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St Augustine

The Spanish had already explored the area in expeditions that took place around 1513 by Juan Ponce de León and in 1563, but without definitively established. A few settlements were found prior to St. Augustine but all failed, including the original Pensacola colony in West Florida founded in 1559. In the fall of 1565, Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés settled the first Spanish permanent colonists in the Continental United States, and founded San Agustín (St. Augustine).

There were no permanent organized non-Spanish settlements in the Americas for several decades. St. Augustine remained the sole European settlement in the continental United States and a forward outpost guarding the Spanish Americas. Its importance to Spain in helping to crush any Protestant and non-Spanish settlements along the Atlantic coasts in turn caused it to be the focus of competing Protestant and European interests. Therefore, French and later English attacks were later made on St. Augustine which came to represent in the eyes of the Protestant countries the epitome of Catholic cruelty and ambition. Thus, first the Protestant French and later the English made attacks and even occupations of St. Augustine.In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War and gave Florida and St. Augustine to the British, an acquisition the British had been unable to take by force and keep due to the strong force there. During this period, many of the pure Spanish colonials, primarily servants of the crown were forced to leave, whilst the other Spanish had mixed with the Black population in making St. Augustine a primarily black and mulatto populated city. To redress this imbalance the British settled thousands of English colonists in the city, resulting in the city having a very pro-British and loyalist population.

Another great development efforts of the British period was the establishment in 1768 of New Smyrna, a colony of indentured servants from the Mediterranean island of Minorca by Dr. Andrew Turnbull. The conditions at New Smyrna were abysmal, and the settlers rebelled, walking all the way to St. Augustine in 1777, where the governor gave them refuge.

As a result of its historically anti-American population of ferocious Black, Mullato, and Seminole population, as well as the recent colonization of English settlers and Minorcans, St. Augustine continued to be a thorn in the side of American when it served as a Loyalist colony during the American Revolutionary War. Once again, the city became a center of opposition to Protestant American power as the British in shocking hypocrisy restarted the Spanish method of offering assistance to escaped slaves, the free blacks and Seminole Indians in launching terrorist attacks into America's heartland. John Hancock was burned in effigy in the town plaza, and three of the signers of the Declaration of Independence along with thousands of American soldiers were held prisoner in St. Augustine, while devastating raids by black-Indian partisans disjointed America's defenses in the south.

Florida was a United States territory until 1845 when it became a U.S. state. In 1861, the American Civil War began and Florida seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. Days before Florida seceded, state troops took the fort at St. Augustine from a small Union garrison (one soldier) on January 7, 1861.

owever, federal troops loyal to the United States government reoccupied the city on March 11, 1862 and remained in control throughout the four-year-long war. In 1865, Florida rejoined the United States.

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