"To arms, Americans, to arms": Creating Cosmopolitan States in the Atlantic World

In Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress, British pamphleteer John Lind ironically noted that if the North American colonists were acknowledged as independent citizens of a foreign state, a pirate like Captain Kidd could just as easily declare himself independent and escape prosecution. "Instead of the guilty pirate, he would have become the independent prince” Lind derided, “and taken among the 'maritime' powers -'that separate and equal station, to which'- he too might have discovered- 'the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled him.'” This paper explores what happened when “pirates” declared themselves to be independent princes, or, in the context of this paper, independent republicans.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Spanish-American independent leaders welcomed thousands of foreigners in their fight against the Spanish crown. However, armed with letters of marque given by Spanish American agents, some of these foreign privateers took possession of various regions and created their own states. Articulating philosophical and legal justifications for rebellion and independence, the founders of these republics had to convince the rest of the world that their authority was legitimate. They therefore created a state apparatus, including declarations of independence, constitutions, and laws, that revealed how men of different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds attempted to constitute themselves as an imagined community. They fleshed out a cosmopolitan political culture. This presentation argues that these expeditions are evidence for the globalization of the revolutionary ideologies that promoted the notion of popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, natural rights, civil and political freedoms, and self-determination by the “people,” ideologies that were inaugurated with the success of U.S. independence in 1783 and the French Revolution in 1789.