Book Review

A very informative book, Black Society in Spanish Florida seeks to correct the erasure of the black record in Florida's early history. Using both primary and secondary sources, Jane Landers documents the physical presence of African Americans in the work force, in Catholic rituals, in the legal apparatus, in military activity, and in other material contexts. Confining her research to a site "where competing slave systems coexisted in a more or less equal level of development prior to the evolution of monoculture and chattel slavery," she revives Frank Tanenbaum's thesis in what she considers "a more appropriate laboratory." Her conclusion is that Spanish law gave bondmen and -women in Florida the room to pursue individual freedoms, which culminated in manumission often enough to ease the transition from slave to citizen. Conversely, she suggests that the imposition of the southern two-caste system in 1821 simplified the complex web of interethnic relations that had characterized Florida's past.

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