Black Lives in 16th-18th century Florida | Black Lives in European History

Discover the origins of Fort Mosé, established in 1738 in St. Augustine, Florida, where free black soldiers and their families developed a mixed-race society – small, but important to and reflective of the Spanish Empire’s military and social organization. In this third session in our series “Black Lives in European History,” we’ll explore the racial fluidity of early St. Augustine, including America’s first recorded wedding, in 1565 – between Luisa Abrego, a free black woman, and Miguel Rodríguez, a white man. We’ll compare the differences of how black and native American people were viewed in Spanish Florida and British South Carolina. We’ll see how those views shaped the different roles black and native American people played in the two societies, and how they also contributed to frequent conflict between the two European powers between the late 17th and late 18th centuries.

We’ll learn about how conflict led to opportunity for greater freedom in Spanish Florida and to an early underground railroad for people escaping slavery in the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, and we’ll see how the free black community of St. Augustine grew as it became increasingly important to colonial defense.

Here are some sources you might want to check, and which I’ve used for this session. I hope you’ll use them to continue your own explorations and discussions of Black Lives in European History.

Deagan, Kathleen. Fort Mose: Colonial America's Black Fortress of Freedom. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida. 1995. (with Darcie MacMahon).

Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Landers, Jane. “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida.” The American Historical Review. Vol. 95, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 9-30

Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas. Psychology Press. 1996.

Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Harvard University Press. February 2010.
Black Society in Spanish Florida. University of Illinois Press. 1999.

Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America. UNM Press. 2006.

Landers, Jane & Kathy Deagan. “Fort Mose: Earliest Free African-American Town in the United States” pp. 261-282, in Theresa A. Singleton, ed. "I, Too, Am America: "Archaeological Studies of African-American Life. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

National Park Services: https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/america...

Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Restall, Matthew, ed. Beyond Black and Red: African-native Relations in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

Slave Societies Digital Archive: https://www.slavesocieties.org

Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.

The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes http://www.slate.com/articles/life/th...

La Florida Digital Archive of the Americas. ( http://laflorida.org/florida-stories/ ) Luisa de Abrego: Marriage, Bigamy, and the Spanish Inquisition.    • Luisa de Abrego: Marriage, Bigamy, an...