"It is supposed they went through the Indian nation": the intersections of Black and Native struggles for freedom and sovereignty in the Floridas, 1763–1803
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The legacy of marronage, an act of resistance by which enslaved people ran away from their masters and formed semi-independent communities in remote and concealed spaces, was evident during the First Spanish Period in La Florida (1565-1763) with the 1693 proclamation by Carlos II of Spain and the establishment of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose) in 1738. Under the British administration of the Floridas (1763-1783), enslaved men, women, and children sought freedom by moving in and out of East and West Florida. More specifically, runaways were featured in at least fourteen advertisements in northern British colonial newspapers as they escaped from British plantations in East and West Florida. Their names, physical attributes, rewards, and, occasionally, motives and destinations were listed in detail. These details not only revealed the diversity of the population of enslaved people but also suggested the geographical scope of freedom.
In their attempts to find freedom, runaway slaves sometimes entered Native spaces and were confronted with a Native world that was in flux due to a struggle for sovereignty over the Southeast. The world of the Creeks and Seminoles was changing and status and identity became flexible. By 1803, attempts to create a powerful sovereign Native nation, a nation composed of black and Native peoples, had failed. However, these efforts laid the foundation for Native resistance in the next century. Shifting imperial control of La Florida following the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution, disruptions within Native communities, attempts to build a plantation economy, and rapacious land grabs made the colonial Southeast an arena that disrupted these communities continuously.
This dissertation complicates the narrative of colonial Florida by exploring the intersections of indigenous and Black inhabitants through migration, social and cultural interaction, violence, and their fight for recognition and sovereignty in Florida, within a multicultural, dynamic, and negotiable frontier. The following chapters also provide a preface to the war-torn South in the next century, and they highlight the significance of the colonial southeast in early American history.