This is the third article in a series about travel and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
In the early 1700s, the French were worried about their Louisiana colony. It was bad enough that the Spanish were entrenched next door in La Florida, which extended westward, dangerously close to French-held Mobile, in what is now Alabama. But the British were also snooping around the Gulf Coast. To secure their territory, the French built the star-shaped Fort Condé to protect Mobile Bay. Some 70 years later, the fort would become the site of a pivotal battle during the American Revolution.
A Gulf fort so far removed from the front lines of the East does not typically come to mind as a theater of action in America’s war with the British. On a spring morning in downtown Mobile, as 18-wheelers thundered past the stout brick walls of the rebuilt fort, Kyle Williams, a curator of living history, told me, “Few of our visitors know about the colonial history we have here.”
That’s not surprising. The Gulf Coast rarely figures in the canonical story of the redcoats and the patriots and the nation’s birth, in part because its role was complicated.
Understanding it requires going back to 1763 and the end of the French and Indian War. Under the terms of that peace agreement, European powers traded territorial claims like cards on a gaming table. The defeated French handed Mobile to the victorious British.
Because Spain had sided with France, La Florida also crossed the table to the British. They, in turn, divided the territory in half, adding two colonies to the 13 familiar to us today. British East Florida occupied the peninsula north to the Georgia border; West Florida extended from the panhandle east to the Mississippi River (excluding New Orleans). France ceded Louisiana to Spain, formalizing an earlier agreement.
Then the Revolution came. When the Americans declared independence, the Spanish moved to reclaim West Florida from the British in what became known as the Gulf Coast Campaign. Retracing its path — from New Orleans to Mobile to Pensacola, Fla. — reveals the campaign’s contribution to the patriots’ cause in the East.
While none of these cities claim that “George Washington slept here,” they are quick to assert the Gulf South’s rightful place in the founding narrative. As part of the nation’s 250th anniversary, each is featuring Revolution-related events and exhibitions that invite visitors to explore its Indigenous and colonial past, during war and peace.
In March, with my mind on ships and soldiers, white gun smoke and white flags, I set off on a three-day road trip across the northern Gulf, sifting through over two centuries of change in search of revolutionary ghosts.
New Orleans: The Gulf Campaign Begins
Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States, it declared war on Britain in June 1779. Soon after, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, launched the Gulf Coast Campaign, forcing Britain to fight on two fronts. Gálvez led his offensive from New Orleans, where the colonial government resided in the Cabildo, a modest brick-and-timber structure on Plaza de Armas, today’s Jackson Square.
The Cabildo is no longer modest. Rebuilt in the 1790s, the Spanish transformed it into a grand, white-stucco landmark in neo-Classical style, with tall arched windows and wrought-iron balconies.
Now a state museum, the Cabildo is where I picked up Gálvez’s scent, but not before being enticed by that of hot beignets buried in powdered sugar at Café du Monde. I atoned for my indulgence by walking the riverside promenade toward Jackson Square. Riverboat tours and the Audubon Aquarium can easily stretch an otherwise 20-minute trek. More distractions awaited at Jackson Square among the brassy street musicians, sidewalk artists and tattooed tarot readers.
Inside the Cabildo, I found the man himself. His likeness presides over “Gálvez and Louisiana in the American Revolution.” On view through May 15, 2027, the exhibition pairs multimedia presentations with personal stories and artifacts, including 18th-century portraits, firearms and Gálvez’s operational diary and maps.
Gálvez was 33 when he struck his first blow. Said to be dignified, energetic and brave, he pressed north along the Mississippi River, leading a strikingly diverse force: regular troops, free Black militiamen, Acadian exiles, Indigenous allies and Canary Island settlers. With relative ease, they captured British forts at Baton Rouge, Natchez and Bayou Manchac.
Mobile: Boot-Sucking Marshes, Freezing Rain
By January, Gálvez, with a dozen ships and 754 men, had turned downriver to the Gulf. He then bore northeast toward the former Fort Condé, now Fort Charlotte under the British, on Mobile Bay.
The campaign’s first setback came when a nor’easter grounded half the fleet, still several miles from Mobile. Undeterred, Gálvez’s men slogged ahead through forbidding marshland, only to be ambushed by blinding snow and freezing rain — an unimaginable fury in the Gulf South. On a brighter side, the Valley Forge-like conditions thwarted the threats of alligators, snakes and fever-bearing mosquitoes.
Learning of the offensive, Fort Charlotte’s commander, Capt. Elias Durnford, requested reinforcements from Pensacola, 60 miles to the east. Gálvez received his own from Havana. After a fierce two-week bombardment — during which Gálvez sent a case of Bordeaux and Spanish wines to Durnford’s reinforcements as a gesture of respect — the British surrendered when artillery reduced the fort’s south wall to rubble. Their reinforcements never arrived, stalled by the boot-sucking marshes.
The environment that once repelled soldiers now supports a thriving ecotourism trade. Several outfits run boat tours through the marshes around the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, one of the nation’s most biologically diverse wetlands. John Sledge, a local maritime historian, guides trips, narrating from an invading army’s perspective. Showy wildlife adds color: Alligators and red-bellied turtles lie in the sun, egrets and herons stalk the shallows, and ospreys and bald eagles fish from overhead. Spring is spectacular, as millions of migrating birds stop after crossing the Gulf from as far as South America.
Back on land, the faithfully reconstructed fort, a four-fifths-scale replica, stands near the site of the original, which was razed in 1823, the shattered masonry used for waterfront fill. The new fort, which opened 50 years ago for the country’s bicentennial, thrums with living-history exhibitions. Museum interpreters in 18th-century attire demonstrate skills like blacksmithing and furniture making. During my visit, a young woman in a mobcap and long skirts crushed leaves for a tincture. Her ingredients came from the fort’s courtyard gardens, which represent the region’s colonial-era cultures: Native, African and European.
Across the street, the History Museum of Mobile occupies a white stucco 1855 market building that houses over 117,000 artifacts. Permanent exhibitions include “Old Ways, New Days,” which traces Gulf Coast history from pre-Columbian life to the civil rights movement, and “Mardi Gras Heritage,” which celebrates Mobile as the holiday’s U.S. birthplace, with vibrant costumes and masks that capture the parade’s buoyant energy.
Next, Mr. Sledge escorted me to the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf. Designed to resemble the upper decks of a container ship, the museum integrates the region’s commercial history and ecology. Putting on his historian-in-residence cap, Mr. Sledge led us through galleries kept “shipshape and Bristol fashion.” Their combined space offers something for everyone — more than 80 interactive exhibits and a “junior mariner” area, an underwater shipwreck display and, my favorite, a high-seas ship simulator.
From an observation deck, we looked toward the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, which opens into a green expanse that will shimmer with yellow American lotuses by the national birthday. On July 5, Fort Condé plans to open a time capsule sealed in brick during the bicentennial in 1976. “No one seems to know what’s inside,” Mr. Williams said. It’s anyone’s guess.
Pensacola: ‘Scooching Up’ Artifacts
After sacking Mobile, no one had to guess that Gálvez would set his sights on Pensacola. He arrived in March 1781 with a large fleet, soon bolstered by gunboats from Cuba. When his captains hesitated to enter the well-defended channel into Pensacola Bay, Gálvez forged ahead in his flagship, an act of bravery that earned him the sobriquet “Yo Solo.”
Both sides relied on support from Native warriors as well as enslaved Black troops. For the enslaved, fighting brought promises — sometimes broken — of freedom with victory. Native forces entered the fray to protect their sovereignty over remaining ancestral lands — much of which had been seized and now lay at the center of the European territorial disputes. They joined the side they believed most likely to preserve it. For the Anglo-aligned bands of Creek and Choctaw, however, the gamble failed when, after holding out for several weeks, the British surrendered on May 10.
In 21st-century Pensacola, preserving history is a point of civic pride. Margo Stringfield, a University of West Florida archaeologist, is a central figure in that effort. We met at the Pensacola Museum of History, housed in the old city hall, a handsome Mediterranean Revival landmark. The museum recently opened the 2,000-square-foot “Road to Revolution” exhibition. Curating it, Ms. Stringfield said, involved “scooching up every artifact we’ve got,” including items recovered from Spanish shipwrecks at the bottom of the bay.
Ms. Stringfield and I walked down the museum’s front steps, where the city’s historic district begins. The day was bright, though what someone called a “cold Yankee wind” rushed in from the north.
Across the street, we entered the Historic Pensacola Village, an outdoor museum featuring original French Creole-style cottages. Inside a replica of a cottage, a living-history interpreter was making perfume, soaking garden-grown chiles in oils.
Nearby is a two-mile bayfront path that connects with the British-designed street grid honeycombing the walkable downtown, astir with shops, galleries and farm- and sea-to-table restaurants. As D.C. Reeves, the mayor, later told me, history here is “not just something on the city’s résumé. You stand in front of it and see it.”
Palafox Street anchors the grid. Originally George Street (after King George III), the Spanish exercised a victor’s privilege and renamed it for one of their own: General José Rebolledo de Palafox y Melci, a nobleman and war hero. Heading north, Palafox opens to a landscaped greenway. At its end rises a 19-foot-tall bronze statue of Gálvez on horseback, brandishing his hat.
Ms. Stringfield and I walked up to the remains of Fort George, the former command center, little more than a hillock. It is now a park overlooking the historic district and waterfront approach. For the bicentennial, the city added low ramparts around a patio-size brick slab and installed two weathered British cannons.
Eight miles away, Fort Barrancas guarded the bay’s entrance, yet not well enough to repulse Yo Solo’s daring assault. What began as a British embankment of pine and packed soil was transformed by the Spanish into a masonry battery that still shields a massive, scrupulously preserved brick fortress — vaulted, cool and heavy-walled. Managed by the National Park Service, Fort Barrancas sits within Naval Air Station Pensacola, home of the Blue Angels. Beside the fort, a half-mile trail winds through a sandhill woodland, where shifting light and shadows lend a quiet that belies the violence once staged here.
Neither Pensacola nor Mobile whitewash the violence of their pasts, or America’s. Yet neither do they cast it, as Ms. Stringfield put it, in the “gunslinger commercialism” common to Wild West attractions. Educational outreach is central in both cities. At museums and forts, I saw as many young people as adults. Embracing a multicultural heritage is an equal priority.
Gálvez’s Gulf Coast Campaign forced the British to divert troops from the main fighting in Yorktown in the north, prevented them from encircling the colonies from the west, and opened the Mississippi as a crucial supply route supporting the patriots. Together, New Orleans, Mobile and Pensacola are offering a fresh perspective on the Revolution, from the Gulf that helped decide its outcome.
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