West Florida

Based on Wikipedia: West Florida

In September 1810, a band of armed rebels stormed a Spanish fort in what is now Louisiana, killed two soldiers in a bloody firefight, and raised a peculiar flag: a single white star on a blue field. They had just created one of American history's strangest nations—a country that would exist for exactly seventy-four days before vanishing into the expanding United States.

This was the Republic of West Florida, and almost nothing about it matches what you'd expect from its name.

For starters, no part of this republic lay within the borders of what we now call Florida. The entire nation occupied territory that today belongs to Louisiana—specifically, the region still known as the Florida Parishes, that odd rectangular chunk of land that juts eastward from the Mississippi River toward the Pearl River.

How did a place called "Florida" end up nowhere near Florida? The answer involves three empires, two wars, a secret treaty, and one of the most audacious land grabs in American history.

The Spanish Foundation

Spain claimed the entire region first, calling it La Florida—a name that originally encompassed most of what we now consider the southeastern United States. The Spanish made several attempts to settle the Gulf Coast, most notably Tristán de Luna's colony in 1559, but these early efforts failed.

Permanent settlement didn't come until the seventeenth century, when Spanish missionaries established outposts among the Apalachee people. In 1698, the Spanish founded Pensacola specifically to counter French expansion into the area. France had been busy establishing its own colonial presence along the Gulf Coast as part of La Louisiane: Mobile in 1702, Fort Maurepas on the Mississippi coast in 1699, and Fort Toulouse in what is now Alabama in 1717.

After years of territorial squabbling, France and Spain finally agreed to draw a line. The Perdido River—today's boundary between Florida and Alabama—would separate French Louisiana from Spanish Florida.

This arrangement seemed settled enough. Then came the Seven Years' War.

The British Invention of West Florida

The Seven Years' War, known in America as the French and Indian War, reshuffled the entire colonial map of eastern North America. When the fighting ended in 1763, Britain emerged holding cards that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier.

From France, Britain received everything east of the Mississippi River—including that territory between the Perdido and Mississippi that had been French Louisiana. From Spain, Britain received La Florida in exchange for returning Cuba, which British forces had captured during the war. Most Spanish colonists packed up and left for Havana, taking their government records with them.

Britain now controlled nearly the entire Gulf Coast east of the Mississippi, but the territory proved too vast to govern from a single capital. The solution was to slice it into two colonies divided by the Apalachicola River.

East Florida kept the old Spanish capital of St. Augustine and retained most of what had been Spanish Florida. West Florida was something genuinely new: a fusion of former Spanish and French territories, stretching from the Apalachicola all the way west to the Mississippi, with Pensacola as its capital. The British arbitrarily set the northern boundary at the thirty-first parallel.

English and Scotch-Irish settlers poured in. The first governor, George Johnstone, arrived in November 1763, and his lieutenant governor, Montfort Browne, became one of the colony's biggest landowners and boosters. Seven General Assemblies convened between 1766 and 1778.

In 1767, the British decided West Florida needed more room. They pushed the northern boundary up to 32°28' north latitude, a line running from the Yazoo River to the Chattahoochee. This expansion brought in the Natchez District and the Tombigbee District—roughly the southern halves of present-day Mississippi and Alabama. More settlers followed.

The Revolution Passes West Florida By

When the American Revolution erupted in 1775, West Florida remained firmly loyal to the British crown. In 1774, the First Continental Congress had sent letters inviting the colony to send delegates to their proceedings. West Florida declined. The overwhelming majority of its inhabitants were Loyalists, and the colony became a refuge for Tories fleeing the rebellious thirteen colonies.

But Spain saw opportunity in Britain's distraction. Though Spain entered the Revolutionary War as France's ally rather than as a direct supporter of American independence, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, launched a devastating campaign along the Gulf Coast.

In 1779, Gálvez captured Baton Rouge and Natchez. In 1780, Mobile fell. And in 1781—the same year as Yorktown—Gálvez took Pensacola itself.

The British had held West Florida for less than two decades.

The Confusion Begins

The 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War created an immediate cartographic headache.

In one agreement, Britain conceded that the boundary between the United States and West Florida would run along the thirty-first parallel between the Mississippi and Apalachicola rivers. But in a separate Anglo-Spanish agreement ceding both Florida colonies back to Spain, no northern boundary was specified at all.

Spain insisted that its West Florida extended all the way up to the 1767 British boundary at 32°28'. The United States countered that the territory between the thirty-first parallel and 32°28' had always been British territory, never Spanish, and therefore belonged to the new American nation.

This was the first West Florida Controversy—a diplomatic tangle that wouldn't be resolved until the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo, in which Spain finally accepted the thirty-first parallel as the border.

Spain, meanwhile, continued governing East and West Florida as separate colonies, though it shifted the boundary between them eastward from the Apalachicola River to the Suwannee River in 1785. The purpose was to transfer the military post at San Marcos and the Apalachee district from East to West Florida.

If you're finding this confusing, so did everyone at the time.

Napoleon Enters the Picture

In 1800, the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso upended everything again. Spain agreed to return Louisiana to France—but once more, nobody bothered to specify exactly where Louisiana ended and West Florida began.

Then, in 1803, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States.

This raised an explosive question: What, exactly, had the United States just purchased?

American officials argued that Louisiana, as France had possessed it before 1762, included all territory between the Perdido and Mississippi rivers. Therefore, the Louisiana Purchase included that land. West Florida—or at least a substantial chunk of it—belonged to the United States.

Spain vehemently disagreed. That territory, the Spanish argued, had been administered as part of West Florida since 1763. France had never given West Florida to Spain; Britain had. Therefore, whatever France sold to the United States could not possibly include West Florida.

The logic on both sides was impeccable, which meant the dispute was essentially irresolvable through negotiation. The two countries argued for years while American and British settlers in the contested territory grew increasingly resentful of Spanish rule.

Rebellion

By 1810, the situation in Spanish West Florida had become volatile. Throughout the summer, dissatisfied settlers held secret meetings in the Baton Rouge district, along with three open conventions. Out of these gatherings emerged a plan for revolution.

Early in the morning on September 23, 1810, the rebels struck. Armed men stormed Fort San Carlos at Baton Rouge in a sharp, bloody firefight. Two Spanish soldiers died. The rebels lowered the Spanish flag and raised their own—that single white star on blue.

The Republic of West Florida was born.

Philemon Thomas, who had organized the attack, immediately began planning to expand the new nation eastward. Mobile and Pensacola were the obvious targets. Reuben Kemper led a small force toward Mobile, but the expedition failed.

Support for the revolt was anything but unanimous. Pro-Spanish, pro-American, and pro-independence factions competed for control, while foreign agents complicated matters further. Historians have described what followed as a "virtual civil war within the Revolt."

The pro-independence faction managed to push through a constitution at a convention in October. General Thomas marched his army across the territory, suppressing opposition with sufficient violence to leave bitter memories in the Tangipahoa and Tchefuncte River regions for years afterward. Residents of the western parishes largely supported the revolt; those in the eastern parishes largely opposed it.

Seventy-Four Days

On November 7, 1810, the fledgling republic elected Fulwar Skipwith as its governor. He was inaugurated on November 29.

A week later, Skipwith and his fellow officials were still lingering at St. Francisville, the republic's capital perched on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. They were preparing to relocate to Baton Rouge for the next legislative session, where Skipwith planned to present an ambitious program of governance.

Then David Holmes, governor of the Mississippi Territory, arrived with unwelcome news.

On October 27, while the West Floridians were still fighting their internal battles and drafting their constitution, President James Madison had issued a proclamation. The United States, Madison declared, should take possession of West Florida between the Mississippi and Perdido rivers.

His justification? The territory was part of the Louisiana Purchase.

It was, to put it mildly, a tenuous claim. The United States had been arguing this position for seven years while Spain continued to occupy and govern the territory. Now Madison was simply asserting American sovereignty and dispatching forces to make it stick.

Skipwith was furious. He complained bitterly to Holmes that the United States, by tolerating Spanish occupation for seven years, had effectively abandoned any right to the country. The West Florida people, he insisted, would not submit to American government without conditions.

At first, Skipwith and General Thomas refused to acquiesce. Most of the other West Florida officials, however, accepted reality. Skipwith and a handful of unreconciled legislators retreated to the fort at Baton Rouge, unwilling to surrender unconditionally.

On December 9, Skipwith told Holmes he would no longer resist—but he couldn't speak for the troops in the fort. Their commander, John Ballinger, agreed to surrender only after Holmes assured him his men would not be harmed.

The next afternoon, William C. C. Claiborne, governor of the Orleans Territory, arrived with armed forces. At 2:30 p.m. on December 10, 1810, the men inside Fort San Carlos marched out, stacked their arms, and saluted the Bonnie Blue Flag as it was lowered for the final time.

The Republic of West Florida had lasted seventy-four days.

The Aftermath

The republic's brief existence left several marks on history. Its flag—that single white star on blue—later influenced the design of the Bonnie Blue Flag that would become an unofficial banner of the Confederacy half a century later.

Politically, the aftermath unfolded in stages. Congress passed a joint resolution in January 1811 providing for "temporary occupation" of the disputed territory while declaring it subject to future negotiation—a fig leaf allowing the United States to hold land whose title remained technically unresolved.

In February 1812, Congress secretly authorized President Madison to seize whatever portion of West Florida west of the Perdido River wasn't already in American hands, by military force if necessary. In April 1812, Congress authorized the territory west of the Pearl River to be incorporated into the new state of Louisiana, which was formally admitted to the Union on April 30. Louisiana's legislature didn't formally accept the addition until August 4.

The Mobile District—the portion between the Pearl and Perdido rivers—took longer to resolve. It would eventually become parts of Mississippi and Alabama.

As for the remainder of West Florida and all of East Florida, those stayed under Spanish control until 1819, when the Adams-Onís Treaty finally settled the matter. Spain ceded all of Florida to the United States. In 1822, West and East Florida merged into the Florida Territory, ending the administrative division that Britain had created nearly sixty years earlier.

The Echoes

The story of West Florida illuminates something important about how nations form and how borders come to exist.

The territory we call West Florida was an artificial creation from the start—lines drawn on maps in London and Madrid and Paris, often by people who had never seen the Gulf Coast and cared little for the people living there. The boundaries shifted repeatedly: Spanish to French to British to Spanish again, expanding and contracting with each change of sovereignty.

The American settlers who staged their rebellion in 1810 weren't fighting for abstract principles of nationhood. They were fighting because Spanish rule inconvenienced them and because they saw an opportunity in Spain's weakness. When the United States offered to absorb them, most accepted readily enough. Only a few, like Skipwith, insisted on negotiating terms.

Perhaps the strangest thing about West Florida is how completely it vanished. Today, Louisiana's Florida Parishes bear the only trace of that confused geography. Few Americans know that a separate nation once existed there, that men died fighting for it, or that its single-star flag would resurface in a later, more famous conflict.

But for seventy-four days in the autumn of 1810, there was a republic on the Mississippi, and its people believed—at least some of them—that they were building something that might last.