Fort Mose was the first free African-American community to be established in North America.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida.
Under the British colonial system, colonies were viewed as simply ways of siphoning wealth from foreign territories and sending it back to the homeland. Many of the colonial charters spelled out how trade was to be conducted in the colonies, with England having special privileges (including, in some cases, the right that all colonial trade had to be with, or at least go through, England). A series of Parliamentary laws known as the Navigation Acts formalized these restrictions, limiting the amount of manufacturing that the colonists could do (forbidding them outright from making their own iron cooking pots, for example), and essentially turning the colonies into a source of raw materials for British industry and a captive market for the finished products.
The most profitable products which could be shipped to England were sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton. All of these, however, required a large labor force to produce, and there simply were not enough colonists to meet that demand. After landing in the New World, Christopher Columbus and his Spanish successors had tried to utilize the local Native Americans as forced labor, but the Native populations had crashed as the result of introduced European diseases, and there weren’t enough of them either. The Europeans in North America had to find a steady source of labor that was abundant, easily-replaced, and above all, cheap. They found it in the African slave trade.
The Spanish had already been bringing African slaves along with them. Accounts from 1526 of the failed colony at Winyah Bay in South Carolina mention that the Spanish settlers there included a number of slaves, and when the colonists moved to present-day Georgia their slaves went along with them. (The Africans promptly escaped and joined with the local Native Americans, helping them to overwhelm and destroy the Spanish settlement.)
Most historians date the beginning of the North American slave trade to 1619. In that year, colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in North America, imported 20 African-American slaves to work their rice and tobacco fields. The Africans had been taken from Angola aboard a Dutch slave ship which had been captured by a British crew of privateers and sold.
In total, the English established 13 colonies in what is now the United States, stretching along the Atlantic seaboard. In the south, the Carolina colony butted up against the Spanish holdings in Florida, and both sides had claims to the area that is now Georgia. This led to tensions and the occasional military raid.
In 18th century Spanish territory, slavery was still legal, but the Spanish form of slavery was somewhat milder than the British colonists, who considered their slaves as simply subhuman chattel. Slaves in Spanish territory could own their own property, and if they had a family it was illegal to sell them separately. Spanish slaves were also legally able to purchase their own freedom.
But when the Spanish King Charles II wanted to poke the British in the eye, he went far beyond that. In the Royal Edict of 1695, Charles declared that any African-American slave who escaped from a British colony and made it into Spanish Florida would be granted freedom, with all the rights and privileges of a Spanish citizen, provided that they converted to Catholicism and joined the local militia.
Word quickly spread amongst African-American slaves across the British south—freedom lay over the border in Florida. The colonials, on the other hand, were terrified by this. Not only was their economy being weakened by the constant flow of slaves escaping to freedom, but the southern colonies had always lived in fear of an armed slave uprising, and the presence of thousands of free African-Americans just a short distance away was a constant enticement to the enslaved. The colonists introduced a whole slew of laws and regulations designed to prevent their slaves from escaping, and periodic militia raids were launched into Florida to recapture the escaped slaves.
In 1738, some 100 African-Americans in St Augustine formed their own town just outside the city, which they called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Mose consisted of around 40 households, nearly all of them former slaves who had escaped the British colonies. They formed their own local militia unit, commanded by an escaped slave named Francisco Menendez, who had become a Captain in the St Augustine reserves.
To further protect the town, the Spanish built a small outpost there which they named Fort Mose. The four-sided fort measured about 60 feet long and had earthenworks walls, a watchtower and a guardhouse.
In 1739, tensions between Britain and Spain reached the breaking point, and resulted in a brief conflict that has become known to history as “The War of Jenkins’ Ear”—reportedly provoked when a Spanish captain sliced off the ear of a British smuggler. England’s King George had already appointed former Army officer and MP James Oglethorpe to establish and govern a new British colony between South Carolina and Florida, known as “Georgia”. Populated mostly by inmates from London’s debtor prisons, the new colony was intended to serve as a buffer to protect the rich South Carolina trading ports from the Spanish in Florida.
Now, with the declaration of war, Oglethorpe saw his chance to capture St Augustine, push back the Spanish, and wipe out the hated African-American settlement at Mose. In May 1740, he sailed for St Augustine with a force of British regulars and colonial militia. As the English approached, the African-American force at Mose retreated back into St Augustine, and when the British landed they occupied the now-empty Fort. Surrounding St Augustine, Oglethorpe opened fire with his cannons and began a siege. On June 14, however, Francisco Menendez led his militia unit back to Mose in a nighttime raid that caught the British by surprise, driving the invaders out and recapturing the Fort. With this, the British siege was fatally weakened, and Oglethorpe withdrew shortly later.
After this the fort was neglected, but in 1752, a newer and stronger Fort Mose was rebuilt a short distance away from the original. The town of Mose continued to thrive as a free African-American settlement until 1763, when Spain, having allied with the losing French in the French and Indian War, was forced to cede the territory of Florida to the victorious British. Now no longer protected by Spanish law, the 3,000 former slaves at Mose and St Augustine had no choice but to leave, and the entire village packed up and shipped off to Cuba. The Fort and town were abandoned. The remains of the fort were eventually destroyed by the British during the War of 1812 to prevent its use by the Americans.
In 1968, a local historian relocated the site using some old maps and purchased the property, then lobbied the State of Florida to send archaeologists to study the site. Archaeological work began in the 1970s, and in 1986 another excavation uncovered the site of the original fort. In 1994, the site of the second Fort Mose from 1752 was designated as a National Historic Landmark and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today that site makes up the Fort Mose Historic State Park, with a Visitors Center and museum.
Some photos from a visit.