Complementing Florida’s early spatial fluctuation among island, peninsula, and continental Southeast is the mobility of its indigenous and nonnative populations. Reports penned by Spanish missionaries who founded Catholic missions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently characterize Florida’s variety of mostly nonagricultural Indian societies—including the Calusa, Guale, Tequesta, and Timucua—as “scattered” and nomadic. Such descriptions probably emerged from the difficulty of converting indigenous peoples who moved seasonally from place to place, and even lived offshore in fishing villages.8
Indigenous populations, along with a variety of newcomers to Florida during this period, both contested and enabled Spanish rule, which lasted until 1763.9 Imperial rivals from France sought to establish a colony near present-day Jacksonville. Pirates of many nations attacked the Florida coast seasonally, sometimes capturing Spanish forts and seizing vessels.10 Some indigenous Indian groups helped sustain the Spanish mission system, but missionization was always a contested process, and by the early eighteenth century many converts began to flee, Indian revolts had challenged the authority of the missionaries, and Spanish-borne diseases ravaged the population.11 Further challenges arose when Indians in other parts of the Southeast began coming to Florida. Yamasees and Lower Creeks, armed and sometimes led by the British, raided the peninsula for Indian captives to use and sell as slaves.12
Yet not all populations drawn to Spanish Florida (1565–1763 and 1783–1821) contested colonial rule. Many became allies in exchange for freedom. African slaves, who began escaping to Florida from British colonies during the late seventeenth century, gained sanctuary and liberty in Florida upon conversion to Catholicism.13 And during Florida’s Second Spanish period, when civil war broke out among the Creek Nation of the Southeast during 1813, many of these Indians—today known as Seminole—began streaming southward onto the peninsula, where Spain recruited them to protect the colony from other Native groups and European imperial competitors. African and Creek migration to Florida would long outlast the end of Spanish rule in 1821, for Africans continued running south to freedom until the Civil War, and Creeks arrived in waves until the 1830s. By and large the two groups lived as allies, and the Seminole augmented their Florida chiefdoms by absorbing outsiders. They granted African newcomers protection in exchange for tribute, and welcomed some formerly missionized “Spanish Indians,” the U.S. name for Florida’s indigenous populations who had been almost entirely decimated by warfare and disease by the mid-eighteenth century.14
Early encounters and alliances among various populations in Spanish Florida produced new cartographic understandings of the region on European and American maps. During the early eighteenth century many of these maps began to represent Florida as multiple islands. The islands of Florida likely originated when slave raiders from the British colonies solicited topographic information about the Everglades from local Indians who may have described the southern part of Florida as a flat expanse of water studded with innumerable rises of dry land.15 A cartographic conception of Florida as islands persisted on some of the most popular maps of North America from the early eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, while other popular maps featured the region as a peninsula. These competing spatial representations of Florida influenced geographic conceptions of the whole continent, for on many maps of the continent the islands of Florida are scattered so widely that they blend with those of the Caribbean, making it difficult to tell where North America ends.
An inaccurate sense of Florida’s location and terrestrial shape exacerbated the enormous challenges to colonial rule that Great Britain faced upon gaining Florida from Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War.16 The British Board of Trade quickly launched a massive cartographic project to survey and map the peninsula, reef, and keys. This project was the first step toward defending Florida from imperial and Native rivals and enticing British settlers who would render the region a southern extension of Great Britain’s continental empire. The British divided Florida into two provinces: West Florida included the panhandle and adjacent parts of present-day Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; East Florida consisted of the entire peninsula stretching south of the Georgia border.
British planters from the Carolinas came to East Florida enticed by generous land grants, and soon “Florida fever” spread through New England, producing new maps, surveys, and natural histories, such as Bernard Romans’s lavishly illustrated Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775).17 British plantations exploiting the work of slaves and indentured servants spread along the St. Johns River near Jacksonville, where agriculture flourished until the outbreak of the American Revolution.18 Briefly during the war this area became a stronghold for Loyalists who fled south from Charleston and Savannah along with their slaves. Yet as fighting disrupted plantation labor and slaves escaped to Seminole villages in the interior, British planters fled Florida for good.
Many early U.S. political figures were intrigued by the prospect of including Florida within the new nation. From their point of view, U.S. control over the region would bolster the emerging nation’s claims to the continent by guaranteeing mastery of the Gulf of Mexico and adjoining commercial waterways such as the Mississippi River.19 For this reason John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison urged claims to the Floridas from the moment independence was declared. Soon these and other U.S. observers had additional cause to do so: upon the war’s conclusion in 1783, Great Britain retroceded the Floridas to Spain, which immediately revived its sanctuary policy, drawing to the Floridas an ever larger number of slaves from plantations across the U.S. South.20
For a newly emergent, slave-holding nation with expansionist designs on the continent, Spanish Florida was an unavoidable topic of concern and debate. The unstable borderland harbored populations both black and white from across and beyond the country, and many of these groups were averse, or even hostile, to the prospect of U.S. rule.21 After the American Revolution Spain opened a generous land grant policy to foreign and non-Catholic immigrants, encouraging planters with their slaves and servants from all over the Caribbean and North America to settle in Spanish Florida alongside Cuban planters and homesteaders.22 And although in 1790 Spain yielded to U.S. pressures to rescind the sanctuary policy, Africans and Creeks continued migrating to Seminole country. The savannahs and swamps of the Florida interior would remain a stronghold of black freedom for many decades to come.23
Spanish Florida’s threat to U.S. chattel slavery compelled Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe to pursue the Floridas during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1812 agitated planters, who lived north of the Florida-Georgia border and called themselves “Patriots,” independently invaded East Florida in an attempt to overthrow Spain. Although Seminoles and Africans joined together and repelled the planters, this unprovoked invasion caused fighting that destroyed what little plantation culture had developed in Spanish Florida after the Revolution. It also provoked Spain to bring a militia of Africans from Cuba to defend the peninsula.24 Soon the British also armed Africans in Florida. During the War of 1812 British troops engaged both Seminoles and Africans to build a fort near Tallahassee and enticed additional Africans to Spanish Florida by offering freedom for loyalty to the British crown.25 Unable to tolerate an ever-enlarging population of Indians and free, armed blacks from the Caribbean and the U.S. South on the nation’s borders, Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in 1818. With the tacit approval of some government officials, Jackson seized Florida for the United States, intensifying local border skirmishes into what we now call the First Seminole War (1817–18), and compelling Spain to relinquish Florida for good.26
By the time the United States annexed Florida officially in 1821, its local populations and landscape were already infamous subjects of national interest. Florida had long challenged plantation slavery as well as control of the Gulf of Mexico, border security, and the burgeoning project of Indian removal. The new U.S. territory of Florida thus raised challenges to national cohesion and imperial expansion over and beyond the continent—challenges that only intensified as expansionist