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Rebels and Runaways
Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida
By LARRY EUGENE RIVERS
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03691-0
Introduction
No close examination of American slavery can better expose the institution's cruel realities than a careful look at the many and varied ways in which its victims resisted their bondage and oppression. This argument, of course, is not a new one. Over a decade past, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger's seminal work
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation took on the subject in a comprehensive manner by focusing directly on slave flight and rebellion throughout the South during the period 1790 to 1860. Their study showed, as the authors remarked, "how a significant number of slaves challenged the system and how the great majority of them struggled to attain their freedom even if they failed." Franklin and Schweninger drew attention, as well, to "how slave owners marshaled considerable effort to prevent the practice of running away, meted out punishments to slaves who disregarded the rules, and established laws and patrols to control the movement of slaves." They added of their research: "It exposed the violence and cruelty that were inherent in the slave system. It illustrates, perhaps better than any other approach, how enslaved blacks resisted with various forms of violence and how slave owners responded, at times brutally, to demonstrate their authority over their human chattel."
Given the extended time frame they considered and a focus that covered most states in the South, Franklin and Schweninger admirably captured the overall essence of regional slave resistance and of the experiences of bond-people as they resisted. As would be true of any large study of the kind, however, their need for generalization due to constraints of time, resources, and space limited Franklin and Schweninger's ability to reveal in great depth the multilayered and richly textured experiences of bondservants who resisted, rebelled, or ran away from their owners in each state of the South. The loss of such rich experience unfortunately can prove highly detrimental to achieving understanding and helpful insight.
Now that over a decade has passed since the release of Runaway Slaves, the time has arrived for another look at the subject, one that not only tests the conclusions offered by its distinguished authors but also affords the kind of in-depth look that a more general survey cannot hope to offer. A state study would fill the bill, and, to this author's mind, Florida provides an excellent laboratory. Its experience may not be typical of the South as a whole, but this very fact may be telling on the more general experience. As a locale not often considered in studies of American slavery, its story comes as a fresh one. In some respects, it may even come as a startling eye-opener.
Accordingly, this study aims to examine slave resistance in Florida while incorporating perspectives that reach beyond its borders to embrace a regional and even larger context. In doing so, it builds upon the foundation laid by Franklin and Schweninger and also upon the works of scholars such as Jane Landers, Michael Gomez, John Blassingame, Lawrence Levine, Margaret Washington Creel, Walter Johnson, Sterling Stuckey, Freddie Parker, and Gwendolyn Hall. Taken together, these historians of slavery, among other things, offered highly useful tools for conceptualizing and analyzing the slave's experience in the Old South and beyond. These authors noted, for example, that a supportive African, Caribbean, and African American culture helped slaves to maintain a sense of agency and humanity. They noted also that the political organization and collective actions of bondservants as they addressed the hegemony of masters and owners remained rooted firmly within the slave community.
The time frame utilized for this look at slave resistance in Florida, it should be pointed out from the start, is considerably shorter than the 1790 to 1860 period adopted by Franklin and Schweninger. For one thing, Florida historiography already benefits from Jane Landers's excellent Black Society in Spanish Florida. This award-winning volume brilliantly analyzes the lives of Africans, persons of African descent, and enslaved blacks in Spanish Florida up to 1821. Landers's work covers many aspects of the African and African American experience under Spanish rule, especially the complex and international world that linked the Caribbean and Africa—and Indians, blacks, and Europeans and their governments and leaderships—to North America. Landers drew also upon African, European, and indigenous models to re-create the black Spanish experience in the "circum-Atlantic periphery of Florida." Some blacks, she emphasized helpfully, were at home on international waters and used the port of St. Augustine and other outlets to connect blacks in Florida to other ports on both sides of the Atlantic as well as to the Caribbean.
As Landers further detailed, some blacks developed maroon societies, not to mention stable communities. In the latter case, Fort Mose, founded in 1738, probably stood out as the first "southern" free black community. It lay a mere two miles north of St. Augustine, Florida's gateway to the Atlantic. Black communities such as Fort Mose helped their inhabitants to establish cultural ties to other Africans, Spanish, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans. The interactions among these groups certainly played complex and varied roles that would contribute to setting the stage for the evolution of slavery in Florida following its cession to the United States in 1821.
Other Florida scholars, too, have joined Landers in setting firm foundations for this study. Their work is noted more closely in the chapters that follow, and all deserve recognition for their contributions. I would underscore here, though, the fact that Kathleen Deagan, Daniel L. Schafer, and Canter Brown Jr. have added significantly to scholars' understanding of the interactions between blacks, whites, and Indians in Florida, particularly in northeast Florida and the peninsula. In a general sense, they have explored the power and culture of these groups from the Spanish period to and through the Civil War. Their studies did not purport to focus specifically on slave resistance or on how it changed over time between 1821 and 1865; yet, each of these scholars has provided factual detail, revelations, and insights that have proved invaluable to me.
Mention of the Civil War compels me to add that the time frame of this study, which begins three decades after that adopted by Franklin and Schweninger, extends five years longer than theirs so as to encompass Civil War resistance. As will be explored in depth, violent resistance to slavery in the form of slave rebellion and even open warfare marked Florida's experience and profoundly affected the nature of Florida development, politics, and race relations. Seen within that context, the Civil War years provided a further laboratory for testing. The results, again, may prove surprising to many readers.
The issue of perspective, as well as that of time frame, commanded my early attention. As I had done with my earlier book Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation, I committed from the beginning to allow the voice of the slave as an active participant to be heard insofar as I was able to do so. On the one hand, I can applaud countless works on slavery for the lasting contributions that they have made and yet, on the other hand, I can rue the fact that, to greater and lesser degrees, they have bled the humanity from their subject. Let us with every step taken remember that our subjects were human beings filled with all the talents, intelligence, and shortcomings of other human beings. They did not exist simply as statistics, and I do not believe their story should be told as if that were all that their lives and experiences constituted.
A few comments on overarching context may help to set the stage for what follows. Slavery had defined colonial Florida during the Spanish and British periods that extended from 1565 to 1821, and the "peculiar institution" continued to dominate during the territorial and statehood periods that followed. This proved true in terms of cultural, social, political, ideological, and economic systems. Importantly, the legal structure in Florida quickly evolved after 1821 from a somewhat more fluid set of racial codes in place at the end of the second Spanish period to a far more stringent system of laws reflective of other Deep South states. Boasting a frontier society for much of the territorial and early statehood periods, Florida nonetheless presented complex day-to-day realities that defied simple description as to either time or place. Within that reality, law often ceded authority to local custom and practice with results that stood in direct contrast to what lawmakers and their planter backers had intended.
Enslaved persons in Florida meanwhile comprehended in important ways the world they and the slaveholders had made and continued to make. Sometimes they interacted with whites and Indians on a daily basis. They also traveled or else heard word of others' travels. Thus, they often managed to know something about the trials and tribulations of their enslaved brothers and sisters in other parts of the South, in the Caribbean, and even in Central and South America. Since Florida and Floridians profoundly affected the lives of whites, enslaved blacks, and Indians all along the Atlantic coastline during the time frame under study, what happened in Florida very well could have influenced attitudes and behavior in the Lowcountry of South Carolina or even in the Bahamas, as well as in other parts of the Atlantic world.
Given the relative complexities of their experiences as suggested by such broad knowledge, it should come as no surprise that slave resistance in Florida came in diverse and sometimes apparently contradictory forms. This work, as a result, attempts to share the slaves' stories as daily dissidents, runaways, violent rebels, saboteurs, and revolutionaries. It aims in doing so to identify forces that shaped the slave's world and made resistance or revolution more possible at certain times and in certain places. The stories, when taken as a whole, should be appreciated as nothing less than remarkable. At least, I consider them so.
The proximity of enslaved Floridians to race war, slave revolution, and societal violence should be emphasized from the outset as major factors in development of resistance patterns. From Spanish days, Florida's geographical proximity to the Atlantic and the Caribbean made it ripe for resistance and revolution. The French sugar island of Saint Domingue lay not far distant across the waters, and by the late 1790s veteran Haitian revolutionaries had resettled in La Florida with responsibilities for the colony's defense, facts that set in place patterns of militancy coupled with military competence. Florida also stood out as a haven that attracted runaways from up and down the Atlantic coast and other parts of the developing cotton, tobacco, and rice kingdoms. With immense reaches that remained poorly policed and sparsely populated well into the nineteenth century—historian James M. Denham in fact has referred to Florida before the Civil War as a "Rogue's Paradise"—maroon communities existed, sometimes thrived, and always offered hope. They meanwhile served occasionally as headquarters for organizing rebellion.
And, make no mistake about it, race war—sometimes combined with slave rebellion—afflicted Florida time and again. Scholars in denominating major slave insurrections generally refer to those associated with Gabriel (Virginia, 1800), Denmark Vesey (Telemaque) (South Carolina, 1822), and Nat Turner (Virginia, 1831) and to the Louisiana revolt of 1811. None of these, however, came close to comparing in size, intensity, or duration with Florida's Second Seminole War of 1835–42, what I call the Black/Indian Rebellion. Despite its traditional name, this upheaval involved maroon insurrection and slave revolution. Army general Thomas Jesup simply stated the facts when he insisted, "This, you may be assured, is a Negro, not an Indian war." No other resistance movement experienced in the United States that was led by blacks and supported by self-determined black runaways endured as long as did this war. The revolution did not last several months but for years. In the process, it rocked the very foundations of Florida's slave society and, with it, the nation.
Whether resistance involved revolution or other actions, questions of culture, the role of the politics of collective action (the importance of which Walter Johnson has noted), and the impact that political movements carried deserve to be explored. As will be seen, acculturation played significantly in the actions of slaves through the antebellum era. The agency gained thereby permitted bondservants—largely American-born English speakers who had assimilated in good part into Anglo-American society—a basis for asserting themselves and otherwise making their views known to those who saw themselves as the masters. When combined with Florida's Atlantic world locale and traditions of militancy, the brew for resistance and rebellion simmered and eventually boiled over. The results were evident through the Civil War.
This study additionally aims to pay due attention to process, development, and change over time. Florida—or, at least, significant portions of it—passed through two basic stages of evolution during the territorial and early statehood periods, including as a frontier region and as a plantation region dominated by slaveholders. Yet, these changes did not occur at the same time or to the same degree in West, East, Central, and South Florida as they did in the principal plantation region of Middle Florida (the panhandle area centered on Tallahassee). The frontier era, for example, lasted longer in Central and South Florida, areas that lagged behind in development until nearly the twentieth century. It was there where maroon communities thrived and where access to the Atlantic world came with relative ease. There, too, resistance pulsed and rebellion was born.
Hosts of other factors influenced slave resistance. Where enslaved people lived made a difference but so, too, did their status, gender, work routines, and work experiences. As to geography, the enslaved typically worked differently in West and East Florida compared to bondservants who labored in Middle Florida. In the former locales, the task system could be seen in use at every hand, while in the latter, the gang system predominated. It was in Middle Florida, though, that most slaves lived and where, by the Civil War era, 80 percent of Florida's commodity exports were produced.
Organizationally, the examination of slave resistance that follows covers its subject thematically and, within themes, chronologically. Three parts, inclusive of eleven chapters, consider nonviolent and day-to-day resistance, running away, and violent resistance. I have attempted to impose a logical progression within these categories, although the reader should keep in mind that the highly complex nature and diversity of Florida's experience tends to interfere with and often confound logic and easy progression. In such cases, reader patience and persistence will be most appreciated and, I hope, rewarded. An afterword briefly presents my thoughts in summation.
I noted earlier my personal and professional commitment to underscoring the humanity of enslaved persons as opposed to approaching the subject of slave resistance purely as a cliometric exercise. This is not to say that I do not have respect for statistical analysis or believe that statistical analysis should play no part in a study such as this one. Having now pursued an understanding of Florida slavery for well over three decades, I have accumulated a mass of documentation from which I felt a limited number of statistical comparisons could be drawn with a measure of helpful validity. This research base consists of oral testimonies, former slave narratives, newspaper advertisements for runaways, census returns, ledgers, wills, court records, and similar documents. The text points out where statistical measures are taken from this database. The documentation is maintained in my personal collections located in Fort Valley, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida. Significant portions of it also have been placed on deposit at the Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee.
Through the full extent of my career as a historian, I have benefited from the generous contributions and support of others. My ability to undertake a study such as this one has depended absolutely on those contributions and that support; this study profited from their sharp critiques and helpful suggestions. They come from all walks of life, political persuasions, and economic backgrounds. Naturally, many are scholars of solid reputation. Florida for many years was understudied, even as it grew into the fourth largest state in the nation. Fortunately, that condition no longer prevails. Thanks to individuals such as Canter Brown Jr., Jane Landers, Daniel Schafer, Kathleen Deagan, James M. Denham, and Edward Baptist, we know much more about blacks, whites, and Indians—and their interrelationships—as well as about the influence of international events on the peninsula from the Spanish eras to the antebellum period. The groundbreaking studies derived from the work of these scholars, along with those of other respected colleagues, clearly have influenced my own.
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Excerpted from Rebels and Runaways by LARRY EUGENE RIVERS Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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