From September 9-14, 1784, Francisco de Miranda toured Providence and the Brown campus (then called Rhode Island College).  This encounter— featuring the first known Latin American to step foot on Brown’s soil— brought together two relatively unknown actors at early stages of their formative developments. 

A Young Miranda
Miranda has been described as the Precursor of Spanish-American Independence.  Born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1750 as the son of a wealthy merchant from the Canary Islands, he served as a colonel in the Spanish army. Miranda fought against the British at the Battle of Penascola in Florida in the final days of the American Revolution when Spanish troops were sent to the Caribbean to reassert Spain’s interests in the region.  After Spain’s victory against the British at Penascola, Miranda returned to Havana before being dispatched to British Jamaica to secure the release of prisoners.  He returned to Havana with not only the freed prisoners but a cargo of contraband— and was soon brought under charges of illegal trading.  Fleeing the sentence (for which he was later exonerated), Miranda traveled to the United States.  He began his expedition in the Carolinas and made his way up the Atlantic coast, stopping in the new nation’s principal cities of Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Providence, and Boston.    

A Young Brown
In Providence, Miranda met several notable individuals that feature in Brown’s early history, including Joseph Brown and Governor Stephen Hopkins.  He described the College Edifice as “quite spacious and located on a height which commands the town of Providence, and from its top one sees the entire bay, the island, and in very clear weather the city of Newport.”   To his eyes, the library and other buildings were “still in their swaddling clothes.”  Miranda listened to Reverend James Manning, first president of the college, deliver a sermon at the meeting house of the First Baptist Church, and then later observed Manning baptize a young man in the Providence River. 

Curiously, despite his military background, Miranda fails to indicate the campus’ disarray from its service in the recent war.  The Treaty of Paris had been signed only one year before Miranda’s tour of Brown, and the college edifice had been used by colonial and French troops as a military barracks and hospital until 1782.  Degrees were suspended during this period and were not conferred again until 1786— enabling Reverend Manning to devote the majority of his attention to the needs of the ministry, though his letters and correspondence of this period are filled with anxieties over the low state of funds at the college and the need for repairs from war-related damages.  University leaders were busy planning to solicit funds from potential benefactors in Europe and America.

Their Futures Unfold
After completing his American tour, Miranda crossed the Atlantic and explored Europe and Russia, fighting as a general in the French Revolutionary Army.  His experiences in both the American and French Revolutions led him to conceive of a plan for the liberty and independence of the entire Spanish-American continent.  With British help, Miranda would go on to lead a failed invasion of Venezuela in 1806; four years later, his young protégé Simon Bolivar invited him back to South America from his London exile to lead a new Venezuelan revolt.  Miranda was taken prisoner by Spanish forces during the fighting, and died in a Spanish prison cell.

Meanwhile at Brown, the number of students would increase steadily from only twenty in 1784.  In 1786, Reverend Manning was appointed by a unanimous resolution of the General Assembly to represent Rhode Island in the Congress of the Confederation.  Manning indicated in his correspondence that his motive in accepting the appointment was to recover payments due to the college for the use of the edifice and its damage.  The edifice would be restored and renamed University Hall, and the new American republic was on its way.

On October 4, 2007, Karen Racine, of the University of Guelph, delivered the annual Maury Bromsen lecture at the John Carter Brown Library on "Love, Liberty, and Lobbying: The Transatlantic Life of Francisco de Miranda, Precursor to Spanish American Independence." Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera offered remarks and presented a portrait of Miranda as a gift to Brown University.

REFERENCES

Guild, Reuben Aldridge.  Life, Times, and Correspondence of James Manning and the Early History of Brown University.  Boston:  Gould & Lincoln, 1864.

Goddard, William G.  Memoir of Reverend James Manning, D.D., First President of Brown University, with Some Biographical Notions of Some of His Pupils.  Boston:  Perkins & Marsh, 1839.

Miranda, Francisco de.  The New Democracy in America:  Travels of Francisco de Miranda in the United States, 1783-84.  Ed. Judson P. Wood.  Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

Racine, Karen.  Francisco de Miranda:  A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution.  Wilmington:  Scholarly Resources, 2003.

Images:

Francisco de Miranda, www.quebec-venezuela.org/IMG/jpg/miranda.jpg.

Rev. James Manning, James Sullivan Lincoln, Brown University.

College Edifice, www.brown.edu/web/about/history.

Miranda en La Carraca, Arturo Michelena's depiction of Miranda's last days, imprisoned in Cádiz, Spain. (Venezuela, 1896: Oil on canvas – 196.6 x 245.5 cm. Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela.)