[1] After war was declared on Great Britain, the British launched a retalitory strike on the provincial capitol of Upper Louisiana.
Given fair warning, De Leyba managed to raise 1000 piastres, including 400 of his own money, for the construction of Fort San Carlos.
Afterwards, many of the villagers from the area around St. Louis began to blame him for their troubles, writing anonymous letters to the government in New Orleans detailing his supposed misbehaviors.
In 1831, one historian Judge, Wilson Primm, wrote a lecture in which he stated that the governor had not only sold the gunpowder stores to the enemy, he had acted in a cowardly manner during the engagement and deliberately impeded the defense of the village.
Supported by accounts made by survivors some fifty years after the battle, these accusations were accepted by many historians for much of the nineteenth century, and it is only recently that some have begun to reconsider the role De Leyba played in the defense of the American frontier.