Fort Mose: Colonial America's Black Fortress of Freedom

by Kathleen Deagan, Darcie A. Macmahon

 This book tells the story of Fort Mose and the people who lived there.  It challenges the notion of the American black colonial experience as only that of slavery, offering instead a richer and more balanced view of the black experience in the Spanish colonies from the arrival of Columbus to the American Revolution.
 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, War, Archaeology

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 20, 1995

Reviews

[Craig Pittman · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a new edition of this book available with an additional co-author, and the result is a terrific, well-illustrated, non-technical read for anyone who wants to know about Fort Mose, the first free Black settlement in North America. I particularly liked how the history is well supported by the archaeology and vice versa.

Fort Mose was an advance military installation built about two miles away from St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied city in North America. Most of the people who lived in Fort Mose (pronounced Mo-SAY, after a nearby creek) were enslaved people who had escaped English-owned plantations in the Carolinas to make their way southward to Florida, where they could obtain their freedom by converting to Catholicism.

These freed Black residents married among other Blacks, both slave and free; Spanish colonialists; and even Native Americans. They were all living together on the frontier and finding any way they could to get by. We know about them and their lives thanks to a mix of meticulous Spanish record-keeping by Catholic priests and the amazing archaeological work that dug up what those pioneers left behind.

At one point, Gov. James Oglethorpe attacked the fort with Carolina troops, hoping to take the slaves back, but they easily evaded him by simply moving back inside the fort in St. Augustine. The troops waited until the English were snoozing inside Fort Mose, then counterattacked and nearly wiped the troops out, chasing them back to the English colonies. The victors had to rebuild the battlements at Fort Mose. They stayed there for about 11 years, creating a real community.

Alas, Fort Mose was overthrown not by military action but by diplomacy. The English talked the Spanish into giving up their claim on Florida and so the occupants of Fort Mose moved to Cuba, and their descendants still live there today.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who's interested in Black history or in colonial life. As the tag for it says, "It challenges the notion of the American black colonial experience as only that of slavery, offering instead a richer and more balanced view of the black experience in the Spanish colonies from the arrival of Columbus to the American Revolution."

[Eyani · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book contains shockingly little about Fort Mose. It consists mostly of a general history of Africans in Spanish America and English Carolina, wedged together with an overview of the Florida Museum of Natural History's archeological exhibit of the site, with a slice of Fort Mose specific history wedged in between.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and very informative. The images are beautiful and illustrative. My only complaint is that some of the maps are very small and hard to understand.