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172 8  Daily Life DUring the maroon community’s existence, Prospect Bluff was a hotbed of daily activity. The former slaves built and maintained their homes, tended their fields, hunted, and participated in an exchange economy that impacted the region. Establishing a functioning economy was easier for the Prospect Bluff maroons than was the case for many other communities across the hemisphere. This was because of the scale of British contributions, the advantageous location, and the array of skills and experiences that the maroons brought to Prospect Bluff. Indeed, the settlement at Prospect Bluff was one of the best-supplied maroon communities in history. If the immense defensive advantages of the fort are factored into a comparative analysis, then the community at Prospect Bluff stood virtually alone among maroon communities in being well served by homes, buildings, and defenses. The community’s economy was built on this strong foundation. There was much more to the maroons’ economic and daily activities than simply assuring their survival. Through farming, trade, and landownership, the community demonstrated that it was a complete society composed of free landowners who met the economic requirements to be full British subjects . This was an important aspect of the struggle that was being waged at Prospect Bluff and further illustrates the extent to which the maroons were aware of the ingredients of modern freedom and demonstrates the maroons’ resistance to slavery as a social system. However, because of its size, location, and conspicuous founding as well as the strong emotions that the community elicited, the maroons found it impossible to live a quiet and undisturbed existence at Prospect Bluff. Consequently the community enjoyed an array of relations with various whites, blacks, and Indians from across the region. As was typical of maroon communities elsewhere, these relations ranged from those of close political, military, and economic allies to those of brutal enemies. A close examination of the Prospect Bluff community’s daily life  173 Daily Life provides a rare glimpse of North American maroons in action. In turn, this glimpse, which becomes more informative in comparative perspective, sheds light on exactly how slave rebels and the enslaved envisioned the daily workings of freedom. Forging an Existence: Shelter, Subsistence, and Daily Life Shortly after the British departure a few reports surfaced claiming that provisions at Prospect Bluff were scarce and that the inhabitants were in a state of near starvation. The vast majority of the extant evidence suggests that this was not the case. Rather such reports were designed to ease American and Spanish apprehensions over what was occurring at Prospect Bluff, and reports such as“an Indian woman [at Prospect Bluff] ate her own child” were simply not true.1 Fugitive slaves continued to flock to Prospect Bluff until its destruction, and there is no reliable evidence of want, making it clear that the community did not suffer from any severe shortages. In fact quite the opposite was the case: evidence shows that the community enjoyed “arms and ammunition of every kind in the greatest abundance . . . and provisions for their subsistence” that were “not only in abundance but in profusion.”2 This abundance continued until the fort was destroyed in July 1816. Even after the fort’s destruction, the Americans reported finding a“great deal of provisions” at Prospect Bluff.3 The traveler William Hayne Simmons, commenting on a group who included a number of refugees from the community, noted that the “negroes here, both men and women, were, as usual, stout, and even gigantic in their persons.”4 He was describing healthy people thriving in the Florida wilderness. The maroons’ greatest material and infrastructure advantages came when the British left the community in possession of the fort and its enormous store of arms, munitions, supplies, and tools. A British deserter testified that the fort was armed with “Canon[s], 4 12 pounders, one howitzer and two cohorns, about 3,000 stand of small arms, and near 3,000 of powder and ball.” A number of slaves returned to their masters from Prospect Bluff and corroborated this testimony.5 Another eyewitness noted that the fort was stocked with“Indian presents” and Indian corn prior to Britain’s departure.6 When the fort was destroyed in July 1816, American estimates of the “property taken and destroyed could not have amounted to less than two hundred thousand dollars . . . [including] about three thousand stand of arms, from five to six hundred barrels of powder, and a great quantity of fixed ammunition , shot, shells...

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