Mrs. Jackson was a domestic woman, and better satisfied to have her husband at home, than to see him in exalted stations requiring his absence from the Hermitage. Whilst in Pensacola, she pined for that dear spot; and it is, evidently, with joy, that she announced in a letter to a friend, that the General calls his coming to Florida, “a wild goose chase,” and that he proposed an early return. In October they returned to Tennessee.
That a man of his estate and political prospects, should have accepted, to fill for a few months, the office of Governor of a wilderness, with a salary of $5,000, admits of only one explanation. His recent campaign had been so severely condemned, that he regarded the tender of the appointment by Mr. Monroe, as having the semblance, at least, of a national apology for the injustice which he had suffered, and accordingly he accepted it in the spirit in which it was tendered. In a word, he filled the office, because filling it would be a vindication of his conduct in the campaign of 1818.
On the third of March, 1822, congress established a territorial government for both the Floridas as one territory. The first governor under the territorial organization was W. P. Duval of Kentucky, who had represented a district of that state in congress, and who was the original of Washington Irving’s Ralph Ringwood. He resided, temporarily, in Pensacola, where the legislative council of thirteen, appointed by the President, held its first session. It had hardly begun its work, however, when the yellow fever breaking out compelled an adjournment to the Fifteen-mile house, before mentioned, where the Florida statutes of 1822 were enacted. One of them illustrates the vice or virtue there may be in a name. The title of “An Act for the Benefit of Insolvent Debtors,” was misprinted in the laws of the session so as to read: “An Act for the Relief of Insolent Debtors.” The error destroyed its utility, and no man, it is said, as long as it remained on the statute book, ever invoked the relief of its provisions.
The limit assigned to these historical sketches has now been reached. The space that intervenes between the visit of the luckless Narvaez to Pensacola bay and the establishment of the territorial government of Florida embraces a period of nearly three hundred years. The changes and shifting scenes which, during that period, marked the history of the settlements on its shores, stand in contrast with the persistency of the arbitrary boundary line of the Perdido, established by the mutual consent of the Spanish and French in the early years of the eighteenth century. Disturbed by the English dominion for twenty years, it was restored by the Spanish, and finally confirmed in 1822 by the act of congress establishing a territorial government for the Floridas.
In 1820 the constitutional convention of Alabama, in anticipation of the ratification of the Spanish treaty, memorialized congress to embrace West Florida within the boundaries of that state. The memorial enforced the measure with all those obvious arguments which come to the mind when it turns to the subject. But they were silenced, as if by the imperious decree of fate that the Perdido boundary should be, and forever remain, a monument of d’ Arriola’s diligence in reaching the Gulf coast three years before d’ Iberville.
[1]. So the name is given by historians; but, to be consistent with the termination of other Indian names in West Florida, it should be written Ochee or Ochusee.
[2]. The last sentence of Guizot’s History of France.
[3]. Canadian Archives (Haldimand Collection), B. 22, p. 262.
[4]. Kingford’s History of Canada, Vol. V., p. 110.