New book proves Spanish money, guns and warships decided the war
TYRONE, Ga., Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — In a single afternoon in 1781, the people of Havana raised more than 500,000 pesos — roughly $12 million in today’s purchasing power — and shipped the money north. It was critical to the campaign that trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Almost no American schoolbook mentions it.
That omission is the subject of Without Spain, Britain Wins, a new book by retired Army Colonel Steve E. Castlen. Its argument is blunt: the Revolution was not a colonial rebellion Britain lost. It was a world war Britain could not afford to fight, and Spain a vital reason so little British power reached North America.
Castlen spent 33 years in uniform as an investigator, prosecutor and military judge, and ten more as Clerk of Court of the Georgia Court of Appeals. He built the book the way he once built a case: witnesses testify, exhibits are entered, and the reader sits in the jury box.
“Take Spain out of the war, and the American Revolution is lost,” Castlen said. “I take nothing away from Washington or from France. I am saying the record shows a third partner nobody called as a witness.”
Spain did not declare war until June 1779, but Spanish gunpowder, muskets, cannon and hard silver were reaching the revolutionaries years earlier, in secret. Spanish records account for 7,944,906 reales between 1776 and 1778 — nearly a million Spanish dollars, or roughly $24 million today — plus 30,000 army coats.
Gálvez, governor of Spanish Louisiana, then took Fort Bute, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile and Pensacola. Spain turned back the British at St. Louis, took Nassau, and tied down British forces at Gibraltar for three years. None of that strength reached the Continental Army.
Then Yorktown. French Admiral de Grasse could not leave the Caribbean for Virginia without exposing French sugar islands. Spanish warships under Admiral José Solano covered them, freeing de Grasse to bring all 28 of his ships of the line north. At the Battle of the Chesapeake, that fleet sealed Cornwallis’s escape route. The Havana silver followed.
Congress has already conceded part of the argument. In 2014 Gálvez was made an honorary citizen of the United States, the eighth person ever, alongside Winston Churchill and Lafayette. Galveston, Texas, carries his name. Most Americans could not identify him. The book also restores the Hispanic soldiers, sailors, financiers and free people of color whose money and lives went into the American cause.
“The documents were always there,” Castlen said. “Nobody read them to the jury.”
About the book: Without Spain, Britain Wins by Steve E. Castlen. Castlewood Publishing. 175 pages, nine maps, 24 illustrations, 177 endnotes, index. Paperback $16.79, ISBN 979-8-9936557-1-0. Kindle $11.99. At amazon.com and SteveCastlen.com. Castlen is available for interviews.
Media contact: Steve E. Castlen, 770-367-9261, 421950@email4pr.com, SteveCastlen.com
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SOURCE Steve E. Castlen
