Brian DeLay

The Arms Trade and American

Revolutions

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Anticolonial rebellions overthrew European rule across most of the Americas between
1775 and 1825. Insurgencies in British North America, Saint-Domingue, and main-
land Spanish America all lacked the capacity to mass-produce guns and ammunition,
yet they put hundreds of thousands of fighters in arms. How they accomplished this
unlikely feat is a poorly understood story, one that can deepen our understanding of
European colonialism, the globe’s first wave of decolonization, and the role the early
United States played in the wider world.
Colonialism requires a managed inequality of firepower. As parasitic enterprises,
Europe’s American colonies all relied on weapons doled out by empire to maintain and
advance the forms of inequality that made empire pay. So long as white colonists had
the guns and ammunition necessary to secure and extend their own interests, most
could ignore the fact that they, too, were subject to an informal arms control regime.
Unlike later international agreements engineered to inhibit anticolonial rebellion in
Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, the early modern arms control regime developed gradu-
ally as a by-product of other commercial, military, and diplomatic structures. This ad
hoc regime provided a backstop for European empire by leaving American subjects
incapable of either making or buying enough matériel to equip rebellion. Historians
have rightly observed that Europe governed American colonies more through consent
than force. But consent depends on a realistic assessment of alternatives. Access to
guns and ammunition could change those assessments dramatically—a fact that came
into focus once Europe’s empires attempted to renegotiate the terms of colonialism in
the Americas following the Seven Years’ War.1
The early modern arms control regime experienced its first major test in 1774–76,
when some of the hemisphere’s wealthiest and best-connected colonists attempted to

1 David R. Stone, “Imperialism and Sovereignty: The League of Nations’ Drive to Control the Global Arms
Trade,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 213–30. For a rich examination of colonial arms
control in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British India, see Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent
Making of the Industrial Revolution (New York, 2018), 176–79, 291–95. For consent, see Jack P. Greene, “The
American Revolution,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 93–102, esp. 95–96; Jaime E. Rodríguez
O., “The Emancipation of America,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 131–52, esp. 135; and Brian
R. Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 (Cambridge, 2017), 30.

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association.
1144  rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
All
 purchase a revolutionary arsenal in the Caribbean and western Europe. The insurgent
arming program enjoyed early successes, but British authorities managed to fatally dis-
rupt it by early 1777. Britain would have regained its thirteen rebellious North Ameri-
can colonies were it not for the extraordinary decisions by France and Spain to secretly
arm them and then declare war on their behalf. But these fateful policies did more than
humble a great rival and secure US independence. They also crippled the early modern
arms control regime that made independence a practical impossibility in France’s and
Spain’s American colonies.

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By the time the French Revolution plunged the French and then the Spanish empire
into crisis, something new had emerged in the Atlantic world: a populous independent
republic unrestrained by colonial anxieties; possessed of a large and growing merchant
marine; and deeply committed to buying, making, and selling guns and ammunition.
Insurgents in Saint-Domingue turned to US merchants as their indispensable arms
dealers in the 1790s and early 1800s, and then Spanish Americans did the same in the
1810s and early 1820s. The arms trade connected the fates of American revolutions.
Independence would have been impossible in the United States were it not for the fall
of the early modern arms control regime. And independence would have been impos-
sible in Haiti or the Spanish American republics were it not for the US arms trafficking
that flourished in the regime’s absence.
This shared history has been obscured in the scholarship on the Age of Revolutions,
scholarship that remains overwhelmingly organized by country even as it becomes
increasingly transnational and cosmopolitan.2 Arms traders can be found lurking in
indexes within these siloed literatures, and there is a tiny, careful body of scholarship
devoted to weapons trafficking during particular wars. But we know startlingly little
about the arms trade as a phenomenon that transcended the era’s individual conflicts.3
The few historians who write connectively about American revolutions mostly focus
on ideas. These scholars have advanced subtle and sometimes contradictory claims about
the degree to which shared motive forces connected insurgent subjects across imperial

2 While there is of course much work on the international dimensions of particular revolutions, there is far
less on what might be termed the transrevolutionary. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Benjamin Breen
put it, a “national Atlantic” framework still prevails in the colonial and revolutionary-era literature. See
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Benjamin Breen, “Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of
the Atlantic World,” History Compass 11, no. 8 (2013): 597–609. This is all the more surprising given the
long-standing appeal of the Atlantic world framework and, more recently, of “entanglement” as metaphor
and call to scholarly action. See Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-
Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764–86, and
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ed., Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830 (Philadelphia,
2018).
3 For arms trading in particular conflicts, see Orlando W. Stephenson, “The Supply of Gunpowder in 1776,”
American Historical Review 30, no. 2 (1925): 271–81; Elizabeth Miles Nuxoll, Congress and the Munitions
Merchants: The Secret Committee of Trade during the American Revolution, 1775–1777 (New York,
1985); and Guillermo García Ponce, Bolívar y las armas en la guerra de independencia (Caracas, 1983). For
more recent works, see Arthur Scherr, “Arms and Men: The Diplomacy of US Weapons Traffic with Saint-
Domingue under Adams and Jefferson,” International History Review 35, no. 3 (2013): 600–648, and Rafe
Blaufarb’s important “Arms for Revolutions: Military Demobilization after the Napoleonic Wars and Latin
American Independence,” in War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic
Revolutions, ed. Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Michael Rowe (Basingstoke, UK, 2016), 100–116.

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1145

 zones. They have also cautioned against flattening the complexity of colonial protest,
protest that seldom began with the aim of sovereign nationhood.4 We now know far
more about why Europe’s American subjects fought than how. Whether partisans spoke
English, Haitian Kreyòl, French, or Spanish; whatever their politics; and regardless of
what they read or didn’t read, they all needed imported firearms and ammunition. The
struggle to obtain it connected American revolutions in dependent relationships. Indeed,
war matériel knit the era’s conflicts together to a degree that ideas seldom could. The
transnational movement of this war matériel ebbed, flowed, and changed over time. The

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arms trade has a history, in other words—one that shaped and was shaped by broader
events in the Atlantic world. Neither American revolutionaries nor their adversaries
would have comprehended modern historiography’s disinterest in it.
This essay seeks to recover that history by explaining how Europe’s informal arms
control regime functioned, how it was undone during the North American Revolution,
and how its undoing made possible the arming of the Haitian Revolution and the Span-
ish American wars for independence. In the process, it offers a framework for thinking
about American revolutions as a series of deeply interconnected events, events bound
together not by republican solidarity so much as by the lucrative and cutthroat busi-
ness of arms trading.
                           

Would-be insurgents in the colonial Americas faced daunting practical challenges.

Driving Great Britain, France, and Spain from their core American interests would
require reams of cartridge paper; tons of lead; hundreds of pieces of artillery; hun-
dreds of thousands of shells, bullet molds, and bayonets; and millions of gunflints.
Above all, it would require hundreds of thousands of firearms and thousands of tons of
gunpowder.
Western Europe enjoyed enormous advantages in the production and global distri-
bution of these goods. While gunpowder and gunpowder weapons originated in China,
Europe became the global center of firearm innovation starting in the late seventeenth
century. By the eighteenth century, the vast majority of the world’s guns came from
Birmingham, Liège, Placencia, Saint-Étienne, and a handful of other European cities

4 On the distinction between connective and contextual approaches, see Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Atlantic
Cultures and the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2017): 667–96. For pioneering
connective histories, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
(Ithaca, NY, 1975), and Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–
1826 (Baltimore, 1983). More recent examples include Rodríguez O., “The Emancipation of America”;
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Jeremy
Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (2008): 319–40;
Wim Klooster, “Slave Revolts, Royal Justice, and a Ubiquitous Rumor in the Age of Revolutions,” William
and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2014): 401–24; Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to
Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT, 2015); Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the
American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton, NJ, 2017); and Joshua Simon, The Ideology
of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought
(Cambridge, 2017). For synthetic overviews of the American conflicts, see Lester D. Langley, The Americas
in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1996), and Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the
Atlantic World: A Comparative History, 2nd ed. (New York, 2018).

1146 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

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Figure 1. Trigger guard and constituent parts of a French flintlock mechanism. While most of these parts were
made from wrought iron, the three springs (figs. 18, 19, and 21) had to be made from steel. From Diderot’s
L’encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers: Recueil de Planches sur les
Sciences et les Arts, vol. 1 (Paris, 1770), plate 6.

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1147

 organized around arms production. These were the places that equipped Europe’s
armies, navies, coast guards, sheriffs, and militias; that supplied the continent’s domes-
tic firearms markets; that armed its vast merchant marine and the huge trading compa-
nies that extracted so much wealth from the rest of the world; that outfitted European
allies and mercenaries in wartime; that shipped nearly four hundred thousand inexpen-
sive guns annually to Africa by midcentury as fuel for the inferno of the Atlantic slave
trade; and that manufactured nearly every firearm that anyone ever laid eyes on in
the colonial Americas. A visitor to the “ants’ nest” of Saint-Étienne, which turned out

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more than a quarter million muskets just in 1772, marveled at its thousands of laborers,
white eyes glaring out from soot-black faces: “These are the true dens of Vulcan.” Fire-
arms were among the eighteenth century’s most technologically complex consumer
goods. More than two dozen subtrades went into making a musket at Saint-Étienne.
The lock mechanism alone consisted of ten carefully cut and balanced parts. Merely
producing a quality barrel involved four supervisors overseeing thirteen armorers. The
system featured decade-long apprenticeships, demanding state quality controls as well
as large reliable contracts nursing economies of scale.5
As European gun making became more sophisticated, specialized, and efficient,
most of the rest of the world chose to import guns instead of trying to compete
through domestic manufacturing. While arms production persisted in the Ottoman
Empire, China, and some polities of South and Southeast Asia, it often involved Euro-
pean advisers and usually supplemented rather than replaced imports from Europe.
European manufacturers dominated the international market. There was nothing that
colonial Americans could do to meaningfully remedy that fact, especially amid the dis-
ruption of an anticolonial rebellion.6
Gunpowder presented comparable challenges. The gunpowder used by European
militaries of the time consisted roughly of 10 percent sulfur, 15 percent charcoal, and

5 British customs records did not enumerate firearms exports to Africa in the eighteenth century, so there
is scholarly debate on the scale of the arms trade. Extrapolating from Royal African Company data, David
Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings estimate Europe annually imported around 190,000 firearms into sub-
Saharan Africa by the 1780s. See David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa
and the Atlantic World in the Pre-colonial Era,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 936–59.
However, a parliamentary report from 1806 found that England alone exported 161,531 arms annually to
West Africa over the previous decade, during the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,
when exports were constrained. Hence J. E. Inikori’s estimate that total European exports likely averaged
between 333,000 and 444,000 annually by the mid-eighteenth century. See J. E. Inikori, “The Import of
Firearms into West Africa 1750–1807: A Quantitative Analysis,” Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977):
339–68, here 343–49. For Saint-Étienne, see Ken Alder’s masterful Engineering the Revolution: Arms and
Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, NJ, 1997), details from 163–201, quote from 163. For
gun production in eighteenth-century England, see Satia, Empire of Guns, 25–180. For locks, see M. L.
Brown, Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492–1792 (Washington,
DC, 1980), 24–27, 68–79.
6 As Peter A. Lorge puts it, Asia “became part of the European arms trading system” starting in the
sixteenth century. See Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
(Cambridge, 2008), 17, 89–90. For production in South Asia, see Satia, Empire of Guns, 176–80, 285–99,
and Emrys Chew, Arming the Periphery: The Arms Trade in the Indian Ocean during the Age of Global
Empire (Basingstoke, UK, 2012), 28–36. Kenneth Chase argues that Europe’s advantages in designing
and producing firearms primarily followed from the fact that Europe was threatened by infantries (which
firearms are effective against), rather than nomads (which they are less effective against). See Kenneth
Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (Cambridge, 2003).

1148 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 75 percent saltpeter (potassium nitrate). Sulfur, which ignites quickly and initiates the
burn, and charcoal, the primary fuel, were usually easy enough to buy or make. The
trouble arose with saltpeter, the magic oxidizer that accelerates the charcoal’s combus-
tion and, in so doing, unleashes the propulsive gases that move bullets down barrels.
Mass-producing quality saltpeter was difficult. In the eighteenth century, India made
more of it than everyone else combined. Each year, European captains sailed away from
Indian ports with thousands of tons of refined saltpeter in their holds, cargo that stank
like sewage but smelled like money. When the British subjugated Bengal in 1757, van-

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quished their Dutch rivals in India in 1759, and defeated the Mughals at Buxar in 1764,
they won control over most of the globe’s saltpeter production. Desperate European
rivals poured resources into domestic industries and recruited some of the Enlighten-
ment’s best minds, France’s Antoine Lavoisier among them, to innovate responses to
Britain’s newfound advantage. Colonists had few of these institutional, financial, or sci-
entific resources. As with muskets, therefore, the gunpowder required to drive Europe
from the Americas would have to come from Europe itself.7
How could this be arranged? Only by solving three interlocked problems: accessing
the right contacts, conjuring up payment, and transporting payment and matériel back
and forth across the ocean. The protective economic policies that Adam Smith would
soon dub “mercantilism” compounded all three problems.8 These policies had their
limits. Smuggling accounted for a large proportion of colonial trade, knitting imperial
realms together in ways that colonists came to depend on. Moreover, careful commod-
ity studies have demonstrated that much international trade was highly decentralized,
networked, and self-organized. Nonetheless, while imperial administrators could be
reforming or at least resigned when it came to freer trade in wine or tea, few felt that
way about guns and ammunition.9
Consider first the trouble with contacts. Where could private persons go to buy an
army’s worth of guns and ammunition? Figuring that out required specialized market

7 See Brenda J. Buchanan, “Saltpetre: A Commodity of Empire,” in Gunpowder, Explosives and the State:
A Technological History, ed. Brenda J. Buchanan (London, 2006), 67–90, here 80–85. For the British
victories (and the smell), see James W. Frey, “The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and
the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower,” Historian 71, no. 3 (2009): 507–54, here 508–9. The largest
gunpowder manufactory in the Western Hemisphere, Mexico City’s powder factory at Chapultepec
remained tightly under the control of Spain’s royal army. See James Allen Lewis, “New Spain during the
American Revolution, 1779–1783: A Viceroyalty at War” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1975), 48–50.
8 On mercantilism and the colonies, I have particularly benefited from John J. McCusker, “British Mercantilist
Policies and the American Colonies,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1,
The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge, 1996), 337–62; Kenneth
Morgan, “Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688–1815,” in The Political Economy of British Historical
Experience, 1688–1914, ed. Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (Oxford, 2002), 165–91; and John J.
McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991),
35–50.
9 For decentralized trade, see David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American
Trade and Taste (New Haven, CT, 2009). For a somewhat more mixed representation of trade, see Jane T.
Merritt, The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy
(Baltimore, 2017). For smuggling, see Oxford Bibliographies, s.v. “smuggling,” by Mark G. Hanna, last
modified August 26, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199730414-0197, and Jesse Cromwell, The
Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2018).

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 knowledge and reliable foreign contacts. The tiny colonial cohort of international mer-
chants relied on chains of credit, marine insurance markets, and information hubs like
Lloyd’s of London to facilitate long-distance trade and manage the great risks of trans-
atlantic commerce. More importantly, they relied on one another—on decentralized,
far-flung networks of reputation and trust linking families, partners, and correspon-
dents around the Atlantic world. However imperfectly, mercantilism’s formal rules and
informal incentives channeled colonial commercial networks toward the metropole
and its possessions. Newcomers couldn’t easily break into foreign mercantile networks,

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dependent as they were on the slow accretion of reputation, mutual connections, and
trust.10
Paying European commercial partners would be at least as difficult as identifying
and recruiting them. New World insurgents had nothing like the fiscal-military state
that financed British and French wars, and mercantilism had long redirected colo-
nial specie to the metropole. Cash-poor colonists relied on financial instruments like
bills of exchange (transferable promises to pay), drafts of credit on financial houses,
and, in British North America especially, paper money issued by individual colonies.
These tools sufficed for local, regional, and even intraimperial trade. But their utility
depended on trust, a virtue many thought compromised by participation in a crimi-
nal insurgency. Most colonial rebels would have to pay for foreign-made matériel with
cash crops and foodstuffs. But arms dealers were seldom best positioned to handle cof-
fee, sugar, tobacco, or flour. Intermediaries would need to be recruited, compounding
the contact problem.11
Even if contacts and payment could be arranged, insurgents still faced a complex
transportation challenge. Mercantile policies forbade most direct trade with foreign
colonies. Foreign merchant ships risked seizure if they did business in the wrong
American ports. As for colonial merchants, they did almost all of their waterborne
trading in smaller schooners and sloops rather than the hulking three-mast ships that
dominated transatlantic commerce. Though changing by the 1770s, European firms
continued to control most oceanic shipping. Worse, multiple ships would need to sail
east for each one that bore matériel west because munitions had a far higher value-to-
weight ratio than cash crops and bulky staples.12

10 On risk and insurance, see Christopher Kingston, “Marine Insurance in Britain and America, 1720–1844: A
Comparative Institutional Analysis,” Journal of Economic History 67, no. 2 (2007): 379–409, and Hannah
Farber, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2021). For personal connections and trust, see Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-
Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks (Woodbridge, UK, 2013).
11 For money, see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook
(Durham, NC, 1992). For bills of exchange in Spanish America, see Samuel Amaral and Richard Doringo,
“Latin America Was Behind: The Economic Background of Independence,” in State and Society in Spanish
America during the Age of Revolution, ed. Victor M. Uribe-Uran (Wilmington, DE, 2001), 3–30. On the
practical challenges of paying in kind, I am in debt to Nuxoll, Congress and the Munitions Merchants.
12 For restrictive treaties and bulky staples, see Nuxoll, Congress and the Munitions Merchants, 286–87, 378.
For loosening restrictions, see Wim Klooster, “Inter-imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800,” in
Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn
and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 141–80, here 173–76. Most transatlantic shipping was
in the hands of non-Spanish Europeans (particularly the French). See Liss, Atlantic Empires, 50–52. For
British North American vessels and British owners dominating transatlantic shipping, see John J. McCusker,

1150 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 The confounding, interlocked problems of contacts, payment, and transport com-
bined to form an imposing, passive obstacle to major anticolonial rebellion. Of course,
empire would not be passive in defense of that obstacle. Spain, France, and Great Brit-
ain all relied on a sprawling complex of ambassadors, consuls, sailors, and eagle-eyed
favor seekers to apprise them of unusual doings in foreign ports. Once this alarm sys-
tem began blaring, empire knew how to magnify the trinity of insurgent problems.
Diplomatic protests would be lodged, treaty obligations invoked, and subtle or not-so-
subtle threats deployed to convince foreign authorities to inspect cargos, interrogate

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merchants, and scuttle illicit commercial relationships. Meanwhile, royal navies would
retake strategic ports, establish blockades, seize insurgent ships, and police foreign
trade. Even modest imperial successes could constrict the flow of munitions across the
Atlantic. All the while, the certainty of interference meant rebel agents would have to
procure more guns and powder abroad than their armies actually needed, in hopes that
just enough would get through.
If it all sounds basically hopeless for would-be insurgents, that’s because it was.
Smuggling abounded throughout the New World, and no monarch could totally sup-
press the arms trade. But they didn’t have to. The early modern arms control regime
made it a practical impossibility for imperial subjects to procure enough matériel to
achieve independence through war. That’s why so many observers expressed incredu-
lity when British North Americans began a rebellion against their king. As one typically
astonished contemporary put it, “Is it possible that a people without arms, ammuni-
tion, money, or navy, should dare to brave a nation, dreaded and respected by all the
powers on earth?”13
Possible? Yes. Rational? That seemed very doubtful to people who knew how the
world worked in 1774.
                             

The North American Revolution began in part because of attempts to circumvent the
mercantile arms control regime. In the summer of 1774, a colonial smuggler named
Benjamin Broadhelp defied British trade restrictions and sailed his ship Polly to Amster-
dam. Anticipating a seller’s market for ammunition following Britain’s severe reaction
to the Boston Tea Party, Broadhelp stuffed the Polly with a colossal 150 tons of Dutch
gunpowder and sailed for Nantucket. He and his ship were never heard from again. Still,
whether seduced by a foreign buyer, sunk in a storm, or blown to splinters somewhere
over the heaving Atlantic, Broadhelp had already set fateful events in motion.14

“The Rise of the Shipping Industry in Colonial America,” in America’s Maritime Legacy: A History of the
U.S. Merchant Marine and Shipbuilding Industry since Colonial Times, ed. Robert A. Kilmarx (Boulder,
CO, 1979), 1–25.
13 Final quote is from letter from Newport, December 14, 1774, published in the New York Gazetteer,
December 29, 1774, in William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 1
(Washington, DC, 1964), 20.
14 Extract of letter from Sir Joseph Yorke to the Earl of Suffolk, The Hague, August 5, 1774, British National
Archives (hereafter cited as BNA)/CO/5/138/394; extract of same to same, The Hague, August 26, 1774,
BNA/CO/5/138/396.

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 Learning of the Polly’s errand from informers on the docks, Sir Joseph Yorke, British
ambassador to the United Provinces, lodged complaints with his friends in the States
General. They promised increased vigilance but reminded the ambassador that he
“knew the merchants well enough to be convinced, they would sell arms and ammuni-
tion to besiege Amsterdam itself.” Distressed British ministers ordered diplomatic staff
in Europe to be alert to other schemers like Broadhelp. Reflecting on the scruples of
their own merchants, they also decided to prohibit the exportation of British matériel
to the colonies.15 When news of the prohibition reached New England in December,

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outraged colonists descended on arsenals and powder magazines, hauling away mus-
kets, artillery, and ammunition to secret locations. In Boston, General Thomas Gage,
Britain’s ranking military officer in North America, redoubled his own efforts to secure
munitions stores. These efforts culminated on April 19, 1775, in a carefully planned
operation to seize matériel stockpiled in Concord, Massachusetts. It went poorly.16
Once the shooting began, General George Washington hoped men would enlist
with their own firearms. British North Americans were probably the best-armed colo-
nial population in the hemisphere. Settler colonialism and slaveholding demanded an
armed white populace. Interimperial warfare also brought European-made firearms to
North America. More than a hundred thousand colonists served in conjunction with
British regulars in North American conflicts between 1691 and 1763, and most had to
be armed by the metropole. Britain shipped more than sixty-six thousand guns to the
colonies during the Seven Years’ War alone, and these weapons often remained with
the men who had mustered out to service. Careful samples of probate inventories from
1774 suggest that about half of all white households possessed a gun, making arms
more common possessions than Bibles. All told, subjects in the thirteen colonies likely
owned between 150,000 and 200,000 guns in 1775.17
Contrary to present-day claims about self-sufficient patriots with guns on their man-
tels, however, these firearms could not win a revolution. Many were unfit for military

15 In addition to the preceding letters, see copy of Yorke to the Earl of Suffolk, The Hague, October 21, 1774,
BNA/CO/5/138/414. For the order itself, see L. Kinvin Wroth, ed., Province in Rebellion: A Documentary
History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1774–1775, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA,
1975), 1206.
16 Robert P. Richmond, Powder Alarm 1774 (Princeton, NJ, 1971); David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride
(New York, 1994).
17 See George D. Moller, American Military Shoulder Arms, vol. 1, Colonial and Revolutionary War Arms
(Albuquerque, 2011), 9–12, for the tally of 107,000 colonists serving in these years. For the Seven Years’
War, see De Witt Bailey, Small Arms of the British Forces in America, 1664–1815 (Woonsocket, RI, 2009),
119–24, 236–38. My (rough) assumptions are a white population of two million and an average household
size of seven, yielding 285,000 total white households, and that half of these households (142,000) owned
at least one firearm; that a relatively small minority owned two or three guns; that a very small minority
owned four or more; and that most guns in probate inventories were functional. For the probate-based
analyses I rely on to make these assumptions, see the excellent essay by James Lindgren and Justin L.
Heather, “Counting Guns in Early America,” William and Mary Law Review 43, no. 5 (2002): 1777–842.
See also Michael Lenz, “Arms Are Necessary”: Gun Culture in Eighteenth-Century American Politics and
Society (Cologne, 2010), whose overall findings are roughly consistent with Lindgren and Heather’s.
Kevin M. Sweeney is finishing what promises to be the new standard work on guns in colonial British
North America. For a preview, see his rich essay “Firearms, Militias, and the Second Amendment,” in The
Second Amendment on Trial: Critical Essays on District of Columbia v. Heller, ed. Saul Cornell and Nathan
Kozuskanich (Amherst, MA, 2013), 310–82.

1152 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 use. Washington complained that muskets brought in by soldiers were “so very indif-
ferent that I Cannot place Confidence in them.” Others, perhaps a fifth, belonged to
loyalists opposed to rebellion. As for the remainder, even committed patriots would
have hesitated to surrender them in the face of invasion and war. While private guns
helped, then, at no point would Washington find them remotely sufficient. The Con-
tinental Congress acknowledged this reality in 1776, when it ordered agents to try to
procure one hundred thousand muskets in continental Europe.18
Ammunition provoked even more anxiety. The insurgents had only around eighty

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thousand pounds of gunpowder on hand when the war began, most of it left over from
the Seven Years’ War. About half as much as Captain Broadhelp had squeezed into his
Polly, this amount was woefully insufficient to the task. Washington tried to keep his
dangerous lack of gunpowder “a profound Secret.” He ordered barrels filled with sand
and moved to and fro in the daytime, hoping British spies would think him flush with
ammunition. He even felt “obliged to use art to conceal it from my own officers.” The
general had to provide precious gunpowder to militias, vulnerable port cities, and the
navy he was trying to conjure into existence. Soldiers squandered it and deenlisted
with their pouches full. Violent downpours periodically ruined nearly everyone’s pow-
der ration, given the scarcity of tents. And muskets made notoriously profligate use of
gunpowder in battle. One expert calculated that the average British infantryman fired
459 times before striking an enemy. Forty tons of powder wasn’t going to get the Con-
tinental army very far. Indeed, insurgent forces would expend nearly thirty times that
much—2.3 million pounds—in the first two and a half years of the war alone.19
Sometimes rebels took what they needed from other white colonists. Following a
congressional call for disarming loyalists, at least ten states launched confiscation cam-
paigns. Insurgent forces had more luck preying on the British. Throughout the war,
American privateers hunted supply ships sent to provision the Royal Army. In late
1775, for example, lucky privateers captured the brig Nancy and her two thousand
stands of arms. Still, while occasional windfalls eased immediate needs, in the long run,
British forces on land and sea almost certainly captured more supplies from patriots
than the other way around.20

18 Privately owned guns came in various types and conditions, and in a wide range of calibers (muzzle-bore
diameters), which often made it impossible for soldiers to share ammunition. See James A. Huston, Logistics
of Liberty: American Services of Supply in the Revolutionary War and After (Newark, DE, 1991), 113–15.
Washington to Major General Richard Montgomery, Cambridge, January 12, 1776, Founders Online, US
National Archives (hereafter cited as FONA). For Congress, see Secret Journals of the Acts and Proceedings
of Congress, from the First Meeting Thereof to the Dissolution of the Confederation, vol. 2 (Boston, 1821),
36–37.
19 For “secret,” see Washington to Hancock, Cambridge, August 4–5, 1775, FONA. For empty barrels,
see Nuxoll, Congress and the Munitions Merchants, 8. For eighty thousand and 2.3 million pounds, see
Stephenson, “The Supply of Gunpowder in 1776,” 273, 277. British forces used nearly four times as much
in two and a half years during the war. See David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (New York,
2012), 146. For the many ways the army lost powder, see Washington to Hancock, Cambridge, November
11, 1775, and same to same, January 30, 1776, both in FONA. For powder consumed by muskets, see
Alexander Rose, American Rifle: A Biography (New York, 2008), 25.
20 See congressional resolutions of Tuesday, January 2, 1776, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Journals of
the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, Edited from the Original Records in the Library of Congress, vol. 4
(Washington, DC, 1906), 205. For state confiscation campaigns, see M. St. Claire Clarke and Peter Force,

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1153

 Insurgent leaders dreamed industry could save them. Benjamin Franklin thought
“arms may be made as good and cheap in America as in any Part of the World.” Thomas
Paine boasted about cannon cast “at pleasure,” powder milled daily, and small arms
“equal to any in the world.” And John Adams informed his compatriots that “every
stable, dove house, cellar, vault, etc. is a mine of saltpeter” and publicized production
steps that were “short, plain and simple, so that Dick, Tom, and Joan may understand
‘em.” The Continental Congress did indeed fund and organize wartime production,
resulting in the repair of tens of thousands of muskets and the manufacture of impres-

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sive quantities of cannon, gun carriages, shot, musket cartridges, cartridge boxes, and
other essential military stores. But the state managed to produce only modest quan-
tities of gunpowder or new firearms. Dick, Tom, and Joan may have understood the
instructions for making saltpeter, and patriotic women put the urine in their cham-
ber pots to the effort. But like most others who tried, Abigail (Adams) discovered
that homespun chemistry wasn’t as easy as advertised. Domestic powder never even
sufficed for state militia, let alone the Continental army, and even then mostly relied
on imported saltpeter.21 As for firearms, in contrast to Saint-Étienne’s swarming dens
of Vulcan, North America’s wartime arms industry consisted of a few hundred men
and (occasionally) women, most laboring alone or in pairs in small impromptu shops,
and more preoccupied with repairing foreign-made arms or assembling muskets from
imported locks and barrels than with making guns from scratch.22

eds., American Archives, vol. 4, 4th series (Washington, DC, 1843), 270–72; M. St. Claire Clarke and Peter
Force, eds., American Archives, vol. 5, 4th series (Washington, DC, 1844), 67, 592, 714, 1301, 1509; M. St.
Claire Clarke and Peter Force, eds., American Archives, vol. 6, 4th series (Washington, DC, 1846), 881,
1634; and Allen D. Candler, ed., The Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta, 1908), 92.
For the Nancy, see Washington to William Ramsay, Cambridge, December 4–11, 1775, and Washington
to Colonel Joseph Reed, Cambridge, December 15, 1775, both in FONA. Stephenson argues that seizures
of British powder were more than offset by British captures of powder destined for the insurgents. “The
Supply of Gunpowder in 1776,” 278.
21 Benjamin Franklin to Silas Deane, August 27, 1775, FONA. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense,
and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, 1998), 41. Adams quotes from Cressy, Saltpeter, 158,
161. For chamber pots, see Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New
York, 2016), 200. For Abigail Adams, see Cressy, Saltpeter, 162. Stephenson estimates that powder made
from domestic saltpeter accounted for about one-twentieth of the total expended in the first two and a half
years of the war. Colonial mills did reasonably well if they had access to foreign saltpeter, producing nearly
seven hundred thousand pounds before the fall of 1777. Stephenson, “The Supply of Gunpowder in 1776,”
277.
22 Huston, Logistics of Liberty, 114, puts the total insurgent arms-making labor force at two hundred. Brown,
Firearms in Colonial America, 404–9, appendix 9, lists around five hundred craftsmen contributing
in some way to the production of arms, accoutrements, and cartridges during the revolution. Moller,
American Military Shoulder Arms, 1:107, claims, without evidence, that there were between 2,500 and
3,000 gunmakers in the colonies during the revolution—a curious exaggeration in an otherwise learned
work. Even with this unrealistic pool of gunsmiths, the author concludes that more than 90 percent of
the firearms used by insurgents were European made (p. 195). Elsewhere, Moller writes that insurgents
imported more than forty thousand gunlocks between 1778 and 1781, along with large numbers of barrels
(pp. 141–42), and notes that he was “unable to establish a single instance where a continental armorer was
employed in the fabrication of entirely new arms” (p. 147). For South Carolina gunsmith Ann Robinson, see
Lenz, “Arms Are Necessary”, 109n437. Though he dramatically understates the centrality of arms imports,
Robert F. Smith has done more than other historians to recover the successes of the wartime manufacturing
program. See Robert F. Smith, Manufacturing Independence: Industrial Innovation in the American
Revolution (Yardley, PA, 2016).

1154 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 From the beginning, then, the insurgency depended existentially on subverting the
informal arms control regime. Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris thought he knew
how to do that. Morris would become the insurgency’s most successful arms importer
and, as chair of Congress’s Secret Committee on Trade, the arming program’s guiding
genius. While Tory skeptics thought it madness to defy the world’s mightiest empire,
Morris understood that they had it backward—that an anticolonial insurgency could
prevail only from within so powerful and privileged a host. Over the previous decades,
British North Americans had reaped the rewards of imperial belonging. Morris had the

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vantage to see that these rewards had left them better positioned than any other colo-
nial population to solve the interlocked problems of transport, payment, and contacts.
Transport seemed the most manageable. North Americans built far more vessels
than anyone else in the hemisphere. Though Britain’s Navigation Acts sharply limited
foreign trade, they made no distinction between colonial and metropolitan shipping.
The colonial shipping industry nursed itself on the vast imperial market and on two
other dividends of empire: unparalleled naval protection and easy access to short-
term credit in London. Both advantages helped colonial merchants exploit geography.
Proximity made them more responsive to Caribbean markets than metropolitan com-
petitors could ever be. By the eve of the revolution, the commercial vessels owned by
Morris and his partner were part of a huge colonial fleet dominating the carrying trade
not only along the east coast but throughout the British West Indies.23
Payment would be harder. Imported matériel would have to be paid for with Brit-
ish North America’s five great export commodities: tobacco, wheat, rice, fish, and
indigo. To obtain these commodities, Congress mostly relied on currency finance,
paper money issued against future tax revenues. Already by mid-1775, it had issued $3
million worth of “continentals.” Morris and other elite merchants would have to play
a final, critical role by using their own hard cash and credit to get foreign arms deals
moving. Congress incentivized this by excepting guns and ammunition from its nonim-
portation policy and eventually by opening their market to foreign merchants. Indeed,
the desperate need for European guns and powder helped compel delegates to declare
independence in July 1776. In sum, the insurgency hoped to pay for matériel through a
complex choreography of agriculture, state and congressional finance currency, trade
policy, and private market incentives.24

23 North Americans constructed as much as a third of the million and a half measured tons of shipping Britain
had afloat around the world in the 1770s. See Jacob M. Price, “A Note on the Value of Colonial Exports of
Shipping,” Journal of Economic History 36, no. 3 (1976): 704–24, and McCusker, “The Rise of the Shipping
Industry in Colonial America,” 16–17. For Willing and Morris’s ships in the European trade, see James
G. Lydon, Fish and Flour for Gold, 1600–1800: Southern Europe in the Colonial Balance of Payments
(Philadelphia, 2008), EPUB, 150, table 9.5.
24 For fiat money, see E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance,
1776–1790 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1961), 26. For continentals set aside for arms purchases, see, for example, the
motion of July 27, 1775, in Secret Journals of the Acts and Proceedings of Congress, from the First Meeting
Thereof to the Dissolution of the Confederation, vol. 1 (Boston, 1820), 23–24. For the trade resolution
excepting matériel, drafted by Franklin, see Worthington Chauncey Ford, Journals of the Continental
Congress, 1774–1789, Edited from the Original Records in the Library of Congress, vol. 2 (Washington, DC,
1905), 184–85. For Congress’s dilemma and its implications, see Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher,

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1155

 Finally, there was the most complex of the insurgent’s three problems: contacts.
The great producers of matériel were in northwestern Europe, where North Ameri-
cans had few direct commercial contacts. The French, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, and Ger-
mans enjoyed supping on Carolinian rice, smoking Chesapeake tobacco, and wearing
wool dyed midnight blue with Low Country indigo, but English firms handled the
sale of these slave-made goods. Still, even here, Morris understood that empire had
helped position British North Americans to access northwestern Europe’s arms mar-
kets indirectly, through Iberia and the Caribbean. Over the previous decades, Great

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Britain had muscled its way into the lucrative business of feeding Portugal and Spain.
The metropole shared that prize with colonial merchants. Unlike cash crops, the mar-
gins on foodstuffs prohibited reexport to the continent. On the contrary, London had
encouraged the colonies to export grain and fish directly to Iberia as a way to reduce
their persistent trade deficits with the metropole.25
Consequently, by 1775, Morris and his colleagues were annually sending several
hundred vessels to Iberia. They turned to contacts there for help acquiring matériel.
Among the most solicitous was Diego de Gardoqui, scion of one of Spain’s great
commercial families. From Bilbao he secured the insurgents three hundred muskets
with bayonets and three hundred pairs of pistols. Gardoqui promised secrecy, “as the
English Embassader will look sharp in every port, & we are upon very good footing
with my Lord Grantham. Should be very Sorry he should know it.” While relatively
little matériel would come from Iberia itself, houses like Gardoqui’s helped Morris con-
vert crops into cash and facilitated deals in France and the Netherlands.26
More importantly, Morris and his colleagues could buy European matériel in mar-
kets throughout the Caribbean, where North Americans enjoyed huge trading advan-
tages. British victories in the Seven Years’ War had left French and Spanish islands
reliant on North American grain, and a series of devastating hurricanes compounded
the dependency. Smuggling, war, and weather, then, had made Morris and his col-
leagues a sea of foreign contacts in the Caribbean. Some came north to offer their ser-
vices. From Saint-Domingue, Pierre Penet and Emmanuel de Pliarne secured fifteen
thousand muskets from Nantes for Massachusetts by way of Dutch Saint Eustatius.
Others ran interference along with muskets and powder. Martinique’s Pierre Begorrat,
an eager arms exporter, told British authorities that a young North American smuggler
had “bought neither powder nor arms” on the island but had merely sought treatment
for venereal disease.27

“Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,”
William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2011): 597–630.
25 The trade with Iberia is comprehensively and lucidly reconstructed in Lydon, Fish and Flour for Gold,
1600–1800, 2–30, 116–22, 129–50. See also Liss, Atlantic Empires, 29–32.
26 Joseph Gardoqui and Sons to Jeremiah Lee, Bilbao, February 15, 1775, in Clark, Naval Documents of the
American Revolution, 1:401.
27 On regional smuggling generally, see Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795
(Leiden, 1998). The British occupation of Havana was a critical turning point in this history. For an inspired
reinterpretation of that event, see Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery
in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018). On British North America’s advantages in the West Indies,
see McCusker, “The Rise of the Shipping Industry in Colonial America,” and Liss, Atlantic Empires, 28–32.

1156 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 In sum, Robert Morris saw commercial doors where Tory skeptics saw imperial
walls. From Congress he issued plum contracts (frequently to partners and even to his
own firm) and mobilized a far-flung network of foreign merchants, correspondents,
ship’s captains, bankers, and manufacturers. By the summer of 1776, Anglo-Americans
were hustling arms in the port cities of Spain, France, Holland, Germany, and Italy;
anchored in the Mediterranean and off the coast of West Africa awaiting munitions
deals at sea; and scouring the Caribbean for gunpowder. Exceedingly risky, the trade
sometimes paid off handsomely. Morris and two partners made £25,500 from a single

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deal in L’Orient, France, at a time when the average free white person in Pennsylvania
had a net worth of £51.28
Nonetheless, the king’s countermeasures soon began to tell. Diplomatic protests
disrupted networks and the flow of matériel. In the Dutch Republic, red-faced Sir
Yorke pressured the States General into prohibiting munitions sales to British subjects
and surveilling arms dealers. European sympathizers reported that “every Port every
Town and almost every public house has spies from England to watch the motions
of the Merchants.” Resourceful British agents spread falsehoods about the imminent
end of the war, spooking Europeans from consummating arms deals with insurgents.
Finally, in the first two years of the war, the British navy effectively tripled its ships in
the American station. “The sea is full of all kind of cruizers,” moaned one arms smug-
gler. “There is not one in ten that escapes, going or coming.” In 1777, the Royal Navy
began stopping and searching neutral as well as colonial vessels. It became practically
impossible to export significant quantities of indigo or tobacco, frustrating insurgent
dreams of transforming enslaved labor into muskets and gunpowder. As for wheat and
flour, military demand restricted exports. Successful attacks on shipping and payment
created a crisis of liquidity (and confidence) with Morris’s contacts. Many abandoned
the insurgent trade. Before long, some of his most obliging European partners would
be bankrupt.29

On the consequences of the war for provisioning islands, see Sherry Johnson, “El Niño, Environmental
Crisis, and the Emergence of Alternative Markets in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1760s–70s,” William and
Mary Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2005): 365–410, here 370–74, and Robert Rhodes Crout, “The Diplomacy of
Trade: The Influence of Commercial Considerations on French Involvement in the Angloamerican War of
Independence, 1775–78” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1977), 26–32. For North American wheat and
the Spanish Caribbean, see Linda K. Salvucci, “Atlantic Intersections: Early American Commerce and the
Rise of the Spanish West Indies (Cuba),” Business History Review 79, no. 4 (2005): 781–809. For Penet and
Pliarne, see Nicholas Cooke to Washington, Providence, December 11, 1775, FONA. For fifteen thousand
muskets, see Moller, American Military Shoulder Arms, 1:206. For interference, see copy of enclosure
signed by Begorrat in Count d’Argout to Vice Admiral James Young, Fort Royal, Martinique, March 20,
1776, in William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 4 (Washington, DC,
1969), 432–33.
28 This paragraph is a simple gloss on a complex story, one worked out exactingly by Nuxoll, Congress and
the Munitions Merchants. For profits, see “Jacob Winey’s Account with Thomas Mason, 1776,” folder 75,
Pleasants Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For average net worth, see McCusker and Menard,
The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, 61, table 3.3.
29 See the States General prohibition against selling munitions to British subjects, published in the London
Gazette, March 28–April 1, 1775, in Clark, Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 1:436–38. For
“every Port,” see Joseph Hewes to Samuel Johnston, Philadelphia, February 13, 1776, in William Bell Clark,
ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 3 (Washington, DC, 1968), 1260–61. For rumors,
see Pierre Begozzat to the New Hampshire Committee of Safety, St. Pierre, Martinico, February 14, 1776,

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Figure 2. Washington had “US” stamped on the locks in an effort to discourage pilfering. The French Model
1763 would become the prototype for the Springfield Model 1795, the first musket produced at the US federal
armory. French Charleville Model 1763 flintlock musket, detail. Shipped by France to British North American
insurgents by the tens of thousands.

By the winter of 1776/77, amid confounding British military victories, Washington

began to despair. Among many other problems, he was running out of powder and
began turning away recruits he could not arm. “Our affairs are in a very bad way,” he
confided that winter. “The game is pretty near up.”30 Morris had been right: British
North Americans were uniquely equipped to challenge the early modern arms control
regime. But even they couldn’t overcome it.
Not alone, at least. London’s remaining fear was that France would avenge its humil-
iation in the Seven Years’ War by doing for the insurgents what the market could not.
Whitehall knew Washington’s men were getting guns and ammunition from the French
Caribbean. Lord Stormont, Britain’s ambassador in France, confronted the French
foreign minister as early as the autumn of 1775 about rumors that his government
approved these arms transfers. “If a lucrative Trade could be carried on with hell,”
the comte de Vergennes wearily acknowledged, some French merchants would send
their “Ships thither au Risque de bruler leur Voiles [at the risk of singeing their sails].”
But he insisted that his government opposed the insurgent arms trade—not to aid

in Clark, Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 3:1297–98. For numbers of ships, see Robert
Greenhalgh Albion and Jennie Barnes Pope, Sea Lanes in Wartime: The American Experience, 1775–1942
(London, 1943), 38. For the limitations of the blockade, see Piers Mackesy, The War for America: 1775–
1783 (Lincoln, 1993), 98–100. For “the sea,” see Captain Matthew Van Alstyne to Abraham Van Alstyne, St.
Eustatia, February 4, 1776, in Clark, Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 3:1129. As with so many
aspects of this story, the best sleuthing on crops, remittances, and merchant failure is in Nuxoll, Congress
and the Munitions Merchants, 134–35, 196–208, 315, 445, 492. By 1784, bankruptcy had taken nearly
every firm in Bordeaux that had been trading extensively with the insurgents.
30 For recruits, see Washington to the Pennsylvania Council of Safety, Headquarters, Bucks County (PA),
December 22, 1776, FONA. Quote is in Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America:
British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven, CT, 2013), 96.

1158 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

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Figure 3. An American Officier [sic]. Friedrich von Germann painted this picture in 1778 while serving as a
captain in one of the German auxiliary units recruited by Britain to fight in the North American Revolution. By
then, most insurgent troops were likely armed with French muskets. From the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Divi-
sion of Art, Prints, and Photographs, Print Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1159

 Britain but rather to preserve France’s Caribbean empire. Vergennes invited Stormont
to imagine a future where the rebels prevailed. They would construct a great marine,
he said, and “with this Superiority and every advantage of Situation they might when
they pleased, conquer both Your [American] Islands and Ours.” In time, the French
minister insisted, they would “not leave a foot of that Hemisphere in the Possession
of any European Power.” The insurgents had to be defeated for the good of European
America.31
This bravura performance reassured Lord Stormont, and the rebellion would have

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been doomed if Vergennes had meant what he said. But he either was lying or quickly
had a change of heart. Following the Seven Years’ War, France had auctioned off near
half a million military muskets from state arsenals. Working through a fictitious cor-
poration established by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the polymath author
of The Barber of Seville, Vergennes started secretly funneling some of these arms to
American insurgents, along with ammunition, artillery, and other supplies. This com-
plex arming campaign would eventually deliver more than 120,000 French muskets
and shiploads of other matériel. France issued massive loans that Benjamin Franklin
and other American agents used for purchases. Vergennes also helped secure loans and
cooperation from Holland and especially Spain, and he took steps to ease the problems
of contacts, payment, and transportation. The first of the resulting shipments of state
arms and ammunition arrived in March 1777, heralding an early spring for Washing-
ton’s despondent winter. “Glorious news this,” the general exulted. French and Span-
ish aid sustained the war effort while Morris’s market program effectively collapsed,
and equipped the startling insurgent victory at Saratoga in October 1777. Both pow-
ers would formally enter the war soon after, and their money and navies, especially,
equipped the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. French and Spanish treasure, men, and
weapons helped sustain Washington’s army until war’s end.32

31 Lord Stormont to Lord Rochford, Paris, October 31, 1775, in William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of
the American Revolution, vol. 2 (Washington, DC, 1966), 798.
32 Stormont’s confidence in Vergennes was such that he felt free to take a leave of absence from France in the
spring of 1776. See Hamish M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford,
1990), 234. Upon his return in July, the ambassador admitted that Vergennes’s continuing “appearance of
openness and cordiality” may mask “deep and dark designs.” But Stormont cautioned that “suspicion has its
danger too and may tend to Raise the Storm it fears.” He tried to split the difference, concluding that “tho’
they may not desire the Independency of America,” Vergennes and his king “wish, that the Reduction of it
may cost us dear.” See Stormont to Weymouth (no. 47), Paris, July 10, 1776, BNA/SP/78/299/263, and same
to same (no. 53), Paris, July 24, 1776, BNA/SP/78/299/306. Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the
American Revolution (New Haven, CT, 1985), remains the best book on a topic that is too easily enchanted
by stories of American diplomatic brilliance in France. For the auctioned arms, see Kenneth Ludwig Alder,
“Forging the New Order: French Mass Production and the Language of the Machine Age, 1763-1815”
(Ph.D. Thesis, United States -- Massachusetts, Harvard University, 1991), 44–58. For the 120,000 figure,
see Moller, American Military Shoulder Arms, 1:291, 484–85. Vergennes and his Spanish counterparts had
their own strategic reasons for supporting the insurgency. See Paul W. Mapp, “The Revolutionary War and
Europe’s Great Powers,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane
Kamensky (New York, 2012), 311–26; Larrie D. Ferreiro, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and
the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (New York, 2016), 75–117; and Thomas E. Chávez, Spain and
the Independence of the United States: An Intrinsic Gift (Albuquerque, 2002). For “glorious,” see George
Washington to Brigadier General George Weedon, Morristown, March 27, 1777, FONA.

1160 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 Vergennes’s policy is fascinating not only because British North America’s revolu-
tion would have failed without it but also because his was one of the most catastrophic
miscalculations of modern international history. Contrary to his expectations, the
war did not weaken Great Britain in the long term, enhance France’s geopolitical sit-
uation in Europe, or pull the newly independent United States firmly into the French
orbit. What it did do was provoke a profound budgetary crisis that would lead to the
summoning of the Estates General, the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the
destruction of the French monarchy.33

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Among all the ironies here, one of the richest and least remarked on is that the vision
Vergennes unfurled before the credulous Stormont proved more prophetic than the
geopolitical expectations he sought to conceal. His policies hadn’t enabled a tempo-
rary suspension of the mercantile arms control regime; they fatally undermined it. And
in his lie, Vergennes foresaw the truth. US independence would produce a new power
whose commerce would help undo European empire throughout the Americas. Ini-
tially that would happen through the arms trade.
                       

Would-be insurgents in French and Spanish America could pay for matériel with plan-
tation crops, hides, mules, plundered property, and sometimes even precious metals.
But by other metrics—arms and ammunition on hand, foreign contacts, and ocean-
going ships—they were far behind their British North American counterparts. The
Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in Peru during the 1780s, for example, enjoyed virtually
no conduits into the international arms trade and succumbed to Spanish suppression
despite the bravery of its many partisans. And whereas the charmed North Americans
had launched their uprising in a time of European peace, rebels in Saint-Domingue
and Spanish America would do so during an unprecedented era of war. This meant
not only a profound disruption in transoceanic commerce but a historic contraction in
the international arms market as European producers shoveled nearly all the guns and
ammunition they could make into the bottomless pit of the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars. Britain prohibited commercial arms exports during its long war with
France; France directed nearly all of its productive capacity to its sweeping military
ambitions in Europe; Napoleon captured Liège and banned all exports from that great
gun-making center starting in 1797; and desperate Spain would have to claw weapons
back from its New World colonies. All other things being equal, these disadvantages
would have hobbled insurgencies in Saint-Domingue and Spanish America. But the
emergence of a new, sovereign arms exporter in the Western Hemisphere meant that
all things were not equal.34

33 Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 159–63. Still, in the short-term, US commerce did
meaningfully reorient toward France and its empire. See François Furstenberg, When the United States
Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (New York, 2014), 98–100.
34 Poverty of arms is a recurring theme throughout Sergio Serulnikov, Revolution in the Andes: The Age of
Túpac Amaru (Durham, NC, 2013), and Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA,
2014). For Britain, see Elton Atwater, “British Control over the Export of War Materials,” American Journal
of International Law 33, no. 2 (1939): 292–317, esp. 292–94. For France and Liège, see Keith Krause, Arms

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1161

 US arms trading capacity wasn’t inevitable, however. Broke and exhausted after its
war for independence, the US government had to auction off decommissioned mus-
kets because it couldn’t even afford to store them securely. But the twin projects of
slaveholding and settler colonialism, made more urgent and dangerous by the presence
of British and Spanish rivals in eastern North America, compelled state and national
authorities to resume importing matériel. The ratification of the Constitution brought
more resources and focus to these efforts and empowered nationalists committed to
arming. State and national laws budgeted for arming militias. Brokers responded with

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bulk purchases in Europe, and if they failed to sell their imported guns, artillery, and
powder to government buyers, they turned to the export market.35
War in Europe should have made major US purchases there impossible. As the
Atlantic world’s most consequential neutral, however, the perennially fortunate United
States again acquired the right patrons at the right time. First, prerevolutionary France
pledged that arms and powder exports to the United States “shall always be permit-
ted,” virtually duty-free. When the fortunes of war made France unable to arm the
United States, and when the emerging Quasi-War made it unwilling to do so, Britain
saw an opportunity to widen the emerging breach between the erstwhile allies and
court the United States. While still prohibiting commercial arms exports, starting in
the late 1790s, the British government sold the United States tens of thousands of fire-
arms from its arsenals, along with artillery, gunpowder, flints, swords, and sulfur, all
at cost. It sent much of this matériel to North America under Royal Navy convoy and
even offered to prove (stress test) muskets US agents managed to buy on the conti-
nent. Britain also exempted the United States from its prohibition on saltpeter exports
during the Napoleonic Wars. This enabled manufacturers like the French expat E. I. du
Pont, Lavoisier’s pupil, to make the United States a significant gunpowder producer
and exporter. Meanwhile, humiliated by Little Turtle and the Miami Confederacy in
the Ohio valley and menaced by Europe’s war in the Atlantic, the federal government
secured new funding for state-run arsenals and contracts for private arms manufactur-
ers. Within a generation, these investments would turn the United States into a signifi-
cant arms producer.36

and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge, 1992), 39–40. In late 1810, New
Spain sent Spain four thousand muskets aboard a British warship. See Esteban Garrea to the Viceroy of
New Spain, Isla de Leon, January 29, 1811, in Exp. 30 / Tom. 204 / Reales Cedules / Novohispano, Archivo
General de al Nación, Mexico City.
35 For government selling arms, and for debates about national arming in the 1780s and early 1790s, see
the important dissertation by Andrew John Beardsley Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early
American Republic, 1774–1821” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2013), 70–
74, 92–137. For an example of the War Department rejecting muskets that then could enter the export
market, see Benjamin Stoddert to Senator Uriah Tracey, Philadelphia, March 13, 1800, in US Office of
Naval Records, Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War between the United States and France, vol. 5
(Washington, DC, 1937), 303–4.
36 For France, see Charles Alexandre de Calonne to Thomas Jefferson, Fontainebleau, October 22, 1786, as
well as Claude Guillaume Lambert II to Thomas Jefferson, Versailles, December 29, 1787, and “Enclosure:
An Act of the French Council of State,” in Mary A. Giunta, ed., The Emerging Nation: A Documentary
History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, 1780–1789,
vol. 3 (Wilmington, DE, 1996), 351–53, 688–90. For direct sales, see Cornwallis to Grenville, Whitehall,
June 8, 1798, BNA/FO/5/24, pp. 183–85. The Royal Board of Ordinance shipped hundreds of cannons to

1162 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 Invoking European authorities on the law of nations, the Washington administra-
tion insisted that a neutral government bore no responsibility to police arms exports
to belligerents. “Our citizens have always been free to make, vend and export arms,”
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson explained to British and French officials com-
plaining about US arms trafficking. As Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton
put it to his new customs service, the purchase and exportation of “warlike instru-
ments and military stores, is free to all parties at war, and is not to be interfered with.”
Blessed with robust arms importation, a growing merchant marine, its own infant

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arms industry, and “the Superiority and every advantage of Situation,” US arms deal-
ers would help make Vergennes’s theatrical vision a geopolitical reality—starting in
Saint-Domingue.37
                       

Enslaved rebels in Saint-Domingue took life-or-death risks before they had reliable
access to arms and ammunition. Leader Georges Biassou later explained that he and
his comrades “began the war, almost without arms, without munitions, without sup-
plies, and almost without resources on August 23, 1791.” Despised, oppressed, and
locked out of the chummy international networks Morris relied on, self-emancipated
insurgents in Saint-Domingue initially had to try to take arms from the people shoot-
ing at them. Remarking on their “unbelievable audacity,” a plantation manager near
Port-au-Prince observed that “most of them are very badly armed, some have lances
and some who don’t have any weapons come at us as if they were armed.” Toussaint
Bréda, soon known to the world as Louverture, ascended to leadership thanks in part
to his genius for acquiring matériel. Rebel islanders appropriated signal cannon and
even reused cannonballs fired at them from offshore. These ad hoc methods of arming
were characteristic of other slave uprisings. It would take large-scale weapons imports
before the rebellion in Saint-Domingue could become a mass movement and one of the
signal events in modern history—“among the most magnificent in the Universe,” as
Biassou put it.38

the United States. It also promised to deliver two thousand muskets in November 1798 and five hundred
each month thereafter. See Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States,
1795–1805 (Philadelphia, 1955), 95–97. For the saltpeter privilege, see Brenda J. Buchanan, “Editor’s
Introduction: Setting the Context,” in Buchanan, Gunpowder, Explosives and the State, 1–18, here 8.
For domestic manufacturing, see Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology:
The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 24–84; Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early
American Republic, 1774–1821”; Andrew John Beardsley Fagal, “The Mills of Liberty: Foreign Capital,
Government Contracts, and the Establishment of DuPont, 1790–1820,” Enterprise and Society 19, no.
2 (2018): 309–51; and Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the
Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 (Baltimore, 2019), 27–84. For the international predicament of
the early United States, see Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and
the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
37 For “our citizens,” see Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Ternant, May 15, 1793, and Jefferson to Edmond Charles
Genêt, November 30, 1793, both in FONA. For “warlike instruments,” see Alexander Hamilton, “Instructions
to the Collectors of the Customs of the United States,” Philadelphia, August 4, 1793, in Charles Ghequiere
Fenwick, “The Neutrality Laws of the United States” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1912), 170–72.
38 The Biassou quote is in Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA, 2010),
55. For the lopsided consequences of the weapons gap, see, for example, Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti,

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1163

 Some of those weapons imports arrived via royal patronage. In May 1793, Santo
Domingo’s governor recruited Louverture and others by promising arms and provi-
sions as well as freedom. Meanwhile, invited by the colony’s terrified enslavers, British
forces seized key points throughout Saint-Domingue’s west. They, too, recruited and
equipped Black troops—some seven thousand. Revolutionary France’s newly arrived
commissioners promised freedom to anyone who would fight for the republic, and
they soon abolished slavery throughout the colony. They sealed their promises with
muskets. “Here is the liberty which Sonthonax gives you,” one of the commissioners

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supposedly proclaimed as he distributed twenty thousand arms in 1794. “Whoever
would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.” French warships deliv-
ered thousands more muskets and tons of gunpowder to the island’s republican forces
two years later.39
While great power rivalry provided both resources and autonomy to insurgent Brit-
ish North Americans, however, Europeans were cautious and controlling when doling
out matériel to Saint-Domingue’s Black insurgents. Though denounced by reaction-
aries for “a spirit of bigotry and hatred … without an example in the world,” Santo
Domingo’s borderland gunrunners—denizens of one of Spain’s minor colonies—never
had much matériel to part with. Even once Spain was at war with France, its officers
complained that they only had rocks to give their ally Louverture. “How do you want
them to win victories and make significant progress,” asked a Cuban officer, yet “order
us all the time not to give them Arms or Munitions?”40
Fearful that Jacobinism and slave rebellion would spread to nearby Jamaica, the Brit-
ish removed far more matériel from the island than they ever issued to Black soldiers.

vol. 1 (Port-au-Prince, 1847), 100. For Toussaint Bréda, see Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture
(New York, 2009), 25–26. For signal cannon, see Jeremy D. Popkin, ed., Facing Racial Revolution:
Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago, 2010), 77. For cannonballs, see Laurent Dubois,
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 110.
39 Dozens of significant slave rebellions erupted in the Western Hemisphere prior to the Haitian Revolution.
But few had the necessary means to grow large, and fewer still survived longer than a few days or weeks.
For classic surveys, see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943), and Eugene D.
Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World
(Baton Rouge, 1992). For two remarkable recent studies, see Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of
an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA, 2020), and Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of
Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York, 2020). For arms trafficking on the Santo Domingo
border, see Miriam Rebekah Martin Erickson, “The Black Auxiliary Troops of King Carlos IV: African
Diaspora in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1791–1818” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2015), 65–66, and
Graham T. Nessler, An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emancipation, and Reenslavement in
Hispaniola, 1789–1809 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016), 34–39. The key work on the British occupation is David
Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798
(Oxford, 1982). For seven thousand recruits, see p. 388. The Sonthonax quote is from Bell, Toussaint
Louverture, 142. Reports varied widely as to the scale of the French resupply in 1796. See Geggus, Slavery,
War, and Revolution, 196, 202, 444n53.
40 For planter accusations against Santo Domingo, see “Particulars concerning the Rebellion in St. Domingo,
Drawn Up by Monsr. Cadush, President of the General Assembly, the 27th Sept., 1791,” translated copy,
BNA/WO/1/58, pp. 1–12. For “a spirit,” see Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in
the Island of St. Domingo (London, 1797), xiii. Geggus doubts the Spanish governor of Santo Domingo had
a policy of arming the insurgents in 1791 and 1792. He argues that the governor “sought to appease them,
not make them stronger.” See David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN,
2002), 171–74. Anecdote about rocks and final quote come from Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and
Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2014), 100, 107.

1164 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 As for French republicans, when they embraced the radical implications of their revo-
lution, abolished slavery, and armed Black leaders as compatriots rather than subor-
dinates, they turned the tide of the war. But British naval power stopped France from
resupplying the island with munitions or anything else for most of the 1790s. Once
that block was temporarily lifted in 1802 with the Treaty of Amiens, Napoleon sent
men not to reequip Saint-Domingue but to disarm it. All told, then, European patron-
age delivered only a small fraction of the matériel consumed by Saint-Domingue’s com-
plex freedom struggle between 1791 and 1804.41

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Whereas the North American Revolution exploited the international arms mar-
ket for initial momentum but required foreign patronage for its ultimate success, the
reverse was true in Saint-Domingue. There, the market played the decisive role. This
was possible only because of the transformational consequences of the North Ameri-
can Revolution for the Atlantic world arms market. In Saint-Domingue, the vast major-
ity of insurgent gunpowder and most of their guns came not from European patrons
but from US merchants.
On the eve of the rebellion, the United States had around five hundred vessels trad-
ing with the colony’s thirteen significant ports. In solidarity with the colony’s besieged
slaveholders, Washington sent nearly $750,000 worth of arms, ammunition, and sup-
plies to Saint-Domingue (deducting the value from the Revolutionary War debt to
France). Whether captured in combat, turned over following new alliances, or pilfered
out of port cities, some of this matériel fell into insurgent hands. More consequentially,
North American merchants traded directly with Black fighters. Just months into the
uprising, Philadelphia’s Federal Gazette reported that “any price was offered for pow-
der and arms” and published stories of US traders running afoul of French authorities
and even being executed for selling arms to “the revolted men of colour.”42

41 Britain’s War Office instructed its commanders in Saint-Domingue to disarm any nonproprietor not
employed in some civil or military capacity and ship captured matériel off the island. See “Instructions
to the Officer Commanding the Expedition to St. Domingo,” draft, n.d., BNA/WO/1/58, pp. 63–69. For
matériel captured in the initial invasion, see Lothrop Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo
(Boston, 1914), 233–45. For the thoroughness of the British evacuation (leaving behind only three to
four functioning iron guns), see Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions
to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987), 306–10. The Royal Navy
energetically intercepted matériel destined for Saint-Domingue. In 1799, for example, it captured and
condemned three of Louverture’s ships and several transports loaded with men and matériel. See Don
Antonio Barba, “An Account of the Disturbance That Took Place in This Island in the Year 1799,” copy,
BNA/WO/1/771, pp. 253–60.
42 For the scale of trade between the United States and Saint-Domingue, see John H. Coatsworth, “American
Trade with European Colonies in the Caribbean and South America, 1790–1812,” William and Mary
Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1967): 243–66, and Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the
Age of the Haitian Revolution (London, 2018), 55. For the number of ships in 1789, the overall importance
of trade, and US funds sent to help the planters, see T. M. Matthewson, “George Washington’s Policy
toward the Haitian Revolution,” Diplomatic History 3, no. 3 (1979): 321–36, here 327, 335, and Donald R.
Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791–1806,” Journal of the Early Republic 2, no.
4 (1982): 361–79, here 363. For people in the colony secretly passing arms to the insurgents, see Thomas
O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville, TN, 1973), 68, and Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are
All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010), 149. For the Federal
Gazette, see James Alexander Dun, “‘What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!’:
Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 62,
no. 3 (2005): 473–504, here 492–95, 496n32.

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 By 1794, besieged planters were imploring the British navy to interdict US arms
smuggling. It is “nouvelle Angleterre,” one of them explained, that “furnishes the arms
and munitions to the revolted quarters.” Two years later, with Black and colored lead-
ers enjoying practical control over most of the colony and foreign observers framing
the conflict more as interimperial war than slave rebellion, six hundred North Ameri-
can ships called at Saint-Domingue. The arms trade became routine. Louverture would
keep US captains waiting if he thought they were overcharging for powder, and he cul-
tivated his reputation for fair dealing. In August 1796, for instance, a French officer at

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Gonaïves seized a US vessel for smuggling ammunition, notwithstanding the captain’s
protestations that he had an arrangement with General Louverture. “What will peo-
ple say about my business?” Louverture responded angrily. “They will say that General
Toussaint Louverture made a deal, and then treacherously abandoned it. They will say
I am humiliated!” Around the same time, a sharp British observer claimed Black insur-
gents were “abundantly supplied, by small vessels from North America,” and had ware-
houses “replete with ammunition.”43
In response to mounting French diplomatic protests, the US government con-
tinued to claim it had neither the right nor the ability to prevent its merchants from
selling guns abroad. There was some truth to this. Unlike European rivals, the United
States hadn’t the customs staff, the revenue cutters, or the political authority neces-
sary to police its international trade. Out of necessity and design, moreover, the coun-
try’s infant customs regime deferred to local mercantile interests. Still, protestations
of powerlessness rested on the fiction that the state and the market were separable.
In reality, US arms merchants looked to the state to provide direct and indirect help
acquiring their wares, to uphold their rights abroad, and to shield them at home from
aggrieved foreign navies that might otherwise wish to attack troublesome gunrunners
in the one place where they could reliably be found—their home ports.44
By 1798, British naval superiority had left Saint-Domingue dependent on US com-
merce. When the Adams administration instituted a trade embargo during the Qua-
si-War with France, Louverture negotiated an exception. He partnered with prominent
US merchants and administration officials to arm himself against his colored rival
André Rigaud. Once victorious, Louverture worked to revive the plantation regime—
without slavery but with significant coercion—and sent much of the resulting revenue
to US arms merchants. In late 1800, for instance, he purchased sixteen artillery pieces
and twenty-five thousand muskets from vendors in New York City. His top generals

43 For “nouvelle Angleterre,” see M. Billard to M. Malouet, Port-au-Prince, November 15, 1794, BNA/
WO/1/61. For six hundred ships, see Ronald Angelo Johnson, Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams,
Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (Athens, GA, 2014), 104. Toussaint Louverture
to Etienne Laveaux, Quartier Général des Cahos, 8 fructidor, l’an 4 de la République Française [August 29,
1796], in Gérard Mentor Laurent, Toussaint Louverture à travers sa correspondance, 1794–1798 (Madrid,
1953), 425–27. For the British observer, see Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the
Island of St. Domingo, 76–77, 151.
44 For US responses to French complaints as early as 1793, see Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The
Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson, 2005), 86. For the infant customs regime, see the
important monograph by Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American
State (Chicago, 2016).

1166 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

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Figure 4. Armed with imported muskets, Dessalines’s men resist a French attack at the Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot,
March 1802. From an image by Auguste Raffet in Jacques de Norvins, Histoire de Napoleon (Paris, 1839), 269.

negotiated their own deals. Henri Christophe, future monarch of the Kingdom of
Haiti, informed the US secretary of state that he had contracted with a prominent mer-
chant for “large quantities of arms and ammunition.” By the time Napoleon sent an
army under Charles Victoire-Emmanuel Leclerc to regain control of Saint-Domingue
and reinstitute slavery, there were an estimated one hundred thousand firearms in the
colony. Leclerc captured Louverture, sent him off to die in France, and then initiated a
mass disarmament campaign. But the general’s deception, bribery, and torture netted
no more than thirty thousand worn-out muskets.45

45 For trade dependency, see Philippe R. Girard, “Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and
a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 30, no. 3
(2010): 351–76, here 363. For Louverture’s negotiations with the Adams administration, see Brown,
Toussaint’s Clause, and Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with
Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1941), 70–98. For arms shipments from New York City, see Stoddard,
The French Revolution in San Domingo, 301. For Christophe, see Thomas Pickering to Edward Stevens,
Trenton, September 5, 1799, in US Office of Naval Records, Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War
between the United States and France, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1936), 157–58, and Scherr, “Arms and
Men,” 628. For numbers of muskets, see Philippe R. Girard, “Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti,
1802–4,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 138–61, here 154. In The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon:
Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2011), Girard
adds, “US historians have failed to find much evidence in US mercantile records that US merchants supplied
Louverture, but French-language sources leave no doubt” (p. 81). See also Dubois, Avengers of the New
World, 224. For thirty thousand, see Leclerc to First Consul, Quartier Général d’Estaing, September 16,
1802, in Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, Lettres du général Leclerc: Commandant en chef de l’armée
de Saint-Domingue en 1802, ed. Paul Roussier (Paris, 1937), 236. For Dessalines’s intriguing role in

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 Yellow fever famously devastated that French army, but guns and especially pow-
der from US traders enabled revolutionaries under Louverture’s fierce successor
Jean-Jacques Dessalines to expel France from the country. The same Treaty of Amiens
that made Leclerc’s expedition possible also brought mountains of decommissioned
matériel onto the market between late 1801 and mid-1803. US brokers purchased
castoffs at bargain prices and, with federal buying paused on account of the end of the
Quasi-War, sent even more of them to the export market and its primary outlet, Saint-
Domingue. Meanwhile, Britain continued to favor the United States with unrestricted

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gunpowder exports. The British consul general in New York City encouraged White-
hall to reconsider this policy in the fall of 1803, observing that three quarters of that
powder was being reexported to the French West Indies.46
Appalled Spanish and British observers denounced the “commercial avarice” of
“a people acting under all the debased principles of a debilitated commercial repub-
lic.” Leclerc agreed but discerned something more than cupidity. “It was the United
States that brought here all the muskets, artillery, powder, and all the munitions of
war,” he explained. “It was they who excited Toussaint to the defense. I am thoroughly
convinced that the Americans formed the plan to secure the independence of all the
Antilles because they hoped to monopolize its commerce as they already had that of
Saint-Domingue.”47
Dessalines wrote to Jefferson to encourage that commerce. Weary of a mother
country “that cuts her children’s throats, and following the example of the wis-
est nations,” he explained, Saint-Domingue had “sworn to expel the torturers.”
The president could not doubt “the loyalty and good faith that await your ships in
our ports.” Given the pace of imports, it isn’t clear that US merchants needed the
encouragement. The people of Saint-Domingue began celebrating the tools of their
liberation in song:

Dessalines is coming to the North.

Come see what he is bringing.
He is bringing muskets, he is bringing bullets—
these are the new talismans!

disarmament, see Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, vol. 2 (Port-au-Prince, 1847), 358–59. For reports of
Dutch merchants smuggling gunpowder into Saint-Domingue in 1802, see Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon
Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti (New Haven, CT, 2019), 219.
46 For yellow fever, see J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–
1914 (New York, 2010), 236–66. For the effect of European peace on the international arms market, see
12 Annals of Cong. 380–86 (1803). For the pause in federal purchases, see Rufus King to Oliver Wolcott,
London, December 12, 1800, in Rufus King, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King: Comprising
His Letters, Private and Official, His Public Documents, and His Speeches, vol. 3 (New York, 1896), 345.
For powder, see Thomas Barclay to George Hammond, New York, October 3, 1803, BNA/FO/5/39/23–24.
47 For “commercial avarice,” see Martínez de Irujo to D. Pedro Cevallos Guerra (no. 344), Philadelphia, May
21, 1803, in Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (hereafter cited as AHN) / Estado / legajo 5630 / Tom.
7. Quote about “a people” is from Thomas Maitland, in Philippe R. Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint
Louverture’s Diplomacy, 1798–1802,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2009): 87–124, here 101.
Leclerc to Minister of Marine, Le Cap, February 9, 1802, in Leclerc, Lettres du général Leclerc, 79–82.
For US arms smuggling, see also Claude Bonaparte Auguste and Marcel Bonaparte Auguste, L’expédition
Leclerc, 1801–1803 (Port-au-Prince, 1985), 47–48.

1168 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 France’s surviving troops surrendered to the British and evacuated Saint-Domingue in
late 1803. On New Year’s Day 1804, Dessalines declared independence for the state of
Haiti.48
Race, anti-Blackness, and white anxiety had always informed North American
reactions to the events in Saint-Domingue. In 1794, for example, a Philadelphia
paper acidly accused a prominent merchant of shipping ammunition to “the meek
and gentle mulattoes.” The social peril of the accusation was evident in the vigor of
the merchant’s outraged denials. Nonetheless, race was muted in commentary about

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the arms trade to the island prior to Haitian independence. The complexity and pace
of events in and around Saint-Domingue confounded tidy narratives of slave versus
free and Black versus white. As the French Revolution grew bloodier and more radi-
cal, as the slave rebellion morphed into an interimperial war, as the French embraced
abolition, as the United States and France drifted into the Quasi-War, and as North
Americans realized Leclerc’s invasion was linked to Napoleon’s designs on Louisi-
ana, commercial and geostrategic concerns repeatedly took precedence over white
solidarity.49
That changed in the years immediately following independence. With Leclerc and
most of his men dead and buried; with the Louisiana Purchase concluded; with US
newspapers reporting that Dessalines had massacred many of the new nation’s remain-
ing white people; with prominent merchants openly continuing to ship muskets, artil-
lery, and ammunition to Haiti anyway; and with Jefferson eager for improved relations
with France, race came to the fore in debate over the arms trade. In Congress, Jeffer-
sonian Republicans argued against arming “a class of people it is in the interest of the
United States to depress and keep down.” Sometimes they were more explicit. “Why
mince the matter?” asked one critic in New York’s Evening Post. “We have assisted
slaves to massacre their masters! In trading with those slaves we have received the
price of blood! The blood of babes! And who are we that we have done this accursed
thing? We are a people who have a million such slaves in the heart, the very vitals of our
country.” This author denounced US citizens who sold guns and ammunition to “mon-
sters in the shape of men” and who had “become so excessively philanthropic as to give
a preference to the blacks over people of our own kind.”50

48 Jean Jacques Dessalines to Thomas Jefferson, June 23, 1803, FONA. For the song, see Robin Blackburn, The
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988), 213.
49 The centrality of race and slavery in US reactions to the events in Saint-Domingue is a major theme in Ashli
White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, 2010). For the
charge and denial in Philadelphia, see “False Imputation!,” American Star, February 4, 1794. As historian
James Alexander Dun puts it, to Philadelphians, the violence in Saint-Domingue through the mid-1790s
“seemed more immediately relevant to their account books than to the shaking of racial hierarchies.” See
Dun, “‘What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!,’” 504. More broadly, see Dun’s
Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia, 2016). For the
deeper reasons that so many white observers found the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable,” see Michel-
Rolph Trouillot’s great Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, rev. ed. (1995; repr.,
Boston, 2015).
50 For reports of massacres, see, for example, the Western Star (Stockbridge, MA), June 16, 1804, and the
Wilmington Gazette, June 26, 1804. For “a class of people,” see Dun, Dangerous Neighbors, 223. Other
quotes are from a letter in the Evening Post (New York), October 18, 1804.

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1169

 In response, defenders of the trade insisted that the insurgents of Saint-Domingue
had all been freed when France was “propagating the rights of man at the point of the
bayonet, in one of her paroxysms of philanthropy.” As such, they were not enslaved
rebels but rather belligerents in a civil war. Vattel and other learned jurists made it
plain that the law of nations put no restriction on the citizens of a neutral party carry-
ing on private commerce with belligerents. Explicitly invoking the precedent of French
merchants arming British North Americans in the early stages of their revolution, one
commentator insisted that the same “enterprize of individuals” is “the right which I

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contend for on the part of our merchants.” If Haiti’s independence struggle differed
from that of the United States, it was in the fact the Haitians were “fighting to pre-
serve not only their independence as a community, but their liberty as individuals.”
That arms trading was beginning to entangle with and even trigger larger debates in
the United States over race, slavery, freedom, and sovereignty was a measure of its ris-
ing importance.51
                        

Writing on the eve of Haitian independence, Spain’s secretary of state Pedro Cevallos
prophesied that US arms trading would have “fatal consequences for [all] the nations
with colonies in this part of the world.” That prophesy began to materialize in the early
1810s, when insurgencies erupted across mainland Spanish America. These diverse
movements would eventually produce more than a dozen nation-states. While the
insurgencies all responded to Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain, they were molded by
distinct regional contexts and confound generalization. Still, they suffered common
debilities. None had significant matériel on hand; none could mass-produce it; and
none possessed the foreign contacts, hard cash, and ships required to easily navigate
international arms markets on their own. As Spanish officials feared they would, many
went looking for both weapons and patronage in the United States.52
Insurgent agents began arriving in US cities in 1810. The nation was now manufac-
turing nearly sixty-three thousand muskets and a million and a half pounds of gun-
powder annually, and the federal government stockpiled more than seventy thousand

51 For “propagating” and “fighting,” see speech of Senator Samuel White (Delaware), February 1806, in 15
Annals of Cong. 117–38, here 121, 124 (1806). For “enterprize,” see letter printed in the Evening Post,
November 16, 1804. Exclamations for or against the arms trade were part of a larger debate over (non)
recognition of and prohibiting trade to Haiti. See Robert J. Reinstein, “Slavery, Executive Power and
International Law: The Haitian Revolution and American Constitutionalism,” American Journal of Legal
History 53, no. 2 (2013): 141–237; Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition
after Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), 153–81; and Rao, National Duties, 119–31. Revolutionary Haiti
also figured in surprising and important ways into hopes and schemes for the colonization of the formerly
enslaved in the early republic United States. See Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened
Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York, 2016).
52 For “fatal,” see Carlos Martínez de Irujo to Pedro Cevallos (no. 344), Philadelphia, May 21, 1803, AHN /
Estado / legajo 5630 / Tom. 7. For overviews, see John Lynch, Latin American Revolutions, 1808–1826:
Old and New World Origins (Norman, OK, 1994); Michael P. Costeloe, Response to Revolution: Imperial
Spain and the Spanish American Revolutions, 1810–1840 (Cambridge, 2009); and Anthony McFarlane,
War and Independence in Spanish America (London, 2013). Roberto Breña cautions against flattening
these histories in “Independence Movements in the Americas during the Age of Revolution,” Forum for
Inter-American Research 11, no. 1 (2008): 47–79, here 51.

1170 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 firearms in the Springfield armory alone. Rebel agents hoped and even assumed that
prominent Anglo-Americans would help them access these stores. Like Spanish anx-
ieties, insurgent expectations of republican solidarity were grounded in history, in
the knowledge that the United States itself had required foreign patronage to achieve
independence. As the Mexican scholar and statesman Carlos María de Bustamante
explained, his fellow insurgents ought not “undertake anything without the help of the
Anglo-Americans, whom we need to be free just as they needed the French.”53
Initially, the Madison administration toyed with providing that help. Philadelphia

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merchant and banker Stephen Girard offered to play Beaumarchais to Secretary of
State James Monroe’s Vergennes by managing the transactions. Whatever the admin-
istration intended, however, it quickly abandoned once war with Great Britain came
into view. Insurgents’ hopes for US patronage only revived in 1815, by which time,
according to an optimistic Venezuelan agent, the end of the War of 1812 had flooded
the North American market with “everything necessary for waging war.” Rebel govern-
ments redoubled their appeals for patronage.54
But the US government refused. In the face of repeated insurgent requests, public
sympathy, and congressional pressure, both the Madison and Monroe administrations
maintained a strict policy of “impartial neutrality” toward Spain and its rebels. They
did so partly to safeguard the nation’s booming trade with Spain and Cuba; partly
because of unease with the racial implications of the insurgencies; and partly because
of their “distrust of everything proposed and desired by these South American gentle-
men,” as Monroe’s influential Secretary of State John Quincy Adams put it. Above all,
the US government refused to aid the insurgents or recognize their independence for
fear doing so would compromise its top strategic priority after 1815, the acquisition of
Spanish Florida.55

53 Especially in this early period, agents came representing not just protonational juntas but also individual
provinces and cities. See Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, Un nuevo reino: Geografía política, pactismo y diplomacia
durante el interregno en Nueva Granada, 1808–1816 (Bogotá, 2010), 470–71. For manufacturing and
Springfield, see Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic, 1774–1821,” 243–
45. For “undertake,” see Carlos María de Bustamante to José María Morelos, Chilpancingo, January 4, 1814,
in Juan E. Hernández y Dávalos, ed., Colección de documentos para la historia de la guerra de independencia
de Mexico de 1808 a 1821, vol. 5 (Mexico City, 1881), 273–74.
54 See Eugene R. Craine, The United States and the Independence of Buenos Aires (Hays, KS, 1961), 80.
Stephen Girard to James Monroe (private), Philadelphia, December 2, 1811, in letters/1811/536, Girard
Papers, American Philosophical Society. For “everything necessary,” see Pedro Gaul to [Venezuela’s]
Secretary of State and Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, September 2, 1815, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary,
ed., Memorias del general O’Leary, vol. 14 (Caracas, 1881), 312–13.
55 For the durability of insurgent hopes, see, for example, Manuel Torres to J. J. Roscio and J. R. Revenga,
Philadelphia, April 13, 1820, in José Urrutia, Los Estados Unidos de América y las repúblicas hispano-
americanas de 1810 á 1830: Páginas de historia diplomática (Madrid, 1918), 192–202. For “impartial,”
see Monroe’s message to Congress, December 2, 1817, in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative
and Executive, of the Congress of the United States—Foreign Relations, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1832),
130. For popular opinion and congressional support, see Caitlin Fitz’s marvelous Our Sister Republics: The
United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York, 2016). For anxieties over trade, see Edward P.
Pompeian, “Spirited Enterprises: Venezuela, the United States, and the Independence of Spanish America,
1789–1823” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 2014), 324–55. For racism, see, for example, Piero
Gleijeses, “The Limits of Sympathy: The United States and the Independence of Spanish America,” Journal
of Latin American Studies 24, no. 3 (1992): 481–505. For “some distrust,” see John Quincy Adams,
Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1765 to 1848, vol. 5, ed. Charles

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 Instead of patronage or recognition, Washington offered the market—inviting insur-
gents from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, the River Plate, and Chile “to run about
the whole country, and freely contract the succors, that we pleased.” That was harder
than it sounded, as Madison and Monroe well knew. Insurgent agents had to compete
against Spain’s tireless, savvy, and credit-worthy minister to the United States, Luis de
Onís, who sabotaged their arms deals and outbid his adversaries for matériel he then
shipped to their royalist enemies. Insurgents also had to compete against one another,
both in the United States and, later, at point of delivery, when captains dissatisfied with

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terms in one rebel port could simply weigh anchor for another.56
To “freely contract,” moreover, cash- and credit-poor agents had to contend
with North American merchants keen to swindle them. Consider the experience of
Chilean general José Miguel Carrera, who journeyed to the United States to buy weap-
ons in 1816. He expected to connect with civic-minded men eager to put their repub-
lican values to work in the service of hemispheric liberation. Instead, he found himself
stumbling around the most commercially minded society in the world, a cutthroat,
market-centric country humming with what the Niles Weekly Register characterized
as “the almost universal ambition to get forward.” While Carrera spoke no English, he
soon came to realize that major arms dealers were fixing prices. The general’s confi-
dant and guide, a supercargo for a Baltimore firm, explained that dealers had to charge
at least eighteen dollars for the castoff US military arms they resold, because the gov-
ernment charged them eleven dollars. But a prominent merchant in the city let slip that
he and his counterparts actually paid five dollars for these castoffs. The indignant gen-
eral soon concluded that in addition to price gouging, dealers were dumping defective
firearms into the insurgencies—doing “in South America what they have done with
the blacks in Angola.” Unable to obtain matériel on credit from gunmaker Eli Whitney,
powder magnate DuPont, or fur-trade tycoon John Jacob Astor (“a rouge”), Carrera
resignedly borrowed $4,000 from the merchant Henry Didier at 100 percent annual
interest and agreed to pay twenty dollars for every musket he shipped to Chile. Didier
armed insurgents all over Spanish America. But he was as neutral as his government.
In 1819, he offered Spain twelve thousand British flintlocks “of the best quality,” with
bayonets, at nine dollars apiece.57

Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1875), 51. For US policy toward Spain and its insurgencies in these years, and
for Florida’s role in that policy, see James E. Lewis, The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood:
The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 69–125,
and Samuel Flagg Bemis, “Early Diplomatic Missions from Buenos Aires to the United States 1811–1824,”
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 49, pt. 1 (April 1939): 11–101, here 36–37.
56 For “to run,” see Fitz, Our Sister Republics, 161. For Onís and his subordinates, see, for example, Luis
de Onís to Pedro Cevallos (no. 120), Philadelphia, December 9, 1815, AHN / Estado / legajo 5640. For
examples of his arms buying, see Antonio A. Jonte to Bernardo O’Higgins, Buenos Aires, June 5, 1819, in
Museo Mitre, Documentos del archivo de San Martín, vol. 8 (Buenos Aires, 1910), 250–52.
57 The Niles Weekly Register quote (1815, emphasis in original) comes from Gordon S. Wood, “The
Significance of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 8, no. 1 (1988): 1–20, here 13. Miguel
Varas Velásquez, Don José Miguel Carrera en Estados Unidos: Apuntes para un estudio tomados de su diario
(Santiago, 1912), 49–69. For “Enrique” Didier’s offer to Spain, see Ministerio de Hacienda to Virrey de
Nueva España [Madrid], May 27, 1819, in Exp. 226 / Tom. 220 / Reales Cedules / Novohispano, Archivo
General de la Nación, Mexico City.

1172 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 The US government’s refusal to provide aid, its arms dealers’ “marked spirit of
speculation,” and their willingness to sell to both sides of the conflict all generated dis-
illusionment and resentment. “Poor men!” Bustamante would later write about Mex-
ico’s rebel leaders and the supplicants they sent to the illusory arsenal of democracy.
“How deluded they were about the policy of the United States government”—deluded
to have “believed what the books that came into our hands told us, that [the United
States] would extend its generous hands to help us.” Simón Bolívar remarked bitterly
that “even our brothers to the North stood apart as idle spectators.” Even royalists

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denounced the North Americans who armed them. “If they loved the Americans,”
explained a jurist in Lima to King Ferdinand VII, “they would not provide aid to Peru’s
Viceroy. They have a double heart.”58
Justified bitterness coursing through period sources has shaped the historiogra-
phy. While generations of scholars have debated the significance of US institutions
and ideas for Spanish American independence, most have ignored or minimized the
material role the United States played in the insurgencies’ eventual success.59 It is more
commonly asserted that Great Britain provided Spanish American rebels with the bal-
ance of their guns and ammunition. But while dozens of agents were active in London
throughout the era, Britain was also Spain’s main ally and patron during the war against
Napoleon. In 1814, Whitehall formally prohibited arms exports to insurgent Spanish
America in return for trading concessions from Spain. Though unevenly enforced, this
order in council helped make major arms deliveries direct from England exceedingly
rare before London lifted its trade prohibition in 1823. In contrast, Great Britain sent
Spain 600,000–750,000 new firearms between 1808 and 1814 as grants-in-aid. Thus,

58 For “marked,” see Varas Velásquez, Don José Miguel Carrera en Estados Unidos, 53. For “poor men,” see
Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro historico de la revolucion Mexicana, vol. 1 (Mexico City, 1844), 156–
58. For “believed,” see Carlos María de Bustamante, Elogio histórico del general don José Maria Morelos y
Pavon (Mexico City, 1822), 37. For “even our,” see the Jamaica letter, Kingston, September 6, 1815, in David
Bushnell, ed., El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar, trans. Fred Fornoff (New York, 2003), 16. For the
jurist, see Manuel de Vidaure to el Rey de España, Lima, March 1, 1818, in Colección de historiadores y de
documentos relativos a la independencia de Chile, vol. 10 (Santiago, 1904), 79–105.
59 For a thoughtful recent assessment of the influence debate, see Isidro Vanegas Useche, “La revolución
angloamericana como herramienta: Nueva Granada 1808–1816,” Co-herencia 13, no. 25 (2016): 89–118.
For earlier work downplaying or denying the significance of US arms trading, see, for example, Urrutia,
Los Estados Unidos de América y las repúblicas hispano-americanas de 1810 á 1830, 25; Isidro Fabela,
Los precursores de la diplomacia mexicana (Mexico City, 1926), 31–32; and Charles K. Webster, ed.,
Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812–1830, vol. 1 (London, 1938), 6–8. For some authors,
bitterness over US imperialism and Cold War–era tensions discouraged acknowledgment of any US role
in Latin American independence, even one as self-interested as arms trading. Guillermo García Ponce’s
Bolívar y las armas en la guerra de independencia exemplifies this. It is the most sophisticated and
exhaustive study yet published of how any of the insurgencies armed themselves. Yet it omits what was
probably the single largest arms deal of Venezuela’s independence struggle, presumably because it was with
a North American (Jacob Idler). More recent scholarship emphasizes neutral islands in the Caribbean or
Great Britain as primary sources of insurgent weapons. See, for example, the important books by Clément
Thibaud, Repúblicas en armas: Los ejércitos Bolivarianos en la guerra de independencia en Colombia y
Venezuela (Lima, 2003), 262, and Gutiérrez Ardila, Un nuevo reino, 567. A few historians have cast doubt
on the significance of British help for the insurgencies. See, for example, McFarlane, War and Independence
in Spanish America, 416. For more on the historiography, see also Caitlin Fitz, “Our Sister Republics: The
United States in an Age of American Revolutions” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2010), 198–99n6. For
the wider geopolitical implications of the insurgencies, see Rafe Blaufarb, “The Western Question: The
Geopolitics of Latin American Independence,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 742–63.

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1173

 when tens of thousands of Spanish veterans came to extinguish the insurgencies start-
ing in 1815, most carried (heavily subsidized) English muskets.60
British exporters mainly equipped insurgents indirectly, through third parties. Whole-
salers from the United Kingdom scooped up decommissioned matériel in huge quantities
after the Napoleonic Wars and exported much of it to the Americas. Tens of thousands
of castoff firearms went to neutral islands, where North American, Haitian, and Spanish
American insurgents had long shopped for war material. Danish Saint Thomas in partic-
ular served as busy and cutthroat arms markets for insurgent and royalist agents alike.

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But the United States imported far more of these British muskets than other buyers:
nearly a quarter million between 1815 and 1822. More than a hundred thousand of them
went to New Orleans, where schemes to profit from the insurgencies preoccupied a num-
ber of the city’s most prominent residents. Spain complained bitterly that many of these
firearms were being reexported to rebels. But Whitehall coolly and honestly replied that
it had no grounds to prevent sales to the United States or any other neutral power.61
Most arms deals from the era are irrecoverable now. But by hunting for numbers in
archival material from the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Britain; by searching the
voluminous published correspondence from Spanish America’s independence strug-
gles; and by combing through the careful work of other scholars, one is able to identify
a floor. This exercise reveals that the large majority of matériel flowed through US mer-
chants, who delivered a documented minimum of 76,407 firearms to insurgent buyers
in Spanish America between 1810 and 1821.62

60 For the British prohibition and its end, see George Canning to Robert Gordon (no. 6), London, March
4, 1823, in Charles K. Webster, ed., Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812–1830, vol. 2
(London, 1938), 9–11. See also Costeloe, Response to Revolution, 200. For an example of enforcement, see
Blaufarb, “Arms for Revolutions,” 105. Blaufarb speculates that the prohibition was routinely violated, but
there isn’t much evidence for that. The great exception came in 1818, when Bolívar’s broke but indefatigable
agents in London managed to ship twelve thousand muskets to Venezuela. These weapons arrived around
the same time as several thousand British volunteers—an infusion of matériel and manpower that made
a difference at a critical time. But this unprecedented deal wrecked Venezuela’s credit in Europe. See
Simón Bolívar to José Antonio Páez, Angostura, July 13, 1818; same to same, August 21, 1808; and same to
same, October 8, 1808, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary, ed., Memorias del general O’Leary, vol. 16 (Caracas,
1881), 69–70, 88–89, 105–6. For a lament about how this notorious deal poisoned future hoped-for arms
purchases, see José R. Revenga to Simón Bolívar, Angostura, August 9, 1820, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary,
ed., Memorias del general O’Leary, vol. 17 (Caracas, 1881), 359–61. For volunteers, see Matthew Brown,
Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations
(Liverpool, 2006). For arms to Spain, see J. Clayburn La Force, “The Supply of Muskets and Spain’s War
of Independence,” Business History Review 43, no. 4 (1969): 523–44, here 542–43. For the productive
capacity that made this patronage possible, see Satia, Empire of Guns. For the scale and cost of the Spanish
expeditions, see Costeloe, Response to Revolution, esp. 101–2.
61 Britain exported 36,164 firearms (“guns” and “pistols”) to Saint Thomas between 1815 and 1817 (imports into
the island drop to near zero after 1817). No other neutral island imported remotely as many. Between 1815
and 1822, the United States imported 241,608 from Great Britain. British export data comes from Ledgers of
Exports of British Merchandise under Articles, BNA/CUST-9 (1815–20). Data is missing for 1821 and 1822,
so I have used averages from the other years to estimate US (and Brazilian) figures for those years. Brazil, like
the United States, a large settler state but one that lacked its own arms industry, was the next-largest New
World importer, receiving 165,602 firearms from Britain in these years. Rafe Blaufarb convincingly argues
that Brazilian firms likely reexported a large proportion of these weapons to Africa as part of the transatlantic
slave trade. See “Arms for Revolutions,” 109. For Spanish complaints and British answers, see George Harrison
to Mr. Hamilton, Treasury Chambers, March 14, 1818, BNA/FO/72/218, pp. 319–24.
62 In this effort, I take inspiration from appendix 3 of Caitlin Fitz’s dissertation, “Our Sister Republics.” Using
some of the same sources as I do, Fitz made a number of reasonable assumptions in order to try to estimate

1174 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

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Figure 5. Enumerated firearm exports from the United States to insurgent Spanish America, 1810–21.

Though small quantities by the standards of Napoleonic warfare, these numbers

were transformative in the Spanish American context. Consider that there were only
1,800 muskets in Buenos Aires in the summer of 1812. In the autumn of 1814, the
Chilean general Bernardo O’Higgins claimed he had 1,500 working muskets (his rival
Carrera doubted he had more than 250). The rebel stronghold of Cartagena possessed
3,388 muskets when it fell to Spanish forces at the end of 1815. Around the same time,
the imprisoned (and soon-to-be-executed) leader José María Morelos testified that
half of Mexico’s insurgents were unarmed and that altogether they had around 4,400
firearms. Organizing in exile that same year, Bolívar insisted that twenty to thirty thou-
sand muskets would be enough to liberate all Spanish America. There is firm evidence

likely totals for US arms exports to South America between 1810 and 1825 (using averages of enumerated
cargos to derive estimates for unenumerated cargos, for example). The figure she arrives at (excluding
Mexico but including insurgent Pernambuco, Brazil) is 145,386 firearms. In my judgment, that’s a credible
total figure. My numbers are more conservative and meant to identify a floor. For details and sources, see
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRreiWE_1VvIQ-n5-Np7hNjNOZuJw2u_5qIBkMmP
sBFZcABRB4Zshs9G3AazYMhzbMCHCOhrvfoLeIa/pubhtml#.

T h e Arms Trad e an d A m er i c a n R evo lu t i o n s S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 3 1175

 that US merchants delivered three times as many arms to insurgent Spanish America
between 1810 and 1821.63
And that figure is a significant underestimate. It doesn’t account for the many
descriptive but numberless references to the trade (the “considerable quantity of
arms” Didier shipped to Buenos Aires in 1815, for example); for arms and ammuni-
tion US dealers sold indirectly to insurgents, through brokers in neutral islands; for
most “ghost exports” of matériel, brought directly from Europe to insurgent buyers
in US-owned ships; or for muskets and powder sold by the dozens of US vessels that

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served as privateers in the Spanish American insurgencies. Finally, the numbers don’t
account for matériel North American merchants quietly traded in smaller quantities as
an adjunct to routine commerce in staples and other merchandize. A North American
vessel arrived in Venezuela nearly once a week on average between 1815 and 1823, for
instance. Imperial authorities were right to suspect that many of them had matériel
hidden in their cargos.64
The United States was the vital source of guns and ammunition for Spanish Ameri-
can insurgencies. But it wasn’t their only postcolonial source of arms. The roles played
by Haiti and the Spanish American republics themselves illustrate how the circulation

63 For Buenos Aires, see W. G. Miller to James Monroe, Buenos Aires, July 16, 1812, in William R. Manning,
Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States concerning the Independence of the Latin-American
Nations, vol. 1 (New York, 1925), 329. For O’Higgins, see Diario del Jeneral Don José Miguel Carrera, August
29 and September 6, 1814, in Colección de historiadores y de documentos relativos a la independencia de
Chile, vol. 1 (Santiago, 1900), 363, 367. For Cartagena, see Ramón G. Corrales, ed., Documentos relativos a
la independencia de Cartagena, tomados de la colección publicada por el señor doctor don Manuel Ezequiel
Corrales (Bogotá, 1911), 37–38. For Mexico, see José María Morelos, tercera y quarta declaraciones,
November 30 and December 1, 1815, Mexico City, in Juan E. Hernández y Dávalos, ed., Colección de
documentos para la historia de la guerra de independencia de Mexico de 1808 a 1821, vol. 6 (Mexico City,
1882), 28–37. Simón Bolívar to Maxwell Hyslop, Kingston, May 19, 1815, in José Enrique Rodó and Rufino
Blanco-Fombona, eds., Cartas de Bolívar, 1799 á 1822, vol. 1 (Paris, 1913), 114–18. Clement Thibaud
makes the important point that material (and morale) difficulties forced Bolívar into brief campaigns. See
Thibaud, Repúblicas en armas, 105.
64 For “considerable,” see Varas Velásquez, Don José Miguel Carrera en Estados Unidos, 9. Insurgent and
Spanish privateers operating off the Spanish Main in particular convinced North American merchants
to take cargos to neutral islands instead. See Robert Monroe Harrison to John Quincy Adams, Saint
Thomas, May 30, 1817, Reel 1 / Despatches from US Consuls in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, 1804–1906
/ T350, National Archives. In one year during this period, a US vessel arrived at Saint Thomas on average
every other day; see the “Report of the Arrival and Departure of [American Vessels in Saint Thomas],”
prepared by the US consul there sometime in the 1810s [document is torn, so year is unclear], in Reel 1 /
Despatches from US Consuls in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, 1804–1906 / T350, National Archives. For
Venezuelan officials contracting with US merchants to deliver arms to Saint Thomas, see José R. Revenga
to Simón Bolívar, Angostura, August 16, 1820, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary, ed., Memorias del general
O’Leary, vol. 6 (Caracas, 1880), 466–67. For “ghost exports” generally, see Javier Cuenca-Esteban, “British
‘Ghost’ Exports, American Middlemen, and the Trade to Spanish America, 1790–1819: A Speculative
Reconstruction,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2014): 63–98. For an example of ghost exports
from 1818 involving the arms trade (two US vessels loaded with matériel from Trieste that departed for
Buenos Aires), see Luis de Onís to Carlos Martínez de Irujo (no. 98), Bristol, June 17, 1818, AHN / Estado
/ legajo 5643. For numbers of privateers, see Blaufarb, “The Western Question,” 753–54. Imperial officials
accused both British and US merchants of smuggling matériel in with other merchandise, though London’s
arms embargo meant British traders who did so faced risks at home as well as abroad. See Luis de Onís to
Pedro Cevallos (no. 111), Philadelphia, December 1, 1815, AHN / Estado / legajo 5640 / 7, and Barão da
Laguna to Conde dos Arcos, Quartel General, Montevideo, July 18, 1815, in Comisión Nacional Archivo
Artigas, Archivo Artigas, vol. 35 (Montevideo, 2005), 83. Pompeian puts the average at forty-seven US
ships annually in Venezuela. See “Spirited Enterprises,” 343.

1176 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 of guns and ammunition entwined American revolutions and unleashed compounding
changes.
Haiti fractured following Dessalines’s assassination in 1806, with Henri Christophe
ruling the Kingdom of Haiti in the North and Alexandre Pétion governing the Repub-
lic of Haiti in the South. Both leaders were avid arms importers. In addition to con-
cluding major deals with US and British merchants, Haitian governments sometimes
exploited insurgent penury. Colombian agents brought fifteen thousand English mus-
kets to Cartagena in the summer of 1815. But when authorities there failed to reim-

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burse their dangerously leveraged brokers, those brokers sold everything to Pétion, at
a steep loss. Similarly, in 1820, Christophe snatched up thirty thousand castoffs that
Bolivar’s agents had contracted for in Trieste and been unable to afford upon deliv-
ery. Hard dealing was obviously part of the story in Haiti too. But in Haiti, it was leav-
ened with state patronage, most famously and consequentially in 1816, when Pétion
gave refuge to exiled Venezuelan and Colombian insurgents and then armed Bolívar’s
return to Costa Firme. When the first attempt failed, the Haitian president armed and
equipped a second. Pétion did what Madison and Monroe dared not: he took signif-
icant geopolitical risks in the name of a broader anticolonial project. In so doing, he
nudged the insurgents in a radical direction. In return for tons of gunpowder and sev-
eral thousand of those cut-rate muskets Pétion had purchased, Bolívar swore to abolish
slavery in Venezuela.65
In South America, too, newly independent governments leveraged some of their
imported arms to accelerate the broader anticolonial project. This happened repeatedly
in the overlapping theaters of Colombia and Venezuela, starting in 1813, when Carta-
gena gave Bolívar two thousand muskets for his “admirable campaign” to retake Cara-
cas. Equipped with matériel imported into Buenos Aires, the great Argentinian general

65 For Haitian importing after independence, see, for example, St. Victor Jean-Baptiste, Le fondateur devant
l’histoire (Port-au-Prince, 1954), 88–89, 99–101. For Spanish American agents seeking guns in Haiti,
see, for example, Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, “Colombia y Haití: Historia de un desencuentro (1819–1831),”
Secuencia: Revista de historia y ciencias sociales, no. 81 (September–December 2011): 67–93, here 70;
Gutiérrez Ardila, Un nuevo reino, 580; and Johanna von Grafenstein, Nueva España en el circuncaribe,
1779–1808: Revolución, competencia imperial y vínculos intercoloniales (Mexico City, 1997), 240–42.
Pétion paid eleven dollars each for muskets the Colombian agents spent eighteen dollars on. For that
remarkable transaction (and for Christophe’s purchase of six thousand English muskets two weeks
earlier), see Gutiérrez Ardila, Un nuevo reino, 471–79. For 1820, see Fernando de Peñalver to Simón
Bolívar, Angostura, August 16, 1820, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary, ed., Memorias del general O’Leary, vol.
8 (Caracas, 1880), 359–60. For Pétion’s patronage, see Paul Verna, Petión y Bolívar: Una etapa decisiva
en la emancipación de Hispanoamérica, 1790–1830 (Caracas, 1980). Spanish authorities knew Pétion was
aiding the insurgents and warned him not to. See Pablo Morillo to Alejandro Petión, Cartagena, December
12, 1816, in Antonio Rodríguez Villa, ed., El teniente general don Pablo Morillo, primer conde de Cartagena,
marqués de La Puerta (1778–1837): Estudio biográfico documentado, vol. 3 (Madrid, 1908), 114–15.
Ada Ferrer brilliantly situates Pétion’s support for Bolívar within a wider Haitian intervention “in broad
Atlantic debates about rights, freedom, citizenship, and sovereignty.” See Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and
Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 40–66. For a
nuanced take on Bolívar’s intentions toward his patron, see Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor
Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham, NC, 2016), 158–71.
Pétion rejected a similar request from Mexico’s insurgents; see his letter to José Bernardo Gutiérrez de
Lara, Port-au-Prince, August 15, 1814, in Hernández y Dávalos, Colección de documentos para la historia de
la guerra de independencia de Mexico de 1808 a 1821, 5:609.

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 José de San Martín crossed the Andes and led Chileans in expelling royalist forces from
their country in 1817 and 1818. Once they regained the port of Valparaiso, the Chileans
purchased 16,715 muskets and 796,690 pounds of powder from US merchants in just
nine months. In 1820, San Martín brought fifteen thousand of Chile’s muskets with him
in his campaign to liberate Peru. Meanwhile, Bolívar’s forces had taken Colombia and
were using their newfound access to the Pacific to import arms from Chile—arms that
they would use in their own Peruvian campaigns. Once insurgent government began to
cohere in Peru by 1823, it sought matériel not just in neighboring South American repub-

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lics but in independent Mexico too. By then, a world where European empires controlled
the circulation of muskets and gunpowder in the Americas seemed very far away.66
                              

“Hang up a bag of coffee in hell,” Jean-Jacques Dessalines was supposed to have

remarked, “and the American merchant will go after it.” Presumably that would have
been true even in the colonial era. But as colonial subjects, North American merchants
couldn’t have gone after coffee (or anything else) with cargos of muskets and gunpow-
der. It took a series of unlikely events to make that possible. It took imperial patronage
in their war for independence. It took the triumph of anxious nationalists determined
to build a robust domestic arms industry. It took a generation of European war, during
which the neutral United States could “fatten on the follies” of the Old World. And
it took the willingness of people elsewhere around the hemisphere to risk their lives
fighting colonialism and slavery. Together, these forces swept aside Europe’s informal
arms control regime and made the United States arms mart to the hemisphere.67
But crucially, the United States never offered terms remotely as generous as those
it had enjoyed from France and Spain. No massive, easy loans from government, no
secret state programs to equip insurgent armies, and certainly no declarations of war
in support of other peoples’ independence. “No foreign nation guided us with its wis-
dom and experience,” Bolívar lamented in 1815, “nor defended us with its arms, nor

66 For the admirable campaign, see García Ponce, Bolívar y las armas en la guerra de independencia, 58. For
Chilean imports, see Henry Hill to John Quincy Adams, Valparaiso, June 30, 1818, in Reel 1 / Despatches
from US Consuls in Valparaiso / M146, National Archives. For the arsenal San Martín brought to Peru,
see McFarlane, War and Independence in Spanish America, 260. For arms transfers between Chile and
Colombia, see, for example, Diego Barros Arana, Historia jeneral de Chile, vol. 12 (Santiago, 1892), 624n10,
and García Ponce, Bolívar y las armas en la guerra de independencia, 219–20. For Peru’s quests for arms,
see “Instrucciones que el presidente de la república del Perú dá al agente diplomático del gobierno de
Colombia,” March 1, 1823; J. Gabriel Pérez to el Intendente del Istmo, Lima, October 4, 1823; and Pérez
to the Colombian minister to Mexico, Lima, October 6, 1823, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary, ed., Memorias
del general O’Leary, vol. 19 (Caracas, 1883), 458, and Daniel Florencio O’Leary, ed., Memorias del general
O’Leary, vol. 20 (Caracas, 1883), 413, 419–21.
67 Dessalines quoted in speech by Representative D. R. Williams, December 9, 1808, in Thomas Hart
Benton, ed., Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856: Nov. 7, 1808–March 3, 1813, vol.
4 (Washington, DC, 1857), 81. For “fatten” (Jefferson), see Jules Lobel, “The Rise and Decline of the
Neutrality Act: Sovereignty and Congressional War Powers in United States Foreign Policy,” Harvard
International Law Journal 24 (Summer 1983): 1–71, here 21. For penetrating observations about US
advantages vis-à-vis Spanish American insurgencies, see Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “Sobre la supuesta
influencia de la independencia de los Estados Unidos en las independencias hispanoamericanas,” Revista
de Indias 70, no. 250 (2010): 691–714, here 707–8.

1178 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/128/3/1144/7282239 by Sno-Isle Libraries user on 02 October 2023
Figure 6. One of two exquisite pistols made by Versailles gunmaker Nicolas-Noël Boutet, and gifted in 1825 to
Simón Bolívar by Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the North American and French Revo-
lutions. The cased pair sold for $1.8 million at auction in 2016. Private collection, photo © Christie’s Images /
Bridgeman Images.

protected us with its resources. It was not as with North America during its freedom
struggle.” That fact helps explain why the independence wars were, in the words of one
distinguished scholar, “the making of the United States and the ruin of much of the
rest of the Americas.”68
If the United States had the immense advantage of fighting its revolution whole-
sale, its Haitian and Spanish American counterparts had to fight their revolutions
retail. Revolution retail meant arms buying wherever and whenever possible, some-
thing that inhibited planning, fostered factionalism, and encouraged the entrepre-
neurial autonomy of military leaders. Revolution retail produced deals made in
existential desperation—deals that could constrain options and undermine sover-
eignty after independence. Revolution retail led to longer and more corrosive wars.
And revolution retail inhibited decisive final outcomes, prolonging antagonism with
former imperial sovereigns and fueling a ruinous militarism in many postcolonial
states.69
Finally, the collapse of the early modern arms control regime didn’t simply make
guns and ammunition more readily available to America’s anticolonial insurgents. It
made guns and ammunition more readily available to insurgents of all persuasions. The
nineteenth century would be far less politically stable than the eighteenth across most

68 For “no foreign,” see Bolívar to editor of the Royal Gazette, Kingston, September 28, 1815, in Simón Bolívar,
La esperanza del universo, ed. José Luis Salcedo Bastardo (Paris, 1983), 115–17. Final quote is from Felipe
Fernández-Armesto, quoted in Breña, “Independence Movements in the Americas during the Age of
Revolution,” 64.
69 Prolonged antagonism with Spain justified/excused massive military budgets in independent Mexico, for
instance. For the wretched consequences, see Barbara A. Tenenbaum, The Politics of Penury: Debts and
Taxes in Mexico, 1821–1856 (Albuquerque, 1986). For a comparable story in Haiti over the longer term,
see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New
York, 1990).

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 of the Americas. The arms dealing that both fueled and fed off this instability would
accelerate the penetration of foreign capital and influence.70
Postcolonial states needed arsenals in order to govern effectively. Firearms under-
went several technological and manufacturing revolutions during the nineteenth cen-
tury. Thanks in part to the constantly receding technological horizon, no country in
the hemisphere managed to build a significant domestic arms industry in the century
after independence—except the United States (blessed with good timing yet again).
Everyone else had to turn to the market. At first, most did so with war-battered econ-

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omies and consequently financed their new arsenals with foreign loans. Inability to
repay these loans led to a pattern of sovereign default and chronic fiscal crisis that gave
foreign capitalists and investors, Britain’s especially, extraordinary leverage over des-
perate governments. By the mid-1820s, merchants and politicians in the United States
were already grumbling about the United Kingdom having engrossed the trade of the
newly independent republics.71
But governments weren’t the only parties shopping for arms. Insurgents looking
to capture fragile states had even fewer resources. They invariably had to court for-
eign patrons to obtain matériel. As they had throughout the wars for independence,
insurgent agents traveled abroad during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
seeking guns and ammunition on credit. In these kinds of appeals, arms dealers in the
nearby United States had the advantage over their distant European competitors. In
advance of hundreds of actual or hoped-for military enterprises, US venture capital-
ists provided funds to insurgent plotters from Latin America and the Caribbean and
arranged contacts with arms industrialists, vendors, and shippers. In return, they were
routinely promised steeply discounted national bonds, shares of future customs rev-
enues, mining privileges, lucrative government contracts, and, eventually, railroad
concessions. Most such projects failed. But those that succeeded could pay handsome
dividends to early investors.72
These dynamics smoothed the way for US empire. Like those eighteenth-century
Dutchmen willing “to sell arms and ammunition to besiege Amsterdam itself,” and like
so many of their modern-day counterparts, arms dealers from the early United States
habitually prioritized personal over national interests. But in the US case at least, the
notorious ungovernability of the trade provided a screen for the manifold ways in
which arms exports indirectly served state interests. Madison had modeled an endur-
ing script of principled powerlessness. “With respect to articles for War,” he responded
to French complaints about arms exports to Haiti, “it is probably the interest of all

70 For independent Latin America’s struggles with “limited war,” usually unfolding within rather than
between countries, see Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America
(University Park, PA, 2002).
71 See, for example, Frank Griffith Dawson, The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and
the 1822–25 Loan Bubble (New Haven, CT, 1990), and Richard J. Salvucci, Politics, Markets, and Mexico’s
“London Debt,” 1823–1887 (New York, 2009). For commercial disappointment in the United States,
see Arthur Preston Whitaker, The United States and the Independence of Latin America, 1800–1830
(Baltimore, 1941), 585–602.
72 For a rich study of US economic penetration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico, see John
Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley, CA, 2002).

1180 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW B RI A N D E L AY

 Nations that they should be kept out of hands likely to make so bad a use of them.”
However, the secretary continued, “it is clear at the same time that the United States
are bound by the law of Nations to nothing further than to leave their offending citi-
zens to the consequences of an illicit trade.” US authorities would keep intoning the
virtue of free trade and reiterating ad nauseam the ungovernability of the merchants
they protected in their ports and sold guns and ammunition to out of state arsenals.73
All the while, private arms trading facilitated the nation’s imperial ambitions over
and over again during the long nineteenth century. Weapons trading and the desta-

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bilizing violence it enabled were preconditions for the acquisition of French Louisi-
ana in the 1800s, Spanish Florida in the 1810s, Mexican Texas in the 1830s, northern
Mexico in the 1840s, and Puerto Rico in the 1890s; for the multiple near misses in the
Yucatán, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti; and for the many military interven-
tions and occupations that the United States orchestrated throughout the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The roots
of these events sank down into the Age of Revolutions, when the weapons trade first
tangled together American state projects and the United States became the Western
Hemisphere’s indispensable arms dealer.74

Brian DeLay is Preston Hotchkis Chair in the History of the United States at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. He is the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian
Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT, 2008). He is finishing a book for W.
W. Norton about guns and American revolutions titled Aim at Empire.

I have accumulated many debts in the years that I have been working on this essay and on the book from which it is
drawn. For research funding, I thank the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned
Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation. Colleagues at several institutions have provided generous feedback on written or spoken iterations
of this essay. For help getting me to the final version, I am especially grateful to Kevin Sweeney, Daniel Sargent,
Brooke Blower, Joshua Piker, Ada Ferrer, Elizabeth Fenn, Nicholas Guyatt, Priya Satia, Mark Philip Bradley, and
the editors and anonymous readers of the AHR.

73 James Madison to Robert Livingston, March 31, 1804, FONA.

74 For an elaboration of this argument focused on Mexico, see Brian DeLay, “How Not to Arm a State:
American Guns and the Crisis of Governance in Mexico, Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Southern
California Quarterly 95, no. 1 (2013): 5–23.

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