El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  While the British made alliances and traded with the Native American groups in the region, the Spanish reinforced their defenses and asserted their claim on the Georgia coast.87 Francisco del Moral Sánchez arrived to take up a post as governor of Florida in 1734 and was aghast at the “deplorable state” of St. Augustine, lamenting that the “fort has been left defenseless by its deterioration,” and “it is impossible to provide in defense, or offence that Plaza with the small number of troops it has.”88

  An engineer named Antonio de Arredondo traveled over from Cuba in 1736 to assist with the building works in St. Augustine and was also dispatched to settle the land claims between Florida and Georgia. Arredondo met with Oglethorpe, and they agreed that the British would dismantle an outpost they had put near the St. Johns River, which they continued to claim was the boundary. In the same year, however, Oglethorpe built the small but well-placed Fort Frederica on St. Simons Island. Arredondo continued to investigate the claims of both sides and in 1742 produced an extensive report detailing Spain’s right to the Georgia coast, writing that “the fact that the Spaniards after the year 1702, in which they abandoned those lands, had never occupied or cultivated them … does not take away from the crown of Spain the right of ownership in them, as every reasonable person knows.”89

  While Oglethorpe was arguing with the Spanish over the limits of his colony, he also became caught up in the debate over whether slavery should be permitted in Georgia. One of the colonists’ concerns was that slaves might be quick to run away to Spanish Florida. Still, the prosperity in South Carolina was seductive, and the ban on slavery in the Georgia colony was a tense issue throughout the 1730s. One faction, in New Inverness, a part of Georgia settled by a group of Scots, made its case to Oglethorpe against slavery in 1739. The prospect of runaways was a crucial component of their reasoning, as they explained: “The Nearness of the Spaniards, who have proclaimed Freedom to all Slaves, who run away from their Masters, makes it impossible for us to keep them, without more Labour in guarding them, than what we would be at to do their Work.” The petitioners also outlined other reasons for eschewing slavery, such as their own industriousness, and the possibility of financial ruin through being “debtors for Slaves.”90

  The issue of runaway slaves within Florida had not been settled, either. Spain still permitted slavery, and the policy was not uniform. For instance, although the black militia helped to defend St. Augustine against the English in 1728, some of its members remained enslaved. Indeed, the leader of the black militia, Francisco Menéndez, made the case for his freedom and that of another thirty people in the years that followed, claiming that they had been unjustly enslaved. The next governor, Manuel de Montiano, investigated their claims and in 1738 granted them their freedom. The crown confirmed this decision, and also ordered that any future fugitives from the English colonies should be given their liberty.91 Menéndez sent a letter in June 1738 thanking the king, explaining that “all the Black people who escaped from the English plantations, obedient and loyal slaves to your majesty, declare that Your Majesty has done us true charity in ordering us to be given freedom” and in exchange promised “whenever the opportunity arises, we will be the cruelest enemies to the English.”92

  Later that year, a settlement for free people was established to the north of St. Augustine; it was known as Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Some hundred people lived there, including Native Americans. The community sat strategically on the shores of Robinson Creek, just up the North River from St. Augustine, also near the Indian trails that connected to an outpost on the St. Johns River or, heading west, to the Apalachee settlements. A small fortification was put there, built with the carpentry and stoneworking skills of the people in Mose, and Menéndez remained in charge of the settlement and the soldiers.93

  The issue of runaway slaves continued to irritate Oglethorpe, who encouraged raids by the Creeks on Spanish Florida throughout 1738. The previous year he had requested and been given permission from London to raise a regiment of soldiers for the defense of the southern boundary of Georgia, claiming Georgia was at constant risk from Spanish invasion.94 By 1739 he had a legitimate reason to attack the Spanish, as the War of Jenkins’ Ear began between the two rivals.95 The colorful name came from the severed ear of British captain Robert Jenkins, who lost it during naval skirmishes with the Spanish in the Caribbean and was alleged to have displayed it in the House of Commons in 1738. The conflict concerned the long-running animosities between Britain and Spain over privateering, contraband trade, and the seizure and searches of each other’s ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean. Britain was quick to score a victory in the 1739 Battle of Portobello, though the conflict would have no firm conclusion as it melded into the wider War of the Austrian Succession, which would last until 1748. Closer to home, the British in South Carolina had been rattled by a rebellion of around sixty to one hundred slaves at Stono River, on September 9, 1739, which was suppressed only after the death of about forty slaves and twenty settlers.

  In the spring of 1740 in the Georgia-Florida borderlands, Oglethorpe, with his troops and Indian allies including the Creeks and Chickasaw, captured three small Spanish forts: San Diego, near the coast; and Pupo and Picolata, on the St. Johns River. This prompted Governor Montiano to make hasty reinforcements to St. Augustine in preparation for an attack, and he also urged the villagers of Fort Mose to join the town’s other two thousand residents in the Castillo de San Marcos for protection.96 By June, Oglethorpe, aided by Royal Navy warships, had blockaded St Augustine, and occupied Fort Mose. On June 26, the Spanish counterattacked, surprising the British at Fort Mose, where Spanish forces—including Menéndez—killed around seventy-five British fighters, prompting the British to later refer to it as “bloody Mose.”97 By July 15 the siege was over. The defeat at Fort Mose and the well-timed arrival of reinforcements from Cuba led to the retreat of the British, and Menéndez won praise for his bravery during the fighting.98 The fort, however, had suffered much damage—British soldiers had taken off the gate and breached some of the walls, and the village was left uninhabitable.99

  After the siege, Governor Montiano decided another fortification was needed, and in 1740 work began on Fort Matanzas, near the site of the violent 1565 massacre of the French. It sits on an islet, known today as Rattlesnake Island, and was tasked with watching ships approaching St. Augustine from the south, via the Matanzas River. It was one of Spain’s smallest forts, with five guns and space for about seven soldiers. Its one small garita peered out over a marshy landscape, with the nearest neighbors being the ospreys and tortoises that lived there. The closest the troops ever came to seeing action there was in 1743, when a potential attack was foiled by rough waters. Now a U.S. national monument, it stands in the silence that has mostly surrounded it since its completion.

  That was not quite the end of the fighting, though, and in the summer of 1741 the Spanish sent Mose militia members into the borderland area to give arms to slaves who would be willing to attack their British masters.100 By July the following year, some fifteen hundred soldiers led by Montiano sailed to St. Simons Island, though it was the British who won the Battle of Bloody Marsh, in July 1742, forcing the Spanish to retreat before the month was out. Battles and raids continued along the border until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in Europe in 1748 brought the War of the Austrian Succession to an end and confirmed British control of Georgia.101 Oglethorpe, for his part, had returned to England in 1743. Eight years later the prohibition against slavery in Georgia had been removed and in 1752 the colony reverted from its status as a trusteeship to control by the crown.

  In Florida, Governor Fulgencio García de Solís, who was appointed in 1752, took a different view of freed people in St. Augustine from that of his predecessor. After the destruction of Fort Mose, its residents lived in or around the main city. García thought the former slaves, in addition to their Indian allies, had the potential to cause social disorder in the town, so he ordered the reconstruction of the s
ettlement. The fort was rebuilt, and many of the original residents moved back, though others were now accustomed to the relative security of urban life and did not want to return to the uncertainty of the frontier. In order to convince them otherwise, he punished two leaders who were resisting the move, threatening to do likewise to anyone else who would not go. The new fort, with a moat and six small cannons, was also located on Mose Creek.102 This time Franciscans were assigned to minister to the sixty-seven villagers in twenty households, according to the 1759 census. The parish register illustrates the wide diversity of the former slaves, who identified themselves by where they were from in Africa; in this period there were people in Mose who identified as Mandinga—as Menéndez had done—Fara, Arará, Congolese, Carabalí, and Mina, among others.103

  García de Solís and his successors remained concerned about the lack of Spanish settlers, and there were attempts to lure people from the Canary Islands, with around seventy-five people arriving by the late 1750s.104 St. Augustine continued to struggle and although Florida was considered strategic because of its proximity to the Caribbean, the city never developed into a port on the scale of San Juan or Havana. The coast remained difficult for growing crops, and settlers stayed away. The low-lying areas of Georgia and South Carolina, however, proved to be more fertile. With the introduction of enslaved labor, the region was soon a center of agricultural production and trade, through the port of Charles Town. By 1760, Georgia had a population of around six thousand British and another thirty-six hundred slaves, far more than the three thousand people in Florida.105 Within a few years, another global battle would upend Spanish Florida, sending it reeling and leaving Fort Mose abandoned once more.

  * By 1691 the Virginia General Assembly had passed a law forbidding marriages of whites to Native Americans, as well as to black and mulatto people.

  Chapter 5

  New Madrid, Missouri, ca. 1760–90

  THE FIRST HALF of the eighteenth century saw a rush of settlers to the colonies of British North America, and by 1760 more than a million Europeans had staked out new lives there.1 The bulk of the immigrants were English, Scottish, and Protestant Irish (Scots-Irish), but other Europeans also came over, with groups like the Swedes settling in Delaware and people from Germanic kingdoms fanning out across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.2 Many were driven by poverty out of their own place of birth and lured by the prospect of land in North America. Not all were in a position to be landowners, and many people came at first as indentured servants, though indenture declined as tens of thousands of Africans were brought in. By the 1770s, the number of enslaved people, from Africa and born within the colonies, reached nearly half a million.3

  Spain had no equivalent surge in its North American lands. Estimates vary, but between 1506 and 1650 some 250,000 to 400,000 people made the voyage from various parts of Spain to the Americas, with more than half going to Peru or New Spain, joining the surviving indigenous peoples and the growing creole and mestizo population. Other Europeans, mostly Catholics, also arrived in Spanish America, including people from France, Portugal, and Italy, but their numbers were small; in New Spain only fifteen hundred non-Spaniards were estimated to have come between 1700 and 1760.4 Few gravitated to the frontiers of either Florida or New Mexico. The number of enslaved people brought to Spanish America continued to rise, and by the late 1700s, the slave population was around 80,000 in the Caribbean islands and 271,000 throughout the rest of the colonies, including New Spain.5

  As the British, French, and Spanish continued to claim significant territory in North America, a battle for supremacy gripped all three powers by the middle of what had already been a violent and bloody eighteenth century. At first this played out in the Great Lakes region and along the St. Lawrence River, between the British and the French and their Indian allies. The British had been eager to expand into the Ohio River valley, and an Ohio Company of Virginia and other, smaller companies had been formed. Land grants were then obtained for some of the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The Native Americans stood firm in their claims to the land, while the French erected a number of strategic forts in the area, including Fort Duquesne where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers converge. The British rubbed up against the western edges of French territory, led by a young major, George Washington, on a mission resulting in a skirmish with French troops in a meadow in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania in 1754. This proved to be the opening salvo in a conflict known as the French and Indian War, with Washington taking a defeat that summer at the makeshift Fort Necessity. Farther east, the British started to expel the French-speaking Acadians who lived in the prized farmland on the North Atlantic peninsula of Nova Scotia, which had been ceded to Britain under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht; this expulsion further stoked French irritation.

  In 1756 Britain and France declared war on each other, and the Seven Years’ War began in Europe. It subsumed the French and Indian War and spread to all parts of the world, turning into a truly global conflict. Its theaters were found in places ranging from the Great Lakes to the Caribbean, and India to Senegal. In North America much of the fighting was between the British and French, but at its heart were concerns about the power balances within Europe.

  The battle lines were drawn between Britain and Prussia on one side, with France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Spain, which entered in 1762, on the other. For much of the Seven Years’ War, Spain wanted to avoid the conflict, but its relationship to France ultimately dragged it in. Although the Bourbon crowns of Spain and France had been separated under the treaty ending the War of the Spanish Succession, the two had a pacte de famille that reinforced their connections. In 1761 they signed a third pact (the previous two having been in 1733 and 1743) causing the British to assume that Spain was about to enter the war on the side of France. In June 1762 the British made a preemptive strike with a surprise attack on Havana, capturing it, and doing the same to the Spanish Pacific port of Manila. A few months later, in November, France and Spain signed the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, which ceded New Orleans and France’s huge Louisiana territory to Spain so that the British could not claim either should they win the war. For the Spanish, Louisiana could serve as an extra buffer to curb any desire of the British to expand west toward New Spain.6

  When the war ended and the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris were negotiated, Britain emerged triumphant. In the Americas, the British received all of French Canada, the Great Lakes region east of the Mississippi, and the Caribbean islands of Grenada, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago. France kept the tiny isles of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Spain retained Louisiana, but the real issue was the return of Havana. The Spanish considered Cuba crucial to Atlantic trade and defense, so they ceded Florida to the British in exchange.

  The addition of Louisiana, however, gave Spain another eight hundred thousand square miles, and great expanses of it were simply unknown to the king or his officials. The Louisiana territory, starting with a dot in New Orleans, spreading like ink-spill on paper, was a place where three peoples collided: the Spanish; the British and other European settlers of the trans-Appalachia region; and Native Americans. Each of the three was aware of the risks and rewards that the other two posed.

  Of most urgent concern to Madrid was the security of the northern frontier of New Spain, and so Cayetano María Pignatelli Rubí Corbera y San Climent, the Marqués de Rubí, was dispatched from Spain to inspect it. He spent two years, starting in March 1766, traveling thousands of miles through New Mexico and Texas, as well as parts of Nueva Vizcaya, Sonora, and Coahuila.7 Although the Seven Years’ War had not found its way that far west, there had been other conflicts. Rubí saw the devastation left by Indian raids, in particular those by the Comanche and Apache, who continued to dominate the area and resist Spanish influence.8 Among the many suggestions Rubí included in his report, he put forward the idea that a line
of presidios from Sonora to Texas, spaced about forty leagues (120 miles) apart, was needed. Existing ones could be closed or relocated, and each presidio should have at least fifty men. Officials studied his report and, despite his claim that other efficiencies would save 80,000 pesos, no line of presidios was forthcoming.9

  This focus on defense was only one aspect of a long-running program of change throughout the empire, known as the “Bourbon reforms,” the bulk of which took place under Carlos III, who came to the Spanish throne in 1759 and wanted to modernize his empire while also reinforcing his authority over it.10 One of the leading reformers was José de Gálvez, who arrived in New Spain in 1765, around the same time Rubí was undertaking his tour. Gálvez started a six-year inspection of New Spain, in the role of visitador general. His task was to find ways to make the empire more efficient and modern—he was the first Spanish official to describe the American territories as “colonies”—as well as more profitable.11 To this end he was involved in the creation of intendancies, or administrative districts, placing peninsular Spaniards in official posts to oversee matters such as tax collection, though by doing so he undermined local creole elites and caused a great deal of anger and disquiet. Gálvez also had his sights set on the colonization of what the Spanish now called upper, or Alta, California, which corresponds to today’s state of California, north of New Spain’s Baja (lower) California. As part of these measures, he opened the Pacific port of San Blas in 1768, in Mexico’s Nayarit state, to use as a base.12