History of Cape Colony From 1806 To 1870 - Convict Agitation and Granting of A Constitution (1848-1853)

Convict Agitation and Granting of A Constitution (1848-1853)

A crisis arose in the colony over a proposal to make the Cape Colony a convict station. A circular written in 1848 by the third Earl Grey, then colonial secretary, was sent to the governor of the Cape, as well as other colonial governors, asking them to ascertain the feelings of the colonists regarding the reception of a certain class of convicts. The Earl intended initially to send Irish peasants who had been driven to crime by the famine of 1845 to South Africa. Sir Harry Smith was very much aware of his unpopularity in the Colonial Office due to his unilateral and expensive colonisation of neighbouring territories. Smith saw a way of winning favour in London, by allowing the Cape to be used as a convict station.

However Smith did not consult the local population on this plan for the Cape which prided itself on being a colony of "free settlement", so when the first convict ship arrived there was uproar among the locals. Local people who were already upset about Smith's perceived dictatorial rule, established an anti-convict association whose members bound themselves to cease from all interaction of any kind with persons in any way associated "with the landing, supplying or employing convicts". The boat, a vessel named the Neptune, had 289 convicts on board, among whom was the famous Irish rebel John Mitchel and his colleagues. Sir Harry Smith had the support of the extremist settlers of the Eastern Cape, whose expansion onto Xhosa lands he had facilitated, but he could not govern without the consent of the powerful Cape Town elite, or his Legislative Council from which they had resigned en masse. Confronted with public resistance, he agreed not to allow the convicts to land when the Neptune arrived in Simon's Bay on 19 September 1849, but to keep them on board the ship until he received orders to send them elsewhere. When the home government became aware of the state of affairs, orders were sent directing the Neptune to proceed to Tasmania, and it did so after staying in Simon’s Bay for five months.

The agitation did not fade away without further achievements, as it had thrown up a generation of local leaders who believed that Britain did not understood or sympathise with local issues. The momentum of this, South Africa's first mass-movement, continued as a drive to obtain a free, representative government for the colony. The British government granted this concession, which had been previously promised by Lord Grey, and a constitution was established in 1854 of almost unprecedented liberality. The first Cape Parliament was elected in the same year.