El Norte
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By 1775 Gálvez would rise to the post of secretary of the Indies, a position he kept until his death in 1787. In this role, he was able to continue the reorganization of New Spain, including putting the region that Rubí had inspected into a new administrative unit, the Internal Provinces (Comandancia General de las Provincias Internas), which was completed in 1776—just as the American Revolution was beginning three thousand miles away. This new administrative configuration put the territories of California, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as Nueva Vizcaya, Coahuila, and Sinaloa in northern New Spain, under a commandancy and captain-general, who reported to the viceroy. It was hoped this would better organize—and make more effective—the defense of this territory.13
There was also a push for more trade with Native Americans, with reformers noting the relative success English and French traders had enjoyed in commodities such as fur. The motivation was not solely economic—commercial ties could also allow for a greater degree of cooperation with groups that had long antagonized the Spanish at the frontier, such as the Apache. As one official wrote, they should aim to end the “frightening noise of the cannon and war, replacing them with the sweet ties of lucrative trade.”14 Commerce, however, had not quite overtaken Christianity, and Carlos III said the “conversion of the numerous nations of heathen Indians” remained a priority. He wrote in his 1776 instructions to the new commander of the Internal Provinces, Teodoro de Croix, that he wanted this enacted with “cajolery, good treatment, persuasion by missionaries, gifts, and the secure offers of my sovereign protection.”15
Revenue was an ongoing concern across the less profitable colonies, and the crown was willing to experiment with comercio libre, or free trade. Here, Cuba offered a different model from northern New Spain: to raise the necessary money to improve defense, higher taxes had to be levied, but in exchange Cuba was granted permission in 1765 to trade with nine Spanish ports, something that had not been permitted before.16 In the past, all trade and goods had to go through a few select main ports, like Veracruz in the Americas, or Seville in Spain. Allowing smaller ports to trade with Cuba proved successful. Sugar exports rose, helping to bring in an annual average royal revenue of 535,404 pesos between 1765 and 1775; in contrast, before the reforms, in 1762, the treasury in Cuba had only 178,000 pesos in income and received subsidies from New Spain. Encouraged by this success and influenced by new economic thinking at the time, in 1778 the crown rolled out its version of free trade, which, among other measures, entailed giving permission to ports across the empire to trade directly with a larger number of Spanish seaports.17
Spain was thus engaging with some of the new ideas about commerce and governance circulating around Enlightenment Europe, although this was not always straightforward. At times certain foreign books fell under the purview of the Inquisition, which had the power to censor them, especially if they were critical of the crown or the Church. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, for instance, was first published in 1776 but did not reach a Castilian-reading audience until it was translated in 1794. Many facets of Spanish cultural and intellectual life—including the Inquisition—had long been under attack, as intellectuals across Europe criticized the crown’s policies, particularly in economics. Montesquieu in France voiced the common complaint about Spain’s reliance on gold and silver, and its inability to foster agrarian development and commerce. If anything, this had become an economic Black Legend. Writing in his 1748 The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu noted that “the Spaniards considered these newly discovered countries [the Americas] as the subject of conquest; while others, more refined in their views, found them to be the proper subjects of commerce … hence several nations have conducted themselves with so much wisdom that they have given a kind of sovereignty to companies of merchants.”18 The agrarian ideals of the British also remained strong, with Smith noting in The Wealth of Nations that “there are no colonies of which the progress has been more rapid than that of English North America. Plenty of good land, and liberty to manage their own affairs their own way, seem to be the two great causes of the prosperity of all new colonies.”19
For the French philosopher Abbé Raynal, Spain needed to strengthen its empire and to do so the Spanish should “not only admit strangers of their own persuasion, but encourage every sect without distinction to come and settle among them.”20 Catholicism still remained a powerful force in Spanish America, though it, too, had not escaped the reforming reach of Carlos III. In 1767 he had banished the Jesuit order from the entire Spanish realm. Although the Jesuits had long been a force for colonization, the king felt their power had grown too unwieldy. In North America, the Franciscans would take over what the Jesuits had been forced to relinquish.
Non-Catholics still faced barriers to living in Spanish possessions, but it was becoming obvious that any future success in North America depended on the inclusion of Protestants. However, Louisiana did receive a Catholic boost in the form of the Acadians, whom the British had hounded out of Nova Scotia. These former French colonists were welcomed in Louisiana and settled into a region later known as Acadiana, which runs along the lower half of the modern state, now known as Cajun country. Although they were Catholic, Spanish Louisiana would soon open its doors to Protestants, as Raynal had foreseen.
WHILE SPAIN WAS coming to terms with Louisiana, the British were working out what to do with Florida. After a century of raids and battles with the Spanish, the colony was at last theirs. They first decided to split their acquisition into East and West Florida along the Apalachicola River, which cuts across the panhandle and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. West Florida’s northern boundary was at N 32°, corresponding with modern cities such as Jackson, Mississippi; and Montgomery, Alabama. Its western boundary was the Mississippi River, but it also included places that had been under French control and were ceded to the British, such as Mobile, Biloxi, and Baton Rouge, as well as the westernmost part of what had been Spanish Florida, with Pensacola being the largest settlement. By 1766, there were more than two thousand Europeans and around one thousand enslaved people in West Florida. Lured by generous land grants, the majority of settlers lived around Pensacola, replacing the Spanish who left.21 In the Mobile area, some French people stayed on and swore loyalty to the British crown.22 By 1774, some twenty-five hundred settlers and six hundred slaves were spread out in an area stretching from Baton Rouge to Pointe Coupée to Natchez.23 Old forts were renamed or anglicized; Fort Condé in Mobile, for instance, became Fort Charlotte. The British also put their stamp on the colony’s laws and slave codes, bringing them more in line with Georgia’s and South Carolina’s.24
When the West Florida governor George Johnstone arrived in the autumn of 1764 to take up his post, he was both alarmed at the extent of the power local Native Americans had and eager to capitalize on trade with them, thinking there now might be scope for the British to dominate Indian commerce in West Florida. In addition, Pensacola was near New Orleans and the wider Spanish Caribbean, including Havana and Veracruz, and Johnstone hoped this proximity would lead to more trade.25 He petitioned for a relaxation of the Navigation Acts, protectionist measures that dated back more than a century and prohibited foreign boats from calling at British ports, but was not successful. The Royal Navy continued to enforce the legislation, seizing ships and stifling suspected contraband during this period, though some trade slipped through and Spanish silver managed to find its way into specie-starved British West Florida.26
Johnstone’s hopes about relations with the Native Americans were similarly overoptimistic. He told the Choctaw and Chickasaw that if they wanted to trade, they needed to be prepared to yield land in return for goods. For their part, the Native Americans were accustomed to gift-giving and expected the British to abide by it. One Choctaw chief told the British, “We hope you will be as generous as the French were.”27 British traders in West Florida continued to point out that their Spanish competitors in Louisiana had few desirable manufactured goods and so would be poor trading partners, yet
at the same time they did little to endear themselves to officials or Indians: by selling alcohol—which Johnstone decried as “the Primary Cause of all Mischief”—as well as harassing Indian women and manipulating prices, they provoked Indian attacks.28
Change also came to East Florida. On the eve of the Seven Years’ War, St. Augustine had around 3,000 people, of whom 551 were in the military. There were around 400 people of color, slave and free; 246 Canary Islanders; 83 Indians; mestizos; and a few other Europeans.29 Many of these residents were evacuated to Cuba after St. Augustine was handed over to the British. One anonymous author of a pamphlet was optimistic about the British prospects in Florida, writing in 1763 that “we may with great Probability say, that although the Spaniards have made but little Use of Florida, as having less Genius for Cultivation than ourselves, and not in want of Southern Land, yet we may fairly hope to avail ourselves from both its Soil and Situation.”30 Yet the British found themselves faced with the same question as the Spanish: how to attract settlers. Officials tried to entice South Carolina and Georgia planters, and a few answered the call, bringing hundreds of enslaved people who were soon put to work draining the swamps and chopping down the vast forests to create fields on the large tracts to be cultivated near the St. Marys and St. Johns Rivers, which would go on to yield rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar. The slave population rose to around 2,000 by 1775, with black people outnumbering whites by more than two to one. In less than a decade, the number of enslaved people rose to around 10,000.31
Florida also became a place of land speculation and unlikely ventures. In 1768 more than a thousand eager colonists arrived—though they were not English or Scottish, but Greeks and other Mediterraneans.32 A Scottish doctor turned speculator named Andrew Turnbull had brought a group from what was the former Spanish, but now British-controlled, island of Minorca, in the Balearic Islands, to Florida as indentured laborers, claiming that people from the Mediterranean were more suited to the hot Florida climate.33 These roughly fourteen hundred workers were to live in a settlement called New Smyrna, located about seventy-five miles down the coast from St. Augustine. In his early correspondence with British officials, Turnbull explained that his wife was Greek and that he wanted to settle “a Greek colony in that Province [Florida].”34 He suggested it was possible to produce a range of products, from rice and indigo to olives, cotton, and silk. For good measure, he also said that “some Sugar canes brought from the Havannah [Havana] this Spring and planted last April by the governor are thriving fast. … The cotton plant is stronger than any I ever saw in Turkey.”35
Whatever the intentions, the settlement was a disaster from the start. A band of three hundred rebels tried to commandeer a ship and flee to Cuba in 1768, after being there just two months. The remaining laborers were guarded by soldiers.36 By 1769 about six hundred people had died of disease or the starvation that was used as a punishment.37 Turnbull did, however, have some success with indigo, then a prized commodity. The Florida climate was ideal for it, and Turnbull pushed the workers with a determined relentlessness to harvest and process the crop, which he first exported in 1772.38
A new governor, Colonel Patrick Tonyn, arrived in 1774, and he and Turnbull took an immediate dislike to each other, not least because Turnbull’s allies had put his name forward for governor.39 The arrival of Tonyn was also the beginning of the end of the settlement, though the causes were not all political: a bad drought and soil depletion caused indigo output to drop. In 1776 Turnbull made a trip to England to attempt to have Tonyn removed from his post. The following year, while he was still away, the remaining settlers petitioned St. Augustine for sanctuary. They were released from their indentures and abandoned the site in 1777, before Turnbull’s return.40
Elsewhere in East Florida, a new people were forming: the Seminoles. By now, many of the indigenous peoples of Florida and the Southeast had weathered serious challenges: European disease, Christian conversion, wars against other Native Americans and Europeans, and the loss of land. Different groups of Native Americans were at times forced to merge with other chiefdoms for their very survival. The Seminoles were one such group. The word “seminole” is a possible corruption of the Spanish word for runaway slave, cimarrón, and there were many runaways among the Seminoles. The Lower Creeks who had moved into Florida made up the main body of the Seminoles, taking over former lands of the Timucua and Apalachee, as they had died or moved away. The runaway Africans who joined them were not re-enslaved; rather, they lived in their own villages and paid tribute to the Creeks each year as well as providing military assistance.41 At times throughout the period of British administration, members of the Creek nation traveled to Cuba to air their grievances and continue to trade. In one letter to the East Florida governor James Grant in 1769, Grant was told that two Creek men had “returned in April from the Havannah for which place they embarked in a Spanish Vessel at the Bay of Tampa in November. They were accompanied by several other Cowetas, they all received presents of Money, rum, ammunition and laced Cloaths from the Spanish Governors.”42 These became regular voyages, and by 1776 there had been at least nineteen trips by Creeks to Havana.43
THE SEVEN YEARS’ War exacted a high social cost from all of the countries involved, as well as denting their treasuries. In an effort to raise revenue, Britian enacted a series of taxes that sparked protest and unrest in its North American colonies, including the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and then a series of bills known as the Townshend Acts of 1767, which levied duties on lead, glass, paper, paint, and tea. These were followed by public grumbling and a flurry of pamphlets pointing out the perceived unfairness of these measures. Refusal to comply and a general air of antagonism led to the increased presence of British troops in urban centers such as Boston, as well as a growing number of overt acts of defiance, among them the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor in 1773. By this point, a distinct “American” identity had formed in the British colonies, based on ideas concerning land, trade, and certain rights within the imperial system. Now this identity was being further molded by the colonists’ growing anger.44
While much of this was taking place at the center of the British colonies, on the periphery a different story was unfolding. As Thomas Jefferson compiled his list of grievances to include in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the residents of East and West Florida waited for news of developments, though no one from Florida would end up signing the declaration.45 Though the opening shots of the American Revolution were in Massachusetts, West Florida would be a critical—and often overlooked—theater of the war. West Florida abutted Louisiana, putting the British and Spanish in close proximity, and many French people still lived in the territory, along with large Indian chiefdoms, including the Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.46 As the rebellion developed in 1776, the Spanish at first watched from afar, though not long afterward rebel leaders reached out to officials in Louisiana and Spain in the hope of loans or supplies to help fight British troops.
Benjamin Franklin, who had been sent to Paris to muster diplomatic support for the American cause, met the Spanish ambassador to France, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Count of Aranda, on December 29, 1776. They spoke in secret because Spain, at the time, had not officially recognized the rebel colonists or their struggle for independence.47 Aranda left the meeting with the realization that Spain needed to be on America’s side. He could see that with all of the European immigration, a nation independent of Britain would be even stronger, writing in a later report to Madrid, “Spain shall find itself dealing with only one other power in all that terra firma of North America. And who is that power? One that is stable and territorial; that has already claimed the patrician name America with two and half million inhabitants.”48
Franklin found Aranda “well dispos’d towards us.”49 Although Spain exercised caution at first, it soon began secretly channeling supplies and money that became crucial to the success of the Continental Army, utilizing merchant connections. Ships that left New England f
or Britain often called at Spanish ports, such as Bilbao and Cádiz, to purchase goods like cod or flour, so a commercial network was already in place. One firm, Joseph Gardoqui & Sons, would have a prominent part using those routes to funnel much-needed supplies.50 While Spain did not want to be seen as supporting the rebel effort outright, Spanish financial support—which reached well into the millions of reales, though estimates vary as to how high—helped procure goods that included cannons, bullets, gunpowder, bombs, rifles, tents, and even lead for bullets, with supplies and money coming from Spain, New Spain, and the Caribbean. In just one instance, in 1777 Gardoqui & Sons sent on the Rockingham one thousand blankets, five thousand yards of material, and one hundred thousand musket flints.51 Another letter, from October 1777, mentioned that “messrs. Gardoqui at Bilboa [Bilbao] have sent several Cargoes of Naval Stores, Cordage, Sailcloth, Anchors, &c.”52
Around the same time, in 1777, Bernardo de Gálvez arrived in Louisiana to take over as governor. Gálvez came from a prominent family—his uncle was José de Gálvez, the reforming inspector of New Spain. He had a long career in the military, having served in Spain and New Spain. With the war already under way, Gálvez was soon involved in intrigues to help the U.S. forces against the British, aided in New Orleans by one of the key brokers between the Spanish and the Continental Army, the prominent Irish-born merchant Oliver Pollock.53