Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Francisco Menéndez & Fort Mose About this episode Fort Mose was the first officially sanctioned settlement for free Black people in what’s now the United States. It was established as a place where people who escaped enslavement in the U. S. could live in the Spanish territory of Florida.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:35 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:03 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:18 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:20 Tracy V. Wilson? At various points on the show, most recently on our episode on the rendition of Anthony Burns, we have talked about people liberating themselves from enslavement and escaping to Canada from the United States. Slavery was abolished in some parts of what's now Canada in the 1790s, and then it was abolished all across the British Empire that Canada was part of under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. It has not come up as often, but we've also talked about people fleeing south to Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1829, and that included people escaping from enslavement
3:01 Tracy V. Wilson? in Texas, which was part of Mexico in 1829, but was exempted from the decree abolishing slavery just a few months after it was issued. And of course, people did also escape to other US states and territories, although they still faced the risk of re-enslavement under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.
3:27 Tracy V. Wilson? I am not sure, though, whether we have ever talked about the period in which people were escaping to Florida. At the time, Florida was Spanish territory, and slavery had not been abolished there. And that's at the heart of today's episode about the first officially sanctioned settlement for free Black people in what is now the United States. That was known as Fort Mose, just outside of St. Augustine, Florida, in the 18th century.
3:55 Holly Frey? St. Augustine served as the capital of Spanish Florida, or La Florida, and it's the oldest continuously occupied city from the colonial era of the United States. Listen, if you grow up in Florida, you get told this all the time, let me assure you. It was established in 1565, or more than 40 years before the first permanent English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia.
4:20 Holly Frey? Jamestown and the British origins of the US do tend to get a lot more attention in US history classes than St. Augustine and Spain do. And of course, both of those usually get more attention than the oldest continually occupied settlements established by indigenous peoples like Acoma Pueblo and Oraybe, which predate St. Augustine by centuries and are still occupied today.
4:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, my original draft of this said that Jamestown and the British origins of the US tend to get a lot more attention unless maybe you live in Florida or in one of the other places that was Spanish territory before becoming British territory and then part of the United States. So Pedro Menendez de Aviles established the city of St. Augustine under a license from King Felipe II, who wanted to protect Spain's claims in the Americas from incursions by other European powers. This included French Huguenots, who established a settlement in what is now Florida in 1562.
5:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Less than a month after arriving in Florida three years later, Pedro Menendez de Aviles led an expedition that killed nearly all of those French colonists.
5:38 Holly Frey? When Spanish forces were tasked with building things like forts and settlements in the Americas, it was typical for them to bring workers who were enslaved to the crown. The Spanish system of slavery also incorporated the idea of manumission. People might be freed as a reward, or enslavers might use the idea of earning freedom to try to control their workforce. Spanish law also recognized some limited rights and protections for enslaved people, including the right to own property and earn money, which made it somewhat easier for people to purchase their own freedom than in societies where that was not the case.
6:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Manumission was not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination, and most Africans in Spanish societies were enslaved. There was also stigma associated with having been previously enslaved, and freed people's records usually made reference to that earlier enslavement for the rest of their lives. But this did mean that Spain and its colonies had a somewhat larger population of free black people than some of the other slaveholding societies of this era. When Menendez de Avies arrived in Florida, he had both enslaved and free Africans with
6:58 Tracy V. Wilson? him. That was something that was true in other Spanish colonies as well. By the end of the 16th century, more than 10% of the population of St. Augustine was black, and a significant number of those people were free.
7:11 Holly Frey? When the British started establishing their own colonies in the Americas, slavery became part of the conflict between England and Spain. So for context, Spain had claimed all of the Americas after the voyages of Christopher Columbus at the end of the 15th century. Other European powers mostly disregarded those claims, and they started claiming territory and establishing colonies of their own. Most relevant to today's episode, in 1663, England established the province of Carolina under a royal charter. Its southern border was close to the border between Florida and Georgia today. A second charter in 1665
7:52 Holly Frey? set the Carolina border even farther south, with England claiming more of Florida, including St. Augustine. Disputes over this territory escalated after English colonists established Charlestown, that is now Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670.
8:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Spain had made some attempts to colonize Florida, but those attempts had not been very successful. And Spanish authorities knew that if they lost St. Augustine, they would lose the whole peninsula. So they established forts, and they raised militias to try to defend this territory. This included militias specifically for black, indigenous, and multiracial people. And this is something else that was really typical across the Spanish colonies and some other colonies. There just weren't enough Europeans to defend all of the claims and the Americas without help from other people. So typically, there were fighting forces of the European colonists, as well as enslaved and free Black people, enslaved
8:53 Tracy V. Wilson? indigenous people, and indigenous allies.
8:57 Holly Frey? The establishment of the first free Black settlement in the United States grew out of the conflict between England and Spain, and the fact that the idea of manumission was already part of the Spanish institution of slavery. In 1687, eight men, two women, and a three-year-old girl arrived in St. Augustine by canoe after liberating themselves from enslavement in the province of Carolina. It's possible that they were not the first people to flee to Florida from Carolina, and that earlier arrivals just were not documented. It is also possible that other people had tried to make it through the swampy landscapes between England's settlements and St. Augustine, and just had not survived. And it's likely
9:40 Holly Frey? that these 11 people had the help of indigenous people as they traveled through this territory along the coast to get there.
9:48 Tracy V. Wilson? With the exception of the three-year-old, probably, these were people who had been enslaved in Africa and transported to North America. At this point, slave traders were transporting people to Carolina mainly from parts of Central and Western Africa where Portuguese merchants had been operating since the 1400s. So it's possible that at least some of these people were familiar with Catholicism as a religion. Some of them may have spoken Portuguese, which would have helped them communicate with the Spanish authorities in St. Augustine. It's even possible that they might have known about laws and customs that would afford them some protection if they asked for religious sanctuary, and
10:31 Tracy V. Wilson? about the possibility of manumission, which Portugal and Spain treated fairly similarly.
10:37 Tracy V. Wilson? We really have no way of knowing any of this for sure. But according to Spanish accounts, after arriving in St. Augustine, these refugees asked to be baptized into the true faith, that being Catholicism.
10:52 Holly Frey? After being baptized and after Catholic marriage ceremonies were provided for the couples, six of the men were put to work helping to build the Castillo de San Marcos. That is a masonry fort that was built to protect St. Augustine from both English forces and from pirates. The other two men worked for a blacksmith, suggesting that they were probably already experienced in that trade. The women did domestic work in the governor's house. All of these adults were paid for their labor, a peso per day for the men and half a peso per day for the women. They were housed with various residents of St. Augustine.
11:32 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1688, James Colleton, governor of Carolina, dispatched Major William Dunlop on a diplomatic mission to St. Augustine. Among other things, he was instructed to demand the return of the people who had escaped to St. Augustine the year before, who Colleton claimed had been stolen in a Spanish raid on Edisto Island.
11:56 Holly Frey? Diego de Quiroga y Lozada, acting governor of Spanish Florida, refused to return them, citing that they had all been baptized into the Catholic faith and were now employed in St. Augustine, and that some of them had married local people. He did, however, offer monetary restitution to be paid to their former enslavers. One man named Minga was also accused of having committed murder during the escape. Quiroga y Lozada told Dunlop that if there was evidence of this murder and if Minga was prosecuted and convicted, that he would be executed for that crime.
12:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Quiroga y Lozada also assured Dunlop that if other enslaved people escaped from Carolina to Florida in the future, they would be, quote, "from time to time faithfully restored in their own proper persons to the governor of Carolina or any sent by him." But that is not what happened. We'll have more after a sponsor break.
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13:30 Speaker 04 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
13:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T Fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
13:54 Speaker 04 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
14:01 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
14:08 Speaker 05 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
14:14 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
14:17 Speaker 05 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
14:21 Speaker 04 With the fan's experience, it's incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
14:25 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
14:27 Speaker 00 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
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15:14 Tracy V. Wilson? you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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16:38 Tracy V. Wilson? It did not take long for word to spread around the province of Carolina that a group of people had escaped to St. Augustine, and the Spanish governor had refused to return them. Soon, more people started liberating themselves and fleeing to the south. This was enough of an issue that within a year of William Dunlop's negotiations with the Spanish, the Lord's proprietors of Carolina, which held joint ownership of the Carolina colony, told Governor James Colleton that he needed to put a stop to it.
17:12 Holly Frey? For the next few years, there wasn't an official policy in Spanish Florida about what to do when Africans arrived seeking refuge. Decisions were at the discretion of whoever was acting as governor, but a general practice did evolve. People who agreed to be baptized as Catholics, swear their allegiance to Spain, and work for the colony, were treated as free.
17:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Eventually, after authorities from Spanish Florida made several requests for some more specific guidance from the Crown, the Council of the Andes recommended formalizing what the governors had most of the time already been doing on their own. In 1693, King Carlos II of Spain issued a decree that liberty would be given to anyone who arrived in Spanish Florida and accepted Catholicism. A similar edict had done the same in the Spanish Caribbean a little more than a decade before this.
18:10 Holly Frey? The reason Carlos gave for this was, quote, "so that by their example and by my liberality, others will do the same." But he was not in any way advocating for abolition, and his motivations were more pragmatic than humanitarian. If Spanish Florida accepted refugees from the province of Carolina, those people could bolster the size of the Spanish militia. They often brought skills and knowledge from work that they had been forced to do while enslaved, which could benefit the Spanish. And if enslaved people knew there was a possible haven in the South where they could be free, it could encourage more people to liberate themselves, which could destabilize England's colonial efforts.
18:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, they might also have specialized skills and knowledge from before they were enslaved. Regardless, though, like, he made that sound like it was really out of the goodness of his own heart, and to set a good example for the rest of the world and...
19:09 Holly Frey? But it was because they were assets.
19:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, they were assets, and he understood that they could have an effect if enough people left Carolina. So, over the span of about 50 years, more than 100 people are known to have successfully made their way from the British colonies to St. Augustine, where they were granted asylum and freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism and allegiance to Spain.
19:36 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1738, their population had reached a size that Spanish authorities decided to establish Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, just north of the city. Also known as Fort Mose, this was the first officially sanctioned free black settlement in North America.
19:54 Holly Frey? This was, of course, a segregation effort, and one of its motivations was straightforward racial prejudice. Also, since slavery was legal in St. Augustine, there were enslaved people living there and enslaved people who tried to escape from there. So officials thought it was prudent to have the free black population just live somewhere else. And it was also an attempt to establish another line of defense between the colonial capital and British territory.
20:23 Tracy V. Wilson? We just described it as a free black settlement, which it was, but Fort Mose also became a multiracial and multicultural settlement. Its African residents came from at least four different ethnic groups. In addition to the freed people, there were also enslaved Africans, indigenous people, and Europeans who married into the community, and their multiracial children. Fort Mose was also assigned a Spanish administrator, who does not appear to have actually lived there, and a Franciscan student priest, who did.
20:55 Holly Frey? Captain Francisco Menendez was tasked with leading the militia that was stationed at Fort Mose, and in many other ways, he was seen as a leader in the community. So we're going to back up a little bit and talk about his backstory. He was Mendinga. That's a Mande speaking ethnic group from West Africa. He was probably born somewhere in the Gambia River region, and the Mendinga in that area are predominantly Muslim. We don't know exactly when he was born or what his original name was. The name Francisco Menendez came from someone who enslaved him after he was in North America.
21:33 Tracy V. Wilson? The province of Carolina was officially separated into the colonies of North and South Carolina in 1712, and Menendez was enslaved in South Carolina by 1715. Prior to that, the timeline is a little vague. That year, 1715, the Yamasi people and their allies, including the Creek and Catawba nations, as well as enslaved Africans, went to war against the English colonists. This followed years of exploitation by white traders, including forcing indigenous people into debt through unfair trading practices, and then enslaving them over non-payment of that debt.
22:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Another factor in this war was the ongoing encroachment of the English onto indigenous lands.
22:23 Holly Frey? The colonists faced huge casualties in this war and were vastly outnumbered by an alliance of indigenous peoples from all over the Carolinas. Eventually, this alliance had Charlestown almost entirely surrounded by land. The tide only turned after reinforcements arrived from Virginia and North Carolina, along with supplies from New England. And the Cherokee, who had initially remained neutral, joined the colonists' side. After that, many of the indigenous and African combatants fled south to Florida. This included Menendez and his wife, known as Anna Maria de Escobar. She was also Mandinga, and the name we know her by today also came from an enslaver.
23:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Based on that 1693 decree from King Carlos II, Menendez and his wife and the other Africans who arrived in Spanish territory after the Yamasi War should have been considered free. But during their retreat to the South, a Yamasi man known as Pedro Bravo turned on them and declared that about 30 Africans in the group were his slaves. He sold them to the acting governor of Florida, who then sold them to Francisco Menendez Marquez, which is where Francisco Menendez got his name.
23:41 Holly Frey? Francisco Menendez made repeated petitions for his own freedom along with that of his wife and the other people who had escaped with him. This included petitions that were written and signed in Spanish with the whole document in the same handwriting, which suggests that he wrote it himself and that he had become literate in Spanish. While still enslaved, he was made commander of a militia for freed people.
24:05 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1733, King Felipe V of Spain issued an edict forbidding compensation to the British for the loss of enslaved people who escaped to Florida. He also reiterated the policy of offering freedom to people who escaped to Spanish Florida. Not long after that, he modified that earlier edict, saying that people would have to serve the crown for four years before being freed. So at this point, Menendez, his wife, and the other people who had escaped with them had all been enslaved since 1718. And Menendez's enslaver was a royal accountant, so even if that stipulation of four years
24:47 Tracy V. Wilson? of service to the crown, which had not existed before, had suddenly been applied to him, he would have met that criteria already. But he and the others were still considered enslaved.
24:59 Holly Frey? Finally, in 1738, a Yamasai chief known as Jorge advocated for Menendez, citing his actions during the war against the British and describing Perobravo as a heathen who did not know any better when he enslaved them. Jorge also argued that the Spanish, on the other hand, should have known better than to purchase Menendez and his compatriots from Perobravo. On March 15, 1738, Governor Manuel de Montiano finally granted unconditional freedom to everyone who had escaped from South Carolina. Even though they really should have been free this whole time, under existing royal decrees,
25:39 Holly Frey? the people who had purportedly bought them were very annoyed about this loss of their free labor. Francisco Menendez was finally free, and he became captain of the militia at Fort Mose.
25:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Fort Mose defended St. Augustine against attacks from the north. In September of 1739, it was also probably the planned destination of enslaved people who rose up in the Stono River area, south of Charleston. The Stono Rebellion was one of the largest slave insurrections in US history, in which between 20 and 30 white people and between 30 and 50 Africans were killed. This rebellion led South Carolina to pass new laws restricting the lives and the movements of enslaved people, and it probably inspired later uprisings in South Carolina and Georgia,
26:31 Tracy V. Wilson? which had also been separated out from South Carolina in 1732.
26:37 Holly Frey? Fort Mose was also part of the defense of St. Augustine during a war between England and Spain. We're going to talk about that after we pause for another sponsor break.
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27:20 Speaker 06 Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option, too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating U.S. restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
28:02 Speaker 06 This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and Sauces today.
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30:02 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1739, England and Spain went to war in what came to be known as the War of Jenkins' Ear. That moniker traces back to 1731, when the British ship Rebecca was stopped and boarded by a Spanish coastguard ship under the command of Captain Juan de Leon Fandino. According to the Rebecca's captain, Robert Jenkins, in the process of pillaging the ship and setting everybody aboard adrift, the Spanish had cut off his ear. Jenkins reported this to the House of Commons in 1738 and showed them the ear which he had preserved and kept.
30:43 Holly Frey? This became a pretext for a war with Spain, but there were other tensions that fed into it, including issues that were connected to slavery. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession had given the British South Sea Company a license to sell enslaved Africans in Spanish America and to send one trading ship to Spanish America each year. But a whole lot of illicit trade operated under the cover of these authorized voyages, and the legitimate ones also became their own source of conflict in the context of the ongoing border disputes in Florida.
31:22 Tracy V. Wilson? The War of Jenkins' Ear gave James Oglethorpe, governor of Georgia Territory, his own pretext to invade Florida. This point in the episode is where just Florida becomes a battleground for a long time. A lot of things happened. Oglethorpe's forces raided forts along the coast of Florida and the St. John's River, and in May of 1740, they laid siege to St. Augustine and established a naval blockade. Some of Oglethorpe's indigenous allies killed some of the defenders at Fort Mosey, and its black militia and civilian residents were evacuated to Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine. Before they left, they destroyed the fort's gates and made
32:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Holes in its fortifications so that the British could not use the fort for their own defense.
32:12 Holly Frey? While the fort was no longer well fortified or secure, the British force, which included black troops, indigenous allies, and units of Scottish Highlanders, decided to use it as a camp. And before dawn on June 26, the Free Black Militia, under the command of Francisco Menendez, regular Spanish Army troops, and Seminole Allies, launched a surprise attack to retake it. More than half of the 170 British occupiers and their allies were either killed or captured, while only 10 people were killed and 20 wounded on the Spanish side. And this battle was nicknamed Bloody Mose.
32:53 Tracy V. Wilson? After this defeat, the British withdrew their naval blockade of St. Augustine, and not long after that, Spanish reinforcements arrived from Cuba. Oglethorpe's forces ultimately retreated back to Georgia.
33:06 Holly Frey? Since Fort Mose had been almost entirely destroyed, its former residents remained in St. Augustine, and that's where most of them lived for the next decade. That was true of Francisco Menendez's wife and children, but he felt that he had earned an officer's salary. He joined a corsair ship, hoping to make his way to Spain to make his case before the king. But in 1741, the ship he was on was captured by the British, who figured out who he was, tortured him, re-enslaved him, and sent him to the Bahamas. The details are not documented anywhere, but somehow, he escaped again, and he made his way back to St. Augustine and rejoined his family.
33:50 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1752, Florida Governor Fulgencio Garcia de Solis decided to rebuild Fort Mose and return the Free Black Militia to it. This was not something that most of those men wanted to do. We have not really spelled this out, but Spain's offer of freedom came with a lot of conditions. People who escaped to Florida were not considered enslaved anymore, but for men, that militia service was mandatory. The fort was also remote and swampy, its housing was austere, the population was a fraction of St. Augustine, so there were not nearly as many opportunities for things like social lives and education.
34:34 Tracy V. Wilson? This forced relocation was also obviously an effort to once again remove the free black population out of St. Augustine because of their race.
34:44 Holly Frey? Ultimately, they didn't really have a choice. Fort Mose was rebuilt and by 1759, it was home to 37 men, 15 women and 15 children. Seven of those children were boys and eight were girls. The fort also had a wooden church where everyone worshipped and where a priest lived. As had been true of its earlier iteration, the second fort's residents came from multiple African ethnic groups, as well as European and indigenous people who married one of the fort's African residents. It's likely that even though its population was small, the community at the fort was multilingual with English, Spanish, Arabic, and different indigenous
35:27 Holly Frey? languages from Africa and North America, all being spoken there.
35:32 Tracy V. Wilson? This rebuilt fort continued to serve as an outer line of defense for the city of St. Augustine. In 1762, as this region became involved in the French and Indian War, an earthwork fortification was built from one corner of the fort, extending west-southwest for about three quarters of a mile.
35:52 Holly Frey? The French and Indian War is the name of the North American component of the Nine Years' War between France and the United Kingdom, which was also connected with the Seven Years' War, which involved pretty much all of Europe. Everybody gets to name their part their own thing and it makes it very confusing for the rest of us. This war ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1763. And under that treaty, Spain ceded all of Florida to England in exchange for Cuba, which England had occupied the year before. England divided Florida into the two colonies of East and West Florida, which set the stage for later disputes over control of those two parts, which we are not going to even try to get into here.
36:36 Holly Frey? Spain evacuated its population from Florida, including relocating the free black population of Fort Mose to Cuba.
36:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, even though there were two colonies of East and West Florida, and sometimes things applied to one of them and not the other, we're just going to continue to talk about all of it as Florida for the most part, because it became a lot to try to explain every nuance of it. Francisco Menendez and his family and about 50 other people were all relocated aboard a schooner called Our Lady of Sorrows in August of 1763. Each family was granted some land and given supplies and an enslaved person to help them establish a homestead. This land was in what was thought of as the frontier around Matanzas, about 60 miles
37:27 Tracy V. Wilson? or 100 kilometers east of Havana. But it was rocky, not very good for farming, and most of them eventually returned to the area more directly around Havana. From there, these folks mostly disappear from the historical record.
37:44 Holly Frey? The United States, of course, declared its independence from England in 1776 during the Revolutionary War. That war ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which returned Florida to Spain. It is possible that some of Fort Mosé's former residents or their descendants went back to St. Augustine after this, but there's no documentation, so we really don't know.
38:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, it's possible that there are records somewhere that someone could unearth and pick through, but not in what's available right now. After retaking control of Florida, Spain continued to have a policy of treating people who escaped to Spanish territory as free. That ended on May 17, 1790, when King Carlos IV issued a decree abolishing all those earlier orders regarding the treatment of escaped slaves. At that point, the United States Constitution had come into effect and Thomas Jefferson had become the first Secretary of State. This decree followed negotiations between Spain and the United States, with the US
38:54 Tracy V. Wilson? trying to get Spain to put a stop to this practice. Of course, this was also interconnected with like the United States getting on its own footing as a newly established nation.
39:07 Holly Frey? People still fled to Florida, though. But instead of trying to get to Spanish territory, they tried to take refuge in Seminole territory. So the name Seminole came into use in the late 18th century for indigenous people who were already living in the southeast and fled to this part of Florida in the face of violence from British colonists and other indigenous nations. The Spanish granted some of these people land with the hope of maintaining a buffer between its settlements and the border with the United States. Black Seminoles eventually became their own distinct ethnic group.
39:44 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1812, in the face of rising tensions between the United States and the United Kingdom, would of course be eventually the War of 1812, US officials intentionally stoked fears of what would happen if Spain lost control of East Florida, leaving it vulnerable to a British attack and occupation. In response, the US attacked parts of northern Florida with the goal of claiming it for the United States. Some of the forces involved with this on the American side were US military and militias from Georgia and Tennessee, and they were at least tacitly supported by President James Monroe. But there was also a group calling themselves the Patriot Army,
40:29 Tracy V. Wilson? who were civilians, who were basically acting on their own. Like the government had intentionally stoked people's fears about this. The military involvement, kind of like on the edge of official, the Patriot Army just doing their thing.
40:46 Holly Frey? Just doing it vigilante style. These combined US forces fought against the Spanish and against the Seminole, and this conflict, known as the Patriot War, can be seen as a precursor to the Seminole Wars that started in 1816. During the Patriot War, some of the American forces who invaded Florida occupied Fort Mosey. They were defeated, and in the process, what was left of that fort was destroyed.
41:15 Tracy V. Wilson? The United States once again gained control of Florida under the Onis-Adams Treaty of 1819, in which the United States got Florida in exchange for taking responsibility for about $5 million in American damage claims against Spain, tracing back to the Seminole Wars that we mentioned a moment ago. And then, of course, Florida became a US state in 1845.
41:42 Holly Frey? The ruins of the second Fort Mosey were eventually overtaken by swamp, while the site of the original fort was flooded due to dredging operations in the late 19th century. The site of the second fort was discovered in the 1960s by Frederick Eugene Williams III. It was on land owned by the St. Augustine Historical Society, which Williams purchased in 1968. It became a state park, and a series of archaeological projects were undertaken there, starting in the 1980s with work done by Dr. Kathleen Deegan of the Florida Museum of Natural History. The story of this rediscovery, the archaeological work, and the creation of the park is quite long, and it's complicated. As many such stories,
42:26 Holly Frey? it's a bit messy, and it's chronicled in an article in Bitter Southerner called "The First Floridians," which was written by Jordan Blumetti.
42:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Fort Mosey was named a National Historic Landmark in 1995, and it is now part of Florida's Black Heritage Trail. A recreation of the 1738 fort was built there just last year, surrounded by a historically accurate moat. This reproduction was made to meet modern building and fire codes while also appearing as historically accurate as possible. The park also hosts reenactors for militia musters and a recreation of the Bloody Mosey Battle every year. The next Bloody Mosey reenactment is scheduled for June 27, 2026.
43:12 Holly Frey? The Gulligici Cultural Heritage Corridor was established by an act of Congress in 2006. The Gulligici are descendants of people who were enslaved in Western and Central Africa and brought to the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, where they developed their own distinct culture and traditions. Fort Mosey is part of the Gulligici Corridor, and this corridor has also been documented as a primary route for people who escaped to St. Augustine and Fort Mosey.
43:43 Tracy V. Wilson? So that is Fort Mosey.
43:45 Holly Frey? Do you have listener mail for us?
43:47 Tracy V. Wilson? I do. I have such incredibly short listener mail, but it's so cute.
43:51 Holly Frey? Great. It just says hi and it's a kitty and we're out.
43:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Almost. This is from Jennifer. Jennifer says, hello, Holly Frey and Tracy B. Wilson. I giggled when I saw the podcast on Rickets come up in my feed. This is Rickets. What follows is a picture of a black kitty cat on an animal print blanket. Behind this kitty cat is a zebra print pillow and like a dark burgundy pair of pillows. The, the look on this cat's face to me is like, I'm lonely and I'm thinking about my friends and my, I want my friend to come over here.
44:36 Tracy V. Wilson? But this animal print fuzzy blanket that I'm on is so comfortable that I also don't want to get up to go look for my friend, but I'm lonely.
44:46 Tracy V. Wilson? So the email goes on to say.
44:49 Holly Frey? I like how you've built an emotionally complicated backstory for this cat.
44:54 Tracy V. Wilson? I mean, black cats can be very expressive in their facial expressions.
45:01 Tracy V. Wilson? So that email goes on to say, I adopted Rickets Ricky to be a companion to my other cat, Scurvy. I considered writing illustrated children's books about their adventures. That's all I needed to say. Exclamation point, Jennifer. And I wanted to read this email to say, I want some children's books about two cats named Rickets and Scurvy and their adventures. I would be very into this. And I love that these kitty cats are named Rickets and Scurvy. I think that's great. And then we love black cats in this household and podcast. So all of these things together, I said, I want to read that. Thank you so much for this picture.
45:48 Tracy V. Wilson? And for giving such great names to these cats and for having the idea of illustrated children's books about Ricky, Ricky, also Rickets and Scurvy. If you would like to write us, we are at [email protected] . If you want to read the source lists for all of our episodes, that is at the website, missinhistory.com. And if you want to subscribe to our show, you can do so on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
46:33 Tracy V. Wilson? you listen to your favorite shows.
46:34 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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