CHAPTER 1

Black Sailors, Oglethorpe’s Georgia, and Spanish Florida

Although poor, Savannah was a distinctive town in British North America. Only six years old in 1739, the settlement could boast a distinctive architectural grid with over six hundred inhabitants living in 140 houses placed around six spacious squares, with a guardhouse, a courthouse, a jail, a wharf, and a set of bailiffs, constables, and wardens to maintain order.¹ Within that time it had established itself as a significant urban center planted on the southernmost tip of the British Empire, a frontier settlement facing the Spanish in Florida, Native Americans in the interior, and the French advancing inland from New Orleans. The inhabitants were men and women of modest origins, artisans, “mechaniks” or skilled laborers, minor officials, a small number of shopkeepers, indentured servants, charity settlers, and a few “adventurers” who sensed opportunity. All major decisions about the life of the colony of Georgia were made in London by a trust of twenty-one men, typically philanthropists, “men of good birth,” and Members of Parliament, or by James Oglethorpe, a wealthy visionary and the one trustee who came to the colony and acted as its virtual governor for the first decade of its life. Most distinctive was the prohibition of slavery in Georgia by executive fiat, then by an act of Parliament in 1735, making Georgia the only province in British North America or the Caribbean where this was so.²

Situated next to South Carolina, where Black people outnumbered whites by a two to one margin and where rice plantations dominated the economy, Savannah’s mix of people seemed odd. No slave ships docked at the single wharf. No auctioning of human beings on the wharf or in back streets took place. No slaves handled the heavy lifting required for the life of the town. No Black women tended households. No barrels of rice stood on the dock, and little agricultural produce was visible. For anyone coming from across the Savannah River, it was a strange sight to step from a slave society where Black slaves outnumbered whites to a place that seemed like the poorer quarters of an English town. For most observers, the story was an improbable one.³ Driven by a philanthropic vision, Oglethorpe, John Perceval (the first Earl of Egmont), and the other trustees had determined to create a colony for the “middling poor” of England, a place for “decayed tradesmen, or supernumerary workmen . . . who cannot put their hands to country affairs or are too proud to do it.”⁴ Slavery, the trustees believed, would depress wages, stigmatize labor, and promote idleness among the very people they intended to redeem, a choice dictated by practical considerations, not as a matter of principle.⁵ For the first nine years, the prohibition seems to have remained in force, at least in and around Savannah.⁶

Creolization, or the merging of habits and practices from different European cultures to create something new, was much in evidence in Savannah during the 1730s.⁷ By the end of the decade, the town was an extension of the original vision of the “worthy poor,” with a population of predominantly English-born people, middle-aged, characterized by a relatively flat profile: laborers, carpenters, a former wigmaker, mariners, taverners, “victuallers,” and artisans. But not entirely so. A significant Jewish group, mostly Sephardic, had arrived in several boatloads and by the end of the decade boasted twenty families.⁸ Comparatively wealthy Lowland Scots came over determined to make a significant investment in agriculture and, when their indentured labor proved unreliable, moved to town and began lobbying for the removal of the ban on slavery. Italian families worked the Trustees’ experimental garden; Germans operated the crane on the Savannah River; and Swiss settlers helped keep the cows across the river on Hutchinson Island.⁹ Out of the cultural interactions across social class and ethnicity, a hybrid society was emerging, but it seemed to lack Africans.

Notwithstanding the clearly enunciated policy against slavery, people of African descent were never absent from a town catching its first breath and dependent on many forms of labor. A small number were always to be found around the single, crudely built wharf below the forty-foot bluff, handling the merchandise and supplies brought from Charles Town or Beaufort to keep the colony alive. Even if present for a short time, these sailors, both free and enslaved, brought attitudes and habits shaped by their roles in trading with the enemy at St. Augustine as well as their sailing throughout the British Caribbean into this tiny space, providing a window into the intercultural frontiers of the Southeast. Far from passive individuals, they were well aware of the geopolitical and social landscape, and the enslaved were ready to seize the moment when the time seemed ripe to make a break for the freedom offered by Spanish Florida to fugitives from British colonies.¹⁰

Despite the exclusion of enslaved Black people, local authorities could never seal off the town with its population of several hundred residents from contact with all Africans and African Americans. In the course of a year, dozens of small schooners and sloops eased in and out of the wharf, transporting supplies purchased with subsidies provided by Parliament. Most of the sailors were enslaved or free Black men skilled in maneuvering through coastal waters, carrying crops and timber from plantations along the Carolina coast to Charles Town and manufactured goods and supplies back again.¹¹ Seasoned veterans, they were a relatively closed community proud of their special standing, carriers of stories and news. As the century progressed, all-slave crews increasingly manned the river-going and coastal boats of South Carolina.¹²

The secretary of the Trustees, William Stephens, described for the Trustees how the challenge of Black sailors in an all-white community was met. “Whenever any Vessel arrives here with Negroes,” he explained, “during their Stay, the Slaves are permitted to come ashore on the Strand by the Water-Side, to boil their Kettle; but in case they come up into Town, they are liable to be seized.”¹³ Most seamen stayed under the bluff toward the eastern end where they carved out a place for themselves to eat and sleep, talk and share stories, and create their own temporary home. Surprisingly, perhaps, a Black man in Savannah was treated with more suspicion and contempt than in Charles Town.

Stephens’s comment that they were likely to be seized should be treated with a degree of skepticism. A number made it into town for purchases or even socializing. The secretary went out of his way to assure London of the enforcement of the informal prohibition. He reported that a mariner named Peter Shepherd brought one of his slaves into his lodgings in town, tied him up, and whipped the man for “a Piece of Thievery on board . . ., which occasioned a great uproar among the Neighborhood.”¹⁴ Shepherd was instructed to take him back to South Carolina. Stephens mentioned another “Negro Slave” that belonged to a Mr. Dyson who died in Savannah. Dyson traveled back and forth between the two colonies and presumably allowed the sailor to stay in or around his living quarters. The magistrates took the Black man into custody until Oglethorpe could pronounce on the case. Without hesitation, the general ordered the sailor to be sold. Stephens opted for a public auction. Of the several bids received, the highest came from sea captain William Thompson, who sailed regularly to London. And so the man passed from one sea captain to another for £25, a competitive rate for enslaved sailors.¹⁵

Another type of boatmen congregated under the bluff. They were the hardy souls who rowed flat-bottomed periaguas filled with valuable deer-skin from Augusta to Charles Town and then returned with British goods. Savannah was a stopping point for them, a way station for rest and nothing more. On the journey, a white patroon stood at the rudder while the rowers, typically four, performed their backbreaking labor facing the stern. Coming down the river may have taken a few days but going back against the current required four to five weeks. The crew slept along the banks in abandoned Indian villages or in the woods, living a rough-and-tumble existence in which isolation was a distinguishing feature.

The movement of Black people along the coast and on the rivers nourished a complex web of communication, as sailors and rowers exchanged information with the local population as well as each other. Black watermen carried news throughout the region. They were privy to the latest talk about the trade with Creeks and Cherokees. They were apprised of developments in both the white and Black communities in Charles Town. They picked up on happenings in this peculiar colony where people of African descent were kept to a minimum. Part of that conversation turned on stories about boatmen who escaped or tried to escape to Spanish Florida, whose government promised freedom and a better life. Sailors and rowers were critical to the spreading of news up and down the coast and into the interior.¹⁶

Black sailors may have drawn contempt when climbing up the bluff to gain access to town, but Savannah was too young a society, too raw, and too subject to sudden death and displacement to maintain the ties that undergirded a deferential social order. Self-interest dictated acceptance. That logic may explain why a mixed-race person could become the manager of the principal store offering trading goods from the West Indies. Capt. Caleb Davis was a sometime trader, privateer, and occasional pirate who operated from his base in Beaufort, South Carolina, kept a two-story house in St. Augustine where he regularly sold goods, and established the one store in Savannah that offered access to goods otherwise absent in this frontier community.¹⁷

In recognition of the military and political intelligence that the captain provided from his voyages to Florida, James Oglethorpe paid Davis the ultimate compliment of awarding him one of the best lots on the strand on top of the bluff overlooking the Savannah River below. The mariner built a store operated by his consort, a mixed-race enslaved person whom William Stephens described as having “an exceeding fine Shape and, setting aside her swarthy Countenance, might compare with [a] European.” Here in a town where slavery was banned, Davis kept a Black consort for all to see and set her up as a shopkeeper selling goods brought from the Caribbean, her presence a testimony to the fluidity of social boundaries in a place of casual borders and blurred lines of authority. Echoing the ethos that prevailed in the Caribbean, Stephens dismissed Davis’s relationship with this “mulatto Servant (or Slave)” as his most visible foible.¹⁸

There were good reasons for Davis’s “mulatto Servant (or Slave)” to feel relatively secure in the context of Trusteeship Georgia. Women were little more than a third of the immigrants recorded between 1733 and 1741. Most came in family groups; death was ever-present; marriages often ended quickly; and cohabitation outside wedlock was a frequent occurrence. Tolerance for relationships that fell outside the European norm was high, creating opportunities for low-status women to marry above their rank in the Old World. Yet marriages were, in the words of historian Ben Marsh, irregular, distorted, and unconventional. Families became diffuse, ethnically mixed, and fragmentary. If a woman could not find a mate, she was exposed to the harsh economic realities of the time.¹⁹

Davis’s confidence in his mistress confounded the discomforted secretary. The captain had taught her how to keep his books. “More astonishing,” Stephens mused, “was that . . . he suffered almost every Thing to pass through her Hands, having such Confidence in her, that she had the Custody of all his Cash, as well as Books; and whenever he ordered any Parcel of Silver to be weighted out for any Use, whether it were two or three hundred ounces, more or less, in Dollars, she had the doing of it.” The secretary could not refrain from speculating that the “Life of such Slavery was not a heavy burden upon her,” the easy assumption of an Englishman who never tried to pierce the veil that hung over enslavement.²⁰ Yet he had a point. At least for a short while, the mistress was the access point for most Savannahians in obtaining goods from the Caribbean.

Nor was this unnamed woman a simple object of convenience for the captain. William Stephens, Cambridge-educated and once a member of Parliament, referred to her as “this Damsel” and “Madam,” willing to accord her a certain standing. “She had Art enough,” he judged, “to shew, [that] all Persons who had any Business with Captain Davis, were expected not to treat her with Contempt.” A shipwright failed that test. Mr. Pope, whom Stephens described as a “rough Tar,” built vessels at Beaufort and sailed with Davis when not otherwise occupied. When Pope walked into the store and let fly a volley of insults, she fired back with a stream of expletives all her own that outdid his. Taken aback, he hit her in the face and stormed out. When Davis heard of the affair, presumably from his consort, he discharged Pope as master of the vessel being loaded in the river for a destination in the Caribbean. Pope rallied a portion of the crew and took the vessel down the Savannah River for the open sea, but Davis declared them pirates and used his influence with Oglethorpe to have the vessel seized. Although the matter ended up before the colony’s magistrates, the unnamed mistress continued to hold forth and received her due in a town where function and utility rather than skin color prevailed when access to basic commodities was at stake.²¹

The unnamed “Damsel” was a self-confident entrepreneur who came out of the Black sailing community of Beaufort, South Carolina, a village founded in 1712 that had become the center of a newly created plantation economy forty-five miles northeast of Savannah. The small port sheltered mariners from the Caribbean and the freewheeling world of Bermuda and the Bahamas where privateering had long been another form of business and mixed-race crews a necessity. The most important of these captains, Caleb Davis, “a shrewd, cunning Fellow” in Stephens’s judgment, fit the model of the master who sailed in search of profit and occasional plunder and traded across imperial boundaries with a multiracial crew changing loyalties as needed.²² For much of the 1730s, Captain Davis lived in Beaufort and St. Augustine at the same time, comfortable in the ferociously anti-Spanish world of South Carolina and the Hispanic world anchored by the Castillo de San Marcos, with its community of freed slaves. The tiny port of Savannah, hardly more than a single wharf with a crane to lift cargo, now joined the exchange of goods between towns that were enemies in all but trade.

As Spain and Great Britain drifted toward a war, Caleb Davis was engaged in an increasingly risky enterprise, as one of only a handful of merchants who ran vessels to Florida, a lucrative venture despite the odds. Three successive governors purchased thirteen thousand pesos’ worth of goods for the garrison between them and many thousands more for foodstuffs, wine, rum, and other spirits.²³ Writing from the Tower of London where he was imprisoned for debt at the end of a colorful career, Davis claimed with considerable truth, “At this time in life, I lived in a good deal of splendor and in friendship with the Spaniards by which means I supplied all South Carolina and Georgia with all the Silver as these Provincials and Colonials had to traffick with among themselves.”²⁴

Established as a military outpost in 1565, the small town of St. Augustine had begun as a vital part of Spain’s Caribbean defenses, evolved into the anchor of a Franciscan mission system that spread Spanish influence among Native Americans, and maintained a viable Hispanic presence on the North American continent.²⁵ Florida’s peninsular configuration offered Spain ports on both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts and proximity to critical ports in New Spain (Mexico), Hispaniola, and Cuba. In the 1730s, the colony retained its character as an outpost of strategic importance characterized by exceptional ethnic diversity as well as a cosmopolitan outlook. Spanish soldiers took Native American wives. Numerous officials had enslaved African domestics while free Blacks and mulattoes occupied the lower ranks of the Spanish community and became Spanish in language use and faith. The Portuguese, some of whom were Jewish, figured prominently among the colony’s ship captains, pilots, and merchants, their vessels combing the coast for cargoes from wrecked ships and castaways. Florida’s importance was strategic rather than economic, and the colony never developed an agricultural infrastructure beyond cattle ranching on the Alachua and Diego Plains.²⁶

The founding of Charles Town in 1670 marked the beginnings of a bitter rivalry for territory and influence, a mirror of the larger contest between Spain and England in the Americas. Early on, Carolina merchants pushed aside the Spanish in the deerskin trade throughout the region and won the loyalty of increasing numbers of Indians until their rapacious business dealings and selling of thousands of Natives as slaves in the Caribbean produced a stunning counter-reaction. The Yamassee Indians led a confederacy of aggrieved tribes in a surprise attack that killed ninety traders on a spring day in 1715 and eventually hundreds of white and Black men, women, and children.²⁷ If South Carolina received a stunning setback in the Yamassee War, the ultimate goals of the British never changed. Imperialists in London saw the newly created town of Savannah as part of a chain of defensive settlements, a step in expanding British influence over the “debatable lands” between the Savannah and St. Johns Rivers, one more step in driving the Spanish from the Southeast.²⁸

When Oglethorpe returned to England in 1735, he convinced Parliament to make two momentous decisions. Responding to his urgent request, it granted £26,000 for the creation of two fortified towns, one at the mouth of the Altamaha that became Darien, the other on St. Simons and given the name Frederica.²⁹ Then, more consequentially, Parliament passed an act that prohibited “the Importation and use of Black Slaves or Negroes” in Georgia, citing the danger of exposing its white population to the “Insurrections Tumults and Rebellion of such Slaves & negroes.”³⁰ Of the twenty-two colonies in British America in 1740—thirteen in North America and nine in the Caribbean, Georgia became the only one ever to repudiate plantation slavery, a radical departure from imperial policy but undertaken as a practical matter rather than one of antislavery principles, which thus far had found few roots in English society.³¹ In 1739, the Highland Scots of Darien, Georgia, called out the danger of succumbing to the lure of enslaved black labor: “The Nearness of the Spaniards, who have proclaimed Freedom to all Slaves, who run away from their Masters, makes it impossible for us to keep them, without more Labour in guarding them, than what we would be at to do their Work.”³² It was an argument that most Georgians and Carolinians understood.

The illegal selling of commodities and British dry goods by Caleb Davis and other mariners brought desperately needed silver currency into the cash-starved economies of the southern colonies and helped underwrite the exchange of goods between British North America and Great Britain while providing a lifeline for the Spanish colony, always desperate for provisions and supplies.³³ As a resident of St. Augustine, Captain Davis was living a double life, an especially delicate matter as tensions heightened between the English colonies and Spanish Florida. It seemed not to faze him that a governor could dispatch a party of four dozen Yamasees northward and offer one hundred pieces-of-eight “for every live Negro they should bring.”³⁴ Nor did two edicts issued in 1733 by the Spanish king, prohibiting the sale of fugitives and offering freedom conditional on four years of service to the Crown. Black freedom seekers continued to petition for their freedom rather than being condemned to indentured servitude under widely varying terms.³⁵ In an ironic turn of events, Davis had unintentionally converted his Black sailors into serving as the lynchpin of two radically opposed economies in the Southeast, with silver coinage the connecting link. He encouraged the governor and other officials, military as well as civilian, to run up debts for goods purchased, confident that his vital role would keep him in a protected space.³⁶

Throughout these comings and goings, his sailors were cognizant of the stakes. On March 15, 1738, they and the captain were standing on the plaza of St. Augustine where a crowd had assembled to hear a proclamation made by the new governor, Manuel de Montiano, a veteran army officer with long experience in North Africa and Central America.³⁷ He had arrived a year earlier when Oglethorpe’s combative moves translated into unmistakable signs of a forthcoming invasion. Together with the military engineer who accompanied him, the governor undertook aggressive steps to improve the dilapidated defenses of the town. Perhaps reflecting his service in North Africa, he showed a keen understanding of the racial dynamics of the region. According to a report submitted to the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, the proclamation was announced “by Beat of Drum round the Town of St. Augustine (where many Negroes belonging to English Vessels that carried thither Supplies of Provisions etc. had the Opportunity of hearing it) promising Liberty and Protection to all Slaves that should desert thither from any of the English colonies but more especially from this (one).”³⁸ Mindful of the psychological dimensions of warfare, Montiano was making clear that the policy of sanctuary extended to every freedom seeker from the British colonies. Nor was Caleb Davis slow in grasping the consequences. A returning captain of an English coasting vessel, presumably Davis, testified before the House that “he heard a Proclamation made at St. Augustine, that all Negroes, who did, or should thereafter, run away from the English should be made free.”³⁹

Montiano was refining a tactic used by Madrid since the late 1600s to threaten the stability of the plantation economy in the Lowcountry and encourage ever-growing fears among planters of slave insurrection. In the last decade of the seventeenth century, freedom seekers from South Carolina commandeered canoes and other watercraft that they steered across more than 150 nautical miles of open water and began appearing in the port, pleading for their freedom. On November 7, 1693, Charles II, the last Hapsburg ruler of Spain, responded by issuing an official proclamation that fugitives be granted their freedom if they converted to Catholicism and accepted the “True Faith,” “the men as well as the women . . . so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same.”⁴⁰

The effect was profound. Freedom seekers appeared in increasing numbers.⁴¹ In 1726, planters near Stono River demanded government action after fourteen of their enslaved people fled to St. Augustine. That same year, the Spanish carried off four slaves from Port Royal, and a vessel manned by Spaniards and Carolina runaways entered the North Edisto River, where its crew struck the Ferguson plantation and carried off seven “Negroes.” The government sent a raiding party to the vicinity of the Spanish capital, burned a few houses, but was unable to inflict serious damage to the massive Castillo de San Marcos, where the town’s population gathered. In June 1728, Acting Governor Arthur Middleton sent a formal complaint to authorities in London: “[The Spanish are] receiving and harbouring all our Ruanway Negreos . . . [and] have found out a new way of sending our own slaves against us to Rob and Plunder us.” He fumed, “They are continually fitting out Partys of Indians from St. A to Murder our White People, Rob our Plantations and carry off our slaves soe that We are not only at a vast expence in Guarding our Southern Frontiers but the Inhabitants are continually alarmed, and have noe leisure to looke after theire Crops.” He added for good measure, “The Indians they send against us are in small Partys . . . and sometimes joined wth Negroes, and all the Mischiefe they doe, is on a sudden and by surprise.”⁴²

Although the appearance of freedom seekers in St. Augustine was episodic and their fate subject to the outlook of the particular Spanish governor, the frequency of escapes continued to grow. The demographics of the Lowcountry contributed to an increasingly tense situation. By the end of the 1730s, the enslaved population was two-thirds of the total population along the coast; and, when only rural parishes are considered, the ratio of Black people to whites was more nearly four or five to one. More than half were less than ten years removed from Africa, and a much larger proportion had been born in Africa.⁴³

In this hothouse atmosphere, Davis’s sailors listened with special attention to Montiano’s announcement in his March proclamation that he was establishing a fortified town, Gracia Réal de Santa Teresa de Mose, for all former fugitive slaves two miles north of the capital. The governor’s actions were hardly revolutionary in terms of Spanish America. Throughout the empire, imperial officials had increasingly turned to free people of African origin as a means of countering repeated assaults from Natives, home-grown rebels, and Europeans.⁴⁴ In arming a Black militia, Spanish Florida was following long-established Caribbean precedents in helping the Crown to populate and hold territory threatened by foreign encroachment. Moreover, officials had long legitimized free Black towns as a way of defusing racial animosity and removing the need for curfews and pass systems. This initiative carried a double meaning. The colony became the first to host a community of free Black people in North America, a high percentage from its bitterest enemy South Carolina.⁴⁵

Most of Mose’s residents began their lives in West Africa, survived the Middle Passage, labored on Carolina plantations, and displayed considerable skill in escaping over hundreds of miles of land and water. They were risk takers willing to remake their identities in a Spanish world that offered a legal and moral personality denied them elsewhere. They personified the Atlantic Creole that historian Ira Berlin first described, a black or mixed-race person who had the linguistic skills, social malleability, and cultural flexibility to adapt in successive locations around the rim of the Atlantic world, a concept that Jane Landers applied so effectively in bringing the story of Fort Mose to life.⁴⁶ Combining military and humanitarian aims to best effect, the governor well understood that the Blacks of Fort Mose would be “the most cruel Enemies of the English,” preferring death to being taken back into slavery.⁴⁷ Almost one hundred individuals began constructing what became the Pueblo de Gracia Réal de Santa Teresa de Mose, a modest affair with a stone wall banked with earth and surrounded by a ditch and thatched huts and a well inside. The fields lay outside.

As Davis feared, his crew became carriers of a powerful story that transformed the landscape of the Carolina Lowcountry. On returning to Beau-fort, the sailors spread the news among their community and began plotting their own escape. Six months after the dramatic proclamation in November 1738, nineteen people—including men, women, and children—boarded a launch and headed out into the open sea.⁴⁸ According to a report submitted to the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, “fifty other Slaves belonging to other Persons inhabiting about Port Royal ran away to the Castle of St. Augustine.” Although that number seems an exaggeration, other small vessels were rowed down the Inland Passage past the silent guns of Fort Frederica.⁴⁹ The exasperated Davis eventually submitted a claim for twenty-seven of his slaves “detained” by the governor, whom he valued at seventy-six hundred pesos, for the boat in which they escaped and for the supplies that they had taken.⁵⁰

From a larger perspective, the escape benefited from the maritime culture that Marcus Rediker describes in his studies of seafaring life: a society of men populated chiefly by the poor, bonding in the face of frequent danger on the high seas; a severe shipboard regimen of despotic authority, discipline, and control; and a spirit of rebellion characterized by frequent mutinies.⁵¹ Well before they heard the Proclamation of 1738, those on Davis’s schooners were motivated by shipboard standards of egalitarianism that spawned an oppositional culture in the face of the autocratic authority exercised by the captain. The role of sailors on the high seas and in numerous ports gave them an opportunity to take charge of their lives. If Rediker sees an early indication of class conflict, the spirit of rebellion born in the hothouse atmosphere of a ship’s hold took on a different meaning when Black sailors became seekers of freedom. As the War of Jenkins’ Ear approached, those with Captain Davis learned how to use the various tactics of resistance and forms of organizing oneself to the fullest.

Confident of his standing in Florida, Captain Davis hurried to St. Augustine to recover his slaves, his case made all the stronger since the governor, royal officials, military officers and other notables were indebted to him for goods purchased.⁵² The captain of Fort Mose, Francisco Menendez, and at least one other at Mose had an open account with the mariner, an anomaly that suggests English merchants were indirectly subsidizing the creation of Gracia Réal de Santa Teresa de Mose.⁵³ When he disembarked, Davis encountered a radically changed setting. At ease on the landing in the port, his former bondsmen hailed him in a mocking way. When he ordered them to board his vessel, he was shocked at their sarcastic laughter. He proceeded angrily to the governor’s residence to enlist his expected support. Montiano cut him short, holding up a copy of the edict issued by Charles III more than forty years before, waving it in his face.⁵⁴ Twenty-three Carolina slaves, including Davis’s nineteen, were sent to Fort Mose to begin a new life under the command of Capt. Francisco Menendez.⁵⁵ Furious, Davis sailed to Savannah and met with a sympathetic Oglethorpe, who, despite a looming war, sent a trusted officer to St. Augustine to negotiate with Montiano on the captain’s behalf, a testimony to their close relationship. This too failed.⁵⁶

The very man to whom Davis had extended credit embodied the subversive values that these sailors now sought to embrace. The captain of the Black militia, Francisco Menendez, was a Mandinga probably from the Gambia River region, captured by other Africans, sold to slave traders, and brought to Charles Town in the early 1700s. Seeing his chance for freedom, he had joined the Yamasee Indians in the hard-fought Yamasee War and fought valiantly with the Yamasee chief, Jorge, for three years. Escaping to St. Augustine at the war’s end in 1717, he came into possession of another warrior, Yfallaquisca, who traded him to the then-governor as a Crown slave. In turn, the governor sold him to Don Francisco Menendez Marques, a royal official and landowner who became his patron, leading him to take his master’s name and embrace the Catholic Church. Within the space of little more than a decade, Francisco Menendez had been enslaved by Africans, Englishmen, Yamasees, and Spaniards, a prime example of the Atlantic Creole whose survival depended on considerable linguistic skills, an ability to adapt to different cultures, and being socially adept. Valued for his military skills, he was made captain of the Black militia and earned a special place when he led his men in repulsing a surprise raid by Carolinians and Creeks that burned part of St. Augustine in 1726. His petition for full freedom was denied until Montiano appeared as governor.⁵⁷

Events in South Carolina changed the landscape radically. In September 1739, ten months after Davis’s sailors fled for Spanish Florida, the Stono Rebellion took place, one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. The widely known flight of Davis’s sailors may have provided a critical spark to Africans well aware of the Spanish offer of freedom. In the face of a lack of evidence, scholars have been cautious about linking the motive for a massive slave revolt to a desire to flee to Spanish Florida. They describe the event as a violent but abortive blow for liberation, the only full-scale slave rebellion to erupt in the British colonies in North America.⁵⁸ However, flight to Florida and the idea of insurrection are not mutually exclusive phenomena. The enslaved people of the Carolina Lowcountry were well aware of the preparations for war with Spanish Florida and recognized that any challenge of the Spanish to English mastery in the region was all to their advantage.

On September 9, 1739, two dozen Africans on the Stono River not far from Charles Town attacked a local storehouse to obtain weapons, killed twenty or more whites, and then began moving southward, perhaps toward St. Augustine, with drums beating and at least one flag flying. The casualties are not known, but the rebellion was without precedent for its total surprise, ruthless killing, considerable property damage, armed engagements, and protracted aftermath stretching over eight days. The rebellion also marked an unprecedented escalation in Black resistance to slavery and sent shock-waves across the whole of British North America.⁵⁹ Receiving an account from the lieutenant governor of South Carolina, Oglethorpe ordered a troop of rangers to fan out across Georgia, placed men at the most likely crossing of the Savannah River, and issued a proclamation ordering the constables of Georgia “to pursue and seize all Negroes” headed to the Spaniards.⁶⁰

Caleb Davis, caught in a quagmire of his own making, survived the revelations of his Janus-like behavior only because of the intervention of Oglethorpe. When the captain sailed into Savannah a few weeks before the declaration of the War of Jenkins’ Ear in October 1739, a mob grabbed him for allegedly selling four hundreds stands of arms to the Spanish and threw him into the ill-kept jail. Oglethorpe intervened to restore his one-time spy.⁶¹ In a mismanaged invasion, Oglethorpe led an army of nearly two thousand men into Spanish Florida, swept past the settlement of Fort Mose, and then stumbled into a futile siege of St. Augustine, where the thick walls of the Castillo de San Marcos repelled bombardment by a small contingent of the Royal Navy. In a well-planned counterattack, three hundred Spanish soldiers, Natives allied to the Spanish, and the still-intact Black militia, including perhaps some of Davis’s former slaves, rushed a party of 142 English and Scots encamped at Mose, catching them still asleep and killing 75, mostly Scotsmen from Darien.⁶² Once back at Fort Frederica on St. Simons, Oglethorpe waited for the expected counterattack. By then, he had conscripted the vessels of Capt. Caleb Davis and used them in both defensive and offensive operations during a two-year interlude before the next battle. It is more than likely that Davis’s crews continued to reflect a significant African presence despite the earlier experience because of the scarcity of white sailors, a common complaint of sea captains.

In the spring of 1742, Governor Manuel de Montiano dramatically appeared off St. Simons on the Georgia coast with a flotilla of thirty vessels and a multiracial army of two to three thousand men, led by Black as well as white officers. Unrealistic thinking, bad weather, poor leadership by officers, and lack of knowledge of the terrain doomed the expedition. The Battle of Bloody Marsh at the southern end of the island ended as little more than a minor engagement. Advancing along a narrow path toward Fort Frederica, Spanish troops were ambushed by the English, became disoriented and confused in the smoke-filled swamp, and lost their bearings. About fifty men, mostly Spanish, were killed.⁶³ The expedition marked an inglorious end to the last major offensive mounted in Georgia. Although neither side considered matters settled and conducted raids to probe defenses, a stalemate ensued. For the rest of the 1740s, the Spanish kept a low profile in recognition of their lack of resources and the defeat of Spanish arms elsewhere.⁶⁴

Throughout the War of Jenkins’ Ear on the southern frontier, the Trustees were simultaneously conducting a debilitating battle with a tight-knit group of mostly well-to-do Savannahians, dubbed the “Malcontents.” The origins of the war had much to do with attempts by British merchants to break into the closed markets of South and Central America. Commercial expansion of the British Empire was an underlying motive that gave the Malcontents of Georgia running room to make their case that the colony was far from realizing its potential.

A small group of Savannahians advocated slavery for a colony that, as they pointed out, produced no agricultural surplus and ran a deficit sustained only by the grace of parliamentary grants. Between 1738 and 1742, a war of words took place in stridently phrased pamphlets circulated in North America and England that sapped support for the humanitarian enterprise.⁶⁵ De-spite clever rhetorical thrusts that bore something of the image of a modern advertising campaign, the dissidents failed to budge the Trustees. Although the intense lobbying was over by the end of the war and the leaders had departed the colony, it was a bitter victory for the Georgia Trust. Skepticism about the viability of the colony spread, and the humanitarian impulse behind the project weakened. In 1746, a minor official who remained loyal to the Trustees noted in disgust, “My Lord(s), they are stark Mad after Negroes” and pointed to artisans and formerly indentured servants as well as wealthier people.⁶⁶ In reality, the single most important factor in undermining the Trustees’ labor policy was not the emotionally draining war of words but rather Oglethorpe’s victory at Bloody Marsh and his return to England. With the waning of the Spanish threat, the antislavery argument lost much of its force.⁶⁷

In the final years of the Trusteeship, the integrity of the Georgia Plan was tested by the emergence of the town of Frederica on St. Simons Island as a poorly hidden slave market. Built in the shadow of a fort that held nearly six hundred soldiers, the town represented a vastly different world than existed in Savannah. Financed by the expenditures of the War Office, it had attracted 100–150 residents, including blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, a locksmith, shopkeepers, and other merchants, as well as traders and merchants from Beaufort, Charles Town, and elsewhere.⁶⁸ During those heady days, St. Simons merchant Henry Manley reproached the citizens of Savannah “for [being] a Pack of Fools to stay and starve, when at Frederica there was money enough, and everybody paid their money upon asking.”⁶⁹

Oglethorpe had personally ensured that people of African descent were excluded from St. Simons except as visiting sailors, and even then he was a stickler for formalities. On returning from a voyage in 1741, the general had the justice of the peace at Frederica arrest an African sailor on board “Mrs. Wood’s schooner” and two on “Mr. Jeny’s vessel.” A fourth person was ordered seized, “a Girl also of Mrs. Lyford’s, who was too cunning for them.” In an appearance before the magistrate, the masters of Mrs. Wood’s vessel and Mr. Jeny’s argued they would not have brought Black sailors into Georgia had they been able to recruit white men and that they were still in port only because of a violent storm. After much wrangling, it was established that the so-called sailor on Mrs. Wood’s vessel was in fact her own slave and had been hired out to the ship’s master. That unfortunate person was sold out of the colony at public auction.⁷⁰

Shortly after Oglethorpe’s departure in 1743, Africans began to be auctioned when eager buyers from within Georgia and Carolina appeared as Frederica emerged as a small market able to sidestep the policy of the Georgia Trust. In what was now functioning as a semi-independent military colony, the commander of the Forty-Second Regiment of Foot, Maj. William Horton, insisted to Savannah magistrates that the colony would never prosper without slave labor and willingly overlooked infractions by his officers and others of a certain prominence. Because the regiment pumped thousands of pounds sterling into local markets and helped float Georgia’s struggling economy, Horton possessed almost irresistible leverage.⁷¹ With this kind of backing, merchants began bringing Africans into Frederica and auctioning them to an array of buyers, from Mary Musgrove, the part-Creek interpreter and confidant of Oglethorpe who resided on an isolated barrier island, to Carolinians who happened to be there on business.⁷² Black captives were put into service under the guise of being indentured servants to support Oglethorpe’s regiment. The terms of service were unspecified.⁷³

Those participating included the unscrupulous Capt. Caleb Davis, who offered his sloops and schooners both to Maj. William Horton and to his successor Col. Alexander Heron as a “navy” for Georgia. He used the forthcoming letters of marque to jump back into an old pastime, privateering against Spanish and French vessels plying the waters in the Caribbean. Full of braggadocio, he claimed to have fitted out eighteen privateers.⁷⁴ Sizing up Davis’s role, a young merchant from Philadelphia judged he had “none but Piratical Principles.”⁷⁵ Seized vessels were brought to Frederica, judged by an admiralty court that had no legal standing, and the cargo sold for the benefit of Horton, Heron, Davis, and others in their tiny circle of friends.⁷⁶

Among those put up for auction in defiance of the Trustees was John Peter, a Dutch-speaking sailor and a free Black man who had been seized by a privateer while sailing on a vessel in the Caribbean. Unceremoniously transported to Newport, Rhode Island, he was judged by an admiralty court to be a slave, taken to Philadelphia, and sold to Samuel Clee, a trader from Georgia. A Jewish merchant in Savannah, Abraham Minis, had sent his young partner to New York with £400 to settle outstanding accounts. Instead, the duplicitous Clee sailed to Philadelphia and used the funds to buy the sailor from Curaçao. Arriving at Frederica, he sold Peter to a planter from Beau-fort and thereby skated around the prohibition on people of African descent in Georgia. The resilient sailor had no intention of remaining a slave on an island off the Carolina coast, made an escape in a large canoe with others he persuaded to follow him, and headed for St. Augustine. Caught, he was brought before the magistrate’s court in Savannah. Claiming to be free, the articulate Peter, who spoke excellent English, threw the leading citizens of the town into a fierce debate about the nature of positive law and how it applied in the case of a literate Black man.⁷⁷

The case of John Peter opens a door to another world, one where creolization and contraband went hand in hand. Curaçao was a small island in the southern Caribbean that had become a major commercial center and a hub of the Dutch Atlantic.⁷⁸ In an age of mercantilism when the great empires imposed a restrictive system for controlling commerce to their advantage, the Dutch opened the port of Willemstad to free trade, making Curaçao a prime center of smuggling or contraband for traders willing to travel along routes that were more direct or more efficient than the often cumbersome official trade channels. Opportunities for illicit trade were all the greater because of the nearness of the Spanish mainland, known as Tierra Firme, today’s Venezuela and part of Colombia. Home to half the island’s population by the mid-1700s, Willemstad offered rich opportunities for sociocultural interactions across lines of race, ethnicity, social class, and even empire. Creolization went apace with a society that attracted people from all quarters of the Atlantic. The layers were many: a small Dutch merchant elite; the largest and most prosperous Jewish community in the Americas; a broad base of sailors of all ethnic groups; skilled slaves; and a large free colored population, who typically lived in a separate quarter that came to be called Otrobanda. From the interplay of disparate cultures, languages, and ethnicities, the island’s sailors absorbed the vibrant new creole identities that emerged. Peter was a prime example of this new identity.

His buyer was a Carolinian who hungered after the potentially rich rice lands in the neighboring colony and was ready to pounce once the prohibition on slavery was lifted. John Mullryne had migrated from Montserrat, established himself as a merchant at Beaufort, and had an interest in four coasting vessels. Fellow Carolinians elected him as colonel in the militia.⁷⁹ He traveled regularly to Frederica on business and used these occasions to visit the mainland looking for likely rice-growing land. Mullryne purchased the man from Curaçao as something of an afterthought but seemingly had no idea of his character. Accustomed to making his way through and around ports, John Peter stood in the mold of Francisco Menendez in that he could fight within the prevailing legal system and still be ready to lead Black resistance outside that system. He was well aware of the sanctuary offered by St. Augustine and of the continuing flights of runaways. Only three years before, Carolina authorities had alerted Oglethorpe that a group of thirty “sensible Negroes, fifteen of whom had firearms[,]” had escaped and were headed for St. Augustine.⁸⁰

As a sailor and free Black man from Dutch Curaçao, John Peter had the confidence and technical expertise to lay out a plan of escape and recruit six men from neighboring plantations on Hilton Head to follow him.⁸¹ Gathering together one night, they departed in a large canoe, possibly a dugout capable of carrying forty or fifty barrels of rice, and relied on his maritime skills to carry them through the Inland Passage. At Tybee, a barrier island eighteen miles from Savannah, the canoe stopped for unknown reasons, and the group disembarked. The “lighthouse people,” the handful of whites who facilitated shipping, spied them moving about. The lighthouse at Tybee, a ninety-foot structure made of durable long-leaf pine on cedar piles with a brick foundation, had been one of Oglethorpe’s first projects. The lighthouse people were accustomed to intercepting freedom seekers and engaged in a firefight that wounded one African. The remaining men surrendered and were imprisoned in the Savannah jail.

The magistrates’ court in Savannah convened in session to listen to a representative of several planters near Beaufort claim their rights to the property. After a brief “trial,” six of the seven were remanded to the agent from South Carolina. Allowed to speak in his own defense, John Peter, a Dutch speaker who was fluent in English and possibly in Spanish, made an impassioned plea about his rights as a free Black person taken illegally on the “Spanish Main” and sold into slavery.⁸² Whatever their thoughts about slavery, local officials were touched by a story that raised a fundamental question about the rule of law in a colony founded for humanitarian reasons. A minor official related to the trustees: “The Negro finding himself detained in cruel Slavery embraced the first opportunity to make his escape, and with some more of his colour who are always glad of a leader sate off in a Canoo.”⁸³ This sailor, familiar with the workings of English law, found a receptive ear when he asked for the same rights as John Mullryne or Samuel Clee enjoyed under English common law. Peter boldly “asserted that he was a freed man and no Slave, and that altho’ he had took the opportunity of coming away with the other Negro’s in the manner he did, which was to escape from a Cruel and unjust Slavery . . . yet being a free subject of the States of Holland prayed he might have the benefit of the English laws of Mulrain who pursu’d him or of Clee who Sold him.”⁸⁴ Impressed, the magistrates declined to return the man to Mullryne.

The chief magistrate, Henry Parker, a former weaver, emphatically declared for his audience he would not deliver up John Peter until word came from Curaçao about the man’s status.⁸⁵ An amiable man who drank too much, Parker had another agenda. The magistrates of Frederica on St. Simons, center for the southern district of the colony, had long resisted the rule of Savannah and relied on the clout that His Majesty’s Forty-Second Regiment of Foot gave them in any dispute. This unprecedented act flowed not only from a genuine concern for the integrity of the Georgia Plan but also with the desire to punish Frederica for flaunting Savannah’s authority. The trustees had long been engaged with Major Horton over his attempt to establish a military government in the southern part of the colony. Striking a blow at the illegal slave market on the island was an opportunity not to be missed.⁸⁶ Standing behind Parker was the thirty-two-year-old James Habersham, disciple of George Whitefield, manager of the Bethesda Orphanage, and fledgling merchant who had recently opened a mercantile house on Bay Street. More than any other person, he provided the muscle behind the defiance of the military, all the more remarkable since privately he was a leading advocate of lifting the ban on slavery in Georgia.⁸⁷

In May 1746, the governor of Curaçao sent a bill attesting to John Peter’s freedom and expressed himself in words described as “strong and particular in [John Peter’s] favor as if he had been a Man of another Rank.”⁸⁸ Clearly John Peter was a personage within the society of free Blacks in Curaçao. On hearing this, Habersham applied to the magistrates for a warrant to arrest Samuel Clee, the trader on Frederica. Clee was already being pursued through the court system by Abraham Minis for the stolen funds.⁸⁹ Swayed by the arguments, Parker granted warrants for the summoning of several individuals on the island. In the ensuing tug-of-war, Lieutenant Colonel Heron, the new commander of the regiment, came to Savannah and threw around his considerable influence to quash the warrants. Heron’s presence notwithstanding, John Peter was released and presumably made his way back to Dutch Curaçao.

It was a stunning victory for the articulate creole in the face of a system heavily weighted against the Black man, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for those committed to the Georgia Plan. During the final years of the Trusteeship, Georgia continued to ban slaves and slavery but took few steps to counter a growing influx of Africans and African Americans, a nibbling around the edges that grew into a steady addition of people of African descent. Although most had left the colony after their final defeat in 1742, the Malcontents had sucked the lifeblood out of the Georgia Plan. A recent interpretation sees that fierce struggle as one between elites who wanted slaves to labor on large-scale plantations on the Carolina model and non-elites who saw their freedom threatened by men who wanted to impose a capitalist economy that would marginalize them.⁹⁰ Yet the desire for enslaved people was widespread among most Savannahians, if not the German Pietists around Ebenezer or the Highlanders around Darien. As many as nine hundred of the fifteen hundred people in the colony signed the four petitions favoring the adoption of slavery. Over 44 percent of the signers were charity settlers whose way had been paid by the Trustees or had gone as indentured servants.⁹¹ The fiercest supporters of the Trustees were not in Savannah but among the German peasant farmers around Ebenezer and the Highland Scots in Darien, culturally as well as philosophically at odds with the majority of residents in Savannah. With the military rationale all but gone, Parliament no longer had an interest in underwriting what increasingly seemed like a failing economic experiment, and the Highland Scots did not feel so strongly about foregoing enslaved labor. The end of the Spanish threat was all-encompassing.

In the second half of 1748, the dispirited Trustees, many of whom no longer attended meetings of the council, reluctantly conceded the point that slavery was inevitable. To lay the groundwork, they ordered local magistrates to assemble a council of notables to discuss conditions under which that coveted institution might be introduced. In one fell swoop, the grand dream of a white man’s colony in the Lower South was pronounced dead. A census taken in 1750 found that the province already held 202 Black men, 147 women, and an undetermined number of children out of 2,500 inhabitants, or about 17 percent of the population.⁹²

For a brief moment, the colony turned into a society with enslaved people as opposed to the harsh enslaved society that existed next door. It more closely resembled the chartered colonies of the seventeenth century in which the unique laboring conditions gave Black people the kind of breathing room that led Ira Berlin to call them the “charter generation,” where slavery was one form of forced labor among many others, notably indentured servitude.⁹³ As the last colony to receive a charter, Georgia arguably belonged to that group, but it was a fleeting moment. At the time that the Trustees petitioned the Privy Council for the removal of the ban on slavery, most Georgians of modest means, men and women, believed that the change would benefit them. Instead, the next decade would see their world turned upside down as Carolina planters crossed the river and, with their enslaved labor force, took the best lands.

Nevertheless, the Black sailors of Trusteeship Georgia left an indelible mark for those who came afterward. As Jeffrey Bolster argues when he draws on Olaudah Equiano’s exceptional career, maritime slaves and freemen became forces for change because they grasped revolutionary ways of imagining the world and their place in it.⁹⁴ From the ranks of Captain Davis’s vessels came men who were accustomed to trading across imperial boundaries, listened intently when the governor of St. Augustine announced the creation of a community for free Blacks, made their escape directly from their home port so that wives and children could accompany them, and probably fought against Oglethorpe and the British in 1740 and again in 1742. The Black sailor from Dutch Curacao, in his interaction with the magistrates of Savannah, gave voice to all his peers when he displayed a self-assurance and fearlessness in the face of the white power structure and revealed a gift for playing on the differences in that structure to obtain his freedom. The demand of John Peter for legal equality captured the essential thrust of Black aspirations in the long eighteenth century. That demand served as a precious legacy for sailors of color during the royal period. How those aspirations translated into a society that set about becoming a plantation economy like South Carolina’s over the next quarter-century is a far different matter.