The Silver Road

The Silver Road How Spain and Latin America Helped to Win the American Revolutionary War

From the Spanish-supplied muskets fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775 to the last-minute collection of silver pesos in Havana that funded the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, Spain and Latin America played a decisive role in the American Revolution.

The Spanish smuggled the critical military supplies that the colonies could not produce. Latin American silver provided both the hard currency and the financing for the fledgling colonial economy. In 1779, Spain declared war on Britain, forcing the British to divert manpower and firepower from the Continental Army to battlefronts that stretched from Nicaragua to Florida to Gibraltar to England itself.

The world erupted in conflict. Britain was simultaneously challenged by Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the Mysore kingdom in India. By 1781, Yorktown had become the Americans' last chance. As the British scrambled to rescue their trapped army, Spain and Latin America supported the French navy and funded the victorious American and French armies on land. The Silver Road tells the story that Americans are rarely told: how the Revolutionary War was actually won.

A little-known history

Drawing on archival research from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville to the Library of Congress, Barbara Pereira-Amador reconstructs a global war fought on five continents-and the silver supply chain that made American independence possible. From the mines of South America and Mexico to the counting houses of Havana and the docks of Bilbao, a vast enterprise across the Spanish empire underwrote and supported the Revolution at decisive moments.

Inside The Silver Road, readers will discover:

• • How Spain covertly armed the Continental Army years before formally entering the war against Britain, channeling supplies through the front company Roderigue Hortalez y Compañía.
  • Why Latin American silver-not Continental paper currency-paid the soldiers, sailors, and suppliers who kept the Revolution alive.
  • The extraordinary collection of 500,000 silver pesos in Havana in August 1781, raised in hours, that funded Washington and Rochambeau's victory at Yorktown.
  • The forgotten campaigns of Bernardo de Gálvez and Francisco de Leyba along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi, which disrupted the British campaigns to divide the colonies.
  • How the Revolution became a world war, with battlefronts from Central America to Europe to India shaping the outcome at Yorktown.

A story Americans rarely learn

The traditional narrative of the American Revolution centers on thirteen colonies, a French alliance, and a singular fight for liberty. The Silver Road widens the lens, revealing a global financial and military network-anchored in Spain and the Americas-without which the United States could not have come into being. It is a story of empires, economics, and ingenuity, and of Spain and Latin America's foundational, unacknowledged role in the creation of a nation.