Sorry if I infringed your trademark!
Galveston is named after this guy!
In September 1779, a 33 year old Spanish colonel marched out of New Orleans with about 700 men, half of them raw recruits, free Black militia, and Native allies.
His name was Bernardo de Gálvez, and he was about to do more for American independence than most Americans have ever heard of.
Spain had just entered the war against Britain. Gálvez, governor of Louisiana, did not wait for orders from Madrid. He moved up the Mississippi and took Fort Bute at Manchac in a single morning. Nine days later, Baton Rouge surrendered. Natchez followed. In one short campaign, he’d cleared the British off the lower Mississippi.
Then he went for the Gulf Coast.
In March 1780, he took Mobile after a brutal siege in freezing rain. His men were sick, his ships had run aground, and a British relief force from Pensacola was closing in. He held anyway.
Pensacola was the real prize. It was the capital of British West Florida and the anchor of Britain’s southern strategy. Gálvez sailed from Havana in February 1781 with a fleet that nearly turned back when the Spanish naval commander refused to cross the sandbar at the harbor entrance under British guns.
Gálvez took a single ship, the Galveztown, and sailed in alone. The rest of the fleet followed after that.
The siege lasted two months. A Spanish shell hit the main British powder magazine at Fort George on May 8. The explosion killed dozens and blew a hole in the British defenses. Pensacola surrendered two days later.
British West Florida was gone. So were more than 1,000 British regulars, taken prisoner or killed. Troops and warships that London had been counting on to reinforce Cornwallis in the Carolinas were tied down, captured, or diverted south for years.
Five months after Pensacola fell, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown.
Gálvez had also kept the Mississippi open for American supplies, funneled Spanish money and gunpowder to the Continentals through New Orleans, and pinned down a British army that could have marched north.
Congress thanked him by name in 1783. George Washington rode beside him in a Fourth of July parade. Then American memory quietly let him go.
In 2014, Congress finally made him an honorary US citizen, one of only eight people ever granted that title. His portrait now hangs in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room, where it was supposed to have been placed in 1783.
It took 231 years to hang the picture.