The Town Called Mose

Learning Objectives

This essay supports the lecture’s essential question: How could freedom serve both enslaved people and an empire? After reading this essay and delivering this lecture, the instructor should be able to:

1. Explain why Spanish Florida offered conditional freedom to enslaved people escaping British Carolina, and what both parties gained from the arrangement.
2. Describe Fort Mose as simultaneously a free Black community and a military installation, and explain Francisco Menéndez's role within it.
3. Evaluate John K. Thornton's argument about Kongolese Catholic and possible military backgrounds at Stono, and distinguish its evidence from its inferences.
4. Assess the meaning of Spain's 1738 bando and the Stono Rebellion within the imperial tensions that culminated in the War of Jenkins's Ear in 1739.
5. Frame Spain's freedom offer as conditional and strategic — meaningful, but not benevolent — in a way accessible to first-year college students.
6. Define the regional and ethnic terms the lecture depends on — Lowcountry, slave society, Mandinga, Yamasee, Gullah — without turning the hour into a glossary drill.

Terms the Lecture Will Use

These definitions are instructor apparatus. They keep the classroom hour from stalling on vocabulary. Name the term when the narrative needs it; do not open the lecture with a list.

Lowcountry

Lowcountry names the flat, tidal coastal plain of South Carolina — and, in this lecture's wider usage, the matching rice coast of Georgia. It is "low" in the literal sense: near sea level, cut by rivers, salt marsh, barrier islands, and swamp. Tides push far inland, which is why rice could be flooded and drained and why the region was a fever zone. The core includes Charleston, the sea islands, and the river systems of the Ashley, Cooper, Santee, Edisto, Combahee, and Savannah. Historians set it against the Upcountry or backcountry: the higher Piedmont inland, later settled and less defined by tidal rice. When this essay says "Lowcountry Carolina," it means the rice-and-slave plantation zone, not the entire colony. Stono sat in that zone. The Stono River is a Lowcountry waterway southwest of Charleston, on the path toward Georgia and Florida.

Slave society

A slave society is not simply a place that holds slaves. Following Moses Finley and Ira Berlin, it is a society in which slavery organizes the economy, the law, and the way power is imagined. Finley's rough tests were scale (enslaved people a large share of the population — he used a floor near 20 percent), production (slave labor central to the surplus that feeds the elite), and culture (the master–slave relationship becoming a model for other hierarchies). Berlin applied the contrast to mainland North America: a society with slaves treats bondage as one form of dependence among others; a slave society places plantation production at the center and uses the master–slave pair as the social exemplar. Lowcountry Carolina crossed that line early. Slavery arrived with Barbadian settlers; after the rice boom and the Black majority from about 1708, the colony was organized to hold people as property. Spanish Florida held enslaved Africans and Indians and was never abolitionist, but St. Augustine was a garrison-and-mission outpost rather than a rice kingdom. That difference in structure is why Spain could manufacture a narrow sanctuary door without ceasing to be a slaveholding colony.

Mandinga

Mandinga (also Mandingo, Mandinka) is an ethnonym: a Mande-speaking people of the Upper Guinea / Senegambia region — the Gambia River and neighboring parts of today's Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Mali — heirs of the medieval Mali Empire. English and Spanish documents used the name as a port-and-nation tag, not a village ID. When Spanish records identify Francisco Menéndez as Mandinga, that is the best ethnic clue in the archive. His African name, birthplace, and the exact circumstances of his capture remain unknown. Landers infers a Gambia-centered Mandinka world from the label plus the English trade of that moment. The inference is reasonable and still an inference. In the Portuguese Atlantic the same word later also meant a protective charm; that is a different documentary world. For this lecture, Mandinga is the African nation-name attached to Mose's captain.

Yamasee

The Yamasee (also Yamassee, Yemassee) were a Native confederation of the southeastern borderlands — coastal Georgia, South Carolina, and northern Florida — formed from survivors of older Georgia chiefdoms, including Guale and interior groups related to Hitchiti and other Muskogean peoples. In the 1680s–1715 they allied with South Carolina, raided Spanish Florida and other Native groups for Indian slaves, and fought as English auxiliaries. Trader abuse, debt, land pressure from rice, and fear they would be enslaved themselves produced the Yamasee War of 1715–1717, which nearly destroyed the colony. After defeat, many fled to Spanish Florida, where officials settled them as a buffer around St. Augustine — the same logic later used for Mose. Menéndez, enslaved in Carolina, fought with Yamasee opponents of the English for several years and reached Florida with Yamasee allies. A Yamasee leader later backed his petition for freedom. The "run south to the Catholics" route was a Yamasee trail that Africans used too.

Gullah

Gullah (often Gullah Geechee) names both a people and an English-based creole language that formed among enslaved Africans and their descendants on the rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton coast from southern North Carolina through South Carolina and Georgia into northeast Florida. It is the Lowcountry's distinctive coastal culture, kept thick by isolation, a Black majority, and the task system — not a generic word for Southern Black culture. Gullah is a creole of many African sources. Charleston's trade drew heavily from West-Central Africa (Kongo–Angola), Senegambia, the Windward / Rice Coast, and the Gold Coast. Rice-coast skills mattered; the population was not a single transplanted "Rice Coast tribe." The language sits on a spectrum. Plantation English aimed at overseers was close enough to run a rice field. Deep in-group Gullah — faster, denser African grammar and rhythm — often left white listeners with only scraps. Opacity to outsiders was a side effect of a common language, not proof that Gullah was invented as a secret code. In 1739 the creole was still forming; many Stono participants were African-born and still spoke Kongo, Mande, or other languages. Do not equate "Angolan Catholics at Stono" with "they spoke Gullah."

Section 1: The Reversal — From Drake to Mose

England as Liberator, Spain as Tyrant

In September 1565, Spanish forces under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés seized the French Huguenot settlement at Fort Caroline and killed most of its defenders; Menéndez then executed many shipwrecked Frenchmen near the inlet later called Matanzas. Later Protestant accounts associated the killings with the phrase "not as Frenchmen but as heretics," but the familiar story of a placard hung over bodies should be presented as a later account, not an uncontested eyewitness detail. In 1586, Francis Drake raided and burned St. Augustine. English promoters cast such attacks as Protestant liberation from Catholic Spanish tyranny, and some Africans and Indigenous people did leave Spanish possessions with Drake's fleet. Yet Drake had also participated in English slaving voyages with John Hawkins. The rhetoric of liberation was imperial propaganda, not a principled rejection of slavery.

By the 1730s, this script had inverted almost completely, at least from the perspective of enslaved people in British Carolina. The "script" is the story each empire told about itself — and the story enslaved people could actually use. In the 1580s, English promoters cast Spain as Catholic tyrant and England as Protestant liberator. By the 1730s that map no longer matched lived geography in the Lowcountry. England's mainland colonies had constructed a plantation economy dependent on African enslaved labor. After decades of imports from West and Central Africa, Lowcountry Carolina had become the only Black-majority society on the British mainland. Its rice regime combined Caribbean-style slave codes with swamp labor and disease so severe that the enslaved population often failed to reproduce itself without continued imports. On that mainland it was among the most lethal and legally severe systems of bondage. It was not, by those same measures, worse than Jamaican or Barbadian sugar. Spain, meanwhile, had spent five decades building a freedom offer that was conditional, strategic, and — crucially — real. The reversal did not happen because Spain became generous or England became cruel. It happened because each empire followed its interests, and those interests produced different outcomes for different populations.

Spanish Policy: Strategic Disruption and Conditional Freedom

Spanish Florida's freedom offer did not emerge from humanitarian principle alone. It developed through local decisions and shifting royal policy. In October 1687 the first documented group from Carolina reached St. Augustine — commonly eight men, two women, and a nursing child, arriving by boat from "St. George" (Charleston). Governor Diego de Quiroga y Losada refused to return them when the English demanded them back. His stated grounds were that they had asked for baptism, received Catholic instruction, married, and were usefully employed. He asked the Crown what to do. On 7 November 1693 Charles II issued a real cédula granting liberty to fugitive men and women from the British colonies who embraced Catholicism, "so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same." Philip V's 1733 cédulas restated the offer, forbade selling the fugitives to private persons or reimbursing English owners, and required four years of Crown service before emancipation. Implementation stayed uneven. Some arrivals were still claimed by Spanish residents. That is how Francisco Menéndez, already a militia captain, could remain enslaved in St. Augustine until 1738. In March 1738 Governor Manuel de Montiano reviewed the decrees, freed the Carolina fugitives held contrary to royal orders, and issued a bando restating that future fugitives who came to profess the Catholic faith would be put at liberty promptly. The Crown later approved him. The policy nevertheless became a weapon of imperial competition: it drained labor from Carolina, unsettled planters, strengthened Florida's population and militia, and made Spanish territory a possible destination for freedom seekers.

The conditions were not decorative. Successful freedom seekers accepted Catholic incorporation (baptism, Christian names, parish life), loyalty and service (militia duty, labor, and at points the four-year Crown-service rule), and Spanish subjecthood rather than Anglo-American "rights." Freedom meant release from a particular British enslaver and recognition as a free vecino under Spanish law: property, family formation, court access, militia rank. It did not mean Spain had stopped enslaving Africans or Indians. The offer applied to people fleeing English (and later Dutch) colonies, not to everyone already held in Spanish households. When officials honored it, the change was enormous. When they did not, people were delayed, sold, or re-enslaved. That gap between decree and practice is the whole story.

Section 2: Fort Mose and Francisco Menéndez

The Foundation of Mose, 1738

In 1738, Florida's governor Manuel de Montiano gave Spain's freedom policy a physical address. He established Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose — Mose for short — about two miles north of St. Augustine in marshy terrain near routes approaching the city from the north. The location served both settlement and defense. Mose's residents farmed, formed families, and built a community, while its militia guarded the northern approaches to the Spanish capital.

The community that formed at Mose consisted largely of people who had escaped British Carolina, together with their families. Spanish officials counted thirty-eight adult men and an estimated total population near one hundred in the first settlement. The sources for the two phases of Mose must be kept distinct: the original 1738 settlement was destroyed in 1740, while descriptions and archaeology of the rebuilt 1752 settlement document earthen defenses, wooden and thatched buildings, fields, and a church. Jane Landers's archival work shows a community with family networks, Catholic ritual life, internal leadership, and its own stakes in the imperial struggle surrounding it.

Francisco Menéndez: Captain of the Free Black Militia

The most important figure in Mose's early history is Francisco Menéndez. Spanish records identify him as Mandinga, but his birthplace and the circumstances of his enslavement in Africa remain uncertain. Parish records also call his wife, Ana María de Escovar, Mandinga. His baptismal name came from the royal accountant who had owned him, don Francisco Menéndez Márquez. Enslaved in Carolina, he joined Yamasee opponents of the English and fought alongside them for several years before reaching Spanish Florida with Yamasee allies. There he was claimed and sold into slavery despite Spain's sanctuary policy. In 1726, while still enslaved, he became captain of St. Augustine's Black militia. After years of petitions by Menéndez and others — with Yamasee support in Landers's reconstruction — Governor Montiano freed the Carolina fugitives in March 1738 and recognized Menéndez as leader and militia captain at the new settlement of Mose.

As militia captain, Menéndez was responsible for Mose's defense and for the community's relationship with the Spanish colonial government. His authority was real — he commanded men in the field and petitioned officials — but it remained bounded by Spanish imperial power. After the 1740 siege he served as a Spanish corsair. In 1741 the British privateer Revenge captured him, its crew tortured him, and a British admiralty proceeding in the Bahamas returned him to slavery. How he regained freedom is unknown, but he was again leading Mose by 1759. The episode shows both the reality and the fragility of freedom in an Atlantic world where rival jurisdictions recognized radically different statuses.

Fort Mose was the first legally sanctioned free Black community within the present boundaries of the United States. That conclusion rests on Jane Landers's archival research and Kathleen Deagan's archaeological work; it should be presented as a scholarly finding, not as a verbatim quotation.

Landers's framing is pointed and worth holding onto. Mose predates the Declaration of Independence by nearly four decades. Its existence as a legally recognized free Black community dependent on Spanish sovereignty — not English or later American sovereignty — is a standing challenge to any narrative in which freedom in North America flows exclusively from the Anglo-American tradition.

Section 3: The 1738 Bando and the Road to Stono

The Bando and the Circulation of News

In 1738, Governor Montiano issued a bando, or public proclamation, restating Spain's offer of freedom to fugitives from the English colonies; he also emancipated people in St. Augustine who had been held contrary to royal orders. The Crown subsequently approved his actions and ordered prompt liberty for future fugitives. These measures came amid rising Anglo-Spanish tension, although Britain did not formally declare the War of Jenkins's Ear until October 1739, after the Stono uprising. The bando served Spanish strategic interests, but it also made a consequential promise to people who could act on it.

News traveled through enslaved communities in ways that planters feared and could not fully monitor. Carolina officials knew that fugitives had reached St. Augustine for decades, and the founding of Mose gave Spain's sanctuary policy a visible institutional form. It is plausible that information moved through maroon, maritime, Native, and plantation networks. The surviving sources, however, do not establish how widely the 1738 bando circulated in Carolina or prove that Stono's leaders knew the name, location, or leadership of Mose. Spanish sanctuary belongs in the rebellion's context; direct causation must remain an inference.

The Stono Rebellion: September 9, 1739

On the morning of September 9, 1739, about twenty enslaved men broke into Hutchenson's store near the Stono River, southwest of Charleston, killed two white men, and seized weapons and ammunition. With colors displayed and drums beating, they moved southwest along the Pon Pon Road, calling out "Liberty," attacking houses, and gathering recruits. Contemporary accounts place the number of rebels at roughly sixty to one hundred by later that day. Reports generally place white deaths at a little over twenty, though later estimates range higher. The group halted near the Edisto River before the militia attacked.

A mounted militia force attacked near the Edisto. Estimates also differ for the rebels: some early accounts describe about fourteen killed in the initial engagement, while Lieutenant Governor William Bull later reported forty-four killed or executed; about thirty initially escaped into the countryside. Colonial forces, including Native trackers and enslaved people who opposed the uprising, captured or killed many over the following weeks and months. The fate of several participants remains unknown, so historians cannot state that none reached Florida. South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 then tightened controls on movement, assembly, independent economic activity, and writing while expanding slaveholders' and patrols' power — a legal infrastructure that shaped Lowcountry plantation life for generations. The same conditions that made the rice coast lethal — Black majority, task labor, planter absenteeism in fever season, constant African arrivals — also allowed a dense African-derived culture to form. Gullah language and community are the long cultural aftermath of that world. They should not be projected backward as the speech of every Stono rebel in 1739.

The geographic direction of the march matters. The rebels moved southwest, away from Charleston and generally toward Georgia and Spanish Florida. That route supports the widely accepted interpretation that Florida was their intended destination. It does not, by itself, reveal what every participant knew, whether all joined voluntarily, or whether the group expected to reach Mose specifically.

Section 4: The Detail That Changes Everything — Thornton's Argument

What One Clause Produces

The textbook chapter devoted to this period contains, in its discussion of the Stono Rebellion, a single clause: some of the rebellion's leaders were Catholics from the African Kingdom of Kongo, where Portuguese missionaries had made numerous converts since the sixteenth century. It is easy to read past this clause. It appears embedded in a paragraph about the rebellion's course and is not followed by any development. John Thornton did not read past it. In his 1991 article in the American Historical Review, Thornton built a substantial reinterpretation of Stono's leadership, its organization, and its meaning from exactly this kind of archival fragment.

Thornton's argument proceeds in two steps. First, the Kingdom of Kongo — centered in parts of present-day northern Angola and western Democratic Republic of the Congo — had embraced Christianity from the late fifteenth century. King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized as João I in 1491; his son Afonso I later deepened the kingdom's Catholic institutions. Over time, Kongolese Christians developed distinctive theology, ritual practice, material culture, and clerical traditions rather than merely copying Portugal. Some people exported from the Kongo-Angola region were therefore already Catholic, which could make Spanish Florida's religious requirement more intelligible and less burdensome, though military service and allegiance to Spain still imposed real conditions.

Second, wars in Kongo and neighboring regions during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries sent many captives into the Atlantic slave trade; some had military experience. Thornton argues that Stono's colors, drums, armed formation, recruiting march, and coordinated resistance are consistent with Central African military traditions and with leaders who may have been seasoned soldiers. The surviving record does not identify individual veterans. The interpretation is therefore contextual and comparative: it explains the rebels' public, organized conduct better than a model of spontaneous or purely furtive escape.

Thornton's argument in brief: Stono's participants should be understood not as culturally undifferentiated victims reacting spontaneously, but as people whose Central African political, religious, and possibly military experiences may have shaped how they organized resistance. This is a paraphrase of the argument, not a direct quotation.

The classroom application of Thornton's argument is as important as its content. Students should understand that it rests on an inference chain: people shipped from the Kongo-Angola region formed a substantial part of Carolina's imported enslaved population in this period; contemporary reports described some rebels as Angolan, Portuguese-speaking, and Catholic; Thornton then brings Central African religious and military history to bear on the group's conduct. No surviving document says, "these men were Kongolese soldiers." The case is argued from context, probability, and pattern.

The Limits of the Argument and the Lesson They Carry

Thornton's argument has been enormously influential, and it has also attracted criticism. The most serious objection is evidentiary: the surviving accounts of Stono were produced by colonial authorities who were frightened, who had interests in particular interpretations of what had happened, and who were not conducting a careful ethnographic survey of their prisoners' origins or prior military experience. We cannot verify the specific origins of individual leaders. We cannot confirm that any given participant was a Kongolese veteran. The argument is probabilistic, not documentary.

This limitation should be taught, not hidden. The careful version of Thornton's claim is: the Kongo-Angola region contributed substantially to Carolina's enslaved population; contemporary reports described some rebels as "Angolans," Portuguese-speaking, and Catholic; Central African wars had produced military captives; and Stono's colors, drums, march, and coordinated fighting are compatible with that background. Prior Catholicism could ease one element of Spain's sanctuary terms, but allegiance and service still mattered. All of this is evidence. None of it identifies an individual rebel's biography. The inference is strong and worth teaching precisely because it remains an argument rather than an established fact.

The pedagogical payoff of this transparency is significant. Students watching an instructor work through what a historical fragment can and cannot support are learning something more durable than the content of the Thornton argument. They are learning what historians do.

Section 5: Conditional Freedom and the Arc of the War

Oglethorpe, 1740, and the Limits of the Promise

In 1740, during James Oglethorpe's invasion of Florida, Spanish authorities ordered Mose's residents into St. Augustine before British forces occupied the settlement. A Spanish counterattack that included Menéndez's Black militia, Spanish regulars, and Native allies retook Mose, but the fighting destroyed the original fort. Oglethorpe withdrew without taking St. Augustine. The episode illustrates the instability of Mose's position: its residents defended Spanish Florida because British conquest threatened their freedom, yet war could erase the physical community on which that freedom had been organized.

The original Mose was not immediately rebuilt. Its residents lived in St. Augustine for roughly twelve years while the Black militia continued to serve Spain; Menéndez also worked as a corsair and endured re-enslavement before returning. In 1752, Governor Fulgencio García de Solís compelled many families to move to a second Fort Mose near the original site. A 1759 census recorded sixty-seven residents in twenty-two households. When the Treaty of Paris transferred Florida to Britain in 1763, nearly all of St. Augustine's Spanish, Native, and Black residents evacuated, and the Mose community moved to Cuba. The transfer closed the formal sanctuary route that had begun with local decisions in 1687 and the royal decree of 1693.

The Promise Thread and What This Lecture Sets Up

The series running thread — the promise — makes its first appearance here in the most literal form it will take across four lectures. Spain's promise changed over time and was enforced unevenly: officials sometimes delayed freedom or allowed fugitives to be re-enslaved, while Menéndez and others had to petition for rights the Crown had announced. The policy was conditional and strategic, requiring Catholic incorporation, allegiance, and at points Crown service. Yet it was also consequentially real: Mose existed in two phases, Menéndez commanded its militia, and its residents lived as free Spanish subjects. Their freedom ultimately depended on the imperial jurisdiction that recognized it.

Each subsequent lecture will ask students to track a different version of this dynamic. The Ohio Valley republics ran on kinship obligations — promises with teeth, as long as the communities holding them remained powerful enough to enforce them. Braddock refused to make a promise and lost an army. Britain made promises at Easton in 1758 and narrowed them in 1763. What the first lecture establishes is not merely an episode in Southern colonial history. It establishes the question the arc will ask in four different registers: who made a promise, on what terms, to whom, and what happened when the power that made it shifted.

Closing Synthesis

The Stono Rebellion is often taught as an episode in the history of American slavery — a dramatic event that tightened Carolina's legal regime and revealed enslaved people's determination to resist. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Placing Stono alongside Spain's sanctuary decrees, Montiano's 1738 bando, Fort Mose, and the crisis that became the War of Jenkins's Ear reveals a wider imperial geography. The rebels moved southwest while calling out "Liberty," and Florida offered a plausible destination. The archive does not prove that they knew Mose's precise location, its captain, or the text of a particular proclamation; those remain historically informed inferences.

The surviving accounts describe the rebels arming themselves, displaying colors, beating drums, recruiting as they moved southwest, and calling out "Liberty." Thornton's Central African interpretation makes their organization and public conduct legible as potentially rooted in Catholic and military experience, but it cannot recover individual biographies. The most defensible conclusion is that Stono was planned and politically purposeful while the precise knowledge, origins, and intentions of its participants remain partly beyond the archive.

The open question this lecture leaves for the instructor to carry forward is narrower and more revealing than a contest over which empire was "freer." In this borderland, why did Spanish officials make a practicable, if conditional, freedom offer to people enslaved under British rule, and why did British colonists define liberty while denying it to so many? Asking who received liberty, on what terms, and under whose jurisdiction reframes the standard narrative of freedom and empire without treating either empire as consistently emancipatory.

Suggested Readings for Instructor Preparation

Fara Dabhoiwala, “Liberty, Slavery, and Biography: The Hidden Shapes of Free Speech,” Journal of British Studies 62, no. 1 (2023): 104–131

Dabhoiwala identifies Elizée (Elisha) Dobrée as the scribe associated with a major early Stono account and situates him within the racialized Atlantic world of “liberty.” The essay is useful for teaching source provenance and the political purposes that shaped the rebellion’s preservation; it does not prove that Dobrée authored the account.