Spain and the American Revolution

New Approaches and Perspectives

Gabriel Paquette, Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, Gabriel Paquette, Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429816086
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Though the participation of France in the American Revolution is well established in the historiography, the role of Spain, France's ally, is relatively understudied and underappreciated. Spain's involvement in the conflict formed part of a global struggle between empires and directly influenced the outcome of the clash between Britain and its North American colonists. Following the establishment of American independence, the Spanish empire became one of the nascent republic's most significant neighbors and, often illicitly, trading partners. Bringing together essays from a range of well-regarded historians, this volume contributes significantly to the international history of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions.

1 Introduction

Spain and the American Revolution

Gabriel Paquette and Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia

At the Palace of Aranjuez, outside of Madrid, in the summer of 1780, war was in the air. Spain, together with its ally France, had in the previous year launched a failed armada to invade Britain, which, had it achieved even its most modest aims, would have brought the war to an end. In the middle of this escalating conflict between Western European powers, a relatively minor—if extremely well-connected—playwright and man of letters, Richard Cumberland, arrived, with his burgeoning family, as an official emissary of the British government. Cumberland, whose inexperience, temperament and talent proved ill-suited for the delicate diplomacy with which he was entrusted,¹ had been forbidden to enter into negotiations with Count Floridablanca, Spain’s chief Minister, unless he received explicit word that Spain did not intend to broach the subject of cession or exchange of either Gibraltar or Minorca.² He had not received such an assurance, but engaged with the Spanish minister anyway.

Also in residence at Aranjuez that sweltering summer was an emissary from the rebellious 13 seaboard North American colonies, John Jay. Those rebels had entered into an alliance with France, Spain’s arch ally. One might expect Jay to have been warmly received and Cumberland treated coolly, but the reception was the inverse of this expectation. As Cumberland informs us in his Memoirs, the Prince of Asturias, the heir to the Spanish throne, entertained his family, and the King himself “gave orders for any pictures to be taken down [from his various Madrid and Escorial palace galleries] and placed at an easel, which I might wish to have a nearer view of; he also gave directions for a catalogue to be made at my request, which I have published and attached to my account of the Spanish painters.”³

Contrast this lavish hospitality and convivial, languorous summer interlude with Jay’s treatment. By any measure, Jay was by far the more impressive of the two men: he had served as President of the Continental Congress, and he would go on, following American independence, to hold the offices of Secretary of State, Governor of New York, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Yet he was rarely (and, even then, furtively,) invited to dine and socialize with the Spanish aristocratic families who summered with the royal family in Aranjuez. He was the emissary of recalcitrant colonies Spain did not recognize, even if its chief ally, France, did. Jay’s audiences with Floridablanca at this time were infrequent, informal, and unsatisfying. Jay was dejected, for the purpose of his mission was to convince Spain to enter the war formally on the American side, to provide material and monetary aid directly, and to begin the task of delineating the border demarcating what he was certain would soon be an independent polity, carved from the British empire, and the Spanish empire.

He had made, by the summer of 1780, little headway on any of these three fronts. Jay was perplexed by Spanish obduracy. As he wrote to John Adams, future President of the US and then emissary to the French Court, “Spain will be our Neighbor. We both have territory enough to prevent our coveting each others’ and I should be happy to see that perfect amity and cordial affection established between us, which would ensure perpetual peace and harmony to both.”⁴ To his chagrin, Spain did not view matters the same way. While engaged in his fruitless mission, Jay received messages of encouragement from two of the great figures of the American Revolution, imploring him to continue his courtship of Spain and not to despair when his entreaties were rebuffed or ignored altogether. Adams tried to revive Jay’s spirits:

[Floridablanca] is agreed to be a man of abilities, but some how or other, there is something in the European understanding different from those we have been more used to. Men of the greatest abilities, and the most experience, are with great difficulty brought to see what appears to us as clear as day. It is habit, it is education, prejudice, what you will, but so it is.⁵

Adopting a somewhat different approach to shake Jay from his despondency, polymath patriot Benjamin Franklin reminded Jay that,

Spain owes us nothing therefore whatever friendship she shows us in lending money or furnishing cloathing & Ca., tho’ not equal to our wants and wishes, is however tant de gagné; those who have begun to assist us are more likely to continue than to decline, and we are still so much obliged as their Aids amount to.⁶

This introductory chapter will assess what aid Spain provided to the American cause and what that aid amounted to in the outcome of the American Revolution.

The historiography of Spain’s involvement in the American Revolution

On both sides of the Atlantic, the study of the role of the Spanish Monarchy in the War of American Independence has been heavily influenced by the perceptions of Spain and the United States in each other’s eyes. On the United States’ side, interest in Spain and its history began during the first half of the nineteenth century with the works of Washington Irving (1828, 1829, 1831, 1832), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1863a, 1863b, 1863c, 1863d, 1843), George Ticknor (1823, 1849), and, especially, William Hickling Prescott (1838, 1843, 1847, 1858–1859). From this milieu emerged what Richard L. Kagan called Prescott’s Paradigm, “created by a Protestant intellectual and social elite centered in Boston and New York” (Brown, 2002, ix), in which Spain was “everything that the United States was not” (Kagan, 2002b, 9, 2002c). The Spanish American War, which began in 1898, reinforced this disparaging depiction while adding strong negative undertones rooted in the anti-Catholic “Black Legend” of Spain’s alleged nefarious conduct in the colonization of the Americas.⁷ It was not a coincidence that precisely in that year a re-edition of a seventeenth-century English book was published, this time with the telling title Horrible Atrocities of Spaniards in Cuba. An Historical and True Account of the cruel massacre and slaughter of 20,000,000 of people in the West Indies by the Spaniards (Powell 1971, 160; Hanke 1963).⁸

Map 1.1 The Americas c. 1775

The twentieth century would witness a slow shift in Spain’s image in America. An important factor contributing to the reappraisal was the undoubtedly romantic, positive vision of Archer Milton Huntington, who in 1904 founded New York’s Hispanic Society and, in 1927, donated his massive collection to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the seed of this institution’s prestigious Hispanic Division. Another crucial contributor in this period was historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1920, 1930, 1933, 1939), whose work on borderlands would summon the attention of American historians to the Spanish imprint in the history of the United States. The 1930s witnessed a renewed interest in Spain, as a newly founded Spanish Republic strove toward the ideals of democracy and liberty that the United States considered as genuinely American. A new image of Spain emerged, tinged with romanticism as well, which, according to Gabriel Jackson (2001), crystallized into a new paradigm, shaped indelibly by Ernest Hemingway (Noya, Rodríguez and Ruiz 2008), from which emerged the works of Samuel Flagg Bemis (1926 [1960], 1931, 1957) and John Walton Caughey (1934 [1998]).

The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s would polarize the image of Spain in the US. While some would support the Spanish Republic, even with the blood of the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, others, especially the Catholic community, would support the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco (Tierney 2007). US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration would declare the US’s neutrality in the conflict in line with the policy of non-intervention adopted by the United Kingdom and France, which was followed by 27 European countries under the Non-Intervention Agreement. The close alignment of Franco with the Axis Powers during the Civil War and first years of the Second World War accounted for Spain’s international isolation after 1945, which produced not only a lack of interest in Spain within academic circles and from the American public, but also denied impoverished Spain the beneficence of the Marshall Plan.

The Cold War, however, would provide Franco with the opportunity to polish his anti-communist credentials, allowing Spain to become a second-class ally through the three US–Spanish Agreements, signed in 1953, that granted several military bases on Spanish territory to the United States. It was during this decade that both governments tried to improve their respective images in the other. While the United States included Spain in the Fulbright Scholarships Program in 1959, Spain could do little more than sponsor some publications about the historical relations between the two countries (Morales Padrón 1952a, 1952b, 1955a, 1955b; Hayes 1952; Gil 1952a, 1952b; Sanz y Díaz 1953; Manfredi 1955). In the late 1970s, Spain’s transition towards a full democracy, its economic development, and the positive image projected by a young king contributed to the normalization of the image of Spain in the United States, in the sense of stripping it of most of its old romantic connotations. Bilateral relations became more balanced with Spain’s membership of NATO (1982) and the European Economic Community (1986), and the signature in 1998 of the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement and the Agreement on Defense Cooperation between Spain and the United States (revised by two protocols in 2012, and a third one in 2015).

The final factor to take into account when considering Spain’s image in the United States is its double status both as a European and a Latin American country. That Spain is a European country derives from a simple geographical fact, though it must not be forgotten that parts of Spain are also geographically in the eastern Atlantic and Africa (the Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla). Spain’s Latin American dimension requires some explanation. When the US Census Office classifies US citizens and residents by country of origin, it includes the category of Hispanics, also known as Latinos, and in the list of countries included under this heading is Spain. Therefore, the descendants of Spaniards living in the US and Spanish immigrants who have become citizens or residents of the United States are officially members of the Hispanic community. This demographic classification has had implications beyond the realm of bureaucracy, extending to the perception of Spanish history in the United States.

In Spain, the study of the Spanish Monarchy’s role in the American War of Independence would emerge from a combination of political interests and the effects of a certain Spanish inferiority complex vis-à-vis the United States. In the 1920s, books by Valentín Urtasún (1920–1924), Manuel Conrotte (1920), and Juan F. Yela Utrilla (1925) shared the aim of nationalistic historical vindication. For some of these writers, Spain’s crucial role was insufficiently recognized by the Americans because they were either ungrateful or could not fathom the notion of owing anything to Spain.⁹ It would take more than three decades and the Cold War, when the Franco regime needed to portray itself as a viable partner of the United States, for the next, more conciliatory wave of histories to appear.¹⁰ In the late 1970s, the same motivation, but this time under the newly established Spanish constitutional monarchy that emerged after Franco, accounted for renewed interest in the subject. Taking advantage of the bicentenary of American Independence, a plethora of studies would appear, most of them published through official patronage. In particular, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, besides publishing a collection of historical studies by renowned Spanish historians, undertook the monumental task of collating and printing a Collection of Documents Related to the Independence of North America in Spanish Archives, which took more than a decade (1977 to 1986) to compile and ultimately filled 14 volumes.¹¹ A new generation of Spanish historians would build a new historiographical approach to the subject thanks to this documentary collection, as demonstrated by the annual bibliographies published by Sylvia L. Hilton between 1983 and 1996 (Hilton 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1994a, 1994b; Hilton and Labandeira 1990, 1991, 1993; Hilton and Paredes 1996).

Parallel to the evolution of Spain’s and the US’s respective images, the increasing attention given to the role of Spain in the American Revolutionary War is also a product of the evolution in historiography towards the study of subjects and geographical areas beyond the traditional Eurocentric approach. Before this evolution, much of the attention to the subject was only given by historians working on the international aspects and diplomatic history of the American Revolution such as Ramón E. Abarca (1970), Samuel Flagg Bemis (1926 [1960], 1931, 1957), Samuel Gwynn Coe (1928), Jonathan R. Dull (1975, 1985), Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (1981), Richard B. Morris (1965), and J. Horace Nunemaker (1943). When the study of Native American communities looked beyond their relations with the British, contacts with the French and Spanish empires in the region became an object of study. The groundbreaking working works by Richard White (1991) and Daniel H. Usner (1992) on the French–Indian relations have been complemented by the study of Spanish–Indian contacts by David J. Weber (1992, 2...