Empowerment and Interconnectivity: Toward a Feminist History of Utilitarian Philosophy

Introduction

Introduction This study focuses on one group of Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans who struggled to “make it” in an ethnically diverse slave-owning community. It is about agency, memory, and what one historian has called the “hidden transcript of resistance ” by oppressed people. It seeks to retrieve “previously suppressed versions of the past” by illuminating interior worlds of the “Inarticulate.”1 The locus is the city of St. Augustine in St. Johns County, East Florida, the time the four decades prior to the Ameri­can Civil War. My subjects are free people of Af­ ri­ can descent in the broad sense of the term free, that is, not just those who were legally free, but all those who resisted the constraints of legal bondage and otherwise asserted varying degrees of control over themselves and their circumstances. Historians have long attributed the relatively flexible sys­ tem of race relations in antebellum East Florida to the area’s Spanish heritage.2 While acknowledging the importance of that heritage, this book gives more than the usual emphasis to the role of Af­ri­can Ameri­can agency in exploiting the limited opportunities that heritage permitted. In other words, remnants of Spanish rule presented blacks with institutions and customs that talented, ambitious , and fortunate individuals might and did exploit. In doing so, they drew especially on memories of lived experiences and cultural resources of their own. “Slavery, though imposed and maintained by violence,” Ira Berlin has noted, was a “negotiated relationship.” That was certainly the case in St. Johns County, and the “negotiators” included free blacks as well as slaves. As Berlin has also noted, Spanish Florida, unlike British South Carolina and Georgia, never made the transition from a “society with slaves,” in which bond persons were “marginal to the central productive processes,” to a “slave society,” in 2 / Introduction which “slavery stood at the center of economic production.” Once the United States acquired Florida in 1821, however, that transition commenced, and the resulting struggle became the focal point of the history of Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans in Florida. East Florida, it must be noted, was outside the plantation belt, and Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans there succeeded in following the role Berlin ascribed to “Atlantic Creoles.” That is, they mastered the art of cultural brokerage in a milieu conducive to at least limited success, thus taking advantage of their time and place and distinctive cultural environment. This continued a pattern developed in the Spanish period, during which black East Floridians matched the profile, noted by Jane Landers as well as Ira Berlin, of a people of “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.”3 This investigation suggests that that profile continued well into the Ameri­ can period and never entirely disappeared. The profile persisted because the Atlantic Creole mentality endured, sustained in large part by memory, agency, and experience. In that experience, nothing was more important than the role blacks played in the Patriot War of 1812–1813, the memories of which kept alive a determination to resist the imposition of Ameri­ can forms of slavery. The area that now falls within St. Johns County prospered in 1812. Although racial prejudice and its consequences were not absent, persons of color aspired to and could in fact live lives of dignity, security, and prosperity. Free blacks, many of them fugitives from Ameri­ can plantations, formed a major talent pool. Some of the enslaved were in the process of purchasing the free­ dom of themselves and loved ones. Others were the offspring and heirs of well-off and influential white fathers. Collectively, they were indispensable to the functioning of the social order.4 The dislocations of the Patriot War and the collapse of Spanish authority between 1812 and 1821 winnowed this population. Many fled to Cuba or elsewhere, but others opted to remain and take their chances in the new Ameri­ can order, confident of their ability to turn the risks of po­ liti­ cal and social transition to their own advantage. Under Spain, they had crafted the boundaries of their liberty; under the Ameri­ cans, they would endeavor to do the same, with what success this study seeks to delineate. For East Floridians of Af­ ri­ can descent, war and social upheaval had always been crucibles of assertiveness and advancement. One or the other—or both—of these conditions would be commonplace in the three decades following the Ameri­ can incursion of 1812. The sheer intensity of the resulting experiences made memory...