In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Sanctuary This study of African American diplomacy in antebellum St. Augustine, Florida, is an intellectual history that explores the roots of a campaign by black Catholics to protect their families from the United States slave society that had solidified by the early 1840s. Because of the economic importance of history to the inhabitants of the former Spanish capital, blacks succeeded in using the past to better secure their present. I argue that significant numbers of white St. Augustinians remembered Spain’s rule as a golden age of prosperity and promise that Washington shattered forever. Local black Catholic militiamen stood out in white antebellum memories as heroic defenders of this noble regime. African Americans in St. Augustine, during the last two decades before the Civil War, exploited these memories to negotiate their freedom. By doing so, they were practicing an art that stretched back to 1687. Around that time, an “embassy” from the Protestant English colony of Carolina reached St. Augustine. The party arrived well prepared. They understood the geopolitics of the Southeast. Immediately, the “diplomats” commenced negotiations that would infuriate Carolina’s governor and England’s monarch.The agreement that they hammered out with the Spaniards reverberated for nearly two centuries. Two fugitives were anonymous women—one of which was nursing an infant.Their eight male comrades were Cambo, Conano, Dicque, Jacque, Jessie, Gran Domingo, Mingo, and Robi. They had paddled a commandeered canoe, and Mingo had committed homicide, so that his wife and baby could accompany him. Their owners would want them extradited. In need of a sanctuary , they asked for a sacrament—Catholic baptism.1 It was a brilliant gambit, 2 / Introduction for by doing so, they had placed Governor Diego de Quiroga’s immortal soul in jeopardy. Thus began their liberation. OraltraditionsregardingCatholicismandintelligencegatheredfromthetongues of black troops participating in Spanish raids in Carolina likely inspired the embassy . When Governor Quiroga refused to extradite the refugees, a wonderfully effective black “grapevine” encouraged others to journey to Florida. Eventually, these fugitives moved the Spanish Crown to make an important foreign policy pronouncement in 1693, when Charles II proclaimed the “liberty” of all of the runaways.2 In this way, a tradition of coopting whites to speak on behalf of black freedom developed. This constitutes a key theme of my study. One significant consequence of Charles II’s decree was the establishment, in 1738, of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, a free black settlement about two miles north of St. Augustine. In the famous Stono Revolt of 1739, the presumed destination of the uprising’s Afro-Carolinian participants was the Ancient City. When Spain ceded Florida to the British in 1763, Mose’s settlers, along with the vast majority of the colony’s inhabitants, evacuated to Cuba. An oral tradition regarding the black settlement went with them. The memory of Mose also survived in British East Florida. Francisco Xavier Sánchez, a prominent cattle rancher who remained behind, along with his slaves, would have remembered it. Since the British had attacked Mose during previous efforts to wrest Florida from Spain, they, too, would not have forgotten the settlement.3 Spain’s reacquisition of the colony in 1784 reinvigorated historical traditions associated with Mose, since a number of black fugitives from departing English owners invoked the incoming regime’s religious sanctuary policy in negotiations for their liberty.These successful diplomats constituted the core of East Florida’s free black population during the Second Spanish Period (1784–1821). After more runaways, this time from the United States, parlayed for their freedom under the policy, the Crown, in 1790, bowed to Washington’s demands to abrogate it.4 Nevertheless, memories of the black negotiations conducted under the sanctuary policy remained imbedded in East Floridians’ popular historical consciousness. Black diplomacy was bound inextricably to Catholicism.The “basis of [black] freedom [at Mose],” in the historian Jane Landers’s analysis, was “religious conversion , and it behooved [blacks] to be as public as possible about it.” Catholicism functioned as a critical “vehicle for African assimilation,” as well as for “social acceptance and advancement in Spanish communities. . . . It was the one true equalizer.”5 Thus, Afro–East Floridians, when they attended Mass and received the sacraments, engaged in diplomacy. Under U.S. rule, as Protestant preachers poured into East Florida starting in 1821, Catholic power waned, and over the years, the number of blacks initiated into the Spaniards’ creed declined. Paradoxically, however, between 1821 and [52.14.126.74] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share