Source: Amy Notes (ID702)
Author: Howard, Amy (ID633)
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Floridanos certainly had to feel constrained by place, due to the expense they had in their strong h
Floridanos certainly had to feel constrained by place, due to the expense they had in their strong homes as well as the job security and protection they had from the Spanish government; by contrast, the Indians and Africans would not feel comfortable investing much in a permanent structure home because they were always aware of the possibility of having to run to a safer place when the European power shifted.
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African personalities at Mose
Date Created: 2023-10-12 20:56:17
Source: Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (ID 101)
Author: Landers, Jane (ID 70)
Content_id: 4012
...Because Atlantic Creoles were so often on the front lines of these contests--European and American revolutions, Indian wars, slave revolts, and the international efforts to abolish slavery--they were keenly attuned to shifting political currents. These African and African-descended actors had access to a wide range of political information, both printed and oral, and they made reasoned and informed choices in their attempt to win and maintain liberty. They were often critical to the balance of power and soon became adept at interpreting political events and manipulating them, when possible, to achieve freedom. Their initiative and agency--their acts of resistance, flight, and marronage (the formation of fugitive slave communities in the wild), and their shifting relationships to various European, American, and Native American powers--shaped the course of international events, as well as local responses to them. ...The Atlantic Creoles about whom I write fought variously for the King of Kongo, the King of England, the King of France, the French Jacobins, Muskogee and Seminole chiefs, the King of Spain, and sometimes for themselves. Each shift of allegiance required a reevaluation of political platforms and programs, with the possibilties for freedom that each offered. AN451 As they changed allegiances and identities, Atlantic Creoles also helped to shape the course of history. …Although the English and French sources for these events are rich, it was the Spanish juridical and archival traditions that recognized loyal Africans and Indians as imperial subjects with a legal personality, and therefore a voice, in Spanish records. Materials actually produced by persons of African and native descent are common: they include loyalty oaths; petitions to Spanish officials and to the King, such as that written by Menendez; legal suits; interrogatories; civil, religious, and criminal records; and more. Through these various sources it is possible to gain access to verbatim statements of the Atlantic Creoles, as well as insights into their thinking. Africans and Spaniards shared many understandings of the proper relationship between ruler and subject. Loyal subjects generated recipricol ogligations from those they served, and both groups organized their societies as sets of interlocking corporate and family structures. These cultural similarities allowed even those Africans newly admitted into the Spanishpolity to quicky learn Spanish legal and cultural norms. Once considered movable property, these newly "human" and free individuals were quick to pursue the rights and privileges accorded them through membership in centuries-old Spanish legal, religious, and military corporations. As they exercised their freedom, Atlantic Creoles, repeatedly stressed their loyalty, their service, and their devotion to the Spanish King and to the "True Faith" in written documents. They also enacted these values in public ceremonies. When they felt aggrieved--and some had reason to--they remonstrated, usually blaming any failure to honor promises and obligations on local officials. The distant Spanish King, dependent as he often was on their services to hold his far-flung and threatended frontiers, almost always supported the Atlantic Creoles. The enslaved African whom the English called Big Prince Whitten lived through the misery of the Atlantic slave trade, the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions, Indian wars, and, in Cuba, slave revolts and the fight for abolition. Whiteen and others like him learned what it was to be a slave in an English colony. They gradually became acculturated to the norms of Anglo slavery--learning plantation regimes, learning English, forming relationships with other Africans and with "country-born" slaves, and eventually starting families. The 1770s were the peak years of the Carolina slave trade, and as more and more Africans poured into flourishing Carolina plantations, freedom must have seemed an ever more remote possibility for Whitten and his fellow slaves. But then came the American Revolution. Its stirring rhetoric moved many who were actually enslaved to claim their own inalienable right to liberty and to fight for it. South Carolina experienced some of the bloodiest fighting in the American Revolution, and enslaved families embroiled in that violence made political choices that might save or ruin them. As battles raged around them, they gained first-hand knowledge of the politics and racial dispositions of both Patriots and Loyalists. Rejecting both, the Whittens and hundreds like them risked everything to escape across the international border and, as Menenedez and otehrs had before them, to claim religious sanctuary in Spanish territory. There they acquired legal personalities and rights, shedding the dishonor of enslavement. Unable to tolerate such a threat to the chattel slave system, the new U.S. government pressured Spain to renounce the sanctuary policy in 1790; thereafter, freedom seekers would have to find alternate routes. …As Atlantic Creoles struggled to maintain their traditional rights in Cuba, Black Seminoles like Abraham and Nero and Spain's African-born militiamen like Prince Whitten joined forces to try to prevent the U.S. Advance into Florida. They helped undo the so-called Patriot Rebellion of 1812 but could not prevent Andrew Jackson from destroying the Seminole heartland six years later. By this time the Spanish empire was disintigrating, and U.S. expansionism could not be stopped. In 1821 Spain ceded East Florida to the United States, and Prince Whitten led his black troops into exile in Cuba, retracing the exodus of Francisco Menendez and the people of Mose more than half a century earlier. The Black Seminoles fought on through another long war against the forces of the United States before Abraham also led his people into exile in Arkansas. …As all their histories show, Atlantic Creoles were extraordinarily mobile, both geographically and socially, and their horizons had few limits.These were not people who felt constrained by place or defined by slavery. AN452 Nor was race their primary identification; that imposition came later. In this revolutionary era, political exigencies demanded more fluid identties. The great instabilty of the age and of the spaces they traversed created remendous danger for these Creoles, but also opportunity. The Atlantic Creoles who surface in this narrative are those who repeatedlty risked danger, found an opening, seized the moment, and freed themselves. Some lived apart--under their own governance while they could, or withindigenous people with whom they found common cause. AN453 Others assessed the strengths and weaknesses of various European powers and supported the one that might best secure them liberty. These alliances were rarely stable, and Atlantic Creoles alwayshad to be ready to adjust quickly to changing conditions. Their mutability and adaptability were survival tools that enabled them to build their lives anew when necessary. And it almost always was. The wars and political transitions they experienced led to repeated dislocation and exile, yet they found ways to begin again. These Atlantic Creoles were a diverse group, born in West Africa, in Haut du Cap, in Jamaica, in Havana, or in the Indian nations of Florida. Some were born enslaved; others were always free. Some were literate, urban, and propertied, while others rose out of more degraded circumstances. What united them was not only their time and place, but a determined quest for freedom. Refusing to be "bound in shallows and in miseries," they took the tide, and while few went on to gain fortunes, many achieved liberty. It has been a privilege to write about their little remarked, but fascinating lives. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)