The year was 1784. Don Vicente Manuel de Zespedes y Velasco, with 500 troops and several hundred governmental employees arrive at the administrative capitol of East Florida at St. Augustine. East Florida proved to be a depopulated Province following the British exodus.
With the newly formed United States of America to the north and the Spanish colonies to the south and west, the British felt their hold of Florida was untenable, at best.
A few hundred colonists returned to England; others took passage to Nova Scotia; thousands left to seek their fortunes in the Bahamas and other locations in the British Caribbean; and yet others trekked into the trackless and uninhabited American West. When I say “uninhabited”, I mean by Europeans. The Natives of the Plains were yet to be encountered.
Governor Zespedes and other representatives of the Spanish government toured the la Florida frontier areas in 1787.
One item of note is they didn’t dredge the mouth of the St. Johns River, not realizing what important advantages such an endeavour might have provided for Spanish shipping and trade.
Another item of note is the Black Seminoles were already ensconced in the area west of the River. This will have a bearing on conflicts arising out of future attemps at westward expansion.
During the First Spanish Colonial Period, the focus was on military posts and missions. During the Second Spanish Colonial Period, the Spanish Crown attempted an economically profitable colony frought with the conflict of Spanish retentiveness and American acquisitiveness.
It would not be long before the eruption of the First Seminole War, which was ignited by intruders on Seminole lands and the death of Chief Payne (for whom Payne’s Prairie is named) and 117 warriors. Colonel Daniel Newnan and river vally residents were the perpetrators of what would come to be considered a massacre.
Heading upriver, one passes New Switzerland, a plantation belonging to Francisco Fatio. Fatio was born in Switzerland; but had been making a life on the bank of the River since 1776 and had established three plantations in that 8-year period. New Switzerland, itself, had twelve miles of riverfront. Needless to say, he relied heavily on slave labor, as did a neighbor to the north, Zephaniah Kingsley.
Twelve miles further upriver was Picolata, the location of an old fort and a plantation belonging to Wm. Bartram’s old friend, Job Wiggins, the mulatto son of a free Black man. He had seventeen slaves working several hundred acres. Wiggins also operated a ferry for Natives and others traveling to St. Augustine.
A little further upriver, the business concern of Panton, Leslie, and Company expanded from simple trading posts of former years to include a packing house for hides and produce for England. They worked 50 – 60 African slaves who herded several hundred head of cattle and formed several timber crews for extracting tannin from bark for the leather industry.
Biographical information about Panton indicates he came from Aberdeenshire, Scotland and arrived before the American Revolution. He had been declared outlaw by the Georgian Provincial Congress in 1778; his property was confiscated; and he was forced to relocate his headquarters to St. Augustine, and subsequently to Pensacola.
He distributed guns to the Natives and “traded them at a vast profit: cloth and coarse linens, sugar, salt, and much strong whisky”. He also exported considerable lumber and became a millionaire. Zespedes went to see him.
Panton waived his temperate loyalty to England and received Zespedes with politeness. Their meeting was recorded by Hanna and Cabell.
The Spanish governor needed money for the maintenance of his military and civilian concerns. The businessman advanced the governor, in all, some $200,000 to finance the Spanish regained hold on Florida. Mind you, there was no treaty agreement prompting the Spanish return; only the void left by the British exodus.
The American colonial militias had defeated the British military force sent to coerce their cooperation under the King’s rule; but were not very interested in colonizing Florida because the swamps and giant alligators were a deterrent to widespread establishment of large farms and plantations on which the agrarian economy of the South depended. When Florida became a Territory, however, in 1821, they had developed the technology for draining swamps and filling in. With that, the need for slave labor increased exponentially thereafter.
Gov. Zespedes left Panton’s trading posts undisturbed; and expressed a desire for more River ports, especially at Wiggins’ Ferry. Zespedes even got Wiggins a government stipend to operate as a vendor.
In 1792, St. Augustine was attacked from the North by sea; and Col. Robert Daniel approached overland from Palatka and set fire to the Convent and the Church on October 22. There were “barbarities” committed and seven missionaries were murdered. The Convent library was burned and much of the records collection of Spanish Florida was destroyed.
This was just one of many incursions that lasted until 1821 and the proclamation of the Treaty of Versailles.
In 1811, Zephaniah Kingsley freed his Senegalese wife, Anna, and their three children. Anna moved across the River from her husband’s plantation, Laurel Grove, on Doctor’s Lake, to Mandarin; and established her own plantation with a thousand acres and twelve slaves of her own; which slaves also built her a 2-story home.
The next year, the Patriots Rebellion (The War of Jenkins Ear) reached Laurel Grove and Zephaniah Kingsley was captured and held hostage until he signed a paper in support of those from Georgia and Carolina who wanted to wrest control of Florida from the Spanish and take the freed Africans living on the First Coast back into slavery. Kingsley made a strategic retreat to Fernandina; bought Ft. George Island, and made a new home for his wife and family. That is the current location of historic Kingsley Plantation, operated by the National Park Service, Dept. of the Interior.
The September 12, 1812 edition of the Niles’ register described Kingsley’s house as being decorated with scalps.
From time to time Africans, Spaniards, Minorcans, and peoples of mixed race who were residents of the river valley had to seek refuge at the Castillo de San Marcos; and the Province became American Territory piece by piece due to the inadequacy of Spanish control; Native outrages; and the loss of escaping slaves.
Another major incident occurred when, in 1814, Andrew Jackson invaded West Florida at Pensacola after destroying the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Hanna and Cabell wrote that it was a “massacre”.
Andy Jackson became America’s idol after leaving Pensacola, allying with pirates, and routing the English at New Orleans on January 8, 1815; which, incidentally, was two weeks after the official end of the War of 1812.
Jackson and his frontier troops were back in Florida in 1818 when they “punished” the Seminoles for scalping forays into Georgia and Alabama. It seems they wanted the plantation lands on the Florida Panhandle.
The Spanish government took careful stock of their situation and realized their holdings in la Florida bordered on an unfriendly nation of more than nine million and with limitless potential. This purview of their situation led to negotiations to create the document known as the Treaty of Versailles. Spanish emmisaries and their American counterparts for President Monroe concluded said Treaty in 1819. The Treaty cancelled American claims against the Spanish government and forgave a $5 million debt owed by the Spanish.
The Treaty of Versailles was proclaimed by both nations in 1821 on Washington’s birthday.
This concludes the fifth article in a series. Yesterday, I published a supplement to the series entitled “LEGACY OF THE BLACK CHURCH: CARAVAN TRAIL TO UNDERGROUND RAILROAD”. Be sure to read that for your enjoyment and edification.
Next: The American Territorial Period on the First Coast: 6th in a Series.
Stay with Examiner. com as the series continues.