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Timothy Walker
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
E-mail: twalker@umassd.edu
Received 8 February 2012; accepted 7 August 2012
Abstract
This article explains and contextualizes the reaction of the Portuguese monarchy and gov-
ernment to the rebellion and independence of the British colonies in North America. This
reaction was a mixed one, shaped by the simultaneous but conflicting motivations of an
economic interest in North American trade, an abhorrence on the part of the Portuguese
Crown for democratic rebellion against monarchical authority and a fundamental require-
ment to maintain a stable relationship with long-time ally Great Britain. Although the
Lisbon regime initially reacted very strongly against the Americans’ insurrection, later,
under a new queen, the Portuguese moderated their position so as not to damage their long-
term imperial political and economic interests.
This article also examines the economic and political power context of the contemporary
Atlantic World from the Portuguese perspective, and specifically outlines the multiple ties
that existed between Portugal and the North American British colonies during the eigh-
teenth century. The argument demonstrates that Portugal reacted according to demands
created by its overseas empire: maximizing trading profits, manipulating the balance of
power in Europe among nations with overseas colonies and discouraging the further spread
of aspirations toward independence throughout the Americas, most notably to Portuguese-
held Brazil.
The Portuguese role as a fundamental player in the early modern Atlantic World is chron-
ically underappreciated and understudied in modern English-language historiography.
Despite the significance of Portugal as a trading partner to the American colonies, and
despite the importance of the Portuguese Atlantic colonial system to British commercial
and military interests in the eighteenth century, no scholarly treatment of this specific
* This article was inspired and informed in part by the exhibition, Relações entre Portugal
e os Estados Unidos da América na Época das Luzes, which opened at the National Archives
of Portugal in January 1997 (Dr. Ana Cannas da Cunha and Dr. Diogo Gaspar, coordinators).
An early version of this paper was presented at the Harvard International Seminar for the
History of the Atlantic World, directed by Professor Bernard Bailyn.
subject has ever appeared in the primary journals that regularly consider Atlantic World
imperial power dynamics or the place of the incipient United States within them. This
contribution, then, helps to fill an obvious gap in the historical literature of the long eigh-
teenth century and the revolutionary era in the Americas.
Keywords
American Revolution; Portugal; Atlantic World; Eighteenth Century; Diplomacy
1 Joaquim Verríssimo Serrão (ed.), História de Portugal, 10 vols. (Lisbon: Editora Verbo,
1996), vol. 6 (1750-1807), tables of commercial ship traffic in Lisbon harbor, pp. 232-5, 428-9.
2 Between 1756 and 1774, approximately one-fifth of “English” goods entering Portugal
originated in the North American colonies, Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 6, pp. 234-5; José
Mattoso (director), História de Portugal, vol. 4: O Antigo Regime (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa,
1993), pp. 103-11; H.E.S. Fisher, The Portugal Trade: A Study of Anglo-Portuguese Commerce
1700-1770 (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 41-52, 64-76.
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 249
7 This particular dynamic has been almost wholly overlooked in contemporary Atlantic
World historiography of the American Revolution. For an example, one could point to Eliga
H. Gould and Peter Onuf, Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). One significant dimension inexpli-
cably left out of the third section of this book, “The American Revolution and the Atlantic
World”, is any reference whatever to the conflict’s impact on the Portuguese Atlantic Empire;
indeed, there is no mention of Portugal, Angola or Brazil in the text.
8 George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 22-3.
9 For a venerable and a recent example, see respectively Friedrich Edler, The Dutch
Republic And The American Revolution (Baltimore, 1911), and Wayne Te Brake, “The Dutch
Republic and the Creation of the United States”, in Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van
Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations: 1609-2009
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2009), pp. 204-18.
10 J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 325-68; Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories,
Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery”, in American
Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007), pp. 764-86; and Jaime Rodriguez, Revolución, indepen-
dencia y la nuevas naciones de América (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre Tavera, 2005).
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 251
that of the British, was more politically stable; Spanish colonial officials in
America generally enjoyed a popular allegiance to the metropolitan
government that was much stronger than in the colonies of Britain or
France.11 Still, in 1781-3, the Spanish faced their own contemporary colonial
rebellion, when Túpac Amaru led a massive indigenous uprising in the
Andes Mountains of Peru that threatened to strip Spain of its largest and
most valuable South American territories. Royalist forces ultimately pre-
vailed, but at a cost in blood of nearly ten percent of the total population
in the rebellious regions (indigenous, European and mestizo casualties
combined).12 Crucially, though, the dominant European castas supported
the Spanish crown at this juncture, thus preserving colonial rule in the
southern viceroyalties for another generation.
When rebellion erupted in North America in 1775, Portugal’s unique and
venerable, yet vulnerable, relationship with Britain placed the Lisbon
regime in a particularly difficult position, caught between the hammer of
habitual reliance on British military power and the anvil of chronic depen-
dence on British trade. Portuguese foreign policy decisions during this era
were therefore predicated on that double-edged, entangled relationship.
Because the Portuguese dimension of the American revolutionary era is so
little known, and compelling, this article expands our understanding of the
international diplomatic complexities inherent in the founding of the
United States.13
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Portuguese econ-
omy remained mercantilist in structure, as it had been since the fifteenth
century. The state’s primary revenues were derived through external
trade—an analysis of the sources of public finance for the period reveals
that up to 65% of annual government income stemmed directly from sea-
borne commerce. Customs duties and consular charges, as well as tobacco
production and the Crown’s one-fifth share of Brazilian gold imports (the
quinto real tax), were the main sources of this income. Further, the Crown
itself took an active part in conducting maritime trade through the
11 Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 42-7 and 175-219; Jaime Rodriguez, The Independence of
Spanish America (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13-35.
12 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. 361-5.
13 Even the most comprehensive recent treatment of United States foreign policy during
and following the Revolution mentions Portugal only in passing, as a member of the League
of Armed Neutrality; Brazil is not mentioned at all, see George Herring, From Colony to
Superpower, pp. 11-92.
252 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
14 V. Magalhães Godinho, “Portugal and her Empire, 1680-1720”, chapter 16 in J. S. Bromley
(ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 6: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia
1688–1715/25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 509-40 at 536.
15 Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 6, p. 427.
16 A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da
Moeda, 1991), pp. 85-7; see also Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825
(Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 1991), pp. 158-60.
17 Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance, pp. 213-14.
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 253
period. They protected their trade interests jealously and, amid the shifting
European power relationships of the eighteenth century, Portugal’s ambig-
uous position could not be maintained without exceptional feats of
diplomacy.
Under the Portuguese old regime, the Ministerio dos Negócios Estrangeiros
(Ministry of Foreign Affairs) handled most matters of foreign relations,
whether diplomatic or economic (though in practice the Portuguese
monarch’s prime minister and the minister for foreign affairs were fre-
quently the same person, a key trusted advisor to the ruler). By the 1750s,
the commercial relationship between the British colonies of North America
and the Kingdom of Portugal, including particularly its island territories,
had achieved a well-defined pattern. The parameters of this trade were set
by an important trade agreement between Portugal and Great Britain, the
Metheun Treaties of 1703, and the Navigation Acts dating back to 1651,
which regulated commerce within the British Empire and taxed colonial
“enumerated commodities” that had to be exported to the metropolis and
customs paid before they could be transshipped.
Under the 1660 version of the Navigation Acts, however, colonial prod-
ucts for which no market existed in the British Isles were never enumer-
ated, and so could move freely and directly to foreign ports. Significantly,
the reverse was also true: ships carrying non-enumerated goods to lands
outside of the empire could return with products from those lands to the
American colonies without first passing through a British home port, so
long as those products had not originated in Europe. This loophole had
important commercial repercussions for the Portuguese, because it opened
some of their colonized territories in the Atlantic to direct trade with North
America and the West Indies.
The Methuen Treaty, essentially a mutually beneficial trade agreement
between Great Britain and Portugal, was negotiated in the context of the
War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Signed on 27 December 1703, it
followed in the wake of a treaty of alliance made the previous May between
Portugal, Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and the Habsburg Empire of
Leopold I against the combined forces of Spain and France. Because this
war denied Britain one of its traditional outlets for domestic woolens and
cut off its supply of French wines, envoy John Methuen negotiated to allow
254 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
effect. The great majority of this bountiful production was destined for
markets in the New World, principally in North America and the Caribbean.
Annual consumption of Madeira wine in the Americas, which included
the West Indies and New England, averaged about 9,000 pipes per year
throughout the eighteenth century. (By comparison, the Dutch Antilles
only absorbed four-to-five hundred pipes’ worth of this lucrative trade
annually.)21
Thus, Madeiran merchants had, during more than a century preceding
1775, systematically built up a trade relationship with the North American
colonies that was central to Madeira’s economic prosperity. (The Portuguese
Azores islands, too, provided their ample share of wine for British colonial
markets, but would become even more important in the nineteenth cen-
tury as a victualling point and recruitment center for New England whaling
ships.22) Powerful landowners and merchants with influence in Lisbon had
staked a great deal of investment in the Madeira wine trade and its subsid-
iary industries, all of which stood to be disrupted by a war between Britain
and its North American colonial dependents.23
Besides the lucrative traffic in Madeira wine, the Portuguese islands and
mainland profited in several other ways by trading with North America.
Important commodities Portugal imported from Britain’s colonies included
high quality naval stores: New England provided some of the timber, oakum,
pitch, pine tar and cordage which Portuguese shipyards and vessels could
not procure at home. New England’s distillers shipped rum to Lisbon, where
products from the whaling trade, such as spermaceti oil and candles, also
found a ready market.24
Of greater importance, however, were foodstuffs. The North Atlantic
Grand Banks and the waters off the aptly named Cape Cod had been valued
fishing grounds for the Portuguese since Columbus’s time, providing gen-
erations of peasants and poorer city-dwellers in Catholic Portugal with
their Friday repasts. Dried and salted in North America (often with imported
21 Godinho, “Portugal and her Empire, 1680-1720”, p. 521, and Hancock, Oceans of Wine,
pp. xxv, 201-23.
22 Duncan, pp. 137-57.
23 Hancock, Oceans of Wine, pp. 107-12; see also Duncan, pp. 37-53.
24 Mattoso, História de Portugal, pp. 103-11; see also José Luís Sul Mendes, “Introductory
Notes to Balance Sheets for Trade between Portugal and the United States”, in Henry Hunt
Keith, Studies in Honor of the Bicentennial of American Independence (Lisbon: The Luso-
American Education Commission and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1976), tables,
pp. 175-236.
256 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
gold, providing the hard specie which the colonists sorely needed to reim-
burse London merchants for British manufactured goods.30
Clearly, by 1775, Portugal and the British American colonies were tightly
bound together by a longstanding, mutually beneficial trade network which
connected at several points throughout the Atlantic world. The value of
this trade was not lost on anyone who was familiar with the system at
the time. Indeed, because of poor land and inefficient agriculture, conti-
nental Portugal had become near-dependent on imported North American
foodstuffs. Only under extraordinary circumstances would the Lisbon
regime have moved to hinder this trade relationship in any way. But in
1774-5, events conspired in North and South America to drive the Portuguese
into a very difficult diplomatic situation, caught between the interests
of powerful European nations with their own colonial empires in the New
World.
30 John Adams to Ralph Izard, in Gregg L. Lint, Robert J. Taylor, Richard Alan Ryerson,
Celeste Walker, and Joanna M. Revelas, (eds.), The Adams Papers, Series III: “General
Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen”, Papers of John Adams, vol. 7
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 74, cited in James Piecuch, “A War
Averted: Luso-American Relations in the Revolutionary Era, 1775-1786”, The Portuguese
Studies Review 5, no. 2 (Durham, N.H.: International Conference Group on Portugal, 1997),
p. 23. Also, see A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), ch. 4, for his valuable discussion of the
diversity and interconnected nature of maritime commerce within the Portuguese empire.
258 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
31 As early as 1738, the visionary Portuguese diplomat and royal advisor Luís da Cunha
had suggested moving the seat of Portugal’s empire across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Brazil,
leaving a viceroy to run the metropolis, as with the Estado da Índia; Kenneth Maxwell,
“Eighteenth-Century Portugal: Faith and Reason, Tradition and Innovation During a Golden
Age”, in Jay A. Levenson (ed.), The Age of the Baroque in Portugal (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993), p. 112.
32 Timothy Walker, “Portuguese Paradox: Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic
World”, in Willem W. Klooster and Alfred L. Padula (eds.), Atlantic Perspectives (New York:
Prentice Hall, 2003), pp. 68-9.
33 Enrique Giménez López, “Portugal y España ante la Extíncion de los Jesuitas”, in
Manfred Tietz and Dietrich Briesemeister (eds.), Los jesuitas españoles expulsos: su imagen y
su contribución al saber sobre el mundo hispánico en la Europa del s. XVIII: Actas del Coloquio
Internacional de Berlín (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2001), pp. 337-40.
34 Although transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, and the
subsequent elevation of Brazil to the status of a kingdom on par with Portugal, would
temporarily quell such separationist sentiments, Brazilians embraced full independence
when championed by Portuguese Crown Prince Pedro in 1822, Adelman, Sovereignty and
Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic, pp. 335-43.
35 Anthony R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 252-6.
36 Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 131-2.
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 259
The influx of gold from Rio de Janeiro had begun in earnest only in 1699
with the completion of direct roads from São Paulo to the mines deep in the
Brazilian interior. Production levels soon outstripped anything the Spanish
or Portuguese colonial bullion trade had known before; as much gold
flowed out of Brazil in the first fifteen years of the boom as had entered
Seville from Spanish America between 1493 and 1660. For a solid half-
century, from 1705 to 1755, the average amount of gold unloaded and regis-
tered at Lisbon amounted to better than 10,000 kilograms annually. 1712 was
an early peak year with imports of 14,500 kilograms; the all-time high,
25,000 kilograms, occurred in 1720. These figures do not take into account
smuggled gold, which most authorities at the time estimated conserva-
tively to amount to a further one-third above legal imports. Nor do they
include diamond mining in Brazil, which after 1720 became another impor-
tant source of royal revenue.37
Such spectacular windfalls enabled the Portuguese state to indulge in
enormous expenditures that made the court of Dom João V (1706-50) the
envy of Europe. Brazilian gold paid for an aggressive royal building program
undertaken during the first half of the century, including the massive out-
lays required between 1717 and 1730 to erect the colossal Baroque monas-
tery at Mafra. Gold paid for grain imports to a nation whose endeavors in
domestic farming had been allowed to atrophy to the point that Portugal
could no longer easily feed itself. Further, this income paid for the luxury
goods, manufactured items and machinery that were shipped to Portugal
and Brazil from the workshops of Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
Finally, following the devastating 1755 All Saints’ Day earthquake, Brazilian
gold made the reconstruction of Lisbon possible.38
That the Portuguese would risk any policy that might endanger their
continued control of Brazil’s tremendous resources was unthinkable. They
went to great lengths to preserve their role there as colonial masters, resist-
ing several attempted French and Dutch encroachments in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and carefully parrying Spanish aggression in the
eighteenth century. Even their closest allies, the British, were denied direct
trade access to Brazilian markets (except for a short-lived period negotiated
as a provision of the 1661 marriage treaty betrothing Catherine of Braganza
to the Stuart King Charles II).39 Portuguese crown policy from the
37 Godinho, “Portugal and her Empire, 1680-1720”, pp. 533-6; see also Disney, A History of
Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 1, pp. 252-6.
38 Ibid.
39 G. V. Scammell, “‘A Very Profitable and Advantageous Trade’: British Smuggling in the
Iberian Americas circa 1500–1750”, in Itinerario 24, no. 3-4 (2000), pp. 151-2; see also V.M.
260 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
Shillington and A.B.W. Chapman, The Commercial Relations of England and Portugal
(London, 1907), pp. 207-14.
40 Lester D. Langly, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996), pp. 156-8.
41 Anthony R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge
University Press, 2009), pp. 290-4.
42 Rules barring trade between Brazil and Britain were partially relaxed only after 1808,
partly in gratitude for the British Navy’s evacuation of the Portuguese royal court to Brazil
and Wellington’s peninsular campaigns in defense of the Portuguese mainland, but also
to compensate for trade lost due to the French occupation of the metropôle, Joseph Smith,
A History of Brazil, 1500-2000 (New York: Longman/Pearson Education Press, 2002), pp. 38-40;
Black, The British Seaborne Empire, p. 160; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 200-202.
43 José Calvet de Magalhães, História das Relações Diplomáticas entre Portugal e os
Estados Unidos da América (1776-1911) (Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América, 1991), p. 26;
Scammell, “‘A Very Profitable and Advantageous Trade’”, pp. 150-2, 167-8.
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 261
rebellion indicates both his level of his frustration at being thwarted and
the supreme importance the Portuguese placed on maintaining control
over Brazilian trade and territorial integrity in the face of any perceived
threat.
At least since 8 June 1775, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had
made public its deliberations, which included debate about declaring
a permanent separation from Great Britain. By 29 July, the Portuguese
ambassador in London, Luís Pinto de Sousa, was penning a report to his
superiors in Lisbon informing them that combat had erupted between
British regulars and rebel forces in New England. He specifically com-
mented on how the colonists justified their rebellion, reporting that once
the British Parliament had dissolved what the Portuguese diplomat referred
to as the “Massachusetts Bay Pact of Union”, the Continental Congress
considered itself authorized to create a new form of self-government.46
Pombal received this news as early as August 1775. His initial response was
a subtle act of purely self-interested statecraft. Hoping to influence British
colonial policy away from a military confrontation with the Americans—a
direction which would tie up British military resources indefinitely, thus
prohibiting their immediate availability in support of Portuguese objectives
against Spain in Brazil—Pombal drew up a dispatch to his minister in
London carefully explaining his views on the American situation.
Revealing a keen understanding of the logistical difficulties involved in
fighting a well-armed and numerous colonial population on the opposite
side of an ocean (an understanding informed by colonial Portuguese suc-
cesses against Dutch invaders in Brazil during the previous century),
Pombal predicted that the British could never achieve a military victory in
America. Rather, he opined, a more prudent and effective course for George
III would be to concede to the rebels’ demands for their own North
American parliament. The crown could then manipulate this legislature
from London through what Pombal called “dexteridade política”, buying off
colonial leaders through the distribution of estates, royal offices, and other
forms of patronage.47
Ever the shrewd statesman, Pombal chose not to risk an affront to British
pride by suggesting such a Machiavellian policy officially through the usual
46 Ofício of Luís Pinto de Sousa to Aires de Sá e Mello, London, 29 July 1775 (ANTT, MNE,
cx. 701, nr. 72).
47 Dispatch of the Marquês de Pombal to Luís Pinto de Sousa, Lisbon: Palácio de Nossa
Senhora da Ajuda, 28 November 1775 (ANTT, MNE, liv. 122, nr. 25).
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 263
The French, recognizing that a broadening of the war would serve Franco-
Spanish interests, hoped to induce the Americans to declare war on Portugal
in retaliation for the trade ban. In Paris, American diplomatic officials heard
proposals for a plan to send a U.S. fleet to Brazil in return for which the
Spanish would invade continental Portugal. This would in turn compel the
British to draw off forces from North America to shore up Lisbon’s defenses,
thus insuring victory in the rebellious colonies. Naturally, the French offered
assurances of their support in any forthcoming Iberian campaign.56
The Portuguese suddenly found themselves caught between two potent
camps in a European power struggle with global implications. At the time,
the Lisbon regime was so accustomed to living comfortably under British
military protection that it had virtually no standing army at its disposal and
only a tiny fleet consisting of, by the most optimistic reckoning, seventeen
capital warships, which any one of Portugal’s potential European enemies
could handily outgun.57 Vulnerable to overland invasion from Spain and
without resources adequate to defend either their shipping routes or their
far-flung colonies, the only reasonable Portuguese recourse in order to main-
tain the collective territorial integrity of their empire was somehow to remain
neutral. In their favor, the Portuguese had commercial and mutual assistance
alliances already in place with Spain and Britain, alliances that could be
invoked as an argument to stay out of a conflict between those two nations.
But in order to have their neutrality recognized, Portuguese diplomats were
going to have to walk a tight rope very carefully between warring factions.58
Because of the slowness of trans-Atlantic and pan-European communi-
cations in the pre-industrial age, the Portuguese were probably not fully
aware of how close the Americans came to declaring war on them.59
Portuguese flank in the coming European conflict. With two strokes, the
Portuguese had extracted themselves from a colonial imbroglio, safe-
guarded their homeland from overland invasion, and provided themselves
with a reliable commercial outlet in case of expected hostilities. They had
achieved a priceless feat of diplomacy.
But settling the Spanish issue did not mean an end to Portugal’s prob-
lems. On 6 February 1778, shortly before the treaty with Spain was con-
cluded, the French recognized American independence and entered into a
formal alliance with the United States; France first engaged in combat on
the American side in July 1778.64 Because Spain appeared poised to follow
into the alliance with the American rebels, the Portuguese were still caught
in a difficult spot. Allied both to Spain and, by the Treaty of Westminster
signed in 1654, to England, the Portuguese still found themselves uncom-
fortably in the middle. Although both treaties were of friendship and non-
aggression which, under the circumstances, did not require Portugal to
provide direct military aid to either side, the British reserved the right
to demand assistance from Lisbon in times of conflict. Without a formal
recognition of neutrality, the British were entitled to use Portuguese har-
bors as bases for military sorties, thereby upsetting the balance of Portugal’s
non-aligned position.65 Therefore, Lisbon next focused on the campaign to
induce the British to recognize Portuguese neutrality.
Toward that end, Maria I dispatched the eminently capable statesman
Luís Pinto de Sousa to the court of Saint James. His was a mission most dif-
ficult to achieve, as British recognition of Portuguese neutrality was the
keystone to Lisbon’s security, yet it served no British purpose. Pinto de
Sousa employed every means at his disposal in London, calling in favors
from a long career as Portuguese envoy there, and reminding the British of
their obligations to Portugal under existing treaties. Finally, in the summer
of 1779, he managed to coax formal recognition for Portuguese neutrality
out of the British, but with the provision that the United Kingdom’s mer-
chantmen would never be barred from Portuguese ports.66
Here was another diplomatic triumph scored by the Lisbon regime.
British recognition gave the Portuguese the diplomatic justification, on
What factors explain this change in policy and outlook toward the
Americans under Maria I? The queen’s royal administration began upon
the death of José I in 1777, when Maria was 42 years old. Born in 1734,
she held vivid memories of the traumatic earthquake of 1755, the subse-
quent dire need for American grain imports, and the dictatorial wielding
of power by Pombal during the emergency. Further, during the Seven
Years War she had watched as Portuguese foreign policy moved the nation
closer to Britain for protection; the results had been ruinous.68 Pombal,
an Anglophile, after all, had spent six years in London before 1750 as the
Portuguese ambassador to the British court. He had a learned affinity for
the British monarchy, and a strong appreciation for the martial benefits
derived from this old alliance.69 But such close allegiances with Britain had
come at a cost; many Portuguese elites felt that the Inglezes exerted far too
much political and economic influence within their nation, and that British
commercial interests pressed incessantly, with an insistence that reached
impertinence, for direct trade access to Brazilian ports and markets.70
Maria, whose advisors included aristocrats who had chafed under the
absolutist rule of José I and Pombal, had come to power with a will to pur-
sue fresh national policy initiatives. With the autocratic minister Pombal
removed from power, Maria began to implement her own ideas of gover-
nance. In response to the rebellion in North America, the new queen and
her advisors, seeing their national prospects and foreign policy with fresh
eyes, understood that British influence in Portugal was oppressive and
potentially dangerous.71 A fragmented British empire, however, stripped of
its American colonies, could serve Portuguese interests by establishing a
countervailing power in the north Atlantic world—a power that did not
appear so dangerous to or especially interested in trespassing on Portuguese
commercial interests. On the contrary, all indications promised that the
guiding principles of the Americans’ foreign policy philosophy and initia-
tives toward European maritime powers would be avowedly isolationist
68 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 195-8; see also Serrão, História de Portugal,
vol. 6, pp. 54-63, 294-8.
69 Maxwell, “Eighteenth-Century Portugal”, p. 108; see also Maxwell, Pombal, pp. 10-20,
87-109.
70 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 200-203; Disney, A History of Portugal and the
Portuguese Empire, vol. 2, pp. 282-98.
71 Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 1, pp. 313-24.
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 271
72 The highly influential, broadly read text Common Sense, by Thomas Paine, included
multiple arguments in favor of American isolationism, the benefit of remaining free from
entangling European alliances, and set the tone for the foreign policy of the early independ-
ent United States; see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), pp. 72-87, and John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1960), pp. 197-8.
73 Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 6, pp. 304-305.
74 Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 30.
272 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
providing the United States with a new privateering vessel at the same
time.75 Dohrman had commercial ties with the former British colonies and
for years had provided assistance to American castaways and prisoners.
Acting in league with Captain Joseph Shute, who had commanded a
recently shipwrecked American sloop, Dohrman bought another ship,
named her the Amity, provided a cargo of clothing and wine and armed her
with twenty cannon. But the British consul learned of the scheme and
intervened while the Amity was still in harbor fitting out. The Lisbon-based
H.M.S. Bellona intercepted the Amity as she tried to flee on the night of 20
January 1779; one American was killed in the ensuing action. British author-
ities insisted that the Portuguese punish Dohrman for these activities,
but the prize court in Lisbon accepted Captain Shute’s story that the Amity
had arrived from France, thus clearing Dohrman, who continued his pro-
American pursuits. Recognizing his service, Congress designated him the
first official United States agent in Portugal on 11 July 1780.76
Even Portuguese newspapers, published under government supervision,
displayed a decidedly American bias during the war. In the early days of the
conflict, Benjamin Franklin had met Félix António Castrioto, a Portuguese
journalist living in Paris, where he had been exiled by Pombal. Enamored
of the American cause, Castrioto published three pamphlets in France
supporting independence for the British colonies. After Maria’s ascendance
to the throne, the new regime invited him to return home.77 Once in Lisbon,
he too petitioned the court on behalf of the Americans to lift the trade ban,
but to no effect.78
Castrioto then resumed publication of his journal, the Gazeta de Lisboa,
which Pombal had banned, in August of 1778, and was influential in
shaping public opinion by including enthusiastic coverage of events in
America. For example, on 18 September 1778, Castrioto reprinted this “Resolu
tion of the Province of Pennsylvania, taken by its Respective Assembly,
with the Purpose of Reaffirming the Sovereignty and Independence of
the United States of America”, freely translating the colonists’ zealous revo-
lutionary language almost verbatim with no consequences from Maria
I’s government:
75 That these were the same thirty seamen mentioned above is possible, but unclear from
the documents.
76 Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 29-30.
77 Ibid., p. 28.
78 Letter of Félix António Castrioto, Lisboa, 12 November 1777 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 550, nr. 2).
T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 273
The division between England and her Colonies represents the most memo-
rable Revolution that we have had in our world, because the consequences
which will come of it will necessarily have a great influence on the general
systems of all Nations. Because of this, everything related to it well deserves a
place in the annals of our times.79
Or, consider the tone and subtext of this “Exhortation to a Group of Oneida
Warriors, being sent to General Washington, spoken by an Orator of that
Tribe”, reported in the Gazeta de Lisboa of 9 October 1778:
Cousins, think about the fact that you are sent to the great Army of America,
and that you will be introduced into the presence of General Washington,
Warrior in Chief, and to a great officer of our Father the French King, the
Marquis de Lafayette, by whose specific request you will be leaving here …
These warriors can achieve very great deeds, or commit grand atrocities: they
are destined to promote the good, removing the evils that threaten the tran-
quility of the nation; doing this, they will perform as heroes.80
Articles such as these won the approval of government censors, who were
required to review all the material Castrioto wished to print.81 Clearly, the
Lisbon regime had little interest in taking a hard line against the Americans,
or in discrediting their cause in public.
De facto Portuguese trade activity during the American Revolution rein-
forces the impression that the closing of their harbors to American vessels
was an act meant primarily to curry favor in London. Originally, in order
not to imperil the old alliance with England, as well as to preserve any hope
of receiving assistance for his South American campaign against the
Spanish, it was necessary for Pombal to appear to have acted boldly in
support of Britain in its colonial crisis. That the ministers of Dom José genu-
inely wished to punish the upstart American rebels while demonstrating
solidarity with a fellow monarchy may be so, but from the perspective of
most Portuguese merchants, the government’s posture was só para o inglês
ver (literally, “just for the Englishman to see”), an idiom which to this day
means, figuratively, “merely for show”.82
At the highest levels of Portuguese administration, too, evidence suggests
that the ban was seen as a calculated temporary maneuver of statecraft,
meant to be rescinded at the earliest possible diplomatic convenience.
As early as mid-August 1776, barely a month after the terms of the Portuguese
decree had become known, Silas Deane, the American representative in
France, reported that the Portuguese minister to Versailles, Ponte de Lima,
had approached him with an invitation to discuss commercial matters
under the circumstances of the then-present conflict. That Deane “readily
embraced” these Portuguese overtures at the height of a serious rift in Luso-
American relations underscores the over-riding importance both nations
ultimately placed on trade considerations.83
There is no doubt that Pombal’s anti-American embargo was a source
of consternation for business interests on both sides. Even so, as the war
progressed, Portuguese and American merchants proved their ingenuity at
getting around the ban to carry on trade illicitly. To do so was in the best
interests of all concerned: Portuguese shippers of wine and other commod-
ities did not wish to see long-standing commercial relationships with their
America partners atrophy, while demand for most Portuguese export goods
in America had not slackened appreciably because of the war.84 The
Portuguese crown continued to benefit from duties levied on goods enter-
ing homeports, regardless of their origins. If the American provenance of
certain products had to be masked to preserve a façade of compliance with
the trade ban, customs officers showed that they were not inclined to
inquire too rigorously into the origins of desired goods.
In practice, contraband trade was merely carried on through third parties
whenever possible. The terms of Portuguese neutrality allowed Spanish
and French as well as British merchantmen to frequent Lisbon and other
ports of entry throughout the American war, a right the Portuguese govern-
ment defended vigorously in the face of pressure from all sides once the
war had broadened to include the European powers. Because North
American merchants routinely—though at great peril from British war-
ships—conducted trade with co-belligerents France and Spain, captains of
those nations were able to transport goods from the former British colonies
to Lisbon with little risk of restriction.85 Alternatively, Portuguese mer-
chants could circumvent the trade ban by simply sending ships to foreign
ports (such as the Dutch Caribbean islands) to procure American supplies.
As early as winter 1778, Castrioto, while urging the repeal of the American
officials to overlook. When French cruisers outside the mouth of the Tagus
River apprehended three of Lisbon-based English businessman Joseph
Hacke’s ostensibly commercial ships operating together as privateers,
Queen Maria had to make a show of upholding Portuguese neutrality by
forbidding the three most affluent British trading houses from conducting
business in Portugal for a term of three months.90
Such action cooled Franco-Spanish ire temporarily but was not sufficient
to deter further British transgressions. The port of Lisbon continued to be a
lair where British privateers could gather information about Spanish and
French ship movements, plot their capture and, once seized, sell them off
as prizes. When one French diplomat charged that all the Portuguese
harbors had become “entrepôts for corsairs and prizes”, he was not exagger-
ating by much.91 Off Faro in 1779, for example, an English privateer took a
Dutch merchantman and then towed it into that port for sale; Portuguese
authorities intervened to restore the ship to her Dutch owners. In the
Azores shortly thereafter, an American ship—perhaps flying French col-
ors—being pursued by a British man-o’-war took refuge in Angra Bay under
the guns of the Castelo São João Baptista. The British, furious at having
been denied their prize, fired on the fortress.92
By the autumn of 1779, Portugal’s inability—or unwillingness—to elimi-
nate British abuses within its own harbors had pushed the French and
Spanish to make vigorous demonstrations at the Portuguese court. They
petitioned for decisive Portuguese action and lodged claims for lost cargoes
on behalf of their victimized countrymen. The Spanish ambassador to
Lisbon tried subtly to pressure the Portuguese court to expel the British and
open their ports to the Americans by publishing an official explanation of
Spain’s support for the American cause, which he distributed in Lisbon.93
The French went so far as to dispatch a special envoy to Lisbon, le Sieur
D’Augnac, to protest the repeated infractions committed in Portuguese
waters against Lisbon’s policy of neutrality.94
The Americans, too, soon reached the limits of their patience, leading to
renewed calls for aggressive action against Portuguese interests. When John
95 Letter of John Adams to John Jay, 15 May 1780; cited in Piecuch, “A War Averted”,
pp. 29-30.
96 Decree of Queen Maria I, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, Lisbon, 30 August 1780,
cited in Beirão, Dona Maria I, pp. 221-2.
97 Ibid., pp. 223-5.
278 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
British were outfitting two captured French vessels, the Artois with forty
guns and the Perle with nineteen, to conduct sorties from Lisbon harbor.
They had planned to depart on 4 September, before the decree’s deadline,
but the French and Spanish protested such an obvious, powerful venture.
The queen first sought to undo this British stratagem peacefully. As the
ships’ crews were mainly hired Portuguese sailors, she sent a city magistrate
with an armed military escort to inspect the ships and remove any
Portuguese subjects he encountered on board. The captain of the Artois,
however, supported by the British fleet commander and the seven warships
at his disposal, threatened the Magistrate with violence if he tried to come
aboard. Faced with this defiance of their authority, the Portuguese placed
an embargo on supplies entering the two ships and forbade them to leave
the harbor without first submitting to the inspection. When the Perle tried
to slip out of the harbor’s mouth with the following morning’s tide, the
Torre do Belém battery fired a blank shot to convince her captain to desist.
When he did not, the Portuguese put a live round through the Perle’s hull,
killing one crewman and injuring several more. Seeing this, the British
consul intervened and attempted to secure the ships’ departure through
diplomatic pressure. His behavior at that point was impertinent; the queen
would not be dissuaded. In the end, the Perle and the Artois left Lisbon with
skeleton crews, having undergone the required inspection.98
In their gravest diplomatic showdown of the war, then, the Portuguese
had finally demonstrated their resolve to the British as well as the French
and Spanish. Maria and her advisors showed that they were determined to
have Lisbon return to the status of a neutral harbor—a zone of commerce
unimpeded by British transgressions. The maintenance of Portuguese mul-
tilateral trade ties, and to some extent even the security of the empire,
depended on the integrity of Lisbon’s foreign policy. Although strict neutral-
ity was an ideal not always perfectly sustained, the Portuguese had found a
balance that they were able to keep through the remainder of the war.
virtually a foregone conclusion. But even after American and French arms
had forced George III’s government to begin negotiating for a peace settle-
ment, the Portuguese still did not consider themselves free to begin open
trade with the United States. Diplomatic propriety tied their hands.
Opening Portuguese ports to American merchant shipping would have
been tantamount to recognition of American sovereignty and indepen-
dence. So long as the British had not officially recognized the United States,
the terms of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance prevented the Portuguese from
doing so. At least, this is how the Portuguese were disposed to interpret the
matter; in fact, there was no clause expressly prohibiting recognition of
powers at war with either of the allied partners, but the realpolitik of the
situation still dictated that Portugal not unnecessarily irritate her principal
trading partner.99
Still, the prospect of renewed and unhindered American commerce
remained a great motivation. On 1 July 1782, Benjamin Franklin again
approached the Portuguese government, forwarding a revised version of
his 1777 plea requesting that their ports be opened.100 But Lisbon continued
to hesitate; having only just succumbed to Russian pressure on 13 July 1782
to join the League of Armed Neutrality, an agreement widely viewed as
anti-British, the Portuguese wanted to avoid any further undermining of
their position in London.101
In the late autumn of 1782, however, a breakthrough in the London peace
negotiations gave the Portuguese their chance for a compromise. Talks
between the United States, France, Spain and Great Britain had been in
session since the previous April; by 3 November, a preliminary agreement
had been reached under which the British accepted the principle of
American independence. Assured that this initial recognition satisfied
Portugal’s treaty obligation (and in any case certain that a definitive treaty
would shortly follow) and acting under pressure from domestic commer-
cial interests impatient to renew trading ties with the former British colo-
nies, Queen Maria I issued a royal decree on 15 February 1783 finally opening
Portuguese ports to the Americans. The new decree, which abolished
Pombal’s edict of 4 July 1776, directed that “in all ports of these realms …
passage and entry shall be given to all ships arrived there from said Northern
America … to enjoy there all the hospitality and favor enjoyed by the ships
of other friendly nations”.102 Significantly, the queen also used this opportu-
nity to reassert the principle of free commerce among neutral parties
during times of war, and to reaffirm Portugal’s adherence to the policy of
“armed neutrality” first promulgated by Russia after 1780. This decree marks
the Portuguese government’s official recognition of an independent United
States, being the first neutral country to do so following the cessation of
hostilities, and only the third to do so, after France and the Netherlands.103
Portuguese recognition came more than six months prior to the official
British grant of independence to their former colonies, done on 3 September
1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.104
By remaining neutral during the American Revolution, the Portuguese
had achieved a great diplomatic accomplishment. They had managed to
stay poised on one fulcrum of a general European war, having been ringed
by potentially hostile interests, and emerge with their trade and empire
intact. By acting with obvious self-interest, yet ultimately with far-sighted
restraint and discipline, the Portuguese had made the best out of a difficult
situation, laying the groundwork for stronger diplomatic and commercial
relations in Europe and North America and helping to promote the princi-
ple of free trade among non-belligerent nations. This success did not go
unnoticed by other Europeans. As the keenly observant English traveler
William Beckford noted while visiting Portugal a few years thereafter:
During the fatal contest betwixt England and its colonies, the wise neutrality
she persevered in maintaining was of the most vital benefit to her dominions,
and hitherto [to 1787], the native commerce of Portugal has attained under her
mild auspices an unprecedented degree of prosperity.105
Having emerged from their wartime diplomatic imbroglio, how did the
Luso-American political and commercial relationship develop during the
early Federal era? Immediately following U.S. independence, the Americans
hoped to negotiate a trade treaty with the Portuguese. In Paris, Benjamin
Franklin began to prepare the groundwork in a letter to Dom Vicente de
Sousa Coutinho, the Portuguese minister to Versailles, dated 7 June 1783.106
Ten days later in Philadelphia, Congress passed a resolution “that the treaty
with Portugal be entered on immediately”, thus revealing the importance
they assigned to Portuguese commercial ties.107 As the treaty’s main objec-
tive, the Americans hoped to open direct trade between the United States
and Brazil. For the Portuguese, however, such a proposition was simply too
risky. The specter of American interlopers, advantageously situated geo-
graphically and with a greater tonnage of merchant ships at their disposal
to drain away trade profits, loomed very large in the Portuguese assessment
of the matter.108 Even worse, officials in Lisbon worried that the presence of
American seamen loudly espousing the virtues of democracy and indepen-
dence would serve as a catalyst, prompting Brazilians to stage their own
rebellion. The Portuguese correctly foresaw that they stood to lose Brazil
altogether.
As it turned out, the Portuguese had had justifiable grounds for con
cern. In particular, they shortly had reason to suspect the motives of
Thomas Jefferson, whom Brazilian revolutionaries twice contacted, seeking
American assistance in a bid for independence. Both encounters occurred
in Paris while Jefferson was serving as American envoy to Versailles. In 1786,
José Maia e Barbello, who had been educated in Portugal at the University
of Coimbra and went by the enigmatic alias “Vendek”, told Jefferson that he
and his co-conspirators wanted to emulate the United States and sever ties
with their mother country. Jefferson conveyed a congenial enthusiasm for
the ideals of liberty, but when confronted with a direct request for American
military and financial support, he demurred. At that time, the Americans
hoped to remain isolated from Europe’s quarrels while participating in
114 Treaty of Commerce and Friendship between Portugal and the United States of
America, London, 25 April 1786 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 550, nr. 13).
115 Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, pp. 37-8.
116 Ibid., pp. 38-41.
117 Ibid., pp. 40-1.
284 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
oval park on the National Mall between the White House and the Washing
ton Monument.
The planned diplomatic residence, of course, was never built. In the
wake of the Brazilian independence crisis of the 1820s, in which privateers
and trade interests from the United States played an active role, diplomatic
relations between the two nations grew strained.122 Strident Portuguese
remonstration against the United States’ Brazil policy, combined with
successful independence movements across Spanish America, directly
inspired the formulation and promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in
December 1823.
After 1820, no Portuguese representative above the rank of chargé
d’ affairs served in Washington until 1840, and no full Minister Plenipotentiary
until 1854.123 With the loss of sovereignty over Brazil’s riches during this
turbulent period, Portugal’s status, and importance as a U.S. trade partner,
fell dramatically. Voices in Congress began to question the propriety of
placing the Portuguese diplomatic mission in so prominent a position near
the Executive Mansion. Eventually, Congress challenged the legality of
President Adams’ decision to grant this land in the first place, charging that
the President’s commissioners had exceeded their authority. By 1851, after
protracted diplomatic correspondence contesting the issue, the grant was
rescinded and the Portuguese government abandoned the matter.124 The
focus of United States’ national interests had shifted westward during the
nineteenth century, and Portugal, once a key U.S. trading partner, had lost
its central place in the exigencies of American foreign policy.