This is Part II in a multi-part series about the American West. You can read Part I here and Part III here. It probes our understanding and perceptions of the West as a historical place, or collection of places. It aims to get at the root of why we think about and portray the West the ways that we do. It also indulges the author’s personal fondness for the West.
“Whereas We have taken into Our Royal Consideration the extensive and valuable Acquisitions in America, secured to Our Crown by the late Definitive Treaty of Peace… We have thought fit… to erect within the Countries and Islands ceded and confirmed to Us by the said Treaty, Four distinct and separate Governments, stiled and called by the Names of Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada…”
So begins the royal proclamation issued by King George III on October 7, 1763.[1]
Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada were spoils of war. France and Spain had established these respective colonies but lost them to Britain at the conclusion of the late Seven Years’ War. Now the Crown was bringing them into the British imperial fold. The proclamation was an administrative directive on how Great Britain was to govern its new territories.
Spanish Florida extended from the Atlantic Coast to New Orleans. The Spanish and British squabbled over the border between Florida and Georgia but it wasn’t until all of Florida came under British control that colonists established hard boundaries. The British split Florida in two along the Apalachicola River. The northern boundary of East Florida is the same today as it was then: the St. Marys River from the sea to its source, and from its source westward to the confluence of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers where they become the Apalachicola River.
West Florida was a different matter. The British originally established the northern boundary of West Florida at the 31st parallel but revised it multiple times to appropriate more land. By raising the boundary further northward, the community of Natchez — which one British officer described as “a place of the greatest consequence” — fell under British control. It also gave the British a gateway to the interior and the fertile Mississippi-Yazoo Delta. Through a series of treaties, they raised the boundary as far north as the confluence of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers above the 32nd parallel.
Also In the Royal Proclamation, King George banned all British settlements in the territory around the Great Lakes and Ohio River Basin. This land he declared an Indian Reserve. But King George did not ban all western settlements. He singled out the newly acquired territories on the continent, including West Florida, as places for “speedy settling of our said new Governments.” And these new governments were to be remarkably liberal.[2]
The proclamation bestowed almost complete political autonomy unto the new colonies. King George reserved the right to appoint colonial governors, but he empowered governors to call general assemblies, settle property disputes with people already living within the new territories, and dispense land grants to veterans of the late war with no fees attached for ten years.
This was no less the flavor of self-government British colonists enjoyed in soon-to-be revolutionary hotbeds like Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, the king appointed the governor but the governor appointed his own Governor’s Council (the upper house) while eligible voters elected members to the House of Representatives (the lower house) as part of a bicameral legislature. Contrast that with Virginia, where the governor and Governor’s Council were all appointed by the king, and the difference in Crown influence is apparent.
This was British West Florida, at least as it appeared on paper. Who it was that actually occupied the land, though, was a different matter.
The Spanish
The Spanish were the first Europeans to populate the Gulf Coast region in the 1500s. They undertook colonization through military conquest and resource appropriation. They also introduced infectious diseases that further devastated Native populations. They established a settlement at Pensacola Bay but abandoned it after a devastating hurricane in the 1600s. The Spanish then concentrated their military and mining operations in today’s Central and South America. To them, the Gulf Coast was little more than a backwater region.
Around this time, the French began to establish footholds in the Caribbean. Piracy increased. The dual threat of an emerging French influence and pirate raids in the Caribbean posed direct risks to Spanish wealth. Spanish fleets carrying gold and silver from the Americas to Europe via the Caribbean needed protection. At the close of the 17th century, the Spanish re-established a presidio and mission at Pensacola.
Surrounded as it was by pine and cypress trees, Pensacola Bay offered a strategic base at which to organize Spanish defenses. Abundant timber provided lumber to build masts and fortify ships, the deepwater harbor offered a port for commercial enterprise, and from the mission they could continue to spread the Catholic faith.
The French
The French had entered the lower Mississippi Valley from the north. Unlike the Spanish, who undertook colonization by military conquest, the French pursued colonization through trade. They primarily sought beaver pelts. To drive trapping operations and additional settlements in the American interior, France incorporated the Company of the West in the early 18th century. It also began occupying Spanish-claimed islands in the Caribbean.
France also sought to bolster its presence by allying with Indigenous tribes and nations, unlike the Spanish who sought violent conquest over Indigenous peoples. As a result, French culture along the Gulf Coast melded with Indigenous, Caribbean, and African cultures and tempered resistance to French imperial authority, thereby centralizing power within the emerging plantation economy system. In the early 1700s France established New Orleans, securing, for a time anyway, French strength in the lower Mississippi Valley. As part of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, though, France ceded its continental holdings to Great Britain but not before handing New Orleans over to the Spanish in secret treaty the year prior.
The Natives
Indigenous tribes and nations long predated the Europeans in the lower Mississippi watershed and along the Gulf Coast.[3] By the mid 1700s, though, local Indigenous sovereignties were small tribal communities — the French called them “Les Petite Nations” — but they managed to resist European colonization.
Sometimes they staged resistance through armed defiance but it was also through social exchange, cultural interaction, and protective political systems. They formed multinational settlements, forged alliances among themselves, pitted European nations against each other, and exploited economic opportunities to their benefit. A 1764 letter the governor of West Florida remarked at how some Indigenous peoples “are at one moment demanding Presents [tribute], and next Moment sending insolent Messages, and this they know we must bear,” showing just how resigned the British actually were to Indigenous power.
The Company of Military Adventurers, the New England-based land corporation with designs to settle the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, were among those in this period who acknowledged the presence of Indians but couldn’t reconcile their ties to the land. To them, Indian lands were up for grabs. To justify Indigenous dispossession of their land, colonists characterized Indian inhabitants as poor stewards incapable of raising surplus crops to generate maximum profit. The land needed European hands to nurture it. One British officer observed in 1763 that Pensacola was “still uncultivated,” and though he blamed this on the “Laziness of the Spaniards,” he also noted that all around them “Game is extremly plenty in the Woods and the Sea Supplies quantities of fish of different sorts & good.” It was an implication that seemed to suggest the rich hunting grounds of the Lower Mississippi Watershed were primed for the taking, despite noting in the very next sentence the “numerous and near” Indians who occupied them.
The borders and boundaries King George drew on his maps were, in a sense, meaningless. They assumed an adherence to political boundaries and a deference to the treaties which established them. They were mere lines and words on a piece of paper that created an intangible, imagined world. Political boundaries are abstract concepts. Visible though they are on paper, they’re invisible on the ground.
King Georg proclaimed a world that didn’t exist.
Part III to follow.
[1] The Royal Proclamation of 1763 played a major role in shaping the geopolitical landscape of the new United States, Canada, and Indigenous nations. British North Americans used the Proclamation Line’s prohibition on western settlement to help justify the American Revolution. Canada continues to recognize the Proclamation as a basis of the treaty-making process throughout Canada, and is referred to in the Section 25 of the Constitution Act 1982.
[2] The government of West Florida, though, got off to a rocky start. Its colonial assembly was delayed for years while the governor and the military commander at Pensacola sparred over the supremacy of civil or military authority — not an auspicious beginning.
[3] Including the Biloxis, Tunicas, Natchez, Chakchiumas, Pascagoulas, Taensas, Avoyelles, Houmas, Ishaks, Yazoos, Tiouxs, Acolapissas, Koroas, Chatots, Tawasas, Pensacolas, Mobilians, Apalachees, Mougoulashas, Chitimachas, Ofogoulas, Bayagoulas, the Grand and Petit Tohomés, and more.
The Sketch Book of Nick DeLuca 
Leave a comment