Romana street bears the name of the most illustrious General Spain produced during her great Peninsula war—the Marquis de Romana. He was one of those great and generous characters who are too great and generous to be moved by selfishness or envy, and was in consequence the bond of union between the English and Spanish armies. He was marching to the relief of Badajoz, when he was seized with heart disease at Cartaxo, where he died suddenly January 22, 1811. It is enough for his fame for him to have been the subject of the following dispatch by the Duke of Wellington: “In the Marquis de Romana, the Spanish army has lost its brightest ornament, his country its most upright patriot, and the world the most strenuous and zealous defender in the cause in which we are engaged; and I shall always acknowledge with gratitude the assistance which I received from him, as well by his operation, as by his counsel, since he has been joined with the army.”
Alcaniz is a reminder of another field of Spanish glory. It is the name of a town in Aragon, on the right bank of the Guadalupe, sixty miles south-east of Zaragoza. It was, on May twenty-third, 1809, the scene of the defeat of a French army under Suchet by the Spanish forces under General Blake.
Tarragona street commemorates one of those sieges like that of Saragossa, which signalize the Spanish race above all others, for the tenacity and devotion with which in all ages it has defended its homes. The city of that name, situated on the Mediterranean shore of Spain, was besieged by Suchet, and defended by General Cortinas, from May 4, to June 29, 1811. The defense was conducted with the same fierce obstinacy and courage which marked that of Saragossa, and with even greater mortality, if allowance is made for the ravages of pestilence in the latter. But there was a vast difference in the finality of the two sieges. Tarragona was taken by assault; and never did American savages exercise more demon-like fury upon unresisting and powerless humanity than the French troops visited upon the Tarragonese. Above six thousand human beings comprising all ages, and both sexes, were massacred whilst appealing for mercy. “The blood of the Spaniards inundated the streets and the houses. Armed and unarmed, men and women, gray hairs and infant innocence, attractive youth and wrinkled age, were alike butchered by the infuriated troops.”[[50]]
CHAPTER XIX.
Folch Leaves West Florida—His Successors—War of 1812—Tecumseh’s Visit to the Seminoles and Creeks—Consequences—Fort Mims—Percy and Nicholls’ Expedition.
In October, 1809, Folch left Pensacola to fill the appointment of Governor of the country west of the Perdido, the capital of which was Mobile. The uneventful period, for Pensacola at least, between that year and 1813, was marked only by the incoming and outgoing of governors. Folch’s successor was his son-in-law, Don Francisco Maximiliano de Saint Maxent, under an ad interim appointment. In July 1812, he was succeeded by Mauricio Zuniga, who in May, 1813, gave place to Mateo Gurzalez Maurique, whose administration covered the period of the war between the United States and Great Britain, which was declared by the former, on June 18, 1812.
That Pensacola should have been involved in that struggle would seem to be out of the natural order of events, when it is remembered that Spain and the United States were at peace. But, as before intimated, there existed a covert hostility on the part of the Spanish officials at Pensacola against the Americans, growing out of the dispute as to the limits of West Florida; and now intensified by the capture of Mobile on April 13, 1813, by an expedition from New Orleans, under the command of General Wilkinson. Spain herself was too much absorbed by her struggle for existence to take any active interest in a question of boundary in the new world. But the British, who were her allies in her war with the French, availed themselves of that official hostility to induce the Spaniards at Pensacola to permit them to make that place a base from which the Indians could be furnished with supplies to wage war on the United States.
After the capture of Detroit, in August, 1812, the British formed the scheme of combining the Indians on the western frontier of the United States in a line of warfare extending from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. As their chief emissary to accomplish that end, they employed Tecumseh, the great Shawnee Chief, who in the fall of that year made his appearance amongst the Seminoles and Creeks. He at once began the work of exciting their hostility against the Americans, by every argument, art, and device which his own savage shrewdness could suggest, or the deliberate calculations of his British allies prompt. He addressed the Creek assemblies with the burning words of an impassioned oratory, to which his stately form and commanding presence gave additional force. He upbraided their disposition to adopt the speech, the dress, and habits of the white man, instead of cleaving to those of their forefathers. He persuaded them that it was degrading to an Indian warrior to follow the plow, or to rely upon cattle and the fruits of the field for sustenance; that it was decreed by the Great Spirit that the country should go back to the forest, and that the Indian should depend upon the chase for his food, as his forefathers had done. An invidious contrast was drawn between the disinterested friendship of the British, who had no occasion or use for their lands, and the cupidity of the Americans who were annually restricting their hunting grounds by their ever extending settlements. Superstition, and necromancy, too, were successfully employed to enforce his teachings. Some of the wavering, like Francis, afterwards known as the prophet, were induced to submit to days of seclusion and fasting, in houses from which the light was excluded, until darkness, spells, and incantations, acting upon bodies enfeebled by hunger, inspired faith in the mission of the great Shawnee. A comet, which appeared in the last days of September of that year, was pointed to as a sign placed in the heavens by the Great Spirit, as a presage of wrath and destruction to the white man, and a promise of redemption to the Indian.
He had the temerity, even, to foretell a great natural phenomenon of which he was to be the proximate cause, as an evidence his mission was inspired. “When I reach Detroit I shall stamp my foot, and the earth will tremble and rock.” And strange to relate, at about the lapse of time the journey would consume, an earthquake was felt throughout the Creek country, when from all sides came the cry of the awe-stricken Indians: “Tecumseh has reached Detroit and stamped his foot.”[[51]]