The South-Eastern Forgotten History

Most people assume that anything east of the Appalachian divide and south of Quebec was once strictly the domain of the Thirteen Colonies.  Never minding that one cannot help but run into a Dutch name in any given mile of the Hudson River Valley, or that the lower Delaware was once the going concern for a Swedish colonial venture, the fact remains that Atlantic North America was a pretty busy place for Scotland (careful now, the parliaments were not joined until 1707), France, and Spain.  Until the 1750's, anything north of New England (except for half of Newfoundland), meaning even Maine, was pretty much Francophone, and everything from Jacksonville on South until the early nineteenth century was a very interesting frontier world of Spanish and First Born cultures that never really managed to dominate one another.  Long before England became a dominant power even in Virginia or Massachusetts there were colonies and missions set up by the other two major European players on the continent.  Ultimately, mostly due to wars between them and the remoteness of these settlements from their main colonial ventures making logistical support very difficult, the other colonial ventures failed and receded into the fog of history.

36 years before the foundation of Jamestowne, in fact, there were Jesuits who tried to set up camp among the Powhatan of the Chesapeake.  These southern Algonquins did not think much of or against the newcomers in any way, mainly because the Jesuits had by even this early adapted a missionary style that tried to learn about the cultures they were going to evangelize in; such an effort took a lot longer to set up than the approaches favored by other orders such as the Dominicans.  They never had the chance to get to know them; the priests were killed by Paquiquino, a Powhatan man who was claiming to be in league with them.  Far from being a true betrayal, Paquiquino was responding brutally to brutally being kidnapped and culturally assimilated by Spanish conquistadors nearly a decade before.  Needless to say, the Spanish had already been in town before the Jesuits ever tried to set up shop at their mission of St. Mary's.  No trace remains of this mission, nor do we even have any record of where it was specifically located other than somewhere between the York and James rivers.  We do know a bit more about the conquistadors, however.  They set up the earliest European settlement inland in eastern North America, Fort San Juan.

Like St. Mary's, we are not entirely sure of the location of San Juan, but we do know that it was deep into North Carolina, possibly even within a few dozen miles of Asheville.  We tend to think of Spanish ventures in the South as being limited to colonizing parts of Florida and De Soto making a complete ass of himself in his explorations, but Spanish ambition was a pretty huge thing.  An empire had thus far been made extending from Peru to Cuba.  Size was not a problem for a Spain that wanted more and more, and the possibility of success by Protestant rival England and the better chefs known as the French meant that whatever gold lay in store for the taking in mysterious North America could no longer remain behind the veil of a northern mystery.  The French and English, in turn, saw what was happening with Spain in the South and started to get an idea that maybe a future was to be had in settling these lands; in fact as a result I consider the Spanish incursions in this part of the continent to actually be one of the most important events in North American history.  But why this far inland, why in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains?

Truth be told, this is a story still being written and read, and close to home at that.  Researchers at the University of Michigan, of all places, are trying to figure out just how far the Spanish were trying to go.  One thing is certain: they were pretty serious about the whole affair.  Whenever the French would set up shop, be it at Fort Caroline (the, ahem, secret French origin of Jacksonville, Florida) or Charlesfort on Parris Island, the Spanish would practically come to try and devour whatever had been achieved.  Part of this might have been religiously inspired, as many of the French colonists in these places were Hugenot refugees.  Regardless, the Spanish won and evicted France from ever having more than a commercial and exploratory presence on the Atlantic coast.  The French retreated north to where they had been fishing and trading with the Micmac for half a century, and would later return to ply the rivers of the South from a base in Louisianne.  But the Spanish...

They wanted colonies here.  They founded a few down in Florida, most notably St. Augustine, but they also liked the paradise that the French had found among the Sea Islands south of modern Charleston.  To this end, they founded Santa Elena, built on the ruins of Charlesfort of Parris Island.  They knew, like the French did, that having an outpost so far afield from the main ventures was going to be difficult.  As such, attempts were made to connect the whole thing together overland to Mexico, and Fort San Juan was part of that concept.  This was still the northern land of mystery, however, and not even a mental map of directions had thus far been conceived.  When in doubt, as so many explorers in North America would later find helpful, the Spanish followed the rivers.  The First Born, after all, had for centuries used the waterways to pass goods from coast to coast, and the newcomers were well aware of this.  As the visitor center of Congaree National Park delightfully points out, De Soto did indeed pass through the breadth of the land this way, and those road-dreamers who founded San Juan after him took to the Congaree and associated rivers as part of the first leg of their journey to possibly connect with the Tennessee and then Mississippi and further western waterways. 

But then they left behind that land of mild winter that is the Lowcountry South and hit some heavy snow in the Appalachians, their first true taste of a winter that even northern Europe was unlikely to provide.  This, combined with the sheer distance they had now put between themselves and even the nearest part of their empire in Florida meant that the Spanish would follow suit to the French and go back to more familiar territory.  Were it not for English initiative in the following century, however, they might have been back in force.  They certainly did just that in Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, and Alta California, roughly at the same time that the Carolinas were getting underway in the early 1700's.  Were it not for the threat of war and the serious competition that England was capable of, the South might have looked very different.  As it is, Carolina came and even divided into two Carolinas.  Georgia, designed as a buffer, became a true colony in its own right.  Even without these developments, the aggressive expansion and political culture dominated by almost constant warfare that has come to encapsulate British and American history means that these places would have become part of the United States anyway.

But imagine if the cultural foundations had been... from someone else.  Florida still has a historical memory of being something New Spain, just as Louisiana still has French-speakers.  There might have been more than just a museum or visitor center pointing out that such places once had different flags flying overhead...

The multi-cultural South... not what we expected, eh?