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• Baltuskonis discusses the American Revolution in a global context

By land and by sea: Global intervention in the American Revolution ensured its success

As the United States of America celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, research in the College of Liberal Arts shows that beyond our own borders, the road to independence was paved by Patriots’ powerful global allies.

Assistant Professor of History Philip Baltuskonis studies Latin American History, the age of revolutions and imperial reform. He said from the beginning, the new nation called on potential international allies for the fight against the British Empire.

“The American Revolution was intentionally international,” Baltuskonis said. “Colonists were intentional about saying this is not a conflict just between two English parties, but an attempt to separate from the nation of England, and that's an important distinction because that invited foreign powers to intervene.”

Baltuskonis said the very language within the Declaration of Independence invited the international community to intervene. If the Seven Years War was the first true “world war,” the powers involved in the American Revolution would make up history’s second global conflict.

France officially allied with the Patriots against the British. Spain joined the conflict to get revenge on the British and support the “Pacte de Famille” – a contract between members of the Bourbon family, including France’s and Spain’s kings, to assist each other during wartime.

Between them, Baltuskonis said the British were on the defensive all over the world.

“As a world war, the American Revolution invites us to not only think about the Caribbean and adjacent regions that see conflict but also allows us to travel all the way to India where there are major battles being fought between the British, the French and their allies,” Baltuskonis said. “By 1780, the French, Spanish, Dutch and numerous regional powers across the Americas, Africa and Southern Asia were at war with the British.”

In the Caribbean, the combined French and Spanish fleets outnumbered the British, engaging in naval battles and pulling resources away from the fight in the colonies. A key Dutch colony, St. Eustatius Island, allowed French, Spanish and Americans to resupply as they outmaneuvered British raids.

The most direct example of the Caribbean’s importance comes from Saint-Domingue, what we know today as Haiti. A militia made up of freed people of color in the French colony fought for the Patriots in America. In Savannah, Georgia, the militia held off British invasion so that revolutionaries could flee the city. Their sacrifice is memorialized with a monument in the city that still stands today.

The Saint-Domingue militia, French, French Canadians, Spanish, Native Americans and free people of color from Spanish colonies would later pull off a massive joint operation to retake Pensacola, Florida.

“It's a success of joint operations in that this invasion required the Spanish and the French to coordinate an amphibious assault between two different empires and military systems, along with coordinate with their various allies,” Baltuskonis said. “The British were unable to amass imperial support, because by 1780, the British are fighting a global war, so their army and navy are stretched quite thin.”

By the end of the American Revolution, the British spent 250 million pounds – double what it spent during the Seven Years’ War. The Spanish spent 431 million reales, including paying for Patriots’ salaries, uniforms and weapons during the Revolution. The French spent more than a billion livres. The human cost of the war, half attributed to smallpox and other diseases, totaled almost 300,000 lives.

While America won its hard-earned independence, the French and Spanish empires gained their payback against Britain for the Seven Years War, but it cost them millions in debt.

“The American Revolution, if we're thinking about it globally, is a massive expenditure for the major empires of the time which will cause severe issues within most of those empires,” Baltuskonis said. “But more importantly, the extent of resources that other imperial powers were willing to expend in a war against Britain proved crucial to the success of the Revolution in the thirteen colonies.”

To recoup the cost of the American Revolution, the French and Spanish empires made some of the same mistakes Britain did in the Americas: increasing taxes, improper representation from colonies and transferring more power to the crown.

Through the late 1780s into the 1810s, those who actively participated in and witnessed America’s independence from Britain used that experience to secure their own freedoms in Europe, the Caribbean and South America.

Baltuskonis said the American Revolution may not have been the cause, but this period of history could be called the “age of revolutions.”

“There's a lot of interesting parallels to what the colonists are fighting for in North America,” Baltuskonis said. “There was always that space for the colonies to contest how strictly imperial policy was practiced. Imperial powers are thinking, ‘If we can meet them at the negotiating table, then maybe we can avoid an American revolution.’ The dangers it posed to local control, and to crown policy, were quite striking.”

Learn more about the Department of History at the College of Liberal Arts website.

Tags: History Faculty Research