"The U.S. Arms Trade in the Age of Latin American Revolutions, 1815-1825"

Our paper uses new research on the international arms trade to address the significance of U.S. support for the Latin American independence wars. The international arms trade, often a clandestine effort, has been largely concealed from scholars as historical actors in the Western Hemisphere purposefully obscured the sources that detailed the regular flow of war materiel, including its financing, manufacture, marketing, and trade. Historians have previously demonstrated that this arms trade involved Latin American purchasing agents soliciting loans and weapons from the U.S. federal government, a country whose populace largely sympathized with their republican anti-colonial struggle. Until now, the multi-layered exchanges behind Atlantic commodity chains concealed an important fact about the arms trade: despite an official policy of neutrality, the Madison administration, federal bureaucrats, and arms contractors regularly participated in the sale of weapons to insurgent nations.
Drawing on research in War and State Department records, merchants’ and manufacturers’ papers, newspapers, and trade statistics, we will explore how the U.S. arms and munitions trade functioned in Latin America during the late 1810s and early 1820s. We will home in on small arms and gunpowder as commodities to explain how, despite the different market dynamics at play, U.S. federal officials directed trade to strengthen the country’s weapons industry. By selling or loaning surplus or “defective” arms and munitions, the Ordnance Department provided a ready source of war materiel to merchants and manufacturers, who then sold these items to Latin American purchasing agents. This flow of weapons provided cash on Ordnance’s accounts, which was used to fund further weapon development. Following a Congressional investigation of this trade as a potential misuse of public property, Congress retroactively authorized it with a law that permitted the executive branch to sell surplus weapons.