AHC: Loyalist Georgia and Florida

Challenge: Have Georgia and Florida stay in the British Empire along with British Canada, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, while having the other continental colonies still successfully secede. (So Glen's Dominion of Southern America doesn't count)
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Florida is a possibility, but Georgia is difficult

Florida was returned to Spain in the Treaty of Paris, 1783, as part of the general settlement, so you'd need to come up with something else - Gibraltar? That alone opens up a lot of butterflies...

Georgia rose in revolution after Lexington, signed the Declaration of Independence, and even after the British occupied Savannah, was still in the fight; I have a hard time seeing all that resulting in a loyallist political majority.

The problems for a British Florida after US independence are:
  • the frontier with the US, which yields all the historical conflict with the Creek/Seminole/border tribes that was seen prior to US annexation in 1819;
  • the fact that once abolition in the British empire kicks in, there's little money to be made in northern Florida; and
  • that there's next to no economic reason for the British to develop or colonize on the Peninsula prior to the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century.
Historically, by 1860, the population of Florida had reached 140,000 people, of which about 44 percent were enslaved (about 43 percent in Georgia at the same time); about 80% of the entire population lived in the state's northern counties, where cotton and sugarcane plantations were established.

A British Florida is a backwater with a significant defense burden and no economic return; it makes British Honduras make sense.

Best,
 
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