NOTES

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The story of Hercules and Betty comes from two notices in the Royal Georgia Gazette, January 11 and October 11, 1781, and one in the Gazette of Georgia, October 10, 1785. For background, see Paul M. Pressly, “The Many Worlds of Titus: Marronage, Freedom, and the Entangled Borders of Lowcountry Georgia and Spanish Florida,” JSH 84, no. 3 (August 2019): 549–50.

2. Notice of John Morel, January 4, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette, in Lathan Wind-ley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983) 4:82–83; Petition of Mary Morel to the Council of Safety, October 22, 1776, in Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia, comp. Allen D. Candler (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner, 1908), 1:210–11. Mary Morel, a widow, moved Hercules and his family to a new site on the mainland that she received from the government for compensation for cattle removed from Ossabaw Island. The family immediately fled and were returned to the island.

3. Notice of John Morel, October 11, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:100.

4. Notice of Peter Henry Morel, October 20, 1785, Gazette of the State of Georgia, in Elizabeth Evans Kilbourne, comp., Savannah, Georgia, Newspaper Clippings (“Georgia Gazette”), 1775–1775 (Savannah: E. E. Kilbourne, 1999) 2:444; Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).

5. James W. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 3–37; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 213–34.

6. Notice of John Morel, May 20, 1789, Gazette of the State of Georgia; and notice of Peter Henry Morel, May 21, 1789, Gazette of the State of Georgia, both in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:165–66; Notices of Bryan Morel and William Bryan, July 30, 1789, Georgia Gazette, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:168–69; Notice of John Morel, Gazette of the State of Georgia, January 12, 1795; affidavits submitted by the Morel brothers and five other families related to the Morel family, October 1, 1791, EFP, reel 174.

7. For the revolutionary period, see Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Vintage Books, 2011); and Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). For the antebellum period, see Damian Alan Pargas, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Damian Alan Pargas, ed., Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018); R. J. M. Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2020); and Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

8. Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 1–14.

9. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 4.

10. “List of destinations, Commissioner for Evacuations, 1785,” NAUK; Wilbur Henry Siebert, “East Florida as a Refuge of Southern Loyalists, 1774–1785,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 37, pt. 2 (October 1927): 244. Commissioner for the Evacuation John Winniett and his successor William Brown produced multiple lists found in the Colonial Office records in the National Archives United Kingdom.

11. Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1985); Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 17–20. For a divergent view, Melissa L. Cooper, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

12. Important articles on Black fugitives include Jane G. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” FHQ 62 (January 1984), 296–313; Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990), 9–30; Patrick Riordan, “Finding Freedom in Florida: Native Peoples, African Americans, and Colonists, 1670–1816,” FHQ 75 (Summer 1996), 24–43; Richard K. Murdoch, “The Return of Runaway Slaves: 1790–1794,” FHQ 38 (October 1959), 96–113; Richard K. Murdoch and Juan de Pierra, “The Seagrove-White Stolen Property Agreement of 1797,” GHQ 42 (September 1958), 258–276; J. Leitch Wright Jr., “Blacks in British East Florida,” FHQ 54 (April 1976), 425–42. Books include Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Timothy James Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford, 1999); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Pres, 1993); Frank Marotti, Heaven’s Soldiers: Free People of Color and the Spanish Legacy in Antebellum Florida (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013).

13. Elijah H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review, 112, no. 3 (January 2007): 764–86.

14. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Jane Landers, ‘Acquisition and Loss on a Spanish Frontier: The Free Black Homesteaders of Florida, 1784–1821,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 17, no. 1 (1996): 85–101.

15. “Our Southern Frontier,” Major General John Floyd, National Intelligencer, October 29, 1817, cited in Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 298.

16. Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Jane G. Landers, “A Nation Divided: Blood Seminoles and Black Seminoles on the Florida Frontier,” in Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Richard F. Brown, 99–116 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 213–43; Andrew K. Frank, “Taking the State Out: Seminoles and Creeks in Late Eighteenth-Century Florida,” FHQ 84, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 10–27; Andrew K. Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole Community Convergence on the Florida Borderlands, 1780–1840,” in Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America’s Contested Spaces, 1500–1850, edited by Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers, 46–67 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017); Watson W. Jennison, Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 127–56; Kevin Kokomoor, “A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery on the Florida Frontier,” FHQ, 88, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 209–36; Brent Richards Weisman, Like Beads on a String: A Culture History of the Seminole Indians in North Peninsular Florida (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); Covington, The Seminoles of Florida, 1–49; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 233–47; Larry Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 1–16; John K. Mahon and Brent R. Weisman, “Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples,” in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 183–206.

17. Saunt, A New Order of Things; C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country; Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Kevin Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government: The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2018); Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

18. See Pargas, Freedom Seekers, a major contribution to the historical literature on fugitive slaves that uses a continental perspective.

Chapter 1. Black Sailors, Oglethorpe’s Georgia, and Spanish Florida

1. Harold E. Davis, The Fledgling Province: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, 1733–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 35.

2. Among the many works considering Savannah during the Trusteeship period are Walter J. Fraser, Savannah in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: kto press, 1976); Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Noeleen McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Ben Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Julie Anne Sweet, William Stephens: Georgia’s Forgotten Founder (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Mart Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996; Paul M. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Mills Lane, The People of Georgia: An Illustrated History (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1992); Milton L. Ready, The Castle Builders: Georgia’s Economy under the Trustees, 1732–1754 (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Sarah Gober Temple and Kenneth Coleman, Georgia’s Journeys, 1732–1754 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961); T. D. Wilson, The Oglethorpe Plan: Enlightenment Design and Beyond (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

3. For a profile of slavery in South Carolina, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Max E. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1–23; Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 33–41.

4. Temple and Coleman, Georgia’s Journeys, 38–39.

5. Philip Morgan, “Lowcountry Georgia and the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1733-ca. 1820,” in African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, edited by Philip Morgan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 15–19.

6. Ready, The Castle Builders, 263–68. By the 1740s, select farmers and “adventurers” played a game of cat-and-mouse with the magistrates over the use of enslaved labor. In 1749, there were 350 adults of African descent as well as their children. Deerskin merchants in and around the newly created town of Augusta relied on slave labor, while residents of the military outpost at Frederica occasionally feigned that Black people who appeared in their households were indentured servants.

7. See a case study of how Savannah’s architecture developed its own style under New World conditions: Carl R. Louisbury, “Savannah: Loopholes in Metropolitan Design on the Frontier,” in Material Culture in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean, ed. David S. Shields (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009): 58–73.

8. Elizabeth B. Cooksey, “Judaism and Jews,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/judaism-and-jews.

9. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 24–29; McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia, 23–39; Ready, The Castle Builders, 37; Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 12–21; H. Davis, The Fledgling Province, 95–124; Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 11–24.

10. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Lynn B. Harris, Patroons and Periaguas: Enslaved Watermen and Watercraft of the Lowcountry (Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014); Werner Sollors, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

11. Ready, The Castle Builders, 268.

12. For an insightful comment on watermen, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 236–44. On Carolina slave watermen, see the study by Lynn Harris, Patroons and Periaguas.

13. William Stephens, Entry for March 10, 1741, CRG, vol. 4 suppl., 102; Robert Paulett, An Empire of Small Places, 72–75; Sweet, William Stephens, 149–50.

14. William Stephens, Entry for March 10, 1741, CRG, vol. 4 suppl., 102–3.

15. William Stephens, Entry for February 29, 1739, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia ([New York]: Readex Microprint, 1966), 2:298. This passage is not found in volume 4 of CRG.

16. Paulett, An Empire of Small Places, 49–52, 72–74.

17. The career of Captain Caleb Davis offers special insight into this world. See “The Most Astonishing Journal of Captain Caleb Davis, Eminent Merchant,” September 20, 1763, box 6, Keith Read Collection, HAR; William Stephens, entries for December 15, 1738, May 28, 29, and 30, 1739, CRG, vol. 4, 247–48, 343–37; Diana Reigelsperger, “Early Eighteenth Century Contraband Trade and Slave Smuggling between Spanish Florida and the British Colonies,” paper presented at the Southern Historical Association, St. Petersburg, Florida, November 2016; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 33; P. Wood, Black Majority, 306–7.

18. CRG, vol. 4, 247–48, 308–9, 343–47. For an analysis of frontier marriage patterns, see Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women, 70–79, 89.

19. Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women, 67–92.

20. CRG, vol. 4, 343–47.

21. CRG, vol. 4, 345–48; Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women, 48–49.

22. CRG, vol. 4, 247–48.

23. Reigelsperger, “Early Eighteenth-Century Contraband Trade,” 6–7. For the type of smuggling and illicit trade that existed in the Spanish Empire in the Americas, see Casey Schmitt, “Virtue in Corruption: Privateers, Smugglers, and the Shape of Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 1 (2015): 80–110.

24. Davis, “The Most Astonishing Journal of Captain Caleb Davis, Eminent Merchant,” 1763, p. 2, HAR; Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 14, 21, 29; Joyce Elizabeth Harmon, Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 1732–1763 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 14–15, 40–43.

25. Susan Richbourg Parker, “St. Augustine in the Seventeenth-Century: Capital of La Florida,” FHQ 92, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 554–576; Sherry Johnson, “The Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Florida,” FHQ 93, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 296–326.

26. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Republic of Spaniards, Republic of Indians,” in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 64–66; Saunt, “’The English Has Now a Mind to Make Slaves of Them All’: Creeks, Seminoles, and the Problem of Slavery,” American Indian Quarterly 22 (nos. 1–2), 1998, 157; Jane G. Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 13.

27. William L Ramsey, The Yamassee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

28. Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 174–88; Max E. Edelson, “Visualizing the Southern Frontier: Cartography and Colonization in Eighteenth-Century Georgia,” in Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast, ed. Paul Sutter and Paul Pressly (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 91–121; Herbert E. Bolton and Mary Ross, The Debatable Land: A Sketch of the Anglo-Spanish Contest for the Georgia Country (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925.

29. No other colony in British North America received such large subsidies. Over the life of the charter, Parliament disbursed £124,000 in grants in addition to the expenditures of the War Office for the regiment stationed on St. Simons Island. See Pressly, On the Rim, 25–26.

30. “An Act for Rendering the Colony of Georgia More Defencible by Prohibiting the Importation and Use of Black Slaves or Negroes into the Same,” CRG, vol. 1, 53–56.

31. Morgan, “Lowcountry Georgia and the Early Modern Atlantic World,” 13–47.

32. The Darien Petition of 1739 can be found in Christopher C. Meyers, The Empire State of the South: Georgia History in Documents (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2008), 111–12; and “Petition against the Introduction of Slavery,” Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Petition_against_the_Introduction_of_Slavery, viewed July 17, 2021.

33. Matthew Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 70–73; Harmon, Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 40–43.

34. Report of Acting Governor Arthur Middleton, June 13, 1728, British Public Record Office Transcript, 8:61–67, cited in P. Wood, Black Majority, 305.

35. Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 19

36. Montiano to captain-general of Cuba, January 3, 1739, CGHS 7, pt. 1:28. Governor Manuel de Montiano boasted to the captain-general of Cuba that he now possessed a true account of the situation in Georgia and South Carolina “for having had an intimate conversation with Mr. Davis and earned from him the present condition of those colonies.”

37. Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 17n39.

38. J. H. Easterby, ed., The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly: Assembly, September 12, 1739–March 26, 1740, vol. 3 (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1952), 83 (July 1, 1741).

39. Testimony of an unnamed sea captain from Beaufort, April 21, 1738, Records in the British Public Record Office relating to South Carolina Transcripts, 19:76, cited in P. Wood, Black Majority, 306.

40. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” 298; “the men as well as the women”: Jane Landers, ed., Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 1996), 87.

41. Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 13–17.

42. Memorandum of Acting Lieutenant Governor Arthur Middleton, June 13, 1728, Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina, 1663–1782, Sainsbury Transcripts, XIII, 61–67, cited in P. Wood, Black Majority, 305.

43. Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 27–28.

44. Paul Lokken, “Useful Enemies: Seventeenth-Century Piracy and the Rise of Pardo Militias in Spanish Central America,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5, no. 2 (2004), https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/9289.

45. For a summary of Fort Mose’s impact, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 74–76.

46. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 38–45; Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 1–14.

47. Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 17–19 (p. 18 for phrase “the most cruel”).

48. Montiano to Governor General of Cuba, January 3, 1738, Letters of Montiano, in CHGS 3:28. The governor noted that only eight were laborers.

49. Easterby, The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1:596 (January 19, 1739). However, the governor of Florida noted twenty-eight runaways coming in this wave, which suggests that one other vessel with a small number of people joined the escape.

50. Claim of Captain Caleb Davis, September 17, 1751, SD 2584, Archivo General de Indias, cited in Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 19.

51. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Alfred F. Young and Gregory H. Nobles, Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 202–3.

52. Reigelsperger, “Early Eighteenth Century Contraband Trade,” 7.

53. Claim of Captain Caleb Davis, September 17, 1751, SD 2584, Archivo General de Indias, cited in Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 33, 296n22.

54. William Stephens, December 11, 1738, CRG, vol. 4, 247–48.

55. Governor Manuel de Montiano to Captain General of Cuba, January 3, 1739, CGHS 7, pt. 1:28.

56. “An Account of the Negro Insurrection in South Carolina,” CRG, vol. 22, pt. 2, 232–36; William Stephens, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia (Readex Microprint), 1:357–58; Montiano to captain-general of Cuba, April 2, 1739, CGHS 7, pt. 1:29–30. The officer was politely received but told that the “Court of Spain” had set the policy and there could be no deviation.

57. Jane Landers, “The Atlantic Transformations of Francisco Menendez,” in Biography and the Black Atlantic, eds. John Wood Sweet and Lisa A. Lindsay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 209–23; Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 9–30.

58. P. Wood, Black Majority, 308; Mark M. Smith, “Time Religion, Rebellion,” in Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt, ed., Mark M. Smith (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 108–23; Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vii; John R. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion”, American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 1101–13.

59. “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” CRG, vol. 22, pt. 2, 232–36; P. Wood, Black Majority, 314–23.

60. “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” CRG, 22, pt. 2, 232–36. The author of this detailed account is not known but thought to be either Oglethorpe or William Stevens.

61. Larry E. Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier: The Military Colonization of Georgia, 1733–1749 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 90–91; Reigelsperger, “Early Eighteenth-Century Contraband Trade,” 7–8.

62. Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 19–20; Ivers, British Drums Drums on the Southern Frontier, 113–24; Julie Anne Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia: British-Creek Relations in the Trustee Era, 1733–1752 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

63. Julie A. Sweet, “Battle of Bloody Marsh,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed July 30, 2023, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/battle-of-bloody-marsh; Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier, 151–53; John Jay TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida, 1700–1763 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964).

64. Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier, 168–84. In 1743, Oglethorpe returned to England. A grateful Parliament reimbursed him £66,000 for the amounts he had spent on the war effort out of his own estate.

65. Trevor R. Reese, ed., The Clamorous Malcontents: Criticisms and Defenses of the Colony of Georgia, 1741–1743 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1973).

66. Dobell to Trustees, June 11, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 72.

67. Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 77–78.

68. Trevor Reese, Frederica: Colonial Fort and Town (St. Simons Island, Ga.: Fort Frederica Association, 1969); Francis Moore, A Voyage to Georgia Begun in the Year 1735 (Jacksonville, Fla.: Fort Frederica Association, 1992), 44–89; J. T. Scott, The First Families of Frederica: Their Lives and Locations (Athens: J. T. Scott, 1985).

69. Entry of January 7, 1743, E. Merton Coulter, ed., The Journal of William Stephens: 1741–1743 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 1:157–58.

70. “Extract of a Letter from General Oglethorpe’s Secretary,” in Reese, The Clamorous Malcontents, 333–35.

71. Andrew C. Lannen, “James Oglethorpe and the Civil-Military Contest for Authority in Colonial Georgia, 1732–1749,” GHQ 95 (Summer 2011): 203–31; Ready, The Castle Builders, 268; Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 25; Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier, 204–7.

72. Benjamin Martyn to John Dobell, March 14, 1746/7, CRG, vol. 31, 56. “The Trustees are extreamly surpris’d at seeing in the Journal of August 21st, 1746, that the Rev. Mr. Thomas Bosomworth had sent to South Carolina for six Negroes, and had employed them on his plantation.”

73. Ready, The Castle Builders, 268.

74. “The Most Astonishing Journal of Captain Caleb Davis, Eminent Merchant,” p. 19, Hargrett Library.

75. William Logan, “William Logan’s Journal of a Trip to Georgia, 1745,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 36, no. 2 (1912): 178.

76. Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier, 206–7.

77. John Dobell to the Trustees, May 17, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 42–54.

78. Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 1–13; Linda M. Rupert, “Marronage, Manumission, and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3 (September 2009), 361–32.

79. Dobell to the Trustees, May 17, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 42–54; “John Mullryne,” in Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, vol. 2, The Commons House of Assembly, 1692–1775, ed. Walter B. Edgar and N. Louis Bailey (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 488–89.

80. Boston Weekly Magazine, March 9, 1743, 16, cited in Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 39.

81. Dobell to the Trustees, May 17, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 45.

82. John Dobell to the Trustees, May 17, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 42–54; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory of South Carolina, 488.

83. Dobell to the Trustees, May 17, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 44–45.

84. Dobell to the Trustees, CRG, vol. 25, 45.

85. Dobell to the Trustees, CRG, vol. 25, 45–47; Kenneth Coleman, “Henry Parker,” in Dictionary of Georgia Biography, ed. Kenneth Coleman and Charles Stevens Gurr (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 2:777–78.

86. For an analysis of Horton’s policies, see Lannen, “James Oglethorpe and the Civil-Military Contest,” 214. To persuade the chief magistrate, three Savannahians, including the merchant James Habersham, offered to stand as guarantors of whatever decision would come from Curaçao. If John Peter could not prove he was a free man, the three would pay for the cost of maintaining him during that time, indemnify Mullryne for the lost labor, and cover the cost of the legal proceedings.

87. Frank Lambert, James Habersham: Loyalty, Politics, and Commerce in Colonial Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

88. Dobell to the Trustees, May 17, 1746, CRG, vol. 25, 46–47.

89. Kaye Kole, The Minis Family of Georgia, 1733–1992 (Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1992), 3–4.

90. Noeleen McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

91. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 50–52.

92. William Stephens and the Assistants to Benjamin Martyn, July 19, 1750, CRG, vol. 26:22. In 1750, the governing magistrates estimated the Black population at 349 working adults (202 men, 147 women) and their children.

93. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15–92.

94. Bolster, Black Jacks, 31–40; Rhae Lynn Barnes, “Sailors and Slaves: Maritime History of the Long Eighteenth Century,” U.S. History Scene. Accessed July 28, 2023. https://ushistoryscene.com/article/sailors-and-slaves.

Chapter 2. The Journeys of Mahomet

1. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 74–87; David R. Chestnutt, South Carolina’s Expansion into Colonial Georgia, 1720–1765 (New York: Garland, 1989).

2. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 76–80.

3. Louis De Vorsey Jr., ed., De Brahm’s Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 163–65; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 11–40; Edward J. Cashin, “Sowing the Wind: Governor Wright and the Georgia Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution” in Forty Years of Diversity: Essays on Colonial Georgia, ed. Harvey H. Jackson and Phinizy Spalding, 233–50 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 42–80; Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 69–70.

4. Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 119–34.

5. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 67–68, 79–80, 88, 90. Equiano earned his freedom from a Quaker merchant on Montserrat. His brutal encounters in Savannah did not change.

6. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 505–6; Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2016), 229–38.

7. James A. McMillin, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade Comes to Georgia” in Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, ed. Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 1–25; Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 114 (table 9); Karen B. Bell, “Rice, Resistance, and Forced Transatlantic Communities: (Re)Envisioning the African Diaspora in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1800,” Journal of African American History 95, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 157–82.

8. Georgia Gazette, September 7, 1774, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:56.

9. Governor’s Council, March 6, 1769, CRG, vol. 10, 699–700; Gerald Lee Cates, “A Medical History of Georgia: The First Hundred Years, 1733–1833,” PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1976: 56–58. The governor’s council noted that Captain Dean arrived with “Negroes from the coast of Africa . . . infected with the small Pox.” The council required him to quarantine his human cargo at the Lazaretto on Tybee Island.

10. On the controversy over the extent of the African contribution to rice technology in the Lowcountry, see Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1329–58; David Eltis, Philip D. Morgan, and David Richardson, “Black, Brown, or White? Color-Coding American Commercial Rice Cultivation with Slave Labor,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (February 2010), 164–71.

11. Bell, “Rice, Resistance, and Forced Transatlantic Communities.” See 166–68 for her assessment of the contribution of African enslaved people to rice cultivation.

12. Lillian Ashcraft-Eason, “’She Voluntarily Hath Come’: A Gambian Woman Trader in Colonial Georgia in the Eighteenth Century” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London: Continuum, 2000), 202. The town of Kau-Ur was connected with the Muslim commercial network in the interior of western Sudan.

13. Memorandum signed by James Wright, John Graham, Joseph Clay, Lachlan McGillivray, William McGillivray, Williams Struthers, and John Deane, April 1775, box 29, Sir James Wright file, Keith Read Collection, HAR; Frank Lambert, James Habersham: Loyalty, Politics, and Commerce in Colonial Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia, 2005), 59–80.

14. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, accessed June 15, 2021, https://www.slavevoyages.org. The 1768 voyage was Deane’s first appearance off the Georgia coast in the New Britannia. He returned with another shipment the following year and then again for a third time in 1770, bringing 490 enslaved people to Georgia, almost one-quarter of the total during that time. A fifth voyage brought additional Africans for a total of 610. See Robert Scott Davis, “Free but Not Freed: Stephen Deane’s African Family in Early Georgia,” GHQ 97, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 62.

15. Henry Laurens to Richard Oswald, May 17, 1756, in Henry Laurens, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 2, ed. Philip M. Hamer and George C. Rogers Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 186; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 8.

16. Joseph Clay to Scott, Mackie & Dover, December 10, 1772, Joseph Clay & Company letter book, Dec. 19, 1772–March 31, 1774, GHS.

17. Ashcraft-Eason, “She Voluntarily Hath Come,” 202–21.

18. Barry Boubacar, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80–81.

19. Ashcraft-Eason, “She Voluntarily Hath Come,” 207–9.

20. Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998, 2013), 20–99.

21. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 78 (table 18). Of two shiploads for whom records exist, a total of 54 whites bought 172 Africans. About half went singly or in pairs. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 128.

22. Mary Granger, ed., Savannah River Plantations (repr.; Savannah, Ga.: Oglethorpe Press, 1997). Merchants owned fourteen of twenty-one plantations whose ownership can be identified. These included John Graham, James Graham, Lachlan McGillivray, William McGillivray, Nathaniel Hall, “Greenwood & Higginson,” John Rae, George Kincaid, Samuel Douglass, Edward Telfair, Basil Cowper, John Jamieson, Lewis Johnston, and Miles Brewton. The non-merchant owners were Jonathan Bryan, Governor James Wright, his son Alexander Wright, James Deveaux, William Knox, Dr. James Cuthbert, and James Hume.

23. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 103–4.

24. “An account of land, Negroes and other effects the property of John Graham late of Georgia,” AO 13/35, Audit Office records, 1764–1835, series 13, box 35, 157–60, NAUK; minutes of interview of John Graham before the Commission of Claims, December 20, 1783, AO 12: Georgia, 57–98, Audit Office records, 1764–1835, NAUK; “A List of Slaves the Property of John Graham, Esq.,” January 9, 1781, Colonial Book of Miscellaneous Bonds KK-2, 294–96, GA.

25. William Knox to James Habersham, March 2, 1768, Habersham Papers, GHS. James Habersham and John Graham served jointly as managers of Knox’s estate.

26. “An account of land, Negroes and other effects,” 157–60; minutes of interview of John Graham, 57–98.

27. “A List of Slaves the Property of John Graham Esq.,” 294–97.

28. Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); “huge hydraulic machine”: Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1620–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 98.

29. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 133.

30. “Evidence on the Memorial of Sir James Wright, Baronet, Sir James Wright Sworn,” October 22, 1783, AO 13/35, Audit Office records, 1764–1835, NAUK. Seventh page of the testimony: “He thinks 3 in 100 might die in a year on an average per year.” See also “An account of lands, Negroes and other effects the property of John Graham,” October 3, 1783, 132, AO 13/35, Audit Office records, 1764–1835, NAUK; and DeVorsey, De Brahm’s Report, 162. In his estimate of the cost of a rice plantation, he calculated the purchase of forty working hands at £1,800 and the cost of their deaths on an annual basis, £100 (two slaves per year).

31. Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire, 131–38; P. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 443–66; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 151–54.

32. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 71–158.

33. Georgia Gazette, September 7, 1774, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:56.

34. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 169–87; Philip Morgan, “Colonial South Carolina Runaways: Their Significance for Slave Culture,” in Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World, ed. Gad Heuman ((London: Routledge, 2016), 57–78; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

35. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 180.

36. Georgia Gazette, June 15, 1774, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:51.

37. Georgia Gazette, March 22, 1775, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:61.

38. Georgia Gazette, November 1, 1769, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:40.

39. Betty Wood, “Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Low Country Georgia, 1763–1815,” Historical Journal 30 (September 1987), 612–13.

40. Kathryn Holland Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” JSH 57, no. 4 (November 1981), 611; P. Wood, Black Majority, 260.

41. Ethridge, Creek Country, 22–31; E. Kathryn Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 3–25; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 11–37.

42. Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 617; Anthony Gene Carey, Sold Down the River: Slavery in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 28.

43. C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 127–51; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 111–35.

44. Lachlan McIntosh to George Houstoun, July 26, 1775 in Lilla Mills Hawes, ed., Lachlan McIntosh Papers in the University of Georgia Library, University of Georgia Miscellanea Publications, no. 7 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 14.

45. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665–1740,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 246–92; Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 1–2.

46. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 1–4.

47. Commons House of Assembly, November 15, 1765, CRG 14:292–93.

48. Roderick McIntosh to Isaac Young, November 18, 1765, enclosed in Governor Wright to Lt. Gov. of South Carolina, Nov. 25, 1765, Council Journal, no. 32, 674–75, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, cited in Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 450.

49. Council meeting, December 4, 1771, CRG, vol. 12, 146–47.

50. Presentations of the presentments of the grand jury to the governor’s council, July 7, 1772, CRG, vol. 12: 325–26. They robbed a boat, shot at a white man, and torched a house in which a white child was burned to death.

51. Michael Mullins, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 34–61 (p. 61 for the statement of the absence of a maroon dimension in the South). In discussing slave resistance, Mullins expressed the prevailing view at the end of the twentieth century when he spoke of the absence of a maroon dimension in the South and observed that it represented a serious loss for southern slaves.

52. Richard Price, “Maroons,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph C. Miller, Vincent Brown, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Laurent Dubois, and Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 326–29; Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 105–10.

53. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 4–5, 72–96.

54. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 1–11, Rhys L. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 52–53.

55. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 169–82. Matthew Mulcahy states that some 30 percent of South Carolina runaways whose intentions were known left home to reconnect with a relative, sometimes a parent, a child, or a sibling. Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire, 130.

56. “An account of land, Negroes and other effects the property of John Graham late of Georgia . . . the account being stated agreeable to an appraisement made of the said property in April 1776,” John Graham, November 6, 1785, AO 13/35, NAUK, 132–40.

57. Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 158–63; Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 104–18.

58. Rita Folse Elliott and Dan T. Elliott, Savannah under Fire, 1779: Expanding the Boundaries (Savannah, Ga.: Coastal Heritage Society, 2011), 53–55 (table 1).

59. An account of land, Negroes and other effects the property of John Graham late of Georgia . . . April 1776,” John Graham, November 6, 1785, AO 13/35, NAUK, 132–40.

60. Memorial of James Graham, March 24, 1785, AO 13/35, NAUK, 124–31.

61. Marshall’s Sales, John Nutt vs. James Habersham, Royal Georgia Gazette, May 17, 1781; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 188.

62. “A Return of Refugees, with their Negroes, who came to the Province of East Florida in consequence of the evacuation of Georgia. July 1783,” CO 5:580, NAUK, cited in Lawrence H. Feldman, ed., Colonization and Conquest: British Florida in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2007), 60–77.

63. “The Memorial of Lieut. Col. Graham,” in Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785 (DeLand: Florida State Historical Society, 1929), 2:76–81. The manager of the estate, Colonel Douglass, stated that there were 102 men, 67 women, and 56 children at work on five tracts of land. Crops of indigo and rice were planted as late as May 1784.

64. J. Leitch Wright Jr., Florida in the American Revolution (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975), 117–23; J. Leitch Wright Jr., Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 136–37; Carole Watterson Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation of East Florida, 183–85,” FHQ, 60, no. 1 (July 1981): 3. In Paris, diplomats from Spain, France, and Great Britain considered a variety of transfers that involved swapping territory in the Caribbean, North America, and the Mediterranean before deciding on the exchange of the two Floridas for Havana.

65. “The Memorial of Lieut. Col. Graham,” in Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 2:80, 82. Graham wanted to sell his slaves in Jamaica, but Douglass thought the better price was in Beaufort even though government transport would not carry them there.

66. The Petition of Godin Guerard and Sworn Oath of Samuel Bostick, December 3, 1793, Records of the General Assembly, South Carolina Department of Archives and History”, cited in Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 189.

67. Gazette of the State of Georgia, May 12, 1785, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:126–27. Fatima’s name is not on the list of the sixteen who escaped. She made her break for freedom with a subsequent group. When captured, she identified herself as a slave of John Graham, not Godin Guerard.

68. The Petition of Godin Guerard, December 3, 1793, Records of the General Assembly, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, cited in Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 189n12, 339.

69. Lockley, Maroon Communities in South Carolina, 40. According to his analysis, nearly 85 percent of colonial runaways were male, while more than a third of Revolutionary War runaways were women and children.

70. Trial Record of Lewis forwarded to governor by Savannah magistrates, May 21, 1787, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HAR, cited in Lockley, Maroon Communities in South Carolina, 62–65. At his trial, Lewis testified that, when he arrived at the Belleisle site in 1785, there were eleven men, including the leader Sharper, and a number of women.

71. Timothy Lockley, “’The King of England’s Soldiers’: Armed Blacks in Savannah and Its Hinterlands during the Revolutionary War Era, 1778–1787,” in Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, ed. Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 26–41; “the very fellows”: General James Jackson to Governor George Matthews, 1786, Joseph Vallence Bevan Papers, GHS, cited in Lockley, Maroon Communities in South Carolina, 47.

72. Charleston Morning Post, May 8, 1787, reprinted in Lockley, Maroon Communities, 59–61 (“In this country”: 60).

73. For Sharper’s background, see the notice of William Woodward, Gazette of the State of Georgia, July 24, 1783, cited in Lockley, “The King of England Soldiers,” 38n9, 219. In Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 189, the trial documents list Sharper as a slave of Alexander Wright, son of the royal governor and owner of the Richmond and Kew Plantation on the Savannah River.

74. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 97; Lockley, “The King of England’s Soldiers,” 37–39; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 189–90.

75. Gazette of the State of Georgia, October 19, 1786, reprinted in Charleston Morning Post, October 26, 1786; and Georgia State Gazette, October 28, 1786, cited in Lockley, Maroon Communities in South Carolina, 44–45. Planters posted notices for runaways believed to be “harbored by the Abercorn negroes,” a reference to a creek thought to be nearby, while the grand jury of Chatham County complained about the “large gangs of runaway Negroes that are allowed to remain with a short distance of town.”

76. Frey, Water from the Rock, 226–28; Betty Wood, “’High Notions of their Liberty’: Women of Color and the American Revolution in Lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina, 1765–1785,” in African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, ed. Philip Morgan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010): 68. In Maroon Communities, Lockley emphasizes how great a threat the white community saw in a maroon community that would serve as an example for Black communities.

77. Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 160.

78. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 208.

79. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 190; Jackson to Matthews, 1786, Bevan Papers, GHS, cited in Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities, 47. The one time they went on the attack was to take the life of a Mr. Wolmar, “whose Negroe, one of their leaders was killed & whose head was fixed on the western road, in revenge for his life.” The attack to extract revenge failed; Wolmar was not at home.

80. Gazette of the State of Georgia, October 19, 1786, reprinted in Charleston Morning Post, October 26, 1786; Jackson to Thomas Pinckney, governor of South Carolina, December 2, 1786, and Jackson to George Matthews, governor of Georgia, December 1786, reprinted in Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities, 44–47; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 190–92.

81. Military Dispatch from Col. James Gunn to Brig. General James Jackson, May 6, 1787, folder 10, item 84, Joseph Vallence Bevan Papers GHS, cited in Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities, 58–59.

82. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 198–201.

83. Georgia State Gazette, April 26, 1787, in Lockley, Maroon Communities, 57; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 201–3.

84. Charleston (S.C.) Morning Post, May 8, 1787, in Lockley, Maroon Communities, 59–61; trial record of Lewis, May 21, 1787, Georgia Slavery Trials, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HAR, reprinted in Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities, 62–65; Lockley, “The King of England Soldiers,” 39–41.

85. “Trial Record of Lewis forwarded to the governor of Georgia by Savannah magistrates,” box 71, folder 12, Georgia Slavery Trials, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HAR.

86. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 97.

87. “Petitions for Compensation from the Owners of Slaves Killed in 1787,” Lockley, Maroon Communities, 67.

88. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 205.

Chapter 3. Hercules, Revolution, and British Florida

1. The three delegates chosen by the Second Provincial Council in January 1775 elected not to go to Philadelphia for fear of setting off a riot in the streets of Savannah. Noble Wimberly Jones, Archibald Bulloch, John Houstoun to the President of the Continental Congress, Savannah, April 6, 1771, Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia, comp. Allen D. Candler (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner, 1908) 1:63–66.

2. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 213–28 Leslie Hall; Land and Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 31–53; Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 102–23; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 19–22; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Kenneth Coleman, American Revolution in Georgia, 1763–1789 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 55–75. Piecuch and Frey offer critical insights into the role of African Americans in revolutionary Georgia.

3. Notice of John Morel, Royal Georgia Gazette, October 11, 1781, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:100; Inventory and appraisement of the personal estate of John Morel, deceased, June 27, 1777, book FF: 70–76, GA; Morel files, Walter Hartridge Collection, GHS; Indenture between William Stephens, Josiah Tattnall, and John Morel, January 25, 1772, 4000–04, conveyances. X-1, GHS; Will of John Morel, Morel Family Documents, mss 1326, box 28, GHS; Daniel T. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, North End Plantation, Ossabaw Island, Georgia, LAMAR Institute publication series, report number 108 (Savannah: LAMAR Institute, 2005), 29–44.

4. Notice of John Morel, Royal Georgia Gazette, October 11, 1781, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 100. Morel identified Hercules as being from Angola.

5. D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, 15–16; Indenture between Grey Elliott and Henry Bourquin, May 17, 1760, Conveyance Book C-1, and Indenture between Henry Bourquin and John Morel, October 10, 1760, Conveyance Book C-1, 597, both in GA. Grey Elliott, a lawyer-merchant with close ties to the governor, submitted the winning bid for Ossabaw Island at public auction. Two months later, he in turn sold the island to Bourquin for a handsome profit. In October that year, Bourquin sold an undivided half-interest to his son-in-law, John Morel.

6. Morel Family files, Walter Charlton Hartridge Jr. Collection, series XIV, 1349, GHS; D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2; Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 260n18; Granger, Savannah River Plantations, 180. When Patrick Brown died, his brother, Alexander Brown, a gilder in Dublin, Ireland, moved the men, women, and children to a tract of land along the Savannah River that his brother had purchased but never developed. Brown attempted a rice plantation, but little rice was ever produced, and the enterprise failed. John Morel moved these people to Ossabaw Island.

7. Indenture between John Morel, merchant of Savannah and Alexander Brown, recorded June 20, 1763, Colonial Bond Book O, 71, GA.

8. Indenture between Morel and Brown.

9. Inventory and appraisement of the personal estate of John Morel, deceased, June 27, 1777, book FF, 70–76, GA.

10. Comparison of names in the indenture of 1763 with the inventory and appraisement of the personal estate of John Morel in 1777. Since most names appeared only once on both lists and the age of the person in question fits the given information, it is possible to have reasonable confidence in this picture. Diana’s sister, Jenny, was married to Jack. Her other sister, Betty, was married to either Hercules, a leader on the plantation with whom she escaped in 1781, or Mingo, with whom she had five children.

11. There were two Bettys in the 1763 list. In the 1777 list, there are two Bettys, one married to Hercules, the other to Mingo.

12. John Martin, “Official Letters of Governor John Martin, 1782–1783,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 1, no. 4: 334–35 (letter to Governor Patrick Tonyn, October 19 and 22, 1782); S. Max Edelson, “The Characters of Commodities: The Reputations of South Carolina Rice and Indigo in the Atlantic World,” in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis, 350–52 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). The productivity of the Morel estate was confirmed by a raid by British loyalists, who took twenty-three hundred pounds of indigo in 1782. D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, 39.

13. R. C. Nash, “South Carolina Indigo, European Textiles, and the British Atlantic Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” English Economic History, 63, no. 2 (May 2010), 362–92; Andrea Feeser, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life (Athens: University of Georgia, 2013); Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 151.

14. John Wand Papers, 1771–1772, GHS. Legal documents and letters concerning the Elizabeth. The vessel carried rice from Savannah to Cowes and then northern Europe. It ended in the timber trade between St. Petersburg and England and was eventually scrapped. Wand lost a considerable amount on this venture.

15. D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, 46–49, 52–56.

16. Testimony in a postrevolutionary court case indicates that there were three plantations on the island before the Revolution. In addition, the total number of enslaved people—155—fits this profile. Deposition of John Morel, the son, March 1797, box 45, Nutt v. estate of John Morel, NARA, Atlanta.

17. For a general description of life on a plantation in Georgia, see Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe, 87–116; and Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 134–52.

18. James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 103–10 (107 for “Ethiopian Regiment”); Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 48–49; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 11–12; Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 15–45; Parkinson, The Common Cause, 155–63;.

19. Diary entry, September 24, 1775, John Adams, The Works of John Adams, ed. by Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little Brown, 1850–1856), 2:428.

20. Memorial of Sir James Wright and several other gentlemen to Lord George Germain, January 6, 1779 in CGHS, vol. 3, 249.

21. Joseph Clay to Mr. Brown, September 1, 1778, in CGHS, vol. 8:99.

22. Wright to Germain, March 10, 1776, CRG, vol. 38, pt. 2:80–81; Wright to My Lord (Germain), March 20/26, 1776, CRG, vol. 38, pt. 2, 80; Stephen Bull to Henry Laurens, March 13 and March 14, 1776, in Henry Laurens, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, ed. David R. Chestnutt and C. James Taylor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 155, 163–64; James Johnson, Militiamen, Rangers, and Redcoats: The Military in Georgia, 1754–1776 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1992), 154–55; Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” WMQ 62, no. 2 (April 2005): 251. For a different view of the incident, see Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 242; and Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 26–27. Despite a raid by patriots who captured twelve fugitives on Tybee and killed two marines, the new government failed to halt the leakage of slaves from a porous system.

23. Martha Condray Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest in the American Revolution, 1776–1778 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 61. In September 1776, a British vessel took forty runaways to St. Augustine, an indication that there was a continual flight to Tybee Island. No great encampment ever emerged because the Royal Navy carried small groups from there to East Florida as needed.

24. Harvey H. Jackson, “The Battle of the Rice Boats: Georgia Joins the Revolution,” GHQ, 58 (June 1974): 229–43; Hall, Land and Allegiance, 54–75.

25. William Drayton, 1732–1790, Force Papers, series 8D, item 37, Library of Congress, cited in Frey, Water from the Rock, 83.

26. Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest, 50, 51, 58.

27. Another planter had six of his thirty-three slaves die during their relocation to East Florida. Memorial of Martin Jolie, September 19, 1783, AO 13/36, pt. 2, Audit Office records, 1764-–1835, NAUK.

28. Wright, Florida in the American Revolution, 22–23, 32–33, 40–44; Kevin J. Koko-moor, “Burning & Destroying all Before Them”: Creeks and Seminoles on Georgia’s Revolutionary Frontier,” GHQ 98 no. 4 (Winter 2014): 300–340.

29. Clay to Laurens, September 9, 1778, CGHS, vol. 6, 106.

30. Pennsylvania Journal, September 1, 1779, cited in Parkinson, The Common Cause, 465–66; South Carolina Gazette, July 7, 1779, cited in Thomas J. Kirkland and Robert M. Kennedy, Historic Camden: Colonial and Revolutionary (Columbia, SC: State Company, 1905), 300.

31. Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 118–24; Hall, Land and Allegiance, 50–53, 67–75; Coleman, American Revolution in Georgia, 100–109.

32. Hall, Land and Allegiance, 51–53, 71–75; Searcy, Georgia-Florida Contest, 134–47.

33. George McIntosh, The Case of George M’Intosh, Esquire, a Member of the Late Council and Convention of the State of Georgia: With the Proceedings Thereon in the Hon. the Assembly and Council of That State (Savannah: 1777); “An Account of the Losses sustained by Thomas Young late of Southampton in the Province of Georgia. Planter. December 23, 1783,” AO 13/36, microfilm, 6015–5, 13–38, GHS.

34. R. Wylly and Wife v. Executors of Estate of J. Morel, Deceased, Superior Court Records, 5125 sp-45, box 6, 714, GHS.

35. Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 124–28; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 132–33.

36. Gary Nash, “The African American’s Revolution” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward C. Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 250; Gary Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 200), 1–7.

37. Archibald Campbell to unknown, January 9, 1779, Prioleau Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, cited in Philip D. Morgan, “Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760–1780,” ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 109.

38. Lilla Mills Hawes, “Minute Book, Savannah Board of Police, 1779,” GHQ 45 (1961): 245–57.

39. James Wright to Lord G. Germain, July 31, 1779, CGHS, vol. 3:256; minutes of governor’s council, July 26, 1779, CRG, vol. 38, pt. 2:183. The great slave merchants of Georgia were particularly anxious to secure Wright’s support in restoring a plantation economy and protecting their investments.

40. Frey, Water from the Rock, 94–99; Alexander A. Lawrence, Storm over Savannah, The Story of Count d’Estaing and the Siege of the Town in 1779 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1951).

41. Meeting of governor’s council, September 6, 1779, CGHS, vol. 10:49–50; Frey, Water from the Rock, 96. Mary Morel was one of nine slaveholders who failed to respond to a previous directive to send “Negroes” equipped with hoes, axes, and spades for six working days.

42. John D. Garrigus, “Catalyst or Catastrophe? Saint-Domingue’s Free Men of Color and the Battle of Savannah, 1779–1782,” Review/Revista Interamericana 22 (1992): 109–25; George P. Clark, “The Role of the Haitian Volunteers of Savannah in 1779: An Attempt at an Objective View,” Phylon 41, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 356–66. In 2007, Savannah erected a statue in honor of these Haitian troops.

43. Petition of William Hanscomb to Augustine Prevost, March 30, 1780, cited in Piecuch, Three Peoples, 169, 371n317; Edward McCrady, South Carolina in the Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 342–44.

44. John J. Zubly to unnamed, November 30, 1779, Zubly Papers, GHS, cited in Piecuch, Three Peoples, 169.

45. Plan of Siege of Savannah, William Faden, Library of Congress, accessed February 8, 2022, https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701sm.gar00004/?sp=6&r=-0.161,-0.234,1.274,0.784,0. Troop disposition is indicated by numbers. Number 7 is “Picket of the Line and Armed Negroes.”

46. Petition of C. M. Handley of South Carolina, 1784, On-Line Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies, accessed November 11, 2021, http://www.royalprovincial.com/military/mems/sc/clmhandley.htm.

47. John Jones to Polly Jones, October 3, 1779, Seaborn Jones Papers, cited in Piecuch, Three Peoples, 168.

48. Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 124–25.

49. “Table 1. Negroes enumerated by the commissary General’s Store at Savannah, October 11–20, 1779 (William L. Clements Library, 1779),” R. Elliott and D. Elliott, Savannah under Fire, 1779, 53–55.

50. Cashin, The King’s Ranger, 83.

51. Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 148. Patriots arrested eight men stealing horses around Midway, former members of the Florida Rangers. Five were white; three were Black.

52. Plan of Siege of Savannah. The location of Brown’s troops is at numbers 13 and 14.

53. “Account of the Siege of Savannah from a British Source,” CGHS, vol. 5, pt. 1:138.

54. “An English Journal of the Siege of Savannah in 1779,” in Muskets, Cannon Balls and Bombs: Nine Narratives of the Siege of Savannah in 1779, ed. Benjamin Kennedy (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1974), 88.

55. Gazette of the State of Georgia, October 20, 1785, cited in Elizabeth Evans Kilbourne, comp., Savannah, Georgia, Newspaper Clippings (“Georgia Gazette”) vol. 2, 1774–1785 (Savannah: E. E. Kilbourne, 1999), 444; D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, 32.

56. Deposition of M. King, King Papers, 1782, GHS.

57. Royal Georgia Gazette, January 18, 1781 in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 84.

58. R. Elliott and D. Elliott, Savannah under Fire, 1779, 52.

59. Meeting of Governor’s Council, October 25, 1779, CGHS, vol. 10, 53–54.

60. Presentments of the Grand Jury of Chatham County, presented to the governor’s council, December 28, 1779, CGHS, vol. 10, 75.

61. Presentments of the Grand Jury of Chatham County, CGHS, vol. 10, 75, 125–26.

62. R. Elliott and D. Elliott, Savannah under Fire, 1779, 52.

63. Frey, Water from the Rock, 99–104.

64. Royal Georgia Gazette, September 6, 1781, notice of John Morel, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 97–98. Abraham and Billy escaped from the Beaulieu plantation on the mainland, not Ossabaw.

65. Notice by Peter Henry Morel, January 18, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 84. He was described as wearing “an old blue coat of the Hessian uniform” and having “several front teeth missing,” and his wife, “country-born,” was said to be wearing a blue coat and a petticoat.

66. Notice by John Morel, September 4, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 93. Joe had been the “property” of Peter Tondee, a deceased taverner in Savannah. He refused to accept his forcible uprooting when sold to the Morels.

67. Notice by Thomas Gibbons, September 7, 1780, Royal Georgia Gazette, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 78–79.

68. Notice by John Morel, January 4, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 82–83.

69. Notice by John Morel, October 11, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:100.

70. Gloria Whiting, paper presented at the Omohundro Institute Coffeehouse, University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 12, 2021.

71. Notice by John Morel, October 11, 1781, Royal Georgia Gazette, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol. 4, 100.

72. William C. Fleetwood Jr., Tidecraft: The Boats of South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeastern Florida, 1550–1950 (Tybee Island, Ga: WBG Marine Press, 1995), 36–43; Harris, Patroons and Periaguas (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014).

73. “Observations on East Florida,” Lord Hawke in response to a request from Bernardo del Campo, June 8, 1783, in East Florida, 1783–1785: A File of Documents Assembled, and Many of Them Translated, comp. Joseph Byrne Lockey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 120–21.

74. William Drayton, 1732–1790, Force Papers, ser. 8D, item 37, cited in Frey, Water from the Rock, 83.

75. East Florida Gazette, May 3, 1783, cited in Riordan, “Seminole Genesis: Native Americans, African Americans, and Colonists on the Southern Frontier from Prehistory through the Colonial Era,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 1996, 250. The commissioner of sequestered estates in South Carolina reported that many of the enslaved on estates for which he was responsible had headed for East Florida.

76. “The Memorial of Capt. Robert Bissett,” in Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 2:250.

77. Robert Baillie to his mother, March 3, 1778, Florida, “Camp Necessity on St. John’s River in East Florida,” Robert Baillie Papers, GD 1/1155/72, NRS.

78. Frey, Water from the Rock, 102–3.

79. Report of the Board of Police to Gov. Wright, May 20, 1780, CGHS, vol. 3, 289–93.

80. Report of the Commissioners of Claims, April 24, 1780, CGHS, vol. 3, 294.

81. Robert Baillie to his mother, March 3, 1778”; Wright to Germain, December 20, 1780, CGHS, vol. 3, 328.

82. Gazette of the State of Georgia, October 20, 1785, cited in Kilbourne, comp., Savannah, Georgia, Newspaper Clippings, 444; D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, 32.

83. Cashin, The King’s Ranger, 162–71.

84. Gazette of the State of Georgia, October 20, 1785, in Kilbourne, Savannah, Georgia, Newspaper Clippings, 444.

85. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 67–68.

86. Weisman, Like Beads on a String; Covington, The Seminoles of Florida; Porter, The Black Seminoles.

87. Winniett’s report in Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1:130–31; Siebert, “East Florida as a Refuge”; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 70–73; Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math,” 262.

Chapter 4. Entangled Borders

1. The figures are taken from three censuses conducted by John Winniett, a military officer, between July 1782 and April 20, 1783, CO/5:560, 805, Library of Congress transcripts, NAUK. See also Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1:130–131, 2:239, 244; Carole Watterson Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation of East Florida, 1783–85,” FHQ 60, no. 1 (July 1981): 1–28. Winniett listed 1,659 African Americans from Georgia arriving between July and November 14, 1782, 1,786 between November 14 and December 31, and 1,336 arriving from Georgia and South Carolina from January 1 to April 20, 1783. It is assumed that 400 of those arriving in 1783 were Georgians, the rest Carolinians, given the late start for the evacuation in South Carolina.

2. Daniel L. Schafer, St. Augustine’s British Years, 1763–1784 (St. Augustine: St. Augustine Historical Society, 2001), 48–58; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 69–70; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Zespedes in East Florida, 1784–1790 (Jacksonville: University of North Florida Press, 1989), 29–30.

3. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 230; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, “The Second Spanish Period Begins” in Clash between Cultures: Spanish East Florida, 1784–1827, ed. Jacqueline K. Fretwell and Susan R. Parker (St. Augustine: St. Augustine Historical Society, 1988), 17–22. Hoffman calculates 17,375 people, of whom 11,285 were Black, 3,000 of whom were present before the war.

4. J. Leitch Wright Jr., Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 137; Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation,” 3; Tanner, “The Second Spanish Period Begins,” 18–19.

5. Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation,” 2–8.

6. Diane Boucher, “Mayhem and Murder in the East Florida Frontier 1783 to 1789.” FHQ 93, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 446–71; Patrick Tonyn to Vicente Manuel de Zespedes, July 29, 1785, in Joseph Byrne Lockey, East Florida, 1783–1785: A Collection of Documents Assembled and Many of Them Translated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 214, 217, 607, 634; Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation,” 1.

7. Jane G. Landers, “Francisco Zavier Sanchez, Floridano Planter and Merchant,” in Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 83–97 (esp. 87); Tanner, “The Second Spanish Period Begins,” 27. McGirt sold Sanchez forty-six slaves in one transaction.

8. Boucher, “Mayhem and Murder in the East Florida Frontier,” 457.

9. Nicolas Grenier, “Brief Description of the Coasts of East Florida,” in Lockey, East Florida, 309.

10. Tanner, “The Second Spanish Period Begins,” 15–43; Siebert, “East Florida as a Refuge,” 239; Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 230–42; Susan R. Parker, “Men without God or King: Rural Settlers of East Florida, 1784–1790,” FHQ 69 (October 1990), 135–55.

11. Schafer, St. Augustine’s British Years, 252–72; Parker, “St. Augustine in the Seventeenth-Century,” 554–76; Wright, Florida in the American Revolution, 125–43.

12. James Penman to Anthony Wayne, October 1, 1783, Anthony Wayne Family Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Daniel L. Schafer, Governor James Grant’s Villa: A British East Florida Indigo Plantation (St. Augustine: St. Augustine Historical Society, 2000), 77–81. Grant finally sold his labor force to a consortium of South Carolina planters for £5,071.

13. Claim of Alexander Patterson, in Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1783–1785, 2:126–128.

14. Siebert, “Loyalists in East Florida,” 1:208.

15. Siebert, “Loyalists in East Florida,” 1:208. The “missing” category reflects estimates by Tonyn and others that several thousand Black people and white people fled to the north and west in early 1784 before the formal evacuation. This unusually large number is suspect. It may have been calculated by subtracting all those who migrated to known destinations from a total of all refugees in the British records.

16. James A. McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 65–66.

17. Granger, Savannah River Plantations, 71–77, 120–26.

18. Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 161.

19. Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene: Strategist of the American Revolution (New York: Twayne, 1960), 437.

20. James Penman to Anthony Wayne, Charleston, October 1, 1783, Anthony Wayne Family Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; Memorandum Book, 1786, box 2, Anthony Wayne Family Papers; Paul David Nelson, Anthony Wayne: Soldier of the Early Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). A former loyalist in East Florida, James Penman, acted as their broker.

21. Memorandum Book, 1786, box 2, Anthony Wayne Family Papers.

22. Census for Effingham, Chatham, Liberty, McIntosh, Glynn and Camden Counties, 1790, June 25, 1791; Robert Forsyth, Marshal, District of Georgia, Census 1790.

23. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” 304; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 76–77.

24. James Hume to Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, July 26, 1784, in Lockey, East Florida, 328–30.

25. The petition of John Milligan, October 26, 1784, EFP, reel 82, LOC.

26. Census Returns, 1784–1814, EFP, reel 148, LOC; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 77.

27. The petition of John Milligan, October 26, 1784, reel 82, EFP (“So many people from Georgia and South Carolina were in this province in quest of Negroes since the War”); Governor Samuel Elbert to governor of Florida, January 20, 1785, reel 41, EFP; Wright, Florida in the American Revolution, 133.

28. Zespedes to Houstoun, November 28, 1784, reel 41, EFP.

29. Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018), 62–68.

30. Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia, comp. Allen D. Candler (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner, 1908), 2:608–9; Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” 303–13.

31. Jane Landers, “African Choices in the Revolutionary South,” chap. 1 in Atlantic Creoles. A remarkable account of the life of Prince Whitten.

32. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 34, 44, 45.

33. Alexander Temple to Mr. Pernan, December 16, 1786, reel 174, EFP; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 30–35.

34. Alexander Temple to Mr. Penman, Amelia Island, December 16, 1786, reel 174, EFP. Temple wrote the letter in the absence of Weed, who was in Augusta.

35. Buddy Sullivan, Sapelo: People and Place on a Georgia Sea Island (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 94; Merton Coulter, Thomas Spalding of Sapelo Island (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 1940), 7; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958) 2:676–78; Richard Dwight Porcher and Sarah Fick, The Story of Sea Island Cotton (Charleston, S.C.: Wyrick, 2005), 94.

36. Alexander Bissett to Governor Zespedes, September 30, 1788, reel 174, EFP.

37. Paul M. Pressly, “The Many Worlds of Titus: Marronage, Freedom, and the Entangled Borders of Lowcountry Georgia and Spanish Florida, JSH 84, no. 1 (August 2018): 545–78.

38. Zespedes to Domingo Cavello, October 17, 1789, reel 8, EFP; Zespedes to Gonzalo Zamorano, October 29, reel 8, EFP. The fugitives were sent on the ship Rosa instead of the Diana.

39. Presentments of the Grand Jury, Gazette of the State of Georgia (Savannah), October 23, 1788 (first and second quotation).

40. James Jackson to Governor Handley, June 2, 1788, DLG, accessed March 30, 2021, http://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc930#item.

41. Amanda D. Roberts Thompson, “People, Place, and Taskscapes of Enslavement: African American life on the South End Plantation, Ossabaw Island, Georgia 1849–1861” (PhD diss., University of York, 2020), 16.

42. Most reports of intercepted fugitives included mention of a “canoe” and often of weapons. Blas de Bouchet to Governor Zespedes, St. Augustine, September 24; Governor Zespedes to Bias de Bouchet, September 28, 1788, reel 45, EFP. The governor announced that nineteen of twenty-one fugitive Georgia slaves had arrived in St. Augustine and approved of Bouchet’s disposition of the “canoes and arms brought by the Negroes.”

43. Harris, Patroons and Periaguas, 63.

44. W. John Davies Affidavit, Chatham County, July 31, 1789, document in possession of the author.

45. Fleetwood, Tidecraft, 31–44. “Pettyaguas”: another local name for periaguas, a type of small craft used for bringing produce from plantations to coastal towns (p. 29).

46. Lieutenant Pedro Carne to Governor Zespedes, July 1, July 9, 1789, reel 46, EFP.

47. Onofre Gutierrez de Rosas to Governor Henrique White, Amelia Island, September 18, 1796, reel 53, EFP.

48. James Seagrove to governor of Florida, December 17, 1790, reel 41, EFP. The fugitives were Dick, Fortune, Prince, and March.

49. Truxillo to Zespedes, July 5 and July 8, 1788, reel 45, EFP.

50. James Spalding to Vicente Manuel de Zespedes, October 2, 1788, reel 174, EFP.

51. Blas de Bouchet to Zespedes, September 6, September 24, 1788, reel 45, EFP; Manuel Otero to Zespedes, September 25, 1788, reel 45, EFP.

52. Susan Richbourg Parker, “So in Fear of Both the Indians and the Americans,” in America’s Hundred Years’ War: American Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminoles, 1763–1858, ed. William S. Belko (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 36. In one notable case, frustrated Georgians attempted to kidnap the enslaved people of Florida resident George Aaron.

53. Gardoqui to Zespedes, September 24, 1788, reel 38, EFP.

54. Pierce Butler to Roger Saunders, August 26, 1790, in Terry W. Lipscomb, ed., The Letters of Pierce Butler: Nation Building and Enterprise in the New American Republic (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 60.

55. “Table 105: White and Colored Population of Each County Reported in 1790, Compared with That of the Same Area in 1900, Together with the Number of Colored per 1000 Whites: Georgia, A Century of Population Growth in the United States: From the First Census to the Twelfth: 1790–1900,” U.S. Census Bureau, 1909, 207.

56. There were over 1,000 Africans in the area before 1775 compared to the 304 recorded in the census of 1790.

57. Seagrove to governor of Florida, August 6, 1791, reel 41, EFP.

58. Boucher, East Florida Frontier, 461–68.

59. Madeleine Hirsiger Carr, Last Betrayal on the Wakulla: Florida’s Forgotten Spanish Frontier ([Morrisville, N.C.]: Lulu Publishing Services, 2019), 10–15.

60. William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847 (Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986), 32–33.

61. Deposition of James Moore, Camden County, August 30, 1802, GA, viewed October 5, 2022, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/78099/rec/5.

62. Henry O’Neil to Carlos Howard, June 9, 1786, reel 45, EFP.

63. Deposition of John Hornsby, Glynn County, August 29, 1789, reel 46, EFP.

64. William Pengree to Carlos Howard, July 10, 1787, reel 82, EFP.

65. Thomas Sterling to Carlos Howad, March 3, 1793, reel 48, EFP.

66. Henry O’Neil to Carlos Howard, September 10, 1787, reel 45, EFP.

67. Henry O’Neil to Carlos Howard, April 17, 1785, reel 44, EFP. O’Neill noted that the Natives had stolen eight horses on the south side of the St. Marys River.

68. Quesada to Jefferson, August 28, 1790, quoted in annotations to George Washington, “[Diary Entry: 20 May 1791],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-06-02-0002-0004-0020.

69. Scott, The Common Wind, 60–68; Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State, April 7, 1792; accessed April 9, 2021, Georgia Historic Newspapers, https://gahistoricnewspapers-files.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82015220/1792-04-07/ed-1/seq-1.pdf.

70. Robert W. Smith, Amid a Warring World: American Foreign Relations, 1775–1815 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac World, 2012), 58–59.

71. George Washington to Seagrove, 20 May 1791, quoted in annotations to George Washington, “[Diary Entry: 20 May 1791],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-06-02-0002-0004-0020.

72. James Seagrove to governor of East Florida, August 2, 1791, reel 174, EFP.

73. James Seagrove to governor of East Florida, August 9, 1791, reel 174, EFP.

Chapter 5. A Maroon in the Postrevolutionary Southeast

1. This chapter is partially based on Paul M. Pressly, “The Many Worlds of Titus: Marronage, Freedom, and the Entangled Borders of Lowcountry Georgia and Spanish Florida,” Journal of Southern History 84, no. 3 (August 2018): 545–78.

2. Richard Price, Maroon Societies, xi.

3. Sherry Johnson, “The Spanish St. Augustine Community, 1784–1795: A Reevaluation,” FHQ 68 (July 1989): 27–54. Using Father Thomas Hassert’s census of the town’s population in 1786, Johnson counts 772 free people, plus the Spanish troops, who after 1789 were the Third Battalion of Cuba, “the dregs of Spanish and Cuban society” (38, 39). The free people included 216 residents who were of Spanish, Cuban, and Floridano extraction, 469 Majorcans, and 87 white foreigners. The number of free Blacks comes from a 1788 census. See also Sherry Johnson, “The Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Florida.” FHQ 93, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 296–326; Patricia C. Griffin, “The Spanish Return: The People-Mix Period,” in The Oldest City: St. Augustine, Saga of Survival, ed. George E. Buker and Jean Parker Waterbury (St. Augustine: St. Augustine Historical Society, 1983), 125–50.

4. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 107 (“brothers in Christ”); Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 39–42.

5. “Investigation of reports concerning free ‘Black Alicke’ and several slaves planning to flee to North Carolina,” Judge and Commissioner Don Bartolome Morales, commandant of the battalion, November 22, 1791, reel 123, EFP.

6. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 183.

7. “African American Heritage and Ethnography,” Park Ethnography Program, National Park Service, accessed August 30, 2020 https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/histContextsE.htm; Jane Landers, “Africans in the Spanish Colonies,” Historical Archaeology 31, no. 1 (1997): 94.

8. Landers, “A Nation Divided,” 106–7; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 167–68; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 88, 96–97, 121, 122, 128, 163–64.

9. Susan Parker, “Men without God or King: Rural Settlers of East Florida, 1784–1790,” FHQ 69 (October 1990): 144–49.

10. Zespedes to Luis de las Casas, June 20, 1790, cited in James A. Lewis, “Cracker— Spanish Florida Style,” FHQ 63 (October 1984): 194.

11. Governor Zespedes to Josef de Espeleta, February 4, 1789, reel 174, EFP.

12. Proclamation by Quesada, September 2, 1790, reel 118, EFP (first quotation); Miguel Ysnardy, Jorge Fleming, and Bernardo Sequi to Quesada, February 12, 1792, reel 83, EFP (second quotation).

13. Governor Quesada to Zomorano, July 4, 1791, reel 25, EFP.

14. Carlos Howard to Governor Quesada, February 28, 1795, reel 51, EFP (first quotation); James Seagrove to Governor Quesada, August 9, 1791, reel 41, EFP (second quotation).

15. Carlos Howard to Acting Governor Bartolome Morales, May 13, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

16. Price, “Maroons.”

17. Lockley, “The King of England’s Soldiers”; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 187–208.

18. Marcus P. Nevius, City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1765–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020); Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 209–29.

19. Historian Nathaniel Millett argues that the largest maroon community to appear in the United States was a fortification created by the British army on the Apalachicola River during the War of 1812, an encampment of several hundred African Americans armed with British weapons who were defiantly independent until destroyed by the American military during the summer of 1816. Nathaniel Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013); Nathaniel Millett, “Defining Freedom in the Atlantic Borderlands of the Revolutionary Southeast,” Early American Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2007), 367–94.

20. Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2006), 7; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 1–16.

21. Agreement between John Morel and Alexander Brown, April 1, 1763, Book of Bonds O, 71, GA; “Inventory and appraisement of the personal estate of John Morel, deceased, June 27, 1777,” Book FF, 70–76, GA; Betty Wood, “Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Lowcountry Georgia, 1763–1815,” Historical Journal 30 (September 1987): 606–7. The prominence of Tom and Nelly flowed from their origin as one of the founding families on Ossabaw.

22. Paul M. Pressly, “The Many Worlds of Titus: Marronage, Freedom, and Entangled Borders of Lowcountry Georgia and Spanish Florida,” JSH 84, no. 1 (August 2018): 545–78.

23. Granger, Savannah River Plantations, 215–18; “Titus,” Georgia Gazette, July 7, 1785, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements 4:130.

24. Notice of John Morel, Georgia Gazette, July 7, September 8, 1785, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:130, 133; Wood, “Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Slavery,” 614. Titus may have escaped twice that summer, first with Jesse and then with Ismael, a fourteen-year-old with whom he had grown up on Ossabaw. For a description of Yamacraw, see Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 80.

25. Notices placed in the Georgia Gazette between 1783 and 1795 record the names of 538 fugitives. Only 3 percent of the given destinations were Florida: masters knew that advertising in these cases was a waste of money. See Wood, “Some Aspects of Female Resistance,” 614.

26. Governor John Martin, Georgia to Governor Patrick Tonyn, British East Florida, October 19 and 22, 1782, GHQ 1 (December 1917): 334–35. For an account of the raid, see D. Elliott, Archaeological Investigations at Tabbies 1 and 2, 39. For the return of the enslaved people, see Wylly and wife vs. Executors of J. Morel, deceased, folder 714, box 6, Superior Court Records #5125, sp-45, GHS.

27. Black Georgians remembered the 1776 escape to Tybee Island of several hundred of their peers, most of whom were taken to St. Augustine. Border warfare between Georgia and British Florida was constant for the first three years of war, and even after the British invasion of Georgia there were raids along the coast by privateers sailing out of St. Augustine.

28. Notice for Hector by John Morel, and notice for Patty and Daniel by Peter Henry Morel, both in Georgia Gazette, May 21, 1789; notice for Tony by William Bryan, Gazette of the State of Georgia, July 30, 1789 (“a stout negro man, much pitted with the small pox”); notice for Abraham, Jacob, and Ishmael by Bryan Morel, Georgia Gazette, July 30, 1789, all in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 4:165–69. John Morel thought they were hiding in a tract of land opposite Ossabaw called Kilkenny but suspected they might head to Florida.

29. Carlos Howard to Governor Quesada, February 28, 1795, reel 51, EFP. Howard informed the governor, “Let it be known to the public that for three years, Titus has roamed about committing thefts in Savannah and its surroundings. He was already a maroon for about four years in this province and he is one of a gang that the aforementioned Mr. J. Brian Morel returned prior to now.” Howard overstates the length of his marronage.

30. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 2.

31. Sebastian Creagh to Governor Quesada, September 12, 1791, reel 47, EFP; Bryan Morel to Quesada, October 17, 1791, reel 174, EFP. Creagh reported that eleven fugitive slaves were taken into custody; Bryan Morel requested the return of fifteen Morel-related fugitives, including Titus (it is assumed that three others were living as maroons in addition to Titus; all were returned as a group).

32. On the death of his first wife, the elder John Morel married Mary Bryan, daughter of Jonathan Bryan, a leading planter and political figure. Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 108.

33. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” 310–13.

34. James Seagrove to Governor Quesada, August 2, 1791, 41, EFP; James Seagrove to Governor Quesada, August 9, 1791, reel 174, EFP; Richard K. Murdoch and Juan de Pierra, “The Seagrove-White Property Agreement of 1797,” GHQ 42, no. 3 (September 1958): 263–64; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 79–81; Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” 311–13.

35. Bryan Morel to governor, October 17, 1791, reel 174, EFP. Six affidavits with descriptions accompany his petition.

36. Notice by John Morel, Gazette of the State of Georgia, January 22, 1795; notice by Bryan Morel, Gazette of the State of Georgia, February 26, 1795.

37. Notice by John Morel, Gazette of the State of Georgia, January 22, 1795; notice by Bryan Morel, Gazette of the State of Georgia, February 26, 1795.

38. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 132–34.

39. John Nutt v. William Telfair, Peter H. Morel, John Morel, and Bryan Morel, Esq., of John Morel deceased, A-18, box 22, mixed cases “In Equity,” 1790–1860, Southern Circuit Court, District of Georgia, NARA. Because all three Morels failed to pay property taxes, the sheriff of Chatham County ordered the sale of “all the valuable land known by the name of Ossabaw, 8,000 acres in the County of Chatham.” If the sale took place, it was a deftly played sleight-of-hand. The brothers retained ownership. Advertisements for the sale of Ossabaw Island: Georgia Gazette, January 9, 1794; July 3, 1794; September 3, 1794; December 4, 1794; January 28, 1795.

40. Sale of slaves by Peter Henry Morel, John Morel, and Bryan Morel to Thomas Netherclift and Peter Deveaux, February 5, 1794, Deed Book M, 309–12, Chatham County Courthouse, Georgia.

41. Georgia Gazette, February 26, 1795. Bryan Morel advertised for Lester and Simon on February 13 and speculated that they had fled to neighboring St. Catherines Island.

42. “List of fugitive Negroes fled from Georgia,” February 22, 1795, reel 51, EFP; notice of John Morel, Georgia Gazette, January 22, 1795.

43. Governor Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada to Governor George Matthews, June 19, 1794, in “Georgia-East Florida-West Florida and Yazoo Land Sales, 1764–1850,” WPA Project no. 5993, GA; James Spalding, planter, to Governor Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, May 28, 1794, reel 41, EFP. Quesada lays out his frustrations; Spalding details why he thinks three slaves stolen from Florida planters and now on the Georgia coast cannot be returned. See also Richard K. Murdoch, The Georgia-Florida Frontier, 1793–1796: Spanish Reactions to French Intrigue and American Designs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 1–10.

44. Joseph de Jaudenes and Josef Ignacio de Viar, Spanish diplomats in Philadelphia, to Governor Quesada, July 26, 1794, reel 39, EFP; Governor Quesada to Luis de las Casas, October 9, 1794, reel 9, EFP; Governor Quesada to Governor George Matthews, January 31, 1795, reel 41, EFP.

45. Howard to Quesada, March 5, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

46. Howard to Quesada, March 5, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

47. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida, 15–16; Mulroy, Freedom on the Border, 6–7; Patrick Riordan, “Seminole Genesis: Native Americans, African Americans, and Colonists on the Southern Frontier from Prehistory through the Colonial Era” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 1996).

48. Carlos Howard to Bartolome Morales, May 25, 1795, reel 51, EFP; C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 213–17; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 129–35.

49. Howard to Quesada, April 6, 1795, “Account of principal events,” reel 51, EFP. Howard said, based on what he had heard from Cohiti, “The rebels had kicked the Indians out of their lands; consequently, they didn’t fear any others as long as they could hunt the lands of this province, which they always considered their own, but . . . nevertheless they would not do any evil, nor rob anything or anybody,” Howard wrote to Quesada, “I stopped to show him the evil consequences of his Negro [named Pedro] wandering around, bribing renegade slaves to the Nation.” Saunt, A New Order of Things, 128–29. For background, see James G. Cusick, “King Payne and His Policies: A Framework for Understanding the Diplomacy of the Seminoles of La Chua, 1784–1812,” in America’s Hundred Years’ War: American Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminoles, 1763–1858, ed. William S. Belko (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 41–53.

50. Landers, “A Nation Divided: Blood Seminoles and Black Seminoles on the Florida Frontier,” 99–116; C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 213–43; Frank, “Taking the State Out,” 10–27.

51. “Account of Principal Events,” Carlos Howard to Governor Quesada, April 26, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

52. John McQueen to Carlos Howard, April 24, 1795, reel 51, EFP. The letter was included with the “Account of principal events” by Howard. See Walter C. Hartridge, The Letters of Don Juan McQueen to His Wife, Written from Spanish East Florida, 1791–1807 (Columbia, S.C.: Boswick & Thornley, 1943).

53. Carlos Howard to Governor Quesada, April 6, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

54. John McQueen to Carlos Howard, April 24, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

55. Governor Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada to Governor George Matthews, St. Augustine, October 8, 1795, in “Georgia–East Florida–West Florida,” GA; Janice Borton Miller, “The Rebellion in East Florida in 1795,” FHQ 57 (October 1978): 173–86; James G. Cusick, “Some Thoughts on Spanish East and West Florida as Borderlands,” FHQ, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 146–49.

56. Acting Governor Bartolomé Morales to Gonzalo Zamoranao, August 8, 1796, reel 26, EFP.

57. Robert W. Smith, Amid a Warring World: American Foreign Relations, 1775–1815 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac World, 2012), 74–75. In late 1795, Spain and the United States finalized the Treaty of San Lorenzo, which accorded the United States the right of free navigation of the Mississippi River and duty-free transport through the port of New Orleans while resolving the vexing question of the territorial boundary between Spanish West Florida and its northern neighbor.

58. Robert K. Murdoch and Juan de Pierra, “The Seagrove-White Stolen Property Agreement of 1797,” GHQ 42 (September 1958): 268–76. The Treaty for the Mutual Return of Fugitive Slaves between East Florida and Georgia negotiated by Governor Henrique White and U.S. Commissioner James Seagrove, May 19, 1797, can be found at reel 174, EFP. The treaty was apparently never ratified by the United States and remained a working document rather than a formal agreement.

59. Colombian Museum and Savannah Advertiser, May 26, 1797, 2. The article noted that the group “had become so great a nuisance to that country, that most of them were chained, and at work among the convicts.” For the compensation agreement, see Enrique White to Thomas King, representative of the state of Georgia, August 25, 1797, in “Georgia–East Florida–West Florida Papers,” GA.

60. Thomas Maxey for his father Robert Maxey to James Seagrove. May 12, 1797, reel 42, EFP.

61. James Seagrove to Governor Henrique White, July 4, 1797, reel 42, EFP.

62. Seagrove to White, July 4, 1797, reel 42, EFP (quotations); Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 98–100; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 132–34.

63. Manuel Rengil to Governor Enrique White, August 10, 1797, Savannah, reel 51, EFP.

64. For example: in 1807, James Seagrove, now a planter, asked for Governor White’s help in capturing Robert Ross for “negroe stealing & taking them into Florida” and other related crimes. In Camden County, Ross claimed to be a Spanish or French citizen as the occasion demanded, and in Florida he was an American. James Seagrove to Governor Enrique White, January 12, 1807, box 9, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HAR.

65. Deposition of Israel Barber, Camden County, June 12, 1817, File II, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 22, 2021, http://vault.georgiaarchives.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/FileIINames/id/4800/rec/1.

66. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 130–56.

67. Manuel Rengil to Governor Enrique White, August 10, 1797, Savannah, reel 51, EFP.

Chapter 6. The Florida of Don Juan McQueen

1. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 244–46.

2. Andrew McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810 (Athens: University Of Georgia Press, 2008), 17–34.

3. Zespedes to Luis de las Casas, June 20, 1790, cited in Lewis, “Cracker—Spanish Florida Style,” 191.

4. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 245; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 74–75.

5. Calculations made from James C. Cusick, transcriber, “Oaths of Allegiance, East Florida Papers, 1793–1804,” unpublished manuscript based on Oaths of Allegiance, 1790–1821,” F.04 E13c, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. The number includes 738 in 1791, 102 in 1792, and 81 in 1793. In Black Society in Spanish Florida, Jane Landers gives approximate numbers—300 whites and 1,000 slaves—on page 75.

6. Hartridge, The Letters of Don Juan McQueen to His Wife, xvi–xxxv.

7. Forrester to Quesada, December 7, 1792, reel 47, EFP, cited in Cormac A. O’Riordan, “The 1795 Rebellion in East Florida” (Master’s thesis, University of North Florida, 1995), 38. Francis Goodwin came to East Florida to avoid facing claims on his property by a Mr. Armstrong of South Carolina while a member of the elite McIntosh family, heavily in debt, needed “to do justice with his creditors without immediate injury to his family.” See Charles E. Bennett, Florida’s “French” Revolution, 1793–95 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1981), 140.

8. Cusick, “Oaths of Allegiance, East Florida Papers,” PKY.

9. Anne Smith McQueen was the daughter of John Smith, a wealthy Scottish immigrant who owned multiple plantations in South Carolina. Of her two sisters, one married the son of Sir James Wright, royal governor of Georgia, and the other, Basil Cowper, one of the wealthiest merchants in Savannah. Both men were loyalists. John Smith was a leading patriot.

10. Hartridge, The Letters of Don Juan McQueen, xxxi; Cusick, “Oaths of Allegiance, East Florida Papers.”

11. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 238–39, table 9.5; Landers Black Society in Spanish Florida, 82, table 2.2. The censuses in Spanish Florida may be questionable in terms of accuracy but provide a serviceable sense of scale.

12. Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, xxi–xxiv; Mackay-McQueen Family Papers, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Georgia historical collection, GHS; McQueen Papers, Walter Hartridge Collection, GHS; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 164–67. The East Florida Papers contain numerous letters from John McQueen, primarily to the governor about state business.

13. George Washington to Captain John McQueen, March 10, 1779, and McQueen to General Nathanael Greene, April 18, 1782, folder 2302, box 126, Hartridge Collection, GHS. The folder contains other notes and letters describing McQueen’s work during the Revolution. Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, xxiii–xxiv.

14. Martha L. Keber, Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton: Christophe Poulain DuBignon of Jekyll Island (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 147, 151–52, 158; Mary Bray Wheeler, Eugenia Price’s South: A Guide to the People and Places of Her Beloved Region (Franklin, Tenn.: Providence House Publishers, 2005), 84.

15. Nathanael Greene to Thomas Jefferson, Charleston, June 11, 1785, McQueen Papers, Hartridge Collection, GHS; Lafayette to McQueen, November 20, 1786, in Hartridge, The Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 10–11. “This letter will be handed to you by my friend Mr. John McQueen whose principal errand to Paris is to form a contract for live oak on which I wrote you some time since. I beg leave to recommend him to your good offices on the business which he comes.”

16. For another account of why the proposed sale fell through, see Virginia Steele Wood, Live Oaking: Southern Timber for Tall Ships (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1981), 18–19.

17. At his father’s death many years before, the inventory for the estate listed 154 enslaved people. It is not clear how many came to him or how many of these survived the revolutionary upheaval.

18. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 166–167.

19. McQueen to Quesada, August 11, 1792, reel 42, EFP.

20. Thomas Shoolbred to Quesada, November 13, 1792, reel 41, EFP; James Shoolbred to Quesada, March 22, 1794, reel 39, EFP; detailed proceedings in suit by Mario de Lasagna and Jose Antonio Igquiniz, agents for James Shoolbred, against John McQueen, March 4, 1796, reel 153, EFP.

21. Keber, Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton, 145–57.

22. Report by Don Vicente Zespedes, June 20, 1790, reproduced in Lewis, “Cracker— Spanish Florida Style,” 194–95.

23. Sheet on John McQueen, in Cusick, “Oaths of Allegiance, East Florida Papers,”, PKY; Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 238–39; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 82, table 1.

24. Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada to Luis de Las Casas, June 26, 1791, reel 46, EFP. John McQueen was baptized on June 22, 1791. The event was all the more remarkable because all those officials were keenly aware that less than one hundred English-speaking Catholics were in East Florida, and they had grown up in or been married into the faith. Quesada mentions the three hundred slaves that he is thought to have brought with him.

25. Fernando Medina to Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, May 7, 1791, reel 46, EFP; Quesada to Fernando Medina, May 10, 1791, reel 46, EFP; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 117. Georgia authorities took into custody the five fugitive slaves and turned them over to a custodian on Amelia Island.

26. J. Leitch Wright Jr., William Augustus Bowles, Director-General of the Creek Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967); DuVal, Independence Lost, 326–31; Gilbert C. Din, “William Augustus Bowles on the Gulf Coast, 1787–1803: Unraveling a Labyrinthine Conundrum,” FHQ 89, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 1–25.

27. Quesada to Las Casas, October 15, 1791, reel 8, EFP. The governor provides a brief account of McQueen’s expedition. See also Wright, William Augustus Bowles, Director-General, 61; extract from McQueen’s diary, 1791, in Hartridge, ed., The Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 13–14.

28. “Memorandum, Lands granted by the Spanish Government of East Florida to John McQueen, B. A. Putnam to E. A. Mackay, October 2, 1830,” folder 61, item 27, box 7-a, Mackay Family Papers, GHS.

29. Wheeler, Eugenia Price’s South, 85, 86.

30. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 164–65.

31. Los Molinos, Testamentary Proceedings of Don Juan McQueen, October 27, 1807, Records of Testamentary Proceedings, 1756–1821, reel 141, EFP.

32. Las Casas to the Conde del Campo de Alange, October 27, 1791, cited in Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 14.

33. “Memorandum, Lands Granted by the Spanish Government of East Florida to John McQueen, B. A. Putnam to E. A. Mackay, October 2, 1830,” folder 61, item 27, box 7-A, Mackay Family Papers, GHS. Putnam was a lawyer in St. Augustine.

34. Testamentary Proceedings of Don Juan McQueen, October 1807, Records of Testamentary Proceedings, 1756–1821, reel 141, EFP; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 166.

35. Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 32; San Pablo Plantation, inventory of John McQueen’s estate, 1807, reel 141, EFP.

36. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 164–65.

37. John McQueen to Eliza Anne McQueen, April 24, 1792, and John McQueen to Liza Anne McQueen, January 20, 1801, in Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 18, 56.

38. John McQueen to Liza Anne McQueen, January 20, 1801, in Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 56.

39. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 117.

40. Baptisms of the McQueen slaves, April 27, 1793, Black Baptisms, vol. 1, CPR, reel 284, PKY, cited in Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 120, 326n58 .

41. For the English hunting dogs, see the story of Titus in the preceding chapter. For other examples of returning enslaved people to their enslavers, see Governor White to Governor Telfair on the return of stolen slaves, April 26, 1797, reel 42, EFP.

42. A succession of letters and documents highlights the process: governor of Florida to Manuel Rengil, August 28, 1798, reel 40, section 26, EFP (the governor informs Rengil that John McQueen does not have permission to conduct duty-free slave sales off Amelia Island); McQueen to governor, September 15, 1798, reel 167, EFP (McQueen requests a passport to send seventy-seven slaves to his mother in Savannah for her support as a way of covering sales to Americans); McQueen receives a license to admit slaves, October 14, 1798, Papers on Negro Titles, Runaways, etc., 1787–1805, reel 167, EFP; Bartolome de Castro y Ferrer, agent for McQueen, requested a license to import between three hundred and four hundred slaves free of duties, December 24, 1798, reel 133, EFP; notice of Marshall, August 2, 1798, Georgia Gazette (notice was given that two families of Blacks, thirteen people in number, had been seized as the property of John McQueen at the suit of Andrew McCredie and Co., a slave trading firm.

43. Manuel Rengil to Enrique White, June 16, 1798, reel 40, EFP.

44. Robert Mackay to Eliza Anne Mackay, March 12, 1801, in Walter Charlton Hartridge, ed., The Letters of Robert Mackay to His Wife (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1949), 21.

45. Civil Petition of Nancy, September 19, 1792, reel 151, EFP; Jane Landers, “African-American Women and Their Pursuit of Rights through Eighteenth-Century Spanish Texts,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, ed. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 66–68.

46. McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 35–40; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 44; Keila Grin-berg, “Manumission,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph C. Miller, Vincent Brown, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Laurent Dubois, Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 319–21. The Siete Partidas recognized the slave as a human being, offered protection against an abusive master, permitted the slave to testify in court, and provided a system whereby an enslaved person could obtain his or her manumission by earning the equivalent of her value through the hiring of her labor.

47. Civil Petition of Nancy, September 19, 1792, reel 151, EFP; Landers, “African-American Women and Their Pursuit of Rights,” 66–68.

48. John McQueen to Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, August 11, 1792, reel 47, EFP.

49. Civil Petition of Nancy, September 19, 1792, reel 151, EFP; Landers, “African-American Women and Their Pursuit of Rights,” 68; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 143–44; John McQueen to Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, August 11, 1792, reel 47, EFP. Landers provides a dramatic account of the closing moments of the trial in “African-American Women and Their Pursuit of Rights,” 66–68.

50. John McQueen to Colonel Bartolome Morales, August 28, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

51. Cusick, “Some Thoughts on Spanish East and West Florida,” 133–56.

52. Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); Richard K. Murdoch, The Georgia–Florida Frontier 1793–1796: Spanish Reactions to French Intrigue and American Designs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Robert J. Alderson, This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792–1794 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).

53. Alderson, This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions, 127–28, 131–33, 170–71.

54. Janice B. Miller, “The Rebellion in East Florida in 1795,” FHQ 57 (October 1978): 173–86; Robert J. Alderson, “Entangled Borderlands: The 1794 Projected French Invasion of Spanish East Florida and Atlantic History,” FHQ 88, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 54–82. Samuel Hammond, a Savannah merchant, became the organizing force in hopes that his firm would displace Panton, Leslie & Company as the chief supplier of trading goods to the Seminoles and Creeks.

55. Deliberations of the Council of War, January 21, 1794, cited in Charles E. Bennett, Florida’s “French” Revolution, 1793–95 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1981), 75–78.

56. Alderson, This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions, 110–44; Michael Morris, “Dreams of Glory, Schemes of Empire: The Plan to Liberate Spanish Florida,” GHQ 87 (Spring 2003): 1–21; O’Riordan, “The 1795 Rebellion in East Florida,” 87.

57. O’Riordan, “The 1795 Rebellion in East Florida,” 33–35. The leader, Richard Lang, had immigrated years earlier to Florida to escape a felony conviction in South Carolina and, once south of the border, became associated with a loosely structured network of horse thieves and cattle rustlers with family conveniently on both sides of the border.

58. Miller, “The Rebellion in East Florida in 1795,” 177–79.

59. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 51–54.

60. John McQueen to Colonel Bartolome Morales, August 28, 1795, reel 51, EFP.

61. Andrew Atkinson to Manual Rengil, September 20, 1795, reel 52, EFP; petition of Daniel Plummer, September 30, 1795, reel 124, EFP; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 51. The men who attacked the farmer, Plummer, were former Florida residents who suspected he had informed on them.

62. “Report on what Corp. Dan McGirt learned in conversation with Coleraine party concerning enemy activity,” Nathaniel Hall to Andrew Atkinson, September 26, 1795, reel 52, EFP.

63. Wright, William Augustus Bowles; DuVal, Independence Lost, 326–31; Landers, “A Nation Divided,” 104–6; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 127–55; Gilbert C. Din, “William Augustus Bowles on the Gulf Coast, 1787–1803: Unraveling a Labyrinthine Conundrum,” FHQ 89, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 14.

64. McQueen to White, September 7, October 3, 1801, reel 56, EFP.

65. Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 45–46.

66. Daniel L. Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 70; calculations made from Cusick, “Oaths of Allegiance.”

67. Rivers, Slavery in Florida, 6. The most reliable censuses are those of 1793, when 1,527 slaves were recorded, and of 1814, when 1,540 were counted. Hoffman, Florida Frontiers, 238–39 (table 9.5); Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 82 (table 1); Cusick, “Oaths of Allegiance.”

68. John McQueen to John McQueen Jr., January 5, 1804, in Hartridge, eLetters of Don Juan McQueen, 62–63.

69. John McQueen to Robert Mackay, March 4, 1804, in Hartridge, Letters of Don McQueen, 64; governor of Florida to Shoolbred, January 7, 1794, reel 39, EFP. Governor Quesada mentions McQueen’s intention to sell all but twenty of his slaves.

70. Governor of Florida to James Shoolbred, January 7, 1794, reel 39, EFP.

71. Testamentary Proceedings of Don Juan McQueen, October 27, October 29, and November 1, 1807, Records of Testamentary Proceedings, 1756–1821, reel 141, EFP.

72. John McQueen to John McQueen Jr., January. 5, 1804, in Hartridge, Letters of Don Juan McQueen, 62–63.

73. Testimony of Harry McQueen, Testamentary Proceedings of Don Juan McQueen, October 14, 1807, cited in \Landers, Black Society in Florida, 166.

74. His closest friend in St. Augustine was John Leslie, partner in Panton, Leslie, who was in a relationship with successive Black women. Leslie recognized the children as his own.

75. Mark A. McDonough, The Francis Richard Family: From French Nobility to Florida Pioneers, 1300–1900 (Lulu.com, 2010), 1–51.

76. Testamentary Proceedings of Don Juan McQueen, October 1807, Records of Testamentary Proceedings, 1756–1821, reel 141, EFP.

77. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 49; Landers Black Society in Spanish Florida, 150, 242.

78. Jose Martinez to Enrique White, January 26, 1802, reel 56, EFP, cited in Mc-Donough, The Francis Richard Family, 47.

79. “Complaint against William Dell for flogging the Negro Dominico belonging to Luis Jose Francois Richard,” January 16, 1810, reel 125, EFP; depositions of the Negros Dominic and Lycurgus before Justice of the Peace William Craig, January 10, 1810, reel 125, EFP; deposition of Francis Richard before Justice of the Peace William Craig, January 11, 1810, reel 125, EFP.

80. Deposition of David Sweeney before Justice of the Peace, William Craig, February 19, 1810, reel 125, EFP.

81. Deposition of Captain Andrew Atkinson before Justice of the Peace William Craig, February 19, 1810, reel 125, EFP.

82. Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 175.

83. Robert Mackay to Eliza Anne Mackay, Amelia Island, March 21, 1810, in Hartridge, The Letters of Robert Mackay, 225–29, quotation from 226.

84. Robert Mackay to Eliza Anne Mackay, Amelia Island, March 20, 1810, in Hartridge, ed., The Letters of Robert Mackay, 223–25; quotation from 225.

85. Robert Mackay to Eliza Anne Mackay, March 21, 1810, in Hartridge, The Letters of Robert Mackay, 223–24.

86. J. Hall to “Dear Sir,” June 30, 1800, reel 55, EFP; A. Atkinson to “Your Excellency,” June 30, 1800, reel 42, EFP; Wiley Thompson to governor of Florida, April 20, 1803, reel 57, EFP. Six Indians from the “Black Creek settlement” had been in the settlement hunting when they snatched three field hands and rode off. One prisoner managed to escape on the first night of captivity.

87. Creek war parties were typically careful to stay along the outer edges of settlements but in a notable exception the town of Greensboro, Georgia, was sacked in 1787.

Chapter 7. War Captives of the Creek People

1. James Spalding to Vicente Manuel de Zespedes, October 2, 1788, reel 174, EFP; Alexander Bissett to Governor Zespedes, September 30, 1788, reel 174, EFP. In 1788, the two planters lost thirteen enslaved people who originally came from East Florida.

2. Saunt, A New Order of Things; C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country; Ethridge, Creek Country; Braund, Deerskins and Duffels; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government; James L. Hill, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

3. Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hartley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 86. The figures come from a report to the governor of Spanish West Florida. The actual number of Creeks at the end of the eighteenth century remains an unknown. Estimates are typically based on the number of gunmen or male warriors. Scholars multiply the number of gunman by an estimate of how many people are in the typical household of a warrior, including women, children, and the aged and infirm. Best estimates for the Lower and Upper Towns are around 18,000 individuals by 1790.

4. Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 622–24; Christina Snyder, “Conquered Enemies, Adopted Kin, and Owned People: The Creek Indians and Their Captives,” Journal of Southern History 73, no. 2 (May 2007): 255–88; Ethridge, Creek Country, 115–19; Littlefield, Africans and Creeks, 26–28; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 78.

5. Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 168–70; Carr, Last Betrayal on the Wakulla, 10–15. “Mother Town” was the term used for the two leading towns among the Lower Creek settlements.

6. See map 5 for the trading path from Jack Kinnard’s settlement.

7. Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers, introduction to Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America’s Contested Spaces, 1500–1850 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017). Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 269–71; Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 11–39. The term “frontier” in this study means a territory that lay beyond the control of an often weak imperial or national power. Given the debate over frontier and borderland, “frontier” refers to a zone where Europeans and Natives met and interacted for sustained periods. “Borderland” is understood as a region where two imperial powers share a border around which a vacuum of power exists.

8. Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 622–24; Littlefield, Africans and Creeks, 26–28.

9. Claudio Saunt, “’The English Has Now a Mind to Make Slaves of Them All’: Creeks, Seminoles, and the Problem of Slavery,” American Indian Quarterly 22 (Winter-Spring 1998): 165–67; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 111.

10. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America, 1–12, 101–26, 182–212. The subtitle expresses the central theme.

11. Lee W. Formwalt, “Violence and Diplomacy in the Creek Country: Jack Kinnard, the Chehaw, and the United States government in Late Eighteenth-Century Southwest Georgia,” Journal of Southwest Georgia History 7 (1989), 1–19.

12. Caleb Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 261–62; Carr, Last Betrayal on the Wakulla, 13–20, 28; Minutes of the Board of the President and Assistants, July 26, August 31, 1749, CGR, vol. 6:256, 287.

13. Kevin Kokomoor, “The Importance of the Oconee War in the Early Republic,” GHQ 105, no. 1 (2021): 26–62.

14. “Treaty with the Creeks, 1790,” Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, accessed February 14, 2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/cre1790.asp.

15. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts in the Creeks, or Muscogee Nation in 1791,” in Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States, ed. Henry R. Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: Lippincott and Grambo, 1855), 261. The spelling of the surname is variously given as “Kennard” or “Kinnard,” with considerably more variations in the correspondence of Spanish authorities. “Kennard is the spelling in local and family histories; “Kinnard” is the spelling by American authorities and most commonly used by historians. Kinnard was called John and Jack.

16. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 261.

17. Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 51–55.

18. “A Sketch of the Creek Country in the years 1798 and 1799,” LBH 1:316; Hawkins to Daniel Steward, October 13, 1810, LBH 2:571–73. In “A Sketch,” Hawkins remarked: “Several of the Indians have negroes taken during the revolutionary war. . . . These negroes were given, many of them, by the agents of Great Britain to the Indians in payment for their services and they generally call themselves “King’s gifts.”

19. Kokomoor, “The Importance of the Oconee War”; Haynes, Patrolling the Border, 88–90; 102–4, 124–29; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 75–110; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 93–95; Kenneth Coleman, American Revolution in Georgia, 238–43; Braund, Deerskins and Duffels, 170–75.

20. Haynes, Patrolling the Border, 1–16.

21. Kokomoor, “The Importance of the Oconee War,” 44–47; Haynes, Patrolling the Border, 137.

22. “Returns of Depredations committed by the Creek Indians,” ASPIA 1:77; Saunt, New Order of Things, 117.

23. Petition of Grand Jury of Glynn County, signed by James Spalding, Georgia Gazette, July 29, 1790, 2.

24. Roger Parker Saunders to General James Jackson, September 29, (1788), File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 20, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/59976/rec/2.

25. Deposition of Winney Akin, August 15, 1800, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 20, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/705/rec/12.

26. Deposition of July 2, 1821, James Smith, Virtual Vault, File II Names, GA, accessed January 18, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/81753/rec/19.

27. James Jackson to Governor Handley, June 2, 1788, HAR, accessed March 30, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc930#item.

28. “[Correspondence] 1788 Apr. 20 -1788 May 27, [Georgia to] General James Jackson / Colonel Jacob Weed, Colonel James Maxwell, James Dunwoody . . . [et al.],” HAR, accessed March 8, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc929#item.

29. Affidavit of Winny Akin, widow of James Allen. Camden County. August 5, 1800, File II Counties, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/702/rec/12; Deposition of Corker, December 25, 1820, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/19881/rec/6.

30. James Maxwell to “Dear Sir,” Midway, May 28, 1789, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/84504/rec/3.

31. John Berrien to James Jackson, September 30, 1788, File II. Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/75266/rec/4.

32. Deposition of Andrew Walthour, August 1789, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/69506/rec/2; Andrew Walthour to Governor Irwin, December 31, 1806, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/69505/rec/2; Daniel Stewart to Governor John Milledge, January 18, 1805, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 4, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/83908/rec/2.

33. Affidavit of Daniel Stewart, January 18 1805, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/78729; “A return of sixteen prime field hands belonging to A. Maybank,” October 27, 1802, Andrew Maybank, File II Names, Virtual Vault, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/44268; affidavit of Andrew Maybank, October 27, 1802, File II Counties, Liberty County, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/78729.

34. “Description of Negroes taken from Israel Bird,” February 14, 1788,” File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 26, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/8450/rec/1.

35. Deposition of John LeConte, August 19, 1789, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77741/rec/1.

36. Affidavit of William Girardeau, August 21, 1788, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77366/rec/5; inventory of losses of Wm. Girardeau to Creek Indians, August 5, 1791, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77371/rec/5.

37. Affidavit of John B. Girardeau on behalf of Andrew Maybank, October 27, 1802, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/44268; “A return of negroes taken from Andrew Maybank by the Creek Indians,” May 30, 1821, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/44271.

38. “A memorandum of property lost by John B. Girardeau, about August 10, 1788,” John B. Girardeau, October 4, 1802, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77343; affidavit of Andrew Maybank on behalf of John B. Girardeau, August 27, 1788, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77336/rec/2; affidavit of William Girardeau, Liberty County, August 21, 1789, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77366; deposition of John Bohrum Girardeau, of Newport, Liberty County, in Chatham County, July 30, 1791, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77338/rec/2.

39. Deposition of Stephen Corker, December 25, 1820, Glynn County, File II, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/19881/rec/2. Those taken include Charlotte, 36; her son Andrew, 20; Bess, 18; Bess’s child Judy, 2; Sam, 15; and Sarah, 12.

40. Kokomoor, “The Oconee War,” 51–53.

41. Saunt, A New Order of Things, 67–73.

42. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 261.

43. For example, John Kinnard to Governor Enrique White, May 8, 1802, reel 56, EFP; and John Cannard to governor of Florida, October 2, 1801, reel 43, EFP.

44. Kinnard to Seagrove, August 28, 1792, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed January 20, 2023. https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/40390/rec/1.

45. James Karnard to James Seagrove, June 5, 1803, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed January 20, 2023, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/41089/rec/1.

46. James Aiken Deposition, May 3, 1793, ASPIA 1:389–90; Talk from Kennard and Other Chiefs, May 16, 1793, ASPIA 1:388–89; Barnard to Seagrove, May 10, 1792, ASPIA 1:297. Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 150–61; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 72–74.

47. Affidavit of Ann Gray, Camden County, ASPIA 1:374; affidavit of Robert Brown, Camden County, March 14, 1793, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 5, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/75563/rec/4; James Seagrove to Governor Edward Telfair, March 17, 1793, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 8, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/81509/rec/3.

48. Deposition of James Akin, Camden County, March 18, 1800, File II, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed October 27, 2022, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/74970/rec/57; affidavit of Nathan Atkinson, Camden County, October 31, 1802, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 15, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/74977/rec/57; affidavit of Richard Carnes, March 18, 1800, affidavit of Amos Cheek, October 19, 1802, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 15, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/74977/rec/57.

49. Juan Forrester to Quesada, October 1, 1792, reel 47, EFP. For a statement of Galphin’s griefs, see John Galphin to Henry Osborne, May 23, 1789, ASPIA 1:35–36; and Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 194–95.

50. J. Leitch Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 75–77, 85; Richard Lang to governor of East Florida, April 19, 1793, reel 48, EFP.

51. Title of head warrior granted by George III to Philatouche, February 9, 1793, signed by Governor Dunmore of the Bahamas, February 1793, reel 55, EFP: “Whereas you have been faithful and loyal to us and friendly to our subjects in East Florida . . ., particularly your extraordinary valor and conduct at the late battle at Savannah with the Rebels.”

52. John Forrester to Quesada, April 23, 1793, reel 48, EFP; John Cannard to headmen of Lower Creeks, May 25, 1793, reel 43, EFP; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 130.

53. Julian Carballo to Arturo O’Neill, n.d., PC, reel 162, EFP, cited in Saunt, New Order of Things, 124; Saunt, “The English Has Now a Mind,” 167.

54. Affidavit of Isaac Green for the estate of James Green, June 12, 1835, Indian Depredations, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 15, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/29713/rec/31.

55. Richard Lang to governor of East Florida, April 19, 1793, reel 48, EFP; Seagrove to Timothy Barnard, April 19, 1793, ASPIA 1:378–79.

56. John Cannard to Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, May 25, 1793, and John Cannard to the principal headmen of the Lower Creeks, May 25, 1793, reel 25, EFP; Saunt, “The English Has Now a Mind,” 167–68; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 130–31.

57. John Hambly to Carlos Howard, May 8, 1793, reel 43, EFP.

58. Richard Lang to governor of East Florida, April 19, 1793, reel 48, EFP; John Forrester to Quesada, April 20, 1793, reel 43, EFP.

59. In May 1793, Creeks carried off thirteen slaves from the plantation of William Smith. Affidavit of William Smith, June 4, 1821, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 14, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/81694/rec/14. John Kinnard reported that the Chiaja people “brought large gangs of cattle and horses in with them with some negroes.” See John Cannard to William Panton, May 27, 1793, PC, reel 286, PKY, cited in Saunt, A New Order of Things, 126; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 170.

60. Seagrove to secretary of war, October 31, 1793, Fort Fidius, ASPIA 1:468–69.

61. James Jackson to governor, October 25, 1795, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 17, 2022, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/37130/rec/13.

62. James Jackson to the governor of Georgia, July 21, 1793, File II, Camden County, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed October 27, 2022, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/p17154coll2/id/1225/rec/152.

63. Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 173–74.

64. James Jackson to Lt. Col. Stewart, October 16, 1795, Savannah, in CGHS, vol. 11, 87–88.

65. Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 74.

66. Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 215. Haynes, Patrolling the Border, 180–85; Littlefield, Africans and Creeks, 35–36; Correspondence concerning the Treaty of Coleraine, 1795, ASPIA, 1:587–620.

67. Hawkins to Daniel Steward, October 13, 1810, LBH 2:571–73. Hawkins pointed out the unfairness of the negotiations at Colerain. Virtually all the headmen were illiterate; they depended on translators provided by the Americans for their understanding of each clause.

68. “The Talk of the Commissioners of Georgia to the Kings, Headmen, and Warriors of the Creek Nation,” June 18, 1796, ASPIA 1:614–15. Among a list of griefs, they pointed out, “Very few Negroes have been returned.”

69. Swan, “Position and State of Manners,” 261; Kokomoor, “Burning and Destroying All Before Them,” GHQ 98, no. 4 (Winter 2014), 300–340.

70. Representatives of the Creek Land, Negotiations for the Treaty of Colerain, June 24, 1795, ASPIA 1:603.

71. Affidavit of David Garvin, February 4, 1803, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/30441/rec/88; affidavit of John Whitehead, Liberty County, September 5, 1791, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 28, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/71828.

72. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 194.

73. Affidavit of Daniel Stewart, January 18 1805, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/78729.

74. Morris, George Galphin and the Transformation of the Georgia–South Carolina Back-country, 161–62.

75. Deposition of Andrew Walthour for the estate of David Anderson, April 29, 1796, accessed September 28, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/2009/rec/1.

76. “The Creek Nation to the estate of James Smith,” May 3, 1793; affidavit of James Smith, July 2, 1821, related financial documents, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 28, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/81743/rec/19.

77. Affidavit of John B. Girardeau, July 30, 1791, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 7, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/77338/rec/2.

78. Affidavit of John B. Girardeau, October 26, 1802, Liberty County, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 29, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/56395/rec/2. The affidavit is followed by affidavits by William Ball and others. The affidavits appear under a case involving Thomas Quarterman.

79. Saunt, A New Order of Things, 122.

80. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 254.

81. Ethridge, Creek Country, 160, 169, 170.

82. Synder, Slavery in Indian Country, 188–90; Saunt, “The English Has Now a Mind,” 169–70; Carr, Last Betrayal on the Wakulla, 51–52.

83. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 201.

84. Deposition of James Akin, Camden County, March 18, 1800, File II, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed October 27, 2022, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/74970/rec/57

85. Affidavit of Nathan Atkinson, Camden County, October 31, 1802; affidavit of Richard Carnes, March 18, 1800; and affidavit of Amos Cheek, October 19, 1802, all in File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed February 15, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/74977/rec/57.

86. Governor James Jackson to the Chehaw King, March 5, 1799, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 29, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/80148/rec/11.

87. James Jackson to Chehaw King, March 5, 1799, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed November 29, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/80148/rec/11.

88. James Jackson to (the governor of Georgia), July 21, 1793, File II Counties, Indians, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 30, 2022, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/p17154coll2/id/1225/rec/3. An investigation suggested that these people were responsible for the killing of a Dr. St. Johns in South Carolina.

89. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 194.

90. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 187.

91. William Laurence to William Panton, August 15, 1798, Cruzat Papers, PKY.

92. Hargrett, ms2599, July 3, Aug. 26, 1801, box 1, folder 1, (Affidavits, 1801), Cuyler Collection

93. John Karnard (Kinnard) to James Seagrove, June 5, 1803, File II Names, Virtual Vault, Ga, accessed March 8, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/41089/rec/1.

94. John Karnard (Kinnard) to James Seagrove, June 5, 1803, File II Names, Virtual Vault, Ga, accessed March 8, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/41089/rec/1.

95. John Galphin to governor of East Florida, November 12, 1795, reel 43, EFP.

96. Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole,” 49–56.

97. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 260–61.

Chapter 8. Flight to the Seminoles

1. Landers, “A Nation Divided,” 99–116; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 213–43; Frank, “Taking the State Out”; Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole,” 46–67; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 127–56; Kokomoor, “A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery”; Weisman, Like Beads on a String; Covington, The Seminoles of Florida, 1–49; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 233–47; Rivers, Slavery in Florida, 1–16; Mahon and Weisman, “Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples”; Patrick Riordan, “Seminole Genesis: Native Americans, African Americans, and Colonists on the Southern Frontier from Pre-history through the Colonial Era” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 1996); Porter, The Black Seminoles, 3–24.

2. Jason Herbert, “Alachua Seminole Identity and Autonomy, 1750–1776,” FHQ 100, no. 1 (summer 2021): 52–75.

3. Saunt, New Order of Things, 206; Richard Winn, Andrew Pickens, and George Matthews to Henry Knox, Secretary of War, Nov. 28, 1788, ASPIA 1:30 (the commissioners stated that they did not know “whether the Seminoles belong[ed] to any part of the Creeks”); Weisman, Like Beads on a String.

4. William Hayne Simmons, Notices of East Florida with an Account of the Seminole Nation of Indians (Charleston, S.C.: N.p., 1822), 54.

5. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 261.

6. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida, 5–13; Simmons, Notices of East Florida, 54–55; Colin G. Callaway, “Cuscowilla: Seminole Loyalism and Seminole Genesis,” in The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, ed. Colin G. Callaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 244–47.

7. Herbert, “Alachua Seminole Identity and Autonomy, 1750–1776,” 55–56.

8. Callaway, “Cuscowilla: Seminole loyalism and Seminole genesis,” 244–77; Weisman, Like Beads on a String, 1–13; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 113–16; Gregory A. Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund, eds., William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 50–52; Edward J. Cashin, William Bartram and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 97–99.

9. James L. Hill, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 9–11.

10. Simmons, Notices of East Florida, 75; Porter, The Black Seminoles, 5–7; Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Negroes and the East Florida Annexation Plot, 1811–1813,” Journal of Negro History 30, no. 1 (January 1945): 9–29.

11. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 227–31; “At liberty,” 227; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 130–31; Brent Weisman, “The Plantation System of the Florida Seminole Indian and Black Seminoles during the Colonial Era,” in Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, ed. Jane G. Landers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 136–49.

12. Testimony of Wiley Thompson, Seminole Agency, April 27, 1835, Doc. No. 271, Register of Debates, House of Representatives, 24th Congress, 183–84.

13. Simmons, Notices of East Florida, 76.

14. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 213, 216, 232–33; Mulroy, Freedom on the Border, 1. Mulroy prefers the term “Seminole maroons” on the grounds that the communities that they established closely matched the classic definition of maroon societies formulated by others. The debate over proper terminology began in the earliest days as army officers, officials, and outside observers struggled to classify them.

15. Frank, “Taking the State Out,” 10–27.

16. James L. Hill, “New Systems, Established Traditions: Governor James Grant’s Indian Diplomacy and the Evolution of British Colonial Policy, 1760–1771,” FHQ 93, no. 2 (Fall 2014), 157–66; Charles Loch Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 1763–1784 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943); Schafer, St. Augustine’s British Years, 29, 36; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153–70.

17. Moultrie to Lord Hillsborough, June 29, 1771, cited by Riordan, “Seminole Genesis,” 247.

18. Schafer, St. Augustine’s British Years, 88.

19. “Copy of a Talk from the Seminollie Indians date Flint River 3rd September 1777,” in James Stuart to Lord George Germain, cited in Riordan, “Seminole Genesis,” 220.

20. Martha Condray Searcy, “The Introduction of African Slavery into the Creek Indian Nation,” GHQ 66, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 29. Governor Tonyn referred to both Seminoles and Creeks as Creek Indians.

21. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida; Porter, The Black Seminoles; Saunt, A New Order of Things (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Weisman, Like Beads on a String.

22. Jane G. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” FHQ 62 (September 1984): 296–313.

23. Jesse Dupont to Enrique White, January 24, 1802, reel 83, EFP.

24. Enrique White to Martinez de Yrujo, October 4, 1796, reel 29, EFP, cited in Saunt, A New Order of Things, 125.

25. “Account of the principal events with Indians in this Port of Saint Vincent Ferrer,” sent by Carlos Howard to Governor Quesada, April [26], 1795, reel 51, EFP.

26. Howard to Quesada, April [26], 1795, reel 51, EFP.

27. Enrique White to Martinez de Yrujo, October 4, 1796, reel 29, EFP, cited in Saunt, A New Order of Things, 125.

28. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 260–61.

29. Waselkov and Braund, William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians, 51–53.

30. Brent Richards Weisman, Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians: Unconquered People (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 22; Weisman, Like Beads on a String, 77.

31. Weisman, “The Plantation System of the Florida Seminole Indians,” 141.

32. Brent W. Weisman, “Nativism, Resistance, and Ethnogenesis of the Florida Seminole Indian Identity,” Historical Archaeology 41, no. 4 (2007), 198–212. Lake Miccosukee is a large swampy prairie lake in Jefferson County, Florida.

33. Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 99, 126; Covington, The Seminoles of Florida, 21–36; Landers, “A Nation Divided,” 104.

34. Swan, “Position and State of Manners and Arts,” 260–61.

35. Cusick, “King Payne and His Policies,” 44–45.

36. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida, 15–26; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 206. For a statement on how Georgians saw the Mikasukis, see Buckner Harris to Governor David Mitchell, November 8, 1810, File II, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 16, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/84042.

37. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 24, 29, 71–86.

38. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 87–106; DuVal, Independence Lost, 326–31; Landers, “A Nation Divided,” 99–116; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 139–42;

39. Cusick, “King Payne and His Policies,” 44–46.

40. Andrew Ellicott, Journal of Andrew Ellicott (Philadelphia: William Fry, 1814), 230.

41. Gilbert C. Din, War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2012), 143–73; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 107–41.

42. Seagrove to McQueen, June 24, 1800, reel 24, EFP.

43. Nathaniel Hall to Enrique White, July 8, 1800, reel 55, EFP.

44. A. Atkinson to governor, July 10, 1800, reel 55, EFP.

45. Landers, “A Nation Divided,” 105–6.

46. Marguerite Reddick, comp., Camden’s Challenge: A History of Camden County, Woodbine, Ga. ([Woodbine, Ga.]: Camden Historical Commission, 1976), 5.

47. Depositions of Samuel Mercer, Robert and James Ross, and Lewis Levi, Camden County, February 7, 1807, reel 58, EFP.

48. Richard Lang to the governor, January 12, 1791, reel 82, EFP.

49. Col. Hannaford to governor, July 25, 1796, reel 83, EFP.

50. James Seagrove to John McQueen, June 25, 1800, reel 55, EFP; July 26, 1800, Andrew Atkinson to governor of Florida, July 26, 1800, reel 55, EFP.

51. Thomas King to governor, October 15, 1800, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, March 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/40318/rec/4; John King to the governor of Georgia, July 12, 1800, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/40209/rec/5; William Jones to governor of Georgia, August 17, 1800, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/39675/rec/5.

52. Cormac A. O’Riordan, “The 1795 Rebellion in East Florida” (Master’s thesis, University of North Florida, 1995), https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/99.

53. Manuel de Castilla to Enrique White, November 10 1800, reel 55, EFP. An officer delegated by the governor, Manuel de Castilla accompanied McQueen on an expedition to capture Bowles.

54. John McQueen to Enrique White, November 10, 1800, reel 55, EFP.

55. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 140–41; proclamation of Governor James Jackson, July 8, 1800, Executive Minutes, GA; proclamation of Governor James Jackson, July 8, 1800, reel 40, EFP.

56. Proclamation of Governor James Jackson, July 8, 1800, Executive Minutes, GA; Proclamation of Governor James Jackson, July 8, 1800, reel 40, EFP.

57. Parker, “So in Fear of Both the Indians and the Americans,” 34–35. Robert Allen may have been a son of James Allen, a noted horse and cattle thief twenty years earlier.

58. Seagrove to McQueen, June 24, 1800, reel 42, EFP; letter from a planter, Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State, July 12, 1800.

59. John King to Governor James Jackson, July 12, 1800, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/40209/rec/5.

60. Governor of East Florida to Andrew Atkinson, March 18, 1800, reel 55, EFP.

61. John King to Governor James Jackson, July 10, 1800, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed March 16, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/80618/rec/26; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 208. One of the Black men was “a certain man named Cudjo, an inhabitant of the Creek nation.”

62. William Floyd to William Augustus Bowles, November 31, 1801, Cruzat Papers, PKY.

63. Benjamin Hawkins to Daniel Stewart, October 13, 1810, LBH 2:571–73.

64. Jennison, Cultivating Race, 127, 143. According to Jennison, building a hybrid society in racial terms was a high priority for Bowles.

65. Hawkins to Efau Haojo and chiefs, June 2, 1802, ASPIA 1:677. Some fled for crimes, others for curiosity (see Saunt, A New Order of Things, 207.)

66. Francis Philip Fatio to Mrs. Fatio, October 18, 1800, cited in William Scott Willis, “A Swiss Settler in East Florida: A Letter of Francis Philip Fatio,” FHQ 64, no. 2 (October 1985): 180.

67. McQueen to White, April 18, 1801, reel 55, EFP; Kinnard to White, October 2, 1802, reel 43, EFP; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 127–28. Snyder gives the name as “Macloggy.”

68. John Cannard to governor of Florida, October 2, 1801, reel 43, EFP.

69. “The Following Trifling Observations Made during a Journey through the Indian Country,” Fatio Jr., November 12, 1801, reel 83, EFP.

70. Francis Philip Fatio Jr. to father, October 2, 1801, reel 83, EFP.

71. “The Following Trifling Observations made during a Journey through the Indian Country,” Francis Philip Fatio Jr., reel 83, EFP.

72. Jesse Dupont to Enrique White, January 24, 1802, reel 83, EFP.

73. Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole,” 49–51.

74. Wiley Thompson to governor of Florida, April 20, 1803, reel 57, EFP.

75. Wiley Thompson to governor of Florida, April 20, 1803, reel 57, EFP.

76. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 163–71; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 151–154.

77. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 182–83.

78. Simmons, Notices of East Florida, 76.

79. Kevin Kokomoor, “A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery”; Weisman, Nativism, Resistance, and Ethnogenesis,” 198–212; Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole,” 49–51; Simmons, Notices of East Florida, 76–77.

80. James Cashen to John Hampton, November 27, 1806, reel 83, EFP, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss19398.mss19398-083_0540_1092/?sp=518.

81. Kokomoor, “A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery.”

82. Snyder, Captivity in Indian Country, 217, 229.

83. Snyder, Captivity in Indian Country, 1–16, 213, 216, 232–33.

84. Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole.”

85. Kokomoor, “A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery.”

86. Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World, 101–6.

87. Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 41, 104.

88. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 178–85.

89. “Our Southern Frontier,” National Intelligencer, October 29, 1817, cited in Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 298.

90. Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 38–55; John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (Gainesville, Fla.: Library Press, 1967, 128–31, 196–97.

91. Rembert W. Patrick, Florida Fiasco: Rampant Rebels on the Georgia-Florida Border, 1810–1815 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1954), 83–98; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 126.

92. Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 128–34; Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 99–127.

93. Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 128–43; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 166–68.

94. Floyd to Senator William Henry Crawford, March 26, 1812, Misc. Let., Department of State, National Archives, cited in Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 130.

95. Lt. Col. Smith to Maj. Gen. Pinckney (copy) Point Petre 30 July, 1812,” in T. Frederick Davis, ed., “United States Troops in Spanish East Florida, 1812–1813, II,” FHQ 9, no. 2, (October 1930): 107.

96. Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 154, 184.

97. David Mitchell to James Monroe, September 19, 1812, Territorial Papers of the Department of State, National Archives, cited by Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 189.

98. A. H. Alexander, “The Ambush of Captain John Williams, U.S.M.C.: Failure of the East Florida Invasion, 1812–1813,” FHQ 56, no. 3 (January 1978): 280–96.

99. “Newnan’s Expeditions,” National Intelligencer, December 5, 1812, https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/00/00/24/08/00001/UF00002408_00001_00001.pdf.

100. Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 231.

101. Between 1785 and 1810, Georgia took in as many as thirty-two thousand Africans according to an estimate by McMillin, The Final Victims, 48. Thousands more came from the Chesapeake and hundreds from Saint-Domingue.

Chapter 9. Erasing a Borderland

1. Mary Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island in 1815 (De Leon Springs, Fla.: E. O. Painter Printing, 1983), 104–5; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 201. This estimate includes Georgia slaves thought to have fled to Spanish Florida, the Seminoles, and the Creeks between 1812 and 1816 or left with the British in the War of 1812. Bullard calculates at least seventeen hundred Black Georgians left with the British or attempted to leave. Jennison thinks that roughly one thousand Black Georgians escaped into the communities bordering the state during the War of 1812.

2. Justin Iverson, “Fugitives on the Front: Maroons in the Gulf Coast Borderlands War, 1812–1823,” FHQ 92, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 105–29. Iverson highlights the importance of African Americans in the Gulf Coast wars and how European imperial rivalries both supported and threatened maroon communities in the Atlantic. His use of the term “maroon” includes virtually any Black who resisted enslavement no matter the circumstances. See Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 120–37.

3. Colonel Smith to General Flournoy, February 24, 1813, in T. Frederick Davis, “United States Troops in Spanish East Florida, IV,” FHQ 9, no. 4 (April 1931): 271–74; Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 232–34; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 256–57.

4. Canter Brown Jr., “Tales of Angola: Free Blacks, Red Stick Creeks, and International Intrigue in Spanish Southwest Florida, 1812–1821,” in Go Sound the Trumpet! Selections in Florida’s African American History, ed. Canter Brown and David Jackson (Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 2005), 5–21; Canter Brown Jr., African Americans on the Tampa Bay Frontier (Tampa: Tampa Bay History Center, 1997), 7, 45; Canter Brown Jr., “The ‘Sarrazota, or Runaway Negro Plantations’: Tampa Bay’s First Black Community, 1812–1814,” Tampa Bay History 12 (Fall/Winter 1990): 5–6; Rosalyn Howard, “’Looking for Angola’: An Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Search for a Nineteenth Century Florida Maroon Community and its Caribbean Connections,” FHQ 92, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 32–68.

5. Benjamin Hawkins to D. B. Mitchell, May 31, 1813, in Louise Frederick Hayes, “Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 1797–1815 (typescript, Atlanta, 1939), GA, cited in Jackson and Brown, eds., Go Sound the Trumpets, 7.

6. Howard, “Looking for Angola,” 32–68; Brown, “Tales of Angola,” 7–12.

7. John H. McIntosh to Governor Peter Early, September 11, 1813, File II Counties and Subjects, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed October 25, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/p17154coll2/id/4066/rec/1.

8. Francis Philip Fatio to Governor Early, December 11, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/25648, viewed October 25, 2020. Fatio gave a detailed assessment of the damage done to East Florida by the patriots.

9. Jose Hibberson to Charles Harris, November 19, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 16, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/44849; Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 275; T. Frederick Davis, “MacGregor’s Invasion of Florida, 1817,” FHQ 7, no. 1 (July 1928): 8–9.

10. Hibberson to Harris, November 19, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 16, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/44849; William Gibson to Governor Mitchell, July 31, 1816, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA; accessed October 27, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/28102/rec/18.

11. Deposition of Jacob Summelin before Buckner Harris, June 16, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 16, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/83963; Cusick, The Other War, 272–73.

12. Jose Hibberson to Charles Harris, November 19, 1813, in “East Florida Documents,” GHQ 13, no. 2 (June 1929): 154–58.

13. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 238; notices in the Savannah Republican, February 27, 1812, March 28, 1812, April 9, 1812, May 23, 1812, June 2, 1812, cited in Jennison, Cultivating Race, 157.

14. Deposition of James Nephew and William Dunham, December 13, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 16, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/83582.

15. David Mitchell to James Monroe, October 13, 1812, State Department Territorial Papers, Florida Series, 1772–1824, 2:133, cited in Saunt, A New Order of Things, 245.

16. Jose Hibberson to Charles Harris, November 19, 1813, in “East Florida Documents,” GHQ 13, no. 2 (June 1929), 154–58.

17. Deposition of James Black, June 11, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 16, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/3009; deposition of Jacob Summerlin before Buckner Harris, June 16, 1813, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/83963, viewed December 16, 2020.

18. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 659–700; Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 110–13; Frank Lawrence Owsley, Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans, 1812–1815 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 1–5.

19. Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 179–93, 200–213; Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

20. Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 208–13; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 16–19.

21. Admiral Cochrane’s position represented a creative reworking of the Somerset doctrine set forth by the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, over the fate of an escaped slave in Great Britain in 1772. Mansfield’s decision promised freedom but only under certain well-defined circumstances that limited the practical import.

22. Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 275–314; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 16–19.

23. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip d. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves from Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

24. Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island, 55; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 43.

25. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 43.

26. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 40–43.

27. William Belko, “Epilogue to the War of 1812: The Monroe Administration, American Anglophobia, and the First Seminole War,” in America’s Hundred Years’ War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763–1858, ed. William Belko (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 59–63.

28. Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island, 55; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 44.

29. Hawkins to John Houston McIntosh, District of Fort Hawkins, Nov. 26, 1814, LBH 2:706–7.

30. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 12–30, quotation from 77–78 (“encourage”).

31. Hawkins to Andrew Jackson, November 11, 1814, LBH 2:704; Hawkins to Jackson, August 30, 1814, Enclosure to Tustunnuggee Hopole, Speaker for the Lower Creeks, LBH 2:694 (“negro-stealing”).

32. “Narrative of the Operations of the British in the Floridas,” 1815, Curzat Papers, PKY, cited in Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 75.

33. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 45, 127. Robin escaped during the Patriot War and hid as a maroon until heading towards the fort.

34. Kathryn E. Holland Braund, ed., Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 1–9; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 139–232; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 293–329.

35. Gregory A. Waselkov, A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006); Braund, Tohopeka, 84–104; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 249–72; John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 244–49.

36. Braund, Tohopeka, 1–9; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 139–232; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government, 293–329.

37. Waselkov, A Conquering Spirit, 167–71; Eve Jensen, “Horseshoe Bend: A Living Memorial,” in Braund, Tohopeka, 146–57.

38. Hawkins to Andrew Jackson, Creek Agency, August 30, 1814 in LBH 2:694; Millett, The Maroons at Prospect Bluff, 78. James Perryman, another wealthy Creek, lost slaves as well.

39. Benjamin Hawkins to Peter Early, Fort Hawkins, Oct. 26, 1814, in LBH, 2:698.

40. Hawkins to Andrew Jackson, Creek Agency, Nov. 11, 1814, in LBH 2:704.

41. Hawkins to Jackson, Creek Agency, August 30, 1814, in LBH, 2:694.

42. Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island, 11, 54; Republican (Chatham County), December 27, 1814, accessed February 22, 2022, image 3, https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82014388/1814-12-27/ed-1/seq-3; and January 19, 1815, accessed February 22, 2022, image 3, https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82014388/1815-01-19/ed-1/seq-3.

43. June Hall McCash, Jekyll Island’s Early Years: From Prehistory through Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 119–22.

44. Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble, 147–48; Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 327–32.

45. Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island, 54–59.

46. John McIlraith, Life of Sir John Richardson (London: N.p., 1868), 56–57.

47. Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 327–28; Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island, 56–57; Malcolm Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 176. Butler’s manager, Roswell King, reported that twenty-five hundred troops had landed, sixteen hundred were Black, and the Blacks had behaved better than the whites.

48. Mary R. Bullard, “Ned Simmons, American Slave: The Role of Imagination in American History,” African Diaspora Newsletter, 10, no. 2 (June 2007), article 7, accessed December 19, 2020, https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adan/vol10/iss2/7.

49. James A. Percoco, “The British Corps of Colonial Marines: African Americans Fight for their Freedom,” American Battlefield Trust, accessed January 8, 2020, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/british-corps-colonial-marines.

50. Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., A Treatise on the Patriarchal System, or the Cooperative System of Society (18929; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 11.

51. Bullard, “Ned Simmons, American Slave,” 18–26.

52. Interview printed in 1867 as part of a war miscellany called Anecdotes, Poetry and Incidents of the Civil War: North and South, 1860–1865, collected and arranged by Frank Moore, cited by Bullard, “Ned Simmons, American Slave,” 6.

53. Granger, Savannah River Plantations, 78–80. The Millers switched from rice production that had encumbered the estate with massive debt to the more profitable cultivation of Sea Island cotton and cutting live oak timber.

54. Bullard, “Ned Simmons, American Slave,” 44–50.

55. Bullard, “Ned Simmons, American Slave,” 25, 35, 36. During the Civil War, Simmons managed to join in a flight of people from Cumberland Island to Union-controlled territory. One of his requests was to be taught how to read.

56. M. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 19–30. For a landmark environmental history of the Butler plantations, see Mart S. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1620–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 87–150. For a treatment of the Butler plantations during the Antebellum Period, see William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 213–84.

57. James M. Couper to Caroline Couper Lovell, August 12, 1912, Cate Collection, GHS, cited in Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 127.

58. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 134.

59. Roswell King to Honored Sir [Butler], November 1, 1806, Butler Family Papers, HSP; see the correspondence about Sambo, the lead driver, in the first half of 1806. Butler refused to sell the man but finally acceded to having Sambo and his family traded for fourteen slaves from South Carolina.

60. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 170–91.

61. Roswell King to Pierce Butler, February 12, 1815, Butler Family Papers, HSP.

62. Affidavit by Roswell King, “A Narrative of the Conduct of the British Armed Forces from the 30th Jany to the 14th of Feb. 1815,” February 14, 1815, Butler Family Papers, HSP.

63. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 182.

64. King to Butler, January 14, February 26, 1815, affidavit by Roswell King, February 14, 1815, Butler Family Papers, HSP. Molly and Old Betty appear in the list of fugitives.

65. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 172.

66. Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble, 192.

67. John Miller to Thomas Miller, February 12, 1815, in Examiner, April 8, 1815, 493, accessed October 29, 2020, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Examiner_Containing_Political_Essays/vixIAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Blackey,+on+the+impulse+of+the+moment,+left+the+ranks&pg=PA493&printsec=frontcover.

68. Taylor, Internal Enemies, 335–42.

69. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 182.

70. Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island, 104–6. For the subsequent history of these fugitives, see Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 183–91.

71. Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 334; Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble, 152–54. The official copy of the Treaty of Ghent did not reach Washington until February 16. Congress did not ratify it until the evening of February 17. That gave Cockburn a justification for returning only those fugitives who were still on Cumberland Island and not on British ships at that date and time. All others were declared free.

72. Bullard, “Ned Simmons, American Slave,” 6–11; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 93–94. Years after his brief moment as a Colonial Marine, Simmons treasured his British regimental button, found by archaeologists in his cabin in the twentieth century.

73. King to Butler, February 12 and 26, 1815, Butler Family Papers, HSP.

74. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 147–213.

75. Nathaniel Millett, “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War and Its Consequences,” in Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812, ed. Nicole Eustace and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 164–201; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 231–49.

76. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 69–70.

77. Quoted in Millett, The Maroons at Prospect Bluff, 150.

78. John Floyd to David Mitchell, April 12, 1816, DLG, accessed December 19, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc859?canvas=0&x=1250&y=1410&w=5959.

79. John Paul Nuño, “’Republica de Bandidos’: The Prospect Bluff Fort’s Challenge to the Spanish Slave System,” FHQ 94, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 192–221; Nathaniel Millett, “Defining Freedom in the Atlantic Borderlands of the Revolutionary Southeast,” Early American Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 383–86.

80. Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble, 179; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 124–28; 205–7.

81. John Floyd to David Mitchell, April 12, 1816, DLG, accessed December 19, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc859?canvas=0&x=1250&y=1410&w=5959.

82. Frank Lawrence Owsley and Gene A. Smith eds., Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 111; Millett, “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War,” 185.

83. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 214–30; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 273–90; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 198–200.

84. Brown, “Tales of Angola,” 1–20; Brown, African Americans on the Tampa Bay Frontier (Tampa: Tampa Bay History Center, 1997), 7, 45; Brown, “The ‘Sarrazota, or Runaway Negro Plantations,’” 5–6.

85. Millett, “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War,” 186–88; John K. Mahon, “The First Seminole War: November 21, 1817–May 24, 1818,” FHQ 77, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 62–67.

86. L. Kingsley to David Brydie Mitchell, September 13, 1816, Hargrett, DLG, accessed December 20, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc442?canvas=1&x=1086&y=1857&w=9277.

87. Millett, “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War,” 187–88.

88. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 175–203; Covington, The Seminoles, 45.

89. Extract of a Letter from George Perryman to Lieutenant Sands, February 24, 1817, ASPIA 2: 681–82.

90. Thomas H. Miller to Dear Sir, April 12, 1817, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed October 24, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/48413/rec/3.

91. Extract of a Letter from George Perryman to Lieutenant Sands, February 24, 1817, ASPIA 2:681–82.

92. B. Low to (governor), April 8, 1817, St. Marys, Camden County, File II Counties and Subjects, GA, accessed December 21, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/p17154coll2/id/1238/rec/3.

93. Millett, “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War,” 191–92.

94. General Gaines to “Sir,” probably the governor of Georgia, November 21, 1817, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 20, 2020, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/27312/rec/4; Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 274–76.

95. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 185–87; Covington, The Seminoles, 42.

96. Owsley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 141–63; David S. Hiedler and Jeanne T. Hiedler, Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2003); Mahon, “The First Seminole War: November 21, 1817–May 24, 1818,” 62–67.

97. Millett, “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War,” 193–96 (“The main drift” on p. 194); Covington, The Seminoles, 43, 46; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 204–8. The young man was Chrystie Ambrister, later hung by Jackson. Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 305–6.

98. James Gadsden, “The Defenses of the Floridas,” FHQ 15, no. 4 (April 1937): 248. Captain James Gadsden, aide-de-camp to General Andrew Jackson, made a general report.

99. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 192–93.

100. President James Monroe and his secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, initially thought to punish Jackson for his insubordination, but Adams took Jackson’s side when the secretary of state sensed the opportunity for concluding the acquisition of Florida.

101. Brown, “Tales of Angola,” 11–14. According to reports sent to the War Office, Coweta Indians took 120 “Negroes” at Angola, brought back 59, and returned about 20 to their masters (Brown, African Americans on the Tampa Bay Frontier, 13). According to a Charleston newspaper, about 300 prisoners were taken at Angola, while 250 escaped to the tip of the Florida Keys, where fishermen took them to the Bahamas. See Rosalyn Howard, “The ‘Wild Indians’ of Andros Island: Black Seminole Legacy in the Bahama Islands,” Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 2 (November 2006): 275–98; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 237; and Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 194–95.

102. Owsley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 118–40; David Head, Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateers from the United States in the Early Republic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 92–121; Jennifer Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires: The 1817 Liberation and Occupation of Amelia Island, East Florida” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2006); Christopher Ward, “The Commerce of East Florida during the Embargo, 1806–1812: The Role of Amelia Island,” FHQ 68, no. 2 (October 1989): 160–79; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 244–46.

103. Governor Coppinger, memo quoting a letter from Gregor MacGregor demanding the surrender of Florida, July 11, 1817, reel 117, EFP; Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires”; Oswley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 122–32; T. Davis, “MacGregor’s Invasion of Florida.”

104. Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires,” 86–87, 92, 109–10.

105. John Henry McIntosh to William Crawford, October 30, 1817, in Crawford to John Quincy Adams, November 21, 1817, H.R. Doc. 12, 15th Cong., 1st Sess., cited in Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires,” 137.

106. Head, Privateers of the Americas, 106–13; Owsley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 135–40; Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires,” 121–88.

107. Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires,” 137–39 (“St. Domingo Rovers” and “brig-ands” on p. 138).

108. Head, Privateers of the Americas, 108–14; Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empires,” 156–58.

109. Ex Parte John Clark, Governor of Georgia vs. Sundry African Negroes, July 22, 1820, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed January 4, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/82379/rec/25; D. Mitchell, Creek Agency, to Governor William Rabun, February 13, 1818, File II Names, Virtual Vault, GA, accessed December 24, 2021, https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/FileIINames/id/48871/rec/26.

110. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 243, 244, 253.

111. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 243–53; Jane Landers, “An Eighteenth-Century Community in Exile: The ‘Floridanos’ in Cuba,” New West Indian Guide 70, no. 1/2 (1996): 39–58.

112. Trevor Barnard, “Ending with a Whimper, Not a Bang: The Relationship between Atlantic History and the Study of the Nineteenth-Century South,” in The American South and the Atlantic World, ed. Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 129–48.

Conclusion. Underground Railroad

1. Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble.

2. Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 121–24.

3. James W. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 50; Weisman, Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians.

4. Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World, 177–90; Rivers, Slavery in Florida, 1–15.

5. Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 7–9, 34–35.

6. Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2020); Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitives on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Cambridge, Mass.: University of Harvard Press, 2015; James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Timothy D. Walker, ed., Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).

7. Pargas, Freedom Seekers; R. J. M. Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Pargas, ed., Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom.

8. Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy Shoemaker, “Settler Colonialism in Early American History: Introduction,” WMQ 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 361–68.