Conceived in Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard

Author:Murray N. Rothbard [Rothbard, Murray N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2011-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

*See George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 19–22.

42

Administering the Conquests

With peace finally concluded and the French ousted from North America, the poor, hapless Acadian refugees in Massachusetts, totaling some nine hundred, began the dangerous and difficult trek back to their beloved Acadia. Many died along the way, but the rest settled again in Acadia. Of course, there was no thought of returning to them their old lands and property. In the final irony, the Acadians who had been sent to France remained as unwanted refugees, pushed from pillar to post for twenty years by the government.

On taking control of Florida from Spain, Britain divided it into two provinces: East Florida, centering in St. Augustine; and West Florida, with headquarters at Pensacola. To East Florida, the British sent as governor Major Francis Ogilvie, who made no attempt to conceal his complete contempt for Spaniards and Roman Catholics.

So grim was the impact of Ogilvie that of the three thousand Spanish inhabitants of St. Augustine, all but five persons decided to emigrate to Cuba. One of the notable events of British East Florida was the founding of the colony of New Smyrna, thirty miles north of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Coast. The promoter, Dr. Andrew Turnbull, wangled a grant of sixty thousand acres as well as a ship and a cash bounty from the Crown. In return, he transported over fourteen hundred emigrants from Greece, Italy, and English-occupied Minorca to the new homeland. The immigrants, expecting freedom and abundance, reaped the opposite: seven years of cruel and dispiriting indentured service, giving their forced labor to producing such goods as hemp, cotton, and indigo subsidized by England.

The immigrants arrived in midsummer 1768. In a few weeks they were ready to revolt. The August revolt was led by Carlo Forni and Clotha Corona. A brutal overseer who tried to stop the revolt was killed. The rebels, acting the part of their masters, plundered the property of the Minorcans of the colony, whose only crime was not joining the revolt. Governor James Grant’s forces soon seized the rebels, but took four months to capture Forni and a band of his men. The governor decided to be relatively lenient with the mutineers, killing only the two leaders, Forni and Corona.

Another forced labor settlement in East Florida was established at Rollston, on the St. John’s River, and organized by the wealthy English landowner Denys Roll. Roll secured a twenty-thousand-acre grant from the government. When the vagrants, beggars, and debtors he had shipped to Rollston balked at the forced labor, Roll cut off their food supply. The workers then ran off to St. Augustine, where the government forcibly shipped them back to suffer Roll’s dictates. They succeeded, however, in running away again. In addition, eighty-nine more immigrants fled from Roll. Finally Roll found the open sesame to success; he purchased openly enslaved Negroes, whom he was able to whip into a passable degree of productivity.

What of former French Canada? After 1763, conquered Quebec was, to be sure, theoretically extended the blessings of English legal and representative institutions.

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