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Florida was reduced to a walled city with a few hundred peasants living outside the walls
Source: Situado and Sabana #82
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In the 18th century, support for the maritime periphery was reduced once more to private enterprise and royal subventions. The once sizeable hinterland had come and gone, leaving St. Augustine a walled city that specialized in prizes of war and illicit trade with English colonies. Colonel Moore had burned the city in 1702. The Crown rebuilt it, refunding homeowners for their losses and authorizing grants for public buildings. What they really needed, the floridanos decided, were a series of stone walls and earthen defenseworks on the landward sides of the city. On them they spent the money the king had authorized to rebuild the friary and the parish church. Outside the walls, under the guns of the Castillo, stood the thatched huts of a few hundred native hunters, loggers, charcoal burners, drunks, and prostitutes. The steadily increasing Indian fund went, not to them, primarily, but to keep the more warlike Southeastern Indians neutral. In the postmission 18th century, as in the premission 16th century, Indians were a drain on the royal resources, a negative element in the support system. The Franciscans, deprived of purpose, spent their time in peninsular-provincial conflicts and were eventually secularized by default when their last doctrinas were taken away from them. (Bushnell SS)
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