Florida’s Colonial History

The year 1565 brought the dramatic and violent resolution of the Franco-Spanish contest for Florida. Fort Caroline had been established on the St.

With Fort Caroline destroyed and St. Augustine planted, Menéndez spent 1566 doing what his asiento actually required of him: turning a beachhead into a province.

Dominique de Gourgues was a Gascon soldier with a personal grievance against Spain: captured in an earlier war, he had been chained to the oar of a Spanish galley before being freed by Turkish corsairs.

The Society of Jesus gave Florida six years and then left. Menéndez had asked for Jesuits in 1566, believing that a permanent Spanish presence required the conversion of the Indigenous peoples rather than merely their submission, and the order sent some of its most capable men.

Francis Drake came to Florida almost as an afterthought.

The Guale rising of 1597 began, as such things often do, over a succession.

Pedro de Ybarra took office as governor of La Florida on October 20, 1603 and served until 1610, and his administration marks the point at which Spanish Florida stopped being an emergency and became an institution.

Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, Bishop of Santiago de Cuba, arrived at St. Augustine in March 1606 and spent several months travelling the Florida mission provinces.

The Tierra Firme fleet of 1622 was late.

Apalachee was the richest province Spain held in North America, and the Spanish took a long time to occupy it.

The rising of 1656 was not a rejection of Spanish rule or of Christianity. It was a revolt of Spain's own Indigenous nobility against a governor who had insulted them, and its specific grievance was the labour system that made the colony work.

The English privateer Robert Searles — he also appears in the records as John Davis — came into St. Augustine's harbour in May 1668 by a piece of straightforward deception.

Ground was broken on October 2, 1672.

The founding of Charles Town in 1670 — under a proprietary charter of 1663 — put an aggressive English colony within a few days' sail of Spanish Florida's northern missions, and within a decade it had worked out how to attack them without ever sending an English army.

On November 7, 1693, Charles II of Spain issued a decree granting liberty to enslaved people who escaped from the English colonies into Spanish Florida, on condition that they accept the Catholic faith.

Two things secured Spanish Florida's western and eastern anchors within a few years of each other at the close of the seventeenth century, and both were responses to somebody else's initiative.

The War of the Spanish Succession reached Florida within months of being declared in Europe, and it reached it in the person of James Moore, governor of Carolina, who had been arguing for the destruction of Spanish Florida for years and now had a war to do it in.

In January 1704 James Moore came back to Florida. Having failed against the Castillo two years earlier and lost the governorship of Carolina for it, he raised a private force — some fifty Carolinians and about a thousand Creek warriors — and marched not on St.

Queen Anne's War is remembered in Florida for St. Augustine and Apalachee, but the same machinery that destroyed the missions was turned on the Gulf coast as well, and in 1707 it very nearly took Pensacola.

The War of the Quadruple Alliance was fought in Europe between Spain and a coalition that included France, over Spanish attempts to recover Italian territory.

Spain took formal repossession of Pensacola Bay in 1722, two years after the Treaty of The Hague had awarded it back, and found nothing there worth repossessing.

By the 1730s the sanctuary policy of 1693 had produced a problem St. Augustine had not planned for: a substantial population of free Black subjects living in and around the town, many of them veterans of its militia, whose legal status the governors had honoured unevenly.

Britain declared war on Spain in October 1739 over a grievance that was largely pretextual and an interest that was entirely real.

James Oglethorpe brought about two thousand men south in May 1740 — his own regiment of British regulars, Georgia and Carolina militia and rangers, a naval squadron, and several hundred Creek, Cherokee and Chickasaw allies.

Two years after beating off Oglethorpe, Montiano went north to finish the argument. Havana provided the means: a fleet of some fifty sail and around two thousand troops, assembled to destroy the Georgia colony and push the frontier back to the Savannah or beyond.

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.