The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History
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Meticulously researched and populated with the colorful characters that make American history a joy, this is the story of a young country testing its power on the global stage and a lost chapter in how the frontier spirit came to define American character. The first treatment of this little-known historical moment, The Rogue Republic shows how hardscrabble frontiersmen and gentleman farmers planted the seeds of civil war, marked the dawn of Manifest Destiny, and laid the groundwork for the American empire.
I think most historians would agree that the most fun in writing a book is the research. That is when a 21st-century man gets to feel a little like Christopher Columbus. There are always "discoveries" to be made in the archives, but more than that is the excitement of placing half a dozen disparate bits of information together, like puzzle pieces, and suddenly seeing the story they tell emerge. No matter how many times it has happened, I still feel excited in those moments.
Happily there were a lot of them working on The Rogue Republic. We have a lot of great resources available to us that still have not been fully exploited by historians. Newspapers are one, and the material that I found in the papers from 1800–1820 for this story would be enough itself to fill a book. The originals are hard to get to, of course, and often in poor condition. But perhaps the greatest advance for newspaper researchers in my memory is the Genealogybank.com site that is now available. It has digitized virtually all of the newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society, and applied an optical character recognition program to them. This means that we don’t have to laboriously scan the originals or microfilms page by page, but rather now we can enter names of keyword search terms, and call up the actual image of the paper with the reference. It is imperfect, since the poor type quality of many originals means that probably only half or less of the appearances of a search term will get caught, but that is a big step forward. In time you learn how to tinker and play with the system to find even more.
Then there are the Archives of the Indies, the massive collection of hundreds of thousands of documents from the Spaniards' years in North America and the Caribbean. Most have never been translated, but time and patience can winkle out wonderful material, and I found a wealth of it on the West Florida revolt.
The result of all this, and more, is that I originally wrote a book that was nearly twice as long as it needed to be, and had to cut more than 200 pages from the manuscript--about 40%. Cutting is almost always a good exercise, and certainly it tightened the book, but it was sad to see so many interesting tidbits go into the waste basket. There may be another book in some of that someday.
One of the things that drew me to this subject was one individual, the man whose involvement provides a skeleton of sorts for the book, and that is Reuben Kemper. All he did was come to West Florida in 1799 intending to run a country store, but within years, events beyond his control and ingredients of his own making made him the spark that eventually ignited a revolution. Electric individuals like Kemper have been the spearheads of many great moments and movements in history around the world, and it is fascinating to observe how they manage--and just often are managed by--the history they make.
Q: How did you come to write the story of the West Florida Revolt and Republic?
A: Most of my books are outgrowths of something I ran across in the course of writing the previous book. In this case, during research for The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, I encountered references to the 1810 revolt of the so-called Florida Parishes of Louisiana. I had also found some material relating to it while writing Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis. Those references stayed in the back of my mind, and came together in the idea for this book.
Q: Isn’t this rather a minor story?
A: I am attracted by small stories, especially if a lot of myth has grown out of them. They are interesting to research, and often, as in the case of The Rogue Republic, you discover that big things came from small events.
Q: Did that happen with the West Florida Rebellion?
A: Yes, it did. This little revolution and the 78-day republic that followed is the rehearsal for Manifest Destiny. All of the elements are there that characterized our later expansion to fill the continent. In fact, the West Florida experience is almost a template for the Texas Revolution of 1836 and California’s Bear Flag Revolt a decade later.
Q: Do any characters stand out in particular as being significant, or most interesting?
A: Easily the one that will stick in memory is Reuben Kemper. The whole period of militant unrest with Spanish rule in West Florida began with him--all as a result of the failure of his store--and he, and later his brothers, kept up the agitation that eventually led to armed revolt. He is genuinely larger than life--a friend and confidant of Andrew Jackson, an acquaintance of Jefferson’s and Monroe’s, a dynamic leader in the War of 1812, and more. His is one of those lives that people write novels about.
Q: What do you think the lasting message of your book is, if it has one?
A: I think it is that Americans will always be Americans, and that our character was already well defined when the nation was only a quarter of a century old. Our peculiar mixture of ambition, self-interest, sense of justice, and above all independence, were already fixed by the early 1800s, and were certainly on display in the revolt that took four parishes of the old Louisiana Territory away from Spain and put them on the road to becoming a part of the United States.
Bonus Pictures from The Rogue Republic
(Click on Images to Enlarge)
Pintado’s deputy surveyor Ira C. Kneeland, his ears notched by the Kempers less than six months before, finished this plan of Baton Rouge on March 6, 1809. Grand Pre had ordered it before his December 1808 departure, but Kneeland’s recovery from the Kemper attack delayed its completion. "B" is the public square where the convention held its sessions with Delassus, and where the Lone Star first rose and last went down. Fort San Carlos is at lower left. The flatland along the river is clearly evident , as is the small ravine leaning up the bluff by which the attackers entered the fort from the rear.
The flag of the infant Republic of West Florida, seen again in Texas in 1836, and later as the Bonnie Blue Flag of the Confederacy in 1861.
Governor David Holmes of Mississippi Territory worked closely with Claiborne in keeping the peace on the troublesome Ellicott line and then was instrumental in the assumption of power in West Florida.
Kemper and Company began operations in a warehouse rented from David Bradford, whose estate, Laurel Grove (later renamed the Myrtles), may have been a temporary home for their retail establishment.
Pintado’s map of Baton Rouge in 1805, when it was the center of the growing West Florida unrest during Carlos de Grand-Pre’s governorship. For San Carlos is at the lower left.
William C. Davis, author of The Rogue Republic
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