Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America’s Revolutionary Era

Once upon a time Great Britain had 14 American colonies, not 13. The 14th colony was a latecomer. And it was short-lived. West Florida was a prize, like Canada, from the defeated French and Spanish at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. The new British colony stretched from the Apalachicola to the Mississippi. Its boundaries encompassed large portions of the present states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, situated between the Spanish and French colonies of East Florida and Louisiana, respectively. Pensacola, the territory’s largest settlement, became the colonial capital while Mobile, with its natural bay, became the major shipping point. But it failed to establish a stable, functioning government, as its sister colonies along the Atlantic seaboard did. Bunn (director, Historic Blakeley State Park, Spanish Fort, AL; Alabama from Territory to Statehood) explains how the colony struggled to attract settlers and to become economically viable. Weak militarily, West Floridians were generally uninterested in the Americans’ revolution, despite two failed filibuster expeditions from their sister colonies. The author details how the British lost the territory when the Spanish, an American ally, easily reconquered it in 1781.