Maitland Plan

Maitland Plan (Spanish, Plan de Maitland), refers to a plan created by British Major General Thomas Maitland in 1800. The plan was titled Plan to capture Buenos Aires and Chile, and then emancipate Peru and Quito. The plan was never really implemented but was used in some way during the South American wars of independence.

Background

By the 1780s Britain was seeking to expand its influence in South America following the loss of the Thirteen Colonies of North America, which had become independent.

The first notion of a plan had been implemented during the Nootka Crisis in 1790, when Britain was planning a war with Spain who had support from France. The revolutionary Franciso de Miranda presented his ideas to the British government about the independence of Spanish territories in America. The idea was put into motion but was cancelled once the crisis had passed. Nevertheless, in 1795 Nicholas Vansittart wrote a white paper outlining a way to take South America away from Spain, which became known as the 'Vansittart plan'. This was then shelved, due to the French Revolutionary Wars when Britain and Spain allied against Revolutionary France.^[1]

The plan

In 1796 Spain was defeated by France and was forced into an alliance with them against Great Britain. The Vansittart plan was then reinstated but this time under the guise of Thomas Maitland, who created additional points.

The plan consisted of the following steps:

Seize control of Buenos Aires.
Take position in Mendoza.
Coordinate actions with an independentist Chilean army.
Cross the Andes.
Defeat the Spanish and take control of Chile.
Continue through sea and liberate Peru.

The British tried to put the plan in practice twice and failed. They attempted to seize Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1806 and 1807, during the British invasions of the Río de la Plata, but were eventually defeated by the Spanish army and the local militias.

An addition to the plan was added by Home Riggs Popham with an attack on Venezuela at the behest of Francisco De Miranda. By 1808 they planned to put it in motion, with a large force which was assembled and placed under the command of Arthur Wellesley, but Napoleon's invasion of Spain that year suddenly transformed Spain into an ally of Britain. British military actions against Spanish South America therefore ceased in the subsequent Peninsular War.

Despite the alliance between Britain and Spain, the Maitland Plan was not cancelled. According to Argentine historians like Felipe Pigna and Rodolfo Terragno, José de San Martín, the Argentine general and prime leader of the southern part of South America's successful struggle for independence from the Spanish Empire, was introduced to the plan (during his stay in London in 1811) by members of the Lautaro Lodge: a Freemasonic Lodge founded by Francisco de Miranda and Scottish Lord MacDuff (James Duff, 4th Earl Fife). San Martín was allegedly part of the lodge, and he took the Maitland Plan as a blueprint for the movements necessary to defeat the Spanish army in South America, he carried on successfully with the last five points of the plan, and thus liberated a great part of the continent.

The British themselves finally fulfilled the Maitland plan from 1817, when it became involved in the South American campaigns. In this, Britain operated in a clandestine role - financially, politically and militarily, which was highly successful.^[2]

Aftermath

The Maitland plan had effectively been achieved more or less by the late 1820's. Spain had been defeated in all of South America by the independentist armies, and Britain's involvement was a key factor for the independence of South American states. Britain was also the determining factor in the relations of Latin America to the rest of the world.^[3] From the 1840's Great Britain exercised huge political influence in the new sovereign states of Latin America through finance and commerce, essentially creating an Informal empire.

References

^ Robertson, William Spence (1909). Francisco de Miranda and the Revolutionizing of Spanish America. U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. 269–71, 311.
^ Waddell, D. A. G (1987). "British Neutrality and Spanish-American Independence: The Problem of Foreign Enlistment". Journal of Latin American Studies. 19 (1). Cambridge University Press: 1–18. doi:10.1017/S0022216X00017119. JSTOR 156899. S2CID 154842346.
^ Webster, Sir Charles Kingsley (1938). Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812-1830, Volume 1. Oxford University Press. p. 74.

Bibliography

Terragno, Rodolfo. Maitland & San Martin. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1998. ISBN 987-9173-35-X
Maitland & San Martin, download available, Spanish version only

[1] Robertson, William Spence (1909). Francisco de Miranda and the Revolutionizing of Spanish America. U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. 269–71, 311.

[Waddell-2] Waddell, D. A. G (1987). "British Neutrality and Spanish-American Independence: The Problem of Foreign Enlistment". Journal of Latin American Studies. 19 (1). Cambridge University Press: 1–18. doi:10.1017/S0022216X00017119. JSTOR 156899. S2CID 154842346.

[3] Webster, Sir Charles Kingsley (1938). Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812-1830, Volume 1. Oxford University Press. p. 74.

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