"Latin American Rebels and the United States, 1806-1822" Topic

"Retired ambassador and career diplomat Gordon S. Brown takes Spanish American rebels, their American partners, and diplomatic hand-wringing as his subjects in a work that reexamines the tumultuous years of the revolutionary Spanish Atlantic. Brown approaches his topic from the perspective of rebellious agents from Spanish American juntas and their efforts to conduct covert operations without upsetting the balancing act of neutrality that constituted US foreign policy. He showcases the ways that these agents made the United States "another theater of the Spanish American independence struggle" (p. 13). The narrative pivots around cross-cultural dialogues, "halting and full of misunderstandings and mistakes"; filibustering expeditions (both those executed and the false starts) along the Gulf Coast; and the "war by proxy" of privateering by Spanish American insurgents, US merchants, and multinational crews (pp. 13, 77).

The book opens in 1797 with Tennessee senator William Blount's scheme to seize Louisiana and Western Florida from the Spanish and deliver the territories to the British, and closes with the first official recognitions of Spanish American independence in the early 1820s. A heavy focus on the critical years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars up to the signing of the Adams-Onís Treaty in 1819 grounds the work as Brown zeroes in on the height of insurgent activity in and around the United States. Brown strikes a careful balance between the high diplomacy of the Adams-Onís discussions at the latter end of the book and the more exciting, clandestine activities of Spanish American insurgents. While scholars will not necessarily find a new interpretation in Latin American Rebels, those interested in the range of activities proposed and executed by the agents in and around the United States or the ways in which US neutrality was debated by politicians and citizens alike, circumvented by agents of multiple locales and compromised by the actions of US citizens, will find the tangled web of revolutionary activity spelled out in ample detail and accessible prose.

Rather than redirect existing scholarship, Brown's goal is to bring together "into a single, concise, coherent narrative" a subject he has found too fragmented in previous studies (p. 3). For that purpose, he largely utilizes previously published primary source materials and secondary sources to weave together the disparate threads of the historiography to fashion his dynamic narrative. He fills his pages with intriguing characters, ranging from the ever-watchful Spanish diplomat Luis de Onís and the indefatigable agent Manuel Torres to the privateering escapades of Captain Thomas Taylor and the opportunistic Lafitte brothers. While these colorful characters make for a page-turning narrative, the work avoids conversing with the more recent debates that historians might be seeking…"
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