The Colored Castes and American Representation in the Cortes of Cadiz

Abstract

Of the many problems facing the General and Extraordinary Cortes of the Spanish Nation when it convened on the Isle of Leon on September 24, 1810,1 none was of greater importance than the representation of the overseas empire. On the one hand the Cortes recognized the need to grant colonial participation in the central government in order to maintain imperial unity in the face of Napoleon's attempt to usurp the Spanish throne. On the other hand, it was clear that some fifteen or sixteen millions of people in the Americas and the Philippines would hopelessly swamp the ten and a half million Peninsular Spaniards2 if anything like equal representation were allowed. Faced by this dilemma, metropolitan Spaniards observed the racial heterogeneity of the Indies, their complicated caste structure, and the resulting antipathies and prejudices of the various classes; and they found therein a plausible formula to exclude enough of the overseas population to assure imperial unity under Peninsular control. But the denial of an equal basis of representation, more than any other act of the Cortes, encouraged and justified incipient revolt in America; and the deliberate adoption of racial discrimination provided revolutionary leaders with a powerful appeal to numerous colored elements in the population. * The author is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley -Ed. 1 The Cortes first met in the Teatro de San Fernando on the Isle of Leon, moving to the Oratorio de San Felipe in Cadiz at the seaward tip of the Island on February 24, 1811, after the yellow fever epidemic in the city had abated. 2 The Instrucci6n que deberd observarse para la eleccion de diputados de Cortes (Seville, 1810) gave the population of Spain as 10,534,985, basing it on the last census (1797). The population of America and the Philippines was not accurately known, despite a number of local censuses taken in the later eighteenth century. Fifteen or sixteen millions, derived from estimates of Alexander von Humboldt, were the figures commonly accepted at the time by both Spaniards and Americans (cf. Diario de las discussions y actas de las Cortes [24 vols., Cadiz, 1811-13], III, 94; VIII, 201 [hereinafter cited as Diario de Cortes]).

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