WHILE THE SPANISH were pushing into New Mexico and the West, the English and Dutch had been lured to the Atlantic coast of North America. They, too, wanted to see what they could find—at the very least there might be a Spanish ship to capture, though many people persisted in the belief that there would be precious metals. The geographer and colonial enthusiast Richard Hakluyt thought the earlier writings from adventurers and explorers, like Jean Ribault’s account of Florida, held clues. Hakluyt wrote in his 1584 Discourse of Western Planting that there was “in the lande golde, silver and copper.” These were metals that, argued Hakluyt, would be in colonies rightfully claimed by Queen Elizabeth I, a territory stretching “from Florida northward to 67 degrees, (and not yet in any Christian princes actual possession).”
Hakluyt supported the planting of English colonies in North America for a number of reasons, not least because it would “be greatly for thinlargment [sic] of the gospel of Christe.” Perhaps more important, it would benefit trade, it would bring “manifolde imployment of nombers of idle men.” Such a colony would also allow the English to find the Northwest Passage, and, perhaps best of all, it would humiliate Felipe II because “the lymites of the kinge of Spaines domynions in the west Indies be nothing so large as ys generally ymagined.”1
The English were already familiar with such enterprises—before they started looking across the Atlantic, they had focused on Ireland. More than one hundred thousand people, mainly Protestants from England, Wales, and especially Scotland, left for Ireland in the seventeenth century, setting up “plantations”—a system that rewarded them with land ownership and altered the dynamics of social and political relations to the detriment of the Catholic Irish. The island had been made a part of Henry VIII’s kingdom in 1541, but the settlement process accelerated under James I’s Plantation of Ulster, in 1609. These developments, however, met with periods of fierce Irish resistance and required the presence of tens of thousands of soldiers.
Settlement expeditions were costly, and so would-be colonizers had to possess the money themselves or raise it through crown-sanctioned joint-stock companies.2 The first serious attempt to place a colony in North America was promoted by the adventurer Walter Raleigh, who was also an Irish landowner. He received a charter from Elizabeth I to put a settlement in what the Spanish considered to be Florida but the English thought of as being “not inhabited by Christian people.”3 A place was found in 1585 between the long stretch of barrier islands along modern North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the mainland, near the Albemarle Sound. These English settlers lived among the Roanoke people, and so the place adopted that name, in an area they called Virginia, thought to be named in honor of the Virgin Queen, though perhaps also inspired by a powerful local chief, Wingina. Although Raleigh did not join the settlers, he hoped the spot would prosper as a base for privateering attacks on the Spanish fleet. Indeed, Francis Drake sailed there after his May 1586 sacking of St. Augustine.
The colonists survived through one winter, but they faced many of the same difficulties as the French in Florida had twenty years earlier, especially food shortages and deteriorating relations with the Native Americans. By the time Drake arrived in June 1586, the settlers wanted to return to England and the colony was abandoned. A new batch of hopeful colonists was sent out in 1587, but because of ongoing naval hostilities between England and Spain—a period that included the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588—no resupply ships could reach the colony. When they finally did arrive in 1590, they found no survivors.
This failure did not dim English enthusiasm for overseas colonies, and plans to try again were aided by the 1604 Treaty of London. This accord ended, for the time being, the hostilities between Spain and England, and trading resumed. James I had come to the English throne in 1603, and his counterpart in Spain, Felipe III, had ascended in 1598. Although James I wanted to improve relations with Spain, many of the English remained distrustful of Catholic Spaniards, while some of the Spanish were wary of England’s designs on the Americas. There were plenty of good reasons to harbor suspicions, as Pedro de Zúñiga, Spain’s ambassador to England, discovered.
Zúñiga arrived in England in July 1605 and by 1607 was relaying his intelligence about plans “made in great secrecy” to send ships to Virginia and Plymouth.4 Zúñiga managed to gain an audience with James I in October that year, when he reiterated the claim that Virginia “is a part of the Indies belonging to Castile.” James I rejected this, saying such measures were not outlined in the 1604 treaty. Zúñiga reported that “he [James I] had never known that Your Majesty had a right to it [Virginia], for it was a region very far from where the Spaniards had settled.” He told Zúñiga that the participants in these voyages undertook them at their own risk, and so could not complain if the Spanish did capture and punish them. Their meeting ended with a final plea from Zúñiga that “a remedy be found for the Virginia affair,” though none was forthcoming.5
Zúñiga continued to worry about the implications for Spain, telling his king in 1609 that he understood the settlements were considered to be “so perfect (as they say) for piratical excursions that Your Majesty will not be able to bring silver from the Indies.” Zúñiga’s advice in dealing with the settlements was to “command that they be crushed as quickly as possible.”6 Felipe III sent Francisco Fernández de Écija, a captain who had served with Governor Menéndez when St. Augustine was founded, to find out more. Although by this point in his sixties, Écija sailed from St. Augustine in June 1609 to gather information about Virginia.7 His report detailed his travels along the coast, including the area around Santa Elena, and his meetings with Native Americans. He sailed near the ruins of the Roanoke Colony, which the Spanish had known about, before heading up to Chesapeake Bay, where his men finally caught sight of an English vessel that “carried two topsails and a great flag at the masthead.” They did not escape detection, and an English ship followed them for a while.8 Once out of the line of attack, the Spaniards continued their investigation, before returning to St. Augustine by late September.9
By the time of Écija’s report, the Virginia Colony had been well established, with its settlers arriving in 1607. Although at least one hundred thousand Spaniards had emigrated to Spain’s colonies by 1600, with some estimates reaching three hundred thousand, few of them were living anywhere near Virginia—most were in New Spain or farther south—leaving an area the Spanish considered to be theirs undefended.10 The English settlement, organized by the Virginia Company, was farther north than Roanoke, in the Chesapeake Bay area. To the Spanish this had been the ill-fated land of Ajacán that they had abandoned a century earlier, but to the English it was Jamestown, named for James I. In the same year that ships departed for Virginia, other vessels headed farther north, funded by the Plymouth Company, which also had a charter. Those settlers established the Popham Colony in 1607, on the Kennebec River in today’s Maine, and built a small fort. However, after a year—including a harsh winter—its colonists returned to England.
Virginia struggled on, and its early years were precarious. The settlers died in droves from disease and hunger—some ten thousand people arrived between 1607 and 1622, but only around two thousand were alive by 1622.11 The crown, however, realized that this colony could be a useful place to send the potentially troublesome as well as the poor, for instance shipping some two hundred impoverished children there in 1618–19.12 Attacks from Native Americans on the colony required constant vigilance. Yet like the French, the English also depended on Indian support for survival, though like the Spanish, they were quick to dispossess Native Americans of their territory. They were aided in this as illnesses threatened peoples of the Algonquin-speaking Powhatan confederacy, whose numbers in Virginia plummeted; there were around twenty-four thousand at the time of the first encounter with the English, but this figure was reduced to two thousand by 1669.13 The English colonies also had lower levels of mestizaje—in their case Anglo-Indian—than Spain’s. While the Spanish crown had permitted, and in the earliest years even encouraged, marriage between Amerindians and Spaniards, the English did not follow suit. Despite this, one of the most important foundational stories of English settlement remains how Pocahontas, a Powhatan chief’s daughter, was said to have saved the life of Captain John Smith, a member of the initial voyage, though she was later held captive by the English. By 1614, however, she married John Rolfe and through her actions temporarily mitigated the growing animosity between the two groups. Pocahontas was an exception and remained so. As more Englishwomen traveled to join the colony, concubinage or cohabitation with Native Americans was increasingly frowned upon.14*
Any hope of finding mineral wealth faded in Virginia’s early years. Captain Smith, in writing his account of Virginia, had much to say about the natural wonders of the colony, though less about such riches. His 1612 The Description of Virginia praised its forests of oak, walnut, and elm trees; the wide range of fruits that grew there; and the birds and fish that abounded: “no place is more convenient for pleasure, profit, and mans sustenance.”15 On the matter of extractable riches, he was more circumspect, claiming that “concerning the entrailes of the earth little can be saide for certainty … only this is certaine, that many regions lying in the same latitude, afford mines very rich of diverse natures.”16
The rise of tobacco reinforced the English belief that the land itself was capable of providing wealth through the production of an exportable commodity, and, to this end, unused land meant a loss of potential profit. The English puzzled over Algonquin land management and often claimed that land was not being “used,” as a justification for trying to buy, barter, or take it away from the Indians. To work the land was to own it, and this pattern was repeated throughout the Tidewater region.17 The English philosopher John Locke, who would go on to become a secretary to one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and a shareholder in the slave-trading Royal African Company, believed that laboring to “improve” land was at the heart of the colonizing project. He wrote much later in his 1690 Two Treatises of Government that “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property,” arguing that “the extent of the ground is of so little value without labour.”18
After some deliberation, the Council of the Indies in Spain finally recommended an attack on Virginia in 1611, though the expedition never materialized. In its place were diplomatic complaints and a slight expansion of the St. Augustine garrison, because it was the closest point to the English.19 The crown did not want to risk another long, costly conflict with England. Spain’s unwillingness to act may have avoided problems for the time being, but the longer-term ramifications were profound: it allowed the English to cement their place in North America and the wider Atlantic world. Not long after the establishment of Jamestown, other colonies were placed on islands with little or no Spanish presence, including St. Kitts in 1623 and Barbados in 1627. The English also later took Jamaica as a consolation prize from the Spanish in 1655 after a failed attempt to capture Santo Domingo.
Where the English went, other Europeans soon followed. French privateers were already roaming the West Indies. The Dutch also engaged in piracy, but they, too, began using joint-stock companies to fund American colonies, putting one in what they called New Amsterdam (New York), by 1625, as well as a few in the islands of the Caribbean, including, in 1634, Curaçao, which would become a hub of the African slave trade.
Trade and wealth were not the only goals of the English colonists; they also had their minds on God. Christianity was a crucial factor in colonization, but for reasons distinct from those of the Spanish. Protestants did not have the equivalent of the Jesuits or Franciscans to minister to Native Americans, nor did English edicts demand conversions. While settlers like Captain Smith believed, as he wrote, that colonists could “bring such poore infidels to the true knowledge of God and his holy Gospell,” Protestant Christianity would have its own trajectory in the Americas.20 At first, religion provided many settlers with their reason for being in North America. John Rolfe described the English presence there as a sign of being “marked and chosen by the finger of God.”21 New England became a beacon for Protestants escaping the often fatal uncertainties of the English Reformation; and while the initial Plymouth Colony may have been a failure, English Protestants continued to eye the shores of North America.
Although Henry VIII had broken with Rome in 1533, the particulars of English Protestantism were in no way settled. The Puritans, who followed the teaching of John Calvin, pushed for further changes in the Anglican Church; indeed the term “Puritan” was initially meant as an insult by Anglicans who viewed them as extremists. There was much disagreement within Puritan circles on how changes should be accomplished, but in general their aims included the creation of a more direct relationship with God and a less formal worship service. Such dissent, however, was interpreted in different ways by subsequent monarchs, and so at times Puritan beliefs could be perilous.22 They were tolerated under James I, though some uneasy Puritans began to seek religious refuge across the Atlantic. The most famous group of dissenters, the Pilgrims, were the first to make that crossing. They were also Calvinists but were more extreme than other Puritans in their demands. Their ship, the Mayflower, arrived in 1620; they landed on the easternmost hook of modern Massachusetts before crossing the bay and establishing their Plymouth Colony.
When Charles I took the throne in 1625 more serious issues emerged, not least that he was married to a Catholic and had sympathies with English Catholics. Indeed, Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, received a charter in 1632 that would become the colony of Maryland, which was intended to be a place of tolerance and refuge for Catholics who faced discrimination in England, though the initial settlers in 1634 also included Protestants.23 By this time, the Puritans were leaving England in droves, having established the Massachusetts Bay Colony near the Pilgrim settlements in 1630. Some thirty thousand Puritans, many of whom had been middle-class merchants in England and would be so again, migrated over the course of the 1630s.24
Unlike Virginia, where tobacco plantations were forming, New England became a land of small farmers, craftsmen, and merchant houses. From here, the Puritans could build their “city upon a hill” and engage in a form of worship they could not practice in England.25 These settlements also faced hardships early on and many were very rudimentary in comparison with parts of the Spanish empire. Mexico City, for instance, had a population of at least 150,000 by 1620, a university, and a cathedral.26 The town of Boston, some thirty years later, in 1650, hovered around only 2,000 souls.27
Although other parts of Spanish America were urban and populated, St. Augustine lagged. The dream of thriving missions throughout Florida had not materialized, though by 1655, seventy friars were ministering to some twenty-six thousand people in the region, working across four mission provinces: Guale, Timucua, Apalachee, and Apalachicola.28 This modest success, however, could do little to stem the decline of the indigenous population by the middle of the 1600s. There were a number of factors involved, with significant outbreaks of smallpox and measles, but also changes in diet and land use brought on by the missions, as well as serious rebellions, including an eight-month uprising in 1656 of the Timucua, and raids from other Native Americans.29 The Spanish settler and mestizo population remained small, while the Timucua would see virtual eradication, dropping from around ten thousand in 1600 to fourteen by 1727, and the Apalachee population was halved to around ten thousand over roughly the same period.30 Some Florida Indians moved north and west, often joining with other indigenous communities.31 Others looked south, seeking Spanish help and protection; for instance, the Guale people headed to St. Augustine around 1680.32 As these groups moved, the number of laborers dropped and the missions struggled to sustain themselves.
Another factor in these shifts in Florida was the English, who were inching closer. As Virginia had prospered, there was growing pressure within the colony to push south, both to expand and, it was claimed, to defend Jamestown from any Spanish incursions.33 In 1663, Charles II issued a grant to a group of investors—who were also supporters of his restoration to the throne after the English Civil War—for a settlement to be called Carolina. Soon English ships were exploring the waterways around Santa Elena, though the main port, Charles Town (modern Charleston, South Carolina), was placed a bit farther north, around the Ashley River, in 1670. That same year, England and Spain hammered out the terms of the Treaty of Madrid, drawn up to ease tensions between the two brought about by a number of attacks between English and Spanish ships in the Caribbean. It was a turning point in Anglo-Spanish relations, finally granting official recognition to British claims on Jamaica and Virginia and placing the boundary of Spanish Florida at N 32°30´, with Charles Town sitting just north of this border.
Around the same time, in 1672, the Royal African Company was granted a monopoly on all English trade between the west coast of Africa, the Caribbean, and the North American colonies, and English ships joined those of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch in violently forcing the migration of Africans. Within thirty years, some sixty-six hundred people lived in Carolina, of whom thirty-eight hundred were settlers and twenty-eight hundred slaves.34
Africans were the other significant group of arrivals in the seventeenth century. These were not the first Africans in North America—the Spanish had enslaved and freed people with them from their sixteenth-century expeditions onward—but the English drove up this number. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between 1670 and 1700, some 8,600 Africans, many from the western region of the continent, disembarked in North America. Most of them went to either the Virginia territory (4,504) or Maryland (2,917).35 Their numbers continued to rise as the colonists wanted more workers for the expanding plantations and Africans replaced white or Indian laborers. The use of enslaved people had also spread throughout the British colonies in the West Indies, where Africans were put to work in the sugar fields of islands such as Barbados.
However, not all slaves were African. Native American enslavement remained a significant component of labor throughout the English colonies at this time, and into the eighteenth century. The English considered conflict with the Indians a “just war,” and so any captivity or enslavement was deemed fair. Native Americans made up the majority of nonwhite labor in New England before 1700, with some thirteen hundred people enslaved at this time.36 The definition of slavery was also nebulous in this period, with servitude and unfair indenture contracts leading to a form of enslavement, even after 1700 when Indian enslavement was made illegal.37 The Virginia colonists also enslaved Indians throughout the seventeenth century, for instance after a number of conflicts with the Powhatan. Some were kept to work in Virginia, while others were exported—often at a handsome profit—to other English colonies.38
Carolina, with its proximity to the Native American communities of Spanish Florida, was heavily involved in this slave trade. The colony’s officials made alliances with the Westo—also called the Rickahockan—who had migrated in the mid-1600s to an area around the Savannah River, and who had pushed the Guale off their land. The Westo were critical to Indian enslavement in Carolina, and they were offered English goods, such as guns, tools, or cloth, in exchange for captives. This made raiding potentially far more lucrative than hunting or farming, but it also introduced a particular dilemma for the English, in that in this trading configuration there was a distinct lack of a “just war.”39
The raids into neighboring chiefdoms and Spanish territory spelled the end of the Spanish mission system in Florida, as the priests could no longer offer protection when the Westo assailed sites in Timucua and Apalachee. The situation was such that by the 1690s the Spanish found it necessary to keep troops in a small fort at the San Luis de Apalachee mission and in the surrounding area.40 By the first years of the 1700s, the chain of missions linking the Guale territory to St. Augustine had disintegrated, bringing more than a century’s worth of evangelical effort to a close.41
While these attacks destroyed a crucial part of Spanish Florida, they were foundational in the development of the Carolina plantation economy. That colony’s leaders tried to keep the trade for themselves, using the profits from Indians sold to other English colonies to buy the tools and African slaves needed to develop the land, as well as the manufactured goods to exchange for more slaves.42 The entire situation was fragile, however, and there were wars between the English and the Westo in the 1670s and 1680s.43 The Carolina planters were forced to find allies beyond the Westo, for instance, with the Yamasee, a confederation of smaller chiefdoms from Georgia and South Carolina that raided Apalachee in 1684–85.44 Some raiders even brought back slaves from as far west as modern Texas, and this practice continued well into the next century.45
In addition to these raids, sea-based hostilities continued between the English and Spanish. English privateers attacked Florida in 1668 and again throughout the 1680s. One attack, in 1682, destroyed the small fort of San Marcos, located near the convergence of the Wakulla and St. Marks Rivers, near the northern Gulf Coast of Florida. The Spanish were under orders not to retaliate, however, because it would violate their peace deal with the English.46 This frustrated the governors of Florida and Cuba, who used a Spanish privateer, Alejandro Tomás de Léon, to organize a retaliation on their behalf. The expedition left St. Augustine in May 1686 and burned down a settlement known as Stuart Town (or Stuart’s Town), south of Charles Town, before going on to attack and plunder plantations along the coast.47 Such back-and-forth raids continued by land and sea throughout the later part of the seventeenth century.
Throughout this turbulent time, the Spanish in St. Augustine were working on a new fort, spurred into action by an attack in 1668. They broke ground on the Castillo de San Marcos fort in 1672, though its completion would take another couple of decades. It was designed to be another link in Spain’s extensive defense system, connecting San Marcos to the older forts, including San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz, and the Castillo San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico. San Marcos was more modest than these other fortifications, though a vast improvement on its predecessor. Each of the fort’s four corners featured a diamond-shaped bastion, with rounded sentry boxes, called garitas, on each of them. Although its style was in line with the design of the other forts, San Marcos’s materials were unique: it was built using coquina, a type of limestone rock consisting of tiny compressed shells. The true test of the fortress’s strength would come soon enough.
WHILE THE ENGLISH and Dutch were making inroads along the Atlantic seaboard, the French had changed direction. Huguenots in Spanish Florida had been only one arm of France’s involvement in the Americas; as early as 1534, Jacques Cartier explored around Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River, claiming the area for France, though his attempts to set up a trading post failed. After further intermittent efforts, the French finally enjoyed some success in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain erected a settlement at Quebec.
From there, they spread in two directions. First, they moved into what they called New France, along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and toward the Great Lakes, where they were trapping animals and trading lucrative furs; they also went into the southern part of the Mississippi valley. In addition, as the English and Dutch had done, they took some Caribbean islands, including Martinique (1635), Guadeloupe (1635), and, by the end of the seventeenth century, Saint-Domingue (1697), which was the eastern third of Spanish Santo Domingo.
Spain may have been successful driving the French out of Florida but now faced a similar problem in the Gulf of Mexico. The Spanish had explored much of the Gulf and considered it part of their territory, though it remained sparsely settled. Thus, when René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, decided to start his travels on the Mississippi River in February 1682, there was no Spaniard to stop him. La Salle, who traversed much of French America, also believed in the dream of a passage to the Pacific. Hoping to find it, his party of twenty-two Frenchmen and eighteen Native Americans, seven of whom were women, set out from where the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers meet, just north of modern St. Louis. On their way south, they passed today’s Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas Rivers, before arriving near the mouth of the Mississippi in April.48 There was no obvious route west, but undeterred, they claimed the area that surrounded the Mississippi River for Louis XIV, calling it La Louisiane.
La Salle had returned to France the following year to make his case to the crown for settlement in this territory, departing once again in 1684 with four ships and some three hundred people. Navigational miscalculations in the Gulf of Mexico put the project in jeopardy: rather than landing at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1685, La Salle arrived at present-day Matagorda Bay, Texas, some four hundred miles west. The French built a rudimentary fort, and La Salle spent the next two years exploring the region by land and sea, trying to find the location of the Mississippi River, as well as now looking for the overland route to the celebrated silver mines of northern Mexico.49
The settlement scarcely survived, and resentment festered as La Salle was absent for long periods. In March 1687 a group of men with La Salle on another of his journeys mutinied and killed him. Some of the survivors of this expedition returned to France, while the remaining handful of people at the settlement were attacked by the local Karankawa people the following year.50 The Spanish made five attempts to look for La Salle after hearing what the French were doing and in 1689 found the ruins of Fort St. Louis. Upon further exploration, the Spanish found two survivors living among the Native Americas. One survivor and mutineer, Jean l’Archevêque, told the Spanish what had happened and was later imprisoned.51 After his release, however, he turned his loyalty to Spain and worked as a translator and soldier, later appearing in New Mexico.
The next significant French expedition came under the leadership of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who managed to find the mouth of the Mississippi River and navigate through its maze of channels. He established a settlement in Biloxi Bay in 1699 and, near the coast, a small military outpost, Fort Maurepas, which would serve as the first capital for the Louisiana territory.52 In 1702, they moved northeast to a bluff overlooking the Mobile River and established Fort Louis de la Louisiane, though that lasted only a few years. In 1711, the residents were uprooted once again to start a settlement twenty-five miles south, building another Fort Louis, which would be renamed Fort Condé in 1723.53 The French by this point were under the leadership of Iberville’s brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, the Sieur de Bienville, who governed the Louisiana territory until 1740.
French objectives in North America were not unlike those of the Spanish and the English: exploration, trade, and profit. However, French interaction with Amerindians was markedly different from that of the Spanish. Rather than using an encomienda-style labor system like the Spanish, or developing plantations along the lines of the English, many of the French started their commercial exploits by trading furs, such as beaver. French traders often resided at close quarters with Native Americans and, over time, they were able to build intimate ties with many chiefdoms, partnering with indigenous women and having children, who were known as métis. Profitable furs were sent to France, and guns and manufactured wares were shipped over to be sold to the Indians.
That is not to say the French eschewed more spiritual activities. Although the earliest French settlers in Santa Elena were Huguenots, Catholicism remained the dominant faith for the seventeenth-century arrivals, among them a number of Jesuits who began to appear in North America in the early 1600s. These priests left extensive accounts of their time among the people along the modern U.S.-Canadian border, including the Iroquois and Algonquin. Like the traders, the Jesuits often lived within Indian villages, where they continued to attempt to convert these “heathen” people.54 Some Jesuits also participated in exploration missions, such as Jacques Marquette, who was a member of the party that in 1673 discovered a route from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, which La Salle would travel all the way down nine years later.55
The French activity in the Mississippi valley unsettled Spanish administrators in Florida, so in 1698 they erected a small defensive settlement, Santa María de Galve, near the waters of Pensacola Bay. Around the same time, in northern New Spain, the Spanish continued their attempts to broker alliances with the Native Americans west of the Mississippi River, including the Caddo-speaking Hasinai people, with the aim of buffering any French advances into that territory.
The Hasinai were part of the larger Caddo confederacy, which spread out in East Texas and western Louisiana. Although there were some twenty-five different chiefdoms, their ways of life had certain shared characteristics. They were mostly agricultural, growing crops like maize and squash, supplemented by the hunting of bison and other animals. They were also sedentary, living in grass homes in villages that also included temple mounds.56 The Spanish began to call this region Tejas, also spelled Texas, after the Hasinai word for “friends” or “allies,” ta-sha.57 Priests tried to put missions among the Hasinai, building San Francisco de los Tejas, just east of today’s Augusta, Texas, in 1690, which was followed by Santísimo Nombre de María, located around twelve miles northeast on the Neches River, in the same year. A smallpox epidemic descended not long afterward, killing about three thousand people. The Hasinai blamed the Spanish for the devastation and drove them out of the territory. San Francisco de los Tejas was abandoned by 1693, and Santísimo Nombre de María was destroyed in an earlier flood in 1692. With little to show for these efforts, in 1694 the viceroy of New Spain, at this point struggling with a number of other concerns, abandoned any further activity in this part of Texas, for the time being.58
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY opened with a crisis in Europe. Spain’s Hapsburg king, Carlos II, died in 1700 with no heir. The prospect of the Spanish throne passing to a French Bourbon, Philippe d’Anjou, the grandson of María Theresa—Carlos’s half sister and the first wife of Louis XIV—left the rest of the continent with serious concerns about the balance of power if France and Spain were united. England, Holland, and Austria went to battle against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict that spilled into the colonies and was known in North America as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13).
Some of the opening shots of this conflict were fired at the recently finished San Marcos fort in St. Augustine, as the English, aided by Indian allies and led by the South Carolina governor James Moore, attacked the Spanish in 1702. They had worked their way down from South Carolina, destroying a Spanish fort on Amelia Island and fortifications near the St. Johns River. By the time the English arrived in St. Augustine, the townspeople had taken refuge inside the fort, waiting out a siege that lasted around seven weeks. The fort’s coquina walls held out until a fleet from Havana arrived in late December and chased away the English, but not before they had set fire to the town.
The French had limited resources to contribute to the conflict; in 1708 French Louisiana consisted of fewer than three hundred settlers, including 122 soldiers.59 However, a plan was organized to make use of the sea power of French privateers, and in 1706 a joint force of the Spanish in Florida and French corsairs attacked Charles Town, though the city remained in English hands.60 The war ended in 1714, with Philippe, now Felipe V, on the Spanish throne after renouncing his French claims. The British—as they had become when the Acts of Union created Great Britain by uniting England and Scotland in 1707—emerged victorious from the negotiations of the Treaty of Utrecht. They were ceded much of France’s territory in Canada, including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Hudson Bay. In addition, within Europe, Spain was forced to turn over Gibraltar and the island of Minorca to Britain. Also as significant, the British won the lucrative asiento, a contract that granted its traders an exclusive right to supply African slaves to Spanish America.
North American colonists had to contend with changing power balances on two fronts: the rivalries and wars of Europe and those in the Native American world. The disease, enslavement, and migration that forced Native Americans into new lands or confederations in the late 1600s meant that by the early 1700s there were a number of recent alliances and animosities among Indian groups. Among the most powerful groups to emerge in this period were the Creeks, also known as Muskogee. The Upper Creeks, as the Europeans called them, lived along the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers that feed into the Alabama River—near modern east Alabama and west Georgia. The Lower Creeks, as they were known, were situated along the Apalachicola River in Florida, and as far north as the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers.61 There was a constant jostle for influence, trade, and alliances among the Upper and Lower Creeks with the British and Spanish. It was a situation that each side could exploit. For instance, the Creeks helped the British fight the Spanish—for example, during a devastating attack on the mission Santa Fé de Toloca among the Apalachee in 1702—but the Spanish at various points played to the Creeks’ anxieties by telling them they might be enslaved by the British.62 Relationships could be fragile and subject to quick changes.
The Creeks also participated in slave raids for the British, who had started giving them goods—including arms and alcohol—on credit, allowing them to run up large debts. Because the Spanish missions in Florida had been abandoned by the early 1700s, few Indians were left to enslave. They had to turn to deerskin to pay the British and became indebted to the tune of about one hundred thousand skins by 1711, something that would require years of labor to produce. The Creek people were angry about their treatment—not only what they considered trickery in allowing the debts to accumulate, but also the British habit of punishing indebted Indian men with humiliating public floggings.63
The Creeks were not the only people with grievances, and in April 1715 some Yamasee people executed a few English traders, triggering a conflict known as the Yamasee War (1715–17). A number of Native American nations, including the Upper Creeks and the Chickasaw, joined the Yamasee in attacking English settlements, and even some runaway black slaves joined the effort.64 After months of fighting, the British faced defeat, until they managed to enlist the help of the Cherokee people, who drove the Yamasee out of the Carolina territory and into Spanish Florida.65
Conflict also spread around the Gulf of Mexico. In 1718, Governor Bienville claimed for France a small crescent of land near where the Mississippi River fans out into the Gulf, calling it La Nouvelle-Orléans, after the Duke of Orléans.66 Although its climate was brutal—hot and sticky in the summer and prone to flooding and hurricanes—it was well positioned for trade, and a handful of settlers arrived. The French had also continued exploring north along the Mississippi River, building a small outpost in 1716 near the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi that meanders from Louisiana through northeast Texas. This was close to the Natchitoches chiefdom, a group that was also part of the larger Caddo confederacy, with whom the French were eager to trade. The Natchitoches also distrusted the Spanish, in part because of their failed attempt at planting missions among the Hasinai in the 1690s.67 This territory had not come under any European dominance, but as the French leaned west, the Spanish were drawn back to Texas. They were spurred into action after French traders arrived at the outpost of San Juan Bautista, near the Río Grande (by today’s Guerrero, in the Mexican state of Coahuila), in July 1714.68 They responded with a flurry of building in East Texas, constructing a small fort in 1716 along with four wooden churches.69 Two Franciscan missions were also built just to the west of Natchitoches—Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de los Ais and San Miguel de Linares de los Adaes, near San Augustine, Texas, and Robeline, Louisiana, respectively—in an attempt to establish a boundary between Spanish and French spheres of influence among Native Americans. In 1718, farther south, a presidio was placed near the headwaters of the San Antonio River, with the name San Antonio de Béxar. A mission—San Antonio de Valero—was built there in the same year and it would later be known as the Alamo.70 Four more missions were later added, strung southward along the San Antonio River.
In the same year, hostilities in Europe resumed, this time in the War of the Quadruple Alliance, which pitted Spain against France, England, Holland, and Austria. The French in Natchitoches used the opportunity to attack and capture San Miguel de Linares de los Adaes, as well as ambush the Spanish fort in Pensacola in May 1719.71
While plans were being made for a Spanish attack on Louisiana, the larger conflict ended, in 1720. Spanish officials in Texas took the opportunity to reinforce the frontier, with the most significant addition being a presidio near the Los Adaes site in 1721; it garrisoned around a hundred men and would become the capital of Spanish Texas from 1729 to 1773.72 Farther away from Louisiana, also in 1721, the presidio of Nuestra Señora de la Bahía de Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was built on the Gulf, on the site of the earlier failed La Salle expedition.
Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío had launched an attack in 1719 against the Ute and Comanche when he heard that the French were nearby and living among the Pawnee and Jumanos.73 In June 1720, Valverde y Cosío’s lieutenant, Pedro de Villasur, was dispatched with around one hundred men, among them the Frenchman Jean l’Archevêque, who had earlier survived at the Matagorda Bay colony and pledged his allegiance to Spain.74 They set off to the northeast from Santa Fe, reaching the Río de Jesús María (today’s Platte River, in Nebraska), which they followed to the Rio San Lorenzo (today’s Loup River). They found the Pawnee people, but their attempts to communicate with them foundered. Villasur and his men set up camp nearby and the following morning were woken by a volley of gunshots—no doubt from French weapons—as the Pawnee ambushed them. Villasur and l’Archevêque were among those killed, with only a few Spaniards escaping.75
Despite a number of losses and setbacks in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the Spanish managed to build up their presence in Texas to around 250 soldiers and ten missions, though they amounted to little more than specks on a landscape still dominated by Native Americans. While the French had been warded off, the lack of settlers in Texas was a growing concern because it hampered Spain’s ability to maintain control of its frontier.76 One Franciscan friar wrote to the king in 1716 asking for “Galicians and [Canary] Islanders” to come to Texas to take advantage of a fertile paradise with a climate ‘similar to that of Castile.’”77 Attacks by local Native Americans—who were proving resistant to conversion—were a constant threat. Although official land grants were made, it was difficult to farm in many of the areas and there were few indications of any new mines. To many in New Spain, going to the frontier was dangerous, and it did not seem that the risks were worthwhile. Still concerned about poor settlement, the crown agreed in 1723 to permit and pay the passage for two hundred isleños from the Canaries to immigrate to Tejas, though in the end the scheme was hampered by an eight-year bureaucratic delay, after which only fifty-six people, in fifteen families, came over. Although the isleños were, in theory, welcome additions, in practice they found it difficult to carve out a place for themselves between the missions and the military garrisons. The friars ensured that the settlers could not hire Indian labor, because it provided the missions with crop surpluses. The Canary Islanders found it hard to compete, opting instead to try to raise cattle or work as merchants.78 Yet, at the same time, the isleños had created their own town, San Fernando, with its own civilian government, laying claim to valuable lands earlier irrigated by soldiers—again causing friction, this time with the military. This led to frustrated attempts to secure permission from the viceroy to hire Indians—a move foiled by the friars—while the military governors prohibited soldiers from buying from local isleño merchants.79 In 1745 the viceroy of New Spain described the isleños as people who “maintain themselves quite comfortably by trading,” though many might have begged to differ.80 The three-way feud continued for years, while other settlers stayed away, leaving Texas as a Spanish outpost.
IN 1725, THE governor of Florida, Antonio de Benavides, wrote a letter to one of his superiors seeking clarification about a group of runaway slaves that had been on his mind, noting that over the “eight months more or less we find ourselves in this Presidio seven blacks, that on two separate occasions have fled the City of Carolina.”81 The arrival of runaways was a familiar issue for Benavides, as it had been for governors before him.
The first reported instance of slaves fleeing from the plantations of South Carolina was in 1687. The Spanish baptized them as Catholics and gave them sanctuary. Word of this spread, causing many more slaves to make their way to Florida. Officials in St. Augustine were forced to ask the crown for guidance, and by 1693 a royal decree granted these refugees their freedom through conversion to Catholicism and a pledge to the crown. This helped Spain in two ways, by depriving the English of their labor force and by populating the frontier with people loyal to Spain.82
At issue for Benavides, more than two decades later, was that the most recent group of runaways had arrived during a pause in the ongoing animus between Spain and Britain.83 He was willing to pay 200 pesos for each runaway, but the planters rejected this offer and threatened to come to Florida and take their slaves back. Forced to make a decision before receiving official instructions, he sold a total of ten runaways at a public auction in St. Augustine and paid off the disgruntled Carolina planters with the proceeds.84
The hiatus with the British was brief. Even before Benavides’s slave dilemma, the British had built Fort King George in 1721, near where the Altamaha River runs into the Atlantic Ocean, by today’s Darien, Georgia. The fort sat along a crucial route for defense and trade, near the site of the abandoned Santo Domingo de Talaje mission. The Spanish were by now accustomed to living with the ongoing British threat, and in 1728 Benavides had requested more men.85 Into this already volatile mix entered another English colony, though it would not follow the same path as Virginia or South Carolina. Instead, Georgia was to be a place for the “worthy poor” of Britain, according to the English social reformer James Edward Oglethorpe, who founded the colony, named for George II, with the intention of giving debtors in prison a new life.
Oglethorpe had served in the military and as a member of Parliament, where the squalor of British jails was brought to his attention. His goal was to establish a colony in North America in which to place those whose crime was often that of simple poverty, and by 1730 he had chosen a site by the Savannah River, with South Carolina to the north and Spanish Florida to the south. Oglethorpe presented the colony as a possible buffer zone between the two rivals—the people sent there could protect as well as work the land—and gambled on this being the key to winning government support. The royal charter he was granted in 1732 permitted him to establish the colony on land between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers, and he joined the first ship to Georgia in October of that year, arriving in early 1733. Later that year, as part of his campaign, he wrote a pamphlet, A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia, laying out his case. In it, he argued that the poor and prison-bound could “relieve themselves and strengthen Georgia, by resorting thither, and Great Britain by their Departure.” In addition, the colony would not permit the labor of enslaved Africans, at least not at first.86
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 settlement. 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.