Grasping the Gulf : Conquest and Indigenous Power from Florida to Yucatan in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

During the age of revolutions, the United States and Mexico declared their independence and attempted to define and consolidate their borders in the context of the political, social, and economic worlds of their shared sea, the Gulf of Mexico. A space of interconnection and exchange since before the arrival of Europeans, the Gulf had, from the late sixteenth to mid eighteenth centuries, been claimed almost entirely by Spain. Between 1763 and 1861, it took on qualities common to places that historians term “borderlands.” With multiple European empires and nation-states vying to control the Gulf, it became a space where power was contested and authority undefined. The island of Cuba remained a Spanish colony, British American adventurers and merchants continued to sail the Gulf waters, and indigenous peoples retained possession of many of the shores and rivers connecting this bustling region to interior zones. Europeans’ and Euro-Americans’ contests over the Gulf involved not only the territory around it but also the lines of exchange that stretched across it and connected it to the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Officials sought, in hopes of controlling traffic into and out of the Gulf, to establish or maintain control over parts of Florida and Yucatán, the peninsulas that formed its entrance. The harsh environment of these peninsular territories made them more conducive to such illegal activities as smuggling and privateering than to imperial or national force. In the same way that “rogue colonialism” has been shown to have kept European empires alive in the Gulf during an earlier period, the United States and Mexico’s efforts to establish control over Florida and Yucatán involved the private and illicit trade relationships that they maintained with other Gulf societies. This was evident in the strategies that each country used in the Seminole Wars and Caste War. The enduring power of “rogues” in the Gulf also offered political strategies to indigenous peoples. Great Britain gave up many of its official claims to mainland North America south of the St. Lawrence River during this period, but British American adventurers, merchants, and even colonial officials continued to exert military and commercial power in the Gulf. Through these rogue agents, the indigenous peoples of Florida (“dissident Creeks,” who at different times included Lower Creeks, Mikasukis, Seminoles, and Red Sticks) and of Yucatán (Mayas, who had been partially incorporated into Spanish, and then Mexican society) found their own direct connections to Gulf trade partners. Abandoned by empires, they were befriended by rogues, who furnished ways for the adventurous among them to seek their own paths through the age of revolutions.