Black Society in Spanish Florida (review)

Black Society in Spanish Florida. By Jane Landers. Foreword by Peter H. Wood. Blacks in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Index. xiv, 390 pp. Cloth, $50.00. Paper, $19.95.

Frank Tannebaum, in the seminal study, Slave and Citizen, argued that there was a marked difference between Spanish and Portuguese slave systems and those of the British and Anglo Americans in terms of the treatment of slaves and free blacks. Tannebaum's thesis--law and religion in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies had a beneficial effect on slavery and, more importantly, eased the transition from slavery to freedom--has been tested many times, with disappointing results. Applied to rapidly expanding plantation areas of the New World, Tannebaum's thesis has proved untenable. Jane Landers argues that if tested in the right "laboratory," the basic tenets of that thesis have validity. Her laboratory is Spanish Florida, or more specifically St. Augustine and its hinterland.

Landers demonstrates that individuals of African descent in Spanish Florida enjoyed a higher social status and more legal rights than did their counterparts in contemporary Anglo America. Free blacks and slaves worked the economic, political and social systems available to them in Spanish Florida. Economically prized by the Spanish in the absence of Native American laborers, politicized by imperial wars, Indian wars and wars of independence and empowered by Spanish law and custom, Africans and African-Americans gained access to freedom, citizenship and property rights. Nowhere were the opportunities available to the enslaved and newly freed more evident than in the maroon community of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Landers recounts the origins of Mose, founded in 1738 just north of St. Augustine, and provides a valuable analysis of the implications of this Spanish sanctuary. She writes, "Mose's inhabitants were able to parlay their initiative, determination, and military and labor skills into free status, autonomy at least equivalent to that of Spain's Indian allies, and a town of their own" (p. 60).

Landers effectively places Florida in an international context and slaves and free blacks in the social, political, and economic systems of the age. Too often, historians of colonial United States and those of colonial Latin American treat Spanish Florida as an anomaly. The author demonstrates the linkages between Spanish Florida and the British colonies to the north and between Florida, the Spanish Empire and the world. She also shows that African, Indian, and Spanish worlds overlapped one another, with the three races mixing and meshing on the very complex, multiethnic and multicultural frontier of Spanish Florida.

In researching this study, Landers delved into national, municipal, and parochial archives in Florida, Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. Exhaustive research in diverse archives allows the author to do more than confirm that the basic tenets of Tannebaum's thesis are valid for Spanish Florida. It affords her the opportunity to reconstruct a segment of African-American society--one of great cultural and linguistic complexity--that predated the antebellum South.

Lander's book is an invaluable addition to a small but growing literature on black society in the Spanish and French colonies of North America. Like works by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and late Kimberly Hanger, Lander's study fosters a new understanding of the lower South during the colonial period. Although "Spanish Florida" is circumscribed to include only the region around St. Augustine, this does not diminish the value of a very well-written and exhaustively researched work. Historians specializing in colonial Latin America or the colonial United States would do well to read this book. Historians of the Spanish borderlands, the antebellum South, or the Atlantic slave trade should not miss it.

JOHN JAMES CLUNE JR., University of West Florida

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