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Reviewed by:
  • Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810
  • Paul E. Hoffman
Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810. By Andrew McMichael (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2008) 226 pp. $55.95 cloth $22.95 paper

“Contextual history,” McMichael explains, permits the sources and actors to dictate the type of history written—be it political, legal, social, etc. The objective is to provide “a more integrated sense of the ways in which people of the time saw their world” (7). The result in this work is a series of topical chapters supporting a thesis similar to those of Woody Holton in Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999) and Leslie Hall in Land and Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia (Athens, 2001). That is, the former British, French, and especially newly immigrated Americans in West Florida were loyal to the Spanish regime because it offered ready access to land and a stable political and social environment for slave holders. When those conditions changed after 1803, so, in time, did the loyalty of the American residents of the Felicianas, the district between Baton Rouge and Mississippi’s southern border. Whether the picture that emerges is “a more integrated sense of the ways in which people of the time saw their world” is doubtful.

The work opens with a two-chapter, mostly economic history of Spanish West Florida before 1803. Based in large part on the Pintado Papers at the Library of Congress, sales documents in the so-called West Florida records held at Baton Rouge, and relevant secondary sources, these chapters deal primarily with land grants and sales (contrasting West Florida with Kentucky) and slavery (the means, along with land, to wealth). The rest of the work takes up the story in 1803.

McMichael finds that neither the United States’ assertion that West Florida was part of the Louisiana Purchase, nor the Kemper raids of 1804 and other filibustering, nor the operation of Spanish slave law—which Americans must have found strange, if not unsettling, because it afforded slaves legal rights unknown in English America—seriously disturbed this loyalty. Loyalty began to erode with the Spanish decision in late 1804 almost to stop granting land to new immigrants, and with the inability of the government to stop a crime wave that arose because criminals could enter the province from Mississippi and Louisiana or escape to those places. Moreover, land prices in the Felicianas fell even as they rose in other parts of the province.

Loyalty took a fatal blow in the multisided political crisis that began with the U.S. Embargo Act of 1807, deepened when Napoleon seized Spain in 1808, and reached acute proportions when Carlos de Grand Pré, a beloved local governor, was removed from office on the suspicion of being too friendly with a French envoy. Carlos Dehault de Lassus, his replacement, was, by all accounts, a corrupt, obtuse official who irritated residents. The West Florida Republic that lasted from September to December 1810 was the result.

The strengths of this work are a quantitative study of the chief complaints [End Page 599] of the residents at their initial assembly in July 1810; the section on crime and another on the difficulty that “men of character” had in obtaining land (128); a sophisticated, sympathetic presentation of how the Spanish legal and governmental systems worked; and a correction of the errors of earlier studies of the revolt. Yet the quantitative work has problems. Readers may wonder whether the sixteen major crimes reported between 1805 and 1810—nine of which were committed by persons from outside of the province who had crossed into it or by persons who fled across “the line” into U.S. territory to escape prosecution (Tables 12 and 13, 132–133)—were as significant a cause of unrest as McMichael suggests.

Furthermore, his discussion of the land issue (142–148) does not explore why Feliciana sales were so numerous from 1803 to 1804 and from 1806 to 1810 (207 n. 74), when prices were falling in that district; nor does it discover who authorized the change in Spanish land policy after 1804 that McMichael...

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