British Colonial Office CO 5 East Florida Records Annotated List of Contents a DLAR Finding Aid by David Swain December 2014 British Colonial Office CO 5—East Florida Records Annotated List of Contents Introduction Contents: Summary Maps Themes Secretaries of State Timeline References General Table of Contents General Notes Summary This is the second Annotated List of Contents Finding Aid prepared by the David Library of the American Revolution on the British Colonial Office CO 5 records of East and West Florida, which are available on microfilm at the David Library. The finding aid for West Florida was completed in 2013 and is available through the David Library’s website/blogsite (www.dlar.org). Now, the David Library makes available the second, complementary finding aid for East Florida. In addition to providing introductory information about East Florida and the East Florida microfilmed papers, these pages offer comparisons between the West Florida and East Florida British colonial experiences. Each introduction is important for the information it provides about its separate colony, but this one also contains certain comparative information. The information presented here is in summary form only, with the intent of guiding researchers toward interesting leads and directions for more complete investigating—including use of the West and East Florida Colonial Office papers. As with West Florida, the history of the British colony of East Florida represents a tiny microcosm of unique experience within the much larger history of the developing British Empire in the late 18th Century. As such, it provides for historians an interesting example of one small colony’s attempt to emulate the accepted model for imperial/colonial development—and its ultimate failure. Yet the nature and degree of British colonial failure differ between the two Floridas. West Florida’s British rule was terminated abruptly by Spanish military conquest in 1781, but, regardless of that outcome, this colony had already failed to achieve viability, either economically or politically. East Florida was internally more successful both economically and politically, and it was never conquered militarily during the Revolutionary War. Instead, it made a somewhat orderly transition from British to Spanish rule, as stipulated in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, during the years 1783 to 1785. Still, East Florida was also a colonial failure for the British. It never rivaled the British West Indies as a colonial source of economic wealth for the mother country. When it reverted to Spanish rule, most of the British subjects who had emigrated there and devoted lives and livelihood to making East Florida prosper lost their homes and most of their property and investments, choosing to leave Florida to start over again elsewhere, mostly in the Bahamas. The British government eventually paid millions of pounds to settle claims by former East Florida residents. Since the 16th Century, Spain had ruled Florida as a single colony. In 1763, Britain made an early administrative decision to split the territory into two separate colonies— West Florida (capital at Pensacola) and East Florida (capital at the old Spanish capital city of St. Augustine). The boundary line between the two new colonies was the Apalachicola River. Under Spanish rule, the Atlantic coast boundary between Georgia and Florida had been drawn westward from the mouth of the St. Johns River. Even before James Grant, British East Florida’s first Governor, had left England, he successfully argued that the Florida line should be redrawn farther north, for both economic and strategic reasons, up the channel of the St. Marys River. This change, still reflected in today’s boundary between the two states, was accomplished by transferring a slice of Georgia territory to Florida, apparently without consulting Georgia. East Florida’s territory consisted of separate fringes of coastal swamps and forested lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, plus an extensive, forested interior accessible via the natural highways of major rivers, especially the St. Johns and St. Marys Rivers. Technically, East Florida included the entire peninsula, down to Key West. However, intentional British colonial settlement focused along the Atlantic coast north of Cape Canaveral and up the corridors of the major rivers. The British sought to establish in Florida’s sandy soils an export-based plantation economy similar to that in the British West Indies, which they knew brought prosperity to both colonial planters and the mother country. As in West Florida, the sandy soils were a challenge for successful agriculture. However, East Florida planters appear to have had greater success than their West Florida counterparts in developing successful export crops, especially indigo. Experiments with other crops, including rice, cotton, silk, wine, sugar cane, figs, and grapes were less successful. Exports of lumber, pitch, and turpentine were also important. An early issue in both Floridas was managing the changeover of landownership from Spanish to British. Laws differed, British ownership had to be certified, and the British King reserved the right, through his colonial governors, to make all land grants. Before British civil government was even established in East Florida, South Carolina speculators with ties to British speculators were roaming the territory, seeking to buy up land at cheap prices from Spanish owners who were leaving for Havana. The new British government in St. Augustine had to sort out this mess, refusing to recognize the Spanish land deeds presented by the speculators and seeking to control the spread of British property ownership through the land grant process—which of course benefited the new governmental officials as well as those well connected in East Florida or in London, including many absentee speculator landowners. Jonathan Bryan, a grand schemer/speculator from Georgia, tried a different approach. Between 1774 and 1776, he sought to obtain lands from Indian tribes, convincing them to sign “indenture” documents giving him use of Indian lands not yet legally open for white settlement. A big thinker, he claimed access to between four and five million acres in the interior of Georgia and East Florida. The governments of both Georgia and East Florida sought to discredit this obvious scam artist, refusing to recognize any of the deeds resulting from his land dealings. The early optimism of East Florida’s speculative land rush was soon dampened when the results of early experiments with export crops and non-slave labor proved disappointing. Years later, when both Floridas reverted to Spanish rule, the process was reversed as many British speculators and resident planters lost their lands and much of their investments. To obtain labor to work their plantations, most East Florida planters followed the example of the British West Indies, importing and purchasing African slaves. Two fascinating, entrepreneurial, wealthy, idealistic, and individualistic exceptions were Dr. Andrew Turnbull and Denys Rolle. In different ways, each sought to develop plantation agriculture in East Florida using European white labor. In practice, each failed well before the British colony was terminated. Turnbull married a Greek lady from Smyrna (now Izmir on the Turkish Mediterranean coast). His idealistic dream was to get rich using “free” indentured servants from Mediterranean countries, rather than black slaves, to operate prosperous plantations. He and fellow speculators obtained huge land grants inland from the Atlantic Ocean at a place he named after his wife’s home town (now New Smyrna Beach, Florida). He personally recruited and shipped 1,400 “Greeks” (actually from several countries) to East Florida and made a go of it. He soon learned that “free” Europeans tended to revolt when they felt mistreated, which they did in 1767 shortly after arriving and again in 1777. After a decade of trying, Turnbull gave up, with the help of Governor Patrick Tonyn, whose relationship with Turnbull was strained. The “Greek” workers were freed from their indentures, and most settled in the St. Augustine area. Today, an ethnic community of people now called “Minorcans” remains identifiable in St. Augustine. After several years of abandonment, Turnbull restarted his plantation enterprises, using purchased African slaves. Rolle separately tried to realize a similar dream, recruiting plantation labor from the poorhouses and streets of Britain. His extensive land-grant plantations, located up the St. Johns River, across from present day Green Cove Springs, became known as Rolletown. He learned more rapidly than Turnbull that “free” labor was not effective on plantations and more quickly replaced his original workforce with African slaves. West Florida lacked a Turnbull or a Rolle, but idealism was also present here, through a settlement of French Huguenots at Campbelltown, near Mobile. Without a wealthy private sponsor but with some public subsistence support, these settlers failed economically and lived in poverty. Geopolitically, British West and East Florida existed for only 20 years, framed by two Treaties of Paris. The first, at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, gave Spanish Florida to victorious Britain. The second, at the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, gave British West and East Florida back to victorious Spain. Internally, both Florida colonies were required to develop from scratch the institutions and practices of civil government