Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coastal encounters: the transformation of the Gulf South in the eighteenth century / edited and with an introduction by Richmond F. Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-6267-6 (pbk: alk. paper) 1. Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History—18th century. 2. Gulf States—History— 18th century. 3. Gulf Coast (U.S.)— Economic conditions—18th century. 4. Gulf Coast (U.S.)—Social conditions—18th century. 5. Gulf Coast (U.S.)—Ethnic relations—History —18th century. 6. Social change— Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History—18th century. 7. Intercultural communication— Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History —18th century. 8. Indians of North America— Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History—18th century. 9. African Americans— Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History —18th century. 10. European Americans— Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History —18th century. I. Brown, Richmond F. (Richmond Forrest), 1961– f372.c62 2007 976—dc22 2007020211 Set in Minion by Kim Essman. Designed by R. W. Boeche. Title page illustration: Felix Achille de Beaupoil Saint-Aulaire and P. Langlume, Vue d’une Rue du Faubourg Marigny, Nelle Orleans, ca. 1821. Lithograph with watercolor. Reproduced by permission of the Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 1937.2.2.

9edj[dji List of Illustrations Preface ix

vii



1. Introduction 1 G>8=BDC9; 7GDLC



2. The Significance of the Gulf South in Early American History 13 96C>:A= JHC:G?G



3. Escape of the Nickaleers European-Indian Relations on the Wild Coast of Florida in 1696, from Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal 31 6BNIJGC:G7JH=C:AA



4. Supplying Our Wants Choctaws and Chickasaws Reassess the Trade Relationship with Britain, 1771–72 H



6. A Nation Divided? Blood Seminoles and Black Seminoles on the Florida Frontier 99 ?6C:< A6C9:GH



7. My Friend Nicolas Mongoula Africans, Indians, and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Mobile 117 96K>9L=:6I

59



8. Scoundrels, Whores, and Gentlemen Defamation and Society in French Colonial Louisiana 132 H=6CCDCA::96L9N



9. Afro-Creole Women, Freedom, and Property-Holding in Early New Orleans 151 K>GC>6B:68=6B:7JGIDC



11. A History of Ranching in Nuevo Santander’s Villas del Norte, 1730s–1848 187 6GB6C9D8 6ADCOD



12. Maintaining Loyalty in the West Florida Borderlands Land as Cause and Effect in the West Florida Revolution of 1810 210 6C9G:LB8B>8=6:A



13. Afterword 231 >966AIB6C Notes 241 Bibliography 281 Contributors 303 Index 307

?bbkijhWj_edi Maps 1. European settlements, 1564–1721 3 2. European settlements, 1721–1821 9 3. Atlantic Florida, ca. 1696 33 4. Seminole Florida, late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries 101 5. Nuevo Santander’s Villas del Norte 189 6. Spanish West Florida, ca. 1803 211 Tables 1. The colonial population of New Orleans 156 2. Property owners from the 1795 New Orleans census 160 3. Landlords by race and gender, 1795 161 4. Slave ownership in New Orleans, 1795 163 5. Average value of inventoried property, 1810–60 165 6. Planters producing tobacco in Natchitoches and pounds produced, 1765–91 169 7. Tobacco produced per planter in Natchitoches, 1765–91 170 8. Slaveholding households in Natchitoches, 1765–95 177 9. Successions and inventories in Natchitoches, 1766–1803 179 10. Black slave population in Natchitoches, 1765–1803 181 11. Slave baptisms in Natchitoches, 1766–1803 182 12. Slaves living together in Natchitoches households, 1765–95 183 13. Races of godparents of slaves, 1766–84 184 14. Races of godparents of slaves, 1785–1803 185 15. Denuncios de Tierras in Camargo, 1800–1810 198 16. Denuncios and land grants in Reynosa, 1777–1836 199 17. Livestock herds of Reynosa and Matamoros vecinos, 1798–1812 201 Figures 1. Average price of land in West Florida, 1785–1810 224 2. Average price of land in West Florida, by region, 1785–1810

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On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, giving rise to the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States and bringing unprecedented — if unwanted — attention to the Gulf Coast region. A little more than three months later, on December 11, 2005, the New York Times fretted that the slow pace of the recovery efforts threatened the very existence of New Orleans and expressed alarm at the prospects of the “Death of an American City.” The anguish derived not only from a humane concern for those whose lives were so brutally disrupted by the storm and its aftermath (a group that includes many of the authors whose work appears in this book) but also from a recognition of the unique contributions that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have made to the history and culture of the United States (and to the world for that matter). This book explores the origins of this great city and its surrounding region. The chapters herein open a window onto the extraordinary world of the eighteenth-century Gulf South, a significant but heretofore relatively neglected subject. The neglect is unfortunate for many reasons. In the realm of international politics, the imperial rivalries of the Spanish, British, and French in the Gulf South (stretching from Florida to Texas) reached their peak in the eighteenth century, creating new challenges and opportunities for the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and other native peoples of the region. Throughout the century the Gulf South’s diverse inhabitants (Native American, European, and African) contested or collaborated with one another in myriad diplomatic and military arrangements.

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Preface

The eighteenth century saw determined efforts to incorporate the area into the expanding Atlantic economy based on the exchange of European manufactures, African peoples, and Caribbean products for animal hides, tobacco, and other Gulf South commodities, all with varying degrees of state support or, in some instances, in defiance of official dictates. The century also saw the expansion of chattel slavery, first indigenous and then African, and the beginning of plantation agriculture in a region that would come to be profoundly identified with them. This book accordingly sheds light on the origins of the Old South. Finally, the eighteenth-century Gulf South offers rich opportunities for the study of social and cultural change. Willingly or not, many of the Gulf South’s inhabitants learned to live together and came to depend on one another, forging new arrangements and defying laws, expectations, and stereotypes. The limited attention directed to the region has therefore deprived scholars of opportunities to study the encounter of European, African, and Native American peoples and the mixing and mingling of their ways and to make useful comparisons with the Atlantic Seaboard, with the American Southwest, and with Latin America and the Caribbean. At the inaugural Howard Mahan Symposium, held at Mobile, Alabama, March 2003, Amy Turner Bushnell compared writings on the colonial Southeast to the tale of Sleeping Beauty, a woman who awoke only when kissed by a European man. When Spanish, French, British, or American adventurers—Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Andrew Jackson—happened by, the region would come to life, or at least stray briefly into the view of European and North American authors, once more returning to slumber when the white men moved on or met their fates. This book addresses the intriguing question, “what happened while Sleeping Beauty was sleeping?” As the following essays make clear, the Gulf South region remained constantly astir even when out of sight and out of the European mind. Buffeted by “storms brewed in other men’s worlds” (to borrow the title of Elizabeth A. H. John’s work), the eighteenth-century Gulf South experienced a profound transformation. It

Preface

xi

was the kind of place David Weber had in mind when he wrote in his Spanish Frontier in North America, “at those edges where cultures come into contact, friction and cross-fertilization transform local peoples and institutions, giving rise to transfrontier regions with distinctive cultures, politics and economic arrangements, and social networks that set them apart from their respective metropoli” (p. 13). The essays presented here deepen our understanding of the Gulf South transfrontier and its transformation in the eighteenth century. Collectively, they treat from a wide array of angles and approaches a complex region and its diverse inhabitants over more than a century. The great majority of the essays are revised versions of papers first presented at the 2003 Howard F. Mahan Symposium, hosted by the University of South Alabama’s Department of History and generously funded by the University of South Alabama Foundation. The symposium featured a stimulating mix of junior and senior scholars and was enriched by the participation of several authorities on European colonialism in North America, including Philip Boucher, Robin Fabel, and Jack P. Greene, as well as the noted archeologist Greg Waselkov. In addition to those whose work appears in this volume, the conference included insightful presentations by Ariana Hannum Moore and Kevin D. Roberts. The symposium was meant to enliven the scholarly conversation on the colonial Gulf South, to assess the state of the field, and to explore new avenues for future scholarship. This volume now looks to expand the conversation to include a broader audience of scholars, students, and the interested public, and it invites others to add their own thoughts and voices to the discussion. It is dedicated to the memory of William Coker, who was a major figure in the historical study of the Gulf South and who passed away just before the 2003 Symposium began. The collection begins with Daniel Usner’s masterful essay that traces the evolution of scholarship on the colonial Gulf South. Usner argues that the region was central, not marginal, to the history of early America. As he points out, the early Gulf South provides excellent opportunities for—and perhaps even demands—interdisciplinary strategies.

xii

Preface

The essays that follow carry out many of Professor Usner’s recommendations. Amy Turner Bushnell conducts a careful exegesis of a wellknown but little used journal of an Englishman marooned in Florida at the end of the seventeenth century. She teases out the journal’s insights into colonial life, especially the situation of Indians who lived on the Atlantic coast and who were caught between the expanding English and the traditional demands of the Spanish authorities. Greg O’Brien offers, from the indigenous point of view, a close reading of the 1771–72 Mobile Conference between the new British overlords and the Chickasaw and Choctaw, long accustomed to dealing with the French. Karl Davis places the founding of the mixed-race Creek Tensaw community north of Mobile in the years after the American Revolution in the context of Creek survival strategies that employed traditional marriage and kinship practices. Jane Landers furnishes an extraordinary account of the interrelations of black and blood Seminoles in late colonial Florida, exploring questions that persist into our own time and in our courts. Employing sparse colonial records, David Wheat pursues a fascinating transcultural individual in eighteenth-century Mobile. Shannon Lee Dawdy explores manners and mobility in early Louisiana through the investigation of insults in a society struggling to establish itself. Virginia Gould presents a detailed inquiry into property holding and cultural transference among free women of color in late colonial and early American New Orleans. Sophie Burton investigates the interplay of Spanish government policy and economic and social change in late colonial Natchitoches. Armando Alonzo traces the eighteenth-century development of livestock raising in the predominantly ranchero economy of neighboring Nuevo Santander (part of which became present-day Texas), a colony whose rapid expansion belies the notion of inevitable Spanish decline. Finally, Andrew McMichael probes land tenure and competing loyalties in a Baton Rouge on the verge of American rule. In this volume’s concluding essay, the distinguished colonial scholar Ida Altman reflects on the meaning of these chapters and comments on the current and possible future directions of the scholarly conversation on the eighteenth-century Gulf South, ruminating poignantly about possible alternative historical developments and roads not taken.

Preface

xiii

As organizer of the Mahan Symposium and editor of this book, I am eager to acknowledge numerous professional debts. Clarence Mohr, chair of the Department of History at the University of South Alabama and a distinguished scholar of the Gulf South in his own right, has been wonderfully supportive throughout. Michael Thomason, former director of the University of South Alabama Archives, provided vital assistance during the symposium itself and sound advice on this book, as well as having long been an inspiration to me and to many in the field of Gulf Coast history. Editors Ann Baker, Elizabeth Demers, Heather Lundine, and Christopher Steinke of the University of Nebraska Press provided valuable guidance in the process of making this book happen. The anonymous external readers provided very helpful constructive criticism. James Corrick served as copyeditor. Sylvia Ash carefully read the manuscript and assisted with preparing the bibliography. Keith Manuel prepared the index. Eugene Wilson, emeritus professor of geography at the University of South Alabama, crafted the maps. Above all, I am profoundly grateful for the loving support and wise counsel of my wife, Ida Altman.

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As of 1685, according to Peter H. Wood, the native population of the South (from Virginia to Texas) numbered about two hundred thousand, a far cry from the approximately two million Native Americans who lived in North America east of the Mississippi River at the time of Columbus. Indigenous numbers declined further to about ninety thousand in 1715 before stabilizing at around fifty-five thousand from 1750 to 1790.1 The horrific decline in native numbers—due largely to disease, slavery, and war—was only the most obvious of the extraordinary challenges presented to native peoples of the Southeast in the eighteenth century. “Making do,” as James Axtell phrases it, they sought to defend themselves or were otherwise forced to find their way in the new age and if possible to advance their own causes within the dynamic framework of the European imperial contests, imported plants and animals, and a consumer revolution that made available new goods—guns, tools, and clothing—that profoundly altered material life in the Gulf South. Deerskins and Indian slaves became the first exports of the future cotton kingdom, and Indian alliances became the key to European success in the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. In turn, European rivalries provided unique opportunities for Indian leaders to exploit. Whereas Spain tried to get by with missions and presidios (frontier military outposts) in Texas and Florida, the French established diplomatic relations with the larger nations of the Gulf South, especially the Choctaw, based on gifts, the exchange of European goods and weapons for deerskins, and modest



Introduction

missionary activity. The British, principally concerned with commerce, countered with their own alliances and trading ventures, particularly among the Creeks and Chickasaws. The latter in turn sought to use British arms and goods to further their own ends and to expand their power, wealth, and numbers vis-à-vis their rivals.2 In this book Amy Turner Bushnell addresses some of these issues by investigating a notable turn-of-the-century encounter between Florida Indians and shipwrecked British subjects, while Greg O’Brien looks closely at the expectations that Chickasaw and Choctaw leaders held of the British rulers of West Florida in the early 1770s. Karl Davis explores the role of the Creek Tensaw community north of Mobile in native efforts to safeguard their future, and Jane Landers analyzes Black Seminole participation in the conflicts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Florida. The first known European encounters with the native peoples of the Southeast occurred in the early 1500s. A parade of Spanish explorers had mapped out the Gulf Coast by the mid-sixteenth century, sometimes wreaking havoc on the native peoples, as in the case of Hernando de Soto’s entrada (frontier exploration) from 1539 to 1542. In 1565, after ruthlessly evicting French Huguenots from the area of the present-day border of Florida and Georgia and establishing St. Augustine, Pedro Menéndez staked Spain’s claim to La Florida, which theoretically encompassed North America but in practice was confined to the Atlantic coast from Florida to South Carolina. After the demise in 1576 of short-lived Santa Elena on present-day Parris Island, South Carolina, St. Augustine remained the only significant Hispanic settlement in Florida until the founding of Pensacola in 1698. Notwithstanding the scarcity of Spanish settlers, La Florida witnessed determined efforts by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries to convert the region’s native peoples. At their height Florida’s missions were organized into four districts with more than forty villages and perhaps twenty-five thousand native proselytes. The missions, however, abruptly collapsed between 1680 and 1706, largely due to British trading and raiding from Carolina. “Whatever their spiritual successes,” David Weber tells us,

. European settlements, including briefly occupied military posts, missions, and towns, established between  and 



Introduction

Spanish “missionaries failed to advance permanently, defend effectively, or Hispanize deeply North American frontiers in the seventeenth century.”3 As Paul Hoffman writes, “Spain normally stood on the defensive in La Florida,” frequently failing to protect and respect friendly Indians, to resolve friction between settlers and priests, or to regularize royal support through subsidies (situados) directed from Mexico and Cuba. Ultimately Spanish Florida was not prepared for the challenge raised by the founding of Charleston in 1670 and the relentless, and sometimes violent, expansion of Anglo-American settlers into Carolina and Georgia thereafter. St. Augustine and its hinterland quickly became dependent on the neighboring Anglo-Americans. With just over three thousand inhabitants in 1760, Spanish Florida’s Hispanized population remained an enclave in a vast and increasingly dangerous land.4 Unlike the faltering Spanish outposts in Florida, the British presence on the Atlantic Coast grew “stunningly” (in Weber’s phrase) from seventy-two thousand in 1660 to more than one million by 1760. In South Carolina alone the white population rose from twenty thousand in 1745 to more than thirty-eight thousand (plus nearly sixty thousand black slaves) by 1760. Georgia, founded in 1733, reached six thousand whites and thirty-six hundred black slaves in less than three decades.5 The British began to push outward from the Atlantic Coast in pursuit of trading, hunting, and slaving opportunities and to conduct damaging raids during times of war with France or Spain, as in the case of the bloody Florida excursions of James Moore between 1702 and 1704. British expansionism inexorably challenged Indian lands and rival European claims to the west and south of the Appalachians. Meanwhile, in 1682 France’s Louis XIV (reigned 1660–1715) dispatched René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle from Canada down the Mississippi River to the Gulf Coast in order to establish French claims to the Mississippi Valley. Following La Salle’s death in Texas in 1687, the French Canadian Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville established Biloxi in 1699 and Mobile in 1702. As the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) wound down, the French monarchy awarded Louisiana to French financier Antoine Crozat in 1712. Crozat oversaw the founding of Natchez, Natchitoches, and Fort Toulouse

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(near modern-day Montgomery, Alabama). Unable to gain legal access to trade with New Spain (Mexico), however, he despaired of Louisiana’s economic prospects. Direction of the colony then passed to the Company of the West (later chartered as the Company of the Indies) from 1717 until 1730. In 1718, working under company auspices, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne Sieur de Bienville, Iberville’s younger brother, founded New Orleans, a city that became the colony’s capital shortly thereafter. In the 1720s the company sent seven thousand whites and a similar number of West Africans to Louisiana. As of 1746, however, Louisiana held only forty-one hundred slaves, thirty-three hundred settlers, and six hundred soldiers.6 Bienville reported an annual trade of fifty thousand pelts in the 1730s, about half that carried out by South Carolina.7 The colony was slow to prosper for several reasons. First, French Caribbean holdings were more lucrative and strategically more significant than Louisiana. Second, the 1729 Natchez War, provoked by French efforts to introduce tobacco plantations in Louisiana, proved disastrous both for the Natchez, many of whom were killed or sent to the West Indies as slaves, and the French colonial enterprise. The conflict induced the Company of the Indies to return Louisiana to the French Crown. Finally, British trading dominance further complicated French and Indian relations.8 France’s Louisiana adventure did spur Spain to launch new efforts to secure Texas and also to establish Pensacola on the Florida Gulf Coast in 1698. Following a brief flurry of missionary activity in the 1690s, Los Adaes was founded in 1716 (and reestablished in 1721) in order to keep an eye on the new French outpost of Natchitoches, founded in 1714. Dolores was also founded in 1716, and San Antonio had its modest beginnings two years later. Nonetheless, Texas attracted few colonists or mission Indians, and Spain’s lonely colonial outposts depended to a large extent on the Caddo Indians and nearby French settlers. The arrival of Canary Islanders in San Antonio in 1731 brought the Texas Hispanic population to about five hundred. A 1749 truce with Apaches allowed expansion along the San Antonio River in the 1750s. Subsistence-oriented ranching remained the norm until the 1770s when the expansion of silver mining in northern



Introduction

Mexico and Spain’s acquisition of Louisiana provided viable markets for Texas beef. The predominance of Franciscans and the military, however, continued to impede economic development. The population of Hispanic Texas grew slowly, from five hundred in 1731 to less than twelve hundred in 1760.9 By contrast, neighboring Nuevo Santander experienced remarkable growth in the eighteenth century. Unlike in Texas, New Mexico, or Florida, New Spain sent colonists instead of soldiers and missionaries to settle the new colony. Under the direction of the able officer José Escandón, colonization commenced in 1749; by 1755 more than six thousand colonists occupied Nuevo Santander, establishing twenty-three towns and fifteen missions. The towns of Laredo and Dolores, as well as many ranchos belonging to the vecinos (householders) of such places as Camargo and Reynosa, stood on the north side of the Rio Grande in present Texas.10 In his contribution to this book Armando Alonzo charts the growth and attempts to explain the vitality of Nuevo Santander in its first century. In addition to Indians, Europeans, Mexicans, and Canadians, Africans and their descendants also played a significant role in the early Gulf South. For the most part forcibly transported to the region, enslaved and free people of color furnished much of the labor on plantations, in towns, and along waterways. They brought with them (and attempted to preserve) much of their culture, food, language, religion, and, as Virginia Gould informs us, traditional gender practices and strategies. Africans in Louisiana were mostly Bambara, Malinke-speaking captives from the interior, but they also included coastal groups such as the Wolof and the Sereer.11 Anglo settlers brought English-speaking slaves with them to the Gulf South after 1763. The African-descended population was further diversified by the arrival of groups from the Caribbean in the second half of the century and the growth of the Creole or American-born slave population. People of African heritage played an important part in the not-infrequent military conflicts of the eighteenth century. In turn, especially in the cities, many enjoyed a surprising range of opportunities for individual advancement. In this book David Wheat, Virginia Gould, Sophie Burton, and Jane Landers treat the challenges, aspirations, and

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achievements of people of African descent in the eighteenth-century Gulf South. The arrival of Europeans and Africans posed new challenges and opportunities for Native Americans and gave rise to new social and economic arrangements. Daniel Usner has described much of what operated in the lower Mississippi Valley in the eighteenth century as a frontier exchange economy. Although disruptive to traditional Indian life, the exchange of deerskin and corn for European manufactures could be accommodated without devastating cultural change. As long as the settlers remained confined to the coastal towns and scattered trading posts in the interior, Indian ways could survive, despite Indian dependence on European goods. Petites nations (small communities) took advantage of provisioning opportunities and European protection, while larger nations such as the Choctaw furnished corn and deerskins in exchange for trade goods. Settlers and slaves depended on Indians and each other for sustenance. Poor whites, free people of color, and slaves engaged in petty trade with one another and with Indian inhabitants—whether petites nations or larger tribes. The emerging urban network facilitated the transfer of European ways and institutions to the Gulf South and linked the region to the Atlantic economy. Gulf Coast towns, however, diverged from the European models and from the American cities they were soon to join by remaining more African, more Caribbean, and more Catholic. European immigrants, at least in the early years, could redefine themselves in a frontier environment that offered, as Shannon Lee Dawdy puts it in this volume, unique opportunities for “self-fashioning.” Indian and African-American women peddlers predominated in urban markets. African slaves sold the goods of their owners and their own surpluses in an urban atmosphere that allowed substantial liberties. African-Americans both free and enslaved could sometimes carve out surprising niches for themselves and even acquire substantial property and position, accomplishments secured despite the legal restrictions governing their behavior. The diverse denizens of the Gulf Coast borrowed food and food ways from one another. Indian uses of corn, persimmon, fruits and nuts; African knowledge of rice culture;



The Gulf South in Early American History

contained the Spanish Borderlands within the nationalist narrative of American westward expansion. In his 1932 presidential address before the American Historical Association, he looked forward to “The Epic of Greater America” in which hemispheric comparisons and connections among all European colonial endeavors would be explored.7 Yet his own treatment of the Spanish empire’s northern fringe tended to isolate the Borderlands from the rest of Latin America’s colonial history and to hinge their importance on American national development. Blame for this seeming contradiction, however, should not be placed too heavily upon Herbert Eugene Bolton. After all, he was boldly confronting some deep biases in American culture and history. The belief that Spain and France failed to colonize America—as represented through images of conquistadors and coureurs de bois—was widespread in the United States. Rooted early in the rivalry between European empires and cultivated later by New England-centered writers, the diminution of non-English colonies was built into national histories of the United States. Spanish and French adventurers usually appeared briefly at the beginning of the story, before attention focused on English settlers along the Atlantic seaboard. Florida, Louisiana, and the Southwest reappeared only when they were being incorporated into the expanding nation. Derogatory glances at the colonial background of these places were used to minimize the extent of non-English settlement north of the Gulf of Mexico and to display the righteousness of United States expansion across North America. Herbert Bolton and his students worked hard at disproving these fundamental notions, delving into the colonial archives of Spain’s North American provinces to uncover two centuries of colonization that predated the birth of the United States. Spanish Borderlands historians, though, also had to wrestle with the rising inclination in American culture to imagine that the Southwest and Southeast under Spain had been a romantic world, whose cultural legacy now served tourism and escapism. Anthropological and archaeological work already played an instrumental role in representing Hispanic and Indian cultures as enchanting features on the American landscape. Now



Introduction

and European preferences for beef, pork, and fowl blended in a culinary and cultural gumbo.12 After 1763 several major geopolitical developments jolted the Gulf South. The Seven Years War (1756–63), the American Revolution (1775–83), the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815), the Haitian Revolution (1789–1804), and the movements for Latin American independence (1808–1820s) had enormous repercussions for the region. Following the Seven Years War, the British acquired Florida and Louisiana east of the Mississippi, an area that they made part of West Florida, bounded on the east by the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee Rivers. Meanwhile, the French were evicted from Louisiana and Canada, and the Spanish were compensated for the loss of Florida with the transfer of most of Louisiana. Between 1763 and 1783 the colonial population in Louisiana more than tripled. There, the formerly French subjects were joined from Nova Scotia by perhaps three thousand Acadian refugees, the future Cajuns, and two thousand Canary Islanders. The African slave trade also picked up steam. British West Florida experienced substantial population growth in the years preceding the American Revolution, perhaps reaching seven thousand colonials as British loyalists flocked to the colony with servants and slaves and began to set up plantations, especially in the fertile Natchez region. By 1785 the colonial population of Louisiana and West Florida reached thirty thousand, with thirteen thousand whites, eleven hundred free people of color, and sixteen thousand slaves. East Florida, following the evacuation of its Hispanic population in 1763, boasted a population of some seven thousand British subjects and ten thousand black slaves by the end of the American Revolution. Some two thousand Seminoles repopulated much of Florida from Georgia. The native population of the Gulf South included an estimated twenty-two hundred Chickasaws, fifteen thousand Choctaws, and another fifteen thousand Upper and Lower Creeks.13 Texas, on the other hand, despite the expansion of ranching, remained sparsely populated. By 1790 the Hispanic population of Texas stood at a little over twenty-five hundred, while neighboring Nuevo Santander had over ten times as many Hispanics. With populations of fifteen hun-

 European settlements established between 1721 and 1821



Introduction

dred, six hundred, and four hundred, respectively, the Texas towns of San Antonio, La Bahia, and Nacogdoches resembled the small presidial Florida outposts of St. Augustine and Pensacola. In Florida and Texas both, the small civilian populations continued to depend on the military for their livelihood.14 During the American Revolution Bernardo de Gálvez, the energetic young Spanish governor of Louisiana, captured Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola between 1779 and 1781. The Floridas were ceded to Spain in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, giving Spain title to a region stretching from St. Augustine to San Francisco (founded in 1776). Nevertheless, Spain’s hold on the Gulf South proved tenuous. Spanish immigration consisted principally of bureaucrats, soldiers, and a few merchants. Instead of Spaniards came large numbers of Americans, who flocked to a region loosely held by Spain and whose present and future loyalties were suspect (although, as Andrew McMichael argues here, they were not predetermined). Spain attempted to use the large Indian nations as a diplomatic and demographic barrier to Anglo-American expansion. The natives looked to Spain for similar ends. The strategy, however, was undermined by the waves of Anglo-American immigrants streaming into Spanish territory and by the southeastern trading dominance of the Panton and Leslie Company, a Florida-based outfit of expatriate Scottish merchants and British loyalists with trading posts as far west as Natchez and as far north as present-day Memphis.15 The dramatic imperial and demographic changes of the late eighteenth century challenged not only Spanish dominion and Indian diplomacy but also the frontier economy and society. Particularly after 1763, new people with new uses for the land strained the status quo. The modus vivendi was increasingly threatened by official efforts to expand plantation agriculture, illicit Anglo-American trade and hunting, and perhaps more ominously, Anglo-American farms and plantations. Slave-based plantation agriculture and the spread of cattle culture began to overwhelm much of the earlier way of life. With the French removed after the Seven Years War and with the British evicted after the American Revolution,

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Spain and its native allies stood alone against the aggressively expanding United States and its pioneers. For the Spanish Empire the death of Charles III in 1788 and the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 set off two decades of crisis that ultimately led to the loss of Spain’s American colonies, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and that accelerated Spain’s demise in the Gulf South. The United States took advantage of Spain’s difficulties. The Pinckney Treaty of 1795, also known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo, confirmed American ownership of lands above the thirty-first parallel, thus destroying the traditional European diplomacy based on Indian trade as the great bulk of the indigenous populations thereafter resided in U.S. territory. Louisiana returned briefly to French hands in 1802, only to be transferred to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The controversial deal gravely threatened Spanish rule in the Floridas. The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804), which at least in part prompted the Louisiana Purchase, shocked the slaveholding world and sent a flood of motley emigrants to Cuba and Louisiana. In 1808 Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula and removed the Spanish Bourbons, thereby setting off the movements for Spanish American independence and plunging the Spanish Empire into disarray. Baton Rouge fell into U.S. hands in the “revolution” of 1810 (roughly contemporaneous with Hidalgo’s more famous Mexican revolt). Mobile succumbed in 1813 during the War of 1812 (1812–15). The concurrent Creek War (1813–14) and Andrew Jackson’s subsequent maneuvers in Florida, including the so-called First Seminole War (1817–18), flouted Spain’s increasingly ineffectual control. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, ratified by Spain in October of the following year, formally ended Spanish ownership of Florida, bringing de jure, and soon de facto, Americanization of the Southeast.16 The three-way European struggle for the Southeast, and the creative indigenous responses to that struggle, yielded to U.S. hegemony and prepared the way for confrontation with Mexico once it asserted its independence from Spain in 1821. Deprived of the European and U.S. rivalries that allowed them to exercise de facto sovereignty and to play



Introduction

off their adversaries against one another and faced with the decline of the deerskin trade, the southeastern Indians were no longer a vital asset but, rather, an obstacle to be removed. With the expansion of plantation economy in the nineteenth century, Gulf South race relations were redefined and seemingly hardened, and a relatively fluid, if by no means idyllic, community of whites, African slaves, free people of color, and Native Americans increasingly gave way to the biracial southern apartheid of King Cotton.

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There is some good news in the field of Early American History. The assumption that New England was the most important region in colonial America is receding, while other colonial regions of North America are gaining importance. For some time the populous English colony of Virginia has shared center stage with Massachusetts—hardly an unexpected development given its role in shaping both freedom and slavery in early modern history. But for too long the other English colonies as well as neighboring Spanish, Dutch, and French colonies remained marginal to the history of colonial America. At the first Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference, Alfred B. Thomas declared that this region has a colonial history but not the conventional one.1 Thirty-five years later, scholars of the so-called conventional one can no longer afford to ignore what historians of the colonial Gulf South are doing. But given everything that took place across the Gulf South from Florida to Texas between 1513 and 1819, a lingering indifference shown by many early American historians toward this region is still a source of disappointment. The central role of religion in colonialism, the contest among empires for Indian trade and territory, African American struggles for freedom, and the origins of U.S. diplomacy toward Latin America are just a few of the major themes in early American history that are richly documented for colonies along the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf South is therefore an essential area of study for understanding colonial and native



The Gulf South in Early American History

societies before the 1820s. Human experiences and historical processes occurring in this region were central, not peripheral, to this study, while comparisons and connections with other colonial regions warrant fuller consideration. Serving mostly as a progress report on recent scholarship, this essay traces the historiography of the early Gulf South and asserts why this is an opportune time to explore that region’s significance in early American history. Although the overall study of non-English colonial societies in North America and their relations with Native American societies has improved significantly over the past thirty years, heavy burdens from the past have not been easy to unload. For most of the last two centuries histories of Gulf Coastal colonization were written in the shadow of a nationalist history of the United States that privileged its founding English colonies. Representation of life in places like seventeenth-century Florida and eighteenth-century Louisiana was selectively shaped to contrast with that along the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Cultural differences between European nations were essentialized in order to explain why England’s colonies purportedly grew and expanded more successfully than others. This construction of otherness for non-English colonial regions can be traced back to European imperial conflict itself but should also be understood as an evolving discourse on American identity. Different stories of empire across North America were scripted into another imperial story, that of American territorial expansion.2 Of course, no discussion of the Gulf South’s colonial history can bypass Herbert Eugene Bolton and his lasting influence on the study of those North American colonies called Spanish Borderlands. Published in 1921, The Spanish Borderlands was an impressive and important synthesis, and for a long time Bolton shaped Borderlands historiography through his more specialized studies and the many students that he directed. The fundamental dilemmas and issues faced by the field’s founder persisted long after his lifetime. Defining the Spanish Borderlands as the “southern fringe of the United States . . . once . . . lightly sprinkled with Spanish outposts and crisscrossed with Spanish trails,” Bolton wanted to capture the important as well as the picturesque history of this vast region.3

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This potential dissonance between historical significance and historical romance was, however, only one of several incongruent objectives that affected subsequent work of Borderlands scholars. Bolton worried that fellow citizens in the United States were deriving false inferences about Spanish America from their narrow exposure to the Borderlands: “With a vision limited by the Rio Grande, and noting that Spain’s outposts within the area now embraced in the United States were slender, and that these fringes eventually fell into the hands of the Anglo-Americans, writers concluded that Spain did not really colonize, and that, after all, she failed.”4 In a 1929 address at the Boulder Conference on the History of the Trans-Mississippi West, Bolton captured this fallacy in the metaphor of “mistaking the tail for the dog, and then leaving the dog out of the picture.” So he advocated the need for Americans to learn more about the dog, that is, Spanish America that lay south of the Rio Grande. Given Bolton’s concern over American ignorance about the core areas of Spain’s American empire, it is somewhat ironic that he devoted his own highly productive career to studying the dog’s tail. But he also believed that Spanish America’s northern frontier had been an important international borderland, “the meeting place of two streams of European civilization.”5 For Bolton this meeting ground held vital lessons about Anglo-American expansionism that might benefit United States relations with Latin America in the twentieth century. The eventual conquest of the Spanish Borderlands by Anglo-America did not reflect the superiority of one civilization over another but rather revealed “the advantage of an expanding economic frontier working from an immediate base, over a defensive frontier operating a long distance from the centers of resources and population.”6 Understanding this geographical circumstance, Bolton hoped, would help Americans realize and respect historical bonds with their Latin American neighbors. Lasting traces of Spanish colonization in the American Southwest—language, architecture, customs, laws, and folklore—also served as contemporary reminders of a shared past in Bolton’s view of the Borderlands. While wishing to rescue Spanish America from the Anglocentric treatment it suffered in U.S. textbooks and classrooms, Bolton unnecessarily

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Borderlands historians began to participate in conflicted ways, with some of their work contesting the romance and others contributing to it. Much of the scholarship practiced by the Bolton School tended to make all of the Spanish Borderlands seem marginal and anomalous in ways that actually undermined fruitful comparison and connection with British North America, while also detaching them from the rest of Spanish America. Emphasis on political and diplomatic forces, along with neglect of social and economic conditions, exaggerated the contrast between Spanish and English colonies. “Instead of promoting the integration of the Spanish Borderlands into United States history,” observed Gerald Poyo and Gilberto Hinojosa, “the comparative framework apparently led most historians to believe that the Spanish era was a failure and could thus be dismissed as an integral part of this nation’s history.”8 Meanwhile, the Borderlands scholars’ preoccupation with the defensive character of New Spain’s northern provinces—particularly directed toward AngloAmerican imperialism—also marginalized the region in the developing field of Latin American history. Perceived as “an exotic subset of United States history that has risen to treat the pre-Anglo, yet European, past of the United States Southwest and Southeast,” in the words of José Cuello, borderlands history remained “peculiar and mystifying to Latin Americanists.”9 So essential questions about the role of Spanish Borderlands studies in early American history lingered for most of the twentieth century. How should Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, as well as New Mexico, Arizona, and California, be related to other colonies in North America? Are there comparisons and connections worth pursuing that would result in a wider, even a deeper, understanding of American colonial history? Can the history of French and Spanish colonization be raised from their subordinate role in United States national narratives and be understood on their own terms while still providing grist for the comparative mill? The compromising position of Borderlands scholarship, caught as it was between Latin American and Early American historiographies, left these and other questions largely unanswered. But in no way did it deter



The Gulf South in Early American History

the production of abundant studies by outstanding historians. Mainly under Bolton’s direct influence, early scholars explored in great detail missions, presidios, administration, law, and Indian relations from California to Florida. In 1966 the eminent Latin Americanist Charles Gibson apologized for merely skimming in his final chapter of Spain in America the many known facts about the Spanish Borderlands, “for it is probable that no other part of colonial Spanish America has stimulated so extensive a program of research.”10 The historiography on Spain’s colonial possessions in the present-day United States did indeed grow into a vibrant field of study over the middle decades of the twentieth century. Historical scholarship on the Gulf Coastal Plain—the focus of this volume—followed Bolton’s lead on a number of methodological fronts. Spanish exploration of the coast and interior of the Southeast was naturally an important area of study. Early attention focused on the military and clerical agents of Spanish expansion, but eventually the American Indian populace would be considered for impacts suffered and interactions engendered from the expeditions. Although this scholarship received minimal notice from historians of English America, it did eventually force them to recognize that North America experienced a long period of European contact and conflict before the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth. Other Gulf Coast historians concentrated their research on colonial institutions created by the Spanish, first in Florida and later in Texas and Louisiana. Missions and presidios were targeted for much of the scholarship, while biographies of provincial officials and histories of colonial administration also appeared. Trade, diplomacy, and war developed into significant themes as Borderlands scholars in general closely examined Spanish relations with Indian nations and other European powers. The historians pursuing these lines of inquiry comprised a diverse group, and the label “Borderlands” can too easily conceal the various paths that they followed to reach different points of expertise across such a vast region. Some contemporaries of Herbert Bolton launched parallel and intersecting projects on their own. Isaac Cox and Arthur Whitaker,

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for example, were distinguished Latin Americanists who concentrated on diplomatic relations between Spain and the United States in the Gulf South region.11 During the 1960s the field was entered by a new generation of scholars, including Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Jack Holmes, Eugene Lyon, William Coker, and Gilbert Din. Mainly through political biographies, administrative studies, and economic histories, they significantly advanced research on Spanish Florida and Louisiana over the ensuing decades.12 The inauguration of annual Gulf Coast History and Humanities conferences in 1969 contributed to a strong sense of association and collaboration. Some Latin Americanists specializing in other regions of Spanish America also turned to this region at different phases of their careers. Important works by John TePaske, John Preston Moore, and Paul E. Hoffman represent this path.13 Other scholars, such as Charles Hudson, Elizabeth A. H. John, and Joel Martin, approached the Gulf Coastal Plain with a primary interest in American Indians.14 The field of ethnohistory quickly became the busiest bridge between Spanish Borderlands and Anglo-American colonies. A landmark synthesis of three generations of scholarship on the Borderlands appeared in 1970 with the publication of John Francis Bannon’s The Spanish Borderlands Frontier. Bannon offered his comprehensive overview of the Spanish frontier in North America to “show that the AngloAmerican experience, magnificent and thrilling though it was, actually was not quite as unique as it is sometimes pictured and chauvinistically thought to be.” The Anglo-American frontier, he argued, was not the only “advance of civilization into the wilderness” and ought to be compared with the northward movement of Spanish pioneers.15 Unfortunately applying Frederick Jackson Turner’s narrow definition of frontier to his subject, Bannon then proceeded to amplify what he thought was distinctive about the Spanish Borderlands in a way that undermined the comparative value of his project. Missions, ranching and mining, absolutism, regimentation, and a mestizo population were listed as major features that sharply distinguished Spanish North America from English North America. Bannon’s Spanish Borderlands Frontier nonetheless proved to



The Gulf South in Early American History

be a valuable contribution to the historiography of the American West, although, not surprisingly, it made little impression on students of early American history. Since the 1970s scholarship on the Borderlands has become less insulated because of changes both inside and outside the field. First of all, new students of Spanish and French colonization in North America have diversified their methods and approaches, and a previously felt common purpose of Borderlands scholars weakened with growth and specialization. The label itself began to lose its clear meaning as a subfield of either United States or Latin American colonial history. Now it is likely that Borderlands, as a particular space on maps of North America, will become more commonly applied to the cultural and geographical area that strictly spans the present-day boundary between Mexico and the United States. Social scientists, historians, cultural critics, and artists have already appropriated the uppercase spelling of “Borderlands” in order to address postcolonial identity and experience along the international border.16 Meanwhile, a less geographically specific usage by early American historians of the lowercase term “borderlands” —referring here to all zones contested by rival empires—is actually facilitating stronger interest in Spanish and French colonies of North America. As connections and comparisons across imperial boundaries are explored more systematically, North American places once viewed with indifference by most colonial scholars will receive greater attention. A convenient way to survey recent advances inside the colonial history of the Gulf South is to summarize the literature colony by colony. Because of its proximity to English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, we might expect Spanish Florida to have received plenty of attention all along from early American historians. But such was not the case until the 1970s when archaeologists and historians began to bring the full scale of Spanish colonization in that province into sharper view. Among the Borderlands scholars themselves, Florida was relatively neglected, especially for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For a long time Bolton’s own The Debatable Land, co-authored with his student Mary Ross, and John Lanning’s Spanish Missions of Georgia stood as the only reminders that

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even the coast of Georgia had once been occupied by Spanish missionaries and soldiers. The long-held view of Florida in American colonial history was captured in fleeting references to Juan Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto, and other Spanish explorers and in the obligatory observation that St. Augustine was founded in 1565 to become the oldest continuous town in European America. The sense that not much happened, except for the maintenance of a Spanish garrison, conveniently catered to the premise that Spain was a feeble competitor with England for the settlement of North America. A long but forgotten period of missionary activity among Florida’s large Indian population, who engaged in some of Native America’s earliest and most dramatic rebellions against colonialism, has finally been recovered. In the middle of the seventeenth century, while New Englanders were attempting their own reorganization of American Indian communities into praying towns, Spanish Florida included nearly forty missions inhabited by some twenty-five thousand Indians—mostly Timucuans and Apalachees. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, most of the mission towns were abandoned because of disease and rebelliousness among the proselytes or because of English-led attacks from Carolina. Unlike New Mexico and California, the Florida landscape held no architectural signs of the mostly wooden buildings that constituted so many Indian missions. Some evidence of this forgotten past began to surface with the 1951 publication of Here They Once Stood by Mark F. Boyd, Hale G. Smith, and John W. Griffin. Not until archaeologists began systematic excavation, in conjunction with archival research by historians, did Indian missions and colonial settlements in Florida become visible again. Fieldwork by Kathleen Deagan, David Hurst Thomas, Bonnie McEwan, Jerald Milanich, and other archaeologists has uncovered increasing evidence of Indian adaptation and agency as well as of colonial plans and policies.17 Analysis of written records by historians like Eugene Lyon, Amy Turner Bushnell, and John Hann has captured the crucial role that Indian labor played in early Florida while also demonstrating how the missions were integrally related to the lives of colonial settlers and soldiers.18 For the Gulf Coastal Plain



The Gulf South in Early American History

of Florida the sizable and dynamic mission communities among the Apalachee Indians were especially important. Although relatively sparse in its non-Indian population throughout the colonial period, society in Spanish Florida was no less diverse and dynamic than that in the English provinces to the north. Hann and McEwan’s overview of Mission San Luis, Jane Landers’ work on African Americans, and Claudio Saunt’s study of Creek Indians have recently added much to our understanding of this complexity.19 Louisiana began as a French colony in 1699 and did not become a Spanish province until 1763. Yet the history of both French and Spanish Louisiana shared an unusually long lapse between romantic narratives written during the nineteenth century and scholarship produced after World War II. Historians of French North America familiar to the United States audience—particularly Francis Parkman and Reuben Thwaites—had paid much greater attention to Canada and the Great Lakes than to Lower Louisiana. Important works produced over the early twentieth century by Jean Delanglez, Nancy Miller Surrey, Verner Crane, and others examined archival sources from the Mississippi Valley much more closely but were too few and far between to accelerate professional scholarship on colonial Louisiana. Substantial improvement in the study of French Louisiana occurred only with the five volumes published by French historian Marcel Giraud between 1953 and 1974. Meanwhile, in the United States specialized studies by Charles O’Neill on early churchgovernment relations, Jay Higginbotham on early Mobile, and John Clark on New Orleans commerce began to reveal what French Louisiana held in store for future scholars.20 Largely because of Herbert Eugene Bolton’s influence, the Spanish regime in the Mississippi Valley received more sustained attention over much of the twentieth century than did the French. Bolton himself contributed only a single important work on Spanish Louisiana, a compilation of documents with a long introduction centering on the border town of Natchitoches, but several of his students, including John Caughey, Lawrence Kinnaird, and Abraham Nasatir, chose to concentrate on Louisiana’s Spanish era.21 A larger number of works on Louisiana and West Florida

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came from subsequent generations of Spanish Borderlands historians, especially Jack Holmes, John Preston Moore, Gilbert Din, William Coker, Thomas Watson, and Light Cummins.22 They were accompanied by historians of West Florida during the English regime and the American Revolution, most notably Robin Fabel, J. Leitch Wright, Robert Haynes, J. Barton Starr, and Robert Rea.23 The study of colonial Louisiana still lagged behind the new social history and ethnohistory that were being applied by the early 1970s to other regions of colonial North America. Work on the eighteenth-century Lower Mississippi Valley focused instead on such areas as exploration, immigration policy, commercial organization, provincial leadership, European diplomacy, and imperial conflict. Very little attention was paid to the general population of colonists, slaves, and Indians or to long-term patterns of social and economic change. While historians of English North America began to examine closely community life, slavery, Indian relations, and other neglected dimensions of colonial society, students of French and Spanish Louisiana as well as English and Spanish West Florida made up for lost time by producing basic biographical and institutional histories. The most significant impetus behind an eventual interest in ordinary inhabitants of the Lower Mississippi Valley came from Acadian-descended historians, whose ethnic and linguistic identity went through a revitalization during the 1960s. Based at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, a small but devoted group of scholars began to promote the importance of learning about the origins and evolution of French Louisiana. In 1968 Glenn Conrad launched a project to microfilm archival materials in France in order to assemble a comprehensive collection of colonial records. This Colonial Records Collection steadily expanded to include microfilmed documents from Spanish archives, and the Center for Louisiana Studies was created in order to publish essential primary sources and to encourage new historical research. The past quarter century has witnessed a significant growth in the number of historians becoming interested in the eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley. Many of the scholars venturing into this relatively unex-



The Gulf South in Early American History

plored region were strongly influenced by studies of migration, slavery, and intercultural relations in other colonial settings. They attempted to apply social history, anthropology, and other approaches to groups of people usually left out of studies that had confined their coverage of early America to Great Britain’s Atlantic seaboard colonies. Works by Morris Arnold, Carl Brasseaux, James Carson, Patricia Galloway, Gwendolyn Hall, Kimberly Hanger, Thomas Ingersoll, Reinhart Kondert, Greg O’Brien, Daniel Usner, Gregory Waselkov, and Charles Weeks helped underscore the fact that the Lower Mississippi Valley is fertile ground for innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to eighteenth-century life.24 Current research on settlement patterns and population growth, economic and environmental change, Indian-colonial relations, the African slave trade and slavery, religion, gender, and family life will uncover a complexity in colonial Louisiana that resembles what historians of other North American colonial regions have recently found. The history of early Texas has lagged even farther behind than Florida and Louisiana in scholarship, but current work is rapidly expanding our knowledge of its colonial origins and evolution. Although one of Bolton’s most important monographs was Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, this 1915 publication did little to spread interest in that part of the Borderlands. With presidios and missions portrayed mainly as Spanish institutions scattered in a vast wilderness, it took a long time for historians to examine how a provincial society developed across southern and eastern Texas. True, Odie Faulk brought attention to the closing years of Spain’s rule over Texas.25 However, neglected mission buildings in the San Antonio area have been better known for the role that just one—the Alamo—played in the Americanization of Texas than for the generations of Coahuiltecan Indians who prayed, worked, and lived in them beginning in the early eighteenth century. Following an initial advance and retreat of Spanish activity in response to French possession of Louisiana, a steady process of Spanish colonization finally got underway in Texas by 1716. Studies by Jack Jackson, Donald Chipman, and Armando Alonzo have begun to capture the extent of colonial settlement and military occupation in Spanish Texas between San

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Antonio and Los Adaes.26 Elizabeth John, Todd Smith, and David La Vere have also contributed significantly to a fuller understanding of Caddo relations with both Texas and Louisiana.27 Meanwhile, Gilberto Hinojosa, Gerald Poyo, and Jesús de la Teja have brought community formation among settlers into sharper focus.28 As in all of the Spanish Borderlands from Florida to California, relations between Indian communities and neighboring colonial towns in Texas involved complicated patterns of socioeconomic exchange and jurisdictional conflict. In addition, the ethnic composition of colonial society there was heterogeneous. General studies of the Spanish Borderlands also are now becoming more common. Between 1989 and 1991 David Hurst Thomas edited a threevolume collection of essays, Colombian Consequences, which provides a valuable overview of ongoing analysis of the Spanish Borderlands.29 Work by social scientists overshadowed that of historians in this survey, but as Light Cummins observed in his review of the book, “a quiet revolution in borderlands scholarship outside the discipline of history has been occurring during the last several decades.”30 The historiographical foundation of Borderlands study will consequently take a new shape. In 1992 David J. Weber produced a timely and prize-winning synthesis of Spanish Borderlands history, The Spanish Frontier in North America. Weber brought to his own survey a keen awareness of how Borderlands history had been marginalized. Excluded from an early American historiography that concentrated on English colonies, ignored by Latin Americanists who focus on more central places in the Spanish empire, and treated as background to a Chicano history more interested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Spanish Borderlands warranted scrutiny on its own terms more than ever. And this is exactly what Weber provided. He pulled together all of the latest scholarship on the individual colonies from Florida to California by featuring current findings and approaches. Moreover, he steered the field into a new comparative direction by emphasizing the agency of American Indians in their relations with Spanish colonists.31 The historical study of the early Gulf South now stands at an exciting threshold. Scholars are paying closer attention to social and economic con-



The Gulf South in Early American History

ditions inside the provinces of Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Preliminary works demonstrate how much will be learned by examining local communities and intercultural relations more intensively. As long-neglected topics move to the forefront of discussion, it will no longer be possible for historians to downplay the extent of French and Spanish colonization. Migration and settlement patterns, labor and land systems, and gender and race—deeply mined subjects in the history of English North America—are also important themes in Spanish and French colonies of North America, and their comparative value crosses imperial boundaries and transcends national categories. As Poyo and Hinojosa declared about current literature on Texas, “paradoxically, it is the regional and local framework, and the consequent focus on socioeconomic development, that will prompt scholars to reconsider the colonial Borderlands’ significance to the United States.”32 Another advance in scholarship is the stronger consideration being given to the wider oceanic and continental contexts of Gulf Coastal colonization, perhaps the most promising way to integrate the study of Spain’s northernmost American colonies more centrally into the larger fields of Latin American and Early American history. Robert Weddle’s three-volume study of the Spanish Sea connects the Gulf Coast to the larger story of exploration and navigation.33 Bushnell has contributed significantly to a new understanding of Florida by explaining much of its development in terms of Spain’s more extensive colonial designs and networks. Proposing that a model of maritime peripheries replace Bolton’s borderlands paradigm, Bushnell fixes Spanish Florida within a Caribbean web of administrative and commercial interaction.34 Kenneth Banks, meanwhile, has explored important characteristics of Atlantic World communication among France’s colonies by comparing Louisiana with Canada and the Lesser Antilles.35 In addition to these larger maritime frameworks of analysis, attention to interior networks of trade and diplomacy is likewise highlighting the significance of the colonial Gulf South. A pivotal group of Indian nations in the imperial contest across the Southeast, the Creek Confederacy

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developed dynamic connections with Gulf coastal as well as Atlantic coastal colonies. Several recent and diverse approaches to Creek history have contributed significantly to our knowledge of how people and goods circulated between Indian and non-Indian communities. In this discussion Joshua Piker explores major themes at the local level, focusing on a particularly important Creek town. Steven Oatis’s study of the Yamasee War and Steven Hahn’s work on Creek diplomacy trace important migrations and relationships with a Gulf Coast orientation. In a historical geography of Creek country at the end of the eighteenth century, Robbie Ethridge also sheds new light on the Creek people’s southwardly facing activities and interests.36 Following parties of traders, emissaries, warriors, and migrants along trails from Florida to Creek country to South Carolina is bound to make the Gulf South more integral to early American history. While specialists of the early Gulf South scrutinize colonial and native societies more closely and survey their external linkages more thoroughly, a general shift in thinking among early American historians promises to have a great influence on the changing role of Spanish Borderlands studies in general. Scholars of English North America have begun to use the term borderlands in a more comparative and generic way to explore any region where two or more European empires faced each other amidst autonomous Indian societies. As this new direction in scholarship has been delineated by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “contested boundaries between colonial domains” might serve as a more durable and versatile definition of borderlands. Conflict over imperial boundaries shaped “the peculiar and contingent character of frontier relations.” But as colonial borderlands gave way to national borders, “fluid and ‘inclusive’ intercultural frontiers yielded to hardened and more ‘exclusive’ hierarchies.” Partly influenced by Herbert Bolton’s understanding of interethnic and international relations, Adelman and Aron advocate a new line of inquiry that just might advance his dream of a more comparative and common early American history.37 Other students of colonial America have called for greater inclusion of non-English provinces in the field, while the Wil-



The Gulf South in Early American History

liam and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of the Early Republic are beginning to include—perhaps still too slowly—essays on the Gulf South as well as the Southwest.38 As boundaries and borders of all kinds receive closer attention, vaguely defined national characteristics will carry less weight in a comparative analysis of North American colonies. Different types of development resulted as much from what happened to colonial policies on the ground as from what colonial rulers intended. Whether comparing provinces within a single empire or comparing provinces from different empires, historians need to consider an array of factors: the scale, composition, and timing of migration; the means of adaptation and resistance deployed by Indians; local environmental and economic circumstances; and even a colony’s location in its particular empire and its proximity to a rival empire. As we learn more about Spanish and French colonies in North America, similarities as well as differences across the divide with British America will become apparent. It is time to pick up at the local level where John TePaske left off more than three decades ago when he demonstrated how the Gulf Coast itself provides colonial historians with a special opportunity for comparative analysis of Spanish, English, and French policies.39 Jaime E. Rodríguez O. has recently underscored the wider importance of considering parallel and rival paths of empire, arguing that autonomy and self-governance practiced by colonists differed in degrees and that all monarchies lacked power to control development in their New World provinces. Negotiation between metropolis and colony occurred in French, Spanish, and English America but played out in different ways because of different demographic, environmental, and economic circumstances. Struggles for independence also varied in complex ways.40 As a result of widening and deepening interest in colonial regions like ours, historians are asking new questions about how they were actually incorporated into the United States. The old assumption that feeble Latin provinces inevitably gave way to a vigorous Anglo-American nation cannot prevail against systematic analysis of United States territorial expansion. Contemporary students of Spanish Borderlands are finding much variation and nuance in the ways that their diverse inhabitants faced processes

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of conquest or annexation over the early nineteenth century.41 Class and ethnic divisions within territories being annexed, as well as economic alliances crossing international and intercultural boundaries, presented countervailing and complicating challenges to the construction of nationalist borders and narratives. The diplomatic and military history of the early nineteenth-century Gulf Coast is strong, thanks in particular to studies by Frank Owsley and Gene Smith.42 We are, however, just beginning to realize through works by Peter Kastor, Adam Rothman, and others the full importance of this region for understanding resistance by American Indians and African Americans to U.S. expansionism across the Deep South.43 With scholarship on the Borderlands accelerating and early American history widening its gaze, we now face an opportunity to reconceptualize our understanding of boundaries in Early America. The historians represented in this volume are among those leading this endeavor. Lines putatively dividing English, French, and Spanish empires on maps of the continent no longer separate the different regional historiographies from each other. The borders between colonial regions were flexible and permeable, although earlier historians were slow in attending to important movement and interaction across them. Nevertheless, now that we are more closely examining Indian societies’ multifaceted relations with two or more different European empires, networks of interaction that transgressed or spanned imperial boundaries are coming into sharper focus. This form of border crossing therefore is now a serious subject for students willing to read sources in more than a single national and linguistic category. As historians also read more widely across the international boundaries of early American historiography, we will enhance our ability to compare different colonial regions in innovative ways. How diverse peoples within these distinct colonial regions demarcated borders between themselves and how groups and individuals attempted to cross them might become a major comparative theme in the colonial history of North America. The differentiation of early North America into England’s robust settlements along the Atlantic coast, France’s extended string of trading posts from



The Gulf South in Early American History

the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and Spain’s weakly held borderlands north of Mexico is finally breaking down. Accordingly, we should no longer be discouraged from exploring similarities as well as differences across imperial lines. Therein lies the significance of the Gulf South in Early American History.

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By the early 1700s the Gulf South encompassed strikingly diverse societies that had experienced complex changes since Europeans first ventured there nearly two hundred years before. Yet even as economic, political, and social forces transformed the region once again during the turbulent eighteenth century, the Gulf South was poised on the brink of another major transition. Its distinctive societies for the most part had developed not only at great distance from the centers of the empires (French, Spanish, and British) that claimed them but in relative isolation from one another as well. In the nineteenth century they would be brought within the expanding borders of the United States. This outcome was as unpredictable in the early eighteenth century as it had begun to appear inevitable by the end of that eventful period. The impact of Americanization on the region can hardly be overstated. The remarkable variation in colonial Gulf South societies defies easy generalization. What they nearly all shared, however, was eventual submersion in the expansionistic United States or partial or even complete elimination—as in the case of Indian groups that were relocated elsewhere—when they were incorporated within U.S. borders. Not only were their histories and particularities in large measure submerged within the national culture and mainstream historical narrative of the United States, as Daniel Usner suggests, but over time even state and local histories were constructed in such ways that what are often taken for local memory and historical knowledge may be largely the product of invention.



Afterword

This mythologization of the Gulf South past in turn has created what sometimes actually are new, hybrid, or imported traditions. Although these traditions may be connected in some fashion to historical experience, they also appear in forms that cannot necessarily be interpreted in straightforward historical terms.1 An example that comes to mind is that of the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. The Afro-Creoles of New Orleans who organized themselves into separate and rival “tribes” did not look to Louisiana’s own indigenous past but instead modeled their tribal costumes on those of the Plains Indians. The story is that, although initially the Lakota Indians were offended by this adoption of their dress, they later came to view the practice as positive.2 This unhistorical adoption of cultural patterns from an area and people far removed from the Gulf South perhaps represents an echo of the formation of Indian-African bonds that characterized parts of the region from Florida to Texas. Those bonds were forged in the context of European pressure, domination, and exploitation that affected individuals and groups in varying ways and at different levels of intensity. The Black Seminoles of Florida, the subject of Jane Landers’s chapter, emerged as a quasi-separate group when fugitive Africans and Creek Indians attempting to maintain their independence and viability in the face of increasing pressure from the British and later the United States made common cause and found strength in unity. David Wheat’s study of Nicolas Mongoula and early Mobile suggests that members of the African and Indian servile groups learned from one another through work experiences and above all through the bonds of marriage and family, in which couples shared their skills, languages, and beliefs and imparted this rich mix to their children. If the history of the Mardi Gras Indians has nothing to do with the developments in the Gulf South during the period that it was settled and colonized by Europeans, nonetheless their brilliant costumes, music, and dance competitions symbolize and evoke a complex past in which Africans and Indians, as well as Europeans, collaborated to form dynamic, culturally and socially pluralistic, if unequal, societies. The chapters in this volume both remind us how relatively little we yet know about these societies and how complex and particular their histories

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were. Apart from their eventual incorporation into the United States and the overwhelming challenge to their locally distinctive socioeconomic and cultural arrangements that Americanization represented, certain forces affected nearly all these societies during the eighteenth century. Probably foremost among these forces were the rapidity of events and of developments in the eighteenth century and the fluidity that characterized socioeconomic and ethnic groups. The degree to which all these groups seem to have been involved in a near-constant effort of reinvention and reassessment of their situations vis- à-vis others is striking indeed. The Indian groups of Florida’s wild Atlantic coast discussed by Amy Bushnell seem to have attempted to maintain an uncertain balance between their relations with the familiar, if grudgingly accepted, Spaniards and the complications and potential new threat represented by the arrival of British castaways in their territory. For their part the castaways hoped to convince the Indians whom they encountered that they were Spanish, a ruse that from the outset was less than convincing. Bushnell concludes that Florida’s coastal Indians probably did not accept the pretense for long, if at all. Rather, their hesitancy to inflict any serious injury on the castaways might have hinged less on the fear that the castaways were Spaniards, and thus that by harming the English they would risk jeopardizing their relations with the established European power in St. Augustine, than on the Indians’ continued uncertainty as to just who these strangers were. In Greg O’Brien’s essay Choctaws and Chickasaws had no doubts with whom they were dealing, as their relations with the British in West Florida had for some time been governed by mutually accepted accords. Additionally, they already had had long experience with British officials and traders. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, however, these relations were affected not only by the strengthening Spanish presence in New Orleans but by internal developments within the tribes themselves. Again, Indian groups found themselves involved in a continuing process of negotiation and reassessment of relative strength and advantage. Internal changes and adjustments to some degree represented a response to the tensions that resulted from the seeming breakdown of earlier understandings



Afterword

forged with British officials and traders. O’Brien notes the challenges that the freelancing activities of non-elite Indians posed, not only to the continuation of advantageous relations with the British but also to the strength of traditional tribal leadership. Just as chiefs had difficulty in controlling the actions of their people, especially the young warriors, so did British officials experience problems in restraining the activities of traders who lived among the Indians and were all too ready to supply them with the alcohol that many demanded. This process of reinvention and the need to revamp alliances for protection and survival likewise structured the Seminoles’ shifting relationships with the British (and later the Americans) and Spanish. It additionally fostered the emergence of the partly distinct but closely allied group of Black Seminoles. The semifeudal relationship that the Seminoles forged with fugitive slaves who sought to settle in their territory provided advantages for both groups as blacks settled both among the Seminoles and in villages of their own. These blacks became key allies of the Seminoles, at times acting as intermediaries between them and the Spaniards. The Spaniards for their part generally recognized the benefits of maintaining friendly relations and military alliances with Creeks and Seminoles (with free blacks playing a key role on both sides) as a hedge against Anglo expansion. They also continued to recognize the independence of former Anglo-owned slaves who had settled among the Indians. Refashioning followed a rather different course among the Creeks whom Karl Davis discusses. Notwithstanding severe population decline, the strength of the lineage and clan-based Creek social organization was such that they were able to incorporate European, mainly British, traders into their system of kinship and family obligations through marriage to Creek women. Intermarried European men found themselves functioning within the Creek context of alliance, kinship obligation, and trade in which the Creeks largely set the terms, while the Creeks viewed these connections as part of their larger effort to pursue diplomatic strategies that would ensure them favorable trade relations and continued political and economic autonomy. The kinship connections that they formed with Europeans not only fostered useful links to sources of manufactured goods

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but also produced outstanding leaders. One such was Alexander McGillivray, whose British and Creek background and upbringing equipped him well to exercise leadership among the Creeks and successfully to forge relations with the Spaniards based in Pensacola so as to fill the vacuum left by the British retreat after the American Revolution and as a hedge against American expansionism. For their part the Spaniards were eager to make an alliance with the Creeks and protected the latter’s territory from the encroachment of new settlers, as well as offering them arms for defense. The Creeks did not refashion themselves so much as they expanded and elaborated on long-established strategies by extending them to include their relationships with the British, Americans, and Spaniards, as Davis so convincingly argues. Although in quite different circumstances and with a very different outcome, the residents of Natchitoches also refashioned themselves in this era, in their case as tobacco planters, as they responded to the opportunities afforded by the economic ambitions of the new Spanish Bourbon regime in Louisiana. The socioeconomic and demographic transformation of Natchitoches that Sophie Burton traces was as rapid as it was profound. The result was the emergence of a “highly stratified,” slave-owning free French society. The formerly significant Indian trade virtually disappeared as a locally important economic activity, disparities of wealth and status within the free group were greatly enhanced, and a black, mainly enslaved, community developed as a quasi-separate group within local society—all within the approximately forty-year period of Spanish rule in Louisiana. Similarly the rapid establishment of a ranching economy in Nuevo Santander in what was southeastern Texas, documented by Armando Alonzo, fostered burgeoning population growth in an area that had been only minimally populated by Spaniards. It also was responsible for the appearance of a new port, Matamoros, that would play an important role in the economy of the Gulf South region in the nineteenth century. Like the planters of Natchitoches, the settlers of Nuevo Santander benefited from the policies and economic initiatives of the Spanish Bourbon regime as well as from growth in markets and shipping that made it feasible and



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even profitable to invest in the development of areas once too remote to participate on a large scale in the active commerce of the Spanish empire. In contrast to the results of the rapid commercialization of agriculture in Natchitoches, however, Alonzo argues that the development of the ranching economy of Nuevo Santander did not lead to the growth of a dominant landed elite. There were large landholdings to be sure, but the great majority of ranches remained small to middling in size. The testing and reassessment of loyalties manifested themselves in yet another variant in West Florida, as Andrew McMichael has shown. Countering the common assumption that British and American settlers of West Florida chafed under Spanish rule, McMichael concludes that in the latter decades of the eighteenth century West Florida’s residents generally were content with the Spanish regime, which had readily provided them with grants of land at reasonable prices and did little to enforce the stipulation that residents must be practitioners of Roman Catholicism. The raids staged by the Kempers failed to spark rebellion among most of West Florida’s residents, and Spanish authorities reciprocated the loyalty of their Anglo-American subjects by relying on them to form patrols to capture the renegade gang. It was only from 1804 onward when Spanish officials adopted tactics designed to slow the rate of Anglo-American settlement—and concomitantly potential settlers’ acquisition of land— that discontent with Spanish rule began to increase. In far more individualized ways the motley residents of French New Orleans took advantage of the opportunities offered by life in a remote colonial outpost to loosen and challenge the social structures of France that were only partially replicated in the colony. Shannon Dawdy argues that the verbal violence she has studied reflected defiance of the old social hierarchy on the part of individuals of the lower classes, as they attempted to disguise sometimes questionable origins and lay claim to respectability that members of the elite would deny them. In face of the notable demographic, economic, and political flux that affected nearly all the peoples and societies of the Gulf South in the eighteenth century, what were the sources of stability? One answer seems to lie in the realm of family and the roles that women in particular played

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in securing and maintaining family survival and success. Virginia Gould offers a fascinating portrait of four generations of Afro-Creole women in New Orleans who not only escaped the bonds of slavery and achieved a measure of financial security but who by the nineteenth century had amassed substantial wealth, chiefly in the form of urban real estate. While their white consorts or husbands fathered their children and provided some financial assistance, in Gould’s perspective these men remained secondary figures in the unfolding drama of the lives of these hard-working and capable women. Significantly she also suggests that in antebellum New Orleans free men of African descent were not nearly as successful economically as their female counterparts, underscoring the crucial role that Afro-Creole women played in achieving stability and security for their families. Women contributed to continuity in slave communities as well, as Burton shows in Natchitoches, where the slave population experienced a natural increase and Afro-Creole women constituted the majority of the town’s female slaves by 1765. The strength of slave family life centered on Afro-Creole women, and the size of Natchitoches’s enslaved group encouraged the growth of slave communities that encompassed slaves from adjoining plantations as slaves owned by different masters opted to construct their cabins in proximity to one another. Choices of godparents among both slave and free blacks, together with the strength and continuity of the Afro-Creole majority, further reinforced the quasi-autonomy and vigor of the black community in Natchitoches. In Mobile the system of godparenthood served to reinforce and enhance social ties, which in this case often were those that had formed between Africans and Indians, both slave and free. Wheat’s intriguing study suggests another and perhaps surprising source for the integration of Mobile’s diverse inhabitants, namely language. Not only Indians but considerable numbers of Africans and whites apparently used the indigenous-based pidgin Mobilian Jargon, which also was spoken well beyond Mobile. Mobile’s rather sizeable indigenous enslaved group included representatives of a number of tribes, and these Indian slaves worked and lived in close association with slaves of African descent. Furthermore the town’s



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preponderantly male free population not surprisingly often turned to Indian women for sexual partners, the result being a notably mixed group of residents who might have relied primarily on an indigenous pidgin language for interethnic communication. Among the Creeks, as Davis explains, kinship relations and matrilineages provided the basic structure for a nation that managed to preserve a notable degree of autonomy and flexibility in a context of considerable demographic and political change and external pressure. The crucial role that women played in ensuring the fulfillment of reciprocal kinship obligations as well as in the economy and ceremonial life was important in ensuring the viability and survival of the Creek nation. Beyond their detailed, suggestive portrayals of remarkably diverse societies and individuals that faced the multiple challenges of frequently unequal socioeconomic, military, and political relations, what lessons do these fine studies teach us? In the ordeal of the Nickaleers on Florida’s Atlantic coast, the common ground established by blacks and Seminoles in Florida and by Indian and African slaves in Mobile, the jockeying for advantage by Choctaws and Chickasaws in their dealings with the British in Mobile, the economic transformation of French planters under Spanish rule in Natchitoches, and the mutual loyalty manifested by Anglo planters and Spanish officials in West Florida, we see the complicated and shifting alliances and rivalries that emerged as members of all groups sought security, advantage, or simply survival. These studies remind us that there were not just three or four powers—France, Spain, Britain, and later the United States—contending in the colonial Gulf South but a host of others as well. These latter included Africans and Afro-Creoles, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Natchez, and Chitimachas, to name but some. The histories of these fluid, vital societies provide a kaleidoscopic picture of shifting interethnic relations and suggest the multiplicity of models of social, economic, and political relations that took hold in the colonial Gulf South. The majority of the studies in this volume also point to a significant change that affected much of the Gulf South and all the groups that inhabited it in the eighteenth century in a way that may seem so obvious as

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often to be ignored: the expanding Spanish presence and the new vitality that the Spanish Bourbon regime brought to commercial and colonization schemes in the region. Essentially a remote backwater of the French empire during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, under Spanish rule New Orleans and Louisiana grew rapidly, both in population and in economic terms, with important consequences for new and existing settlements and relations among ethnic and national groups. The African population in Louisiana soared, and the increasing presence of settlers of European origin—Anglos in West Florida and the Upper Mississippi Valley, Mexicans in Nuevo Santander, Acadians (Cajuns), and Canary Islanders in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Texas—further pressured native American groups. The results of Spanish ambitions in the Gulf South were in some ways paradoxical, particularly the decision to allow settlement by Anglo settlers in the Upper Mississippi Valley, West Florida, and Texas. This policy is usually seen as paving the way for the Americanization that began in earnest after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but as seen in McMichael’s article, the mainly British settlers of West Florida were not necessarily eager for annexation to the United States, even when they decided to break ties with Spain. The success of Escandón’s settlement of Nuevo Santander ironically suggests that, rather than relying on expensive colonization schemes (such as the effort to bring Canary Islanders to Louisiana and Texas) or turning to Anglo settlers, Bourbon planners who hoped to strengthen Spain’s presence in the Gulf South might have done better to look south to New Spain for potential settlers eager for land and economic opportunity. Often seen as the weakest and most ineffectual of the powers active in the Gulf South in the eighteenth century, Spain’s representatives in the region recognized the limitations of their ability to impose their will and attempted instead to strike a balance in their dealings with the diverse inhabitants of the Gulf South. They thus made pragmatic adjustments to the complex reality of the region that benefited many groups. Gould points out that Spanish laws regulating manumission afforded slaves in Louisiana more possibilities for gaining their freedom than had existed



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under the French regime, and the Spanish system of compadrazgo (godparenthood) offered members of all socioeconomic groups and races a means of creating new kinship ties and perhaps extending their social safety net. The Spanish presence in Louisiana may have given Choctaws and Creeks greater bargaining power in dealing with the British and later the Americans. Spanish economic and land policies benefited French planters in Natchitoches, French merchants in New Orleans, Anglo settlers in several areas, and Creeks in West Florida. Spain established an effective municipal government in New Orleans that would be largely dominated by French merchants and planters, and the Spanish system of alliances afforded some protection to Seminoles and Black Seminoles in Florida. However monarchism is viewed today as a political system and whatever Spaniards might have done elsewhere in their extensive empire, in the eighteenth century the Spanish regime in the Gulf South developed successful approaches to the challenges of dealing with a highly diverse multiethnic and multinational population spread out over a vast region. Spanish policies and authorities offered some legal protections and guarantees to slaves, sought to maintain balanced relations with independent Indian groups, and did not discriminate against French residents and Anglo newcomers. Once the United States acquired this territory, American authorities introduced new forms of discrimination against nonwhites and greater restrictions on manumission, reduced protections for slave families, and carried out the forcible removal of Indian groups. We cannot know what might have happened had this region not been engulfed by the United States and had Spanish power in the Americas not been tested beyond its limits by the crises and revolutions of the Napoleonic era. Nonetheless, the pluralistic model of accommodation and balance that Spain fostered in the Gulf South is one that is well worth considering and that resonates for us today as society in the United States becomes ever more diverse.

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Abbreviations 66B Archives of the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama 66CD Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans 6 H9 Records of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo, Archivo General de Indias, Seville 6 EE8 Records of the Papeles Procedentes de Cuba, Archivo General de Indias, Seville 6