Historical Sketches of Colonial Florida

by Richard L. Campbell

Palafox and Saragossa, or Zaragoza, are the first to arrest attention, as they are likewise suggestive one of the other.

José de Palafox y Melzi, whose ancestral seat was near the city of Zaragoza, was in 1808, a young officer of the King’s guards. He accompanied Ferdinand on his visit to Bayonne, which ended in the King’s abdication. It was by him the captive King sent the instructions to the Junta which was to exercise the sovereignty of the Spanish people during the exile of their monarch. Having performed that duty, Palafox went to Zaragoza, to join in the uprising of Aragon, of which it was the capital. Despite his lack of years and experience, his commanding presence led the Aragonese, full of patriotic ardor and warlike impulse, to choose him as their leader, and proclaim him Captain General of Aragon. In a short time he found himself at the head of ten thousand infantry, two hundred horse, and eight pieces of artillery.

Zaragoza, situated on the right bank of the Ebro, was, in 1808, a city of fifty thousand inhabitants. It stood in the midst of an alluvial plain, rich in its olive trees, its vineyards, and agricultural products. Its fortifications consisted of a brick wall not above ten feet high and three in thickness, pierced for guns, but few were in the embrasures. At intervals, however, there were convents, castles, and other solid stone structures. The universal uprising of the Aragonese, and the proximity of the city to the French frontiers, suggested it as one of the most important points for the French to occupy, in the execution of their designs to subjugate Spain. It was, accordingly, one of the first places against which a military force was sent.

In June 1808, Napoleon ordered Lefebvre to advance against it from the Pyrenian frontier. His advance was interrupted by three battles, in which the raw and undisciplined Aragonese peasants did not hesitate to attack the French column, but were in each instance driven back. Lefebvre at last presented himself before Zaragoza, with a demand for its submission. To that demand Palafox made the memorable reply, “War to the knife;” a reply that foreshadowed the terrific struggle by which those old brick walls were to be won by the enemy. In every attack the French made upon the gates and walls, between the twelfth of June and August fifteenth, they were repulsed with fearful loss. Lefebvre, discouraged by his successive failures to carry the place by storm, drew off his army to await the arrival of heavy artillery, to enable him to undertake a regular siege.

The second attempt on Zaragoza began in December, 1808. In the interval between this and the first attack the defences had been greatly strengthened, and a large supply of arms procured. As the French columns advanced towards the city there was presented a spectacle not often witnessed by one doomed to a siege. The entire population, men, women and children, were engaged in the work of preparing for resistance. None left the walls, but on the contrary the peasantry of the surrounding country rushed within them to share in the perilous defence. By the time the French took their position around the city, it had within it fifty thousand defenders, the most of them undisciplined and uninured to arms, yet animated with the spirit of their leader’s reply to Lefebvre’s demand of surrender.

The French force consisted of two army corps of fifty thousand men, commanded by Marshals Moncey and Montier, with all the necessary artillery and appliances for a siege. For fifty days after the French artillery began to play upon the city the conflict between the besieged and the besiegers was incessant. In that time, thirty-three thousand cannon shot, and sixteen thousand bombs had been hurled against the place. When a breach was made in the wall, immediately and under the terrific fire of the enemy it was closed up with sand bags. If at any point an entry was made within them by the besiegers, the stone houses became citadels for the besieged. If the defenders were driven from a room, a stand was made in the next one. Women and children shared in the labors and the perils of the fight. As a gunner fell at the feet of his wife, stricken down by a cannon shot, she promptly took his place at the gun. Napoleon, dissatisfied with the slow progress made by Moncey and Montier towards a reduction of the place, sent Junot to take the command. Becoming dissatisfied with him, he sent Lannes to bring the operations to a close. Pestilence, too, came to his aid as well as additional forces sent by the Emperor. At last Palafox was confined to his bed with the prevailing epidemic. The French soldiers were at the same time depressed by the fierce and uninterrupted conflict. “Scarce a fourth of the town is won,” said one of them, “and we are already exhausted. We shall all perish amongst these ruins, which will become our own tombs, before we can force the last of these fanatics from the last of their dens.” With the assailants thus depressed, and the besieged deprived of the presence and encouragement of their leader, besides the havoc of pestilence, a favorable capitulation was accepted by Marshal Lannes. The regular troops marched out of the walls with the honors of war, and were sent as prisoners into France, each soldier retaining his knapsack, the officers their horses and side arms. The peasants were dismissed, and private property was respected. Fifty thousand human beings perished during the siege, all, except six thousand, from pestilence. Palafox remained a prisoner in France until 1814, when he returned to Spain. He was afterwards created Duke of Zaragoza, and died in 1847.

Of this siege a British historian has said: “Modern Europe has not such a memorable siege to recount; and to the end of the world, even after Spain and France have sunk before the waves of time, and all the glories of modern Europe have passed away, it will stand forth in undecaying lustre; a monument of heroic devotion, which will thrill the hearts of the brave and generous throughout every succeeding age.”[^[49]]

Baylen, a parallel street with Palafox, next invites notice. Baylen is a small town at the foot of the Sierra Morena, on the road leading from Cadiz to Cordova and Seville. There, on July nineteenth, 1808, the French General Dupont, after his recent plunder of Cordova, with excesses more in keeping with the days of Alaric, than the nineteenth century, was, with 20,000 men, and all their plunder, compelled to surrender, after a series of battles to a Spanish army, largely made up of irregular Spanish troops.

To Reding, a Swiss in the service of Spain, was due the glory of the event, which excited profound attention throughout Europe, and made a deep and sinister impression on the French.

Of the “catastrophe” Napoleon, who was at Bordeaux when he heard of it, said: “That an army should be beaten, is nothing; it is the daily fate of war and is easily repaired; but that an army should submit to a dishonorable capitulation is a stain upon the glory of our arms which can never be effaced. Wounds inflicted on honor are incurable. The moral effect of this catastrophe will be terrible.” Baylen was doubtless the first link in the chain of events which drew from him the reflection in which he indulged at St. Helena: “It was that unhappy war in Spain which ruined me.”