Five Flags Over Mobile

Five separate national flags have flown over Mobile, a sequence that no other American city can quite match. France planted the first in seventeen hundred and two. Britain claimed the city in seventeen sixty-three under the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years' War, and held it for seventeen years before the Spanish arrived.

The Spanish chapter is the one most Americans overlook. General Bernardo de Galvez, governor of Louisiana, landed a force of Spanish regulars and American volunteers on February tenth, seventeen eighty, and laid siege to Fort Charlotte. The British surrendered on March fourteenth. Spain held Mobile for thirty-three years, far longer than Britain ever did, and the period left its mark in street names, family lines, and a legal culture that blended French civil law with Iberian custom.

American sovereignty arrived not through revolution but through a diplomatic maneuver. In April eighteen thirteen, General James Wilkinson marched from New Orleans and surrounded Fort Carlota, the Spanish-held garrison on this site. The Spanish commander, Cayetano Perez, was outnumbered and unsupported. He surrendered without a shot fired on April thirteenth. Stars and Stripes rose for the first time over Mobile, annexing the last slice of West Florida.

The Confederate battle flag flew above city buildings from eighteen sixty-one to eighteen sixty-five. Since then, the fifth flag has been the American. The Conde-Charlotte Museum here on Theatre Street still flies all five above its portico, a quiet argument that history does not simplify.