INNERARITY'S CLAIM

Robert Register and James Hargrove

North of the Apalachicola River bridge, Market Street intersects Forbes Street, Leslie Street and Panton Street. These streets were all named on the 1835 plat of Apalachicola as a legacy to three partners of Panton, Leslie and Company, the old Indian trading firm that was renamed John Forbes & Company in 1804. 

The future Apalachicola was sandwiched between two of Forbes’ immense land claims, which were the largest Spanish land grants in the Territory of Florida. To the east lay over 1.4 million acres called Forbes Purchase, which John Forbes & Company had sold to the men who founded the Apalachicola Land Company in 1817. To the west lay a 1.2 million acre grant that was named Innerarity’s Claim on Searcy’s 1829 map of Florida. 

Whereas the Forbes Purchase had originated in an 1804 land cession from the Creek Indians in payment for bad debt, Innerarity’s Claim resulted from losses sustained from British-provoked attacks and looting during the War of 1812-1815.

Assisting Americans during the First Seminole War

After their defeat to General Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, British forces returned to Apalachicola and Dauphin Island in 1815 to plan a large scale invasion that would capture all American possessions along the Gulf of Mexico and give them control over the Mississippi River. In early February, a large British force had begun to attack Ft. Boyer at Mobile Point (present-day Fort Morgan) when news arrived that the Treaty of Ghent had been signed.

In May, Col. Edward Nicolls sailed for England, leaving the former British fort on the Apalachicola River in control of a regiment of erstwhile black Colonial Marines and Choctaw Indians he had armed and trained. Even though the fort was in Spanish territory and the War of 1812 was over, the men continued to fly the British flag and promised to defend the fort against American forces.

Shortly after the British departed, two of Colonel Nicolls’ former lieutenants, George Woodbine and Robert Ambrister, went to the Seminole town at Suwannee in an attempt to wrest Florida from Spain. They were joined by a trader from the Bahamas named Alexander Arbuthnot, who opened stores on the Ochlockonee and Wakulla Rivers to confront the rival firm of John Forbes & Co. Arbuthnot, Ambrister and Woodbine planned to act as agents for the Creeks and Seminoles to help regain their lands, meanwhile carving an empire out of the territory much as William Bowles had attempted 20 years earlier.

At risk to their lives, Forbes’ agents William Hambly and Edmund Doyle were then managing the store at Prospect Bluff and plantations that they owned up the Apalachicola River at Spanish Bluff. Hambly wrote to Arbuthnot, warning him to stop fomenting an Indian war and associating with Woodbine, Ambrister, and the outlaws in the fort.

Hambly had helped build and manage the British fort at Prospect Bluff, and knew the layout perfectly. Afraid to keep working close to what had become known as the Negro Fort, Hambly made his way up the river to a U.S. garrison at Fort Scott on the Flint River, and explained the fort’s defenses to the commander, Lt. Col. Duncan Clinch, just before U.S. generals Andrew Jackson and Edmund Gaines ordered that the fort be destroyed.

Clinch was joined on the river by two U.S. Navy gunboats that sailed to Prospect Bluff from Apalachicola Bay. On July 27, 1816, they moved the gunboats into range, and sailing master Jairus Loomis fired a heated cannonball that struck the powder magazine of the fort. The gunpowder detonated and killed 270 of the 300 defenders. The attack incensed Arbuthnot, Ambrister and the Seminoles, who blamed William Hambly for the destruction of the fort, just as Colonel Nicolls had blamed James and John Innerarity for British losses in the battles at Mobile and New Orleans.

Destruction of the fort at Prospect Bluff shortly initiated the First Seminole War, sparked by a massacre of 36 men, women and children on the Apalachicola River. In 1818, Andrew Jackson’s forces invaded Spanish Florida, burned the Seminole town at Suwannee, and captured the Spanish fort at St. Marks. Woodbine escaped back to Nassau, but Ambrister and Arbuthot were captured and executed. The United States began negotiating with Spain for cession of Florida, and the treaty of 1819 stated that only Spanish land grants deeded before January 24, 1818 could be valid. That provision was to decide the fate of Forbes Purchase and Innerarity’s Claim.

Decline of the trading empire

Constant warring from 1813-1818 had ended Forbes & Co.’s trade with Indian tribes, and 14 of its stores closed, leaving James and John Innerarity managing the last two in Mobile and Pensacola. Lawsuits to recover their estimated losses of $100,000 were overturned in British courts.

John Forbes and his daughters moved to Cuba in 1817, where he closed out his days running a sugar mill with his sons-in-law on the Canimar River. In 1818, he petitioned the Captain-General of Cuba, Don Jose Cienfuegos, to repay John Forbes & Co. for its losses by awarding title to all the land from the mouth of the Choctawhatchee east to the point where Sweetwater Creek enters the Apalachicola River. Without consulting the inhabitants of West Florida, the governor agreed to grant the company over 1.2 million acres of land. 

Andrew Jackson was sufficiently impressed by John Innerarity’s good reputation in the Pensacola community that, days after the general assumed command as governor of West Florida in 1821, he appointed Innerarity to the town council of Pensacola. Within a month, however, this cordial relationship became strained because Jackson sided with Mercedes and Caroline Vidal of Pensacola in a minor lawsuit against Forbes & Co.

In 1830, John Innerarity purchased the remaining Forbes & Co. property in Pensacola, thereby ending the firm’s activities there. In addition to enjoying the company of his family, including the marriage of two of his daughters to Americans and the third to his nephew, William Panton Innerarity, he maintained a prominent social and economic status in Pensacola. A respected citizen, in 1830 he was appointed as the vice-consul of France, for which service he was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1846.

James continued as the main partner of John Forbes & Company at Mobile from 1818 until his death in 1847 when Forbes & Company ceased to exist. But during some years from the 1820s to the 1840s, he also lived on a plantation in Cuba, where he met Laura Manual Centeno, by whom he had five children out of wedlock.

Richard Keith Call intervenes

Land ownership controversies like “Innerarity’s Claim” were the most pressing problems facing the government in Florida Territory. Not until 1828 did Congress pass a law allowing claimants of large grants like Innerarity’s Claim and Forbes Purchase to file suit against the United States in the Superior Court of the district where the disputed land was located. 

Even though he was a partner with James Innerarity in the purchase of property on Santa Rosa Island, lawyer Richard Keith Call was the last person Innerarity wanted to represent the United States when his case came before Judge Henry M. Brackenridge’s Pensacola courtroom in the fall of 1830. Call, who had served with Jackson at Mobile and New Orleans, was appointed to assist government attorneys in settling larger Spanish grants.

Through service as Florida’s territorial delegate to Congress and as Receiver of Public Monies at the public land office in Tallahassee, Call had become an expert on Spanish land grants and was convinced that all of the Spanish land grants issued in the last days of the regime were frauds. In preparing for the case in 1829, Call received a federal commission that paid him to sail to Havana in pursuit of original documents pertaining to the case.

Call returned to Pensacola and showed Judge Brackenridge that the actual date of the land grant had been altered in order to make it conform with the provision in the treaty that made it illegal to make land grants in Florida after January 24, 1818. In the original document, a line had been drawn through “March” and the word “January” written above it. By a matter of days, James and John Innerarity lost the land grant that compensated Forbes & Co. for wartime losses.

Indian title to the land had already been extinguished by the Treaty of Moultrie Creek with the Seminoles, so the title to land west of Apalachicola was clear. In 1831, Robert Butler, the Surveyor-General of Florida, ordered surveys of the townships west of the river. By 1834, the land was being purchased at the Tallahassee land office for about two dollars an acre.

If R. K. Call had not found the fraudulent date on the original Forbes grant to the land between the Apalachicola and the Choctawhatchee, the land where old St. Joseph was built in 1835 as a rival port to Apalachicola would not have been available.  The saga of the St. Joseph Canal and Railroad Company building a shortcut to Iola would not have happened, and James and John Innerarity would have been among the richest men in Florida.

For decades, the fact that James Innerarity had warned Andrew Jackson about British plans to invade New Orleans was kept secret. However, Richard Keith Call knew of the meeting, and he recounted the event in a speech he gave at Jackson Square, New Orleans in 1855. His account was confirmed by letters found in Andrew Jackson’s public papers, and we now know that John Forbes, James and John Innerarity, and William Hambly all contributed to Andrew Jackson’s victories in the Creek War, the battles of Mobile and New Orleans, and the First Seminole War.