Fort Mose — the First Free Town

Now settle in for this one, friend, because it's the tale I most want you to carry home — and hardly anybody knows it. Boone Merrick. Just a couple miles north of where you stand, there once stood a little fort and town called Fort Mosé, and it was the first free Black settlement in what would become the United States. And it was here, in Spanish Florida, near a hundred years before the Civil War.

Here's how a thing like that came to be. Up north, in the English colonies of Carolina and Georgia, slavery was the brutal law of the land. But Spanish Florida was enemy territory to the English — and the Spanish crown, partly out of faith and partly to stick a thorn in the English side, made an extraordinary promise. Any enslaved person who could escape the English colonies and make it to Spanish St. Augustine — and would take up the Catholic faith and defend the Spanish king — would be granted their freedom.

Think on what that meant. It meant that for enslaved men, women, and children in the Carolinas, there was a direction that meant liberty, and that direction was south. Not north — south, to Florida. It was one of the earliest routes of what would later, in other times, be called an underground railroad, and it ran the opposite way from the one we learned in school. And they came — through hundreds of miles of wilderness and swamp and danger, hunted every step, following the drinking gourd south toward this old Spanish city and the promise of freedom at the end of it.

And in seventeen thirty-eight, the Spanish governor gave those freedom-seekers their own fortified town of their own, north of St. Augustine, and called it Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé — Fort Mosé for short. It had its own homes, its own church, its own militia of free Black soldiers led by a formidable captain named Francisco Menéndez, himself once enslaved, who had escaped and fought his way to freedom. And when the English came raiding — as they did — the free men of Fort Mosé took up arms and fought to defend their liberty and their families and their town. And they fought well.

The little town didn't last forever; war and treaty and the tides of empire eventually swept it away, and for two centuries the world near enough forgot it. But archaeologists found it again, and Florida made the ground a state park, and now the story is coming back into the light where it belongs.

Don't you forget it. Now keep on to the south end of Saint George Street, where the lane opens out into the old plaza.