Governor Folch—Barrancas—Changes in the Plan of the Town—Ship Pensacola—
Disputed Boundaries—Square Ferdinand VII.—English Names of Streets
Changed for Spanish Names—Palafox—Saragossa—Reding—Baylen Romana—
Alcaniz—Tarragona.
Galvez remained but a short time in Pensacola after the surrender of the
British. On their departure, he returned to New Orleans, the capital of
his province of Louisiana.
In May, 1781, Don Arturo O’Niell was appointed Governor of Spanish
West-Florida, and continued to hold the office until 1792. His successor
was Enrique White, who was succeeded by Francisco de Paula Gelabert,
whose _ad interim_ tenure expired in 1796, by the appointment of Vicente
Folch y Juan.
The events of any interest which occurred before that year, have been
already mentioned in previous chapters. Folch signalized the early part
of his administration by causing a town to be laid out, “between a
quarter and half a mile” from San Carlos, that fort having been
reconstructed between 1781 and 1796.[48] This town was officially known
as San Carlos de Barrancas, that being the original application to the
locality of the Spanish word _barranca_, signifying broken, in the sense
in which the term is applied to a landscape.
Folch’s purpose in laying out the town was, to substitute it for
Pensacola, as the chief town and capital of the province. Of the real
motives which prompted the design no information can be obtained. His
scheme was defeated, however, by his inability to procure for it the
royal approval; the probable result of an appeal to the King by the
inhabitants of Pensacola.
He afterwards attempted an important change in the English plan, by
laying off into blocks and lots, so much of the park, or public place as
is now embraced in the area between Intendencia and Government streets.
He also sold many of the lots, which the purchasers proceeded to
improve. But, when Intendant Morales visited the town in 1806, he
utterly disapproved of Folch’s proceedings, and refused to confirm the
titles of the vendees. Morales’ subsequent conduct in the matter,
however, shows that in refusing his confirmation he was influenced more
by inimical feeling against the governor, than any just sense of public
duty, for he himself afterwards granted the lots. This was the beginning
of the mutilation of the great public place according to the English
plan; a mutilation which was continued from time to time, until there
was nothing left but the two small plats of ground known as Seville
Square, and that of Ferdinand VII.
His administration in one of its earlier years was marked by one event
for which his generation is entitled to credit. A ship of 800 tons was
built at _Caranaro_, as the cove in which the Marine Railway is now
situated was then known. Her name was Pensacola, and during the decade
from 1870, she was still in existence, making voyages to and from
Spanish ports. This was the first, and thus far, the last private
enterprise of the kind by Pensacolians.
In 1804, the firm of William Panton & Co., was dissolved by the death of
William Panton, who had been, as we have seen, so prominent a figure in
the history of Pensacola, both under the British and Spanish rule. The
business of the firm was thenceforward carried on under the style of
John Forbes & Co.
In October, 1800, Bonaparte compelled Spain by the treaty of San
Ildefonso to cede Louisiana to France; and France, in 1803, sold and
ceded it to the United States. The United States, from the time of the
purchase, claimed that it extended eastward to the Perdido, which was
the eastern boundary of Louisiana in the days of d’Arriola and
Iberville, and so remained until the cession, in 1763, to Great Britain
of Florida by Spain, and of that portion of Louisiana south of the 31
parallel of N. latitude, east of the Mississippi, by France. The
British, after that cession, in creating the province of West-Florida,
extended it from the Chattahoochee to the Mississippi. Spain, on the
other hand, after the treaty of Versailles, restricted West-Florida to
the Perdido, she being at that time the owner of the whole of Louisiana.
When, therefore, she ceded Louisiana to France, it was, as claimed by
the United States, Louisiana beginning westward of the Perdido; for by
contracting the West-Florida of the British, she, to that extent,
extended Louisiana to its original limit, and left Pensacola within the
boundary line tacitly established by the expeditions of Arriola and
Iberville. Spain did not, however, consent to that construction. She
claimed that British West-Florida was not embraced in Louisiana; and the
question was not finally settled until 1819, when Florida was ceded to
the United States. It was, from 1803, up to that cession, a cause of ill
feeling and secret hostility on the part of Spanish officials at
Pensacola, towards the American settlers in the disputed district.
Folch’s official term extended to 1809, and in the number of sovereign
masters to whom he was subject during one year of his administration,
his official life was remarkable. He was commissioned by Charles IV.,
who abdicated the throne of Spain in March, 1808. Upon his abdication,
his eldest son, the Prince of Asturias, was proclaimed King, under the
title of Ferdinand VII. On May 10, Bonaparte, having insidiously enticed
Ferdinand to Bayonne, compelled him, by threats against his life, to
resign his crown. On June sixth, of the same year, Joseph Bonaparte was
proclaimed King of Spain, by no other real authority than the will of
his imperial brother.
Never did any event arouse the patriotic resentment of a people, as
Spain’s was aroused, by the ignominy of witnessing her lawful King
deposed, to enable an adventurer to assume his crown. The French Emperor
marched army after army into the country, to establish the new dynasty
by overawing the people into submission. But army corps led by marshals,
whose names had theretofore been the synonyms of victory, only
intensified the spirit of resistance. As one man, from the shore of the
Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay, the population flew to arms.
Mountain and plain, hill and valley, rang with their battle cry as they
hastened to their cities, towns, and villages, to be organized into
military commands. The patriotic passion that fired every heart in the
Kingdom, was shared by Spaniards in every quarter of the globe. Of the
sympathy of Pensacola with the great patriotic movement in the mother
country, there exists memorials in the names of some of its streets, and
its chief public square.
It was in the fervor of that sympathy that the square received the name
of the exiled monarch; a token of loyalty, of which, however, he proved
himself unworthy by his conduct after his restoration to the throne.
Never had a monarch a better opportunity of making his reign happy and
illustrious, and never did one under such conditions make it a source of
greater shame to himself, and misery to his people. He was not by nature
a cruel, or a bad man; but he was neither firm nor truthful; two
weaknesses in a ruler which may prove as fruitful a source of political
crimes as a natural inclination to evil actions. In his first
proclamation after re-ascending the throne, amid the enthusiastic joy of
his people, he said, “I detest, I abhor despotism;” yet he, afterwards,
lent himself to schemes which deprived Spain of constitutional
government, restored the inquisition, and led to proscriptions involving
the lives of some of the patriots who had contributed so largely to the
restoration of his crown. The cruel and despotic policy of his advisers,
at length, drove the liberal party into a widespread revolt, which would
have resulted in his permanent dethronement, but for the intervention of
the French, who, in 1823, enabled him by their arms to keep on his head
the crown they had snatched from it in 1808.
But, if in the chief square of the town there be a reminder of a
perfidious monarch, there are in some of its streets memorials of
Spanish glory.
The English names of those streets were changed to the names they bear,
at the time when the events with which the latter are associated
occurred, and were designed to be commemorative monuments of the glory
shed upon old Spain by the illustrious deeds of her sons. Upon their
being monumental, must rest the apology for a slight retracing of their
legends, which would otherwise be out of place in this book.
Palafox and Saragossa, or Zaragoza, are the first to arrest attention,
as they are likewise suggestive one of the other.
José de Palafox y Melzi, whose ancestral seat was near the city of
Zaragoza, was in 1808, a young officer of the King’s guards. He
accompanied Ferdinand on his visit to Bayonne, which ended in the King’s
abdication. It was by him the captive King sent the instructions to the
Junta which was to exercise the sovereignty of the Spanish people during
the exile of their monarch. Having performed that duty, Palafox went to
Zaragoza, to join in the uprising of Aragon, of which it was the
capital. Despite his lack of years and experience, his commanding
presence led the Aragonese, full of patriotic ardor and warlike impulse,
to choose him as their leader, and proclaim him Captain General of
Aragon. In a short time he found himself at the head of ten thousand
infantry, two hundred horse, and eight pieces of artillery.
Zaragoza, situated on the right bank of the Ebro, was, in 1808, a city
of fifty thousand inhabitants. It stood in the midst of an alluvial
plain, rich in its olive trees, its vineyards, and agricultural
products. Its fortifications consisted of a brick wall not above ten
feet high and three in thickness, pierced for guns, but few were in the
embrasures. At intervals, however, there were convents, castles, and
other solid stone structures. The universal uprising of the Aragonese,
and the proximity of the city to the French frontiers, suggested it as
one of the most important points for the French to occupy, in the
execution of their designs to subjugate Spain. It was, accordingly, one
of the first places against which a military force was sent.
In June 1808, Napoleon ordered Lefebvre to advance against it from the
Pyrenian frontier. His advance was interrupted by three battles, in
which the raw and undisciplined Aragonese peasants did not hesitate to
attack the French column, but were in each instance driven back.
Lefebvre at last presented himself before Zaragoza, with a demand for
its submission. To that demand Palafox made the memorable reply, “War to
the knife;” a reply that foreshadowed the terrific struggle by which
those old brick walls were to be won by the enemy. In every attack the
French made upon the gates and walls, between the twelfth of June and
August fifteenth, they were repulsed with fearful loss. Lefebvre,
discouraged by his successive failures to carry the place by storm, drew
off his army to await the arrival of heavy artillery, to enable him to
undertake a regular siege.
The second attempt on Zaragoza began in December, 1808. In the interval
between this and the first attack the defences had been greatly
strengthened, and a large supply of arms procured. As the French columns
advanced towards the city there was presented a spectacle not often
witnessed by one doomed to a siege. The entire population, men, women
and children, were engaged in the work of preparing for resistance. None
left the walls, but on the contrary the peasantry of the surrounding
country rushed within them to share in the perilous defence. By the time
the French took their position around the city, it had within it fifty
thousand defenders, the most of them undisciplined and uninured to arms,
yet animated with the spirit of their leader’s reply to Lefebvre’s
demand of surrender.
The French force consisted of two army corps of fifty thousand men,
commanded by Marshals Moncey and Montier, with all the necessary
artillery and appliances for a siege. For fifty days after the French
artillery began to play upon the city the conflict between the besieged
and the besiegers was incessant. In that time, thirty-three thousand
cannon shot, and sixteen thousand bombs had been hurled against the
place. When a breach was made in the wall, immediately and under the
terrific fire of the enemy it was closed up with sand bags. If at any
point an entry was made within them by the besiegers, the stone houses
became citadels for the besieged. If the defenders were driven from a
room, a stand was made in the next one. Women and children shared in the
labors and the perils of the fight. As a gunner fell at the feet of his
wife, stricken down by a cannon shot, she promptly took his place at the
gun. Napoleon, dissatisfied with the slow progress made by Moncey and
Montier towards a reduction of the place, sent Junot to take the
command. Becoming dissatisfied with him, he sent Lannes to bring the
operations to a close. Pestilence, too, came to his aid as well as
additional forces sent by the Emperor. At last Palafox was confined to
his bed with the prevailing epidemic. The French soldiers were at the
same time depressed by the fierce and uninterrupted conflict. “Scarce a
fourth of the town is won,” said one of them, “and we are already
exhausted. We shall all perish amongst these ruins, which will become
our own tombs, before we can force the last of these fanatics from the
last of their dens.” With the assailants thus depressed, and the
besieged deprived of the presence and encouragement of their leader,
besides the havoc of pestilence, a favorable capitulation was accepted
by Marshal Lannes. The regular troops marched out of the walls with the
honors of war, and were sent as prisoners into France, each soldier
retaining his knapsack, the officers their horses and side arms. The
peasants were dismissed, and private property was respected. Fifty
thousand human beings perished during the siege, all, except six
thousand, from pestilence. Palafox remained a prisoner in France until
1814, when he returned to Spain. He was afterwards created Duke of
Zaragoza, and died in 1847.
Of this siege a British historian has said: “Modern Europe has not such
a memorable siege to recount; and to the end of the world, even after
Spain and France have sunk before the waves of time, and all the glories
of modern Europe have passed away, it will stand forth in undecaying
lustre; a monument of heroic devotion, which will thrill the hearts of
the brave and generous throughout every succeeding age.”[49]
Baylen, a parallel street with Palafox, next invites notice. Baylen is a
small town at the foot of the Sierra Morena, on the road leading from
Cadiz to Cordova and Seville. There, on July nineteenth, 1808, the
French General Dupont, after his recent plunder of Cordova, with
excesses more in keeping with the days of Alaric, than the nineteenth
century, was, with 20,000 men, and all their plunder, compelled to
surrender, after a series of battles to a Spanish army, largely made up
of irregular Spanish troops.
To Reding, a Swiss in the service of Spain, was due the glory of the
event, which excited profound attention throughout Europe, and made a
deep and sinister impression on the French.
Of the “catastrophe” Napoleon, who was at Bordeaux when he heard of it,
said: “That an army should be beaten, is nothing; it is the daily fate
of war and is easily repaired; but that an army should submit to a
dishonorable capitulation is a stain upon the glory of our arms which
can never be effaced. Wounds inflicted on honor are incurable. The moral
effect of this catastrophe will be terrible.” Baylen was doubtless the
first link in the chain of events which drew from him the reflection in
which he indulged at St. Helena: “It was that unhappy war in Spain which
ruined me.”
Romana street bears the name of the most illustrious General Spain
produced during her great Peninsula war—the Marquis de Romana. He was
one of those great and generous characters who are too great and
generous to be moved by selfishness or envy, and was in consequence the
bond of union between the English and Spanish armies. He was marching to
the relief of Badajoz, when he was seized with heart disease at Cartaxo,
where he died suddenly January 22, 1811. It is enough for his fame for
him to have been the subject of the following dispatch by the Duke of
Wellington: “In the Marquis de Romana, the Spanish army has lost its
brightest ornament, his country its most upright patriot, and the world
the most strenuous and zealous defender in the cause in which we are
engaged; and I shall always acknowledge with gratitude the assistance
which I received from him, as well by his operation, as by his counsel,
since he has been joined with the army.”
Alcaniz is a reminder of another field of Spanish glory. It is the name
of a town in Aragon, on the right bank of the Guadalupe, sixty miles
south-east of Zaragoza. It was, on May twenty-third, 1809, the scene of
the defeat of a French army under Suchet by the Spanish forces under
General Blake.
Tarragona street commemorates one of those sieges like that of
Saragossa, which signalize the Spanish race above all others, for the
tenacity and devotion with which in all ages it has defended its homes.
The city of that name, situated on the Mediterranean shore of Spain, was
besieged by Suchet, and defended by General Cortinas, from May 4, to
June 29, 1811. The defense was conducted with the same fierce obstinacy
and courage which marked that of Saragossa, and with even greater
mortality, if allowance is made for the ravages of pestilence in the
latter. But there was a vast difference in the finality of the two
sieges. Tarragona was taken by assault; and never did American savages
exercise more demon-like fury upon unresisting and powerless humanity
than the French troops visited upon the Tarragonese. Above six thousand
human beings comprising all ages, and both sexes, were massacred whilst
appealing for mercy. “The blood of the Spaniards inundated the streets
and the houses. Armed and unarmed, men and women, gray hairs and infant
innocence, attractive youth and wrinkled age, were alike butchered by
the infuriated troops.”[50]
-----
Footnote 48:
American State Papers, Public Lands, Vol. IV., p. 136.
Footnote 49:
Allison’s Modern Europe, Vol. III., p. 301.
Footnote 50:
Allison’s History of Modern Europe, Vol. III., p. 422.
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