Governor Peter Chester—Fort George of the British and St. Michael of the
Spanish—Tartar Point—Red Cliff.
Peter Chester, having been commissioned governor of West Florida in
1772, came to Pensacola, the capital of the province, and entered upon
the administration of the office. He was recognized and deferred to by
General Haldimand as a man of capacity and experience, a reputation
which was not impaired by his nine years’ rule in Florida.
The first days of his administration were marked by a determination to
reform the public service, and to supersede the old star fort by more
stable and efficient defenses for the town and harbor, and the spirit
which animated him was at once communicated to the military commander of
the province.
Early in his administration, after much discussion by engineers of
several plans for the defense of the town, a fort was built, under
orders from General Gage, on Gage Hill, and named Fort George for his
majesty George III.[12]
In the centre of the fortress was the council chamber of the province
and the repository of its archives, where the office duties of the
governor and the military commander were performed, where audience was
given to Indian chiefs and delegations, and where really centered the
government of West Florida, according to its English boundaries.
In that chamber on one occasion could have been seen a man in the prime
of life, partly in Indian dress, in earnest conversation with Governor
Chester and William Panton, the millionaire and merchant prince of the
Floridas. By the evident admixture of white and Indian blood in his
veins, his skin had lost several shades of the hue, his hair the
peculiar stiffness, and his cheek bones somewhat of the prominence of
those of his aboriginal ancestry. He was tall and slender; his eyes,
black and piercing, beamed with the light that belongs to those of the
cultured; the Indians said his high forehead was arched like a
horse-shoe; the fingers which hold the pen with which he is writing,
during a pause in the conversation, are long and slender; he speaks and
then reads what he has written; all is in the purest English, to which
he is capable of giving point by an apt classical quotation. On a future
occasion he will enter that chamber with the commission of a British
colonel. A few years later he will hold a like commission from the King
of Spain. A few years later still will find him a brigadier-general of
the United States. That man is Alexander McGillivray, of whom much is to
be written.
In that chamber three men were once seated at a table, attended by two
secretaries busily writing, one in English, the other in Spanish. One of
the three is Governor Chester, another is General John Campbell, a
distinguished English officer whom fortune has just deserted. The third,
a young-looking Spaniard, too young for his insignia of a Spanish
general, is Don Bernardo de Galvez, the governor and military commander
of Louisiana. Those three men are closing a drama and writing the last
paragraph of a chapter of history. The two papers the secretaries are
writing, when signed, will separate, one going to London, the other to
Madrid, to meet again at Versailles. At Versailles they will be copied
substantially into the duplicates of the treaty of 1783 between Spain
and Great Britain, and constitute its V Article.
A pigeon-hole on the side of that chamber once contained an order from
Lord Dartmouth, dated January, 1774, to the commander-in-chief of West
Florida, to forward a regiment from Pensacola to revolutionary Boston to
quell the tea-riots. This book is debtor to many documents which once
rested in other pigeon-holes of the chamber.
Fort George was a quadrangle with bastions at each corner. There were
within the fort a powder magazine and barracks for the garrison, besides
the chamber above mentioned. The woods north of it, for an eighth of a
mile, and within a curve bending around it to the bay, were felled, in
order to give play to its guns landward, whilst they could bear upon an
enemy in the bay by firing over the town. By a system of signals,
intercommunication was kept up with Tartar Point and thence with Red
Cliff.
Tartar Point, now the site of the Navy Yard, where a battery and
barracks were erected by the British, is the only existing name in this
part of West Florida which carries one’s thoughts back to the days of
British rule. The name of the point under the second Spanish dominion,
which lasted about forty years, was _Punta de la Asta Bandera_—the Point
of the Flagstaff. It seems strange that an English name which had been
superseded for that period by a Spanish designation, should after that
lapse of time be restored.
The locality of Red Cliff was for a time a puzzle. Such a name for a
locality at once induced a search for a suggestive aspect. No red bluff,
however, not too far eastward to serve as the site of a work for the
defense of the town or harbor, could be found, and yet, no bluff
westward of the former could be observed to suit the designation. But at
length, a letter in the Canadian archives fixed Barrancas as the
locality by stating that there was at about the distance of a half to a
quarter of a mile from Red Cliff a powder magazine, built by the
Spaniards, capable of holding 500 barrels of powder, which was then
being used as the powder depôt of the province, evidently the relic of
old San Carlos, destroyed by the French in 1719, and stood on the site
of the present Fort Redoubt.
The defenses of Red Cliff consisted of two batteries, “one on the top
and the other at the foot of the hill.” There were quarters for the
officers and barracks for the soldiers in one building, so constructed
as to be proof against musket balls and available as an ample defense
against an Indian attack.[13]
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Footnote 12:
Mr. Fairbanks, in his ‘History of Florida,’ calls the fort St.
Michael; but that was, in fact, a name bestowed upon it after 1783,
when Florida became a Spanish colony.
Footnote 13:
Canadian Archives—Rept. of T. Sowers, Capt. Engineers Series B., Vol.
XVII., page 302.
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