First published in 1963 by the University of Miami Press and originally Tanner’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, this work in its present edition contains a new acknowledgement, preface, and introduction. Patricia C. Griffin wrote the new introduction and included two pages of references, which add a few new titles to the bibliography.
The book is for the most part a biography of Governor Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes y Velasco, the first Spanish governor of East Florida after the return of that province to Spain in 1783. A military officer with more than forty years’ service, Zéspedes reached the pinnacle of his career with his appointment as brigadier (general) and governor of East Florida. His job was to Hispanicize East Florida and its polyglot population, to administer the province, and to deal with the plots and counterplots of his northern neighbors. Tanner did an excellent job in recording Zéspedes’ governorship as well as providing a good history of East Florida from 1784 to 1790, the year Zéspedes departed.
In the years since the book was first published, thousands of pages of additional documents from the Spanish archives have been acquired by various libraries and universities. In those documents are the answers to several questions not included in the original edition. Tanner has noted several such answers, albeit quite briefly, in her new preface (pp. xv–xvii). She tantalizingly refers to the solution of the Delaney murder case, 1785–86, about which she had written an article in 1965, but we still do not know who the guilty party was. I would have preferred that the text be rewritten to include much of the new information, although I recognize that it would not have changed the overall biography of Governor Zéspedes nor the history of Spanish East Florida.
