Spain and the American Revolution

I've set up a couple of Google Alerts as part of writing my book on the American Revolution. Via this, I was informed that there is an art exhibit in Washington, DC, on the theme of Spanish support for the American Revolution. This is one of those episodes of a Latin American military history that needs to be made more prominent.

Spain's participation in the war focused on retrieving the Gulf Coast, which had fallen into British hands after the end of the Seven Years' War. The British divided the colony into two, and established the capital of West Florida, which included the Florida panhandle and stretched west along the cost to the Mississippi river, at Pensacola.

The Spanish governor of Louisiana (which had been transferred by France to Spain in 1762, although no-one knew until 1764), Bernardo de Gálvez y Gallado, pursued an aggressive campaign against British West Florida following the Spanish declaration of war against Britain in 1779. A summary article outlining Gálvez' actions is found at the Patriot Resource.

The most significant action occurred in 1781, with the siege and battle of Pensacola. This has apparently been described as one of the most written-about battles in history, and extensive excerpts from Gálvez' own combat diary are included at the Florida Historical Quarterly. The Spanish won; and the peace agreements of 1783 that ended the war gave them back both of the Floridas. Of course, the actual northern boundary of the Floridas was not carefully delineated in all the agreements, and the resultant dispute returned relations between Catholic Spain and Protestant Anglo-America back to their frigid normal state.

If you haven't got time to read so much as I offer in my links, you could do worse than read the summary of events at Little Town Mart.

Sack of Lima Library

The War of the Pacific is a little-known conflict in the English-speaking world. However, it made the headlines today when Chile returned 3,778 books to Peru, books that had been seized during the Chilean occupation of the capital Lima during the war. The books include the works of Homer, Bibles, and the 16th-century poet Garcilaso de la Vega.

The comments to this 2006 blog entry reveals a list of some of the absent volumes. In February of this year, a former director of the Peruvian National Library proposed the creation of a commission to draw up a list of the books pending their return. In March, 50 Latin American intellectuals sent an open letter to the Chilean government requesting the return of these books. The Chilean government agreed to do so shortly afterwards. If you can read Spanish, here's a decidedly Peruvian view, suggesting that the 3,778 books represent only a small part of a cultural heritage that has passed into institutional and private hands in Chile, and more should be returned. These two countries still don't get on, really.