On my first attempt to find Bernardo de Gálvez in 2015 in Pensacola, Fla., he was difficult to spot. I eventually found him at Fort George, in the form of a small stone bust with the words “Yo Solo” (“I Alone”) carved underneath. The memorial — dedicated in 1981, on the 200th anniversary of the Siege of Pensacola — was an underwhelming tribute to a Spanish general who helped the United States win the American Revolution.
The nation is approaching the 250th anniversary of its independence at a moment when Latino people have been targeted, harassed and fatally neglected by two Trump administrations over the past decade. Recent studies by Pew Research have found that more than 55% of Latinos are concerned about their place in the U.S.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that in such a climate the events in Pensacola, like many other parts of the Hispanic past of the United States, continue to lie in the historical shadows, resulting in an inaccurate and compartmentalized version of U.S. history.
When the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in Massachusetts, the future United States was a strip of British colonies set next to an enormous Spanish empire and multiple Indigenous nations. Events on the eastern coast were just one part of a dynamic landscape across North America, and without repeated interventions by the people of Spanish territories, those events might have played out very differently.
Bernardo de Gálvez was the governor of Louisiana and in charge of its troops. That vast territory had been under French control before it was passed to the Spanish in 1762 to keep it from falling into British hands, though Florida would become Britain’s the following year. California — or Alta California, as it was then — was also under Spanish control, with the first mission in San Diego erected in 1769. Gálvez’s uncle was one of the architects of Spanish expansion into California and later helped to direct Spain’s involvement in the American Revolution.
Spanish officials understood that something profound was taking place in the British colonies, and the Continental Army saw a potential ally in Spain. When Benjamin Franklin was in Paris in late 1776, he met with Spain’s ambassador. By that point, Spain had already been assisting the Continental Army by funneling arms, supplies and money through New Orleans. More active aid would come after France declared war on Britain and Spain followed suit in 1779.
Even as colonists resisted the British empire in the fights familiar from U.S. history books — Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Long Island, Trenton, Yorktown — parallel conflicts to the south and the west were key to driving the British out of the future United States.
From Louisiana, Gálvez turned his gaze to British-held West Florida, seeing a chance to disrupt the British strategy in the Mississippi basin — and to regain Florida for Spain.
Gálvez led three successful campaigns in quick succession, drawing on troops from other parts of Spain’s empire, such as Mexico and Cuba — local militia, Irish, American and French-speaking Acadian recruits, as well as enslaved and free Black soldiers. On the first mission in September 1779, as they marched toward the westernmost outpost of British West Florida, Ft. Bute, they were joined by Native Americans, including the Houma, Choctaw and Alabama peoples. They captured that fort and two more before returning to New Orleans.
Thomas Jefferson was pleased and wrote to Gálvez in November 1779: “The weight of your powerfull and wealthy Empire, has given us, all the certainty of a happy Issue to the present Contest. ”
The following January, Gálvez led around 800 men and 12 ships to Mobile, laying siege to the British fort guarding that port and forcing surrender. He then went to Havana to prepare an attack on Pensacola.
For his third round, Gálvez — with a fleet and 1,300 soldiers — arrived near Pensacola Bay by March 9, 1781. However, after one warship became stuck on a sandbar, and the fleet stalled, so Gálvez took his brigantine and sailed into the bay. The fleet was able to follow, and a siege began that would last until May 8, when the Spanish landed a devastating final blow on a British powder magazine.
Galvez was not alone in his heroics against the British. In May 1780 in St. Louis, also part of Spanish Louisiana, Lt. Col. Fernando de Leyba of Spain saw off a raid by some 900 British and Native American fighters after building a fort and rounding up around 300 soldiers only weeks before.
This defense halted British plans to expand into the upper Mississippi Valley.
Galvez’s campaigns had thwarted the British in the Gulf.
And by October 1781, the empire would be stopped again at Yorktown, securing victory for the Continental Army and the establishment of the United States. This is remembered as the moment of victory, but it ended a war fought on many fronts by many peoples.
In the aftermath, Spain was given back Florida, which remained under its control until 1819. Louisiana territory remained Spanish until briefly returning to the French and being sold to the young United States in 1803.
There has been a growing awareness of Gálvez and the events in the Gulf, most recently through Ken Burns’ documentary “The American Revolution.” In 2018, a larger statue of Gálvez, this time on horseback, was installed in Pensacola, after he had been made an honorary U. S. citizen, though none of this has been quite enough to make him a household name — or earn him a “Hamilton”-esque star turn à la the Marquis de Lafayette.
The southern and western fronts against the British empire during the Revolutionary War deserve to be better known — honoring not just Gálvez and Leyba but also the soldiers from across the Spanish empire, the Native American allies, the French Acadians, the enslaved and free Black soldiers and the entire diverse team that helped secure these victories. Their stories are part of a larger Hispanic past that also belongs in the annals of the American Revolution.
There is no building a wall around the history that connects the U.S. to the wider Spanish-speaking world. The independence of the United States was possible in part because of Spanish assistance and because of all the people who were willing to fight for a cause that was not their own.
Carrie Gibson is the author of “El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America.” Her most recent book is “The Great Resistance.”
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