Spain in the American Revolutionary War Spain actively supported the Thirteen Colonies throughout the American Revolutionary War , beginning in 1776 by jointly funding Roderigue Hortalez and Company , a trading company that provided critical military supplies , through financing the final Siege of Yorktown in 1781 with a collection of gold and silver in Havana , Cuba . Spain was allied with France through the Bourbon Family Compact , and also viewed the Revolution as an opportunity to weaken the British Empire , which had caused Spain substantial losses during the Seven Years ' War . As the newly appointed Prime Minister , José Moñino y Redondo , Count of Floridablanca , wrote in March 1777 , " the fate of the colonies interests us very much , and we shall do for them everything that circumstances permit " . Aid to the Colonies : 1776 – 1778 . Spanish aid was supplied to the colonies through four main routes : from French ports with the funding of Roderigue Hortalez and Company , through the port of New Orleans and up the Mississippi River , from the warehouses in Havana , and from Bilbao , through the Gardoqui family trading company . Smuggling from New Orleans began in 1776 , when General Charles Lee sent two Continental Army ( the army of the Thirteen Colonies ) officers to request supplies from the New Orleans Governor , Luis de Unzaga . Unzaga , concerned about overtly antagonizing the British before the Spanish were prepared for war , agreed to assist the rebels covertly . Unzaga authorized the shipment of desperately needed gunpowder in a transaction brokered by Oliver Pollock , a Patriot ( Revolutionary ) and financier . When Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid , Count of Gálvez was appointed Governor of New Orleans in January 1777 , he continued and expanded the supply operations . As the Patriot Benjamin Franklin reported from Paris to the Congressional Committee of Secret Correspondence in March 1777 , the Spanish court quietly granted the rebels direct admission to the rich , previously restricted port of Havana under most favored nation status . Franklin also noted in the same report that three thousand barrels of gunpowder were waiting in New Orleans , and that the merchants in Bilbao " had orders to ship for us such necessaries as we might want . " Declaration of war . The Spanish had sustained serious losses against the British in the Seven Years War ( 1756 - 1763 ) , and these losses less than two decades earlier heavily influenced their timing in entering the American Revolutionary War in the 1770s . During the Seven Years War the British had attacked and occupied two of Spain ' s key trading ports : Havana ( in Cuba ) and Manila ( in the Philippines ) in 1762 . In the peace settlement of 1763 Spain recovered Havana by ceding Florida , including St . Augustine , which the Spanish had founded in 1565 . Spain recovered the Philippines later . The Spanish ministers had concerns about Spain ' s geographic neighbor Portugal , an ally of the British , and about Portugal ' s immensely wealthy treasure fleet that was due to sail from Havana . The former Spanish Prime Minister and then - Ambassador to the French Court , Jerónimo Grimaldi , 1st Duke of Grimaldi , summarized the Spanish position in a letter to Arthur Lee , an American diplomat in Madrid who was trying to persuade the Spanish to declare an open alliance with the fledgling United States . Genoese by birth and a shrewdly calculating politico by nature , Grimaldi demurred , replying , " You have considered your own situation , and not ours . The moment is not yet come for us . The war with Portugal — France being unprepared , and our treasure ships from South America not being arrived — makes it improper for us to declare immediately . " Meanwhile , Grimaldi reassured Lee , stores of clothing and powder were deposited at New Orleans and Havana for the Americans , and further shipments of blankets were being collected at Bilbao . By June 1779 the Spanish had finalized their preparations for war . The British cause seemed to be at a particularly low ebb . The Spanish joined France in the war , implementing the Treaty of Aranjuez signed in April 1779 . War fronts . European waters . The main goals of Spain were , as in the Seven Years ' War , the recovery of Gibraltar and Minorca from the British , who had owned them since 1704 and to damage British trade through the actions of privateer s . In 1780 and 1781 , Luis de Córdova y Córdova ' s fleet captured great America bound British convoys , doing much damage to British military supplies and commerce . The siege of Gibraltar , June 16 , 1779 to February 7 , 1783 , was the longest lasting Spanish action in the war . Despite the larger size of the besieging Franco - Spanish army , at one point numbering 33 , 000 , the British under George Augustus Elliott were able to hold out in the fortress and were resupplied by sea three times . Luis de Córdova y Córdova was unable to prevent Howe ' s fleet returning home after resupplying Gibraltar in October 1782 . The combined Franco - Spanish invasion of Minorca in 1781 met with more success ; Minorca surrendered the following year , and was restored to Spain after the war , nearly eighty years after it was first captured by the British . West Indies and Gulf Coast . In the Caribbean , the main effort was directed to prevent possible British landings in Cuba , remembering the British expedition against Cuba that seized Havana in the Seven Years War . Other goals included the reconquest of Florida ( which the British had divided into West Florida and East Florida in 1763 ) , and the resolution of logging disputes involving the British in Belize . On the mainland , the governor of Spanish Louisiana , Count Bernardo de Gálvez , led a series of successful offensives against the British forts in the Mississippi Valley , first capturing Fort Bute at Manchac and then forcing the surrender of Baton Rouge , Natchez and Mobile in 1779 and 1780 . While a hurricane halted an expedition to capture Pensacola , the capital of British West Florida , in 1780 , Gálvez ' s forces achieved a decisive victory against the British in 1781 at the Battle of Pensacola giving the Spanish control of all of West Florida . This secured the southern route for supplies and closed off the possibility of any British offensive into the western frontier of United States via the Mississippi River . When Spain entered the war , Britain also went on the offensive in the Caribbean , planning an expedition against Spanish Nicaragua . A British attempt to gain a foothold at San Fernando de Omoa was rebuffed in October 1779 , and an expedition in 1780 against Fort San Juan in Nicaragua was at first successful , but yellow fever and other tropical diseases wiped out most of the force , which then withdrew back to Jamaica . Following these successes , an unauthorised Spanish force captured the Bahamas in 1782 , without battle . In 1783 Gálvez was preparing to invade Jamaica from Cuba , but these plans were aborted when Britain sued for peace . American Midwest . At the end of the Seven Years War , France gifted the Mississippi Valley to her ally Spain , in order to prevent it from coming under British control at the Treaty of Paris ( 1763 ) . The Spanish assisted the Thirteen Colonies in their campaigns in the American Midwest . In January 1778 , Virginia Governor Patrick Henry authorized an expedition by George Rogers Clark , who captured the fort at Vincennes and secured the northern region of the Ohio for the rebels . Clark relied on Gálvez and Oliver Pollock for support to supply his men with weapons and ammunition , and to provide credit for provisions . The credit lines that Pollock established to purchase supplies for Clark were supposed to be backed by the state of Virginia . However , Pollock in turn had to rely on his own personal credit and Gálvez , who allowed the funds of the Spanish government to be at Pollock ' s disposal as loans . These funds were usually delivered in the dark cover of night by Gálvez ' s private secretary . The Spanish garrisons in the Louisiana region repelled attacks from British units and the latter ' s Indian allies in the Battle of Saint Louis in 1780 . A year later , a detachment travelled through present - day Illinois and took Fort St . Joseph , in the modern state of Michigan . This expedition gave Spain some claim to the Northwest Territory , which was thwarted diplomatically by Great Britain and the young United States in their separate peace in the Treaty of Paris ( 1783 ) . Siege of Yorktown . The Spanish also assisted in the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 , the critical and final major battle of the War . French General Jean - Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur , comte de Rochambeau , commanding his country ' s forces in North America , sent a desperate appeal to François Joseph Paul de Grasse , the French admiral designated to assist the Colonists , asking him to raise money in the Caribbean to fund the campaign at Yorktown . With the assistance of Spanish agent Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis , the needed cash , over 500 , 000 in silver pesos , was raised in Havana , Cuba within 24 hours . This money was used to purchase critical supplies for the siege , and to fund payroll for the Continental Army . Peace of Paris . The reforms made by Spanish authorities as a result of Spain ' s poor performance in the Seven Years War had proved generally successful . As a result , Spain retained Minorca and West Florida in the Treaty of Paris and also regained East Florida . The lands east of the Mississippi , however , were recognized as part of the newly independent United States of America . Contribution to victory . The involvement of other European states in the war contributed significantly to British defeat . Spain ' s contribution was just as significant as France ' s due largely in part to its extensive interests in the region . By allying themselves to foreign monarchies , the colonies took advantage of the power struggles boiling within European imperialism and essentially formed a united front against Britain . Despite the aims of the revolutionary colonies , and the republicanism which could threaten Spain ' s own colonies , and later did , in the Latin American wars of independence , Spain maintained a level of support throughout the war in pursuit of its geopolitical interests . Aftermath . Spain ' s involvement in the American Revolutionary War was widely regarded as a successful one . The Spanish took a gamble in entering the war , banking on Great Britain ' s vulnerability caused by the effort of fighting their rebellious colonists in North America while also conducting a global war on many fronts against a coalition of major powers . This helped Spain gain some relatively easy conquests . The war gave a boost to the kingdom ' s prestige , which had suffered from the losses to Britain in the Seven Years War . Even though Spain ' s single most coveted target , Gibraltar , remained out of its grasp , Spain had more than compensated by recovering Minorca and by reducing the British threat to its colonies in and around the Caribbean , all of which were seen as vital to Spanish interests . Spain was seen to have received tangible results out of the war , especially in contrast to its ally France . The French king had invested huge amounts of manpower , finance and resources for little clear military or economic gain . France had been left with crippling debts which it struggled to pay off , and which would become one of the major causes of the French Revolution that broke out in 1789 . Spain , in comparison , disposed of its debts more easily , partly due to the stunning increases in silver production from the mines in Mexico and Bolivia . One particular outcome of the war was the manner in which it enhanced the position of Prime Minister Floridablanca , and his government continued to dominate Spanish politics until 1792 . Don Diego de Gardoqui , of the Gardoqui trading company that had greatly assisted the rebels during the war , was appointed as Spain ' s first ambassador to the United States of America in 1784 . Gardoqui became well acquainted with George Washington , and marched in the newly elected President Washington ' s inaugural parade . King Charles III of Spain continued communications with Washington , sending him livestock from Spain that Washington had requested for his farm at Mount Vernon . External links . df∞ ¶ ¶ ¶