Nelson, never one to be overly concerned with the grumbling of merchants, nonetheless took to his new role with his usual unwavering gusto. He began enforcing the letter of the new law almost as soon as hurricane season was over and it was safe to leave English Harbour. In November he boarded a ship bound from Boston to St. Kitts before sailing for Barbados where he ordered several American vessels out of the harbor at Carlisle Bay. Over the next three years he would seize at least ten more American ships for breaching the new Navigation Acts, earning himself a reputation as an unbending rule follower and provoking a lawsuit instigated by a group of merchants from Nevis. This reputation made Nelson the visible personification of a hated policy and thus the target of popular ire. At one point he was forced to remain on ship for three months for fear he would be torn apart by an angry mob if he set foot on shore.33
Most of Nelson’s colleagues in the Caribbean, however, took a more practical approach. Officially, the British government ignored the pleas of the West Indian merchants and planters for the resumption of free trade with America, but practically speaking, there was little that could be done to stop the trade. With dwindling naval resources and entrenched local opposition, most British officials turned a blind eye to the American vessels that swarmed into British ports in the post-war period. British governors, other naval officers, and even Nelson’s superior officer Admiral Hughes largely ignored the illicit commerce. This lassitude incensed a stickler like Nelson, but the rapid resumption of Anglo-American trade was one of the most beneficial outcomes of the peace. Both countries badly needed the trade to recover from the war, and despite French hopes that it would replace Britain as America’s principal trade partner, Britain swiftly regained its preeminent position after the war. With the illicit trade booming in the Caribbean and trade relations normalized elsewhere, Britain was well placed to absorb the blows it was dealt during the war.
Nelson’s tenure as trade enforcer was largely frustrating. He returned to England in 1787, where he would remain on half pay until war with France broke out once more in 1793. Ironically, Nelson’s failure in the Caribbean was Britain’s gain. Not for the first time. The failure to capture Nicaragua, like the failure to retain Florida, also ultimately benefited Britain. The expenditure necessary to protect and govern such unproductive colonies from the inevitable Spanish and American attacks would be better spent elsewhere. Both were Spain’s problem now. Nelson would have to wait for another war to become the hero he already imagined himself to be. As for so many others, Nelson’s life had been fundamentally altered by the American War, setting him on a course for future success and future glory. For most who lived through the times, the American War would prove less of a boon.
In the fall of 1783, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Comte de Aranda, Spanish ambassador to France, informed King Carlos III that the long-wished-for peace with Britain had at last arrived. The treaty ending the war had been signed in Paris on September 3. It should have been a celebratory occasion, the final culmination of a long, but victorious struggle. Spanish arms had seemingly triumphed on every front. In Europe, Britain still clung to Gibraltar, but Menorca had been regained. In North America, José de Gálvez had succeeded in capturing Pensacola, restoring Florida to Spain and driving the British from the Gulf Coast once and for all. In Central America, Matís de Gálvez’s forces recaptured Fort San Juan and thwarted British attempts to divide the empire. South America had nearly combusted, but the revolts in Peru and Colombia had been successfully stamped out. To top it all, Britain’s humiliating defeat at Yorktown, the turning point of the entire war, had been paid for with Spanish pesos from Havana secured by Francisco Saavedra, a Spanish official who had slipped through British fingers in Jamaica less than a year before.
And yet, Aranda, the man who had directed Spain’s successful alliance with France, the keystone of victory, confessed that peace “has left in my soul, I must admit, a painful feeling.” For Aranda, the independence of the United States, the issue at the very heart of the conflict, inspired not pride or hope, but “pain and fear.” The effort to recover and expand its empire in North America was a chimera. By securing its empire Spain was now set on a collision course with the new United States, with the empire now “exposed to serious dangers at the hands of a new power we have just recognized, in a country in which there is no other in a position to clip its wings.” “This federal republic,” he warned:
has been born a pygmy . . . and it needed the support and power of two states as powerful as Spain and France to win its independence. The day will come in which it grows and turns into a giant, even a frightening colossus, in that region. It will then forget the benefits it has received from the two powers, and it will only think of its own expansion. Freedom of conscience, the ability to establish a new population in immense lands, as well as the advantages of a new government, will attract to them farmers and artisans from all nations. And within a few years we will see with real dismay the tyrannical existence of this colossus of which I am speaking. The first step for this power . . . will be to take over Florida, in order to dominate the Gulf of Mexico. After harassing us and our relations with New Spain in this way, it will aspire to conquer this vast empire, which we will not be able to defend against a formidable power established in that very continent and a neighbor of it.34
But the danger to Spain’s American empire would not come from the new United States alone. Unlike Britain, whose trade-based wealth allowed it to pivot away from territorial empire in North America to other imperial horizons, Spain could not afford to lose her American possessions and hope to compete on the world stage. Without the mineral wealth extracted from the Indies, Spanish power would wither and die. And it had been a near thing. As the future first minister Manuel Godoy would admit, “Nobody is unaware how close we were to losing in the years 1781–2 the whole viceroyalty of Peru and part of la Plata, when the famous Condorcanqui raised the standard of rebellion . . . The swell from this storm was felt . . . in New Granada, and even reached New Spain.”35 For the moment, the crisis was averted, the military presence in the Americas amped up and the program of reform recommenced. The Cassandra cry of men like Saavedra and Aranda was largely, often willfully, ignored as most preferred to bask in the false dawn of a victory that would prove far more disastrous than the much lamented defeat of the Seven Years’ War. The expense of military intervention, the aborted armada, the interminable and ultimately unsuccessful siege of Gibraltar, and the defense of the Americas had drained Spanish coffers, ensuring that post-war optimism was gravely misplaced.
Indeed it was the very appearance of Spanish success in the American War that would prove to be the ultimate source of Spanish decline. On the surface, victory over Britain seemed to vindicate Spanish imperial and military policy and signal a new golden age for the resurgent Spanish Empire. As such, the reforms begun in the 1760s and pursued with relentless ferocity under José de Gálvez in the 1770s were recklessly expanded. Colonial government was further centralized, colonial taxes and revenue more rigorously extracted, and colonial dissent more vigorously suppressed, all for the single-minded purpose of financing an expansion of the military to continue aggressive competition with Britain around the globe. By 1788, nearly a quarter of Spanish expenditure was being spent on the naval arms race with Britain—a figure that would rise to nearly 40 per cent by the 1790s—money that was not invested in the commerce and economic infrastructure that would have allowed Spain to compete with Britain in the long run. But even in the short term, the extraction of imperial revenue in bullion, taxes, and state monopolies, was merely a drop in the ocean of Spanish debt and military expenditure. The American War had drained Spanish coffers, ensuring that more and more colonial revenue was needed to fund continued military expansion. To secure this revenue, colonial administration took on a more centralized authoritarian tone that increasingly geared the entire imperial enterprise toward the extraction of revenue for the benefit of Spain and Spain alone. Such policies alienated
colonial populations, who now bore a greater financial burden at the very moment that they were increasingly shut out of colonial office. As a small measure of compensation, Creoles were allowed to join the previously Spanish-dominated colonial military establishment in ever greater numbers, eventually transforming the officer corps with grave consequences for Spanish imperial control.36
Still, for all the centralization and focus on revenue extraction at the expense of trade, cost-saving measures were still required to stabilize Spain’s precarious post-war financial position. Navy spending, the centerpiece of Spain’s military strategy after the seeming success of the American War, could not be reduced, so cuts were made to spending elsewhere. To save money, in 1786, Spain abandoned its traditional policy of rotating colonial garrisons throughout the empire, and replaced it with a policy of fixed garrisons. This saved money spent on transporting troops from Spain around the empire, but when combined with the Creole takeover of the officer corps, the new policy ensured that the colonial military became local, autonomous, Creole institutions with more colonial than metropolitan interests and loyalties. Thus, Spain’s war-proven strategy saddled its colonial subjects with a greater financial burden, a more invasive and authoritarian administration, and a lack of political power at the same time that it delivered more military power into colonial hands. It was a recipe for disaster.37
In South America, the stage had been set for a new cycle of revolution inspired and influenced by the chaotic years of the American War. As Aranda feared, in the aftermath of the war, Spain’s empire would be “exposed to the most terrible disturbances.” The violence of Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas’ rebellion, which saw 100,000 Indians and as many as 40,000 Creoles and Spanish die, a full tenth of the regional population, had driven a wedge between indigenous peoples and Europeans, hardening once fluid racial boundaries. This had been codified in an official crackdown on indigenous culture. The Inca Royal Commentaries that had so inspired Tupac Amaru were outlawed, as was the wearing of Inca dress. Traditional Indian hereditary offices were abolished, restrictions were levied on the use of Quechua, and it was forbidden to depict Inca rulers in plays and paintings.38
Spain’s natural allies in the Americas, the Creoles, had also been alienated by Spanish policy. They had been incensed by reforms that excluded them from high office in the imperial administration and chafed at measures that restricted their autonomy in the name of greater metropolitan control. Many had initially sided with Tupac Amaru for these very reasons, only abandoning the cause when it became more violently anti-European. As in the British Empire, a new dichotomy had been created that pitted the interests of the center, of Spain, against the needs and desires of the colonies, driving a wedge between Spain and the natural constituency for empire. No longer partners in empire, Creoles and mestizos were thus driven away from metropolitan interests, and toward a more distinct colonial identity, creating among these groups a greater sense of unity in opposition. This emerging colonial identity would be increasingly anti-imperial and pro-independence. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion and the Revolt of the Comuneros were the first flowering of this growing anti-imperialism. In Peru, the revolt had faltered along racial divisions, but the precedent had been set. In Colombia, the weakness of the Spanish Empire was exposed, and the effectiveness of concerted colonial protests, and colonial arms confirmed.
When a financially drained and imperially overstretched Spain collapsed under the strain of further wars in the 1790s, alienated South Americans would rise in a series of revolutions, beginning in Venezuela in 1810 and soon engulfing the entire continent. For the future revolutionaries, like the Venezuelan veteran of the American and French revolutions Francisco de Miranda, the American Revolution, the Anglo-Spanish War, and the South American revolts had all proved instructive. Having fought at Pensacola and Yorktown, Miranda firmly believed that the Anglo-American struggle for independence “was bound to be . . . the infallible preliminary to our own.” In both Colombia and Peru the seeds of future revolts had been planted. Many of those who sought to reap the harvest would find their inspiration in the American War and the world it created.39
In 1825 Simón Bolívar, liberator of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru from Spanish rule, received a joyous letter from an old man recently arrived from Spain. “I,” the letter read, “in the name of the spirits of my sacred ancestors, congratulate the American Spirit of the Century.” The letter, signed “Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru,” had been sent by the brother of Tupac Amaru II, who, along with Micaela Bastidas’ son Fernando and other relatives, had survived decades of imprisonment and exile in Spain, only returning to Buenos Aires in 1822. For Juan Bautista, the liberation of South America brought all the memories of the last Inca Revolt cascading into his mind and so he wrote to Bolívar both to congratulate him on his achievements and to remind him of where the struggle had truly begun. “If it has been a duty of the friends of the Homeland of the Incas . . . to congratulate the Hero of Colombia and the Liberator of the vast countries of South America,” he wrote, “I am obliged by a double motive to manifest my heart filled with the highest jubilation. I have survived to the age of eighty-six, despite great hardship . . . to see consummated the great and always just struggle that will place us in full enjoyment of our rights and liberty. This was the aim of José Gabriel Tupac Amaru, my venerated brother and martyr of the Peruvian Empire, whose blood was the plow which prepared that soil to bring forth the best fruits,” which Bolívar had now begun to harvest. The sowing of South American independence had begun with the American War.40
6
EUROPEAN WEAKNESS AND
THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST
OF THE CRIMEA
At almost the same moment in 1781 that Lord Cornwallis was leading his troops out of the Yorktown Peninsula in surrender, 5,000 miles away on the shores of the Black Sea, Sahin Giray, Khan of Crimea, was fleeing the Crimea Peninsula with another group of rebels hot on his heels. Giray had never been a popular ruler. He had succeeded to the throne in 1777 largely due to Russian backing, and only survived a rebellion that same year when Catherine sent Russian troops to crush the uprising against her would-be puppet. But by the early months of 1782, it became clear that the new rebellion was an even more serious affair. By April the contagion had spread to the nobility and the army, forcing Giray and the Russian consul in Kaffa to flee the Crimean capital by boat for the tenuous security of the nearby Russian fortress of Kerch. In the deposed khan’s place, the rebels elected his brother Bahadir Giray, a move that was quickly supported and officially recognized by the Ottoman sultan. There were now two khans claiming the crown of Crimea, one backed by the Ottoman Empire and another with Russian support, a divide that aptly reflected the fractious history of the Crimean khanate.
The khanate had its origins in the Mongol Hordes that swept with ruthless violence across the Eurasian steppe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Crimean peninsula fell to the Mongols in 1338, becoming part of the Golden Horde. In 1441, Sahin Giray’s ancestors succeeded in creating an independent Crimean khanate, ruled by the Giray dynasty for centuries. The steady expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century brought the khanate into Istanbul’s sphere of influence, and in 1478 Crimea became a vassal state of the Ottoman sultans. Despite this official subordination, the khanate retained its autonomy, entering into a mutually beneficial relationship with the Ottomans. Crimea would serve as a buffer state between the Ottoman Empire and its enemies in Central Asia, while the khanate would receive protection from its newly aggressive neighbors.1
The khanate’s relationship with her northern neighbors was much less advantageous. Russia suffered repeated invasions from Crimea, and as late as 1504 Moscow was still forced to pay an annual tribute to the khan. Nearly two hundred years of traumatic incursions and humiliating payments had a profound and lasting effect on the Russian psyche. The khanate became the Russian bogeyman par excellence, and when the tide at last began to shift in Russia’s fa
vor in the late sixteenth century, the fight against Crimea took on all the patriotic fervor and religious symbolism of a crusade. Russian propaganda painted the Tatars as a cruel, despotic people, the ancient enemy and modern scourge of Moscow. As inheritors of the medieval Kievan Rus, Russia’s rulers also claimed the Crimea as part of their rightful patrimony, stolen territory that was theirs by right. As Russia expanded in the seventeenth century, the clashes with Crimea increasingly included the khanate’s protector, the Ottoman Empire, initiating a long series of wars between the two expansionist empires. The rebellion against Sahin Giray in 1781 and the election of his brother as rival Khan in 1782 threatened to renew the conflict in Crimea.2
One might think that violent unrest on her southern border would be a cause for grave concern for the Russian empress, but Catherine saw opportunity where others might see danger. Catherine had gone to war with the Ottomans in similar circumstance in 1768, seizing a moment in the wake of the Seven Years’ War in which war fatigue and French losses left the Ottoman Empire bereft of allies and vulnerable to a Russian land grab. The Russo-Turkish War, which lasted until 1774, had been launched with the aim of gaining a much-needed toehold for the Russian navy on the warm-weather ports of the Black Sea. Kronstadt, St. Petersburg’s port and Russia’s primary naval base, was choked with ice during the long Russian winter, rendering its fleet ineffectual, “firmly bound in the harbor, dismantled of its rigging, and hung round with icicles.” Access to the Black Sea would thus allow Catherine to build and expand the moribund Russian navy, a necessity if Russia hoped to compete militarily and commercially with the great powers of Europe. A Black Sea fleet would also provide a crucial staging ground for further Russian conquests of the Ottoman Empire and perhaps even the glittering capital of Istanbul itself. With the Black Sea a Russian lake, Catherine could realistically imagine the sultan’s crown resting on her own brow.3
To Begin the World Over Again Page 23