The Boers won the first victories of the war, using their old commando style of warfare, armed and mounted farmers under elected officers. The British, with far more men, were badly led and managed to win only by sheer weight of numbers.
Because of the guerrilla nature of the war, British forces conducted a "scorched earth" campaign, burning farmhouses and barns and crops to prevent their use by the enemy, and sending captured Boer women and children to camps, where many died. In fact, more people died in the camps than died, both British and Boer, in battle. This "scorched earth" campaign and the horror of the concentration camps embittered the Boers terribly; although they surrendered to the British in 1902, they have never forgotten or forgiven. However, the Boers themselves were barbaric, for they executed all captured natives who had worked for the British armies.
While Britain's policy during the Boer War was full of blunders and brutality, its policy after the war was very liberal and conciliatory. Increasing freedom was given to the newly-captured territories, and in 1910, they were united with other British South African territories in the Union of South Africa, with the former Boer general Louis Botha as prime minister. Botha and his deputy, Jan Christian Smuts, also one of the defeated Boer generals, were in favor of healing the wounds of the war and cooperating with the English-speaking population of the new country. A third Boer general, J. B. M. Hertzog, was not so eager to forget the unreconciled Boers, or Afrikaners, as they now preferred to be called.
The unreconciled Afrikaners eventually found their political home in the National party of General Hertzog and Daniel Malan, a Dutch Reformed Church clergyman. The liberal-minded Afrikaners and the English-speaking South Africans largely belonged to the United party of Generals Botha and Smuts. Except for one brief period of Nationalist coalition government in the 1930s, it was the Botha and Smuts party that ruled the Union until 1948.
