Black Society in Spanish Florida.

Black Society in Spanish Florida. By Jane Landers. Foreword by Peter H. Wood. Blacks in the New World. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 390. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-252-06753-3; cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-252-02446-X.)

Jane Landers presents a "complex and sometimes more empowered past that blacks experienced in Florida" (p. 5) as a counterpoint to the more familiar southern story of black-white relations. Free persons of African heritage, whom the late Kimberly Hanger called libres in her memorable book Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham, N.C., and London, 1997), are the principal subjects of this work, although Landers has also gathered as much information as she could about slaves and the slave trade in Spanish Florida. Asserting that "the history of colonial Africans is neither anonymous, lost, nor irretrievable" (p. 249), Landers principally focuses on the second Spanish period, 1784-1821.

The work begins with three chapters that discuss slavery in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean, the libre town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose just north of St. Augustine (1738-1763), and the British and early second Spanish periods (to 1790), respectively. When viewed in conjunction with the final chapter on the escalating American pressure on post-1790 Florida and the "Afterword," these chapters paint a broad-brush history of Africans in Spanish Florida and relate it to the Spanish Caribbean context. These chapters develop one of the work's themes: that Florida's libres (and some slaves as well) were persons with an Atlantic and Caribbean orientation not much different from that of whites in Florida.

Set between the third and the final chapter are five topical chapters that cover libre economic activities, religion and life stages, the lives of black women, slaves and the slave trade, crime and punishment, and military service. Landers begins each of the topical chapters with a brief look at pre-1763 Florida and the Caribbean context; she then proceeds to develop various aspects of the topic through examples of the lives of particular individuals or families, some of whom reappear elsewhere in the book. The examples are drawn from the East Florida Papers, the Spanish administrative and notarial archives that American officials seized in 1821 (the collection is in the Library of Congress and is available on microfilm). This material is not as rich as the sources that Hanger used for New Orleans, but the number of persons involved in Landers story is not as large: perhaps five hundred compared to a few thousand. Jorge Biassou, a slave turned military leader of the Haitian revolution but then an ally of the Spaniards in their effort to destroy French control of Haiti, is perhaps the most colorful character Landers discovered. His life is a good example of how the male libres combined military service with other activities to try to establish places of honor for themselves in St. Augustine's small interracial society. Women's positions generally depended on those of their husbands, owners, or other significant males.

Recent students of persons of African descent in the eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean have found that their lives were much as Landers found those of her subjects Spanish Florida. The picture is quite different from that of the American South, where to be of African descent was to be servile and where legal marriage across the race line was unthinkable. Landers finds--as Kenneth Porter argued in a series of articles in the Journal of Negro History in the 1940s--that one of the reasons that Americans wanted to control Florida was to eliminate its status as a haven for runaway slaves and to remove its example as a land where free persons of color could live successfully under a racial system quite different from that of the Anglo South.

Laying aside its somewhat schizophrenic nature, and the sources' limitations that make generalizations tentative, this fine book is a delight to read. Yet it must also be noted that it contains much that will be familiar to readers who have heard Landers speak or have read her published essays. That she has new things to say here indicates that the topic has not been exhausted.

PAUL E. HOFFMAN

Louisiana State University