The fourteenth colony: Florida and the American Revolution in the South

• Main Author: Smith, Roger C
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2011
• Subjects: American history; History; Military history
• ISBN: 9781303773228; 1303773228

This study will examine the southern theater of the American Revolution from a British perspective. By looking beyond New England, Bunker Hill, and the “original” thirteen British colonies, utilizing the same map of the British Americas one would find at the war ministry in Whitehall, it becomes obvious that Florida was not a peripheral entity to British interests on the North American continent. I will argue three intertwined points: 1) that Florida was the geographic center of the British Americas and, therefore, integral to the American Revolution early on; 2) that the southern colonies were a significant and continual focus of Great Britain’s war ministry from the outbreak of the conflict in 1775 resulting in two major southern campaigns, the first beginning in March 1776; and, 3) that the famous British Southern campaign of 1780 was but one phase of a more extensive British southern invasion, which originated from St. Augustine and Pensacola in 1778, and encompassed the southern mainland from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. It is my hope and intention that this study will not only redraw the map of the American Revolution, but redefine the importance of the southern theater’s impact on the war. The objective of this study is to identify one of the most marginalized stories in American history and recreate it from an Atlantic world perspective by utilizing many of the principle characters of the southern British war effort. My goal is to destabilize one of the more traditional narratives in American Revolutionary folklore by demonstrating the significant importance placed on the southern region by the British throughout the entirety of the war. By rescuing Florida and other “peripheral” zones from regionalized history by inserting this discussion into the primary dialogue of Revolutionary conversations, I will demonstrate how influential they were to the larger panoply of America’s struggle for independence.