Rotten Tobacco, Transnational Filibusters, and the Shifting Boundaries of Atlantic Idealism

Rotten Tobacco, Transnational Filibusters,

and the Shifting Boundaries of Atlantic Idealism

The rise of “the Atlantic World” has underscored the appeal of studies that take a transnational approach to early modern history.  Atlantic history is meant to transcend national narratives, and rightfully so.  Nonetheless, it is the very success of national movements in the Americas that dismantles (and then resituates) the colonial enterprises that form the predominant subject of Atlantic studies.  This project examines the transnational nature of these revolutionary shifts through the actions and rhetoric of two very different individuals.  Their stories characterize the paradoxical and competing strains of liberal idealism that drove the Atlantic Revolutions.

William Davis Robinson, a tobacco merchant from Philadelphia, promoted the cause of Spanish American independence as an arms dealing, pamphleteering, agent of U.S. capital.  Spanish liberal hero Francisco Xavier Mina led an ill-fated filibustering expedition to New Spain to support the cause of Mexican independence, in a style reminiscent of the Marquis de Lafayette.  In his Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution, Robinson’s dramatic narrative of Mina’s expedition connected liberal idealism and anti-Spanish sentiment with the opening of the Americas to U.S. and British commerce. 

Although filibusters never played a military role in the rebellion in New Spain equal to that of foreigners in Bolívar’s South American campaigns, Mina’s image looms relatively large in Mexican memory, as is evident in a recent stamp commemorating his 200th birthday, numerous monuments, and the name of the Francisco Javier Mina International Airport.  Both Robinson and Mina journeyed through intercultural revolutionary circles in the Atlantic and Circum-Caribbean, meeting with liberal exiles, ambitious merchants, and other clandestine characters in London, Baltimore, New Orleans, and elsewhere.  Their lives illustrate the disparate motivations for such journeys, and the ideological and geographical extent of revolutionary idealism in the early nineteenth century Atlantic.