Date
3-10-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Bruce Bendler
Keywords
Florida, War of 1812, French, Spanish, British, Creeks, Red Sticks, East Florida, West Florida, Borderlands, Gulf of Mexico
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Booth, Corey M., "Florida’s Impact on the War of 1812" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 7994.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/7994
Abstract
This dissertation challenges the traditional historiography of the War of 1812, which favors maritime disputes and northern campaigns, by demonstrating that Florida constituted a central theater whose strategic significance has been systematically understudied. Drawing upon multi-archival research in Spanish, British, and American sources and employing a borderlands analytical framework, this study argues that three interconnected imperatives, not discrete motivations, shaped American policy toward Florida during the conflict. First, Florida represented a critical national security vulnerability: British forces exploited Spanish colonial weakness to establish military footholds, armed Creek and Seminole allies, and thereby threatened the entire southern frontier with coordinated indigenous-imperial resistance. Second, American expansionist ambitions demonstrably predated formal hostilities, as evidenced by Jeffersonian territorial designs, systematic settler incursions into Spanish Florida, and land seizures that warfare subsequently legitimized through military occupation. Third, eliminating European imperial presence in Florida became inseparable from American war aims, as Spanish colonial decay and British strategic exploitation rendered continued European sovereignty fundamentally incompatible with American continental security imperatives. By analyzing these three dimensions as mutually reinforcing rather than competing explanations, this dissertation reframes the War of 1812 from a primarily maritime dispute into a continental territorial struggle in which the Gulf borderlands proved as consequential as the Canadian frontier or Atlantic shipping lanes. This reinterpretation illuminates how national security anxieties, expansionist ideology, and anti-imperial objectives converged in Florida.
