1775 (88 page)

The evidence of 1775, as we have seen, showed that much of Europe and the Caribbean and even bits of Africa were
already
abetting that upheaval. Gunpowder and munitions in considerable quantities were crossing the Atlantic from Sweden, Hamburg, Holland, the Austrian Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, and West Africa’s Slave Coast. Besides French and Spanish annoyance, Austria resented King George’s intrusions in German politics and Prussia vented Frederick the Great’s personal pique over perceived British insults. The Dutch, ever commercial, mostly disliked British interference with their trade and shipping. But during the heady early 1760s, hubristic British policy makers often seemed not to care.

A few British critics cautioned against overconfidence. The philosopher David Hume worried in 1764 about Britain being tempted by the Roman “spirit of conquest” and lulled by smug certainty about London’s wealth and fiscal prowess.
¹
As if to substantiate Hume, Lord Sandwich, then a principal secretary of state, commented grandly in 1764 that while Britain would be slow to form new alliances, it would “renew our old ones when proper attention was paid to us by those whose interest it is to be united with us.”
²
Bow twice to London, or take your chances. To the playwright Oliver Goldsmith in 1763, “Great Britain is stronger, fighting by herself and for herself, than if half Europe were her allies.”
³
But in the 1770s, it would become painfully clear that Britain had almost no allies.

In late 1775, as push came to shove over Britain’s quest for mercenaries, the Dutch declined to let Britain borrow Holland’s so-called Scots Brigade to serve in America. Catherine of Russia decided against letting the British contract for 20,000 Russian soldiers. Frederick of Prussia, still angry, not only encouraged Catherine’s refusal but worked to undercut British
Soldatenpolitik
among the German princes.
⁴
Austrian officials, taking a cue from anti-English coregent Joseph II, sought to block George III from using his dual role as Elector of Hanover to recruit soldiers within the German (Holy Roman) Empire. Indeed, King George manipulated Hanover when, in his capacity as elector, he sent Hanoverian troops to Gibraltar and Minorca in order to release British units there to be sent to America.

During 1775 at least four empires—France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria—favored or tolerated their merchants’ covert selling of arms to the American rebels. An overlapping foursome—the Netherlands, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—either turned down or interfered with King George’s efforts to procure mercenaries. One British historian has found predictions that British hauteur toward allies “would leave her without one single friend in Europe” dating back to the late 1750s.
⁵

The existing Spanish and French settlements in North America included numerous rebel sympathizers. Spanish colonial administrators looked the other way as local merchants shipped munitions to American Patriots through Charleston and New Orleans.
⁶
Not a few French speakers in what until 1763 had been King Louis’s colonies—
habitants
in Quebec and Louisiana, Acadians in present-day New Brunswick—preferred joining the American rebels to soldiering under the British flag. The Acadians sourly remembered their ethnic expulsion from Nova Scotia at British hands in 1755. In Louisiana and New Orleans, Frenchmen serving in Spanish militia units became American allies once Madrid declared war in 1779. Many would fight against the British in a succession of Spanish victories from Pensacola, Florida, to St. Joseph on the distant shores of Lake Michigan. In 1778 and 1779, many settlers of French descent in Illinois and Indiana allied with George Rogers Clark to capture British forts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes.

On America’s far-off North Pacific coast, the early 1770s saw a convergence and clash of Spanish, Russian, and British ambitions. A new arena was in the making. The extent to which Spain was thinking imperially again had much to do with her reawakening plans for North America.

French, Spanish, and Russian North America in 1775

The continent of 1775 had already become a geopolitical chessboard of global consequence, and most European governments had some interest. Perceptions of North America’s booming population, wealth, and prospects between 1750 and 1775 had convinced many of Britain’s European rivals and
ill wishers that a successful rebellion there would be the best way to cripple Albion Perfide. King George himself worried about that possibility.

The vulnerability of Britain in North America is easily overstated. Certainly no plausible colonial revolt or global war could drive her off the continent. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France had built a power base along the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi Valley, England had carved out a huge fur-trading empire in the far north, centered on Hudson’s Bay. In 1775, these tracts—governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company—stretched from Labrador in the east across the huge bay and then west to Saskatchewan. This Arctic-fronting domain had nothing to do with Massachusetts or Virginia; it was safely British, although the French did capture one Hudson’s Bay post in 1782. Vergennes, the French foreign minister, speculated from time to time about some degree of Gallic restoration in Canada. France would like to have regained the Newfoundland fisheries. But in the continent’s far north, Britain was entrenched.

Fortunately for the English-speaking rebels, though, Spain in 1763 had become Britain’s principal foe in North America. Spanish king Carlos III, being obliged by the peace treaty to yield Florida (then also including much of Mississippi and Alabama) to the victorious British, was richly compensated by his French ally. King Louis XV deeded over Louisiana, essentially the western half of the Mississippi Valley, together with the port of New Orleans. Combined with already-Spanish Texas, the Southwest, and California, Madrid’s power base in North America now included most of the present-day United States west of the Mississippi (excluding Hawaii, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest). By 1775, moreover, after a decade of domestic reform and rejuvenation, imperially minded Spaniards had great hopes.

Back in the mid-1600s, two centuries of Spanish preeminence in Europe had collapsed following the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). Confirmation came in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, which passed political, economic, and military leadership to France. However, Philip of Bourbon took the throne of Spain in 1700, effectively allying the two nations in the so-called Bourbon Compact. This was reaffirmed and updated in 1761, and coincided with a period in which Spain modernized her economy, trade, and colonial administration.
⁷
Succinctly put, Spain, together with France, might again be a force. What had not changed, though, was traditional Spanish hostility toward Britain; if anything, it had intensified. By the 1770s, Madrid began to entertain far-ranging ambitions—not just to curb
illicit British trade in Central America and to expand north from Spanish California, but also to recover both Florida and Gibraltar from Britain.

With this new bravura, a Spanish military force from Buenos Aires in June 1770 ejected the small British garrison in Port Egmont, in the Falkland Islands. For Britain, the Falklands were a staging post for a drive into the Pacific. Still, when hawks in the British Parliament shrilled for war, the Madrid government allowed the irate British back into the Falklands.

In moments of reverie, Spanish officials doubtless imagined a new geopolitical opportunity. The nation’s earlier military supremacy had been lost in European defeats, but North America was now becoming an important enough battleground that Spanish success there could trump near-irrelevance in yesteryear’s European theaters. Perhaps an empire defeated in Germany and the Low Countries could recoup militarily in the Mississippi Valley or along the Gulf of Mexico.

Russian contemplation of a growing world role was more soundly based. To the west, her imperialists sought a naval presence in the Mediterranean. To the east, they gazed across Siberia to Kamchatka, Russia’s peninsula on the Pacific. Beyond lay the Aleutian Islands and North America. Several years after taking the throne in 1762, Catherine the Great ordered the resumption of the earlier Great Northern Expeditions, which in 1741-1742 had reached the Aleutians.
⁸
By 1768, new voyages from Kamchatka had explored well down the latter-day Alaska Coast to the Dixon Entrance, in the southern part of the Alaskan Panhandle.
⁹

Here is where the reenergizing of Spain mattered. Officials in Mexico and California felt menaced by rumors of Russian settlements pushing south in the wake of naval exploration.
¹⁰
Under the leadership of José de Gálvez, minister of the Indies, Madrid responded by establishing a new naval base in Mexico to support northward exploration, and by colonizing San Diego and Monterrey.
¹¹
In 1773, the viceroy in Mexico City ordered expeditions to sail farther north and assert Spain’s territorial claim. The second of these voyages, in 1775, included three vessels under the command of one Bruno de Hezeta. Departing in March from the new San Blas naval base, they got as far north as upper Vancouver Island. Together, the three crews found what became San Francisco’s Golden Gate and sailed past the mouth of the Columbia River well before its recognized discovery in 1793.
¹²

The British, besides renewing their own efforts to find the Northwest Passage, began planning for Captain James Cook to make a third exploratory voyage, this time to the North Pacific and the Bering Strait. As for
the Russians, scholars once convinced that they were principally pursuing geographic knowledge have contended in recent years that their real mission was “to extend Russian sovereignty into northwestern America with the eventual aim of exploiting its natural resources.”
¹³
Thousands of miles to the south, Spanish, Russian, and British explorations were also converging in the waters near the Hawaiian Islands.

No one can say how much such Pacific rivalries shaped broader Spanish or Russian strategy in the mid-1770s. Even so, Madrid’s agitation over Russia’s supposed southward thrust toward California must be taken as an indicator of resurgent Spanish self-importance and geopolitical ambition. For the thirteen United Colonies, these stirrings could not have come at a better time.

With respect to Catherine’s interest in asserting Russian claims in North America or in thwarting British naval power, there is no obvious tie to her impolite refusal of King George’s request to hire 20,000 troops. However, Alaska historian Lydia Black, author of
Russians in Alaska: 1732–1867,
described the czarina as involved from the start with Russia’s claims in America, adding that “the empress’s personal interest in America did not abate until the end of Catherine’s reign [in 1796].”
¹⁴

Because the future United States was still decades away from flexing even youthful muscles in these regions, general American histories pay almost no attention to events along the Pacific Coast in 1775. What seems clear, though, is that during Spain’s brief quarter century of imperial rejuvenation, resurgent ambitions led her to make significant, if generally unrecognized, contributions to the American Revolution.

Spain and the American Revolution

Madrid paid close attention. As the Revolution began, high Spanish officials, especially the principal minister of state, the Marques de Grimaldi, voiced periodic qualms about the large number of soldiers Britain was sending to America to subdue its rebellious colonists. Should that fighting finish quickly, Grimaldi reasoned, might not the British redeploy these troops to attack Spain’s possessions in the West Indies? A belligerent faction in Parliament had urged war with Spain in 1772 following the Falklands incident, although the Spanish Embassy in London played down the threat.
¹⁵

Which leads to the crux. By the 1770s, it was Spain, not France, with whom Britain essentially shared North America. The two confronted each
other along an already trouble-prone border that ran from present-day Minnesota down the Mississippi River past St. Louis to New Orleans. Like France, Spain wanted revenge—in Madrid’s case, a sweeping enough recovery of territory to roll back a century of losses, encroachments, and British incursions. That kind of war would necessarily involve a large military and economic commitment.

During the dozen years between 1763 and 1775, Spain’s relevant reforms and modernization plans ran the gamut from a reorganization of public finance and expulsion of the Jesuits to a rejuvenation of Madrid, reforms in colonial administration, changes in the colonial trade system, and freer trade in the Spanish Caribbean.
¹⁶
Many of the gains were minor or tenuous, soon vanishing in the tumult of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. But the mid-1770s were a time when Spanish officialdom took renewal seriously.

To return to those years, the expansion of both Bourbon Compact navies had put their combined numbers of ships of the line ahead of Britain’s, the British Admiralty’s worst-case scenario. Back in 1765, British naval tonnage still exceeded that of France and Spain combined; by 1770, the Bourbon powers were definitely ahead, and with respect to 1775, historians appear to disagree. There is also an obvious caveat: what counted more were ships actually ready to do battle. If King George, Lord North, and the British Cabinet of 1774–1775 were foolish in failing to take seriously the Americans’ drift toward war and the rebels’ considerable capacity for maritime annoyance, the various British Cabinets of the 1760s and early 1770s could be faulted at least as harshly for misjudging or discounting French and Spanish naval intentions and capabilities.

As successive leading world powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, neither Britain nor the United States respected Spain in a military sense, and an eighteenth-century precursor of this disregard may help to explain latter-day U.S. reluctance to acknowledge the considerable Spanish role in the American Revolution. In addition to one respected earlier Spanish account—
España ante la independencia de los Estados Unidos,
published in 1925—there have been several recent Spanish and American volumes, but attention remains inadequate.
¹⁷