ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that wars with the Xhosa bred a rising racism amongst those who had once been self-styled champions of the African cause. By the middle of the nineteenth century the political influence of Cape humanitarians and, even more strikingly, their very faith in their civilizing mission had eroded. The early disillusion of the Cape humanitarians also qualifies the conventional periodization of the rise and fall of Cape liberalism in South African historiography. Liberal and revisionist historians of the 1980s concurred that the Cape liberal tradition was ascendant in the mid-nineteenth century and only went into decline in the closing decades of the century. The decline of the Cape humanitarian movement in the 1840s made way for the rise of a new racial conservatism in the 1850s. It was ironically the disillusioned humanitarians themselves, ideologues like John Fairbairn, William Porter and their merchant allies, who formed the core of this mid-century conservative consensus.
