Again we find the General engaged with a small matter at Red Cliff.[[21]] Lieutenant Cambell, of the engineer department, had furnished some carpenters who were employed there with candles and firewood, doubtless because they could not otherwise be procured by the men. That act of kindness brought the benevolent lieutenant the following scorching reproof: “I am sorry to acquaint you that his excellency, General Gage, is greatly displeased at your giving of the carpenters candles and firewood; and he desires to know by what authority you assumed to give those allowances, or by what order they were given? For his excellency declares, that a shilling shall not be paid on that account.” New York, 16 Feb. 1773. S. Sowers, Captain of Engineers.
Even the quality of bricks used on the public works at Pensacola was a matter of interest to the commander in chief. In 1771, a brick manufactured by the British, and one by the Spaniards, nearly a century before, as General Haldimand says, were sent to headquarters at New York, for the judgment of his excellency as to their comparative merits.
These letters impress us the more with the cares of General Gage, when we reflect they were written at the time of the troublesome tea business at rebellious Boston; and when the flowing tide of the revolution, as may be discerned from almost every page of the calendar, was daily rising, and threatening to sweep away the supports of British authority in the colonies.
In a former page mention is made of a Philadelphia lady, whose name occurs in the Pensacola correspondence of an earlier day. It is but fair, therefore, that we should not leave unnoticed a New York lady who is mentioned in letters of Governor Chester’s time; the more so, because she seems to have been one of those thrifty housewives, who do not entirely depend upon the tin can, and green glass jar of the shop to supply their families with preserved fruits and vegetables; besides, there can be brought in with her extracts from letters, exemplary of the courtly style, with which in Governor Chester’s day, a gentleman returned, and a lady received his thanks for a small courtesy.[[22]]
General Haldimand, at Pensacola, writes Captain S. Sowers, the husband of the lady, who is in New York:
“I most respectfully ask Mrs. Sowers, to permit me, through you, to tender to her my most grateful thanks for the three jars of pickels.”
The Captain replies: “Mrs. Sowers, with pleasure, accepts your thanks for the pickels, and when ye season comes for curing of them, she will send you another collection which she hopes will be acceptable.”
In this stirring, short-hand, type-writing age, the form of a like exchange of courtesies would probably be: “Pickels received. Thanks.”
Though there was no lack of lawyers and doctors, who it is said, lived in fine style, there was a sad want of clergymen or preachers in the province. There was but one of whom we have any account up to 1779, and he was stationed at Mobile. Stuernagel, the Waldeck Field Preacher, on his arrival in Pensacola, in that year, christened a boy whose parents had been waiting eight years to make him the subject of the holy office. He also baptized men who had been watching from their boyhood for an opportunity to make their baptismal vows. Nor can there be found a reference to church or chapel during the English dominion.[[23]]
The most prosperous and promising days Pensacola ever saw, except those since the close of the civil war, were from 1772 to 1781. As the American revolution advanced, additions were made to the numbers, intelligence and wealth of its population, owing to causes already mentioned. It was the capital of a province rich in its forests, its agricultural and other resources. Its Bay was prized as the peerless harbor of the Gulf, which it was proposed by the British government to make a great naval station, a beginning in that direction having been made by selecting a site for a navy yard adjoining the town to the westward. Its commerce was daily on the increase; not only in consequence of the extension of Panton, Leslie & Co.’s trade with the Indians, but other enterprising merchants who had been added to the population, were engaged in an export trade, comprising pine timber and lumber, cedar, salt beef, raw hides, cattle, tallow, pitch, bear’s oil, staves, shingles, honey, beeswax, salt fish, myrtle wax[[24]], deer skins, dried venison, furs and peltry. This trade, and the £200,000 annually extended by the British government, as well as the disbursements of the shipping, constituted the sources of the prosperity of the town.