As related in a forthcoming issue of FORUM MAGAZINE, when Spain entered the conflict of the American Revolution in 1779, the British colony of West Florida became a frontline combat zone. One of Spain’s war-time goals was to reclaim the Floridas, both East and West, but the most tempting target was the latter, vulnerable to a build up of Spanish forces in adjacent Louisiana. A long rectangle of land extending between Louisiana and the Florida peninsula, British West Florida incorporated what is now the Florida Panhandle, southern Alabama, southern Mississippi, and the “Florida” parishes of Louisiana. Spain had lost this area to Britain in 1763 and King Charles III was determined to get it back. To achieve this, he appointed the redoubtable Bernardo de Gálvez as commander of troops and governor of Spanish Louisiana, anticipating he would be a formidable nemesis to British interests. Gálvez did not disappoint. Between 1779 and 1781 he systematically conquered Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola in a series of blows to British morale that rivaled those at Saratoga, the Cowpens, and Yorktown.
The most dramatic of the conquests was that of Pensacola, capital of West Florida and military headquarters for Major General John Campbell and some 2,000 British, Hessian, and Loyalist troops. In a six-week siege beginning in March 1781, Gálvez took over the harbor with a Spanish fleet, landed troops west of the city, and began a lengthy campaign of entrenchment and artillery bombardment. Campbell’s garrison and hundreds of allied Choctaw warriors put up a staunch defense, but when a French fleet arrived to reinforce Gálvez, Pensacola’s fate was sealed. Almost 7,000 Spanish and French troops and naval personnel were now part of the siege.
The end came suddenly. On May 8, a Spanish artillery shell detonated the powder house in the northernmost British redoubt. The catastrophic explosion killed almost 100 defenders and shattered the redoubt, allowing Gálvez to move his troops against the remaining fortifications. Campbell sued for terms and surrendered the city two days later.
The victory caused such a stir in Spain that Gálvez wrote and published a laudatory poem about it in 1782. An original copy is now part of the holdings of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. Among the causes for rejoice, the field marshal said in verse, were the total number of British captives. Of the 1113 who surrendered under arms, he had y entre ellos / tres Generales gallardos / ciento y veinte capitanes / y otros muy nobles soldados (three gallant generals, one hundred and twenty captains, and other soldiers most noble).
