Spain and the American Civil War

Introduction

Introduction  Spain is the natural ally of the South. If the South has had a friend, from the beginning of her troubles, it has been Spain. —Richmond Dispatch, February 10, 1862 The American Civil War was primarily a domestic conflict, pitting the southeastern slaveholding states against the more urban and industrial North and the antislavery West. Other nations, including major powers such as France and Britain and less globally significant ones such as Russia and Spain, did not intervene militarily or politically in any significant way. Even so, there was strong international interest and involvement in the conflict. The United States before its civil war was a rising economic and ideological power, especially in the Americas and the Atlantic world, so its division into two warring factions generated interest in overseas capitals. Some historians have noted the attention paid to the war internationally, but most publications have focused on diplomatic and economic relations between the two American republics—the United States of America and the Confederate States of America (CSA)—with the French empire and the United Kingdom. Negotiations between the Confederacy and these two European powers and the potential for their intervention on behalf of the Southern rebels have generated deserved attention. Only these two European states had the potential to broaden the conflict instantly—with British troops in Canada and the French in Mexico,   Spain and the American Civil War as well as navies from both, able to lend immediate aid to the South should they choose to do so.1 However, one other nation was of comparable importance to the Confederacy and, in many ways, was more amenable to cooperation and even military collaboration: the kingdom of Spain. During the American Civil War, Spain was actively engaged in military expansion in the Caribbean. The nation worked to support slavery in its colonies and elsewhere, hoped for the defeat of the United States, provided tangible aid to Confederate warships, and even considered possibilities for an alliance with the rebels. After decades of foreign weakness and internal conflict, during the 1860s Spain was once again a nation of consequence. Its involvement, whether alone or in conjunction with its allies, could have transformed the American Civil War had it opted to align itself with the Confederacy, a viable option considered seriously in Madrid. Some at the time regarded Spain as likely to be “the last power to act,” but even so there was a serious opportunity to engage it in the war on behalf of the Confederacy.2 That it did not choose this path does not diminish the importance of understanding the history of Spain during this period, an understanding that will also enrich the overall picture of the global significance of the American Civil War. Spain during the late 1850s and early 1860s stood at a moment of promise, in terms of its international position, economy, and military strength. This period, directly related to the temporary strength of the “Unión Liberal,” between 1858 and 1863, “represented a culminating moment” in the foreign relations of the reign of Queen Isabel II, Spain’s sole monarch. For a variety of reasons, Spain had relatively more freedom of diplomatic action during this period than at any other time in the nineteenth century. With British and French ambivalence and distractions elsewhere and the focus of the United States and the Confederacy on their own survival during the American Civil War, relative domestic peace within Spain made more action overseas possible. Temporary budget surpluses also meant Spain could afford to take actions such as building new warships, modernizing its army, and undertaking overseas expeditions and even wars in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The nation’s leaders were embarking on what one historian referred to as “a vivid, grandiose, and really Spanish foreign policy,” for the first time perhaps since the seventeenth century.3  Introduction There was therefore, a brief moment when some Spaniards, and even foreign leaders such as Emperor Napoleon III of France, believed Spain could again become a great power as it had been in previous centuries. Certainly this was the ambition of Spain’s most prominent prime minister during this period, General Leopoldo O’Donnell, whose experience as a senior officer in the Spanish empire had convinced him that his nation was destined to return to greatness. Britain was the superpower of the nineteenth century, and its toleration of Spanish ambitions was a contributing factor in...