Mixed Race Studies

Persistent Borderland: Freedom and Citizenship in Territorial Florida

Texas A&M University
August 2007
295 pages

Philip Matthew Smith

A Dissertation by Philip Matthew Smith Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves.

The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States.

In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy.

The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ABSTRACT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• CHAPTER
• I INTRODUCTION
  • The problem
  • An imaginary line
• II FLORIDA’S BORDERS
  • First-contact Florida.
  • First Spanish Period, 1565-1763
  • British Period, 1763-1784
  • Second Spanish Period, 1784-1821
  • The Adams-Onís Treaty, 1818-1821
• III A NEW TERRITORY
  • “The Province is as yet such a Blank”
  • First impressions
  • “warm climates are congenial to bad habits.”
  • “There is such a heterogeneous mass here.”
  • Who was in Florida?
  • Appendages and sustenance
  • Who can be a citizen?
  • “no law except the law of force”
  • “the retreat of the opulent, the gay and the fashionable.”
  • Citizenship, lotteries and matrimony
  • Color, race, and subjection of the borderland
• IV OPPORTUNITIES IN A CARRIBEAN PLACE
  • Borderland or profitable periphery
  • Unlocking the economy
  • Infrastructure
  • “In a Spanish street”
  • “The sickness rages here.”
  • “an added peculiar charm”
• V INDIAN LANDS AND CARIBBEAN THREATS
  • “ – the land was not theirs, but belonged to the Seminoles”.
  • Natural and unnatural connections
  • “apprehensions of hostilities on our southern border”
  • “a separate and distinct people.”
  • “most exposed, but important frontiers of the Union”
  • “apply force to a much greater extent.”
  • “the horrors of St. Domingo enacted over again in earnest”
• VI WHITE ADVOCATES
  • Liberty for people of color
  • Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. and Anna Madigigine Jai
  • Kingsley’s arguments
  • “this species of our population”
  • “the grand chain of security”
  • “the materials of our own dissolution”
  • Colonization versus naturalization
  • The difference between biracial and multi-tier slavery
  • Memorial to Congress of 1833
  • Leaving Florida for Haiti
  • Other signers
  • Another white advocate
  • Legacy of white advocacy
• VII BLACK CITIZENS
  • Free blacks in Florida
  • Slavery laws and manumission
  • Free black rights reduced
  • Free blacks resist
  • Mixed families, white allies
  • Parents and children
  • The good old flag of Spain
• VIII CONCLUSION
  • Summary
  • True to our native land
  • The defining feature
  • The insecure Deep South
• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• VITA

LIST OF FIGURES

1. La Florida, 1584
2. Drake’s attack on St. Augustine, May 28 and 29, 1586
3. Spanish missions in Florida, 1680
4. Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine
5. Fuerte Negro
6. East Florida, 1826
7. Florida, 1834
8. Kingsley home, Fort George Island
9. Anna’s house, Fort George Island
10. Former slave dwellings on Fort George Island
11. Ruins of Fort George Island slave dwellings

LIST OF TABLES

• 1 Northeast Florida Non-Indian population
• 2 Non-Spanish immigration to Florida during Second Spanish Period
• 3 Population of St. Augustine during the Second Spanish Period
• 4 Percent free blacks to slaves in 1830
• 5 Percent free blacks to slaves in 1860
• 6 Pre-emancipation census
• 7 Free blacks in households, 1830
• 8 Memorial signers’ households, 1830 and 1840
• 9 Free blacks as a percent of total population during antebellum years
• 10 Population of Nassau, Duval and St. Johns counties
• 11 Black baptisms in St. Augustine, 1784-1821
• A-1 1820 United States Census
• A-2 1830 United States Census
• A-3 1840 United States Census
• A-4 1850 United States Census
• A-5 1860 United States Census
• A-6 1840 Florida Census
• A-7 1850 Florida Census
• A-8 1860 Florida Census

Read the entire dissertation here.

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Working Paper 32
May 2009
37 pages

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction “transplanted” in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a “Black Code,” first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans’ three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law. This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the “law in action”? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves – manumission, racial identity, and “redhibition” (breach of warranty) – to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner’s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met “any Negro” who “lift up his hand against any Christian.” In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard. In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as “free people of color” in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…

Read the entire paper here.

Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870-1930

Louisiana State University Press
Published: December 2009
288 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 1 map
Cloth ISBN: 13: 978-0-8071-3516-7

Joshua Goode, Professor of History and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, California

Although Francisco Franco courted the Nazis as allies during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, the Spanish dictator’s racial ideals had little to do with the kind of pure lineage that obsessed the Nazis. Indeed, Franco’s idea of race—that of a National Catholic state as the happy meeting grounds of many different peoples willingly blended together—differed from most European conceptions of race in this period and had its roots in earlier views of Spanish racial identity from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Impurity of Blood, Joshua Goode traces the development of racial theories in Spain from 1870 to 1930 in the burgeoning human science of anthropology and in political and social debates, exploring the counterintuitive Spanish proposition that racial mixture rather than racial purity was the bulwark of national strength.

Goode begins with a history of ethnic thought in Spain in the medieval and early modern era, and then details the formation of racial thought in Spain’s nascent human sciences. He goes on to explore the political, social, and cultural manifestations of racial thought at the dawn of the Franco regime and, finally, discusses its ramifications in Francoist Spain and post–World War II Europe. In the process, he brings together normally segregated historiographies of race in Europe.

Goode analyzes the findings of Spanish racial theorists working to forge a Spanish racial identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when race and racial sciences were most in vogue across Europe. Spaniards devised their own racial identities using scientifically substantiated racial ideas and confronted head-on the apparent limitations of Spain’s history by considering them as the defining characteristics of la raza española. The task of the Spanish social sciences was to trace the history of racial fusion: to study both the separate elements of the Spanish composition and the factors that had nurtured them. Ultimately, by exploring the development of Spanish racial thought between 1875 and 1930, Goode demonstrates that national identity based on mixture—the inclusion rather than the exclusion of different peoples—did not preclude the establishment of finely wrought and politically charged racial hierarchies.

Providing a new comprehensive view of racial thought in Spain and its connections to the larger twentieth-century formation of racial thought in the West, Impurity of Blood will enlighten and inform scholars of Spanish and European history, racial theory, historical anthropology, and the history of science.