History of Pensacola, Florida
The city's strategic but isolated position, combined with continued European rivalries played out in North America, led to it changing hands among different Western powers a number of times.
[3][4] This area was first documented as "Panzacola" in 1686, when a maritime expedition, headed by Juan Enríquez Barroto and Antonio Romero, visited Pensacola Bay in February 1686.
This site would have had easy access by a dugout canoe, the main mode of transportation used by the people; they traveled primarily by the waterways rather than through the thick vegetation.
The first Spanish settlement expedition in the region was large but short-lived, entering the bay on August 15, 1559, and led by Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano.
But, weeks later, the colony was decimated by a hurricane on September 19, 1559,[4][11] which killed an unknown number of sailors, sank six ships, grounded a seventh, and ruined supplies.
[12] After their return to Mexico, Sigüenza wrote a glowing report and enthusiastically endorsed the notion of a settlement on the bay in his letter to the viceroy.
Charged with such a task, Siguenza, prone to exaggeration,[12] described a veritable paradise,[12] teeming with food resources and ample economic opportunities.
[15] Governor of French Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, took Pensacola for France on May 14, 1719, arriving with his fleet and a large ground force of allied Indian warriors.
[2] The Spanish commander of Pensacola, Metamoras, had not heard that war had been declared between France and Spain, and his garrison was so small that he believed it would be useless to resist.
At four o'clock in the afternoon, he surrendered on the conditions that private citizens and property should not be disturbed, and the garrison should be allowed to march out with honors of war and be transported to Havana, Cuba in French vessels.
Population growth remained modest during this period, which was characterized by Spanish missionary work with Indians and the development of Pensacola as an important port and military outpost.
Spain's informal alliance with France meant that the greatest threat to colonial Florida was from British privateers, smugglers and traders.
Their ability to sell goods to the Indians and Spanish colonists more cheaply than companies from Spain did diminished local support for the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid.
During the period of British rule, the area began to prosper following establishment of the Panton, Leslie Company in 1785, which had a trading post attracting Creek people from southern Alabama and Georgia.
[17] During the American Revolution (1775–1783), the state of Georgia joined the Patriot cause, but East and West Florida, like the Canadian colonies, remained loyal to the British.
After exchanges of land with the British following the American Revolutionary War, in North America the Spanish controlled the entire Gulf Coast and Mississippi River Valley.
The United States thought of the Mississippi River and New Orleans as vital to its shipment and trade of such American goods such as cotton, tobacco, and corn.
American Southern settlers of inland Alabama and riverfront Mississippi were rapidly developing large cotton plantations to meet growing demand for the product.
Anglo-American settlement of West Florida increased and the Spanish, busy with growing rebellions throughout Mexico and South America, were not able to focus on fortifying the region.
[19] The residents of the prosperous Alabama and Mississippi territories, eager to avoid being trapped in landlocked states without seaports, agitated to annex more of West Florida.
An 1820 Spanish census recorded 181 households, with about one third of mixed race: typically a white man with a woman of black or mulatto ancestry, and their children.
In the Panhandle, most slaves outside Pensacola were held by people in Tallahassee and in the plantation counties near the Georgia border, notably Jackson, Gadsden, Leon, and Jefferson.
In the Battle of Santa Rosa Island in October 1861, Fort Pickens repulsed a Confederate advance to remain in Union hands, as it did throughout the war.
In the late 19th century, Florida, like other southern states, passed a new constitution and other laws that disfranchised most African Americans, using tools like poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, totally closing them out of the political system.
[23] Cotton, worked largely by the sharecropper descendants of freedmen, remained crucial to the economy, but the South's reliance on agriculture slowed its progress.
With strong cultural ties to the old South, Florida and Pensacola had a racially segregated society that imposed Jim Crow since the period of whites regaining political domination following Reconstruction.
African Americans in Florida began a long struggle to regain their civil rights, with the movement growing in the 1950s and 1960s, after decades of being excluded from the political system and being treated as second-class citizens.
During the early 1970s, a group of students and other Pensacolans published the Gulf Coast Fish Cheer, a newspaper that covered the Vietnam War, race relations, youth culture, civil liberties, and other topics.
People from the Northern United States, notably retirees, and immigrants from the Caribbean, Central and South America have begun to widely settle the area in the 21st century.
Upscale locals in Pensacola, and surrounding areas disapproved of expanded tourism, citing problems of increased traffic, demands on public services and infrastructure, and higher property taxes.
