Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic by David Head (review)

Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republicreveals the fascinating commercial, ideological, political, and personal links between various North American, Caribbean, South American, and European historical actors along the waters and ports of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Working with nearly 350 federal court cases—as well as shipping news, diplomatic correspondence, and other sources—David Head skillfully weaves together the adventures and misadventures of these seamen, merchants, investors, and statesmen to uncover the complex geopolitical backdrop against which U.S. privateering for the Spanish Americas occurred. Head is mostly concerned with explaining how privateering worked, how the United States government responded to it, and what broader historical context facilitated or discouraged privateering.

His answers to these questions emerge from the stories of men like James Chaytor, a Baltimore-based brig captain who renounced his American citizenship and was naturalized in Buenos Aires in order to legally accept a commission to attack Spanish vessels and capture Spanish goods. In the process of serving the greater goal of Spanish American independence, Chaytor also hoped to recover the investment he had made in the commodities he had taken to but failed to sell in Buenos Aires. Head introduces us as well to brothers Pierre and Jean Laffite, French nationals who ran an impressive smuggling scheme in Louisiana, in and around New Orleans. Mediating transactions between privateers eager to sell captured prizes and merchant-buyers eager to profit from the local trade in smuggled goods and slaves, the Laffites built an influential clientele who protected them from legal prosecution and ensured the longevity of their activities. We also learn about Thomas Taylor, a Delaware native turned citizen of Buenos Aires, who recruited privateers in Baltimore to cross the Atlantic and attack Spanish vessels on behalf of his adopted government. Along with other like-minded agents, he mobilized some wealthy and prominent Baltimore investors who helped make privateering for Spanish America an everyday business in that city. Finally, we meet men like Louis-Michel Aury, a French privateer, and Gregor MacGregor, a Scotsman who had served in the Venezuelan army. Both Aury and MacGregor ambitiously attempted to create independently governed havens for privateers in Galveston and on Amelia Island, respectively, vesting themselves with the political authority to issue their own privateering commissions. Through these individual stories, Head teases out the historical context that made privateering attractive and somewhat tolerated: the wars of independence in the Spanish American colonies; U.S. commitment to neutrality during territorial negotiations with Spain after the Louisiana Purchase; and the United States’ cautious sympathy for Spanish American independence at a time when some American citizens expressed enthusiastic support for it.

Privateers of the Americasoffers a rich account of how the imperial and national struggle for sovereignty and territorial control intersected with individual pursuits of glory, wealth, and freedom of action to shape the early-nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Moreover, Head effectively challenges a scholarship that has interpreted American diplomatic and political history of the early nineteenth century as the onset of the age of manifest destiny. Instead, he situates events of this period firmly within an Atlantic world context, demonstrating that the comings and goings of the men who transited the Atlantic space during the early republic—and not plans of westward expansion—were foremost in the minds of American statesmen negotiating U.S. international relationships. Head, therefore, reminds us that the Atlantic world, as a framework through which to interpret human action and political developments in the past, can be as relevant to writing the history of the young nations of the Americas as it has proved to be to the scholarship on early modern European empires.