What was the significance of the Jameson Raid at the end of 1895?

‘Partly because of its dramatic qualities, the Jameson Raid has always been assigned a prominent place as a cause of the Anglo-Boer war.’ However this is not the only significance of The Jameson Raid - it also had important political consequences. Rhodes was forced to resign as Premier of Cape Colony because of his knowledge of the conspiracy; evidence suggests that Joseph Chamberlain knew and approved of the revolt in Johannesburg, if not the actual raid. A Parliamentary Inquiry exonerated Chamberlain from participating in the conspiracy, resulting in what appeared to be a corrupt government and many debates between historians. The Boers exaggerated their ability to deal with British forces and were encouraged by the ‘Kruger Telegram’ that they had German support in resisting the British.

The British, primarily concerned with the strategic Cape Colony, were content to accept two neighboring Boer states until 1886, when the discovery of gold in the Transvaal made Johannesburg a boomtown, larger even than Cape Colony's capital at Cape Town. Prospectors, including British settlers known as "Uitlanders", flocked to the Transvaal. The vast store of gold discovered in the Witwatersrand Reef was more than the world had ever seen. This new development in the Transvaal led to confrontations, such as the infamous Jameson Raid, led by Sir Leander Jameson but encouraged by Joseph Chamberlain and supported by Cecil Rhodes.

Thousands of settlers, many of them Cape British moved into the Transvaal to work the goldmines. By 1895 these Uitlanders outnumbered the Boers themselves. Kruger, afraid of being swamped and anxious to preserve the character of his country, refused them all political rights and taxed them heavily. Rhodes, who became Prime Minister of Cape Colony in 1890, decided to stir up uitlander unrest into revolution, which, with some outside help was hoped would be strong enough to overthrow Kruger.

On the 29th of December 1895 Dr. L. Storr Jameson, an administrator in the British South Africa Company and an associate of Cecil Rhodes, led a force of 470 mounted men from Bechuanaland into Transvaal. In an effort to support a brewing rebellion by foreign settlers and to further Rhodes’s ambition for a united South Africa, Jameson and his men intended to advance 180 miles to Johannesburg and join Uitlander workers and attempt to instigate a rebellion overthrowing the government of Paul Kruger. The raid was premature and the conspiracy failed; the Uitlanders did not revolt, and Jameson’s force was captured several days after crossing the frontier and turned over by President Kruger to the British to be punished for this unauthorized venture. The fiasco brought Anglo-Boer tensions to a fever pitch. Following a final effort at reconciliation between High Commissioner Sir Alfred Milner and Transvaal President Paul Kruger at Bloemfontein, war formally began in 1899. Jameson was returned to London for trial and served a prison sentence in Britain, on his release he returned to South Africa, served in the Cape Colony Parliament, and was Premier of Cape Colony from 1904-1908. He played an important role in the South African National Convention, which achieved the union of the South African colonies.

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The prevention of the Jameson raid was a great success for the Boers giving them strength and a false belief of control over their assets; this confidence was enhanced by The Kruger Telegram. A message sent by the German Kaiser, William 2, to President Kruger in January 1896, congratulating him on preventing the Jameson raid and preserving the independence of the Transvaal without appealing to the help of friendly powers. German interests in the Transvaal were considerable, but not decisive. The Germans made themselves the advocates of the Transvaal because they hoped to demonstrate the value of German friendship to Britain by annoying the British into better relations. When news of the Jameson raid reached Berlin, the Kaiser, assuming that the British government was privy to the scheme, demanded strong measures and even military intervention on behalf of Kruger. This created a storm of bitterness and recrimination in Britain, especially when it became known that the real purpose of the German government was to beat the British into friendship. The Kaiser’s action aroused considerable resentment among the British, the telegram was regarded as brazen meddling in British colonial affairs and it was thought to contain needless aggressive language. The telegram also encouraged the Boers in the mistaken belief that they could expect German aid in case of conflict with Britain.

As an eyewitness to events in South Africa, J.A Hobson assembled piles of statistics and corroborating arguments for his view that capitalist interests drove the war. In the Boer War, Rand millionaires such as Cecil Rhodes embodied the general idea that capitalist interests rather than Uitlander grievances were the real cause of the conflict. Hobson believed that Rhodes backed Jameson in an attempt to open the Transvaal to his corporate mining interests. However, the significance of Rhodes does not end there. He remained a key figure for other reasons, for instance, though Rhodes may not have had ultimate control of the Jameson Raid, Rhodes and his associates owned the South African newspaper-publishing network, ‘a small confederacy of international financiers working through a kept press’, and this translated into a great deal of control over British home opinion. Rhodes personal and business sympathies with the Uitlanders in the Transvaal, led him to conspire against the government of Paul Kruger. Although Rhodes did not approve the timing of the raid, he was so clearly implicated that he was forced to resign as Prime Minister in 1896. In 1897 a committee of the British House of Commons pronounced him guilty of grave breaches of duty as prime minister and as administrator of the British South Africa Company. Although Hobson's views on imperialism in general have become increasingly accepted, his initial indisputable assessment of the Jameson Raid has become less certain over time. The reason is that Rhodes may not have been the sole mastermind behind the raid.

A leading proponent of this view is the South African historian Jean van der Poel, who believes that Rhodes actually had reservations about the raid, but was secretly spurred on by British officials. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. ‘A man of clear-cut strategic aims and impatient with delay, shared Rhodes’s desire to be rid of the Kruger regime.’ There was suspicion of a conspiracy on his part as early as 1896, when a parliamentary Committee of Inquiry questioned Chamberlain's foreknowledge of the raid. According to van der Poel, Chamberlain skillfully sidestepped questioning by means of a clever evasion, stating that neither he nor any British officials had any idea about Jameson's decision to attack. Although this statement was enough to satisfy the committee, it does not satisfy van der Poel, who points out that Rhodes himself could have also made precisely the same claim. No one knew about the final decision to make the raid except for Jameson--the decision was left solely to him. The preparations for the raid, on the other hand, were well known to Chamberlain who ‘did all he could to promote the venture by ceding the Pitsani strip to the British South African Company, as a convenient base from which to launch the attack.’ The lack of extensive concrete evidence for official British involvement, was due to the willful suppression of this information by a politically minded Chamberlain.

Chamberlain adopted a course not unknown to political opportunists: he would take care ‘not to know too much’. If the plot failed he could plead official ignorance; if it succeeded he would share the credit with Rhodes and Beit. But this was not merely a policy of opportunism; it was extremely dangerous. To have knowledge, without complicity in the plot, was to tread a moral and political tightrope. Who but a brave man (or a lunatic) would share a tightrope with Cecil Rhodes?’

The Colonial Secretary's knowledge lessens the strength of Hobson's interpretation of the Jameson Raid, undoubtedly a major root of the war, as a purely capitalist-driven event. As historians increasingly come to see Chamberlain as a central importance to the Jameson Raid, Hobson's view of a solely Rhodes-backed conspiracy has declined.

Although in recent years van der Poel's argument has been increasingly accepted, the point remains arguable. Even considering ‘virtually’ self-incriminating passages in Chamberlain's telegrams, the British historian R. C. K. Ensor maintains that claims of Chamberlain's involvement are speculation, inadmissible to serious historians. However, Ensor also accepts that Uitlanders were being treated unjustly and that this was a primary cause of the war.

The acceptance of van der Poel's view over Ensor's is proven by another well known British historian, Ethel Drus. With access not only to newly unsealed government documents in both Cape Town and London, but also to privately owned Chamberlain papers, Drus reconfirmed van der Poel's conclusion on the issue of Chamberlain's complicity in the Jameson Raid. Her only substantial difference from van der Poel is that she did not accept that the Committee of Enquiry was actually fooled by Chamberlain's verbal maneuver. Rather, they were quite aware of the real implications of his sophistry, but discontinued the investigation and allowed the public to believe that Chamberlain was innocent out of patriotism and a desire to avoid further scandal.

The result of the Jameson Raid was disastrous: it signified to the rest of the world that Britain had authorized the unprovoked invasion of a foreign state. The raid offended the Orange Free State and the Cape Boers; it confirmed all Kruger’s fears about British intentions and he continued to arm heavily. When one looks back in history at imperialist expansion, it appears the consequences of the raid could have been avoided if the responsible minister and his party suffered the ordinary constitutional penalties. When the opposite course was taken, a tragic error had been made. War was not inevitable at this stage, though ‘the shielding of Chamberlain had much to do with the coming of war. It left a determined, and temporarily discomfited, imperialist in power. And it aroused in the minds of the Afrikaners a deep suspicion of the Government that he dominated.’ It could be said that the Jameson raid not only signified a corrupt government but also the beginning of the end of the British Empire.