George Washington feared Florida. He wrote at least 80 letters warning about threats the peninsula posed during the Revolutionary War. And he authorized five invasions into the “14th colony.”
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It may be surprising to learn, as we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, that 18th-century Floridians supported the British, fighting a “War for Dependence.”
Maybe that’s because theme parks and Florida Man overshadow the state’s storied past, one history professor said.
Maybe, another professor said, it’s because when we teach American history, we focus on the winners.
Here are five things to know about Florida during the Revolutionary War.
We were young
When the war started, Florida had been a British colony for only a dozen years. Northern colonies had a century to develop towns, build businesses, choose leaders and form alliances. But Spain had controlled Florida until 1763, when it traded the territory to the British in exchange for Havana.
We were 2 colonies
Britain’s Florida stretched from the Atlantic Ocean, across the peninsula, to the Mississippi River — a tract too large, officials decided, to manage as a single parcel.
Land east of the Apalachicola River became East Florida, the 14th colony. Its capital was St. Augustine, which boasted the only stone fortress south of the Chesapeake Bay. West Florida, the 15th colony, chose Pensacola as its capital.
By 1776, about 3,000 British landowners, slaves and loyalists fleeing other colonies lived in East Florida, and a few hundred occupied West Florida, mostly along the coasts. The two Floridas were combined in 1821 when they joined the United States.
We backed the Brits
In the 1770s, Britain had 33 colonies in the Western Hemisphere, from Nova Scotia to Grenada. Only 13 rebelled. When the First Continental Congress invited the Floridas to send delegates, they declined. Floridians wanted British protection and purchasing power.
Escaped slaves also sought refuge beneath the Georgia border. And some Native American tribes fought for the British, believing they were less likely to invade their lands than the Patriots.
“Florida was known as a place for freedom. It was the wild, wild west. There was no sovereignty here, no bureaucracy,” said Richard Byington, who teaches history at the University of South Florida. “This place was full of independent contractors more concerned with their personal interests than in state-making. That’s the origin, you could say, of the Florida Man.”
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We pushed away the Patriots
George Washington wrote to John Hancock in December 1775, warning the Continental Congress that the British were stockpiling weapons and gunpowder in St. Augustine and might be planning to attack the southern colonies.
In August 1776, on Washington’s orders, more than 2,500 Patriot troops left Savannah for St. Augustine — braving swamps, snakes, alligators and mosquitoes, carrying powder kegs above their heads as they swam across rivers.
“This wasn’t a border skirmish,” said historian Roger Smith, author of “The 14th Colony,” a book about Florida in the late 1700s. “It was an invasion of a loyalist colony.”
Hostile terrain, lack of supplies and poor planning forced the Patriots to turn back.
The next year, 500 Patriot soldiers marched from Georgia into Florida and clashed with Thomas Brown, who refused to swear an oath to the “Sons of Liberty.” Patriots tied him to a tree, where they scalped, tarred and feathered him. When he recovered, he rallied more than 100 other loyalists and Native Americans to form the East Florida Rangers. They surprised the invading Continental Army at a campsite on Thomas Creek, near modern-day Jacksonville. That was the southernmost skirmish of the war.
In 1778, about 1,000 British soldiers, Native Americans and Brown’s Rangers thwarted the last Patriot attack at the Battle of Alligator Creek Bridge, also near what is now Jacksonville. No one had official uniforms, so soldiers struggled to determine if they were attacking the right people.
We had to leave
In 1781, more than 7,000 Spanish troops invaded West Florida, recapturing it from the British. The Siege of Pensacola “took up valuable resources that the British could have deployed elsewhere,” said Erin Stewart Mauldin, a professor at USF.
Two years later, when the revolution ended, the British gave East Florida back to Spain in exchange for Gibraltar. After 20 years in Florida, more than 17,000 British colonists left, boarding ships bound for the Bahamas and other colonies.
“Some stayed,” said Smith, the historian. “We thought we’d be like the Canadians, living peacefully on the other side of the border.”
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