IN JULY 1781, ON A WARSHIP anchored off Santo Domingo,
two men met to devise a plan that would ultimately lead
to American independence. The two representatives of
European monarchs agreed to align French and Spanish
military and financial resources against England in
support of the American revolutionary cause.
Within months, with some luck and proper execution,
their plan would result in one of the most impressive
military successes of the Revolutionary War—a
watershed victory that eventually convinced the British
to abandon their fight to keep the thirteen colonies
from becoming an independent nation.
The plan devised by French
Rear Adm. François Joseph Paul, comtede
Grasse, and Spaniard Don Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis,
known as the de Grasse–Saavedra Convention after its
ratification in Paris and Madrid, had far-reaching aims.
Saavedra described the convention's goals in his
journal: "These were to aid the Anglo-Americans
powerfully, in such a way that the English cabinet would
in the end lose the hope of subduing them; to take
possession of various points in the Windward Islands,
where the English fleets lying in protected forts were
threatening French and Spanish possessions; and to
conquer Jamaica, the center of the wealth and power of
Great Britain in that part of the world."
The first part of their plan hinged on thwarting the
British fleet in North America through the timely naval
support of the French, preventing General Charles
Cornwallis from receiving reinforcements at Yorktown,
Virginia, while George Washington's army blocked his
retreat by land. To do this required hard
currency—gold and silver to finance French efforts and
pay soldiers of the Continental Army, many of whom
hadn't received any pay in months—as by that time
hyperinflation had rendered the Continental currency
worthless. In a dramatic last-minute effort, often
overlooked in histories of the war, most of the needed
funds were raised within six hours in Cuba, in an
emergency collection from the people of Havana.
The vital French and Spanish help came at a time when
the rebel army was showing signs of improvement.
Washington had managed to harass the British on their
retreat from Philadelphia to New York in 1778, although
the Battle of Monmouth Court House had been at best a
draw, and his forces around New York had been bolstered
in the summer of 1780 by a significant number of French
troops. While the British spent three years trying to
control the southern colonies, Continental troops had
won a few victories and the main British force under
Lord Cornwallis had left the Carolinas, marching into
Virginia. Still, despite these positive developments,
colonial finances remained bleak indeed.
"In modern wars the longest purse may chiefly
determine the event," lamented Washington in 1780,
as the commander of the new Continental Army
acknowledged that the British "system of public
credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions
than any other nation." One of the greatest
challenges facing the Continental government was the
eighteenth-century American economy. The reality
confronting the Founding Fathers was that they had no
effective centralized government entity to collect funds
and taxes to support the war.
Read
more by Barbara A. Mitchell
America's
Spanish Savior: Bernardo de Gálvez
During the revolution, the thirteen colonies supplied
money and provisions sporadically, governed by the
mercurial wills of colonial leaders with decidedly
provincial mindsets. Key Continental officials from
George Washington to Benedict Arnold used their personal
funds to buy supplies for their troops and pay
informants. Individuals, most notably Robert Morris, set
up and managed revolutionary finances using initiative
and perseverance. Morris, known as financier of the
revolution, was a shipper and banker before the war. He
profited greatly from privateering but also raised
$10,000 for Washington's army just before the critical
events at Trenton and Princeton in late 1776 and early
1777, keeping the army operational.
The lack of sufficient funds meant that the
Continental Army usually was unpaid or underpaid, a
situation that affected the enlistment and retention of
troops, not to mention their morale. As the war
continued, many Continental soldiers went without good
shoes or boots, even in winter. This scarcity of
clothing and supplies contributed to the army's tragic
noncombat death toll. Modern historians estimate that
eight times the number of Americans died of deprivation
and disease in the Revolutionary War as died in combat.
Throughout the revolution, the shortage of widely
accepted currency severely diminished the ability of the
agriculture-based colonies to purchase manufactured
goods on world markets. The revolutionaries obtained
critical supplies by trading and smuggling through the
West Indies, an important theater in the wider conflict
between the British and the French, Spanish, and Dutch.
Money and financing became increasingly important each
year the war continued, and the patience and patriotic
enthusiasm of American citizens were sorely tested, worn
by the frightening reality of war against a
well-supplied, well-financed empire.
King George III, who would suffer from terrible
seizures of mental illness throughout the last years of
his reign, was lucid and confident when he stated in
September 1780: "America is distressed to the
greatest degree. The finances of France, as well as
Spain, are in no good situation. This war, like the
last, will prove one of credit."
Spain's involvement began before the American
Declaration of Independence. In May 1776, French King
Louis XVI directed that the Continental Army be given
one million livres in munitions and supplies through a
fictitious firm, Roderigue Hortalez & Co. Informed
of the French gift, Charles III of Spain matched it with
another million, also funneled to the colonies through
the dummy firm. The two Catholic Bourbon monarchs on the
French and Spanish thrones continued to assist the
American Revolution, more to divert British resources
than from a desire to aid the revolutionary cause.
In 1777 the former Spanish
prime minister and then ambassador to the French court
Pablo Jerónimo, marquésde
Grimaldi, had authorized aid for the Americans. The firm
of Gardoqui e Hijos of Bilbao managed substantial
portions of the supply chain by sea. The worldly Basques
were active merchants throughout the Americas, having
used their global trading networks to market a critical
eighteenth-century New England cash commodity: cod. The
Basques were an effective and discreet conduit for
supplies such as blankets and clothing, although the
British had established a blockade of trade goods. The
firm routed gunpowder and supplies from Mexico and other
locations in Central and South America to the ports of
New Orleans and Havana, and then shipped them north to
the Continental Army.
Benjamin Franklin confirmed this contribution in a
report to the Committee of Secret Correspondence from
Paris in March 1777. Franklin wrote of the assistance
given by the Spanish at this early date, stating that
colonial ships would be admitted into Havana under
most-favored-nation status and that the Spanish would
arrange a credit for the colonies through Holland, to be
expected in Paris at the end of the month. Franklin also
noted that three thousand barrels of gunpowder would be
available in New Orleans and that the merchants in
Bilbao "had orders to ship for us such necessaries
as we might want."
In August 1777, the Spanish minister of the Indies,
José de Galvéz, instructed the governor of Havana to
send "observers" to the American colonies. One
of the first of these observers, Juan de Miralles,
arrived by sea in Charleston in January 1778, under the
pretext of making a forced landing due to bad weather.
De Miralles, from an established, wealthy merchant
family in Havana, was fluent in English and had
extensive business dealings with Robert Morris. He
remained in the colonies as an informal diplomat and
orchestrated the import and export trade between the
colonies and Cuba. De Miralles often spent time at
Washington's headquarters.
De Miralles was a force behind the active merchant
trade between the colonies and Havana, with wheat flour
as the key commodity exported from colonial America to
Cuba. He had initially underwritten the flour trade to
smuggle his intelligence reports back to Cuba. This
international trade expanded through 1781 and onward,
becoming so extensive that it would form a line item in
the official treasury report Robert Morris submitted in
1785, which listed "Bills of exchange sold,
including Havana bills and bills for flour." By
this time Congress had accepted the plan Morris
submitted to form a national bank. As financial agent of
the Bank of North America, Morris was functioning as
secretary of the treasury for the thirteen colonies.
In April 1780, despite daily treatment by
Washington's personal physician, Juan de Miralles died
of "pulmonic fever" at the Ford House,
Washington's official residence at his military camp in
Morristown, N.J. Washington wrote a letter of condolence
to Don Diego José Navarro and sponsored a memorial
service at the Continental Army headquarters. De
Miralles was succeeded by his assistant, Francisco Rendón,
who remained in America through the end of the war.
Philadelphia's merchants
prospered from the growing Latin trade, and many were
able to purchase their own vessels. Some of the ships
were named after prominent Cuban personalities,
including Navarro and Miralles' widow, Doña María
Elegio de la Puente. One vessel was christened La
Havana. By 1781 Cuba had
become Philadelphia's key trading partner, in part due
to the British seizure of St. Eustatius in the Caribbean
that February. During that year, more than half the
vessels that ran the British blockade to enter
Philadelphia originated in Havana.
IN THE MEANTIME, THE FRENCH
COURT had decided to move beyond financing and supplying
the American Revolution to deploying professional troops
in North America under a seasoned commander, Jean-Baptiste
Donatien de Vimeur, comtede
Rochambeau. When Rochambeau and his forces landed in
July 1780, they found Washington's army in what appeared
to be an astonishingly distressed condition. The
Continentals' lack of an effective navy was also
obvious.
Throughout the war, the Continental Navy was able to
commission only about fifty ships, which were pitted
against a massive British fleet. The British had adopted
the technique of shielding ship hulls with copper plates
to increase speed and deter marine growth. Improved
shipping gave the British a decided advantage in
blockading ports, and control of the seas allowed them
to move troops and supplies along the eastern seaboard
at will.
General Henry Clinton, commander in chief of British
forces in North America since May 1778, then
headquartered in New York, understood the advantage of
British naval power. He planned to dispatch a fleet
under Rear Adm. Samuel Hood to reinforce Cornwallis at
Yorktown. But French Rear Adm. de Grasse and his Spanish
and Latin American allies had other plans.
DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, the balance of
population and wealth lay with the Spanish empire in the
Americas. Mexico City, with a population of one hundred
fifty thousand, was five times as large as Philadelphia,
the most populous city in British North America, and ten
times the size of Boston. The silver mines of Mexico and
Bolivia and gold mines in upper Peru were then the
richest in the world and formed the base of the wealth
exported to Spain. A strong labor force of indigenous
people, now managed by Spaniards and other Europeans,
worked in these perilous mines.
Toward the end of the century, this indigenous
population was recovering from the slaughter and disease
the Spanish had brought in their initial conquests and
efforts at subjugation. The total population in the
Caribbean and Spain's Latin American empire was
estimated at twenty to twenty-two million, thirteen
million of them Indian.
Havana had been considered the "Key to the New
World" for over two hundred fifty years. The city's
protected port was the shipping hub for the gold,
silver, and wealth of the Spanish empire. Havana in the
1780s was prosperous, elegant, and a critical trading
partner with the beleaguered colonies. The Spanish
silver dollar was widely circulated in North America as
a sound alternative to the increasingly inflated
American Continental paper currency.
The West Indies was also the exchange point for cash
transactions between the French and the Spanish courts.
As greedy pirates and privateers prowled the seas and
the British actively protected their possessions in the
West Indies, shipping gold and silver was risky in this
region. Instead, the French court would transfer money
to the Spanish in Madrid and would be repaid through
currency transactions in the West Indies. This method
ensured that both countries would have the funds they
needed for operations in their respective theaters of
war.
Political leaders in Havana included the minister of
the Indies, José de Gálvez, and his nephew, Bernardo
de Gálvez. Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis was one of
the Gálvez family's important protégés. Born in 1746
(the same year as Francisco José de Goya, who would
later paint his portrait), Saavedra was educated,
urbane, and insightful—an excellent selection as
diplomatic emissary assigned to the strategic West
Indies in 1779. His mission was to promote the
Spanish–French alliance and joint military operations
against the British and to ensure the movement of
finances for this effort. King Carlos III approved of
his appointment and mission.
Saavedra spoke and wrote French fluently, translating
the works of French military writers into Spanish. His
favorite books included the works of Horace, Plutarch,
Caesar, and Tacitus, and he was an eloquent and thorough
correspondent. The man who would play a vital role in
forcing the British army to surrender at Yorktown wrote
a detailed journal of the events that ensured victory
for the French and the Continentals. Saavedra also
recorded his insights and perceptions on the American
Revolution. Among his most prescient observations:
"What is not being thought about at present, what
ought to occupy the whole attention of politics, is the
great upheaval that in time the North American
revolution is going to produce in the human race."
Saavedra's role has been overlooked by many
historians, his position often described as that of a
"customs director" who Rear Adm. de Grasse had
to persuade to provide assistance. He actually was an
official of the secretary of state and of the General
Bureau of the Spanish Indies.
The prospects for the thirteen colonies in 1781
appeared bleak. "We are at the end of our tether,
and…now or never our deliverance must come,"
wrote a discouraged George Washington in April. The
rebellion was in its seventh year. The strain of
supporting the conflict and deprivation brought on by
the British blockade continued to crush the economy. A
nightmarish smallpox epidemic ravaged the populace.
As the government printed more money, Continental
currency continued to hyperinflate. The council in
Philadelphia began publishing the month-to-month rates
of currency to specie, which weary consumers then
multiplied by three. When the currency finally collapsed
in May 1781, its ratio to specie was officially 175 to
1, or 525 to 1 by public reckoning. A spirited
procession was staged in Philadelphia to mark its
collapse, with people marching with dollars in their
hats as paper plumes. An unhappy dog trotted alongside,
tarred and pasted with the worthless paper.
From the marquisde
Lafayette, whose forces had shadowed Lord Cornwallis in
Virginia, Washington knew that the British commander had
entrenched his forces at Yorktown, in a potentially
fatal position. Knowing that a French fleet was headed
for Cuba, Washington and Rochambeau devised a plan to
move many of their forces south and spring a surprise
trap on the British army. The French navy's coordination
was crucial, since Cornwallis could use the British
fleet to remove his troops unless the French could break
the British control of the Chesapeake Bay.
As he planned for the Yorktown campaign, Washington
was desperate for hard currency to pay his troops. He
wrote to Robert Morris: "I must entreat you, if
possible, to procure one month's pay in specie for the
detachment under my command. Part of the troops have not
been paid anything for a long time past and have upon
several occasions shown marks of great discontent,"
an understated reference to the mutinies by some
Continental troops and the general unrest among many.
At this point in the summer of 1781, the French war
chest in North America was also depleted. A shipment of
gold was due to arrive in Boston sometime in the early
fall, but with the dangers and unpredictability of
overland transport, Rochambeau knew that he could not
depend on these funds for the Virginia campaign. He
wrote to de Grasse on June 6, 1781, stating that his
funds were insufficient to maintain his army longer than
August 20, and he felt that it was impossible to secure
the needed gold or silver specie at any price.
Rochambeau also shared his knowledge of the condition
of the Continental Army: "I should not conceal from
you, M. l'Amiral, that these people are at the very end
of the resources or that Washington will not have at his
disposal half of the number of troops he counted upon
having. While he is secretive on this subject I believe
that at present he has not more than 6,000 men all
told."
Rear Admiral de Grasse would
command French sailors and marines on French ships for
the most decisive naval battle of the American
Revolution. On March 22, 1781, de Grasse had sailed for
the Caribbean with an armada of more than twenty ships
of the line, leading a convoy of a hundred and fifty
French merchant vessels. He also ferried infantry
reinforcements for Rochambeau. His command ship was Le
Ville de Paris, reportedly
the largest warship on the seas when it was launched. Le
Ville de Pariswas an
imposing vessel with one hundred ten cannons on three
gun decks. The admiral's mission was to reinforce the
French possessions in the West Indies and then to turn
toward North America.
Fully briefed on the gravity of the situation when he
arrived in Cuba and anxious to sail north, de Grasse
corresponded with Spanish authorities in Cuba and with
Bernardo de Gálvez in New Orleans. De Gálvez, governor
of Louisiana (and nephew of Jose de Gálvez), was also
the senior Spanish military commander. He had defeated
British forces at Natchez and Baton Rouge in 1779,
captured Mobile the next year, and in May 1781 had taken
the British capital of West Florida, Pensacola,
effectively leaving the British with no Caribbean base
other than Jamaica.
Although he was eyeing the British naval base at New
Providence in the Bahamas (which he would capture the
following year), and he had authority to request the
French fleet's support, de Gálvez had already
determined to release these ships, as well as the French
corps at Santo Domingo that had been placed in Spanish
service. De Gálvez instructed Francisco Saavedra, then
in Santo Domingo, to confer with de Grasse about
"the operations that must be executed."
On June 19, 1781, Juan Ignacio de Urriza, intendant
in Havana, wrote de Gálvez, stating that
"following the Real Orden of March 17, [they] had
prepared beforehand for the delivery of one million
pesos to the French commanders." Urriza added that
this same day they had received a sealed letter from the
viceroy of New Spain advising that warships would soon
be available to sail from Vera Cruz with all or at least
part of the needed money.
On July 16, de Grasse arrived in Santo Domingo. Five
more ships joined the admiral's fleet, having recently
returned from the victorious joint expedition with
Bernardo de Gálvez in Pensacola.
Saavedra had arrived in the
French Cape on July 12 and later dined with the French
officers aboard Palmier.
At the dinner, he learned that the frigate Concordehad
carried to the French Cape an interesting cargo. He
wrote of "twelve harbor pilots experienced in those
northern seas, about whom there was much secrecy. This
indicated that Comte de Grasse must be going to lead an
expedition to those parts."
Saavedra and de Grasse met
for the first time on July 17, 1781, and Saavedra joined
de Grasse at dawn the next day on board Ville
de Paris. The two
representatives developed an impressive list of options
to
harass the British. They agreed that de Grasse and
his fleet would take possession of the Chesapeake Bay,
moving inland via the rivers to "cut off the
retreat and prevent the reinforcement of the army of
Lord Cornwallis who was in that area. At the same time,
General Washington, Comte de Rochambeau, and the Marquis
de Lafayette, who had already agreed to the plan, would
encircle him on all sides with their respective troops
and totally destroy him or oblige him to
surrender."
De Grasse was planning to take no more than
twenty-four ships of the line in order to leave five or
six vessels to protect French commerce. He suggested
that four Spanish ships could join his fleet as they
headed to the Chesapeake. Saavedra noted that
"because Spain had not yet formally recognized the
independence of the Anglo-Americans, there could perhaps
be some political objection to taking a step that
appeared to suppose this recognition." However,
Saavedra reasoned, de Grasse could take all of his
combat ships to the Chesapeake if four Spanish ships
protected the French merchant ships in Santo Domingo,
and de Grasse accepted the proposal.
With the naval campaign plans formed, de Grasse then
turned to Rochambeau's request that he raise 1 million
livres or more in specie and bring it with his
reinforcements to the Chesapeake Bay. This assignment
proved to be challenging, even for a man as formidable
as de Grasse. His first step was to meet with merchants
and planters of the Cape of France, offering the
collateral of his own plantations in Haiti.
Saavedra wrote that in late July de Grasse had
printed notices posted on the street corners of the
French Cape, offering bills redeemable at the treasury
of Paris at a profitable rate of interest in return for
hard currency. Having experienced unacceptable delays in
the past when lending to their court, the French
citizens of Santo Domingo declined, even at the
twenty-five percent interest rate offered. De Grasse
wrote on August 3 from the Cape to the Spanish
leadership in Havana, asking for a loan of half a
million pesos.
De Grasse again conferred
with Saavedra, who reassured him that he was certain the
silver would be available in Havana. He was expecting it
to be shipped from Mexico, from the mines in Zacatecas
and Chihuahua. Saavedra wrote that he left for Havana on
August 5 on Aigrette,
arriving on August 15, and went to see "the
generals, then the intendant and the treasurer."
However, Saavedra soon learned that the expected
shipments with specie from Mexico had not arrived. The
Spanish people in Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo had
contributed a hundred thousand pesos for the cause, but
this was not nearly enough, and Havana's official
treasury temporarily lacked gold and silver.
Saavedra acted quickly, turning to the Spanish and
Cuban residents in Havana for assistance. On August 16,
he later recorded, "the announcement was
promulgated among the citizens, and it was proclaimed
that anyone who wished to contribute towards aiding the
French fleet with his money should send it immediately
to the treasury. Two French officers went to collect the
funds, and in six hours the requisite amount was
gathered."
After receiving the funds, de Grasse immediately
sailed for the Chesapeake with his fleet. Spy ships
prowled West Indies waters, and de Grasse feared that
the British would learn details of his mission.
Realizing he was critically pressed for time to reach
Yorktown, the admiral decided to take his fleet through
the old Bahamian Channel, described by José de Gálvez
as "the famous dreaded channel, where no French
fleet had ever passed."
The Spanish authorities well
understood the potential im-pact of their funding of
Yorktown on the outcome of the Revolutionary War. King
Carlos III promulgated an official notice on September
5, 1781, the same day the British fleet sailing from New
York to relieve the Yorktown siege first encountered de
Grasse's warships, and long before the king knew the
outcome. This document establishes the king's great
satisfaction with the assistance the citizens of Havana
rendered in lending half a million pesos in "the
briefest time" to the comtede
Grasse and the French squadron under his command.
In later official Spanish testimony recorded on
December 7, 1781, the leading naval officer in the
region, General José Solano, also discussed the king's
review of the incident and the response of the citizens
in Havana. By then Cornwallis had surrendered, and
Solano noted "with great pleasure the gains in the
North, the effects of the aid with the triumphs are well
known."
OF COURSE, THESE DEVELOPMENTS WERE CRUCIAL as a
worried General Washington and his staff marched south,
awaiting news of de Grasse. The reaction of the normally
reserved Washington to de Grasse's arrival underscores
the importance with which the commander in chief viewed
the French naval reinforcements. A bemused Rochambeau
spotted Washington "waving his hat at me with
demonstrative gestures of the greatest joy. When I rode
up to him, he explained that he had just received a
dispatch…informing him that de Grasse had
arrived."
De Grasse wrote Rochambeau on
August 30 from aboard Le Ville de Paris,
anchored in the Chesapeake Bay, noting his "great
pleasure" in arriving at the bay after departing
from Santo Domingo on August 3. He said that he had
needed to first cruise to Havana for the 1.2 million
livres, and he was ferrying the thirty-two hundred
reinforcements that Rochambeau had requested.
The spies that de Grasse had feared alerted a furious
Sir Henry Clinton to many of the details of the French
fleet from Havana, including how quickly a substantial
war chest had been raised. Assuming British control of
the coast, Clinton had ordered Cornwallis to take a
defensible position in Tidewater Virginia. He was also
sure that the main American army was facing his forces
in New York, and was genuinely surprised that Washington
had tricked him. He immediately realized the peril
Cornwallis faced.
Clinton fully understood how this fresh infusion of
funds could rejuvenate the exhausted rebels. Referring
to the preparations by the Continental Army for the
Yorktown campaign, Clinton wrote in his memoirs:
"as the hard money…procured from the Havana
(amounting in a very short time, as was reported to me,
to half a million dollars)…was beginning to give a
life and figure to all their measures, I had proposed to
the Admiral [Hood] a plan for shutting up that port
[Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress met] and
attempting such a blow against the place itself as might
disperse the Congress, ruin public credit, and totally
overset their schemes and preparations for the
campaign."
De Grasse's swift arrival,
with its timing decidedly affected by the speed of the
collection of funds from Havana, was harrowingly close
for eighteenth-century military maneuvers. On September
1, the British fleet under Rear Adm. Thomas Graves
sailed from New York for the Chesapeake. From his
ninety-eight-gun flagship London,
Graves commanded nineteen ships of the line and nine
frigates. In the dawn light of September 5, Graves
sighted the Chesapeake capes. De Grasse's men too were
on the lookout early that morning, but for a French
squadron coming from Newport, Rhode Island, under
Jacques-Melchior Saint-Laurent, comtede
Barras, that were heading south with supplies for
Lafayette. The sailors in de Grasse's fleet soon
realized that the oncoming ships plowing across the seas
were British. They quickly sprinkled the decks with sand
to soak up the blood that would be splattered in the
morning battle.
De Grasse would enter the battle with his entire
fleet, as arranged by Saavedra, and could bring at least
two hundred more cannons to bear than Graves. But the
British were also handicapped by faulty communication.
As the ships closed, heading south, the two fleets
forming a V, Graves signaled "bear down and engage
the enemy" but Hood's ship continued to signal
"line ahead." Only eight British ships fired
against fifteen French vessels in the 90 minutes of
sharp fighting that ended with nightfall. Wood
shattered, canvas sails ripped, cannonballs screamed
through the air, and the cries of wounded and dying
rolled across the blue and white waves. Finally, both
sides halted to appraise the damage and briefly mourn
their dead. The British flagship and five others were
badly damaged, while the French suffered only minor
damage and lost about two hundred dead and wounded.
Neither side wishing to resume fighting, they drifted
south for several days, reaching the vicinity of Cape
Hatteras, North Carolina.
When de Grasse could no longer see the British fleet,
he feared they might have turned toward Yorktown, so he
sailed back to the Chesapeake, finding de Barras waiting
for him.
The British held a council of war at which Graves and
Hood concluded that given "the position of the
enemy, the present condition of the British fleet…and
the impracticability of giving any effectual succour to
General Earl Cornwallis…it was resolved the British
squadron…should proceed with all dispatch to New
York." The British ships withdrew, leaving
Cornwallis and his army to defend themselves against the
combined American and French forces. When a shocked King
George heard the news of the defeat of his navy at the
Chesapeake capes, he confided to the earl of Sandwich
in a decidedly different tone than his pronouncements of
September 1780, "I nearly think the empire
ruined…this cruel event is too recent for me to be as
yet able to say more."
On October 17, Cornwallis realized his position was
hopeless. After a siege of twenty-one days, he
surrendered his seventy-two hundred men at Yorktown.
General Washington and his wife Martha ended the
tumultuous year of 1781 as guests of the Spanish in
Philadelphia. Francisco Rendón hosted the Washingtons
at his home during the Christmas holidays. They had
brought their own food, housewares, and cook, but Rendón
graciously insisted that the king of Spain intended to
meet all of their domestic needs. In a letter to José
de Gálvez reporting on the Washingtons' holiday, Rendón
wrote that he "interpreted their acceptance of his
hospitality as a gesture of respect for the Spanish
King."
The financial assistance at Yorktown from Havana
represented the most critical support provided by the
Spanish and Latin Americans during the Revolutionary
War, but it was far from the only assistance they
rendered. From the Mexicans who mined the silver to
supply Havana to the victorious Spanish and Latin
American troops who defeated the British at Pensacola,
many Latinos played an important though largely
overlooked role in America's successful bid for
independence. It is a legacy that should not be
forgotten.
historynet.comhttp://www.historynet.com/bankrolling-the-battle-of-yorktown.htm
How
is my Darling today? I hope you are fine, you and my babies, and the
rest of the Family.
craftsmen
from 
After visiting the church and the plaza area,
it was time to return to my hotel. I was tired and hungry.
These
parish documents date back to 1594, and they record the births, deaths,
marriages and baptisms of the people who lived in St. Augustine from
that time through the mid-1700s. They're the earliest written documents
from any region of the United States, according to J. Michael Francis, a
history professor at the University of South Florida.![Florida digital documents project: Fragile documents at the Historical Archives of the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine, in St. Augustine, Fla., which date back to the year 1594, when Spanish colonialists settled in the area, are being digitized to preserve them. IMAGE]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/be/e8529d1622acfb870ece9427f272_h0_w305_m6_lfalse.jpg"} "Florida digital documents project: Fragile documents at the Historical Archives of the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine, in St. Augustine, Fla., which date back to the year 1594, when Spanish colonialists settled in the area, are being digitized to preserve them. IMAGE (AP: Tamara Lush)")
ara
mi familia, amigas y amigos.
Excavations
at the site of the wreck have been going on for more than 20 years,
using deep-sea technology developed by British engineers to drill for
oil in the North Sea.
In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee,
wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he
come back to work on his farm. Jourdon — who, since being 
The
vitality of the present moment in Cuba even compelled me to wonder if we as
North Americans are so comfortable and confident in our culture that we have
ceased to imagine a different one. It was clear to me that Cubans have no
choice. They must create a new world. I was inspired to imagine collaborations
with North American artists and Cubans at this critical juncture. But could we
as North Americans let go of our fixed ideas regarding our own society (and
Cuba’s)? Could we in fact abandon our prejudices toward Cuba and join our
neighbors in co-creating a vision for the future? If so, I believe we could
pursue the first meaningful collaborations with our Cuban counterparts during
these defining years of shared history. Our generation of theater artists
could in fact contribute to new ways in which Cubans and North Americans
relate as we move into the 21st century.
At
the entrance of La Colmenita, Arts School for Children, Havana
I
addition to the emigration, young people without the skills to leave
Spain are 
Another town, Kennesaw, in Georgia has has a similar law on the books for several years. The crime rate their is significantly lower than the state and national averages. Violent crime rates began to drop just after the law was passed, and continued to drop at at rate that was faster than the the national average.
While these laws are symbolic, they do set a tone and raise awareness for people to prepare themselves to take care of themselves. Only when individuals practice self-sufficiency, can a society have the means and the attitude to help others.
Kennesaw, GA – a suburb of Atlanta – passed the first of these laws in the 80′s. Crime immediately dropped and has stayed significantly lower than surrounding towns even though population has exploded.
Sent by Odell Harwell hirider@clear.net