes e Extraordinarias Constituintes, 2nd edition (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1821), Titulo III, §5, p. 13. Maria Alexandre Lousada, Fátima Sá e Melo Ferreira, D. Miguel (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 2006), pp. 110–115.

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25. Diego Palacios, “Embodying Public Opinion: From Petitions to Mass Meetings in Nineteenth-Century Portugal”, e-JPH , 9, no. 1 (2011). 26. Joana Estorninho de Almeida, A Cultura burocrática ministerial: repartições, empregados e quotidiano das secretarias de estado na primeira metade do século XIX , PhD dissertation (Lisboa: ICS, 2008), p. 74. 27. Diário da Câmara dos Deputados, session of 10 February 1987, articles 131–133 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1857), p. 115. 28. Ana Cristina Araújo, A Cultura das Luzes em Portugal (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2003), pp. 92–103 and Maria Alexandre Lousada, “Vida privada, sociabilidades culturais e emergência do espaço público”, in Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro (coord.), História da Vida Privada em Portugal. A Idade Moderna (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores/Temas e Debates, 2011), pp. 424–456. 29. Criticism of the treaty started well before the 1820 Revolution, in the press published by political exiles in England. Papers such as O Investigador Português constantly decried the arrangement. See, for example, Valentim Alexandre, Os Sentidos do Império. Questão Nacional e Questão Colonial na Crise do Antigo Regime Português (Oporto: Edições Afrontamento, 1992), pp. 261–269. 30. Petition from the Guimarães body of commerce. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 8). 31. DCGENP, no. 64, 26 April 1821, p. 689. 32. Miguel Dantas da Cruz, “Soterrados em petições: os liberais e a regulamentação do comércio itinerante em Portugal, 1820–1823”, Ler História, 73 (2018), pp. 159–160. 33. For example, Petitions from the Beja body of commerce. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 4). 34. Petition from the peddlers of Lisbon. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 21). 35. Memoir written by Captain Joaquim Luís de Fraga, 1 June 1822. AHP, Comissão especial dos negócios políticos do Brasil, sections I and II, box 120, packet 82 (doc. 9). 36. Palacios, “Embodying Public Opinion”, p. 7. 37. José Tengarrinha, “Movimentos camponeses em Portugal na transição do Antigo Regime para a sociedade liberal”, in Miriam Halpern Pereira, Maria de Fátima Sá e Melo Ferreira, and João Serra (eds.), Liberalismo na Península Ibérica na Primeira Metade do Século XIX , vol. II (Lisbon: Sá da Costa Editora, 1982), p. 156. 38. Petition from 22 April 1822. AHP, Comissão de Agricultura, sections I and II, box 65, packet 38 (doc. 46b). 39. Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, Elites e Poder, entre o Antigo Regime e o Liberalismo (Lisbon: ICS, 2003), p. 265. 40. Palacios, “Embodying Public Opinion”, pp. 9–10.

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41. Petition from the citizens of Vila Alva, from 13 November 1821. In Albert Silbert, Le problème agraire portugais au temps des premières cortès libérales, 1821–1823 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p. 43. 42. Petition undated, registered in the Cortes in 6 June 1821. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 21), number 11. 43. Petition from the female peddlers of Lisbon, 24 March 1821. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 23). 44. Miriam Halpern Pereira, “Artesãos, operários e o liberalismo. Dos privilégios corporativos para o direito ao trabalho (1820–1840)”, Ler História, 14 (1988), pp. 41–86. 45. Petitions from traders of the fairs. Undated, registered in the Cortes in 22 May 1821. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 7). 46. Petition from several peddlers. Undated, registered in the Cortes in 2 June 1821. AHP, Comissão de comércio, sections I and II, packet 92 (doc. 21), number 6. 47. See Maggie Blackhawk’s overview of this proposal in “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State”, p. 1558.

Index

A Abogados , 90 Absolutist/absolutism, 13, 26, 66, 222, 230, 231, 248–250, 255 Academia de Ciências de Lisboa, 248 Act against tumultuous petitioning (1661), 5 Age of Democratic Revolutions, 3 Agravos , 68–70 Alabama, 139 Alcobaça, 254 Alderman, 93 Alentejo, 256 Algeria, 159, 166 American Confederation, 180, 188 Ammunition, 142, 146, 147 Amparo, 71, 72, 75 Amsterdam, 50, 52 Anáhuac, 107, 108 Ancient constitutions, 29 Anti-Brazilian, 253, 258 Anti-British, 119, 258 Apalache (Language of), 140, 143, 144, 146–148

Apalachicolos, 143 Apess, William, 118 Appeal courts, 4, 8, 67, 69, 70, 73, 85 Aragonese, 117 Arbitrary Power, 27 Arkansas, 106 Atlantic history, 1, 2 Atlantic World, 2, 5, 12, 14, 47, 158, 161, 166, 167, 192, 221 Attorney, 90, 93 Audiencia, 8, 70, 72, 85–87, 93, 94, 96, 97, 109, 116 B Bahia, 69, 70 Bail bonds, 73 Barcelona Conscription Riots (1773), 225 Basques, 117 Beaumetz, Bon-Albert de, 210 Bentham, Benjamin, 248 Biauzat, Jean-François Gaultier de, 209

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. D. da Cruz (ed.), Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9

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INDEX

Bill of Rights (1688), 3, 8 Bogotá, 85, 98, 101, 129, 134, 236 Borderlands, 114, 115, 120, 137 Borges Carneiro, Manuel, 242 Boston, 181, 183–185 Bouche, Charles-François, 208 Brazilian Empire, 66 British forces (in Boston), 183, 184 Bueno, José António Pimenta, 65, 66, 71, 78 Buffalo hide (Petition in), 144

C Caciques , 110, 117, 140–144, 146, 147 Cádiz Constitution (1812), 120 Cahier de Doléances , 162 Cahokia, 138, 145 Caixa de Petições , 251 Câmara dos Deputados , 251 Caminha, Gregorio Martins, 73 Canada, 7, 183 Canvassers/canvassing, 13, 49, 50, 59, 235, 254, 258 Carolina, 107, 110, 111, 114, 143, 145, 147, 148 Cartagena, 143 Cartas de seguro, 73–75 Casa da Suplicação, 69, 78 Castilians, 117 Castro y Pardo, Damián De Vega, 142 Catawbas, 144, 145 Chacatos, 143, 144, 147 Chancelleries, 70 Chapelier, Isaac René Guy Le, 206, 207, 209 Charles II of England, 111 Charles II of Spain, 24, 26, 222 Charles III of Spain, 224 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 9, 109

Chasset, Charles Antoine, 204, 207 Cherokee, 119, 146 Chichimecos, 145 Chiefdoms, 137 Children, 24, 76, 145, 148, 209 Citizenship (claim of), 227 Citizenship (consciousness of), 247 City council/municipality, 85–87, 93 Civil Code (France), 164, 165 Civil Constitutions, 25 Civil equality, 256 Civil service, 228 Clergy, 117, 201, 228, 246 Client communities, 138, 147 Collective petition, 5, 13, 158, 220, 245, 250, 254, 255, 258 Colombia independence, 12 Colonial assemblies, 7 Colonial authorities, 7, 10, 110 Colonial compact, 140, 142 Colonial encounters, 6 Colonial regulations, 49 Colonial settlements, 163 Colonial subjects, 7, 8, 159 Colonization, 25, 26, 36, 38 Columbus, Christopher, 109 Comanches, 138 Comité des petitions (France), 210 Common law, 36, 71, 75 Communal land, 227 Companhia Geral da Agricultura das vinhas do Alto Douro, 254 Compromise of the nobles (1566), 52 Comuneros revolt, 222 Congressional law-making process, 11 Congress of Philadelphia, 189, 191 Conquest, 26, 105, 120, 139, 140, 166 Conquistadores, 139 Conspiracy (pro-French), 86 Constitutional reform, 49, 191 Constitution (France, 1791), 209

INDEX

Constitution-making, 192 Continental Army, 184, 188 Corn, 146 Corporations, 50, 53, 224 Corregidores , 109 Cortés, Hernan, 109 Cortes of 1810 (Spain), 228 Corunna, 230 Cosimo I of Tuscany, 5 Cosmopolitan elites, 192 Council of the Indies, 90, 92, 94, 109, 115 Counties, 30, 183, 184 Cree, 115 Creoles, 48, 94 Crimes against property or people, 252 Criminal code (France, 1830), 66

D d’André, Antoine Joachim, 211 d’Angely, Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean, 208 Dakota Sioux, 138 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 66, 87 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 199, 208 Deerskins (Petition in), 144 Delacroix, Jean-François, 211 de la Vega, Garcilaso, 108, 118 Democracy, 192 Democratisation, 12 Dene, 115 Desembargo do Paço, 69, 78, 246, 250 Despotism, 23, 66, 207, 230 Díaz Calderón, Gabriel Vara, 143 Distributive justice, 88 D. Miguel I of Portugal, 250 Dubois-Crancé, Edmond-Louis-Alexis, 209

265

E Early-modern Cortes, 246, 247 Economic rights, 10, 162 Edward I, 30 Elected deputies, 162, 204 Elections, 201 Emancipation, 73, 76, 109, 167 English Civil War, 34 Enlightenment, 73 Entails, 89 e-petitioning, 3 Esquilache Riots (1766), 230 Estado Novo dictatorship (Portugal), 243 Estates-General (France), 202, 203 Estates general (Netherlands), 56 European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights, 3 Exchange Bank, 50 Extrajudicial petitions, 68 Ezpeleta, José, 86

F Factions (Political factions), 255 Farmers, 253 Felipe II of Spain, 139 Ferdinand VII of Spain, 231, 232 Filmer, Sir Robert, 25 Firearms, 142, 145, 226 Florida, 114, 137–140, 142, 143, 145–149 Food provisions, 145 Forceful petitioning, 232, 234, 235 Fort/fortification, 148, 149, 159, 160, 185, 188 Franchise rights, 31 Franciscan(s), 140, 143, 145, 147, 148 Frederick the Great of Prussia, 220, 236 Free press, 232, 247

266

INDEX

Free trade, 52, 161, 162 French law, 10, 164–166 French Martial law (1789), 228 French Revolution, 158, 203, 256 Fréteau, Emmanuel Marie Michel, 208 Friesland, 47 G Galand, Alexis-François Pison du, 205 Garrison, 142, 224, 229 Gathering of signatures, 221, 235 General Will, 200, 210, 214 Georgia, 139, 140, 148 Go-betweens, 115 Godoy, Manuel de, 97, 219, 220, 226 Gordon riots (1780), 220 Gospel, 139, 143, 149 Grace/Royal Grace, 30 Grain, 223, 226 Greco-Roman heritage, 3 Gregoire, Abbé Henri-Baptiste, 207 Groningen, 47 Groundnuts, 160 Guale (language), 140, 142, 143, 146, 147 Guarantees, 71, 111 Guatemala, 117 Guild(s), 6, 50, 219, 221, 224, 226, 228, 246, 253, 257 Guimarães, 252, 261 Guinea, 50 Gum, 159, 160, 162 H Habsburgs, 6 Haecxs, Hendrick, 55, 58 The Hague, 46, 50, 55, 56 Haiti, 159, 169 Harrington, James, 25 Harvesting, 147

Herculano, Alexandre, 248 Hidalgos , 140 High Council of Recife (Dutch Brazil), 54 High court, 30, 109, 118 High government of Brazil (Dutch Brazil), 46 Hirschman, Albert O., 22, 23, 40 Hita y Salazar, Pablo, 143 Hobbes, Thomas, 25 Holten, Samuel, 189, 197 Hooker, Richard, 25 House of Commons, 31 Hunting, 138, 141, 147 Hybrid Ordinances, 116 I Iberian Union, 70 Imagined community, 258 Inca, 108, 118–120 Independence of Brazil, 242, 258 Indian conquistadors, 117 Indian nation, 117 Indigenous justice-seekers, 115, 116, 118 Indigenous municipal councils (attributes), 110 Indigenous resistance, 36 Indio legal category, 117 Indirect rule, 37, 38 Indoctrination, 140, 141 Intellectuals, 118, 248 Intendência Geral da Polícia, 255 Interest group, 8, 12, 39, 46, 48, 50 Investors, 52 Iroquois, 10, 138 Island of Gorée, 159, 164 Itamaracá, 50 J Jamaica (England invasion of), 142

INDEX

Jefferson, Thomas, 119 Jews, 48, 58 Jororos, 143 Juntas , 221, 228–233, 235 Jurisdictional culture, 2 Justice-seekers, 10, 115, 118

K Kingship, 88

L Labour reforms, 119 Lakota, 115 Land disputes, 109, 111, 119 Language of rights, 255, 259 Law of Nations (ius gentium), 138 Law of Towns, 138–141, 143, 144 Lawsuits, 73–75, 107, 109, 226 Legal equality, 208, 257 León, Juan Ponce de, 108, 138 Letter of Credence, 52 Liberal triennium, 231 Lima, 119 Limitations on the right to petition, 5 Lisbon, 57, 69, 253, 256, 257 Literacy, 52, 182, 200, 214 Litigation, 8, 66, 72, 78, 79, 87, 89, 90, 108, 115, 118 Litigious indios , 115 Lobbying/lobby, 24, 46, 47, 57 Local government, 79, 224 Locke, John, 25 London, 12, 25, 29, 46, 47, 114, 115, 220 Louisiana, 146, 168 Louis XIV of France, 26 Lovell, James, 189, 197 Lower courts, 66

267

M Macedo, Joaquim José da Costa, 248, 249 Madison, James, 189, 191 Madrid, 6, 9, 10, 86, 87, 90–95, 97, 98, 115, 222–224, 233 Maine, 183, 184, 186–188 Manhattan, 52 Manuel, Maurício José Castello Branco, 242 Mapuche, 106, 120 Marghareta of Parma, 49 Maria II of Portugal, 234 Márquez Cabrera, Juan, 143 Marriage practices, 167 Martineau, Louis-Simon, 208 Marxist analysis, 4 Massachusetts, 114, 119, 179–183, 186–192 Massachusetts Charter (1691), 194 Massachusetts General Court, 195 Mass petitioning, 13, 158, 221, 235 Mayacas, 143 Memoriales , 88, 221 Memórias , 247 Menéndez de Avilés, Pedro, 139 Merchants, 31, 47–50, 52, 57, 107, 117, 160, 165, 252 Mestizos, 116, 117 Mexica, 107, 117 Mexico City, 133, 135, 140 Military and naval assistance, 7, 39 Military mobilization, 181, 191 Military service, 167 Minas Gerais, 69, 75, 77 Mirabeau, Honoré de, 205–207, 228 Missionaries, 139, 142, 143 Mixed-race, 10, 157, 159 Mobile (Alabama), 148 Mohawks, 115 Mohegan, 111, 113, 117, 118 Mohicans, 115

268

INDEX

Monasteries, 30 Monopolies, 158, 162, 243 Montiano, Manuel de, 149, 155 Municipality/municipal government, 204, 205, 207 Musgrove, Mary, 118 Muslim, 158, 164–167 Muslim law, 164, 166 Muslim traditions, 10

N Nahua, 109 Napoleonic Wars, 160, 244 Nariño, Antonio, 87, 94, 98 Narragansett, 114, 117 Nation/nationhood, 10, 138 National Assembly (France), 163, 201, 202, 204–206, 213, 233, 248 National Constituent Assembly (France), 199 National Guard (Portugal), 234 Nationalist sentiments, 253 Nationalization of church lands, 212 National politics, 255, 258 Native appeals to the Crown, 111 Natural rights, 221 New England, 6, 110, 111, 138 Newfoundland, 138 New Granada, 85–87, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 110, 222 New Ireland, 187 New Netherlands, 52, 56, 58, 138 New Spain, 138, 140 New York, 57, 119, 183 Nobility, 47, 49, 89, 117, 119, 201, 224, 228, 246 North Sea, 47 Notaries, 90, 118, 212 Nova Scotia, 183

O Oaxaca, 110 Occom, Samuel, 118 Odawa, 115 Odds of allegiance, 180 Ojibwe, 115 Ordinary trial, 74, 76, 77 Orphans, 70, 109, 117 Otis, Samuel, 189 Ouvidores , 67, 74, 75

P Pacification (discourse of), 139 Paraíba, 50 Pardons, 4, 31 Paris, 12, 157, 163, 166, 206–208, 210 Parliament (British), 244 Parliamentarisation, 12, 243, 245, 247, 250, 258 Parliamentary petition, 33 Parties (political parties), 12 Pasquine, 86, 91, 93, 95–98 Paternal authority, 227 Peddlers, 252, 253, 256, 257 Pensacola, 148 Pernambuco, 46, 50 Peru, 109, 110, 115, 117–120 Petition-and-response model, 15 Philadelphia, 189, 191, 192 Pirate attack, 147 Pizarro, Francisco, 109 Plaintiffs, 68 Plantations, 47, 54, 160, 161 Pleas for protection, 179 Plebiscite, 232 Plymouth, 110, 186 Political borders, 1 Political clubs, 207–209, 213 Political community, 33, 180, 182, 186, 188, 190–192, 207

INDEX

Political movements, 245 Polycentric Monarchy, 89 Poor relief, 4, 13 Popular legitimacy, 13 Portuguese Constitution (1822), 11 Potiguar, 56, 57 Pre-Columbian, 6 Pre-conquest identities, 10 Primogeniture, 89 Principales , 141, 144 Prison/jail, 75–77, 94, 96 Privy Council, 111, 113 Projeto de regimento das Cortes , 248, 260 Projecto de regimento para o governo interior das Côrtes Geraes , 250 Proletarianisation, 12 Pronunciamiento, 221, 229–233, 235 Property rights, 33, 178 Protector de indios , 141, 146 Public opinion, 34, 38, 40, 57, 230, 245, 247, 249 Public pressure, 6, 255 Public sphere, 12, 34, 228, 235, 244, 245, 251

Q Querelas , 74, 75

R Race, 9, 146, 158, 161, 163, 164, 167, 244 Reactionary ideas, 13 Reales cédulas , 87, 116 Rebellion, 24, 57, 79, 93, 96, 142, 146, 229, 230, 232 Recife (Pernambuco), 46 Refugees/migrants, 144–148 Religious dissent, 24 Repertoires of contention, 12

269

Representative government, 40, 49, 200, 203–205, 207, 213, 214, 220, 232 Revolutionary legislatures, 119 Revolutionary Wars, 119, 159, 178 Rhine, 47 Rhode Island, 183, 185 Rickahockans, 145 Riego’s Pronunciamiento (1820), 229 Right to assemble, 205 Right to petition, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 38, 207–211, 221, 227, 228, 231–234, 249 Right to vote, 11, 200 Rio de Janeiro, 69, 73, 77 Riot act (Naples, 1848), 234 Riot/rioting, 24, 220–225, 227–229, 231–233, 235 Ritualised procedures, 5, 9 Robespierre, Maximilien, 207 Royalist, 211, 231, 232 Royal justice, 30, 34 Royal official, 7, 33, 39, 91, 140 Royal treasury, 92, 140 S Saint-Louis (Senegal), 159, 160, 162, 164–167 São Vicente, Marquis of, 66, 79 Saragossa, 230 Saratoga, 183 Savannahs, 145, 148, 149 Sedition, 6 Seminoles, 148, 155 Seneca, 115 Senegal River, 159, 160 Sesmarias , 73, 75 Settlers, 6–9, 36 Seven Years War, 7 Signatures, 13, 46, 49, 50, 52–54, 58, 165, 229, 232, 233, 244, 249, 250, 254

270

INDEX

Situado, 140 Slave raiding, 145 Slaves, 10, 27, 66, 76, 77, 115, 117, 148, 149, 159–161, 164, 253 Slave trade, 35 Social contract, 25 Social movements, 220, 235 Soldiers, 50, 56, 111, 139, 142, 230, 252 Soto, Hernando de, 106, 127 State building, 36, 67 State formation, 22, 24, 37 St. Augustine, 139–143, 146–149 St. Eustatius, 48, 60 Stuyvesant, Petrus, 56 Subjecthood, 6, 111, 117 Sugar, 54

T Taxes/taxation, 94, 181, 186, 189, 190, 206, 254 Temple, Sir William, 22, 24–29, 32, 33, 40, 41 Tenochtitlán, 107 Tetzcoca, 107 Third Republic (France), 159 Tihuantinsuyo, 108 Timucua (language of), 140, 142 Tlaxcala, 117 Tobacco, 48 Tocobagas, 144 Torre do Tombo, 248 Towasas, 144 Translators, 118 Treaty of middle plantation (1677), 111 Tribunal da Relação, 68, 70, 73, 74, 76–78 Tumult, 6, 232 Tupac Amaru II, 136

U Ultra-royalist manifesto (Spain, 1825), 232 United States Constitution, 178, 180, 191, 192 University of Coimbra, 75 Urgel (Spain), 231 V Valencia Conscription Riots (1801), 225, 226 Vassal, 89, 91, 109, 117, 119, 222, 225, 228 Vassalage, 72 Vergniaud, Pierre, 211 Versailles, 201, 202 Vía reservada, 92 Viceroy, 70, 91, 93, 108–110, 116 Villeneuve, Jérôme Pétion de, 207, 209, 210 Virginia, 36, 48, 110, 111, 119, 138, 145 Visitador, 147 Voting rights, 167 W Wappinger, 119 Warfare, 145 War of Independence (United States), 178, 180 War of Spanish Succession, 147 Washington, George, 119, 188 West Indies, 168 Westminster, 8 Westos, 145 Widows, 70, 109, 208 Women, 24, 50, 51, 78, 109, 115, 116, 118, 140, 145, 147, 158–160, 182, 208, 209, 213, 252, 257 Wompas, John, 114

INDEX

Working hours, 225 Writs, 68–71, 73–79

Yucatán, 151 Yuchis, 149

Y Yamasees, 114, 143–146 Ybarra, Pedro, 140, 151

Z Zeeland, 47, 50, 52, 53

271