Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era

by Mike Bunn

The British colony of West Florida--which once stretched from the mighty Mississippi to the shallow bends of the Apalachicola and portions of what are now the states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana--is the forgotten fourteenth colony of America's Revolutionary era. The colony's eventful years as a part of the British Empire form an important and compelling interlude in Gulf Coast history that has for too long been overlooked. For a host of reasons, including the fact that West Florida did not rebel against the British Government, the colony has long been dismissed as a loyal but inconsequential fringe outpost, if considered at all. But the colony's history showcases a tumultuous political scene featuring a halting attempt at instituting representative government; a host of bold and colorful characters; a compelling saga of struggle and perseverance in the pursuit of financial stability; and a dramatic series of battles on land and water which brought about the end of its days under the Union Jack. In Fourteenth Colony, historian Mike Bunn offers the first comprehensive history of the colony, introducing readers to the Gulf Coast's remarkable British period and putting West Florida back in its rightful place on the map of Colonial America.

Genres: History, American History, Audiobook, American Revolution, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

Published November 3, 2020

Reviews

[Jeff Takacs · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Don Siegrist · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging book about the Southern Gulf Coast's short time as a British colony under the name West Florida. A misnomer to modern ears, as the colony of West Florida stretched from Tallahassee almost to New Orleans. Its short existence coincidentally overlapped with the American Revolution. The author provides interesting insight as to why it's inhabitants refused to join the thirteen colonies on the Eastern Seaboard in their rebellion against Great Britain. West Florida was a sparcely populated region considered to be on the fringe of the civilizated world. The author, a local historian by the name of Mike Bunn, spins an entertaining story but one that probably only appeals to history fans.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1762 there were a couple dozen French farm families living on the lower stretches of the western shore of Mobile Bay. The nearby town of Mobile, founded some fifty years earlier, was an important center for trade and diplomacy with indigenous tribes from the area. Its 350 residents made it one of the larger settlements in what was then the French colony of Louisiana.

A few of those farmers probably counted themselves among the first generation of settlers to the area. It's not hard to imagine their regaling the younger generations with adventurous tales of their immigration to the swampy shores of the Gulf, and of their offspring as feeling certain their own futures were likely to be far less interesting.

Yet, had you been born in 1744 on the shores of Mobile Bay, there's a chance that by your 65th birthday you would have been a subject of the French, English, and Spanish kings, and a citizen of the young American republic, all while having never left those same fields your parents and grandparents carved out of the coastal forests a generation earlier.

Conceivably, your father-in-law could have been a trader in nearby Pensacola, the western-most settlement of the Spanish colony of Florida. Had he left on your 18th birthday and returned 20 years later, having heard nothing while he was away, he wouldn't have found anything amiss. The Pensacola he left behind in 1762 was a Spanish city. The Pensacola he returned to in 1782 was a Spanish city. Mention to him that it had been the capital of British West Florida in the interim and he'd have thought you had too much rum.

The fascinating history that made such fates possible is the same one that Mike Bunn tells with exceptional skill and admirable clarity in Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era. Despite its brief existence (1763-1781), West Florida's is a story of imperial overreach, of colonial folly, and of the gentlemanly warfare between Spain and Great Britain that ultimately aided in the American revolutionary cause. Or as Bunn puts it, it’s a story of "drama, action, and consequence."

The first half of the well-organized book traces the origins of the colony, documents the peaceful handovers of Pensacola and Mobile to British forces, and sketches the outlines of an undeveloped economy struggling, in the face of poor governance, to find a viable cash crop that would attract new settlers to the region.

Following the Treaty of Paris (1763), which formally ended the Seven Years War (and the French and Indian War), the victorious British were the recipients of all of Spanish Florida and the portions of French Louisiana east of the Mississippi River. The Spanish retained control of New Orleans and those parts of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, both of which they had received from the French a short time earlier.

The Spanish and French transfer of territory to Great Britain was one of the largest ever recorded and the British moved quickly to organize their real estate gains into two colonies: East Florida, which would be governed from St. Augustine, and West Florida, which would be governed from Pensacola.

The Spaniards, in Bunn's accounting, were organized and savvy colonialists, pros compared to the relatively upstart British. On the eve of the 1763 handover of Pensacola, for instance, they sent eight ships to evacuate the entirety of that city's 400 residents, slaves and Christianized Indians included. It was either that or give the incoming British a head start on settling the strategically important port city.

The French, for their part, did their best to complicate the handover of Mobile in a different way. It took a while for the British commander to arrive from Pensacola--his ship was ignominiously grounded on a sand bar a mile from the shores of Mobile--but when he did he found that the French had invited a large number of Indians to town for a feast and diplomatic gift exchange.

Bunn portrays the incident as something of a coincidence, probably due to the lack of any concrete historical evidence that it was anything but. My own intuition suggests otherwise. The French almost certainly would have known the small British outfit would be ill-prepared to meet the expectations of their new neighbors, tribes whose goodwill would be critical to the new British settlement's existence.

Unlike the Spanish, the French only evacuated their soldiers and colonial officials. Merchants, back woods traders, and those French farmers mentioned above would have to stay or pay their own fare to someplace else. The British, meanwhile, were in no position to send those several hundred French subjects into exile. Even despite their Roman Catholic faith, their economic contributions to the nascent colony were too important.

The solution was simple enough. Anyone who wanted to stay could. The French could even continue to practice their faith providing that within three months' time they would swear loyalty to the English crown. Thus our Frenchman, born in 1744, would now be a 19 year old British subject.

West Florida's government was spelled out in the colony's royal charter. It featured a tripartite system somewhat familiar to us today: an executive (the royally appointed governor) and two legislative bodies (upper and lower). Despite the charter's detail, state building in the new colony was anything but smooth. The new government was ruled by a series of petty incompetents who rarely convened the popularly elected assembly. And when they did that body proved rarely able to overcome its own internal squabbling for the good of the colony.

Bunn lays the blame primarily on the poor interpersonal skills of the governors. The one governor that did show political promise--he who joined the Royal Navy at 10!--inexplicably hanged himself shortly after arriving in the colony. To make matters worse, the charter was open to varying interpretations, a problem in a place where there does not appear to have been much of an independent or respected judiciary.

Bunn doesn’t delve into the role that ethnic coalitions or politics might have played, or how they might have contributed to the dysfunction of the elected assembly. Could it have been the different expectations, not to mention languages, that the French populace in Mobile would have brought to the nascent legislative body that were partially a cause of the crippling factionalism?

Whatever the reasons, British West Florida was plagued by self-dealing politicians who proved unable to stand up credible governing institutions, a fact that would shape the colony's response to the revolutionary fervor of the late 1770s. The colony was so dependent on direct aid from London that to do anything but remain loyal would have probably led to disaster for West Florida.

Making things more difficult was the problem of transportation. A waterborne voyage from Pensacola in the easternmost part of West Florida to Natchez in its most western reaches took three to four weeks. Combine that with the fact that mail could take four months or more to arrive from London and you can see the difficulty of trying to govern, even if there were never more than 6000 scattered European inhabitants in total.

That sparse population made trade relations with the Creek and Choctaw crucial, and Bunn's chapter on the Indian trade is fascinating. W.J. Cash, in his classic book The Mind of the South, first introduced me to the importance of deer skins in the colonial South. Bunn goes further yet, showing how that trade generated new Indian consumption demands and moved Indian life, especially for women, away from more traditional tasks and handicrafts.

Bunn's portrayal of Indian-Settler relationships is pragmatic and well-informed. His Indians exist in coherent social groups with aims and goals that are reasonable and familiar to us today. There is little to no exoticism, nor any of the 'white man bad, red man good' ideological ax-grinding that can sometimes find its way into the work of more purely academic historians. Bunn’s history is the better for it.

While the Indian trade was important, it wasn't well regulated and was hard to tax. This fact made it all the more important for the nascent colony to develop some kind of a cash crop for export. Doing so would have aided in self-sufficiency and helped to attract desperately-needed immigrants. Unfortunately for the British, none of the possibilities--tobacco, indigo, rice, viticulture, even silkworms--proved viable.

The second half of Bunn's book centers the reader's gaze on the American War for Independence and how it played out along the Mississippi River, in Mobile, and in Pensacola. Bunn writes with alacrity about the three major incidents: Willing's Raid, the Battle of Mobile, and the Siege of Pensacola.

James Willing was the son of the mayor of Philadelphia. He was also something of a failed businessmen, if not an outright scoundrel. In 1777 he convinced the Second Continental Congress to make him an officer of the new American republic and to appropriate funds for 50 men to travel from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and then Mississippi Rivers to raise the American flag over Natchez, the largest settlement in loyalist West Florida.

Having spent several years in Natchez doing business, Willing claimed he was the right man for the job. In hindsight his motivations appear much more complicated. Once his ragtag band of poorly organized men arrived in Natchez they raised the American flag and then went on a terror spree burning and plundering nearby plantations, many of which were owned by none other than Willing's creditors.

Willing's raid proved to be little more than a spectacle, and a tawdry one at that, but it did alert the British to the poor state of West Florida's defenses. Even that, however, would matter little in the end. The Spanish, led by the competent, dashing Bernardo de Galvez, Governor of New Orleans, were ready to take advantage of the weak British position in the Gulf region.

Their efforts would begin with a march up the Mississippi River where they won a brief battle at Baton Rouge. The negotiated terms of surrender after that battle included a stipulation that Natchez was to be handed over at the same time. The settlers in Natchez, still reeling from the effect of Willing's terrorism, were to say the least nonplussed.

With the western reaches of British West Florida in Spanish hands, Galvez turned to Mobile, a city that took just one day to fall to the Spanish, thanks to overpowering Spanish artillery. Perhaps the most interesting part of that battle was what Bunn refers to as a "bizarre interlude" in which the two commanders exchanged gifts and politely worded letters. Once all was said and done in Mobile in 1781, our Frenchman turned British subject, then 37 years old, would have likely sworn his allegiance to the Spanish crown.

The final battle of the war between Spain and Britain in what is today America's deep south was fought at Pensacola. Whereas the earlier battles on the Mississippi River and in and around Mobile Bay had resulted in just a score of casualties on both sides, the battle in Pensacola, the longest siege of the Revolutionary War period, would prove significantly more deadly. Almost 200 soldiers lost their lives before the Spanish took the city.

The victorious Spanish ruled the colony for most of the next three decades, only relinquishing it to the American government when it became clear their own hold was as tenuous as that of the British in 1780. Our French farmer, a British subject in the prime years of his adulthood, a Spanish subject during his middle ages, would have thus retired an American citizen, regaling his own grandchildren with the stories of his varying allegiances across the years.

(And for what it's worth, his own children or grandchildren, in 1865, may have been required to pledge their own allegiance to the USA if they wanted to be able to sell their cotton out of a Mobile Bay controlled by Union forces in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War…but that's another story!)

Bunn's book is marketed as part and parcel of the Revolutionary War. Its title alone connects the book to the 13 Atlantic colonies. But as Bunn notes, 'Fourteenth Colony' doesn't speak to its uniqueness, or order of establishment (several British colonies in North America might claim the same sobriquet), but instead serves as "a pointed address of a general perception that [West Florida] is somehow extraneous in our memory of America's founding epoch."

While this might be true, the book as a whole is about much more than just West Florida's place in the larger history of the American Revolution. It's the story of a rising imperial power, Great Britain, taking on more responsibility than it was able to handle. It's the story of a colony with weak governing institutions and flawed men trying to do a lot in extremely challenging conditions. And it's the story of another empire, Spain, enjoying the last fruits of the season, its own empire on the precipice of terminal decline.

While it's two halves are appreciably well balanced, Fourteenth Colony may have benefited from an expanded introductory section. As it is, there are but several paragraphs in the preface that sketch the broad contours of the story one is about to read. Many readers, like me, will be coming to the book with little knowledge of the subject.

Something else I might note: quite often while reading Bunn's book, I found myself wanting comparative analysis. That's not Bunn's self-set mission and I don't hold him at fault for not including more. But I found myself asking questions about how British soldiers and politicians understood the remoteness of the Gulf geography versus say that of Bengal or the more remote stretches of the Indian subcontinent, areas they were also hard at work colonizing at the time.

I also wondered about the West Florida royal charter and how it compared to the charters that governed the North American colonies that had been established a century or more earlier. What things had the crown and parliament learned during that time? Was there any hint of defensiveness in the charter given some of the political restiveness in the Atlantic colonies? Or was it more liberal, reflecting some of the Enlightenment thought of its time? What can it tell us about contemporary English attitudes towards government and colonial administration?

As for the physical book itself, NewSouth Books has done a decent job. The sangria cloth cover is sumptuous, the dust jacket is graced with two beautifully antique maps, and the pages inside are soft and thick. My only complaint, and its not a small one, is the eccentric typeface, which most notably features t's and p's that are connected to the preceding letter with a small squiggle in words such as 'faction', 'western', and 'spent', among others. Even when I came to realize it wasn’t a printing error, I had to still spend some time trying to studiously ignore the unsatisfying quirk.

Finally, let me just say this: even had I not thoroughly enjoyed Bunn's history in Fourteenth Colony, I would have noted how much I appreciate the fact that it's not a book written by a career academic looking for tenure, but by a public historian with an obvious passion for local history. There's so much little-known and often overlooked history, even in a place like the South where the past is never dead. Without men like Bunn, that past would remain obscure and inaccessible.

None of which is to say, of course, that Bunn's book is anything but a font of solid research and constructive citations. In short, my fellow armchair historians and local history buffs owe Mike Bunn a profound debt of gratitude. Fourteenth Colony is local, public history at its finest. ©Jeffrey L. Otto, June 21, 2021

[Charles Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a compulsory read for me since it deals with the history of the Gulf Coast where I live. In that sense the book surprised me when I got so engrossed in it that I didn't want to put it down. That hardly ever happens. It informed me of local history that I did not know, and the information builds to a crescendo in the final chapters. Bravo Mike Bunn!

[Scott Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 stars) (Audiobook) This work looks at the backstory of the British colony in Western Florida. While most would know of the 13th colonies and their association with the British Empire, the Florida colony, since it was not as tied in with the Revolution and did not send any delegates to the Continental Congress, tends to get overlooked in overall American history. Yet, Florida had its role to play in American history. The British colonists had plenty to be contending with in the 18th century, which is where most of this account focuses. The colonists had to deal with the Spanish, who had their own claims to Florida, as well as the Seminole and other tribes that settled that part of the North American continent.

The work is primarily chronological, following the fortunes of the colony, internal and external politics. The colonists themselves had trouble governing themselves and making policies. The international aspect was also complex, as the warring factions saw Florida more as a strategic buffer/status of political claim, vs. any high resource area. The French-Indian War and the Revolutionary War had impacts on the area as far as conflict between Spain and England, with the tribes also factoring in. Slavery is a factor in the region, but not the major flashpoint that it would be in other parts of the future US. Eventually, Florida would come under US control in 1819, but the work does not focus on that part of history, more on life in the 18th century.

A decent read. The rating would be about the same regardless of format. Does fill in some gaps in American history for those that don’t live in Western Florida.

[Chuck Barber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between the American Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase, which are familiar to all school children (one hopes), there is a sliver of what is now the Southeast that was excluded from both…or included in both, depending on whom you ask. British West Florida, encompassing what is now SE Louisiana, east of the Mississippi and north of New Orleans, southern Mississippi and Alabama, and the Florida panhandle, was Britain’s other American colony, and its history is distinct from the other colonies and the other side of the River.

Living in Baton Rouge, I knew there was a Revolutionary War battle fought here, just a few blocks from my office (spoiler alert: it was really a battle between Spain and Britain). This book fills in many details around what happened and why, and sets the stage for the Lone Star Rebellion that led to my city becoming part of the State of Louisiana and the United States.

This book is a history of West Florida, from its ceding to Britain from Spain after the Seven Years (French and Indian) War to its recapture by Spain in the American Revolution. The first half of the book focuses on the development of the colony, its settlement, economic development, etc. That takes a bit of effort to get through. The Revolutionary period is much more interesting, as one would expect. All told, this book did a nice job of filling in a gap in my knowledge related to the Gulf Coast area.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book connects all the dots.

I had many questions regarding British West Florida. The colony stood in the shadows during the Revolutionary War. From 1779 to 1821 - the map of Florida changed quite a bit. If you want to know how and why - read this book - because Mike Bunn is very thorough on many unanswered questions. The big one for me was the fort at Bayou Manchac. I couldn't find much information on this particular fort - until I read this book.

As I stated earlier - this book connects all the dots. I recommend it.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book strikes a balance between academic depth and reader-friendly narrative, providing a comprehensive history of West Florida. It not only enhances my understanding of the American Revolutionary War but also unveils intriguing aspects of Florida’s history that were previously unknown to me. I wholeheartedly recommend it for those seeking a thorough yet accessible exploration of this fascinating historical period.

[Ellen Morris Prewitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I went through this entire book not clearly understanding where the boundaries of West Florida was, but that is probably more my geographical ignorance than the author's fault. Yet, I enjoyed it. And it's helpful, as all these histories are, to understanding the origins of the places where I live.

[Caleb C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting book about an untaught and obscure history. I had never heard of West Florida being considered a colony. I thought it was just unexplored territory at the time. I did not even know the Spanish assisted the US somewhat unofficially during the Revolutionary War. I would recommend for those who are interested in this time period and obscure American history.

[Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good scholarship but dull reading.

[Ben Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff!

We’ll researched and concise, oftentimes with humor, this book definitely delivers what was promised, an engaging and informative account about this hole in American history.