Abstract
By the end of 1815, the Latin American independence movement was stalled. In New Spain (Mexico) the creole elites, who elsewhere led the movement, had been frightened by the spectre of social upheaval into supporting the royalist cause. The last major Mexican insurgent leader, Morelos, was executed in December 1815. His army disintegrated. On the Costa Firme, infighting and an effective, homegrown royalist military response hindered the insurgents’ ability to resist the expedition of Spanish General Morillo when it arrived in mid-1815. Composed of over 10,000 veterans of the Peninsular campaign, it overwhelmed the insurgents. Their last bastion, Cartagena, surrendered on 6 December 1815. Only a few insurgents escaped, fleeing by boat to Jamaica or Haiti. Six months later, Morillo took Bogotá, the last major city in insurgent hands, which in turn prompted Quito to surrender. Only in Buenos Aires did independence seem secure. Yet, even there, all was not well. Repeated attempts by Buenos Aires to invade Peru, the centre of royalist power in South America, failed. In Buenos Aires itself, factionalism produced instability. At the same time, the provinces chafed at the city’s centralizing ambitions. Trouble was also brewing across the River Plate, in the Banda Oriental (Uruguay), where a local independence movement was confronting Buenos Aires, Spain, and Portugal. The troops of the last-named power occupied the area in August 1816, probably with Argentine complicity.
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Notes
The word is from Jaime E. Rodriguez O., ‘The Process of Spanish American Independence’, in A Companion to Latin American History, ed. Thomas H. Holloway (Malden, MA, 2008), 195–214, 200.
François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e Independencias: Ensayos sobre las Revoluciones Hispánicas (Madrid, 1992);
and Jaime E. Rodriguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1998).
Among these works, a number offer sophisticated analyses of the political impact of military structures and events. See, in particular, Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz, ‘Armies, Politics, and Revolution: Chile, 1780–1826’, D.Phil dissertation (University of Oxford, 2011);
and Clément Thibaud, Républiques en armes: Les armées de Bolívar dans les guerres d’indépendance du Venezuela et de la Colombie (Rennes, 2006).
The impact of the Constitution of 1812 on the Spanish American revolutions is attracting more and more attention. Among the many recent publications, see Manuel Chus (ed.), 1812: El Poder de la Palabra. América y la Constitución de 1812 (Madrid, 2012).
For a particularly effective treatment of this kind, see Rebecca A. Earle, Spain and the Independence of Columbia, 1810–1825 (Exeter, 2000).
For the British, see Alfred Hasbrouck, Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish America (New York, 1928).
For the French, see Walter Bruyère-Ostells, La grande armée de la liberté (Paris, 2009), 46–53.
Matthew Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simon Bolivar, Foreign Mercenaries, and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool, 2006), 25 and 27.
On government efforts to prevent volunteerism, see D. A. G. Waddell, ‘British Neutrality and Spanish American Independence: The Problem of Foreign Enlistment’, Journal of Latin American Studies 18/1 (1987): 1–18.
Jane Lucas De Grummond, Renato Beluche: Smuggler, Privateer, and Patriot, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1999).
The maritime dimensions of the wars are at last beginning to receive attention. For the Spanish perspective, see Feliciano Gámez Duarte, Del uno al otro confino: España y la lucha contra el corso insurgent hispanoamericano, 1812–1828 (Cádiz, 2008);
for the American, see David Head, ‘Sailing for Spanish America: The Atlantic Geopolitics of Foreign Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic’, Ph.D. dissertation (University of SUNY Buffalo, 2009);
and for the British, see Matthew McCarthy, Privateering, Piracy, and British Policy in Spanish America, 1810–1830 (London, 2013).
William L. Neumann, ‘United States Aid to the Chilean Wars of Independence’, Hispanic American Historical Review 27/2 (1947): 204–219, 214.
This was a quantity of gunpowder sold by the US Ordnance Department to the purchasing agent of Venezuela in 1816. See Arthur Preston Whitaker, The United States and the Independence of Latin America, 1800–1830 (New York, 1962), 197–198.
Charles H. Bowman, Jr., ‘The Activities of Manuel Torres As Purchasing Agent, 1820–1821’, Hispanic American Historical Review 48/2 (1968): 234–246.
Stanley Faye, ‘Privateersmen of the Gulf and their Prizes’, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22/4 (1939): 1012–1094.
On the transfer of former imperial French privateers to the cause of Latin American independence, see Faye, ‘Privateers of Guadeloupe and their Establishment in Barataria’, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 23/2 (1940): 428–444.
On the circuits of trade, both licit and illicit between the British West Indies and Spanish America, see Adrian J. Pearce, British Trade with Spanish America, 1763–1808 (Liverpool, 2007).
Cited in Robert Edgar Conrad, World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil (Baton Rouge, LA, 1986), 126.
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WI, 1988), 75.
David Richardson, ‘West African Consumption Patterns and their Influence on the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade’, in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York, 1979), 303–330.
Christon I. Archer, ‘Introduction’, The Wars of Independence in Spanish America, ed. Christon I. Archer (Wilmington, DL, 2000), 3–42, 36.
Marcela Echeverri, ‘Popular Royalists, Empire, and Politics in Southwestern New Granada, 1809–1819’, Hispanic American Historical Review 91/2 (2011): 237–269.
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Blaufarb, R. (2016). Arms for Revolutions: Military Demobilization after the Napoleonic Wars and Latin American Independence. In: Forrest, A., Hagemann, K., Rowe, M. (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_6
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