Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida by Larry Eugene Rivers (review)

Larry Eugene Rivers, author of a useful monograph titled Slavery in Florida 2000, has written a sequel on the question of slave resistance during Florida’s antebellum transition from ceded Spanish territory to defiant Confederate state. For Rivers, “race war—sometimes combined with slave rebellion—afflicted Florida time and again” (5). Yet, no serious slave insurrection, even during the Second Seminole War (1835–42), broke out in antebellum Florida. The very absence of a section devoted to plots and revolts speaks to the point. If anything, Rivers’s often insightful investigation of evolving forms and patterns of slave resistance underscores the gross imbalance of forces that slaves, individually and collectively, confronted in trying to acquire the space necessary to even think freedom a remote possibility. The presence of a vast hinterland, which siphoned off some slave dissidents, may have acted to preempt more ambitious forms of resistance. As Rivers admits, “few of Florida’s slave-owners expressed concern” about slave insurrection (12). Like their counterparts in other southern slaveholding states, Florida’s elite planters managed their slaves successfully, wielding both carrot and stick to get what they wanted.

Florida followed only South Carolina and Mississippi into secession. Although no state in the Confederacy had fewer slaves, Florida’s slave population had quadrupled to more than sixty thousand during the preceding three decades. The state’s free colored class, small even by southern standards, had shrunk by 1860 to less than 1 percent of the total population. Middle Florida, a northern tier of counties bookended by the Apalachicola River to the west and the Suwanee River to the east, boomed under upland cotton production in the state’s plantation heartland. In 1860, slaves formed a substantial majority of the total number of inhabitants of six Middle Florida counties, which together held slightly more than half of all the state’s slaves.

In a book of three parts and eleven chapters, Rivers begins with day-to-day resistance, covering issues of malingering, theft (taking), hiring-out, and feigned sickness, in each case paying attention to differences by gender. From decades of research, he has compiled for the period 1821 to 1865, a database of more than “1,403 pertinent references from Florida’s probate records, slaveholders’ journals, diaries, ledgers, and letters” (18). Mining this source, Rivers finds that whites referenced slaves as lazy or poor workers 267 times. Yet, here and in other places, Rivers’s generalizations or pronouncements lose force without meaningful standards of comparison. As it turns out, the 19 percent of pejorative references compares favorably with the percentage of workforce turnover in some modern businesses.

Rivers devotes six chapters in part 2 to slave desertion: temporary and permanent, small-scale and large-scale. His data show that slaves who had more than one master ran away in numbers disproportionate to those who had only one. Most slaves who deserted did so temporarily. They frequently left plantations to see loved ones or to get out from under brutal taskmasters or demanding regimens, especially during harvest. Florida, with its unusual geography, acquired a reputation early on as a haven for runaway slaves. The Caribbean, given the state’s western coastline, clearly had an allure. Although, according to Rivers, more than one-third of Florida’s runaways headed for Georgia, almost 20 percent deserted to the Caribbean, particularly to Cuba and the Bahamas. The typical runaway was a young male traveling alone. In 1833, Florida established a patrol system, but it functioned erratically based on concern about the threat of slave resistance. Cuban bloodhounds had an unsurpassed reputation throughout the Americas for tracking down runaway slaves. Newspapers reveal that at least a few entrepreneurial Floridians had access to imports and were breeding pups for sale.

In part 3, Rivers tackles more violent forms of resistance, such as arson and poisoning. The lengthiest of three chapters focuses on the Second Seminole War (1835–42...