all who have paid the slightest
attention to the progress of affairs in that quarter. Throughout
the whole of those Provinces to which the Spanish title extends the
Government of Spain has scarcely been felt. Its authority has been
confined almost exclusively to the walls of Pensacola and St. Augustine,
within which only small garrisons have been maintained. Adventurers from
every country, fugitives from justice, and absconding slaves have found
an asylum there. Several tribes of Indians, strong in the number of
their warriors, remarkable for their ferocity, and whose settlements
extend to our limits, inhabit those Provinces. These different hordes of
people, connected together, disregarding on the one side the authority
of Spain, and protected on the other by an imaginary line which
separates Florida from the United States, have violated our laws
prohibiting the introduction of slaves, have practiced various frauds
on our revenue, and committed every kind of outrage on our peaceable
citizens which their proximity to us enabled them to perpetrate. The
invasion of Amelia Island last year by a small band of adventurers, not
exceeding 150 in number, who wrested it from the inconsiderable Spanish
force stationed there, and held it several months, during which a single
feeble effort only was made to recover it, which failed, clearly proves
how completely extinct the Spanish authority had become, as the conduct
of those adventurers while in possession of the island as distinctly
shows the pernicious purposes for which their combination had been
formed.

This country had, in fact, become the theater of every species of
lawless adventure. With little population of its own, the Spanish
authority almost extinct, and the colonial governments in a state of
revolution, having no pretension to it, and sufficiently employed in
their own concerns, it was in a great measure derelict, and the object
of cupidity to every adventurer. A system of buccaneering was rapidly
organizing over it which menaced in its consequences the lawful commerce
of every nation, and particularly of the United States, while it
presented a temptation to every people, on whose seduction its success
principally depended. In regard to the United States, the pernicious
effect of this unlawful combination was not confined to the ocean;
the Indian tribes have constituted the effective force in Florida.
With these tribes these adventurers had formed at an early period