Life in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Augustine on the Eve of Evacuation

Between Two Empires:

T.E. Bryant

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Liberal Arts in Florida Studies College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida St. Petersburg

Major Professor: Dr. J. Michael Francis, Ph.D. Adrian O’Connor, Ph.D. Erica Heinsen-Roach, Ph.D.

Date of Approval: June 19. 2017

Keywords: 1764 Evacuation, Florida, Spanish Empire, Diversity, Property Ownership

Acknowledgments

Writing a thesis is an arduous journey and many people have supported me along the way. First and foremost I want to thank my primary advisor, Dr. J. Michael Francis.

Dr. Francis’ constant support and mentorship enabled me to thrive at the University of

South Florida St. Petersburg. I hope that my future students will respect me as much as I respect Dr. Francis. I would also like to thank Dr. Adrian O’Connor and Dr. Erica

Heinsen-Roach for their support and advice. They were more than willing to join my thesis committee and their help has been invaluable. William and Hazel Hough’s love of

Florida history is truly amazing, as is their passion in aiding aspiring historians. Their support allowed me to spend three summers studying in the Archive of the Indies in

Seville, Spain.

Graduate school is difficult and it takes a community of friends and colleagues to succeed. In no particular order, I want to thank Jeffery Arnold, Gabby Pillucere, Rachel

Sanderson, Kate Godfrey, Maria Wilhelmy, Clinton Hough, Robert Landry, Ayla

Hatadis, Pieter Craig, Jackie Inman, Leah Hart, and Hannah Tweet for their friendship and support. The USFSP’s faculty and staff cannot be given enough credit for their hard work. Specifically, I want to thank Dr. Raymond Arsenault, Dr. Christopher Meindl,

Daun Fletcher, Veronica Matthews, and Sudsy Tschiderer for their help and encouragement. The staff at the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library, the Archive of the

Indies, the Archive of the Naval Museum of Madrid, and the St. Augustine Historical

Society were crucial to the completion of this thesis. Lastly, and certainly the most important, I want to thank my family. My parents, Julie and Jill, have always supported me through the ups and downs of life. Their unconditional love allows me to pursue my dream with abandon. My brother and sister, Jason and Katie, are my constant cheerleaders. My family makes my defeats endurable and my successes even sweeter.

This thesis is a tribute to their support. i

Table of Contents

List of Tables ii

List of Figures iii

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter Two: Abandoning the Last Bastion 11

Chapter Three: The People of St. Augustine 45

Chapter Four: Where They Lived 69

Epilogue 97

Works Cited 102

Reference Bibliography 111

Appendices 117 Appendix 1: Maps of St. Augustine 118 Appendix 2: Additional Tables 121

List of Tables

Table 4.1: Property Owners on the Crown’s Payroll 82

Table 4.2: Military, Church, and City Administrators Who Owned Coquina Stone Buildings in 1764 83

Table 4.3: Manuela Díaz’s and Juan de Landa’s House Appraisal 92

Table A1: St. Augustine’s Evacuation Vessels 1763-1764 121

Table A2: Domingo Cardoso’s Slave Family 126

Table A3: Women Property Owners in 1764 127

Table A4: Fifty-three Canary Islander Militiamen as of 1764 132

Table A5: St. Augustine’s Black Militia Members in 1764 134

Table A6: Compañía de Fucileros de Montaña de América (1764) 137

Table A7: Military Regiments, Royal Administration, and Church Officials Evacuating St. Augustine in 1763-1764 139

Table A8: Confirmed St. Augustine Black Property Owners in 1764 140

Table A9: Unconfirmed St. Augustine Black Property Owners in 1764 141

Table A10: The 1764 Evacuation Committee 144

iii

List of Figures

Figure 2.1: Article VII of the Treaty of Madrid (1670) 15

Figure 2.2: Early Carolina, 1565-1733 16

Figure 2.3: James Oglethorpe's invasion of St. Augustine according to British mapmakers in 1740 18

Figure 2.4: Article XIX of the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau in French and English 23

Figure 2.5: Bernard Gordon’s baptismal entry 36

Figure 2.6: The number of British transactions according to Puente’s receipts from June to July, 1764 41

Figure 2.7: British investment in pesos 42

Figure 3.1: Summary table from the royal 1764 census 47

Figure 3.2: Black births 1735-1763 52

Figure 3.3: Fugitive Carolinian baptisms 52

Figure 3.4: Black baptisms 1735-1763 54

Figure 3.5: Baptized blacks previous place of origin: 1735-1763 55

Figure 3.6: Canary Islanders evacuees 60

Figure 3.7: Canary Islander fields surrounding St. Augustine by 1763 62

Figure 3.8: 1764 royal census 65

Figure 4.1: St. Augustine’s plaza mayor in 1764 and the buildings surrounding it 71

List of Figures Continued

Figure 4.2: St. Augustine’s surrounding countryside in 1763 73

Figure 4.3: Building Composition Comparison 80

Figure 4.4: Confirmed black property owners 86

Figure 4.5: Don Juan Pescador’s house 94

Map 1: Don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente 1764 Property Map 118

Map 2: Pablo Castello 1763 Map 119

Map 3: 1769 don Juan Joseph Eligio de la Puente Map 120

Abstract

St. Augustine’s 1763-64 evacuation was a ten-month event that ended Spain’s two hundred year rule in Florida. A careful review of Spanish records produced during the evacuation reveals that mid-eighteenth century St. Augustine was a cosmopolitan city, where immigration was a key component to social mobility. St. Augustine’s role as

Spain’s bastion against the expanding British North American colonies meant that the city was a key piece in British and Spanish imperial maneuvering. Both St. Augustine’s strategic location and military function allowed diversity to flourish in the city. St.

Augustine’s diverse community adapted to the constant immigration by developing intricate kinship networks that allowed both newcomers and Florida-born criollos to elevate and secure their social standing. St. Augustine’s residents used religious and legal institutions to express their agency by transforming physical spaces into safe spaces that protected them from Crown authority. In short, St. Augustine was a diverse, dynamic, city with tight connections to the Atlantic world; an idea that challenges traditional narratives that depict the city as an impoverished and isolated military outpost.

Introduction

“His Catholic Majesty cedes and guaranties…to His Britannick Majesty, all that Spain possesses on the Continent of North America, to the East, or to the South East, of the River Mississippi.” - 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau1

When the galleon Our Lady of Sorrow departed from St. Augustine, Florida, on

January 21, 1764, it carried the settlement’s last remaining Spanish residents into Cuban exile. Another seven ships had departed earlier that day with the same mission, but the

Sorrow’s passengers included the town’s governor, don Melchor Feliú.2 With his departure, Spain’s two hundred-year presence in Florida came to an abrupt end.3 Spanish

Florida was a casualty of the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau, a treaty designed to remedy the damages France, England, and Spain inflicted upon each other during the Seven

Years War. In the treaty, the British agreed to return Havana, a city they had captured three months prior to the treaty’s ratification, to Spanish rule. In exchange, the British demanded sovereignty over Spain's colonial possessions south and southeast of the

1 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” (London: Printed by E. Owen and T. Harrison ..., 1762), 15. 2 “Razon de las familias blancas y morenas que a pedimento piedad y quenta del Yll(mo) Señor don Pedro Augustin Morel y Santa Cruz, Dignissimo obispo de esta Ysla, se transportaron del presidio de San Augustin de la Florida a esta ciudad en los Barcos que abajo se expresaran con declaración de sus capitanes día en que partieron de aquella barra y numero de personas que trajo cada uno y son a saver” Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI], Seville, Spain. Santo Domingo 2660, fol. 43. 3 To put Spain’s possession of Florida into perspective, as of the date of this study, the United States of America’s ownership of Florida is still shorter than the First Spanish Period.

Mississippi River, that is, all of Spanish Florida. The Spanish were eager to regain their most prized possession in the Caribbean and therefore agreed to the terms.

Fortunately, for the residents of St. Augustine, the British gave them a choice.

The city’s inhabitants could remain or they could choose exile. Under the terms of the treaty, the British guaranteed that those who remained could continue to practice

Catholicism. Those who chose to abandon St. Augustine were granted eighteen months following the treaty’s ratification to leave the city.4 Most of St. Augustine’s residents chose exile. In early 1764, the Spanish Crown commissioned a detailed census, including a map of all properties and property owners at the time of abandonment. The census reveals that 3,096 people evacuated Florida.5 St. Augustine was virtually empty.

The ensuing evacuation of St. Augustine lasted about ten months and produced a wealth of information about the city and its inhabitants. The 1764 evacuation is treated as a defining event in the history of Spanish Florida, as indeed it punctuated the end of the

First Spanish Period.6 In St. Augustine’s historiography, it is used as a gateway to understand what St. Augustine was like both architecturally and demographically.

However, little research has been conducted on the evacuation itself and its relationship to Spain’s imperial rivalry with Britain. Doing so illustrates St. Augustine’s role within

Spain’s imperial strategies and the interconnectedness between St. Augustine and the

British Atlantic world. Furthermore, the documents created as a result of the evacuation give a glimpse into residents’ social mobility. St. Augustine was a diverse place, where

4 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 15-16. 5 “Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias que componían las personas de ambos sexos, y todos edades, condiciones, calidades, y estados: vecinos y moradores de la Plaza de San Agustin de Florida…”AGI Santo Domingo 2595, fol. 17r. 6 The evacuation started in April 1763 and ended in January 1764.

3 people from all over the Atlantic could find opportunities to secure or elevate their place in society. Military service was the most common path to social integration and elevation, but it was not the only one. St. Augustine contained two, dual but intertwined, identities.

Built upon the city’s military identity was a social sphere that manifested itself in St.

Augustine’s architecture, affording people the physical spaces to express their agency beyond the Crown’s authority. Ultimately, St. Augustine’s location at the edge of the

British and Spanish empires forced the city to develop a dynamic cosmopolitan society.

St. Augustine was far more than an isolated frontier military settlement. Whether through immigration, treaties, or imperial agendas, the city was deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic world.

St. Augustine’s role within the Spanish empire was to defend the lucrative

Caribbean trade-networks as a presidio. A presidio, for lack of an absolute definition, was a fortified military settlement that the Spanish Crown used to protect the empire’s frontiers.7 However, in his book The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands, Max

Moorhead argues that St. Augustine was not actually a presidio, despite the term’s frequent use in contemporary records. Rather, the city was officially designated a fuerte

(fort) or castillo (castle).8 The distinction is of little importance, though, as St. Augustine protected Spain’s interests in the same manner as the presidios of northern New Spain.

Due to St. Augustine’s military purpose, much scholarship focuses on the city’s political and military history. Many studies of eighteenth-century St. Augustine emphasize the city’s population structure, economy, defensive capabilities, and the city’s

7 Max L. Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands, (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 3. 8 Ibid, 28-29.

4 dependence on the situado (the Crown’s stipend).9 The situado inconsistently arrived in

St. Augustine, leading many scholars to conclude that St. Augustine was an impoverished city, consistently on the brink of starvation. St. Augustine’s white criollo (creole) residents were the center of many studies.10 Even when closer attention was paid to minority groups, scholars tended to conclude that St. Augustine was a closed community with little or no movement into or out of the province.11 The work of Mark Boyd and José

Navarro Latorre capsulated this argument. In their unpublished manuscript, “La Florida:

The Place and Its People During the Residence of Don Juan Joseph Eligio de la Puente,”

Boyd and Navarro Latorre concluded that St. Augustine was a “thoroughly static or even stagnant” community, notorious for its isolation.12

Building upon Florida’s traditional historical narrative, scholars have begun to describe a much more complex city. For example, Charles Arnade examined documentation from parish, property, and census records, and found that St. Augustine’s residents had developed intricate kinship-networks woven together through marriage,

9 Charles Arnade “The Architecture of Spanish St. Augustine,” The Americas 18, no. 2 (1961): 149–186; Paul Hoffman Florida’s Frontiers, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2002; Daniel Schafer “Raids, Sieges, and International Wars,” in The History of Florida ed. by Michael Gannon, 112-127. Gainesville FL: University of Florida Press, 1996; John TePaske The Governorship of Spanish Florida: 1700-1764. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1964; Ronald Wayne Childers “The Presidio System in Spanish Florida 1565-1763,” Historical Archaeology 38, no. 3 (2004): 24–32; John Dunkle "Population change as an element in the historical geography of St. Augustine,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1958): 3-32; Carl Halbrit “La Ciudad De San Agustín: A European Fighting Presidio in Eighteenth-century "la Florida”.” Historical Archaeology 38, no. 3 (2004): 33–46; Daniel Hughes, “A Case of Multiple Identities in La Florida: A Statistical Approach to Nascent Cosmopolitanism,” Historical Archaeology 46.1 (2012): 8–27. 10 A criollo was a person of European decent who was born in the Indies. This term also applied to people of African decent born in the indies. 11 Kathleen Deagan, “Mestizaje in colonial St. Augustine,” Ethnohistory 20, no. 1 (1973): 55-65. 12 Mark F. Boyd and José Navarro Latorre, “La Florida: The Place and Its People During the Residence of Don Juan Joseph Eligio de la Puente,” (Book manuscript, Madrid, 1962) accessed through the Archivo de Museo Naval [hereafter ANM].

5 god-parentage, and property ownership. Arnade himself admitted that little had been done to document Florida’s social history.13 Other scholars, like Theodore Corbett, focused on St. Augustine’s migration patterns and the city’s population structure to emphasize St. Augustine’s diversity.14 Scholars now refute the idea that St. Augustine was a closed community, showing that the city was connected to the wider Atlantic world through demography.

Susan Pickman refined these ideas by analyzing St. Augustine’s social and economic dynamics in depth. She examined many of the same sources as Boyd and

Navarro la Torre did for her dissertation entitled, “Life on the Spanish-American

Colonial Frontier.” Pickman placed St. Augustine’s history within a much broader

Atlantic world context, arguing that the city became increasingly dependent upon trade with its northern English neighbors. Her analysis of St. Augustine’s economy reveals that the city was neither isolated nor impoverished. Rather, economic prosperity and material wealth were concentrated in the hands of a small “elite” criollo class. Viewing eighteenth-century St. Augustine through a class system, Pickman contended that the city’s elite consisted of the oldest families of the city. They held the most property, developed interwoven kin networks, and owned most of the city’s slaves. Because of this, they were in the best position to profit from legal, and illegal, trade with British America and Cuba.

13 Charles Arnade, “The Avero Story: An Early Saint Augustine Family with Many Daughters and Many Houses,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 40, no.1 (1961): 4. 14 Theodore G. Corbett, “Migration to a Spanish Imperial Frontier in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: St. Augustine,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54, no. 3 (1974): 414-430. Theodore G. Corbett, “Population Structure in Hispanic St. Augustine, 1629- 1763,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, 54, no. 3 (1976): 263-284.

Residents who were not a part of the elite class, like free blacks, Canary Islanders, and other minority groups, suffered in the poverty that Boyd and Navarro Latorre described. Minority groups, Pickman continued, had opportunities to enter the ranks of elite families through marriage and god-parentage to gain access to property and better jobs, but the cases of this happening were few.15 Pickman’s analysis, however, overlooks the agency of minority groups. She admits that several foreigners were successful in integrating into the kinship networks of the elite criollo families, yet her conclusion implies that elites controlled entrance into the networks, which overlooks the power that other classes enjoyed in the city. As will be discussed later, there are several examples where non-criollos successively entered St. Augustine’s kinship-networks to elevate or secure their social standing, proving how much power foreigners held in society.

Jane Landers’ work on the black community of Spanish Florida broadens our understanding of how minorities operated in St. Augustine. In her book, Black Society in

Spanish Florida, Landers analyzes how effective the Tannenbaum thesis worked in an urban environment like St. Augustine. The Tannenbaum thesis was articulated by Frank

Tannenbaum in one of the first works on comparative slavery, Slave and Citizen. In short,

Tannenbaum argued that Spanish law regarded slaves as humans as it engendered slaves with souls and granted them certain legal rights. Because of this, slavery in the Spanish empire was “softer” than it was in the British empire.16 Landers argues that the

15 Susan L. Pickman, “Life on the Spanish-American Colonial Frontier; A Study in the Social and Economic History of Mid-18th Century St. Augustine, Florida” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1980). 16 Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). Slave and Citizen remains an influential work on comparative slavery. For more on the historiographical debates over the Tannenbaum thesis, please read Alejandro De la Fuente’s “Slave Law and Claims-making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” and Ann

Tannenbaum thesis is better suited to an urban environment, like St. Augustine. Slaves in the city were closer to the legal and religious institutions that protected them than were slaves in rural areas. In St. Augustine, black men, specifically fugitive Carolinian slaves, were able to utilize militia service and the Catholic Church to gain freedom, and thus, secure their rights as Spanish subjects. Through these rights, freed blacks were often able to improve their social standing by owning property or could protect themselves from legal trouble by directly accessing local religious institutions that resided close to their own neighborhood. Landers’ exploration of black legal navigation and property ownership shows that the black community was not insignificant nor powerless, but was an active and important part of the city’s social composition.

Many scholars use the 1763-64 evacuation as a bookend that either ends the First

Spanish Period or begins a new chapter for the Florida exiles. Robert Gold is one of the few scholars to study the evacuation itself and its legal consequences. He argues that both

Spanish and British agents disregarded key parts of the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau and the later 1763 Treaty of Paris to fulfill each Crowns’ more specific directives. He details how the evacuation was executed, giving readers insight into the demographic composition of St. Augustine and the city’s real estate market. Gold’s work places St.

Augustine, and Florida in general, in the center of international politics, rather than treating Florida as a byproduct of larger diplomatic issues. Between Two Empires follows

Gold’s example and treats the 1763-64 evacuation as a catalyst for understanding life in mid-eighteenth century St. Augustine; it is central to understanding St. Augustine’s diversity and social mobility.

Twinam’s Purchasing Whiteness; Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies.

Chapter Two focuses on the evacuation, viewing it as the culmination of 150 years of Spanish-British rivalry in the American southeast. Spanish Florida was a key part of British expansion plans in North America, thus converting Florida into an important Spanish military bastion. The Anglo-Spanish struggle for imperial supremacy reverberated in St. Augustine, as every war and treaty forced the Spanish settlement to reckon with encroaching and hostile British colonists. However, the Anglo-Spanish rivalry was not absolute in its acrimony, as the evacuation reveals a group of British merchants who traded with, lived with, and sometimes at times aided the Spanish in times of need. Moreover, British merchants were key components in St. Augustine’s economy and often became part of Spanish society. These British merchants were crucial in St.

Augustine’s evacuation, buying most of the evacuating Spanish residents’ properties.

While this did not end well for the Spanish sellers (many never received the money from the sale of their properties), it shows that many British merchants were a part of St.

Augustine society and confirms that the city was not isolated but part of the British

Atlantic as well.

Chapter Three builds upon the previous chapter by focusing on St. Augustine’s diverse population. Many in St. Augustine were sent to the city for the purpose of serving the Spanish Crown. Parish records, census reports, criminal proceedings, and royal decrees show that St. Augustine’s minorities integrated into local society and became valued members. The presence of many different kinds of people challenges the narrative that St. Augustine was a closed community with little population movement into or out of

9 the city.17 In fact, St. Augustine’s history is one of constant demographic flux. During the eighteenth-century, the city’s population grew steadily. Its growth was not solely due to a growing birthrate, but to Spanish imperial policy. The Crown wanted to prevent St.

Augustine’s population from dwindling, so the Crown and its agents encouraged, and often forced, people from all over the Atlantic world to move to St. Augustine to keep pace with British expansion. As a result, the city’s residents adapted to the constant flow of immigrants, with foreign immigration becoming a key component to navigating life in

St. Augustine.

Chapter Four is a description of St. Augustine’s architecture and an analysis of its relationship to the city’s inhabitants. Many scholars claim that St. Augustine’s architecture matched its image as a poor frontier outpost. But a closer look shows that St.

Augustine’s physical profile was much more complex than previously depicted, as people used buildings to navigate legal and religious authority (through ecclesiastical asylum) and to elevate their social status (though property ownership and marriage).

The complexity of St. Augustine’s architecture, as well as its diversity and place within imperial agendas, is revealed through parish data, property maps, census reports, and invaluable archival material created by the 1763-64 evacuation and two hundred years of Spanish bureaucracy. These documents question the narratives of St.

Augustine’s poverty and imperial irrelevance. The city was not a Spanish peripheral in the Atlantic nor was it an orphan in the Crown’s plans. St. Augustine was on the edge of two competing empires, and while it was not the most important place in either Spain’s or

17 The idea that St. Augustine was a closed community was stated by Kathleen Deagan in her study of St. Augustine’s mestizaje population. Kathleen Deagan, “Mestizaje in colonial St. Augustine,” Ethnohistory 20, no. 1 (1973): 59.

Britain’s plans, it was certainly valuable. Because of its location, life in St. Augustine was much more dynamic than previously credited, and tightly connected to the broader

Atlantic world.

Chapter Two: Abandoning the Last Bastion

“I do not know if I correctly served You Lord to play on their onerous trust, but I have the satisfaction that I have tried, and had managed to do it.”

- Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente to the King, regarding the cession of Spanish Florida18

The borders of Spanish Florida were always in flux, even before St. Augustine was established in 1565. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas split the New World in two.

The treaty established a line running 370 degrees west of the Cape Verde Islands as the line of demarcation, with everything west of it belonging to Spain and everything east to

Portugal.19 The line of demarcation, though, was an arbitrary one with no geographic landmarks to distinguish where one territory ended and another began. Lacking a distinguishable border, both Spain and Portugal (as well as many other European powers and Native American societies) tested and disregarded the treaty though war, diplomacy, and ceaseless legal maneuvering.20 What was clear, to the Spanish at least, was that the entire Atlantic border of North America fell under its dominion. By 1513, the Spanish

Crown supported the expedition of former Puerto Rican governor, Juan Ponce de León, to conquer and settle the land of Bimini. After making landfall on April 2, Ponce

18 “No se si habré acerttado a servir a V.S. desempeñando su onrrosa confianza, pero ttengo la sattisfaccion de que lo hé procurado, y ttendria la de haverla conseguido,” “Memorial de 166 cavesas de familias españolas antiguas de Florida, y 4 Documentos que compruevan lo que representan,” Archivo General de Indias [Hereafter AGI]: Santo Domingo 2595, sin folio. 19 J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830, (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 267. 20 Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

12 renamed the land La Florida.21 While the peninsula on which Ponce landed retains the name of Florida, the Spanish understanding of Florida was much larger, encompassing all the land between current-day Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Newfoundland, Canada.22

Ponce failed to conquer or settle Florida, a failure shared by many who followed. Over the next half-century, seven subsequent expeditions came to colonize Florida. All of them failed.23

By 1564, Spain still lacked a permanent colony in La Florida. Seeking to remedy this, Spain’s King Philip II entered into contract negotiations with don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, an ambitious and well-decorated naval officer, to lead a colonizing expedition to Florida.24 Menéndez succeeded where his predecessors had failed, and on September

8, 1565, he established the settlement of St. Augustine.25 By settling Florida on a permanent basis, Menéndez, and by proxy, Spain, successfully enforced the Treaty of

Tordesillas. But as the treaty was irrelevant to the interests of other European nations,

Spain’s ability to continually enforce it was difficult at best, and no where more so than in Florida. At the same time that Santa Elena, Menéndez’s intended capital of Spanish

21 Michael Gannon, “First European Contacts,” in The History of Florida ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville FL: University of Florida Press, 1996), 20. 22 Eugene Lyon, "Settlement and Survival,” in The History of Florida, edited by Michael Gannon, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1996), 55-75 23 Juan Ponce launched another expedition to Florida in 1514, but it ended with his death at the hands of Natives. The next potential Florida conquistadors after Ponce were Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón the elder, Pánfulo de Narváez, Hernando de Soto, Fray Luis Cáncer de Barbastro (Though not a conquistador, he did seek to establish a Dominican utopia in the Tampa Bay area), don Tristán de Luna y Arellano and Ángel de Villafañe, and finally Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón the younger (who failed to even reach Florida). In total there were eight failed conquests of Florida. Ibid, 18-38. 24 In recognition to his service to the Crown, Menéndez was picked to be one of the military escorts of Philip when he traveled to England to marry Mary Tudor.; Eugene Lyon, The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Spanish Conquest of 1565-1568, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1976). 25 Ibid, 115.

Florida, was abandoned in 1587, the English attempted to colonize Virginia. Over the next two centuries, St. Augustine experienced continual friction with English settlers in

Virginia, conflicts that over time extended south into Carolina and Georgia.

Spain’s inability to keep rival powers out of its territory both, in Florida and throughout its entire empire, led to the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. Leading up to the treaty, the Spanish were not necessarily concerned with British encroachment in Florida, but rathers with English piracy and logging rights in the Yucatan.26 The idea of occupation through cultivation was England’s main argument in almost every territorial debate with

Spain, especially in Florida, where Spaniards failed to establish permanent colonies. In

Article VII of the Treaty of Madrid, Spain legally recognized Great Britain’s presence in the Americas, thus nullifying the monopoly the Treaty of Tordesillas had conferred to

Spain and Portugal in the Indies.27 The Treaty of Madrid established a significant precedence; Britain now had a legal right to colonize in the New World, but their presence did not go uncontested. Article VII’s language was purposefully vague, only relaying that:

“the most serene King of Great Britain… shall have, hold, keep, and enjoy for ever, with plenary right of sovereignty, dominion, possession, and propriety, all

26 According to the British, Spanish claims to the Yucatan were irrelevant because much of the land was neither settled nor cultivated by Spaniards. Furthermore, a profitable tree, the logwood, grew in the Yucatan. Seeing this vacant space as a chance to extend their empire, the British commissioned privateers to cultivate the land. According to British jurists, the fact that Britain had cultivated land, whereas the Spanish did not, meant that Britain had res nullius rights over the land, which in turn, meant that British agents had a right to fell wood in the area. Eva Botella- Ordinas, “Debating Empires, Inventing Empires: British Territorial Claims Against the Spaniards in America, 1670-1714,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 no. 1, (2010), 143-144; “The Bases of Territorial Claims,” Geographical Review 63, no. 2 (1973), 226. 27 Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 220.

those lands…in the West Indies, or in any part of America which the said King of Great Britain and his subjects do at present hold and possess.”28

Where those British possessions were and who specifically owned those lands (illegal pirates or sanctioned officials) was a matter of continuous debate long after the treaty was signed.29

In Florida, the treaty legitimized the English colony of Carolina, founded in 1629.

For St. Augustine and the Spanish Crown, this meant that the British could not colonize farther south. Numerous Franciscan missionaries inhabited the land south of Carolina, with the northernmost mission near present-day Savannah, Georgia.30 People, both in St.

Augustine and in Madrid, believed that the presence of Franciscan missions represented the northern border of Spanish Florida. The British disagreed, believing that the treaty gave them the right to be in the Indies and did not prohibit further expansion. The establishment of Carolina represented this view, as its original charter included both St.

Augustine and parts of New Spain. The British never expanded Carolina to the size that its charter claimed, but they did push into land that Menéndez had once proclaimed for

Spain. Port Royal was originally picked by the founding Carolinians for colonization, but they decided to settle farther north, at the Ashley River. It was there that Charleston (San

28 “A Treaty for the composing of Differences, restraining of Depredations, and Establishing of Peace in America, between the Crown of Great Britain and Spain, concluded at Madrid, the 11th Day of July, in the Year of our Lord 1760,” in A Collection of treaties Between Great Britain and Other Powers, Vol. II, edited by George Chalmers, (Piccadilly: Printed by John Stockdale, 1790), 37. 29 Botella-Ordinas, “Debating Empires, Inventing Empires.” 30 About eighty Franciscan missions were established throughout Florida from 1567 to 1705. John Hann, “The Missions of Spanish Florida,” in The History of Florida, edited by Michael Gannon, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1996), 91-111.

Jorge to the Spanish) was established in 1670, just seventy-seven miles north of Santa

Elena’s ruins and an uncomfortable five-day ride from St. Augustine.31

Figure 2.1: Article VII of the Treaty of Madrid (1670). The second paragraph states that Great Britain held sovereignty in the Americas, but did not say where. The vagueness of the language allowed both British and Spanish subjects to invoke this Article when determining where one territory ended and another one started.

31 J. Leitch Jr. Wright, “Spanish Reaction to Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review 41, no. 4 (1964): 468.

Figure 2.2: Early Carolina, 1565-1733. This map of Georgia and the Carolinas shows the land granted by King Charles II under the charter of 1663. It starts at the southern border of Virginia south, the 36° parallel, and goes to the 29° parallel, which includes St. Augustine. It also shows the boundary lines that divided Carolina and established Georgia. Santa Elena is the red dot below Charleston.

Carolina was legitimized by the Treaty of Madrid, but still represented a major threat to St. Augustine. Over the next century, tensions between Carolina and Florida often ended in violence, though usually in the pretext of a global war. In 1702, Carolinian governor James Moore launched a full-scale invasion of Florida as a part of the War of the Spanish Succession, known in North America as Queen Anne’s War. The grandson of

French King Luis XIII stood to inherit the Spanish throne after the last Hapsburg king,

Charles II, died without an heir. European rivals of France and Spain, fearing this would tilt the balance of power in France’s favor, sought to prevent the succession.32 Looking to capitalize on the war to expel the Spanish from Florida, Moore razed every Spanish residence he encountered and eventually laid siege to St. Augustine. Though he failed to capture St. Augustine, Moore's attack left the city in shambles. Moreover, his forces destroyed the remaining Franciscan missions along the Atlantic coast, thus clearing the way for the establishment of Georgia three decades later, in 1732.33 The British and

British-allied natives continued to harass St. Augustine after Moore returned to Carolina, heightening tensions between Florida and its northern British neighbors and setting the stage for James Oglethorpe’s 1740 and 1743 invasions into Florida during the War of

Jenkins’ Ear. The war, which lasted from 1739 to 1748, erupted over Anglo-Spanish trade rivalries in the Americas but eventually extended into the War of Austrian

Succession. Oglethorpe was a proponent of aggressive British expansion into Spanish

Florida and, like Moore before him, tried but failed to capture St. Augustine from the

Spanish. Two years after Oglethorpe's initial attack, Spanish forces under the command of Manual de Montiano launched a retaliatory invasion into Georgia, an assault that devolved into border skirmishes after Spanish forces were defeated by the British at the

Battle of Bloody Marsh.

32 Daniel L. Schafer, “Raids, Sieges, and International Wars,” in The History of Florida, edited by Michael Gannon, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1996), 115-116. 33 Moore’s invasion ended the Mission period of Spanish Florida but the missions themselves. Moore destroyed all the missions in present-day Georgia, but the Spanish built new ones closer to St. Augustine and the protection of San Marcos. Hann, “The Missions of Spanish Florida,” 105- 106; Schafer, “Raids, Sieges, and International Wars,” 120.

Figure 2.3: James Oglethorpe's invasion of St. Augustine according to British mapmakers in 1740. Oglethorpe failed to capture St. Augustine and retreated to Georgia, abandoning the artillery he deployed in his attack on the city.34

34 A View of the Town and Castle of St. Augustine, and the English Camp before it June 20, 1740,” Thos Silver, [Map] 12 x 6.5 inches, London: 1740. Downloaded from RareMaps.com on the web at https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/49078?view=print.

Filled with violence, the eighteenth-century was also characterized by dramatic demographic growth and population movement throughout the Spanish and British empires.35 In the Carolinas and Georgia, a growing number of British colonists were eager to acquire new lands to develop. British leaders saw in Spanish Florida an opportunity to give the growing number of colonists new land to settle and to rid the region of a European rival. Using international wars as cover, men like James Moore and

James Oglethorpe sought to capture or destroy St. Augustine, but they could never overcome the defenses of Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine’s imposing stone fortress. Their exploits, though, were incorporated into British narrative of global imperial growth. After reverend Edward Clarke accompanied the British ambassador to

Spain as a chaplain, Clarke published a collection of essays, called Letters Concerning the Spanish Nation.36 In it, Clarke relayed his understanding of how Spain’s government, culture, and religion functioned. While his intention can be perceived as benign, Letters

Concerning the Spanish Nation was ultimately a justification for British expansion into

Spanish territories. Clarke edited excerpts from a contemporary historian, the Marquis of

Mondecar, to summarize Spanish history from Roman times to the 1760s. The Marquis weaved both Oglethorpe’s Florida invasion and the subsequent Spanish counter-invasion of Georgia into important aspects of Britain’s larger global territorial struggles, and victories, against the Spanish Crown. Chief among these territorial struggles were

Spanish claims to fisheries in Newfoundland and the Spanish presence in peninsular

35 Elliot, “Empires of the Atlantic World,” 255-292. 36 Edward Clarke, Letters Concerning the Spanish Nation: Written at Madrid during the Years 1760 and 1761, (London: T. Becket & P.A. Hondt, 1763).

Florida, both integral parts of sixteenth-century La Florida.37 In this account, Florida was not an isolated outpost in British expansionist plans, but a point of interest in British foreign policy.38 For the British, Florida represented both an opportunity and a threat to the British empire. Its proximity to Cuba and Caribbean trade networks, as well as its serviceable harbors, could prove a boon to British trading interests in the region if St.

Augustine was captured. By contrast, Florida’s proximity to Georgia and Carolina made it an attractive destination for fugitive slaves, and a perfect base from which the Spanish could stage an invasion into British territory.39 Florida was thus an integral part of

Britain’s imperial agenda.

Spain’s diplomatic concessions following the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau and the 1763 Treaty of Paris justified to the British their perception of American expansion.

As Mondecar explained at the end of his introduction, “…Spaniards artfully… sought a rupture, for which they have since paid very dear, by being obliged to desist from their pretensions to a fishery at Newfoundland, and likewise to cede to us all Florida, and to allow us to cut logwood in the Bay of Campeachy.”40 Clarke’s work was published in

1763 and his rhetoric echoed Britain’s victorious sentiment, especially towards Spain.

37 Marquis de Mondecar, “Historical Introduction,” in Letters Concerning the Spanish Nation: Written at Madrid during the Years 1760 and 1761, edited by Rev. Edward Clarke, (London: T. Becket & P.A. Hondt, 1763), xxxiii-xxxvi. 38 Gabriel B. Paquette, “The Image of Imperial Spain in British Political Thought, 1750-1800,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81 no 2 (2004): 206; J.D. Alsop, “The Age of the Projectors: British Imperial Strategy in the North Atlantic in the War of Spanish Succession,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 21 no. 1 (1991), 44 39 Paquette, “The Image of Imperial Spain in British Political Thought,” Rodney E. Baine, “General James Oglethorpe and the Expedition Against St. Augustine,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 84, no. 2 (2000), 204.; Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687- 1790,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1984): 296–313. 40 Ibid, xxxvi.

The treaties of Paris and Fontainebleau ended the Seven Years War, rewarding Britain with Spanish territory. Indeed, the terms outlined in the Treaty of Fontainebleau proved disastrous for Spanish Florida, as Article XIX stipulated that Spain had to cede Florida to the British.41 Ultimately, it was not an ambitious Carolinian or Georgian who captured

Florida for the British. Rather, it was diplomacy and Spain’s costly alliances that resulted in Florida’s transfer to the British.

The Seven Years War, or the French & Indian War as it is called in North

America, lasted from 1756 to 1763, a global conflict that eventually dragged all the major

European powers into war. Its outcome dramatically transformed the imperial boundaries of the Americas, and Spanish America in particular. Spain remained neutral for the war’s first five years, but British victories in the Atlantic caused the balance of imperial power to shift toward the British Crown, worrying officials in Madrid. In 1761, Spain decided to act to curb Britain’s rising power and renewed the Family Compact with the French

Crown, thereby creating a defensive alliance between the two empires.42 Spain's involvement in the war proved to be disastrous. As soon as Britain learned of the Family

Compact, it launched two military offensives against Spanish holdings, eventually capturing Manila in the Pacific and Havana, Spain’s prize colony in the Caribbean, in

1762.43 The Treaty of Paris, the accord that ended the war, was signed in 1763 and was

41 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 15-16. 42 The Family Compact was an agreement between the Spanish and French Bourbons to come to each other’s aid in case of attack from a from another power, like Great Britain. There were several Family Compacts between France and Spain, but the one that initiated Spanish intervention in the Seven Years War was known as the Third Family Compact. For more on the Family Compact, please read A.S. Aiton’s “Spanish Colonial Reorganization under the Family Compact.” 43 Elliot, Empires of he Atlantic World, 292-294.

22 the product of several complex agreements between every participant in the war, such as the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau.

Britain was particularly successful during the war because of its naval superiority, but victory came at a steep price. When the French minister, Etienne-Franois de

Stainville, duc de Choiseul, suggested an end to the war, he found a war-weary British government ready to end hostilities.44 The Treaty of Fontainebleau was negotiated between the French and British governments as a basis for the later peace accord, the

Treaty of Paris. Spain, much to its chagrin, was forced to rely on the French to negotiate the terms of the treaty.45 Massive amounts of territory were transferred between the three empires as restitution for the war. Britain agreed to return Havana to Spain in exchange for all that Spain “possesses on the Continent of North America, to the East, or to the

South East, of the Rover Mississippi.”46 Spain was reluctant to cede Florida to Britain, since a British Florida threatened Spain’s lucrative trade networks in the Caribbean. Yet

Havana’s value to Spain was critical to its empire. Thus, Spain agreed to surrender

Florida. Ceding Florida did not mean that Spain no longer had a presence in the region, though. Cajoling their Spanish allies so they would agree to the treaty’s terms, France agreed to transfer French Louisiana to Spain, allowing Spain to maintain a foothold in the northern Gulf of Mexico.47

44 Ibid. 45 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 4. 46 Ibid, 15. 47 Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 295.

Figure 2.4: Article XIX of the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau in French and English. It stipulates that the Spanish Crown cede all its territories southeast of the Mississippi River to Britain. It also sets the conditions of the evacuation of Florida for those who chose to leave during the transfer.48

48 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 15-16.

When looking at the progression of British expansion into Spanish territory, historians argue that rapidly expanding populations in Carolina and Georgia eventually pushed the Spanish out of Florida, an inevitable process due to Spain’s failure to develop a viable presence in the region. Many historians attribute this lack of Spanish growth to a number of reasons: a failure to incorporate Florida’s native population into the empire, a failure to colonize the region’s rich agricultural land, an unstable birth rate, as well as military conflicts with the English to the north.49 However, a closer examination of the records produced during the period reveals that St. Augustine, the principle population center of Spanish Florida, was growing while, paradoxically, the boundaries of Spanish

Florida were shrinking.

In 1689, the Bishop of Cuba issued a census that listed 1,444 residents living in

St. Augustine.50 In a report sent to Spain’s King Charles III in 1759, don Juan Joseph

Solana, St. Augustine’s priest, counted 2,446 residents in the city.51 When the Crown ordered a census be taken of all who left St. Augustine in 1764, don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente, who executed the census, listed 3,104 people who lived in or near St.

Augustine.52 In seventy-five years, and in spite of two major military invasions, St.

49 Paul Hoffman’s synthesis of Spanish Florida, Florida’s Frontiers, capsulizes these arguments in more detail. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 204-206; J.H. Elliot espouses these ideas on a larger scale, arguing that the demographically dynamic British colonies were able to push into Spanish borderlands because the Spanish population in the borderlands were stagnating, if not outright shrinking demographically. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 255-292. 50 Theodore Corbett, “Population Structure in Hispanic St. Augustine, 1629-1763,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1976): 267-268. 51 “Expediente de don Juan Joseph Solana” St. Augustine, April 22, 1759. AGI: Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 91.2r. 52 “Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias que componían las Personas de ambos sexos, y todos edades, condiciones, calidades, y estados: vecinos y moradores de la Plaza de San Agustin de Florida…” St. Augustine, January 21, 1764. AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fol. 17r.

Augustine’s population more than doubled in size. It was not solely due to increased birth rates, but also increased immigration from British and Spanish territories.

Hundreds of black fugitives from Carolina and Georgia escaped south to St.

Augustine and found freedom and multiple opportunities to fight their former British masters.53 The constant flow of fugitive slaves to St. Augustine aggravated British slave owners, who feared that escaping slaves would return to incite slave rebellions throughout the southern British colonies. Part of the goal for Moore’s attack in 1702 and for Oglethorpe’s 1740 invasion was to capture St. Augustine to terminate Spain’s fugitive slave policy and to recover any escaped slaves residing in Florida. During Oglethorpe’s invasion, the most vicious fighting occurred at Fort Mose, the free black military fort located two miles north of St. Augustine. Years after the Battle of Mose, any black

Floridian captured by the British who was suspected of participating in the battle was often subjected to torture and sometimes, executed.54 Though the Treaty of Paris omitted any mention of fugitive slaves, its terms ensured that the southern route to freedom was finally closed to British slaves, a major victory for slave owners in Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia.

53 Irene A. Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Florida,” The Journal of Negro History 9 no. 2 (1924): 144–95; Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, Archive of the Ecclesiastical Records of the St. Augustine Diocese (hereafter AERSAD), Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (hereafter ESSSS). 54 Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687-1790,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1984): 296–313; Landers, “Fort Mose: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: a Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” The American Historical Review 95, no.1 (1990): 9-30; Landers, Black Socety in Spanish Florida, (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999)39-45; Robin Blackburn. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, (London: Verso Books, 2010), 474.

While the attacks headed by Moore and Oglethorpe failed to stop the fugitive slave policy, they did succeed in weakening St. Augustine’s population.55 To bolster the city’s population following the attacks, Spanish officials shipped more than four hundred

Canary Islander families to the recovering Florida presido.56 By 1764, though, St.

Augustine was virtually empty. Because of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the people of

Spanish St. Augustine chose to forsake their Florida homes and move elsewhere in the

Spanish empire.

One way the British government tried to entice Spanish Florida’s residents to stay in Florida was to guarantee them “the liberity of the Catholick Religion.” Specifically, any Catholic resident was free to worship according to the “Rites of the Roman Church, as far as the Laws of Great Britain Permit.”57 If residents chose to leave, however, they were to be permitted to do so without any harassment from British authorities.

Furthermore, those who left could take as many possessions as they could, also without any interference from British authorities. The only exception concerned those who were in debt or were under criminal prosecution. Although a vague stipulation, it can be assumed that this applied to those who were indebted or being prosecuted by the British, and not the Spanish.

Those who chose exile had eighteen months to evacuate the city, beginning on the day the Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed, November 3, 1762. But the Treaty of Paris,

55 Corbett, “Population Structure in Hispanic St. Augustine, 1629-1763.” 56 Elliot, “Empires of the Atlantic World,” 272; “Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias que componían las Personas de ambos sexos, y todos edades, condiciones, calidades, y estados: vecinos y moradores de la Plaza de San Agustin de Florida…” St. Augustine, January 21, 1764, AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fol. 17. 57 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 15.

27 which the Treaty of Fontainebleau was folded into, was signed on February 10, 1763, meaning the Spanish had until early September, 1764, to abandon Florida.

In regards to royal property, the Spanish Crown was allowed to take any military effects with its evacuating subjects.58 The agreements concerning Florida in the Treaty of

Fontainebleau were then rewritten as Article XX in the Treaty of Paris, which was finalized on March 10, 1763, and which initiated with the evacuation process in Florida.59

Official preparations for the impending transfer of power began as soon as the details of the Treaties of Fontainebleau and Paris became public on February 24, 1763.

St. Augustinians most likely knew of Florida’s coming cession earlier that month, as the

South Carolina Gazette announced the treaty’s terms in early February.60 News would have traveled quickly between the southern English colonies and Spanish Florida, either through illegal trading or through the small community of British subjects who lived and worked in St. Augustine.

When the terms of the treaty were made public, the Spanish Crown immediately dispatched lieutenant colonel don Melchor Feliú to St. Augustine to replace the interim governor of Florida, Alonso de Cárdenas. As St. Augustine’s sargento mayor, Alonso de

Cárdenas had replaced the controversial Lucas Fernando de Palacio y Valenzuela, who died in 1761, shortly after marrying the floridana Josepha Escobedo y Angulo. While

Cárdenas led a decorated career as a soldier in Florida, it was the Spanish Crown’s policy

58 Ibid, 15-16. 59 Robert Gold, “Politics and Property during the Transfer of Florida from Spanish to English Rule, 1763-1764,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1963), 19-20. 60 Robert Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition: The Triple-Nation Transfer of Florida, (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 86-87.

28 to appoint military officers from outside Florida as its permanent governors.61 Feliú’s main objective as Florida’s governor was to oversee the evacuation of St. Augustine’s residents and to protect the Crown’s and the Church’s interests. The Crown

“recommended” to Feliú that St. Augustine was to be completely evacuated.

Furthermore, the Council of the Indies instructed Feliú to convince St. Augustinians to evacuate by promising them new homes and assignments elsewhere in Spanish America.

Moreover, the Crown would cover the cost of evacuation and provide remuneration in certain cases, thus providing an added incentive to convince its subjects to abandon their

Florida homes.62

Whether it was the promise of a new life or because of loyalty to the Spanish

Crown, almost every Spanish subject and slave in Florida, over three thousand individuals, chose to evacuate.63 It is not surprising that most Spanish Floridians chose to leave their homes. The 1764 royal census listed 961 evacuating military, Church, or

Crown personnel, accounting for one-third of St. Augustine’s overall population.64

Specifically, over seven hundred military personnel evacuated the presidio. When the

Crown ceded Florida, these soldiers no longer had a reason to defend the land. The

61 John Jay Tepaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida: 1700-1764. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1964), 18. A floridano was someone of Spanish decent who was born and raised in Florida. The practice of selecting officers from outside Florida was a Crown practice dating back to when the Crown took over the presidio in the mid-sixteenth century. The Crown did so to prevent its American subjects from gaining too much power, and potentially usurping the Crown’s authority. 62 Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition, 86. 63 In fact, only three families chose to stay in St. Augustine. Several years after the evacuation, only one Spaniard, Lucas de Herrara, remained, though he served as a spy for the Spanish Crown. Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition,75; Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias que componían las personas de ambos sexos, y todos edades, condiciones, calidades, y estados: vecinos y moradores de la Plaza de San Agustin de Florida…” AGI Santo Domingo 2595, fol. 17r. 64 “Resumen General,” AGI Santo Domingo 2595, fol. 15v

Crown’s “recommendation” to Feliú can easily be interpreted as a veiled order to leave the presidio. If the soldiers and royal agents viewed the recommendation as an implied order, then they risked committing treason if they defied the Crown to stay in Florida. In the Crown’s eyes these men were soldiers, though many of the men performed additional trades. If the Crown wanted its subjects to leave Florida, then these soldiers were expected to follow the Crown’s command, even if it meant abandoning their homes.

However, soldiers were not the only ones who left Florida. Puente recorded over two hundred evacuating widows and orphans who received Crown stipends.65 These women would no longer receive financial assistance from the Crown if they elected to remain in St. Augustine. Over one hundred free black men and women also took part in the evacuation.66 Many of these men and women were former British slaves who gained their freedom in St. Augustine through military service and by converting to Catholicism.

As stated earlier, the British guaranteed that St. Augustinians could continue to practice

Catholicism, though only “as far as the laws of Great Britain permit.”67 Blacks could continue to practice Catholicism under British rule, but their status as free men and women was not guaranteed. This stipulation is a major reason why not only black

Floridians, but almost every Spanish subject, decided to leave St. Augustine. Great

Britain’s only guarantee to those who stayed was the preservation of their religion, but

65 “Yncluye las Personas del Sexo fememíno procedentes de las familias españolas vecinas antiguas que rean de la Plazade San agustin de la Florida, y al tiempo de su entrea a la corona Britanica, se trasladaron a la Havana donde gozan a la sason de las Penciones mercedes y limosnas que lleban señaladas por sus clases,” Havana, May 8 1770, AGI Santo Domingo 2595, no. 2 fols. 5r-13r. 66 “Resumen General,” AGI Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 15v. 67 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 15-16.

30 not the legality of their religion. In the Spanish empire, the Church played an important role in society and in the law. Spanish subjects who stayed in British Florida could remain members of the Catholic Church, but would lose the benefits the Church provided in the Spanish world, such as ecclesiastical asylum.68 Furthermore Spanish law, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, would be denied to any who did not evacuate.69 Black or white, man or woman, those who remained in Florida would find themselves cut off from the society that formed their identity or from the law that protected them, and from opportunities that could elevate their standing in society. While the British offered the people of St. Augustine a choice to stay, many would not have seen it as a viable option.

Thus, most chose exile. They were Spanish subjects, either through birth or through choice, and they left with the monarch that symbolized their social, legal, and religious identity.

Despite the longstanding aggression between the British and Spanish colonists, the evacuation and transfer of political power was orderly and calm.70 General William

Keppel, who was appointed commander-in-chief of English forces in Florida, was

68 Ecclesiastical asylum was a common practice in the Spanish empire but was not a observed in the British empire. Robert Kapitzke, Religion, Power, and Politics in Colonial St. Augustine (Gainesville FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), 98. 69 The Church’s influence on Spanish law is quite apparent in Spain’s slave laws. The Portuguese and Spanish Crowns were allowed to engage in the slave trade as a means to save the souls of the enslaved, who were often Muslim. It was Pope Eugene IV and Pope Callixtus III who conferred this right to the Iberian Crowns with two separate Papal Bulls, one in 1442 and one in 1456. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492- 1800, (London: Verso Books, 2010), 50-53. 70 There were only two issues that concerned Feliú. In a report to the King, Feliú wrote that British soldiers tore down wooden houses to use as firewood, greatly depreciating the evacuating owners’ property values. Additionally, very few people were buying houses. According to Feliú, one investor, the Scotsman David Martin, was dissuaded from further investing by Major Ogilvie, who consistently made property sales difficult. “Melchor Feliú to the Spanish Crown,” Havana, March 14, 1764, AGI: Santo Domingo 2660 sin folio, accessed through and translated by the St. Augustine Historical Society [hereafter SAHS].

31 ordered by England’s Secretary of State, the Earl of Egremont, to send a small military force to St. Augustine to preside over the transfer of power. In compliance, Keppel sent

Major Francis Ogilvie of the Ninth Regiment and Captain John Hedges of the Twenty- second regiment to St. Augustine to represent the British. Captain Hedges and his regiment were the first to arrive in St. Augustine, and so it was to him that Feliú gave the keys of the city, even though Major Ogilvie was Hedges’ superior officer. When Ogilvie arrived on July 20, Feliú entrusted St. Augustine’s archive to him.71 Conceding his position as Florida’s governor, Feliú’s remaining responsibility was to oversee the evacuation of St. Augustine’s people and the Crown’s property. St. Augustine’s evacuation, though, was not solely Feliú’s responsibility.

Feliú was responsible for representing Crown and Church interests in the transfer of power. However, the Crown appointed don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente, St.

Augustine’s royal accountant, to oversee the evacuation of the city’s residents and the subsequent sale of their properties. Puente was responsible for creating many of the documents used in this study. In addition to executing the 1764 census that listed every person on the Crown’s payroll, he also conducted a second census in 1770 that recorded every person still alive who either received, or was still receiving, financial assistance from the Crown. Puente was also responsible for, or involved with, creating several maps of St. Augustine and its surrounding geography. Most importantly to this study is the

1764 Puente property map, seen in Appendix 1: Map 1 (please see page 119).

The map’s center displays the physical layout of the city. Each property’s profile is contained around the map’s margins and contains information such as who owned each

71 Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition, 87-88.

32 property lot, whether the lot contained a building, the building’s composition, and the lot size.72 To help determine the size and composition of St. Augustine’s properties, Feliú brought along don Pablo Castelló, a royal engineer, with him to Florida.73 In addition to helping Puente and Feliú, Castelló also produced a map of St. Augustine in 1763, which displays St. Augustine, its surrounding fields, villages, forts, and countryside, as well as instructions on how to navigate the infamous sandbar that protected but hindered maritime traffic into and out of the city.74 Though it was not produced for the evacuation,

Puente made a second map in 1769 of St. Augustine and its surrounding physical features, especially the neighboring Anastasia Island. Puente used the map to show how

Oglethorpe had laid siege to St. Augustine in 1740.75 This was only one of several maps

Puente designed to show how St. Augustine could be captured. Though the Crown had lost Florida in 1764, it had every intention of reclaiming the land over which it had governed for more than two centuries.76

72 Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine de Florida, con su Parroquíal mayor, convento É Iglesía de San Francisco: Casas Y Solares de los Vecinos; y mas algunas fabricas y huertas extramuros de ella todo segun y en la fonna que existe oy 22 de Enero de 1764 , quando en virtud de su entrega a la Corona Britaníca se han embarcado y salen para la Havana y Campeche el ultimo resto de Tropas y Familias Españolas de la Guarnicion y Vecindario de dicha Plaza de San Agustin, Juan Joseph Eligio de la Puente, [Map] St. Augustine: 1764, Archivo del Museo Naval de Madrid (hereafter AMN). 73 Castello was one of two engineers that assisted in the evacuation. The other was Pedro Brozas y Garay, a Spaniard that replaced the previous local engineer, don Pedro Ruiz de Olano, sometime around 1752, when Olano retired. Melchor Feliú to the governor of Cuba, May 30, 1764, AGI Santo Domingo 2660 fols. 2r- 4v, 41r. 74 Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontaínebleau, Pablo Castello, [Map] St. Augustine: 1763, AMN. The map can be seen in Appendix 1: Map 2. 75 Plano del pressidio de San Agustin de la Florida que poscen a la sason los Yngleses con las Barras Ríos y terrenos que se demuestran en el cuyas entradas fondos comunicaciones parages y sus nombres son a saber Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente [Map] 1769, AMN 76 Elixio de la Puente even created a map in 1779 that depicted the best way to lay siege to fort San Marcos. Plano de la ciudad y fuerte de San Augustin de la Florida, sus imediciones y plano

Two locations were chosen for the resettlement of Florida’s population: Havana,

Cuba, and Campeche, Mexico.77 On April 12, 1763, the first three ships, with seventy- four passengers, departed for Havana. Yet most of the city’s residents waited several more months to leave Florida, with most evacuating ships sailing for Cuba between

August 3, 1763 and January 21, 1764. The largest exodus of Floridians took place in

August, when 1,308 people left St. Augustine. Only one ship departed in September, transporting eighty-two people. The second largest emigration occurred in October, with

578 individuals leaving St. Augustine. Two ships, a brigantine named the El Firme and a

French sloop called La María, left in November, carrying away 135 people. Six ships left in December, including two British ships, with 275 evacuees. Finally, in January, 544 departed St. Augustine on ten ships. Overall, it took thirty-four ships and forty-six trips to move 2,996 people from St. Augustine to Cuba. Only two ships departed for Campeche,

Mexico. The San Joseph y las Animas left on December 5, with ten people and the brigantine La María left on January 23 with thirty-four people.78 Overall, 3,091 people left St. Augustine within a ten month period.79

de ataques, Juan Josef Elixio de la Puente [Map] 1:363’, 1779,. Copy provided by the SAHS: D7 F2 #2, MAP91. 77 The evacuation process was organized and executed by eleven of St. Augustine’s leading officials, one of whom was Elixio de la Puente. While the eleven officials helped facilitate the evacuation, it was Governor Feliú and Elixio de la Puente who were ultimately responsible for the evacuation’s success. The complete list of names and positions for the eleven officials is found in Appendix 2: Table A10. 78 For a complete breakdown of evacuating ships, pleas reference Appendix 2: Table A1. “Razon de las familias blancas y morenas que apedimento…,” St. Augustine, February 20, 1764, AGI: Santo Domingo 2660 fol. 432r; “Estado que manifiesta los barcos de transportes…,” Havana, October 14 1762, AGI: Santo Domingo 2574 fols. 417r-418r; Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition, 70-73. 79 Only one ship, the sloop Nuestra Señora del Rosario, did not make it to its destination, as it sank on its way to Cuba. Four people died in the shipwreck, Theodora Maria Cantal, Petrona Nieto, and a soldier named Phelipe Cartella whose death meant that his wife would be widowed for a second time. The author cannot identify the fourth person who died in the wreck. “Relacion

Most of the ships used in the evacuation were Spanish yet it is not surprising that seventeen percent of ships were either foreign-owned or -operated. Regular trade occurred between St. Augustine and the English colonies, even in times of conflict.

During the 1740s and 1750s the William Walton Trading Company, a New York shipping company, regularly conducted business in St. Augustine. The Crown, not pleased with the presence of a British trading company in Florida, insisted that St.

Augustine’s residents only do business with the Royal Havana Company, the official imperial Spanish trading company. But the Royal Havana Company was never able to adequately supply St. Augustine’s growing population. After several petitions from St.

Augustine’s royal officials, the William Walton Company eventually received a special permit from the Spanish Crown.80 The William Walton Company was not the only reason for British merchants to be in Florida. Private British merchants often did business in St.

Augustine or sent their employees to the city for both long and short periods of times.

Many of these men spent years living in St. Augustine and several became part of the community.

Principle among the British merchants who lived in St. Augustine was Jesse Fish.

Fish was born in New York in either 1724 or 1726 to a family of moderate wealth. In

1736, he first arrived in St. Augustine at the age of ten or twelve working for the William

del numero de personas del sexo masculino y vasallos de la corona de España…a saber,” St. Augustine January 22, 1764 AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fols. 2r-16r. Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition, 68. 80 “Testimonios de autos sobre el contrato de suministro y provisión del presidio de San Agustín de la Florida por la Real Compañía de La Habana, y sobre la posterior rescisión del mismo,” AGI Ultramar 1004, fols. 568r-669r.

Walton Company.81 When the company received permission from the Crown to trade in

Florida, Fish was chosen as the company’s official representative to St. Augustine, a role he maintained until the evacuation.82 Fish quickly immersed himself in the culture and language of Spanish St. Augustine, living with a prominent St. Augustine family, the

Herreras. Over time he became so knowledgeable about Spanish society that one

Spaniard observed that he “seemed more Spanish than foreign.”83 While Fish was the most prominent British merchant in St. Augustine’s community, he was not alone.

Bernard Gordon, the son of John Gordon, an Irish merchant based in Charleston, was baptized into the Catholic Church in St. Augustine on March 29, 1761. He was baptized as an adult a year before Spain entered the Seven Years war.84 Adult baptisms took more time and effort than adolescent baptisms, as adults needed to find a godparent willing to take time to teach them the basic tenets of the Church.85 Presumably for a foreigner, this would also mean learning the Church’s tenets in Spanish, as well.

Gordon’s baptism record suggests that he was connected to a prominent St. Augustine resident, Bernardo Pérez. Pérez, an artillery sergeant who owned a coquina-stone building close to the town center and an 8,000 sq. foot property located near the

81 Robert Gold, “That Infamous Floridian, Jesse Fish,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, 52, no. 1 (1973), 1-2. It is not clear what Fish’s original duties were when he first arrived in Florida. 82 “Testimonios de autos sobre el contrato de suministro y provisión del presidio de San Agustín de la Florida por la Real Compañía de La Habana, y sobre la posterior rescisión del mismo,” AGI Ultramar 1004, fol. 568r. 83 “Unsigned letter to don Antonio Porilier,” St. Augustine, October 6, 1789 SAHS: transcribed and translated by Eleanor Philips Barnes, June 1952. 84 Baptisms 1761-1763: AERSAD, accessed through the ESSS; “John Gordon to James Grant, Chalestown, 1 September 1769,” The Indian Frontier in British East Florida; Letters to Governor James Grant from British Soldiers and Indian Traders, accessed through Florida History Online. 85 Stephen Gudeman, “Spiritual Relationships and Selecting a Godparent,” Man, New Series 10, no. 2(1675), 221-237; Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 40-41.

Franciscan monastery, is listed as Gordon’s godfather.86 British merchants like Fish and

Gordon integrated into St. Augustine’s community, bringing Spanish Florida and the southern British colonies together through community as much as war and diplomacy did.

Figure 2.5: Bernard Gordon’s baptismal entry. Record found in Baptisms 1761-1763: AERSAD, accessed through the ESSS.

It was the British residents of Spanish St. Augustine who played a central role in enacting one of the key stipulations in Article XIX of the Treaty of Fontainebleau.

According to the article, evacuees who wished to sell their property must sell to a British agent.87 Few Spanish landowners sold their property during the evacuation itself. Rather,

86 Baptisms 1761-1763: AERSAD, accessed through the ESSS; Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine de Florida, Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente [Map] St. Augustine: 1764, ANM. 87 “Preliminary articles of peace between His Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King and the Catholick King signed at Fontainebleau, the 3d day of November, 1762,” 15-16.

37 in May of 1764, almost three months after the last Spanish ship departed from St.

Augustine, the Crown sent Elixio de la Puente back to the city as its official property agent, assigned to negotiate the sale of both royal and private Spanish property.

Unfortunately for Puente, there were few incentives for incoming British subjects to buy property in St. Augustine. On October 7, 1763, in an effort to populate the new colony, the British Crown issued a royal proclamation declaring that royal British administers would hand out land grants in Florida, effectively nullifying every transaction made under the Treaty of Paris.88 When Puente arrived in St. Augustine in the summer of 1764, he could not find any incoming investors willing to purchase Spanish property.

Somehow ignorant about the October 7 Royal Proclamation and sensing a potential lucrative opportunity, several British residents of Spanish St. Augustine tried to step into the gap and become the principal investors of property in St. Augustine.

Foremost among these investors was Jesse Fish, who purchased more than two hundred properties from Puente. Fish bought so much property that both his contemporaries and modern historians view him with an air of suspicion, writing that he scurrilously bought the property under dubious circumstances.89 When looking at the timeline of property transactions, though, such suspicions seem unwarranted. Puente sold property in St.

Augustine from the beginning of June to late July. In those two months, Puente was only able to sell 125 properties to more than twenty individual buyers, and he conducted

88 Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition, 23-27; Gold, “Politics and Property during the Transfer of Florida from Spanish to English Rule, 1763-1764.” 89 Ibid, 44-48; Gold, “That Infamous Floridian”; Charles Arnade, “The Avero Story: An Early Saint Augustine Family with Many Daughters and Many Houses,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, 40 no. 1 (1761), 5-13.

38 thirteen non-land transactions with nine British buyers.90 Fish bought forty-five properties during that same period, accounting for thirty-six percent of land-based property transactions. Despite local British investments, 185 properties remained unsold.

Puente feared that the unsold properties would be confiscated by the British government if he did not find a buyer for them, a likely possibility as the evacuation’s eighteen-month deadline was only forty-five days away and there were no foreign investors willing to buy property. To ensure that the former Spanish homeowners could still profit from the sale of their land, Puente struck a deal with Fish.

On July 23, Puente sold the remaining 185 properties to Fish at fantastically low prices.91 A house that was appraised for 3,000 pesos in November, 1764, was sold to Fish for 150 pesos.92 In return for buying the greatly-depreciated properties, Fish promised to sell them for the best price possible once the British began to settle St. Augustine.

Following the July 23 transaction, Fish had purchased 230 pieces of land and non-land property, comprising over seventy percent of all of Puente’s official transactions.

The Royal Proclamation of October 7th, 1763, mandated that any purchase made under Article XX of the 1763 Treaty of Paris would be nullified if the Crown’s governor did not approve the transaction. Britain’s brazen violation of the treaty seems to have had

90 “Cuadernos de recibos de los procedidos de las casas y bienes que quedaron en el presidio de la Florida,” Havana, October 6, 1764. AGI: Cuba 372, fols. 17v-35r. The non-land transactions consisted of various boats, construction materials, food supplies, a horse, different alcoholic beverages, and tobacco. It is unclear if the items were privately owned or Crown property. It is also interesting to note that another prominent St. Augustine official, don Juan Joseph de Arransate may have participated in the sale of his own property, meaning that Puente was not the only Spaniard involved with the property transactions. 91 “Ración de las casas y solares que se hallan a la fecha sin vender por no haver asido ni hacer ninguno que quiera comprarlas en cuya virtud las traspaso bajo de confianza a don Jesse Fish…” St. Augustine, July 23, 1764 AGI: Cuba 372, fols. 119r-121v; 92 “Tasación de la Casa del Capitan don Juan Leandro de Landa…” St. Augustine, November 6, 1673, AGI: Santo Domingo 2660, fol. 62r.

39 little effect on the diplomatic relations between Spain and Britain. Rather it was Fish and the other British investors who suffered the consequences of the Proclamation. Lord

Hillsborough, the British Secretary of State, wrote to Governor James Grant, the first

British governor of St. Augustine, ordering him not to validate any private property transactions made during the evacuation. Instead, Hillsborough recommended that the governor should permit the claimants to send proof of their transactions to London for approval by Hillsborough and his office.93 The reason behind this nullification of Spanish transactions was due to British law, or rather the denial of Spanish law. In his letter to

Grant, Lord Hillsborough noted that British law did not recognize the veracity of Spanish land claims in Florida, thus any transaction of such property without British approval was invalid. Grant agreed wholeheartedly with his superior and when Gordon and Fish approached the governor to validate their land purchases, Grant refused.94 Much to their chagrin, Gordon and Fish were forced to appeal directly to London.95 While some of the property they bought from Puente was eventually validated or remunerated, most of it was lost.

Regardless of the issues Fish and his fellow British businessmen encountered after the transfer of power, Elixio de la Puente was still able to sail back to Cuba with his mission complete. He not only sold every property in St. Augustine, he secured the

93 “Lord Hillsborough to Governor James Grant, Regarding Spanish Land Claims.” London, April 3, 1764 [British] National Archives (hereafter NA): Colonial Office 05 pgs 41-44. Transcription provided by the St. Augustine Historical Society (hereafter SAHS): mc-48 folder 19. 94 “Governor Grant to the Lords of Trade,” St. Augustine, TNA: Colonial Office 5-540, pgs 105- 160. Transcription provided by the SAHS: mc-48, Folder 1a, pg 12. 95 “Gordon to the Royal Council,” London, 1764, TNA: Colonial Office: 5-540 pgs 221-224. Transcription provided by the SAHR: Jesse Fish Bundle; Gold, “Politics and Property during the Transfer of Florida from Spanish to English Rule, 1763-1764.”

40 promise that Fish would send the profits to the former homeowners in Cuba once the

British settled St. Augustine. Upon returning to Cuba, Elixio de la Puente met with 114 former land owners to give them the money or goods he had received from the sales.96

However, those whose properties were sold to Fish on July 23 never received payment.97

While many historians claim this was proof of Fish’s greed, it should be noted that the agreement between Puente and Fish was not legally binding under British law and that

Grant had plenty of reasons not to validate the July 23 transactions. It remains unclear how Fish, and Gordon too, were able to keep some of the properties they bought from

Puente while losing others.

96 “Confirmations of Sales,” AGI: Cuba 372 fols. 46r-66r. 97 Arnade, “The Avero Story.”

Figure 2.6: The number of British transactions according to Puente’s receipts from June to July, 1764. Fish bought two-thirds of all properties that Puente sold.

British Investments In Pesos

Diego Henderson Jesse Fish Juan Gordon Jacob Kip David Martin, Diego Henderson David Martin Samuel Paile Jacob Kip, Benjamin Barton Jesse Fish, Juan Gordon unknown British Crown Artur Carney Guillermo Johnson Henrique Hopkins Thomas Tiveedy, Diego Cameron Guillermo Greening Juan Menab Margarita Doque Juan Rayer Pablo Mattel Sargento Jorge Williams Jaun Menab Juan Meek Artillery Lieutenant Thomas Pas Juan Ambristo Andres Rainsford Capitan Ginlins 0 5000 10000 15000 20000 Figure 2.7: British investment in pesos. The top four men who invested the most money were connected to St. Augustine through trade, family, or having lived there for most of their lives. It was not Jesse Fish who invested the most money in the evacuation, but Diego [James] Henderson. Little is known about Henderson, though, or his connection to St Augustine.98

98 Cuadernos de recibos de los procedidos de las casas y bienes que quedaron en el presidio de la Florida,” Havana, October 6, 1764. AGI: Cuba 372, fols. 17v-35r;

The 1764 evacuation is often seen as a major event in Spanish Florida’s history. It ended the First Spanish Period in Florida and caused the mass exodus of over three thousand people from a small military outpost on the fringe of the Spanish empire. Upon closer study, the evacuation was not an isolated event, but was the culmination of two hundred years of Spanish and British imperial policy. St. Augustine’s location as the northernmost colony in the Spanish empire did not mean it was on the periphery of imperial policy. Rather, the city was consistently a point of strategic importance for both the British and the Spanish. Spanish St. Augustine was an irritant to British colonists who perceived it as a threat. Conversely, St. Augustine also held lucrative opportunities for

British merchants who sought to provide what Spanish traders could not. These merchants often worked directly in St. Augustine, some of them integrating into Spanish society. It was logical for Puente to trust these longtime British residents of Spanish St.

Augustine. Many of them had spent most of their lives in the city, at times growing up alongside the neighbors whose property they purchased during the evacuation. British merchants of Spanish St. Augustine complicated how Spain used Florida in its international policy. For the Spanish, Florida was the empire’s first and last line of defense for its profitable Caribbean trade-networks. It also represented the last vestige of the Spanish Crown’s claim to the North American Atlantic seaboard.

The ensuing British expansion into Florida, though, was not simply the result of a dynamic British empire populating what a stagnate Spanish colony could not. On the

Atlantic coast of North America, St. Augustine represented the focal point of Spanish authority. Every attempt Britain made to remove St. Augustine through warfare failed.

Spain ultimately ceded Florida to Britain because of losses elsewhere in its empire, and

44 the ensuing evacuation revealed a faction of British merchants living in St. Augustine.

These British residents were not only interested in making a profit, but also identified with the Spanish at some level. As Jesse Fish once wrote to the Spanish Crown in 1789,

“[I was] established in this plaza since my early years, my customs, my language and my disposition were early made Spanish….I not only helped individuals with provisions, goods and even money from my pocket; but also in time of war, [I helped] this same government at the risk of my life.”99 Florida was Spain’s last foothold on the Atlantic coast of North America, but it was not without British influence. Whether through war, imperial policy, or trade, Spanish St. Augustine was as connected to Britain as it was to

Spain. The British, though, were not the only minorities to shape St. Augustine society, and they were not the city’s sole connections to the Atlantic world.

99 “Petition of Jesse Fish, March 23, 1789,” found in Eleanor Philip Barnes The Study of the Fish Family with De La Puente Notes, June 1952, provided by the SAHS.

Chapter Three: The People of St. Augustine

“And is worthy of the Compassionate Lord that I preside over the number of children that are in this city[,] children of good parents…” - Benefited Curate don Juan Joseph Solana100

In a 1759 report sent to the Spanish Crown concerning St. Augustine’s condition, don Juan Joseph Solana, the city’s priest, wrote that the city was composed of 462 families representing 2446 people, who lived in 303 different houses.101 Later census reports show that Solana’s findings were quite accurate. The 1764 royal evacuation census, executed by don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente, identified more than three thousand inhabitants, most of whom lived in or near St. Augustine’s walls. Where

Solana’s report diverted from the census was about the city’s diversity. Not only did

Spaniards, indios, blacks, and mulatos inhabit the presidio, but so did Frenchmen,

Englishmen, Italians, Canary Islanders, people of Philippine decent, Mexican Cuban, and

Colombian criollos, and many other people from around the Atlantic World.102 The 1764

100 “Y es digno señor de compassion que siendo presido el numero de los niños que ay en esta ciudad hijos de buenos padres…” Expediente de Don Juan Joseph Solana” AGI: Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 91r. 101 “El vecindario que se compone de españoles yndios negros y mulatos se duze a 462 familias que entre parbulos y adultos forman el numero de 2446 personas que son las que havitan en las 303 casas.” Expediente de Don Juan Joseph Solana” AGI: Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 91r. 102 Spaniards used the term Indio to indicate native Indians. Because the term carries certain racial, caste, and status implications, it will be used in this study in lieu of the term Indian. For more on these implications, refer to Robert Jackson, “Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America,” (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Also, even though Canary Islanders can be identified as Spaniards, census reports and military rosters from the eighteenth-century often categorized Canary Islanders, or isleños, as a separate group from

46 royal census provides insight into St. Augustine’s demographic composition and shows that a large part of St. Augustine’s population originated someplace else.

One depiction of St. Augustine is that of an isolated frontier town, with a “closed community…[with] little or no movements of populations into or out of St.

Augustine.”103 This view is far from the truth. The Crown took advantage of St.

Augustine’s constant influx of immigrants to help fortify its military defenses, which were continually exhausted due to the incessant fighting with the British. At times, the

Crown took advantage of St. Augustine’s proximity to Georgia and Carolina and manumitted runaway British slaves. In return for their freedom, these new Spanish subjects were required to convert to Catholicism and to fight for the Crown. Other times the Crown utilized past migration policies and moved different ethnic groups within its empire to fortify outposts with lagging populations and undermanned defenses. Canary

Islanders who migrated to St. Augustine in the mid-eighteenth-century were part of this policy. No matter their reasons for moving to Florida, people from all over the Atlantic world integrated into St. Augustine’s society, a pattern reflected in the rich parish records kept by St. Augustine’s clergy. Ultimately, a diverse population flourished in Spanish

Florida because of the Spanish Crown’s need to keep St. Augustine demographically sustainable and militarily competitive.

Spaniards. Because of this separation, I have treated them as a distinct minority group instead of calling them Spaniards. 103 Kathleen Deagan, “Mestizaje in Colonial St. Augustine,” Ethnohistory 20 no. 1 (1973): 59.

Figure 3.1: Summary table from the royal 1764 census. It shows that 3096 Europeans, criollos, Catalans, Canary Islanders, Germans, Indios, and blacks who left Florida in the evacuation.104

104 “Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias, que componían las Personas de ambos sexos, y todos esclavos…” Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 17r, AGI, Seville, Spain.

British Carolina and Georgia and Spanish Florida had an inimical relationship, as both saw each other as a dangerous military threat. Further aggravating the two’s testy relationship was the constant flow of runaway slaves from the southern British colonies into Spanish Florida. So many slaves found refuge in Florida that the Spanish Crown felt the need to issue two royal decrees, in 1693 and 1733, to codify the practice of manumitting British slaves.105

In general, the two decrees legalized the existing practice of accepting fugitive

British slaves. Specifically, they codified asylum procedures and laid out manumission justifications and practices. Implicitly, the decrees denied the British slave labor and helped fortify St. Augustine’s defenses. In turn, fugitive blacks used the decrees to gain manumission and become part of St. Augustine society by becoming Catholic and joining

St. Augustine’s militia. The 1693 decree stipulated that if any British slave owner came to St. Augustine to claim an escaped slave, St. Augustine’s governor needed to compensate the owner for their lost slave, but not return the slave. Furthermore, the

Crown announced that any fugitive slave who came to St. Augustine seeking religious asylum would be granted freedom (though, as will be explained later, this stipulation was not always followed). By 1733, the Crown eventually commanded that the governor should no longer offer compensation. Moreover, the Crown commended freed fugitive slaves who defended St. Augustine against British invasion. The second part of the 1733

105 Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687-1790,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 62 no. 3 (1984): 296–313.

49 decree highlights the Spanish practice of freeing fugitive slaves who converted to

Catholicism and joined the king’s militia.106

In 1687, the first known fugitive slaves arrived in St. Augustine from

Charlestown, Carolina. The governor of St. Augustine did not manumit them, but he did pay them for their labor. Compensating slaves for their work added ambiguity to their legal status as slaves, but was not uncommon in the Spanish Empire. Slaves in sixteenth and seventeenth century Cuba, for instance, often owned their own businesses, which garnered them money and allowed them to purchase their own manumission.107 Despite the royal decrees, many fugitive slaves were not automatically granted freedom upon entering Spanish Florida. In 1738, a group of “los Negros fugitivos de los Plantages de

Yngleses”108 wrote to Spain’s king detailing how they repeatedly asked for their liberty, only to have Governor Montiano grant it much later, and only after promising to establish a place outside the city where they could cultivate the land and serve the king against the

British.109 The decrees offered a path to manumission, but it was not a proactive path.

106 Ibid. There are no official records available that recorded of how many slaves were freed each year. However, in 1738, 31 slaves petitioned the governor for their freedom. It is unclear how many petitions were granted and how many of the petitioners were British fugitives. Also, in 1764, there were 34 black militiamen, though it is also unclear how many of them were manumitted through the two royal decrees. The complete list of black militiamen in 1764 can be found in Appendix 2: Table A5. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Appendix 2; “Resumen General,” St. Augustine, January 2, 1764, AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fol. 15v. 107 Alejandro De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 108 I translate it as “the Black fugitives of the English Plantations”. The capitalization is from the text. 109 June 10, 1738, Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI), 58-1-31/62, in Irene A. Wright, "Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Florida," Journal of Negro History, IX (April 1924), 146. This place would eventually become Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the all black fort and settlement that resided two miles north of St. Augustine.

Many Spanish fugitive slave owners reacted negatively when their slaves were manumitted. Just ten days prior to the Negros fugitivos de los Plantages de Yngleses’ manumission, Governor Montiano wrote to the Crown that citizens protested when their slaves, British fugitives, demanded (and were given) their freedom because of the royal decrees. On July 2, 1738, prominent St. Augustine resident, Diego de Espinosa, protested to the Crown when three of his slaves, also fugitives from Carolina, were freed, even though Espinosa was compensated for their liberation.110 But in spite of their owners’ reluctance, or apathy, to the royal decrees, slaves were still able to garner freedom, even if it was not automatically given to them.

With the Crown’s decrees of 1693 and 1733 legalizing a pre-existing practice of freeing runaway slaves, the flow of slaves from the Carolinas to Florida continued to heighten tensions between the two empires. Before 1733, it was common practice for St.

Augustine’s governor to compensate English slave owners who came to Florida demanding the return of their slaves. Yet this practice was not always followed, as the governor often gave the money to his troops first. The British, not satisfied with monetary compensation, would often refuse the compensation, as in 1725, when British agents refused then Florida governor Antonio de Benavides’ offer to pay two hundred pesos per fugitive slave.

To bring any arguments to a close, the Spanish king further ordered that no reimbursement would be paid with the 1733 decree.111 The Spanish were not about to give back their new Catholic militia members and laborers, and the English usually returned home empty-handed. Relations between the two colonies were not good, and

110 Ibid, 146-147 111 Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary…”, 297-300.

Spain’s fugitive slave policy served to thwart British colonists. The king’s rhetoric in his

1693 decree is telling, as he granted, “liberty to all… the men as well as the women… so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same.”112 The Crown not only wanted to deny the British the slaves who already escaped, but to encourage other slaves to leave as well. Coupled with the 1733 decree that legitimized St. Augustine’s black militia members, the Spanish Crown used manumission to convert a foe’s weakness (fleeing British slaves) into the Crown’s strength.

Once in St. Augustine, many blacks entered the Catholic community through baptism. Between 1735 and 1763, 844 blacks, chinos, and indios were baptized in St.

Augustine and recorded in a segregated book of baptisms.113 Of those 844 baptisms, ninety-four men, women, and children were listed as being from the Carolinas. Of these ninety-four, twenty-seven were specifically identified as free.114 So, despite the promise of freedom, few gained it. Of the thirty percent of black Carolinians who were explicitly designated as free, it is likely that they received help from the black community already immersed in Spanish society to capitalize on the royal decrees.

112 As quoted in Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 25. 113 A chino is someone of Philippine decent. For more on chinos in the Indies, please read Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians, (New York NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 114 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. Possibly fourteen more could be free as well, but their status is not listed in the records.

Figure 3.2: Black births 1735-1763.115

Figure 3.3: Fugitive Carolinian baptisms. Ninety-four blacks from Carolina were baptized in St. Augustine from 1735-1764. The spike of fugitive baptisms in 1738 may have contributed to James Oglethorpe's Florida invasion a year later.

115 Ibid.

Between 1735 and 1763, 101 baptized blacks claimed to be from a British territory. Of those 101, fifty-six were slaves and twenty-eight were free, with seventeen entries omitting the person’s status.116 This means that about eleven percent of blacks baptized in twenty-eight years were from an English territory. While the decrees were meant for fugitive British slaves, they only affected one in every ten black man or woman in St. Augustine. Furthermore, not every slave originating from a British territory was a fugitive, otherwise, one can assume that liberated British slave rates would be higher. The royal decrees were meant for runaway Carolinian slaves, not for slaves directly sold from

British colonies to Spanish Florida. Also, manumission depended upon knowledge of the system. While it could be assumed that manumitted blacks would aid other fugitives, the lack of free baptisms seems to suggest that aid-networks were not available (or offered) to everyone. It must also be noted that baptism was an early step toward manumission, and many blacks who were baptized as slaves could have been manumitted shortly thereafter. In any case, with such a low number of free blacks from Carolina, it seems as if the royal decrees were not as successful as the Crown had hoped in sparking a massive slave exodus into Florida. And yet, the freedom that the decrees promised was enough to instill fear into British slave owners and affect Anglo-Spanish relations in Florida.117

116 Ibid. 117 Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary…”

Figure 3.4: Black baptisms 1735-1763. 118

Because of Spanish fugitive slave policies, the British wanted to limit the contact between blacks in British territories with Spanish blacks. The British knew the Spanish used their fugitive slave policy as a strategy to undermine British plantations, and by extension, British imperial expansion.119 They feared a slave uprising if Spanish manumitted blacks returned to instigate a slave revolt and capture more slaves.120 When

British officials came to St. Augustine demanding a runaway’s return, their requests were refused. In addition to the royal decrees, Spanish officials claimed that the said fugitive

118 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. The two highest years were 1739 and in 1763. The spike in 1739 can be seen as a precursor to James Oglethorpe’s invasion in 1740. The spike in 1763 may be attributed to the impending 1763-64 evacuation. Many parents and adults may have wanted to be baptized in their homeland before moving another part of the empire. 119 Governor Benavides to the crown, February 23, 1730, Seville (AGI) 58-1-31/18, in Wright, 146 120 Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary…,” 298

55 had become a productive member of society by becoming a Catholic, being usefully employed, and/or marrying.121

Figure 3.5: Baptized blacks previous place of origin: 1735-1763. Out of the 844 blacks baptized between 1735-1764, only 120 were described by their place of origin before their baptism in St. Augustine.122

121 Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary…,” 298-299. 122 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS.

While the decrees did not spark a massive exodus, they were partially successful as slaves steadily fled from Carolina, though not in large numbers. Ninety-four Carolina blacks were baptized in St. Augustine over a twenty-eight year period.123 These British slaves not only knew to escape to Florida but had the wherewithal to secure manumission in a society with a different religion, language, and law. That these fugitive blacks overcame language barriers and the ideology of differing religions demonstrates their ability to navigate manumission laws and practices. St. Augustine blacks displayed the cosmopolitan features of an Atlantic Creole, distinguished by their “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity and social agility.” 124 The term, Atlantic Creole, was coined by historian Ira Berlin and was used to describe people of mixed African, American, and

European ethnicity and culture who were “familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, fluent in its new languages, and intimate with its trade and cultures…cosmopolitan in the fullest sense.” Atlantic Creoles were present in society with slaves and often pressed into the Atlantic slave trade. Jane Landers describes fugitive African slaves in Florida and the circa-Caribbean as the ideal Atlantic Creoles due to their ability to navigate and potentially thrive in the different American empires.125

An example of an Atlantic Creole navigating St. Augustine’s diverse social and legal system can be found on April, 1750. A young black teenager named Jason Johns was building a fence on property owned by a man named Pablo de Hita.126 In the midst of

123 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. 124 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 17-28. 125 Ibid.; Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1-14. 126 The records state that Jason Johns was a slave, but do not indicate if Pablo de Hita owned him.

57 his work, Johns noticed through the fence’s cracks that there was an unfamiliar white man entering the house of don Joseph del Olmo, the city’s English and French interpreter.127 According to Johns’ testimony, the man, later identified as Pancho, noticed

Johns staring at him and waved him over. Going inside the house, Pancho showed Johns where Olmo’s money was kept and, before Johns could notice, Pancho left the house.

Johns then took a large sack of money with eighty pesos in it and ran back to Pablo de

Hita’s house, where he proceeded to bury the money in Hita’s chicken coop.

The following day, the city’s officials caught Johns and took him to the royal guardhouse for questioning. Between interrogation sessions, Johns confided to a slave working in the guardhouse where the money was hidden. The slave, Antonio, then recovered the sack of money and went to the house of the black cooper, Domingo de

Jesus. At Jesus’ house, Antonio, Domingo, and two of their friends, Francisco Sanson and Thomas Hume, split the money between them four ways evenly. Antonio, Sanson, and Hume were caught in the following days and all confessed to their involvement in the conspiracy. Domingo de Jesus, however, sought refuge in the Franciscan monastery, where he remained for several months.128

No one involved in the robbery was originally from St. Augustine, an example of

St. Augustine’s diversity and the black community’s intimacy with the region’s trade network. Domingo de Jesus was born in Carolina. Antonio is listed in the baptismal records as a Congo from Carolina. Francisco Sanson and Thomas Hume were not even owned by Spanish residents. Thomas Hume was owned by John Hume, a Carolinian living in St. Augustine at the time of the robbery. In his testimony, officials noted that

127 A cooper is a barrel-maker. 128 “Testimonios sobre del robo del Joseph del Omo” Santo Domingo 2584 fol. 58r, AGI.

Sanson was a native of Antigua and was owned by a Carolinian named Carl Veit. Sanson even came to St. Augustine on a British trading vessel, the Isabel.129 The fact that

Sanson’s and Hume’s owners let their slaves interact with St. Augustine’s black population indicates that fears of a slave revolt may not have been universal among

British slave owners.

These four black men all displayed the traits of an “Atlantic Creole.” Though his testimony does not identify his place of origin, Jason Johns’ English name implies that he was from an English colony. Antonio was from Carolina but could easily have been born in Africa. Given that Domingo de Jesus was a free black man from Carolina, it can be assumed that he was a fugitive. Sanson not only worked in Carolina and St. Augustine, but as an Antiguan, he would have traveled across the Atlantic-Caribbean world. Jason

Johns testified that he knew enough Spanish to communicate with Pancho. Domingo de

Jesus and his wife, Maria de Rosario, had three daughters in St. Augustine, indicating that he knew how to speak Spanish with some fluency.130 Sanson and Thomas Hume needed interpreters to testify, but as both traveled for their master’s businesses, they were at least familiar with Spanish. The fact that Domingo de Jesus knew to use the monastery as protection shows that he understood the laws and customs of the Spanish empire.

Moreover, not even Joseph del Olmo, the man who was robbed, was from St.

Augustine. Olmo was born in Asti, Piedmont, in Italy. He had traveled all over Europe and North America and married an Englishwoman, Angela Maria Rotina, who gave birth

129 Ibid. 130 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. When a slave converted to Catholicism, they needed to prove they knew the basic tenets of the faith, which was done on Spanish. Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles In the Age of Revolutions, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) 39-42.

59 to their first child, Margarita, in Villorca (possibly Billerica, Massachusetts) before they moved to St. Augustine in 1731.131 In 1740 Angela gave birth to a second daughter,

Gerónima. Angela died shortly thereafter, making Olmo a widower.132 Joseph del Olmo must have seemed different to most St. Augustinian residents, even in a city where a large proportion of the population had come from someplace else. He was the only Italian in the city. He spent part of his life in English colonies. He spoke Spanish, English,

French, and most likely Piedmontese. Moreover, he had married an English woman. Even his first daughter was not born in Florida, a rare occurrence in a city where most daughters were from Florida. For a cosmopolitan city like St. Augustine, few were as international in identity as Olmo.

The Crown regularly moved different racial and ethnic communities around the empire to strengthen areas like St. Augustine. For example, Canary Islanders were a staple of intercolonial migration within the Spanish Empire. Canary migration was clustered by time and place. In the sixteenth century, Canary Islanders were involved in almost every conquest expedition to the Americas. In the seventeenth century, Canary

Islanders were used to populate colonies all over the New World. By the eighteenth- century, the Spanish Crown recruited Canary Islanders to fortify borderland settlements like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida.133

131 Estefanía Ruíz to the Governor of the Province of Yucatan, Ultramar 150, AGI. Baptisms 1737-1751, AERSAD, accessed through ESSSS, Images 54, 60. 132 Ibid. 133 James Parsons, “The Migration of Canary Islanders to the Americas: An Unbroken Current Since Columbus,” The Americas 39 no. 4 (1983): 447-481.

Figure 3.6: Canary Islanders evacuees. According to the royal census, 425 Islanders made up ninety-six families.

Pirate attacks, skirmishes with English colonists, the War of the Spanish

Succession, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Seven Years War, and multiple other conflicts from the mid-seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries exhausted St. Augustine’s population.134 Though Canary Islanders were an essential part of St. Augustine since its

1565 founding, they were often called upon specifically to fortify the city’s flailing population. Juan Márquez Cabrera, the governor of Florida in 1681, suggested bringing in Canary Islanders. In 1740, the Royal Havana Company agreed to import fifty families from the Canaries annually for the next ten years. During the Seven Years War, over

134 Theodore G. Corbett, “Migration to a Spanish Imperial Frontier in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: St. Augustine,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 54 no. 3 (1974): 447-481.

61 seven hundred people from the Canary Islands were shipped to Florida, though several hundred either died or moved to another Spanish colony.135 By the time of the evacuation, ninety-six Canary families, comprised of 425 people, departed for Cuba.136

Canary families were badly needed in St. Augustine as the string of violent conflicts throughout the eighteenth century hurt St. Augustine’s ability to farm the land around the city. These lands were once cultivated by Indians who lived in or very near St.

Augustine, but English invasions and English-allied Indian raiding parties caused many to abandon the farmlands.137 With a shortage of available hands to work the fields,

Spanish officials looked to Canary Islanders to rectify the problem. In 1745, Florida

Governor Manuel de Montiano sent a report to the Crown requesting that the Crown pay for 250 Canary Island families to transfer to Florida to farm the vacant lands.138 Twelve years later, the Crown sent 711 Canary Islanders to St. Augustine over a three-year period, from 1757-1759. It appears that despite their necessity, St. Augustine officials were not prepared to house and feed the new immigrants and, by 1764, 286 Canary

Islanders had either died or abandoned Florida.139 The 425 Islanders who remained were

135 Parsons, “The Migration of Canary Islanders…,” 460-461. 136 “Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias, que componían las Personas de ambos sexos, y todos esclavos…” Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 17r, AGI, Seville, Spain. 137 Many villages surrounded St. Augustine in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. By 1736, eight Indian villages were located around St. Augustine. These villages represented the last vestige of Florida’s mission system, but by 1745 the Crown ended Franciscan control over the villages. “Estado de los Yndios que estan a la denocion del precidio de San Augustin de la Florida con Separacion de pueblos capases de tomar armas,” November 27, 1736, AGI: Escribania 157c; Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 197. 138“Governor Manuel de Montiano to the Crown,” February 25, 1745, St. Augustine AGI: 58-1- 32. Transcript provided by the SAHS. 139 Hoffman, 201-202. “Expediente de don Juan Jospeh Solana,” fol. 92r. A major source for the unpreparedness of St. Augustine’s officials is the 1759 report from don Juan Joseph Solana. As will be discussed in the following chapter, Solana’s report is somewhat suspect, as he was investigating the Governor who arrested him and tried to remove him from his post as head priest of St Augustine.

62 able to integrate themselves into St. Augustine’s society. By 1758, these Canary Islander families lived and worked in four different fields surrounding St. Augustine, like the field

Macaris (see Figure 3.7), which supported twenty-five families.140

Figure 3.7: Canary Islander fields surrounding St. Augustine by 1763. Many of these were indio fields, but were abandoned after several enemy invasions.141

140 Hoffman, 201. Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontaínebleau, Pablo Castello, [Map], St. Augustine: 1763, Museo Naval de Madrid; Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontaínebleau, Pablo Castello [Map] St. Augustine: 1763, AMN. 141 Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontaínebleau, Pablo Castello [Map] St. Augustine: 1763, AMN.

Not all Canary Islanders were farmers and many were an inseparable part of St.

Augustinian urban life long before the migrations of the 1750s. Domingo Cardoso was a royal mariner who owned a tabby and wood house near the oldest part of St.

Augustine.142 The earliest records of him are from parish records dated 1735. With his criollo wife, Josepha Fernandes, Cardoso had three children: Manuel, Rita, and Maria and he served as godfather to four children, one of whom was part of the prestigious Híta y Salazar family.143 Cardoso owned nine slaves, all members of the same family. While owned by Cardoso, Juan Joseph Garcia Cardoso and Maria Cardoso had seven children from 1745 to 1762.144

Antonio de la Rosa, another mariner from the Canaries, died shortly before the

1764 evacuation. He had at least four children with his criollo wife, Juana Quiñones, and owned a tabby house three blocks north of the plaza mayor, the focal point of St.

Augustine’s urban layout. Another Canary Islander was Juan de Morales, an infantryman who owned a 2,112 square foot property with a wooden house. The Canary Islanders who arrived in the 1757-59 immigrations remained in St. Augustine for a short period of time, but their children accounted for more than twenty percent of baptisms from September

142 “Yncluye por sus nombres, el numero de personas del sexo masculino de edad de 15 anos para arriba, y de todas condiciones calidades y estados, que componian la guarnicion y vecindario de la plaza de San Augustin de Florida, y su Jurisdiccion, al tiempo de entregarse a la Corona Britanica.” Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 3r, AGI, Seville, Spain. Eligio de la Puente, Juan Joseph. “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine de Florida, con su Parroquial Mayor, Convento e Iglesia de San Francisco: Casas y Solares de los Vecinos; y mas algunas Fabricas y Huertas Extramuros de ella…” [Map]. St. Augustine: 1764, Museo Naval de Madrid. 143 Baptisms 1761-1763: AERSAD, accessed through the ESSS. 144 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. For more on the family, please refer to Appendix 2: Table A2.

1760 to February 1763.145 The high number of Canary baptisms is significant because it challenges Theodore Corbett’s claim that Canary Islanders composed only five percent of

St. Augustine’s population.146 In his analysis, Corbett only used male origins in St.

Augustine’s marriage records to determine the composition of different nationalities in the city. Such a method skews the reality because it ignores the fact that most Canary immigrants traveled in families. Baptismal records offer a clearer picture of the city’s demographic composition because it includes not only the parents (and often their nationalities) but that of the children as well. Furthermore, the 1764 royal census reveals that men from the Canaries represented over nine percent of the population and that

Canary Islanders of both sexes composed about fourteen percent of the overall population. Based on these percentages, Canary Islanders represented one of the largest minorities in St. Augustine. Several Canary Islanders were already fully integrated into

St. Augustine society, as evidenced by Domingo Cardoso and Antonio de la Rosa, but if the 1764 evacuation had not occurred, Canary Islanders and their descendants would have comprised a main demographic pillar of the city.

145 Baptisms 1760-1763: AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. 146 Corbett, “Migration to a Spanish Imperial Frontier…,” 418.

Figure 3.8: 1764 royal census: Though Catalans are from Iberia, Spanish officials identified them in a separate category in the 1764 royal census. The largest category represents Spaniards, Spanish creoles, and other Europeans. All language is from the census.

Besides fortifying the city’s population, Spanish officials also expected Canary

Islanders to help protect St. Augustine during the Seven Years War. Preparing against a potential English invasion, eighty-nine Canary Islanders entered into military service.

Thirty-six men were part of the city’s three infantry companies. One man, Armero

Bernardo Rivero, was an artilleryman, a prestigious appointment as only forty-thee men

66 in all of St. Augustine were part of the artillery company. Lastly, fifty-three Canary

Islanders formed their own militia composed entirely of Canary Islanders.147

The Canary Islander military units were not unique because St. Augustine’s military companies often were categorized by race and nationality. In addition to the

Canary militia, there was the free black militia that operated from Fort Mose, the Indio militia, and militiamen from German Catholic families. Among the 303 infantrymen, there were the thirty-six Canary Islanders, a German Catholic named Juan de la Cruz, and four soldiers from Indio families. Even Florida criollos had their own militia company, the Milicianos Vecinos Antigüos o Moradores de la Plaza, which was comprised of seventy-eight Florida-born men.148

Often, the Crown shifted specific national military companies across the empire to fortify different outposts in need of more men. During the Seven Years War, Havana infantry companies reinforced the St. Augustine garrison.149 Even as late as 1761, soldiers from the Compañía de Fusileros de Montaña de América were sent to St.

Augustine. Composed entirely of men from Catalonia, the company was ninety-eight strong at the time of the 1764 evacuation.150 The company was originally formed in

Barcelona on July 29th, 1761, and composed of 102 men, forty-three of whom brought their wives.151 A month later the company went to Cadiz, Spain, to embark for the Indies.

147 The complete list of their names can be found in Appendix 2: Table A4. “Yncluye por sus nombres, el numero de personas del sexo masculino de edad de 15 anos para arriba…” Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 1r-16r, AGI, Seville, Spain. 148 Ibid. 149 Robert Kapitzke, “The "Calamities of Florida": Father Solana, Governor Palacio Y Valenzuela, and the Desertions of 1758” The Florida Historical Quarterly 72 no. 1 (1993): 5. 150 Ibid. Appendix 2: Table A6 contains a full list of Compañía de Fusileros de Montaña de América members. 151 Additionally, seventeen children were a part of the voyage to Florida.

While in Cadiz, six men, with two wives and one child, returned to Barcelona. The others sailed to Havana, then to St. Augustine, where they served briefly before evacuating to

Cuba in 1764.152 Unlike the Canary Islanders, the Catalan company was not designed to stabilize St. Augustine’s population, but, over time, Catalans from the regiment started to appear in the parish records from 1760-1763. On October 25, 1762, Eululia and Juan

Porchez gave birth to twins. Later that same year, Theresa and Antonio Soldamer had a daughter, Maria Josepha de la Concepcion. In January of 1763, Josepha Thereza Basbuo

Barria and Joseph Calcofe Brufau welcomed a son named Antonio.153 Out of these four children, three had non-Catalan godparents, indicating that the fusiliers were beginning to integrate into St. Augustinian society.154

The Spanish Crown used different racial groups and nationalities to protect its imperial interests in North America. St. Augustine, in turn, was a natural place for people from all over the Atlantic world to gather. Both the Crown and blacks utilized St.

Augustine’s proximity to Georgia and Carolina to barter manumission in exchange for military aid. Canary Islanders were moved around by the Crown to St. Augustine to expand the city’s population, enhance its defensive capabilities, and increase its agricultural production. Even Catalans were starting to settle into St. Augustine society, despite their recent arrival and their role as a purely military unit. St. Augustine’s location

152 “Expediente sobre la formazion de una compañía de fusileros de montaña en Barcelona y envio a Cadiz y la Havana con destino a la Ysla de la Florida,” Santo Domingo 2660, fols. 9.1- 9.42, AGI, Seville, Spain. 153 Baptisms 1760-1763: AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS. 154 One of the non-Catalan godparents was Antonio Gallardos. He was godfather to one of Eululia and Juan Porchez’s daughters. During this time, there were two men in St. Augustine with that same name. One was a mounted dragoon and the other was a free moreno militiaman. It is not clear which one was the daughter’s godfather. Maria Josepha de la Concepcion’s godfather, Manuel Joseph, was a don, which was an honorific that indicated a higher social status. Ibid.

68 on the border of the Spanish and English empires meant that people were constantly coming through the city, whether they were Spanish or British subjects. St. Augustine was far from an isolated frontier with a closed community. Its role as the protector of

Spain’s interests in the area meant that it could not afford to be isolated from the rest of the world.

Chapter Four: Where They Lived

“…it must be very pleasant walking here[,]in a hot summers evening” -John Bartram155

The Crown viewed St. Augustine as a military bastion because the city represented the Crown’s interests in Florida. Though the city’s residents served the

Crown, they still developed a dynamic cosmopolitan city. It was St. Augustine’s civilian side that don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente portrayed when he created the 1764 property map. Many scholars use this map, in conjunction with reports from St.

Augustine’s governors and residents, to glimpse into the social and urban life of St.

Augustine’s eighteenth-century residents. But due to dubious reports from St.

Augustine’s officials and a focus on the city’s military function, scholars often disparage

St. Augustine’s urban profile.156 One scholar even claimed that the city was “poor man’s architecture, reflecting a rustic garrison town.”157 A closer look at the map, though, reveals a much more socially and physically dynamic city than previously described.

155 John Bartram, Diary of a Journey Through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, 1765-1766, annotated by Francis Harper, (Philadelphia PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1942), 52. Brackets included in the original annotated version. 156 Three works that reinforce this idea are Boyd’s and Latorre’s “La Florida: The Place and Its People During the Residence of Don Juan Joseph Eligio de la Puente,” Charles Arnade “The Architecture of Spanish St. Augustine,” and Paul Hoffman’s Florida’s Frontiers. One of the primary reports they used to understand St. Augustine’s urban and social profile was don Juan Joseph Solana’s 1759 report to the Crown. As will be discussed later, his report was heavily influenced by infighting between St. Augustine’s governor and several religious and lay clergy. 157 Arnade, “The Architecture of Spanish St. Augustine,” 151.

Studying St. Augustine’s building composition, property ownership, and settlement patterns illuminates the city’s physical diversity and social stratification.

Focusing on minority property ownership reveals the presence of several black property owners. Digging deeper into the documentation shows the power of certain institutions that are displayed on the map. St. Augustine’s black property owners, along with their white neighbors, were able to utilize the physical space offered by institutions like the

Church as a safe space to resist the Crown’s authority. Additionally, women represented almost twenty percent of St. Augustine’s property owners. Parish data and other sources reveal that both female property owners and foreigners often married each other to elevate or secure their social status within the city and the empire. An analysis of the relationship between St. Augustine’s physical profile and the city’s inhabitants not only demonstrates the city’s diversity, but also how people secured and elevated their place in

St. Augustine society.

In 1573, the Spanish Crown issued the Ordinances for the Discovery, New

Settlement, and Pacification of the Indies. Based on the writings of the first-century

Roman architect Vitruvius, the ordinances prescribed the basic template for building cities in the New World.158 Despite the variance in terrain and populace, most Spanish cities in the Indies were designed in the same manner. The Ordinances stressed that the city be built around a main plaza, the plaza mayor, which would be the center of city life.

Additionally, streets were to be built in a grid pattern. The Church had first selection among lots, or solares, in the city. Next, people were given their choice of a solar based on their place within the city’s hierarchy. Because the Ordinances guided the

158 Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism, (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 24-26.

71 construction of cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, St. Augustine was built in relatively the same manner as the rest of urban Spanish-America.159

Figure 4.1: St. Augustine’s plaza mayor in 1764 and the buildings surrounding it.160

159 St. Augustine appears to deviate from the norm in one way, the presence of buildings in the central plaza. While two of the buildings were central to the Crown and the Church, one property was owned by a private citizen, something not common in other cities. For more on the uses of central plazas, please read Daniel Gade’s “The Latin American Central Plaza as a Functional Space,” Publication Series (Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers) vol 5 (1976): 16-23. 160 Eligio de la Puente, Juan Joseph. “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine de Florida, con su Parroquial Mayor, Convento e Iglesia de San Francisco: Casas y Solares de los Vecinos; y mas algunas Fabricas y Huertas Extramuros de ella…” [Map] St. Augustine: 1764, Museo Naval de Madrid.

St. Augustine’s most imposing structure is the Castillo de San Marcos.

Completed in 1687, the large stone fortress became the symbol of Spain’s military presence in Florida.161 The fort was important to the Crown, but the city’s social life did not revolve around it. Instead, the city’s builders followed the instructions provided by the Ordinances and the city was arranged around the plaza mayor, which became the center of St. Augustine society. In the plaza mayor stood the royal guardhouse, a 3,000 square foot lot owned by a prominent resident’s heirs, and the ruins of the old central church that was burned to the ground during James Moore’s 1702 invasion. Frustrated that he was unable to capture the fortress, Moore burned the entire city to the ground before retreating back to Carolina. When St. Augustine’s residents rebuilt and expanded the city, they built another church several blocks southwest of the old one. The former church remained an empty lot even during the 1764 evacuation. Many of St. Augustine’s most important buildings were located around the plaza mayor. Directly surrounding the area were the governor’s mansion, the royal hospital, and the bishop’s residence.162 In addition to Crown and Church properties, the royal accountant, chief medic, two royal coastguardsmen, four cavalry soldiers and officers, and almost thirty percent of St.

Augustine’s dons and doñas owned property surrounding the plaza mayor.

The plaza mayor was surrounded by thirty-seven blocks, sixteen north of the plaza and twenty-one to the south. In 1764, the city contained 372 property lots with a

161 Paul Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 144. The National Parks Service states the fort was completed in 1695. “Castillo de San Marcos,” NPS.gov, last modified June 6, 2017, accessed June 21, 2017. https://www.nps.gov/casa/learn/historyculture/construction.htm. 162 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map].

73 total of 317 buildings. Not everyone lived inside the city’s walls. By 1762, two Indian villages, called Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and Tolomato, had been built just north of the city walls.163 About a mile north of Tolomato was Macaris, home to twenty-five

Canary Islander families. North of Macaris, two miles from the city center, was Fort

Mose, which housed the city’s free black militia and their families.164 Sabanas, rural properties owned by St. Augustinians that were often used for farming, dotted the landscape throughout the countryside.165

Figure 4.2: St. Augustine’s surrounding countryside in 1763.166

163 Pablo Castello, Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontainebleau, [Map] St. Augustine: 1763. 164 Ibid. 165 For more on the sabana system in St. Augustine, please read Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida. 166 Pablo Castello, Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontainebleau, [Map].

The Church was often one of the largest landowners in Latin American cities, though this was not the case in St. Augustine.167 Of the 393 properties listed in the 1764

Puente property map, the Church owned just six of them. The largest Church property, the old ruins, was over five thousand square feet. But due to James Moore it was unusable. The church that served St. Augustine's parishioners was three blocks southwest of the old church and was much smaller; the property measured approximately one thousand square feet. Another church, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, was built for allied

Indians living in the pueblo of Tolomato. The bishop’s residence was the only functional

Church building near the plaza mayor, but it was never consistently inhabited as neither the Bishop of Cuba nor Florida’s Auxiliary Bishop had a regular presence in St.

Augustine.168 The last two buildings owned by the Church were the Franciscan monasteries, located in the city’s southeastern limits. They were the two largest buildings on the block, taking up over 24,000 square feet of space, as compared to the combined

30,000 square feet of the other seven buildings on the block. Overall, Church property accounted for just two percent of the city’s urban properties and, with the exception of

167 Kinsbruner, 53. 168 Ideally, the Bishop of Cuba was supposed to regularly visit the province to ensure the populace’s religious needs were met and that the parish records were in good order. Yet the bishop rarely visited Florida, with about twenty-five years between visits. To solve this problem, in 1701, the Council of the Indies and King Philip V approved a plan to install a resident bishop in Florida, an auxiliary bishop. While officials in St. Augustine, Cuba, and Spain approved this idea, it took eight more years for the auxiliary bishop to arrive in Florida because few wanted the position and no one could agree how to pay for it. The first bishop to take the position, Dionisio Resino, died in 1711, three years after arriving to the office. His replacement, Francisco de San Buenaventura y Tejada, did not arrive to Florida until 1735. Buenaventura left the position in 1745 and his replacement Pedro Ponce y Carrasco did not come to Florida until 1754. Ponce chose not to stay in St. Augustine and left for Cuba in 1755, ten months after coming to St. Augustine. The bishop’s mansion was usually left vacated between residencies, though Florida’s governor occasionally stayed in the mansion while the governor’s mansion underwent repairs. John J. TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida; 1700-1763, (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1964), 161-171.

75 the usually vacant bishop’s residence and the old church ruins, were located on the outskirts of the city.169 This is a marked departure from other urban centers in the Spanish empire, where important secular Church buildings were featured prominently along the plaza mayor.170 The Catholic Church was vital to St. Augustine’s residents as it helped form people’s identity and helped to facilitate kinship networks through god-parentage.

Furthermore, the Church provided legal protection, through ecclesiastical asylum, which allowed residents to express their agency by resisting Crown authority. But the Church in

St. Augustine lacked the geographic prestige of having a fully functioning building close to the plaza mayor.

By contrast, several Crown-owned buildings, like the governor’s mansion and the royal guardhouse, dominated the plaza mayor. The Puente map reveals that the Crown owned about five percent of the 393 properties in the city. Of those properties, five were meant for work and/or habitation: the governor’s mansion, the royal guard house, the royal smithy, the hospital, and the largest building, the castillo de San Marcos. The other fifteen properties were bulwarks, the city gates, and the wharf. All combined, the Crown owned about 35,000 square feet of property. To put that figure into perspective, the total amount of square footage available within the city walls was over 950,000. Though St.

Augustine was a military bastion, there was a large amount of space for private citizens to own and operate. The largest Crown property, Fort San Marcos, is not included in either of these figures, as the Puente Map did not include the fort’s dimensions. If it did, then

169 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]. It is important to note that Franciscans commonly built their monasteries some distance away from the central plaza. 170 Kinsbruner, 51-52.

76 the amount of property owned by the Crown would be much greater. 171 The locations of

Church and Crown property represented a physical manifestation of the incessant tension between church and city officials, a tension that colored how scholars have interpreted the 1764 Elixio de la Puente property map. This tension will be discussed later.

Wealthy residents in Spanish-American towns often adopted the architectural style of southern Spain, which allowed for cooler houses in hot climates.172 St.

Augustinians did so too, using local materials to battle the heat of Florida. While visiting the city shortly after the British took possession of it, the famous botanist, John Bartram, remarked on the utility of St. Augustine’s oyster-shelled houses. He noted that these buildings stayed cool in the summer and it seemed to him that the best houses were made entirely out of a shell material while the homes of less affluent people were constructed from an oyster and mortar mix.173 In fact, almost seventy percent of St. Augustine’s buildings were made of two distinctively different types of shell.

Elite residences were built from coquina stone and accounted for thirty percent of all buildings in the city.174 Coquina stone, quarried along the Florida-Georgia coast, was a compressed sediment composed of small bivalves, called coquinas.175 The governor’s mansion, the royal guardhouse, the hospital, fort San Marcos, the city’s defensive bulwarks, and all six Church properties were constructed from coquina stone. Of the

171 Ibid. 172 Kinsbruner, 55. 173 Boyd and Navarro la Torre, 72-75. 174 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]. 175 National Parks Service, Spanish Coquina Quarries (Anastasia State Park), Register of Historic Places Inventory- Nomination Form 10-300, (Washington, DC, 1972), https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/nrhp/text/72001462.PDF.

77 thirty-nine properties that surrounded the Plaza Mayor, twenty-two were made out of coquina stone or a coquina stone/tabby/wood composite. Though the city’s physical appearance during the eighteenth-century is commonly disparaged, St. Augustine was more prosperous than it seemed, as every three in ten buildings were constructed with the most valuable material available.176

While coquina stone was a typical sight in St. Augustine, the most common building material was tabby cement. Tabby is a concrete mixture made from burnt oyster shells that have been turned into lime and then combined with water, sand, and ash.177 As

Figure 4.3 shows, almost forty percent of St. Augustine’s buildings were constructed with tabby or a tabby mixture. While not as costly as coquina stone, tabby was still a versatile building material that enabled buildings to remain cool in the summer heat.178

The third most common building material in the city was wood. About fifteen percent of buildings were constructed with wooden boards. Of these buildings, twenty- nine were located north of the plaza, nineteen south of the plaza, and another four wooden buildings were located outside the city’s walls. Three of the four buildings outside the city’s walls were owned by St. Augustine’s royal treasurer (don Juan Esteban de Peña), royal accountant (Elixio de la Puente), and the sargento mayor (Don Alonso de

Cárdenas). The presence of four wooden structures outside the city’s walls on the map is

176 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]. 177 Michael Sheehan and Lauren Sickels-Taves, “Vernacular Building Materials and the Factors Conditioning Their Use: Tabby, A Case Study,” Material Culture 34 no. 2 (2002), 16-28. St. Augustine was the first European settlement in the New World to use tabby cement. Tabby was originally shipped to Florida from Cuba but, by 1580, St. Augustinians started producing their own tabby. 178 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map].

78 odd, as Elixio de la Puente’s personal records reveal the presence of many more properties directly outside the walls.179 But whether it was due to favoritism or to expedience, Elixio de la Puente only displayed the properties of three of the more influential persons in St. Augustine, leading one to assume that he was more concerned with highlighting his friend’s properties and not necessarily all properties.

The largest cluster of coquina stone buildings other than the plaza mayor was in block K, which had eleven of them. The largest cluster of tabby buildings was in blocks j and k, with fifteen and nineteen buildings, respectively. Furthermore, the greatest number of wooden buildings were clustered around blocks I and J, which were north of the plaza mayor.180 Assuming that a building’s composition offers an indication of wealth, then the highest concentration of the city’s elite must have resided in blocks O, K, P and M, which had the greatest number of coquina buildings and were located just north of the plaza mayor. Furthermore, dons and doñas owned thirty-two percent of all property in blocks O, K, P, and M. While thirty-two percent may not seem like a lot, consider that almost fifty percent of buildings in the plaza mayor and in blocks O, K, P, and M were owned by someone with the honorific don or doña. Those property owners represented forty percent of St. Augustine’s total don and doña population.181 Based on these figures, the plaza mayor and blocks O, K, P, and M were the most prestigious part of town.

Another cluster of coquina buildings was located along the street leading to the

Puerta de la Leche, the city’s north gate. The street, present-day St. George St., was

179 “Cuadernos de recibos de los procedidos de las casas y bienes que quedaron en el presidio de la Florida,” Havana, October 6, 1764, AGI: Cuba 372 4r-125v. 180 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]. 181 Ibid.

79 comprised of fifteen coquina buildings along the last two blocks leading to the gate.

While those two blocks contained only five dons, these dons were highly influential residents, as two were infantry officers, one was the city’s quarter-master, one was a member of the prestigious López de Toledo family, and one was the Spanish commander of Fort Mose. It appears as if the Puerta de la Leche was the city’s main gate, as not only was there a higher concentration of coquina buildings leading up to la Leche, but three out of St. Augustine’s other four gates did not even open to a street. The only other gate to open to a street, today’s King St., was the western Puerta de Nuestra Señora del

Rosario, which led directly to the plaza mayor. The only properties that surrounded that street were four empty lots on the street’s southern side and the governor’s mansion on the northern side.

The largest cluster of tabby buildings was located in blocks k and j, about three- and-a-half blocks south of the plaza mayor, which had a combined thirty-four tabby buildings. Five dons and one doña resided in blocks k and j, but they represented only ten percent of all property owners in those blocks. South St. Augustine had nineteen more tabby buildings than northern St. Augustine, eighty versus sixty-one. Based on the concentration of coquina buildings and property owners with honorifics, it appears that the city’s elite resided in northern St. Augustine, whereas less affluent residents lived south of the plaza mayor, or in St. Augustine’s northwest side, where there was a high concentration of wooden buildings.

Figure 4.3: Building composition comparison.182

The Church and the Crown owned seven percent of all the city’s property. The rest belonged to private owners, though more than half of private property owners were on the Crown’s payroll, as Table 4.1 shows. It is no surprise that most property owners were on the Crown’s payroll, but the surplus in military occupations did not mean the city lacked occupational diversity. Moreover, many people performed crafts or trades in addition to their military service. For example, don Joseph del Olmo served as the city’s chief English and French interpreter and as a master cooper.183 Despite the importance of occupational diversity, one’s prestige was usually tied to one’s service to the Crown.

182 Building compositions based on the information provided in the 1764 Puente property map. 183 “Estefanía Ruíz to the Governor of the Province of Yucatan,” AGI: Ultramar 150 no. 5.

As Table 4.2 reveals, more than half of all coquina stone buildings were owned by residents on the Crown’s payroll. The Crown was the main benefactor in the city and the best way to elevate one’s position in society was to serve the Crown, as property ownership best illustrates. However, just as the urban landscape illustrates how people benefitted from the Crown, it also illustrates how people engaged with society and resisted the Crown’s authority by using institutions like the Church. One of the best ways to understand this use of the urban landscape is by focusing on St. Augustine’s minority communities.

The residences of minority communities living outside St. Augustine can be ascertained due to residential segregation. Over two-thirds of the city’s free black population resided in Fort Mose.184 Twenty-five of the ninety-six Canary Islander families who left St. Augustine in the evacuation lived and worked a mile north of the city, well outside the protection of the city walls.185 In 1736 eight Indian pueblos surrounded the city.186 According to records, though, the native population shrunk significantly over the next thirty years and by 1764, just eighty-nine Indians lived in the two remaining pueblos next to the city.187

184 Santo Domingo 2595 185 Pablo Castello, Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontainebleau, [Map]. 186 “Estado de los Yndios que estan a la denocion del precidio de San Augustin de la Florida con Separacion de pueblos capases de tomar armas” AGI Escribania 157C. A pueblo is like a small village. 187 “Expediente de Juan Joseph Solana” Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 92, AGI, Seville, Spain.

Table 4.1: Property Owners on the Crown’s Payroll188

Service to the Crown Number of Properties

Artillerymen 17

Artillery Officers 5

Royal Coast Guard 7

Dismounted Cavalry 3

Mounted Cavalry 31

Mounted Cavalry Officers 5

Infantry 61

Infantry Officers 11

Militia 22

Militia Officers 6

City Officials 6

Royal Treasury 7

Royal Master Smith 1 Total 182

188 Occupations listed in AGI Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 25r.

Table 4.2: Military, Church, and City Administrators Who Owned Coquina Stone Buildings in 1764

Occupation Number of Owners

Artillery Officer 2

Artillerymen 8

Shipwright 1

Dismounted Cavalry 1

Free Black Militiamen 1

Head Quartermaster 1

Infantry Officer 4

Infantrymen 8

Mariner/Coastguardsmen 4

Militia Officer 1

Militiamen 4

Mounted Cavalry 9

Mounted Cavalry Officer 4

Notary 1

Priest/Church Official 3

Sargento Mayor de la Plaza* 1

Treasury Official 4

Grand Total 57

* The sargento mayor de la Plaza is roughly translated to Master Sargent of the Post. The exact duties of the sargento mayor is vague as the holder of the position had both political and military responsibilities. When a governor died while in office, the sargento mayor would often serve as the interim governor until the Crown appointed a new governor. Usually the sargento mayor was a filled by someone originally from Florida.

Minority groups that lived outside the city could operate freely within their own communities. However, that did not mean minorities lacked opportunities within in the walled city, or were confined by segregation. Blacks, Indians, Canary Islanders, and non-

Spaniards all owned property within the city’s walls. Scholars disagree about how many black men and women owned property in the city. Susan Pickman argues that there were thirteen black property owners while Jane Landers argues that sixteen owned property.189

Identifying black property owners is complicated, as many people, both black and white, shared the same name. A conservative estimate would be eleven black property owners.

Their names and properties are found in Figure 4.4. Most of these black property owners served in the free black militia and several of them owned property in Fort Mose as well.

Tomas Chrisostomo Antonio Joseph Elixio, Pedro de León, and Domingo de Jesus all owned two houses, one in the city and one in Fort Mose.190 Pedro de León owned a property lot in St. Augustine and a house in Fort Mose.191

Based on the map, there appears to be no specific settlement pattern for black property owners. The highest concentration of black property owners was in the oldest part of St. Augustine: blocks c, g, i, and f. While the oldest part of town was not the wealthiest part of town, it was close to several influential property owners. For example,

Elixio de la Puente almost controlled his entire neighborhood by owning three properties on the corner of blocks Z, e and a. Marcos de Ortega, Manuel de la Asension y Soto, Juan

189 For more on the disputed black property owners identified by Landers and Pickman, please refer to Appendix 2: Table A9. 190 Elixio de la Puente’s property map has Domingo de Jesus owning only a property lot in 1764. However, the 1750 robbery investigation into Jason Johns revealed that Jesus owned a house in the city. It is unknown if Jesus’s house was destroyed before the map was created or if Elixio de la Puente did not record the house for whatever reason. 191 Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 261-263; Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]; Santo Domingo 2595.

Tomas de Castilla, and Ignacio Roso all lived only one block from Elixio de la Puente’s neighborhood. There were also twenty-nine tabby buildings in the area, a possible indication of the middling status of the neighborhood. However, almost every black- owned property close to Elixio de la Puente’s properties was one of the nicer buildings in their neighborhood. Both Manuel de la Asension y Soto and Ignacio Roso owned a coquina stone building. Juan Tomas de Castilla owned a building made of coquina and wooden boards. Of the sixty-one properties in the neighborhood, Asension y Soto, Roso, and Castilla were among the twenty-four percent of property owners to own a coquina or coquina composite building.192 The greater value of Asension y Soto’s, Roso’s, and

Castilla’s properties may reflect their higher standing in both black society and St.

Augustine’s society at large.

The other concentration of black property owners was in blocks I and J, which were north of the plaza mayor. While those two blocks were close to the elite-owned blocks (K, M, O, and P) and the plaza mayor, the neighborhood was not considered to be affluent. Between blocks I and J, there were only three dons and two coquina buildings.

Additionally, I and J contained the highest concentration of wooden board houses, which are assumed to be the lowest quality building material in the city. Unlike some black property owners south of the plaza mayor who owned more affluent buildings, both

Tomas Chrisostomo and Antonio Joseph Elixio owned wooden board buildings, just like their neighbors. Living in St. Augustine afforded blacks a chance to better their social standing through property ownership. Additionally, living in urban St. Augustine meant

192 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map].

86 that blacks were closer to the institutions that engendered their freedom and protected their legal rights.

Figure 4.4: Confirmed black property owners.193

193 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]. For more on black property owners, please refer to Appendix 2: Table A8.

For instance, Domingo de Jesus, the black cooper who was part of a 1750 robbery conspiracy, escaped capture and prosecution by successfully seeking refuge in the

Franciscan monastery for several months after his fellow conspirators had been captured.

Jesus’ stay in the monastery frustrated St. Augustine’s chief curate, don Juan Joseph

Solana. But Solana still offered to commute Jesus’ sentence from death to hard labor, though it was mainly to convince Jesus to abandon the monastery. Jesus eventually agreed to the commutation as he knew that religious asylum extended the possibility that his punishment would be less severe.194 Jesus certainly paid a price for his crime, but the

Church offered a way for him to push back against the authorities.195

Domingo de Jesus’ use of ecclesiastical asylum not only demonstrates how blacks used the Church, but also how St. Augustine’s general population used the Church to express their agency within society. In 1758, an incident sparked by the rivalry between don Juan Joseph Solana and St. Augustine’s governor, don Lucas Fernando de Palacio y

Valenzuela, embroiled the city. From August 6 to August 8, more than eighty soldiers left their posts and sought asylum at the parish church, the church in Tolomato, and in the

Franciscan monastery in protest over a new policy instituted by the incoming Governor

Palacio. According to Palacio y Valenzuela, soldiers needed to be on guard duty for twenty-four consecutive hours and were not allowed to take meal breaks. Many of those who deserted were recent transfers from Havana, who knew no one that could take them

194 “Governor Melchor de Navarrete to the Crown,” St. Augustine, November 28, 1750, AGI Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 58r. 195 Domingo de Jesus did not disappear from the records after this affair. He and his wife, Maria del Rosario, had several more children and godchildren after the 1750 robbery conspiracy and took part in the 1764 evacuation. They resettled in Cuba. Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763: AERSAD, images 220, 222 [accessed through ESSS];

88 food. The ensuing hold-out lasted one month before the governor ultimately pardoned the soldiers for desertion.196

That such a flagrant action would be so easily pardoned is surprising, especially in a city whose very survival depended upon a disciplined military. But as Domingo de

Jesus and the eighty-four soldiers demonstrated, the Church offered a space for political protest while avoiding harsh punishment. Using the Church as a safe legal space is an example of how St. Augustinians used religious physical space to challenge secular law.197 Ecclesiastical asylum was a common practice throughout the Spanish empire, but in St. Augustine, with no judicial body beyond the governor, the practice became even more important. The governor had few checks to his authority, but ecclesiastical asylum was one method that, if granted, assured residents time for their case to be reviewed without haste.198

The role that ecclesiastical asylum played in the 1758 desertions also factored into scholars’ poor perception of St. Augustine’s urban profile. The 1758 desertions and

Solana’s granting of ecclesiastical asylum further deteriorated relations between Solana and Governor Palacio y Valenzuela, who were at odds from the beginning of Palacio’s term. One of Palacio’s first actions in office was to request Father Solana’s removal to

Havana.199 Palacio must have been concerned about the priest’s power to impede the governor’s authority as Solana was a member of an old Florida family and had deep ties

196 Robert Kapitzke, “The ‘Calamities of Florida’: Father Solana, Governor Palacio y Valenzuela, and the Desertions of 1758,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, 72 no. 1 (1993). 197 For more on the use of ecclesiastical asylum in St. Augustine, please read Robert Kapitzke’s chapter “A Sacred Refuge: Ecclesiastical asylum,” in Religion, Power, and Politics in Colonial St. Augustine, 98-123. 198 Kapitzke, Religion, Power, and Politics in Colonial St. Augustine, 103. 199 Kapitzke, 4.

89 to the community. Palacio’s accusations of Solana’s role in the desertions spurred an investigation from Cuba’s bishop into Solana’s alleged abuses of power. The investigation sparked several more investigations of Father Solana, none of which offered sufficient evidence to indict him. Ultimately, the investigations riled Solana and his allies, and incited Solana to launch his own counter-investigation of the governor. The ruckus in Florida eventually reached the Crown, who appointed none other than Solana to investigate the complaints made against the governor. However, Palacio died in 1761, ending any further inquiries into Solana’s activities.200

One of the most fruitful reports to come out of Solana’s counter-investigation was an account of St. Augustine that he sent to the Crown in 1760.201 Solana’s report seems to have been of more use to present-day historians than to the Crown. Many studies of eighteenth-century St. Augustine rely on the information Solana provided.202 Solana vacillated between praising his native city and bemoaning the state of the Church in St.

Augustine. His St. Augustine is a quaint pastoral one, with fields filled with vegetable gardens, an ample supply of cattle for the butcher, and saltwater fishing nearly year- round.203 When it comes to the state of the Church, though, affairs were not as positive.

200 Kapitzke, 17. 201 “Expediente de Juan Joseph Solana” Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 91. 202 Boyd’s and Navarro la Torre’s La Florida, Susan Pickman’s “Life on the Spanish-American Colonial Frontier”, Paul Hoffman’s Florida Frontiers, and Charles Arnade’s “Architecture of Spanish St. Augustine” are just a few of the social, demographic, and architectural studies of St. Augustine to extensively use Solana’s report. While he used the report in his synthesis of eighteenth-century Florida, Paul Hoffman did acknowledge that Solana report was highly critical of Governor Palacio y Valenzuela. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 396-397. 203 “el vecindario se mantiene lo mas del año con carne salada pescado de que abunda mucho el rio y algunas legumbres, al presente se matan algunas reses en una casa que esta dentro del recinto destinada para carnicería” ““Expediente de Juan Joseph Solana” AGI Santo Domingo 2584, fol. 91r.

After sixty years, all that remained of the old church in the plaza mayor was a wall and a lot. Solana was aware of the Church’s lack of presence in the center of the city. In the same report where he described a picturesque St. Augustine, he also pleaded with the

Crown to send money so they could rebuild the old church, saying it would only cost four thousand pesos.204 It is unknown if the Crown sent funds for the reconstruction, but in

1764, an empty lot remained.

While certainly descriptive of his native city and highly critical about the church’s state of disrepair, Solana is conspicuously silent about the number of female property owners in St. Augustine. As with black property owners, the urban city provided many opportunities for women.205 Almost twenty percent of property owners were female.

Women owned twenty-five percent of all coquina stone buildings. On average, properties owned by women were one hundred square feet larger than properties owned by men.

Women owned twenty-six percent of all square footage within the walls of the city.206

Some scholars argue that for a community to grow at a healthy rate, there should be about ten percent more males in society than females. The male to female ratio in the average

Spanish-American urban center, though, was about ten percent more females than males.207 Florida diverged from the Spanish-American norm as the 1764 royal census listed two hundred more men living in St. Augustine than women.208

204 Ibid. 205 Kinsbruner, 110-119. 206 Eligio de la Puente, “Plano de la Real Fuerza, Baluartes, y Linea de la Plaza de Sn. Augustine…” [Map]. 207 Kinsbruner, 113 208 Estado que manifiesta el numero de familias…” Santo Domingo 2595 fol. 17 AGI, Seville, Spain.

Women occupied an important place in urban St. Augustine. The greater number of men living in the city meant that women had more opportunities to advance through marriage. Likewise, marrying an established criolla woman allowed men not native to

Florida to integrate into society. Historians like Charles Arnade noticed these patterns and used women to identify major blocks of family property in eighteenth-century St.

Augustine.209 Manuela Díaz and Estefanía Ruíz are just two examples of how women used marriage to foreigners to advance in St. Augustine society.

Manuela Díaz was a criolla woman who owned a 1,080 square foot property lot with a coquina stone house located two blocks north of the governor’s mansion. It was a two-story building that, when appraised in 1763, was valued at 3,144 pesos.210 In

October, 1745, the property was given as a dowry by Manuela’s parents when she married a young lieutenant from Madrid named Juan Leandro de Landa.211 During the evacuation, the house was sold in Landa’s name for one hundred fifty pesos. But that was the only property Manuela owned that was sold in her husband’s name. At the same time that Landa was selling Díaz’s house in the city, Díaz was selling her own two sabanas, called Capoaca and Pantano.212

209 Charles Arnade, “The Avero Story: An Early Saint Augustine Family with Many Daughters and Many Houses." 210 The full appraisal can be found in Table 4.3. 211 Ibid. 212 “Cuadernos de recibos de los procedidos de las casas y bienes que quedaron en el presidio de la Florida” AGI Cuba 372, fol. 119r. On the bills of sale for the sabans, she needed a don Joachin de Landa (possibly Juan de Landa’s brother?) to sign to for her because she did not know how to sign her own name.

Table 4.3: Manuela Díaz’s and Juan de Landa’s House Appraisal213

Masonry, Carpentry, and Courtyard of the Landa- Value Díaz House

452 square varas* of Floor (Total Floor plan) 113 Pesos

338 varas of Stone Panelling 1,690 Pesos

160 cubic varas of Stonework a 1/3 Thick 400 Pesos

52 varas of Corresponding Cement 30 pesos

Upper & Lower Floor (First & Second Floors) 75 Pesos

20 cubic varas of Kitchen walls made of oyster shells 25 pesos

For the Corresponding Cement 10 Pesos

Well & Small Oven 25 Pesos

Lot & Tile-Kiln 28 Pesos

Upper Doors & Windows 38 Pesos

2 Balconies 60 Pesos

Leftover Glass & Lumber 128 Pesos

Stairs 20 Pesos

Lower Doors in the House 140 Pesos

The Shingled Roof 220 Pesos

Kitchen 12 Pesos

Outside Walls & Door to the Street 26 Pesos

4 Mandarin Orange Trees 24 Pesos

1 Sour Orange Tree 3 Pesos

1 Fig Tree 1 Pesos

2 Fig Trees 12 Pesos

3 Guava Trees 12 Pesos

Total 3,144 Pesos

213 “Tascion de la casa del capitan don Juan Leandro de Landa…” AGI Santo Domingo 2660 fol. 62r. It was Juan de Landa who signed off on the house’s appraisal. A vara is a Spanish yard and is roughly three feet. For more on the variations in the vara, please refer to Horace Doursther’s "Dictionnaire universel des poids et mesures" (Brussels, 1840)

The Landa-Díaz Mejía household is an ideal example of how property defined social status. Manuela’s father was don Antonio Díaz, a former sargento mayor of St.

Augustine.214 The position of sargento mayor was a powerful one, as the sargento mayor often served as interim governor when the Crown-appointed governor died in office. By giving his daughter and son-in-law a house near the plaza mayor, he ensured that his daughter kept her elevated social standing in the city’s community. Having her name on the property was also a reminder of the power and influence that Antonio Díaz’s name wielded in the community. Every advancement Juan de Landa made in his career would reflect well on the Díaz family. When Landa was promoted to capítan, it added another influential member to the kin-network. Juan and Manuela’s daughters also used the house for their benefit. The family moved to Cuba after the evacuation, where Manuela and

Juan died, leaving their four daughters without any source of income. To remedy this, their eldest daughter, doña Maria de los Angeles, wrote to the King, asking for an orphan’s stipend befitting their station. To prove their high social status, Maria provided biographical information about her parents and, more importantly, the property appraisal of her childhood home in St. Augustine. It is unknown if she and her sisters received succor, but it is clear that her social status was rooted in the house where she and her sisters were born and raised. St. Augustinians saw property as a direct link to social status and advancement.

Doña Estefanía Ruíz also sought to secure her social standing through marriage.

In 1751, Ruíz married don Joseph del Olmo, the city’s French and English interpreter.

Ruíz was the widow of St. Augustine’s physician, don Juan Pescador. Ruíz's higher

214 Ibid.

94 standing is evidenced by the location of Pescador’s house, which was right next to the plaza mayor.

Figure 4.5: Don Juan Pescador’s house. It was given to his heirs after his death in 1749.215

Juan Pescador’s and Estefanía Ruíz’s children, Francisco Josef, Josef Antonio, and Maria Josefa Pescador, were declared Juan’s heirs after his death in 1749, yet they were too young to manage the affairs of the house. It is not recorded who was in charge of the house, but a safe assumption would be Estefanía Ruíz, as it was common for women to head the household in Spanish America.216 Ruíz’s second marriage to Joseph

215 “Estefanía Ruíz to the Governor of the Province of Yucatan” Mérida, October, 10, 1774, AGI Ultramar 150, no. 5. 216 Kinsbruner, 112-114.

95 del Olmo secured both Ruiz’s and Olmo’s place in society, as well as their children’s status. Olmo’s work as the city’s French and English interpreter was crucial to St.

Augustine’s relationship with neighboring French and English colonies in the region.

Olmo was present at many important meetings that affected St. Augustine, like when St.

Augustine’s officials petitioned the Crown to legitimize trade with the William Walton

Company or when the British took over the city during the evacuation.217 By marrying

Olmo, Ruíz become associated with her new husband’s prestige and could use it to cement her and her children’s place in society. Likewise, Olmo, who was born in Asti,

Piedmont, and his children, who were born to an English mother, could ingratiate themselves in St. Augustine’s criollo society through the respectable Ruíz and gain access to Ruíz’s valuable kinship-network.218

One of the few drawbacks of their marriage was their financial situation. Joseph del Olmo’s salary as an interpreter was 391 pesos per year. Though it was supplemented with income he received as a master cooper, it was not much compared to the amount others received, especially when compared to Estefanía’s Ruíz’s widow stipend. Every year the Crown gave her 446 pesos in succor.219 Ruíz needed to feed three children, but she stood to lose that money when she married Olmo, who had two children of his own to feed. While the financial aspect of their marriage is unclear, Ruíz’s marriage to Joseph

217“Testimonios de autos sobre el contrato de suministro y provisión del presidio de San Agustín de la Florida por la Real Compañía de La Habana, y sobre la posterior rescisión del mismo” AGI Ultramar 1004, no. 2, fols. 3r-669r; “Noticias relativas a la florida y los cayos de los mártires,” 1764, AGI Santo Domingo 2595, no. 3. 218 “Estefanía Ruíz to the Governor of the Province of Yucatan.” One of more prestigious members of Ruíz’s kinship-network was Juan Esteban de Peña, who was Ruíz’s godparent at her first wedding. Peña was the city’s head royal accountant and Ruíz’s neighbor. 219 Situado 1754-1764, Cuba 473 AGI Seville, Spain.

96 del Olmo signifies that she was had the freedom to choose to remarry. Ruíz’s freedom of choice was common in urban Spanish-American cities and is indicative of women’s roles in St. Augustine.

Historian Jay Kinsbruner once wrote that “function and form are the essentials of what is truly urban and not the number of people living coherently in a settlement.”220

While St. Augustine was a military bastion, it still functioned as a Spanish-American urban center with a dynamic physical and social profile. Not only did residents use property to signify or elevate social status, they also utilized the physical space provided by institutions like the Church to resist Crown authority. People like Domingo de Jesus or the deserting soldiers of 1758 used the local church as a physical safe-house and, in turn, navigated their legal standing in society. Juan de Landa and Joseph del Olmo, both not criollos, were able to gain an elevated standing in society by marrying into a prestigious criollo family and, consequently, gained access to valuable property. Manuela Díaz, in turn, owned property, something that occurred regularly in an urban setting. Likewise,

Estefanía Ruíz, though she did not own property, was able to control her family’s future and household by living in an urban city. St. Augustine was a small military city that did not possess the same population size as other Spanish-American urban centers. Yet through the physical spaces of the city, St. Augustine’s diverse population found multiple opportunities to navigate, secure, and elevate their place in society.

220 Kinsbruner, 1.

Epilogue

“In my last [letter dated] February seventh I informed you [of] the complete evacuation of the presidio of San Agustin of Florida…” - Former Florida Governor Melchor Feliú, April 16, 1774221

St. Augustine's exiles sailed to their new homelands with the chance to rebuild their lives. Unfortunately, their new home was not ready to house the almost three thousand refugees. Most floridano families, as they were now called, were quartered with

Cuban families in Havana upon arrival. To deal with the surge in population, Cuban officials gave floridanos the chance to settle a new Florida, San Agustín de Nueva

Florida. Nueva Florida was located east of Havana, close to Matanzas, and was given solely to floridano refugees. Eighty-four families settled there. Black exiles, along with

Canary Islanders, and Florida indios labored alongside their fellow Spanish expatriates to cultivate a modest life in Nueva Florida. Each family received sixty pesos, foodstuffs, tools, and an imported African slave to cultivate a parcel of uncultivated land. Life was not easy in Nueva Florida. Few residents could afford better tools to harvest timber from the surrounding forest or an ox to plow the hard fields. Many could not dig wells and had to travel several miles to find clean water. Poverty and disease plagued Nueva Florida and by 1766, two years after the evacuation and the settlement’s creation, only sixteen families remained, with most returning to Havana, Guanabacoa, or nearby Matanzas.222

221 “Melchor Feliú to the Cuban Governor,” Havana, April 16, 1774, AGI: Santo Domingo 2660 No. 43 fol. 1r. 222 Jane Landers, “An eighteenth-century community in Exile: The “Floridanos” in Cuba,” New West Indian Guide 40 no. 1/2 (1996), 45-50.

Using Nueva Florida as proof, many scholars argue that the evacuation was detrimental to floridanos. Nueva Florida, however, represents only a small fraction of

Florida refugees. In fact, many floridanos thrived after the evacuation. Historian Sherry

Johnson points out that many floridano soldiers were valued because of their service in the Florida presidio. Floridanos filled important positions and performed vital duties throughout the Spanish empire.223 While Nueva Florida was designed to accommodate the incoming refugees, most floridanos were not meant to live there, as many quickly assimilated into Cuban society. Upon arriving in Havana, Cuba’s senior military official,

Alejandro O’Reilly, integrated many former Florida soldiers into the Cuban military, where many thrived.224 Juan Manuel Ximinez, a sergeant in Florida, became a second lieutenant in Cuba. Ventura Díaz, an infantry captain, rose to the rank of graduate lieutenant colonel of the Fixed Regiment of Havana. Don Juan Leandro de Landa, who started as a young lieutenant in St. Augustine, became a lieutenant colonel and was the captain of the Cuban grenadiers.225 A testament to his military expertise and service to the Crown, the former governor of Florida, Melchor Feliú, was made commander of the

First Battalion of Cuba.226

Not only did military men thrive in exile, but so too did St. Augustine’s city administrators. Perhaps the most successful Florida refugee was don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente. Finished with his duties in Florida, Puente took his immediate and extended

223 Sherry Johnson, “Casualties of Peace: Tracing the Historic Roots of the Florida-Cuba Diaspora, 1763-1800.” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 10 no.1 (2001), 92-93. 224 Ibid, 102. 225 “Floridanas widow and orphan petitions,” Havana, October 25, 1784 AGI: Cuba 1228, fols. 343r-567r. 226 Johnson, “Casualties of Peace,” 104.

99 family with him to his affluent Havana home, where he quickly became the spokesperson for the exiled floridanos and the Crown’s resident Florida expert.227 Keeping a close eye on British Florida, the Crown often sent Elixio de la Puente back to Florida to talk with the Talapoosa and Uchise nations about spying on, and possibly fighting, the British.228

With Spain’s entrance into the War of American Independence in 1779, Elixio de la

Puente was tasked with creating another map depicting ways to capture St. Augustine and lay siege to castillo San Marcos.229 His favor with the Crown and its officials was reflected in his career advancement, as he became an official for the royal accounts and chief accountant of the royal tribunal of accounts in Havana.230 Elixio de la Puente was not the sole member of his family to serve the Crown. His son, Manuel, was given a license to sail to America to fight alongside the rebelling colonists as a junior lieutenant.231

Not all floridanos stayed in Cuba, instead many traveled throughout the empire.

Manuel Elixio de la Puente’s regiment was to embark from Cadiz to the rebelling British

Colonies. Doña Estefanía Ruíz moved to Mérida, New Spain (Mexico) after her husband, don Joseph del Olmo, died in Cuba. While there, she joined her old friend don Juan

Esteban de Peña, who served as the region’s official royal treasurer.232 Translator Nicolás

227 Johnson, “Casualties of Peace.” 228 Ibid, 116-119. 229 Juan Josef Elixio de la Puente, Plano de la ciudad y fuerte de San Augustin de la Florida, sus imediciones y plano de ataques, [Map] 1779, Replica housed at the SAHS: MAP91, D7 F2 #2. 230 Francisco Xavier de Santa Cruz y Mallen, Historia de familias Cubanas, (Havana: Editorial Hercules, 1940), 90. 231 “Oficiales de Regimiento que sirven en america,” Cadiz, May 19, 1779, AGI: Contratación 5523 n 4 fol. 38r. 232 “Estefanía Ruíz to the Governor of the Province of Yucatan,” Mérida, October, 10, 1774, AGI: Ultramar 150 n. 5.

100

Ponce de León, infantry lieutenant Francisco Solana López de Toledo, lieutenant Diego de León, and lieutenant Antonio Casimiro López de Toledo were all former Floridians whom the Crown sent to Luisiana and British Florida to assess Britain’s state of affairs there.233

Exile gave many former St. Augustine residents the chance to thrive, but their experiences in the wider Atlantic world was not new. Living in St. Augustine meant that floridanos were already familiar with the workings of the Atlantic world. Through war, trade, and daily life, the people of St. Augustine were in constant contact with the British.

Likewise, St. Augustine was an important part of Britain’s imperial expansion. St.

Augustine’s strategic location allowed a diverse population to grow, as the Spanish

Crown encouraged, or forced, people of different nations and races to settle in the Florida presidio. Constant immigration become the norm, and in turn, the key to social mobility.

Both Florida-born criollos and incoming immigrants used each other to elevate their social status through marriage and god-parentage. Furthermore, people of St. Augustine were able to utilize legal and religious safeguards, like ecclesiastical asylum, to express and protect themselves to and from Crown authority. One scholar, writing about the floridano assimilation into Cuba, remarked that “Florida exiles were indistinguishable from the society into which they had been absorbed.”234 Assimilation in Cuba was easy for floridanos, as immigration was a key part of St. Augustine society. St. Augustine’s social dynamics flourished not because the city was on the empire’s frontier, but because it was deeply enmeshed in the affairs of the Atlantic world. The evacuation of St.

Augustine does more than punctuate the First Spanish Period’s end. It provides a window

233 Johnson, “Casualties of Peace,” 118. 234 Ibid, 124.

101 into the life of mid-eighteenth century St. Augustine. A dynamic, international, cosmopolitan, military town that resided between two powerful Atlantic empires.

102

Work Cited

Abbreviations

AERSAD Archive of the Ecclesiastical Records of the St. Augustine Diocese, St. Augustine, Florida AGI Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain AMN Archivo del Museo Naval, Madrid, Spain ESSSS Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies TNA The National Archives of the UK, London, England SAHS St. Augustine Historical Society, St. Augustine, Florida

Primary Sources

AERSAD (Accessed through the ESSSS) Baptisms 1761-1763:

— 1737-1751.

— (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763.

AGI Cuba 372, F.4R-125V “Cuadernos de recibos de los procedidos de las casas y bienes que quedaron en el presidio de la Florida,” Havana, October 6, 1764.

AGI: Cuba 372, F.119R-121V “Ración de las casas y solares que se hallan a la fecha sin venden por no haver asido ni hacer ninguno que quiera comprarlas en cuya virtud las traspaso bajo de confianza a don Jesse Fish…” St. Augustine, July 23, 1764.

AGI: Cuba 473, L3.F1R-165V “Libro de Certificación que corre desde el año de 1755- 1764,” Havana, August 22, 1775.

AGI: Cuba 486 ,L.1“Libro de Assientos.” St. Augustine, May 10, 1754.

AGI: Cuba 1228, F343R-567R “Floridanas widow and orphan petitions,” Havana, October 25, 1784.

AGI: Contratación 5523 N.4.F38R “Oficiales de Regimiento que sirven en América,” Cadiz, May 19, 1779.

103

AGI: Escribania 157c sin folio “Estado de los Yndios que estan a la denocion del precidio de San Augustin de la Florida con Separacion de pueblos capases de tomar armas,” November 27, 1736.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2574, F.417R-418R “Estado que manifiesta los barcos de transportes sus capitanes o patrones y dias en que han sido de este puerto para el de la Havana a conduría el numero de Familias que cada uno llevar a señalado en su partida, cuia exprecion y clase de personas son a saber,” Havana, October 14 1762.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2584, F.58R “Governor Melchor de Navarrete to the Crown,” St. Augustine, November 28, 1750.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2584,F.91 “Expediente de don Juan Joseph Solana,” St. Augustine, April 22 1759.

AGI Santo Domingo 2595,N1.F.15R “Compañía de Morenos Libres que con sus familias formaban el pueblo de dicho fuerte,” 1764.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2595,N1.F.15V “Resumen General” St. Augustine, January 22, 1764.

AGI Santo Domingo 2595,N1.F17R “Estado que manifiesta el numero de Familias que componían las Personas de ambos sexos, y todos edades, condiciones, calidades, y estados: vecinos y moradores de la Plaza de San Agustin de Florida…” St. Augustine, January 21, 1764.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, F.2R-16R “Relacion del numero de personas del sexo masculino y vasallos de la corona de España…a saber.” St. Augustine January 22, 1764.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2595 N.2.F.5R-13R “Yncluye las Personas del Sexo fememíno procedentes de las familias españolas vecinas antiguas que rean de la Plazade San agustin de la Florida, y al tiempo de su entrea a la corona Britanica, se trasladaron a la Havana donde gozan a la sason de las Penciones mercedes y limosnas que lleban señaladas por sus clases.” Havana, May 8, 1770.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, N.3 “Noticias relativas a la florida y los cayos de los mártires.” 1764.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2595 N3.F1 “Relacion de las 3096 personas de todas clases, condiciones, y estados de que se componia el vecindario Guarnicion y avitantes del presidio de S. Augustin de la Florida y destacamento del Fuerte de San Marcos de Apalache a la sazon de la entrega de aquellas Probincias (en virtud de Real Orden) a la Corona de Ynglaterra cuio 11 con expresion de las familias españolas de alli, las de ls Yndios, Pardos y morenos Libres….de mas noticias que combengar informar sobre el Particular son a saver.”” Havana, September 22, 1766.

104

AGI: Santo Domingo 2595 N3.F.1R-16R “Yncluye por sus nombres, el numero de personas del sexo masculino de edad de 15 anos para arriba, y de todas condiciones calidades y estados, que componian la guarnicion y vecindario de la plaza de San Augustin de Florida, y su Jurisdiccion, al tiempo de entregarse a la Corona Britanica.” 1764.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2660, N.9.F.1R-42V “Expediente sobre la formazion de una compañía de fusileros de montaña en Barcelona y envio a Cadiz y la Havana con destino a la Ysla de la Florida,” Barcelona, July 13 1761.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2660, F.62R“Tasación de la Casa del Capitan don Juan Leandro de Landa…” St. Augustine, November 6, 1673.

AGI: Santo Domingo 2660, F.432R “Razon de las familias blancas y morenas que a pedimento piedad y quenta del Yll(mo) Señor don Pedro Augustin Morel y Santa Cruz, Dignissimo obispo de esta Ysla, se transportaron del presidio de San Augustin de la Florida a esta ciudad en los Barcos que abajo se expresaran con declaración de sus capitanes día en que partieron de aquella barra y numero de personas que trajo cada uno y son a saver.” St. Augustine, February 20, 1764.

AGI: Ultramar 150,N.5 “Estefanía Ruíz to the Governor of the Province of Yucatan,” Mérida, October, 10, 1774.

AGI Ultramar 1004, N.2.F.3R-669R “Testimonios de autos sobre el contrato de suministro y provisión del presidio de San Agustín de la Florida por la Real Compañía de La Habana, y sobre la posterior rescisión del mismo.”

TNA: Colonial Office 05 pages 41-44 “Lord Hillsborough to Governor James Grant, Regarding Spanish Land Claims.” London, April 3, 1764. Transcription provided by the SAHS: mc-48 folder 19.

TNA: Colonial Office, 05-540, pages 105-160 “Governor Grant to the Lords of Trade,” St. Augustine. Transcription provided by the SAHS: mc-48, Folder 1a, pg 12.

TNA: Colonial Office, 05-540 pgs 221-224 “Gordon to the Royal Council,” London, 1764. Transcription provided by the SAHR: Jesse Fish Bundle.

SAHS: “Petition of Jesse Fish, March 23, 1789.” Found in The Study of the Fish Family with De La Puente Notes. Composed by Eleanor Philip Barnes in June 1952.

105

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Elixio de la Puente, Juan Josef, Plano de la ciudad y fuerte de San Augustin de la Florida, sus imediciones y plano de ataques. [Map]. 1779, Replica housed at the SAHS: MAP91, D7 F2 #2.

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Eligio de la Puente, Juan Joseph. Plano del pressidio de San Agustin de la Florida que poscen a la sason los Yngleses con las Barras Ríos y terrenos que se demuestran en el cuyas entradas fondos comunicaciones parages y sus nombres son a saber. Map. 1769 From AMN 0006-B-013.

Castello, Pablo. Plano del presidio de San Augustine de la Florida y sus contornos situado en el continente de la America del Norte…por el Articulo 19 de la Paz de Fontaínebleau. [Map]. St. Augustine: 1763. From AMN 0006-B-017.

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Silver, Thos. “A View of the Town and Castle of St. Augustine, and the English Camp before it June 20, 1740.”[Map] 12 x 6.5 inches. London: 1740. Downloaded from RareMaps.com on the web at https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/49078?view=print.

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Appendices

118

Appendix 1: Maps of St. Augustine

Map 1: Don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente 1764 Property Map

119

Appendix 1: Maps of St. Augustine

Map 2: 1763 Pablo Castello Map

120

Appendix 1: Maps of St. Augustine

Map 3: 1769 don Juan Joseph Eligio de la Puente Map

121

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A1: St. Augustine’s Evacuating Vessels: 1763-1764 Date Ship Ship Name Ship Ship Type Ship Ship Ship Patron Left Florida Destination Nation Captain

April 12, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Juan de 1763 Santa Acosta Thereza

April 12, Not Given Cuba Schooner don Thomas 1763 Patricio del Meanzano

April 12, Not Given Cuba Schooner don 1763 Santhiago Garcia

August 3, Nuestra Cuba Schooner Francisco 1763 Señora de la Camero Soledad

August 3, Jesus Maria Cuba Schooner Joseph Rocio 1763

August 3, La Cuba Schooner Joseph Milan 1763 Candelaria

August 3, San Miguel Cuba Schooner Joseph 1763 Meireles

August 3, San Cuba Schooner Manuel 1763 Francisco de Gallozo Paula

August 4, Nuestra Cuba Sloop Thomas de 1763 Señora del Amigo Rosario

August 5, La Cuba Schooner Domingo de 1763 Candelaria Espinosa

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Date Ship Ship Name Ship Ship Type Ship Ship Ship Patron Left Florida Destination Nation Captain

August 6, Nuestra Cuba Sloop don Miguel 1763 Señora del Quintos Rosario

August 7, Nuestra Cuba Sloop don Andres 1763 Señora de Lopez Regla

August 7, San Antonio Cuba Sloop Diego de 1763 Miranda

August 7, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Nicolas 1763 Señora de los Martel Dolores

August 10, El Mejandro Cuba Sloop don Antonio 1763 Bartolome

August 20, Amitante Cuba Packet Boat English M Hircklan 1763 Sander

August 22, La Santísima Cuba Sloop Bernardo 1763 Trinidad Fernandes

August 30, El Gavilan Cuba Schooner English Jorge Gabriel 1763

August 31, San Cuba Brigantine don Antonio 1763 Francisco Saenz Xavier

August 14, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Juan de 1763 Santa Acosta Thereza

October 12, La Santísima Cuba Sloop don Pedro de 1763 Trinidad Florencia Alias de la Gayarda

123

Date Ship Ship Name Ship Ship Type Ship Ship Ship Patron Left Florida Destination Nation Captain

September Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Juan de 12, 1763 Santa Acosta Thereza

October 12, San Juan Cuba Sloop Francisco de 1763 Baptista Abreu

October 14, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Marcos 1763 Señora de la Capetillo Luz y Santa Barbara

October 19, La Salli Cuba Schooner English don Enrique 1763 Hopkins

October 27, Santa Ana Cuba Sloop don Santiago 1763 Queto

October 28, San Antonio Cuba Brigantine French don Nicolas 1763 Charle

November El Firme Cuba Brigantine don Lucas de 17, 1763 Villaescusa

November La Maria Cuba Schooner French don Estevan 19, 1763 Papet

December 5, San Joseph y Campeche Schooner don Joseph 1763 las Animas de Escalera

December 7, Nuestra Cuba Schooner Domingo de 1763 Señora de la Espinosa Soledad

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Date Ship Ship Name Ship Ship Type Ship Ship Ship Patron Left Florida Destination Nation Captain

December San Joseph y Cuba Brigantine don Joseph 19, 1763 Nuestra de Estayola Señora del Rosario

December El Phani Cuba Brigantine English don Roberto 24, 1763 Hauvie

December la Yndustries Cuba Sloop English Daniel 24, 1763 Laurensi

December Santa Madre Cuba Sloop Bernardo 24, 1763 Trinidad Fernandes

December Nuestra Cuba Schooner Pedro de los 30, 1763 Señora de la Santos Soledad

January 8, La Santísima Cuba Sloop don Martin 1763 Trinidad de Almarza Alias la Esperanza

January 9, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Juan de 1763 Señora Acosta Thereza

January 9, Nuestra Cuba Packet Boat Fernando 1763 Señora de Garcia Duran Begoña

January 21, Nuestra Cuba Sloop Melchor 1763 Señora de Benites Concepcion

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Date Ship Ship Name Ship Ship Type Ship Ship Ship Patron Left Florida Destination Nation Captain

January 21, La Santísima Cuba Sloop Juan 1763 Trinidad Ronquillo Alias la Gallarda

January 21, La Santísima Cuba Sloop don Juan 1763 Trinidad y Joseph de Nuestra Arranzate Señora de Concepcion

January 21, San Antonio Cuba Sloop Diego de 1763 Miranda

January 21, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Marcos 1763 Señora de la Capetillo Luz y Santa Barbara

January 21, San Judas Cuba Schooner don Juan 1763 Thadeo Perez de Mota

January 21, Señora de Cuba Schooner Joseph Milas 1763 Candelara

January 21, Nuestra Cuba Schooner don Nicolas 1763 Señora de los Martel Dolores

January 21, Maria Campeche Brigantine English don Diego 1763 Deveris

“Razon de las familias blancas y morenas que apedimento piedad …,” St. Augustine, February 20, 1764, AGI: Santo Domingo 2660 fol. 432r; “Estado que manifiesta los barcos de transportes sus capitanes o patrones …,” Havana, October 14 1762, AGI: Santo Domingo 2574 fols. 417r-418r; Robert Gold, Borderland Empires in Transition: The Triple-Nation Transfer of Florida, (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 70-73.

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Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A2: Domingo Cardoso’s Slave Family Domingo Cardoso’s Slaves Baptized

Maria Cardoso Mother May, 1739

Juan Joseph Garcia Father Not Found Cardoso

Nicolas Antonio Son September, 1745

Estevan Son November, 1749

Manuela Sacramento Daughter June, 1752

Juan Son June, 1755

Juana Daughter September, 1756

Seferina Daughter July, 1759

Maria Daughter August, 1762 Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood) 1735-1763, AERSAD, accessed through the ESSSS.

127

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A3: Women Property Owners in 1764 Women property Number of Propert(y/ies) Type Building(s) owners Properties Owned Composition

Agustina Rexidar 1 Building Coquina Stone

Agustina Perez 1 Building Tabby

Alfonsa de Avero 1 Building Coquina Stone

Ana Horruitiner 1 Empty Lot Lot

Ana Perez 1 Building Wooden Board

Ana Rodriguez 1 Building Tabby

Ana Christomo 1 Building Tabby

Ana de Oteyro 1 Building Tabby

Ana Maria Tobar 1 Empty Lot Lot

Ana Maria Paniagua 1 Building Tabby

Anastacia de 1 Building Coquina Stone Florencia

Antonia Aliendo 1 Building Wattle & Daub

Antonia Dueñas 1 Building Tabby

Antonia Monron 1 Building Tabby

Antonia Marin 1 Building Coquina Stone

Antonia Cruz 1 Building Coquina Stone Antonia 1 Building Coquina Stone Chrisostomo

Antonia Tovar 1 Building Tabby

Antonia Solana 1 Building Tabby

Antonia de Avero 2 Building Coquina Stone

128

Women property Number of Propert(y/ies) Type Building(s) owners Properties Owned Composition

Antonia de Almeira 1 Building Wooden Board

Barbara Villegas 1 Building Tabby

Barbara Peña 1 Building Tabby

Barbara Garcia 1 Building Tabby

Barbara Santoyo 1 Building Tabby

Barbara Rodriguez Coquina Stone and 1 Building Tabby

Basilia Miranda 1 Building Tabby

Bernarda Rodriguez 1 Empty Lot Lot

Felipa Serrano 1 Building Tabby

Flora de Avero 1 Empty Lot Lot

Francisca Granados 1 Empty Lot Lot

Francisca de 1 Building Tabby Florencia

Geronima Chavez 1 Building Tabby

Geronima Garcia 1 Building Tabby

Gerrudis Villaverde 1 Building Tabby

Gerrudis de la 1 Building Tabby Pasqua

Ignacia de Ortiz 1 Building Wooden Board

Josefa Hernandez 1 Empty Lot Lot

Josefa Escalona 1 Building Tabby

Josefa Yanes 1 Empty Lot Lot Josefa Sanchez 1 Building Wooden Board Ortigosa

129

Women property Number of Propert(y/ies) Type Building(s) owners Properties Owned Composition

Josefa de Torres 1 Building Coquina Stone

Juana Rico 1 Building Tabby

Juana Esquivel 1 Building Tabby

Juana Baez 1 Building Wooden Board

Juana Ronquillo 1 Building Tabby

Juana de Uriza Tabby and Wooden 1 Building Board

Juana de Abila 1 Building Tabby

Juana de Aliendo 1 Empty Lot Lot

Juana de la Cruz 1 Building Coquina Stone

Juana de los Reyes 1 Empty Lot Lot Laureana de los 1 Empty Lot Lot Reyes

Lorenza Sanchez (2)Empty Lots, Lot, Tabby and 3 (1)Building Wooden Board

Luisa Gaviño Coquina Stone and 1 Building Tabby

Luisa de Ortega 1 Building Coquina Stone

Magdalena Rexidor 1 Building Tabby

Manuela Alvarez de Santhiago 1 Building Tabby Sotomayor

Manuela Diaz 1 Building Coquina Stone

Manuela Rutia 1 Building Wooden Board

Margarita Esquivel 1 Empty Lot Lot

Margarita Sanchez 1 Building Wooden Board

130

Women property Number of Propert(y/ies) Type Building(s) owners Properties Owned Composition

Margarita de Uriza Coquina Stone and 1 Building Tabby

Margarita de Uriza 1 Empty Lot Lot

Maria Cordero 1 Building Coquina Stone

Maria Reseo 1 Building Wooden Board

Maria Rodriguez 1 Building Tabby

Maria Marquez 1 Empty Lot Lot

Maria Ferrera 1 Building Tabby

Maria Barba 1 Empty Lot Lot

Maria Rica 1 Building Wooden Board

Maria de Guevara 1 Empty Lot Lot

Maria de la Cruz 1 Building Coquina Stone Maria Getrudis 1 Building Coquina Stone Ponce

Mariana Horruitiner 1 Building Coquina Stone

Mariana Perez 1 Building Wooden Board

Mathea Ponce 1 Building Wooden Board

Micaela Villaverde 1 Building Tabby

Nicolasa Gomez 1 Building Tabby

Petrona Nieto Tabby, Wooden 2 Building Board

Petrona de Arritola 1 Empty Lot Lot

Petrona de la Rosa (1)Empty Lot, (1) Lot, Coquina Stone 2 Building and Wooden Board

Prudencia Ponce Coquina Stone and 1 Building Tabby

131

Women property Number of Propert(y/ies) Type Building(s) owners Properties Owned Composition

Prudencia Ansures 1 Empty Lot Lot

Rita Fernandez 1 Empty Lot Lot

Rosa Angulo 1 Building Coquina Stone

Rosalia Ponce 1 Building Coquina Stone

Teresa del Pueyo 1 Building Tabby

Information from the 1764 Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente property Map.

132

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A4: Fifty-three Canary Islander Militiamen as of 1764

Pedro López Miguel Yanes

Pedro Hernández Miguel Suarez

Luis Hernández Diego Sánchez

Francisco Hernández Nicolás Martín Sánchez

Mathias Hernandez Lazaro Sanchez

Mathias de Guerra Pedro Roxas

Juan Guerra Ygnacio del Rolo

Antonio González Ynfante Roque Rodríguez

Joseph González de Arocha Melchor Rodríguez

Ygnacio Godoy Joachin Rodríguez

Antonio Garcia Francisco Rodríguez

Franisco Ferrera Feliz Rodriguez

Christoval de Febles Pedro Ramos

Angel Espinosa Joseph Quintana

Pedro Duran Juan Adrian

Hilario Alonzo Delgado Juan Agustin Pérez Ensinoso

Alexo de la Cruz Joseph Pérez

Joseph Antonio de la Cruz Francisco Ramon Perdomo

Francisco Corrates Estevan Peñate

Sebastian de Castro Gonzalo Padrón

Christoval Caballero Juan Monzon

Antonio Caballero Francisco Montes de Oca

Joseph Brito Antonio Monrroy

Diego Boza Antonio Molina

Andtonio de Bosa Juan de Medina

133

Luis Beltran Diego Lozano “Yncluye por sus nombres, el numero de personas del sexo masculino de edad de 15 anos para arriba…” Santo Domingo 2595 fols. 1r-16r, AGI, Seville, Spain.

134

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A5: St. Augustine’s Black Militia Members in 1764 Name Rank Company

Francisco Menéndez Captain Compañía de Morenos Libres

Antonio Joseph Elixio Lieutenant Compañía de Morenos Libres

Francisco Escobedo Second Lieutenant Compañía de Morenos Libres

Pedro Graxales Sargent Compañía de Morenos Libres

Francisco de Torres Compañía de Morenos Libres

Juan de la Torre Compañía de Morenos Libres

Francisco Suri Compañía de Morenos Libres

Santiago Solís Compañía de Morenos Libres

Francisco Roso Compañía de Morenos Libres

Ignacio Roso Compañía de Morenos Libres

Juan Rodríguez Compañía de Morenos Libres

Manuel Rivera Compañía de Morenos Libres

Joseph Peña Compañía de Morenos Libres

Francisco Joseph Meléndez Compañía de Morenos Libres

Pedro Martínes Compañía de Morenos Libres

Pedro de Fuentes Compañía de Morenos Libres

Pedro de Leon Compañía de Morenos Libres

Juan Lamberto Compañía de Morenos Libres

135

Name Rank Company

Francisco Graxales Compañía de Morenos Libres

Antonio García Compañía de Morenos Libres

Antonio Gallardo Compañía de Morenos Libres

Joseph Fernando Compañía de Morenos Libres

Juan Fernández Compañía de Morenos Libres

Joseph Escobedo Compañía de Morenos Libres

Francisco Díaz Compañía de Morenos Libres

Tomas Crisostomo Compañía de Morenos Libres

Juan Chrisostomo Compañía de Morenos Libres

Nicolás de Cesar Compañía de Morenos Libres

Juan Tomas de Castilla Compañía de Morenos Libres

Antonio Carballo Compañía de Morenos Libres

Nicolás Briones Compañía de Morenos Libres

Antonio Blanco Compañía de Morenos Libres

Joseph Bentura Compañía de Morenos Libres

Julián Balero Compañía de Morenos Libres

Manuel de la Asension y Lieutenant Compañía de Pardos Libres Soto

Juan Fermin de Quixas Adjunct to the Lieutenant Compañía de Pardos Libres

Antonio Horruitiner Sargent Compañía de Pardos Libres

Juan Estevan de Soto Compañía de Pardos Libres

Juan Revolledo Compañía de Pardos Libres

136

Name Rank Company

Marcos de Ortega Compañía de Pardos Libres

Joseph Orosco Compañía de Pardos Libres

Marcelo de Córdova Compañía de Pardos Libres

Antonio Calistro Compañía de Pardos Libres

Andrés de Avero Compañía de Pardos Libres “Relacion del numero de personas del sexo masculino y vasallos de la corona de España…a saber..” St. Augustine January 22, 1764 AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fols. 2r- 16r.

137

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A6: Compañía de Fucileros de Montaña de América (1764) Name Rank Name Rank

Estevan Fontanet Captain Pablo Margarit

Andrés Boleda Lieutenant Bentura Llaveria

Antonio Regas Second Lieutenant Segismundo Macia

Jayme Gómez Sargent Don Pedro Yglesias

Juan Goma Sargent Jacinto Vilaseca

Alverto Marzal Sargent Pablo Vila

Matheo Liron Corporal Raphael Garcia

Francisco Vila Corporal Pedro Martir

Antonio Galvada Corporal Ramón Vilar

Joseph Baly Corporal Feliu Amigo

Don Estevan Sola Cadet Thomas Vilaseca

Jayme Suduarni Gunsmith Antonio Gallar

Grau Priu Drummer Joseph Casanovas

Joseph Matheo Drummer Balthasar Morera

Jacinto Vicenti Feliz Harnaback

Pedro Valls Andrés Guet

Pablo Valls Joseph Gubau

Francisco Truis Joseph Giralt

Ysidro Torres Francisco Gabalda

Jayme Torrents Joseph Freyxes

Francisco Tayxeda Manuel Fortich

Manuel Sugrañas Don Francisco Duro

Edual Suciés Francisco Duño

Joseph Furquet Francisco Donadeu

138

Name Rank Name Rank

Don Silvestre Selles Joseph Cuyas

Antonio Sedalmer Andrés Cumulada

Bentura Santacreu Joseph Cruillas Francisco Pedro Saliner Comapusadas Agustin Salas Ramón Arboys

Francisco Sagates Antonio Colominas

Salvador Rovira Martin Casanovas

Deodato Rivas Juan Capera Joseph Thomas Antonio Capdevilla Revanates Pedro Juan Comas Antonio Caballer

Don Isidro Quintana Joseph Busquets

Joseph Quer Pacian Burboza

Juan Puyol Joseph Brufau

Juan Porras Don Joseph Boer

Francisco Pocho Francisco Blasi

Domingo Poch Joseph Benas

Estevan Pich Francisco Baluis

Antonio Pesola Jacinto Mila

Pablo Perea Martin Alvareda

Antonio Paysa Francisco Mas

Jayme Paus Narciso Nicolau

Carlos Paret Francisco Morera

Pablo Pallares Francisco Montadaz

Juan Padrós Juan Montadas

Pablo Valls Miguel Ortal “Relacion del numero de personas del sexo masculino y vasallos de la corona de España…a saber..” St. Augustine January 22, 1764 AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fols. 2r- 16r.

139

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A7: Military Regiments, Royal Administration, and Church Officials Evacuating St. Augustine in 1763-1764 Number of Men

City Administrators 6

Royal Treasury 8

Parish Officials (Secular Clergy) 13

Franciscans 9

Chaplain of Fort San Marcos de Apalache 1

Royal Mariners 15

Royal Hospital 4

Royal Fabrications (Royal Builders, 50 Conscripted Laborers, and Royal Slaves)

Three Infantry Companies 303

Artillery Company 43

Mounted Dragoons (Cavalry) 49

Dismounted Dragoons (Cavalry) 38

Mountain Fusiliers (Catalan Regiment) 98

Disabled Soldiers 45

Militia Companies 138 Indian Villages of Nuestra Señora de la Leche 17 and Nuestra Señra de Guadalupe de Tolomato (Indian Militia)

Free Black Pardos Militia 10

Fort Santa Theresa de Gracia Real Mose (Free 36 Black Moreno Militia)

Private Slaves 78

Total 961 "Resumen General,” St. Augustine, January 22, 1764 AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fol 15v.

140

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A8: Confirmed St. Augustine Black Property Owners in 1764 Block/House # Name Property Description

C 57 Domingo de Jesus Lot, 2304 Sq. Ft.

I 122 Tomas Chrisostomo House of Wooden Boards, 4,284 Sq. Ft.

I125 Pedro de Leon Lot, 4,320 Sq. Ft.

J 142 Lt. Antonio Joseph Elixio House of Wooden Boards, 5,940 Sq. Ft.

c 269 Ignacio Roso House of Coquina Stone, 6,552 Sq. Ft.

f 283 Marcos de Ortega Lot, 2,592 Sq. Ft.

g 289 Juan Tomas de Castilla House of Wooden Board & Coquina Stone, 2,504 Sq. Ft.

k 358 Lt. Manuel de la Asension y House of Coquina Stone, Soto 2,970 Sq. Ft.

n 391 Manuel Manrresa House of Wooden Board, 1900 Sq. Ft.

i 296 Andres Montero House of Coquina Stone, 3974 Sq. Ft.

B 42 Margarita Sanchez House of Wooden Board, Total Sq. Ft. Not Recorded

141

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A9: Unconfirmed St. Augustine Black Property Owners in 1764 Block/House # Name Property Description Reason Why Unconfirmed

E 78 Pedro de Florencia House of Coquina The 1764 census lists Stone, 2,556 Sq. Ft. Pedro de Florencia as a white militiaman.There is a black Pedro de Florencia in the segregated black baptisms book.

F 96 Flora de Avero Lot, 1512 Sq. Ft. There is no definitive proof that she is black.

I 123 Francisco Gomez House of Wooden The 1764 census lists Escovedo Board, 1,814 Sq. Ft. Francisco Gómez Escobedo as an infantryman or a Francisco Escobedo as a black militiaman.

J 145 José Clemente del House of Tabby, 936 The 1764 census lists Castillo Sq. Ft. a don Joseph del Castillo as a white militiaman or a clemente del castillo as a white artilleryman. There is a black Joseph Clemente born in 1748.

142

Block/House # Name Property Description Reason Why Unconfirmed

K 151 Antonio Gallardo House of Coquina The 1764 census lists Stone, 1,584 Sq. Ft. a white Dragone Montado and a black militiaman as Antonio Gallardo

L 170 Francisco Mendez House of Coquina Other works state this Stone, 441 Sq. Ft. is Francisco Menéndez. There is not definitive proof this is so. Also the 1764 census lists Francisco Méndez as a white artilleryman.

c 257 Francisco Xavier Díaz House of Coquina The 1764 census, lists Stone, 2,736 Sq. Ft. two Francisco Xavier Díaz’. One is white and the other is black

j 314 Juan Pedro de Fuentes Lot, 1,425 Sq. Ft. The 1764 census lists a white artilleryman named Juan Pedro de Fuente and a Pedro de Fuentes in the black militia.

k 335 Francisco Solana House of Wooden The 1764 census lists Board, 1,888 Sq. Ft. a white infantryman named Francisco Solana. The Author cannot find any other Francisco Solanas in the records.

143

Block/House # Name Property Description Reason Why Unconfirmed

m 373 Sebastiana Bran House of Tabby, Bran’s baptismal 1,920 Sq. Ft. entry does not list her as black. She is also not in the segregated black baptisms book.

k 333 Roque Pereyza House of Tabby, 468 Pereyza child was Sq. Ft. baptized in the segregated black baptism book, but Pereyza was not given a racial designation.

C 46 Maria Barba Lot, 273, 2736 Sp. Ft. Barba was baptized as a slave from Carolina, but there is no other proof that she is the same person as the property owner.

1764 Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente property map; “Relacion del numero de personas del sexo masculino y vasallos de la corona de España…a saber,” St. Augustine January 22, 1764 AGI: Santo Domingo 2595, fols. 2r-16r; “Governor Melchor de Navarrete to the Crown,” St. Augustine, November 28, 1750 AGI: Santo Domingo 2584 fol 58r; “Ración de las casas y solares que se hallan a la fecha sin venden por no haver asido ni hacer ninguno que quiera comprarlas en cuya virtud las traspaso bajo de confianza a don Jesse Fish…” St. Augustine, July 23, 1764 AGI: Cuba 372, fols. 119r-121v; Baptisms (Negroes & Mixed Blood): AERSAD, accessed through the ESSS; Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, (Urbana IN: University of Illinois Press, 1999)

144

Appendix 2: Additional Tables

Table A10: The 1764 Evacuation Committee Name Position

* Don Antonio Fernandez Customs Officer/Lieutenant in the Mounted Dragoons

Antonio Pueyo Royal Mariner

Don Juan Joseph Elixio de la Puente Chief Official of the Royal Accounts

Juan Joseph de Arransate Militiaman in the Company of Old Landed Neighbors & Residents of the City

Juan de Salas Militiaman in the Company of Old Landed Neighbors & Residents of the City

Juan de Eloy del Pueyo Infantryman

Domingo Rodriguez Herrera Captain in the Militia

Don Joseph del Olmo French & English Interpreter

Don Francisco Solano Lopez de Toledo Cadet in the Infantry

* Manuel Fernandez Lopez Corporal in the Mounted Dragoons/ Cadet in the Mounted Dragoons * There were two Antonio Fernandez’ and two Manuel Fernandez Lopez’ living in St. Augustine during the evacuation and each one held a different position in the city. It is unclear which ones were involved in the evacuation committee. “Noticias relativas a la florida y los cayos de los mártires.” AGI: Santo Domingo 2595 sin folio.