Florida's British Period, 1763 to 1783

The British Period was the roughly 20 years, from 1763 to 1783 or 1784, when Great Britain ruled Florida as two colonies, East Florida and West Florida, after taking it from Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War (Florida Division of Historical Resources).

Florida was the price of Havana. British forces had captured Havana, Spain's principal seaport and headquarters for much of Spanish America, and the Treaty of Paris that ended the war traded Havana and Manila back to Spain in exchange for the province of Florida, the Castillo de San Marcos history says (National Park Service). The Fort Matanzas history dates that First Treaty of Paris to February 10, 1763 (National Park Service), and the Museum of Florida History says Britain formally accepted Florida from Spain in July 1763 (Museum of Florida History). With the transfer, Britain controlled all of North America east of the Mississippi River (Castillo de San Marcos).

The end date depends on the source, as the section on how British rule ended explains: the Museum and the Park Service tie it to the Treaty of Paris of 1783, while the Department of State and its Division of Historical Resources say Spain regained the rest of Florida in 1784 (Florida Department of State). Last verified: October 18, 2026, by reading the Museum of Florida History's British and Second Spanish Period exhibits, three Park Service histories from Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas, and two Florida Department of State history pages.

Britain split its new province into East Florida, governed from St. Augustine, and West Florida, governed from Pensacola, which, with Nova Scotia, gave Great Britain sixteen American colonies (Museum of Florida History; National Park Service).

Both capitals were small. The Department of State describes St. Augustine in 1763 as a garrison community with fewer than five hundred houses and Pensacola as a small military town, and says Spain's evacuation left the province virtually empty (Florida Department of State). The Spanish of St. Augustine took their possessions, even the forts' cannons, to Cuba, and the first British supply ship to St. Augustine, the Industry, sank near the St. Augustine Inlet with cannon meant for Fort Matanzas; archaeologists working from the St. Augustine Lighthouse have since found the wreck (National Park Service).

West Florida included much more than Pensacola. The Park Service's Galvez history says Pensacola, Mobile, Baton Rouge and Natchez were all part of British Florida during the Revolution (National Park Service). British surveyors mapped much of the land and coast, and the British dealt with a people of Creek descent moving in from the north whom they called Seminolies, or Seminoles, according to the Department of State (Department of State).

Britain drew settlers to Florida with land grants: the London Board of Trade advertised 20,000 acre lots to groups willing to settle them, and each pioneer received 100 acres plus 50 for every family member (National Park Service).

The grants came with conditions. The 20,000 acre lots had to be settled within ten years at one resident per 100 acres, the Privy Council in London granted titles, and pioneer families could apply at St. Augustine or Pensacola, with special grants for former British soldiers, the Castillo history says (National Park Service). To recruit Southerners, slavery was allowed. Under Governor James Grant, 2,856,000 acres were granted in East Florida.

Policy in London helped. The Proclamation of 1763 outlawed settlement west of the Appalachians to calm frontier unrest, which turned the colonists' hunger for land toward Florida (National Park Service). St. Augustine's population nearly doubled from the Spanish period, old single-story Spanish houses gained second stories, and cattle ranching, shipping and plantation farming grew. The Museum of Florida History calls the first decade one of expansion and dramatic population growth (Museum of Florida History).

British Florida's plantations grew indigo, cotton, sugar cane and rice, with indigo the main export crop of East Florida in the 1760s and 1770s, and enslaved Black laborers made up the vast majority of the workforce (Museum of Florida History).

Only two plantations, Smyrnea and Rollestown, used white indentured workers, the Museum says (Museum of Florida History). At Smyrnea, the Scottish physician Andrew Turnbull brought in more than 1,400 Menorcan, Greek and Italian colonists to raise indigo; disease, short food and clothing and harsh overseers marked the place, and about 600 survivors left for St. Augustine. The Fort Matanzas history says the Spanish Mediterranean culture still seen in St. Augustine owes more to these British Period Menorcans than to either Spanish period (National Park Service).

Other exports came from the forests and the Indian trade. Colonists shipped naval stores, the tar, pitch and turpentine used in shipbuilding, and deerskins bought from Native hunters for guns, cloth, kettles, iron tools and beads became one of Florida's main exports before the Revolutionary War (Museum of Florida History). Most plantations were in East Florida, since the sandy soil around Pensacola could not support large ones, and neither colony became economically independent of Britain.

East Florida and West Florida stayed loyal to the Crown because most colonists were recent immigrants who saw themselves as British subjects, and because the colonies depended on British trade (Museum of Florida History; National Park Service).

Loyalty ran strong in St. Augustine. Residents burned effigies of the revolutionary leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock in the plaza, and the East Florida capital became a staging area and central command post for British operations in the southern colonies, overflowing with troops and loyalist refugees from the Carolinas and Georgia, the Castillo history says (National Park Service). The Museum notes that loyalists were often called Tories (Museum of Florida History).

The old Spanish fort, renamed Fort St. Mark, served as a supply base and a prison for captured rebels, among them three signers of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Heyward Jr., Arthur Middleton and Edward Rutledge; South Carolina's lieutenant governor Christopher Gadsden spent 42 weeks in solitary confinement in its jail (National Park Service). Local men fought too. The East Florida Rangers, organized in 1776, grew to some 130 men in four companies, raided into Georgia, scouted within five miles of Savannah and in 1779 were reorganized as the King's Rangers.

Spain took Pensacola, the capital of West Florida, in May 1781 after about two months of fighting led by Bernardo de Galvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana (National Park Service).

Galvez worked his way along the Gulf first. After Spain declared war on Britain in August 1779, he took all four British forts on the lower Mississippi, including Baton Rouge and Natchez, within a month, and the next March Mobile surrendered in less than a day, according to the Fort Matanzas history (National Park Service). Hurricanes and storms forced him to wait until the following March to move on Pensacola.

The Museum of Florida History calls the siege the only major battle of the American Revolution fought in Florida, with Spanish and French forces against British and Indigenous defenders (Museum of Florida History). The Spanish besieged the city and Fort George for two months, and the turning point came when a Spanish artillery shell hit the British powder magazine of an outlying fortification, after which the garrison surrendered.

Galvez did not capture St. Augustine, the Park Service says (National Park Service). The British feared the Spanish would come up the Matanzas River and strike from the rear, as the British themselves had once tried, but no such attack was made (National Park Service). The Division of Historical Resources describes Spain as taking part in the war indirectly, as an ally of France (Division of Historical Resources).

British rule in East Florida and West Florida ended with the peace that closed the American Revolution, though the sources describe the handover to Spain differently.

The Castillo de San Marcos history says a treaty separate from the September 3, 1783 Treaty of Paris ceded Florida to Spain (National Park Service), the Museum of Florida History ties the loss to the 1783 Treaty of Paris (Museum of Florida History), and the Division of Historical Resources dates Spain's recovery of the rest of Florida to 1784 (Division of Historical Resources).

The sources also differ on who left. The Department of State speaks of the British evacuating Florida, with Spanish colonists and American settlers pouring in afterward (Florida Department of State), while both Park Service histories say most of the population, who owned businesses and plantations, did not leave, and that so many British stayed and so few Spanish returned that the colony's character changed (National Park Service; Fort Matanzas). The Museum counts British settlers who chose to remain among the Second Spanish Period's population, and notes that the British firm Panton, Leslie and Company, formed in East Florida shortly before the handover, set up headquarters in Pensacola in 1785 and dominated the southeastern Indian trade (Museum of Florida History).

For readers tracing the period on the ground, the Division of Historical Resources publishes a 64-page Florida British Heritage Trail guidebook with essays on the period and over 80 related historic sites across the state (Division of Historical Resources).