The History of Florida (33 page)

extreme demands for reinforcements of more than 3,000 British regulars,

provincial militia and marines, and 1,000 Indian al ies to conduct a war

against the Creek led to his removal from office in January 1767. Political

instability was a continuing problem in West Florida.

In East Florida, Governor Grant served well and energetical y from 1764

until 1771, when he returned to Britain for health reasons and was replaced

on an interim basis by a competent administrator, Lieutenant Governor

John Moultrie, a native of South Carolina and a planter with a degree in

medicine from Edinburgh University. Grant never returned to East Florida.

He was elected to the House of Commons in 1773 and resigned his gover-

norship in April of that year.

Colonel Patrick Tonyn, a naval officer who was appointed the second

governor of East Florida, arrived at St. Augustine in March 1774. Prior

to his appointment as governor, Tonyn had established a St. Johns River

154 · Robin F. A. Fabel and Daniel L. Schafer

plantation, although as an absentee owner. Like his predecessor, Governor

Tonyn worked in concert with John Stuart to maintain peaceful relations

with the Indians. After the War of Rebellion began in 1775, Tonyn ordered

a census of white inhabitants in the province fit to bear arms, and of the

enslaved men who could be trusted with weapons. By August 1776 he had

formed the East Florida Rangers, a provincial militia of seven companies of

white volunteers and four companies of enslaved black men serving under

white officers. Thomas Brown, a Loyalist refugee from Georgia, was given

command.

Forming an alliance between his loyal colony and the Creek and Semi-

nole was one of Tonyn’s wartime achievements. He first sought their al-

legiance in December 1775 at a congress held at the Cowford under the

branches of the “Treaty Oak,” a giant live oak tree that still stands near the

south bank of the St. Johns River opposite Jacksonvil e’s downtown busi-

ness district. Anticipating the need for wel -armed Native American al ies to

repel invaders from Georgia, Tonyn supplied the Creek and Seminole with

weapons and gunpowder and deployed them as scouts and soldiers.

The war in East Florida devolved into border warfare as Georgia militia

crossed into Florida in August 1776 to destroy settlements and steal cattle

and slaves. Within weeks, Florida’s Rangers retaliated with raids into Geor-

proof

gia. The violent raids back and forth across the border continued for the

remainder of the war and turned the area between the St. Marys and the

St. Johns Rivers into a “no man’s land” of debris and ashes where dwellings

and farm buildings once stood, and scorched stubble where corn and in-

digo fields once thrived. Following Patriot raids in 1776, East Florida forces

crossed into Georgia and captured Fort McIntosh on the Satil a River in

February 1777, and returned to St. Augustine with two thousand head of

cattle and sixty-eight prisoners. A Georgia invasion force struck back in

May but was stopped short of the St. Johns River. John Moultrie remarked:

“The common frontier quite abandoned on both sides, horses and crops

destroyed, people and cattle moved away; numbers of refugees . . . fled to us,

they almost eat up our provisions, but . . . we drive off as many cattle from

the Georgians as have hitherto supplied our market.”

In March 1778, the East Florida Rangers invaded Georgia to burn Fort

Barrington on the Altamaha River. An American force of two thousand

retaliated in June, driving the Rangers south to the Alligator Creek Bridge

on Nassau River, where they were defeated by Florida troops. This would

be the last major invasion of the war in East Florida. Reinforcements were

British Rule in the Floridas · 155

rushed to St. Augustine in the summer of 1778. In November, British forces

under General Augustine Prevost crossed the Florida/Georgia border and

marched north toward Savannah. The besieged city was surrendered on De-

cember 29, 1778, and Prevost’s army continued northward to assist in the

capture of Charleston in May 1780.

For West Florida, the outbreak of war came as a significant migratory

movement was under way. Increasing numbers of settlers had heard of the

rich agricultural lands along the western rivers and were initiating settle-

ments. General Phyneas Lyman had returned to Connecticut in 1772 and

arranged another meeting of the Company of Military Adventurers at

Hartford. Members of an exploratory committee traveled to West Florida

to select land for settlements. Committee members arrived at Pensacola on

February 28, 1773, and after exploring possible sites along the Mississippi as

far as the Yazoo River, submitted claims for nineteen townships averaging

23,000 acres each. Thaddeus Lyman, son of the general, and the other com-

mittee members observed several groups of colonists from New England,

North Carolina, and Virginia searching for land or already established on

farms, and rightful y concluded that a major rush of settlement was under

way. But it was not until March 1774 that two ships chartered by the Ad-

venturers arrived at Pensacola, each carrying approximately 100 passengers.

proof

From Pensacola, they journeyed up the Mississippi to begin the arduous

task of establishing settlements in the Natchez district. The total number

of emigrants representing the Company of Military Adventurers was prob-

ably less than two hundred, and they were only beginning their settlements

when the American Revolution broke out.

In 1774, Elias Durnford estimated that 3,100 persons (2,500 white and

600 black) resided at the east bank of the Mississippi between the Iberville

and Yazoo Rivers. Migration was stagnated by the onset of the American

Revolution, yet the settlements along the Mississippi, Amite, and Comite

Rivers were temporarily unaffected by the violence that occurred to the east

of the province. That tranquil state ended in February 1778, when a Pa-

triot naval captain, James Willing, a former planter in the Natchez district,

floated past a sentinel post at today’s Vicksburg and, with fewer than one

hundred men, gained control of Natchez before continuing downriver to

New Orleans. His presumed goal was to gain support for the Revolutionary

cause, but looting and unobstructed mayhem characterized his career on

the lower Mississippi. After selling the plundered treasure at New Orleans,

the threat from Willing and his bandits dissipated. Bernardo de Gálvez, the

156 · Robin F. A. Fabel and Daniel L. Schafer

governor of Spanish Louisiana, was greatly embarrassed by the incident.

Spain and Britain were not then at war, and the presence of British frigates

on the Mississippi gave British forces a decided advantage in armament.

Britain responded to the Wil ing raid by sending regular troops to the

abandoned forts at Natchez and Manchac and building a new fort at Baton

Rouge, thus strengthening the defenses of West Florida. John Stuart, who

had moved to Pensacola in 1776, organized a company of mounted rangers

and an infantry regiment that provided settlers with a sense of security and

stabilized the economy. With the war under way, New England’s merchants

were cut off from markets in the British West Indies, enabling entrepreneurs

and planters in both West and East Florida to prosper from exports of lum-

ber, naval stores, fish from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and rice

and other foodstuffs to Jamaica and other British colonies.

The principal restraint on optimism was the prospect of war with Spain.

When the Spanish monarch, Charles III, declared war on Britain on June 21,

1779, the thinly garrisoned forts in the western districts were placed in jeop-

ardy. To sever the link between West Florida’s capital and the settlements in

the Natchez district, Bernardo de Gálvez focused his first military campaign

against the tiny trade center of Manchac, at the junction of the Mississippi

River and the Ibervil e Bayou. Galvez’s army of 1,000 easily captured the

proof

twenty-three-man garrison at Manchac and followed that victory with the

conquest of the British forts at Baton Rouge and Natchez by September

1779. Fort Charlotte at Mobile fell to the Spanish army in March 1780, and

after a two-month siege of Fort George and Pensacola, Major General John

Campbel and Governor Peter Chester surrendered to Gálvez on May 10,

1781. With the surrender of Pensacola, West Florida became again part of

the Spanish colonial empire.

In East Florida, however, British strength increased during the Revolu-

tion’s latter stages. As early as the latter months of 1775, supporters of King

George III living in the Georgia and South Carolina backcountry began

fleeing to woods and swamps to escape zealous revolutionaries. Hundreds

made their way overland to loyal East Florida, where Governor Tonyn made

unoccupied land available for settlement. Without land, it was feared the

refugee Loyalists would drift toward the rebel cause.

In August 1776, John Moultrie described St. Augustine as “full of people

who have fled for safety. Our planting thrives finely; good indigo, plenty

of provisions . . . [and] the consumption of the town at present is great.”

Moultrie decided to “plant nothing but what is to go into the mouth.” In the

summer of 1778, troop reinforcements began pouring into St. Augustine

British Rule in the Floridas · 157

Portrait of Bernardo

de Gálvez, colonial

governor of Spanish

Louisiana and Cuba,

and the viceroy of

New Spain. Gálvez

commanded Spanish

troops in victories over

the British at Manchac,

Baton Rouge, and

Natchez in 1779, and at

Mobile and Pensacola

in 1780, effectively

terminating British

rule in West Florida.

Courtesy of the State

Archives of Florida,

Florida Memory
, http://

floridamemory.com/

proof

items/show/128368.

accompanied by carpenters, dock workers, and hundreds of sailors on shore

leave. For local farmers and businessmen, the influx meant unprecedented

opportunity.

After the disturbing capitulations of Baton Rouge, Natchez, and Mobile

to the Spanish in 1779 and 1780 and the capture of Pensacola in May 1781,

Loyalists in East Florida were shocked to learn that Lord Charles Cornwal is

had surrendered his 8,000-man British army to General George Washing-

ton at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. In the early months of 1782,

Spain gained control of Minorca and the Bahamas from Britain, and France

seized St. Eustasius, galvanizing the House of Commons vote at the end

of February that terminated offensive actions against the Patriots in North

America and forced Lord Frederick North to resign as prime minister. Peace

negotiations began in earnest in Paris.

On May 20, 1782, General Sir Guy Carleton, commander of British forces

in North America, ordered the withdrawal of British garrisons at St. Augus-

tine, Charleston, and Savannah. East Florida Loyalists were disil usioned

158 · Robin F. A. Fabel and Daniel L. Schafer

and devastated. In June, David Yeats, a medical doctor and the plantation

agent for James Grant, confided in the former governor: “I am total y ruined

and see nothing but want and misery before me.”

One month later, however, Yeats was again optimistic. Admiral George

Rodney’s British fleet had achieved a victory over a French fleet in the West

Indies, Jamaica was secure, and St. Lucia had been successful y defended

by British forces under James Grant, by then a major general. Carleton re-

scinded his order for the evacuation of the St. Augustine garrison, and des-

ignated East Florida a haven for disheartened Loyalists from other British

provinces. Between July and October, British transports carried thousands

of Loyalists to East Florida, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and other British colo-

nies. Governor Tonyn reported that many of the refugees that debarked at

St. Augustine had survived “truly deplorable” circumstances, while others

succumbed to sickness. The historian Charles Mowat called the conditions