What if the "Virginius Affair" led to an Anglo-Spanish War?

Thanks to lordroel the adminstrator for implementing the edit to the thread title.

I have a series of questions.

1. Why would the British stir up trouble in the Caribbean and invite a coalition war against them? There is France, Spain and Holland in the Caribbean and one also remembers a very hostile United States. It has been six years since a the British and French engaged in economic warfare against the Americans by violating a blockade the Americans established against the rebel Confederacy. Many British, French and Spanish blockade runners were seized with British, Spanish and French citizens killed in the process. One of the remaining sore points in addition was the predations of British supported Confederate pirates. CSS Alabama was not exactly crewed by "southerners". She was "British".

2. Russia. American ally during the same war. Always looking to make trouble.

3. Cuba. The Ten Years War was mounted by sugar oligarchs who wanted to change the nature of slavery in Cuba. The racial component was to reduce reliance on Africans now that there was teeth in the anti-piracy patrols, and shift over to the importation of Chinese indentured labor. The Americans and the British were letting that human trafficking in slavery happen willy nilly.

4. Speaking of Americans... the Cuban sugar interests who instigated the Cuban Revolution were backed financially and politically by their American co-investors and not so much by the British who had much less financial stake in the Cuban economy. The "pirates" of the Virginius affair were aboard a "Confederate blockade runner" built in Glasgow, but captured by the United States during their civil war. Sold off in a prize court, she was purchased and placed into American merchant marine service. John F. Patterson, acting as agent for the Cuban rebel Manuel Quesada and his American backers, Marshall and J. Roberts. There is little British involvement at that juncture, however one notes the USN was covering the SS Virginius' runs to Cuba to aid the rebels. This was exactly the shenanigans the British in the Caribbean pulled against the United States between 1862 and 1865, so it might be a form of irony?

3. How do the Philippine Islands become involved and what does France think about it, since they are kind of active in the South China Sea?

In a Civil War pod that would be a good timeline if they Confederates were the ones to have this affair happened to them.

Who is going to participate in that 'coalition', what will they expect to get, and why will they think it wise to stick their neck out?



So France, Holland, and the US decide to take Spain's side? Um, sorry no. This isn't the American revolution 1770s-1780s.

France, as of 1873 is rather busy paying off reparations to get the last Prussian soldiers out of its country. Remember the Prussians were there because they finished beating up the French just two years earlier in the Franco-Prussian war. The French were licking their wounds, and if looking to fight anyone post-recovery it was the Germans post-recovery, it wasn't the British in the Caribbean to make some random point.

The Netherlands after the Napoleonic wars tended to keep its head down and be neutralist, knowing it had shrunk to lesser power leagues, just beating up on native Indonesians. They didn't intervene in the Boer War, ticked off as they were about it, why intervene in favor of the Spanish, a historic enemy more often than not, in Cuba.

The US had its sore points with Britain and it certainly wouldn't want any new colonial establishments by Britain in the Caribbean, but why side with Spain, who also supported blockade runners and was just massacring Americans along with British on the Virginius, against the British who are avenging the Virginius, especially as this is one year *after* the Alabama Claims have been paid?

Great catch. Thanks for searching out this detail.

Yes, I would say that temperamentally and in principle, Gladstone is less disposed to war and political reliance on jingoistic reactions.

At the same time, British liberals have just the same tradition of Tories as being against Spanish oppression, they further have the idea of sympathy for rebelling foreign underdogs, and Gladstone was anti-Catholic enough he somewhat favored Bismarck's kulturkampf at first. I imagine he could work himself up into a self-righteous Wilsonian lather about dastardly oppressive, inquisitorial Papist Spanish massacres of British seamen without due process.



I also think tension with the US could be managed on this. I think Grant's common sense, and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish's cautious approach, plus the important fact the arbitration of the Alabama Claims had been completed and accepted a year earlier in 1872, would help alot.

The Americans may quietly ask the British to 'slow down' a little and try to participate as separate but equal members of an anti-Spanish coalition to free Cuba, wanting to show they are strong enough to punish Spain and help Cuba, knowing secretly that British participation makes Spain's defeat inevitable and Spain's fleet totally harmless, but not having to admit openly it is the decidedly junior partner to Britain.




Yes, I think Gladstone would be as anti-slavery as anyone, and anyone, either he or Disraeli, would add emancipation on as moral icing on the cake if they are choosing already to do a war of retribution or muscle-flexing or market opening or liberation.

You may very well be right about the action being limited to Cuba and Cuba alone. I speculated on the Pacific mainly because it just makes things more different and potentially more interesting, and to supply an additional acquisitive motive.





As you say, the action may be limited to Cuba and Cuba alone. And slavery emancipation, with the law you cite, wouldn't provide a *genuine* excuse for intervening, except I guess to get rid of the exceptions. However, there was a Puerto Rican independence movement, with its own leaders in exile, mainly in New York. And the British, and if they are involved the Americans, may decide they are saving themselves future trouble by ousting the Spanish and making Puerto Rico an independent Republic. The rationale could be, "why risk having a revolutionary struggle later, so close to the Virgin Islands, and risk having a Virginius incident all over again in a decade?"





Maybe Spain could go through a revitalization.

I have a bad feeling however that Carlist and other reactionary movements in Spain would be able to exploit a British war of anti-Spanish colonial despoliation best. The Carlists would try to make Spanish liberals suffer for their ideological association with with the liberal British government and liberal America. The Carlists would add to their rallying cries, "Spaniards, rise with us, be authentic patriots, fudge the English and Americans, fudge their liberal democracy, fudge their Protestantism and fremasonry!"




Agree- with Cuba (or Cuba and other parts of the Spanish empire) taken out of Spanish hands in the 1870s, there's no excuse for the 1890s Spanish-American war.

If Spain doesn't sell their possessions to another power, I can imagine Spain holding on to Puerto Rico, Guam and Micronesia into the 20th century, but the Philippines would successfully rebel.

Spain might sell to Germany or Japan, with Micronesia most likely to be bought and sold.




There was a short-lived revolt at Cavite in 1872, but it was put down quickly. It was not followed up by a continuous movement though until the propaganda movement of Filipino exiles in Europe began pamphleteering, and a continuous armed insurgent movement only began with Bonifacio's Katipunan movement from 1892. So there was not something for the British to piggy back on right there in 1873. Now seeing Britain/America free Cuba may bring people out of the woodwork quickly, but not necessarily enough to make Gladstone and the Admiralty start thinking of a campaign from scratch if they weren't already thinking on those lines.