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5. Prophets of the Apocalypse
- The University of Alabama Press
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5 Prophets of the Apocalypse We have seen how white antebellum East Floridians remembered the years immediately preceding the United States–sponsored invasion of 1812 as harbingers of a golden age. Witnesses testifying in the Patriot War claims cases blamed Washington for shattering their dreams of prosperity. Moreover, they portrayed the Americans and their allies not as missionaries of republican virtue, but instead as ruthless barbarians who shattered the very foundations of civilized life in the Spanish colony. In contrast, the region’s elders elevated soldiers belonging to a local black militia unit under the charismatic leadership of Prince Witten to the status of folk heroes for their pivotal role in rescuing St. Augustine’s besieged inhabitants from starvation. The historical context of whites’ recollections of black valor adds poignancy to their praise, for after the Spaniards finally surrendered the Floridas to the United States in 1821, the subsequent territorial and state governments enacted a series of measures aimed at marginalizing free persons of African descent. As the color line hardened, blacks found themselves barred from their traditional role as military defenders, a role that had earned them freedom, prestige, and material gains under Catholic rule.1 Therefore, when antebellum testimony resurrected and recorded tales of the martial prowess of Afro-Spaniards during the Patriot War, those who proffered it, consciously or unconsciously, were lodging veiled protests against the racial policies that had arisen under the American regime. The cognitive dissonance that ensued when memories of the courage, competence, and loyalty of free men of color clashed with contemporary legal restrictions based upon their unfitness for civic responsibility furnished black folk diplomats with valuable leverage for negotiating freedom. Enslaved East Floridians also shared in the suffering that Prophets of the Apocalypse / 95 the U.S. assault of 1812 generated. More than a quarter century after the attack, whites acknowledged slaves’ victimhood, which tied them to their masters in a manner that transcended the usual relationships linking bondsmen and their owners. Here, too, between the lines of their depositions, witnesses protested the regime change by depicting a peaceful Spanish slaveholding past that had “gone with the wind.” In its place, American rule brought slave rebellion in the form of the Second Seminole War, as well as a spectacular escape from St. Augustine engineered by the bondsman Andrew Gué that cast East Florida into an embarrassing international spotlight. Recollections of contented and trustworthy slaves whose benign existence had been suddenly disrupted by swarming white hordes from the north further expanded the repertoire of ambassadors of color seeking to ameliorate the oppressive precepts of a government that had transformed a “society with slaves” into a “slave society.”2 What also shines forth from the Patriot War claims cases is witnesses’ tacit and sometimes direct recognition of slaves’ intelligence, bravery, initiative, and overriding desire for freedom, as well as the hollowness of planters’ paternalism . Combined with the inspirational valor that free blacks exhibited during the chaos of the Patriot War, this testimony indicts the U.S. slave society in Florida as wasteful and immoral. Following a “providential” interpretation of history,3 the destruction of 1812–13 may be perceived as God’s way of preventing a Spanish “society with slaves” from developing into an even more diabolical “slave society .” In addition, according to this line of thought, free and enslaved blacks, by their words and deeds, acted as prophets of abolition who chastised whites for their social injustice and warned them of a coming apocalypse should they ignore the call to repentance. The Second Seminole War served as another divine chastisement. On the eve of the Civil War, a Catholic bishop issued a final warning . Then, at last, came the cataclysmic year of jubilee. Whites had not availed themselves of the opportunities for reflection and reform that a series of violent tragedies had presented to them. The result was a bloodbath that their obstinance created. Certainly, according to white testimony in federal court during the lengthy process of the adjudication of the Patriot War claims, free men of color had posed no threat to Spanish rule. Whites portrayed them as hard-working family heads who, like other East Floridians in the boom times of 1812, were striving to increase their fortunes. Although there was much to admire concerning black property, the holdings of blacks were generally inferior to those of whites.There existed ample evidence of interracial friendships, but even these relationships seem to have been conducted within the framework of white...