Spanish Orphans, British Prisoners, and the American Revolution: Warfare, Social Welfare, and Technical Training

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and aScotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgottenSpot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalorGrow up to be a hero and a scholar?¹

These lines about an orphan open the hottest show on Broadway this year. While others would not share Alexander Hamilton’s fate as a revolutionary hero portrayed centuries later on U.S. currency and Broadway stages, orphans in European home countries and overseas territories were commonly embroiled in the economic and political developments that brought metropoles and colonies into alliances and conflicts with one another during the late eighteenth century. The American Revolution was one such conflict. This article discusses male orphans from Spain, which is less famous than France as an ally of the rebels in Britain’s North American colonies, and an arena of the war relatively little known to non-specialists: the 1779–1783 siege of Gibraltar. More specifically, this study explores the capture of British ships and crewmembers off the Iberian coast, and the involvement of and implications for different groups of male orphanage wards from Seville in these events. Teens at the maritime orphanage of San Telmo participated in the August 1780 capture of an English convoy near the Strait of Gibraltar and were at the heart of a resulting dispute over the monetary portions due to them for it. In the following years, the youths at Seville’s other main male orphanage, known as “The Toribios,” figured prominently in plans to spur the local economy by tapping the textile-making savvy of British prisoners of war in Andalusia.

Besides illuminating understudied dimensions, arenas, and actors in the American Revolution, this essay examines Spanish initiatives to combine juvenile poor relief with efforts to invigorate Spain’s economic and military profile in the competitive international context of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The setting is the reign of Charles III (1759–1788), often considered the high water mark of “enlightened” monarchy in Spain, and the Bourbon Reforms. The episodes occurring at this time show that institutionalized young people—in this case, male youths—became an important resource and conduit through which reformers tried to implement technological innovations and promote international competitiveness, both on land and sea, and both in military and commercial ventures. They highlight the importance of site-specific adaptation and continued reliance on local players as well as bureaucratic machinations and the contingency of international conditions that the Spanish Crown and other “enlightened” reformers could not fully control. This study thus reveals intriguing intersections between areas of Spain’s Bourbon Reforms which were often seen in relative isolation from one another, and the tensions that developed as they were put into practice.

Though not initially conceived as a study of the Enlightenment per se, this exploration also responds to trends in the scholarship on this topic. In a recent essay, Gabriel Paquette usefully discusses developments in scholarship on the Enlightenment that he finds especially helpful in considering the Spanish case. These include our growing recognition that not all Enlightenments (like Dorinda Outram and others, Paquette insists on the plural) were subversive, and our renewed willingness to consider the plausibility of government-sponsored “enlightened reform.”² As Paquette notes, openness to considering programs emanating from or patronized by monarchical governments as potentially worthy and authentic components of the Enlightenment facilitates and encourages thinking about the ideas concerning political economy that were so prominent among self-styled reformers within and beyond the Spanish court. These are welcome developments in the scholarship, and not only as a vehicle for championing the Spanish Enlightenment and its most prominent figures, as Ruth MacKay has shown in her trenchant critique.³ The present study benefits from and builds on such work, as the linked cases involving Spanish orphans in the wars of the American Revolution invite us to consider the usefulness, and limits, of “enlightened reform.”

The findings reported here are based primarily on manuscripts from the Spanish national archive at Simancas, with additional documentation from the...