Second Spanish Period

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.

American Pressure Intensifies on All Frontiers

By 1790 the United States had a constitution, a federal government under Washington, a treasury and an army, and a population expanding south and west faster than any government could regulate. Spanish Florida's northern boundary was a line on a map running through pine woods, and the people crossing it were not an invading force but farmers, herdsmen, traders and slave-catchers, arriving continuously and in numbers Spain could neither count nor stop.

Two frictions dominated the decade and neither could be resolved. The first was the sanctuary question. The 1693 decree had never been formally revoked, and enslaved people continued to cross from Georgia knowing that Spanish Florida had for a century been a place where freedom could be claimed. Georgians came after them, armed, without permission, and often took whoever they found. Spain, which needed American goodwill and could not police its own frontier, temporised: in 1790 it agreed to stop granting sanctuary to new arrivals from the United States, a concession that satisfied nobody and was widely ignored on the ground.

The second was the Indigenous interior. Creek and Seminole towns lay across the frontier and dealt with whichever power supplied trade goods; Spain supplied them through the British firm of Panton, Leslie and Company because it had no manufactures of its own, and the United States regarded the whole arrangement as a hostile combination on its southern flank.

Governor Quesada — Land Grant Policy Codified

Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada y Barnuevo succeeded Zéspedes as governor of East Florida in July 1790 and served until 1795, and his administration codified the policy that would ultimately hand Florida to the United States.

The problem was simple and had no good answer. Florida had land and no people. Spain had no surplus population to send and no money to induce one. So the crown opened the province to settlers of any nationality: land grants free of purchase price, subject to an oath of allegiance, the toleration of private Protestant worship, and the requirement to occupy and improve the tract for ten years before a perfect title issued. Acreage was scaled to family size and to the number of enslaved people brought in.

The settlers who took the offer were overwhelmingly American, because they were the only ones available. They came from Georgia and the Carolinas into the country between the St. Marys and the St. Johns, took the oath, and farmed. Spanish authority over them was nominal — a governor at St. Augustine, no local garrison, no courts to speak of in the countryside — and their loyalty ran to their own community and to the United States.

The paradox is exact: the only way to populate Florida was to fill it with the citizens of the power most determined to take it. Every grant issued under the Quesada policy made the province more valuable and less Spanish, and within a generation those settlers and their sons would supply the manpower for the Patriot War of 1812 and the political case for annexation in 1819.

Pinckney's Treaty — Boundary Disputes Temporarily Resolved

The Treaty of San Lorenzo was signed on October 27, 1795 and is generally called Pinckney's Treaty after Thomas Pinckney, the American envoy who negotiated it. It is the most favourable agreement the United States obtained from Spain before 1819, and it was obtained mostly by luck.

The dispute was old. Britain had moved West Florida's northern boundary to roughly 32°28′ in 1764; when Spain recovered the province in 1783 it claimed that line, while the United States insisted the boundary was the 31st parallel as specified in its own treaty with Britain. Between the two lines lay the Natchez district and a great deal of the lower Mississippi valley. Compounding it, Spain controlled New Orleans and therefore the mouth of the river down which everything the American west produced had to travel. Spanish officials had spent a decade opening and closing that trade to extract concessions, and had been intriguing with western settlers about separating from the Union.

What changed was Europe. Spain had gone to war with revolutionary France in 1793, done badly, and made peace at Basel in July 1795 — a switch of sides that left Madrid fearing a British attack on its American possessions and, worse, an Anglo-American combination against them. Manuel de Godoy, who ran the Spanish government, decided to buy American neutrality by conceding everything in dispute.

The treaty gave the United States the 31st parallel, free navigation of the Mississippi to its mouth, and the right of deposit at New Orleans — permission to land goods there for transshipment without duty — for three years, renewable. Both parties undertook to restrain the Indigenous nations within their territories from raiding across the line.

For Florida the consequences were mixed and largely bad. In the short term the frontier quieted. In the longer term the treaty conceded the principle that Spanish claims in North America were negotiable under pressure, established the American right to be present on the Mississippi, and cost Spain the loyalty of the Creek and Choctaw towns north of the new line, who correctly read the abandonment of the 32°28′ claim as evidence that Spain would not defend them. Running the boundary took until 1798 and involved a Spanish refusal to evacuate Natchez that nearly produced a war.

The right of deposit was suspended in 1802, which precipitated the crisis that led Jefferson to send envoys to Paris — and thence to the Louisiana Purchase, and to a Florida surrounded.

Census of St. Augustine — Population Profile of the Second Spanish Period

The Spanish census of 1797 counted the people of St. Augustine and its immediate district: 1,007 whites, 483 enslaved people and 102 free people of colour — something under sixteen hundred in all. That is the whole of the provincial capital of a territory the size of a European kingdom, thirteen years into the Second Spanish Period.

The first thing the numbers show is how little Spain had recovered. St. Augustine had held roughly three thousand people before the evacuation of 1763, and East Florida perhaps seventeen thousand at the British departure in 1783. Spain had refilled less than a tenth of that. The province had no export economy worth the name, no shipping of its own, and a treasury that depended on a Mexican subsidy which the wars of the period increasingly interrupted.

The second is the composition. Nearly a third of the population was enslaved. Spanish Florida was a slave society, and the plantations along the St. Johns — many of them run by British or American proprietors who had stayed on and sworn allegiance — worked cotton, rice and timber with enslaved labour exactly as their neighbours in Georgia did.

The third and most distinctive figure is the 102. Free people of colour made up roughly a fifth of St. Augustine's African-descended population, a proportion without parallel anywhere in the neighbouring American states, and the legal position they held was different in kind rather than merely in degree. Under Spanish law they could own and bequeath property, make contracts, sue and testify in court, marry in the Church with the marriage recorded, petition the governor, and serve in the militia — where free Black companies were a standing part of the province's defence, and where at least one free Black officer held a captaincy by 1801. This population included the surviving Fort Mose families, veterans of the 1740 fighting and their descendants, people manumitted locally, and refugees from the Haitian Revolution.

Jane Landers's Black Society in Spanish Florida (1999) reconstructed this world from the parish registers, militia rolls, wills, court records and land petitions of the Spanish archives, and it changed how the period is understood. The older account treated Second Spanish Florida as a moribund backwater waiting to be annexed. What the records show is a small, poor, legally distinctive society in which the boundary between free and enslaved ran differently than it did fifty miles north — and in which people used Spanish law deliberately and effectively to secure position for themselves and their children.

That difference is also why the United States regarded the province as intolerable, and why the transfer of 1821 was followed within a few years by laws that stripped Florida's free Black population of nearly everything the Spanish census-takers had recorded them as possessing.

William Augustus Bowles and the 'State of Muskogee'

William Augustus Bowles was born in Frederick County, Maryland about 1763, took an ensign's commission in the Maryland Loyalists at thirteen, and was at the surrender of Pensacola in 1781 — from which he escaped inland with Creek allies rather than into captivity. He never went back to being a British officer. He married into Muscogee families, one wife being a daughter of the Hitchiti chief William Perryman, and used those connections to claim a standing among the Lower Creek and Seminole that his own countrymen would never have granted him.

What he proposed was genuinely radical: an independent Indigenous state on the Gulf, the State of Muskogee, sovereign over the Creek and Seminole country of Florida and southern Georgia, with its own flag, constitution, navy and — critically — its own ports, open to any trader. He declared it in 1795 and styled himself Director General.

Its target was as much commercial as political. Spain had no manufactures to supply the Indigenous trade and had licensed the Scottish firm of Panton, Leslie and Company to conduct it under Spanish protection, which gave one house a monopoly over the deerskin trade of the whole Southeast on terms it set itself. Bowles had briefly worked for Panton in 1788 and understood the arrangement exactly. He attacked the firm's stores and shipping, offered Creek and Seminole hunters better prices from British suppliers in the Bahamas, and thereby threatened the mechanism by which Spain held its Indigenous alliances.

He returned to Florida in 1799 after an escape from Spanish custody that had taken him from Havana to Madrid to the Philippines and back across the Indian and Atlantic oceans, and re-established himself in the Apalachicola country. In the spring of 1800 he declared war on Spain outright and, with a Creek and Seminole force, took the Spanish fort of San Marcos de Apalache at St. Marks, holding it some five weeks before a Spanish naval and land force retook it. He commanded two schooners at the height of his career and claimed several hundred followers — frontiersmen, formerly enslaved men and warriors. Spain put a price on him of six thousand dollars and fifteen hundred kegs of rum.

He was undone by Creek politics rather than Spanish arms. At a general council on the Hickory Ground in 1803 he was seized by chiefs who had concluded that his war was costing them more than his trade was worth, and handed over. He died at Morro Castle in Havana in 1805, reportedly by refusing food.

Bowles is easy to write off as an adventurer, and he was one. He was also the clearest expression of something real: the Indigenous nations of the Southeast were not passive ground over which Spain and the United States contended, and the possibility of an independent Native polity on the Gulf was taken seriously enough by every government in the region to be worth six thousand dollars and the rum.

Napoleon's Florida Ambitions — Louisiana Retroceded; Florida Isolated

The Third Treaty of San Ildefonso was signed in secret on October 1, 1800. Spain returned Louisiana to France — the territory it had received from France in 1762 as compensation for entering the Seven Years' War and losing Florida — in exchange for a promise of an Italian kingdom for the Duke of Parma, who was son-in-law to the Spanish king. Napoleon wanted Louisiana as the granary for a restored French empire in the Caribbean, to be built on the reconquest of Saint-Domingue.

Spain took care to keep the Floridas out of the bargain, and refused repeatedly to include them despite French pressure. That refusal was the one piece of successful Spanish diplomacy in the whole affair, and it is the reason Florida did not pass to the United States in 1803 along with everything else.

It still left Spanish Florida in a far worse position. Its western neighbour was no longer a friendly and militarily negligible Spanish province but the strongest power in Europe, whose intentions in the Gulf were unknown, and whose interest in the Floridas was well understood in Madrid to be considerable.

Then the plan collapsed. The French army sent to retake Saint-Domingue was destroyed by Haitian resistance and yellow fever, war with Britain resumed, and Louisiana without a Caribbean empire to feed was a liability Napoleon could not defend against the Royal Navy. In April 1803 he sold the whole of it to the United States for fifteen million dollars — to envoys who had been sent to buy nothing more than New Orleans.

The consequences for Florida were immediate and permanent. The province was now bounded on the north and west by the United States, cut off from any European neighbour, and reachable from Spain only by sea across an ocean dominated by the British fleet. Worse, the sale left the boundaries of Louisiana deliberately undefined: France had conveyed the territory "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain," and Talleyrand's celebrated reply when pressed for a definition was that the Americans had made a noble bargain and would doubtless make the most of it. They did. Within a year the United States was claiming that West Florida as far east as the Perdido had been part of French Louisiana and was therefore already American property.

Spain, at war in Europe and heading toward the catastrophe of 1808, had no capacity to contest any of it. Everything that happens in Florida between 1804 and 1821 — the Mobile Act, the West Florida rebellion, the Patriot War, Jackson's invasions — proceeds from the deliberate vagueness of a sentence in the Louisiana treaty and from the fact that the province now had only one neighbour.

The Mobile Act — United States Claims West Florida

Congress passed the Mobile Act in February 1804. On its face it was a customs measure, annexing the navigable waters and shores of the Mobile Bay district to a United States revenue district and authorising a collector to be stationed there. Its substance was a claim of sovereignty over a stretch of Spanish West Florida that no American had ever governed.

The argument ran as follows. France had owned Louisiana before 1762. The Mobile district had been administered as part of French Louisiana before it went to Britain in 1763. Spain had retroceded Louisiana to France in 1800 "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it." Therefore, the reasoning concluded, Mobile came back to France in 1800 and passed to the United States in 1803, and Spain's continued occupation of it was a trespass.

The argument was weak and the administration knew it. Spain had held West Florida continuously since 1783 as a province distinct from Louisiana, had governed it as such, and had explicitly declined to include the Floridas in the retrocession. The Spanish minister at Washington, the Marqués de Casa Yrujo, protested in terms that caused a diplomatic rupture, and Jefferson quietly declined to enforce the act — the customs district was established at Fort Stoddert on the American side of the line instead, and no collector went to Mobile.

But the claim was not withdrawn. It was left standing on the statute book as a marker, to be acted upon when circumstances allowed, and it defined American policy toward Florida for the next fifteen years: assert a legal title, wait, and let settlement and disorder do the work that an army would otherwise have to do.

The pattern is worth naming because it recurs precisely. In 1810 American settlers in the Baton Rouge district rebelled and asked to be annexed, and Madison annexed them under the Mobile Act theory. In 1812 the same theory justified sending troops to Amelia Island. In 1813 General James Wilkinson finally occupied Mobile itself, under cover of the war with Britain — and the United States has held it ever since. In 1818 Jackson took Pensacola and St. Marks on the ground that Spain was failing to control territory it claimed.

At no point did the United States declare war on Spain over Florida. It acquired the province by a sequence of legal assertions, settler movements and unauthorised military actions that were retrospectively ratified, and the Mobile Act of 1804 is where the sequence starts.

West Florida Rebellion — Baton Rouge Republic; American Annexation

By 1810 the Baton Rouge district of Spanish West Florida was populated largely by English-speaking settlers from the United States, who had come in under Spanish land grants and taken the oath of allegiance without in any sense becoming Spaniards. Spain was in no condition to hold them: Napoleon had deposed the Bourbon king in 1808 and installed his own brother in Madrid, the Spanish empire was breaking into juntas and independence movements, and the colonial officials on the Mississippi had no orders, no money, no reinforcements, and no legitimate government to report to.

The settlers held conventions through the summer of 1810, ostensibly to organise the district's government in the king's name during the crisis in Spain — the standard formula used across Spanish America that year, and in most places the first step toward independence. In September the pretence was dropped. On September 23, 1810 a party of horsemen under Philemon Thomas rode into Baton Rouge before dawn, stormed the fort, and killed the Spanish commandant. The convention declared the independent State of West Florida three days later, adopted a constitution, elected Fulwar Skipwith as governor, and raised a blue flag with a single white star — the Bone Alley flag, ancestor of the Lone Star banners later used in Texas.

Independence lasted seventy-four days. The republic had immediately petitioned for annexation, and on October 27, 1810 President Madison issued a proclamation declaring that the territory between the Mississippi and the Perdido had been part of the Louisiana Purchase all along, and directing Governor Claiborne of the Orleans Territory to take possession. American troops occupied Baton Rouge in December. Skipwith and the convention protested that they had expected to negotiate terms of entry rather than be annexed as recovered property, and were ignored.

Spain protested, and could do nothing else. The district between the Pearl and the Mississippi went into the Orleans Territory and became part of Louisiana at statehood in 1812; the strip between the Pearl and the Perdido was added to the Mississippi Territory in 1812 and occupied — Mobile included — by General Wilkinson in April 1813.

What remained of Spanish West Florida after all this was Pensacola and a stretch of coast between the Perdido and the Apalachicola: a garrison town with no hinterland, no revenue and no communication with Madrid. The rebellion demonstrated the method that would finish the business nine years later, and it demonstrated it without the United States having to fire a shot at a Spanish soldier — American settlers acting on their own account, an American president recognising the result under a legal theory prepared in advance, and a Spanish empire too broken to answer.

The Patriot War — American Filibusters Invade East Florida

In January 1811 Congress secretly authorised President Madison to take possession of the Floridas if local authorities offered them or if a foreign power threatened to occupy them, and voted a hundred thousand dollars for the purpose. Madison sent George Mathews, a former governor of Georgia then in his seventies, to find such an offer. When none materialised, Mathews manufactured one.

He recruited a body of Georgians and a handful of Florida settlers, styled them the Patriots of East Florida, and had them elect John Houston McIntosh as their leader on March 16, 1812. The next day about a hundred and twenty-five of them appeared before Fernandina on Amelia Island — backed by United States Army regulars under Colonel Thomas Adams Smith and by navy gunboats lying in the harbour, whose presence made resistance pointless. The Spanish commandant surrendered, and the Patriots handed the place to the United States.

The column then moved on St. Augustine and established itself at Fort Mose, on the ground the free Black militia had defended in 1740. There it stopped. The Castillo could not be taken by a few hundred irregulars with no siege train, and the Patriots settled into a blockade that lasted through the summer.

Washington's position collapsed under diplomatic embarrassment. On April 4, 1812 Secretary of State Monroe informed Mathews that his acts were not authorised, and disavowed him — while American troops remained in occupation. Mathews died the following year still protesting that he had done exactly what was wanted of him, which was substantially true.

What defeated the invasion was not Spanish arms but the Seminole and the free and fugitive Black communities of the interior, who understood precisely what an American Florida would mean for them. Their raids cut the besiegers' supply line from Georgia. In September 1812 a Seminole and Black force under King Payne ambushed a Georgia militia detachment near modern Gainesville; Payne was mortally wounded, but the action broke the siege of St. Augustine. American retaliation fell on the Alachua towns, which were burned in 1813, driving the Seminole south — the first stage of a displacement that would run through three wars.

The occupation dragged into 1814. A remnant under Buckner Harris built Fort Mitchell near Micanopy and declared it a capital; Harris was killed by Seminoles and the post was abandoned by May 1814. The United States withdrew, and Spain was left holding a province that had been invaded by its neighbour's soldiers in a time of formal peace, and had received no compensation and no apology.

Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley — Heroism in the Patriot War

Anna Madgigine Jai was born in Senegal about 1793, taken in a slaving raid as a girl, carried to Cuba and bought there in 1806 by Zephaniah Kingsley, a Florida planter and slave trader. She was thirteen. He brought her to Laurel Grove on the St. Johns, and in 1811 he emancipated her and their three children before a Spanish notary — an act with real legal force under Spanish law, which recognised manumission, protected the property of free women of colour, and acknowledged their unions.

She became a planter in her own right, holding land granted to her by the Spanish government and the enslaved people who worked it. Her position is not a comfortable one to summarise: a woman who had been trafficked herself, operating as an owner within the same system, using the only legal instruments available to secure her children's freedom.

During the Patriot War the invaders came to Laurel Grove. Rather than let the plantation's stores and buildings fall to them, Anna Kingsley burned her own house and outbuildings and left with her children under Spanish naval protection. The colonial government recognised the act formally and granted her land at Mandarin in compensation.

The family later moved to Fort George Island, where the Kingsley Plantation stands today as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve. When Florida became American and its new laws made her family's position untenable, Zephaniah moved much of the household to Haiti. Anna returned to Florida after his death in 1843 and spent years in the American courts defending the inheritance her Spanish papers had guaranteed. She died in 1870.

War of 1812 — British Base in Florida; Jackson Occupies Pensacola

Spain was neutral in the War of 1812 — indeed it was Britain's ally in Europe against Napoleon — and its neutrality in Florida was a fiction that nobody had the means to maintain. Pensacola's governor, Mateo González Manrique, had a decayed fort, a few hundred men and no prospect of relief, and when a British squadron arrived in August 1814 asking to use the harbour he was in no position to refuse.

The British came with a purpose beyond harbour space. Major Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines had been sent to raise the Gulf frontier against the United States, and the material for it was ready to hand: the Red Stick Creek, broken by Jackson at Horseshoe Bend in March 1814 and driven into Florida, and the substantial population of people who had escaped slavery in Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. Nicolls recruited, drilled and uniformed them as Colonial Marines, issued arms from British stores, and proclaimed freedom to any who would join.

In May 1814 the British had seized a Forbes and Company trading post at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola, some fifteen miles above the modern town of Apalachicola, and built a substantial work there — a stockade with bastions inside a moat, stone barracks, a warehouse and a magazine holding seventy-three kegs of powder. It was intended as the arsenal of a Gulf campaign.

Andrew Jackson's response was characteristic and entirely unauthorised. Judging that a neutral port sheltering an enemy squadron was not neutral, he marched from Mobile with some three thousand men and took Pensacola on November 7, 1814. The British blew up Fort Barrancas and withdrew by sea; Jackson, having made his point and having no orders to hold Spanish territory, left within days and turned west to New Orleans, where he fought the battle that made him a national figure in January 1815.

The war ended, and the British left the Gulf in May 1815 — but Nicolls, departing, handed the fort at Prospect Bluff and its entire contents to the people he had armed. What Britain left behind on Spanish soil was a fortified, well-supplied community of several hundred formerly enslaved people and their Seminole and Choctaw allies, sitting on a river that ran up into the plantation districts of Georgia and Alabama.

To Spain it was an embarrassment it could not remove. To the planters of the American Southeast it was the most alarming thing on the continent. Everything that happened in Florida over the next seven years — the destruction of the fort in 1816, the First Seminole War, Jackson's invasion of 1818, and the cession itself — followed from it.

Destruction of the Negro Fort — Unauthorized American Military Action

After the British withdrawal in May 1815 the post at Prospect Bluff passed to the people Nicolls had armed, and it became something without precedent in North America: a self-governing community of formerly enslaved people, fortified, well armed, and settled on farms strung for miles along the Apalachicola. At the time of the attack it held around three hundred and thirty people — some two hundred armed men, thirty or so Seminole and Choctaw allies, and their families. Three of its leaders were former Colonial Marines: Garçon, Prince and Cyrus, all carpenters, all in their twenties.

Its existence was intolerable to the plantation districts upriver, and the reasoning was stated plainly at the time. It was not that the fort raided — the record of raiding is thin — but that it stood, and that its standing was visible for hundreds of miles to people held in slavery in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Andrew Jackson demanded that Spain remove it; Spain had no force capable of doing so. Jackson then instructed his subordinates that if Spain would not act, the United States would.

The pretext came in April 1816 when the fort's people fired on American boats moving up the river to supply Fort Scott, and killed several men. In July a force under Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Clinch came downriver with Creek allies who had been promised the salvage, while navy gunboats under Sailing Master Jairus Loomis worked up from the Gulf.

Garçon refused a summons to surrender, hoisted the Union Jack and a red flag meaning no quarter, and the fort's guns and the gunboats exchanged fire ineffectually. Then, on the morning of July 27, 1816, Gunboat No. 154 began firing heated shot, and one round went into the magazine. Seventy-three kegs of powder detonated at once. The explosion was heard at Pensacola, a hundred miles away, and it destroyed the fort and most of the people in it.

The traditional figure, drawn from the American reports, is about two hundred and seventy dead; some recent scholarship argues the toll was considerably lower and that many had left before the attack. Either way, women and children died in numbers. Of the few survivors, Garçon and a Choctaw chief were executed on the spot — Garçon handed to the Creek allies and shot. Those identifiable as escaped slaves were returned to slavery. The Creek carried off twenty-five hundred muskets and several hundred pistols and swords from the ruins.

Spain protested an armed invasion of its territory in a time of peace and was disregarded. Survivors moved east to the Suwannee and rebuilt near Bowlegs Town; others eventually reached the Bahamas, and more than eight hundred former Colonial Marines were resettled by Britain in Trinidad, where their descendants are known as the Merikins.

The destruction did not settle the frontier. It enraged the Seminole, and the First Seminole War began the following year. The United States built Fort Gadsden on the same bluff in 1818.

First Seminole War Begins — American-Seminole Conflict in Spanish Territory

The Seminole were not an ancient nation of the peninsula. They were formed in the eighteenth century out of Lower Creek towns migrating south into a Florida emptied by the destruction of the mission provinces, joined by remnants of older Florida peoples and, crucially, by people escaping slavery in the British and then American colonies. Those latter communities — the Black Seminoles — lived in their own towns, farmed, bore arms, and paid tribute to Seminole chiefs in a relationship that was not chattel slavery and that the planters of Georgia refused to recognise as anything but theft.

That is the root of the war. The Treaty of Fort Jackson of 1814, which Jackson had imposed on the Creek after Horseshoe Bend, took some twenty-three million acres from the Creek nation, including from towns that had fought on the American side, and drove more refugees into Florida. American settlers pressed to the border and beyond; slave-catching parties crossed it; Seminole and Black Seminole parties raided back. Spain, which nominally governed the territory, had perhaps a few hundred soldiers between St. Augustine and Pensacola and no presence at all in the interior.

The formal opening came in November 1817 at Fowltown, a Mikasuki village in southwestern Georgia about fifteen miles east of Fort Scott, whose chief Neamathla had told the fort's commander that the land east of the Flint was his. The Mikasuki did not regard themselves as Creek, had not signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, and denied that the Creek had any right to cede their country. On 21 November 1817 General Edmund Gaines sent a force of two hundred and fifty men to seize Neamathla; the first attempt was beaten off, and the following day the Mikasuki were driven out of the village. Some historians date the war from this attack.

The reply came a week later on the Apalachicola. A boat working upriver to Fort Scott under Lieutenant Richard W. Scott was attacked and most of those aboard were killed. Accounts put between forty and fifty people on it, among them some twenty sick soldiers and seven soldiers' wives; one woman was carried off as a prisoner and six people reached the fort alive. Later reports added four children to the dead, but they do not appear in the earliest accounts and their presence has never been confirmed. The Scott massacre, as it became known, produced exactly the reaction in Washington that the destruction of the Negro Fort had produced among the Seminole.

President Monroe authorised Jackson to take command and to pursue the Seminole across the Spanish line. The orders were drafted with a studied vagueness, and Jackson wrote to the president suggesting that the whole of Florida could be seized within sixty days if it were signified to him through any channel that this was desired. Whether such a signification was given became one of the most contested questions in American political history, and it has never been settled.

What is certain is that Jackson took the orders as sufficient. In March 1818 he crossed into Spanish Florida with an army, and treated the Spanish garrisons as belligerents.

Andrew Jackson's Invasion — First Seminole War at Its Height

Jackson crossed the Florida line in March 1818 with something over three thousand men — regulars, Tennessee volunteers and a large contingent of Creek allies under William McIntosh — and conducted the campaign as though Spanish sovereignty did not exist.

He rebuilt the works at Prospect Bluff as Fort Gadsden and used it as a base. In April he took the Spanish fort of San Marcos de Apalache at St. Marks, hauling down the Spanish flag and garrisoning it. He marched east to the Suwannee and burned the Seminole and Black Seminole towns around Bowlegs Town, though most of their people had gone. Then, in May, he turned west and took Pensacola itself, drove Governor José Masot into Fort Barrancas, compelled its surrender on May 28, seized the archives and the treasury, and installed an American officer as governor of West Florida.

The episode that made it an international crisis was the trial of two British subjects. Alexander Arbuthnot was a seventy-year-old Scottish trader from the Bahamas who dealt with the Seminole and had written on their behalf to British and Spanish officials. Robert Ambrister was a former Royal Marine lieutenant who had served with Nicolls and had been drilling Seminole fighters. Jackson had both seized and tried by a hastily assembled court martial. The court sentenced Arbuthnot to hang and Ambrister to be shot, then reconsidered Ambrister's sentence and reduced it to fifty lashes and confinement. Jackson set the reconsideration aside and confirmed the original. On April 29, 1818 Arbuthnot was hanged from the yardarm of his own schooner and Ambrister was shot.

Executing British civilians on Spanish territory during peace with both powers was, by any ordinary reading, an act of war against two nations. Madrid demanded restitution and punishment; London was inflamed; and the cabinet in Washington moved to disavow Jackson — with a single exception. John Quincy Adams argued, and eventually carried the point, that Spain had accepted by treaty an obligation to restrain the inhabitants of Florida from attacking the United States, that it had manifestly failed to do so, and that a power unable to govern its territory could not claim the immunities of sovereignty over it. He put this to Onís in a note of November 1818 that is one of the most consequential documents in American diplomatic history, and he paired it with a plain proposition: Spain should either garrison Florida properly or cede it.

Britain, calculating that its trade with the United States mattered more than two dead adventurers, declined to press the matter. Spain, at war with independence movements across South America, had no capacity to fight and knew it.

Pensacola and St. Marks were handed back, and the House of Representatives debated censuring Jackson for five weeks and declined to. Within three months of the debate, Onís signed.

Adams-Onís Treaty Signed — Spain Cedes Florida to the United States

John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onís signed the treaty in Washington on February 22, 1819 — Washington's birthday, a date Adams chose deliberately. It is formally the Treaty of Amity, Settlement and Limits, and it is known variously as the Adams-Onís Treaty, the Florida Purchase Treaty and — most accurately, since Florida was the smaller part of what it settled — the Transcontinental Treaty.

Spain ceded both Floridas. In return the United States paid Spain nothing: it assumed up to five million dollars in claims that its own citizens held against the Spanish government, and distributed that sum among them through a commission that sat until 1824. Florida was not bought from Spain. It was taken in settlement of a debt, by a government that had just occupied the territory militarily and declined to apologise.

The larger business was the line. The treaty drew, for the first time, a boundary between American and Spanish territory running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean: up the Sabine, north and west by a series of rivers and meridians, and along the 42nd parallel to the sea. In exchange for that line the United States renounced its claim to Texas — the concession that made Adams's own party furious and that would be undone by other means within a generation — and Spain renounced its claim to the Oregon Country north of 42°.

That last clause is why the treaty matters beyond Florida. It removed the only European power with a competing claim to the Pacific Northwest other than Britain and Russia, and it gave the United States a legal foothold on the Pacific coast at a time when it had no settlement within a thousand miles of it. Adams regarded it as the achievement of his career, and historians have generally agreed.

The Senate ratified unanimously on February 24, 1819. Spain then did nothing for twenty months. Ferdinand VII objected to the treatment of certain enormous land grants he had made to court favourites in Florida, and hoped to extract American undertakings not to recognise the independence movements in Spanish America. The delay achieved neither: the treaty was amended to void the disputed grants, no undertaking on recognition was given, and the revolution of 1820 in Spain produced a government that ratified in October 1820.

Ratifications were exchanged in Washington on February 22, 1821 — two years to the day after signature.

Spanish Ratification; Final Colonial Administration — Speculative Land Grants

Spain ratified in October 1820, and Florida spent its last months as a colony being quietly stripped by the people best placed to do it.

The mechanism was the land grant. American courts would be obliged, under the treaty and under settled principles of international law, to honour titles validly granted by the previous sovereign before the transfer. That created an obvious opportunity, and it was taken up with enthusiasm. Grants were issued, antedated, enlarged and traded in the final period of Spanish authority — some to genuine settlers, many to speculators, and the largest of all to men close to Ferdinand VII himself. Three grants made to the Duke of Alagón, the Count of Puñonrostro and Pedro de Vargas covered, between them, a substantial fraction of the entire peninsula.

Those three were the reason Spain delayed ratification for twenty months, and they were dealt with directly: the treaty was amended to declare those grants null and void, and Ferdinand was obliged to accept the amendment. The smaller grants remained, and the litigation over them ran through the American courts for decades. Cases arising from Spanish Florida titles reached the Supreme Court repeatedly, and the resulting body of law shaped how the United States handled acquired territory thereafter.

Governor José Coppinger administered East Florida to the end and did what he could to wind it up honestly — validating what was valid, refusing what was plainly fraudulent, and arranging for the archives to be preserved. Those records, the East Florida Papers, went eventually to the Library of Congress and are the principal source for everything now known about the period.

The province he handed over was small and its Spanish component smaller still. St. Augustine held perhaps a few hundred Spanish-speaking residents, and the Minorcan community that had been there since 1777. Around them was a population of American settlers who had come in under the open land policy, several thousand enslaved people, the free Black families whose legal standing depended entirely on Spanish law, and — in the interior, unconsulted and unrepresented in any of the arrangements being made — the Seminole and Black Seminole towns.

Of all these, only the American settlers had any reason to welcome what was coming. For the free Black population of St. Augustine the transfer meant the loss of nearly every legal protection they held, and many left for Cuba with the departing Spanish. For the Seminole it meant Andrew Jackson as governor, and then removal.

Formal Transfer to the United States — End of Colonial Florida

The handovers took place in the summer of 1821. East Florida was transferred at St. Augustine on July 10, when Governor José Coppinger delivered the province and the Castillo de San Marcos — renamed Fort Marion — to Colonel Robert Butler. West Florida followed at Pensacola on July 17, where Andrew Jackson took possession from Governor José Callava. In both towns the Spanish colours came down and the American flag went up, and the Spanish garrisons embarked for Havana.

Jackson had been appointed provisional governor by President Monroe: the man whose unauthorised invasions of 1814 and 1818 had done more than any treaty to force the cession now received the territory formally. His tenure lasted eleven weeks. He quarrelled immediately and violently with Callava over the custody of records — going so far as to imprison the former Spanish governor briefly, which produced yet another diplomatic protest — found the administrative and legal confusion of the transition intolerable, and resigned in October 1821, never to return to Florida. Congress organised the Territory of Florida on March 30, 1822, joining East and West into a single government, and a new capital was laid out at Tallahassee in 1824 at the midpoint between the two old ones.

Three hundred and eight years had passed since Ponce de León sighted the coast at Eastertide in 1513. In that time the peninsula had been claimed by Spain, contested by France, governed by Britain as two colonies, returned to Spain, and ceded to a republic that had not existed when the last Spanish period began. It had produced almost no wealth for anyone who held it. Spain kept it for two centuries because of the Gulf Stream, held it with a fort and a subsidy, and let it go when the subsidy and the empire behind it were gone.

What the colonial era left is unevenly distributed. It left the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded town in the United States, and the oldest masonry fort, both still standing at St. Augustine. It left the Minorcan families of the north quarter, the Spanish place-names along both coasts, and the cattle and citrus that came in with the first Spanish ships. It left the archives — the East Florida Papers and the Spanish colonial records — out of which most of what is written on these pages has been reconstructed.

It also left an accounting that is harder to summarise. The Timucua, the Apalachee, the Calusa, the Guale and the Tequesta, who between them numbered in the hundreds of thousands when Ponce arrived, were gone. The free Black community that Spanish law had recognised for a century and a quarter lost its standing within a few years of the transfer, and much of it left for Cuba. The Seminole, who had formed in the space the earlier peoples left behind, would be fought in three wars and removed, and the few hundred who were never defeated remain in the state today.

The colonial period ended in 1821. What followed was not peace.