The Power of Symbolism
The first free-Black settlement in North America was more than a place
Been a while since I made a post. This one actually had some high points before it had the inevitable low.
Drawing via National Park Service
A few miles north of St. Augustine, often unnoticed by tourists, a state park called Fort Mose marks the first free Black settlement in what would become America. For many, that’s the takeaway for the place, but a more thorough look shows a deep history of risk, struggle, and freedom.
The story begins in Spanish Florida. The Spanish were enslavers, so let’s not paint them in any sort of righteous light. Comparatively, their idea of enslavement was fairly liberal - enslaved people could own property, and such property could include slaves of their own. Unofficially, Florida became a haven for escaped enslaved people from the British colonies to the north. The earliest escapees traveled south along the Low Country, sometimes aided by Native people with whom they found common cause in hatred of the English, to cross into Spanish territory.
In the Edict of 1693, King Charles the III of Spain declared that any escaped enslaved person from an English plantation in America or the West Indies was free. The provisions required they convert to Catholicism, take a “Christian” name, pledge their allegiance to the King, and males serve four years in the militia. This policy was in place as early as 1687 for any person making it across the St. Mary’s River; the edict merely codified and expanded it.
Why all the fuss? First, the Spanish and English had an “it’s complicated” relationship status. At this point, they hated each other, and any chance to put one over on the other was welcome. The proximity of the English plantations made the entire plan feasible. Second, there was a great need for labor in both English and Spanish colonies, and freedom was a powerful recruiting tool. Third, given the hatred between the two countries and Spain’s smaller military presence in Florida, a homegrown militia composed of people with a highly vested interest – not wanting to be reenslaved – was a perfect tool for bolstering the defense of the colony.
By 1738, over 100 people had successfully gained asylum in St. Augustine. While that seems a small number, do remember that the journey from the Carolinas or the newly-established colony of Georgia involved significant risk, both from white humans and from crossing a landscape covered with swamps, marshes, and dense forests. That year, Governor Manuel Joaquín de Montiano y Sopelana established the town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (mo-say) as the first free Black settlement in the Americas. Free is an abstract word for most of us. This wasn’t yelling at a school board meeting-type freedom. The formerly enslaved residents of Fort Mose now had the power of self-determination; control of their lives and futures. Some experienced this concept for the first time; others regained what they had lost when kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped to the Americas for sale in the colonies.
The town served as a northern military defense against approach from the north for the city of St. Augustine, garrisoned by a militia led by Captain Francisco Menéndez, a formerly-enslaved Mandinka from Gambia. Most of the fort’s population also originated from West African tribal and cultural groups such as Kongos, Carabalis, and other Mandinkas. Together with Native groups, many of whom had also dropped below the Florida border due to English predation and oppression, the garrison at Ft Mose tended the fort and patrolled the surrounding frontier. They also thrived, establishing agriculture and trade with Spanish and Native neighbors. Not for nothing, many West African foodways ingrained themselves into the new habitat, with dishes like Pilau and ingredients like rice, peanuts, black-eyed peas, and okra becoming staples in the Florida pantry in later years.
Word of this free settlement traveled north and became the stuff of legend. As “Negro Fort” would in later years, the ideation of the free Black town fed aspirations of escape. Many historians believe the existence of Ft Mose was the impetus for the Stono Rebellion the year after its founding. Twenty enslaved South Carolinians near the Stono River revolted, armed themselves, and marched south toward freedom in Florida. Over sixty deaths, white and Black, resulted from the rebellion, but it also raised the population of the fort by a few dozen.
As was often the case, European disagreements manifested in North America, affecting people stolen from Africa. Spurred mainly by the English desire to rid America of the Spanish, but in no small measure a punitive action for the Stono Rebellion, Governor James Oglethorpe of Georgia led a siege on St. Augustine and Ft Mose in 1740 as part of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
The British quickly overran the fort. 170 troops took up residency at Ft Mose for 16 days before Spanish troops, Black militia, and Native allies quickly retook Mose, destroying it in the process, while the siege of St Augustine ended in failure. Oglethorpe retreated to Savannah to lick his wounds, and the residents of Ft Mose assimilated into the population of St Augustine as free and equal people before rebuilding the fort in 1752.
Life continued at the fort until 1763 when the First Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War, and Florida became an English territory in exchange for Cuba. The laws that protected slavery in the other English colonies now applied to Florida. That meant that every single person of African descent living in Florida was subject to enslavement. Even if a person was born free in Florida, that person was the offspring of a white person’s property. Therefore those property rights extended to any of their descendants, no matter how many generations removed. Fighting and protecting Florida had been for naught, and the Black residents of Ft Mose removed themselves to Cuba with the Spanish to avoid re-enslavement.
When Spain regained ownership of Florida in 1783 after the American Revolution, their slavery laws were again in effect. They again rebuilt Ft Mose, and the population lived in freedom until the US deceitfully purchased Florida from the Spanish, who’d grown weary of the place after failing to extract fortunes from their colony. Again the rules regarding human ownership shifted to the English model, where proof of ownership was not required to re-sell a human life; any Black person was a commodity on the open market. The people quickly abandoned Ft Mose, and it disappeared into the marshlands, its history obscured until archaeologists investigated the site in the late 1980s. Like Angola, another free town near present-day Bradenton, few written records of this free-person site exist, and life in these places required reconstruction via forensic investigation.
Ft Mose wasn’t the only settlement of free Black people in Florida, but it was the first. Reducing it to that title is a disservice. Symbolism has power; the concept of a place where Black people lived freely during a time when no such thing existed on this continent lent hope to those suffering enslavement, possibly having a more significant effect than its physical presence.