American Revolution was Global

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The Forgotten World War

Exploring the Secret History of the American Revolution, from Spain to India and Back Again by Derek Baxter  published by  Source Books 

Follow the American Revolution far beyond the 13 colonies and trace how diplomacy, logistics, and foreign interests shape independence. We talk with author Derek Baxter about the overlooked allies and global battlefields that turn a colonial revolt into a true world war.

• Mercy Otis Warren as a trailblazing historian with a front-row view of the war
• The Declaration of Independence as a strategic message to foreign powers
• Gunpowder, artillery, and naval weakness as the Patriots’ early crisis
• The failed Canada campaign as a lesson in diplomacy and homework
• Bernardo de Galvez and Spain’s decisive Gulf Coast victories
• Comte de Vergennes and Lafayette driving French support and public momentum
• St Eustatius as a Dutch smuggling hub and the first foreign salute to the US flag
• The Channel Islands and the failed France Spain invasion threat that pins Britain down
• The Mysore Kingdom in India and the rocket technology tied to later British warfare
• Why these stories fade from US memory and why the global view matters now

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Transcript

Welcome to The Revolutionary World War

Michele McAloon 0:04

Hey folks, you're listening to Crossword where Cultural Clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. I hope you had a great Memorial Day, and we've got Father's Day rolling upon us. Go to my website and look at some of the great books that we have been discussing on this podcast. They would make a great, great Father's Day gift, which is panic button, June 5th. There's some great historical narratives out there. So many really good books coming down the pike about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And our interview today with Derek Baxter, who has written The Forgotten World War, is one of those books. Actually, a really, really fun read and would be a great gift-giving book. All right, folks, and you can find out more about me at bookclues.com. Happy listening. God bless. Okay, folks, today we have a fun book about the American Revolution. And it the timing could not be better. I'm going to tell you right up front, I am a America first. I'm an American nationalist, but never an America alone, because nothing in life that is human beings happens alone. And our country did not start out alone, and we're still not alone. And we need to remember that, right? Derek, how are you?

Derek Baxter 1:30

Absolutely. And doing well. Thanks for having me.

Michele McAloon 1:33

Good. So we are introducing Derek Baxter. He is the author of The Forgotten World War, Exploring the Secret History of the American Revolution from Spain to India and back again. And it is a super fun read. Derek Baxter is the author of In Pursuit of Jefferson, Traveling Through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father, in which he recounts his journeys through six countries, armed with a guide written by Jefferson in 1788. This is his second book. He lives with his family in Northern Virginia. And you can follow his adventures at JeffersonTravels.com on a very good website. So Derek, wow, this is a great travel log. It's a great history book, and it's a great book on the perspective of who we are and where we came from.

Mercy Otis Warren And A Lost View

Michele McAloon 2:28

Let's start the conversation with someone who's not even really in your book, but is in the background of your book, and that's Mercy Otis Warren. Tell us about her.

Derek Baxter 2:39

Sure. Mercy Otis Warren, I think a fascinating figure in American history. She was a playwright in Massachusetts and the first female historian in U.S. history. And I came across, you mentioned my project on Jefferson, and I came across a book that Warren had written that Jefferson owned. He had it in his personal library, and then it was part of the books that he sold to the Library of Congress. She wrote one of the earliest histories of the Revolutionary War. And she had a ringside seat to it. You know, her husband was involved, her brother was involved, she was involved. And Jefferson owned this book, he prized it. It barely survived a fire in the Library of Congress. You can still see the scorch marks on the cover, which I thought was really cool. So I came across this book, thought, what an interesting story, started to dip into it and realized that the this the history she was telling about the Revolutionary War went far beyond what we're used to learning in school about the 13 colonies, which all that was part of it. But it turns out the war was a world war and there were theaters, you know, all around the globe. So that kind of sparked my interest in learning more about this side of the Revolutionary War that we hadn't really been taught that much about.

Michele McAloon 3:50

I haven't really heard of her. I mean, I've heard of her name, but I haven't really I mean, and you bring out so many characters, yeah, and they are characters in this book of people that we really haven't heard about, but they were monumental to our success as an American country. Let's sort of start a timeline.

The Declaration As A Call Abroad

Michele McAloon 4:14

We're 1776. We have the Declaration of Independence. What is the Declaration for? And you bring that out. It's a multi-purpose document, but what is one of the primary purposes that most people don't realize?

Derek Baxter 4:28

Well, it was we have Jefferson's beautiful words and inspiring words, but it was much more, the declaration was much more than a document for Americans. It was also for the entire world. And in a way, it was a sort of cry for help from foreign powers and an invitation for the superpowers of the day, France and Spain, to come into the war. So by the time of the Declaration of Independence, we were already in a shooting war with Britain for over a year. Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, other battles had happened a year before. And the Americans realized that after this first year that we were so undermanned taking on the British, the which had the mightiest navy in the world, we didn't have a navy. We're just starting to get a navy. We didn't have the gunpowder, the cannons. We really needed help from foreign powers. And these kingdoms of France and Spain wouldn't deal with a group of irregulars, a group of rebels. You know, protocol and the law of the time demanded that if they were going to officially enter into an alliance, they'd have to do it with another nation-state. So France and Spain were actually already funding the U.S. secretly and already secretly shipping arms, but before independence, but for them to come in as equal partners in the war, we needed to be a country that they recognized. And so that was one of the kind of hidden reasons, I think, for the Declaration of Independence. Not so hidden at the time. This was all said above board, you know, in the Constitutional Congress and elsewhere, but it's one of those things that's been forgotten over time, I think.

Michele McAloon 6:02

One of the things that your book brings forward, too, is just we actually didn't have the ammunition at this point. We didn't have the gunpowder. We were so poorly equipped to actually fight a war. And I never really thought about that. And I guess, you know, the gunpowder arms, that was a lot of what these battles were about with the British in the early part of the war. Is that correct?

Derek Baxter 6:27

Absolutely. Yeah, that was one of the one of the reasons that some of those early battles happened. The British were trying to keep the Patriots from keeping hold of the munitions at Lexington and Concord. Uh, the Americans attacked Fort Ticonderoga to get artillery there. So, what we did have, we had lots of soldiers. We had lots of young men who could join the army, and many of them had hunting rifles or muskets, but we didn't mass produce arms. We certainly didn't make much gunpowder, and there weren't foundries to produce the cannon that we needed to stand up against the British. So we it was a complete David and Goliath story from the beginning, and we were just the underdogs and needed help, needed to find a way to get these military supplies that we couldn't make ourselves.

Michele McAloon 7:09

Well, one of the really charming aspects of your book is you actually it's like it's a travelog because you actually go to Fort Ticonderoga and you meet the reenactors and the colorful characters, and I didn't really realize the history of that we had tried to go to Canada, we tried to go to Quebec, and turned out to be pretty disastrous. Old Benedict Arnold gets shot in the leg there in Ticonda Rogue. He gets shot in Canada, right?

Derek Baxter 7:36

That's right. Yeah, it was it was a disaster. And stepping back, yeah, I think that was one of the fun parts of the book for me, and hopefully for the reader going to these places. I tried not to write straight up academic history, but to really get out there and get my hands dirty and look at the places today and talk to reenactors or descendants sometimes of people who had fought or local historians who could really tell me these stories. And the Canada expedition was certainly, again, one of these parts of the Revolutionary War that I hadn't heard much about in school, but it was hard for me to believe. It was even before the Declaration of Independence was signed. So late 1775, we decided to mount a full-fledged invasion of Canada. It wasn't completely crazy because Canada was pretty lightly defended by the British. They weren't expecting an attack. But the idea was that the people of Quebec would rise up and join us and also want to rebel from Britain. There were a couple of early victories by the Americans, but it wound up being a total debacle. They tried to take Quebec City. If any of your listeners have ever been to Quebec City, you can see it's on this promontory. There's a whole citadel, which wasn't built at the time, but they did have other fortifications. It's just a fool's errand to try to take that, especially without enough men and artillery and everything, to do a proper siege and attack on Quebec. So it was a valiant try, but it completely backfired. And one of the problems, I think, also was that we really hadn't done our homework. We thought that marching into Canada, the people would see us and welcome us as a liberating force, but we hadn't done the homework of diplomacy and figuring out what did the people of Quebec really want? What were their interests? How can we make common cause? Towards the end of that invasion, Benjamin Franklin was sent up there along with a Catholic priest and a delegate, Charles Carroll, who was Catholic, which was a really good overture to talk to the Quebeccois, but it was all it came pretty late in the process. And so I think that was a lesson that some of the leaders learned was that the diplomacy part of things has to start a lot earlier.

Michele McAloon 9:33

Rules of war don't change. Our technology changes, but how we conduct war based on the rules of war, and it really shows in your book, you mean there's about diplomacy and communications and having the right equipment, having the right equipment at the right time. It doesn't matter whether it's this war 250 years ago or whether it's a war today. It really actually is a lot about the realities of logistics and getting people together and ammunition. And it's a good lesson for us to remember. You have such so many great characters. I don't know where to start.

Galvez Strikes Along The Gulf Coast

Michele McAloon 10:10

Like Bernard Galvez. Yes. He's great. He's like, I think he's my favorite.

Derek Baxter 10:15

Oh, I think he was he was one of my favorites too. He's another great character, kind of unsung hero of the Revolutionary War, a Spanish general, very young. He was in his early 30s during the war, and he came from this small little town, village in Andalusia that still hosts this pageant every 4th of July to honor him and the rest of his family that fought in the Revolutionary War, which we went to, and it's just what a great story. If if if anyone is ever traveling in the south of Spain around the 4th of July, look this town up, look up Bernardo de Galvez and try to attend this pageant because, you know, they have fireworks, they have hot dogs, it's the most American thing you can do, and yet you're in the mountains of Spain. But Bernardo was just a very dynamic lever leader, and he was the governor of the province of Louisiana. Louisiana had been French. The French transferred it to Spain after the Seven Years' War, before the Revolutionary War. So Spain was now in control. And but Bernardo wasn't in a very strong position. There weren't that many Spanish settlers there. The French settlers didn't totally trust him. The British were in Florida and were much more heavily armed. And yet he was this leader that really connected with the people of his province. And he persuaded them to follow him, and he took the same hardships and risks they did. He slept on the ground with his men. He embarked on this very uh bold lightning campaign to surprise the British, even though he was the underdog. He started attacking their forts along the Gulf Coast and ultimately won this really key victory by taking the main British fort in Pensacola, Florida, which secured the Gulf of Mexico for the Spanish and played into the Yorktown campaign. It just really shored up things for the French and the Spanish and the Americans by by cleaning out the British forts there.

Michele McAloon 12:01

And I'm from Mobile, Alabama. I know where these forts are. I have a beach house on Il Dafien. So I think originally settled. So I mean, it's so it's it's such an American story because also you talk about how New Orleans actually was more Spanish than French at one point. Yeah.

Derek Baxter 12:20

That yes, that that was something I wasn't expecting at all. So when I went to New Orleans to learn more about Bernardo's story, I hear about the French quarter, and and I found out it was just as much Spanish that the architectural style, the balconies that we're so used to, a lot of that came from the Spanish, which a light bulb went off. It was like, oh yes, I have seen that style in other places in Spain or Latin America. The Spanish were there for a long time, for many decades. But the French got the province back right at the very end, right before they sold it to Thomas Jefferson. So we just, I think, in our heads have it. It's a French city, but it was such a multicultural city with people from all over the Caribbean coming there. So a lot of fascinating history there. And I also had no idea that there were revolutionary war battles in Louisiana and Alabama and Florida. You know, you think about Valley Forge and Massachusetts, but the fighting was all over, you know, way outside of the borders of the 13 colonies.

Michele McAloon 13:09

And it always surprised me that Georgia. Georgia's so far away from Massachusetts. It always kind of shocks me. The one thing is the colonists, they were actually, they really were fighting against a behamoth of the British Empire. So it was in this fight against the British Empire, everybody else was willing to jump in on this. They were willing to take the big dog down, whether it was Spain, whether it was Mexico, whether it was India. Your thesis is that this really truly was a world war at this point.

Derek Baxter 13:43

It absolutely was. Yeah, as I was saying earlier, you know, taking on the British Empire with about 100,000 soldiers and war. They had the most powerful Navy in the history of the world. It was a such a gargantuan task for the Americans. Luckily for them, for us, that all these allies and partners showed up. They didn't always sympathize with the cause of liberty, of March for Freedom. They were doing it for their own interests, which is what allies always do. You always analyze your own interest and then find what you have in common, obviously, with your partner. So France and Spain were still monarchies. They didn't want a revolution like that in their own country, but they did want to knock Britain down a peg because after the Seven Years' War, which Britain overwhelmingly won, the balance of power was shifted. And instead of having all of these different powers balancing each other out, it was Britain was ascendant. France and Spain wanted anything they could do to knock down Britain, and also in Spain's case, to recover territory that they had lost from their empire. So Britain had alienated a lot of other countries for a lot of reasons after the Seven Years' War, but basically acting somewhat arrogantly in their relations with them. And in the Seven Years' War, it was Britain with countries versus France and Spain, you know, coalitions on each side. In the American Revolution, it was pretty much Britain against the world because aside from some Iroquois nations, no one came in on the British side. So it was Britain versus France, Spain, the US, the Dutch, the Mysore Kingdom, and India. And it just ground the British down. Eventually, it was too much for them to handle. They were being attacked. Their colonies around the world were being attacked. So that's what the war turned into kind of a grind that it was, it was just too many resources and too much risk for the British to continue.

France The Dutch And Channel Fear

Michele McAloon 15:24

We couldn't have done it without France. And we are Americans because of France, whether we like to admit that or not. But and one of the founding fathers that you never hear about, I think he's definitely a founding father, and that's the Comte de Verzan, right? He wow. He his story needs to be told over and over again because he really is one of the founding fathers of America.

Derek Baxter 15:46

I think so. This nobody, you know, he's a hint and figure in history. We have a town in Vermont named after him, but that's about it, which is good. But he he was so important. So the Comte de Virgen, the foreign minister of France during this time, hit himself with a very interesting story. He wasn't from one of those extremely rich and powerful aristocratic families either. He rose his way up through the diplomatic ranks. He was posted in Turkey, where he married somebody there who was of Turkish Greek descent, which was a big scandal at the time. Such an interesting guy because of all the different people in King Louis XVI's cabinet, he was the one who was most in favor of helping the Americans and bringing France into the war from the beginning. And again, not out of necessarily a love of liberty, but out of this idea that they wanted to defeat Britain. And Virgen wrote that we can never let this opportunity slip through their fingers. They knew that Britain being tied down fighting the rebels in America was this golden opportunity for them to really put pressure on the British. So Virgen to spent a couple of years secretly arming the Washington's army and biding his time and getting France ready for war, getting the ships of the line built, getting his soldiers trained, trying to convince Spain to enter. And then finally in 1778, France officially entered the war. And it was such a help. That was the reason the British started diverting troops outside of the U.S. So we think of Washington at Valley Forge suffering through that winter, and the British over in Philadelphia, just about 20 miles away, living in comfort, and everyone's thinking, okay, once the winter's over, the British are going to march out. They have a much bigger army. They're going to wipe up the Americans. That didn't happen. They evacuated Philadelphia in the spring of 1778. Why? Because the French had just entered the war. All of a sudden, the British didn't care about Philadelphia that much. They needed to send thousands of men down to Jamaica before the French seized that island. The French coming into the war had this ripple effect and changed the strategy and opened up all these different theaters. And uh just Washington and the men at Valley Forge were just overjoyed when they heard about the French Alliance because they knew that all of a sudden Britain would be pinned down in different parts of the world.

Michele McAloon 18:03

And Marquis de Lafayette. Wow.

Derek Baxter 18:05

He's one of them that we we do know about, but he's worth the praise. Lafayette, I mean, there are, I think, something like 80 different towns and places named after Lafayette in the country. I was born in a place named after him, even probably lots of people are. We love Lafayette. And he was such a symbol. He was not only a great tactician on the battlefield, he helped, along with Virgin, helped galvanize French popular opinion. He he made the American cause trendy because the Marquis de Lafayette, he was this teenager when he came to America. He was fabulously wealthy, one of the most, and from one of the most powerful aristocratic families in France. The idea that this 19-year-old would volunteer to help the cause of liberty, and he was more motivated for liberty, probably than Burgin was, to come to America and fight for a country that wasn't even his own. He just became, you know, the darling of all the salons in Paris and in Versailles. Everybody was following his exploits and he made the cause trendy. So and he put pressure on the French behind the scenes too to officially come in. So Lafayette, such a great character. I I never get tired about reading about Lafayette.

Michele McAloon 19:13

He was a social media influencer before influence, my goodness. So just so interesting. Now you visit some very interesting places. You visit a place that I actually had to look up on the map because I'd never heard of it. Stasia. Yes. Am I saying that right?

Derek Baxter 19:28

Yes, yes. St. Eustatius, Stasia, the nickname that everybody uses. Uh-huh.

Michele McAloon 19:32

Tell our audience where that is and why you visited there.

Derek Baxter 19:35

Well, I had never heard of this island before doing this research, but it's a tiny, it's a speck of island in the Caribbean, in the Leeward Islands. It's only a quarter the size of Manhattan. Only a few thousand people live there. But in the 1700s, it this was the Netherlands, the Dutch Republics, they called it the Golden Rock. It was their great market for trade. And ships came from all over the Caribbean to dock at Stasia and get different trade goods. Americans did a lot of trade, a lot of tobacco trade with Stasia. And during the war, during the very early years of the war, Dutch merchants would ship arms to Stasia, and American ships would come down and pick them up. They're all smuggled because the Dutch weren't in the war officially yet. It was all completely illegal, and the British would stop, you know, stop if they could, you know, intercept the ships. But that's how so many of the guns and gunpowders, gunpowder came up to the Patriots in those years. But it was, it's, it, it had a real interesting place in history. It was the first place that the American flag was saluted by a foreign power. So the story is in the fall of 1776, we sent a brig down to Stasia and they were going to trade and get and get more goods, and they're flying the American flag, and they had a copy of the Declaration of Independence, which was, you know, newly written. And the Dutch commander fired off a big salute for the Americans coming in, which really raised the morale, and they had a big party by the time they landed. And even today, St. Eustatius celebrates this day as Stasia Day. It remains part of the Netherlands. And this is their big national day, November 16th. They always have a big celebration. We went down there to see it. It was just a lot of fun. I mean, they recreate the salute, and there's speeches, and there's food, and there's dancing all night. And this fall is going to be the 250th anniversary. So I think they're going to pull out all the stops. Just like that 4th of July party in Spain, I was mentioning earlier. It's so interesting to find these for to me to see these little spots of the Revolutionary War being celebrated in other countries and places we may not have even heard of.

Michele McAloon 21:42

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You also go to the George. I love this. You use this line. You go to the OG Jersey shore.

Derek Baxter 21:49

That's right. That's right. Another, another really interesting place you can travel to and see a little part of uh the Revolutionary War you probably didn't know was was there. So Jersey is an island in the Channel Islands in the English Channel. It was the site of fighting twice during the Revolutionary War, controlled by the British. It's well worth the trip. You can take a ferry from England, but you could also take a ferry from France. It's actually much closer to Normandy than it is to England. And there's a castle there, there's a reenactor, it's just a lot of fun. It's a fantastic trip if you can make it there. It really interested me because there's an angle of the Revolutionary War I had never heard of, which was that France and Spain tried to invade England. So that definitely wasn't in my history book, that England itself, England was the aggressor. They almost had this huge army of 60,000 soldiers land on their shores. The French and the Spanish assembled this huge armada, the biggest since the Spanish armada of the 1500s. And it failed. Obviously, there wasn't any big marching of the troops into London. I'm sure we would have heard of that if it had happened. It failed because the men got sick and there were just all sorts of logistical problems. The French and Spanish naval captains hadn't figured out how to cooperate. They weren't even using some of the same flags and signals. And it was just kind of a debacle upon debacle. One of the advanced parties actually landed on Jersey and had a battle there. But the invasion of England actually had an interesting effect in that it it, as you would imagine, it scared the English because the French and Spanish withdrew their troops. They withdrew their ships. They didn't land, but they still had all those ships. And at any time, they could go back and have a surprise visit. So for the rest of the war, Britain heavily defended the English Channel. It was just full of British ships of the line. That helped the Americans, the French a lot at Yorktown. So many ships of the line were back defending the homeland, so to speak, that it was much easier for us at Yorktown because they they they started, they didn't send the same amount of forces to America after that.

Michele McAloon 23:51

Funny how tactics don't change. That's right. That's interesting. That's interesting. Okay.

Mysore Rockets And The Last Battle

Michele McAloon 23:58

Now, India. That one is wild. And it's kind of the kind of the same thing that happened in the Jersey Shore, pending down troops. But talk a little bit about that, about the Mysore Kingdom. That would be the last place in the world that you would think of. So explain that to the audience. It's interesting.

Derek Baxter 24:16

Absolutely. India, in at the time of the Revolutionary War, was there were still many different states and kingdoms at play. It was not like later, like we might think of in the 19th century when Britain controlled pretty much the whole subcontinent. There were strong British presence and colonies, but the French also had colonies, the Dutch did, and many Indian kingdoms, as I said, were still strong. The British, they actually got word of that France was in the war before the French did in India, because they got word through Egypt, and France didn't have that way to get that early warning. So the British took the offensive and immediately started attacking the French in India to try to kick them out. And that triggered the anger of the Mysore Kingdom, which was a kingdom in the southwest of India that had very friendly relations with the French. They didn't want to see the British come in there and potentially threaten them. They had fought the British before. So the Mysore Kingdom entered the fray, huge army, 90,000 men, which just blows my mind because Washington was incredibly pleased to get 20,000 men in the field. So here in this army, like maybe four times the size of the Continental Army, marching through the plains of South India. They had cavalry, they had men on elephants, which scared the way. They also had soldiers firing rockets encased in iron tubes, which impressed the British so much that they copied the technology and incorporated it into their own army. So when we sing the Star Spangled Banner, we get to that line of the rocket's red glare. That's Mysorean technology that the British had taken. And then by the time of the War of 1812, when the Star Spangled Banner was written, it had become something they were using. So more fighting throughout the war. Again, this is diverting resources from America. Britain had to start sending more troops and reinforcements to India. The French of the Mysore Kingdom actually did pretty well during the war there. And again, there was such a time lag. It took so many months to get news to India that the fighting continued there after everybody else had already agreed to a peace deal. It kept going for about another six months. And the very last battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in India. It was a pitched battle between the British and the French and the Mysoreans. And the French and Mysoreans were winning when all of a sudden a British ship came sailing up with a message, and then a messenger came out with a white flag and said, the war's over. You've got to stop fighting, which made the French and Mysoreans pretty upset. They're like, well, if if you were winning, you never would have said that. But but I went to that little town in India. I mean, this is definitely off the beaten track. But so fascinating to me that you can see a I saw the ruins of a fort there that made me think of some of the other forts I had seen in America, even, you know, some of the same architectural style. It's all part of the same war.

Michele McAloon 26:59

Interesting. I mean, that is so interesting. What do they have in France? The Vauban.

Derek Baxter 27:04

The Baubon, yes.

Michele McAloon 27:05

Yeah, the Vauban. And actually, if you go down to Mobile and Pensacola, you see that kind of same style of uh fortress or ruins down there, which I find very interesting. The timeline at the early you had the early years of the war, you had the middle years of the war, and then you had the late years. So late year being Yorktown, early years being Bunker Hill, right?

Speaker 1 27:27

Correct.

Michele McAloon 27:28

But you look at sort of 1779 as the midpoint and as kind of the apex of this was fighting around the world at this time.

Derek Baxter 27:38

Yeah, I think so much, yes, our histories were so focused on the early years, and of course, getting into the war and some of those great victories in the early years, like or almost victories, like Bunker Hill, and then Saratoga was a tremendous American victory in the fall of 1777. And then we often skip over or kind of yada yada yada a lot of the space between Saratoga and Viley Forge came after Saratoga, and then all the way to Yorktown. You know, that's that's a full three plus years of the war that's often, sometimes anyway, glossed over because why? Because not so much was happening relatively in the 13 colonies. That's when France and Spain entered the war and it in the Dutch, and then it expanded into all these other theaters. There was fighting in Central America. The British took over Nicaragua from the Spanish. There was fighting all over the Caribbean, fighting in the North Sea. The Spanish mounted this huge siege of Gibraltar, which is the British outpost, right on the coast of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. So there were huge battles throughout the war, not as many, relatively speaking, in the U.S. It's hard to keep track of them sometimes, but that's what I tried to do was even take a snapshot. Like here is a day of the life. Say, here is July 4th, 1779. What is going on in the world? It turns out there's all sorts of things going on all around the world on the same day. So that that helped kind of put it into perspective for me that just while Washington was in, you know, was kind of waiting for something to happen here, the Spanish were attacking here and the the French were defending here, and just so much, so so many different theaters that play at once, basically.

Michele McAloon 29:20

Yeah, it's it's a nice technique that you use. Marcy Otis Warren, how did she get all this information? How did she, I mean, she was basically, she was in Boston, right? Or Massachusetts. How did she come upon all this information? Because there's oftentimes in your book where you say, Well, I I looked it up on my phone, or I'm looking it up. And folks, you can go and buy her book from Kindle, download it for $1.79. And I did. And I was reading through, it's a little bit, it's old English, but it's but it actually is. She's a good writer. She's a beautiful writer.

Derek Baxter 29:56

Yeah, she was a poet and a playwright, and she wrote, and it was just uh what a trailblazer because she wrote her plays and they're published in newspapers, but not under her own name. It was anonymous because they wouldn't publish in Massachusetts a play written by a woman at the time, but it would do very biting whip, very satirical plays against the British when they were occupying Boston in the very early, early years of the war, and wrote, you know, poems about the Boston Tea Party. She was good friends with John Adams and Abigail Adams. And she was right there in the middle of it. So her husband was in the Massachusetts legislature, and he also had different roles with the Continental Army and Navy. She met the Washingtons when they were posted up there in Cambridge. She and Martha Washington, after the fighting was all over, they actually toured Charleston and saw where Bunker Hill happened together, which I would have loved to have somehow tagged along and seen that, right? As their scene where all this fighting happened. She was just a dogged historian. She she wrote to generals and asked them for all of letters, for information. She met Lafayette, she met with a Spanish officer, Francisco de Miranda, who had been at with Galvez at some of these campaigns. She clipped stuff from the newspaper and she worked on her Magna Opus for years and overcame health issues. She was having vision issues, personal tragedies, a death of a son, and yet she persevered and came out with this book, which, yes, as you say, you can read it today. It just her perspective on the war. And again, such an interesting thing for me that she published it finally in 1805. It was actually ready quite a bit earlier, but it finally got published in 1805. Jefferson praised her. And it was interesting that she just so matter-of-factly talked about the world war. So she didn't have to sell it and say, oh, wait, you have to believe me that the war was fought outside of her borders. Look, there's stuff in the Caribbean. No, everybody knew. All the readers back then in 1805 knew because they had been reading about this in the newspapers too. It was more over time that the role of the Spanish and the Dutch started dropping out of the history. But but she just very matter-of-factly described some of these actions and then added her own flourishes to it. So yeah, I I found that kind of a really interesting angle to use to explore this war.

Why Allies Vanished From Our Memory

Michele McAloon 32:10

Why do you think we've forgotten these characters? Well, because they were so large. Europe has been was so important to us, and we seem to have forgotten that now. But why do you think some of these characters fell by the wayside? Because it's not that they're not low colorful and that they were successful. I I mean, these they these should have been great boys' books for years, right? Oh, for sure. For sure. Yes.

Derek Baxter 32:32

I remember reading, yes, yeah, as a kid, reading stories of that. I would have loved to have read about Bernardo and all of his adventures and things like that. So they're great stories. And I think, and the founders knew about it. That I mean, again, this is not something that Washington was was trying to sweep under the rug. It happened over time. It happened over the 19th and 20th century, probably, and people have done studies of this. Uh, Professor Larry Ferrero has actually uh did a study of how many times the Spanish and different people were cited in different histories, and it's just it's just declining. It's like a graph, like going downwards. Perhaps because America was expanding and we were clashing with the Spanish and over territory and land, and they weren't, they weren't seen as as the good guys anymore. It became just a very American story, you know, as part of our manifest destiny. We started to forget that at the beginning, we came to these powers very much hat in hand. We were very dependent on their Navy, on the arms they could send, on the money. France and Spain sent the equivalent of $30 billion in US dollars, just direct aid to the US, much less all the money they spent on their own militaries and especially the Navy, because navies in the 18th century were very expensive to maintain. So it was a tremendous contribution, but it just fell away for a variety of reasons. And I think it's it might be starting to come back now. I I hope so. I hope people are taking more notice of just the global scope of this war now.

Michele McAloon 34:01

I hope so. We need to understand that. We need to understand that more than ever right now. And I tell you, there's been several historical narratives that I've had the great, great opportunity to interview. These historical narratives are focusing on different voices, whether it's the founding of the West or the Lewis and Clark adventure. We don't do things alone. We do things as, I mean, as human beings, we live in community and nobody is a hero out there alone. There's so many voices, and especially in founding a nation, we have in founding this nation above all nations, there are so many different voices. I mean, you bring up Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end where he's bringing people in. I mean, that's great, you know. Right.

Derek Baxter 34:42

Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a talk at Mount Vernon on the 4th of July. They always had a speaker, naturalization ceremony for immigrants, and he was talking about his own story and making jokes about his Austrian accent, but but also so proud of all these people from different countries who had chosen to become Americans and gone through all the process to do so. And it just struck me watching the serum had about a hundred people or so there at the ceremony. How many of them came from countries that had something to do with our with our war, either as directly as allies and partners, or there were just battles fought in those areas? And I don't, it's it was just a different perspective for me that the war was much bigger than the people who fought here. Obviously, the Americans were the key part of it. We're the ones who instigated the war, made all sorts of sacrifices, but we absolutely couldn't have done it alone and and without France and Spain. And I think no one recognized that more than George Washington. He was absolutely thrilled to get to get the help from those two powers.

Michele McAloon 35:34

Sure. And we still can't do it alone. We've got it. I mean, we're all this in together, and we're the most dynamic, strongest nation on earth because we do hear different voices and we see different voices and we use that energy, and and we we that's who we need to be.

Book Launch And Support The Show

Michele McAloon 35:50

Derek Baxter, I congratulate you on this book. And folks, if you want a fun read about to celebrate the 250th signing of the Declaration of Independence, this is a great book. It would be great for again, it'd be great for an older teenager, it'd be great for a book club. It really, if you want to learn a bunch of stuff that you never knew, I never knew. I had to look up where the dollar sign came from. I didn't realize that was from the Spanish pay cell. That's right. Yeah. So I mean, there's all kinds of great tidbits and hidden nuggets and and big picture stuff here. Derek, when does this book come out?

Derek Baxter 36:27

It comes out May 26th.

Michele McAloon 36:28

Okay, and it's by a publisher called Source Books. So congratulations. I wish you the best. And I really, really hope this uh book gets wide coverage because it really does make you appreciate not only the United States, but everybody who helped found the United States.

Derek Baxter 36:46

Well, thank you so much, Michelle. Really enjoy the conversation. Yes, I think it's it's such a great story. So, yes, I hope people learn more about the story of our founding, which definitely put it in a different perspective for me.

Michele McAloon 36:57

I do too. And also, Derek kind of rates uh the different beers he talks about throughout the world. So we're also not alone in. I like that. All right. Thank you very much, Derek.

Speaker 1 37:08

Thanks for showing.

Michele McAloon 37:12

Hey folks, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope you learned a lot. I hope you go out and buy the book because it really is a great read. And if you could be so kind to like and subscribe to my podcast, it would really be appreciated. You can find out more about me at bookclues.com. Thank you. Thanks for listening.