The First Underground Railroad

I know I have been on a kick about the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida lately, but the truth is that this region was an incredibly diverse and storied region until it fought for the wrong side of history during the Civil War.  Yes, here there was the hearth of the house of Southern elite slaveholders and their belles, but there were also the non-slave holding Second Born Georgians, First Born, Spanish, French (of both Hugenot and Royal varieties), long forgotten Austrians, and of course Black people which would soon, through economic reasons, come to outnumber all of these groups.  Needless to say, I also have long loved the majestic world of palm and pine which thrives here in an otherwise humid, bug-infested wild country.  When I recently began to read more about both the birth of slavery and its opposition among abolitionists and freedom-seekers here, I just had to share what a powerful crossroads in history this truly difficult land had become.

No one can argue against the fact that the Spanish colonizers were brutal and racist in their treatment of the First Born, and that they enjoyed watching their conquered subjects tend the fields for them.  That said, it was the English colonizers who were real pros at commercial exploitation of the new land and exotic peoples from just about anywhere on the planet.  The Spanish, you see, were plunderers less than merchants (they kicked out a good portion of their merchant class when they told every Jew in Spain to head out of town in 1492), and they were also enthralled by the concept of converting the planet to Roman Catholicism.  In contrast, the English also plundered, but on a smaller scale (except maybe in India), so as to better gradually set up favorable economic conditions for their cult of free-enterprise.  Oh sure, they had religion too, many Protestant varieties of it in fact, but their concept of spreading the faith was pretty much centered on trying to get freedom for themselves to contemplate and pray as they so wished, which they had to cross an ocean for in the face of Anglican and then Calvinistic and then lip-service Anglican successions of power.  They rejoiced when the First Born converted, but otherwise just regarded them as pagans who could either be helpful to setting up commercial security or harmful in trying to dismantle colonial progress.  The French were another story altogether, and that one takes a while to explain...

Anyway, the Spanish would not hesitate to bring over Africans for use as slaves, but seeing as how plantations of cash crops were but one of many different agendas behind the otherwise important gold-plundering and conversion game, race slavery never developed to the same degree that it did in the English colonies.  Again, this is not to say that it did not happen; many Black communities can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and a few traces of where African slavery did make inroads into Mexico can be found in Veracruz and Guerrero, the two important states of colonial landing of the Mexican coast.  The ban on a Spanish-run slave trade made importation of Africans difficult, if nothing else.  When they wanted slaves, the Spanish could run to the English or Dutch for their needs, which further compounded the general aloofness from the enslavement of Africans.  What's more, racial hatred did not develop in nearly the same way throughout New Spain than it did it the English colonies.  As I state in my post about the most important event in North American history, while the Spanish came as conquerors and extractors, they also often fell in love with the land and the people of the New World.  Mexicans to this day are largely Mestizos of heritage reaching back to both sides of the Atlantic.   Yes, you can find hatred towards the First Born in the Spanish-descended elite of El Salvador or Argentina, but by and large the rest of modern Latin America is a culture resulting from pure exchange rather than separation. 

So it was that when a few runaway slaves heading south from the Carolinas made their way into Florida, they were not immediately chained up and re-enslaved in their new home of Florida.  Rather, they were not only welcomed, but encouraged to keep coming.  Those who chose a more colonial existence in St. Augustine would be required to convert to Catholicism, but often times the Black refugees found a happy existence with the First Born of the area.  Further north, they often helped the refugees through to their freedom, which as usual was a very difficult and terror-filled trip to safety, but down here in the still-largely natural hot and humid subtropical lushness, they had the advantage of not being readily followed by the prone-to-malaria and easily sweat-able northern Europeans.  The Spanish authorities figured that they would be so grateful to make their way into waiting freedom and safety that they would rise up in arms with them, Black beside colonist, against English advances from Georgia.  They were not wrong. 

Some stayed in town, some even enlisted in the Spanish forces.  Others left to form new societies of their own in the wilds, and sometimes they came across the First Born and formed a new culture of this encounter.

Public domain.

You can read more and see some pictures here.  Actually, that website can tell you quite a lot about some of the Black experience I never knew existed.