AboutHank Hokamp Expertise U. S. (American) History has been a hobby of mine for many a moon. When you understand history, you understand basic concepts and ideas. You will learn about cause and effect, relationships and human nature.
Question What did Spain benefit with the Adams/Onis Treaty? Why did they give up Florida?
Answer Hello, Michelle. Hope you're having a great day:
In the last years of the eighteenth century, Spain once again faced concerted efforts by rivals, now including the United States, to wrest from it important parts of its North American empire. Relations with the United States had come dangerously close to war over navigation rights on the Mississippi River and the expansion of Anglo-American frontier settlements into the Spanish Floridas. Napoleon's coerced acquisition of Louisiana in 1800 and his subsequent sale of the vast territory to the United States in 1803 left Spanish North America divided and vulnerable. Under these circumstances Texas assumed a geopolitical importance vastly disproportionate to its economic or demographic place in the empire. To Spanish royal officials United States claims that the Louisiana Purchase included all the territory to the Rio Grande put in jeopardy not only New Mexico, but the silver-mining regions of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí as well. Governor Manuel Antonio Cordero Bustamanteqv had orders to hold on to all of Texas, which at that time stretched northward from the Medina and Nueces rivers to the Red River and eastward to the Arroyo Hondo. Laredo at this time was part of Nuevo Santander, today Tamaulipas, and Ysleta was then part of New Mexico. Simón Herrera, Spanish military commander at the eastern border, decided to make his stand on the west bank of the Sabine River. Late in 1806 he and Gen. James Wilkinson, who had orders to occupy the territory to the Sabine, signed the Neutral Ground agreement, by which both sides agreed to stay out of the area between the Sabine and the Arroyo Hondo until its sovereignty was determined by treaty.
For the next decade Spain tried to keep the United States at bay in Texas while slowly ceding ground in Florida. The Mexican-oriented activities of Philip Nolan, Aaron Burr, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, and General Wilkinson concerned Spanish officials more than Anglo-American encroachments in Florida because Mexico was a richer colonial possession. The overthrow of the Spanish Bourbons by Napoleon, the resistance government in southern Spain, and the outbreak of various rebellions throughout Spanish America also contributed to loss of ground to the United States. Between 1810 and 1813 Baton Rouge and the Florida parishes and Mobile areas were incorporated into the United States. In 1814 and again in 1818 Andrew Jackson captured Pensacola. In 1817 a group of filibusters established the Republic of the Floridas on Amelia Island and resisted efforts by Spanish troops to oust them. Mexican viceregal authorities, successful in containing Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla's revolt and in keeping Texas under Spanish rule, handed Ferdinand VII, the restored Bourbon monarch, at least one strong bargaining position in negotiations with the United States. Between 1816 and 1819 John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onís negotiated the conflicting territorial claims of the two continental powers. The resulting Adams-Onís Treaty, signed in Washington on February 22, 1819, recognized the obvious: the United States got the Floridas, much of which were already in Anglo-American hands; Spain retained title to Texas and got a clear demarcation of its boundary with the Louisiana territory. By terms of the treaty, the Sabine and Red Rivers marked the Texas-Louisiana border and the Neutral Ground became a permanent part of Louisiana.
