Fort Mose

Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose — Fort Mose — was the first legally sanctioned community of free Black people in what is now the United States. Founded by the Spanish in 1738 on the edge of the salt marsh two miles north of St. Augustine, Florida, it was both a town and a military outpost: its residents farmed the fields around it and served as the colony’s first line of defense against the British colonies to the north.

Its story begins with the Spanish policy of religious sanctuary, which promised freedom to enslaved people who fled the British Carolinas and converted to Catholicism. By the 1730s more than a hundred such fugitives had gathered at St. Augustine, and in 1738 the Spanish granted them their freedom and gave them a town of their own, under the command of its most capable leader, Francisco Menéndez.

The free Black militia of Mose went on to win one of the few victories Spain enjoyed on the frontier, routing a British force at the fort in 1740 in the battle the British called Bloody Mose. When the Treaty of Paris ceded Florida to Britain in 1763, the community crossed to Cuba rather than face re-enslavement. For two centuries the fort’s location was forgotten; it was rediscovered in the late 1960s by Jack Williams, a respected expert on Spanish colonial history, and confirmed in the 1980s by Kathleen A. Deagan, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Williams had opened the Gun Shop and Museum of Weapons in St. Augustine in time for the city’s 400th anniversary in 1965. It was his interest in Spanish colonial weapons and history that inspired his search for Fort Mose. A portion of Williams’ collection can be viewed online at weaponscollector.com.

The story in four parts

Read the full story in the pages to the left, or in this order:

1. The Road to Freedom — the sanctuary policy, the 1693 edict, and the founding of Mose in 1738.
2. Life at the Fort — the community, the militia, and the 1759 census.
3. Bloody Mose — the 1740 siege and the militia’s victory.
4. Exile to Cuba — the 1763 cession and the community’s departure.

Beyond the fort’s own story, this site also carries an account of the Patriot War of 1812, when the United States attempted to take Florida from Spain and the Spanish burned the fort.

Sources: Florida Museum of Natural History, Fort Mose: Colonial America’s Black Fortress of Freedom (education packet, Betty Dunkel Camp, 1991); Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” The American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (1990); Fort Mosé: Earliest Free African-American Town in the United States (archaeological report, Kathleen Deagan and Jane Landers).