INTRODUCTION

AS THE SKY LIGHTENED in the early morning hours of March 9, 1781, British sailors on a frigate floating at the mouth of Pensacola Bay spotted a fleet heading straight for them. One sailor scrambled high on the mast, straining to see the flag flying over the lead ship. Hoping to see the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack, instead the lookout recognized the bold red and gold stripes of Spanish King Carlos III’s naval flag. The British frigate fired seven shots, whose thunderous sound warned the people of Pensacola of imminent invasion.

These sailors were not surprised at the Spanish invasion—Pensacola was the capital of British West Florida and the last line of defense against Spanish conquest of the entire colony. The sailors had only hoped that the Spanish would not arrive before reinforcements. However, readers today might be surprised by this North American battle adjacent to battles of a better-known war—the American Revolution. While histories of the American Revolution include the Marquis de Lafayette and the French fleet at Yorktown, most Americans and even many historians do not know that the Spanish were fighting their own battles against the British at the same time. As Britain tried to put down the rebellion in thirteen of its colonies, it was also defending its other thirteen colonies on the North American mainland and in the West Indies against the Spanish and the French. By invading West Florida, Spain was taking advantage of the distraction of the rebellion to expand eastward along the Gulf of Mexico. For Britain, now on the defensive on two fronts, the prospect of Spanish expansion raised the stakes of the war.

Pensacola, March 9–10, 1781, with the Spanish fleet off Santa Rosa Island and the British Mentor and Port Royal guarding the Bay. (Toma de la plaza de Panzacola y rendición de la Florida Occidental a las armas de Carlos III, Ministerio de Defensa, Archivo del Museo Naval, Spain).

Forgotten Stories

The American Revolution on the Gulf Coast is a story without minutemen, without founding fathers, without rebels. It reveals a different war with unexpected participants, forgotten outcomes, and surprising winners and losers.

Although the Revolutionary War was a global war with global causes and consequences, two circumstances following the rebels’ victory led their story to take center stage as the standard history of the Revolution. The first was the Treaty of Paris, in which the United States and Britain divided the eastern half of the continent—and excluded other Europeans and Indians. The second, following the treaty, was the large numbers of Americans settling on lands claimed by Spaniards, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and others. The kings of France and Spain entered this global war not because they loved rebellion (much the contrary) but for the same kinds of imperial objectives that had propelled them into previous wars. Although both worried that the rebellion could set a bad example for their own colonies, they were more interested in reversing Britain’s victories from the Seven Years’ War of the 1750s and 1760s and protecting and expanding their global empires.¹

On the Gulf Coast, and indeed for most people, the Revolution seemed to be just another imperial war, another war fought for territory and treasure. As different alliances competed for power, Spanish, British, and French colonists, black slaves, and Indians of many nations were drawn into this multifaceted war. The narrative of the Revolutionary era is more true to its people and more fascinating in its complexity if it includes less familiar regions and peoples and if it encompasses the war’s experiences and results in all their diversity.

The war on the Gulf Coast proves two truths often buried by common narratives of the Revolutionary War: that most people chose sides for reasons besides genuine revolutionary or loyalist fervor and that non-British colonists exercised a great deal of influence over the war’s outcome. In Virginia, slaves rushed to British lines seeking freedom from their American masters. Near the border of New York and Canada, Mohawk Indian Molly Brant spied for the British, sheltered loyalists in her home, and persuaded men of the Iroquois Confederacy to fight on the British side. She hoped that by supporting the British she could maintain the Iroquois-British alliance and stem the tide of settlers into Iroquoia. Sometimes support was merely for self-preservation. In Vincennes (present-day Indiana), French families came out to welcome American George Rogers Clark with a bottle of wine when he took their town from the British, assuring him of their love of the American rebels. They did the same for the British when they retook Vincennes a few months later, and again brought out the wine when Clark returned, each time hoping to curry favor with whatever military power was ascendant.²

This book focuses on the Gulf Coast, from Florida to Louisiana, because of the astounding number of competing interests that came into conflict there. The Gulf Coast was the only site of Revolutionary War battles that was outside the rebelling colonies during the war but soon became part of the United States. The Gulf Coast’s war included participants that most people do not think of when they consider the American Revolution: the French and Spanish, who had a centuries-long history in the region; Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, whose lands spread from the coast deep into the interior of the continent; and people of African descent, whose experiences of enslavement and freedom differed widely and, with the introduction of large-scale plantation slavery, would be changing faster than ever.

The People

To make sense of the dizzying complexity of the Revolutionary War on the Gulf Coast, this book centers on eight individuals. These characters stand in for larger peoples but also illustrate that imperial relationships were almost always personal and that the most complete history is a multi-perspectival one. Today, their names are obscure, but some were famous in their time. Oliver Pollock, Alexander McGillivray, and Payamataha, for example, were names that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson came to know well.³

Less known was Petit Jean, who grew up a slave in Mobile. As he tended his master’s cattle, he would never have imagined that he would become a trusted spy and courier for Spain. Yet right before the Spanish fleet left Havana for Pensacola, it was Petit Jean who transported Spanish orders for New Orleans to prepare the local militias to aid the naval forces. The Revolutionary War brought Petit Jean this opportunity, and his operations helped the Spanish cause.

Another man assisting the Spanish invading force was a young Cajun militiaman named Amand Broussard. A refugee from the last war between France and Britain, he hated the British for forcing his family out of their Acadian homeland in eastern Canada and was glad to get the chance to fight again.

Eagerly awaiting news in New Orleans, Oliver Pollock, a merchant, had garnered financial support for the war effort. The Continental Congress had appointed Pollock as its agent in Louisiana, where he fostered an unofficial alliance between the rebels and the Spanish crown. Pollock hoped soon to send news of Pensacola’s fall to Congress and to General George Washington. Waiting with him was his wife, Margaret O’Brien Pollock, whose Irish Catholic family had long fought against the British and whose husband’s wartime decisions would create opportunities and perils for their growing family.

A pressing question on the minds of those defending as well as those hoping to take Pensacola was whether the region’s Native peoples would show up for the battle. The vast inland of North America was Indian country, and its people far outnumbered the Europeans clashing on the Gulf Coast. North of Pensacola was the Creek Confederacy, a loose confederation whose towns ruled themselves separately, needed interpreters within the Confederacy, and had occasionally even joined opposite sides in war. Alexander McGillivray, the son of a Creek mother and a Scottish trader, blamed the rebels for threatening his parents’ lands and livelihoods. During the war, he tried to rally Creek fighters to aid the British. His frustrations coordinating war parties later inspired him to try to centralize the Creek Confederacy into a nation and to unite all southeastern Indians into a “Southern Confederacy.”

In contrast to Alexander McGillivray, the Chickasaw leader and diplomat named Payamataha influenced the war by inaction. The British considered Payamataha and the Chickasaws “absolutely at our disposal” and believed that Payamataha was rallying his people to ride the four hundred miles from their towns near the Mississippi River to rescue Pensacola.⁴ Payamataha had different plans. He was a leader in a growing movement among Indians to stay out of European conflicts, a movement that, if it succeeded, might doom the British effort to retain the Gulf Coast and to quell the rebellion to the north.

Within all of the groups involved in the Revolutionary War, both familiar and unfamiliar, there were tremendous differences in background and opinion. “British” soldiers came to the Gulf Coast from not only England, Scotland, Wales, and Protestant Ireland but also Jamaica, the German principality of Waldeck, and German-American communities in Pennsylvania. People of African descent included Malike-speaking Bambara people from the inland tributaries of the Senegal River, Wolof speakers from the lower Senegal Valley, and Yorubas from the Bight of Benin. They had lived through the horrors of the Middle Passage and found themselves enslaved in the towns and plantations of the Gulf Coast. Other people of African descent had been in the Americas for generations. Some of them were enslaved, some had gained their freedom, and others had been free all their lives. The invading Spanish force included soldiers from, in addition to Spain itself, Catholic Ireland, Cuba, France, Flanders, Mallorca, Catalonia, and the Canary Islands.

Although diverse, the people of the Gulf Coast had more in common than their ethnic or racial labels imply. Europeans and Africans had been coming to the Americas for nearly three centuries, and they and Native Americans had changed one another. Indians and Africans had readily established trade with Europe, and they had acquired metal tools and new kinds of cloth and weapons. Trading partnerships and alliances had in turn affected regional wars. Although the Declaration of Independence accused King George III of inciting “merciless Indian savages” against the thirteen colonies, Indians worked for their own interests and indeed had demanded the king’s restrictions on westward expansion. They were not simply pawns of the British king. Like Europeans and Africans, American Indians had their own policies, disputes, and agendas. Natives, Europeans, and Africans knew one another well by the eighteenth century, and their lives had been changed by the same global forces. The natural resources and labor of Europe’s colonies fed an industrial revolution in England, which was changing the material lives of people all over the world.

This book’s characters lived more than a thousand miles away from where the war began. Most had no interest in Britain’s attempt to tax and regulate its colonies and little in common with Boston’s famously raucous protesters. Still, when war came, it presented them all with opportunities and dangers, and they worked to profit from the squabble among the English speakers to the north. They tried, in dramatic and innovative ways, to use the war to forward their own ambitions for themselves, their families, and their nations.

Interdependence

When James Bruce, a member of His Majesty’s Council for West Florida, and his wife, Isabella, heard the cannon fire and saw the smoke rising from the extinguished fire of the lighthouse to signal the arrival of the Spanish ships, they gathered their children, some provisions, and a few belongings. Along with Pensacola’s other government officials and several hundred European, African, and Native women and children, the Bruces rushed into the town’s main fort. Natives of Scotland, their fortunes lay with the British empire. If the Spanish or the rebels prevailed, they were likely to capture the Bruces and their children and send them into exile—or worse.

Every July 4, Americans celebrate the independence the Revolution created, the political separation from Britain and the creation of the United States of America. On such occasions, Americans might imagine that independence was a universal and uniform goal in the eighteenth century. But as the story of James and Isabella Bruce would remind us, the Revolutionary War was not fought solely for the independence of the United States. The war’s conclusion did not bring freedom to all of those who became part of the new republic. Some people fought hard against joining the new nation that Jefferson called “the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government.”⁵

Stories of competing colonial groups, strong Native confederacies and nations, and overlapping systems of slavery reveal that the Anglo-American nation that arose from the Revolution was not inevitable. In fact, both the defeat of the most powerful empire in the world and the creation of a lasting republic were highly unlikely outcomes. Scholarship and popular memory have long portrayed late eighteenth-century Spaniards and Indians as people out of time—Spain as a crumbling empire and Indians living in ways incompatible with the agrarianism to come. In this view, both were incapable of change, destined to be overrun by settlers from the United States. But in fact, they had ambitions that were reasonable at the time, and they came close to realizing their goals, goals that if achieved would have spawned a very different nation or (more likely) multiple polities.⁶

Being independent would have been unwelcome to most people in eighteenth-century North America. Men and women depended on a web of economic, social, and political connections that provided stability and opportunity even as they limited complete freedom of action. Indeed, empires worked in part because they incorporated diverse and unequal populations into a system of beneficial, if also coercive, connections. An individual or society that tried to act completely alone had no chance.⁷

For most, advantageous interdependence was a more logical goal. Leaders of all kinds of polities struggled to establish a balance in which they might have more control over dependent relationships. Sovereign states involved networks of dependency. Families and individuals measured their freedom according to how much less dependent they were on others than others were on them. Colonists might feel that their empires took advantage of them, restricting their trade and limiting their production. Still, it was empire that delivered manufactured goods, created a market for colonial produce, and secured property rights. It was empire that protected them from the military might of other empires and powerful Indians who might otherwise expel or kill them. Even propertied Britons like James Bruce, who believed themselves the most independent subjects in the world, were part of a hierarchy of reciprocal dependencies that extended from the king at the top to slaves at the bottom.⁸

Throughout the early modern world, dependence meant security, while independence could mean vulnerability and even slavery. Being captured and enslaved meant that a man, woman, or child was ripped from the interdependent relationships of kin and community to face a cruel world without protection. A slave like Petit Jean might work for freedom from literal enslavement, but he also wanted ties of community and patronage that would make his life more secure. Other freedoms might be more pressing than freedom from slavery—freedom from violent abuse, freedom to reunite with family members, or even some measure of independence of daily life within the legal strictures of enslavement.⁹

The only people involved in the war on the Gulf Coast who fought for sovereign independence were Native leaders. Through the early nineteenth century, independent Indian polities ruled the vast interior of North America, although they too operated within a complicated set of interdependencies. The basic unit of southeastern Indian politics was the town, but towns were not fully independent. People were born into matrilineal clans that united people of different towns and could make decisions of war and peace that might not align with the desires of particular town leaders. And towns and clans were then part of even larger polities. The Chickasaws exercised sovereignty as a nation (in the eighteenth-century sense of “a numerous people inhabiting a certain extent of land, enclosed within certain limits, and under the same government”).¹⁰ In contrast, the Creek Confederacy was a much looser collection of towns. Each major Creek town ruled itself and lesser towns and farms in its jurisdiction, while the Creek Confederacy tried, but often failed, to unite the towns’ foreign policy. Like European monarchs, Native leaders were bound by reciprocal obligations. While men conducted most of the diplomacy, Creek and Chickasaw women had some say in community decision-making. More important for daily life, women owned the houses and fields and therefore did not depend on marriage for economic security. Women’s and men’s reciprocal responsibilities together established and protected family and community.

Although politically independent, Indian polities still needed external connections for trade and security. Historians have at times argued that American Indians and other colonized peoples became subject to imperial powers because they became dependent on European goods, thereby debilitating their economies. But dependency is a tricky concept—each side in an exchange relationship trades because the other has what it wants. Europeans needed the products of the fur trade and Indians’ cooperation in everything from allowing a post on their lands to providing transportation and information. And European trade did not end Indian control over their economies, their land, or their internal governance. Indeed, Indians had participated in both local and long-distance trade with other Indians long before the arrival of Europeans and Africans, and they incorporated European trade into old networks and old practices based on reciprocity. Being part of a world economy had made the lives of Payamataha and Alexander McGillivray more cosmopolitan than those of their Native ancestors, but in most cases Indians had shaped their own participation and understanding of that change more than Europeans had.¹¹

Yet as the British population in North America grew, some leaders of both Native and colonial communities began to advocate for more independence from empire, although for quite different, indeed often conflicting, reasons. In the 1760s and 1770s, some British colonists began to see the British empire as a force of tyranny more than opportunity, as an empire that did not allow the colonies enough say over taxes or access to western lands. At the same time, fearing dependence, some Indian leaders sought ways to end or diversify their trade with Britain. And some advocated military solutions against the colonial settlers infringing on Indian lands, the very settlers who protested their empire’s efforts to hold them back from expansion.

Nations used some dependencies to free themselves from others. Chickasaw leader Payamataha promoted Chickasaw independence from British dictates by increasing connections to other Indians and the Spanish empire. After the war, Creek leader Alexander McGillivray sought to persuade other Indians to cede some sovereignty to a centralized structure that would be led by Creeks. But a Creek-led confederacy was not at all what Payamataha had in mind. For its part, Spain hoped to preserve and expand its empire by offering various communities—both Indian and non-Indian—military protection and the economic opportunities of empire. For the thirteen colonies that declared political independence from King George III, recognition by and relations with other nations were essential to operating an independent state, particularly one begun in rebellion. As the Declaration of Independence put it, the new nation wanted to take its place “among the powers of the earth.”¹²

A Lost World

In colonial and Indian towns along the Gulf Coast and in the interior, the surprising surrender of the British in 1783 seemed parallel to the French surrender at the end of the Seven Years’ War twenty years earlier. People expected that the borders of European empires might shift and that imperial officers might speak Spanish instead of English, but borders had changed in the past. However, the Revolution was not like the wars that had come before. Its importance for the Gulf region lay not in immediate changes but in the new empire it created—a land-based “empire of liberty,” in Thomas Jefferson’s words. With a population doubling every twenty-five years, the land base of the United States also needed to double every twenty-five years if it were to follow Jefferson’s ideal of independent and small family farms. Ultimately, the independence of the United States was built on refusing to share the continent with empires or with sovereign Indians.¹³

In winning the Revolutionary War and eventually revolutionizing power relations on the continent of North America, American rebels forwarded their own varieties of independence at the expense of others. The eventual transition to one sovereign state—the United States—over all others meant the loss of earlier kinds of interdependence. At the same time, as an empire of its own, the nation’s expanding plantations and farms robbed Indians of their lands and enslaved millions of men and women to grow the cotton that fed a new industrial economy. The longevity and power of an independent United States depended on the land and labor Americans took by force.

Beginning in the 1970s, historians challenged the standard litany of inevitabilities in early American history: British colonial success, the rise of an English-speaking American republic on the Atlantic coast, the expansion of that republic across the continent, and the entrenchment of a plantation economy in the South. Women, Native Americans, non-English Europeans, and Africans are becoming as prominent in our histories of early America as they were in its reality. At its best, this approach to history is multi-perspectival. That is, it not only includes people who were once left out of the history books but also acknowledges their full humanity, including their motivations, diversity, resourcefulness, successes, misjudgments, and mistakes.

More recently, a new narrative of colonial history has evolved from this approach, one that emphasizes cross-cultural encounters, variations and changes in slavery practices, and the changing power dynamics of the entire continent, not just the thirteen British colonies that eventually rebelled. The story of early America in textbooks and classrooms today usually presents a broad view of colonial America, but because scholarship on the Revolution in particular has been slower to move beyond the thirteen colonies, around 1770 the story sharply narrows its focus and disconnects the Revolution from previous history. This narrowing then sets up the early republic as the era when the United States expanded into regions whose past histories are oddly disjointed from their nineteenth-century fates. In reality, the shift from multiple empires and powerful Indian nations to one dominant United States is part of a centuries-long narrative of changing power relations.¹⁴

The Gulf Coast, far from the traditionally recognized centers of the Revolution, sheds new light on some of the major themes that would dominate the development of the young republic for the next century and still have relevance today. In this region, we see the burgeoning system of the Deep South’s plantation slavery. We observe the continued negotiation between colonial settlers and Indian tribes as well as settlers’ earliest and increasing efforts to remove these tribes wholesale from their native lands. And we witness the definition of U.S. citizenship hardening around the white male individual. These changes replaced the eighteenth-century world with its diversity of polities, shifting networks of interdependency, and more inclusive (and often more hierarchical) definitions of belonging.¹⁵

As the Spanish fleet approached Pensacola in 1781, people’s hopes and fears were the usual ones in an imperial war. James and Isabella Bruce feared that Catholic Spain would take their home. Amand Broussard looked forward to a chance to humiliate the British. Alexander McGillivray hoped for personal glory and Creek victory. They might have foreseen a new regime controlling West Florida, but what they could not have imagined was that an entire system of imperial and Native interdependence would be utterly overtaken by the rise of the United States.