[3] Patriots wished neither independence nor statehood in the United States; they desired annexation by the U.S., connoted by the word "Territory" in their name of the country, and as expressly declared by the delegates at their constitutional convention.

[4] However, the local inhabitants had little cause for complaint toward the Spanish government, as the province was enjoying prosperity from the markets in cotton and timber, with prices high and demand increasing.

Instead, Mathews set about recruiting leaders of a rebellion among the frontier inhabitants in the northern part of the province, mostly Georgia militiamen, wood-choppers and boatmen from the neighborhood of St.

[1] They were supported by slave-holding planters who wanted to stop raiding parties of Seminole Indians from the Alachua region and feared the presence of armed free black militias in Spanish Florida.

Mathews not only promised arms and the support of the U.S. military to the rebels in order to wrest control of the Spanish fort at Fernandina but also to defend the territory once they, as the new local authority, ceded it to the United States.

On March 16, nine American gunboats under the command of Commodore Hugh Campbell lined up in the harbor at Fernandina with guns aimed at the town as cover for the Patriot volunteers.

[4][9][10] Gen. Mathews, still ensconced at Point Peter on the St. Marys River in Georgia, demanded that Justo López, commandant of Fort San Carlos and Amelia Island, surrender.

The next day, a detachment of 250 regular United States troops were brought over from Point Peter, and the Patriots surrendered the town to Gen. Mathews, who had the U.S. flag raised immediately.

[1] Monroe ordered the withdrawal of American troops with instructions "to restore back to the Spanish authorities Amelia Island and such other posts of East Florida as had been thus taken from them".

[14] The revolution affected a narrow strip of settled territory along the east coast of Florida, north of St. Augustine, about sixty miles long by fifteen to twenty in width.

[16] In the state of anarchy endemic to the area, civil disturbances were prevalent, and the rebellion begun in 1812 persisted, with hostility directed at the Spanish authorities on Amelia Island.

[15][17] The three commissioners met forty "people of the main" at Mill's Ferry on the St. Marys and arranged for a general meeting of the men of the region to be convened at Waterman's Bluff in three weeks.

[15] On March 14, 1812, a group of men calling themselves the "Patriots" assembled at Rose's Bluff, across the river from St. Marys, and raised their standard of revolt against the Spanish government of East Florida.

[18] This was a flag designed by Colonel Ralph Isaacs, Mathew's aide-de-camp,[7] with a white field on which the blue figure of a soldier was depicted charging with his bayonet.