I always begin a book with questions that I must answer before my characters can come to life—questions about terminology, cultural and racial influences, literature and music, political power struggles, behind-the-scenes movers and shakers. But then a weird thing happens. As I immerse myself in the period and get comfortable with my imaginary people, I sort of forget how shocking some of those historically accurate words and ideas can seem to contemporary readers.
Which is where my editor comes in. It is one of her jobs to help identify places in the story where the reader may have difficulty swallowing some arcane or politically incorrect phrase, or where the context isn’t quite obvious enough to explain it. Then it’s a delicate dance, deciding how much is too much—which explanations can most effectively be woven into the story, which should be relegated to this type of afterword. After all, the goal of storytelling in a historical setting is to sweep the reader into an unfamiliar era, surround her with people of long-forgotten customs and language and dress, and make her forget for a time that life is zooming by at warp speed.
If you’ve hung with me this far, I assume you’re the kind of reader who wants to know a little more. You wonder which characters are the “real” ones, and which are strictly from the author’s imagination. You’re curious about background forces that led people to think a certain way or make decisions that seem bizarre in twenty-first-century hindsight. Or maybe you want to know where I got my information so you can do some further reading. Just for you, I’m pulling back the curtain a bit!
First of all, I should note that, during the period of The Creole Princess, the American Gulf Coast—which, for my purposes, includes everything from present-day Florida to the eastern coast of Texas—developed under a confusing succession of European monarchies. Every American schoolchild knows that the thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard rebelled and formed the United States of America. But few are aware that two other British colonies remained loyal to the Crown—East Florida and West Florida (which came into England’s possession in the 1763 Treaty of Paris at the end of the French and Indian War). Loyalist refugees from the rebelling colonies flocked to the largest settlements of the time, Pensacola and Mobile. Some also settled along the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, near Natchez, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Meanwhile, Spain had taken control of the Louisiana colony lying west of the Mississippi River (along with Texas, Mexico, and most of Central and South America), with New Orleans as its seat of administration—and France had pretty much given up its stake in the American continent (for the time being, anyway).
Like players in a giant Monopoly game, the nations who held various pieces of American property rolled the metaphorical dice with regard to alliances, trades, and declarations of war, timing their moves for maximum economic advantage, and withholding and releasing information (both true and misleading) with an eye to manipulating friends and enemies alike. The history surrounding the American Revolution is complex, fascinating, and surprising—much too complicated to distill into a one-paragraph explanation. The best I can do is roughly set the geographical stage, as outlined above, and let the story speak for itself.
Regarding characters, there were a few fascinating heroes and villains of American Revolutionary history that I couldn’t resist plugging into my story. Front and center looms Brigadier-General Don Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of the province of Louisiana and commander of Spanish forces out of New Orleans which captured the British forts at Natchez, Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola. Gálvez was an extraordinarily effective politician, military strategist, and administrator who was universally respected and admired by his own superiors in the Spanish chain of command, as well as those who reported to him, and who effectively negotiated the delicate relationship between the Spanish court at Madrid and the American Continental Congress. A short biography of Gálvez can be found on Wikipedia, but most of my information about his extraordinary life came from Thomas E. Chávez’s excellent Spain and the Independence of the United States (University of New Mexico Press, 2002).
Gálvez’s wife, María Feliciana de St. Maxent d’Estrehan, makes an appearance in my story, as does Oliver Pollock, the Irish-American merchant who served as liaison and supply agent between the Spanish government and Philadelphia. Pollock, whose significant personal fortune financed weapons, ammunition, and uniforms sent to the American militia, is a little-known hero of the Revolution. He eventually retired in poverty to his daughter’s Mississippi plantation, after unsuccessfully applying to the Congress for redress of his debts. The two governors of New Orleans previous to Gálvez, O’Reilly and Unzaga, are mentioned in the story, as are Spanish minister of state Floridablanca (stationed in Madrid) and Captain-General Navarro, governor of Cuba.
On the British side, the real governor of West Florida, Peter Chester, is mentioned in my story, and Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Elias Durnford plays an important role in the first and last few chapters during the siege of Fort Charlotte. Durnford was apparently a man of many talents—he was the civil engineer who redesigned the city of Pensacola after the Spanish decamped in 1763 (at the same time the French ceded Mobile)—and that he was given command of Fort Charlotte during the Spanish attack is a testament to his administrative and political skills (ignoring the fact that the fort turned out to be unprepared to sustain the determined onslaught of Gálvez’s marines).
Beyond those few, all characters are strictly from my imagination.
One might well ask, Why have I never heard of these people? Early American history is full of the exploits of French allies like Rochambeau and Lafayette, but the contribution of Spain to the success of the American War of Independence is only recently coming to light—probably because it was of a necessarily clandestine nature. Spain’s aid to the Patriot cause remained under wraps until late in the war, in order to give her time to outfit her navy with sufficient strength to engage and overcome the significantly stronger British fleet. But catalogs and records available in Spain and the National Archives in Washington (as well as other sources cited by Chávez) reveal that Spain’s financial contribution to the American cause mounted into the thousands, probably millions, of pesos fuertes before her official declaration of war against Britain, and contributed significantly to the American victory at Saratoga. Perhaps most important, the fact that Spanish forces effectively split the British navy between two theaters of war became a deciding factor in the American success at Yorktown.
So much for the political and military aspects of the setting; the next most obvious questions surround the lumbering elephant in the room—slavery. It is probably true that the twenty-first-century American will have difficulty wrapping her brain around eighteenth-century attitudes (those of slaves, slaveholders, and free objectors to the practice) about this most deplorable of human interactions. It might be helpful to remember, however, that by the time of the American Revolution, slavery had been in practice since prehistoric times, not just in the American colonies but all over the world. Still, as I developed this book, I was highly conscious that modern readers have become justifiably sensitized and guilt-stricken that America, the cradle of freedom, somehow managed to deny that beautiful right to some of her own citizens—for nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence.
And then it occurred to me that the eventual abolition of slavery, and the convulsions of the Civil Rights Era, must have actually germinated right along with the struggle for freedom from British tyranny—that those two major revolutions developed, not in spite of Americans of European origin, but because of their passionate investment in man’s God-given right to self-actualization. They were indeed a continuation of the Revolution, requiring a great deal more time to effect because those practices and attitudes had been entrenched for thousands of years. It is rather more miraculous than not that slavery in America was abolished as quickly as it was.
In any case, I chose to take my heroine, Lyse Lanier, straight through the middle of that quagmire of guilt, frustration, bitterness, and victory. I gave her a family tree rich with complex cultural roots and branches—French, Indian, African, aristocratic, slave, and free—much like many modern-day Gulf Coast natives. I matched her with a man of adventurous, generous, humorous spirit—and then let the story pieces fall where they would. I prefer not to prompt the reader to interpret the story in any particular way, but I hope you will find human truth in the characters. And while I tried not to go overboard in insensitivity, I hope some eighteenth-century terminology that may seem a bit politically incorrect to our modern ears can be accepted as historically accurate. Anyone interested in further study on the subject of slavery in the Deep South should check out a fascinating true story called The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey (Grove Press, 2005).
A more specific question I wanted to address here is in reference to the non-marriage between Lyse’s cousin Scarlet and her “mate,” Cain. In brief, it wouldn’t even occur to Scarlet (let alone her owners) to want a marriage ceremony. Slaves were property and could not take part in any legal contract, even marriage (“jumping the broom,” which one sometimes reads about as a substitute for formal marriage ceremonies, seems to have started in Scotland and Wales and became somewhat of a custom in the mid-nineteenth century). It appears that when the great noise of abolition controversy spread in the 1800s (several decades after my story), southern slave owners slyly began to encourage marriage between slaves, in order to counter the abolitionist argument that slavery was destroying human family units—which it was—and also to discourage slaves from running away and thus abandoning their families. It was despicable, of course, that human beings were treated so cavalierly, but it shouldn’t be surprising for the time period.
Let me address one more item, and I’ll wrap up this treatise. My leaping-off point for The Creole Princess was “How did a person become an American Patriot?” Or, as my editor asked it, “What was an American? Did they call themselves that at the time?” In a word, yes. The continents of North and South America had been called America since 1507, when the first world map that included the New World appeared in Europe. Thomas Paine’s first collection of Common Sense essays, published in April 1776, is titled Writings of Thomas Paine—Volume I (1774–1779): The American Crisis (I highly recommend reading this collection—it’s in public domain and thus free!).
And remember, the purpose of the Declaration of Independence was to establish the new republican government, The United States of America. So . . . an American colonist was a British citizen who lived in one of the fifteen British colonies in North America. Citizens of the thirteen rebellious colonies called themselves Americans or Patriots or Continentals, depending on context.
So, am I a complete and unashamed history nerd? You bet! And even more so after reading some of the writings that actually jump-started the Revolution. Before I go, I’ll recommend one more excellent resource for my fellow nerds: American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History by Charles Murray (AEI Press, 2013).
I certainly hope you have enjoyed The Creole Princess, and if you haven’t read its prequel, The Pelican Bride, by all means do so! And look forward to more adventures of the Lanier family next year with the release of The Duchess of Navy Cove.
May you live long and prosper,
Beth White
Mobile, Alabama
August 2014