CHAPTER 6

The Florida of Don Juan McQueen

At the very moment that Titus was attempting to create an autonomous community for family and friends in East Florida and Georgia, entire settlements on the Georgia coast were being abruptly uprooted and relocated to Florida. At the beginning of the 1790s, hundreds of enslaved people found themselves deracinated with little warning, carried across the St. Marys River in a mass migration, and planted on largely unsettled spaces in East Florida, facing a new life in a Hispanic context.¹ The forced migration reflected a radical change in Spanish land policy that pushed the colony toward a genuine plantation economy. Africans and African Americans, whether recent arrivals or not, faced a new reality as the first moves of the Spanish government toward a plantation economy raised questions of how Hispanic culture, law, and society would accommodate the new reality of American planters playing a driving role and how those same planters and their enslaved would adapt to the changed setting.

East Florida governor Vicente Manuel de Céspedes had been closely watching events in West Florida, using the province as a model for opening up East Florida to settlers who could breathe economic life into what remained not much more than a glorified military outpost. By a royal order issued in 1787, Spain formally allowed loyalists who retained their British citizenship to settle along the rich alluvial lands of the Mississippi River, while opening the door to a controlled flow of Americans in search of opportunity.² Céspedes embraced this vision with enthusiasm. Northern Florida, he claimed, was being infiltrated by American frontiersmen “distinguished from savages only in their color, language, and the superiority of their depraved cunning and untrustworthiness.” By admitting farmers and planters, Spain would create “a living wall of industrious citizens” and build an export economy around cotton, rice, and timber.³

His reliance on cultural stereotypes may have reduced a complex dynamic to simple terms, but, for that moment, it had the ring of truth. On November 20, 1790, the Spanish government issued a decree enabling foreigners to migrate to East Florida and receive land grants based on the headright system, with each head of family eligible for one hundred acres and each dependent, whether slave or free, fifty acres.⁴ In return, settlers were to follow the same requirements as in West Florida: giving an oath of loyalty to the Spanish Crown, obeying Spanish law, and confining Protestant worship to the home.

The effect was electric. During the following three years, some 348 white men, women, and children entered East Florida, bringing with them at least 921 enslaved Black people and probably more.⁵ Although Americans formed a little less than one half of the settlers, they were the source for most of the enslaved. Many, like John McQueen, the planter who had imprisoned Titus, were one step ahead of their creditors and chose Florida rather than face bankruptcy and the loss of their human property.⁶ According to the magistrate for the St. Marys District, many of the wealthier immigrants intended to remain only until matters could be “made up with their creditors.”⁷

The infusion of Black and white people between the St. Johns and St. Marys Rivers promised to create a vibrant export economy, bring to an end the relative lawlessness of that area, and, it was hoped, call into being Céspedes’s image of a living wall of industrious citizens. To an extent it succeeded. More than half of the settlers came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, and France. Most were Protestant. Of the Americans, not a single Catholic was among them if one does not count McQueen, who converted after arriving. Almost 40 percent of both Americans and those of other nationalities came as single individuals without family.⁸ In some cases, they left wives and families behind, as did McQueen, whose spouse, Anne Smith McQueen, continued to reside in Savannah under the protection of her father and John’s brother, a merchant. Most of the others did not hold enslaved people.⁹ They were simple farmers or artisans or mariners who blended into the maritime community in St. Augustine.¹⁰ The Black population of East Florida more than doubled, from 588 enslaved people and 63 free Blacks in 1788 to 1,527 enslaved and 126 free Blacks, a step on the road to a full plantation economy.¹¹

Such a policy carried huge risks. The central question became whether Americans would give their loyalty to the government and accept the rule of Spanish law or in turn become disloyal and sow the seeds of rebellion. The role of John McQueen, a land speculator and planter in Florida until his death in 1807 at the age of fifty-seven, testifies to the presence of a small but important group of Americans who embraced Hispanic values to a surprising extent, remained loyal to the Spanish government, and opposed the intrigues of settlers conspiring to overthrow it. His flamboyant career as the largest slaveholder in East Florida, as a Presbyterian who converted to Catholicism, as an advisor to the governor, and as a backer of the free Black militia serves as a window through which one can peer into the conflicted lives of enslaved people who participated in this latest migration, as opposed to the freedom seekers whose story dominated the previous decade.¹²

McQueen was no stranger to a multicultural society. His father ranked among the top deerskin merchants in Charles Town before the Revolution, while the son’s own openness owed much to the cosmopolitan upbringing he received. When his father died an early death, the mother took young John to England for his education. Sometime during his late teens and early twenties, he became a sea captain, and his maritime credentials would catch the eye of Carolina legislators. When the Revolution began, he was named commander of the small patriot navy for South Carolina. His greatest skill seemed to have been in making himself useful to powerful figures. As a twenty-six-year-old, he greeted the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette when Lafayette landed in South Carolina on his way to Washington’s army, and he kept up that friendship after the war. On subsequent missions to Philadelphia, he was introduced to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and toward the end of the Revolution he provided intelligence and provisions to Gen. Nathanael Greene, a close friend until the general’s early death.¹³

At the conclusion of the war, McQueen reverted to his speculative ways and placed a high-risk bet on the purchase of Sapelo Island, one-half of St. Catherines, as well as Little Cabretta and Blackbeard Islands from the State of Georgia, a total of twelve thousand acres that had been confiscated from loyalist merchants.¹⁴ Young John moved aggressively to claim a stake in “live oaking” at a time when navies throughout the Atlantic were rebuilding their fleets using this wood with exceptional tensile strength and graceful curves that made it ideal for specialty parts on a ship. He sent some of his best enslaved timbermen to Cumberland Island to help Nathanael Greene initiate timbering on the extensive property the general had purchased there. The bet did not pay off.¹⁵ Despite the lobbying of Lafayette, the French Ministry of War made a half-hearted offer to buy his pieces but only if delivered to a French port, a financially ruinous condition.¹⁶

It remains a mystery how and why McQueen assembled an enslaved population of almost three hundred people on the Sea Islands during the 1780s when he was first and foremost a timberman with a taste for land speculation. Inheritance, opportunism, and debt on McQueen’s part shared in equal measure in explaining the three distinct groups that made up the population. The core set of families came from a substantial rice plantation on Horse Savannah Creek in South Carolina that the timber speculator inherited at his father’s death in 1762. At that time, they numbered well over one hundred people, but there is no indication of how many families or individuals were still present eighteen years later.¹⁷ These were men and women who gave a certain cohesion and stability to the whole community. Harry, his body servant, who had been with him since the age of twelve, belonged to this cohort. He offered a fierce loyalty to his “master,” was entrusted with considerable responsibility that included sailing on his own from West Florida to Havana back to St. Augustine, and eventually became a freeman with a small farm and a member of the prestigious free Black militia. When Mc-Queen died, he supervised the burial and noted that the enslaved had wept over “the loss of such a good owner.”¹⁸

The second group came from the manner in which McQueen took advantage of the confusion at the end of the Revolutionary War to seize unattached Black people and enlarge his holdings through subterfuge. The governor of South Carolina had placed in his care 120 enslaved people turned over by the British as they departed Charleston and asked that he hold them until claimed by their “masters.”¹⁹ Although enslavers appeared and made their claims, he benefited in the exchange and retained a few. One of these presented a letter from the British military that certified her freedom and became the basis for a long-running court battle in St. Augustine during the 1790s. How many came this way is unknown. Certainly they were the smallest of the three groups. Finally, McQueen purchased a large number of Africans during the 1780s from Thomas Shoolbred, an English slave trader in Charleston to whom he was deeply indebted, a financial obligation that hung over him for the remainder of his days.²⁰ These were recent survivors of the Middle Passage on slavers coming from West Africa.

McQueen had mortgaged his property on the Sea Islands to acquire additional timber-rich lands around Augusta and dozens more African captives, failed to pay taxes in three counties at a time when authorities had become less forgiving, and faced down creditors in court, notably Shoolbred. His hopes momentarily brightened when two young Frenchmen, the marquis de Chappedelaine and François Dumoussay, looking for an investment safe from the turmoil of revolutionary France, bought the islands. The complex sale, replete with lawsuits, did not solve his problems.²¹ The bet on St. Catherines and Sapelo ended in bankruptcy. At that point, he entered into conversation with Governor Céspedes, an acquaintance he had made during a diplomatic mission taken on behalf of the Georgia legislature. The soon-to-depart governor used these discussions to prod the captain-general of Cuba into approving the same land policy for East Florida as for West Florida. He let drop that “a certain Don Diego MacQueen,” with as many as five hundred slaves, had declared to him “his determination one way or another to become a Spanish citizen by moving his entire estate to the island of Trinidad” (“since he has not been allowed to settle here as a vassal of the King”).²²

When news of the change in land policy reached McQueen, the Georgian discretely assembled schooners and sloops and departed for St. Augustine in April 1791. Self-assured, this cosmopolitan figure meant to transform himself into a dominant figure on a smaller stage in a new cultural setting. He had a fair claim. The 280 enslaved people that accompanied him represented almost one-half of the entire slave population of East Florida as enumerated in the census of 1788.²³ Landing with his labor force in the schooners and sloops, he strode to the government building facing the plaza of St. Augustine and took an oath of allegiance to the Spanish Crown, with the new governor, Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, as a witness. This complex man who embodied so much of the revolutionary generation—with his patriotic credentials, his taste for land speculation, his friendship with leading public figures in the United States, his stake in the emerging national economy, and his Presbyterian roots—changed loyalties with dizzying speed. A few days later, McQueen played on the excitement by announcing his desire to convert to the “One True Faith” and embrace an institution that was the ultimate expression of Hispanic values. Two months after his arrival, the assembled ranks of the priesthood in St. Augustine came together to baptize this longtime Scottish Presbyterian into the Catholic faith.²⁴

The victims of this migration were the Africans whose sudden removal from the Sea Islands had come as one more unpleasant surprise. McQueen had studiously avoided giving advanced warning to anyone of his departure for fear of tipping off the creditors. Bewildered and shocked, the families received minimal notice, were forced to depart without a farewell to family members or friends on other plantations, and had no choice but to leave behind livestock, gardens, and material possessions in the rush. Shortly after landing, at least five of their number voted with their feet and escaped over the St. Marys River to be reunited with extended family in Georgia. Quickly caught and returned, they served as a cautionary tale. Their capture was one more indicator of McQueen’s high standing along the coast since Georgia planters were notorious about incorporating fugitives from Florida into their own labor force.²⁵

Where did such a large body of Africans and people of African descent go once they disembarked in St. Augustine? How were they housed and maintained? For the tiny government of Spanish Florida that was already short of cash, the logistical challenge was enormous. Probably they were placed in different locations outside the town and encouraged to raise their own provisions despite the late May start. Conditions were miserable for these forcibly uprooted people who were expected to cope as best they could. But they did not have to wait long before John McQueen obtained a huge grant of land, made all the sweeter through an extraordinary adventure in keeping with his outsized personality.

In late 1791, Governor Quesada was in a state of panic because thirty-one-year-old William Augustus Bowles, a former loyalist armed with a vague expression of support from the British government, was aiming at nothing less than the overthrow of Spanish rule in Florida, the creation of an independent state among the Creeks and Seminoles, and the reintroduction of Great Britain as an active force in the Southeast.²⁶ He was sailing around the Florida coast to reunite with his father-in-law, Kinache, the most powerful Seminole leader in the Apalachicola region and arguably in the entire network of decentralized towns that made up the still coalescing Native people. After the British defeat at Pensacola late in the war, Bowles had deserted his unit and sought refuge with Natives led by Kinache. He married the chief ’s daughter and intended to build on the resulting relationships to create a veritable state anchored in the grievances felt by Natives. With two vessels supplied by the governor and a makeshift crew recruited along the waterfront, an emboldened McQueen sailed to the west side of Florida, seized several prizes, and came close to tracking down the would-be revolutionary.²⁷

If the expedition failed to secure the man, the demonstration of Spanish “naval” power was important in saving face for a weak government. Quesada responded by granting McQueen the whole of Fort George Island at the mouth of the St. Johns River, several thousand acres of mostly marsh but with valuable uplands at the northern and southern ends.²⁸ For the first few months, enslaved men and women were put to work raising provisions to feed themselves and building “Negro huts” thatched with palms. At the site of a former indigo plantation, McQueen installed several metal vats for the manufacturing of the dye but soon reverted to form. His laborers were diverted to cutting timber, always a dependable source of income, and building sawmills at the north end, still known today as Los Molinos de McQueen.²⁹

According to an inventory at McQueen’s death, Los Molinos sheltered ninety-three slaves living in seventeen wooden cabins. Most of them raised Sea Island cotton, although timbering always remained a staple commodity produced by a water-driven saw. Dominating the plantation was Mc-Queen’s own well-furnished house, surrounded by other wooden structures, including one for cotton gins, a water-driven saw with two working blades, a blacksmith’s forge, a kitchen, and livestock pens.³⁰ The population included forty children or adolescents, forty between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine, and thirteen who were fifty or older. Most lived in fifteen nuclear families, but on the plantation as a whole men outnumbered women by fifty-one to forty-two. The largest family had eighteen members, including the grandparents, Jacob and Amy, sixty-five and fifty years old, two other men and three other women, and eleven children or adolescents. Jack and Theresa, both thirty years old, had four young children, aged nine, eight, four, and two. As a carpenter, Jack was the most highly valued enslaved person (at 600 livres) other than the blacksmith. Seven people were listed as “mulatto.” Nancy, twenty-eight years old, bore that designation as did her ten-year-old daughter, Sophia, but not her two younger children, Sam and James.³¹

Other grants followed as the government looked with favor on McQueen, an extraordinary individual whom the captain-general of Cuba described as “a wealthy, intelligent, expert man, one partial to the Spaniards.”³² Within three years of his arrival, McQueen had assembled an estate that spanned sixteen thousand acres of land, claimed another ten thousand acres, and received a favorable response to setting up a sawmill near the southern tip of the peninsula to export lumber to Havana with claims on thousands of surrounding acres. His empire of sand, mud, water, and timber matched those of John Graham and Governor James Wright in prerevolutionary Georgia.³³

Of the two plantations established on the St. Johns River, the first, called Canefield, later Shipyard, spanned over a thousand acres and housed fifty-eight enslaved people in nine cabins, a few miles south of today’s Jacksonville.³⁴ As the name indicates, Shipyard had a stock of wood and heavily wooded grounds around it, together with carpenter tools. The enslaved families included an equal number of men and women and tended to be younger than those at Los Molinos. In their twenties, Paul and Bina were raising four young children. Forty-five-year-old Clarisa had three teenagers in her household. Nevertheless, four individuals were listed as eighty years old, two were ninety, and one was said to be one hundred five years old. If the five young single males were to marry, some would have had to search for their wives on other estates. The single women like Clarissa were older and had either lost their husbands or had husbands on other plantations.

The second plantation on the St. Johns, San Pablo, near Cowford, the crossing point now at the heart of Jacksonville, covered 2,266 acres and sheltered 106 people living in twenty-eight houses. The least productive of several enterprises, San Pablo contained the highest number of people fifty years or older, many in their sixties and seventies and older, just shy of one-third of the population. It may well be that these were from the plantation of McQueen’s father on Horseshoe Creek in South Carolina, reflecting his disposition never to sell enslaved people even when hard-pressed financially but rather to duck and weave in order to hold on. According to the inventory at his death in 1807, the humans located at San Pablo represented considerably less value than those on his other plantations. Another twenty-three people worked on a smaller plantation on a creek off the St. Johns, and ten bondsmen raised crops on a farm on Amelia Island.³⁵ On virtually every unit, enslaved people produced lumber, always the cornerstone for Mc-Queen’s success; others raised Sea Island cotton and provisions like corn and peas; and a small number herded cattle. Rice was a minor crop.³⁶ Government contracts provided a ready market for the lumber.

Harry McQueen, John McQueen’s faithful and supportive body-servant, had witnessed his owner’s transition from a southern planter of the eighteenth century who demanded absolute obedience to a man with a more paternalistic approach, showing concern for the well-being of enslaved people, sometimes real, more often for show, but always self-interested. In letters to his family in Savannah, John McQueen expressed his concern for the health of particular Black people, described their illnesses, and spoke movingly of their deaths.³⁷

His son shared those sentiments. John McQueen Jr. had come to Florida to be with his father and to serve in the trading firm of Panton, Leslie. From St. Augustine, the son advised his sister, Eliza, who was in Savannah, not to marry Bryan Morel, the much younger brother of John Morel, describing him as “a hard Negro Master,” a sign of “a little mind & bad disposition.”³⁸ What made the father and son unusual was the way they worked within a Spanish context and their embrace, however partial, of Hispanic values and norms, especially of a three-caste society in which free Blacks had a prominent role. The father was not alone in this respect and provided leadership to a small group of American planters who adapted as well. Peter Carne and Andrew Atkinson, captains in the militia for the northern district, were two of his leading supporters.

Harry was almost certainly a baptized Catholic. McQueen demanded as much. The planter met each week with Father Miguel O’Reilly, participated in the many rituals of the Catholic Church, prayed on a daily basis, and provided opportunities for his enslaved people to convert. In 1788, a bishop had conducted an ecclesiastical visitation of the entire province and observed “with great pain” that almost all the slaves and free Black people lived without the sacrament of baptism and “were denied the happiness of being Christians.”³⁹ When Father Hassett, the second priest in St. Augustine, made a tour of the province in 1793, he noted that McQueen had 44 of his “children” baptized and eventually saw to the baptism of 110 children and adults, more than for any other planter in Florida, Spanish, or non-Spanish.⁴⁰ McQueen served as godparent in a number of instances and was a witness to many marriages, a sharp departure from American practices in which the marriage of slaves had no legal basis. McQueen’s conversion to Catholicism was no cynical ploy as is frequently suggested, and his concern for the spiritual life of the enslaved set him apart from his peers.

But his paternalism had sharp limits. The other side of the romantic image of “Don Juan” McQueen was visible in a man who pursued escaped slaves with English hunting dogs, used his position as judge of the northern district to maintain the violent and oppressive nature of a slave society, and participated in the African slave trade in a desperate attempt to right his shaky finances.⁴¹ His embrace of the trade was no less vigorous than his commitment to capturing runaways. When the Georgia legislature banned the trade from Africa and the Caribbean from January 1, 1798, he obtained a license from the new East Florida governor, Enrique White, to bring a vessel carrying seventy-seven captives—thirty-three men, twenty-one women, and twenty-three children—into Florida and sell the human cargo primarily to U.S. citizens coming across the sound.⁴² Indulging the planter, White authorized Georgia slave traders to come to Amelia Island and broker the sales to fellow Georgians duty-free, a considerable enticement. Alexander Watt, the leading dealer in Savannah, was present at this event, as was Edward Swarback, a Savannah slave trader of German descent, and, surprisingly, James Seagrove, the U.S. agent to the southern Indians, who had dabbled in the slave trade before settling at St. Marys.⁴³ McQueen was dissuaded by Robert Mackay, his son-in-law and slave trader in Savannah, from joining a subsequent plot to smuggle Africans into Georgia.⁴⁴

In a province with a legal system rooted in Roman and canon law, enslaved people were able to stand up to their “masters” by having recourse to the courts or at least to the local justice of the peace, on a range of issues. It may have taken a strong person to follow through and pursue a legal challenge to the person who controlled his or her fate, but many did, whether it was protesting unfair treatment, asking for a price to be set for the purchase of one’s freedom, or enforcing a contractual relationship. Isabel Mc-Cully, who later called herself Nancy, was an extraordinarily strong-willed, determined woman who fought for her legal rights against John McQueen, one of the most powerful men in East Florida, in a Hispanic legal system of which she had little knowledge. She took the lead role from her husband and conducted herself with considerable self-confidence. Seized by McQueen in South Carolina in the aftermath of the Revolution, McCully clung to a letter that testified to her and her husband’s freedom for service to the British army in Charleston.⁴⁵ The military had issued certificates of freedom to enslaved people who escaped from patriot planters and came into British lines to participate in the defense of the crown. Unfazed by Mc-Queen’s dismissal of the letter, Nancy refused to let the question of her status as a free person be pushed aside and forgotten.

The Siete Partidas, a compilation of Roman and canon law whose origins lay in the Middle Ages, recognized the slave as a human being and gave enslaved women as well as men the right to sue.⁴⁶ One year after her traumatic removal to Florida, Nancy filed suit against her enslaver and laid out a compelling story. She related to a judge how she and her husband had fled to British lines when their master and his widow in South Carolina had died, and she and her husband had earned a certificate of freedom from the military for their service. As the war ended, the British turned them over to the Americans as they made haste to evacuate. At the governor’s direction, the two were carried to the McQueen plantation in South Carolina to join the 120 individuals sheltered there. Apparently she had the opportunity to leave the compound but elected to stay “because she was pregnant, sick, and starving.” When she was well enough to leave, McQueen ignored her plea and carried her and her growing family to St. Catherines Island in Georgia along with others who had not been claimed.⁴⁷

When McQueen finally sold her and her family to a Spanish don, as much to rid himself of a nuisance as for financial gain, she filed a second suit and again produced the paper she claimed granted her family freedom. And once again McQueen discounted the value of this “freedom paper,” saying that it only promised to maintain the family in the same job with the British army and nothing more. And therein lay the ambiguity of the Philipsburg Declaration issued by General Clinton in 1780, promising limited freedom without a formal promise of full freedom. In 1784 and 1785, Gen. Archibald MacArthur, once British commander in Charleston and then in St. Augustine, ultimately stood behind several hundred of those certificates when pressed by Céspedes at the time of the evacuation. McQueen described how MacArthur had turned over to the governor of South Carolina hundreds of Black people in 1782, of which the governor turned over 120 to him. “They all came to my plantation, were fed and supported and some of them for many months at my expense,” he noted in the Spanish court, “Every week or two their respective owners came and claimed them away. At length they were all taken.”⁴⁸ At best, this was a half-truth. He had confiscated those for whom there was no clear title.

The semiliterate Nancy stood toe-to-toe with a man who belonged to an international elite that had included George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, boldly disputing his attempt to discredit her arguments point by point. When he said that her Carolina owners had attempted to reclaim her, she replied that they were deceased before the end of the war. When he said her slip of paper was signed by a simple soldier, she countered that it had the full faith of the British army behind it. She challenged him to produce any proof of ownership, which he could not. She cited the support she had received from the Marquis de Chappedelaine, who had bought St. Catherines Island, and urged the court to contact her previous master’s family and friends now living in Philadelphia. McQueen’s strongest point hinged on the piece of paper that Nancy McCully had carefully guarded over the years and presented in court. “But on the so-called certificate being produced,” he told the judge, “it proved to contain nothing more than a note of some hanger-on of the army, that they were under his protection to prevent their being imployed in other departments.” Her sale to the intendant was allowed to stand. An illiterate field hand, she showed a remarkable ability to conduct her case in court but had little or no grasp of Spanish institutions and law and of the need for powerful allies like the Catholic Church.⁴⁹

Paradoxes abounded. During the “Second Spanish Period” (1784–1821), many American planters in East Florida embraced the use of armed Black militiamen in defense of the province at precisely the moment that their peers in the United States were burrowing further into a racist ideology that saw no room for Black people other than as bonded labor. Don Juan Mc-Queen stood at the center of this enigma. While fighting Nancy McCully in court, chasing freedom seekers in northern Florida, and importing Africans from West Africa, he embraced wholeheartedly the idea of a free Black militia that could defend the integrity of the Spanish colony. He accepted Black soldiers as capable fighters, reliable and tough human beings with a full range of emotions and talents. McQueen himself defied the odds when he led Black troops into a skirmish against Georgians involved in a clumsy rebellion in Florida in 1795.⁵⁰

McQueen’s brief moment leading the Black militia was a little-known episode during a mini-invasion of the colony by a group of adventurers out of Camden County. Historian James Cusick notes that, during the postrevolutionary period, the Spanish borderlands of East and West Florida and Spanish Louisiana comprised an area of constant turmoil. Between 1778 and 1818, fourteen different conspiracies, revolts, or invasions occurred, many carried out by small groups of white men who drew their support from across international boundaries. In areas of weak authority, these adventurers were motivated by a desire for self-aggrandizement, contempt for Spanish regulation, personal feuds with Spanish functionaries, clan loyalty, and the ability to whip up support among discontented settlers. Seven of those events shook East Florida.⁵¹

The background lay in a failed invasion in the spring of 1794 by American adventurers, backed by French money and naval vessels.⁵² The revolutionary government in Paris had dispatched an emissary to Charleston, Edmund-Charles Genêt, to dispense funds and recruit troops in an effort to topple the government of both provinces in Florida and expand the revolutionary movement to the Americas.⁵³ For many Georgians, a full-fledged assault, whether under French sponsorship or American, offered an opportunity to resolve the question of runaway slaves to their satisfaction, spike Spanish influence over Native Americans, and create conditions for eventual annexation of the territory.⁵⁴ A hastily called council of war in St. Augustine put the regiment from Cuba on alert, called up all the free “Negroes” in the province, and summoned the Black militia inside and outside of St. Augustine.⁵⁵ The French threat collapsed when a change of government in Paris produced a radical change in foreign policy and support evaporated overnight.

The clumsy, brutal handling of the scare by Governor Quesada backfired badly when he ordered the houses of suspect collaborators south of the St. Marys to be burned as part of an ill-conceived scorched-earth policy.⁵⁶ Almost immediately, a handful of American settlers in Florida fled to the safety of Camden County and began fomenting a new plot to overthrow a government they held in utter contempt.⁵⁷ On June 29, 1795, a small group, joined by eighteen Georgians from Camden County, launched an assault on the tiny military post of Juana on the St. Johns, where they were greeted like heroes by the militia stationed there.⁵⁸ Matters took a more serious turn when the momentarily triumphant rebels captured Fort St. Nicholas, located on the southeastern side of the St. Johns and guarding the all-important road from Georgia to St. Augustine. In a vigorous counterattack, an assault force launched by the Spanish government mirrored the multicultural nature of Floridian society: a brig captained by an Englishman with a crew of English, Black sailors, and others, forty veteran soldiers of the Third Cuban Regiment, thirty-two free Blacks and mixed race men, including Prince Whitten and Felipe Edimboro, and thirteen from the white militia of St. Augustine. For the first time, an organized unit of freemen, composed primarily of freedom seekers from Georgia and South Carolina, participated in the defense of the colony, an evocation of the stirring memory of Captain Menendez and the freemen of Fort Mose in 1740.⁵⁹

After the rebels fled Fort St. Nicholas in the face of the superior firepower and retreated to the safety of Camden County, Quesada appointed McQueen commander of the naval forces on the St. Johns River. When word came that Gen. Elijah Clarke, Revolutionary War hero and unrepentant expansionist, was assembling his frontiersmen on the St. Marys for a fresh chance at dismembering the province, McQueen was asked to lead the Black militia in the place of John Leslie, the successful deerskin merchant and perhaps his closest friend.⁶⁰ The war council in St. Augustine ordered the arming of all freemen still not under arms and the deployment of a hundred troops from the Third Cuban Regiment. McQueen was instructed to find arms for those freemen who did not have any weapons.

In the final episode of the mini-rebellion of 1795, McQueen personally led the Black militia against a fresh incursion by a small number of diehards. A handful of the followers of General Clarke crossed the St. Marys, raided the home of a farmer who supported the government, and made off with three enslaved people.⁶¹ The enslaved were promptly sold to residents of Camden County. With 150 frontiersmen and adventurers at the tiny village of Temple on the upper part of the river, Clarke led an advance party of thirty men across the St. Marys to probe Florida’s defenses. A member of the McGirt family was captured. Had the defenses at Fort Saint Nicholas been strengthened? Yes, Daniel McGirt replied matter-of-factly. Were the loyal militiamen being paid any better than they had been? Yes! Were there any free Negroes among the defenders? Yes! The interrogator must have breathed deeply when he observed, “I reckon they will fight Dam strong.” It was clearly recognition of their emerging reputation as fighters and their preference for dying rather than return to slavery.⁶² When the Spanish force reached the hammock where Clarke was thought to be, only campfires were found. Once more, the frontiersmen and adventurers melted away rather than risk battle with Black troops and white militiamen.

McQueen’s military skills were used to best effect when Spanish Florida faced a new challenge from William Augustus Bowles, the loyalist who escaped from house arrest in the Philippines in 1799 and returned to the Apalachicola region to carry through his vision of creating an independent Indian state under British influence.⁶³ When the Seminoles launched a series of attacks against the plantations along the St. Johns in 1800, McQueen coordinated the actions of the governor and planters in mounting a defense. For the northern district, he hurried about looking for gunpowder for the militia in the area, set up a defensive position near the crucial crossing at Cowford, and asked the governor to “strengthen us with the Black gen’l [Georges Biassou] and his colored troops,” a measure of his respect for this veteran of the Haitian Revolution. Known for his military skill as well as brutality, Biassou, an early leader of the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue, had built an army of thousands and had been enjoying an awkward retirement in Spanish Florida with his followers. After Biassou died from natural causes, McQueen suggested to the governor that, for those planters nervous about their exposure to the Seminoles, “nothing would quiet their minds so effectively as your establishing a post of free negroes [if regular troops cannot be spared].”⁶⁴

After Bowles was captured and imprisoned in Cuba, East Florida entered into a decade of spectacular growth. Motivated in part by the closing of the slave trade in the United States, American and foreign settlers poured into the colony to take advantage of the huge reserves of unclaimed land, rich natural resources, and resistance to Anglo-American hegemony.⁶⁵ In an unprecedented migration in 1803, sixty-three new settlers brought into the province 2,270 enslaved men and women and their children, a greater influx of Africans than Georgia ever experienced in any one year before the close of the slave trade.⁶⁶ That injection of labor, prompted by fears for the closing of the African slave trade, fueled a booming trade in lumber, cotton, and rice, resulting in a record level of prosperity. The town of Fernandina on Amelia Island appeared as if out of nowhere and emerged as the second largest in the colony, the port of choice for Georgians who wanted to escape the severe disruption in trade caused by Jefferson’s Embargo Act.⁶⁷

With the influx of this entrepreneurial set of planters, many of them British citizens and former loyalists, McQueen saw his position in the colony diminished. A restless person, he was a speculator by temperament. His operation could no longer sustain itself with a man at its head more interested in timbering than planting. Flailing about, he removed the overseer of his Amelia Island farm for attending “more to his own interests” than to McQueen’s affairs and noted that none of his cotton had been ginned for the market.⁶⁸ The Georgian could never resolve the underlying problems that indebtedness created and turn his four plantations into efficient, profitable operations. Despite the extensive land and labor that he had amassed, he never developed his enterprises to the point that he could pay down his debts in Savannah or Charleston of £60,000 ($300,000) by the turn of the century.⁶⁹

His creditors kept up a steady drumbeat of threats and lobbied the governor to help their cause. Notable among these was Shoolbred, who sold slaves to Florida planters and enjoyed a certain leverage over local officials. At one point, McQueen grandly promised to sell his entire estate of 260 people except for 22 bondsmen that he proposed to keep for one of his plantations to maintain himself in comfort.⁷⁰ That never happened. It was another stalling tactic. When he died in 1807, the average age of his enslaved people was unusually high. Some 22 percent were over fifty years old, a rare phenomenon on coastal plantations where black mortality was elevated.⁷¹ Clearly he had chosen not to sell those coming from his father’s plantation.

When McQueen faced bankruptcy once again near the end of this life, he chose a novel way of addressing the dilemma that spoke to those deeper values. Instead of commodifying his “property,” he sold the land on which Los Molinos and San Juan stood for $28,000 and rented the workers at the two plantations to the new owner, John Henry McIntosh, once imprisoned in Cuba for his involvement in the intrigues of the mid-1790s and a member of a prominent coastal family. “I have hired him the Working Negroes here,” McQueen told his son, John Jr., “for 120 dollars the head . . . I begin to take new Courage and on your plan I hope yet to leave my poor Negroes to my family.”⁷² McIntosh was to pay ten dollars per person per month. McQueen chose to hold on to “his people,” partly out of loyalty, partly in the knowledge that his son would inherit the most valuable part of his estate.

When he died in 1807, his body servant, Harry, emerged as the pivotal person who supervised the burial at Los Molinos plantation. A solemn procession of twelve Black people carried his coffin to the gravesite. The faithful body servant was manumitted by the terms of the will, became a subsistence farmer through a government land grant, and joined the free Black militia, where he found himself in the company of Prince Whitten and Edimboro, part of that tight-knit circle of men who set the tone for the free Black community of East Florida.⁷³ His path to emancipation lay through devotion to his enslaver but ironically ended in the company of those free Blacks who had escaped their Georgia planters and went on to fight those same Georgians.

McQueen’s death marked the loss of the one American leader in East Florida who unabashedly championed Hispanic values. His conversion to Catholicism and devotion to the liturgical life of the Catholic Church suggests as much. His active role in serving as godparent to so many Black people, his tolerance of mixed marriages, and his acceptance of the necessity for a free Black militia was at considerable variance with American practices as well.⁷⁴ Increasingly he found himself in the minority. The growing number of settlers from the United States, small farmers and frontiersmen for the most part, brought with them a sharply bifurcated view of Blacks and whites that had no room for the three-caste system of Spanish society and a law that viewed the enslaved as legal personalities.

Some years before his death, John McQueen had welcomed the arrival of Louis Joseph de François Richard, a French refugee from Saint-Domingue, and his family, together with twenty enslaved Blacks, and was impressed enough to employ his son, Francis Richard Jr., as the manager of the extensive lumbering operation at Shipyard with its massive sawmill. Mirroring the attitudes of the Hispanic elite, Francis had two and possibly three enslaved consorts during his lifetime and fathered thirteen children by them.⁷⁵ McQueen had stood as godparent to the fourth child, embracing the color line as a flexible instrument that was as much a matter of personal convenience as a perceived law of nature. It was an unthinkable public display for coastal Georgians, who kept their sexual exploitation of Black women well hidden from public view. Although there is no evidence that McQueen had a mixed-race family, his housekeeper in St. Augustine was Maria, mother of three children, one of whom, also Maria, was listed as a “mulatto.”⁷⁶ European-African unions were common and accepted throughout the length and breadth of Florida. Many of the wealthiest ranchers, planters, government officials, and merchants had large mixed-race families and recognized their mixed-race children. Prominent among them was John Leslie, close friend of McQueen and a partner in dominant Panton, Leslie, & Company.⁷⁷

“French Negroes” also posed an issue in the changing society of Hispanic Florida. Dominic, a favored captive on the Richard plantation, cut a striking figure for a style of dress more characteristic of Saint-Domingue than Florida, his casual use of French, and the unaccustomed autonomy that he enjoyed. Philip and William Dell, a father and son who lived close by, were appalled. Eager to exploit a new frontier, these eager Americans had arrived in 1802 with an indentured servant, eight slaves, and attitudes at considerable variance with those of Spanish society. They worked a small farm and had bid on property owned by Richard that apparently led to a disagreement that colored their subsequent dealings.⁷⁸

One Sunday, Dominic took his wife and children across Pottsburg Creek for an afternoon away from the plantation visiting friends. As they were waiting for the canoe that served as the ferry to carry them back, William Dell arrived at the same time and demanded to see his pass. Dominic replied that he did not have a pass, had never used one, and that he had always been allowed this freedom by Mr. Richard. Incensed at what he deemed impudence, Dell grabbed a wooden stick and beat him fiercely, pushing the defenseless man into the creek in front of his horrified wife and children. The family was forced to watch as their husband and father was humiliated and emasculated. Lycurgus, the Black ferryman, maneuvered his canoe to grab Dominic and shove him and his family into the boat. The planter pursued in his own canoe, forcing the victim to jump into the water rather than running the risk of causing the boat to tip over and endangering the life of his family. Dell continued to hit him whenever he surfaced until Lycurgus, fearing that he would drown, rescued the injured man.⁷⁹

In a hearing before a justice of the peace, Francis Richard demanded satisfaction for his injured worker and for the services that he lost during Dominic’s recovery. Dell retorted that, if he were in the United States, he would not care a whit if the slave had drowned. “If he caught him, he would have learned him [how] to speak to a white man,” said one David Sweeney in a deposition.⁸⁰ Although Capt. Andrew Atkinson testified that Dominic had been severely beaten and manhandled and that he had seen the injuries, the examining doctor, another American, insisted that he found no evidence of bruising. The justice of the peace, an American as well, seized the opportunity to dismiss the charges.⁸¹ Two worldviews were colliding, and the cruder, harsher view based on a purely racial definition of slavery was gaining the upper hand along the banks of the St. Johns River. William Dell would participate eagerly in the Patriot War that took place in 1812 as a priceless opportunity to rid the country of “savage” Indians and “the Spanish yoke.” He died violently in a skirmish during that ill-fated attempt.⁸²

For most of the captives on the McQueen plantations, one last migration across an international boundary awaited. The father had left massive debts. Creditors were quick to assert their claims. John McQueen Jr. handled the estate with an insider’s knowledge of Spanish procedure grounded in the time he had spent in St. Augustine and Pensacola as an agent of Panton, Leslie. The plan was risky: delay the legal process as best as he could, offer land in settlement of as many debts as possible, and find a way to smuggle as many of the 280 enslaved people back into Georgia as possible. The key to success if creditors were to be held at bay was shipping these human beings across the St. Marys as quickly as possible without attracting attention. On board a vessel off Amelia Island, Robert Mackay, McQueen’s brother-in-law and cotton broker, wrote his wife, Eliza McQueen MacKay, “I am busy removing the Negroes into Georgia as fast as possible and hope soon to finish, as I am really tired of being here and wish much to be in Savannah.”⁸³ The challenge was the constant petitioning by those whom he would prefer not to take back—the old, the feeble, the difficult, all the people he preferred to leave in East Florida as economic liabilities:

The Negroes all seem glad to go to Georgia, but I have been dreadfully pestered by many of those that were sold [to Floridians], begging to be taken back, saying they were enticed away by wicked people. In one case, I have given way to keep peace with a large family. Old Minah who was sold with her daughter to Richard, says it was all a plan of his to get her, and her other children making such an uproar about separation I have taken her back. She is of little value and it makes not much odds but makes it pleasant to preserve peace and quiet. And I am sure it is very agreeable to me to make them comfortable and as happy as they can be.⁸⁴

It was an impressive exercise in self-deception. McQueen’s son-in-law found himself in a position of power to decide who was worth keeping and who could be left behind, mistaking the swelling chorus of pleas from those whom he had sold with expressions of undying loyalty and devotion. Those pleas were less about loyalty to a family than having second thoughts about having agreed to be sold to Francis Richard, an apparently benevolent man, and seeing their own relatives and friends depart for Georgia. While basking in the faux praise of Minah and the daughter, McQueen was shuttling the rest over to Cumberland Island, where the descendants of his father’s old friend Nathanael Greene held them on their Dungeness estate. While this operation proceeded, the young man sat on a vessel off Amelia Island grandly dinning on fine turtle from the Bahamas, chicken from Savannah, and turnips, carrots, beets, and cabbage from Dungeness.⁸⁵

A missing element in the story of the McQueens and their enslaved population is the presence of Native Americans, never far away from the fluid boundaries of Spanish East Florida, itself a tiny intrusion into the vastness of the Southeast. The attempt by Titus to escape from John McQueen’s plantation by fleeing to the camp of Cohiti and the Seminole hunting party is a testimonial. He came close to succeeding. Five years later, in 1800, a small party of Seminoles suddenly appeared at the Richard property, next door to McQueen’s Shipyard plantation. The Natives grabbed three field hands finishing their labor in the field as the sun was setting, threw them on the back of their horses, and rode into the dusk. Dominic was among them. One of the other men escaped that same night by waiting until everyone else was asleep. Dominic was ransomed two years later. The third never returned, perhaps because he chose to stay.⁸⁶ The McQueen enslaved were fully aware of the dangers and sometimes opportunities that raids by Indigenous people posed for them.⁸⁷ Native Americans, whether Creek or Seminole, posed a different kind of choice for the Black population along the coast of Georgia and East Florida, one that required weighing difficult options.