AHC: A Spanish Southeast

Spanish missions dotted Florida and Georgia coast until 1650 but left few impacts in the Southaeastern history.....your task is to establish a viable Spanish colony from those missions and keep the English to the north of the Carolinas...
 
Dalton

One impetus for getting more Spanish attention to the Southeast would be for some explorer to find some sign of the gold that was later discovered in Dalton, GA.
 
Also, tobacco farming discovered by the spanish, or cotton. Either would be a good incentive to colonize the region given both where of extreme value.
 
Imagine that the Spanish starts planting Tobacco in OTL Georgia....how would this colony develop? Would the English accept a border in The Carolinas?
 

Meerkat92

Banned
Imagine that the Spanish starts planting Tobacco in OTL Georgia....how would this colony develop? Would the English accept a border in The Carolinas?

After a certain point, once the Spanish had settled in large enough numbers, wouldn't a Carolinian border be a fiat accompli?
 
After a certain point, once the Spanish had settled in large enough numbers, wouldn't a Carolinian border be a fiat accompli?

It depends.....the Mexican border before 1848 was also considered as fiat accompli.....other good question is if the Spanish would spread to the west of the Apalaches, maybe joining by land the Florida / Georgia colony with OTL Texas...
 
This would take a fairly large divergence in Spanish colonial policy. Settler colonies in Latin America weren't quite the same as the English/British colonies on the East Coast. Most Spanish colonies were really conquests of pre-existing nations, using their social ladders as tools to extract labor for the pursuit of gold and silver. Settler colonies like Argentina began out of necessity: the need for a port out of Paraguay, which was actually settled before Buenos Aires due to the Guarani chiefdoms to be exploited.

There were no complex nation-states or chiefdoms to be exploited in the Southeast; at least, none that survived the plagues and other effects of initial contact. You'd need a Spain that is OK with settling for settling's sake (like England was), or for them to conquer another empire's colony that is built up and profitable enough to consider keeping and Hispanifying. Note that the second scenario never happened OTL either, as opposed to England (New York, Jamaica, Quebec, etc).
 
This would take a fairly large divergence in Spanish colonial policy. Settler colonies in Latin America weren't quite the same as the English/British colonies on the East Coast. Most Spanish colonies were really conquests of pre-existing nations, using their social ladders as tools to extract labor for the pursuit of gold and silver. Settler colonies like Argentina began out of necessity: the need for a port out of Paraguay, which was actually settled before Buenos Aires due to the Guarani chiefdoms to be exploited.

There were no complex nation-states or chiefdoms to be exploited in the Southeast; at least, none that survived the plagues and other effects of initial contact. You'd need a Spain that is OK with settling for settling's sake (like England was), or for them to conquer another empire's colony that is built up and profitable enough to consider keeping and Hispanifying. Note that the second scenario never happened OTL either, as opposed to England (New York, Jamaica, Quebec, etc).

See but even then the Spanish did get plantation agriculture and importing slaves to do the work, they could totally develop a systemvery much like the southern british colonies.
 
See but even then the Spanish did get plantation agriculture and importing slaves to do the work, they could totally develop a systemvery much like the southern british colonies.

But Georgia and the Carolinas also had a sizable white settler population. Georgia was originally established as a debtors' prison; forcible settlement was the only way Britain could cement control over the southern East coast, there weren't very many other reasons to settle it. Spanish settlement (by Spaniards) was almost entirely voluntary, and typically by men, thus the prevalence of mestizos throughout Latin America.

The Spanish had the potential to settle the Southeast for almost three centuries but never did. It just didn't mesh with their national strategy, and there wasn't anything to gain but land (which was important to England, not Spain). Change this strategy from the get-go and you might get somewhere.
 
Tristán de Luna y Arellano's colony at Ochuse is not hit by a hurricane on September 19, 1559 and the colony he plants is able to survive and from there it is a base to found later colonies like Santa Elena.
 
This would take a fairly large divergence in Spanish colonial policy. Settler colonies in Latin America weren't quite the same as the English/British colonies on the East Coast. Most Spanish colonies were really conquests of pre-existing nations, using their social ladders as tools to extract labor for the pursuit of gold and silver. Settler colonies like Argentina began out of necessity: the need for a port out of Paraguay, which was actually settled before Buenos Aires due to the Guarani chiefdoms to be exploited.

There were no complex nation-states or chiefdoms to be exploited in the Southeast; at least, none that survived the plagues and other effects of initial contact. You'd need a Spain that is OK with settling for settling's sake (like England was), or for them to conquer another empire's colony that is built up and profitable enough to consider keeping and Hispanifying. Note that the second scenario never happened OTL either, as opposed to England (New York, Jamaica, Quebec, etc).

Well, Spain had its exceptions: Colombia, Venezuela, Central America and The Caribbean had not pre-existing nations like Incas or Aztecs....their natives were in a similar tech level of those that inhabited the U.S Southeast.

I think that the best odd would be if Spain saw value in Tobacco.....the Southeast would be, like in OTL, the ideal place from where the Spanish would dominate the Tobacco commerce. Other chance would be sugar cane, as a competitor to the English Caribbean or Portuguese Brazil...although the Southeast is cooler than those places and less suitable for sugar cane, it could sustain a good level of competition against English and Portuguese.
 
I think if De Soto wasn't as crazy or if he decided to settle down in Georgia, you would end up with a much more Spanish South East. I think he made good native alliances, and even most of expedition didn't want to go any farther, so if he was less crazy there could definitely be a spanish colony in Georgia or South Carolina.
 
I think if De Soto wasn't as crazy or if he decided to settle down in Georgia, you would end up with a much more Spanish South East. I think he made good native alliances, and even most of expedition didn't want to go any farther, so if he was less crazy there could definitely be a spanish colony in Georgia or South Carolina.

Do you think that this colony could have developed until reaching a nation-state level like Mexico, Argentina, Cuba and other colonies had or it would be annexed by the English colonies or even the U.S?

Would we see a "Republica de la Florida" today in our maps?
 
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