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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jane Landers. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Foreword by Peter H. Wood. (Blacks in the New World.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 390. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.

Excepting an obligatory nod to Estevan, the black Moor who traveled with Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the identification of a few blacks and mulattos who showed up in muster roles or censuses, most scholars have reduced the Spanish borderlands' triracial society to a biracial story. Recently, however, works by Gilbert C. Din, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Kimberly S. Hanger, and Daniel H. Usner have made it impossible to ignore blacks in Spanish Louisiana. Now, in this admirable first book, Jane Landers restores blacks to their place in the history of Spanish Florida. 1

From Florida's inception in 1565, Spaniards imported black slaves, but appallingly high death rates and Florida's feeble economy kept their numbers low. They were augmented, however, by blacks who fled slavery in the Carolinas, and later Georgia, to seek sanctuary in Florida. Spanish officials in Florida welcomed them. Runaways who converted to Catholicism received generous treatment from Spaniards, who hoped to weaken the English colonies to the north by encouraging the flight of more slaves. Landers argues that this Spanish policy of asylum had its genesis with the very blacks who fled to Florida; she sees Spanish policy makers as reactive rather than proactive. From Florida, however, the idea of offering sanctuary to black slaves spread throughout the Spanish Caribbean, where Spain used it to annoy Dutch and French slaveholders as well as English ones. . . .

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