John Paterson (Cape politician)
John ("Jock") Paterson (1822 – 1880) was a prominent politician and successful businessman of the Cape Colony, and had a great influence on the development of Port Elizabeth where he was based.
He ran newspapers, established the Grey Institute and played a significant role in founding South Africa's Standard Bank.
Born and raised in Aberdeen, Scotland, Paterson studied at Marischal university college and emigrated to Port Elizabeth in 1841 to take up a position as a school master.
He had made a series of property investments on the outskirts of the expanding town of Port Elizabeth, and a range of other business enterprises.
He also briefly served as the Consular Agent for the United States in Port Elizabeth, and gained much American business for his trading firm though this.
In this, he differed from the radical members of the "separatist league", who were based further east in Grahamstown, were led by Robert Godlonton, and who proposed absolute and immediate separation.
He also angered Godlonton's Grahamstown clique by his blocking of their Kowie harbour proposal, which he saw as potentially taking shipping activity away from Port Elizabeth.
The separatist movement began a gradual decline due to a growing fear in the Midlands around Port Elizabeth and Graaff-Reinett that if they attained separation then they would fall under the domination of Grahamstown.
Paterson therefore returned to his fight for a moderate form of separation – so as to avoid dominance by either Cape Town to the west, or Grahamstown to the east.
Together with Molteno's policy of drawing ministers from the Eastern Cape into his government, and the general rising prosperity of the whole country, this effectively crushed the separatist movement.
[10] There was little local enthusiasm for the project, and its timing was particularly unfortunate – coming when the various southern African states were still simmering after the last bout of British imperial expansion.
In a series of letters between him and Carnarvon (The Confederation Despatch, 1876), Paterson discreetly offered the British Colonial Office his support against the Molteno government in exchange for vague promises of a future leadership position.
[11] When Molteno, by now furious with Paterson for what he saw as a betrayal of the Cape's independence and democracy, made it clear that he was willing to resign but not to endorse confederation, Frere used the authority of the British Colonial Office to suspend the elected Cape government and assumed direct control in 1878 (appointing Gordon Sprigg as his puppet Prime Minister, instead of Paterson who was at the time considered too divisive a politician for the job).
The American was then dramatically wrecked off West Africa, when its propeller-shaft snapped, bent and tore open part of the ship's plating.
His obituary in the Cape Argus, while acknowledging the political controversy and hostility he sometimes caused, paid tribute to his zeal for what he believed to be right, and to his enormous achievements.
The American, in which vessel he took his passage, sustained shipwreck, but he escaped in the Senegal, which ship grounded a few days afterwards, and Mr Paterson went to the bottom.
