Black Society in Spanish Florida

by Jane Landers

Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe with a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Jane Landers’s pioneering study of people of the African diaspora under Spain’s colonial rule rewrites Florida history and enriches our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom.  As Landers shows, Spanish Florida was a sanctuary to Blacks fleeing enslavement on plantations. Castilian law, meanwhile, offered many avenues out of slavery. In St. Augustine and elsewhere, society accepted European-African unions, with families developing community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparents. Assisted by Spanish traditions and ever-present geopolitical threats, people of African descent leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. Landers details how Blacks became homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, and in the process enjoyed greater legal and social protection than in the two hundred years of Anglo history that followed.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

390 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

Reviews

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Jane Landers, wrote this book, Black Society in Spanish Florida, as a topic-based chronology of Africans during the first Spanish period in Florida, the British Florida regime, through the second Spanish period. The author’s purpose is to prove how “the patterns of black society in Florida evolved during Spain’s first tenure in the province (1565-1763) and were shaped by complex interethnic relations and international politics.” Landers expanded her argument into further discussion on how black society evolved during the British Florida regime and the second Spanish period. She ends her book with the Afterword that covers the history that society is more familiar with: the restrictive legislature and a two-caste system.
The author supported her thesis by dividing the book into an overall history of early African society in Spanish Americas through the late 1790s from chapters 1 to 3. Chapters 4 to 9 described the history in more detail based on the topic of discussion such as: “Black Religious Life,” and “The Lives of Black Women.” Chapter 10 wraps up the chronology with the history around the War of 1812 and into the downfall of Spanish Florida. The author divided these chapters further into more specific subsections with descriptive sub-headings for improved organization. Landers focused on the Spanish and African perspective away from the typical American view of Florida’s history.
The sources for Landers’ book include an extensive list of Spanish records and census reports. The author mentions that the records for the first Spanish period are less complete, but that the records from the second Spanish period have “survived virtually intact.” “This remarkable source contains a truly vast array of military, criminal, civil, religious, and notarial records, and the history of the black Floridians is found throughout, much of it generated in their own words, and often their own hand.” When reading through the copious notes, the lack of primary sources for the first Spanish period is evident as mentioned by the author. However, the second Spanish period notes and use of Spanish-language sources “presents a view of early African American life in the Southeast that is unfamiliar and that contrasts sharply with the usual image of the slave in the tobacco patch and the rice field,” as explained by Peter H. Wood in the Foreword.
A weakness in this book would be the traveling timeline. Throughout this book, the chronology gets skewed when the author goes into the specific topics for chapters 4 through 9. It becomes difficult to follow the exact timeline with the numerous dates, newly introduced names, and the shifting sequence of events. Even more than this, the author mentions numerous times throughout the book, “as discussed in [a future chapter]” that may be 3 or 4 chapters later in the book. This organization also confuses the stream of thought.
Landers’ strengths include an organized division within the chapters that allowed the reader to focus on the importance of the sub-section and how it supported the author’s thesis. Additionally, as mentioned in the sources and in Wood’s Foreword, Landers shares a unique view of the Africans from a unique Spanish-Floridian perspective. Historians tend to write African American history from the American perspective from a 10,000-foot view that exudes harsh treatment of enslaved blacks.
Overall, Landers’ book supported her thesis on the evolution of African history in Spanish-Florida society by examining black men and women from a Spanish perspective. She shows evidence of the Spanish society giving blacks the ability to hold property, the freer lives of women, the rewards through defense in the militia, their assimilation into Catholicism, and their rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.