[Map: Distribution of Slaves 1820]
This bold attempt to prevent the spread of slavery provoked a brief but momentous debate. Clay left the Speaker"s chair to remonstrate, "in the name of humanity," against a policy which could result, he believed, only in the misery of the slaves of the South. The lot of the negro would be vastly improved if the unfortunate people were more widely dispersed. Taylor, of New York, called this a specious plea. "It is that humanity," said he, "which seeks to palliate disease by the application of nostrums, which scatter its seeds through the whole system." To open the West to slavery would be simply to create an additional demand for the importation of slaves. Of those Southern Representatives who took part in this debate, not a man posed as the defender of slavery in the abstract. Barbour, of Virginia, frankly admitted that slavery "like all other human things is mixed with good and evil--the latter, no doubt, preponderating." And Johnson, of Kentucky, maintained that though slavery might be a necessary evil, "not incompatible with true religion," even so "slavery must still be a bitter draught."
What rankled in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of all Southern men was the insinuation that their social system was founded on hypocrisy and tyranny. Tallmadge commented with biting sarcasm on the willingness of Southern gentlemen to contribute to missionary enterprises for the uplifting of the Hottentots and Hindus, and their determination to keep their African slaves in ignorance. And his colleague contrasted the plantations, overrun with weeds on one side of Mason and Dixon"s line, with the cultivated farms on the other: in Pennsylvania, he observed "a neat, blooming, animated, rosy-cheeked peasantry"; in Maryland, "a squalid, slow-motioned black population." These were barbed shafts which left sore wounds.
When the Union was formed, African negroes were held in servitude in all but two of the States. At the time of this debate, slavery had been abolished, or was on the way to ultimate extinction, in every State north of Maryland and Delaware. Climate rather than humanitarian considerations sealed the fate of slavery at the North; and climate, in the last a.n.a.lysis, fastened African slavery on the South. As the South became committed to the raising of a staple, and that staple cotton, the negro was regarded as an indispensable factor in plantation economy.
There were far-sighted individuals, it is true, who deprecated slavery on humanitarian grounds; but they were, for the most part, citizens of border States where the profitableness of negro labor was less apparent.
Even in these communities opposition to slavery was tempered by dread of what emanc.i.p.ation might bring in its train. The history of Santo Domingo revealed the hideous possibilities of a negro insurrection. No father of a family could contemplate with equanimity the proximity of a large body of free, semi-civilized blacks. For a time even prominent slaveholders favored the aims of the Colonization Society which proposed to deport emanc.i.p.ated blacks to the African coast. So late as 1820 the Governor of Virginia recommended an appropriation by the legislature for the emanc.i.p.ation and removal of the negroes.
Although slavery was a local inst.i.tution, and regulated by state law, its existence was recognized by the Federal Convention of 1787. The arrangement which obtained under the old Confederation, whereby five slaves were to count as three whites in apportioning representation and taxes, was continued; the mutual obligation of the States to return fugitives from justice and labor was distinctly stated in the Const.i.tution; and the slave trade was permitted to continue at least to the year 1808.
In 1793, Congress had met its const.i.tutional obligations by enacting a law for the return of fugitive slaves; and in 1794, Congress pa.s.sed an act--"the first national act against the slave trade"--which prohibited all trade in slaves from the United States to any foreign country. By the opening of the new century all the States had forbidden the importation of slaves from abroad. But in 1803, South Carolina again legalized the slave trade; and in 1805, Congress after a brief interdiction removed all restrictions upon the importation of slaves into the Louisiana Territory. The slave trade at once a.s.sumed alarming proportions. It was officially stated that between 1803 and 1807, 39,075 negroes were brought into the port of Charleston. Eighteen hundred of these unfortunate blacks were imported in American vessels. One half of the consignees of these slavers were Americans, of whom thirteen were natives of Charleston and eighty-eight of Rhode Island.
This traffic, coupled with the alarm caused by negro insurrections in the West Indies, prepared the public mind for positive action, as the year approached when Congress might const.i.tutionally prohibit the foreign slave trade. The Act of March 2, 1807, however, only partially met the expectations of the anti-slavery people. The African slave trade was forbidden, but negroes illegally imported were to be disposed of as the legislatures of the several States should determine. There was reason to fear that the Southern States would neglect to legislate on this important matter, and that the act would be indifferently enforced.
Moreover, the coastwise slave trade for purposes of sale was not interdicted, but forbidden only in vessels under forty tons burden.
That the Act of 1807 did not prevent the African slave trade was patent to every one who knew conditions in the Southern Seaboard States; but the extent of this traffic can only be surmised. During the debates on the Missouri Bill, Tallmadge stated that fourteen thousand negroes had been brought into the country within the last year, and the statement was not challenged.
When the Missouri controversy was renewed in the session of December, 1819, the number of free States equaled the number of slave States. The addition of a twenty-third State, then, would unsettle the equilibrium between the sections in the Senate. A growing antagonism based upon widely different economic and social organizations was coming to be felt--felt rather than clearly perceived and openly recognized. In the year 1800, the two sections had been nearly equal in population; in 1820, the North outnumbered the South by over half a million. This disparity in numbers had a direct political significance, for the national House of Representatives was beyond all question controlled by the delegations from the free States. No great prescience was needed to warn the South that in self-defense it must maintain the even balance of sections in the Senate. The contest for Missouri was therefore essentially "a struggle for sectional domination."
The Tallmadge amendment was pa.s.sed by the House, but rejected by the Senate, after a heated debate which convinced Southern statesmen that there was a distinct anti-slavery sentiment at the North. The adjournment of Congress threw the whole controversy into the crucible of public opinion. The latent hostility of men and women with humanitarian sympathies was at once raised to white heat. Ma.s.s meetings in city, town, and county pa.s.sed resolutions against the spread of slavery and the admission of more slave States. Yet it can hardly be said that the public conscience was deeply touched. The leaven of abolitionism had to work many years before it could produce results in politics.
The whole question a.s.sumed a new guise when Congress met in December, 1820. The people of Maine had held a convention and formed a const.i.tution, and were now applying for admission as a State. Here was a free State which would offset Missouri if it were admitted as a slave State. When the House pa.s.sed a bill to admit Maine, the Senate promptly attached to it, as a "rider," a bill for the admission of Missouri without any prohibition of slavery. It was to this bill that Senator Thomas, of Illinois, representing a const.i.tuency divided against itself on the subject of slavery, offered an amendment in the nature of a compromise. He would admit Missouri as a slave State, but prohibit slavery forever in the rest of the old Province of Louisiana north of 36 30". The Senate accepted this amendment and sent the bill to the House. Here the original Maine Bill was stripped of the rider and the Thomas amendment by large majorities. Shortly after this vigorous a.s.sertion of independence, the House pa.s.sed a bill for the admission of Missouri with the prohibition of slavery. The deadlock seemed complete.
The const.i.tutional aspects of the problem called forth some exceedingly able argumentation. Those who favored imposing a restriction upon Missouri argued, plausibly enough, that as Congress was given the power to admit new States, so it was fully warranted in exercising discretion and refusing to admit. Precedents existed for imposing restrictions.
Three States carved out of the Northwest Territory had been admitted on condition that their const.i.tutions should not be repugnant to the sixth article of the Ordinance of 1787. The State of Louisiana had been admitted under explicit conditions. It was fully competent for Congress, by virtue of its authority over Territories, to regulate all the stages in the process of framing a const.i.tution, and then to give or to withhold its approval.
The most brilliant argument on the other side was made by William Pinkney, of Maryland. Conceding that the power of Congress was discretionary, he insisted that Congress might not exact terms which would interfere with the results to be accomplished. "What, then," he asked, "is the professed result? To admit a State into this Union. What is that Union?... An equal Union between parties equally sovereign....
It is into that Union that a new State is to come. By acceding to it the new State is placed on the same footing with the original States....
If it comes in shorn of its beams--crippled and disparaged beyond the original States--it is not into the original Union that it comes.... The first was a Union _inter pares_; this is a Union between _disparates_, between giants and a dwarf, between power and feebleness, between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable image of power."
Yet there were Senators and Representatives from the North who would not be diverted from the discussion of the larger sectional and ethical issues involved in the extension of slavery. Chief among these was Rufus King, who then represented New York in the Senate. His cogent arguments made a profound impression. "The great slaveholders in the House," Adams wrote in his journal, "gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him."
[Map: House Vote on the Missouri Compromise March 2, 1820]
Meantime, a joint committee of conference was endeavoring to reconcile the differences between the House and the Senate. The House was put at a disadvantage by the approach of March 4--when the consent of Ma.s.sachusetts to the admission of Maine would expire. It was finally agreed that the Senate should pa.s.s the bill admitting Maine as a separate measure, while the House should accept the Missouri Bill with the Thomas amendment. Missouri, in short, was to come in as a slave State, but slavery was forever prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of her southern boundary. An a.n.a.lysis of the voting in the House of Representatives reveals no clear-cut sectional divisions, though it forecasts a time when slavery might split parties along sectional lines. In New England and the Middle States public opinion had not yet crystallized into inflexible opposition to the spread of slavery; but the Northwest was distinctly in favor of a restriction upon Missouri. The Southwest and the South were a unit in desiring the admission of Missouri as a slave State.
In the fall of 1820, the Missouri question in another form returned to vex Congress. When the const.i.tution of the State was presented to Congress, it was found to contain a clause which excluded free negroes.
Again the two houses locked horns. Pa.s.sions rose again. The work of the preceding session seemed about to be undone. But under the persuasive leadership of Henry Clay, a joint committee elaborated a resolution which was acceptable to both houses. Missouri was to be admitted on the express condition that the offending clause in her const.i.tution should never be construed so as to authorize the pa.s.sing of any law by which any citizen of any of the States of the Union should be deprived of his privileges and immunities under the Federal Const.i.tution. The legislature of Missouri was to give its solemn consent to this fundamental condition. Then, and not until then, the President was to declare Missouri a member of the Union. The State complied with the requirement, though in the same breath protesting that all this was an empty form, since Congress could not thus bind a State. On August 10, 1821, President Monroe declared Missouri a State of the Union.
In the midst of this exciting controversy, Monroe was reelected President. Nowhere but in Pennsylvania was there any serious opposition.
Old distinctions of party had so far disappeared that the venerable ex-President John Adams was chosen as a presidential elector in Ma.s.sachusetts, and voted with his fourteen colleagues--who were half Federalists and half Democrats--for James Monroe. In the electoral count Monroe lacked only a single vote of a unanimous election.
When the electoral vote was about to be counted, an embarra.s.sing question arose with regard to the vote of Missouri. As the State had not yet complied with the condition imposed by Congress, its right to vote was challenged. Again Clay appeared in his role of compromiser. The delicate question was adroitly avoided by having the President of the Senate announce the electoral vote with and without the votes of Missouri. At last the Missouri question was disposed of; but words had been uttered which could not be recalled; and wounds had been inflicted which left scars. The South could never quite forget that it had been charged with conniving at crime in maintaining slavery. "You have kindled a fire," said Cobb, of Georgia, to Tallmadge, "which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood only can extinguish."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
An account of the crisis of 1819 is contained in F. J. Turner"s _Rise of the New West_ (in _The American Nation_, vol. 14, 1906); a shorter and less satisfactory account in A. M. Simons"s _Social Forces in American History_ (1911). Much information may be gleaned from the pages of McMaster"s history. Detailed information must be sought in the special studies already cited, such as R. C.
H. Catterall, _The Second Bank of the United States_ (1903), and P. J. Treat, _The National Land System, 1785-1820_ (1910). From the vast literature dealing with slavery and the slavery controversy, the following t.i.tles may be selected as especially important: W. E. B. DuBois, _The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870_ (1896); W.
H. Collins, _The Domestic Slave-Trade_ (1904); A. B. Hart, _Slavery and Abolition_ (in _The American Nation_, vol. 16, 1906); N. D. Harris, _The History of Negro Servitude in Illinois_ (1904); E. R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_ (1911); and a number of monographs in the Johns Hopkins University _Studies_. All the larger histories discourse with great particularity upon the Missouri controversy. Contemporary views of the congressional struggle are presented in J. Q. Adams"s _Memoirs_, and in T. H.
Benton"s _Thirty Years" View; or, A History of the Working of American Government, 1820-1850_ (2 vols., 1854).
CHAPTER XVI
THE NATIONAL AWAKENING
There is a measure of truth in speaking of the War of 1812 as a second war of independence. In throwing off the shackles of British commercial ascendency, American society experienced much the same sense of elation and liberation as the peoples of Europe who contemporaneously rose in their might against Napoleon and a.s.serted their right to independent national existence. The war was followed in the United States by an expansion of the vital forces of the nation in all directions. The earliest manifestations of this new national consciousness, however, were characteristically boisterous. An English traveler, who visited the United States soon after the war, found every man, woman, and child talking about the Guerriere, the Java, the Macedonia, the Frolic, Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, and the "vast inferiority of British sailors and soldiers to the true-blooded Yankees." The events of the war were commemorated in songs which this Briton declared--and no doubt truthfully--to be "frothy, senseless bombast." But whatever limitations of culture were disclosed by this outburst of national conceit, no one could doubt for an instant that an exuberant vitality was coursing through the veins of the nation.
It was a fair question, however, whether this national feeling would find expression in any permanent literary form. A literature of its own America did not possess: every one with literary tastes was forced to this humiliating admission. Writing from Berlin in 1801, John Quincy Adams hailed the first number of Dennie"s _Port Folio_ with delight.
"The object," he declared, "is n.o.ble. It is to take off that foul stain of literary barbarism which has so long exposed our country to the reproach of strangers and to the derision of our enemies." But the periodical had a very limited circle of readers, and its literary merits were slight. The _Anthology and Boston Review_, founded in 1805, had a wider influence upon letters in America; but it is memorable chiefly as the forerunner of the _North American Review_, modeled upon the English quarterlies, which was first published by William Tudor, in the year 1815, at Boston.
The publication of American books at this time was a hazardous enterprise. "The successful booksellers of the country," wrote one who recalled his own experiences in the book trade, "were for the most part the mere reproducers and sellers of English books." Yet American publishers often showed commendable enterprise. In 1817, Byron"s _Manfred_ was received, printed, and published at Philadelphia in a single day. Walter Scott, Moore, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Porter, and Lord Byron were the favorite British novelists and poets whose writings were reprinted in America. Among the American publications advertised by booksellers, were sermons, geographies, and schoolbooks; but rarely any productions which belonged to the category termed by contemporaries _belles-lettres_.
The slender literary product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious reviews, like the _American Biblical Repository_, the _American Law Journal_, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter magazines, like the _Ladies" Literary Cabinet_, the _Young Ladies"
Parental Mentor_, and the _Casket: or Flowers of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment_, rose and fell on the fickle tide of public taste. Even the West had its magazines. Lexington, Kentucky, which disputed with Cincinnati the proud t.i.tle, "Athens of the West," published the _Western Review_, one number of which contained a review of _Don Juan_ within six weeks after the poem was published in England.
In the September number of the _North American Review_, in 1817, appeared an original poem of such merit as to mark an era in the history of American verse. There was in William Cullen Bryant"s _Thanatopsis_, it is true, no such youthful exuberance of feeling as the first stirrings of poetic genius in a new world might be expected to exhibit.
The sense of refined form seemed almost un-American; yet there are lines in the poem which suggest the primeval background of American life and its influence upon the American mind. In 1819 appeared Washington Irving"s _Sketch-Book_--the first American book which was widely read in England; and in 1821, Cooper published _The Spy_, which was the first to win favor on the Continent. Both Cooper and Irving were more or less conscious imitators of English prose writers, the one of Scott and the other of Addison; and they lacked consequently that originality which critics have always demanded as the hall-mark of a genuinely native art.
It is easy to forget, however, that the Americans were not a primitive people. They were folk with a literary inheritance, of which albeit they often showed little knowledge. It was not for them to invent new forms, but to press new wine into old bottles. Of Irving, moreover, it should be said that he drew freely upon a vein of delicious humor, as in his _Knickerbocker History of New York_, which may be truly characterized as American.
The annals of American art in these years are even more bare. Benjamin West, to be sure, was born in Pennsylvania, but he achieved eminence in England. That he could succeed Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy was a tribute to his fame, but equally convincing proof that he had ceased to be identified with the land of his nativity.
Gilbert Stuart owed much to West, but his return to America in 1792 saved him from complete subservience to English models. As a portrait painter he developed power and individuality. Posterity may well be grateful that the portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were painted with fidelity to nature as Stuart saw it, rather than in the grandiose manner of West. Two other names, Malbone and Allston, deserve brief mention. The one achieved some distinction as a painter of miniatures; the other is remembered both as artist and man of letters in the literary circle which was forming about Boston. The name of Jonathan Trumbull completes the list of American artists. What David was to the great actors in the revolutionary drama in France, Trumbull was to the notable characters of the American Revolution. In his conception of his themes he was perhaps the most genuinely American painter of his time.
In the pages of his autobiography, Trumbull recounts an interview with his father which may take the place of any further comment on the dearth of artistic feeling in the United States. The young man was arguing pa.s.sionately for his vocation. The father, a typical Yankee, listened with commendable patience, and complimented the lad when he had finished. ""But," added he, "you must give me leave to say, that you appear to have overlooked, or forgotten, one very important point in your case." "Pray, sir," I rejoined, "what was that?" "You appear to forget, sir, that _Connecticut is not Athens_"; and with this pithy remark, he bowed and withdrew, and nevermore opened his lips upon the subject. How often have those few impressive words recurred to my memory."
The names of Bryant, Cooper, and Irving are linked with the city of New York which enjoyed for a brief time that primacy in the world of American letters which it was fast acquiring in commerce. The center of literary and scholarly activity in the next generation was Boston, where the New England renaissance began. In this revival of letters Harvard College had a notable part. In 1806, John Quincy Adams was appointed Professor of Rhetoric and gave a course of lectures which moulded the taste of that school of orators to which Edward Everett belonged--a school of oratory which found its models in Demosthenes and Cicero. Everett became Professor of Greek in 1815; and George Ticknor, Professor of Belles-Lettres in 1816. Prescott graduated in 1814, Palfrey in 1815, and George Bancroft in 1817,--all three to add to American historiography works of enduring excellence. In 1817, young Ralph Waldo Emerson entered college.
It was Boston, however, rather than Harvard College, which created the atmosphere that these young scholars--all from Boston families--breathed: for the Athenaeum, the American School of Arts and Sciences, and the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society had begun to exercise an increasing influence on the younger generation. Harvard College, like all colleges of the day, was hardly more than a species of higher academy whither boys went at a tender age to continue their study of the cla.s.sics and mathematics, and incidentally to cultivate rhetoric and _belles-lettres_.
The liberation of the American mind from time-honored traditions and conventions appeared markedly in the ecclesiastical revolts and religious revivals of the age. Unitarianism took its rise quite as much in protest against the teaching of Calvinism, that man was brought into the world hopelessly depraved, as against the orthodox conception of Christ"s nature. The definite separation of Unitarianism from Congregationalism dates from 1815 when William E. Channing published his memorable letter to the Reverend Samuel C. Thacher. The writings of Buckminster, Channing, and other theological liberals have a distinct place in the annals of American intellectual life. Universalism also took its rise at this time and spread with remarkable rapidity under the lead of Hosea Ballou. In western Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Campbells, father and son, led a departure from the established Presbyterian order. The Society of Friends was also rent by the teachings of Elias Hicks.
Revivals had been a recurring feature of New England religious life since the latter years of the seventeenth century. That they stimulated many forms of religious activity appears in the annals of missionary enterprises at home and abroad. In 1810 the American Board of Foreign Missions and in 1814 the American Baptist Missionary Union were founded.
In 1812 four young missionaries went out to India; and five years later other devoted young men began their labors among the Cherokees and Choctaws of the Southwest. There is something at once heroic and pathetic in the humanitarian zeal of a people, whom Europeans still regarded with disdain, to carry to the remote ends of the earth a Christian civilization which they had themselves hardly attained. But an incomprehensible idealism has from first to last been interwoven in the texture of American character.
After the cessation of European wars the United States stood singularly aloof from the Old World, yet in the affairs of South America they did not cease to take a lively interest. The successive revolutions by which the provinces of the Rio de la Plata, Chili, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico threw off the yoke of Spain woke a thrill in the people of the United States, for they thought they saw the events of their own revolution repeated in the exploits of San Martin and Bolivar. To the imagination of Henry Clay, this was a sublime spectacle--"eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and be free." He would have had the United States recognize these sister republics and join hands with them in forming an American system independent of Europe. And when the Administration hesitated, he exclaimed: "We look too much abroad. Let us break these commercial and political fetters; let us no longer watch the nod of any European politician; let us become real and true Americans, and place ourselves at the head of the American system."
The conception of an American system did not originate in the ardent mind of Henry Clay. It was as old as the Union itself. Foreign encroachment had been feared from the very birth of the nation. "You are afraid of being made the tool of the powers of Europe," said Richard Oswald to John Adams while peace negotiations were pending at Paris.
"Indeed I am," rejoined Adams. "What powers?" asked Oswald. "All of them," said Adams; "it is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually manoeuvring with us to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power.... But I think that it ought to be our rule not to meddle." Washington"s refusal to enter into an alliance with France and his firm insistence upon neutrality were inspired by this same fear. Jefferson"s negotiations for the purchase of New Orleans were motivated by the fear that France, once in possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, would threaten the isolation of the United States and drive us into the arms of Great Britain. "Jefferson is an American,"
Adet once said, with rare insight, "and by that t.i.tle, it is impossible for him to be sincerely our friend. _An American is the born enemy of European peoples._"
The corollary of the principle of non-intervention was abstention on the part of the United States from the affairs of Europe. Could the United States, then, recognize the colonies of Spain as independent republics without emerging from its traditional isolation? President Monroe would have been glad to recognize the South American republics even before they had demonstrated their ability to maintain their independence; but his cool-headed Secretary of State prevailed upon him to await further evidence. It was not until 1822, indeed, that the President recommended to Congress the establishment of missions in the new republics of South America. Spain protested emphatically against this action; but Adams, now sure of his ground, justified the action of the Administration by an appeal to facts. So long as Spain was attempting to reduce the colonies by arms, the United States had observed "the most impartial neutrality."
But war had ceased, and the United States had "yielded to an obligation of duty of the highest order, by recognizing, as independent states, nations which, after deliberately a.s.serting their right to that character, had maintained and established it against all the resistance which had been or could be brought to oppose it."
In the year 1823, the traditional principles of American foreign policy were put to a severer test. Soon after the Congress of Vienna, that combination of the great powers was consummated which contemporaries usually but erroneously styled the Holy Alliance. Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain covenanted together to meet at fixed periods to consult upon their common interests and to consider the measures "most salutary for the repose and prosperity of nations, and for the maintenance of the peace of Europe." Three years later, France was admitted to the councils of these "self-appointed keepers of the world"s peace." Innocent enough in its public professions, this a.s.sociation of the great powers was converted by Metternich of Austria, who had acquired a remarkable ascendency over the mind of his own sovereign and over that of the impressionable czar, into an instrument of reaction and repression, whenever and wherever the specter of revolution raised its head. Within a few years revolutionary uprisings occurred in Italy and Spain. The so-called legitimate sovereigns were driven from their thrones and const.i.tutional governments were established. In successive congresses at Troppau and Laybach, the three powers, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, resolved to suppress these revolutionary movements. An Austrian army was commissioned to carry out this policy of intervention, as it was termed; and the King of the Two Sicilies was restored to his uneasy throne. Neither Great Britain nor France took part in these congresses. It now remained to chastise the revolutionists of Spain. At the Congress of Verona in 1822, the representative of Great Britain openly protested against any intervention in Spain. But again the three powers, now joined by France, resolved to restore the deposed Fernando VII. Early in the following year a French army crossed the Pyrenees and entered Madrid. It was commonly believed that the restoration of the monarchy was to be followed by a reduction of the revolted colonies and a restoration of the Spanish colonial empire.