Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785-1810

by Andrew McMichael

Overview

The book contextualizes the 1810 rebellion, and by extension the southern frontier, within the broader Atlantic World, showing how both local factors and events in Europe affected lives in the Spanish borderlands. Breaking with traditional scholarship, McMichael examines contests over land and slaves as a determinant of loyalty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820336503
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	01/25/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

ANDREW McMICHAEL is an associate professor of history at Western Kentucky University. McMichael is also the author of History on the Web and an assistant editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 30.

Table of Contents

List of Maps, Tables, and Figures     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     1
Settling the West Florida Frontier: Land, Wealth, and Loyalty     10
Working the West Florida Frontier: Slavery and the Accumulation of Wealth     35
Owning the West Florida Frontier: The International Microcosm of the Louisiana Purchase     54
Strains on the System I: Filibustering     76
Strains on the System II: Slavery and the Law     102
Testing the Bounds of Loyalty: Property and Crime     127
Breaking the Bonds: The End of Spanish Rule in West Florida     149
Epilogue     169
Notes     177
Bibliography     211
Index     223

Editorial Reviews

Atlantic Loyalties does an excellent job in placing West Florida into an international context. . . . An interesting book that sheds historical light on an area all-too-often downplayed or not mentioned at all.

Journal of American History

McMichael's book is a powerful argument for writing borderlands history from the ground up, concentrating on what actually happened in a given place and fitting that place into an Atlantic framework. The story of Anglo-American expansion into the Spanish borderlands has traditionally been told as the inevitable triumph of English liberty over Spanish tyranny. In this pathbreaking study, McMichael shows that government in the Baton Rouge district of West Florida was enlightened and mild and that Anglo settlers, whose allegiance was more practical than patriotic, were content to live under Spanish law as long as Spain was able to grant lands and protect property.

author of Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida - Amy Turner Bushnell

Atlantic Loyalties is the finest book written on the southern borderlands. Focusing upon an obscure region the Baton Rouge district of West Florida, he has carefully chronicled the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that gave context to the lives and loyalties of the French, Spanish, British, and American settlers. This is a revolutionary book that moves easily between the local and the international, revealing the shifting loyalties and abiding self-interest of the settlers.

editor of Chained to the Rock of Adversity - Virginia Meacham Gould

One of the most impressive achievements of Atlantic Loyalties is to establish a road map for studying West Florida in particular and the southern borderlands in general. McMichael offers an important counterpart to the standard narrative of the system of British slavery that began in the upper South before heading South and West. Instead, we learn about a more complex and dynamic process through which enslavement and freedom, plantation agriculture and frontier settlement, regional connections and international tensions overlapped to shape life in North America.

author of The Nation's Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America - Peter Kastor

Offers exceptionally well written, interesting, and innovative approaches that promise to breathe new interpretive life into what many may consider an old topic . . . As one of the stronger anthologies in the field published in recent years, this collection will be useful to specialists and students alike . . . the range of interpretations and the nuanced understandings of American slavery will certainly benefit scholars for years to come.

Journal of Southern History

[Andrew] McMichael does a good job of describing the operations and end of twenty-five years of Spanish rule in West Florida. He uses a rich variety of archival sources to illustrate and establish his key points. This is bottom-up history that takes into account theoretical themes but is ever on the search for concrete evidence on which to base the more abstract claims. Others would do well to imitate his work.

Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer