1775 (89 page)

“During 1775,” according to one specialist, “the Spanish king and his advisers could not decide on the diplomatic response they wanted to make to Lexington and Concord.” Spain’s ambassador to France, the Conde de Aranda, a respected former president of the Council of Castile and leader
of a major faction at court, was the principal hawk. He favored “joining the conflict immediately, with the combined forces of France and Spain attacking Great Britain as soon as events warranted.” Aranda even “went so far as to send Madrid a plan outlining the methods whereby the two Bourbon courts could join their naval forces to cut Great Britain’s supply lines and disrupt its commerce.”
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The Marques de Grimaldi, who advocated neutrality and noninvolvement, was restrained by fear of a sudden British attack. With Grimaldi cautious, discussions between France and Spain did not yield “a unified plan of action. In mid-1775, Charles [Carlos III] and his ministers settled for inertia, deciding to continue normal relations with Great Britain and to profess neutrality until events in North America recommended doing otherwise.” This posture was occasionally strained, as in October 1775, when two Spanish ships from central America brought gunpowder to Charleston, provoking an official British complaint.
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With Grimaldi continuing to tell both King Carlos and French foreign minister Vergennes that Britain might attack Spain in the West Indies, in late 1775 the Spanish minister of war sent additional troops to Cuba and Puerto Rico. In addition, “Grimaldi decided to expand the observation responsibilities of the Captain General of Cuba to include the monitoring of all events relating to the Revolution, even those not directly threatening to the Spanish colonies. He notified the French court in early 1776 that Spain would be creating a network of observers in North America to provide regular intelligence.”
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In December 1775, supervision in the hemisphere also began passing to a new and active minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez. He and Grimaldi agreed that in the event of war with Britain, Cuba and Louisiana should become the first line of defense.
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In 1776, despite ostensible neutrality, Carlos III gave France’s agent, Caron de Beaumarchais, one million livres with which to arm the Americans.
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In late summer, the governor of Louisiana, Luis de Unzaga, delivered 98 kegs of gunpowder from the king’s stores to Virginians in New Orleans, who paid and took it upriver to Pittsburgh. Late that year officials including the governors in Havana and Louisiana were instructed by a royal order to supply the Americans with available gunpowder and
fusiles.
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Spain’s principal aspirations were territorial. Policy makers sought to regain the Floridas, to capture both Jamaica and the Bahamas, and to eliminate the lucrative British enclaves for cutting logwood (for dyestuffs) along the east coast of Central America. In Europe, the top Spanish priority was
to recover Gibraltar, taken by Britain in 1713, and secondarily to regain the western Mediterranean island of Minorca. Achieving most of these objectives would constitute a grand reversal of the losses suffered since the mid-seventeenth century, which helps to explain the years of planning and the expenses undertaken. The American Revolution offered a potentially unique opportunity.
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Spain’s carefully timed declaration of war in 1779 was quickly followed up by a string of Spanish victories in the Mississippi Valley and along the Gulf of Mexico, mainly owed to the generalship of the capable Bernardo de Gálvez, who was also well supported. His father was General Mathias de Gálvez, soon to become viceroy of New Spain, and his uncle José de Gálvez, Spanish-based minister for the Indies, both sympathetic to the American enterprise.
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In more or less chronological order, Bernardo de Gálvez’s military successes included the capture of British forts in Manchac, Natchez, and Baton Rouge (September to October 1779), the taking of Mobile (March 1780), the successful defense of St. Louis (May 1780), the capture of Fort St. Joseph in Michigan (February 1781), and the capture of Pensacola (May 1781). Then in May 1782, after a combined Spanish and American expedition took New Providence in the Bahamas, the agreement of capitulation turned over all of the Bahama Islands to Spain. In Central American fighting over a set of British trade concessions, General Mathias de Gálvez won most of the battles in Nicaragua, Honduras, and along the Mosquito Coast. However, although their access was narrowed, Britons kept their Central American toeholds.
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Logwood concessions or minor battles along the Mosquito Coast are not the point. Simply put, without Spain’s 1775–1782 role as an early source of munitions and financial aid, and then as an open American ally, the Revolution would have been less successful. For example, as
Chapter 25
will pursue, a revealing chronological overlap can be seen. The second British invasion of the American South, relatively successful in 1779 and 1780, started to falter in 1781. Even before Yorktown, those were the months when Lord Cornwallis’s loss of irreplaceable men in the Carolinas through costly battles like King’s Mountain, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, and Eutaw Springs was aggravated by the string of Spanish victories that culminated in their May 1781 capture of Pensacola, where 1,113 British prisoners were taken.
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It is also clear that Spain played an important role—perhaps even a decisive one—in arranging for Admiral de Grasse and the French fleet to
put aside other agendas and provide a September-October naval umbrella as arriving forces under George Washington and French General Rochambeau combined in Virginia to trap Cornwallis on the Yorktown Peninsula. Because the Spanish had agreed to protect several French Caribbean islands with their navy while de Grasse was gone, and also to finance part of the Chesapeake expedition, the French admiral, with 26 ships of the line, arrived off the Virginia Capes on August 31 and stayed through October. On September 5, de Grasse repulsed British Admiral Thomas Graves—a different Graves, not the one who failed earlier in Boston—whose 19 ships were unable to break through the 24 men-of-war de Grasse now deployed. This was classic line-of-battle warfare, in which American skills with fast schooners or whaleboats were an irrelevance. With the French fleet blocking relief, Cornwallis had to surrender on October 19.

The French and Spanish navies had put the Royal Navy in a two-ocean squeeze. During August and early September, they massed a combined fleet of 49 ships of the line—disproportionately Spanish—not far from England’s southwestern coast, and the British Cabinet’s priority need to protect the home islands meant that no naval reinforcements could be spared for North America, which doomed Cornwallis. For this chapter’s purpose, the Spanish role requires particular emphasis. Historian Jonathan Dull, in his book
The French Navy and American Independence,
explained that de Grasse must share his laurels for sailing to the Chesapeake with “two extraordinary young Spaniards, Bernardo de Gálvez and Francisco de Saavedra. Gálvez (1746–1786) was acting governor of Louisiana…It was in his power as senior military commander in the theater to request part of de Grasses’s fleet. Not only did he release all of de Grasse’s ships, but also the corps at St. Domingue which had been placed in Spanish service. To coordinate plans with de Grasse he sent his principal aide to Cape Francois aboard Montiel’s flagship. This aide, Francisco de Saavedra (1746–1819), was actually a representative of the Colonial Ministry, which was headed by Gálvez’ uncle, Jose de Gálvez. In his extraordinary career, Saavedra would become finance minister of Spain and an organizer of the resistance to Napoleon; for his role in de Grasse’s campaign alone he merits serious historical attention.”
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Indeed, Saavedra put some of that financial acumen to immediate use. In July, after the French could not raise funds locally, the future Spanish finance minister arranged for citizens of Spanish Havana, in a single day, to contribute 5 million livres for the North American expedition. Supposedly they were grateful for shipments of American wheat.
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Even after Yorktown’s surrender in October 1781, British troops continued to occupy Savannah and Charleston through much of 1782. However, the Spanish victory at Pensacola and the subsequent joint Spanish-American capture of the Bahamas in May 1782 effectively ensured that Britain would have to return East and West Florida to Spain at the peace tables. This unwelcome political geography more or less extinguished British hopes of holding on to Georgia and the Carolinas, which meant that London’s carefully undertaken second “southern strategy” had been in vain.

Unfortunately for Spain’s own hoped-for
reconquista,
that nation’s overall military results fell short of what Gálvez managed individually. Despite Spanish victories at Pensacola and in the Bahamas, and some successes in Central America, Britain held on to Jamaica. Several invasions of that island were jointly planned by the French and Spanish between 1780 and 1782, but none were ever mounted. To an extent, that reflected the priority given the American Revolution. The last chance vanished in April 1782 with British Admiral Rodney’s victory over a French and Spanish fleet at the Îles des Saintes off Guadeloupe. In Europe, Gibraltar was besieged off and on for two years but never fell, and Spain’s recapture of Minorca was a small consolation prize.

By 1783, even the archhawk, the Conde de Aranda, had concluded that Spain should not have supported the French lead in a war in the Americas “opposed to our own [Spanish] interests.” The independent North American colonies would now threaten more “grief and fear” inasmuch as their success would inspire convulsions in Spain’s own colonies.
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This proved true. Tensions with yesteryear’s ally grew along the Louisiana and Florida frontiers, and several prominent Americans—Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson—lost their reputations for conspiring with Spain.

Politically and territorially, the United States was the only real winner. However, by the early twentieth century, Hispanic Americans and French Americans had gained a different kind of recognition. Up and down the Mississippi Valley, and west to Arizona and California, Spain’s 1779–1782 mobilization and war effort has been increasingly treated as the American Revolution in state after state. Historical reviews cover as “their” revolution Spanish engagements from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. Organizations like the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution extend membership to persons descended from Spanish soldiers.

In Louisiana, for example, the ethnic outreach of the Daughters of the American Revolution began in the 1920s. Visitors to the town of
St. Martinville in Louisiana’s Lafayette Parish will see a 1974 DAR monument to the (largely French) Attakapas Militia for their service in Gálvez’s capture of Baton Rouge and Manchac in September 1779.

In Texas, an organization called the Granaderos (grenadiers) de Gálvez encourages awareness of the Spanish role in the Revolution. The principal Texas connection lies in the Texas Longhorn cattle drives initiated by Gálvez in 1779 to feed the Spanish and Allied armies in the Mississippi Valley. As a young lieutenant, he had led Spanish troops against the Apache, going as far east as the Pecos River, and he remembered the cattle in Texas’s Bexar-La Bahía region. At that time, they could not be exported to other provinces and were worth little. But in 1779 Gálvez secured authorization, and through 1782, 9,000 head were driven east to Louisiana, guarded by soldiers and militia from Bexar, La Bahía, and El Fuerte del Cibola.
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In 1976, a statue of Bernardo de Gálvez was dedicated in Washington, D.C., at Virginia Avenue and 22nd Street, where it sits near statues of Simon Bolívar, Benito Juárez, and other Latin American liberators. The various Daughters and Sons have much the better understanding. Gálvez fought his battles in what is now the United States and has become a hero of the
American
Revolution.

Britain and the Alienation of Two Continents, 1775–1783

Early in the Revolution, when Virginia burgesses wore tomahawks and fringed hunting shirts to empathize with republican virtue, Patriot leaders often glibly referred to “the Continent.” Many were speaking of the Continental Congress, although it was not in fact Continental, lacking any representatives from Quebec, Hudson’s Bay, Nova Scotia, the Bahamas, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, California, or the rest of New Spain. Thomas Paine, for one, referred to “the Continent” as if that entity were interchangeable with the thirteen United Colonies. Had that been true—had the conflict in North America not also involved provinces and colonies of Continental Europe—the results might have been less favorable for the English-speaking rebels.

Once Spain declared war in 1779, and Hispanic
vaqueros
began driving Texas longhorns east to feed Spanish soldiers in Louisiana and Virginia riflemen in Illinois, while French-speaking militia marched on Mobile in Spanish uniforms, the notion of a North American continent aroused against Britain became more plausible. What started in Massachusetts and
Virginia had, in a sense, spread to Bayou Teche, San Antonio de Bexar, and Alta California.

Even so, it was another alienated continent, Europe, that truly cost Britain her rebellious North American colonies. Since late in the Seven Years War, Britain had offended almost every nation in Europe, although Portugal remained London’s ally and George III had cousins or in-laws in virtually every North German Protestant principality. The evidence that Britain had dangerously alienated most of the Continent is detailed and surprising.

To many influential Britons, trade, wealth, and empire, particularly in burgeoning North America, were what had made Britain strong—powerful enough to win her war in 1759 and 1760, and confident enough to crow during the 1760s that a rich island did not need Continental allies. Many of the king’s most reliable supporters in Parliament—the Scots and the old Bedford, Grenville, and Sandwich factions—heartily subscribed to a dual mercantilist and navalist explanation of British success. Lord Sandwich, as secretary of state in 1764, remarked that Britain’s influence depended on “making a proper use of its power as an island.” In 1765, Thomas Whately, secretary to the treasury, had further amplified: “The trade from whence [Britain’s] greatest wealth is derived, and upon which its maritime power is principally founded, depends on a wise and proper use of the colonies.”
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