Slavery and Sanctuary in Colonial Florida
By Jean M. West

Overview

Slavery and Sanctuary in Colonial Florida is a lesson plan designed for use in conjunction with or as a follow up lesson on the topic of slavery in the United States. This lesson is most appropriate for grades nine-12.

National Curriculum Standards met by this lesson

For a list of standards that this unit addresses, click here.

Time required

This lesson will likely take one class period, depending on the amount of outside reading and written work assigned.

Materials

• Essay, "Slavery and Sanctuary in Colonial Florida"
• List of excavated remains from Gracia Reál de Santa Terésa de Mosé
• Chalkboard, flipchart or overhead projector

The Lesson

Anticipatory Set

1. Divide students into teams of three and provide each team with the alphabetized list of excavated remains from Gracia Reál de Santa Terésa de Mosé.



2. Ask each team to categorize the items in the list without specifying the categories they should use. When the teams have categorized the lists, ask each team how they organized their list.



3. Explain to students that the Florida Museum of Natural History is the custodian of many of these items and has grouped human-made artifacts separately from food trash. Artifact groupings include: Military items, Ceramic tablewares, Religious/magical, Personal Items, Clothing and Sewing, Glassware, and Jewelry/beads.



4. Discuss the similarities and differences between the class’s groupings and the museum’s and whether some artifacts seem to fall into more than one category.

Excavated Remains from Gracia Reál de Santa Terésa de Mosé

• Blue glass seed beads
• Bone buttons
• Brass ring
• Cattle bones
• Copper alloy buckle
• Copper alloy buttons
• Deer bones
• English slipware pottery fragments
• Faceted, amber glass rosary bead
• Fish bones
• Green glass wine or spirit bottle fragments
• Gunspall (Dutch flint for musket)
• Hand-cast silver Medal (St. Christopher on front, compass rose on reverse)
• Iron nails
• Iron striker (fire-starter)
• Lead musket balls
• Metal chain link rosary fragment
• Metal spoon handle
• Metal thimble
• Native American pottery cooking pot
• Native American pottery in shape of European pitcher (colono-ware)
• Opossum bones
• Oyster shells
• Pig bones
• Pin
• Pistol flints
• Rabbit bones
• Spanish pottery olive jar shards (fragments)
• Squirrel bones
• Stone mano (grain-grinder)
• Turtle bones and shells
• White clay tobacco pipe

Procedures

1. Ask students to hypothesize what the diet of the residents of Fort Mosé might have included. Explain that, over time, water invaded the site destroying most plant material and wooden evidence. Discuss what other evidence would be helpful to reconstruct their diet.



2. Direct students to read the essay "Slavery and Sanctuary in Colonial Florida." Then, review the list of artifacts from Fort Mosé. Ask students whether the artifacts support Spanish historical documents (both governmental and religious), and, if so, which ones support the following statements:


1. European colonization caused interactions between previously unconnected people of North America, Europe, and Africa.
2. The Spanish encouraged conversion of Native Americans and Africans to the Catholic religion.
3. Fort Mosé’s free black residents were armed.


3. Have students consider this: Father Juan Joseph de Solana reported in 1759 to the Bishop of Cuba that "…the Fort at Mosé is situated on the banks of the River which runs to the north, and at a distance of 3/4 of a league from the presidio [St. Augustine], the part that faces the river has no protection or a defense whatsoever and is formed by two small bastions which look landward on which are mounted two four-pound cannons and six swivel guns divided among them, and on the wall whose face appears to be of thirty tree-trunks, the earthwork embankment is covered with thorns and the moat is three feet wide and two feet deep…there are only twelve [free blacks] fit for the work who are divided into two watches and six take guard duty each week; when daylight comes they go to their work and are replaced by four soldiers, two artillerymen and one corporal." Then, ask students to hypothesize why none of this physical evidence was included on their list.



4. Discuss how the historical document adds to their knowledge of life at Fort Mosé, including how people survived and how they protected the fort.

Assessment

1. Ask students to describe the life of a single slave or free black resident of Florida in the Spanish or British colonial era. Students should draw on both secondary and primary sources. You can have them present their material in any of the following ways, making sure they attach an annotated bibliography of supporting sources and what information each contributed:


• A play
• A fictional story
• A scrapbook
• An exhibit board
• A formal research paper
• An oral report
• A painting, sketch or scale model


2. To assess students’ work, use the following assessment rubric:

Content Area	Points Assigned and Grading Criteria		Percent of Total Grade
Clarity of presentation	0	No focus to the presentation	15%
	1	Presentation has some extraneous information
	2	Presentation is clearly focused
Sources	0	No sources of evidence	45%
	1	(a) Some sources of evidence; and (b) No annotation or the evidence does not relate to the presentation
	2	(a) Some sources of evidence but incomplete annotation; and (b) Presentation not fully supported by evidence
	3	(a) Ample sources of evidence but incomplete annotation; (b) Presentation not fully supported by evidence
	4	(a) Ample sources of evidence included and annotated (b) Presentation not fully supported by evidence
	5	Ample sources of evidence included, annotated, and support the presentation
	6-7	(a) Ample sources of evidence included, annotated, and support the presentation (b) Annotations reveal evaluation of reliability of the source (c) Material is synthesized smoothly in the final presentation
Application	0	No application of evidence to presentation	40%
	1-3	Some evidence applied to the presentation
	4-6	Ample evidence applied to support presentation

Books
Bannon, John Francis. The Spanish Borderlands Frontier: 1513-1821. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Deagan, Kathleen and Darcie MacMahon. Colonial America's Black Fortress of Freedom. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995.

Henderson, Ann L. and Gary Mormino, ed. Spanish Pathways in Florida. Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1991.

Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

TePaske, John J., ed. Three American Empires. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

Articles
Ingraham, Lori. "Fort Mosé: Passage to Freedom." Cobblestone, 16:9 pp. 14-17.

Johnson, Ralph B. "Freedom’s Trail: The Florida Cuba Connection." Conference paper for Places of Cultural Memory: African Reflections on the American Landscape, 2001.

Wright, I.A.  "Dispatches of Spanish officials bearing on the free Negro settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose Florida."  Journal of Negro History, 9: pp. 144-95.

Videos
Suchy, Bill and Florida Films. Fort Mose: A New Chapter in American History. Winter Park: Ironwood Productions, 1992.

Teachers’ Guides
Camp, Betty D. Fort Mose Education Packet. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1991.

West, Jean M. Archaeology of Early Colonial Life. Peterborough: Cobblestone Publishing Company, 1998.

Web sites
Fort Mose Historical Society, "Fort Mose Free African Settlement."
http://www.oldcity.com/mose/

Johnson, Ralph B. "Freedom’s Trail: The Florida Cuba Connection." Conference paper for Places of Cultural Memory: African Reflections on the American Landscape, 2001.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/crdi/conferences/conflinks.htm

Hillsdale College, Documents in Military History, "The Evil Deeds of the Spaniards by Colonel Miles Brewton and Others."
http://www.hillsdale.edu/dept/History/War/Abroad/1702-Spaniards.htm

Historical Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, "Fort Mosé Artifact Gallery."
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/anthro/histarch/gallery/gallery.asp?site_name=ft.%20mose

McMichael, Andrew. "Slavery on the Southwestern Borderlands: Anglos, Slaves, and Receding Spaniards." Conference paper for Scholars of the History of the Early American Republic, 1999.
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~shear/s99abs/DrewMcmichaelPaper.htm

PBS Africans in America, The Terrible Transformation, Resource Bank, "The Stono Rebellion."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p284.html

Interdisciplinary Links:

1. Art (visual arts): Students may wish to work with historical and archaeological information to draw or model a recreation of an historical site that is no longer standing.



2. Mathematics: Students can calculate the dimensions of Fort Mosé and calculate the amount of space available within the fort for its 100 residents



3. Science: Students may create a poster or scrapbook about the plants and animals native to Florida and that Africans would have used for construction, food, medicine, or other purposes as they adapted to a new ecology.



4. Social Studies (archaeology): Students could examine how material remnants, such as food trash and artifacts, add to historical records and create a more complete knowledge of the slaves of colonial Florida in St. Augustine and other sites.



5. Foreign Languages (Spanish): Students could try translating a Spanish colonial record. They should also understand that the handwriting may be difficult or abbreviated, and that Spanish (like English) has evolved so some expressions may be archaic or the usage may have changed.

This lesson plan was written by Jean M. West, a social studies education consultant in Port Orange, Florida.