The Battle of Baton Rouge, 1779: Spain's Forgotten Revolution
Near Baton Rouge, Louisiana
While the thirteen colonies fought for independence along the Atlantic coast, a different war was being waged along the lower Mississippi. And the man fighting it was one of the most consequential figures in American history that almost no one can name.
Bernardo de Galvez was thirty years old when he was appointed governor of Spanish Louisiana in seventeen seventy-seven. Spain was officially neutral in the American Revolution, but Galvez had his own ideas about what neutrality meant. He supplied American forces with weapons, medicine, and money smuggled through New Orleans, and he allowed American privateers to use Spanish ports to evade British warships. When Spain formally entered the war in seventeen seventy-nine, Galvez moved immediately.
A hurricane struck in August of that year, sinking nearly every ship he had planned to use. Galvez refused to wait for replacements. He assembled a force of roughly fourteen hundred men drawn from Spanish regulars, Creole militia, free Black soldiers, Acadian settlers, and a handful of American volunteers, and marched them overland north toward the British fortifications.
On September seventh, he took Fort Bute at Manchac without serious resistance. By September twentieth, he was outside Baton Rouge, where Fort New Richmond was garrisoned by more than three hundred British regulars behind earthworks reinforced with artillery. Galvez ordered a feint to the north to draw British fire, used the covering noise and smoke to dig siege trenches closer in, and on September twenty-first opened a concentrated artillery barrage. The British endured three hours of shelling before surrendering, giving up not just Baton Rouge but the garrison at Natchez as well under the terms of capitulation.
The campaign continued. The following spring, Galvez took Mobile. In seventeen eighty-one, he took Pensacola, ending British power on the Gulf Coast permanently. His victories forced Britain to fight a two-front war across an ocean and stretched resources that might otherwise have been concentrated against Washington's army in the north.
Congress named him an honorary citizen of the United States in twenty fourteen, two hundred and thirty-five years after he marched through the Louisiana summer to fight a war the history books rarely mention.
