Citation:
Abstract:
My thesis examines the foundations of Florida’s fugitive slave community, beginning in the seventeenth century, and its subsequent role in creating the first, original Underground Railroad and the largest and deadliest black uprising in American history. In particular, I am tracking the leaders of the rebellion, such as Abraham, a runaway slave from Pensacola, and John Caesar, a fugitive slave living among the Seminole tribe in the Florida Everglades. My thesis also gives voice to the runaway slaves from Georgia and South Carolina who enabled Abraham and John Caesar to find sanctuary among the native peoples two hundred years earlier. African military leaders such as Francisco Menendez were instrumental in creating the first free black settlement in North America—Fort Mose—and establishing a cultural exchange with Seminoles in Middle Florida. The bulk of my primary research focuses on the plantation uprising that erupted along the east coast of Florida in Saint John’s Valley and the former Mosquitoe County in 1835-1836. I have collected primary documents that identify the participation of more than three hundred slaves and deaths of nearly four hundred white plantation owners. Validating such claims is particularly challenging because of the dearth of newspapers and proper governmental documentation in Florida at that time. Most of the sources I have located portray the conflict as an Indian war, owing to a contemporary fear of inspiring widespread unrest among the region’s slaves. By minimizing the participation of plantation slaves, and instead claiming that Indians had kidnapped runaways, white plantation owners could seek restitution from the U.S. government for war damages. I am examining county tax records from 1835 and 1836 to compare the number of slaves listed at each plantation. That will, I hope, corroborate some of the claims I have found in other archival sources. I will also continue to read both military correspondence and regional newspapers from Georgia and South Carolina in search of references to the uprising. I am employing all of those sources to construct a rich and meaningful narrative of the events that transpired, as well as the uprising’s political, social, and historical implications. As detailed in the following pages, I have accumulated more than one hundred primary and secondary sources on Florida’s maroon community. The vast majority of secondary sources provide background information on Spanish and Territorial Florida, rather than on the slave rebellion itself, which has been largely overlooked in the literature. As a result, I have focused my archival research on the letters of those living in the vicinity of Saint Augustine at that time. I have found references to twenty-one destroyed sugar plantations and suspect that there are still several more undiscovered in the records. I hope to understand whether the uprising was limited to the 1835-1836 period and whether plantations outside the already examined counties also experienced disturbances. I also hope to delineate the relationship between the Black Seminoles (a maroon community within the Seminole tribe) and the plantation slaves, as well as the economic ties between the Seminole tribe and the Spanish government in Cuba, which supplied the rebels with weapons and supplies. I am confident that my experience in two courses this year, Professor Alison Frank Johnson’s “Commodities in International History” and Professor Vincent Brown’s “The History of African Americans from the Slave Trade to the Civil War,” will prove especially helpful to me in identifying and deciphering evidence as I continue to accumulate sources. I have consulted several experts at archives across the nation, who have provided guidance to help advance my work.