José de Gálvez, 1st Marquess of Sonora

Spanish lawyer and Visitador general

José de Gálvez y Gallardo, 1st Marquess of Sonora (2 January 1720, Macharaviaya, Spain – 17 June 1787, Aranjuez, Spain) was a Spanish lawyer and Visitador general (inspector general) in New Spain (1764–1772); later appointed to the Council of the Indies (1775–1787). He was one of the prime figures behind the Bourbon Reforms. He belonged to an important political family that included his brother Matías de Gálvez and nephew Bernardo de Gálvez.

Following the death of his noble but impoverished father, Gálvez became a shepherd, then studied at an elite Catholic seminary in Málaga. After he realized he was not cut out for a priestly vocation, the local bishop sent him to study law at Salamanca. He received his law degree at the University of Alcalá. Practicing law in Madrid, he handled many legal cases involving the Indies. He gained the attention of powerful people in Madrid, including the marqués de Equilache and the marqués de Grimaldi, ministers of Charles III. Gálvez married María Magdalena de Grimaldo, who died a year later. He then married Lucía Romet y Pichelín, an elite woman of French origin, well connected at the royal court. Lucía's connections enabled Gálvez to work as legal adviser at the French embassy in Madrid. Climbing the social and political ladder, he secured a job as personal secretary to Jerónimo Grimaldi, minister to the newly ascended king Carlos III. In 1762, Gálvez secured a position as attorney to prince Carlos, the future king Carlos IV. In 1765, he was appointed visitador (inspector) of New Spain, where he both gathered information and implemented royal policy to increase crown revenues.

In 1765 at the age of 45, Gálvez arrived in New Spain, which included all of Spanish North America. As visitador del virreinato de Nueva España (inspector general for the viceroyalty of New Spain) he exercised sweeping powers; the most in Spanish North America. The visitador served as the king's special deputy, with special powers overlapping and sometimes exceeding those of the viceroy. Gálvez was given the task of reforming the finances of New Spain to increase its revenues for the crown — part of the energetic attempts to reorganize king Carlos III's government after the costly Seven Years' War, which had in 1762 seen the British capture both Havana, Spain's main Caribbean port, and Manila, Spain's governmental and commercial center in the Philippines and also resulted in Spain ceding Florida to Britain. As visitador, Gálvez instituted quick and decisive changes in tax collection, accounting, and jailed corrupt officials. He created a state monopoly of tobacco and imposed new taxes on pulque and flour. He also took measures to combat contraband and reformed the system of customs collection in Veracruz and Acapulco. (He ended the farming of customs.) He also established general accounting offices in the municipal governments. Government revenues rose from 6 million pesos in 1763 to 8 million in 1767 and 12 million in 1773. In 1765 Gálvez assisted in reorganizing the army, a project of viceroy Joaquín de Montserrat, marqués de Cruillas under the direction of general Juan de Villalva. When Cuillas opposed Gálvez's actions, he was soon replaced by a new viceroy, Carlos Francisco de Croix. Gálvez privileged peninsular born Spanish merchants over American born, which had the effect of funneling capital into mining. He boosted the mining industry further by reducing the price of mercury, a crown monopoly, which allowed a greater volume of silver ore to be refined. In 1767, Spain's king Carlos III decreed expulsion for the Jesuits throughout his empire. In Mexico, this decree led to riots and other disturbances. Gálvez suppressed these by summary trials and sentences of life imprisonment, mainly in San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato and parts of Michoacán.

With the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Baja California peninsula, Gálvez engaged the Franciscan Order to take over the spiritual affairs of the missions there. Even after the arrival of Junípero Serra and his fellow Franciscan friars, the Spanish military — having evicted the Jesuits from the missions they had established — continued running the missions' practical business. In 1768, Gálvez toured the Baja chain of missions. Angered over the sloppy administration he found there, he reprimanded the soldier commissioners stationed at the missions. In August, he signed a decree turning all of Baja's missions — except mission Loreto — over fully to the Franciscan friars. He banned card playing and gambling at mission settlements. Overruling the Franciscans' appeal for clemency for miscreant soldiers, Gálvez punished most of them by assigning them to the upcoming expedition to Alta California — and discharged the rest from military service. Continuing to manage Baja California affairs into 1769, Gálvez sought to balance scarce natural and human resources in the fragile chain of missions: Some missions lacked enough land and water to sustain all their Indian converts; other missions, endowed with ample land and water, lacked enough workers to cultivate their fields. Gálvez ordered Indians moved from one mission to another — despite the Indians' reluctance to leave their home villages — to correct such imbalances. He also had some young Indian orphans sent to Loreto for training in handling coastal boats and ships. Gálvez worked with the Franciscan president of the Baja missions, Junípero Serra, in his projects to improve the lives of the natives, whom he called "the poor Israelites." Yet he insisted that Baja Indians pay the royal tax, standing by his order despite Serra's efforts to persuade him that collecting such a tax would prove impractical.

Ambitious to reinvigorate the imperial fortunes of New Spain, Gálvez proposed consolidating and developing the far northwest under a huge governmental unit to embrace the regions of Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, and the Californias — including claimed but unsettled upper (Alta) California. Playing on long standing fears in Spain's ruling circles that rival powers would muscle in on territories Spain claimed along the Pacific coast, Gálvez spread rumors of schemes by the British and Dutch rulers to add California to their own empires. Then, when a report arrived from the Spanish ambassador in Russia that Catherine the Great planned to establish settlements down the California coast towards Monterey, Gálvez trumpeted the Russian threat. King Carlos gave the go ahead, and Gálvez prepared a series of expeditions of soldiers, sailors, artisans, Christian Indians and missionaries to push north into unexplored upper California. In 1768, Gálvez sailed from San Blas to Loreto to finish planning the coming year's expeditions. To free the Franciscan missionaries from their posts in Baja California, Gálvez called upon friars of the Dominican Order to take charge of the Baja missions. Gálvez assigned Junípero Serra to head the missionary team in the Alta California expedition — without bothering to ask padre Serra if he agreed to his new mission. As it turned out, Serra, eager to pioneer in evangelizing Indians in Alta California, readily joined in. Gálvez established a naval base at San Blas and, in 1768–9, organized sea and land expeditions up the California coast to the projected Spanish outpost at the harbor named Monterrey (originally spelled with a double "r") by Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1603. Gaspar de Portolá, governor of Las Californias, commanded the second overland expedition. Closely attending to the logistical details of the expeditions, Gálvez issued thorough instructions to the key officers and technicians. He ordered Miguel Costansó, the young engineer and cartographer, to make observations of the ports of San Diego and Monterey, compare his findings with the older sailing charts, draw new maps, and examine the countryside around both ports. Gálvez issued further instructions for building a proper fortification at Monterey; reconnoitering the ports of Monterey and San Francisco; and preparing detailed accounts destined for top officials in Mexico and Spain.

Historians James Rawls and Walton Bean call Gálvez the most effective visitador (inspector general) in the history of New Spain. They attribute Spain's expansion into Alta California to his intense personal ambitions. " Although he was a brilliant, forceful, and generally successful administrator," write Rawls and Bean, "he was also unusually vain, selfish, ruthless, deceitful and unstable. It was, indeed, because of Gálvez's possession of this very combination of qualities that the occupation of San Diego and Monterey, long considered and periodically given up as hopeless, actually materialized."

Gálvez returned to Spain in 1771. In 1769 he collapsed mentally and physically, attributed to overwork and the conflict with the indigenous in Sonora; although he recovered, "the end of the visita was clouded." He returned to take up his position on the Council of the Indies to which he had been appointed in 1767.

José de Gálvez returned to Spain in 1772, where he was a member of the General Council on Commerce, Coinage and Mining, a governor in the Council of the Indies, and a councilor of state. Instead he was authorized to set up a Commandancy General of the Provincias Internas, which was to be independent of the viceroy of New Spain. The new political unit included the Provincias Internas of Nueva Vizcaya, Nuevo Santander, Sonora y Sinaloa, Las Californias, Coahuila y Tejas (Coahuila and Texas), and Nuevo México. Chihuahua was the capital, and Teodoro de Croix, nephew of the former viceroy, was named the first Commandant General. Gálvez's zeal to more effectively organize the overseas administration led him to also establish the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata (1776) from territories of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the Captaincy General of Venezuela (1777) from parts of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. He also created the Captaincy General of Venezuela in order to promote the population and economy of the area; For this purpose, in 1776 he named his fellow Malaga native Luis de Unzaga for his diplomatic skills, Unzaga, known as "le Conciliateur" the next time he will leave his nephew, Bernardo de Gálvez as interim governor From Spanish Louisiana, replacing Unzaga, that same year he became brothers in law, when Bernardo married the little sister of Unzaga's wife; In this way, Minister José de Gálvez appointed Luis de Unzaga as the first Captain General of Venezuela in 1777 by bringing together various territories and creating a defense plan there that would also help achieve the birth of the United States. Both these new governments were intended to expand areas of settlement and stimulate the economy. He also established the Real Compañía de Filipinas and in 1778 founded the Archivo General de Indias, bringing together documents about the Indies from Simancas, Seville and Cádiz. Also in 1778 he established limited free trade among the colonies. As Minister of the Indies he was able to secure the appointment of his brother Matías as governor captain general of Guatemala. Matías went on to serve as viceroy of New Spain. In 1780, he sent a royal dispatch to Teodoro de Croix, Commandant General of the Internal Provinces of New Spain, asking all subjects to donate money to help the American Revolution. Millions of pesos were given. In 1784 he established a uniform excise tax on the importation of African slaves into the Indies. In 1786 he undertook another major reorganizing of the Spanish American administration with the introduction of the intendencia (intendancy) administered by an Intendente (Intendant) throughout most of the Americas. When in 1781 the Túpac Amaru rebellion broke out in Peru and the Comunero Revolt in New Granada (Colombia), Gálvez unleashed ruthless repression.

Gálvez was a heavy handed administrator, implementing major reforms in Spanish America to strengthen royal power, promote efficiency, diminish the role of American born elites, and increase revenues. One assessment of Gálvez is that "his legacy of a more rational administration was purchased with the political alienation of many Americans and not a few Spaniards, whom he pushed from their traditional places and powers."