Plaza Ferdinand VII: Where Florida Became American

The park in front of you, Plaza Ferdinand VII, is one of the most historically loaded squares in the United States. On July seventeenth, eighteen twenty-one, in this very space, the flag of Spain came down for the last time over West Florida and the flag of the United States went up to stay.

The moment was the climax of a decades-long American campaign to pry Florida away from Spain. Andrew Jackson had invaded Spanish Florida twice before he was ever appointed to govern it. Once during the War of eighteen twelve, in eighteen fourteen, and once more during the First Seminole War in eighteen eighteen, his troops had marched through these streets and dared Madrid to fight back. Spain, stretched thin by revolutions across Latin America and exhausted by Napoleon's wars in Europe, could not afford a confrontation with the rising American republic. The Adams-Onís Treaty of eighteen nineteen formalized the transfer. Ratification took two more years.

When the ceremony finally came, Spanish soldiers lowered their banner to the sound of an American military band. A twenty-one gun salute fired from the USS Hornet anchored in the bay. Andrew Jackson, newly appointed military governor of the Floridas, watched from the plaza and then spent eleven weeks governing a city he had captured by force twice before governing it by appointment.

The plaza takes its name from Ferdinand the Seventh of Spain, the king who signed away the territory. There is a mild irony in that, a public square in an American city memorializing the Spanish monarch who surrendered it.

The ceremony here also settled a question that had shadowed Florida for a generation: the refuge it had offered to runaway enslaved people from Georgia and the Carolinas, who had found sanctuary in Spanish territory and among Seminole communities, would now end. American jurisdiction meant American fugitive-slave law. The geography that had given thousands of people freedom closed that same afternoon the flag changed.