The Last Battle of the American Revolution: Yorktown. No, The Bahamas! (The Spanish-American Expedition to Nassau in 1782)

1988 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Eric Beerman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
New Providence ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
William Iii

History generally records Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 as the last battle of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, six months after that epic campaign, warships of the South Carolina Navy commanded by Commodore Alexander Gillon, transported Spanish General Juan Manuel de Cagigal's infantrymen from Havana to Nassau in the Bahamas, where the British capitulated on May 8, 1782. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles signed the following year made this little-known Spanish and American expedition the last battle of the American Revolution.The Bahamas, or Lucayos, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of the United States, take on increasing historical interest with the approach of the 500th Anniversary of Columbus's first landing in the New World 200 miles southeast of Nassau at Guanahani. The Bahamas, however, played only a minor role in the Spanish colonization of the Americas whereas, Great Britain gave priority to these strategic islands, making an initial settlement on the island of Eleuthera. The British later found a better harbor to the west and named the island New Providence which became their Bahama stronghold. King Charles II granted the Duke of Albemarle the Bahamas in 1670 and appointed John Wentworth as governor. Harrassed by plundering pirates, the British governor constructed a fort on New Providence in 1695 and named it Nassau in honor of King William III. The island's preoccupation changed in 1703 from marauding corsairs to a Spanish and French invasion during the War of the Spanish Succession. Great Britain regained control and maintained it until the outbreak of the American Revolution when John Paul Jones participated in the brief American seizure of Nassau in March 1776 in one of the first offensive operations in the history of the United States Navy.

2. Diplomacy of the American Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
John Adams ◽  
The Us

‘Diplomacy of the American Revolution’ considers the United States' battle for independence and the diplomatic efforts required to reach agreement with Great Britain. In order to win independence, the United States had found it necessary to involve itself in the international rivalries and politics of Europe. The negotiations between the US peace commissioners — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay — and the Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, the Earl of Shelburne, Richard Oswald, and the Spanish are worth examining at this point. A number of key treaties were signed during the negotiations, including the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce and Treaty of Alliance between America and France.

Rebellion and Treason

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
British Government ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law

During the American Revolution, the treatment of the American “rebels” fighting for independence posed a series of difficult questions about the reach and framework of British law. The centerpiece of the legal calculus governing the detention of prisoners during the war—both in Great Britain and in the United States—remained the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. The war also confirmed the Act’s limitations on two scores. First, well before Americans declared independence, the British government had denied the Act’s application in the colonies, thereby taking the position that its geographic sweep did not follow British rule wherever it went. Second, during the war, Parliament suspended the Act’s application to Americans held on English soil. With independence, however, Parliament permitted the suspension to lapse and treated the American rebels as prisoners of war whose rights would be governed by the law of nations.

History, Politics, and Health in Early American Thought: The Case of David Ramsay

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Friedman ◽  
Arthur H. Shaffer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

In 1785 physician-politician David Ramsay of Charleston published The History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Contemporaries praised it highly. Four years later Ramsay produced a more ambitious work, The History of the American Revolution. It established his reputation both in America and abroad as the new nation's leading historian. Thus in a few short years Ramsay went from a locally prominent physician and State legislator to an important national cultural and literary figure. The American reading public found his approach to history to its tastes. He expressed a set of ideas about American history in general and the Revolution in particular that were common currency in the United States. But he expressed them for the first time in well-reasoned and documented historical narrative: in volumes that were suitably pro-American, yet judicious in their treatment of Britain, that made a strong case for American uniqueness while maintaining the ideal of the United States as a model for the world.Ramsay's histories alone would attract our interest as the first and most influential historical analysis of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Federal Constitution. But Ramsay's writings and his career as physician and politician are also significant because they launch us upon a journey into the mind of one of the new nation's most articulate spokesmen on historical, political, and medical issues. There is, to be sure, little in the general pattern of his life to distinguish him from a number of his contemporaries among the professions and political figures of second rank. Ramsay seldom formulated original ideas. His importance was not simply, or even primarily, that of a political or historical philosopher or medical innovator.

The Trials of Allegiance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlton F.W. Larson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
Whiskey Rebellion

The Trials of Allegiance examines the law of treason during the American Revolution—a convulsive, violent civil war in which nearly everyone could be considered a traitor, either to Great Britain or to America. Drawing from extensive archival research in Pennsylvania—one of the main centers of the revolution—Carlton Larson provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of the treason prosecutions brought by Americans against British adherents—through committees of safety, military tribunals, and ordinary criminal trials. Although popular rhetoric against traitors was pervasive in Pennsylvania, jurors consistently viewed treason defendants not as incorrigibly evil, but as fellow Americans who had made a political mistake. This book explains the repeated—and violently controversial—pattern of acquittals. Juries were carefully selected in ways that benefited the defendants, and jurors refused to accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment for treason. The American Revolution, unlike many others, would not be enforced with the gallows. More broadly, Larson explores how the Revolution’s treason trials shaped American national identity and perceptions of national allegiance. He concludes with the adoption of the Treason Clause of the United States Constitution, which was immediately put to use in the early 1790s in response to the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion. In taking a fresh look at these formative events, The Trials of Allegiance will reframe how we think about treason in American history—up to and including the present.

Black Muslimness Mobilized

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef J. Carter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Religious Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
West African ◽  
Religious Leader ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Sufi Order

The Mustafawi Tariqa is a transnational Sufi Order that was initiated in 1966 by the late Cheikh Mustafa Gueye Haydara (d. 1989) in Thiès, Senegal. Yet, only since 1994 has this specific Sufi network reached westward across the water, bringing American Muslims—many of whom are converts—into the larger network. In the United States, the majority of students who have entered the Tariqa and have declared allegiance (bayah) to Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye Al-Faqir are African-Americans who have inserted themselves religiously, culturally, and pedagogically into a West African Sufi tradition which emphasizes religious study and the practice of dhikr (remembrance of God). Shaykh Arona Faye is a Senegalese religious leader who relocated to the southeastern region of the United States from West Africa to spread the religion of Islam and expose American Muslims to the rich West African tradition of spiritual purification and Islamic piety. At the same time, many of those who are African-American members of this tradition have made it a point to travel to Senegal themselves to strengthen transatlantic ties with West African compatriots and visit sacred burial sites in the small city of Thiès. I examine how two sites of pilgrimage for the Mustafawi—Moncks Corner, South Carolina and Thiès, Senegal—play a part in the infrastructure of Black Atlantic Sufi network. Moncks Corner is the central site in which access to the Tariqa’s most charismatic living shaykh, Shaykh Arona Faye, has worked for the past two decades teaching and mentoring those on the Path. On the other hand, Thiès is the location where the Tariqa’s founder is buried and travelers visit the town in order to pay homage to his memory. I show how these sites catalyze mobility and operate as spaces of spiritual refuge for visitors in both local and regional contexts by looking at how a local zawiyah produces movement in relation to a broader tariqa. By looking at pilgrimage and knowledge transmission, I argue that the manner in which esoteric approaches to spiritual care and the embodiment of higher Islamic ethics via the West African Sufi methodology of the Mustafawi informs the manner in which Muslims of varying African descent inhabit a broader diasporic identification of “Black Muslimness.”

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