Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIX:4 (Primavera, 2019), 641–648.

Robert I. Rotberg
The Jameson Raid: An American Imperial Plot?

The Cowboy Capitalist: John Hays Hammond, the American West, E
the Jameson Raid. By Charles van Onselen (Charlottesville, Univer-
sity of Virginia Press, 2018), 557 pag. $35.00

The failed Jameson Raid (1895) implicated the British govern-
ment; removed Cecil Rhodes from the premiership of the Cape
Colony; strengthened Afrikaner control of the South African Re-
public (the Transvaal) and its world-supplying gold mines; led to,
if not actually precipitated, the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902); E
ultimately motivated the Afrikaner-controlled consolidation of seg-
regation in the Union of South Africa and thence apartheid. As van
Onselen concludes, the Raid initiated the postwar “handing-over of
political power” to Afrikaner nationalist governments, a “betrayal of
African rights,” and the eventual creation of apartheid, “the master
plan for white racial domination of every single aspect of economic,
political and social life” (470).

For years, local and external scholars and experts have puzzled
about Dr. Leander Starr Jameson’s seemingly madcap and outra-
geous attempt to invade Johannesburg and join an uprising there
by the English-speaking miners who were responsible for the Re-
public’s prosperity but had been denied the franchise. The mutual
conspiracy sought to end President Paul Kruger’s control over
Johannesburg and its gold mines by coup d’état.

As van Onselen says, the Raid was “a conspiracy by urban
capitalists to overthrow a conservative rural elite rooted in a re-
public founded on agricultural production so as to . . . entrench
IL . . . privileges” of expatriate gold mining industry magnates
(471). But who were those mining moguls? Who exactly thought
that a ﬁlibustering expedition from outside the Republic and a
revolt by non-citizen miners and shopkeepers could overthrow

Robert I. Rotberg is co-editor of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and President emeritus
of the World Peace Foundation. His most recent book is The Corruption Cure: How Citizens
and Leaders Can Combat Graft (Princeton, 2017).

© 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01341

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| R O B E R T I . R O T B E R G

an established, if landlocked, constituted government? And to
what exact ends?

Rhodes clearly paid for the arms that Jameson and his 500
men carried on their invasive endeavor. Secretary of State for
the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain probably sanctioned the adven-
ture. But who dreamed it up? Who invented and planned the in-
cursion, imagining that a posse of lightly armed mercenaries could
enter undetected on horseback from the west, support or incite a
rebellion among the Johannesburg miners, and overthrow Kruger,
just like that? Was it Rhodes’ scheme, as has oft been believed, O
was it Jameson’s? Or did it depend on the so called “reformers” in
Johannesburg led by the likes of Lionel Phillips, George Farrar,
John Hays Hammond, and other English-speaking mining bosses?
The conspiracy was oddly and badly conceived and executed
irresponsibly. Who contributed signiﬁcantly to the ﬁasco? Che cosa
were the constituents of what turned out to be a massive failure
with monumental consequences? Why did Jameson start when
he did, well before the bizarre and heavily contingent scheme
was ﬁrmly in place? Did Jameson put too much faith in the power
of the state-of-the-art Maxim guns that he had used successfully
against the Ndebele kingdom in Zimbabwe? Did Jameson evade
Rhodes’ attempt to stop any attack? What motivated such a fool-
ish, ill-conceived, and ill-prepared assault? Answers to these ques-
tions tell us about the Raid, but also about imperial designs, Di
economic imperatives and economic history on an emerging fron-
tier, and about the perils and inconsistencies of leadership.

More than thirty years ago, a chapter on the Jameson Raid in
my biography of Rhodes concluded, “The Raid was designed and
prosecuted by Rhodes, but he lost control in the end.” Rhodes
ﬁnally gathered that Johannesburg was “unready,” that the upris-
ing of foreign miners would not take place. He tried, but failed, A
stop Jameson. Jameson, always impulsive and decisive, had already
“bolted.”1 That chapter names Hammond as one of the plotters in
Johannesburg, but now it appears, thanks to van Onselen’s careful
culling of the available hard and circumstantial evidence, Quello
Hammond had a central role in the conspiracy to supplant Kruger.
In unwittingly anticipated corroboration of the main thrust of
van Onselen’s much more fully articulated argument, I wrote that

1 Rotberg, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (New York, 1988), 541.

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THE JAM ESON RAID | 643

on the eve of the Raid, with Jameson champing at the bit to attack
from Pitsani (near modern Maﬁkeng), 300 kms from Johannesburg,
Jameson telegraphed, “Let Hammond telegraph instantly all right,"
meaning that the revolutionaries were ready to move.2 Instead,
Hammond lost resolve, telegraphing, “Expert reports decidedly
adverse. I absolutely condemn further developments at present”
(190–191).

Van Onselen explains that Hammond was “the catalyst” be-
hind the events leading to the Raid. “Hammond, sensing the
emerging leadership vacuum [in Johannesburg, among the early
set of plotters against Kruger] drew on his considerable American
[ﬁlibustering] experiences and . . . became the de facto conspirator-
in-chief in planning the insurrection and the coup d’état that was
supposed to follow.” Instead of Rhodes’ British-inspired scheme
to secure an imperial outcome, Hammond made the plot more
American, “with a probable ‘republican’ twist to it” (105, 131).
An American, in other words, helped to plunge South Africa
and Empire into turmoil, and to keep Afrikaners from trusting
Britons to this day.

Van Onselen argues that the Raid may have been given a
“decisive boost” by Rhodes and Jameson, but “the idea of an
uprising,” and of troops energizing it, “was born in the mind
of a frustrated American mine-owning capitalist” with roots in
Idaho (154). In 1894, Hammond plied Rhodes and Jameson with
stories about his own supposed and exaggerated successes in arm-
ing freebooters and taking control of the mines of northern Idaho.
He also talked to Rhodes and Jameson about the supposed suc-
cesses of Vigilance Committees in San Francisco and about how
such informal methods, if well supported by illicit weapons, could
turn political tides. Rhodes had two reactions—(1) that removing
Kruger as an obstacle to imperial advances northward would be
beneﬁcial to Rhodes’ ambitions and (2) that in the event of an in-
surrection, he wanted full control to avoid any upstart republicans
supplanting Kruger.

Van Onselen provides a perverse answer, or series of answers,
to the riddle of the Raid. His remarkable book thus sheds illuminat-
ing new light on South Africa’s historical course. In his ingenious—
and thoroughly researched—exposé, van Onselen traces the origins

2 Telegraph message from Jameson quoted in ibid., 538–539.

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644

| R O B E R T I . R O T B E R G

of the Raid to the mind and machinations of Hammond, an expert
and highly compensated mining engineer and entrepreneur who
had come to the goldﬁelds in Johannesburg in 1893 and had ridden
across the Matabeleland veldt of Zimbabwe with Rhodes and
Jameson in 1894, scheming all the while.

This book is an innovative micro-history that pays close
attention to industrial economics and labor relations. Few other
authors have written so perceptively about the economics and ﬁ-
nances of the modern mining business. Few have been as steeped
in mining matters while also producing good social history. Few,
when writing about Johannesburg, have so carefully explicated
Hamilton’s strange conspiratorial adventures. The overall result,
Tuttavia, is not explicitly interdisciplinary in the manner that this
journal prefers. It draws from the work of cognate social sciences
by inference only. Infatti, van Onselen pursues most of his
fonti, as well as the evidence in them, in a traditional manner
that ﬁts well with his quest to ﬁnd a solution to the book’s central
conundrum.

Van Onselen portrays Hammond as a romantic, ruthless, E
ambitious blowhard who used fanciful stories to regale Rhodes
and Jameson and, much later, to embellish his autobiography.
Van Onselen also depicts Hammond and Jameson as chancers
and recalcitrants who delighted in skirting, if not breaking, IL
law. Inoltre, Hammond was faint-hearted, yet obsessively
fearful of being called a coward.

Hammond always pushed his own interests and prospects.
After growing up in San Francisco among ex-Confederate gen-
erals and Central American ﬁlibusters like William Walker—the
invader of lower California and Honduras—Hammond made
promising capitalistic connections at Yale, where he honed his
mining knowledge, and in Washington, D.C., among Republi-
can bankers and politicians. As a young man, he operated a silver
mine in northern Mexico, employing questionable practices
while managing to keep both bandits and the soldiers of Presi-
dent Porﬁrio Diaz at bay. His next move was to invest in, E
run, a silver and lead mine in the Coeur d’Alene valley of north-
ern Idaho. Attempting to raise proﬁts, he reduced wages there,
imported scab workers and Pinkerton mercenaries to deter strik-
ing miners, locked out his own employees, thereby stimulating
the militant unionization efforts that eventually spawned the

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THE JAM ESON RAID | 645
Industrial Workers of the World (“the Wobblies”). He was not
above calling in the Idaho National Guard or federal authorities
for help. He left Idaho as a marked man—with the reputation of
being a “bloodsucking” capitalist.

Hardly successful, and hardly a hero in Idaho, Hammond es-
sentially escaped to South Africa after low silver prices, the retreat
from bimetallism, and Grover Cleveland’s presidential victory in
1892 forced him to sell his Idaho mine and seek new fame and
fortune from gold, the bulwark of American and other global cur-
rencies. Hammond’s gift was to understand the new technical pro-
cesses of separating gold from conglomerate—the overburden.
Inoltre, because the extensive goldﬁelds of the Witwatersrand
were of low grade, blasting, separating, and reﬁning were compli-
cated, labor-intensive endeavors that Hammond could help to
manage on behalf of Rhodes’ Consolidated Goldﬁelds Company.
Van Onselen magisterially brings Hammond’s American past
neatly to bear on his South African presence before (and after) IL
Raid. The result is meticulous—what Geertz and others would
call “thick description” of the best kind.3 Van Onselen appears
to be well aware of what each of the many persons involved in
plotting against Kruger were doing day-by-day, almost hour-by-
hour. Infatti, the many intertwined plots that he recounts were
mostly hare-brained or at least haphazard. Hammond, accord-
ing to van Onselen, was a chief instigator of the discontented
miners in Johannesburg who were supposed to trigger and justify
Jameson’s surge across the veldt toward Johannesburg. But the
uprising was beset with serious problems:

(1) Few of the ﬁrearms that the insurgents needed were suc-
cessfully smuggled into the city before Christmas 1895, when the
rising and the Raid were ﬁrst scheduled. (2) The preparations were
shoddy. Hammond and his group of Americans thought that they
had a substantial following of revolutionaries, but only a relatively
few likely suspects turned into serious conspirators. (3) Hammond
had rivals. Several other American mining principals opposed attack-
ing the established order and actively worked to subvert him. (4) IL
timing of the uprising was questionable. Miners and other workers
were reluctant to forgo their holiday celebrations (Christmas fes-
tivities and Boxing Day) for the sake of revolt. (5) Kruger knew

3 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York, 1973), 3.

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646

| R O B E R T I . R O T B E R G

what was happening, almost from the beginning. Secrecy among
the plotters was compromised heavily by informers. (6) Jameson
promised Hammond that he would stay in neighboring British
Bechuanaland (now South Africa’s Northern Cape Province)
and not invade until the rising in Johannesburg had occurred.
But Jameson, whose patience wore thin as he waited on the bor-
der of the Republic with his troops while Hammond kept post-
poning the day of the revolt, impulsively “bolted” before the
plotters were ready (if they ever would have been). He hoped
to summon the rising by entering from the west (right into the
arms of Kruger’s Afrikaner defenders).

The Jameson Raid in its smallest and largest senses was both
farce and tragedy. Fortunately for historians and readers, van Onselen
provides abundant evidence of the magical thinking of the plotting
classes within Johannesburg. Wisely, he spends little time belaboring
the political and social “injustices” under which the mining enter-
prises and the non-Afrikaans-speaking laboring class suffered under
South African Republican rule. The workers and owners were in-
deed uitlanders (outsiders) who had not been granted the franchise.
They were taxed without representation; they had almost no voice
in how Kruger and the ﬁrst and second volksstaad (people’s con-
gresses) governed the Republic and its bullion bonanza. The Re-
public treated its new immigrants as second-class transients, non
contributing members of the agrarian Republic—with its long-
harbored antagonism to imperial rule.

Van Onselen tells us in detail about Hammond’s sub-plot—
the putative plan to ransack Pretoria’s armory and abduct Kruger.
He also outlines the rivalry within frontier Johannesburg between
the leading mining houses and the unwillingness of expert Cornish
hard-rock blasters and shaft sinkers to take part in a plot conceived
by Americans to upend legitimate authority. He further depicts
opportunistic would-be revolutionaries morphing overnight into
reformers willing to strike bargains with a wily Kruger, after the
Raid.

Critics might argue that van Onselen could have told the story of
Hammond and the Jameson Raid more economically. But such a
strategy would have risked the wealth of intricate and interlocking de-
tail that van Onselen provides about how an embryonic Johannesburg
functioned in the 1890s and the years preceding. It also would have
shortchanged the intrigues of the many major and minor players in the

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THE JAM ESON RAID | 647
conspiracy before they arrived at the realization—too late—that they
were all bit players in a slapstick comedy.

Van Onselen’s careful unraveling of the various strands of the
Raid makes Hammond the arch villain. It implies that Rhodes (COME
we knew before) championed the Raid to further his imperial am-
bitions and remove a major obstacle to British hegemony. It paints
Jameson as equally a tool of Rhodes and Hammond and accepts
that Jameson was acting well beyond “instructions” when he set
out from Pitsani on December 29, 1895. Van Onselen concludes
that Hammond attempted to orchestrate Kruger’s overthrow
without even a transient appreciation of the South African Repub-
lic’s formidable strengths, failing to understand the state president’s
sagacity and believing (based on experiences in Mexico and Idaho)
that he could foment an uprising of militant workers who would
remain loyal to a wild scheme.

From van Onselen’s point of view, the riddles of the Raid are
now solved: Hammond was its inventor, and Rhodes, Jameson,
many of his fellow Americans, and other Johannesburgers were
his gullible followers. Many English-speaking mine managers,
lawyers, storekeepers, and workers who chafed under Republican
rule and wanted Kruger’s regime gone were friendly to the inter-
locking cabal—the internal and external assault on Afrikaner hege-
mony in the Republic. But Hammond, the conspirator in chief,
drew his closest support from the numerous Americans who had
come to dig and sell gold. In that sense, the Raid indeed originated
as an American plot—an extension of foreign adventuring that could
be considered a southern African advancing of the Monroe Doctrine.
Van Onselen stretches the evidence (albeit in an interesting fashion),
Tuttavia, when he suggests that the Raid “may, Infatti, have been
the very ﬁrst explosive act in a decade that witnessed America’s
greatest push to extend its formal and informal empires” (470).
Hammond was hardly an instrument of American foreign policy.
Otherwise, van Onselen makes a very good case that Rhodes
was a victim of Hammond’s insouciant persuasiveness; Rhodes saw
Kruger and the Republic as major obstacles to the consolidation of
British interests (and Rhodes’-sponsored mining accomplishments)
in southern Africa. Ma, as van Onselen implies, the Raid would not
have happened without Hammond’s propaganda regarding the ease
of ﬁlibustering and his ability to assure Rhodes that the miners
would rise to oppose continued Afrikaner domination. Nor would

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648

| R O B E R T I . R O T B E R G

Rhodes have been heavily implicated in the plot if he had not
feared a successful American-run coup d’état that would have cul-
minated in a city-state or a republic under local or non-British con-
trol. Rhodes told Stead that if he had not involved himself in the
Raid, “the forces on the spot would soon [have made] short work
of President Kruger. Then I would [have been] faced with an
American Republic” that was “hostile to and jealous of Britain.”4
This new light on the Raid hardly exonerates Rhodes; he was
culpable. But it shifts primary responsibility for the Raid’s failure to
Hammond; Rhodes’ primary error was to believe in Hammond’s
credibility and to trust his good ofﬁces. Hammond, as van Onselen
carefully depicts him, was a self-important scoundrel who largely
evaded punishment for his part in South Africa’s ultimate turmoil.
Infatti, much of the second half of this long and sometimes repet-
itive book is about Hammond’s maneuverings and machinations
after the Raid, and even about his inﬂuence on President William
Howard Taft.

This biography is a magniﬁcent achievement, even though its
subject was a smarmy troublemaker active across continents and cul-
tures. As for Hammond’s baleful inﬂuence on mining, Johannesburg,
and South Africa’s historical evolution toward apartheid, van Onselen
makes an excellent case that he (and other Americans in the 1890s)
played a much bigger and stronger role in shaping modern South
Africa than has hitherto been appreciated.

4 Rhodes, quoted in William Thomas Stead, The Americanisation of the World or the Trend of
the Twentieth Century (London, 1902), 30 (the interview was in 1900). Rhodes and Stead are
fully quoted in van Onselen, Jameson Raid, 462.

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