Reviews of Books

Jane Landers's study of black society in Spanish Florida revives the debate over New World slavery first set off by Frank Tannenbaum a half century ago. Founded in the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish colony of Florida drew on the labor of slaves from the start and took shape as a mixed society of Europeans, Africans, and Indians for two and a half centuries. On the borders first of the British empire and then of the newly independent United States, Florida manifested an Iberian model of slavery that was arguably distinct from Anglo-American practice. That was the claim made in Tannenbaum's influential Slave and Citizen (New York, 1946), which shaped scholarship on slavery through the 1960s. For Tannenbaum, Latin American slavery was a milder, more benign system than existed in British North America. The Catholic Church recognized the basic humanity of Africans held in bondage, and imperial officials enforced crown protections for slave families. In contrast to the future United States, Latin American society was not starkly divided into black and white. It was constituted from an elaborate hierarchy of racial categories and social statuses.	1
The "Tannenbaum Thesis," as it came to be known, inspired a generation of historians, including Stanley Elkins, Eugene Genovese, and Herbert Klein, to explore and reflect on the differences between Latin American and Anglo-American slavery. This approach has been dismissed by those whom Genovese dubbed "materialists," who insist with some justification that slavery was slavery wherever it existed and whatever its accents. Yet, as Black Society in Spanish Florida demonstrates, Tannenbaum was correct. Without minimizing the harshness of slavery or ignoring the power of racial prejudice, Landers persuasively demonstrates that the character of slavery in Spanish Florida was distinct.	2
When the Tannenbaum Thesis was the subject of active debate, scholars looked to such venues as Brazil and Cuba to test its central claims. But a "more appropriate site," Landers suggests, lies in Spanish Florida, at the United States' back door, where "competing slave systems coexisted" (p. 1). Initially, during the First Spanish Period (1565–763), Florida was a society-with-slaves, rather than a slave society, to use Ira Berlin's terms. But it developed a plantation regime, dependent on the exploitation of slaves for intense agricultural cultivation, during the Second Spanish Period (1784–1821), which lasted until the United States acquired the territory in the Adams-Onís treaty. In both periods, the Spanish borderland beckoned as a haven for slaves to the north. That was, in part, due to Iberian weakness. Laying claim to a contested region and lacking in resources, the Spanish crown had to depend on whatever expedients came to hand. These included runaway slaves from Anglo-America, whom they shielded, thereby encouraging others to flee. Not all slaves who ran to Florida were immediately freed, however, and those recognized as free were settled in a separate town as a defense for St. Augustine, where life was not especially easy. Nonetheless, Florida came to be highly dependent on black militias for its defense. In the 1790s, as the frontier outpost grew into a plantation regime, the Spanish bowed to American pressure and ceased to welcome runaway slaves. Yet blacks held in bondage in Georgia continued to seek sanctuary across the southern border.	. . .