We seceded where others failed

Of all the flags, T-shirts, and bumper stickers sold on Duval Street, the blue-and-yellow Conch Republic banner is the one most visitors assume is pure invention. It isn't. The secession happened, the reasons behind it were serious, and it worked.

The roadblock

In the spring of 1982, the United States Border Patrol set up a roadblock on U.S. 1 just south of Florida City — at the top of the Overseas Highway, on the only road connecting the Keys to the mainland. The stated purpose was intercepting drugs and undocumented immigrants, in the years following the Mariel boatlift.

The method was the problem. Agents stopped and searched vehicles leaving the Keys — looking under seats, opening glove compartments, checking trunks. Delays ran for hours and traffic backed up as far as nineteen miles.

For a community whose entire economy is people driving down to visit, this was a catastrophe. As news of the traffic jam spread, visitors began canceling their reservations. Key West residents also noticed the implication: to get home, American citizens were being stopped and searched as though crossing an international border.

The lawsuit

Community leaders gathered around Mayor Dennis Wardlow, and at the urging of attorney David Paul Horan they tried the legal route first, filing for an injunction in federal court in Miami.

The court declined to stop the Border Patrol from treating the Keys as though they were a foreign country.

Wardlow walked out of the courthouse into a crowd of reporters asking what he intended to do now. His answer: they were going home to secede.

April 23, 1982

The logic was simple and, in its way, unanswerable. As Wardlow later put it: if they were going to be treated as a foreign country, they would become one.

At noon, at Clinton Square, Wardlow and a crowd of supporters and press lowered the Stars and Stripes and raised the blue and yellow flag of the Conch Republic, and he read the Proclamation of Secession — the name taken from "Conch," what people born in the Keys have called themselves for generations. He announced that Washington could remove the roadblock or prepare to put up a permanent border to a new foreign land, and said he would negotiate only with the President or Vice President.

Then came the war.

Officially, the whole thing was theater. But it was extremely effective theater. The secession generated enormous publicity for the Keys' predicament, and the roadblock and inspection station were removed shortly afterward.

Why it stuck

Most publicity stunts evaporate. This one became permanent identity, for a reason that goes deeper than merchandise.

The Keys have always sat at an angle to the mainland. Even during the Civil War, when Florida seceded, Key West remained under Union control — an island whose loyalties were determined by the sea rather than the state it was attached to. Before that came the wreckers, who lived off salvage and answered to their own court. It's a place with its own economy, its own weather, its own way of doing things, and a long memory of being governed by people 500 miles away who have never been here.

The Conch Republic describes itself as a "Sovereign State of Mind," seeking to bring more humor, warmth, and respect to a world in need of all three. That's the whole philosophy on a T-shirt, and it's more sincere than it looks.

The 1995 invasion

There was a sequel, and it's just as good.

In September 1995, a U.S. Army Reserve civil affairs battalion planned a training exercise simulating the invasion of a foreign island — landing at Key West and treating the residents as foreign nationals. Nobody thought to notify Conch Republic officials.

Seeing another opportunity, the Republic mobilized. The city responded to the "invasion" with fire hoses, water balloons, and stale bread, and the Army eventually issued a formal apology to the Conch Republic. It remains, as far as anyone knows, the only occasion on which the United States military has apologized to a micronation inside its own borders.

Independence Day

The Conch Republic celebrates Independence Day every April 23 as part of a week-long festival, and it's one of the best times to be in Key West if you like your history served with rum. The celebration includes a pirates' ball, a drag queen footrace, and a sailing regatta recalling the island's seafaring heritage.

The flag flies over businesses all through the Keys, not just Key West. Passports and currency are sold as souvenirs. And if you ask a longtime resident whether it was all a joke, you'll usually get a careful answer: the war was a joke. The reason for it wasn't.