This essay argues that Great Britain provided the strongest and most relevant contemporary model for the Spanish American independence leaders. Over the course of two eventful decades, 1808 to 1826, over 70 patriot leaders made the long and difficult journey to London to seek political recognition, arms, recruits, and financial backing for their emancipation movements. Countless others remained at home in Spanish America but allied themselves with Britain through their commercial ventures, their ideological affiliation, or their enthusiastic emulation of British institutions, inventions, and practices such as the Lancasterian system of monitorial education, trial by jury, freedom of the press laws, steam engines, and mining technology.
This generation of independence leaders carried on a purposeful correspondence with famous British figures such as abolitionist William Wilberforce, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, scientist Humphrey Davy, and vaccination proponent Edward Jenner. Their conscious choice to draw closer to Great Britain, rather than Napoleonic France or the early republican United States, reveals much about the kind of cultural model the Spanish American independence leaders admired and their vision of the countries they wanted to create.
The events of Alberto Masferrer's life and the parallel evolution of his social thought reveal much about the broader forces which shaped El Salvador and Central America during his generation. His lifetime brackets the consolidation of the Salvadoran state and the formation of modern social groups. Alberto Masferrer was born in 1868, the age of the Liberal presidents' ascendence throughout Central America; he died in 1932 as Depression-era dictators assumed power throughout that same region. In fact, 1932 is a watershed year in Central American history. With Agustín Farabundo Martí's failed Communist uprising in El Salvador and the murder of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Nicaragua, the early 1930s brought a decisive end to the possibility for Masferrer's idealized type of elite-led reform and instead turned opponents toward ideologically-motivated popular revolt. Alberto Masferrer, like most intellectuals, struggled with ideas and power. He realized that the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century Presidents not only had failed to improve the material and moral condition of the majority of his countrymen, but actually had degraded them. Though Masferrer's admiring biographer Matilde Elena López observed that “[t]he reality of man exploited by an unjust society is the central idea of his life,” it remains no easy task to categorize the cranky journalist's thought for, indeed, he does not fit neatly into any single ideology. Masferrer the humanist gave primary importance to the betterment of social and economic conditions for those living on the material plane, while Masferrer as a Christian stressed the otherworldly values of humility, hard work, patience and charity. Masferrer the communist called for a return to the ejidal landholding system of the traditional Indian communities and a guaranteed standard of living for all Salvadorans, but Masferrer the corporatist recognized the existence of a natural state of hierarchy and felt that harmony would prevail if each remained true to his pre-ordained vocation. Masferrer the aesthetic arielista venerated language and culture, but Masferrer the criollista could not be restrained to the world of pure art and consistently returned to earth to criticize uneven social conditions. Masferrer the hispano-falangist idealized a strong and vigorous nation, yet Masferrer the pacifist abhorred violence and aggressiveness.
Often called the precursor of Latin American independence, Francisco de Miranda grew up in Caracas. At the age of 14 he entered the Royal and Pontifical University, claiming to have received a bachelor's degree in 1767 although there is no official record that he ever graduated. In 1772 Miranda's father purchased a junior commission for him in the Princess's Infantry Regiment in Spain. He was inducted into the forces and sent to a frontier garrison in Melilla, North Africa. Unlike many of his peers, Miranda had a healthy respect for his Moorish opponents, even sympathy for their efforts to oust a foreign presence from their land. He took the time to read the Quran and continuously offered unsolicited advice and criticism to his superior officers. In 1774 Miranda applied to join Alejandro O'Reilly's corps that was destined for Spanish America, but he was refused. Three years later, however, he was jailed in Cádiz for disobedience and confined again the next year for insubordination. He was transferred to the Regiment of Aragón and sailed for Havana in April 1780 as a supernumerary officer.
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