“The shops were closed, every one made holiday, triumphal arches were erected surmounted by inscriptions proclaiming welcome to the new Governor and old friend. The very bonhommie with which Sir Harry had met his old acquaintances—even an old Hottentot sergeant with whom he shook hands on the road—procured for him a ready popularity ere he entered Grahamstown.”
And at night—
“The frontier to-night was delirious with joy. Its own hero, its best friend next to Sir Benjamin the Good, has arrived. The town is illuminated, and beacon-lights telegraph from the hill-tops.... We watched the rockets ascending and the lights flashing from one end of Grahamstown to the other; the very Fingo kraals sent forth shouts, and torches flitted from hut to hut. But long before the lights were extinguished, Sir Harry Smith was up and at work. Three o’clock on the morning of the 18th found him at his desk, which he scarcely left till five in the evening.”
But even on the day of his arrival in Grahamstown he had made history. He had released the captive chief Sandilli (an act of generosity afterwards ill-requited), and sent him the baton of office of a British magistrate; and, more than this, he had issued a proclamation creating a new boundary for the Colony, which was now to include the district of Victoria (to the east of Albany and Somerset), the district of Albert (north-east of Cradock), and a vast territory stretching from the old northern boundary of the Colony to the Orange River. The chief town of Victoria he named “Alice,” doubtless after his beloved sister, Mrs. Sargant.
On the 19th, by the submission of Pato, it appeared that the Kafir War was at an end. The Governor at once set out for King William’s Town, which he reached on the 23rd, and was again received enthusiastically. The troops—the Rifle Brigade and the 7th Dragoon Guards—were drawn up on the parade, and were praised in stirring terms for their services in the recent war. On another part of the square an assembly of two thousand Kafirs waited, sitting in a great hollow circle. Into this circle Sir Harry rode with his staff, and read a proclamation, which was practically a dramatic reversal of that abandonment by Lord Glenelg of the “Province of Queen Adelaide” which he had felt so bitterly in 1836. He declared the whole country between the Keiskamma and the Kei, running northwards to the junction of the Klipplaats and Zwart Kei rivers, to be under the sovereignty of the Queen, not, however, as part of Cape Colony, but as a district dependency of the Crown to be named “British Kaffraria,” and kept in reserve for the Kafir people, over whom the Governor, as High Commissioner, was to be “Inkosi Inkulu,” or Great Chief. Colonel Mackinnon was appointed to a post such as Harry Smith had held in 1835-36—that of Commandant and Chief Commissioner of British Kaffraria, with his headquarters at King William’s Town.[177] Having read the proclamation, he gave an illustration of those dramatic methods of treating the Kafirs on which he had always relied, but which stirred some ridicule in England during the time of his Governorship. “He called for a sergeant’s baton, which he termed the staff of war, and a wand with a brass head, which he termed the staff of peace. Calling the chiefs forward, he desired them to touch whichever they pleased, when each of course touched the staff of peace. After an address of some length upon their prospects if they behaved themselves, and threats of what would happen if they did not, he required them to kiss his foot in token of submission.” [He was, of course, still on horseback.] “This they did also without hesitation. The ceremony concluded by the High Commissioner shaking hands with all the chiefs, calling them his children, and presenting them with a herd of oxen to feast upon.”[178]
On 7th January,[179] 1848, the Chiefs were called to a second meeting to hear the arrangements which had been made for the government of the new province. Sir Harry addressed them, after which they took oath to obey the High Commissioner as the Queens representative, and to renounce witchcraft, violation of women, murder, robbery, and the buying of wives, to listen to the missionaries, and on every anniversary of that day to bring to King William’s Town a fat ox in acknowledgment of holding their lands from the Queen. “Sir Harry then addressed them again, telling them what would happen if they were not faithful. ‘Look at that waggon,’ said he, pointing to one at a distance which had been prepared for an explosion, ‘and hear me give the word Fire!’ The train was lit, and the waggon was sent skyward in a thousand pieces. ‘That is what I will do to you,’ he continued, ‘if you do not behave yourselves.’ Taking a sheet of paper in his hand, ‘Do you see this?’ said he. Tearing it and throwing the pieces to the wind, ‘There go the treaties!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you hear? No more treaties.’”[180]
Things being thus settled at King William’s Town, Sir Harry proceeded to the country between the Orange River and the Vaal.[181] Here Major Warden at Bloemfontein had authority over the emigrant Boers between the Modder and the Riet rivers; the Boers north of the Modder were left to themselves, and large tracts bordering on the Orange River were assigned as reserves to the chiefs Moshesh and Adam Kok, who could also exact quit-rents from the farmers outside the reserves.
“Sir Harry Smith came to South Africa with a fully matured plan for the settlement of affairs north of the Orange. He would take no land from black people that they needed for their maintenance, but there were no longer to be black states covering vast areas of ground either unoccupied or in possession of white men. Such ground he would form into a new colony, and he would exercise a general control over the chiefs themselves in the interests of peace and civilization. A system antagonistic to that of the Napier treaties was to be introduced. Those treaties attempted to subject civilized men to barbarians. He would place an enlightened and benevolent government over all. But to enable him to do so, the consent of Adam Kok and Moshesh must be obtained to new agreements, for he could not take the high-handed course of setting the treaties aside.”[182]