Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at whether the Americans would have won the Revolutionary War without help from Spain, a topic that is the subject of a discussion tonight aboard a Spanish ship docked in Manhattan.
Move over, Lafayette. Spain helped the colonials in the Revolutionary War, too. In fact, Spanish arms and munitions were sent across the Atlantic first, before aid from France — and before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Three scholars may not put it exactly that way at a presentation tonight, but the subtext is that Spain was essential to the plucky colonists’ fight for independence 250 years ago.
The New York-based Queen Sofía Spanish Institute planned the invitation-only gathering tonight, aboard the Spanish training ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano, docked at a pier in Manhattan. For its “America&Spain250 Initiative,” the institute is spotlighting “the significant yet little-understood role of Spain in America’s war of independence.” Prince Pedro, Duke of Calabria, is scheduled to attend the event.
“It’s not a matter of getting the credit” for Spain, said Gonzalo Quintero, a historian who is to give a talk at the event. “Credit is not a thing we historians are concerned about. In the community of historians, it’s well recognized that without the help of Spain, American independence would never have taken place.”
The bond that was forged was strong — so strong that the only foreign war vessel on hand when George Washington was inaugurated was a Spanish one, Quintero noted, and it fired a 15-gun salute to the new president. (A footnote: The ship had been built in New York.)
And what about the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who bankrolled the Americans and fought alongside them? Maria Begonia Santos, the president and chief executive of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, noted that long after the Revolutionary War had ended, Lafayette “made a rock-star tour of the U.S.” His first stop was New York, where a huge crowd turned out to see the “French founding father,” as some Americans called him.
Spain’s ‘equivalent hero’
“Our equivalent hero died a young man at the age of 40,” she said, referring to Bernardo de Gálvez, who had captured British outposts in Florida. Those victories opened the way for the French Navy to send onward its fleet to defeat the British at Yorktown, according to Larrie Ferreiro, a naval historian who is scheduled to speak tonight.
Yes, he said, Spain and France were allies. Still sore at losing the Seven Years’ War to Britain in the 1760s, they saw the American Revolution as a grudge match.
“Spain did not get involved in the war because it liked the idea of American independence,” he said. “It’s the old saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ They made common cause with the Americans. Spain and France saw Britain as the common adversary.” Or, as Quintero put it, “the main motivation for intervening in the war was to weaken the position of the British.”
But the Spanish and the French did not want to get caught in a civil war between London and mere colonies, so the Declaration of Independence served a purpose that was pragmatic as well as patriotic: It told the kings of France and Spain that America was its own nation. “All of the correspondence between the people who eventually wrote the Declaration of Independence says pretty much the same thing: We need to publicly say we are an independent nation for France and Spain to come to our side,” Ferreiro said.
The colonists needed weapons that could come only from Europe — the colonies had no factories for mass-producing muskets and ammunition — and Britain’s adversaries were waiting to do more than “covert action” for the colonials, he said. By 1775, “Spain first, then France, were supplying arms, muskets, guns and powder to the Americans,” but only indirectly.
Where the first foreign aid came from
The Basque merchant Diego de Gardoqui, whose family operated a business that had imported cod from North America for decades, sent the first foreign aid to the rebels: 300 muskets and pistols. Later he sent thousands more guns, along with boots and cloth for uniforms for the colonials. (He was named Spain’s first ambassador to the United States in 1778.)
For his part, Gálvez was providing money and gunpowder in the South. Later he led attacks on British forts along the Mississippi River; later, he commanded a siege at Pensacola, in what became Florida. The fight went on for two months until a Spanish shell destroyed a British powder magazine. The British surrendered the following day.
Gálvez was a brilliant strategist, Quintero said, and survived the war despite being wounded twice. He died of illness in 1786, three years after the fighting ended — and after he was posted to what was then called New Spain (now Mexico).
“The people who fought alongside Bernardo de Gálvez and those troops — these were the ancestors of today’s Hispanics and Latinos,” Santos said, “and we feel they should be included in the narrative of the United States. But the mythology of the birthplace of the United States is centered on the East Coast, not the Gulf Coast.”
Weather
Today will be cloudy with a slight chance of showers and a high near 71. Tonight will bring a greater chance of showers with fog and a low near 63.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Juneteenth.
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METROPOLITAN diary
Flirting
Dear Diary:
After boarding an uptown No. 1 on a Tuesday evening, I noticed a man in his 40s talking to two women of about the same age.
“Sorry, but I was eavesdropping,” he said. “Are you dancers?”
One of the women, it turned out, had performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
The man said he had asked because his son loved to dance and had forced his reticent father to participate in more than a few TikTok videos.
“Do you have any shows coming up?” the man asked the dancer as his stop approached.
“Next Thursday,” she said, giving him the address of a studio in the West Village.
As the man hustled off the train, the dancer turned to her friend.
“He’s cute,” she said. “I hope he comes!”
“He was obviously flirting with you,” the friend said. “You should have asked him out.”
Two older women seated nearby leaned across the aisle.
“He was flirting,” one said. “Go ask that boy on a date!”
The dancer looked toward the doors, which were still open.
“Should I?” she said.
“Yes!” a whole group of us said.
A teenager reached an arm toward the closing doors to hold them open, and the dancer ran off the train.
We all craned our necks, watching as she caught up to the man midway down the platform.
The doors finally closed, and the train started to move. The man and the dancer were still talking. As we pulled away, she looked toward our car, flashed a wide grin and gave a thumbs up.
— Zoe Menon
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Sure, France Helped the Colonists. So Did Spain. appeared first on New York Times.
