Freedom seekers of Timucuan: five escapes along the St. Johns River

A reward notice for Charles and Dorcas, from the Jacksonville Courier, April 16, 1835.

Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve covers more than 46,000 acres of Jacksonville, Florida — salt marsh, islands, and stretches of the St. Johns and Nassau rivers. Under Spanish, British and American rule it held plantations: Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, the Houston plantation on Big Talbot Island, the Fitzpatrick plantation at Cedar Point. They were places of bondage, and the waterways around them were routes out of it. Five stories, spanning seventy years, show people in and around the preserve taking their freedom.

St. Johns Town, 1783–84: escape in the handover

In 1782, as the Revolution drove British loyalists south, Thomas Williamson bought Hester's Bluff on the St. Johns River, laid out St. Johns Town with 230 lots, and sold them to refugees from Charleston and Savannah: merchants, carpenters, mariners, shipbuilders, innkeepers. For a few years it was the second-largest settlement in British East Florida. Then Britain ceded Florida back to Spain, and the loyalists left — Williamson even took his house apart and shipped it to Jamaica.

In the confusion of the handover, enslaved people seized their chance:

• two men held by the auctioneer William Russell — one a carpenter, one a cooper;
• a man who "left his service and ran away to the Spaniards" from Patrick Licetti, an Irish settler;
• six people held by William Young, among them a cooper and a carpenter, all American-born, five of them at the moment of embarkation.

Some historians and local descendant communities believe these freedom seekers may have formed maroon communities along St. Johns Bluff, perhaps alongside Seminole people; that is not yet proven.

The Guerrero survivors, 1827–29

In 1827 the Spanish slave ship Guerrero, fighting a British anti-slavery patrol, wrecked on a reef off the Florida Keys with 561 captive Africans aboard; 41 drowned. The legal status of 121 survivors was contested, and the U.S. marshal for East Florida, Waters Smith, held them while Washington decided. Smith hired 36 of the men out to Zephaniah Kingsley — planter, merchant and slave trader, who would hold more than 32,000 acres and over 200 people — for two dollars a month and their keep. Kingsley, with a contract to cut a navigation channel between the St. Marys and St. Johns rivers, used them rather than risk his own enslaved workers on the dangerous digging through oyster beds.

The courts eventually ruled them free, but in Florida they were treated as enslaved, unpaid and unable to leave. Three tried to escape Kingsley's property. In August 1829 the men were recalled and sent to Liberia.

The slave cabins at Kingsley Plantation, all that remains of Kingsley's plantations. NPS.

Charles and Dorcas, 1835

On March 4, 1835, Henry W. Maxey of Cedar Point advertised a ten-dollar reward for Charles, about forty, with "the African marks on his face of his native country", and Dorcas, thirty-eight. A Spanish land-grant record from 1808 for the same plantation lists an enslaved fifteen-year-old named Charles — and a twelve-year-old member of the Fitzpatrick family named Dorcas. The names, ages and place fit. If Dorcas was the daughter of the planter William Fitzpatrick and an enslaved woman, she may have counted as family under Spanish law, which ranked people by class, and as a "Negro" under the American law that took over after 1821, which ranked them by race and stripped free people of colour of property, inheritance and the legal paths to freedom. Nothing more is known of either after 1835.

Romeo, 1843–44

After Kingsley's death his sister contested his will, which left his estate to his African wife Anna and their children. In the court fight that followed, neighbours described the San Jose plantation under the overseer Charles McNeill: people "refused to obey his orders"; there had been "once a rebellion"; two ran away, one after a flogging. One was Romeo Murray. McNeill offered twenty dollars for him "dead or alive" and set a neighbour to hunt him with bulldogs; he was caught, though not by the dogs. The witnesses blamed McNeill's abuse of the task system, not Romeo — though they had their own stake in the family dispute. The reward itself suggests Romeo may have been a leader of the resistance.

James Eulin and Pattie Smith, the Civil War

Before the war, some people escaped by stowing away on ships on the St. Johns, which were searched near Fort George Island. Once the U.S. Navy held the river, it became a road to freedom: people reached Union vessels, carried intelligence about Confederate troops and stores, and made for Fernandina, which after the Emancipation Proclamation became a refugee camp and a recruiting centre for Black soldiers.

James Eulin, born about 1839 on Talbot Island and enslaved by the Houston family with his mother, Pattie Smith, gained his freedom with her in 1863 — perhaps when the Houstons abandoned their plantation, on foot by hidden trails or aboard a passing Union ship. James served in the U.S. Navy and then the army, and married while in service; his enlistment also left his mother without his support, a cost many families bore.

Sources

Written from "Freedom Seekers of Timucuan Preserve", National Park Service, Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, a work of the United States government in the public domain.