SOUTH AFRICA, 1847-1854.
(The coloured districts were annexed by Sir Harry Smith, those only lightly coloured becoming part of Cape Colony.)
[Opposite p. 594.
The creation of the Orange River Sovereignty was reluctantly agreed to by the Home Government,[185] and the measures taken by Sir Harry to induce settlers in Natal to remain there, and others to come there, were to a great extent successful. But his belief that the settlers in the northern part of the new Sovereignty and over the Vaal would readily accept British supremacy when offered them by one whom they had known and trusted in the past—this belief proved fallacious. The sense of wrong created by the Glenelg policy could not be so easily assuaged.
By the 1st March Sir Harry Smith was back at Cape Town, “welcomed as a successful pacificator and benefactor with pæans of praise from all classes of the inhabitants. His meteoric progress over the length and breadth of the country—all at once dispelling the idea of the unwieldiness of the settlement and its dependencies—and the generous character of the mission he had so triumphantly concluded were regarded as the most signally happy events South Africa had ever witnessed. His Excellency’s praise was on every lip, and his virtues were to be symbolized to future generations by an equestrian statue.”[186]
But no sooner had he returned than he heard that among the farmers of the Winburg district (constituting the northern part of the new Orange River Sovereignty) there was a movement against the British authority which had been imposed upon them. To counteract it, Sir Harry issued on 29th March a manifesto of a rather unconventional kind. He bade the farmers remember all the benefits he had lately conferred on them [freedom from nominal subjection to native chiefs, etc.], and contrast the misery from which he had endeavoured to raise them with the happiness of their friends and cousins living under the Colonial government. If they compelled him to wield the fatal sword, after all he had attempted to do for them, the crime be on their own heads. He concluded with a prayer to the Almighty in which he suggested that the farmers might unite with himself.
Such a manifesto is not to be judged cynically. The religious passages were sincere and characteristic of their author, and calculated to appeal especially to the people to whom they were addressed. But the distrust of England was too deep for such an appeal to have more than a partial success. The disaffected party in the Winburg district determined to make a struggle for independence, and invited Pretorius to come over the Vaal to lead them. Pretorius arrived at Winburg on the 12th July. At his approach, Mr. Biddulph, the British magistrate, rode off to Bloemfontein and informed Major Warden, who sent a report to the Governor on the 13th.
On the 17th Pretorius reached Bloemfontein, and Major Warden, being unable to offer resistance, capitulated, and was furnished by Pretorius with waggons to take him, his troops, and the refugees who had sought his protection, to Colesberg. Pretorius with his force marched to a camp on the Orange River in the same neighbourhood.
Major Warden’s report of the 13th July reached Sir Harry Smith at Cape Town on the 22nd.[187] On the same day he issued a reward of £1000 for the apprehension of Pretorius and made arrangements for collecting a force to put down the rebellion.
On the 29th July he left Cape Town for the Sovereignty, accompanied by his Private Secretary, Major Garvock, Dr. Hall, Principal Medical Officer, Mr. Southey, Secretary to the High Commissioner, and Lieutenant Holdich, A.D.C, (now General Sir Edward Alan Holdich, K.C.B.). The party travelled with three waggons.