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Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida

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Jane Landers at Vanderbilt University
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Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida
Author(s): Jane Landers
Source:
The American Historical Review,
Vol. 95, No. 1, (Feb., 1990), pp. 9-30
Published by: American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2162952
Accessed: 22/04/2008 21:50
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... Fort Mose was a 1700s military fortress, that housed the first free Black settlement in what is now the United States (Turner, 2022). This included a Black militia, and formerly enslaved Black people who were promised their freedom if they supported the Spanish that ruled the area (Landers, 1990). Today, Fort Mose is memorialized as a historic site that preserves the legacy of the people of the fort (Levine, 2023). ...
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... La tercera línea defensiva, la Línea de Mose, fue erigida con bastante posterioridad, entre el año 1740 y el 1762, según un trazado aproximadamente paralelo a las dos anteriores pero ubicada aún más al norte. Su nombre se deriva del llamado fuerte de Mose, en el que se ubicó una compañía de soldados negros huidos de las colonias inglesas huyendo de la esclavitud (Deagan et alii, 1999;Landers, 1990). ...
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Los territorios de La Florida española constituyeron la frontera norte de las posesiones hispanas en el Nuevo Mundo desde 1513 hasta 1821. Situados al margen de las principales estructuras administrativas del Imperio, el Cuerpo de Ingenieros del Ejército se estableció como el único cuerpo especializado capacitado para el diseño y construcción, no solo de las estructuras defensivas y fortalezas, sino que bajo su responsabilidad recayeron también el control de la forma urbana y de la estructura territorial en su conjunto. El presente artículo analiza el papel del ingeniero militar en la ciudad de San Agustín, capital española de La Florida, a partir de las fuentes documentales conservadas en archivos españoles, británicos y franceses, analizando las características de las defensas erigidas entre los siglos XVI y XVIII, así como su relación con la tratadística impresa y con las bases conceptuales que constituían la base de su formación teórica.
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... In Florida, while the histories of the African Seminole and the free black militia at Fort Mose are becoming more well-known, self-liberation is not a central part of the state's shared history. Several historians have dedicated themselves to the stories of self-liberators in Florida (Landers 1989(Landers , 1990(Landers , 1996(Landers , 1999(Landers , 2007Millett 2005Millett , 2007Millett , 2013Millett , 2014Mulroy 1993aMulroy , 2007Porter 1971Porter , 1996Rivers 2000Rivers , 2017Rivers , 2021, however, as is true throughout the Americas, the amount of archaeological material assembled so far in no way compares quantitatively to the amount of historical research on these groups (Agorsah 1994:165;Arana 1963;Baram 2015;Binkley 1976;Deagan and Landers 1999;Marron , 1989Spencer 1971;Weik 2002Weik , 2007Weik , 2009Weik , 2012. Consequently, archaeological research on Maroon lives in Florida has largely been one shaped by the concept of searching for evidence and the paucity of known sites and materials (Baram 2012;Ibarrola 2016;Weik 2007). ...
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In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.
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From June 2020 to February 2022, a group of cultural and academic institutions in St. Augustine, Florida worked together to develop and facilitate the “Resilience: Black Heritage St. Augustine” project. This year-long collaboration aimed to bring together the many threads of Black history interwoven into the city. In this chapter, the authors explore the successes and challenges of developing a broad collaborative project, drawing attention to successful community engagement strategies and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the project. The chapter offers an exploration of the white and European-centered narratives embedded in the interpretation of St. Augustine's history and the ways in which the resilience project combats these narratives and articulates a commitment to diversified and inclusive collections, language, and storytelling.
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Bibliography
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  • Jun 2018
An Archaeology of the English Atlantic World, 1600 – 1700 - by Charles E. Orser, Jr. July 2018
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An Archaeology of the English Atlantic World, 1600 – 1700
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  • Jun 2018
Cambridge Core - Colonial American History - An Archaeology of the English Atlantic World, 1600 – 1700 - by Charles E. Orser, Jr.
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Despite the fact that the conquest of Spanish America had been primarily a military undertaking, during two centuries of Hapsburg rule the army played a secondary role, with real power and authority being vested in a pervasive civil bureaucracy. The armed groups of adelantados who had initially conquered Peru lacked the objectives and organizational structure of true militaries. Fighters rather than soldiers, their social positions defined more through the possession of encomiendas than by military functions, they cannot be ragarded as constituting a true army. In 1615, Viceroy Montesclaros informed the Crown that in any other area these soldados would be regarded as dangerous vagabonds who posed a threat to public safety.
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