Lefebvre's Charles Town expedition

In September 1706, a joint force of French and Spanish troops under Captain Jacques Lefebvre set out to seize Charles Town, the seat of the English Province of Carolina. This effort unfolded during Queen Anne's War, the label sometimes given to the North American arm of the War of the Spanish Succession.

The French bore most of the cost and planning for the venture, sending the fleet from Havana, Cuba. Before reaching its target, the expedition paused at St. Augustine to gather additional men. It was early September 1706 when the ships finally arrived off Charles Town. Along the way, a skirmish with a privateer caused the Brillant, one of six vessels in the fleet, to fall behind and lose contact with the others.

News of the approaching fleet had already reached the area, prompting Governor Nathaniel Johnson to summon the militia. When the invading troops came ashore near the town, these defenders pushed them back without much difficulty. Meanwhile, a hastily assembled group of small boats under Colonel William Rhett moved against the lagging Brillant. By the time that ship finally arrived, its five companions had already retreated in defeat, and Rhett's makeshift flotilla managed to seize it.

Background

Word of the War of the Spanish Succession reached the southeastern reaches of North America by the middle of 1702, and the English Province of Carolina's officials responded without delay. Their December 1702 attempt to seize St. Augustine, capital of Spanish Florida, ended in failure, so they turned instead to launching a string of punishing raids on the Spanish-Indian settlements scattered across northern Florida. Watching these events unfold from their small outpost at Mobile on the Gulf coast, French officials grew uneasy, fearing that their own lands might become a target as well, given their alliance with the Spanish.

A joint Franco-Spanish expedition was first proposed in 1704, when Florida's governor, José de Zúñiga y la Cerda, raised the notion with a French naval captain as a way of striking back for the Carolina raids, though nothing concrete followed from their talk. Separately, Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville, who had founded Mobile and made a name for himself as a skilled privateer wreaking havoc on English colonial settlements during the Nine Years' War, drew up an ambitious scheme in 1703 for attacking Carolina. His plan called for a modest French fleet, built on limited resources, to rendezvous at Havana with a much larger Spanish fleet before the combined force struck Charles Town, as Carolina's capital was then called. Once Charles Town lay in ruins, the plan envisioned funding the entire venture by taking other English colonial towns hostage. D'Iberville did not manage to win King Louis XIV's approval for the scheme until late 1705. Although the king furnished ships and a contingent of troops, he insisted that d'Iberville cover the initial expense of equipping the expedition himself.

Attacks

The Spanish fleet appeared beyond the harbor bar on September 4, though Francis Le Jau's diary and other English-language accounts of the period list the date as August 24, a discrepancy stemming from the gap between the Julian calendar still used in the colonies and the Gregorian calendar we now follow. The Brillant had not yet arrived, and with her went a substantial portion of the French strength, including the guns meant for the campaign, digging tools, shells, and General Arbousset, who was to lead the land forces. Even without these assets, Captain Lefebvre pushed his ships across the bar on September 7 and issued a demand the following day. He wanted 50,000 Spanish pesos handed over, warning that Charles Town would be laid waste otherwise. Governor Johnson scoffed at the sum, insisting the town's worth ran to 40 million pesos and declaring that it had already cost so much blood that the enemy was welcome to try their luck.

Two landing parties came ashore on September 9. The larger group, roughly 160 strong, raided plantations near the Charleston neck before pulling back once Johnson dispatched militia by boat to confront them. A smaller detachment put ashore on James Island met the same fate, retreating once resistance loomed. Word reached Johnson late that night that the group near the neck had not fully withdrawn, prompting him to send Lieutenant Colonel Rhett with a hundred men to check on the situation. Reaching the area near dawn on the 10th, Rhett's force caught the invaders off guard. A short clash sent them running, though roughly 60 were taken prisoner, and the fighting cost as many as 12 invaders their lives along with a single defender. Rhett then took the colonial ships out on September 11 to hunt for the enemy vessels, only to find they had already slipped away.

Ignorant of these events, the Brillant finally arrived the following day. Her captain had misjudged how far St. Augustine lay, overshooting the mark and having to backtrack southward. General Arbousset put his men ashore east of Charles Town, but colonial forces seized the Brillant itself, and after a short engagement with Carolina militia that left between 14 and 30 dead, Arbousset and his troops gave up the fight. Among those captured were between 90 and 100 Indians, most of whom ended up "sold for slaves."

Aftermath

Following their triumph, colonial leaders in Carolina proclaimed a thanksgiving observance on October 17. Managing so many captives proved more complicated than celebrating, though. Roughly a third of these men were dispatched northward to Virginia, where officials assumed passage to England awaited them. That assumption fell apart because the yearly merchant convoy had already departed by the time the captives reached Virginia soil. Virginia's leadership found itself saddled with prisoners who, had the timing worked out differently, would simply have sailed away free aboard the very vessel that brought them.

The Franco-Spanish expedition provoked its own countermeasures. Carolinians organized Native American war parties that laid siege to Pensacola, among the last Spanish holdings still standing in Florida. A separate push aimed to rally Native American fighters against Mobile, yet this campaign collapsed under the weight of French diplomatic maneuvering within Native American communities, compounded by unfounded reports circulating about a second Franco-Spanish force.