Spain

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SPAIN

Charles III came to the throne of Spain in 1759 as its third Bourbon monarch. Under his enlightened reign Spain experienced growth by almost every measure of national success. His death in 1788, however, brought an abrupt end to this era of expansion and prosperity. The reign of Charles IV, who ruled from 1788 until 1808, was marred by a series of governmental blunders, incompetent ministers, and the successful efforts of Napoleon to assume control of his neighbor to the south. By the time Charles III's equally incompetent grandson, Ferdinand VII, came to the throne in 1808, Spain was in serious decline. Under Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, Spain lacked the political, military, or diplomatic means to block Anglo-American expansion into the Spanish Borderlands of North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

the reign of charles iii (1759–1788)

Charles III assumed the Spanish throne during the initial stages of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) in Europe. Spain entered the war during the final year of fighting; militarily Spain did not fare well. The loss of Havana to the British in January of 1762 brought Spain to the peace table in Paris as a defeated nation anxious both to regain its major Cuban port and also to distance its future foreign policy from that of France. Charles III accomplished both tasks at the Peace of Paris in 1763, where he gained France's Louisiana colony while ceding Spanish Florida to the British. With peace restored, Charles III surrounded himself with a talented group of ministers and advisors, all of whom were university-educated adherents of the Spanish enlightenment. They embarked on an ambitious program of urban renewal, educational development, the revision of taxation, a reorganization of the military, and the implementation of free-trade regulations throughout the Spanish empire. They also began to formulate a foreign policy that would be more independent from that of their long-standing ally, France.

The international crisis precipitated by the American Revolution became a major diplomatic concern for Charles III and his ministers. The Spanish government adopted an official policy of neutrality while issuing secret instructions to Spanish military commanders in Cuba and Louisiana to provide covert assistance to the rebels. Spain instructed a wealthy Bilbao merchant, Diego de Gardoqui, to create a fictitious merchant house that would serve as a secret conduit for military supplies and munitions to the Continental Army; much of these supplies eventually passed through Havana or New Orleans. Spain did not wish to enter the conflict until it had fully prepared its New World forces. At the same time, ministers at Madrid already worried at this relatively early date about the territorial pressures the infant United States might bring to bear on the lower Mississippi Valley and Gulf Coast. Finally, during the summer of 1779 Spain entered the war but did not sign a treaty of alliance with the Continental Congress. The Spanish court sent Juan de Miralles to Philadelphia as an unofficial envoy. The Congress appointed New Yorker John Jay to represent the interests of the United States at Madrid. Jay, who arrived in Spain during 1780, was never fully accepted by the Spanish government and accomplished little of diplomatic import. Spain's entry in the war did provide an opportunity for Bernardo de Gálvez, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, to achieve a series of important victories. His armies took the entire lower Mississippi Valley and northern Gulf Coast in a series of daring campaigns between 1779 and the Battle of Pensacola in May 1781.

The Peace of Paris in 1783 favored Spanish interests. Charles III regained possession of Florida while the Mississippi River became the western boundary of the United States, with the City of New Orleans remaining under Spanish control. The treaties, however, did not adequately define the southern boundary of the United States. Spain believed the boundary fell north of Natchez on the Mississippi, whereas the United States thought it fell much farther south. This proved to be a long-standing point of diplomatic contention between the two nations. Diego de Gardoqui arrived in the United States two years after the Peace of Paris as Spain's fully accredited chargé d'affaires. Gardoqui worried about the western movement of frontier settlers from the United States, in the process employing the concept of "defensive colonization" for Spanish territory west of the Mississippi. He invited English-speaking American land agents to organize settlements of people from the United States, who would take loyalty oaths to the Spanish king in exchange for land. George Morgan was the first of these agents, founding the settlement at New Madrid south of St. Louis.

the reign of charles iv (1788–1808)

The ascension of Charles IV to the throne marked a drastic change in the fortunes of Spain and its monarchy. Unlike his father, the new king was an inept, incompetent, and indolent individual with few, if any, qualities of leadership. His wife, Queen Maria Luisa, proved to be strong-willed and opinionated, an activist who constantly meddled in affairs of state. Charles IV inherited several of his father's most accomplished ministers; after a few years of frustration, they left their offices as an unlikely successor, Manuel de Godoy, became the king's chief minister and major advisor. A dashing young army officer, Godoy had caught the eye of Queen Maria Luisa and reputedly became her lover. With her support and powerful royal patronage, he advanced rapidly at court, becoming chief minister while still in his early twenties. Godoy presided over Spain's reaction to the French Revolution. Most Spaniards at court, including Godoy, naturally worried about the spread of French republicanism to Spain. These distractions created a favorable atmosphere for the United States to negotiate a treaty with Spain to resolve the disputed Florida boundary and secure free navigation of the Mississippi River. Godoy accordingly signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo on 27 October 1795 with American envoy Thomas Pinckney, an accord known in United States history as Pinckney's Treaty. This agreement set the northern boundary of Florida at the thirty-first degree of latitude and gave United States citizens free navigation of the Mississippi.

The rise of Napoleon presented Spain with serious foreign policy problems, which Godoy resolved by signing the Treaty of San Ildefonso with France in 1796. By this accord, Spain rejoined its Bourbon neighbor as a diplomatic and military ally. This strategy proved to be a disaster for Spain and the beginning of the end of its international power. In 1803 Napoleon bargained Louisiana away to the United States; although Spain strongly disagreed with this transfer, it was powerless to stop it. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, a circle of discontents that had formed at court around Crown Prince Ferdinand sought to place the younger Bourbon on the throne. A palace coup in March 1808 resulted in the indolent king's abdicating to his son, who became Ferdinand VII.

the reign of ferdinand vii (1808–1833)

The new king had little chance to establish himself before Napoleon summoned both him and his father to France. Napoleon compelled Ferdinand VII to abdicate the throne of Spain as well. Both former monarchs found themselves under arrest while Napoleon declared his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, to be the new king of Spain, José I. Many Spaniards immediately greeted their new French king as a pretender, launching the Spanish War of Independence, or the Peninsular War as the British styled it. The country split into regional factions while José I and his French-backed army controlled major urban centers. Napoleon temporarily appeared in Spain during 1809 in an unsuccessful effort to bring order to the situation. This resulted in a British intervention, with the duke of Wellington leading a British army in support of Spanish resistance to French intervention. Battles fought at Talavera and Victoria marked major French defeats at the hands of the British army.

A government in support of the exiled Ferdinand VII eventually appeared at Cadiz in 1812. Known as the Cortes de Cadiz, this government wrote a new constitution for Spain that retained the monarchy but promised some reforms. The disarray of the Peninsular War guaranteed that Spain could not sufficiently protect its American colonies, especially those bordering on the United States. Between 1810 and 1814, Americans made several attempts to take Spanish territory along the lower Mississippi and Gulf Coast. The West Florida Revolt of 1810 and the intervention of the United States Army at Mobile in 1813 successfully brought these areas under American control. The unsuccessful Patriot War in East Florida during 1812 and 1813 was a similar incursion. The Cortes de Cadiz did dispatch a diplomat, Luis de Onís, to the United States as its representative to protest these occurrences. President James Madison, however, refused to extend diplomatic recognition to Onís because he was not the envoy of an accredited government, which in theory still rested with the exiled monarch Ferdinand. Onís nonetheless remained in Washington, where he unofficially spoke for Spain and provided his government with much information about events in the United States. The Spanish diplomat finally received recognition when Ferdinand VII returned to Spain after the abdication of Napoleon in 1814. Onís thereafter continued vigorously to protest events in Florida but also began to believe that Spain might profit from negotiating a treaty definitively defining a boundary between the United States and Spain's North American colonies. The Spanish envoy's views caught the attention of John Quincy Adams, whom James Madison named as his secretary of state after his election to the presidency in 1817. Onís and Adams entered into informal discussions, which soon accelerated. The following year, Adams and Onís signed the Transcontinental Treaty giving both East and West Florida to the United States while drawing a boundary line across the entire continent. Onís returned to Spain, where he worked diligently to win ratification of this treaty by the government of Ferdinand VII, an approval that eventually came in 1821.

The resolution of Spain's boundary problems with the United States constituted the least of its international concerns during the ten years following the Peninsular War. The restoration of the monarchy, upon Ferdinand's return to Spain in 1814, did not go smoothly. Once home, the king rejected the liberal reforms of the Cortes de Cadiz and ruled as an absolute monarch. This disgusted many of his former supporters, including many Creoles in Spain's New World colonies. The restoration of the monarchy under such circumstances inflamed the colonial independence movement, which had already begun to fester for a variety of reasons. Already in 1810 a Mexican priest had launched an unsuccessful coup against the royal government in that colony. The movement for independence spread rapidly throughout the Spanish Indies. The early 1820s saw the loss of every important Spanish colony located on the mainland of North and South America. For a short while at the start of the decade, a group of European nations known as the Holy Alliance, composed of conservative monarchs in Europe, including the czar of Russia and the king of Prussia, contemplated sending an expedition to the Spanish Indies for the purpose of restoring Spanish colonial rule. The Monroe Doctrine, however, put Europe on notice that the Americas remained closed to further colonization. Hence, by 1825 the Spanish colonial era in the Western Hemisphere had essentially come to an end, as only a few small possessions (especially Cuba) remained in the hands of the weak Ferdinand VII, who would reign until 1833. Thereafter, the independent successors to Spain in the Americas, especially contiguous Mexico, continued to deal with the United States and its westward expansion.

bibliography

Black, Jeremy. Eighteenth Century Europe. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1999.

Chavez, Thomas. Spain and the Independence of the United States: An Intrinsic Gift. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Cummins, Light Townsend. Spanish Observers and the American Revolution, 1775–1783. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Esdaile, Charles. The Peninsular War: A New History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Herr, Richard. The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.

Lewis, James E., Jr. The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Light Townsend Cummins

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation