Guns, Ships, and Cows: Spain in the American Revolution with Dr. Richard Bell

Between 1779 and 1782, Spanish rangers from the region around San Antonio herded more than 10,000 cows over 500 miles to Louisiana to help feed Spanish soldiers fighting the British in the American Revolutionary War. Spain had joined the war on the patriots’ side in 1779 and would spend the next four years contributing a deluge of fresh soldiers, sailors, ships, and cows to the war effort.

University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell explores the hidden history of Spain’s participation in the American Revolution. Bell argues that King Carlos III and his ministers in Madrid saw the conflict as an unprecedented opportunity to regain territory Spain had ceded to the British during the French and Indian War. For that reason, Spanish merchants in Bilbao and the Caribbean had been secretly supplying the patriots with hundreds of thousands of flints, shot, and blankets since 1774. 

Their government’s declaration of war five years later turned that trickle of support into a flood. It marked the starting pistol for a fifty-month campaign to recapture Minorca in the Mediterranean, and to lay siege to Gibraltar, the rocky promontory on Spain’s southern tip that the British had held since the start of the century. The Spanish Navy would also partner with France to harass British merchant shipping and would send an enormous armada to invade Britain itself. Spanish soldiers would also dominate much of the fighting in the Southern colonies, launching campaigns to dislodge the redcoats from strategic forts at Pensacola and Mobile. 

Led by Dr. Richard Bell, an expert on American Revolutionary history, this seminar will explore the often overlooked, but undeniably significant role that Spain played in America's revolution. Participants will come away with an increased appreciation for the ways in which the Spanish aided America in its fight for freedom.