Spanish support across the border was crucial to the insurgent army’s success
Evidence
Insurgents had a powerful incentive to take a “royalist” tone: the collaboration, and ultimately alliance, they developed with the Spanish across the border in Santo Domingo. The Spanish had “an open market with the brigands,” who arrived with money, but also with dishes, jewels, furniture, f i r e i n t h e c a n e 107 and animals taken from plantations to buy supplies, as well as weapons and ammunition to supplement those they took on plantations or during battles. This trade, as well as some direct military aid given by the Spanish, provided crucial support for the insurgent army, and indeed was probably one reason it succeeded as well as it did. Insurgent leaders traveled to the border, and Spanish officers visited their camps. The insurgents cultivated such contacts, adopting an “extravagantly royalist rhetoric” and “posing as defenders of church and king” at least in part to encourage the Spanish to support them. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 368
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The insurgents’ strategic adoption of royalist rhetoric connects to how Caribbean and American revolutionaries leveraged imperial rivalries (e.g., US use of French-Spanish tensions, later US wars).