Atlantic Dimensions of The American Rev PDF

Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 brill.
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Atlantic Dimensions of the American

Revolution: Imperial Priorities and the
Portuguese Reaction to the North American
Bid for Independence (1775-83)*
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.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18770703-00203003

248 T. Walker / Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285
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
Portugal pioneered fundamental navigation techniques in Atlantic waters

and developed colonial holdings in the north and south Atlantic during the
early-to-mid fifteenth century, long prior to 1492, thus making it the oldest
Atlantic World imperial maritime power. By the middle of the eighteenth
century, the Kingdom of Portugal had built up a substantial colonial and
commercial trading network throughout the Atlantic World, incorporating
diverse colonies extending from those along the length of West Africa to
the strategically located Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira, Cape Verde and
the Azores to, most notably, Brazil in South America. Portugal’s trading
interests also included such important commercial partners as the Dutch,
French, Danes and the Swedes among the nations of Europe. Well above
the rest stood England: Portugal’s oldest ally and most important trading
partner (consolidated by the Treaties of Windsor [1386] and Westminster
[1654]), whose commerce with Portugal enjoyed a volume typically more
than double that of the next closest competitor in any given year.1
The British colonies in North America, geographically well placed to
benefit commercially from Atlantic wind and current patterns and the
proximity of cod fisheries off the New England coast, accounted for a
significant volume of the Portuguese exchange with the British Empire.2
A number of industries within the Portuguese trade economy—in particu-
lar salt and olive oil, citrus fruits, and Madeira wine, all produced for
export—had come to depend on this trade relationship with North
America. Because many Portuguese producers had invested heavily to
develop goods specifically for that market, the British colonies represented
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
an important leg in the Portuguese network of transatlantic commerce.3

The escalating rebellion begun in Britain’s North American colonies in 1775,
then, threatened to disrupt a substantial portion of this well-established
system: a share of trade that, because it was so lucrative, key sections of the
Portuguese economy could ill-afford to lose.4
This article will focus on the reaction of the Portuguese state to the rebel-
lion and independence of the British North American colonies—the goal is
to cast a net in waters long neglected in U.S. historiography, to gain a more
nuanced understanding of the broader contexts of “American” history, and
the transatlantic dimensions of the founding of the United States.5 The
Portuguese reaction was a mixed one, shaped by the simultaneous but
conflicting expedients of an economic interest in North American trade
and an abhorrence on the part of Portugal’s king for democratic rebellion
against monarchical authority. Although the Lisbon regime initially reacted
very strongly against the Americans’ insurrection, the Portuguese, under
new monarchical leadership after 1777, later moderated their position
in order not to damage their broad imperial political and economic inter-
ests. To understand this reaction, it is first necessary to examine trade con-
siderations and diplomatic relations between Portugal and British North
America between 1750 and 1783.
The Portuguese acted strategically, according to the demands of their
overseas empire—with an eye toward maximizing trading profits, manipu-
lating the balance of power in Europe among nations with overseas colo-
nies, and discouraging the further spread of dangerous republican rhetoric
that could encourage independence aspirations throughout the Americas—
most notably to their own colony of Brazil.6 In short, the rebellion in
3 Mattoso, História de Portugal, pp. 103-11.

4 T. Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verdes in
Seventeenth-Century Commerce and Navigation (Chicago, Ill,: University of Chicago Press,
1972), pp. 1-6, 239-52.
5 Atlanticist scholarship of late has generally recognized that a greater inclusion of
Portuguese continental and imperial themes in English-language scholarship would
enhance our understanding of Atlantic World interconnectedness. The idea of an Atlantic
World framework itself has provoked a great deal of discussion and debate among scholars,
much of which has been represented in the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic”, 63, no. 4 (October 2006), and Patrick Griffin, “A Plea for a
New Atlantic History”, 68, no. 2 (April 2011), and among the contributions to Jack P. Greene
and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
6 See the discussion in David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European
Overseas Empires, 1415 –1980 (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 209-14.
North America threatened to destabilize, in economic and political terms,

Portugal’s colonial system in the Atlantic.7
But Portugal’s particular quandary during the American bid for indepen-
dence is emblematic of the larger challenges that the Revolution posed
for Europe’s second-tier maritime powers, several of which sought to
defend their sovereign right to conduct diplomacy and trade as neutral
nations during time of general war, whether in an imperial or continental
European context. The Russian Empire, the Dutch Republic, the Kingdoms
of Denmark-Norway and of Sweden, Prussia, and the Two Sicilies, the
Ottoman Empire, and eventually even the Portuguese regime—all
responded to British aggression against neutral nations’ trade with belliger-
ent countries by joining together in the League of Armed Neutrality, a
strong principled diplomatic stand against an overbearing and inflexible
British maritime policy.8 Much scholarly attention has already been focused
on the Dutch—like the Portuguese a longstanding British ally with deep-
seated ties to Britain’s North Atlantic colonies, but who were drawn into
armed conflict with London in the 1780s due to hostilities over American
independence. The Dutch example provides an important counterpoint to
the Portuguese experience under present consideration.9
Similarly, imperial Spain’s entanglement in and reaction to events in rev-
olutionary American has received significant academic scrutiny.10 Spain’s
long colonial presence in the Americas, established over a century before
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).
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.
management of lucrative royal monopolies over an array of imported and

exported goods.14
State solvency, then, depended on the maintenance of external com-
merce and the integrity of the colonial mercantilist system. Therefore,
trade interests naturally stood at the heart of Portuguese foreign policy of
the day. Because of the general political stability provided by a buoyant
economy, as well as the fact that customs receipts accrued directly to royal
coffers, the crown had a dual interest in promoting trade. Shrewd conven-
tional wisdom in Lisbon dictated that the economic health of the nation, if
not to say the financial interests of the crown and many influential families
among the ruling and mercantile classes, revolved around the ability of
continental Portugal to maintain its colonies while augmenting potentially
lucrative trade throughout its established Atlantic network.15
In order to achieve these ends, it was necessary for Portugal to maintain
a delicate neutrality, one suspended between the two power blocs which
had evolved in Europe since the late seventeenth century—Britain squared
off against France, each with their respective allies—and not break trade
links with either side. During the long eighteenth century, any time that
Portugal had deviated from that centrist path and imprudently supported
Britain , the results had been disastrous: Spanish invasions during the Seven
Years War had devastated parts of the Portuguese mainland and losses to
commercial shipping proved costly in human, economic and political
terms.16 The Portuguese realistically saw themselves as a second-tier
European power, lacking population, adequate naval and land defenses
and dependent on food imports because of a dearth of developed arable
lands within the home country. Maintaining the integrity of their colonial
system and even their national independence required appeasement and
diplomatic cooperation with all threatening neighbors.17
Because the Portuguese, like any maritime power, regarded seaborne
trade as vital to their national interests, commercial considerations shaded
virtually every foreign policy decision made in Lisbon throughout this
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.
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.
Political Implications of Portuguese Trade with the British North

American Colonies before 1775
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
the duty-free entrance of English woolens into Portugal, in exchange for

which the Portuguese received a favored status for their port wine, which
passed through British customs at a rate of taxation one-third less than that
of French wines. The Methuen agreement had an impact far outlasting the
war; it laid new foundations for Anglo-Portuguese commercial ties that
continued and grew more complex well into the nineteenth century.18
Importantly, the provisions of the Navigation Acts of 1663 did not restrict
English imperial ships from conducting trade with the Madeira island
group. In a move that reveals much about British commercial interests in
Portugal, Parliament classified the Madeiras as Portuguese territory, but
outside of continental Europe for purposes of trade, thereby placing the
islands’ commodities outside of the Navigation Acts. Therefore, wines,
fruits, and other products could move freely and directly from the Madeira
archipelago to the British colonies in America without first passing through
ports in Britain. Thus unburdened by British duties and handling costs,
Madeira wine entered the American market much more cheaply than port
wine or Spanish sherry, for example, which, as commodities originating in
continental Europe, had to be transshipped under the Navigation Acts
through the British Isles. This regulatory “loophole” would prove very fortu-
nate for Portuguese producers and British shippers who dealt in Madeira
wine.19
During the course of the eighteenth century, Madeiran wine merchants
and shippers in the Americas increasingly took advantage of this situation,
building up a commerce which nearly eclipsed wine imports from other
regions into the British colonies. In North America and the British West
Indies, Madeira wine graced the tables of virtually all wealthier households,
where it was consumed in enormous quantities. Even before 1720, Madeiran
vineyards were producing on average between 20,000 and 30,000 pipes of
Malmsey and eight hundred pipes of brandy (aguardente) annually, levels
they would maintain (though with significant annual fluctuations) through
the Napoleonic Era.20 This represents a tenfold increase over production in
1650, before trade regulations that produced the “Madeira loophole” took
18 Douglas L. Wheeler, Historical Dictionary of Portugal (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow

Press, Inc., 1993), pp. 126-7; Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 5, pp. 223-32.
19 The Sugar Act of 1764 did impose import duties on Madeira wine shipped to North
America, but the volume of this trade remained steady; David Hancock, Oceans of Wine:
Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), pp. 107-108, 116-19.
20 Ibid., pp. 44-5. A pipe’s liquid volume varied, but the standard English measurement
was equal to approximately 126 imperial gallons.
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.
Portuguese salt), bacalhau (codfish) was consumed in such enormous

quantities in Portugal that it became known in the vernacular as the amigo
fiel, or faithful friend, of the masses. By the 1770s, Portuguese merchants
were spending £57,000 a year on imported colonial American codfish.25
North American grain, however, had eclipsed bacalhau in importance
by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Ever since 1 November
1755, when a powerful earthquake devastated Lisbon and its surrounding
communities, shiploads of rice from the Carolinas and wheat originating
from the port of Philadelphia had arrived annually in the Tagus River, to be
unloaded at the doca do terreiro do trigo, or “wheat terrace dock”.26 Initial
emergency demand grew into a habit; the Portuguese began regularly to
augment their diet with New World grains. During the post-quake rebuild-
ing period, demand soared. By 1773, average import expenditures amounted
to £47,000 worth of wheat, another £79,000 in ground flour, £12,000 in
maize, and £8,900 in rice, all from North America.27
In return, the Portuguese world provided the Americas with a diversity of
products besides Madeira wine and aguardente (brandy). Bills of lading for
ships sailing out of Lisbon and the Portuguese Atlantic colonies included
such items as sugar, coffee, salt, olive oil, and citrus fruits, valued agricul-
tural produce bound for North America from warmer climes. The Portuguese
mainland also produced cheese, shoes and cordage for the North American
market.28 More exotic goods from the Portuguese Asian colonies were also
in demand: drugs and tea from Macau or spices and printed cotton cloth
from Goa made their way to the American colonies in Portuguese holds.
Slavers from Portuguese Africa found buyers for their human cargoes in
Charleston and other southern ports, though not in the numbers as slaves
sold from other sources.29 Most importantly to the Americans, though,
Portuguese ship masters frequently paid for their purchases with Brazilian
25 Fisher, The Portugal Trade, p. 42.

26 Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 6, pp. 304-305.
27 Fisher, The Portugal Trade, p. 42; see also Mendes, “Introductory Notes”, trade tables,
pp. 175-236; and António Alves Caetano, A Economia Portuguesa no tempo de Napoleão
(Lisbon: Tribuna da História, 2008), pp. 18-23.
28 Mapa dos produtos importados pelos Estados Unidos da America (circa 1796), (Arquivo
Nacional do Torre do Tombo (National Archive of Portugal, the Torre do Tombo) (ANTT),
Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (Ministry of Foreign Relations) (MNE), caixa (box)
(cx.) 551, no. 84); see also Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New
York: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 300, 310-14.
29 Taylor, American Colonies, pp. 323-5; Jeremy H. Black, The British Seaborne Empire
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 68-73.
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.
Centrality of Brazil to the Portuguese Economy in the

Eighteenth Century
To understand the Portuguese crown’s strong negative reaction to the colo-

nial rebellion in North America, it is also necessary to realize the impor-
tance of Brazil to Portuguese finances in the eighteenth century. Not only
did the Americans’ war for independence disrupt trade throughout the
Atlantic world, but it threatened to spread revolutionary doctrines to
Central and South America, as well. The Portuguese Prime Minister, the
Marquês de Pombal, realized that, ultimately, Portugal’s hold on Brazil was
tenuous. Support for the Portuguese crown was relatively weak in eigh-
teenth-century Brazil, in part because of the obvious wealth and size dis-
parity between colony and mother country, as well as protracted resource
and tax exploitation by the metropôle, but also due to demonstrated
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.
Portuguese military weakness in protecting Brazil from invasion.31 After

all, driving out French and Dutch interlopers in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries had been accomplished mainly through the efforts of
provincial forces (who relied heavily on armed slaves for their rank and file)
improvised by the colonists themselves.32 Further, justification for the cen-
sure and ultimate expulsion of the Jesuits from Brazil (1750-60) hinged on
charges that they had undermined crown authority and fomented insurrec-
tion among native peoples.33 Thus, the potential for rebellion in Brazil was
a chronic Portuguese fear, and in fact several alarming revolts aimed at
self-determination (termed “inconfidências”, detailed below) would break
out in the two decades following U.S. independence.34 So, to gamble with
the proliferation of anti-colonial ideology in Brazil was considered too
great a risk. Quite simply, Brazil was far too valuable to lose.35
Without exaggeration, Brazilian gold had become the central pillar of
the Portuguese domestic economy during the first half of the eighteenth
century. Other Brazilian products, too, such as sugar, tobacco and dye
woods, contributed significantly to the fortunes of the Portuguese Empire,
but it was primarily gold that occupied the minds of financiers and states-
men of the day. Even though the volume of this gilded traffic had begun to
shrink markedly during the 1770s, bullion maintained its vital position
throughout the time of the American Revolution.36
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.
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.
mid-eighteenth century, set by the Marquês de Pombal, was to rule Brazil

with a kind of “salutary neglect”, lest aggressive regulation from the
metropôle alienate colonial elites.40
Strained diplomatic relations with Spain over territories in South America
also rendered Portuguese authority in Brazil precarious. As recently as 1750,
the Portuguese and Spanish had reached a fragile peace (the Treaty of
Madrid or, as it is sometimes known, the Treaty of Limits) over the disputed
border with Paraguay (and, indeed, the entire southeast frontier between
Brazil and Spanish lands in America), which was then supplanted by the
Treaty of Pardo of 1761. Because of their defiance of royal policies, danger-
ously autonomous Jesuit missionaries had been expelled from Brazil and
Paraguay (as well as the rest of the Portuguese empire) at this time. These
treaties, however, had left several issues unsettled, so further boundary
disagreements continued to simmer into the 1770s.41
The Portuguese were deeply troubled at the thought of aspirations
for colonial independence seeping into Brazil from the north, so they took
strong measures to prevent the proliferation of outside influences.
Immigration to Brazil was strictly controlled; no official printing press
was permitted there until 1808 (when the royal family arrived after fleeing
the French invasion of the Portuguese mainland during the Napoleonic
Wars), and trade with Europe and North America was heavily regulated.42
The ships of American colonists, like those of all other non-Portuguese
merchant vessels, were prohibited from carrying on any direct trade
with Brazil (though crown officials could not fully abrogate inveterate
smuggling).43
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
41 Anthony R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge
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.
Initial Reaction of the Portuguese Crown to the Declaration

of Independence
As colonial militiamen and British regulars clashed at Lexington and

Concord in April of 1775, the foreign policy of the Portuguese government
was focused far to the south. During the 1760s and 1770s Spain, Portugal’s
only contiguous neighbor and constant rival in the New World, had contin-
ued to dispute the colonial border between Brazil and what is today
Uruguay, an old point of irritation that had been reinflamed by fighting
during the Seven Years War. Finally, in May 1774, the Spanish dispatched an
enormous amphibious military expedition, their largest ever to date, to the
contested region along the Rio de la Plata area with the aim of conquering
all of southern Brazil. Although the Spanish managed to overwhelm the
Portuguese coastal villages on Santa Catarina Island and at Colónia, their
mission was frustrated by a smaller group of Portuguese settlers at Rio
Grande de São Pedro who doggedly held on, maintaining Portuguese
authority over the region.44
Preoccupied by this threat to Brazilian territory, yet encouraged because
the Spanish advance had bogged down in the face of tactical reverses, the
Portuguese decided to press for a military outcome in their favor. The
Marquês de Pombal knew that another Spanish expedition, this one
directed against Algiers, had suffered terrible losses in July 1775, thus hin-
dering Spain’s ability to reinforce its troops in Brazil. When the Spanish
foreign minister, the Marqués de Grimaldi, offered to negotiate a settle-
ment on the Rio Grande de São Pedro border issue, Pombal delayed his
response and immediately made overtures to London, trying to secure
support for his aggressive policy initiative. But his ambassador to the Court
of St. James encountered a London government firmly in the grip of a colo-
nial crisis: Boston, one of the British Empire’s major ports, had just been put
under siege by a rebellious militia army; prime minister Lord North had
little attention to spare for Portugal’s distant troubles.45
Pombal was dismayed that the American crisis threatened to interfere
with the British element of his South American strategy. He immediately
acted to influence London’s policy and nudge events in his favor. The heavy-
handedness of Pombal’s policy as it developed in response to the American
44 Maxwell, Pombal, pp. 126-8.

45 Ibid., and Dauril Alden, “The Marquis de Pombal and the American Revolution”, The
Americas 17, no. 4 (April 1961), pp. 369-71.
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).
diplomatic channels. Instead, Pombal picked subtler means: he forwarded

his dispatch through the regular mails, assuming that it would be opened
by British intelligence services who would relay the contents to their supe-
riors. Under the circumstances, Pombal made a wise choice: British troops
had been fired upon, and Pombal’s advocacy of subterfuge (particularly
coming from a Portuguese, whom the British tended to regard as mere
younger siblings on the European political stage) could easily have given
offense, which would have been unproductive for his true goals. In any
case, there is no evidence that the British government ever received
Pombal’s message; prudent or not, George III and Lord North obviously
chose not to heed his advice, if indeed they were ever aware of it.48
In May 1776, the Continental Congress reiterated its intention to declare
independence from Great Britain. This time Pombal reacted with charac-
teristic force and decision, swiftly formulating a policy calculated to ingrati-
ate his nation to the British while harming the finances of the rebellious
colonials. Pombal’s plan, contained in a royal decree dated 4 July 1776,
closed every port in the kingdom and dominions of Portugal to “all ships
originating from América Septentrional Inglêza” and further requiring that
any vessels hailing from British colonies in revolt then in Portuguese har-
bors must be underway within ten days. Finally, in an affront to common
maritime practice of the period, Pombal further ordered that American
ships “may not be given any assistance in any form whatsoever” in
Portuguese waters, even under circumstances of extreme duress.49 The
contents of this decree were made public the following day in a printed
royal edict which was distributed to foreign representatives in Lisbon and
forwarded to harbor masters throughout the Portuguese realm and Atlantic
islands.50
Why did the Portuguese government react so strongly against the
Americans, with whom they had long traded and interacted amicably? In
fact, the closing of the harbors was not purely Pombal’s initiative; it had
been done with some heavy-handed prompting from the British.51 But
Pombal’s primary motivation, to guarantee reciprocal British help against
48 Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 24.

49 Decree of King D. José, Lisbon: Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, 4 July 1776 (ANTT,
Conselho de Fazenda, Repartição da Índia e Ordens, Decretos, mç. 4, nr. 1 [provisionary
number]).
50 Edict of King D. José, Lisbon, 5 July 1776 (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (National
Library of Portugal) (BNP), Res. 2020 A).
51 Maxwell, Pombal, p. 127.
Spain for the protection of Portuguese colonial interests in South America,

served only Portugal. Despite the service rendered to Britain, his policy
nevertheless kept the broad defensive requirements of the Portuguese
Empire foremost in mind.
Beyond that, Pombal and the Portuguese crown no doubt acted out of
a sense of revulsion against democratic rebellion as an affront to Divine
Right monarchy. Naturally, King Dom José could not be expected to see the
prospect of a colonial rebellion against the absolute authority of a fellow
sovereign monarch in a favorable light.52 After all, he and his Prime Minister
were engaged at the time in a twenty-year policy to further subordinate all
institutional authority within Portugal to that of the crown.53 In this light,
we may accept the announced motivation of Dom Jose’s edict, “to support
the King of Britain, my good brother, friend and ally”, as sincere. Even so, this
objection to the principle of democratic rebellion reflected the more imme-
diate, practical, and realistic Portuguese fear that revolutionary doctrines
would spread south to Brazil, a nightmare scenario for the Lisbon regime.54
The war in North America, because it threatened to spread to Europe, left
Portugal in a very vulnerable position. By coming out strongly in support of
Britain in mid-summer 1776, the Portuguese had antagonized the Americans
and, by extension, any of their would-be allies. Within eighteen months
France, England’s traditional enemy, would be motivated to join the
American cause in retaliation for—and in an attempt to recoup—colonial
losses suffered during the Seven Years War. Long before the conclusion of
an alliance in February 1778, the French began to supply military assistance
covertly to the American rebels. Spain and France, both Bourbon monar-
chies, were linked by the “Family Compact”, and possession of Gibraltar
(occupied by the British since 1704) was a cause over which Spain could be
induced to go to war against Britain, thus indirectly aiding the American
cause.55 Portugal, of course, was already on the brink of war with Spain over
the Brazilian border issue.
52 Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, D. José, Na Sombra da Pombal (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores,

2008), pp. 231-48.
53 For a concise, enlightening discussion of Pombaline internal policy aimed at eclipsing
any but royal authority in Portugal during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, John
Gagliardo, Enlightened Despotism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967), pp. 34-51.
54 David Francis, Portugal 1715-1808: Joanine, Pombaline and Rococo Portugal as seen by
British Diplomats and Traders (London: Tamesis Books, 1985), pp. 187-9.
55 Caetano Beirão, Dona Maria I, 3rd ed. (Lisbon: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1944),
pp. 216-17.
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
56 Ibid., and Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 24-5.

57 Maxwell, Pombal, p. 128. The weakness of Portugal’s navy throughout the early modern
period lends a new semantic dimension to the scurrilous provenance of “Portuguese Man-
o’-War” as a name for the stinging sea creature.
58 Beirão, Dona Maria I, pp. 216-17.
59 This sort of aggressive foreign policy was consistent with the incipient U.S. govern-
ment’s posture toward other territories ostensibly hostile to the American cause, including
neighboring parts of the British Empire. As evidence, one may point to the American
military expeditions against Canada, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and West Florida, all of which
Congress asserted sovereign rights over as U.S. territory in the Model Treaty of 1776; Eliga
H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New
World Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 1-4; and Howard Jones,
Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2002), pp. 7-12, 41-8.
Tempting as the prospect was—Silas Deane in Paris and John Adams

solidly favored the plan—Benjamin Franklin’s less impetuous, more cir-
cumspect demeanor exerted the definitive influence on American policy
toward Portugal. As resident American diplomat in Paris, Franklin was
aware that the French had no guarantees of Spanish aggression against
Portugal.60 Also, by early July 1777, Franklin had learned of Portuguese King
Dom José’s death that February and the Marquês de Pombal’s subsequent
dismissal. This, he reasoned, could soon result in favorable policy changes
from the new Lisbon regime as Dona Maria, José’s daughter, took the throne.
Therefore, when Franklin initiated diplomatic contact with the Portuguese
government, he chose a conciliatory approach.
Franklin’s letter of 16 July 1777, protesting the closing of Portuguese ports
to American shipping, was Portugal’s first official diplomatic contact with
the new United States of America. Given the hawkish mood of most of his
colleagues toward Portugal at the time, it was also a masterly piece of
appeasement. With a sensitive insight to the Portuguese outlook and
priorities, Franklin pointed out that:
As a long Friendship and Commerce has subsisted between the Portuguese
and the Inhabitants of North America, whereby Portugal has been supplied
with the most necessary Commodities in Exchange for her Superfluities, and
not the least Injury has ever been committed or even attempted or imagined
by America to that Kingdom, the United States cannot but be astonished to
find not only their commerce rejected, but their Navigators who may need a
Port when in Distress refused the common Rights of Humanity, a Conduct
towards the said States not only unprecedented, but which we are confident
will not be follow’d by any other Power in Europe; all the rest having consid-
ered our Difference with & Separation from England as a Matter of which they
were not constituted Judges, and therefore have not undertaken to condemn
either Party, without Hearing or Inquiry, but allow our Ships of all kinds the
same Freedoms of their Ports as is allow’d to those belonging to England, and
the same Privileges of Commerce.61
By appealing for a reconciliation based primarily on the mutual advan
tages of conducting trade, Franklin revealed the importance placed on
perpetuating trans-Atlantic commerce in the highest circles of both
governments.
60 Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 26-7.

61 North American formal protest against the Portuguese edict of 5 July 1776, Paris, 16 July
1777 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 550, nr. 1).
Portuguese Neutrality during the Years of Armed

Conflict in North America
The Lisbon regime, however, was in no mood or position to be reconciled.

Ever mindful of their pressing need to court British power, the Portuguese
sought to turn Franklin’s forthright remonstrance to their advantage in
London. In order to demonstrate their loyalty to the British government
and the steadfastness of the position they had taken on the American
conflict, as well as to show the pains which the Portuguese were willing to
suffer in support of the British cause, the Portuguese Foreign Ministry
forwarded a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s letter of protest to London, along
with an accompanying note which read, in part, “in your cause, you see, we
are exposed to similar insults”.62
The change of government in Lisbon did result in foreign policy changes,
as Franklin had anticipated, but not directed towards the United States.
Instead, the new Queen, Maria I, and her ministers saw the Spanish, just
over the frontier, as their most immediate threat and hence their first prior-
ity. Pombal had left behind a smoldering powder keg in the Brazilian border
dispute; with the American conflagration threatening to spread to Europe,
Lisbon felt an urgent need to extinguish tensions with Madrid, lest hostili-
ties explode close to home.
In some haste, therefore, Maria I dispatched Dom Francisco de Sousa
Coutinho to Madrid to negotiate a preliminary settlement. He returned
with the Treaty of Santo Ildefonso, signed on 1 October 1777 and ratified ten
days later, which established definitive boundaries for Spanish and
Portuguese territories in South America. The Portuguese relinquished their
settlement at Sacramento but received the island of Santa Catarina in
exchange. This accord also functioned as a prologue to the more conse-
quential Treaty of Pardo, an alliance formed six months later between
Maria I and Carlos III of Spain. Promising a reciprocal recognition of neu-
trality and, significantly, continued commercial relations in time of war, the
Treaty of Pardo, signed on 11 March 1778, marked an end to hostilities
between the Iberian nations over South America.63 More importantly from
the Portuguese point of view, these two agreements served to secure one
62 Ofiício of Aires de Sá e Mello to D. Vicente De Sousa Coutinho, Lisbon, 27 November

1777, cited in Beirão, Dona Maria I, p. 216.
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
64 Beirão, Dona Maria I, p. 217; Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 28.

65 Wheeler, pp. 36-8, and Visconde de Borges de Castro, Collecção dos Tratados,
Convenções, Contratos, e Actos Publicos Celebrados entre a Coroa de Portugal e as Mais
Potencias, desde 1640 até ao Present, 8 vols. (Lisbon, 1856-8).
66 Beirão, Dona Maria I, p. 218.
paper, to maintain a non-aligned, non-combatant status throughout

the American conflict. Maintaining this status to the satisfaction of the
belligerent powers, however, proved to be a nearly impossible balancing
act. In the first place, allowing British merchant ships to frequent Portuguese
harbors was an unfortunate concession, because the British used this privi-
lege as a cover for privateering operations against the French, Spanish,
Dutch and Americans. Naturally, this outraged those nations, resulting in
vigorous protests and accusations of Portuguese complicity. In the event,
the Portuguese spent much of the next two years asserting and defending,
to little immediate effect, their rights as a neutral nation, all the while
remaining at pains to convince the British that, despite irritation at the
British abuse of harbor privileges, Portugal was still a loyal ally.
One certain way for the Portuguese to demonstrate that their fidelity to
Britain had not begun to waiver was to keep their ports closed to American
commerce. In Lisbon’s response to Benjamin Franklin’s letter protesting the
ban and asking for reconciliation, the Portuguese reaffirmed their resolve.
Communicating in the late autumn of 1777 through the Portuguese ambas-
sador in Paris, Foreign Affairs Minister Aires de Sá e Melo informed Franklin
that, because any act that could be construed as recognition of the United
States’ independence would violate the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, Portugal
would continue to bar American vessels from its harbors.67
That the Portuguese Foreign Minister would confide such information to
the venerable American diplomat—in essence, that the Portuguese policy
was meant to placate the British—is remarkable enough, but it underscores
the fact that, behind the façade of the commercial ban, the goals of the
regime in Lisbon had changed significantly when a new monarch took the
throne. Indeed, throughout the war, Queen Maria I and her ministers
sought at every opportunity to help, or at least not to hinder, the Americans
in their struggle for independence. From 1778 to 1783, the Portuguese regime
quietly but repeatedly showed its willingness to provide aid, up to the point
that their treaty obligations to the British would allow and insofar as their
actions were consistent with the interests of their own trade and empire.
Such efforts, it is true, often went hand in hand with attempts to assert and
protect Portuguese neutrality. Even so, the new Lisbon government did not
openly oppose American self-determination in principle; on the contrary,
alongside political and economic self-interest, Queen Maria’s regime dem-
onstrated a measure of sympathy for the cause.
67 Cited in Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 28.

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.
and anti-interventionist.72 Maria’s government expected that the loss of the

thirteen colonies would weaken British power and prestige but would not
necessarily reduce Portuguese commercial prospects—indeed, the clear
potential was for sustained future growth in trade between Portugal and an
independent United States, whose commerce would not be fettered by the
Navigation Acts and other British imperial trade restrictions.
After calculating such forward-looking scenarios, Maria changed course
in her foreign policy toward the United States, pragmatically remaining
neutral but quietly cultivating a sympathetic relationship with an eye
toward future commercial exchange.73 Plainly, commercial considerations
remained of far greater long-term importance to the Portuguese, who knew
that, whatever the war’s outcome, they had everything to gain commer-
cially in the future if they could ride out the war without antagonizing
the Americans any further. Portuguese policy toward the United States
followed this course during the balance of the conflict.
Shipwrecked or captured American seamen, for example, could expect
aid and comfort if the vicissitudes of war brought them under the jurisdic-
tion of Portuguese authorities. After the British took his ship in June 1779,
the captain of a Massachusetts privateer, John Kendrick, was being held in
the Azores. Maria, at her own expense, had him moved to Lisbon, where he
could seek passage home more easily. Later in the same year, thirty impris-
oned American crewmen received a royal allowance for their living
expenses in Lisbon until they could be repatriated. Benjamin Franklin tried
to reimburse the Portuguese government for this expenditure but his offer
was courteously declined. The Queen took “pleasure in showing hospitality
to strangers in distress”, he was told.74
Another case that illustrates how the Portuguese subtly provided assis-
tance to the Americans is the so-called “Amity” incident. In January 1779, a
German merchant resident in Lisbon, Arnold Henry Dohrman, came up
with a plan to repatriate a crew of thirty captured American sailors while
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.
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.
77 Ibid., p. 28.
78 Letter of Félix António Castrioto, Lisboa, 12 November 1777 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 550, nr. 2).
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.
79 Gazeta de Lisboa, 18 September 1778, p. 1 (author’s translation).

80 Gazeta de Lisboa, 9 October 1778, pp. 1-2 (author’s translation).
82 Wheeler, p. 38; Francis, Portugal 1715-1808, pp. 187-9.
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
83 Wharton, Francis (ed.), The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United

States (Washington, D.C., 1889), vol. 2, pp. 146-7, cited in Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 25.
84 Hancock, Oceans of Wine, pp. 120-2, 266-7; Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 28.
trade ban in a letter to de Sá e Melo, noted that “the Portuguese go to

foreign ports to load the wheat carried there by Americans”.86
Further, there was in principle no regulation preventing Portuguese
captains from sailing directly to the United States in pursuit of trade.
Rumors of planned American hostility directed at Portuguese shipping in
retaliation for the ban, however, kept most from venturing into American
waters. Yet, with assurances of protection, many captains were willing
to make the trip. In 1778, for example, Lisbon merchant Joseph Wharton
contacted the American commissioners in Paris, offering to arrange for
consignments of Portuguese salt to be shipped to the United States,
where it was in dangerously short supply. To allay the apprehensions of
Portuguese merchants about “the supposed unfriendliness of Portugal and
the United States toward each other”, he needed only to provide American
passports to ship captains and crews.87
The British, meanwhile, were taking every opportunity to prey on this
theoretically proscribed commerce using warships and privateers based in
Lisbon, a practice that had also been, in theory, expressly forbidden by
Article 18 of the Anglo-Portuguese treaty signed in 1654.88 Portuguese
military weakness and a long-established habit of influencing policy in
Lisbon with a heavy hand, however, predisposed the British to simply disre-
gard these pledges to gain an advantage: controlling strategically-situated
Lisbon harbor provided them with an undeniable edge in a war against
Spain and France.
The British Admiralty routinely sent warships to Lisbon harbor far in
excess of the numbers allowed there under the existing alliance, a fact that
the Spanish envoy to the Portuguese court noted with increasing irrita-
tion.89 Worse still, the British navy made demands on the Lisbon armory,
requisitioning cannon and supplies obviously destined for the war effort.
Despite mild Portuguese remonstrances to London, abuses mounted. Most
rankling was the practice of resident British traders’ outfitting merchant
vessels as privateers in Lisbon harbor itself, under the very eaves of the
royal palace. The grandes casas comerciais inglesas were long-established
and powerful, but the audacity of their actions was too much for Portuguese
86 Cited in José Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, Journal

of the American Portuguese Society 11, no. 1 (1977), p. 7.
87 Ibid.
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

91 Cited in ibid.
93 Marquês de Almodôvar, Exposição dos Motivos da Conducta de Sua Magestade
Christianissima Relativa a Inglaterra com hum Resumo dos que Guiarão Sua Magestade
Catholica no Seu Modo de Proceder a Respeito da Mesma Potência) (Lisbon: Biblioteca Central
de Marinha, Special Collections nr. 19032, [1779]).
94 Beirão, Dona Maria I, pp. 221-2.
Adams expressed his substantial frustration with the situation in a letter to

John Jay written 15 May 1780, he was speaking for many of his countrymen:
Pray is it not necessary to think a little of Portugal? Under her present system
of neutrality, as they call it, the ports of Portugal are as advantageous to
England as any of her own, and more injurious to the trade of Spain and
America, if not of France … this little impotent morsel of a state ought not to
do so much mischief so unjustly. If she is neutral, let her be neutral, not say she
is neutral and be otherwise.95
Eventually, the Portuguese found the diplomatic pressure from the
Spanish, French and Americans too great to parry with mere words. On 30
August 1780, Maria issued a decree announcing that, thereafter, her nation
would begin to observe only the strictest neutrality. She denied privateers
of all nations access her ports, gave those currently in harbor twenty days to
leave, and prohibited the sale of captured prizes in her harbors. Bolder still,
citing Article 18 of the 1654 Anglo-Portuguese treaty, the Queen requested
that all British warships take leave of their Portuguese havens.96 Given the
usual subordination of Portuguese policy to British exigencies, this was a
brazen move.
This marked shift in Lisbon’s diplomatic conduct coincides with an ini-
tiative toward similar ends propagated by the Russians earlier that year.
Outraged at incessant British aggression against her own neutral commer-
cial shipping, Czarina Catherine II formulated the principle that “the flag of
a nation covers that country’s commerce” and proposed that all neutral
countries combine in protection of their right to conduct trade. When
Catherine proclaimed this League of Armed Neutrality in her decree of
26 February 1780, the Dutch and the Baltic states rapidly announced their
solidarity. Viewing this pact as an effective weapon against the British, the
French and Spanish officially recognized the League in April 1780. Although
the Portuguese were not induced to join initially, because of the League’s
manifestly anti-British stance, the presence of such an accord among other
neutral nations reinforced the Portuguese position in the summer of 1780
when Queen Maria forbade partisan activities inside her harbors.97
The British did not wait long to test the Portuguese Queen’s new-found
resolve. At the moment Maria issued her decree expelling privateers, the
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.
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.
Rapid Change in the Portuguese Position Following the Cessation

of Hostilities
Lord Cornwallis’ surrender of British forces at Yorktown, Virginia, on 19

October 1781, made the United States’ military victory and independence
98 Ibid., pp. 221-2.

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
99 Jorge Borges de Macedo, História Diplomática Portuguesa: Constantes e Linhas de

Força, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Lisbon: Instituto da Defesa Nacional/Tribuna da História, 2006),
pp. 335-8.
101 Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, p. 23.
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
102 Decreto da Rainha D. Maria I que Marca o Reconhecimento da Independência dos

Estados Unidos da América, Salvaterra de Magos, 15 February 1783 (ANTT, Colecção de Leis,
SP nr. 2230).
103 Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, pp. 10-11; and Canas da
Cunha and Diogo Gaspar (eds.), Católogo de Exposição: Relações entre Portugal e os Estados
Unidos da América na Época das Luzes (Lisbon: Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo and
the Fundação Luso-Americano para Desenvolvimento, 1997), pp. 51-2.
104 Morocco is sometimes credited as the first country to recognize U.S. independence,
but the Sultan of Morocco only did so formally on 23 June 1786, when a treaty of peace and
friendship was signed at Marrakech. Sweden formally recognized the U.S. with a treaty
signed in Paris on 3 April 1783; see U.S. Department of State; Office of the Historian; Guide to
Country Recognition and Relations: http://history.state.gov/countries.
105 William Beckford, Italy; With Sketches of Spain and Portugal, 2 vols. (London, 1835),
vol. 2, p. 257.
After the Revolution: Impact on Portuguese-American Trade

and Diplomacy into the Nineteenth Century
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
106 Letter of Benjamin Franklin to D. Vicente de Sousa Coutinho, Passy, France, 7 June

1783 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 550, nr. 3a).
108 Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, pp. 27, 30.
transatlantic trade; Jefferson therefore responded that a conflict with

Portugal was not in the interests of the United States.109
Three years later, in 1789 when the incipient French Revolution inspired
Brazilian patriots to action once more, Jefferson was contacted again. This
time his response was apparently more encouraging. A Brazilian medical
student at Université de Montpellier, José Joaquim da Maia Montenegro,
maintained that he obtained a “promise” from Jefferson of American sup-
port for the independence of Brazil. At least, that is what Montenegro
reported to his comrades in Minas Gerais, where the news caused great
excitement and helped to incite the rebellious uprising of 1789 known as
the Inconfidência Mineira.110
Although the “inconfidence” at Minas Gerais failed, many Brazilians con-
tinued to admire the North Americans’ democratic principles and the suc-
cessful independence bid those principles had inspired. A steadily growing
movement toward independence in Brazil remained a serious preoccupa-
tion for the Portuguese for the rest of the eighteenth century and into the
next. Two further revolts, known respectively as the Inconfidência Baiana
and the Inconfidência Pernambucana, shook the colony in 1798 and 1801; both
embraced independence, based on the U.S. model, as an explicit goal.111
The Portuguese colonial administration tried to quell these aspirations
with every means available. To inhibit the flow of ideas, no free printing
press was allowed in Brazil until 1808 (after the Portuguese royal court took
up residence in Rio de Janeiro). A special police unit in Lisbon kept detailed
files on potential revolutionaries—even future Portuguese ambassador to
the United States Abbade José Corrêa da Serra, a friend of Thomas Jefferson,
was put under surveillance as a “jacobino”.112 Even so, unabashedly favor-
able views of the United States and its independent political institutions,
described in the pages of the influential newspaper Correio Braziliense
(published in London from 1808-22), circulated among expatriate Brazilians
in Europe, and illegal copies inevitably made their way back to Rio, São
Paulo and Salvador.113
109 Recounted in Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 32-3.

110 Calmon, Pedro, História do Brasil, 3rd ed., vol. 4 pp. 1352-4, cited in Serrão, História de
Portugal, vol. 6, p. 385.
112 Memorandum to the Intendente-Geral of Police, Lisbon, 6 November 1794 (ANTT,
Intendência Geralda Polícia, Conta para as Secretarias, Book 4, p. 214).
113 Henry Hunt Keith, “Independent America through Luso-Brazilian Eyes: The ‘Gazeta
de Lisboa’ (1778-1779) and the ‘Correio Braziliense’ (1808-1822) of London”, in idem, Studies in
Honor of the Bicentennial of American Independence, pp. 29-30, 35-47.
Mostly, however, the Lisbon regime tried to staunch the influx of

American republican influences simply by continuing to prohibit (with
mixed success) direct trade between the United States and Brazil. In the
end, the Americans were forced to accept this unyielding Portuguese posi-
tion. The final version of the first Luso-American Treaty of Commerce and
Friendship was signed in London on 25 April 1786.114
Meanwhile, other circumstances were at work that influenced develop-
ing Portuguese-American relations: both nations’ merchant ships had
become subject to attack by Algerian corsairs. Naturally, the Americans
could no longer expect the protection of the British Navy, but the new
United States lacked warships to safeguard its merchant fleet and, follow-
ing the Peace of Paris in 1783, no European power was interested in provid-
ing such protection.
The Algerians had been kept temporarily at bay by two joint naval expe-
ditions conducted by Malta, Naples, Spain and Portugal in 1783 and 1784. In
1785, however, the Spanish negotiated a separate peace, necessitating the
annual payment of a substantial bribe, euphemistically termed a subsidy,
to the Barbary rulers. Portugal attended these negotiations but refused to
make peace under conditions that demanded tribute.115
With the largest naval force thus removed from the allied powers’ fleet,
the Algerians were able once again to cause substantial damage in the
Mediterranean and along the Iberian coast. During 1785 and 1786, the
Portuguese and Americans suffered painful losses to corsairs: the Portuguese
had to ransom thirteen ships and 125 passengers and crewmen, while the
Americans lost several ships, including some off the Portuguese coast. On
24 July 1785, the Maria from Boston was taken near the Cape of Saint
Vincent; six days later, the Dauphin of Philadelphia was taken eighty miles
northwest of Setúbal.116
In response to these losses, the Americans sent representative John Lamb
to Algiers to see if a negotiated settlement was possible, but the Algerians
predictably demanded another bribe. The Portuguese, for their part, pre-
pared a powerful fleet to patrol the Straits of Gibraltar and the North African
coast.117 Queen Maria ordered her Mediterranean war fleet to protect
American-flagged merchantmen on an equal basis with her own subjects’
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.
vessels. Word of this benevolent act reached the American Congress

through John Jay on 26 September 1786, but the government of the United
States, preoccupied with Shays’ Rebellion, did not respond with an official
message of gratitude until 3 February 1787.118 Shortly thereafter, Congress
also began serious deliberations about funding new U.S. military vessels
capable of protecting national merchant shipping, leading to the Naval Act
of 1794 and the commissioning of an innovative class of “super frigates” like
the USS Constitution.
By the late eighteenth century, warming diplomatic relations and the
steady increase of commercial traffic between the United States and
Portugal convinced John Adams’ administration that this nation—with
such important economic ties and a proven record of friendship shown to
the young republic—should be the recipient of a choice location in the
new capitol city on which to build facilities for its diplomatic mission. In
late spring of 1797, the first Portuguese envoy to the U.S., Cipriano Freire,
sent word to his superiors in Lisbon that the American government had
offered to provide a plot of land in the District of Columbia expressly for the
construction of a residence for Portuguese ministers to the United States.
When the Portuguese ambassador chose a place of honor on “President’s
Square”, immediately accessible to the planned United States Executive
Mansion, John Adams’ commissioners readily approved the site. On 31 May
1798, the President signed and sealed the indenture officially granting the
land to the Queen of Portugal “for the use and purpose of a residence for the
Minister of her said Majesty, her Heirs and Successors forever”. Cipriano
Freire received the title upon the symbolic payment of one United States
dollar.119 The rectangular plot boasted 281 feet of frontage along the east
side of 17th Street N.W. and extended 319 feet east into the square adjacent
to the Executive Mansion.120 In 1797, this area was actually waterfront prop-
erty, being just north of the wharves near the point where the Tiber Creek
entered the Potomac River.121 Today the area is known as “The Ellipse”, the
118 Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, pp. 41-2.

119 Instrument of donation of land in Washington, D.C. for a residence for the ministers
of Portugal, Philadelphia, 5 May 1798 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 551, nrs. 70-4).
120 Ibid.
121 I. Warland, , L. Reid, and C. Smith, “Plan of the City of Washington”, New York, 1795
(ANTT, MNE, cx. 551, nr. 21); attachment to Ofício Number 117 from Cipriano Ribeiro Freire to
Luís Pinto de Sousa Coutinho, Philadelphia, 20 May 1797 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 551, nr. 17), and
Robert King, Sr., “Plan of part of the City of Washington”, made for Cipriano Ribeiro Freire,
c. 1798 (BNL, D. 290 A.).
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.
122 Herring, From Colony to Superpower, pp. 160-1.

123 Luis Teixeira de Sampaio, O Arquivo Histórico do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros
(Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1925), p. 98.
124 Various Ofícios, Lisbon and Washington, D.C., 1850-1 (ANTT, MNE, cx. 116).

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Journal of Early American History 2 (2012) 247–285 brill.

Atlantic Dimensions of the American

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18770703-00203003

Portugal pioneered fundamental navigation techniques in Atlantic waters

an important leg in the Portuguese network of transatlantic commerce.3

3 Mattoso, História de Portugal, pp. 103-11.

North America threatened to destabilize, in economic and political terms,

management of lucrative royal monopolies over an array of imported and

Political Implications of Portuguese Trade with the British North

the duty-free entrance of English woolens into Portugal, in exchange for

18 Douglas L. Wheeler, Historical Dictionary of Portugal (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow

Portuguese salt), bacalhau (codfish) was consumed in such enormous

25 Fisher, The Portugal Trade, p. 42.

Centrality of Brazil to the Portuguese Economy in the

To understand the Portuguese crown’s strong negative reaction to the colo-

Portuguese military weakness in protecting Brazil from invasion.31 After

mid-eighteenth century, set by the Marquês de Pombal, was to rule Brazil

Initial Reaction of the Portuguese Crown to the Declaration

As colonial militiamen and British regulars clashed at Lexington and

44 Maxwell, Pombal, pp. 126-8.

diplomatic channels. Instead, Pombal picked subtler means: he forwarded

48 Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 24.

Spain for the protection of Portuguese colonial interests in South America,

52 Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, D. José, Na Sombra da Pombal (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores,

56 Ibid., and Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 24-5.

Tempting as the prospect was—Silas Deane in Paris and John Adams

60 Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 26-7.

Portuguese Neutrality during the Years of Armed

The Lisbon regime, however, was in no mood or position to be reconciled.

62 Ofiício of Aires de Sá e Mello to D. Vicente De Sousa Coutinho, Lisbon, 27 November

64 Beirão, Dona Maria I, p. 217; Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 28.

paper, to maintain a non-aligned, non-combatant status throughout

67 Cited in Piecuch, “A War Averted”, p. 28.

and anti-interventionist.72 Maria’s government expected that the loss of the

79 Gazeta de Lisboa, 18 September 1778, p. 1 (author’s translation).

83 Wharton, Francis (ed.), The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United

trade ban in a letter to de Sá e Melo, noted that “the Portuguese go to

86 Cited in José Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, Journal

90 Beirão, Dona Maria I, p. 220.

Adams expressed his substantial frustration with the situation in a letter to

Rapid Change in the Portuguese Position Following the Cessation

Lord Cornwallis’ surrender of British forces at Yorktown, Virginia, on 19

98 Ibid., pp. 221-2.

99 Jorge Borges de Macedo, História Diplomática Portuguesa: Constantes e Linhas de

102 Decreto da Rainha D. Maria I que Marca o Reconhecimento da Independência dos

After the Revolution: Impact on Portuguese-American Trade

106 Letter of Benjamin Franklin to D. Vicente de Sousa Coutinho, Passy, France, 7 June

transatlantic trade; Jefferson therefore responded that a conflict with

109 Recounted in Piecuch, “A War Averted”, pp. 32-3.

Mostly, however, the Lisbon regime tried to staunch the influx of

vessels. Word of this benevolent act reached the American Congress

118 Calvet de Magalhães, “Portugal and American Independence”, pp. 41-2.

122 Herring, From Colony to Superpower, pp. 160-1.

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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18770703-00203003