The Cowboy Capitalist

John Hays Hammond, the American West, and the Jameson Raid in South Africa

Charles van Onselen

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780813941318
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813941363
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering.

In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa's critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 See JH Wilkins (ed), The Great Diamond Hoax and other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending (San Francisco, 1913) – from Chapter 3 of an electronic version without page numbers.

2 In his late sixties, when working outside the framework of the law was less possible, Hammond laid out his views on what was needed and how it was best achieved in JH Hammond and JW Jenks, Great American Issues: Political, Social and Economic (A Constructive Study) (New York, 1923).

3 See I Colvin, The Life of Jameson, Vol 1 (London, 1922), pp 306–314.

4 See JH Hammond, ‘South African Memories: Rhodes-Barnato-Burnham’, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol LXlX, No 3, March 1921, pp 257–278.

5 On this crucial point, which demonstrates how Hammond rather than Rhodes was at the cutting edge of revolutionary thought on the Rand, see WT Stead, The Americanisation of the World or The Trend of the Twentieth Century (London, 1902), p 30.

6 On the changing political climate in the United States in the 1890s, see KL Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (London, 1998).

7 The men behind the Jameson Raid, argued Davis, ‘… were acting for the best good of the country, in trying to overthrow the Boer Government, as did the revolutionists of 1776 in our own country, or as do the rebels in Cuba at the present day’ – RH Davis, Dr Jameson’s Raiders vs The Johannesburg Reformers (New York, 1897), p 15.

8 A Ireland, ‘The True Story of the Jameson Raid as Related to me by John Hays Hammond’, The North American Review, Vol 208, No 753 and 754, August and September 1918, pp 185–196 and 365–376.

9 Electrical Engineer, Vol 55, No 7, July 1936, p 835.

CHAPTER 1

1 The attitudes, beliefs and visions of the three men on the mining safari are all beautifully captured and preserved in JH Hammond, ‘South African Memories: Rhodes-Barnato-Burnham’, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol LXlX, No 3, March 1921, pp 257–278 [hereafter Hammond, ‘Memories’].

2 See I Colvin, The Life of Jameson, Vol 1 (London, 1922), p 307 [hereafter Colvin, Jameson 1] and, on Hammond’s trauma and inflated assessment of the revolutionary potential of the Witwatersrand in the mid-1890s, see below Chapters 10 and 11.

3 See especially Colvin, Jameson 1, pp 171–218.

4 As reported in the Morning Oregonian, 29 March 1902.

5 JH Hammond, The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond, Vol 1, (New York, 1935), p 290 [hereafter Hammond, Autobiography 1].

6 The British allowed the old Roman-Dutch legal system to remain in place in the Cape Colony in the early 19th century and, in 1844, the South African Republic – the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek – in turn adopted Cape law – see HR Halho and E Kahn, The South African Legal System and its Background (Johannesburg, 1973), pp 575–578.

7 See the ‘Introduction’ to JG Kotzé, Memoirs and Reminiscences (Cape Town, 1934).

8 See CH Muller, ‘Policing the Witwatersrand: A History of the South African Republic Police’, unpublished DPhil thesis, Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State, 2016 [hereafter Muller, ‘Policing the Witwatersrand’]. See also, Chapter 10, ‘Organised Crime in a Frontier Town: Johannesburg, the Kruger State and the Depression of 1889–1892’ in C van Onselen, Showdown at the Red Lion: The Life and Times of Jack McLoughlin, 1859–1910 (Cape Town, 2014) [hereafter van Onselen, Showdown at the Red Lion].

9 See C van Onselen, Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880–1889 (Cape Town, 2010), pp 30–32, 36–40 and 88–90 [hereafter van Onselen, Masked Raiders].

10 As a prominent Johannesburg attorney who later became a member of the ‘Reform Committee’ noted: ‘In 1890, a conspiracy was on foot to seize the artillery barracks and magazines at Pretoria as well as the public offices and members of the Executive Committee.’ FW Bell, The South African Conspiracy or the Aims of Afrikanerdom (London, 1900), p 11.

11 For the disapproval that such punishment excited in the minds of members of the Reform Committee and those who were implicated in the Jameson Raid conspiracy, and its use for political propaganda purposes by the mining houses, see, for example, ‘Life in Gaol’, JP FitzPatrick, The Transvaal from Within: A Private Record of Public Affairs (London, 1899), pp 160–177 [hereafter FitzPatrick, Transvaal from Within].

12 On the Kruger government’s attempt to cope with the emergence of organised white crime and resistance in the prisons during the depression of 1889–1892, see Chapter 10 in van Onselen, Showdown at the Red Lion and van Onselen, Masked Raiders, pp 75–92.

13 See especially CT Gordon, The Growth of Boer Opposition to Kruger, 1890–1895 (London, 1970), pp 102 and 108 [hereafter Gordon, Boer Opposition].

14 See, for example, Gordon, Boer Opposition, p 89.

15 South African National Library, Cape Town, Lord Henry de Villiers Collection, MSC7, Vol 10, File 3, Extract from a letter written by Lionel Phillips to Alfred Beit, Johannesburg, dated 26 March 1894. I am indebted to Johan Bergh for drawing this and other items relating to the Kruger administ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Foreword, by Robert E. May
• Introduction: Looking Up from the Last of History
• The Mother Lode
• Mining
• Blasting
• Undermining
• Milling
• Smelting
• Refining
• Conclusion: John Hays Hammond and the Jameson Raid read as American Imperial History
• Notes
• A Cautionary Note: The Historiography of the Jameson Raid
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements and Thanks
• Index