CHAPTER 4

Entangled Borders

In the months after the end of the war in Georgia and South Carolina, over eighty-five hundred Black people, some free but most enslaved, stepped off a steady stream of vessels from Savannah and Charleston onto the wharves at St. Augustine, a sandy town ill equipped to receive a flood of people.¹ With a traditional Spanish grid pattern built around a central plaza, the town consisted of houses little more than shacks, a handful of more substantial buildings, and a few two-story structures displaying typical Spanish features like side entrances and loggias.² People of all backgrounds—Black, white, and Indigenous, including Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws—thronged the streets, walking with apparent ease in a center demobilizing after an exhausting war. Counting the white loyalists and those already in East Florida, the population—some sixteen to seventeen thousand humans—were pushing up against each other, trying to make do with limited provisions and groping about for a space on which to land.³

Loyalists expected British East Florida to become a haven for all those forced to leave the United States, naively envisioning a new colony made up of both East and West Florida that would be integrated more closely with the British Caribbean. News of the preliminary Treaty of Paris reached them in February 1783, only six months after their arrival, shattering their illusions and throwing them into despair. All the fierce lobbying could not undo the final signing of the treaty in September and the restoration of both Floridas to Spain. A brief uprising by John Cruden, a British official who plotted with fellow loyalists to seize an enclave around the St. Marys River and make it into an autonomous region, collapsed with no support from London.⁴

As the months passed and people scrambled to secure their future, the besieged governor, Patrick Tonyn, former military officer with a quick temper, found himself an unwilling spectator to the unraveling of the colony.⁵ The announcement of Britain’s departure gave rise to a spate of lawlessness as impoverished inhabitants, disbanded soldiers, and Americans coming into the province to claim fugitives and stolen slaves jockeyed to secure their future. Several units of the British infantry briefly mutinied on learning of orders to be transferred to hazardous duty in the West Indies. Former guerrilla fighters known for their ruthlessness put together marauding communities of war veterans, deserters, social outcasts, and “Negroes,” and struck northern Florida and southern Georgia. Both sides of the St. Marys River in Florida and Georgia once again became an outlaw-infested no-man’s-land.⁶

All the more galling was the role of Francisco Sanchez, a long-time planter and merchant in St. Augustine. Aware that law and order were breaking down, he conveniently shipped to Havana slaves stolen by Daniel McGirt, the nemesis of authorities on both sides of the border, and shared the profits. The governor of South Carolina accused Sanchez of responsibility for the theft of at least one hundred enslaved people from his state.⁷ While Tonyn struggled to impose order and curb the activities of individuals like McGirt and Sanchez, planters began dismantling their plantations or holdings, made plans to evacuate their labor forces, and cast around for shipping. The theft of slaves and horses along the St. Marys River by border-crossing Georgians or those Floridians out for a quick profit made it difficult to distinguish who was law-abiding and who was not.⁸

Over the next four decades, the river was to assume enormous significance. Serving as the dividing line between Georgia and soon-to-become Spanish East Florida, the St. Marys was a slow-moving channel of water originating in the Okefenokee Swamp and emptying into Cumberland Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. The river basin contained extensive wetlands, interspersed with bottomland growths of cypress trees, and flanked by long-leaf pine forests that fueled a slowly developing logging industry. On the American side, marsh predominated and was submerged four or five feet at every high tide.⁹

For almost one hundred years, the river had functioned as the central feature of a borderland in which Spanish, British, Native Americans, and all those who fell outside any neat racial or ethnic definition met, fought, negotiated, and, more often than not, looked after their own personal interests. The river was no impermeable boundary but a place of continual interaction, a contested space in constant upheaval. In the run-up to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, it was the scene of repeated attempts by the Spanish and British to outflank each other. During the Revolution, the bloody border warfare saw rangers and guerrillas from Florida wreak havoc on nearby Georgians while a succession of invasions by ineptly led American armies ended in humiliating defeat. The borderland represented as much a process as a place, one where many cultures and ethnicities interacted and produced a constantly changing image.

In the second Spanish period (1783–1821), East Florida and southern Georgia evolved into one large zone of transition that stretched from the St. Johns River in Florida to the Altamaha River in Georgia. Despite the obvious differences in governance, language, and population, the two adjacent regions were inextricably linked by the frequent crossing of cultural, religious, and racial boundaries by their inhabitants. It was an ambiguous and often unstable realm where the boundary was also a crossroad. Creeks and Seminoles came down the St. Marys River at will to trade on occasion but more often than not to steal horses or cattle from people who had seized their land in shameful fashion. Indian traders casually flouted regulations as they moved between two radically different worlds. French refugees from Saint-Domingue were concentrated along the St. Marys on the Georgia side; British loyalists farmed modest holdings on the south bank of the St. Marys; Americans trying to escape debt reinvented themselves on both sides of the border, while cattle thieves flourished in this unregulated environment. A critical feature of this social and cultural mixing was the number of Black people who moved across the borders as fugitives or as slaves, from Georgia to Florida for the most part but on occasion from Florida to Georgia, an aspect that is often overlooked. The cultural intermingling and weak central authority created an ideal space for fugitives to find a path forward to a new life.

The British departure was messy, and in those first years the new Spanish government was short of staff and resources, with only a light footprint beyond the gates of St. Augustine. In June 1784, the new Spanish governor, Vicente Manuel de Céspedes, arrived to find the British colony in a state of turmoil, with Blacks and whites crowded into small houses and huts throughout St. Augustine and in small, primitive encampments along the banks of the St. Johns and Matanzas Rivers and with British authority unraveling.¹⁰ Sensitive to the awkwardness of the situation, the veteran administrator offered additional time for evacuation. For over a year, the British and Spanish governors ran dual administrations, with Céspedes in control but in an increasingly strained relationship with his counterpart, who watched in frustration as his power over British residents slipped away.¹¹

As the evacuation proceeded in fits and starts from 1782 to 1785, St. Augustine evolved into an active slave market where seasoned creoles rather than Africans were auctioned to a variety of slaveholders, especially Americans crossing into the territory to rebuild their labor force. Absentee landlords in England who had been swept up in the enthusiasm for what had been a great speculative venture sought to liquidate their holdings and redeem as much of their investment as possible. Lady Egmont offered a “gang” of sixty slaves, while the broker for a London notable touted that the seventy-six people in his estate divided almost equally between men, women, and children. The first governor of East Florida, Gen. James Grant, put up for bids the seventy enslaved people who were the heart and soul of his plantation that had produced some of the finest indigo in the colony. The broker described fifty of them as workers and “the rest, Children, some of whom were nearly fit for the hoe.”¹²

Loyalists who had fled Georgia and South Carolina scrambled to trade away their labor force as they sought financial liquidity for their next move in the British Empire. Black families and communities were destroyed with scarcely a thought. Twenty-eight men, women, and children arrived from Augusta as the “property” of Alexander Patterson, including Hannah, March, and Monday. Their enslaver promptly traded two people as well as three cows for eight horses that he needed for the plantation he hoped to establish. When the evacuation began, the remaining twenty-six were offered in the market at St. Augustine. Those that could not be sold were loaded onto a ship for Patterson’s next destination, Dominica. In the confusion, Monday, March, and Hannah managed to escape before embarking on a ship stationed in the St. Marys.¹³

The great outmigration of slaves from St. Augustine between 1783 and 1785 produced a stunning surprise. More Black people arrived in the United States and West Florida than in any other location in the British Caribbean, Canada, or England, a reality that is often overlooked. According to the meticulous records kept by the Commissary of Refugees in St. Augustine, planters and others transported 2,214 enslaved people to the Bahamas, another 714 to Jamaica, 444 to Dominica, 155 to Nova Scotia, and 35 to “Europe.” Two hundred went to “other Foreign parts.” Those same records show that 2,561 Black people were carried back to the United States, a stunning 40 percent of those on the British evacuation lists.¹⁴ Far from being an exception, Mahomet, the recaptured maroon, was part of a sizeable movement of people. In his case, it meant shipment to Beaufort, South Carolina, for sale.

The British statistics hold another surprise. Governor Tonyn reported a category on the list for those who went “missing,” white and Black people who apparently had departed from East Florida but whose destination was not known. These figures included 2,692 whites and 4,756 Blacks, people he surmised disappeared into the vast territory of Spanish West Florida, the Creek Nation, and the United States.¹⁵ Historian James McMillin estimates that, out of all the different categories, a total of 1,500 African Americans entered Georgia during the three-year period following the Revolution, an assumption that sounds reasonable. There were probably more.¹⁶

Georgians came in person or sent brokers to St. Augustine to bid on the human flesh being offered in what became an important slave market for a very brief period. Leading the way were two of Washington’s most capable generals, Nathanael Greene and “Mad Anthony” Wayne, who had been awarded prize plantations along the Savannah River by the legislature in gratitude for their role in liberating Georgia. Greene received Mulberry Grove, the former property of John Graham. Wayne received Richmond and Kew, once the plantation of the royal governor’s son.¹⁷ The irony was palpable. Only four years before, a hard-pressed Greene had written to the governor of South Carolina that Black men “would make good soldiers,” described them as the natural strength of the state, and argued that freedom rather than wages should be their reward.¹⁸ Of the one hundred five Africans purchased, Greene took fifty-eight men, women, and children, including sixteen sawyers, two coopers, one carpenter, two tanners, cooks, and seamstresses, the type of skilled and semiskilled labor that formed an important component of any plantation.¹⁹

Gen. Anthony Wayne claimed forty-seven of the enslaved and quickly instructed his broker to purchase another twenty-three from an Englishman who had relocated his estate from Florida to the Satilla River in Georgia.²⁰ In 1786, his overseer submitted a memorandum that included a list of the “Negroes” a year after the purchase. Out of the pages leaps a tale of incredible cruelty and indifference. Of the original forty-seven, nineteen had died—”4 taskable hands & 15 Superannuated blind Idiots & Children,” the overseer maliciously noted. He complained he was left with twenty men, three of whom were too old to be useful. And then there was Pompey, “the worst of the bad Negroes”; Sam, unfit for service; and Adam, who was blind. The women fared better in his estimation, and he made no comment on the children.²¹

The arrival of fifteen hundred or so African Americans in Georgia, most to the Lowcountry to supplement the losses incurred at the time of the evacuation, represented more than a simple addition to the labor force. The presence of these people who had spent one, two, or more years in Florida seeing and absorbing a different world, one where constraints were loosened, raises questions about the kind of cultural impact that they had on the enslaved communities on the Georgia coast. What narratives did the loyalist Africans of Florida carry with them? What perspective on life did people like Pompey and Sam offer? Each had his or her story, and collectively they shared a common set of experiences. They had witnessed the aftermath of the defeat of British arms and the resulting collapse of British power. They had seen a plantation economy come unraveled. They knew someone or had heard of someone who had received a certificate of freedom or escaped to the Seminoles or found a niche as a free Black person in the confusion of the evacuation. Most found themselves in a setting in Florida where controls were looser and greater autonomy was possible. Others knew people who had been kidnapped and sold to Havana or been subject to arbitrary violence. If nothing else, their memories gave them a powerful sense of the region in which they lived. They could not go back to thinking of themselves as part of small, self-contained communities isolated from the outside world. Those fifteen hundred men and women would not fail to leave an imprint on a population that numbered 13,261 in the Georgia Lowcountry in 1790.²²

On his arrival in July 1784, Governor Céspedes had issued a proclamation that required all white people having Black people “in their power,” slave or free, to register them. In addition, it required that all Black people or people of mixed race without a known owner or without papers present themselves to the governor, clarify their status, and obtain a work permit.²³ Those failing to do so would be claimed by the Spanish government and put to public works or sold into slavery. Céspedes thought the measure a way to clear out the “wandering vagrants” who proliferated around St. Augustine. The British viewed it as an attack on their property rights as guaranteed by the Treaty of Paris. It was an embarrassing reminder. Few British citizens possessed clear property titles to their enslaved people, as the chief justice, John Hume, pointed out to a glum Patrick Tonyn: “Your Excellency well knows, that five out of six of the Slaves in the Country, are held without any title deeds, and Bills of Sale were never given with New Negroes: parole Sales, and possession is all they can shew, which was sufficient Title by the Laws of this Province.”²⁴

Of the over 250 people who eventually came forward, most were in possession of certificates of freedom from the British commanding officer, Gen. Archibald MacArthur, in recognition of their service in South Carolina. More than half of that number belonged to thirty-eight family groupings. Even in flight, family ties remained central to their lives. The largest family came from Savannah, Bacchus and Betty Camel and their seven children, although they had embarked from Charleston before coming to St. Augustine. Disputes broke out between British citizens and the authorities. Katy, an enslaved women that John Milligan, a Savannah loyalist, claimed to have bought for his wife, presented herself “unknown to her master or mistress” to MacArthur, told her story, and obtained a certificate of freedom.²⁵ Céspedes was resolute in defending the basic principle of recognizing the free status of those who had some proof, however slender, and eventually issued certificates of freedom, mostly to individuals who had fought with or given aid to the British in South Carolina.²⁶

As the evacuations got under way, planters in Georgia and South Carolina journeyed to St. Augustine in an attempt to reclaim slaves taken or “stolen” by Loyalists.²⁷ Hopes rose when the Spanish governor took office and expressed a desire for amicable relations with the United States. Nevertheless, Céspedes made clear that his government would never hand back fugitives and reaffirmed the old policy of sanctuary that offered freedom and a recognized place in Hispanic society to fleeing slaves in return for conversion to Catholicism.²⁸ It was not only the case in Florida. Royal orders to Spanish governors in the colonies of Trinidad, Venezuela, Cuba, and Santo Domingo as well as Florida continued to encourage the immigration of freedom seekers from British, Dutch, and other foreign colonies throughout the 1780s. An increasingly impotent Spanish Empire refused to back down from a century-old policy.²⁹

East Florida presented a remarkable test case. Spain had few troops, few citizens, and little in the way of resources to defend its restored colony, but there were sound political and cultural reasons for activating the policy. The province was desperately undermanned, short of workers and skilled laborer, and stood to benefit by welcoming any and all comers. More significant was the diplomatic leverage offered vis-à-vis the United States in the face of the great territorial issues of the Mississippi Valley. Spain held as much territory as did its neighbor in North America and saw the policy as a useful diplomatic tool.³⁰ At a deeper level, the stance reflected the uniqueness of Spanish society and its legal codes, which accorded limited rights to slaves, including the right to own property, testify in court, and negotiate for manumission or liberty.

Among the first to respond to the open door were enslaved people who had been part of the African Americans carried from Florida into Georgia. Returning to a space they knew and appreciated for its greater freedoms was a natural instinct. Prince Whitten and his wife Judy had been taken from their neighboring plantations outside Charleston in 1780 by Col. William Young and a guerrilla fighter, “Wild Bill” Cunningham, and carried back to East Florida with as many as two hundred other captives. Prince could have been one of the colonel’s “colored Dragoons” that American guerrilla leader Francis Marion reported that he fought against later in the war. It is more likely that he remained an enslaved person since the property of Peter Whit-ten was “plundered as the spoils of war” and eventually sold.³¹ After three years in Florida, Prince was purchased by Jacob Weed, a wealthy rancher, land speculator, and agent of the federal government whom the Spanish used to represent some of their interests across the border. With thousands of acres in Camden County, Weed took the lead in organizing the small trading and shipping port of St. Marys.³² Whitten’s skill as a carpenter and a shaper of lumber was highly valued by this timber merchant. In December 1786, only eighteen months after arriving in Georgia, Prince’s family of four boarded a canoe and made their way several hundred yards across the river into Spanish Florida to seek asylum and ask for freedom.³³

Weed was less surprised by the fact of their escape than by their chosen destination. The family had already made attempts to flee to South Carolina but been caught. He was on the point of selling Prince back to Peter Whitten, his original “master,” and had agreed on terms to sell “the wench & Children” to a Mr. Kenty, her original enslaver in South Carolina. Prince’s flight was a heartfelt effort to keep his family together in the face of an oppressive system that tore families apart with scarcely a thought for lives destroyed. Learning that the four had headed south, he placed a notice that gave a fair measure of the family. According to Weed, Prince Whitten was a striking individual, 6 feet tall, “strong built and brawny,” talkative, a skilled carpenter, about thirty years old, from Africa. His wife Judy was “a smart, active wench,” about thirty, a creole, and their children, Glasgow, “a well-looking boy of open countenance and obliging disposition”, eight years old, and his sister Polly, six, with “lively eyes and gently pitted with the pox.”³⁴

Others who had been part of the reverse migration to Georgia followed. Six men who escaped from St. Simons in a canoe and made it to St. Augustine were part of the estate of a former deerskin merchant, James Spalding, who left St. Simons Island for St. Augustine at the beginning of the conflict and earned his considerable wealth providing supplies for the British army. In 1785, he moved back to the island, site of his original home, and began planting black-seed cotton that developed into the highly successful Sea Island cotton, a long, silky, strong fiber that commanded a premium price and helped fuel Britain’s Industrial Revolution.³⁵ From a neighboring plantation on St. Simons, a man named Primus entered the slave quarters of Alexander Bisset, who had accompanied his father from South Carolina to East Florida with one hundred bondsmen before the revolutionary war. A pragmatist, Bisset decided to throw in his lot with the new republic when the war concluded. Primus had little difficulty in persuading Sancho, James, Mary Ann, Ned, and John to join him in a flight to East Florida. It is probable that there had been extensive conversations over a period of time.³⁶

Between 1787 and 1790, over two hundred fugitives escaped and made their way, most by water, to East Florida.³⁷ If one adds those who fled between the end of the Revolution and 1797, the total probably came to over four hundred people, a figure that suggests more freedom seekers may have reached Florida in this brief period than during the several decades before the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The total does not count the many who were successful but were never reported to the authorities or the many others who had the misfortune of being caught before crossing the border. If one counts the enslaved people who came as fugitives between 1783 and 1786, the number climbs higher still. Most remained in Florida, but at least fifty-seven Black fugitives were sent to Cuba on the vessel Diana in accordance with orders.³⁸

The effect on coastal planters was profound. By October 1788, the grand jury of Chatham County, sifting through typically local issues, was startled to receive an angry petition from ninety citizens demanding action and responded in kind: “We present as a grievance of a most oppressive and alarming nature the frequent instances of negroes absconding from this state to East Florida, and the protection they meet with from the Spaniards, in violation of the laws of nations.” The petition demanded restitution of this “property” and called for the building of a boathouse on St. Simons “or some more southern station.”³⁹ Reports to the governor highlighted the “passing of negroes” into East Florida and their role in contributing to the general disorder that prevailed along the entangled border. A young revolutionary war hero with a plantation on the coast, James Jackson, now a general in the state militia, could scarcely restrain himself. He led the Georgia militia against the maroon encampment on Belleisle. Station a unit of the militia near St. Marys, he urged, and a host of problems would be solved: people of color would find no way to cross over, the plague of outlaws would be ended, and the Spaniards would learn respect.⁴⁰

Fugitives to Florida were cut from a different cloth from most Black freedom seekers who fled their plantations singly or in pairs to see family and friends or chose to shelter in secret spots around the margins of the formal world. The men and women who headed to Florida left in surprisingly large groups, sometimes families but more often bands of friends. They were willing to cut ties with their communities, risk crossing an international boundary, and face the uncertainty of a land where the official language was different from their own. Most chose to flee over water. The enslaved communities on barrier islands and coastal lands had deep ties to the tidal and marsh ecosystem that supplied the fish, oysters, and other marine life on which they depended.⁴¹ Most fugitive groups included one or more skilled watermen who showed a keen understanding of maritime culture.⁴² In South Carolina, 60 percent of skilled slaves who fled their enslavers had maritime experience, while slave boatmen accounted for 10 percent of all male enslaved people advertised as runaways.⁴³

The dash to Florida in large groups did not come about as a sudden decision. To escape required one or more boats or canoes, ample provisions and water, a set of goals that were generally understood, and thoughtful planning, nautical and otherwise. The psychology of flight brought forth a ruggedness and fortitude in fugitives that overcame the haunting doubts that gripped many at the outset of their venture. On May 8, 1789, sixteen slaves, nine of them from the plantation of John Davies, six from his neighbor Ferdinand O’Neil, and one the “property” of Alexander Creighton in Liberty County, put into play a carefully designed plan. The adults placed their baggage, including clothing, food, and water, in a vessel of some size and rowed away until it was safe to hoist a sail.

Shortly afterward, the planters caught wind of what was afoot and launched a vessel manned by two planters and other armed white men. The pursuing boat discovered the fleeing Blacks crossing the Cumberland Sound and ran them ashore between the Satilla and Crooked Rivers. The fugitives jumped out and took off on foot into the thick underbrush and swampy waters, hoping to lose themselves in the saw palmetto of the maritime forest and the Spartina cordgrass of the marsh. One by one they were picked off by their pursuers until all had been caught except for three men—Harry, Hector, and Isaac. Those three kept forging ahead, eluded their pursuers, stole a boat, and completed the dangerous journey to Amelia Island. The fact of sixteen desperate people fighting through swamp and palmetto to elude armed men personified the kind of heart and commitment necessary for success.⁴⁴

Canoes seemed to have been the most common watercraft thanks to the availability of cypress suitable for dugout construction and a set of techniques based on Indian and West African technology. Neither South Carolina nor Georgia had invested in the shipbuilding industry during the prerevolutionary period and residents relied instead on canoes, boats, and periaguas to bring the produce of plantations to market down tidal creeks and on to Savannah or Sunbury.⁴⁵ Hugging the coast or traveling the inland route behind the Sea Islands, these craft navigated the waterways from Savannah to St. Augustine with relative ease.

Case after case involved flight by canoes. Lt. Pedro Carne on Amelia Island reported that nine fugitives had arrived from Savannah in a canoe with a rudder, four oars, a mast, and a sail. In the craft were two boxes of clothing, a small cask of water, a cauldron for cooking, and two wooden plates.⁴⁶ Prince Whitten used a canoe to power his family across the St. Marys to Spanish territory. The six men from Spalding’s estate and the other six from Bisset’s are likely to have used canoes in their escape from St. Simons. Five enslaved people in the town of St. Marys boldly swam out into the river, boarded a Spanish canoe passing through, and reached the opposite shore.⁴⁷ Four fugitives from South Carolina were forced to land on Jekyll Island, where a planter saw opportunity and enslaved them on his estate. Several months later, Dick, Fortune, March, and Prince took another canoe or boat and finished their journey.⁴⁸ Christopher Paysan, resident of Amelia, captured three fugitives from Charleston, sent them to St. Augustine, and confiscated their canoe and several weapons for his own benefit. The governor allowed him to keep the guns but not the canoe.⁴⁹

James Spalding used his considerable authority to reach St. Augustine and present his case for restitution to the governor. Much to his surprise, the governor accorded him the privilege of speaking directly with his former captives. And much to his dismay, he watched as they laughed contemptuously in his face. The governor had promised freedom, they pointed out in high spirits. Before leaving St. Augustine, he penned a hastily written letter appealing to Céspedes’s sense of justice and pointing out that the governor’s decision was setting a bad example: “It will be easy for the rest of [my] slaves to follow their companions into this country in hopes of also being made free.” This would deprive him of his means of support.⁵⁰ Or so he pleaded. Céspedes returned the canoe but not the men. In need of watercraft, Spanish officials often kept the American-made canoes and sometimes, as an act of concession, returned a locally made substitute, to the anger of Georgians.⁵¹ An influential figure like Spalding recovered his boat while others did not.

Since the commander of the garrison on Amelia Island typically initiated reporting on fugitives, the official correspondence in the East Florida Papers records only a few flights overland. Given this scenario, it is likely that the number of fugitives is higher, perhaps significantly higher, than what has been put forward. Georgia planters, frustrated by their inability to seize their “property” so close by, threatened to invade Spanish territory in an effort to grab their enslaved, a reminder that many freedom seekers never went to St. Augustine but secured work or hid in the countryside between the St. Marys and St. Johns Rivers.⁵²

The commander of the district, Carlos Howard, asked Céspedes to make preparations to counter any invasion. Relations between East Florida and Georgia reached a nadir as preparations for armed conflict were made on the Spanish side, while Georgia showed a galling indifference to reining in the freewheeling adventurers and planters who dominated this frontier world where legal processes were notably absent.⁵³ The turmoil delayed the settlement of Glynn and Camden Counties, as planters attracted to the possibilities of new lands decided to wait and see whether military-style labor camps with little possibility of escape could be created. Pierce Butler, one of the larger slaveholders in the Carolina Lowcountry and owner of valuable lands on St. Simons Island, told his manager that he would not move his work-force to Georgia until the Florida question was settled.⁵⁴

The American side of the St. Marys River was no less a part of the borderland that encompassed the region. In 1790, only 304 Black people lived in the entire fifty-one-mile strip between the Altamaha and St. Marys Rivers, compared to the 13,115 who lived in the sixty-five miles between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers. Glynn County, where St. Simons and adjacent islands were to boast some of the largest rice and cotton plantations in later years, held only 193 whites and 220 blacks, including five free blacks. In Camden, there were more whites, 221 in all, and 84 blacks, including 14 free blacks.⁵⁵ Eight years after the war ended, there were fewer enslaved people and fewer plantations than before the conflict.⁵⁶ The legacy of a bloody guerrilla war had taken its toll, as had the sanctuary policy of the Spanish government.

James Seagrove, a former Philadelphia merchant who had spent time in Havana, took a lead role in organizing the county and was one of the founders of the town of St. Marys. He confessed to the Spanish governor that the port had become a magnet for smuggling and added the obvious: “There are numbers of suspicious and bad characters passing and repassing the river with property for sale such as horses, cattle, and Negroes etc., which in many cases have been stolen on both sides of the river.”⁵⁷ His call to put a monitoring station on Amelia Island was ignored. Within Camden County, there was little check on those who operated outside the law and considerable tolerance of those who pushed social norms, a frontier-like setting where individual egos found considerable space for expression.

Loosely organized groups of men, united by kinship networks but little else, traded in stolen cattle, horses, and occasionally enslaved persons. On the Spanish side of the St. Marys, the Rain cousins and John Bailey cooperated with Nathaniel Ashley and Richard Lang on the American side. Most had been loyalists during the Revolution and enjoyed a camaraderie rooted in military experience. During the late 1780s, Lang used an appointment as a customs official by the Spanish working on the American side to admit four hundred cattle illegally into Florida. Ashley gained notoriety for smuggling horses purchased in Creek territory, some of which had been stolen from Georgians.⁵⁸

Native Americans added to the feeling of insecurity on both sides of the river. Many decades before, a Scotsman had set up an isolated trading post, known as Trader’s Hill, only thirty-five miles from the mouth of the St. Marys and a few miles shy of the Okefenokee Swamp and made it into an important location for Indigenous people to obtain supplies, clothing, and provisions.⁵⁹ Not far away on the other side of the river but farther south into East Florida, the Scottish firm Panton, Leslie & Company, licensed by the Spanish government, had set up another of their several stores in the Florida Panhandle.⁶⁰ Their clientele aimed at the nearby Seminoles, then in the process of evolving away from their Creek roots.

Native hunting across farmlands became a common occurrence in a region where deer were increasingly scarce. During the latter part of the 1780s, incursions took on a more threatening appearance. At the western end of Camden County, a large party of Natives led by an Indian of mixed parentage suddenly emerged to surround a pair of white men rounding up their cattle. They killed the horse on which one was riding and held both overnight, threatening to murder them. Because James Bryant, one of their captives, was a sometime Indian trader who spoke Hitchiti, they decided otherwise and departed with the cattle, a substantial windfall by any measure.⁶¹ Then there were the occasional “rogue” warriors like the three men painted in black who raided a home on a small farm in the county, dashed out the brains of a three-year-old, and scalped a boy, all without apparent motive. Nothing else in the house was touched.⁶² That kind of apparently irrational terror left deep marks.

Concerns of the white elite about the dangers posed by Black and Native peoples in a lightly policed region were paramount. Before a justice of the peace in Glynn County, John Hornsby testified that his house had been attacked by a “mulatto” at the head of three or four Black men armed with muskets. He claimed they had pointed their muskets at his chest, rifled through the house, and helped themselves to guns, rum, bolts of cloth, and provisions. Apparently the victim was a merchant. In the process, they commandeered an unfinished canoe twenty feet long and three feet wide. Hornsby saw a second canoe come out of the shadows. After loading, the two canoes disappeared into the muddy currents of the Altamaha. The merchant suspected that the thieves had gone to East Florida and had his deposition sent to Spanish authorities.⁶³

Even in Florida the simple presence of Black freedom seekers was enough to generate outsized fears, especially among Anglo-American planters. Insertion into a slave society was never easy. When Prince Whitten crossed the St. Marys with his family, he found a place as a contract worker on a farm on the southern banks of that river. William Pengree, a prominent planter, complained that “the negro Prince and his family, who in reality belong to Colonel Weed, have behaved with such shamelessness and presumption since they have moved to the River, that two of my negroes, have fled with the idea of becoming free; I have been able to catch one and have sent to Georgia for the other.”⁶⁴ Pengree had once lived in Camden County. It is likely that the two men who escaped his grasp were headed back to the communities from which they had originally come.

Nor were white farmers, accustomed to having slaves at their beck and call, impressed with the work ethic of free Black men. Charged with constructing public facilities on the banks of the St. Johns, a manager explained his delay to the Spanish governor with the revealing note, “Supervising runaways takes a lot of time.” Indeed, assembling a work force of men who came to Florida in search of autonomy and creating an efficient work unit under white men accustomed to slavery was a challenge. The Anglo supervisor expressed his frustration at not being able to control their movements. Those free Negroes were in the habit of visiting enslaved Africans on plantations across the river from where they worked “at all hours of the night,” much to the discomfort of the white inhabitants.⁶⁵

In this loosely defined environment, confrontations reinforced the stereotype of the “Negro” as a criminal element in society. Magistrates were on the lookout for a Black man who had slipped out of jail in St. Augustine and stolen a horse. When two deputies approached an individual who fit the description riding northward, the man pulled a knife and lunged at one of the two but missed his target. When a deputy aimed a gun and told him to surrender, “The Negro positively refused to do so, and on jumping about was fired at by Mr. Blunt.” He was subdued. Standing before the justice, the African American claimed to be free since he had been in the “Black troop in the American War” and was being unfairly targeted. To the magistrate recording the incident, the status of being a veteran of the “American War” had lost its power to command attention.⁶⁶

Incident after incident underscored the vulnerability of African Americans in northern Florida. William Cain, an Indian trader and sometime farmer living on the St. Marys River, lodged a complaint of how an outlaw, with three stolen horses in tow, aimed a pistol at his head and robbed him of his own horse and the “Negro man” accompanying him. The robber met up with accomplices who had meanwhile kidnapped a “Negro woman” from a nearby planation. Together, the party crossed the river and headed to the Creek Nation to find a market for their horses and enslaved people. It was a lucrative trade.⁶⁷

For freedom seekers, that landscape changed quickly and unexpectedly in a decidedly unfavorable way. In a surprise move, King Charles IV of Spain issued an edict on May 17, 1790, that withdrew the century-old policy that had governed the fate of fugitive slaves from foreign lands since 1693. No longer would runaways from the United States be accorded their freedom in return for converting to Catholicism and embracing Hispanic society. A feeble ruler had given way to a set of ministers who were anxiously trying to navigate the treacherous waters of an unraveling empire. Local officials in Florida had long been advising the Spanish government to do so, pointing out that few fugitives ever converted to Catholicism and that, when they did, it was for show. The policy, they pointed out, antagonized more powerful neighbors with little gain to show for it. By a letter dated August 28, 1790, Governor Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, the newly appointed governor of East Florida, informed newly appointed Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson that the Spanish monarch had given orders “not to permit, under any pretext, that persons sold in slavery in the United States introduce themselves, as free, into the province of East Florida.”⁶⁸ And so a turning point had been reached.

The pivotal change reflected geopolitical concerns that went far beyond the politics of East Florida. No indication had been given that Madrid was considering a major step repealing a century-old policy. In fact, there was every indication of the opposite. An edict published in Spanish Trinidad only a few months earlier had welcomed runaways from the English and French colonies while Jamaican planters continued to be worried by Africans making their way to Cuba to gain free status under the protection of its governor.⁶⁹ The edict of May 17 came as a surprise to virtually everyone in North and South America. Geopolitical concerns in both hemispheres had flowed together in an unexpected way, perhaps triggered by the Nootka Sound Crisis, a confrontation between Spain, Great Britain, the United States, and Native Americans over sovereignty claims and maritime rights and trade in the Pacific Northwest.⁷⁰

Georgia planters welcomed the news but guardedly. If the new policy promised to halt runaways from the United States in the future, it explicitly declined to take any action on those who were already in Florida. The many enslaved people who had crossed the international border before 1790 would indeed be lost. Jefferson and Washington were cautious about embracing this hardline stance. They had no desire to pick a fight with the Spanish Empire when the larger game concerned navigation rights on the Mississippi River. Governor Edward Telfair dined with the president in an effort push him into taking a strong stand. Washington’s instructions to James Seagrove, the federal collector of the port of St. Marys, however, gave the newly designated diplomat ample running room. Seagrove was to ensure that Quesada fully enforce the king’s order to stop sheltering fugitives from Georgia, seek the return of slaves who had come since the proclamation of the edict, and, lastly, attempt to recover slaves lost since 1783. “This last instruction,” the president knowingly warned, “will require peculiar delicacy, and must be entered on with caution and circumspection, or [is] not to be taken up at all.”⁷¹

Seagrove’s opening position was blunt. He forcefully demanded a return of all fugitives who had arrived in Spanish East Florida before May 17, 1790, arguing that it was an act of justice for all property owners no matter where they resided.⁷² The final agreement fell far short of that mark. Quesada agreed to issue an order to his officials to detain fugitive slaves but never specified how they were to be returned or whether they were to be delivered in St. Augustine or on Amelia Island or elsewhere. Moreover, he demanded proof of ownership, a significant hurdle for many if not most planters. Nor would the Spanish government pay for the feeding and housing of prisoners, while all questions about their upkeep would have to be funneled through George Fleming, a loyalist merchant in St. Augustine. Finally, he stated that only those runaways who came after August 9, 1791, the date of the agreement, would be returned. Checkmated at each turn, Seagrove had no choice but to accept.⁷³

Seagrove’s agreement was a sobering reminder of how little power the United States actually exercised over this borderland region. It was also a hint that freedom seekers were not to be so easily halted at the border on St.Marys River. The period between 1791 and 1797 saw a continued flight into Spanish Florida although at a reduced flow of people. The circumstances say much about how the borderland on either side of the river was evolving. Indeed, as has been mentioned, the borderland was as much a process as a place, foreshadowing the uneven spaces on either side of the Ohio River in Kentucky and Ohio.