Vanished Dreams and Nightmares of Liberty: The 1806 Leander Expedition as Slave Rebellion

This paper reexamines the Venezuelan exile Francisco de Miranda’ Leander Expedition, a revolutionary enterprise organized in New York in 1806 to overthrow Spanish rule in South America. Fears of slave emancipation mobilized Venezuelan Captain General Manuel Guevara Vasconcelos’s successful defense of the Caribbean coast to twice repulse the armed expedition. After experiencing the devastating Coro slave uprising, British conquest of Trinidad, and radical La Guaira conspiracy less than a decade before, Spanish authorities and the colonial elite in Venezuela united in opposition to the Leander Expedition because they feared slave rebellion, racial equality, and race war. Rather than discount these anxieties as unfounded nightmares, this paper argues they were real. Miranda’s armed vessel inspired talk of slave emancipation and rebellion everywhere it anchored along its winding voyage to Venezuela, attracting Black liberators from throughout the Caribbean. Whether in the United States, Haiti, or the British and Danish Antilles, the Leander Expedition stirred both dreams and nightmares of liberty. This paper will explore the Leander Expedition as an emancipatory republican project with anti-slavery aims. Miranda’s attempt to allay the fears of his White revolutionary cosmopolitan allies that his emancipatory objects included slave liberation, could not overcome the realities of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean. The paper will focus on Captain General Guevara’s mobilization and the expedition’s disastrous failure in Coro, where memories of slave revolts and anti-slavery plots remained vivid. This paper will argue that the Leander Expedition was also a slave rebellion, reimagining it as an uprising that floated on the sea and manifested on land.