British Colonial Period

Spanish: Treaty of Paris — End of First Spanish Period

The Seven Years' War, known in North America as the French and Indian War and fought between 1756 and 1763, ended in Britain's comprehensive victory over France and its Spanish allies. Spain had entered the war late, in 1762, and paid for it almost immediately: a British expedition took Havana that summer, closing the harbour through which the whole Spanish Caribbean traded. When the Treaty of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763, Spain recovered Cuba — and surrendered Florida to obtain it. Nearly two centuries of Spanish rule over the peninsula came to an end in a single clause, and a colony that had cost Spain a permanent subsidy for six generations was traded away for the port that actually paid.

The treaty was, on its face, generous to those it left behind. Catholic worship was protected and private property guaranteed, and Spanish subjects who wished to remain were free to do so. Almost none did. The entire population of St. Augustine — roughly three thousand people — evacuated to Cuba, along with perhaps a thousand more from Pensacola and the smaller settlements; by some accounts as few as five Spanish residents stayed on in St. Augustine. The free Black community of Fort Mose, whose liberty rested entirely on Spanish law and the sanctuary decree of 1693, had the clearest reason of all to go, and evacuated to Cuba with the rest rather than test their standing under a British regime that recognised no such protection.

What the British inherited was therefore a set of buildings rather than a functioning province. The Castillo de San Marcos stood undamaged, the town was intact, and the human community that had sustained both for 198 years had simply gone. Spain had completed the withdrawal by February 1764. The demographic rupture was total, and it shaped everything the British attempted over the next twenty years: they were not taking over a colony but restarting one.

British: Division into East and West Florida

Britain organised its new possession in July 1763 as two colonies rather than one, a recognition that no single administration could govern a territory reaching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. East Florida ran from the Atlantic coast to the Apalachicola River, with its capital at St. Augustine. West Florida ran from the Apalachicola to the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, north to the 31st parallel, with its capital at Pensacola; in 1764 its northern boundary was moved up to 32°28′, taking in much of what is now southern Alabama and Mississippi. Each colony had its own governor, council and, in time, an elected assembly.

The first appointments followed quickly. In East Florida, John Hedges and Francis Ogilvie served as acting governors through 1763 and 1764 before James Grant took office in 1764, beginning a seven-year administration. In West Florida, Augustine Prevost held authority in 1763 and George Johnstone arrived as the first commissioned governor, calling a colonial assembly in 1764. Both colonies were organised on the ordinary British American model, with the rights and institutions the older mainland colonies already possessed.

George III's Royal Proclamation of October 1763 set the terms of settlement. It offered land grants to veterans of the Seven Years' War who would settle the new territories, promised British subjects in the Floridas the same legal rights as those in the older colonies including representative assemblies, and — in the provision that mattered most elsewhere in America — drew a line against westward expansion into Indian country. In the Floridas the effect was invitation rather than restriction. Grants went out generously to officers and soldiers, and settlers began arriving from South Carolina, Georgia, Bermuda and Britain itself to plant indigo, sugar cane and fruit, and to ship lumber and naval stores.

The response was real but modest. Governor Johnstone reckoned the white population of West Florida at eighteen hundred to two thousand in the middle 1760s, concentrated at Pensacola, Mobile, Natchez and along the Gulf coast, and the surviving grant records show roughly four hundred English, Scottish and Irish recipients alongside smaller French, German and other European contingents. Twenty years would not be long enough to build what the evacuation of 1763 had removed.

First British Governors Appointed; Colonial Assemblies Convened

Britain took possession of two Floridas in 1763 and spent 1764 discovering what it had actually acquired: a magnificent fortress, two good harbours, and almost nobody at all. The Spanish evacuation had been near-total. St. Augustine stood intact — a stone fort, a stone governor's house, coquina dwellings, streets — and held a handful of people. Pensacola was a decayed stockade and some huts on the sand.

The civil establishments were commissioned that year. James Grant, a Scottish soldier who had served in the Cherokee campaigns, arrived at St. Augustine in 1764 as the first commissioned governor of East Florida, after John Hedges and Francis Ogilvie had held things together as acting governors. George Johnstone, a naval officer of famously combustible temperament, reached Pensacola as first governor of West Florida. Both carried instructions to erect the ordinary machinery of a royal colony: a council, courts, and in due course an elected assembly.

Johnstone convened the first West Florida assembly in November 1764. It was a legislature on the standard British American model, and it immediately began behaving like one, quarrelling with the governor over money and privilege in the manner of every assembly from Massachusetts to Barbados. Grant took the opposite course in East Florida and simply declined to call one, governing with his council alone for the whole of his seven-year term on the argument that the colony had too few freeholders to make an assembly meaningful. East Florida had no elected legislature until 1781, which is one reason it produced no revolutionary movement.

The same year brought a large redrawing of the map. The Proclamation of 1763 had fixed West Florida's northern boundary at the 31st parallel, which left the settlements at Natchez and the rich country along the lower Mississippi outside the colony. In 1764 the boundary was moved north to a line running east from the mouth of the Yazoo at roughly 32°28′, adding a great swathe of what is now southern Mississippi and Alabama. West Florida thereby became a Mississippi River colony as much as a Gulf one — and acquired, in the Natchez district, the only part of either Florida that would attract substantial numbers of settlers from the older colonies.

The central problem for both governors was people. Grant's method was promotion: he wrote to investors in Britain, Charleston and Savannah, entertained visiting planters at St. Augustine, and talked up indigo. Johnstone's was recruitment of whole communities — Huguenots at Campbelltown, Acadians, Germans — most of which came to nothing. Land grants were issued generously, on the standard condition of settling and improving within ten years; a great many were taken by absentee proprietors in London who never saw them and never developed them.

Twenty years was not going to be enough to replace what the evacuation of 1763 had removed. But the framework put in place in 1764 — governors, councils, courts, surveyed grants and, in the west, an assembly — is what made British Florida a colony rather than a garrison.

Stamp Act; Land Grant Settlement Begins

The Stamp Act was passed in March 1765 and taxed printed matter throughout British America — legal instruments, newspapers, licences, playing cards. In Boston it produced riots and the sacking of the lieutenant governor's house; in Virginia it produced Patrick Henry's resolves; in nine colonies it produced a congress. In the Floridas it produced nothing whatever. Governor Grant reported from St. Augustine that the stamps had been landed and distributed without incident.

The reasons are worth stating because they explain everything about Florida's conduct a decade later. Both colonies were two years old. Neither had a settled merchant class, a printing press of consequence, or a tradition of self-government to defend — East Florida had no assembly at all. Both were carried financially by the imperial parliament, which paid the governors, the garrisons and the Indian department out of the estimates; a Floridian objecting to taxation without representation would have been objecting to the arrangement that fed him. The men who mattered in East Florida were recent arrivals holding crown grants that could be revoked. The Floridas had every reason to be loyal, and they were.

The year's other business was the land itself. The grant machinery established in 1763 began to produce visible results in 1765, with surveyors laying out large tracts along the St. Johns in East Florida and along the Apalachicola, Mobile and lower Mississippi in the west. This was the beginning of Florida as a plantation society: the tracts were taken up for indigo, rice and naval stores, and they were taken up on the explicit assumption that they would be worked by enslaved Africans, since there was no other labour force available and the crown offered additional acreage for every slave imported.

Scientific Survey — de Brahm and Bartram Commissioned

The crown also set out to find out what it owned. William Gerard de Brahm, a German-born engineer already established as a surveyor in Georgia, was appointed Surveyor General of the Southern District, with instructions to chart the coasts, harbours and rivers of the new provinces and assess their military and agricultural possibilities. His resulting charts of the Florida coast, the Keys and the Gulf Stream were the first genuinely accurate ones, and remained in use for decades.

John Bartram of Philadelphia, the leading naturalist in British America, was appointed King's Botanist and travelled to Florida in the winter of 1765–66, ascending the St. Johns with his son William. The elder Bartram produced a journal and a report on soils and agricultural prospects. The son produced something considerably more durable: the observations that became Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, published in 1791 — a book that described the Florida interior, its springs, its plants and its Seminole inhabitants with an attentiveness nobody had brought to them before, and that was read by Wordsworth and Coleridge and helped shape the Romantic idea of American wilderness.

Between them, de Brahm and the Bartrams turned an unmapped province into a described one. That was a precondition of colonisation, and it was also the beginning of Florida natural history.

New Smyrna Colony — Largest Single Immigrant Group in British America

Andrew Turnbull was a Scottish physician who had served as British consul at Smyrna in the Ottoman Levant and had married a Greek woman from that city. His proposition to the Board of Trade was that Mediterranean people would flourish in a Mediterranean climate where northern Europeans sickened, and that indigo grown by them in East Florida could break Britain's dependence on French and Spanish dye. He obtained a large grant on the Mosquito Inlet some seventy-five miles south of St. Augustine, government bounties, and a partnership with Sir William Duncan, physician to the king.

In June 1767 he went recruiting through the Mediterranean — Minorca, Italy, Greece, Crete, Corsica — meeting official obstruction in several places and assembling roughly fourteen hundred people, the majority of them Minorcan. They sailed in eight ships in 1768. It was the largest single body of immigrants brought to British North America in one movement, and rather more than Turnbull had provisioned for: he had planned on five hundred.

The terms were indenture. Colonists were to work three years, after which they would be free and would receive fifty acres apiece. The promise was not kept.

The colony was named New Smyrna for Turnbull's wife's birthplace, and it began to fail immediately. Provisions ran short before the first crop; the site was mosquito country; malaria and dysentery went through a population weakened by the voyage. Within months hundreds were dead, and by some counts nearly half the original number died in the first two years. Discipline was enforced by overseers with whips.

In August 1768, a few months after landing, several hundred colonists rose, seized stores and a vessel, and attempted to sail for Havana. They were intercepted and brought back. Three ringleaders were condemned; two were hanged, and one — a man named Carlo Forni — was, by the accounts, executed by a fellow colonist who was pardoned for performing the office.

What makes the episode difficult rather than simply appalling is that the colony worked. New Smyrna produced indigo in real quantity, along with hemp, sugar cane and provisions; it dug an extensive system of drainage and irrigation canals whose traces survive; and for a decade it was among the most productive settlements in British Florida. The plantation succeeded and the people in it died.

The survivors held on for nine more years before walking out. Their descendants — the Minorcans of St. Augustine — remain a distinct community there, and the datil pepper they brought is still grown in that one small corner of Florida and effectively nowhere else in the country.

New Smyrna Collapses — Workers Flee to St. Augustine

By 1771 New Smyrna was three years old and had buried a large proportion of the people who had landed in it. The indentures should by then have been expiring — three years was the term — and they were not being honoured. No land was distributed. Colonists who asked were told the debt for their passage and provisions had not been worked off, which under the accounting Turnbull kept it never would be. The settlement had become, in practice, a place where Mediterranean Catholics worked indigo for life under overseers, in the middle of a colony whose other plantations were worked by enslaved Africans.

People began leaving. The journey to St. Augustine was seventy-five miles up the King's Road, through country that had its own hazards, and those who made it presented themselves to the government and asked to be released from what they described as unlawful bondage. Their legal position was genuinely strong: they were free subjects of the crown under contract, not chattels, and the contract had a term that had passed.

The political ground shifted in the same year. Governor James Grant, Turnbull's patron and the man who had backed the New Smyrna scheme from the start, left East Florida in May 1771 in poor health and never returned. Authority passed to Lieutenant Governor John Moultrie, and then in 1774 to Patrick Tonyn — an officer with no stake in Turnbull's enterprise and, before long, an active dislike of the man. Turnbull for his part joined the faction on the council working to have Tonyn removed, which converted a policy disagreement into a personal war.

The two of them then fought it out through the East Florida courts and by letter to London over several years, while the colonists at Mosquito Inlet went on dying. The quarrel is unedifying on both sides — Tonyn was pursuing a rival as much as protecting the exploited — but the outcome turned on a point of law that was correct, and the Minorcans were its beneficiaries.

The final exodus came in 1777, when the bulk of those still alive walked to St. Augustine together and Tonyn declared their indentures void. Of some fourteen hundred who had arrived in 1768, roughly six hundred were left.

They were given ground in the north end of St. Augustine, in what is still called the Minorcan Quarter, and stayed. They kept their Catalan dialect and their Catholicism through the British period and into the Spanish one that followed, by which time they were the largest settled civilian population in the province and the connective tissue that carried St. Augustine from one empire to the next.

Indigo Economy at Peak Production — Plantation Slave Economy Grows

Indigo was the crop on which British Florida was staked. The dye was indispensable to the British textile trade, Britain bought most of it from French and Spanish colonies, and Parliament had been paying a bounty since 1749 to anyone who could grow it inside the empire. East Florida's climate suited it. The colony's whole promotional case — Grant's letters, Turnbull's prospectus, the terms on which grants were issued — rested on it.

By 1772 the plantations were producing. Estates lined the St. Johns, which functioned as the colony's highway, and stretched south to Mosquito Inlet; in West Florida the crop went in along the Apalachicola, the Mobile and the lower Mississippi. Something like fifteen thousand pounds of processed indigo cleared Mobile and Pensacola that year, and a considerably larger quantity moved through St. Augustine and the St. Johns. Naval stores, rice, oranges, timber and sugar filled out the trade.

The processing was foul work. Cut plants were steeped in vats until they fermented, the liquor beaten for hours to oxidise it, the sediment drained, pressed and cut into cakes. The vats stank, drew flies in enormous numbers, and stood in standing water in a malarial climate; contemporaries regarded indigo work as among the deadliest employments in the colonies.

It was performed by enslaved Africans. East Florida had almost no enslaved population in 1763 and several thousand by the early 1770s, the great majority brought in by planters relocating from South Carolina and Georgia, some imported directly. The crown had built this into policy from the beginning: land grants were sized partly by the number of enslaved people an applicant brought, so the grant system itself rewarded importing them. By the end of the British period enslaved people were the large majority of East Florida's population — somewhere around eleven thousand out of perhaps seventeen thousand in 1783.

That is the fact the indigo figures rest on, and it is the thing the promotional literature of the period is most careful not to dwell upon. Grant entertained investors at St. Augustine and described a colony of opportunity; the opportunity was the differential between the bounty-supported price of indigo and the cost of maintaining people who were not paid.

The economy so constructed lasted barely fifteen years. When Britain ceded the Floridas in 1783 the planters left, taking the enslaved population with them — several thousand to the Bahamas, where they cleared new ground for cotton, and thousands more to the West Indies. The indigo works were abandoned, and Spain, returning to a province with no bounty and no British market, never revived the crop.

American Revolution Begins — Florida Remains Loyal to the Crown

When the shooting started at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, thirteen of Britain's mainland American colonies moved toward rebellion and two did not. East and West Florida stayed loyal, sent no delegates to the Continental Congress, and were not parties to the Declaration of Independence the following year.

The reasons are structural rather than sentimental. Both colonies were twelve years old. Neither had the accumulated grievances of a century of self-government — East Florida had never held an election at all, and West Florida's assembly had existed for barely a decade. Both were carried on the imperial estimates: parliament paid the governors, the garrisons, the Indian presents and much else besides, so that the Floridas were net recipients of British money rather than contributors to it. Their populations were recent arrivals holding crown land grants on conditions the crown could enforce. And both sat next to hostile neighbours — Georgia and South Carolina to the north, Spanish Louisiana to the west — which made a British garrison a comfort rather than an irritation.

There was also a great deal of exceedingly practical resentment. Georgia and Carolina had spent a decade disputing the Florida boundary and harassing the cattle trade across the St. Marys, and the frontier had been in a low state of raid and counter-raid for years before the war made it official.

Patrick Tonyn, governor of East Florida from 1774, was one of the most energetic loyalists in America and turned the province into an offensive base rather than a refuge. When his requests for regular troops went unanswered he raised his own irregulars, the East Florida Rangers, and gave them to Thomas Brown — a young Georgia planter who had been seized by a Sons of Liberty mob at Augusta in 1775, beaten, scalped in part, tarred and burned about the feet, and who escaped to Florida with a personal account to settle. Brown's Rangers, working with Creek allies, raided into Georgia continually for the rest of the war, running off cattle, burning plantations and gathering intelligence.

St. Augustine also became a prison. Loyalist Florida also held captured Patriot leaders through the war, men taken at Charleston in 1780 and confined in East Florida on parole.

Congress recognised the threat and tried three times to remove it. The Florida expeditions of 1776, 1777 and 1778 all failed, and none of them for want of numbers: they failed on the St. Marys and the swamps beyond it, on disease, on supply, and on the quarrels between Continental officers and Georgia militia commanders. East Florida was never invaded successfully during the Revolution. It was lost, in the end, at the negotiating table.

Loyalist Refugees Arrive; Patriot Raids Into East Florida Repulsed

East Florida spent the Revolution doing two things at once: absorbing refugees and raiding the people who had made them refugees.

The influx began in earnest in 1776, as revolutionary committees in Georgia and South Carolina moved from social pressure to confiscation and banishment. Loyalists who would not swear the new allegiances lost their property and, in many cases, the safety of their families, and the nearest ground still under the king's peace was across the St. Marys. They came overland in parties, and by sea into St. Augustine, bringing what they could carry and often the people they held in slavery. Governor Patrick Tonyn took them in, fed them from government stores he had no authority to open, and enrolled the men.

The military instrument he built from them was the East Florida Rangers under Thomas Brown, operating with Creek and Seminole allies. Their war was one of cattle, corn and terror: driving off the herds that fed Georgia's militia, burning plantations along the Altamaha, ambushing patrols, and keeping the whole southern Georgia frontier in a condition where no crop could be brought in safely. It was extremely effective, and it made East Florida intolerable to Congress.

Three expeditions were sent against it. The first, in 1776, under Charles Lee, got as far as Georgia and dissolved when Lee was recalled north. The second, in 1777, under Button Gwinnett — a signer of the Declaration and by then Georgia's acting president — collapsed in a quarrel between Gwinnett and his militia commander Lachlan McIntosh so bitter that the two men fought a duel in which Gwinnett was killed; the expedition never reached the St. Johns. The third and largest, in 1778, under Robert Howe, took Fort Tonyn on the St. Marys and then came apart on the same ground as the others: disease in the ranks, no supply, and Continental, Georgia and South Carolina officers who would not accept one another's orders. It withdrew after an action at Alligator Creek.

The obstacles were consistent. Between Georgia and St. Augustine lay a hundred miles of pine barren, swamp and river crossings with no forage and no road worth the name; an army arriving at the far end of it would face the Castillo de San Marcos, which nobody had ever taken; and the local knowledge belonged entirely to Brown's Rangers and their Indigenous allies.

East Florida thus ended the Revolution undefeated, having been attacked three times, and having contributed materially to the British capture of Savannah in 1778 and of Charleston in 1780. What finished it was not Continental arms but a Spanish army eight hundred miles to the west, and a treaty signed in Paris.

Minorcan Exodus — New Smyrna Workers Reach St. Augustine; Turnbull Flees

In the spring of 1777 the surviving people of New Smyrna left it. They went in a body up the King's Road to St. Augustine — some six hundred men, women and children out of the fourteen hundred who had landed nine years earlier — and laid their case before Governor Patrick Tonyn and the East Florida court.

The case was heard, and it was won. The indentures had run their term years before; the promised land had never been granted; the accounting by which the debt was said to persist did not survive examination. Tonyn declared the colonists free of their obligations and offered them protection and ground at St. Augustine. There is no need to be sentimental about his motives — he was at war with Andrew Turnbull over the government of the province and had every political reason to break him — but the judgment was sound in law, and it ended the largest single instance of bound European labour in the history of the American Southeast.

Turnbull was ruined by it. The plantation could not operate without the workforce, his partners' investment was gone, and the litigation and pamphleteering with Tonyn consumed what remained of his standing. He left Florida for South Carolina, practised medicine at Charleston, and died there in 1792.

The Minorcans stayed. They were settled in the north quarter of St. Augustine, where their descendants still live and where the streets of the district retain the shape they gave it. They kept their Catalan speech, their Catholic religion — which mattered a great deal when the province reverted to Spain seven years later — their fishing and their food, including the datil pepper, a variety that is grown in and around St. Augustine and effectively nowhere else in the United States.

Their significance to Florida history is out of proportion to their numbers. In 1783 the British planters and their enslaved workforces evacuated almost entirely, and the province emptied for the second time in twenty years. The Minorcans had nowhere else to go and no reason to fear a Catholic king, so they remained — and they were therefore the one civilian community that carried through from British East Florida into the Second Spanish Period, and from there into the American territory in 1821. When Zéspedes arrived in 1784 to take over a province whose British population was leaving, the largest settled group he found already in place was Minorcan.

Names from that migration — Pellicer, Ponce, Usina, Andreu, Genovar, Pacetti, Sánchez, Solana, Triay — are still common in St. Augustine, and the community observes its origins as a living tradition rather than a historical footnote.

Spain Enters the Revolutionary War — Gálvez Campaigns Begin

Spain declared war on Britain in June 1779. It did not recognise the United States and did not sign a treaty with Congress: it entered as an ally of France under the Family Compact, and its war aims were its own — Gibraltar, Minorca, the Mississippi, and the Floridas it had surrendered in 1763. American independence was, from Madrid's point of view, a useful by-product and a slightly alarming precedent.

The consequences for Florida were immediate, because Spain had in Louisiana one of the ablest field commanders of the century. Bernardo de Gálvez was thirty-three, governor at New Orleans, and had been quietly assisting the American cause for two years — funnelling powder and supplies up the Mississippi to the Continental forces in the west while Spain was still formally neutral. He had also been studying British West Florida, and he had reached the conclusion that it was a chain of undermanned posts strung along six hundred miles of river and coast, any one of which could be taken before the others could react.

He did not wait for orders. On learning of the declaration he raised what he could at New Orleans — a mixed force of Spanish regulars, Louisiana militia, free Black companies, Acadians, German settlers and Indigenous allies, something over a thousand men — and moved up the Mississippi before the British commanders knew war had been declared. A hurricane wrecked his boats and much of his supply on the way; he went on anyway.

Fort Bute at Manchac fell on September 7, 1779, taken by surprise. Baton Rouge, the stronger position, was invested and its garrison surrendered on September 21 after a short bombardment, and Gálvez required as a condition of the capitulation that Fort Panmure at Natchez be surrendered along with it — which delivered the whole Mississippi district without another shot. Some five hundred and fifty British troops were taken.

In a matter of weeks Britain had lost the eastern bank of the lower Mississippi, the Natchez settlements, and any prospect of using the river to strike at Spanish Louisiana. West Florida was cut in half, its western districts gone and its remaining strength concentrated at Mobile and Pensacola. Gálvez turned immediately to those.

For the Floridas the entry of Spain changed the war entirely. The provinces had comfortably resisted everything the Americans could send at them across the Georgia frontier. They were about to be taken from the other direction by a professional army with naval support, and there was very little Britain could do about it while its forces were committed in the Carolinas.

Fall of Mobile — Gálvez Advances Along the Gulf Coast

Having cleared the Mississippi in the autumn of 1779, Gálvez turned east along the Gulf. Mobile was the next objective: a port that had been the capital of French Louisiana before 1763, that commanded the bay and the river system behind it, and that stood between Spanish New Orleans and British Pensacola.

He sailed from New Orleans in January 1780 with roughly seven hundred and fifty men, and the expedition nearly ended before it began — the fleet was scattered and several vessels grounded and wrecked crossing Mobile Bay's shallow bar in February. Gálvez salvaged what he could, landed his force, and was reinforced from Havana to something over a thousand, with Louisiana militia, free Black and mixed-race companies from New Orleans, and Indigenous allies among them.

Fort Charlotte — the old French Fort Condé, rebuilt in brick — was held by Captain Elias Durnford with a garrison of about three hundred. Durnford refused a summons, burned the buildings outside the walls to clear his field of fire, and waited for relief from Pensacola. Gálvez landed his siege guns and opened a breaching battery on March 12. By the following day the wall was going, and Durnford surrendered in March 1780.

The relief column from Pensacola, under General John Campbell, was still more than a day's march away when the fort fell. It turned back.

The pattern of the campaign was now clear and it was largely a British failure of concentration. Britain's Gulf forces were dispersed across posts that could not support one another, dependent on Indigenous allies whose loyalty tracked the reliability of trade goods, and commanded by officers who had expected the war's southern theatre to be in the Carolinas. Gálvez, operating on interior lines with naval support from Havana, took the posts in sequence: Manchac and Baton Rouge in the autumn, Natchez by capitulation, Mobile in the spring.

Only Pensacola was left. Gálvez went to Havana to argue for the force he judged necessary to take it — a much larger one than he had used so far, since Pensacola was properly fortified and garrisoned — and spent the rest of 1780 in the frustrating business of prising an expedition out of a cautious naval command. A fleet finally sailed in October and was dispersed by a hurricane. He began again.

Siege of Pensacola — Fall of British West Florida

The expedition sailed from Havana on February 13, 1781 and reached Pensacola Bay on March 9. It was the largest amphibious operation Spain mounted in North America during the war, and it began with a quarrel.

The entrance to Pensacola Bay is a narrow pass under the guns of Santa Rosa Island, and the naval commander, José Calvo de Irazábal, refused to take his ships in. Gálvez ended the argument on March 18 by boarding the brig Galveztown, hoisting his pennant, and sailing in alone under the British batteries with his colours flying, daring the fleet to follow. It did. Charles III afterwards granted him the motto Yo solo — I alone — for his arms, and it is the reason his name is on the map from Galveston to Galvez Street.

The forces built up through the spring. Gálvez had something over thirteen hundred men at the outset, including the Hibernia Regiment of Irish exiles in Spanish service under Arturo O'Neill and a Mallorcan regiment; reinforcements from Havana under Field Marshal Juan Manuel de Cagigal on April 19 brought the total to around eight thousand, with French vessels and troops in support. General John Campbell held Fort George on the heights above the town with its two supporting works — the Prince of Wales Redoubt and the Queen's Redoubt, also called the Crescent — with a garrison of some two and a half thousand: the 16th Regiment, a battalion of the 60th, Royal Artillery, Waldeck Germans, Maryland and Pennsylvania loyalist battalions, armed Black companies, and about five hundred Choctaw and other Indigenous allies who did most of the skirmishing on the British side.

The siege ran two months. Gálvez was wounded in the hand and abdomen on April 12 while reconnoitring, and Colonel José de Ezpeleta took over the direction of the works. The Spanish pushed their approach trenches up the sand ridge toward the Queen's Redoubt through April.

It ended in a few minutes on the morning of May 8, 1781. A Spanish howitzer shell dropped into the powder magazine of the Queen's Redoubt and detonated it, killing fifty-seven men outright, wounding many more, and blowing open the work. Spanish grenadiers went straight into the breach and turned the captured guns on Fort George. Campbell asked for terms the same day and surrendered on May 10.

The capitulation delivered not just the garrison — more than eleven hundred prisoners — but the whole province of West Florida. Britain's Gulf coast empire, twenty years old, ceased to exist. Gálvez was made lieutenant general and governor of Louisiana and West Florida; he later became viceroy of New Spain, and died at forty in 1786.

For Florida the consequence was decisive. Spain now held West Florida by conquest, which put it in a position at the peace table to demand East Florida as well — and to get it.

Treaty of Paris — Florida Returned to Spain; Loyalist Evacuation Begins

The Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783. Britain recognised the independence of the United States and, in the separate settlement with Spain concluded the same day at Versailles, ceded both Floridas — West Florida, which Spain had taken by force at Pensacola, and East Florida, which it had not — in exchange for the return of the Bahamas, taken by Spain in 1782.

East Florida had never rebelled. It had sheltered loyalist refugees from three colonies, supplied the rangers who kept the Georgia frontier in flames for seven years, held Patriot prisoners including three signers of the Declaration, and repelled every expedition Congress sent against it. Its reward was to be traded away for an island group. The news reached St. Augustine in the spring of 1784 and was received, by every account, with disbelief and then fury.

Governor Patrick Tonyn was left to manage the consequences. The province held roughly seventeen thousand people, of whom something like eleven thousand were enslaved — a population that had more than doubled during the war as refugees poured in from Georgia and South Carolina. Britain granted eighteen months to leave. Those with means could go; those without had to be moved at government expense, and the shipping had to be found.

Most went. The largest number sailed for the Bahamas, where the East Florida planters and the enslaved people they carried with them transformed a thinly settled fishing colony into a cotton economy, and where their descendants remain a substantial part of the population. Others went to Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, to Nova Scotia, and to Britain. Perhaps four thousand more struck out overland into the backcountry, some going as far as the Mississippi, dispersing into the Creek country or into the new United States they had spent the war fighting.

For many it was a second or third displacement in a decade — people who had left Georgia for Carolina, Carolina for East Florida, and East Florida now for a Bahamian out-island. Loyalist claims commissions in London spent years afterwards adjudicating what they had lost.

What was left behind was a province stripped for the second time in twenty years. The plantations along the St. Johns went back to scrub; the indigo works rotted; the improvements British investors had made were abandoned to a Spanish administration that had no use for them and no capital to maintain them. The Minorcans of St. Augustine stayed because they had nowhere to go and no fear of a Catholic king. A handful of British merchants and planters stayed and swore allegiance to Spain.

The transfer of authority was completed in July 1784, when Tonyn handed the Castillo de San Marcos to Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes.

British: Final Transfer of Authority to Spain

The Treaty of Paris signed on September 3, 1783 ended the American Revolutionary War and returned both Floridas to Spain, which had already taken West Florida by force under Bernardo de Gálvez in 1779–1781. Britain gave up the Floridas and kept the Bahamas. For the loyalist population of East Florida the news was worse than defeat, because East Florida had never rebelled: it had been the refuge to which loyalists from Georgia and the Carolinas fled, and its reward for constancy was to be handed to a foreign crown.

The evacuation that followed took some eighteen months and was managed, with considerable difficulty, by Governor Patrick Tonyn. Roughly ten thousand people left, most for the Bahamas and the West Indies, others for Nova Scotia and England. A further four thousand or so dispersed overland into the backcountry, some travelling as far as the Mississippi. Planters who had brought enslaved labourers with them from Georgia and South Carolina took them onward; those who could not sell property in a collapsing market abandoned it. The St. Marys frontier fell into disorder as banditry filled the gap between one government leaving and another arriving, and the last British troops did not depart until well after the formal transfer.

Not everyone went. The Minorcans — the survivors of Andrew Turnbull's New Smyrna colony, who had walked to St. Augustine in 1777 — had no other home and stayed, becoming the largest settled community in the province. A number of British merchants and planters also elected to remain and swear allegiance to the Spanish crown, a decision Spain was willing to accommodate because the alternative was an empty colony.

Spanish: Zéspedes Administration — Second Period Begins

Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes y Velasco assumed office as governor of East Florida on June 27, 1784, and Patrick Tonyn formally surrendered the Castillo de San Marcos to him on July 12, 1784. Born in Valencia about 1721 into a distinguished military family, Zéspedes had risen through the Spanish royal army to colonel and field marshal, had married in Havana in 1754, and had served briefly as acting governor of Santiago de Cuba in 1781–82. Bernardo de Gálvez appointed him to Florida in 1783.

He inherited a province in a peculiar kind of ruin: not destroyed, but emptied and unsettled. Much of St. Augustine's housing stock stood vacant with absent owners, and Zéspedes proposed that the crown confiscate abandoned property for redistribution and impose a time limit on repossession claims before the question became unmanageable. The frontier remained lawless, departing loyalists and arriving Spaniards had to be kept apart, and the province's new subjects were largely Protestant and English-speaking. A partial census was taken in 1784 and a fuller one in 1786.

The policy Zéspedes adopted was frank inducement. Spain offered land grants, ten-year exemptions from taxation and cash bonuses, and — unusually for a Spanish colony — actively recruited non-Spanish settlers. A group of impoverished Canary Islanders already in Florida was moved from Pensacola to St. Augustine in 1786, to Zéspedes's disappointment when their farming came to little. Anglo-American settlers began coming from 1787, swearing allegiance to the crown while quietly declining to convert; from 1790 the land-grant policy was formally opened to non-Spaniards, requiring only an oath of loyalty and a commitment to live on and work the land for ten years. Zéspedes also backed the licensing in 1786 of the British trading house of Panton, Leslie and Company, on the practical grounds that Spain could not manufacture the goods the Creek and Seminole expected, and that a British firm holding the Indian trade under Spanish licence was preferable to no trade and no allies at all.

These were sensible measures taken from a position of structural weakness. The situado, the subsidy on which the colony's finances depended, arrived irregularly from Havana. Spain, increasingly preoccupied with revolt elsewhere in its empire, had neither the settlers nor the manufactures to fill Florida, and its practical authority never extended much beyond St. Augustine, Pensacola and a few small towns. Zéspedes was replaced by Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada in July 1790 and died in Havana on October 21, 1794. The Second Spanish Period he opened would last thirty-seven years and end with the province being handed to a neighbour that had simply grown too strong to resist.