Here's a quick sample of the first chapter of my dissertation project, "The Capture of the American South." I should really finish it!

The Amelia Expedition: Louis Aury, Filibustering, and the Politics of Primitive Accumulation

William Armshaw

Draft Copy – Do Not Circulate or Cite Without Permission

Introduction: The Republic of the Floridas, September 1817

It was late September when the banner of the insurgent Mexican Republic was first hoisted, attended by the boom of cannon and the polyglot roar of the assembled ranks, above the streets and quays of the Spanish island port of Fernandina, just south of the Georgia border.  In that year 1817, “first of the Independence of the Floridas,” Louis-Michel Aury, once Commodore of the revolutionary Republic of New Grenada, now captain of a crew of several hundred Haitian, Irish, French and American sailors and soldiers, proclaimed the foundation of the Républica de las Floridas.  The Proclamation of this revolutionary polity began with an epitaph taken from Cicero, words written in the shadow of the fall of the Roman Republic:

What will happen I certainly do not know but nevertheless there is one hope that some day the Roman people will be like our ancestors.  I at least shall not fail the Republic and whatever happens I hope that I shall be free from all blame in this matter and that I shall bear it with a brave heart.[1]

With words of foreboding inscribed at the foundation of this short-lived revolutionary regime, Aury and his crew of “one hundred and thirty brigand negroes… desperate & bloody dogs” set out to establish a republican haven against the colonial designs of the regnant Spanish empire as well as those of an expansive United States.[2] 

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[1] Report of the Committee – Appointed to Frame the Plan of Provisional Government for the Republic of the Floridas by Pedro Gaul, Chairman, Vicente Pazos, and M. Murden, December 9, 1817.  George R. Fairbanks Collection, Reel 8, no. 61, Robert Strozier Library Special Collections, Florida State University. 

[2]  John Houston McIntosh to Treasury Secretary William Crawford, July 30, 1817, American State Papers Class I: Foreign Relations, vol. 4, p. 128.  This quotation, perhaps the most reproduced of any of the remarkable characterizations of the pirate polity on Amelia Island, has been extensively cited; see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 246, Owsley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 118 and T. Frederick Davis, “MacGregor’s Invasion of Florida, 1817; together with an account of his successors, Irwin, Hubbard and Aury on Amelia Island, East Florida” (Florida Historical Society, 1928), 39.