Black History Month: Fort Mose: The first sanctioned African-American

Fort Mose

Spanish culture had a different way of viewing slavery than their English neighbors in the Carolina Colony did, and probably due to the influence of the Moors who ruled Spain for 700 years, slavery never had the racial overtones that it did to the English. Therefore, it was quite common to find both enslaved people of African origin and free Africans together in St. Augustine.

By the late 1600s, black slaves had learned that they could escape their British masters and seek freedom and asylum in Spanish Florida if they embraced Catholicism and pledged to serve the Spanish Crown. In 1738 Florida Governor Manuel de Montiano granted these blacks a plot of land about two miles north of St. Augustine where they could build their own settlement and fort. The fort was described as an earthern-walled fort with Indian-type thatched huts, and the community housed thirty-eight men and their families, and estimated population of about one hundred people. They adopted Spanish names and Spanish culture with an African flavor. Settlers of Fort Mose maintained important social links to St. Augustine, resulting in marriages, baptisms, and fraternal relations between the two communities.

This was the beginning of Fort Mose, or "Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose", North America's first free legally sanctioned Black community. Fort Mose (pronounced moe-say) was located two miles north of the Castillo de San Marcos near the marsh on Mose Creek, a tributary of the Tolomato River which flows south into Matanzas Bay. Trails from St. Augustine heading north and west passed near the fort. With these waterways and trails so near, this outpost was of strategic importance to the Spanish military. In exchange for the land, the black militia would help protect the northern approaches to St. Augustine.

In 1740, during his attack against St. Augustine, British General James Oglethorpe captured Fort Mose, and the inhabitants fled to St. Augustine. A few weeks later, however, Francisco Menendez, the leader of the Ft. Mose community, led his forces in a surprise attack and a valiant retaking of the fort. However, the battle had destroyed the fort, and it would not be rebuilt until 1752. The former enslaved Africans from English colonies lived there as free people until 1763 when the First Treaty of Paris gave Florida to Great Britain, and the inhabitants of Fort Mose and most other citizens of Spanish St. Augustine relocated to Cuba.(snip)