Likewise, an elderly John Adams wrote to James Lloyd in 1815:
The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom. . . . No Catholics on earth were so abjectly devoted to their priests, as blindly superstitious as themselves, and these priests had the powers and apparatus of the Inquisition to seize every suspected person and suppress every rising motion. Was it probable, was it possible, that such a plan as [Francisco] Miranda’s, of a free government, and a confederation of free governments, should be introduced and established among such a people, over that vast continent, or any part of it? It appeared to me more extravagant than the schemes of Condorcet and Brissot to establish a democracy in France, schemes which had always appeared to me as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes.5
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The independence of Spanish America did not make Jefferson more optimistic regarding the future of those nations. On May 14, 1817, he wrote to the marquis de Lafayette:
I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. The achievement of their independence of Spain is no longer a question. But it is a very serious one, what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism, and become the murderous tools of the ambition of their respective Bonapartes; and whether this will be for their greater happiness, the rule of one only has taught you to judge. No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable? As their sincere friend and brother then, I do believe the best thing for them, would be for themselves to come to an accord with Spain, under the guarantee of France, Russia, Holland, and the United States, allowing to Spain a nominal supremacy, with authority only to keep the peace among them, leaving them otherwise all the powers of self-government, until their experience in them, their emancipation from their priests, and advancement in information, shall prepare them for complete independence.6
SPANISH AMERICA AND THE LIBERAL TRADITION
The importation of liberal constitutionalism into Spanish America has been the object of much political and scholarly debate. Much of the discussion has focused on the performance of institutions. As Charles Hale asserts:
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Much of the skepticism about the liberal experience has focused on constitutionalism—the effort to guarantee individual liberty and limit central authority by the legal precepts of a written code. The strivings of liberal legislators to establish separation of powers, federalism, municipal autonomy, and even at times parliamentary supremacy or a plural executive typify the divergence between ideals and reality and between liberal institutional forms and political practice that is the hallmark of Latin American politics.7
As a result, Latin America was excluded from the liberal experience by many scholars. Liberalism, they contend, was only a disguise for traditional practices. One of the supporters of this view argues that “eighteenth-century political liberalism was almost uniformly and overwhelmingly rejected by Spanish America’s first statesmen.”8 These authors assert that liberalism was a political tradition alien to the Spanish American nations. The British scholar Cecil Jane identified several contradictions within Spanish culture. Spaniards were idealistic extremists who sought both order and individual liberty in such perfect forms that politics went from one extreme (despotism) to the other (anarchy) rather than “finding stability in constitutional compromise between the two contending principles.”9 Conservatives in power carried the “pursuit of order” to such an extreme as to provoke a violent reaction in behalf of liberty. Likewise, when liberals enacted “standard western liberal protections of the individual,” Spanish Americans did not use these liberties with the responsibility expected by the “Englishmen who had developed these liberties, but rather carried them to the extreme of anarchy.”10
Richard Morse finds the key to understanding Spanish America in
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the Spanish patrimonial state.11 The state was embodied in the patrimonial power of the king, who was the source of all patronage and the ultimate arbiter of all disputes. Without the presence of the king the system collapsed. According to Morse, Spanish American leaders in the nineteenth century were constantly trying to reconstruct the patrimonial authority of the Spanish crown. One factor obstructing the reconstruction of authority along traditional Spanish lines, Morse argues, was the meddling of Western constitutional ideas. Anglo-French liberal constitutionalism—with its emphasis on the rule of law, the separation of powers, constitutional checks on authority, and the efficacy of elections—stood as a contradiction to those traditional attitudes and modes of behavior that lived in the marrow of Spanish Americans. Because liberal constitutionalism was ill adapted to traditional Spanish American culture, “attempts to erect and maintain states according to liberal principles invariably failed.” The authority of imported liberal constitutional ideas, while insufficient to provide a viable alternative to the traditional political model, was often sufficient to undermine the legitimacy of governments operating according to the traditional model.
These interpretations are wanting in several respects. For one thing, they treat culture in an excessively static manner; and while it is true that liberal constitutional ideas in Spanish America failed to gain the hegemony that they enjoyed in other parts of the world, they did have a significant effect on modes of political thought and became at least partially incorporated into the political rules.12
Never before were liberal constitutional procedures applied in so many places at the same time as in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. To assume that this fact says nothing about liberal constitutionalism is myopic at best. Until very recently, scholars had refused to draw any lessons from the Latin American liberal experiment. While it is true that many liberal principles flew in the face of Spanish political
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traditions and the realities of Spanish America at the time, historians have not seized the opportunity to see Spanish America as the laboratory where liberal theories were put to the test. Until then, liberals had little empirical evidence to support their claims of universal applicability; the historical record was inconclusive at best.13 Why was the evidence from Spanish America disregarded by liberal pundits? Embedded in the central propositions of liberalism, Joyce Appleby contends, “was the story of its own triumph, but it was a peculiarly ahistorical one.”14 The idea of progress helps to explain why, in the eyes of past and present liberals, the failure of liberalism in Spanish America was dismissed so easily. “Shining through the darkness that was the past,” Appleby asserts, “were liberal triumphs to be recorded, examined, and celebrated. The rest of known history was useless to an enlightened present, its existence a reproach to the human spirit so long enshrouded in ignorance.”15 Since Latin America could not be celebrated as a liberal triumph it was repudiated from the liberal pantheon.
Yet, Spanish America constitutes the great postrevolutionary liberal constitutional experiment. After independence all of the revolutionary leaders moved quickly to write constitutions. As Frank Safford asserts, almost all of these constitutions “proclaimed the existence of inalienable natural rights (liberty, legal equality, security, property); many provided for freedom of the press and some attempted to establish jury trials. Almost all sought to protect these rights through the separation of powers and by making the executive branch relatively weaker than the