and a puny military detachment were stationed there. 56
Major Henry Warden, the British administrator of the sovereignty, made
a bad situation
worse. Succumbing to pressures from emigrants
and
Wesleyan missionaries, he imposed new internal boundaries that treated
the lesser African chiefdoms as independent
from Moshoeshoe.
But in'
1851, when Warden patched together a force of emigrants and Africans to
give effect to this decision, Moshoeshoe's Basotho won a convincing victo-
ry at Viervoet."?
The British government then started to withdraw
from the highveld.
First, it recalled Smith and sent out two commissioners, who negotiated an
agreement with Pretorius, granting independence to the emigrants in the
territory north of the Vaal River (January
17,
1852).
Next, Smith's suc-
cessor, General Sir George Cathcart,
warned London that to rule the
sovereignty effectively would require a permanent
garrison of two thou-
sand troops and a greatly increased civil establishment, which he knew the
British government would not provide. But before abandoning the territo-
ry, Cathcart believed that, as a matter of honor, Moshoeshoe should be
humiliated. In December 1852, he led a military expedition into Lesotho.
His troops captured
over four thousand
head of cattle, but the people