CHAPTER 5

A Maroon in the Postrevolutionary Southeast

For Black Georgians in the postrevolutionary period, Spanish Florida was a beacon of freedom; but for those who made it into the colony, choices had to be made. Where did they go and how did they integrate into the life of this new world during the second period of Spanish rule when such great diversity characterized town and countryside? That question took on different meanings as waves of people made it into the province during the 1780s and 1790s. Freedom seekers adopted differing models of behavior in the presence of the tension between Hispanic culture and government and the strong population of Anglo-Americans. “Freedom” was a relative term that depended on the merging of the varied aspirations of individuals and the circumstances in which they found themselves once in Florida.¹

The exploits of a man named Titus represent choices that illuminate the several faces of marronage on the Georgia and Florida coasts and the fluidity of the borders between Georgia and Florida. His career and his mobility illustrate the many cracks in the region’s system of slavery. In the course of a long-distance run over twelve years, Titus created three different communities of people, each with its own inner logic yet each demonstrating underlying commonalities. His experiences as a maroon offer what Richard Price calls “the living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness that refused to be curbed by the master’s conception or manipulation of it.”² They also offer a close-up look at the movement between a republic and the province of an empire. To understand Titus’s life, we must first appreciate the larger context in which he operated.

The town of St. Augustine was a welcoming place for freedom seekers. Its heterogeneous population representing diverse cultures made assimilation considerably easier than in the countryside. Spanish officials and those of Cuban or Spanish extraction ensured that Spanish law and language as well as the Catholic faith were the dominant features of the town, ensuring a culture that closely resembled that in every other Spanish town in the Americas. The great majority of residents were Majorcans, Italians, and Greeks, the surviving indentured servants of Dr. Andrew Turnbull’s indigo plantation at New Smyrna and now shopkeepers and artisans, devout Catholics, and strong supporters of the new regime. At the southern end of town were the barracks housing a regiment of troops from Cuba, together with those who catered to the military trade—petty merchants, artisans, and wineshop keepers. Foreign residents included Britons, French, Swiss, Italians, Corsicans, and Americans, mostly elite merchants, clustered in the core of the city around the central plaza. An undetermined number of slaves worked as house servants or laborers on the waterfront. Some sixty to one hundred freemen found space in the poorer neighborhoods on the periphery of the town, although several found places in the central district through the special protection of high officials or merchants.³

Once in St. Augustine, Prince Whitten and his wife Judy, refugees from Georgia, took full advantage of the support offered by the Catholic Church in its role as the primary vehicle for Black assimilation into the life of the town. The two priests, Fathers Thomas Hassett and Miguel O’Reilly, both Irish, were adamant in their instructions to their white parishioners to treat Black people as “brothers in Christ.” The Whittens’ son, Glasgow, was baptized as Francisco Domingo Mariano Witten, and their daughter, Polly, as Maria Rafaela Witten. The protective priests placed them in a Catholic school for basic literacy and the tenets of the Christian faith. There they were with children of all social classes, although they sat separately from the others in the classroom. When the parents’ baptism took place sometime later, Prince became Juan Bautista Whitten, and Judy became Maria Rafaela Quenty. Significantly, their godparent was Manuel Fernandez Bendicho, a prominent Spaniard who lent his influence and patronage, ensuring their social acceptance. In turn, Prince acted as godparent to twenty-three men and Judy to thirty-one women, transforming themselves over the years into loyal Spanish subjects and popular leaders in the Black community.⁴

However, Euro-Americans in St. Augustine did not always see free people of color in the same positive light as they did the Whittens and harbored deep-seated fears of a slave insurrection being plotted in the shadows of the town. This fear was a permanent feature of the landscape. In 1792, a judge was called on to untangle accusations that “free Alick” had gone into the household of John Sanders to meet with Diana, the cook and also his wife, and six others—two from another household—to conspire. While they were talking in the kitchen over a period of days, a white man who lay sick in an adjoining room overheard discussion of plans to commandeer a boat, rally “Negroes of both sexes, free and slaves,” and escape to North Carolina, killing anyone who tried to stop them. Pleading innocent, Alick related how he had been brutally seized by a band of North Carolina patriots during the Revolution, sold for the benefit of the state, and, not “liking” his new “master”, made it to Florida and a new life. Told that he had to convert to Catholicism, he claimed to have memorized pages from the catechism and studied Catholic doctrine but gave up after four years of effort since he understood little. Although Alick never formally converted, Céspedes granted him his status. At the conclusion of the trial, the judge found that the alleged conspirators were covering for each other and remanded the seven to the presidio for whipping and Alick to be exiled to Havana “for the scandal he has caused.”⁵

For people of African descent outside St. Augustine, the situation was considerably more fluid. Black people could use the law to their own advantage.⁶ Spanish law and custom, based on thirteenth-century Castilian slave codes, acknowledged enslaved Africans as human beings with a juridical personality. One of the most significant benefits of this was the possibility of manumission through coartación, a process by which a slave could file a lawsuit to have a judge establish a price at which he or she could purchase his freedom.⁷

Born in West Africa, Felipe Edimboro had originally been a slave of Francisco Xavier Sanchez, a merchant, rancher, and slave trader whom the governor of South Carolina had fingered as the orchestrator of a pipeline that fed more than one hundred Carolina enslaved people to East Florida and eventually Havana. Edimboro and his wife became members of the Catholic Church, had their children baptized, and remained close to their one-time owner. Skilled at butchering cattle, Edimboro sometimes served as overseer of the main estate, San Diego, when Sanchez was away on business in Havana. Granted one hundred acres of farmland, Edimboro acted like his white counterparts and invested his income in slaves to work the land. Black slave-holders in Florida seemed to have had the same relationship to their bondsmen as did whites. They rented them out, sold them on a regular basis, and posted them as collateral for bond.⁸ Skin color did not necessarily determine the treatment of enslaved people.

For most people of African descent living in the countryside, the fluid conditions throughout the region led to other kinds of choices given the lay of the land. In the late 1780s, the Florida between the basins of the St. Marys and St. Johns Rivers remained exclusively Anglo, with a small population that was predominantly American-born and Protestant. Resistant to authority of any kind, disruptive and sometimes violent, they were described by one official as “men without God or King.” The land was a place of small farms and a few plantations, cultivated by the handful of British subjects, mostly loyalists who had stayed behind when the colony was evacuated. It was a wide-open space. Most farmers were to be found along the banks of the rivers growing provisions and herding cattle, the majority of the farms did not exceed thirty-six acres, and few households held slaves. Freemen and freewomen were to be found working for wages. When he first crossed the St. Marys, Prince Whitten had been one of those. A loyalist, William Pengree, had a plantation with fifty-two enslaved people, and a Swiss-born planter, Philip Francis Fatio, made his New Switzerland plantation into a model of efficiency with its eighty-six enslaved people.⁹ In 1790, Governor Céspedes estimated that there were forty-four white families with two hundred members and seventy-one slaves in the St. Marys district of the colony.¹⁰

In this setting, most fugitives followed a different path and chose not to apply for free status. Many, perhaps the majority, worked on farms or plantations for wages paid through a formal work contract. Céspedes complained more than once to his superior, the governor-general of Cuba, that fugitives only went through the motions of conversion.¹¹ Anglo-Floridians in the northern part of the colony feared the precedent being set for their own slaves. William Pengree leveled a charge against Prince Whitten while he was under contract to another planter, accusing him of setting a dangerous example. Pengree had only to point to the two of his slaves who had already run away, one of them to Georgia. When Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada arrived as the governor to succeed Céspedes, he proposed dealing with the issue head-on. On September 2, 1790, he issued a “Proclamation of Good Government” that ordered all unattached Black people to enter the service of a propertied person within one month of the announcement. The aim was a simple one, to control “the multitude of foreign blacks” in the rural areas. In the background were the voices of members of the elite assigned administrative duties for a region, known as regidores, who frequently complained of the misconduct of fugitive slaves residing in Florida.¹² For his misbehavior, a freedom seeker from Georgia named Alexander was sentenced to two months on public works, and he was placed on half rations when he continued to be disruptive.¹³

Other fugitives were grimly determined to establish more fully their autonomy and independence in the new setting. In the lingo of Spanish officialdom, they were “dancers”, moving from site to site, hard to catch, and free of white control. James Seagrove, by this time the southern superintendent for Indian affairs, wrote the governor that his slave, Will, had run away from his house in Georgia: “[He] has been seen several times between the St. Marys and St. Johns rivers. . . . I believe he is skulking about near the plantation of McQueen on the St. Johns.”¹⁴ The refugees maintained ties with the enslaved on neighboring farms and plantations and emerged to trade with whites and people of color for clothing, food, and tools. When an agreement with the State of Georgia was in the works in 1795 and fugitives were at risk, a Spanish official wrote the governor of his hesitation “to pick up the maroons dispersed throughout this province,” saying that “putting a hand on a few without doing it to all would cause some of them to hide and others would flee to the Indian Nation.” Better to wait, he said: “to give it time until knowing the name of everyone and to be able to nab them in one blow or as prudence dictates.”¹⁵

Marronage was part of a long-established phenomenon. The word “maroon” was derived from the Anglicization of the Spanish word “cimarrón,” meaning wild and untamed, and was used to describe fugitives hiding on the fringes of the plantation world or further into the woods and swamps in inaccessible terrain. North America never had the equivalent of the powerful communities that had existed in the Caribbean or Spanish America, like the separate enclaves of Captain Cudjoe and a woman warrior known as Nanny in Jamaica, or the legendary Palmares in Brazil, a close-knit federation of villages made up of thousands of people that lasted for over one hundred years until their defeat by a large Portuguese army.¹⁶

In North America, the one great community that appeared after the Revolution was on Belleisle and neighboring islands on the Savannah River. Belleisle comprised 2,081 acres in a remote, uninhabited section of the Savannah River, virtually impassable given the thick, subtropical vegetation that flourished. The settlement lasted four or five years but finally succumbed to the combined assault of Georgia and Carolina militias, assisted by Catawba Indians.¹⁷ In contrast, the Great Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina offered maroons a waterlogged terrain that proved welcoming for a period of more than one hundred years, with two thousand square miles of a vast natural wetland studded with small islands or hammocks. Recent research has shown that no permanent settlement of maroons took root, no serious threat to southern slavery ever emerged, and many of the maroons were indirectly tied to the Atlantic economy. That fragile connection came through the production of shingles and other wood products for the slave labor camps devoted to timbering in the swamp.¹⁸ Nevertheless, the very existence of an independent space where an individual Black person could find autonomy posed a threat to the institution of slavery.¹⁹

All maroon communities, however big or small, short-lived or long-lasting, borderland or buried in the hinterlands, shared commonalities. Their members lived in exile; they chose inhospitable, inaccessible areas in which to hide; they exhibited extraordinary survival skills in the face of limited resources and frequent threats; they lived in a state of continuous crisis; a skilled leader invariably emerged in the communities that survived; and, if there was not always a commitment to guerrilla warfare in the way that existed in the Caribbean or Spanish America, they showed a willingness to fight in self-defense.²⁰

Emblematic of these maroons was Titus, mentioned above, a Black Georgian who crossed boundaries and frontiers for at least twelve years. Born around 1769, Titus grew up in a large family on Ossabaw Island where the Savannah merchant John Morel had established three indigo plantations. His parents, Tom and Nelly, were two of the several dozen enslaved people purchased from the estate of a deerskin merchant and spent their early years laboring in the deerskin trade in and around Augusta. Titus was the youngest or next to the youngest of seven children in one of the leading families on the island; the other children were Tice, Abraham, Joe, Saffee, Phoebe, and Bacchus.²¹ By the time he came of age, he spoke good English, was familiar with the ways of the white world, and enjoyed the security offered by a large family. Titus emblematizes those who rejected white authority in search of self-determination, empowerment, and autonomy. He exemplifies how goals, ambitions, and motivations evolved over time, with each person’s experience distinctive when it came to the decisions made at each point in the journey.²²

Very much a cross-cultural creole in outlook and upbringing, he was given the dubious privilege of becoming “waiting man” to John Morel (son of the original John) at age sixteen on a recently purchased rice plantation, Tweed-side, on the Savannah River. The young Morel had acquired the plantation by purchasing property confiscated from a loyalist and making the main house the center of activity, a chance to impress the coastal elite with his rice cultivation debut.²³ Titus was admitted to the most intimate details of the private life of the family, the personal conversations, the moments of tension, and the normal give-and-take of any household, in return for giving up his privacy and leaving behind family and friends. Within months of going to Tweedside, the frustrated young man headed for Yamacraw, the biracial neighborhood where sailors, Black people, and local whites regularly repaired to find drink and entertainment or someone to buy their stolen goods or provide other illicit services. Described as being “of a black complexion, smooth skin, 5 feet 6 inches high, well known about Savannah,” Titus joined a childhood friend from Ossabaw Island named Jesse. For both men, it was their introduction to an adult world that provided ample opportunity to make new friends, experience different forms of pleasure, and find a place to sleep.²⁴ After two months, they were captured and returned to their respective plantations.

Four years later at age twenty, Titus made another attempt, this time with a radically different destination in mind, East Florida, rarely mentioned in the advertisements in the Georgia Gazette.²⁵ It is not clear whether he was on Ossabaw or at Tweedside. As a twelve-year-old in 1781, Titus had listened to the spirited conversations in the settlement about the flight of Hercules and Betty to St. Augustine as news sped from cabin to cabin. A few months later, he was somewhere on Ossabaw when a galley full of loyalists, sailors, and roustabouts from St. Augustine made a stunning raid that hauled away thirty-three Black slaves, took two thousand pounds of indigo, and burned a ship under construction.²⁶ Negotiations secured the return of most, but the very mention of Florida called forth a flood of ambivalent feelings and meaning.²⁷ In 1789, Titus recruited Hector, the valuable blacksmith; Patty, a nineteen-year old with a baby; and Daniel, Patty’s fourteen-year-old nephew, to escape with him. Four men at the plantation of Bryan Morel at the north end of Ossabaw left at the same time, probably in concert.²⁸ Throughout his career, Titus never moved alone.

How many set out is not known, but Titus and at least three others crossed the border into northern Florida to find an ideal setting for sustaining an existence relatively independent of outside support. Once embedded in the landscape, the Georgia fugitives never applied for free status, never converted to Catholicism, and never embraced Spanish culture as had so many others. Nor did they make an attempt to escape to Seminole country and a new life in alliance with Natives who would have valued their skills. They chose to live the life of maroons, hiding in swamps and forests or perhaps more openly in a land where settlements were still sparse, free from any form of white control, emerging to secure provisions and foodstuffs.²⁹ Titus and his companions had to learn a new geography in a land where Spanish was the official language and to function as strangers in an alien world, buoyed only by the fact that the region was a borderland where many enslaved people and planters spoke English and where other fugitives lived with an ambiguous status. It is probable that the sparsely populated land south of the St. Marys River offered ample room for this group to trade with whites, to steal on occasion when supplies ran short, and maintain its ability to move across the landscape without constant fear of being intercepted. As Sylviane Diouf so aptly phrases, autonomy was at the heart of the maroons’ project, and exile was their means to realize it.³⁰ Communication with families on Ossabaw seems never to have been interrupted and may have prepared the way for another grand escape from the Morel plantations. In September 1791, two boats, probably twenty-five to thirty feet long, one of them with six oars, landed on Amelia Island with nine men, one woman, and a boy, all from Ossabaw or the network of plantations around Savannah where Titus had family and friends. Titus and the three other maroons surfaced at that very moment to meet them, an extraordinary testimony to the ability of Blacks to communicate across long distances.³¹ The new arrivals came from seven different plantations and had been acquired by two sets of families—the Morels and the Bryans, related by marriage.³² It is impossible to tease out who knew whom and how, but it is clear that these people were part of a much larger network than one plantation, had moved back and forth between multiple sites, had been acquainted with each other for a long period of time, and were disillusioned by changes in their current masters.

What these new fugitives had in mind is not clear. They might have become maroons in the same fashion as Titus and his friends; they might have sought to blend into the variegated Spanish landscape and find protection and perhaps wages; and some might have made a break for the Seminoles. Those options never materialized. By 1790, Spain had concluded that the usefulness of runaways as pawns in international diplomacy had ended and that the empire had little to gain by antagonizing the United States.³³ The negotiations of August 1791 between the U.S. commissioner, James Seagrove, and the new governor of East Florida, Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, produced an arrangement for the return of fugitive slaves.³⁴

Spanish soldiers were well prepared to carry out the mandate. They surrounded and arrested the fugitives shortly after they landed on the island, much to their surprise. Journeying to St. Augustine as the representative of the planters, the young Bryan Morel presented to the governor affidavits from the six planters who claimed ownership.³⁵ The legal documents were nothing grander than sworn statements before a justice of the peace in Chatham County in which each holder gave little information about the slave or his claim. Adam was described as “a lusty, stout fellow, of a black complexion”; Cesar was said to have a ring in his ear and be “much addicted to drinking”; Sam was “a well-made fellow of a yellowish cast”; and Tom was said to speaks good English. By Spanish standards, it was thin gruel, but Governor Quesada did not quibble. It was important to successfully conclude the first test of the August agreement. In January 1792, all fifteen were returned to Savannah and re-enslavement.

That marked the beginning of Titus’s second experience with marronage. For two years he had tasted a life that spoke to his deepest aspirations and refused to accept becoming chattel property, condemned to being deferential and obedient, having to endure countless humiliations, including occasional whippings. His Spanish experiences conditioned his new existence. He remained a “dancer,” only now on a grander scale. After several months, he found an opportunity to escape from John Morel and resumed his life as a permanent fugitive on the outskirts of settled communities, receiving food from sympathetic slaves, stealing from plantations, occasionally robbing people, and staying in constant motion.³⁶ The distinguishing feature of this new life phase was the incredible mobility of the man. He constantly moved in an arc that took him fifty miles from one end of his accustomed travels to the other and back again.

He roamed a broad expanse of land, “a known villain,” in the words of his aggrieved owner, “concerned in most of the robberies committed on the inhabitants of this city and the neighborhood,” moving surreptitiously among the hammocks on the coast bordering Chatham and Bryan Counties, that part of Carolina facing Chatham County, and in the swamps of the Savannah River “as high as Purrysburg [in South Carolina].”³⁷ In Slavery’s Exiles, Diouf takes Titus as an example of what she describes as the “hinterland” maroon, that person who lived in the wilderness in secret, was not under any form of control by outsiders, and sought autonomy in a limited sense.³⁸ Her analysis focuses on the final community created in 1797, but his presence along the river during these earlier years provides a striking demonstration of those same characteristics.

His travels provide a map of the informal connections that linked the region. First, Titus knew the geography extremely well. This was not a case of a man finding an inaccessible spot in the wilderness and clinging to it. He ranged from the plantations along the Ogeechee to his childhood home on Ossabaw Island to the rice plantations along the Savannah to the Carolina side of the river, today the site of the Savannah Wildlife Refuge, and almost to Purrysburg, still a viable if dwindling community. He was easily covering fifty miles or more in his jaunts. Secondly, he was moving by water. Did he have his own boat or canoe? Were other people with him? At the very least, he emerges as a waterman of considerable skill and strength. Lastly, he was touching base with a large number of enslaved people along two of the great waterways in coastal Georgia. One wonders what kind of communications took place. What news did he carry? What did he learn at each of his stops? Surely, he must have become a folk hero to the Africans and African Americans who fed and supported him.

At every turn, Titus’s character stands out as a rejection of white authority and indeed of white society, and his burning desire for self-determination is evident. Gifted with extraordinary survival skills, he simultaneously demonstrated a strong sense of community as seen in his orchestrating the landing of his compatriots in Florida. To that list, one must add loyalty to his extended family that never disappeared. In late 1794, he learned that the Morel brothers were planning to sell dozens of their enslaved people to stave off an impending bankruptcy that stemmed from over a decade of poor investments and high living. By this time, the brothers were struggling to maintain their father’s legacy in the face of financial constraints generated by prewar commitments, postwar ambitions, poor management, and multiple lawsuits.³⁹ Members of Titus’s family were included in two lots of forty-eight and thirty-seven people that the Morels were planning to put on the block.⁴⁰

Concentrating on the problem at hand, he and others secured a boat large enough to hold eight people, six from one of the Morel plantations together with him and his wife. They took with them supplies of rice and other provisions, clothing, and at least one shotgun. A second group followed suit, drawing their numbers from the estate of Bryan Morel at the north end of the island.⁴¹ Entire families boarded the two vessels. The men were seven in number: Titus; Tice, probably his brother; Jeffrey, John, Mingo, Lester, and Summer. There were five women: Nelly, the wife that Titus took during his years in Savannah; Betty, the wife of Tice; Beck, a mulatto skilled in tailoring women’s clothes; Rose, and Sue. And there were three children: Bess, Elsey, and Phoebe, the daughter of Nelly and Titus. Nine of the group came from the plantations of John Morel while two, Lester and Summer, were “New Negroes” from Bryan Morel’s estate.⁴² Most were in their twenties and “country-born.”

The composition of the group tells yet another story. In the constant waves of Blacks headed to Florida, creoles were dominant, not individuals born in Africa, as was the case for the majority of runaways from Lowcountry plantations. The presence of women and children harked back to revolutionary times when the confusion and chaos of the war created opportunities for whole families to flee, an indication of the strength and depth of feeling that animated this unusually cohesive community.

The geopolitics of the region was treacherous. Spanish Florida had little trust in the integrity of Georgia, whose citizens were bent on territorial expansion and eager to see the Spanish government fall so that they could add the peninsula to the “Empire of Liberty” that Thomas Jefferson was to extoll as president. Nor did Georgia trust the Spaniards, whom they considered deceitful and superstitious and who had supplied the Creeks with the arms and ammunition in the recent raids along the extensive border of the state. Indeed, contempt for the other was the common frame of mind.

Titus had had no qualms about returning to the territory where he had been captured. He was aware that the agreement of August 1791 had broken down in a welter of mutual accusations, with the Spanish accusing Georgians of coming across the border to steal slaves while refusing to return Florida slaves who escaped into Georgia, and the Americans accusing the Spanish of allowing a fresh wave of fugitives to cross the border without consequence.⁴³ Both sets of charges were true. Over one hundred enslaved people were successful in escaping to the colony during those years, and a handful of Florida-based escapees were in hiding in Camden and Glynn Counties.⁴⁴

The circumstances that had preceded Titus and his party’s voyage in 1791 were repeated in a nasty twist of fate. In the weeks before Titus, Nelly, Tice, Betty, and the others landed on Amelia Island in February 1795, Spanish and Georgia negotiators had come to an informal agreement to resume the former practice of mutually returning runaway enslaved people. Both sides were eager to bury the issue once and for all. St. Augustine had issued orders to the garrisons of soldiers stationed on the northern tip of Amelia Island to halt and hold any fugitives by force of arms. Unknowingly, Titus and the others stepped into a trap. When a small garrison confronted the seven men, five women, and three children, the creoles and two Africans put up a spirited fight. One was severely wounded, and, within minutes, the outgunned freedom seekers surrendered.⁴⁵

Col. Carlos Howard, commander of the military post at San Vicente de Ferrer at the mouth of the St. Johns River, was in the middle of punishing a set of freeman for their “excesses” and wanted to keep the fugitives from becoming heroes to the Black population. His greatest concern was Titus, who was known from his earlier time there. “He is of such notoriety,” Howard explained to the governor, “that I consider it to be prudent to put him in chains here and then to consign him to work in chains.”⁴⁶ The colonel arranged for the group to be lodged in the outbuildings of a nearby plantation belonging to John McQueen, a former Georgian. McQueen was the uncle (by marriage) of John Morel and quite familiar with Titus’s reputation.

At this point, Titus turned to the only resource left, a party of Seminoles who were making their way through the region hunting game. Between the St. Johns and St. Marys Rivers, there were no fixed boundaries as such, and plantations and farms on the west bank of the St. Johns were especially vulnerable to having their livestock stolen.⁴⁷ Hunting parties occasionally appeared among the settlements, making planters and farmers nervous for their property and fearful for their own safety should something go awry. The appearance of a Seminole hunting party led by Cohiti, a chief or headman, near the post at St. Vicente de Ferrer and McQueen’s plantation gave Titus his opportunity. Security was lax, and he already was slipping out at night to visit his compatriots in scattered outbuildings near the main house.

Cohiti was leading a party of ten or twelve men, with several women and children, ambling through the countryside supposedly hunting for deer. The Seminoles were accompanied by two Black fugitives of Governor John Houstoun of Georgia, fugitives who—like so many of their peers—were serving as translators and cultural brokers between the Natives and Euro-American society. Farmers and ranchers feared that the Indians were looking for opportunities to steal livestock, slaves, and valuables. Colonel Howard put out feelers and learned that Cohiti was a medicine man from a Hichiti-speaking town who had chosen to go into exile when townsmen had turned against him. It seems that predictions the headman had made had not come true and had had placed his settlement into a difficult position. But the exile was temporary. Cohiti was planning to return at the time of the Green Corn Festival in late summer, when the town fire was extinguished and a new one built, past misdeeds were forgiven, amnesty extended, and ceremonies marked a new beginning in the cycle of life.⁴⁸

Appearing at Colonel Howard’s residence with several horses carrying furs, Peter, one of Houstoun’s fugitives, told the commander that the Natives wanted to sell the skins to sailors on a nearby boat for rum. Howard refused permission. At this point, Cohiti rode up to the post and entered into a spirited discussion that set forth the points for debate. When the colonel asked in frustration why the Natives would dare hunt among the plantations along the St. Johns River, burn fields in the search for game, and enter private houses when they knew it was against Spanish policy, Cohiti gave a spirited reply that blamed the Americans for pushing Natives out of their land and asserted that the territory west of the St. Johns belonged to the Seminoles. “These Negroes already speak the Indian language,” Howard wrote to Quesada, “and were going about spreading word around the slaves in the neighborhood of the happy life they could live with the Seminoles.”⁴⁹

The “happy life” that Peter described to his enslaved peers in East Florida was indeed privileged in the sense that Black Seminoles lived in villages attached to Seminole towns, retained control of their daily lives to an extraordinary degree, and performed certain services for their captors—from giving a small portion of their crops to acting as interpreters and cultural brokers with the white world. Some historians considered them as genuine maroons loosely attached to the Seminoles, a relatively recent coalition of Native groups that retained older forms of captivity with looser forms of control. Historians continue to debate their status, but it is worth noting that the Indigenous Seminoles viewed Black Seminoles as enslaved people, even if they required little from them and eventually fought side-by-side with them in the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century. The subsequent history of the two groups down to the present day reflects this reality, with Black Seminoles claiming recognition as members of the Seminole Nation and “blood Seminoles” refusing to accord that status.⁵⁰

Slipping out of his place of imprisonment, Titus freed Nelly, his wife; John, Nelly’s brother; and Mingo from their outbuilding and fled with them in search of Peter and the Seminoles.⁵¹ Cohiti and his men were pleased to add to their numbers and planned to pull up stakes and leave the area with their rich prize of four new Black people as quickly as possible. On learning of their escape the next morning, McQueen moved quickly, dispatching two professional slave hunters, a Mr. Thorp and a Mr. Fitzgerald, together with their English hunting dogs, to track the four.⁵² Howard instructed that, if McQueen’s men discovered the fugitives already with the Natives, they were to negotiate for their return, it “being notorious that the Indians easily return any stolen property that they find [in return for money].”⁵³ The bounty hunters discovered the four with Cohiti and, for a goodly price, arranged for the Seminoles to return them to the McQueen plantation.

Cohiti and his men brought back the fugitives, but, for reasons that reflected their deep aversion to humiliating people who demonstrated bravery, refused to tie their hands and delivered them at the plantation house free of restraint. Titus was far from cowed. Standing in front of the house, he refused an order to go inside, and pulled a knife. McQueen would write to Howard, “[Titus] swore that if [the overseer] tried to lay a hand on him, he would cut his guts out and immediately grabbed [the man].” On seeing McQueen and his foreman appear, the fugitive moved behind the screen offered by the eight Native warriors and dashed into nearby underbrush. The foreman discharged his shotgun but missed as the escapee disappeared into a dense thicket. Titus doubled back but was captured that night hiding under his wife’s bed.⁵⁴

The Spanish governor hoped to return him to Georgia as quickly as possible. That was not to be. At the very moment the transfer was being arranged in late June 1795, the Georgia-Florida frontier exploded in violence as a disjointed fighting force of American adventurers, supported by disaffected American colonists in Florida, attempted a clumsy uprising that collapsed under the weight of a Spanish counterattack.⁵⁵ Some of the leaders of a failed invasion in 1794 rallied a few dozen Anglo planters who were dissatisfied with their lack of protection from raids by the Seminoles and the mercantilist restrictions on trade that reduced them to smuggling goods from Georgia. The attempted coup ended talks between the two governments and resulted in Titus spending two years imprisoned in the fearsome Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, with its thick tabby walls and dungeon-like rooms. Never losing hope, he made a bold but futile attempt to escape. For his troubles, he was placed on half rations.⁵⁶ Despite the Treaty of San Lorenzo between Spain and the United States in late 1795 that opened the Mississippi River to American vessels, the crudely mounted coup on the St. Johns River delayed a settlement on fugitive slaves until early 1797.⁵⁷

In that year, the U.S. commissioner, James Seagrove, and the new Spanish governor, Enrique White, took advantage of the turn of events and began a conversation that led to the exchange of lists of enslaved people held in the two territories. Realizing that both sides had little to gain from prolonging the tension, they worked out the terms of agreement with surprising ease.⁵⁸ An understanding reached in May 1797 provided for the return of Florida fugitives in Georgia and Georgia fugitives in Florida. The return took place rapidly. On May 22, 1797, the sloop Harriet brought twenty-seven of the failed freedom seekers to St. Marys, where they were said to be “safely lodged in the new prison in this town, until proof be made by their owners.” Another eleven remained in St. Augustine as “hostages” until the return of an equal number “now detained in Georgia.” Unable to budge planters in the Lowcountry, Georgia had to compensate Spanish slaveholders for the fugitives that they adamantly refused to release and shipped thirty-four hundred Spanish dollars to St. Augustine.⁵⁹ News of the agreement motivated Titus to make a new attempt at escape. He made his way past guards at the seventeenth-century fortress and headed northward toward Georgia. Always in search of followers, he recruited two English-speaking field hands to join him.⁶⁰

The remarkable escape, a rarity in a century-old masonry fortress, inaugurated the third phase in his career as a maroon. In July, Seagrove reported to the Spanish governor, “The notorious fellow Titus, with some negros from Florida, made their way along the sea coast until they got into Savannah River and among the rice plantations where he was well acquainted. There Titus soon formed a party with some other outlaying negroes who became very troublesome to the people by plunder and as a receptacle for runaways.”⁶¹ Within short order, this quintessential maverick had created a wholly new community around the rice plantations of the Savannah River. Maroons in the neighborhood joined him, and runaways began to appear, with the group evolving into an unstable community whose survival depended on raiding nearby plantations at a time when a network of support had not yet been built.

Until this point, Titus had surrounded himself with family members and friends from the Morel and related plantations. Once back in Georgia, he began welcoming other maroons and runaways. The recruitment of outsiders represented something new, as if he had adopted the model of marronage that the so-called soldiers of the King of England had embraced toward the final days of their settlement. It is hard not to draw the conclusion that imprisonment in the Castillo de San Marcos had profoundly changed Titus and that he was an angry man ready to throw caution to the wind. Predictably, the new formula drew the intervention of the authorities. For the white community, individual maroons and even small numbers of them were often too inaccessible to make it worthwhile to root them out. The presence of a growing number of maroons who struck at nearby plantations and impeded travel on rural roads brought back white Georgians’ memories of the existential threat that the Belleisle community had represented in the 1780s.

Within short order, a company of the Georgia militia was dispatched with orders to kill those who did not surrender. Although they discovered and fired upon Titus’s band, most of the maroons escaped, “it being a very thick swamp.” They suspected they had killed one of them given “a great quantity of blood found on the ground,” but they were not able to confirm this. Trackers, presumably with dogs, headed into the marshes and managed to capture several people who were taken to the jail in Savannah. Seagrove noted to the Florida governor, “A Negro belonging to Mr. Maxey may still be with his friend and patron, Titus, in the woods but parties are constantly after them and there is little doubt they will be taken or killed.”⁶² Both Ben and Plato, from the estate of Robert Maxey in Florida, were eventually captured, but there is no evidence that Titus was taken. At that point, the historical record falls silent.⁶³

Charismatic, bull-headed, blessed with an indomitable spirit, and possessing a proud sense of his Black features, Titus had made the sanctity of his own group his primary focus. Over the years, that focus changed. At the beginning, he led a community built around the conventional model of men creating a highly gendered society in a place of safety. He then led a second community in which the family was paramount and women and children were present. It appears that the flight to Florida in 1795 was less about him and his wife, Nelly—they had been successful maroons outside of Savannah for three years—and more about saving their loved ones from sale by the Morel brothers. In the third and last iteration, he created a short-lived community that became a magnet for runaways and other maroons in the region and showed himself willing to stake out a claim for broader recognition within the Black world.

The year 1797 marked the turning point for Spanish-American relations on the Georgia border. Henceforward, Spanish authorities detained and returned escapees when caught, although for years to come Georgia newspapers carried the occasional notice that a fugitive was suspected to have gone to St. Augustine. Not all fugitives were intercepted, nor did authorities in Florida have the time or interest in pursuing them. If tensions subsided and a relatively cordial working relationship emerged during the next decade, the border remained a lawless area. Smuggling cattle, cotton, and slaves was always a staple of business on both sides of the frontier.⁶⁴ With the change, fugitives now headed directly to the Seminoles. Many took the well-worn Mikasuki path that crossed the St. Marys River at several points below Trader’s Hill and wound around the outer edge of the Okefenokee Swamp into Indian territory.⁶⁵ The Seminole people and the role they accorded to fugitives in leading a relatively independent life remained a source of considerable angst among whites.

One can argue that Titus bore only a distant relationship to Prince Whit-ten and his friends, who took full advantage of the opportunities offered by the Spanish government, Spanish law, and the Catholic Church. Whitten’s family became valued members of the St. Augustine community, skilled artisans who constituted a critical part of the colony’s defensive forces. Indeed, Titus more nearly fits the image of the “hinterland maroon” that Sylviane Diouf draws in Slavery’s Exiles, the fugitive who relied on the difficult terrain of dense forests and treacherous swamps rather than on man-made works to elude the white world.⁶⁶ His was a much less complicated quest to establish absolute autonomy free of any form of outside control. When the Spanish consul in Savannah interrogated Ben, one of the fugitive slaves he had recruited from a Florida plantation, Ben stated that he had fled “at the instigation of the notoriously perverse Titus, of the same color, who made them [Ben and Plato] believe that here they would spend a life entirely different from the yoke of slavery.”⁶⁷ That life was to be more nearly the life of a survivalist, not a participant in a community rooted in the culture of Spanish America.

Nevertheless, Titus’s exploits cannot be fully understood unless they are placed in the larger movement of African Americans from the Georgia Lowcountry to Spanish Florida across a span of forty years. In searching for freedom, he sought the same basic goal that animated Jupiter and Auba during the Revolution, Prince Whitten and his family during the 1780s, and the fugitives who attached themselves as “junior allies” to the Seminoles. Titus’s remarkable ability to traverse the width and breadth of the Lowcountry, cross international borders, and seemingly appear and disappear at will represented an accentuated version of what hundreds of other Black people were doing across a long period of time. Although negotiating a place in white society was foreign to his thinking, Titus remained an integral part of the Atlantic world. His interactions with Spanish authorities, Georgia planters, Seminole Indians, Florida enslaved, Savannah-region maroons, and enslaved people still living on the Morel plantations showed his remarkable connections to this larger world and his ability to read the political and cultural landscape according to his own deeply held beliefs. Far from an isolated actor, he played a leadership role in a relatively large-scale movement of fugitives into Spanish territory between 1785 and 1797.

Another lesson is apparent. Not only was Titus aware of this larger world, but so too were the enslaved people along the Georgia coast. Far from being isolated and cut off on rice plantations in swampy terrain, many of them remained connected with the realities of the Atlantic world as filtered through the adjacent borderland. Too many of their family, friends, and acquaintances made their way to Spanish Florida for them not to be. Too many raids by Creeks and Seminoles into coastal areas reminded them of both the dangers and possibilities. The occasional slave stolen from a Lowcountry plantation and hustled across the frontier provided another marker; and the occasional Florida freedom seekers heading north provided yet another. And in the background was the underground pipeline of information that traveled up and down the coast such that Titus could stay in touch with the Morel slaves during his years as a maroon in Florida.

Few Black people were tempted by the life of Titus or his followers. But they were well aware of the possibilities that existed, and hundreds of them did choose to make their way across the frontier over a forty-year period. The ties between Lowcountry Georgia, Spanish Florida, and the Seminoles were substantial and nowhere more so than in the understanding that pervaded slave quarters along the coast. The movement of Black people was an important element in creating a sense of a larger region among those who remained in place, one that included knowledge of the Spanish, the Creeks, the Seminoles, and perhaps even the British. In the backdrop were the geo-political calculations of many governors, three empires, and one republic. Marronage during the concluding years of the eighteenth century bore a transnational perspective, stemming in large part from the incredible mobility that the juxtaposition of a colonial society, a newly created republic, Native lands, and a watery world of swamps and tidal creeks made possible.

Beside the movement of maroons like Titus and freedom seekers like Prince Whitten, something new was happening along the border that separated an increasingly self-confident state, flush with an expanding population, and a colony that was only beginning to find its footing and stood in desperate need of manpower. In 1791, the governor of East Florida received belated approval of a policy already in place in West Florida and threw open the gates of his province to all settlers willing to give an oath of allegiance to the king of Spain, accept Spanish law, and worship as Protestants only in private homes. It was a generous offer that required little, while land was virtually for the taking. A new generation of American planters with their enslaved people made an appearance, and a different dynamic took hold. Suddenly, enslaved people from Georgia found themselves thrust into a Hispanic landscape.