The Spanish Siege of Pensacola

In 1779, the king of Spain declared war on Britain. Like his ally the king of France, he decided to fight his British enemies while they were busy trying to defeat the American Revolution. As soon as he declared war, the Mississippi River and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico became a wartime borderland. The Spanish colony of Louisiana was on the west side of the Mississippi River, and the British colony of West Florida was on the east side. Because thirteen British colonies rebelled against Britain in the Revolution, people often assume that there were only thirteen British American colonies, but in fact Britain had around twenty-six American colonies, from Jamaica and other colonies in the West Indies and Caribbean to Canada. A major goal of the Spanish king was to take colonies from the British, including West Florida.

As soon as war was declared between Spain and Britain, leaders within each of those empires sent orders to their commanders in Louisiana and West Florida. The governor and commanding general of Spanish Louisiana was Bernardo de Gálvez, and he was stationed in Louisiana’s capital, New Orleans. The commanding general of the colony of British West Florida was John Campbell, and he was stationed at that colony’s capital, Pensacola. The orders were strikingly similar. British King George III ordered General Campbell to defend his colony and prepare to invade Louisiana. Spanish King Carlos III ordered General Gálvez to defend Louisiana and prepare to attack West Florida.

Another similarity was that neither king sent many troops or supplies to help their generals carry out these orders. Britain and Spain both had large armies and navies, but they were stretched thin in this global war. King George and King Carlos did both order that troops and supplies be sent to the Gulf Coast front, but the British and Spanish generals who were in charge of the war in all of the Americas were reluctant to send what little they had. British forces were busy trying to defeat the thirteen rebelling colonies, of course, and they were defending their colonies in the West Indies against the Spanish, French, and Dutch. Spanish forces were trying to take Gibraltar (a territory bordering Spain) from Britain, and Spain and France even hoped to invade Britain itself.

Both Campbell and Gálvez realized that, while they continued to lobby their imperial superiors for troops and supplies, they would also need to look for help locally. Colonists were an obvious source of soldiers. Colonial men often served in local units called militias. As soon as war looked likely, Gálvez started putting a huge effort into increasing the size of Louisiana’s militias. Some of Louisiana’s colonists had recently arrived from Acadia in French Canada (they became Louisiana’s “Cajuns”) and hated the British for having kicked them out of their homeland, so they were easy to recruit. When Gálvez learned that the upper-class men of New Orleans weren’t in the militia “because they do not want to serve in formations next to their own shoemakers and hairdressers,” he appealed to their elitism and established a militia just for them, the “Carabineros de la Luisiana,” with fancy uniforms with gilt buttons and gold thread buttonholes and matching sabers. Gálvez also recruited free Black men in New Orleans into their own militia with their own fancy uniforms (though not as fancy as the Carabineros). He married a local woman named Marie Felice de St. Maxent of a prominent New Orleans family. He also put money and time into diplomacy with Native American nations in the region. He hosted delegations of the large and powerful Muscogee Creeks and Choctaws as well as smaller Native nations including the Attakapas, Biloxis, Chitimachas, Natchitoches, Opelousas, and Pascagoulas. He wanted them to fight for Spain, but if they were unwilling, he asked only that they “take no part in the quarrel between the white people.”

In contrast to Gálvez, British commander John Campbell in Pensacola was really bad at convincing people to fight for the colony. He didn’t even try to organize colonists into the militia. He thought of them as potential rebels and enemies like those in Boston and was snobbish about the abilities of militias versus regular British army troops. While Gálvez understood that Native American communities made their own decisions about war and only sent fighters if they believed that the war was in their communities’ interests, Campbell believed that he should be able to order Native American fighters to go wherever and whenever he thought they should fight. He refused to listen even to his own official who was in charge of diplomacy with Native Americans, who said that General Campbell “does not understand anything of Indians or their affairs[.] He thinks they are to be used like slaves or a people void of natural sense.”[1]

Because of Gálvez’s preparations, he was ready to march against West Florida almost as soon as Spain declared war on Britain. With his few regular army soldiers plus his militia troops and Native allies, he quickly forced British posts on the border to surrender. Those victories increased local support for him as well as support from the Spanish government. King Carlos III wrote him an official commendation recognizing “the great valor and courage shown by their scanty forces.” In 1780, Gálvez managed to take Mobile, and after that victory, he was able to persuade Spanish officials to send a large fleet of twenty ships with more than 1,300 soldiers and sailors from Cuba and Spain. In the meantime, British officials had sent about the same number of soldiers to Campbell. But Campbell was outnumbered because he didn’t have significant colonial and Native American forces—Gálvez’s total force was more than 7,000.

So it was that in March 1781, Gálvez’s fleet sailed from New Orleans to the mouth of Pensacola Bay to try to seize the capital of West Florida. The Spanish naval commander told Gálvez that he wasn’t sure that the bay was deep enough for the ships, so Gálvez took matters into his own hands and led the first ship into the harbor, as British artillery guns fired on it. He proved that ships could enter the bay, so the rest of the ships followed. In a siege, the attackers surround a post, preventing it from getting any reinforcements and trying to get it to surrender by firing artillery guns at it. So the Spanish ships encircled Pensacola by water while Spanish troops surrounded it by land. They besieged Pensacola for nearly two months. On May 8, 1781, Spanish artillery fire finally ignited a gunpowder storage house, which blew open a hole in Pensacola’s defenses, and Spanish troops poured in through the gap. Campbell raised the white flag and surrendered.

The Siege of Pensacola had important results for the American Revolution. Because it was the capital of West Florida, the British had to surrender the whole colony to the Spanish. West Florida was the first non-rebelling colony that the British lost, and they knew there were many more colonies that they might lose to Spain, France, and the Netherlands if the war lasted much longer. The Spanish knew that too. Right after Campbell’s surrender, Gálvez sailed with his Spanish troops to the West Indies to reinforce French naval forces there, who then sailed north to help George Washington at the Siege of Yorktown. Gálvez’s forces next won the Bahamas from Britain and were preparing to attack Jamaica, the most valuable colony in the British empire, when the British government decided to stop fighting the Americans and to agree to American independence. So the Siege of Pensacola helped the United States to win its independence, even though that wasn’t really the goal of the Spanish.

Kathleen DuVal, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the co-author, with Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, of Give Me Liberty! (7th edition, Norton, 2022) and the author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2015).

[1] Alexander Cameron to Lord George Germain, October 31, 1780,  in K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783 (Colonial Office Series), vol. 18 (Dublin: Irish University Press,1977), pp. 221–222.