Boer War - Background
Great Britain, by the Sand River Convention in 1852, acknowledged the independence of the Transvaal Republic; and, by the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854, she recognized the independence of the Orange Free State, against the wishes of the Orange River Boers, whom the British compelled to accept independence against their will. The Orange Free State thereafter prospered and many British colonists settled within its limits. The Tansvaal Republic was continually involved in civil wars among its own people and at one time split up into four miniature republics after a long war of secession. The Transvaal was also engaged in a twelve years' war with her sister republic, the Orange Free State, and was also continually engaged in bloody wars with the Kaffirs, the Zulus and the other negro tribes of South Africa, in consequence of the massacres of negro natives and the kidnapping of negroes for slaves by the Boers.
The refusal of the Boers to pay taxes to their own government well-nigh bankrupted the Transvaal, and the negro native tribes attacked the Republic on all sides and had it at their mercy. So desperate were the straits of the Transvaal Boers that they certainly would have been annihilated and wholly exterminated by the exasperated negro tribes, whom they had outraged and whose people they had massacred or kidnapped into slavery, had not the British come to their rescue at their piteous appeals for help and placed them under British protection by annexation of the Transvaal to British South Africa in 1877. This British rescue of the Boers also involved the British in their bloody war with the Zulus in 1879, which cost the British eight million pounds sterling (about forty million dollars), all on account of the Boers.
The Transvaal prospered greatly under British rule, and the British aided the Boers financially in improving their farms and adopted many measures for their improvement; but in three years the Boers grew tired of British subjection, and late in 1880 they revolted, and won three great victories over the British troops under General Colley, who was defeated and killed at Majuba Hill, the last of these three battles, February 27, 1881, after which the British government under Mr. Gladstone granted the Transvaal Boers independence under British suzerainty. Then arose the second Transvaal Republic under Johannes Stephanus Paulus Kriiger, who was President of the restored Transvaal Republic during the whole nineteen years of its existence, 1881-1900. The second Transvaal Republic, like the first, was soon involved in troubles with the Kaffirs, the Zulus and the other negro tribes by kidnapping their people into slavery, in violation of their treaty with the British in 1881, by which they recovered their independence; and the Transvaal Boers made six raids into the negro states around them to seize their territories—raids of the same character as the Jameson raid against the Boers themselves in 1895—96.
The London Convention of 1884, which President Kriiger negotiated with the British government, settled certain questions for the time; but, as we have observed, the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold mines in 1886 brought hitherto-unforeseen troubles, as it both enriched the Transvaal and proved its curse, causing a large influx of British settlers with a sprinkling of other foreigners, French, Americans, Germans, etc.; and the city of Johannesburg, the "Golden Reef City," sprang up as by magic, its population growing to over a hundred thousand in six years (1890-1896), more than the entire Boer population of the two Republics and more than twice the Boer population of the Transvaal. The two Boer Republics had an area as large as New York and Pennsylvania with a Boer population of less than a hundred thousand.
The Uitlanders, or British and other foreign settlers in the Transvaal, although outnumbering the Boers therein more than two to one, paid nine-tenths of the taxes and were subject to military duty in the service of the Republic, but were deprived of all political rights and could be naturalized as citizens of the Republic only after a residence of a long series of years and much trouble. A reform party arose among the Uitlanders which demanded political rights and more easy naturalization; and this party contemplated a rising late in December, 1895, in which they were to be aided by British raiders from the outside under Dr. Jameson; but these raiders were defeated, and Dr. Jameson was taken prisoner and afterwards turned over to the British government and tried and imprisoned in London. The leaders of the reform party at Johannesburg, among whom was an American, John Hays Hammond, of California, were tried for treason and were convicted, fined and imprisoned.
The troubles between the Boers and Uitlanders continued. Though Johannesburg had over a hundred thousand inhabitants, only its one thousand Boer citizens had political rights and were the rulers of the city, oppressing the Uitlanders, who contended that they were asserting the principle of "no taxation without representation." These people were subjected to many annoyances, and their situation was made as irksome as possible, so that in the spring of 1899 they sent a petition with over twenty-one thousand signatures to Queen Victoria praying for relief from their intolerable situation. Negotiations for the next six months followed between President Kriiger and British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for the enactment of more liberal naturalization laws in the Transvaal, and in May a conference between President Kriiger and Sir Alfred Milner, Governor of Cape Colony and British High Commissioner in South Africa, was held at Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, but without a result; and negotiations for the settlement of the questions at issue continued between the Transvaal President and the British authorities until the next fall, when the final rupture came.
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