Black Society in Spanish Florida (review)

Black Society in Spanish Florida. By Jane Landers (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1999) 397 pp. $50.00 cloth $19.95 paper

This sophisticated, meticulously researched, and highly informative monograph accomplishes four laudable aims. First, it reconstructs the continually difficult, occasionally marginal, and invariably interesting local history of Florida, mainly under Spanish colonial administration. Second, it places the history of Spanish Florida within the wider context of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world. Third, it illustrates the cyclical pattern of change in the region, deftly explaining the long-term consequences of each change. Fourth, it emphasizes the critical importance of time, place, and circumstance on history and society.

Most general histories of the United States, or those written from the Caribbean perspective, pass quickly over Florida--at least before the recent Cuban "invasion" of the twentieth century, inspired by Fidel Castro's revolution. The neglect is lamentable. Landers, however, describes in richly persuasive detail numerous fascinating ways in which this particular frontier forced Africans, Spaniards, Britons, and indigenous Indians to create a dynamic and multi-ethnic society that provided opportunities of reciprocal community construction. Spanish colonial society in Florida between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century--when, after more than a half-century of indecision, Spain ceded the territory to the United States--provided ample opportunities for the intrusive communities of Europeans and Africans, as well as the resident indigenous population of Indians (largely Seminoles) to punctuate their incessant militaristic competition with alliances that served their short-term purposes. For more than a century, the various groups created a viable variant to the three main forms of community construction in the New World based on mining, plantation production, or yeoman agriculture.

Placing the history of Florida into the wider Caribbean and Atlantic context helps to show how and why local society and culture manifested the peculiarities of diversity and tolerance that would be lost after the North American takeover. By her indefatigable archival research in Florida, Cuba, Mexico, and Spain, Landers demonstrates the local impact of international events and imperial rivalry. Although on the periphery, Florida reeled from the inescapable repercussions of the constant imperial wars between 1739 and 1815. Spain twice exported large numbers of its colonial residents in Florida to new homes in Cuba. Moreover, many of the exiles from the tempestuous French revolution in Saint-Domingue ended up in Florida, including Georges Biassou, an important black revolutionary general.

Florida also illustrates the cyclical patterns of change throughout the Caribbean. Communities seem always to be starting over from natural devastation of hurricanes or diseases, or the depredations of war and administrative upheavals. Like so many Caribbean islands, Florida alternated between Spanish, British, and North American administrations. Each change had far-reaching consequences for society and economy, especially for the upwardly mobile non-European colonists. Spanish colonists came to Florida largely from Cuba, where they returned when Spain pulled down the curtain of empire on its mainland possession. A century and a half later, Florida would host refugees from Cuba, repeating a pattern of earlier days.

The factual information recovered by this study is of inordinate importance to the history of both the United States and the Caribbean. It contains many trenchant observations on the impact of time, place, and circumstance on the patterns of social change. The frontier nature of Florida provided unparalleled opportunities for nonwhite--especially black--social and economic advancement. This book describes scores of examples. In Spanish Florida, blacks worked industriously in all aspects of colonial economic life, distinguishing themselves especially in multilingual communication and military service.

The crosscutting cleavages of the multi-ethnic Spanish system ended with the American takeover. After 1821, Florida came to reflect the narrow, mutually reinforcing biracial structure of the United States that terminated the opportunities available in an open society. Africans and their descendants in Florida, who had achieved so much, gradually lost their material possessions, their history, their opportunities for mobility, their citizenship, and sometimes their free status and well...