Britain\u27s 1814 Occupation of Pensecola and America\u27s Response: An Episode of the War of 1812 in the Southeastern Borderlands

With the appointment of Alexander Cochrane to Commander of the North American Squadron in the summer of 1814, Britain began to formalize a strategy that called for a systematic series of campaigns against the Chesapeake, New England, South Carolina, Georgia, and New Orleans with the ultimate aim of bringing the United States to its knees while protecting Canada. The bulk of the attack on New Orleans was to be carried out in a straight-forward assault by the Royal Navy, but forces were to come from a number of directions. In the build-up to the attack, it was envisioned that some of these armies would launch raids across the Deep South at strategically important locations designed to distract American forces. Over the course of 1814 and into 1815, Colonel Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines, and George Woodbine, a white trader from Jamaica, were put in charge of raising one of these forces from the slave and Indian populations of the Southeastern borderlands. Nicolls and Woodbine erected a fort on the Apalachicola River in West Florida and between August and November of 1814, occupied the capital of Spanish West Florida, Pensacola.This study examines Nicolls\u27s and Woodbine\u27s efforts to raise a multi-racial army from their Pensacola base and considers the extent to which the Southeast\u27s unique conditions shaped their efforts as well as America\u27s response