The Road to Glory by E. Alexander Powell — Read

I wonder how many of the white-clad, white-shod folk who lounge their winters away on the golf-links at St. Augustine or in wheeled chairs propelled by Ethiopians along the fragrant pathways of Palm Beach ever speculate as to how it happens that the flags which fly over the Ponce de Leon and the Royal Poinciana are made of red, white, and blue bunting instead, say, of red and yellow. Not many of them, I expect, for professional joy hunters have no time to spare for history. I wonder how many of those people who complacently regard themselves as well-read and well-informed could tell you offhand, if you asked them, how Florida became American or give you even the barest outline of the conception and execution of that daring and cynical scheme whereby it was added to the Union. I wonder how many professors of history in our schools and colleges are aware that Florida was once a republic -- for but a brief time, it is true -- with a flag and a president and an army of its own. I wonder how many of our military and naval officers know that we fought Spanish soldiers and stormed Spanish forts and captured Spanish towns and hauled down Spanish colors (all quite unofficially, of course) fourscore years before Schley and Sampson sunk the Spanish fleet off Santiago. And, finally, I wonder how many people have ever so much as heard of the Emperor McGillivray, who held his barbaric court at Tallahassee and was a general in the armies of England, Spain, and the United States at the same time; of Sir Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier of fortune who attempted to establish a kingdom at Fernandina and died King of the Mosquito Coast; or any of those other strange and romantic figures -- De Aury, Hubbard, Peire, Humbert -- who followed him. It is a dashing story but a bloody one, and those who have no stomach for intrigue and treachery and massacre and ambushes and storming parties and filibustering expeditions had better turn elsewhere for their reading.

Some one has aptly remarked that the history of Florida is but a bowl of blood, and that, were a man to cast into it some chemical that would separate the solid ingredients from the mere water, he would find that the precipitate at the bottom consisted of little save death and disappointment. Certainly the Spaniards were rewarded by little more, for after they had ruled it for two hundred and fifty years the net results of their labor were the beggarly settlements at Pensacola and St. Augustine. In 1763 England ceded Havana to Spain in exchange for Florida, and for a brief time that harassed country was on speaking terms with peace and prosperity, for the English established settlements and built roads and started schools, as is the quaint Anglo-Saxon way. But with the loss of her American colonies, in 1783, England suddenly concluded that it was not worth her while to retain this now isolated province; so she ceded it back to Spain, and the settlers found that their work had gone for nothing. A Spanish lethargy promptly settled upon the land; grass sprang up in the main streets of the towns; the noon-hour was expanded into a _siesta_ which lasted from twelve to four; the indigo plantations started by the English colonists were neglected and ran out; the injustice, cruelty, and oppression which everywhere characterized Spanish rule entered upon a return engagement; and Florida became a savage and lawless borderland, where Indians, runaway slaves, filibusters, frontiersmen, and fugitives from justice fought each other and united only in jeering at the feeble rule of Spain.