Florida. February 10, 1763 Florida was ceded by Spain to the United Kingdom by the Treaty of Paris. History of English Florida.
On May 14, 1781 Spain recovers Florida after the famous victory in the battle of Pensacola.
The English corsair-pirate Francis Drake burned in 1586 St. Augustine in Florida (now the United States) when the parish church and the town hall were already erected, which had to be rebuilt. In 1587 the towns of Tolomato, Topiqui, Nombre de Dios, San Sebastián, San Antonio, San Pedro and San Juan had been founded. In 1588 an attempt was made to restore the mission of Ajacán. In the middle of September 1597, five friars were martyred, but seven years later, normality reigned, beginning a time of striking missionary success and becoming entire indigenous peoples everywhere.
Beginning of the presence of England to the north.
In 1607 the English settled in present-day Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay, and founded Jamestown. Spain considered the fact as a usurpation and a threat, and reacted immediately, although weakly. In 1609 Felipe III sent an expedition against this establishment under the command of Captain Fernández de Écija and Ensign Juan Rodríguez de Cartaya and Juan de Santiago, but since his force was insufficient, he did not attack it, merely provoking the hostilities of Indians against the English; this indirect war technique would later revert against the Spanish establishment, and then it was ineffective because the king of Spain, to attract England, contemplated with his settlers, as he expected them to fail on their own, which did not happen.
Meanwhile new Franciscan missions appeared among the Indians. And so, in 1612, those of Georgia were created, and two years later they amounted to 20 villages of Christian Indians raised in Florida. In 1633 the Appalachian missions began, with which in 1634 there were 44 missionary establishments and 30,000 indigenous people converted to Christianity, spread over a territory located more than 200 km from the Atlantic.
After the plundering of the English buccaneer John Davis to St. Augustine and the rebellion of the Appalachian Indians that caused the retreat of those prosperous missions, the English, taking advantage of such circumstances, gradually advanced southward and consolidated their positions by establishing themselves in 1670, and definitively, in Charleston (South Carolina), leaving only the missions of the current state of Georgia between the Spanish settlements of Florida and the English of Carolina.
As a result of the attack by the English pirate Robert Searle on St. Augustine in 1668, it was decided to replace the wooden fort and build a stone castle to protect the city. The construction of the Castillo de San Marcos began in October 1672. The workers were brought from Havana, Cuba and the work was extended twenty-three years, being completed in 1695.
In 1674, new Spanish missionaries returned to present-day Georgia.
Near the old Villa de Santa María 1559 (destroyed by a hurricane), the Spaniards were restored fifteen years later and founded Panzacola, in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Bay of Pensacola, to protect themselves against a possible French settlement. Even so, due to lack of means, the French occupied and populated the neighboring colony of Louisiana, thus separating the Viceroyalty of New Spain from that of Florida, which remained in the General Captaincy of Cuba.
During the Spanish War of Succession, it was violently fought, with each contender leaning on the tribes of neighboring Indians.
In 1702 the other missions in the Appalachian region were destroyed and San Agustín attacked again, although the British artillery was ineffective against the walls of the Castle of San Marcos. A fleet from Havana forced the British to burn their ships to avoid their capture and to fight in retreat by land. Before leaving, they set fire to the city, which was partially destroyed.
In response, there was a Franco-Spanish attack against Charleston in 1706, which was left in a skirmish. Over time, all the missions in the northern part of Florida were destroyed and uninhabited, an occasion that took advantage of the English James Oglethorpe to create a new English colony, called Georgia, between the Savannah River (or in the Spanish spelling Yamacraf) and Altamaba. In this way the territorial extension of the primitive Florida was gradually reduced.
In 1739 the Seat War broke out. The immediate cause of the conflagration was an incident near the coast of Florida when the captain of a Spanish coast guard, Juan León Fandiño, intercepted the Rebbeca under Robert Jenkins and had him cut off an ear; after which he released him with this insolent message: "Go and tell your King that I will do the same if he dares the same." This event inflamed British public opinion and resulted in the United Kingdom declaring war on Spain.
General Oglethorpe attacked and conquered Fort Mosé, defended by 100 raw recruits.
After receiving news of it, the Spanish counterattack did not wait and that same night the troops of Montiano assaulted the Mosé killing or capturing more than 100 Britons of the garrison that had remained there, while Oglethorpe and the bulk of his troops (more of 1,000) installed some cannons and put a place for the second time at the Castillo de San Marcos, trusting it to be able to render it with a continuous bombardment. However, a small Spanish ship was able to evade the blockade and give notice to Havana, from where supplies were sent, ending the siege after 38 days without having succeeded in surrendering the castle to the British.
During the war of the Succession of Austria, the American border of Spanish and British territory (present-day Georgia) was fought again.
In 1740, again Oglethorpe put siege for the third time to St. Augustine, but failed, although after exterminating most of the Timucua (allies of Spain) the British captured the Spanish wooden fort of San Simón (now Georgia) and so they controlled the territory north of present-day Florida with the name of Georgia. In the face of British pressure in 1748, Spain negotiated with the Cric (Muscoguía group from the Seminoles), Chacta and Chicaza, which populated the territory of the current states located south of the Tennessee River and west of Georgia, and signed treaties with the King of Spain, which became virtually its protector.
A realistic refugee organized the Panton, Leslie and Company merchant society, which established, with Spanish permission, trading posts in Florida and trafficked with the Indians by providing them with weapons and supplies. These tribes dedicated themselves to attacking the British border towns.
By the Treaty of Paris of February 10, 1763 Florida was ceded by Spain to the United Kingdom of Great Britain, along with the territories to the east and southeast of the Mississippi. The United Kingdom obtains the return of the port of Havana and the city of Manila (Philippines), occupied during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) to which Spain was forced to enter in 1761).
As compensation to Spain for the loss of Florida, the Kingdom of France (which to gain the allied participation of Spain in the Seven Years' War, had already offered it according to the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762)), cedes to Spain the Louisiana: it was the immense territories that since 1673 had claimed after their explorations that descended from their colonies in New France (present Quebec, and Acadia, Canada, by the Mississippi River and that had been named Louisiana in honor of the Sun King .
The British divided the territories received in 1763 into two parts:
East Florida, with capital in San Agustín. It largely occupied the peninsula of that name, which forms the current US state of Florida (without the cities of Mobile and Pensacola).
West Florida, with capital in Pensacola. Its territory is now part of the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
The second period under Spanish sovereignty occurred during the war of the Independence of the United States when the Spaniards recovered West Florida in 1779 after the battles of Baton Rouge, Fort Charlotte, San Fernando de Omoa and Mobila and East Florida after the famous victory in the battle of Pensacola (March-May 1781), in which Bernardo de Gálvez, Spanish governor of La Luisiana (Spanish since 1763), gathered troops from different parts of the Empire to deal with the British and brought additional supplies de Cuba, Louisiana, etc., gathering an army of about seven thousand men, a considerable size for the time. This army defeated the British troops of John Campbell, achieving a decisive victory.
Shortly thereafter, Galvez seized the New Providence Island in the Bahamas, aborting the last British plan of resistance, thereby maintaining Spanish rule over the Caribbean and accelerating the triumph of American weapons over the British.
Jamaica being the last British stronghold of importance in the Caribbean, Galvez set out to organize a landing on the island to add it to the territories under Spanish sovereignty but, in the middle of the preparations, he was surprised by the end of the war. At the end of the contest, Florida (eastern and western Florida) was officially returned to Spain by the Treaty of Versailles of 1783; it also conserved the recovered territories of Menorca and recovered the coasts of Nicaragua, Honduras (Coast of the Mosquitos) and Campeche. The Spanish sovereignty over the Providencia colony was also recognized.