Tyson Reeder - Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series Editors

Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Free Trade in the Age of Revolution

Tyson Reeder

Copyright 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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ISBN 978-0-8122-5138-8

For Karen

Map 1. North AmericanLuso-Atlantic trade region.

On July 15, 1818, Captain Jacob Leandro da Silva and his crew left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil aboard the Unio da Amrica and sailed north toward the Brazilian province of Bahia. The following day, nine leagues southeast of Cabo Frio, a distant ship with a Portuguese flag fired an eighteen-pound cannon ball into the open waters, signaling Leandro da Silva to halt. As the unidentified vessel approached, the crew lowered the Portuguese flag and hoisted the flag of the insurgents of Spanish America. Leandro da Silva realized too late the intentions of the advancing privateer brigantine called Irresistible.

Captain John Danels of Baltimore had weighed anchor at Buenos Aires on June 12 and sailed the Irresistible up the southern coast of Brazil with his crew of about a hundred and eighty North Americans. He wielded a letter of marque (also called a commission) from Jos Gervasio Artigas, the revolutionary leader of the Banda Oriental, or present-day Uruguay. The Portuguese military had invaded the region just south of the Brazilian border in 1816. As an eminent caudillo, Artigas led an army to stave off Portuguese encroachments and to protect the provinces autonomy. He offered privateer commissions to North Americans to assist him. The commissions ostensibly allowed captains such as Danels to plunder Portuguese and Spanish vessels according to international legal custom. But Artigass government lacked recognition from the community of nations. Commissioned by a government of such precarious international status, Danels inhabited a shadowy legal space between pirate and privateer.

Upon capturing the Unio, Danels and his crew brought Leandro da Silva and other officers aboard the Irresistible while they pillaged the Portuguese ship until only a pipe remained for drinking. Aboard the Irresistible,

In his audacious defiance of Portuguese sovereignty, Danels revealed a willingness to profit from political turmoil in South America. During the Age of Revolution (the tumultuous era between the 1760s and mid-1820s in which Atlantic empires fractured), many traders displayed ingenuity as they sought to enhance their commerce to the detriment of imperial states. Most U.S. traders did not meddle so wantonly in Iberian affairs, but privateers such as Danels marked the culmination of a hope long held among many North Americans that they could profit from revolution in Brazil. As the Age of Revolution progressed, numerous Atlantic theorists and traders extolled the virtues of free trade and decried government restrictions on commerce. Smugglers, pirates, and free trade advocates helped mold commercial policy in the British-American and Luso-Brazilian Atlantics by challenging states for control over commerce. By the early nineteenth century, U.S. republicans viewed free trade as a tool to combat monarchy and empire, whereas Portuguese monarchists assumed it could reinforce them. Their divergent interpretations provoked international conflict that by the 1820s led many North Americans to abandon hope that the Americas would become a hemisphere of free trade republics.