Despite the treaty, relations between Spain and Britain remained edgy. Spain’s traditional enemy, Britain, had posts on the Mississippi’s eastern bank, from Natchez, south to Baton Rouge, east to West Florida and its capital, Pensacola, and to East Florida and its capital, St. Augustine. In the South Atlantic, the two almost went to war in 1770 over the Falkland Islands. (Britain and Argentina went to war over the islands in 1982.) On the Spanish mainland, the British occupation of Gibraltar since 1704 was a constant irritation, friction that still flares up. In North America, Spain and Britain, as well as individual traders, competed against and tried to undermine each other for favorable position with the Chickasaws and other Indians. Sometimes, the enemies fought: Officially still at peace in 1777, the British plundered Spanish posts along the Mississippi and seized a Spanish ship. Spain retaliated by seizing eleven British boats and encouraged French Canadians to settle in Spanish territory as a counterbalance.3
Spain also secretly armed and traded with the American rebels. Its goal: Undermine British influence in the Gulf of Mexico and, ultimately, regain Gibraltar. The rebels encouraged this. In 1776, Continental general Charles Lee urged Louisiana’s Spanish governor to send guns, blankets, and quinine. In 1777 and 1778, Governor Henry of Virginia reinforced the benefits of trade in three letters to a new Spanish governor. Governor Bernardo de Gálvez, 31, kept New Orleans open to Whig commerce, and ignored British demands to surrender the Whig business agent. In 1778, a rebel force raided British posts from Natchez to Baton Rouge; Gálvez gave the raiders sanctuary in New Orleans.4
The Chickasaws, Quapaws, and other Indians took advantage of the situation, playing the British and Spanish against each other. One chief said neutrality might preserve the Chickasaw nation as a “people to ourselves.” This neutrality angered the warring parties. At a 1777 conference with the Indians, the British warned that a rebel victory would make the Chickasaws “a lost people.” Virginia told the Chickasaws they had a choice of friendship or destruction. Tensions with the Spanish also rose. Chickasaw visitors to a Spanish trading post were harassed, and Chicksaws began raiding Spanish boats on the Mississippi—careful to avoid attacking any Quapaws who might accompany the boats.5
At the revolution’s start, the Chickasaw population was about 2,300, including four hundred fifty warriors. Just as they had adopted captive Quapaws in the past to replenish population lost to war and smallpox, the Chickasaws attracted and welcomed escaped slaves, Loyalist refugees, and others.6
James Logan Colbert was one of the “others.” Information about his early years is contradictory. He was probably born in Scotland around 1720 or 1721, although Colbert, writing in the third person, claimed America as his birth country. An aging Chickasaw interpreter interviewed in 1841 said Colbert was a Carolinian. Some reports say he immigrated to Georgia from Scotland in the winter of 1735–1736.7
Sometime in the mid-to-late 1730s, perhaps as late as 1740, he made his way inland and chose to live with the Chickasaws, who adopted him. He married into the tribe three times, outliving at least his first two wives, who were full-blooded Chickasaws. His third wife was of mixed race. Between them, Colbert had eight children. Because of his family connections, his fighting ability, and his wealth, he had “considerable influence” in his adopted nation, an official said. He was a successful trader, and he owned both a “fine house” and about one hundred fifty African slaves, according to a Franco-Spanish merchant. His sons were “very important chiefs in that [Chickasaw] nation,” the merchant said. He added that Colbert was virulently anti-Spanish, therefore “one of the greatest enemies of our nation, against which he is so angered.” Colbert was “insolent, ironic, and contemptuous,” with a “violent temper,” and, despite being in his sixties, was able to endure “the greatest hardships.”8
Whether his motivation was hatred of the Spanish or preference for the British, when war came, Colbert led a pro-British Chickasaw faction.
The war was late in coming to the lower Mississippi because Spain was late in coming to the war. The American rebels and the French agreed to an alliance in February 1778. Despite French pressure to join the fight, Spain’s chief minister, José Moñino, Conde de Floridablanca, resisted. Britain threatened Spanish possessions around the world, including the Caribbean and America, but Floridablanca was wary about American Whigs growing too strong and populous, overwhelming the Spanish territory west of the Mississippi. “A sort of equality of enmity . . . makes it difficult to prefer either” Britain or the Whigs, he said.9 Lafayette was blunter. The Spanish, he said, “fear the loss of their colonies, and the success of our revolution appears to be an encouragement to this fear. . . . They labor under fits of occasional madness.” To persuade Spain to enter the war, France secretly agreed in April 1779 to help Spain recover British-held Gibraltar and Minorca in Europe, Central American posts, and West Florida. Spain declared war on Britain the next month.10
Even then, it refused to recognize American independence or formally ally with the Whigs, despite John Jay’s two years of lobbying Floridablanca. (Jay described Floridablanca as a “little man” in stature, but one with “more than a common share of understanding.”) Fellow Whig diplomat John Adams said he wasn’t surprised that “Spain has been cool to us.” This would be a relationship of cobelligerents, not allies, with cooperation based on self-interest. For example, trade between the Whigs and Spain increased, with the Americans sending flour to Spanish Havana, and the Spanish continuing to arm and supply the Whigs. Congressman and financier Robert Morris described the impact on Philadelphia in 1782: “Our port is filled . . . with many, many Spanish dollars.”11
Those Spanish dollars helped defeat the British at Yorktown. The British navy posed a danger to French trans-Atlantic convoys that might carry money to America, so France and Spain skirted the problem: The Spanish, with their Bolivian silver mines, transferred silver to the French in the Caribbean. The silver found its way north to subsidize the insolvent Continental army prior to Yorktown, and to pay for French expenses in Virginia. France repaid Spain with a reverse transfer in Europe.12
News of war reached Governor Gálvez in New Orleans in August 1779. On September 7, he began an offensive with Spanish regulars, Indians, and white and black militia. It resulted in British surrender throughout the Mississippi Valley and West Florida: Fort Bute, Baton Rouge, Manchac, Natchez, Mobile, and, in May 1781, Pensacola. In St. Louis, a Spanish commander repelled a British-led expedition of mostly Indians, and later, in January 1782, made a quick, prophylactic raid against British Fort St. Joseph (now Niles, Michigan).
While Gálvez besieged Pensacola in April 1781, the British commander, General John Campbell, prepared for the worst. Chickasaws, led by Colbert, and Choctaws, traveled to Pensacola to help defend it. When the British failed to supply them adequately, they returned home, but Campbell commissioned Colbert as a British captain and “leader and conductor of such volunteer inhabitants and Chickasaws, Choctaw, Creek, or other Indians as shall join you for the purpose of annoying, distressing, attacking, or repelling the King’s enemies.” Gálvez refused to treat Colbert as anything but a pirate, because the defeated Campbell, despite his orders to Colbert, suspended (probably under duress) all military operations in West Florida and the lower Mississippi. “By no means consider James Colbert a captain,” Gálvez told his officers.13
Before he surrendered, Campbell also commissioned Loyalists in Spanish-occupied Natchez as British officers with a duty to rebel. This, they did, violating their oath to the Spanish to remain peaceful. The Spanish garrison surrendered to the Loyalists in May 1781. Spain retook the town in June. Most Loyalists fled to refuge among the Chickasaws and Choctaws. A few made it to Georgia. But Spain arrested the rebellion’s leaders and sent them to New Orleans for trial.14
One of Colbert’s goals in the coming months would be to force the Spanish to release the Loyalist prisoners.
Without British regulars present in the lower Mississippi, thanks to Gálvez, Colbert b
ecame the de facto leader of Loyalist resistance to Spain. His band never numbered more than one hundred forty men—white Loyalists, mixed-race warriors (many of them relatives), blacks, Indians, and escaped or wanted criminals.
Similar, smaller bands had less altruistic motivation. They were in it for the goods they could capture. Spain couldn’t differentiate between them: “The great part of these vagabonds, dregs of Europe and America, are men abandoned to all vices and capable of committing any crime. These are the ones who have devastated this district with their continual thefts of horses, mules, and Negroes,” a Spanish official said. “The Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, because of a humane spirit common in almost all the Indians, receive and shelter these vagabonds, sharing with them the little they have to eat, and thereby give them the means and facilities to come [to Spanish settlements] and steal.”15
A Whig captain who traveled the area in 1771 and 1772 described the Chickasaws as “the most fierce, cruel, insolent, and haughty people” among the southern tribes. Despite their small population, “they are very intrepid in the[ir] wars.” The white traders who lived with the Chickasaws were “monsters in human form, the very scum and outcast of the earth . . . more prone to savage barbarity than the savages themselves.” The captain had no use for Chickasaw morals, either, saying that they were “more corrupt than those of any of their neighbors.”16
Despite Spanish and Whig perceptions, most Chickasaw chiefs tried to put some distance between themselves and Colbert’s fighters. In the years Colbert was active, they maintained contact with both Spanish and Whig leaders, saying they neither supported nor condoned him. Their statements weren’t entirely honest: Colbert shared the supplies he looted, and the tribe never betrayed his location.17
Colbert’s first post-Pensacola operation was in the northern part of Chickasaw territory, in Kentucky, just south of what is now Cairo, Illinois. In 1780, George Rogers Clark built Fort Jefferson there without the Chickasaws’ permission. The Chickasaws harassed and attacked the fort from the start, but the one hundred-man garrison held. In summer 1781, Colbert led a force to end the rebel presence, raiding settlements along the way. During a short siege, Colbert was wounded in his arm, and his force retreated, burning rebel crops and homes. The Whigs, with little to eat and fearing the Chickasaws’ return, abandoned the fort soon after.
In January 1782, Colbert’s wound was healed, and he faced a new opponent. Gálvez had gone to Spain, and later sailed to Hispaniola to plan an invasion of Jamaica. He left an acting governor—his top aide, Colonel Esteban Rodríguez Miró, 38. Miró joined the army as a teenaged cadet in 1760. He fought in a campaign in Portugal two years later, and afterward was transferred to Mexico. When the revolution began, Miró was in Algiers. During the years when France was trying to persuade Spain to join the war, Miró was assigned to the Spanish military academy. He arrived in Louisiana in 1778 as the highest-ranking officer after Gálvez. Louisiana agreed with him: He married a prominent French Creole woman from New Orleans. They had one child, a daughter, who died young.18
Miró immediately faced a surge in Tory activity. In April 1782, a Loyalist named John Turner, with about fifteen Natchez men, captured a large Spanish barge and took the crew prisoner. A few hours later, the prisoners surprised the Loyalists, bludgeoning them with the oars, and killing all but six who were able to swim ashore. Colbert himself was more successful, capturing two small Spanish flotillas that month. Those cargo boats were just the start.19
On May 2, Colbert and a multiethnic band of about forty men captured a boat headed from New Orleans to St. Louis with rum, gunpowder, other supplies, a large sum of cash to pay for army necessities—and Doña Anicanova Ramos de Cruzat, 27, the wife of the St. Louis commander, along with her four small sons and four black slaves. Colbert immediately tried to put Doña Cruzat at ease. He said he would “respect her person and her sons,” according to a Spanish merchant who was captured with her. “They should not receive the slightest offence, and . . . he would have her conducted in safety” back to New Orleans.20
But first, Colbert ensured the safety of his own men, taking them and his captives back to their camp near present-day Memphis, Tennessee. The camp, Cruzat remembered, consisted of eighteen huts covered with skins or oilcloth. All of Colbert’s men were armed with one or two carbines and assorted clubs and knives. Four days later, they moved up Wolf River to a more secure location, where they built new huts. There, Cruzat said, Colbert’s men were “continually drunk,” and they spent much time divvying up plunder and auctioning slaves. Colbert told Cruzat that some of their actions were in response to Spanish commanders overcharging for goods and demanding bribes. “These are the grievances which oblige them to decide to abandon themselves to this kind of living,” he said. In all, Colbert had about fifty Spanish and Franco-Spanish prisoners.21
Colbert was as good as his word. On May 22, he paroled Cruzat, her sons, a black female slave, and nine whites. Through them, he sent a message to Miró that the prisoner release was conditioned on Miró’s good faith that he would parole the nine jailed Natchez rebellion leaders.
Cruzat’s husband, meanwhile, had learned (probably from friendly Indians) of his wife’s capture and sent thirty men to hunt Colbert down. They found and burned the first camp, but then returned to St. Louis.
Cruzat reached New Orleans and Miró on May 30. After debriefing her, he wrote Gálvez, updating him on the situation and asking the commander to endorse his course of action: No parole of the Natchez prisoners, and reinforcement of the Natchez garrison.
“I have some doubt as to how I ought to consider the case of James Colbert,” Miró told Gálvez. “He has never been a prisoner, he was defending Mobile and Pensacola, but always retired at the time when these cities surrendered.” Campbell commissioned him as a captain, but apparently without higher approval. Therefore, Miró said, he would deal with Colbert as a criminal associated with the Natchez uprising, rather than a military peer. Miró also told Gálvez of his frustration in trying to capture Colbert and his band of “fugitives of Natchez and of roving traders who have remained among the Indian nations.” The criminals were far from New Orleans. “It is almost impossible to attack them, to capture or slay them, as they do not wait for our attack. . . . The forests of the interior of the lands are close by, and there, they may easily hide themselves.” As for Natchez, beyond reinforcing it, “I shall attempt to tranquilize those inhabitants with a kind treatment.”22
Gálvez praised Miró’s game plan. Colbert’s proposal to parole the Natchez prisoners was “entirely out of season.” Moreover, he advised against any general prisoner exchange: Holding Loyalists was the only way the Spanish could ensure good treatment of Colbert’s prisoners. Overall, Gálvez was “disgusted by the numerous revolts in this province.”23
To his superiors in Spain, Gálvez summarized the situation. “The navigation on the Mississippi is interrupted from Arkansas to Illinois.” He had no budget with which to buy off the Indians. Besides, the Chickasaws condoned the raids. Without their support, “the rebellious fugitives of Natchez, with the other insignificant union with rovers or vagrants . . . could not have accomplished anything.”24
By fall, Colbert learned about Miró’s decision. He responded with a half-threatening, half-conciliatory letter. “I would have you to know that I have as much authority to distress my King’s enemies as you have to maintain Natchez or any other place in behalf of your King,” Colbert said. “I have prevailed with my Indians to make peace both with you and the Americans and with all the world, as it is proper that no Indians ought to interfere with what concerns none but white[s].” But unless Spain released the Natchez prisoners, he would continue to keep his prisoners. He ended with a request: “If you should have any occasion to write anymore to me, please to write in English or send an interpreter with it, having none here.”25
Colbert continued to raid Spanish and Whig boats. The Spanish, who estimated Colbert’s band as having 30 men, stepped up the press
ure on the mainstream Chickasaws to betray Colbert. They incentivized the Kickapoos, a traditional enemy, to raid Chickasaw villages. The Kickapoos stopped their raids after the Chickasaws pledged to refuse refuge to Colbert’s men and protect any Spanish prisoners who escaped from him. By the end of 1782, Miró felt confident that the Chickasaws had stopped abetting Colbert. “The Chickasaws are poor, and there are no other white people except the Spaniards who can supply their necessities,” he said. The Chickasaws also worked the other side of the mountains. They sent peace feelers to the Whigs, who demanded land cessions, which the Chickasaws refused.26
In January 1783, Colbert seized a Whig boat. Its crew joined Colbert’s band. Then, they successfully attacked a Spanish boat. More attacks ensued in February and March. An escaped Spanish prisoner reported that Colbert intended to increase shipping raids, and expected his thirty men to be augmented by one hundred more Loyalists and two hundred Chickasaws.27
But Colbert wanted to do more than act the role of a pirate. He wanted to hit the Spanish head on. He planned to do this at a settlement called Arkansas Post, guarded by Fort Carlos III, named after the Spanish king.
The French founded Arkansas Post in the late 1680s as a station half way between New Orleans to the south, and St. Louis to the north. Although it was moved over the years due to floods, it remained near the junction of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers, and was continuously manned after 1732. It was an important location, not only because of the St. Louis–New Orleans link, but because the nearly one thousand five hundred-mile-long Arkansas River was a major portal into the interior for trappers and traders.
Its permanent population was under one hundred. In 1766, eight white families totaling forty-four people with nineteen slaves lived there. By 1778, it had fifty whites, eleven slaves, and a twenty-man Spanish garrison called Fort Carlos III. Scores of hunters and traders might be at the post at any given time.28
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