The Boer commandos were defeated and General Pretorius and the remainder of his men fled north across the Vaal river. : 230 Commandant-General Andries Pretorius led the commandos against the British forces later that year, at the battle of Boomplaats, near Smithfield. In 1848 the British Governor of the Cape, Sir Harry Smith, issued a proclamation declaring British sovereignty over all the lands to the north and to the south of the Vaal river. : 225 At this time, this new country included the area north (Potchefstroom) and south (Winburg) of the Vaal river. During April 1838 Potgieter returned to the area north of the Vaal river and founded the town of Potchefstroom. : 224 Boers started settling on both sides of the Vaal river and in March 1838, Potgieter, Uys and the men of their commando provided relief to Gerrit Maritz, and early in April 1838, Uys and his son were killed. Potgieter declared the lands north and south of the Vaal river as Boer lands. The establishment of the South African Republic had its origins in 1837 when the commandos of Potgieter and Piet Uys defeated a Matabele raiding party of Moselekatse and drove them back over the Limpopo river. Potgieter's group remained at the Vet river and founded a town called Winburg. Louis Trichardt and Jan van Rensburg split off from Hendrik Potgieter's group, and continued on to establish Zoutpansberg. In 1835, one of the large groups of Boers arrived at the Vet river. In truth, the allocated money was simply too little to cover even half of the claims. : 199 The settlers believed incorrectly that the Cape Colony administration had taken the money due to them as payment for freeing their slaves. This caused further dissatisfaction among the Dutch settlers. The Dutch settlers disputed the requirement that they had to lodge their claims in Britain and that the value of the slaves was many times the allocated amount. Britain abolished slavery in 1834 and allocated the sum of 1,200,000 British pounds as recompense for the Dutch settlers' slaves. As the Bible, churches, schools and culture of many of the settlers were Dutch, this caused a lot of friction.
The British had proclaimed the English language as the only language of the Cape Colony and prohibited the use of the Dutch language. There were many reasons why the Boers left the Cape Colony among the initial reasons were the language laws. Subsequently a number of its Dutch-speaking inhabitants trekked inland, first in smaller numbers, then in groups as large as almost a hundred people, after 1834 even in groups of hundreds. The United Kingdom took over from the Netherlands as the colonial power at the Cape of Good Hope in 1806.
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