‘Yo Solo’: Gálvez’s Bold Strike at Pensacola
How a daring Spanish general defeated the British in West Florida and shaped the course of the American Revolution.
By James Cusick
“It has been my great misfortune,” British general John Campbell wrote to his superiors in 1781, “to have been employed in this ill-fated corner of His Majesty’s Dominion; but I trust that the calamities that have befallen West Florida will not be imputed to me.”
Campbell, speaking partly in justification and partly in commiseration over his military failures, was only too well aware of what many stories about the American Revolution often leave out: Once Spain entered the war in 1779, the colony of British West Florida became a frontline combat zone.
One of Spain’s wartime goals was to reclaim the colony. A long rectangle of land between Louisiana and the Florida peninsula, it incorporated what is now the Florida Panhandle, southern Alabama, southern Mississippi, and the “Florida” parishes of Louisiana. Spain had lost this area to Britain in 1763 and King Charles III was determined to get it back. To achieve this, he appointed the redoubtable Bernardo de Gálvez as commander of troops and governor of Spanish Louisiana, anticipating he would be a formidable nemesis to British interests. Gálvez did not disappoint. Between 1779 and 1781, he systematically conquered Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola, delivering a series of blows to British morale that rivaled those at Saratoga, Cowpens, and Yorktown.
to the P.K. Yonge Library of
Florida History by the Museo Nacional de
Historia, Mexico.
In fact, the story of West Florida during the years of the Revolution is largely the story of Gálvez—something he himself understood and savored, as shown by the two-part poem he wrote celebrating his victory. His appearance on the scene was well timed. The Revolution was starting to heat up in the American South, with British colors rising and the stars-and-stripes sinking. The British captured Savannah, then Charleston, and were gradually asserting Crown control over much of Georgia.
But Britain’s war machine was overextended. Royal troops and Hessians were committed to opposing Washington’s Continentals up north, occupying Georgia and South Carolina in the south, and defending the British Caribbean at sea. West Florida was vulnerable, and Gálvez knew it as soon as he took up his posting at New Orleans.
Just 32 years old, he was ambitious, sure of himself, and well-connected—his uncle was Minister for the Indies. Even before Spain made its official declaration of war, Gálvez quietly provided aid to the American cause, sending supplies to Continental forces, including a loan of $74,000 and guns, ammunition, and medicine valued at $100,000. But he was eager to strike his British adversaries first, targeting their outposts on the Mississippi River.
“If they were not taken one-by-one,” Gálvez advised his superiors, “I knew full well they would come looking for me.”
Hampered by a hurricane that struck and heavily damaged New Orleans on August 18 (he would have many difficulties with hurricanes over the next few years), Gálvez managed to pull together a force of about 1,400 men, composed of regulars, militia, and Indian allies. Then, moving before his counterparts even knew Spain was in the war, he captured Fort Bute and Baton Rouge, and cut the supply line to Natchez to force its capitulation.
In 1780, Gálvez assembled another force, this time 1,200 men that included veteran soldiers, Black militia, and volunteers, aiming to surprise the small British garrison holding the strategic port of Mobile. Bad weather struck again, depriving him of a third of his transport ships. However, with reinforcements from Havana, Cuba, Gálvez mounted a successful two-week siege. By the time British reinforcements reached Mobile from Pensacola, the Spanish flag was already flying over the fort.
This rapid series of victories caused consternation in the British ranks. Peter Chester, governor of West Florida, and General John Campbell, the British commander at Pensacola, appeared stunned and daunted by the losses. Campbell was especially pessimistic. What could he do, he complained to Sir Henry Clinton in New York, when his “pitiable command” was barely adequate to defend posts, let alone go on the offensive?
Campbell’s pleas for reinforcement went largely unanswered. He began canvassing for support among the Choctaw and Creek, holding parleys and sending gifts to native leaders, in hopes of keeping them in alliance with Britain so that “our interest will still finally predominate.” Meanwhile, determined to retaliate against the Spanish, he sent out an expedition to retake Mobile, only to see it defeated and its commander killed. Most of West Florida was again in Spanish hands.
One prize remained: Pensacola, the colony’s capital and Campbell’s headquarters.
But an attack there proved far more difficult to orchestrate than Bernardo de Gálvez had anticipated. His initial plan was to attack Pensacola right after the capture of Mobile, taking advantage of a 2,000-man reinforcement arriving from Cuba. His superiors in Havana overruled him. Undeterred, he traveled there in person to press his case. Knowing he had influence at court, they authorized a second expedition. It sailed on October 16, 17, and 18, 1780, only to be hit by a hurricane and scattered across the Gulf—with ships blown to the Mississippi River, the Mexican outpost of Campeche, and even back to Havana.
A third attempt was organized in early 1781. On February 28, Gálvez again sailed from Havana, this time with a flotilla carrying 1,500 men. The expedition was led by the 64-gun San Ramon under command of Admiral José Calbo de Irazabal, in company with a frigate, three smaller warships, and more than 30 support vessels.
In Pensacola, General Campbell received conflicting intelligence about the Spanish fleet but pressed ahead with fortifying the town and its defenses. An artillery battery on the Red Hills above the harbor entrance challenged approaching enemy ships. Small rivers to the east and west of the city provided natural obstacles to an attack, leaving the only practical approach from the north. There, Campbell established two outlying fortifications, the Queen’s and Prince of Wales’ redoubts, supported by his main garrison at Fort George.
Campbell also had a fairly robust defensive force of some 350 men from the British 16th and 60th regiments, 700 German Hessians (the Waldeckers), and about 300 men from Loyalist units out of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Beyond that force, he had a company of rangers, his artillerymen, the crews of two ships of the Royal Navy, a local militia, and a unit of enslaved Black men. The Choctaw Nation leader Franchimastabé, heeding requests for assistance, brought 400 warriors, and a smaller party of Creeks also arrived. Overall, Campell had 2,200 men under arms, considerably more than the Spanish force.
On March 9, 1781, Campbell put his men on alert as lookouts spotted Gálvez’s invasion fleet drawing close to Santa Rosa Island. The curtain was about to rise on one of the great dramas of the American Revolution.
At the start, however, it turned out to be a drama in slow motion. After successfully disembarking his troops on March 10, Gálvez discovered that his naval colleagues were reluctant to risk their ships against the British battery on the Red Hills. They attempted to enter the harbor on March 11 but quickly abandoned the effort when the San Ramon ran aground in the channel.
What seemed a temporary setback grew into a protracted week of increasingly angry exchanges between Gálvez and Admiral Calbo de Irazabal, who steadfastly refused to order another attempt. His intransigence not only gave the British a welcome reprieve, but set off a showdown with Gálvez worthy of the best plays of the Spanish stage.
Without accurate charts, Calbo de Irazabal insisted, a forced entry of the harbor was too risky. “It would be inevitable that after losing the first ship, that would prohibit the transit of the next one,” he told Gálvez. “And the enemy has a battery capable of destroying the ships without risking theirs.”
Gálvez, whose strategy had already been thwarted three times by bad weather, was equally adamant that the fleet advance at once. Was it better, he asked, to wait for a hurricane to strike, than to run the risk of the channel?
On March 18, his patience exhausted, Gálvez boarded his own brig, the Gálveztown, and with typical audacity raised his pennant so the British would know that he was onboard. Disregarding fire from British cannon, which he was sure had been situated too high to do his ships any serious damage, he made his own entry into the harbor, in company with two launches. He sent a cannonball back to Calbo de Irazabal, with a note asking if anyone in the fleet would now deign to follow where he had led.
Gálvez’s taunt enraged Calbo de Irazabal, who called him arrogant and conceited and told his officers he hoped one day to see him dangling from a yardarm. It was only after Gálvez apologized that the fleet entered Pensacola Bay. Calbo de Irazabal, however, took the flagship and departed.
Gálvez reveled in his feat, later boasting in print that “Yo solo” — I alone — led the troops into battle.
With the personal drama over, the serious business of a siege began. The Spanish fleet had full control of Pensacola Bay, where there were only two British warships to oppose them. As reinforcements arrived from Mobile, the Spanish began a slow and grinding advance toward Pensacola. They established camp to the west of the city, along Sutton’s Lagoon, and began to extend their lines north and east.
Progress proved tortuous as they came under daily and nightly attack from Campbell’s Choctaw allies. Franchimastabé’s warriors opened fire, then withdrew into thick woods, only to come back after dark and ambush sentries and soldiers at their campfires. They picked off small foraging parties and groups detached to unload supplies from the ships. One soldier recalled being encamped “in the middle of the forest and surrounded by savages who insult us at all hours, hiding themselves for that purpose.” Gálvez’s troops began the exhausting work of cutting down trees, clearing land, and digging trenches to keep the native fighters at bay and deny them cover.
At the same time, the Choctaws were frustrated by the combat. With one exception, when Campbell sent out troops to support the warriors, British forces largely remained inside the Queen’s and Prince of Wales’ redoubts and in their main stronghold of Fort George. Franchimastabé complained that his warriors were doing all of the fighting “without support or reward” and threatened to withdraw from the field.
Nor could these sporadic attacks alone stem the Spanish advance. Through March and into April, Gálvez extended the siege lines, going to the north of the Queen’s redoubt and taking undefended high ground there for his artillery.
The fate of Pensacola depended on which side received reinforcement. Campbell hoped to get a relief force from Jamaica, while Gálvez sent requests to Cuba for more men and the heavy artillery he needed against the redoubts.
When a fleet emerged out of heavy fog on April 18 and 19, it was the worst possible news for the British. The ships were not from Jamaica. They were Spanish and French vessels delivering 2,300 soldiers, 1,400 sailors, and siege cannons. Gálvez now had what he wanted: an army of more than 6,000 against 2,000 British.
The final act of the siege occurred in an instant. On May 8, at about 9 a.m., a shell from a Spanish howitzer landed in the Queen’s redoubt and exploded near the open doorway of the powder magazine. It detonated the magazine’s entire cache of gunpowder in an ear-shattering blast.
Among the 105 defenders, 76 died instantly, “seamen and soldiers blown up or buried in the ruins,” reported one officer at Fort George, leaving only a handful of badly injured survivors.
The destruction of the redoubt signaled the death knell for British hopes. With powder running low, Campbell’s men withdrew to Fort George. A short time later, all his outer defenses gone, Campbell raised a white flag to seek terms for surrender. He was outnumbered three to one, with a hostile fleet in control of the harbor and his Indian allies withdrawing.
In some respects, the Spanish victory at Pensacola in 1781 was comparable to the Patriot victory over General John Burgoyne’s troops at Saratoga in 1777. The size of the surrendering force was not nearly so great. Gálvez listed 1,113 prisoners; at Saratoga more than 5,000 British soldiers and their officers surrendered. But the capitulation of Pensacola completed the Spanish conquest of West Florida, securing the Gulf Coast for American allies, blocking a British resurgence in the region, and adding to gloom in London about the war’s toll. That gloom would increase tenfold when, just five months later, an even bigger disaster occurred with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown.
James Cusick is the curator of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Library. He holds degrees in journalism and anthropology. He is the author of The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida and is currently working on a second book, Colonial Crime: Cases from the Records of Spanish East Florida. Dr. Cusick serves as a board member of UF’s Historic St. Augustine, Inc., and has served as president of the Florida Historical Society and as a judge for the State of Florida’s annual book awards.