Scottish Ancestors in The Second Boer War

With the 1885 discovery of gold in Transvaal, thousands of British and other prospectors and settlers streamed over the border from the Cape Colony (anexed by Britain earlier) and from across the globe. The city of Johannesburg sprang up as a shanty town nearly overnight as the uitlanders (foreigners) poured in and settled near the mines. The uitlanders rapidly outnumbered the Boers on the Rand, but remained a minority in the Transvaal as a whole. The Afrikaners, nervous and resentful of the uitlanders' presence, denied them voting rights and taxed the gold industry heavily. In response, there was pressure from the uitlanders and the British mine owners to overthrow the Boer government. In 1895, Cecil Rhodes sponsored a failed coup d'état backed by an armed incursion, the Jameson Raid.

The failure to gain improved rights for Britons was used to justify a major military buildup in the Cape, since several key British colonial leaders favoured annexation of the Boer republics. These included the Cape Colony governor Sir Alfred Milner, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and mining syndicate owners (nicknamed the gold bugs) such as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato and Lionel Phillips. Confident that the Boers would be quickly defeated, they attempted to precipitate a war.

President Martinus Steyn of the Orange Free State invited Milner and Kruger (President of the Transvaal) to attend a conference in Bloemfontein which started on 30 May 1899, but negotiations quickly broke down. In September 1899, Chamberlain sent an ultimatum demanding full equality for British citizens resident in Transvaal.

Kruger, seeing that war was inevitable, simultaneously issued his own ultimatum prior to receiving Chamberlain's. This gave the British 48 hours to withdraw all their troops from the border of Transvaal; otherwise the Transvaal, allied with the Orange Free State, would declare war.