Vicente Manuel de Céspedes

Vicente Manuel de Cespedes (1721?-1794), also known as Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes, was a Spanish governor of Santiago de Cuba (1781-1782) and the Spanish province of East Florida (1784-1790).

Vicente Manuel de Cespedes y Velasco was born in Valencia, Spain, probably in 1721. His paternal grandfather, José de Céspedes, was a lieutenant general in the Spanish Royal Army and Governor of Rosalcazár in Oran, (Algeria), and his maternal grandfather, Martín Arostegui Larrea, was a Knight of Santiago (1750) in Spain. He joined the Spanish Royal Army in his youth, attaining the rank of colonel and field marshal.

In 1781, Cespedes was elected acting governor of Santiago de Cuba, but this assignment lasted only until 1782.

In 1783, he was appointed Governor of East Florida by Bernardo de Gálvez, assuming the office on June 27, 1784. On July 12, British Governor Patrick Tonyn turned over the Castillo de San Marcos to Cespedes, which marked the end of the British regime in East Florida and the renewal of Spanish administration. Thus, the British who had migrated there during British rule of the province moved to the British colonies in the Caribbean.

For other way, Céspedes proposed that all the vacant property in St. Augustine should be confiscated by the Crown for distribution to returning Floridanos. He also recommended that the King impose time limits for the repossession of unoccupied property to avoid confusion when the former proprietors or their heirs asserted their claims. Zéspedes wanted to register all legitimate proprietorships purchased from such realtors during the British Period; by this means he hoped to forestall disruption of the traditional real estate system in St. Augustine. Following the Spanish exodus of 1763, twenty years of British rule, and the retrocession of Florida to Spain in 1784, Céspedes faced many problems concerning the disposition of property; his manner of addressing them was expeditious and suitable to the complex situation in St. Augustine.

Céspedes began to attract settlers to East Florida, granting them lands, the right not to pay taxes for ten years and delivery of cash bonuses.

He especially promoted the emigration of settlers who were not of Spanish origin to East Florida. However, eventually, many non-Catholic foreigners were settled in the province, according could check. In 1784, Cespedes ordered a census taken of East Florida, although only a partial draft of it is preserved. In 1786, still under the Céspedes administration, the priest Thomas Hassett conducted another more detailed census, to learn the population of the province, The complete draft of this census, unlike the previous one, has been preserved.

Cespedes, along with the British military officers stationed in the Floridas, asked the Spanish king that the British merchants William Panton (of the trading firm Panton, Leslie & Company) and Mathew and Strother (of the namesake company) be allowed to stay in the Floridas, maintaining that they prevented Amerindian attacks against the Spanish garrisons, undersold the price of goods sold by the Americans, and would help keep the Floridas under Spanish dominion. After their trade commissions were authorized in 1786, these merchants could legally maintain their commercial relations with Native Americans.

Also during his governorship, Cespedes granted permission to botanist André Michaux to explore East Florida in search of new species of plants, he obtaining great success in this enterprise. Cespedes was replaced by Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada y Barnuevo as governor of the province in July 1790.

Cespedes died on October 21, 1794 and was buried in the Cathedral of San Cristóbal in Havana.

Cespedes married Maria de la Conception Basabe Arostegui the July 22, 1754, in the Cathedral of Havana, Cuba.

• According to American botanist Asa Gray (1810 – 1888), the flowering plants genus, "Lespedeza", was named in honor of Céspedes (who, through a letter, allowed André Michaux to explore East Florida in search of new species of plants), but when Céspedes wrote the letter, at the beginning of it, somehow, the name of Céspedes was changed to "Zespedes". So, when the Michaux´s book Flora Boreali-Americana of 1802 was printed, the name "Céspedes" to refer to the plant was wrote as "Lespedez", of which derived the current name of the plant: Lespedeza.

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• S. Fralish, James; B. Franklin, Scott (February 2002). Taxonomy and Ecology of Woody Plants in North American Forests: Excluding. Page 568.