Canada and the United States
Britons. In perhaps her boldest statement, she goes on
to declare that "eyewitnesses all agreed that the Indians ... lived in civil society." They had complex
languages, "government by a hereditary hierarchy,"
settled towns, agriculture, religion, and "male-female
distinctions" (pp. 78, 18).
Kupperman reminds us that, just as these Indians
"are remote and foreign to us, so the English are as
well" (p. 11). She points out that, among Europeans,
the most important aspects of physical appearance
were thought to derive from cultural choices. Turning
the same lens toward Indians, the English "read"
native bodies "in order to understand the underlying
qualities of their culture" (p. 43). Intriguingly, the
famous de Bry engravings meticulously followed the
John White watercolor portraits of Roanoke Indians
for tattoos, jewelry, and clothing. Yet de Bry "Europeanized" the natives' faces, postures, and bodily
proportions as "unimportant" (p. 42). Skin color was
seen as more akin to tattoos than facial features. Since
English observers thought the Indians were boen
white, their darker hue "was a cultural artifact, selfconsciously produced on a pale background" (p. 58).
However, the English regarded the class distinction
between common people and elite as natural rather
than cultural. "Status distinctions . . . were innate
unlike mutable ethnic and cultural categories" (pp.
234-35).
The book's final chapters deal with "boundary crossing." Aiming to incorporate the other, each side chose
youths to serve as interpreters and intermediaries. A
few may have crossed totally, "but most entered a state
of liminality" (p. 212). Even this proved impossible for
the larger societies: the dream of incorporation flickered out amid suspicion and fear. Highly vulnerable,
and having found the Indians to be so much like
themselves, the English constantly worried about their
"treacherous nature" (p. 223).
This book is ambitious, deeply researched, densely
argued, and well written. Even the most skeptical
readers will probably find it generally persuasive.
Kupperman has produced an imaginative and important synthesis that will serve as a weighty corrective to
one-sided simplicities that have been current too long.
Still, it is not flawless. Although every chapter
contains material on Indian reactions toward the English, it is usually thinner than need be. In particular,
unfamiliarity with classic anthropological works on
Indian religion limits Kupperman's ability to interpret
her trove of sources. Strangely, there is not a word
about Africans, the other "Other" that Chesapeake
colonists regularly and Indians often encountered. It is
not likely that the English and Indians only had eyes
for each other, or that perceptions of blacks by either
had no effect on their views of their main rivals.
Finally, there are a few too many overstatements: for
example, "There was no action taken against `savages'
that was not also taken against Christian Europeans"
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561
(p. 220). Englishmen did not enslave European war
captives.
JOHN T. JURICEK
Emmy University
Black Society in Spanish Florida. Foreword by PETER H. Woon. (Blacks in the New World.)
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1999.
Pp. xiv, 390. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
JANE LANDERS.
Excepting an obligatory nod to Estevan, the black
Moor who traveled with Alvar Nátiez Cabeza de Vaca,
and the identification of a few blacks and mulattos who
showed up in muster roles or censuses, most scholars
have reduced the Spanish borderlands' triracial society
to a biracial story. Recently, however, works by Gilbert
C. Din, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Kimberly S. Hanger,
and Daniel H. Usner have made it impossible to ignore
blacks in Spanish Louisiana. Now, in this admirable
first book, Jane Landers restores blacks to their place
in the history of Spanish Florida.
From Florida's inception in 1565, Spaniards imported black slaves, but appallingly high death rates
and Florida's feeble economy kept their numbers low.
They were augmented, however, by blacks who lied
slavery in the Carolinas, and later Georgia, to seek
sanctuary in Florida. Spanish officials in Florida welcomed them. Runaways who converted to Catholicism
received generous treatment from Spaniards, who
hoped to weaken the English colonies to the north by
encouraging the flight of more slaves. Landers argues
that this Spanish policy of asylum had its genesis with
the very blacks who lied to Florida; she sees Spanish
policy makers as reactive rather than proactive. From
Florida, however, the idea of offering sanctuary to
black slaves spread throughout the Spanish Caribbean,
where Spain used it to annoy Dutch and French
slaveholders as well as English ones.
In Florida, officials hoped to settle the newly freed
blacks in a town of their own, Gracia Réal de Santa
Teresa de Mose, just north of St. Augustine. That free
black community, for which there was ample precedent
in the Caribbean, segregated blacks only briefly.
Founded in 1738, it succumbed to English raiders from
Georgia in 1740; it was reestablished in 1752, but died
again when the English took Florida in 1763. With the
demise of Mose, many black runaways made their
homes in St. Augustine, where they adapted to the
Spanish world. Mostly males, they formed relationships with Indian or black Floridian women.
Florida's Spanish past had two Aarts, 1565-1763 and
1784-1821, punctuated by a British interregnum.
When Spaniards returned in 1784, they constituted a
minority. Some Englishmen and their slaves remained,
as did Italians, Greeks, and Minorcans who had come
during the British years. Blacks fleeing slavery in the
United States also swelled the population of Florida
until the United States pressured Spain to stop offering them sanctuary in 1790. Florida continued, however, to import black slaves from Africa, as well as to
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562
Reviews of Books
welcome black refugees from Haiti. Late in the colonial period, free and enslaved blacks together constituted roughly half of the population of "Spanish"
Florida.
After sketching out this chronology, Landers examines several areas of black life: ownership of property
and business, religion, women, the slave trade, crime
and punishment, and military service. In each case, she
puts the Florida experience in context by providing
smart, concise overviews of Spanish law and practice
and by making comparisons with other parts of the
Spanish empire and with English America. She provides abundant evidence to support her claim that
Frank Tannenbaum's well-known thesis applied to
Florida. Indeed, long before the appearance of Tannenbaum's Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas
(1946), blacks in the Carolinas and Georgia understood that their futures looked brighter under Spain.
They not only fied to Florida from the Anglophone
world, but, when the English took over Spanish Florida
in 1763, and again when the Americans acquired it
from Spain in 1821, blacks abandoned Florida for
Cuba. So, too, did the United States understand the
special status that blacks enjoyed in neighboring Spanish society. When the United States intervened in
Florida in the 1810s, it was not simply to fulfill
territorial ambitions, Landers argues, but because it
could not tolerate the dangerous example of blacks
and Indians (Seminoles in the main) living in freedom
and fighting for Spain.
Florida's second Spanish period (1784-1821) constitutes the heart of Lander's study, for it provides the
richest sources for reconstructing the lives of blacks,
including court cases, notarial records, and land
grants. The sources allow her to paint portraits of
individuals and explore episodes in their lives. This is
not group biography. Even the lists in the appendixes
contain names, not mere numbers, of individuals:
slaves who petitioned for freedom, free blacks in the
militia, blacks who owned land; blacks—and their ages
and families—who lived in the free town of Mose;
baptismal sponsors; and black slaves imported into
Florida between 1752 and 1763.
This is a fully realized book, clearly written, deeply
researched in archival sources, and engaged with relevant historiography. Spanish Florida will never be the
same.
DAVID J. WEBER
Southem Methodist University
JEFFREY ROBERT YOUNG. Domesticating Slavery: The
Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–
1837. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
1999. Pp. xii, 336. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.
This ambitious and eclectic work attempts to reconcile
competing interpretations of the Old South by demonstrating that "corporate individualism," which combined elements of capitalism, bourgeois domesticity,
and paternalism, was the ideology around which the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
southern planter class cohered in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century. According to Jeffrey
Robert Young, the same transatlantic markets in
capital and culture that spawned abolitionism also
furnished South Carolina and Georgia planters with
the reasons and the means to formulate and disseminate an aggressive defense of slavery. Planters cast
slavery in familial terms, drawing heavily on bourgeois
language of individual rights and domesticity, while at
the same time emphasizing the claims of society on the
individual and delimiting the rights of subordinate
members of households. In a momentous, protracted
act of collective self-deception (Young declares at one
point that "slaveowners were in deep denial" [p. 174]),
slaveholders convinced themselves and most other
white southerners that African slavery was a respectable—even an admirable and indispensable—institution, one that protected the rights and promoted the
happiness of all individuals according to their race,
gender, and station. The ideology of corporate individualism legitimated planter rule in the South and,
ultimately, justified the quest for southern independence.
How all this happened is a long story: Young's
narrative begins with Christopher Columbus and ends
with William Gilmore Simms. Colonial slaveholders
were a crude, greedy, irreligious, brutal, and racist lot,
yet some aspired to refinement and imitated the
English gentry. Few refiected on slavery or condemned
its evils; far more simply calculated the profits generated by chattels whom they barely recognized as
human beings. It was not until the era of the American
Revolution that Deep South patriot-masters feit compelled to develop more complex rationales for denying
freedom to others. Young ingeniously contends that
independence enabled planters to co-opt organic and
familial arguments for submission to authority, which
they had found so galling in British condemnations of
colonial resistance, and to make themselves the heads
instead of the limbs, the parents instead of the children. Between 1785 and 1815, planters amalgamated
organicism, individualism, humanitarianism, and
Christianity into a coherent slaveholding creed, and
the expansion of evangelicalism, print culture, and the
market enabled corporate individualism to take root in
the Deep South. The "positive good" defense of
slavery was in place well before the onslaught of
immediate abolitionism, and slaveholders refined and
extended corporate individualism in the 1820s and
1830s to meet the challenges of adult white male
democracy and political party conflict. The resulting
society rested on "inclusion without equality" (p. 233)
for slaves, free blacks, and lesser whites. As Young
puts it, "Slaveowners had managed to concoct a regional identity that centered on idealized notions of
their own mastery" (p. 228).
This work displays a depth of research and a breadth
of vision seldom found in first books. Young weaves
together dozens of themes developed in the historiography of the past forty years, making slight modifica-
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