Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

By Kathleen DuVal

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian tells the “astonishing” (The New York Times Book Review) story of the Revolutionary War through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society—including enslaved people, American Indians, women, and British loyalists—in a revised edition with a new preface and afterword.

**Kathleen DuVal is featured in the new Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution.**

Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award • Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize • Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize

Over the last decade, Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Here, she recounts an untold story as significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by those living on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

While citizens of the thirteen rebelling colonies came to blows with the British Empire over tariffs and parliamentary representation, the situation on the rest of the continent was even more fraught. In the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish forces clashed with Britain’s strained army to carve up the Gulf Coast, as both sides competed for allegiances with the powerful Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations who inhabited the region. Meanwhile, African American slaves had little control over their own lives, but some individuals found opportunities to expand their freedoms.

Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning. The choices of individuals outside the colonies were crucial to the war's outcome. DuVal introduces us to the Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; the Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, who organized funds and garnered Spanish support for the American Revolution; and the half-Scottish-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, who fought to protect indigenous interests from imperial encroachment. Their lives illuminate the fateful events along the Gulf of Mexico that changed the history of North America itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781588369611

Kathleen DuVal

Kathleen DuVal is the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies early America, particularly how various Native American, European, and African women and men interacted from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. Her books include Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (2024) and Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2015).

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Cover for Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, Author, Kathleen DuVal

Praise for Independence Lost

Winner of the

Journal of the American Revolution

Book of the Year Award

Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize

"Paint yourself a mental picture of the American War of Independence. If all you see are British redcoats battling minutemen and Continentals, Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost will knock your socks off…. [An] astonishing story. To read Independence Lost…is to see that the task of recovering the entire American Revolution has barely begun."

—The New York Times Book Review

A remarkable, necessary—and entirely new—book about the American Revolution.

—The Daily Beast

Intrepid history.

—The New Yorker

A richly documented and compelling account.

—The Wall Street Journal

"Increasingly, historians are interpreting the American Revolution from two wider perspectives. First, it was a global war fought on five continents with major battles outside of the thirteen colonies critical to the war’s outcome. Second, there is a fresh emphasis on conveying individual participants’ stories and describing the war’s differential impact on their lives. Kathleen DuVal’s new book, Independence Lost, weaves these two perspectives into a compelling narrative about the American War for Independence in the Gulf Coast region."

—Journal of the American Revolution

Highly recommended for students and scholars of the revolution, American South, borderlands, and forgotten theaters of war; along with those looking for a solid read in history.

—Library Journal (starred review)

Eye-opening discussion…fine scholarship.

—Publishers Weekly

An illuminating history of events, many barely mentioned in history books.

—Kirkus Reviews

With deep research and lively writing, Kathleen DuVal musters a compelling cast to recover the dramatic story of the American Revolution in a borderlands uneasily shared by rival empires, enslaved people, and defiant natives. She deftly reveals powerful but long hidden dimensions of a revolution rich with many possible alternatives to the triumph of the United States.

—Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832

A completely new take on the American Revolution. In this riveting contribution to history, Kathleen DuVal explains how an unexpected cast of Gulf Coast characters—anxious entrepreneurs, displaced Acadians, Franco-African spies, Chickasaw obstructionists, Scots-Creek mestizo diplomats, and others—fought for their own version of self-determination in the Revolutionary War. The story is gripping, rife with pathos, double-dealing, and intrigue. The outcome is compelling, reverberating through American history to the present.

—Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People

"Independence Lost is an extraordinary achievement. Rooting compelling personal stories in deep original research, Kathleen DuVal brings to life a War for American Independence that will be utterly foreign to most readers. But there will also be something to inspire deep personal connections with people forced to make hard choices in tumultuous times. The Gulf Coast may have been on the geographic edge of the American Revolution, but its stories lie at the center of the human experience."

—Daniel K. Richter, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts

"Independence Lost tells a startling story, one that is too often obscured by the blinding light of the American Revolution in its more familiar guises. With stirring prose and through inventive, indefatigable research, Kathleen DuVal recovers a place in time and a cast of compelling characters that seldom feature in our accounts of the wars that created the United States. The result is a rich and variegated tapestry featuring French, Spanish, English, Native, and African actors: ordinary men and women navigating extraordinary times, and making history in the process. An important, original, and entirely unforgettable book."

—Jane Kamensky, author of The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse

Connected to the American colonies and transformed by the revolutionary upheaval of the eighteenth century, the Gulf Cost was nonetheless a separate world. Through the lives of eight individuals, Kathleen DuVal has found an exciting and accessible way to convey this history without sacrificing the richness and intricacy of a part of North America where multiple Indian nations as well as Britain, France, Spain, and the emerging United States competed for power with one another.

—Andrés Reséndez, author of A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca

"A superb example of how the familiar becomes unfamiliar when viewed from a fresh angle. Narrating the history of the eighteenth-century Gulf Coast through the intertwined stories of eight extraordinary individuals, Kathleen DuVal shows how the American Revolution disrupted and often devastated the lives of people on the margins of the new republic. Independence Lost is a work of stunning scholarship with which anyone interested in the origins of the United States will have to contend."

—Andrew Cayton, co-author of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000

By Kathleen DuVal

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

Give Me Liberty!: An American History (with Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr)

The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent

Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America (with John DuVal)

Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

Book Title, Independence Lost, Subtitle, Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, Author, Kathleen DuVal, Imprint, Random House

Random House

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Copyright © 2015 by Kathleen DuVal

Preface copyright © 2025 by Kathleen DuVal

Afterword copyright © 2025 by Kathleen DuVal

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

List of Illustrations and Maps

Introduction

Part I: The Place and Its People

Chapter One: The Gulf Coast

Chapter Two: Payamataha

Chapter Three: Alexander McGillivray

Chapter Four: Oliver Pollock and Margaret O’Brien

Chapter Five: James Bruce and Isabella Chrystie

Chapter Six: Petit Jean

Chapter Seven: Amand Broussard

Part II: What to Do About This War?

Chapter Eight: Independence in Creek and Chickasaw Countries

Chapter Nine: To Fight for Britain?

Chapter Ten: To Fight for Spain?

Part III: The Revolutionary War

Chapter Eleven: Inspiring Loyalty

Chapter Twelve: A Wartime Borderland

Chapter Thirteen: The Spanish Siege of Pensacola

Part IV: The Paradox of Independence

Chapter Fourteen: Nations, Colonies, Towns, and States

Chapter Fifteen: Independence Gained or Lost?

Chapter Sixteen: Confederacies

Conclusion: Republican Empires and Sovereign Dependencies

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

_153726494_

For Marty

Preface

In 1976, the bicentennial celebrations of the American Revolution barely mentioned the war on the Gulf Coast. In the two hundred years between 1776 and 1976, Americans’ view of the Revolution had narrowed to events on the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Virginia. France’s essential military and financial assistance had been shrunk mostly to the individual contributions of the Marquis de Lafayette. Crispus Attucks and Betsy Ross made cameo appearances, but the founding fathers—a phrase first used in the early twentieth century—were front and center.[1] Almost entirely forgotten were the roles of Spain and the Netherlands in fighting in and funding the war against Britain. My family was no different from those thousands of others. Despite the fact that we lived closer to the Revolution’s battle sites along the Mississippi River, we loaded into our Chevy Impala in the summer of 1976 and drove east to Williamsburg and Philadelphia.

Fifty years later, at the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution, the places and people that historians and the American public consider to be part of the story are far bigger than we thought at the bicentennial. And really, it is the myopia of 1976 that looks like the outlier now—Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War knew that they would not have won without the contributions of many kinds of men and women in the colonies and in Europe. Thomas Jefferson was typical in gushing over the Spanish king’s decision to join the war against Britain as having given us all the certainty of a happy issue to the present contest.[2] The revolutionaries knew that their revolution had sparked a global war. They knew it was a civil conflict that tore families apart. They knew it was a revolution that had everyone talking politics, from a teenager writing her cousin of her desire to retire beyond the reach of arbitrary power, cloathed with the work of our own hands, & feeding on what the country affords to enslaved men and women who heard the words liberty and freedom as a call to escape bondage.[3]

My goal with Independence Lost was to restore to historical memory fronts of the Revolutionary War that were, for a time, forgotten. By focusing on the Gulf Coast—including battles fought near New Orleans and at Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola—the book introduces twenty-first-century readers to a set of conflicts, motivations, and results of a war that, indeed, started in Massachusetts but had ramifications around the globe and through the centuries ever since. By widening the scope of histories of the Revolution, we not only have returned to an understanding that is closer to that of the revolutionaries but also can more deeply appreciate how truly world-changing the American Revolution was. Of course, history marches on, and it remains to be seen whether Americans will continue to appreciate a wide range of perspectives on the Revolution or will contract back to a narrower view of whose stories mattered.[4]

One of the delights of having published this book has been hearing from readers. Countless people who grew up in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida have told me that they never knew their hometowns were battlegrounds of the American Revolution. Descendants of some of the book’s main characters have reached out to me, mostly in excitement at their ancestors’ revolutionary stories but also with some corrections based on their own family research.

The afterword will provide additional details I’ve learned, but I do want to tell you about one possible correction here, before you start the book—a correction that illuminates the difficulties and importance of pulling out unknown stories from archives that mostly foreground just a small number of already well-known men and can obscure the richness of the past. In chapter five, I note that As a woman, Isabella Bruce is harder to find in the documentary record. We can only guess the details of her life before she married James Bruce and moved to Pensacola in 1769. Following the patriarchal system of British common law, the West Florida records always refer to her as ‘Isabella Bruce’ or ‘Mrs. Bruce,’ so we cannot be sure who she was before she married. I hypothesized that she was the woman born Isabella Chrystie in 1742, whom I found in the Scottish archives. Isabella Chrystie married a man named James Bruce in Auchterless, Aberdeenshire, on August 8, 1769. The James Bruce who is a character in this book was born in Aberdeenshire, and a marriage date of 1769 works for getting Isabella Bruce to Pensacola by the time I know she was there and makes her an appropriate age for bearing children when I know Isabella Bruce did.

But after the book’s publication, Allen Bruce, a descendant of James Bruce’s brother, emailed me with new evidence. James and Isabella Bruce’s son, Archibald, wrote a memorandum detailing what he knew of his parents’ lives. He recalled that his mother’s father was Sir William Sinclair, the Earl of Caithness. Allen Bruce also sent me an inscription of a gravesite monument that no longer exists, presumably put up by James or Archibald Bruce, that memorialized Isabella Bruce Sinclair as daughter of the late Sir William Sinclair.[5] Genealogical researchers record that William and Barbara Sinclair did have a daughter named Isabella but that she died unmarried, and I have not been able to find any record of a marriage between a James Bruce and an Isabella Sinclair.[6]

Does it matter what family Isabella Bruce was born into? Certainly the daughter of an earl would have had higher expectations for the prospects of a marriage partner than a young woman from a less elite family would have. Marrying a Seven Years’ War veteran and moving to his land bounty in the distant and raw colony of West Florida would have been a step down. If Isabella Bruce did come from the gentry, it makes sense that she would have wanted her children to know their ancestry. On the other hand, Archibald recorded his memorandum nearly thirty years after his mother died and could have confused the details or enhanced his mother’s tale. There’s no clear answer to the puzzle of Isabella Bruce’s pre-marriage past.

What is clear is that historical documents hide women much more than men. It’s no puzzle why founding fathers have gotten, and still get, the vast majority of books written about them. Their names, origins, educations, writings, and beliefs are easy to find. Women—and most men—made little imprint in the eighteenth-century archive.

In this book, though, you’ll find those kinds of people. You’ll get to know many men and women you haven’t heard of before, including Scots and Cajuns, Chickasaws and Muscogee Creeks, enslaved and free Africans, Irish rebels, and Spanish generals. Their stories—and countless others still out there to be explored—open new understandings of why people fought in the Revolution, how they survived it, and what independence meant to them. Like the founding fathers, these men and women’s stories are essential for understanding how the United States achieved its independence and how that effort drew in an entire continent, an entire world. By zeroing in on stories from the Gulf Coast, we can also imagine how the war drew in people from all walks of life in other parts of the continent and world more distant from the familiar stories from the East Coast. I hope readers will learn from Independence Lost and then keep exploring how the Revolution reached into their own regions and the histories of their own communities and families in ways they may not have realized previously.

List of Illustrations and Maps

List of Illustrations

Pensacola, March 9–10, 1781, this page

Rigobert Bonne, Carte de la Louisiane et de la Floride, this page

George Catlin, Ball-play of the Choctaw, this page

George Gauld, A View of Pensacola in West Florida, this page

Louisiana Governor Bernardo de Gálvez, this page

Continental three-dollar bill, this page

Bernard Romans, A General Map of the Southern British Colonies in America, this page

Payamataha’s Spanish commission, this page

Siege of Pensacola, this page

The Taking of Pensacola, this page

Hopothle Mico, this page

William Augustus Bowles, this page

Jan Barend Elwe, Amerique Septentrionale, this page

List of Maps

The Gulf of Mexico, 1763–1779, this page

Creek Country, 1770s, this page

Creek Country and British Georgia, 1770s, this page

Chickasaw Country, 1770s, this page

Lower Mississippi Valley, 1779, this page

The Mobile Region, 1780, this page

Pensacola Bay, 1781, this page

Treaty of Paris, Proposals, this page

Treaty of Paris, 1783, this page

The Southeast and Trans-Appalachia, 1780s, this page

Introduction

As the sky lightened in the early morning hours of March 9, 1781, British sailors on a frigate floating at the mouth of Pensacola Bay spotted a fleet heading straight for them. One sailor scrambled high on the mast, straining to see the flag flying over the lead ship. Hoping to see the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack, instead the lookout recognized the bold red and gold stripes of Spanish King Carlos III’s naval flag. The British frigate fired seven shots, whose thunderous sound warned the people of Pensacola of imminent invasion.

These sailors were not surprised at the Spanish invasion—Pensacola was the capital of British West Florida and the last line of defense against Spanish conquest of the entire colony. The sailors had only hoped that the Spanish would not arrive before reinforcements. However, readers today might be surprised by this North American battle adjacent to battles of a better-known war—the American Revolution. While histories of the American Revolution include the Marquis de Lafayette and the French fleet at Yorktown, most Americans and even many historians do not know that the Spanish were fighting their own battles against the British at the same time. As Britain tried to put down the rebellion in thirteen of its colonies, it was also defending its other thirteen colonies on the North American mainland and in the West Indies against the Spanish and the French. By invading West Florida, Spain was taking advantage of the distraction of the rebellion to expand eastward along the Gulf of Mexico. For Britain, now on the defensive on two fronts, the prospect of Spanish expansion raised the stakes of the war.

Pensacola, March 9–10, 1781, with the Spanish fleet off Santa Rosa Island and the British Mentor and Port Royal guarding the Bay. (Toma de la plaza de Panzacola y rendición de la Florida Occidental a las armas de Carlos III, Ministerio de Defensa, Archivo del Museo Naval, Spain).

Forgotten Stories

The American Revolution on the Gulf Coast is a story without minutemen, without founding fathers, without rebels. It reveals a different war with unexpected participants, forgotten outcomes, and surprising winners and losers.

Although the Revolutionary War was a global war with global causes and consequences, two circumstances following the rebels’ victory led their story to take center stage as the standard history of the Revolution. The first was the Treaty of Paris, in which the United States and Britain divided the eastern half of the continent—and excluded other Europeans and Indians. The second, following the treaty, was the large numbers of Americans settling on lands claimed by Spaniards, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and others. The kings of France and Spain entered this global war not because they loved rebellion (much the contrary) but for the same kinds of imperial objectives that had propelled them into previous wars. Although both worried that the rebellion could set a bad example for their own colonies, they were more interested in reversing Britain’s victories from the Seven Years’ War of the 1750s and 1760s and protecting and expanding their global empires.[1]

On the Gulf Coast, and indeed for most people, the Revolution seemed to be just another imperial war, another war fought for territory and treasure. As different alliances competed for power, Spanish, British, and French colonists, black slaves, and Indians of many nations were drawn into this multifaceted war. The narrative of the Revolutionary era is more true to its people and more fascinating in its complexity if it includes less familiar regions and peoples and if it encompasses the war’s experiences and results in all their diversity.

The war on the Gulf Coast proves two truths often buried by common narratives of the Revolutionary War: that most people chose sides for reasons besides genuine revolutionary or loyalist fervor and that non-British colonists exercised a great deal of influence over the war’s outcome. In Virginia, slaves rushed to British lines seeking freedom from their American masters. Near the border of New York and Canada, Mohawk Indian Molly Brant spied for the British, sheltered loyalists in her home, and persuaded men of the Iroquois Confederacy to fight on the British side. She hoped that by supporting the British she could maintain the Iroquois-British alliance and stem the tide of settlers into Iroquoia. Sometimes support was merely for self-preservation. In Vincennes (present-day Indiana), French families came out to welcome American George Rogers Clark with a bottle of wine when he took their town from the British, assuring him of their love of the American rebels. They did the same for the British when they retook Vincennes a few months later, and again brought out the wine when Clark returned, each time hoping to curry favor with whatever military power was ascendant.[2]

Map of The Gulf of Mexico, 1763 to 1779.

This book focuses on the Gulf Coast, from Florida to Louisiana, because of the astounding number of competing interests that came into conflict there. The Gulf Coast was the only site of Revolutionary War battles that was outside the rebelling colonies during the war but soon became part of the United States. The Gulf Coast’s war included participants that most people do not think of when they consider the American Revolution: the French and Spanish, who had a centuries-long history in the region; Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, whose lands spread from the coast deep into the interior of the continent; and people of African descent, whose experiences of enslavement and freedom differed widely and, with the introduction of large-scale plantation slavery, would be changing faster than ever.

The People

To make sense of the dizzying complexity of the Revolutionary War on the Gulf Coast, this book centers on eight individuals. These characters stand in for larger peoples but also illustrate that imperial relationships were almost always personal and that the most complete history is a multi-perspectival one. Today, their names are obscure, but some were famous in their time. Oliver Pollock, Alexander McGillivray, and Payamataha, for example, were names that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson came to know well.[3]

Less known was Petit Jean, who grew up a slave in Mobile. As he tended his master’s cattle, he would never have imagined that he would become a trusted spy and courier for Spain. Yet right before the Spanish fleet left Havana for Pensacola, it was Petit Jean who transported Spanish orders for New Orleans to prepare the local militias to aid the naval forces. The Revolutionary War brought Petit Jean this opportunity, and his operations helped the Spanish cause.

Another man assisting the Spanish invading force was a young Cajun militiaman named Amand Broussard. A refugee from the last war between France and Britain, he hated the British for forcing his family out of their Acadian homeland in eastern Canada and was glad to get the chance to fight again.

Eagerly awaiting news in New Orleans, Oliver Pollock, a merchant, had garnered financial support for the war effort. The Continental Congress had appointed Pollock as its agent in Louisiana, where he fostered an unofficial alliance between the rebels and the Spanish crown. Pollock hoped soon to send news of Pensacola’s fall to Congress and to General George Washington. Waiting with him was his wife, Margaret O’Brien Pollock, whose Irish Catholic family had long fought against the British and whose husband’s wartime decisions would create opportunities and perils for their growing family.

A pressing question on the minds of those defending as well as those hoping to take Pensacola was whether the region’s Native peoples would show up for the battle. The vast inland of North America was Indian country, and its people far outnumbered the Europeans clashing on the Gulf Coast. North of Pensacola was the Creek Confederacy, a loose confederation whose towns ruled themselves separately, needed interpreters within the Confederacy, and had occasionally even joined opposite sides in war. Alexander McGillivray, the son of a Creek mother and a Scottish trader, blamed the rebels for threatening his parents’ lands and livelihoods. During the war, he tried to rally Creek fighters to aid the British. His frustrations coordinating war parties later inspired him to try to centralize the Creek Confederacy into a nation and to unite all southeastern Indians into a Southern Confederacy.

In contrast to Alexander McGillivray, the Chickasaw leader and diplomat named Payamataha influenced the war by inaction. The British considered Payamataha and the Chickasaws absolutely at our disposal and believed that Payamataha was rallying his people to ride the four hundred miles from their towns near the Mississippi River to rescue Pensacola.[4] Payamataha had different plans. He was a leader in a growing movement among Indians to stay out of European conflicts, a movement that, if it succeeded, might doom the British effort to retain the Gulf Coast and to quell the rebellion to the north.

Within all of the groups involved in the Revolutionary War, both familiar and unfamiliar, there were tremendous differences in background and opinion. British soldiers came to the Gulf Coast from not only England, Scotland, Wales, and Protestant Ireland but also Jamaica, the German principality of Waldeck, and German-American communities in Pennsylvania. People of African descent included Bambara people from the inland tributaries of the Senegal River, Wolof speakers from the lower Senegal Valley, and Yorubas from the Bight of Benin. They had lived through the horrors of the Middle Passage and found themselves enslaved in the towns and plantations of the Gulf Coast. Other people of African descent had been in the Americas for generations. Some of them were enslaved, some had gained their freedom, and others had been free all their lives. The invading Spanish force included soldiers from, in addition to Spain itself, Catholic Ireland, Cuba, France, Flanders, Mallorca, Catalonia, and the Canary Islands.

Although diverse, the people of the Gulf Coast had more in common than their ethnic or racial labels imply. Europeans and Africans had been coming to the Americas for nearly three centuries, and they and Native Americans had changed one another. Indians and Africans had readily established trade with Europe, and they had acquired metal tools and new kinds of cloth and weapons. Trading partnerships and alliances had in turn affected regional wars. Although the Declaration of Independence accused King George III of inciting merciless Indian savages against the thirteen colonies, Indians worked for their own interests and indeed had demanded the king’s restrictions on westward expansion. They were not simply pawns of the British king. Like Europeans and Africans, American Indians had their own policies, disputes, and agendas. Natives, Europeans, and Africans knew one another well by the eighteenth century, and their lives had been changed by the same global forces. The natural resources and labor of Europe’s colonies fed an industrial revolution in England, which was changing the material lives of people all over the world.

This book’s characters lived more than a thousand miles away from where the war began. Most had no interest in Britain’s attempt to tax and regulate its colonies and little in common with Boston’s famously raucous protesters. Still, when war came, it presented them all with opportunities and dangers, and they worked to profit from the squabble among the English speakers to the north. They tried, in dramatic and innovative ways, to use the war to forward their own ambitions for themselves, their families, and their nations.

Interdependence

When James Bruce, a member of His Majesty’s Council for West Florida, and his wife, Isabella, heard the cannon fire and saw the smoke rising from the extinguished fire of the lighthouse to signal the arrival of the Spanish ships, they gathered their children, some provisions, and a few belongings. Along with Pensacola’s other government officials and several hundred European, African, and Native women and children, the Bruces rushed into the town’s main fort. Natives of Scotland, their fortunes lay with the British empire. If the Spanish or the rebels prevailed, they were likely to capture the Bruces and their children and send them into exile—or worse.

Every July 4, Americans celebrate the independence the Revolution created, the political separation from Britain and the creation of the United States of America. On such occasions, Americans might imagine that independence was a universal and uniform goal in the eighteenth century. But as the story of James and Isabella Bruce would remind us, the Revolutionary War was not fought solely for the independence of the United States. The war’s conclusion did not bring freedom to all of those who became part of the new republic. Some people fought hard against joining the new nation that Jefferson called the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government.[5]

Stories of competing colonial groups, strong Native confederacies and nations, and overlapping systems of slavery reveal that the Anglo-American nation that arose from the Revolution was not inevitable. In fact, both the defeat of the most powerful empire in the world and the creation of a lasting republic were highly unlikely outcomes. Scholarship and popular memory have long portrayed late eighteenth-century Spaniards and Indians as people out of time—Spain as a crumbling empire and Indians living in ways incompatible with the agrarianism to come. In this view, both were incapable of change, destined to be overrun by settlers from the United States. But in fact, they had ambitions that were reasonable at the time, and they came close to realizing their goals, goals that if achieved would have spawned a very different nation or (more likely) multiple polities.[6]

Being independent would have been unwelcome to most people in eighteenth-century North America. Men and women depended on a web of economic, social, and political connections that provided stability and opportunity even as they limited complete freedom of action. Indeed, empires worked in part because they incorporated diverse and unequal populations into a system of beneficial, if also coercive, connections. An individual or society that tried to act completely alone had no chance.[7]

For most, advantageous interdependence was a more logical goal. Leaders of all kinds of polities struggled to establish a balance in which they might have more control over dependent relationships. Sovereign states involved networks of dependency. Families and individuals measured their freedom according to how much less dependent they were on others than others were on them. Colonists might feel that their empires took advantage of them, restricting their trade and limiting their production. Still, it was empire that delivered manufactured goods, created a market for colonial produce, and secured property rights. It was empire that protected them from the military might of other empires and powerful Indians who might otherwise expel or kill them. Even propertied Britons like James Bruce, who believed themselves the most independent subjects in the world, were part of a hierarchy of reciprocal dependencies that extended from the king at the top to slaves at the bottom.[8]

Throughout the early modern world, dependence meant security, while independence could mean vulnerability and even slavery. Being captured and enslaved meant that a man, woman, or child was ripped from the interdependent relationships of kin and community to face a cruel world without protection. A slave like Petit Jean might work for freedom from literal enslavement, but he also wanted ties of community and patronage that would make his life more secure. Other freedoms might be more pressing than freedom from slavery—freedom from violent abuse, freedom to reunite with family members, or even some measure of independence of daily life within the legal strictures of enslavement.[9]

The only people involved in the war on the Gulf Coast who fought for sovereign independence were Native leaders. Through the early nineteenth century, independent Indian polities ruled the vast interior of North America, although they too operated within a complicated set of interdependencies. The basic unit of southeastern Indian politics was the town, but towns were not fully independent. People were born into matrilineal clans that united people of different towns and could make decisions of war and peace that might not align with the desires of particular town leaders. And towns and clans were then part of even larger polities. The Chickasaws exercised sovereignty as a nation (in the eighteenth-century sense of a numerous people inhabiting a certain extent of land, enclosed within certain limits, and under the same government).[10] In contrast, the Creek Confederacy was a much looser collection of towns. Each major Creek town ruled itself and lesser towns and farms in its jurisdiction, while the Creek Confederacy tried, but often failed, to unite the towns’ foreign policy. Like European monarchs, Native leaders were bound by reciprocal obligations. While men conducted most of the diplomacy, Creek and Chickasaw women had some say in community decision-making. More important for daily life, women owned the houses and fields and therefore did not depend on marriage for economic security. Women’s and men’s reciprocal responsibilities together established and protected family and community.

Although politically independent, Indian polities still needed external connections for trade and security. Historians have at times argued that American Indians and other colonized peoples became subject to imperial powers because they became dependent on European goods, thereby debilitating their economies. But dependency is a tricky concept—each side in an exchange relationship trades because the other has what it wants. Europeans needed the products of the fur trade and Indians’ cooperation in everything from allowing a post on their lands to providing transportation and information. And European trade did not end Indian control over their economies, their land, or their internal governance. Indeed, Indians had participated in both local and long-distance trade with other Indians long before the arrival of Europeans and Africans, and they incorporated European trade into old networks and old practices based on reciprocity. Being part of a world economy had made the lives of Payamataha and Alexander McGillivray more cosmopolitan than those of their Native ancestors, but in most cases Indians had shaped their own participation and understanding of that change more than Europeans had.[11]

Yet as the British population in North America grew, some leaders of both Native and colonial communities began to advocate for more independence from empire, although for quite different, indeed often conflicting, reasons. In the 1760s and 1770s, some British colonists began to see the British empire as a force of tyranny more than opportunity, as an empire that did not allow the colonies enough say over taxes or access to western lands. At the same time, fearing dependence, some Indian leaders sought ways to end or diversify their trade with Britain. And some advocated military solutions against the colonial settlers infringing on Indian lands, the very settlers who protested their empire’s efforts to hold them back from expansion.

Nations used some dependencies to free themselves from others. Chickasaw leader Payamataha promoted Chickasaw independence from British dictates by increasing connections to other Indians and the Spanish empire. After the war, Creek leader Alexander McGillivray sought to persuade other Indians to cede some sovereignty to a centralized structure that would be led by Creeks. But a Creek-led confederacy was not at all what Payamataha had in mind. For its part, Spain hoped to preserve and expand its empire by offering various communities—both Indian and non-Indian—military protection and the economic opportunities of empire. For the thirteen colonies that declared political independence from King George III, recognition by and relations with other nations were essential to operating an independent state, particularly one begun in rebellion. As the Declaration of Independence put it, the new nation wanted to take its place among the powers of the earth.[12]

A Lost World

In colonial and Indian towns along the Gulf Coast and in the interior, the surprising surrender of the British in 1783 seemed parallel to the French surrender at the end of the Seven Years’ War twenty years earlier. People expected that the borders of European empires might shift and that imperial officers might speak Spanish instead of English, but borders had changed in the past. However, the Revolution was not like the wars that had come before. Its importance for the Gulf region lay not in immediate changes but in the new empire it created—a land-based empire of liberty, in Thomas Jefferson’s words. With a population doubling every twenty-five years, the land base of the United States also needed to double every twenty-five years if it were to follow Jefferson’s ideal of independent and small family farms. Ultimately, the independence of the United States was built on refusing to share the continent with empires or with sovereign Indians.[13]

In winning the Revolutionary War and eventually revolutionizing power relations on the continent of North America, American rebels forwarded their own varieties of independence at the expense of others. The eventual transition to one sovereign state—the United States—over all others meant the loss of earlier kinds of interdependence. At the same time, as an empire of its own, the nation’s expanding plantations and farms robbed Indians of their lands and enslaved millions of men and women to grow the cotton that fed a new industrial economy. The longevity and power of an independent United States depended on the land and labor Americans took by force.

Beginning in the 1970s, historians challenged the standard litany of inevitabilities in early American history: British colonial success, the rise of an English-speaking American republic on the Atlantic coast, the expansion of that republic across the continent, and the entrenchment of a plantation economy in the South. Women, Native Americans, non-English Europeans, and Africans are becoming as prominent in our histories of early America as they were in its reality. At its best, this approach to history is multi-perspectival. That is, it not only includes people who were once left out of the history books but also acknowledges their full humanity, including their motivations, diversity, resourcefulness, successes, misjudgments, and mistakes.

More recently, a new narrative of colonial history has evolved from this approach, one that emphasizes cross-cultural encounters, variations and changes in slavery practices, and the changing power dynamics of the entire continent, not just the thirteen British colonies that eventually rebelled. The story of early America in textbooks and classrooms today usually presents a broad view of colonial America, but because scholarship on the Revolution in particular has been slower to move beyond the thirteen colonies, around 1770 the story sharply narrows its focus and disconnects the Revolution from previous history. This narrowing then sets up the early republic as the era when the United States expanded into regions whose past histories are oddly disjointed from their nineteenth-century fates. In reality, the shift from multiple empires and powerful Indian nations to one dominant United States is part of a centuries-long narrative of changing power relations.[14]

The Gulf Coast, far from the traditionally recognized centers of the Revolution, sheds new light on some of the major themes that would dominate the development of the young republic for the next century and still have relevance today. In this region, we see the burgeoning system of the Deep South’s plantation slavery. We observe the continued negotiation between colonial settlers and Indian tribes as well as settlers’ earliest and increasing efforts to remove these tribes wholesale from their native lands. And we witness the definition of U.S. citizenship hardening around the white male individual. These changes replaced the eighteenth-century world with its diversity of polities, shifting networks of interdependency, and more inclusive (and often more hierarchical) definitions of belonging.[15]

As the Spanish fleet approached Pensacola in 1781, people’s hopes and fears were the usual ones in an imperial war. James and Isabella Bruce feared that Catholic Spain would take their home. Amand Broussard looked forward to a chance to humiliate the British. Alexander McGillivray hoped for personal glory and Creek victory. They might have foreseen a new regime controlling West Florida, but what they could not have imagined was that an entire system of imperial and Native interdependence would be utterly overtaken by the rise of the United States.

Part I

The Place and Its People

In 1774, West Florida Governor Peter Chester opened a letter from men in Philadelphia calling themselves a general Congress of deputies, from the colonies of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhode-Island, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, the lower counties on [the] Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, and South-Carolina. The letter asserted that so rapidly violent and unjust has been the late conduct of the British Administration against the colonies, that each colony must either resign itself to losing its ancient, just, and constitutional liberty or join the opposition. They hoped West Florida and the other British colonies in North America would join them.[1]

There were not just thirteen British American colonies in 1774. From Nova Scotia to Jamaica, the actual count was at least twice that. People all across the British colonies would have to decide how to respond to this protest and, later, to the war and the independence movement it would become. Local people would decide whether or not to rebel, and then they and their adversaries would try to recruit others. Allegiances were complicated, seldom tied to simple national or imperial loyalties. Familial or community ties often trumped more abstract identities, and allegiances could shift depending on who promised what and who seemed likely to prevail. As the Spanish and French kings watched this rebellion from Europe, they hoped that it would prove disastrous for their British rival and would revise British gains from victory in the Seven Years’ War just a few years earlier. For now, though, most people on the Gulf Coast remained focused on local matters. Governor Chester shoved the letter into his pocket and did not tell anyone about it.

Part I introduces the region of the Gulf Coast and the book’s eight central characters, showing how their personal backgrounds and the histories of their peoples brought them to the Gulf Coast and its interlocking dependencies. The book’s subsequent parts will weave together these people’s stories and show how they influenced the course of the war and the shape of the world to come.

Chapter One

The Gulf Coast

When the letter from Congress arrived, West Florida Governor Peter Chester was building himself a new house. Most of Pensacola’s buildings had log frames with sides of bark and plaster and thatched roofs made of palmetto leaves, but the governor’s would be made of brick with a balcony and a shingle roof. It was a sign of British permanence in their relatively new colony, and West Florida’s leaders hoped that more development would follow.

From their town, Pensacolans could look out onto a place of striking colors—white sand beaches, water in hues from icy blue to gelatinous green to deep indigo, dark green sea grasses, and tall yellow sea oats. To European explorers in previous centuries, this coast had been a confusing array of inlets and barrier islands, but eighteenth-century merchant sailors knew the region well and skillfully navigated its shoreline to enter its harbors and approach its port towns. Pensacola Bay was a large deepwater port, its narrow entryway well protected by the Santa Rosa barrier island. Nearby Mobile Bay was much shallower, so ships had to unload at Dauphin Island onto smaller sailboats and canoes, which then traveled the forty miles across the bay to the town of Mobile. In the same manner, large ships approaching New Orleans stopped at Balize at the mouth of the river to unload onto smaller vessels to reach the coast’s largest and busiest port.

Note how this French mapmaker wrote colonial names across the map, such as Louisiane and Floride but still showed the dominions of Indian nations, including the Chicachas (Chickasaws). Rigobert Bonne, Carte de la Louisiane et de la Floride, c. 1750. (Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, Atlas de toutes les parties connues du globe terrestre, 1780, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress)

New Orleans was more physically impressive than either Mobile or Pensacola, and its buildings tended to be of higher quality than those found in most colonial towns. That city’s several thousand residents lived in the low-lying flatland now called the French Quarter, protected by levees from the unpredictable Mississippi River. The better buildings were built of plastered and whitewashed wood planks with glass windows and stone foundations and chimneys, but most houses were single-story log-framed buildings that sat directly on the sand, with windows covered in linen cloths. As in Mobile and Pensacola, houses were hot in summer and cold and drafty in winter. Slaves, as usual, had the worst accommodations. Hurricanes and smaller storms caused frequent damage, and buildings had to be perpetually repaired and rebuilt. As the capital of the colony of Louisiana, the city had a cathedral, an Ursuline convent, government buildings, several schools, and many taverns. In and around the central market of New Orleans, vendors sold goods to the city’s white, black, Indian, and mixed-ancestry customers. Pigs, chickens, goats, and vegetable gardens were ubiquitous, and on the edge of town, herds of cattle roamed.

Trade had made the region cosmopolitan. Most of the people and goods on the Gulf Coast came from somewhere else: Indian towns to the north, other colonies, Europe, or Africa. The fur trade of the lower Mississippi Valley was the lifeblood of Gulf Coast commerce. Indian and European traders carried skins, furs, and tallow down the region’s rivers in huge canoes and flatboats to the port cities. At the ports, dockworkers loaded the products of the hunt onto ships, as well as timber cut from nearby forests, barrels of tar processed from pine trees, and baked hardtack and other provisions for sailors. Enslaved men and women on plantations along the lower Mississippi and its tributaries grew and processed tobacco, rice, and indigo, which were sailed from Gulf ports to markets around the Atlantic. In return, merchant ships arrived with cotton, linen, taffeta, silk, wool, rum, candles, soap, hats, wine, kettles, knives, needles, flour, sugar, fruits, spices, muskets, gunpowder, ammunition, and other products from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They also brought human beings to sell in the slave markets of the major Gulf ports.

Despite their involvement in global networks of trade, the people in and around the Gulf Coast still lived in the early modern world of small communities where kin relationships dominated and information traveled only as quickly as a horse, canoe, or sailing ship dependent on winds and currents could carry it. Parents understood that if they had several children, it was unlikely that all would survive the treacherous years of early childhood.

The colonial posts of the Gulf Coast had changed hands several times, most recently in the Seven Years’ War. Because that war began in the Ohio Valley, where British settlers pushing west from Virginia and Pennsylvania clashed with the Indians and their French allies, British colonists called it the French and Indian War. Soon, however, the war spread to Europe and beyond. Spain joined the war late, and its help was not enough to prevent France from surrendering.

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 dramatically reshuffled colonial possessions. France surrendered all of Canada to Britain as well as the half of Louisiana that lay east of the Mississippi River, including Mobile and the smaller inland posts of Baton Rouge and Natchez. The British renamed this region West Florida. Spain was eager to regain Havana, seized by Britain during the war, so Spain traded Britain the Florida peninsula, which the British called East Florida. To compensate Spain for being dragged into the losing venture, France gave Spain the western half of Louisiana, including New Orleans. Thus France lost all of its colonies on the North American continent.[1]

Because of European protectionism, including Britain’s Navigation Acts, direct trade between now-British West Florida and now-Spanish Louisiana—which had all been French Louisiana before the treaty—was suddenly illegal. Commerce thrived anyway. British traders had better and cheaper goods, so they rowed canoes (or floating warehouses, as Louisianans called them) into the middle of the Mississippi River or its lakes to sell British-manufactured goods to consumers in the New Orleans market. Louisianans paid with rum and wheat as well as gold and silver dug from the mines of Spanish Mexico, precious metals that the British empire sorely lacked.[2]

The vast interior of both sides of the Mississippi Valley was Indian country. A few small European settlements and trading posts—Natchez, Baton Rouge, Manchac, Natchitoches, Arkansas Post, St. Louis—hugged the Mississippi River and its large tributaries, but, despite claims on paper, Europeans controlled fewer than one hundred square miles of territory in Louisiana and West Florida. In contrast, Indians of various nations held some three hundred thousand square miles. Until the 1760s, the Indian population of the region outnumbered the colonial population (counting Europeans, slaves, and free people of color) by a factor of ten, even after Indians had suffered for almost three centuries from diseases the newcomers had brought. As the British in West Florida quickly learned, they were surrounded with ten thousand Indians capable of bearing arms. When the Revolution began, that was still approximately the ratio west of the Mississippi River, but the massive immigration of British settlers and their slaves since 1763 was bringing the colonial population of British West Florida closer to the size of its neighboring Native population.[3]

Indians themselves were not one people, any more than the colonial newcomers were. They spoke dozens of languages, had diverse economic and political systems, and were every bit as motivated by commerce as the Europeans. Three large groups dominated the Gulf South: the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. The Creeks, a fairly new confederacy of smaller groups, lived in the river valleys of the region that would become the states of Alabama and Georgia. The Choctaws controlled the territory to the west, north of Mobile. And farther north, the Chickasaws lived in what is now Mississippi and Tennessee. Like colonists, southeastern Indians built their towns on waterways

Reviews for Independence Lost

[valerieandbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

DuVal brings attention to a little-known (at least to me) aspect of the American Revolutionary War era: events and people in the area that surrounds the Gulf of Mexico. She also covers the involvement of diverse types of people: Native-Americans tribes, the slave Petit Jean, negotiator Alexander McGillivray who was Scots-Creek, and others. Sometimes I‘d lose the thread of the overall history when she‘d zoom into one of these individuals; but overall enlightening.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A history focused on the southeastern North American colonies, from which the Revolution looked less important than the larger imperial contests of which it was a part. DuVal argues that “independence” wasn’t an important concept in the way we now understand it; instead, relationships of dependence and interaction were key to how people and peoples structured their lives.

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When you cut to the chase this book is mostly a history of the American Revolution in the South as an imperial war between Britain & Spain and how local communities decided what sides they were on; in this perspective the Chickasaw and Creek nations were rather more relevant than the doings of the Patriot government in Philadelphia. I tend to agree with some Amazon reviewers that DuVal's focus on exemplary individuals as stand-ins for whole communities can feel a little schematic at times, but for the person this book is aimed at the notion of the Indian tribes having an organized foreign policy is still probably a novel concept. This is besides the emphasis on communities seeking better relationships with other communities AS a community, not the then rising American notion of a polity based on a society of free white men with minimal social commitments to each other.