St Augustine, Spanish Florida

Is St Augustine the oldest city in the US?

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St Augustine for Spain in 1565. The National Park Service describes it as one of “the oldest continuously occupied European and African American settlements in the United States.” In plain words, it is the oldest city founded by Europeans in the mainland United States that people have lived in without a break ever since.

It is not the oldest European town in North America. Spanish towns in Mexico and the Caribbean, such as Havana, are older.

What was St Augustine like around 1715?

St Augustine was a small garrison town, a place that existed mainly to house soldiers and guard Spain’s claim to Florida. No census survives for the game’s years, but about 1,500 people sheltered in its fort in 1702 and almost 2,000 in 1740, so the town was probably somewhere in between, with Native villages nearby. The garrison numbered about 350 men before 1740.

Much of the town was new. English attackers burned it in 1702, and its oldest surviving colonial buildings date from 1703 onward.

Florida could not pay for itself. The garrison depended on the situado, a yearly payment of silver that the viceroy of New Spain, in Mexico City, was meant to send. It often came late or not at all; by 1668 more than 400,000 pesos were owed. Skilled workers, guns and rescue ships came from Havana.

When was the Castillo de San Marcos built?

Two events pushed Spain to build in stone: a pirate raid on the town in 1668, and the English founding of Charles Town in 1670, only two days’ sail to the north. Ground was broken on 2 October 1672, and the first phase was finished in 1695 at a cost of 138,375 pesos.

The fort is made of coquina, a soft rock formed from tiny shells, quarried on Anastasia Island across the bay. Its walls are about 12 feet thick, and 19 feet on the side facing the sea. Native labourers quarried the stone and gathered shell to burn for lime, and disease killed many of them. Masons and lime-burners came from Havana.

The National Park Service calls the Castillo the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. Coquina proved a lucky choice: the soft stone squeezed together and absorbed cannonballs instead of shattering.

What happened in the siege of St Augustine in 1702?

Governor James Moore of Carolina, a planter and slave dealer, attacked with about 800 English and Native fighters, most of the Native fighters were Yamasee allies of Carolina. His fleet appeared on 8 November 1702. Within two days nearly 1,500 people had crowded into the Castillo.

The English held the town for nearly two months but could not break the fort’s walls. On 26 December four Spanish warships arrived from Havana and Moore gave up. As his troops left they burned what remained of the town. The Spanish put the damage at 20,000 pesos or more.

Why did people escaping slavery go to St Augustine?

In 1687 a small boat reached St Augustine from Carolina carrying eight men, two women and a nursing child who had escaped slavery. They are the first recorded group of freedom-seekers in Spanish Florida, and Spain refused to send them back.

In 1693 King Charles II of Spain issued a royal decree, or cédula, promising freedom to people who escaped from the English colonies and became Catholic. As word spread, more came south, overland and by boat. Historian Jane Landers has compared this route to an early underground railroad, one that ran south.

The promise was real, but it was not always kept. Spanish governors sometimes held or sold new arrivals as slaves. Spain’s motives were also practical: every person who escaped weakened Carolina and could become a soldier for Florida, which itself still allowed slavery.

After the Yamasee War against Carolina began in 1715, many Yamasee moved south and settled near St Augustine, becoming allies of Spain. Some enslaved Africans used the chaos of that war to escape south.

Who was Francisco Menéndez?

Francisco Menéndez was a Mandinga man from the Gambia region of West Africa, born about 1700 and enslaved in Carolina. He escaped during the Yamasee War and reached Spanish Florida with his wife, Ana María de Escobar.

Instead of freedom, they were sold. According to Landers’s research, a Yamasee man first held the group as hostages, the acting governor bought them, and in 1718 Menéndez was sold to the royal accountant Francisco Menéndez Márquez, whose name he took at baptism.

Still enslaved, he became captain of St Augustine’s Black militia in 1726, and the militia helped defend the town against a raid from Carolina led by Colonel John Palmer in 1728. Menéndez learned to write and sent petition after petition asking freedom for himself and about 30 others.

What was Fort Mose?

In 1738, more than twenty years after the game begins, Governor Manuel de Montiano freed Menéndez and his companions without conditions and founded Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, about 2 miles north of St Augustine. About 38 men and their families, roughly 100 people, lived there behind earthen walls in thatched houses, with Menéndez as their captain and leader. The National Park Service calls it North America’s first free, legally sanctioned Black community.

In 1740 a British force led by James Oglethorpe captured Mose. Menéndez’s militia helped take it back, but the fort was wrecked, while the Castillo held out through a 27-day bombardment. That same year Montiano ordered Fort Matanzas built to guard the southern inlet. In 1741 Menéndez was captured at sea while sailing as a privateer, a licensed raider, and sold into slavery in the Bahamas; he was free and back in Florida by 1759.

Mose was rebuilt in 1752. When Spain handed Florida to Britain in 1763, its people sailed to Cuba with the rest of the town. The exact site of the first 1738 fort has never been confirmed; it probably lies under the marsh.