US Slave
This site is for educational purposes. Slavery in the new world from Africa to the Americas.
Florida History Built on Slavery
As reported in the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union, "Built on Slavery: Africans played a far greater role in Florida's history than Hollywood's viewpoint suggests, by Nicole Johnson McGill, on 9 December 2001 -- Slavery in America often conjures images of antebellum plantations with sprawling fields worked by weary black folks picking cotton or tobacco under the hot sun and the watchful eye of a whip-yielding white overseer.
This, after all, is the picture of slavery most often presented to us in books, on television and in the movies.
But the history of slavery in Florida challenges that cliche and reveals that black people were a diverse lot. Sure, they worked the fields, and yes, they were mammies, too. But they were also warriors and talented artisans who played vital roles in shaping Florida history. They could earn money and buy their own freedom. Slaves helped build cities, and while few structures remain, traces of their work still can be seen throughout Northeast Florida.
"I don't think people think of bridges and seawalls and forts as being constructed by slaves," said Jane Landers, a history professor at Vanderbilt University and author of Black Society in Spanish Florida (University of Illinois, $19.95). "But from the very beginning, slaves were responsible for building all of the major forts, the main public works, bridges and seawalls. All of those were constructed by enslaved Africans."
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in the New World, a landmark that has caused many to look back on the legacy of slavery in America.
Call it the Gone With the Wind phenomenon, said University of North Florida history professor Carolyn Williams, referring to the way Hollywood has shaped the American perception of slavery. "We don't see how complex it was and the rich contributions of black people from slavery through freedom."
To perpetuate the story of plantation slavery in the antebellum South as the whole truth is to distort history, said Landers of Vanderbilt, and ultimately to deny African-Americans a past rich in resourcefulness, entrepreneurial spirit, leadership and resistance.
Spanish influence
The earliest contributions of blacks were documented in the meticulously detailed records of the Spanish, who controlled Florida during two periods -- from 1565-1763 and from 1784-1821.
When Spanish explorers started arriving in the New World, both free and enslaved Africans journeyed with them as they conquered the Caribbean, and black people were among the first to settle in North America.
African-born explorer Juan Garrido was one. He fought the Indians in the conquest of Hispaniola and was with Juan Ponce de Leon on his voyages to Florida in 1513 and 1521. An African-born slave by the name of Bernaldo, a caulker from Vizcaya, was another. He accompanied Hernando de Soto in his 1539 expedition through what is now the southeastern United States and sailed on the Mississippi River before anyone knew its name.
Spanish records show that African-born slaves worked alongside Indians and Europeans. Some of their work still stands in St. Augustine, such as the city's seawalls and the Castillo de San Marcos, which was built from 1672-1695. Slaves served in Spain's militia, too, defending Florida from the British and later from the United States.
"My hero was Capt. Francisco Menendez," said Landers. In 1740 Menendez, an African slave who served in the militia, petitioned the Spanish king for the rank of captain and the salary that would accompany the title. As proof of his loyalty, he proudly listed all of his accomplishments, including a victory he led against the British as commander of the Mose Militia and renovations he did on the fort in St. Augustine.
"He tells the Spanish crown that he did construction work on a specific part of the Castillo de San Marcos for free," Landers said.
Fight for control
Florida was a sanctuary for runaway slaves from British colonies, and later the United States.
"The enslaved people who crossed the international border, across the St. Marys River, knew there was a difference," Landers said.
In Spanish Florida, slavery was not as severe as it was in British colonies or even in plantations in Latin America. Because of the growing threat of the British to the north, it was in Florida's best interest to offer refuge to runaways and to build a population that would be eager to aid in the colony's defense.
Like slavery in African countries, it was not necessarily a permanent situation, either. Slaves had some rights and could work their way out of bondage. The Catholic church and Castilian law provided for this because slavery was considered an "unnatural condition."
"If they were an enslaved person there also was a way for them to earn money," Landers said. "The Catholic calendar was full of holy days [when slaves didn't have to work] so even slaves had their own little businesses going on."
Most black slaves in the New World were West Africans, people who were desirable because of the skills they possessed, said Williams of UNF.
African masonry and metalworking techniques were used in the Castillo de San Marcos, as well as forts at ports in Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan, Cartagena, Portobelo and Acapulco.
"They were skilled craftsmen," she said. "They got those skills from their African ancestors. People think that slaves had only marginal agricultural skills, but they knew about rice cultivation, they knew carpentry and metallurgy. They knew a lot of things."
Many African slaves also were quick to learn new languages, including English, Spanish and French. They also could communicate with various Indian tribes, said Williams. Many served as translators and middlemen during transactions between the various traders in the New World.
Slaves' lot in life took a turn for the worse in 1763, when Florida became a British colony during a 21-year stretch between the two periods of Spanish rule. The British brought with them their chattel-based system of enslavement, in which blacks were treated as property.
The number of slaves imported from Africa increased dramatically during those years, Landers said, and British plantations sprouted up along the St. Johns River and throughout Florida. "When ranches got developed in the late 1700s, black slaves and some who were free were overseers on plantations," Landers said, adding that slaves also worked as sailors, rowers and riverboat pilots.
"All of the wharf jobs and all of the steamship and shipping labor, they would have handled as well," Landers said. "They were the backbone of all of that."
Spain regained power in Florida in 1784 and ceded the territory to the United States in 1821.
In Jacksonville area
In the mid to late 1850s, railroad companies in the Jacksonville area, such as Florida Atlantic & Gulf Central linking Lake City and Jacksonville and the Florida Railroad Co. out of Fernandina, relied on both free and enslaved blacks to build some of the tracks and track beds that can still be seen today, said Joel McEachin of the Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission.
"Slaves helped build Old Plank Road, the first paved road out of Jacksonville going toward Lake City," McEachin said. "I'm sure that when the British were here, they helped build Old Kings Road. There was so much that was done in relation to the slave plantations, whether it was building docks or digging canals for rice cultivation."
The Red Bank plantation was built with slave labor in 1854. The home, on Greenridge Road on the Southside, is one of a handful of pre-Civil War structures still standing in Jacksonville.
In the 1930s, in interviews for the Federal Writers' Project, life on the Red Bank plantation was described in great detail. Slaves there used a large kiln to fire clay found on the plantation to make the bricks. In addition to growing cotton and other crops, they tended to horses in the stables and worked in the plantation's blacksmith and carpenter shops.
Dave Nelson of Uncle Davey's Americana on St. Augustine Road has several books on slavery, abolitionist newspapers and artifacts such as copper tags worn about the necks of slaves in Charleston. The tags identified the various occupations of slaves -- carpenter, mechanic, blacksmith. Nelson also has shackles from that era.
"That's sort of ironic, that they actually made their own shackles," said Nelson.
If something needed to be done, slaves and free blacks were likely the ones to do it, said Williams of UNF. The black workers were good craftsmen and came cheaper than white workers.
"That's part of the reason why whites who had those skills resented blacks," she said. "These are the jobs they would have had."
Blacks found ways to work the system, writes Florida A&M University professor Larry Eugene Rivers, in his book Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (University Press of Florida, $29.95). In many instances, after serving their masters, they worked other jobs in their off hours to earn extra money.
"Probate records, estate sales records, advertisements and runaway notices suggest that many if not most of them commonly worked under hire," Rivers wrote. "In doing so they labored as carpenters, longshoremen and mechanics; they also staffed timber mills and cotton warehouses."
Whether or not they kept all of their wages depended on the agreement they had with their masters.
During the Civil War, when many slaves took advantage of the opportunity to escape, blacks served with the Union army and helped build the defensive infrastructure in Jacksonville, said McEachin of the preservation commission.
"They were Union soldiers recruited from the Battle of Olustee," he said, "and they came back to Jacksonville to fortify the city."
After the war, those soldiers, along with their families and countless other former slaves, settled in black communities -- LaVilla near Jacksonville, Franklintown on Amelia Island, in Mandarin along San Jose and Orange Pickers Road, and in places such as Lincolnville in St. Augustine and Rosewood west of Gainesville -- where they continued to build and leave their mark.
Historian and author Jane Landers said LaVilla was settled by many families that had been enslaved.
"Basically those are the people [LaVillans] who were freed after the Civil War. They become the businessmen and the founders of that community."
Even though they were free, they faced a new system of bondage, Williams said, in the form of segregation, discrimination and Jim Crow laws, that would deny them a fair opportunity to make a good living utilizing the very skills that had made them so desirable through centuries of slavery. (source: Jacksonville Florida Times-Union; Staff writer Nicole Johnson McGill )
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theplacecalledhome@gmail.com June 3, 2013 at 7:13 AM
This is very eye opening. The contrast between Spanish rule and British rule, and the treatment of the enslaved Africans. Your rich research of the contribution Africans made in establishing the state of Florida, I would dare guess that this was the case throughout the United States, in particular along the Atlanta and Gulf of Mexico coastal states, and including the capitol city of The District of Columbia. It has been established that enslaved Africans contributed to the building and construction of the "WHITE HOUSE". So thanks you very much for this adding this vital information to the modern record.
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Thanks for this information on slavery in Florida, excellent work.
Sadly slavery has returned to Florida through corporate agreements that make victims of the venerable disabled elderly in long term home care programs and it is all legal with no recourse.
thanks this helped alot
Sadly now even in 2016 we still have slavery. Not a lot, but sill
there is some. Those poor girls.
Did Africans interpret between the Brits, Portuguese and Native Americans because they were taught the language for that purpose or, as Ivan Van Septima says, because they had been the the New World long before the Portuguese and Brits ever arrived and already knew the language?
Good question, was there any research done on that topic. America's Story before the New World.
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Escrava Anastacia
Philip Morgan: Early American Slave Culture
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Gene Dattel's Slave Grown Cotton in Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860)
Scarred Back of an Escaped Mississippi Slave
This enslaved man had a name, Gordon.
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Charleston Slave Tags and Slave Badges
Badge laws existed in several Southern cities, urban centers such as Mobile and New Orleans, Savannah and Norfolk; the practice of hiring out slaves was common in both the rural and urban South. But the only city known to have implemented a rigid and formal regulatory system is Charleston.
MANILLA: MONEY OF THE SLAVE TRADE
Manilla. Manillas were brass bracelet-shaped objects used by Europeans in trade with West Africa, from about the 16th century to the 1930s. They were made in Europe, perhaps based on an African original.Once Bristol entered the African trade, manillas were made locally for export to West Africa.
SLAVE CURRENCY: African Slave Trade Beads
In Africa, trade beads were used in West Africa by Europeans who got them from Venice, Holland, and Bohemia. They used millions of beads to trade with Africans for slaves, services, and goods such as palm oil, gold, and ivory. The trade with Africans was so vital that some of the beads were made specifically for Africans.
Slave Trade Currency: Cowry Shells
Long before our era the cowry shell was known as an instrument of payment and a symbol of wealth and power. This monetary usage continued until the 20th century. If we look a bit closer into these shells it is absolutely not astonishing that varieties as the cypraea moneta or cypraea annulus were beloved means of payments and eventually became in some cases huge competitors of metal currencies.
Bunce Island Slave Factory
Cannons with the Royal Crest
Adanggaman
Africans Making Slaves of Africans
Ota Benga The Man in the Bronx Zoo
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Railroads and Slave Labor
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Sculptor Augusta Savage
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Enslaved Children
Bare feet in tattered rags
Civil War Orphans
President George Washington
Owned 316 Slaves
President Thomas Jefferson
President James Madison
President Andrew Jackson
President John Tyler
Owned 70 Slaves
James K. Polk
Owned Slaves
President Zachary Taylor
Owned at least 1 slave
African Slave Trade Ad
"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -- W.E.B. DuBois
Slave Tortures
Portugal Slave Trade
1501-1866 Portugal transported 5,848,265 people from Africa to the Americas.
French Slave Trade
1501-1866 France transported 1,381,404 Africans to America.
Great Britain Slave Trade
1501-1866 The British transported 3,259,440 Africans to the Americas.
Spain Slave Trade
1501-1866 Spain transported 1,061,524 Africans to the Americas
Denmark Slave Trade
1501-1866 Denmark transported 111,041 people from Africa.
United States Slave Trade
1501-1866 The USA transported 305,326 Africans to the Americas.
Netherlands Slave Trade
1501-1866 The Netherlands transported 554,336 Africans.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (Roman statesman, orator and essayist, 106–43 B.C.).
"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" — Marcus Tullius Cicero
BRAWLEY, BENJAMIN; "A Social History of the American Negro"
Charter of the Dutch West India Company : 1621
CLARKSON, THOMAS; "An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African"
Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK; "Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass"
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK; "Fourth of July Speech"
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK; "My Bondage and My Freedom "
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK; "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass"
DOUGLASS, FREDRICK; "Speech on the Dred Scott Decision"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "Critiques Booker T. Washington"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "Freedmen's Bureau Pt. 2"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "Freedmen's Bureau Pt.1"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "The Conservation of Races "
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "The Negro"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "The Philadelphia Negro"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "The Quest of the Silver Fleece"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "The Souls of Black Folk"
DUBOIS, W.E.B.; "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America"
FONER, ERIC; "EXPERT REPORT"
GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD; "No Compromise with Slavery"
GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD; "The Abolition Of Slavery The Right Of The Government Under The War Power"
KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR.; "I have a Dream"
Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention
OLAUDAH EQUIANO; "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African"
Statutes of the United States Concerning Slavery
The History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
TRUTH, SOJOURNER; "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth"
WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.; "Atlanta Compromise Speech"
WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.; "Up From Slavery: An Autobiography"
WOODSON, CARTER G.; "A Century of Negro Migration"
Slave Narratives
Aaron; "The Light and Truth of Slavery"
Ball, Charles; "Fifty Years in Chains, or, The Life of an American Slave"
Bayley, Solomon; "A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware"
Bibb, Henry
Bruce, Henry Clay; "The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave,Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man"
Cugoano, Ottobah; "Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa; Published by Himself in the Year 1787"
Douglass, Frederick; "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave"
Equiano, Olaudah; "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa"
Grandy, Moses; "Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America"
Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs; "Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House"
Picquet, Louisa; "Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life"
Smith, Harry; "Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America"
Solomon Northup; "Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841"
Steward, Austin
Veney, Bethany; "The Narrative of Bethany Veney: A Slave Woman"
Washington, Booker Taliaferro; "An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work"
Watson, Henry; "Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave"
Williams, James; "A Narrative of Events Since the First of August, 1834, By James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica"