Joseph Burkholder Smith

My review of this book focuses on its shortcomings. The book includes a bibliography that mentions other books on the subject; I haven't read any of them but they likely are more objective accounts of "President Madison's phony war to steal Florida from Spain."

Here are my criticisms with this book:

1. No maps, not a single one. Unless you are familiar with the panhandle of Florida and the area down to St. Augustine and coastal Alabama and Mississippi and the terms East and West Florida, now over two hundred years old, you will have to settle for the author's paragraph-long descriptions of the contested areas.
2. A dramatis personae would have helped. One character in particular threw me in this regard, Enrique White. When the author first mentions him in Chapter V he appears to be on the Spanish side. Although this is early in the book the author had already lost my confidence and I thought something was amiss. But in the following chapter the author reveals that White was an Irish mercenary in the service of Spain.
Later the author mentions a U.S. naval lieutenant named Winslow Foster. First he refers to him as Foster but later as Winslow. The first name basis appears to be nothing more than rushed slipshod writing. Or a lack of genuine curiosity in his subject: How can a character with the name of Outerbridge Horsey avoid comment? Wikipedia reveals him to be a U.S. senator from Delaware (1801-1821). This book was published in 1983 so I wonder what readers thought of Outerbridge Horsey before the advent of the internet.
There is also a distressingly frequent use of last names only when introducing characters. Generals Lafayette and Wilkinson can reasonably be assumed to be the Marquis de Lafayette and James Wilkinson but on page 67 when Governor Hodge seems to morph into Governor Holmes can any reader really be sure what is going on?
3. A photo section would have been helpful in establishing some of the many characters in the readers' minds. The frontier towns of St. Marys and St. Johns might also have been better visualized if contemporary sketches or drawings had been included. Perhaps that was beyond the means of this independent publisher, Arbor House.
4. The late author, a retired and disaffected CIA officer, saw a common thread between the Vietnam war, the Bay of Pigs and the overthrow of Salvador Allende and Madison's phony war. But he not only fails to show a relationship but can't even give an overview of what he means instead throwing out passing references to Lee Harvey Oswald, Alexander Haig, Anthony Summers among others and expecting the reader to connect the dots.
On page 149 the author does a bit of foreshadowing, indicating a big reveal will be forthcoming but it never materializes. The bottom line is that Madison and his secretary of state James Monroe were not going to invade or "steal" Florida unless (1) the Spanish authorities ceded the territory to the U.S. as they eventually did seven or eight years later in 1819 or (2) a foreign (i.e., European, most probably British) power seized Florida from Spain. Perhaps this was the genesis of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.… (mehr)