2.11 The Stono Rebellion and Fort Mose

St. Augustine, founded by Spain in 1565, is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African origin in the United States. Africans were part of it from the start.

From the late 1600s, enslaved people escaping from the Carolinas, and later Georgia, fled south to St. Augustine. Spanish Florida offered them freedom if they converted to Catholicism. Spain had its own reasons: the freedom seekers weakened its British rivals and could help defend Florida.

In 1738 Florida's governor set up a fortified settlement north of St. Augustine, officially named Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. It was led by Francisco Menéndez, an African-born man from Senegambia who had escaped slavery in the Carolinas after fighting against the English in the Yamasee War. Fort Mose was the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States, and its men served in a militia defending Spanish Florida.

Names like Francisco Menéndez came from the Spanish and British colonies where these Africans were enslaved, not from their homelands.

Florida's offer of freedom helped inspire the largest slave revolt in the British mainland colonies. In September 1739, an enslaved man named Jemmy, from the Angola region, led a group that grew to nearly 100 enslaved people near the Stono River in South Carolina. They seized weapons, burned plantations and marched south toward Spanish Florida, drumming and calling out for liberty. The colonial militia attacked them, and most rebels were killed or executed.

Many rebels came from the Kingdom of Kongo (1.9). They spoke Portuguese and knew Catholicism, which may explain both their military skill and their hope of refuge in Catholic Florida.

South Carolina responded with the harsh slave code of 1740 (2.7). That same year, British forces from Georgia and South Carolina invaded Spanish Florida. They occupied Fort Mose, but its Black militia and Spanish troops retook it in a surprise attack, and the fort was left in ruins. The required sources show both sides: a 1739 letter from the governor of Florida to the king of Spain, and a white South Carolinian's account of the Stono Rebellion.

Fort Mose's story didn't end there. The Spanish rebuilt the town in the 1750s. When Spain handed Florida to Britain in 1763, most of Mose's free Black residents left with the Spanish for Cuba rather than risk enslavement under British rule. Archaeologists later located the site, and today it's a National Historic Landmark, a reminder that some of the earliest free Black communities in the US were in the South, not the North.