A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland

by Mary Platt Parmele

Thus two contrasting people had been carelessly and hastily tossed together. The most conservative and the most progressive of nationalities were expected to fuse their uncompromising traits into a harmonious whole. The result should have been easy to foresee. The Dutch, coerced into this union, with embittered hearts and deep sense of injury, after twenty unhappy, stormy years, determined to escape. They would cross the Orange River into the wilderness and there build up another State, which should be forever their own. And so, in the year 1835, there occurred what is known as "The Great Trek," when about thirty thousand men and women, like swarming bees, migrated in a body into the region north of the Orange River, later spreading east as far as the coast in what is now "Natal," the whole region then bearing the significant title: "The Orange Free State."

In the terms of the purchase, in 1814, not a word had been said about this Hinterland, the vast region stretching indefinitely towards the north; and here was the germ of all the trouble that was to come. Through an oversight there existed a serious flaw in the British title, which would severely tax statesmanship, diplomacy, and perhaps strain national morality to the breaking point. Had this people the right, or had they not the right to plant a State bearing a foreign flag, which should effectually bar the path to the north? Should the English Government allow a people fiercely antagonistic to itself to build up an unfriendly State on its border? Such were the questions which arose then, and which have been variously answered since, depending upon the point of view.

If the question had been what would happen, there would have been greater unanimity in the replies! And, it must be acknowledged, however uncertain the claim to this disputed region, that the interests of civilization were more to be subserved by British than by Dutch Sovereignty in South Africa.

The policies of these two people were absolutely opposed; and it was upon the question of the emancipation of the slaves, at the time of the Emancipation Act, in 1835, that the final rupture and secession took place. These slaves constituted a large part of the property of the Boers; and great was their indignation when they were compelled to accept from the British Government a compensation for their property so far below their own appraisal of its value that it seemed to them a confiscation.

Then it was that they resolved to break away from their oppressors, and go where they could make their own laws, and follow their own ideals of right and wrong. And so they turned their backs upon the scene of their long toil.

In this strange exodus not the least important person, though unobserved then, was a sturdy little fellow ten years old, energetically doing his part in rounding up the cattle and flocks as he trudged along beside the huge oxcarts. His name was Paul Stephanus Kruger. And this little man also took his first lesson in military exploits when one hundred and thirty-five Boer farmers, by ingenious use of horses and rifles, put to flight twelve thousand Metabeli spearsmen. But again the Boer was only clearing the way for British occupation, which, commencing at Natal in 1842, had, by 1848, extended over the entire Orange Free State. And then there was another trek. Again the Boers migrated, this time crossing the River Vaal, and founding a "Transvaal Republic."

In the history of the next thirty years we see not a vacillating, but rather a tentative policy, behind which was always an inflexible purpose to establish British rule in South Africa, peaceably, if possible, or by force, if compelled. The British Government was trying to bring to terms the most intractable race it had ever dealt with in all its colonizing experience. The thing which embarrassed the English was that flaw in their claim; and the trouble with the Boers was that they were archaic in their ideals, and obstructive to all policies which belonged to a modern civilization. They had stopped growing when they left Holland. The emancipation and the philanthropies forced upon them by a people who were stealing their land, exasperated them, and outraged their sense of justice; and when the English punished them for cruelties to the native savages, by executing four Boers, vitriol was poured upon an open wound, and peace was forever impossible.

In 1852 England, in placating mood, yielded the local control of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic. But in less than five years the Boers had thrown away their opportunity by strife and discord among themselves, and had separated into four small hostile Republics, which Paul Stephanus Kruger, then President of the Transvaal, was vainly striving to bring together. The only time they were not at war with each other was when they were all fighting the natives, with whom they never established friendly relations. Perhaps it is asking too much of a people so many times emptied from one region into another, to have established internal conditions, economic and political, such as belong to ordinary civilized states. But the condition of disorder had become such that the British Government believed, or at least claimed to believe, that as a measure of safety to their own Colonies, the Transvaal should be annexed to the Colony at the Cape.

The people were cautiously approached upon this subject, and even some of the leaders among the burghers advocated the measure as the best, and, indeed, only thing possible in the present state of demoralization.