The late eighteenth-century Spanish Gulf Coast remains one of the least examined and woefully misunderstood regions of North America. American historians of the period generally focus on revolutionary developments in New England or on the French and British imperial struggle to define the Great Lakes region. Yet the Gulf was a dynamic nexus of empire in which three imperial metropolises—Britain, France, and Spain—all vied with one another, and, after 1783, with the United States and numerous Native American peoples and maroon communities to strengthen and expand their own spheres of control. By the late eighteenth century, the destiny of this region had coalesced as the number of competitors had been reduced to only Spain and the nascent United States.
Bunn’s Fourteenth Colony provides an explanation of how and why the colony of West Florida remained loyal to Britain during the period of the American Revolution, and how Spanish forces wrested...