Cradle of Stories:

Selected Antecedents to the Black Caesar Legends of Biscayne Bay (1770-1877)

By Devin Leigh1

Professor Theodore Karamanski

HIST 450 – Nineteenth Century America

December 5, 2013

1Masters Student in the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago

Contact Information: Dleigh@luc.edu

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Abstract:

This paper explores selected antecedents to a particular pirate legend of Biscayne Bay,

Florida, between the years 1770 and 1877. The former date represents the verifiable existence of

the legend in Bahamian oral tradition, while the latter date represents the first articulations of the

legend in the American print record. This paper covers the one hundred year period between

these two bookends, focusing on a selection of historical moments behind the region that is now

associated with the Black Caesar legends.

This paper argues that the Black Caesar legends have strong and disguised roots in such

historical anchors as the literary culture of the Robinsonade, Anglo-American naturalism on the

Florida peninsula, southward expanding American imperialism, and the Black Seminole

diaspora. This list is by no means exhaustive, and this essay does not go on to explain how each

of these individual historical moments factor into the content of the Black Caesar legends. That

discussion is for another paper on the next one hundred years—the period in which the legends

coalesce as dominant narratives in the print record, and Biscayne Bay enters the industrial age.

For now, this paper seeks to draw important connections between the broader history of

the Florida peninsula, and the arrival of the first American settlers in Biscayne Bay, northerners

who would take an existing Bahamian tradition and make it their own, without fully realizing its

significance.

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2

…we were invested with the spirit of piracy, for this was the stronghold of Black Caesar…who

took toll from passing vessels along the reef until… Jackson’s administration put an end to his

operations.3

- Ralph Middleton Munroe (1930)

-

Andros Island historically has been reputed as a refuge for pirates, bootleggers, and

gunrunners…Less known is the fact that the island also served as a refuge for groups of freedom-

seeking Black Seminoles who escaped from Florida beginning in 1821.4

- Rosalyn Howard (2006)

2Unknown, “Cape Florida Lighthouse,” Photograph, ca, late 1800s. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory,

http://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/27033 (accessed December 5, 2013). 3Ralph Middleton Munroe and Vincent Gilpin, The Commodores Story: The early days on Biscayne Bay (Miami:

The Historical Association of Southern Florida, 1985), 19. 4Rosalyn Howard, “The "Wild Indians" of Andros Island: Black Seminole Legacy in the Bahamas,” Journal of

Black Studies (2006): 275.

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The American yacht designer Ralph Middleton Munroe had been working in the office of

the Coast Wrecking Company of Staten Island, New York, when he first heard stories about the

pirates of south Florida. The year was 1872, and Munroe was barely twenty-one years old. It was

late spring, and the company steamer Amanda Whinants had returned from one of her winter

wrecking cruises along the Florida Straits, laden with cargo and stories. Her crew was mostly

Staten Islanders, but they were captained by one Edward ‘Ned’ Pent, a pioneer whose family

legacy in the region of Biscayne Bay, then only a few scattered settlements, dated back to the

year 1810, when his father came over from the Bahamas. That evening, in one of the local bars

that lined the wharves on South Street, the young Munroe listened to “fascinating tales of the

tropics,” “yarns of storms and wrecks and salvage,” and recollections of a “mysterious, remote,

and legend-haunted region.” In that moment, his fate was set.5

Like many American boys coming of age in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ralph

Middleton Munroe had been raised on tales of survival and adventure. No doubt the Frenchman

Alexandre Dumas did much to stir his imagination, but Mediterranean stories like The Count of

Monte Cristo (1841) had nothing on the romances of the Atlantic and the Pacific. In this respect,

the English writer Daniel Defoe had done nothing less than create a genre when he penned the

fictional autobiography Robison Crusoe in the year 1718. Over a century later, on the heels of

successors like the Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift and the Frenchman Antoine Galland, a new

generation of Euro-American writers was publishing books called Robinsonades.6

From the manicured lawn of Eagleswood Military Academy, to the sunlit boards of his

bedroom on Fire Island, Ralph Middleton Munroe could lose himself in the world. He could

5Ralph Middleton Munroe, The Commodores Story, 68.

2Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Die Insel Felsenburg (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeuns, 1997), 3. The word “Robinsonade”

was coined by the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel in the preface to this work, originally published in the

year 1731, but cited here from a reproduced, English translation.

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chase the Great White Whale alongside that one-legged, egomaniacal captain Ahab, and he could

dive beneath the crystal waters of Coral Island in order to escape that cut-throat buccaneer

Bloody Bill. But most of all, he could relive the stark desperation of that shipwrecked Seagrave

family, their hardened leader, and their young black servant, Juno. For Munroe, none of the

classic Robinsonades could hold a candle to the three-volume series of Masterman Ready, or the

Wreck of the Pacific (1841), handed down from his grandmother Haven. 7

While the Robinsonades conformed to several preexisting genres, namely those of

adventure, travel, and utopian literature for young adults, they also carried an entirely unique

significance for a new generation of American adolescents.8 Often based in historical

occurrences, such as the marooning of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, or the discoveries

and conquests of the British navigator James Cook, these dramatic stories introduced young

readers to the romances of the past while simultaneously suggesting the possibilities of the

future. Young males who grew up reading quintessential tales of oceanic desperation—like the

Swiss Family Robinson (1812)—in burgeoning cities of the American north, would migrate

south on the heels of a new American imperialism, rooted in the first decades of the nineteenth

century. In seeking to place themselves in their new environments, several of these northerners

would draft their own Robinsonades.9 Others, such as Munroe himself, would settle for writing

7The Frenchmen Antoine Galland bears mention in this list for allegedly producing the first European translation of

the Arabic folk tales One Thousand and One Nights. These stories, which introduced European readership to the

iconic sailor Sinbad, were published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717. Other texts referenced in this section

are Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) by the American writer Herman Melville, The Coral Island (1857) by the

Scot Robert Michael Ballantyne, Mastermen Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific (1841) by the Englishman Frederick

Marryat, and The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) by the German novelist Johann David Wyss. Among these

selections, Moby Dick is not generally considered to be a Robinsonade, as its plot was not based on shipwreck and

survival. 8For a study on the conventions of travel and adventure literature in the context of Robinson Crusoe, see Ian Watt,

The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 60-92. 9Kirk Munroe, The Coral Ship (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893). The author of this particular Robinsonade

was actually a cousin of Ralph Middleton Munroe, who also settled on Biscayne Bay.

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memoirs in a similar style, claiming that it was not until “Robinson Crusoe hove his grappling

hook into my imagination [that] the lure of coral sands and waving palms was complete.”10

The year was 1877 when Ralph Middleton Munroe finally decided to head south. In

February, two years prior, he had met and helped a visiting merchant named William B. Brickell,

who happened to own an Indian trading store on the south shores of the Miami River. It was this

encounter that reaffirmed the precise location of his visit, for “the descriptions of the Bay and its

possibilities fanned [his] suppressed yearnings into a smart blaze.” As the entrepreneur of a

failing keg-delivery business, Munroe had recently traveled as far west as Chicago, and he had

learned that the 35-by-8 mile shallow, tropical and saline lagoon on the southeast corner of

Florida was something special.11

The people that he met on business trips might be expected to

know about Jacksonville or St. Augustine, perhaps they had even read Florida: Its Scenery,

Climate and History (1875) by the American poet Sidney Lanier, or Palmetto Leaves (1873) by

the famed novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, but who had ever heard of a place called Biscayne

Bay? Who had ever heard of a village called Coconut Grove?12

Like any good adventure, the trip south was guaranteed to be difficult. In 1871, there

were approximately 45,000 miles of railroad track in the contiguous United States, and not one

of them extended into the Florida peninsula.13

Munroe would have to ride the rails into

Ferdnandina Beach, twenty miles north of Jacksonville, and then take The Florida Railway to

10

Munroe, The Commodores Story, 18.

For an interesting discussion about the intersection of adventure literature and the development of manhood in the

life of another prominent, male figure from the nineteenth-century, see chapter five of Gail Bederman, Manliness

and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, the University

of Chicago Press, 1995), 170-215. This chapter provides an analysis of the intersection between turn-of-the-century

adventure literature about the American west and the recreation of manhood among young adults, specifically

through the context of the former, United States president Theodore Roosevelt. 11

A.Y. Cantillo, K. Hale, L. Pikula, and R. Caballero, Biscayne Bay: Environmental History and Annotated

Bibliography (Silver Spring, MD: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, 2000), 2-5. 12

Sidney Lanier, Florida: Its Scenery, Climate and History (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Company, 1876).

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto Leaves (Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1873). 13

See The Library of Congress, “Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900: Railroads in the Late 19th Century,”

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/railroad/.

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Cedar Keys on the west coast of the peninsula. From there, he could charter a steamer to the

island of Key West and catch a second ride from Brickell himself—in a turtler named Ada that

Munroe had designed—roughly 102 nautical miles back to the southeast side of the peninsula,

where they would enter Biscayne Bay through a cut at the southern end. The alternative option

was buying passage on one of the Mallory boats, a private line of schooners that ran direct from

New York to Key West on a weekly basis. Munroe would still have to get picked up from

Brickell at the port of Key West, but this way he could avoid the overland trip on the rails while

also getting the opportunity to sail the “indigo rollers” of the Gulf Stream backwards, something

practically unthinkable in the days before steam power.14

To someone accustomed to hearing second-hand stories on the wooden pilings of New

York harbor, and reading about castaways only in the pages of romantic novels, the experience

of entering the diverse and heavily trafficked Florida Straits was overwhelming. Drafting his

memoir years later, Munroe could not help but recount each of the sensory details. There was the

“ceaseless thrumming of guitars [and] tom-tom accompaniment” on exotic, moonlit beaches;

there was the constant sight of multicolored fish, abundant fruit, and vibrant flowers; the ambient

sound of barking dogs and croaking toads; the mingled smell of singed tobacco and buttonwood

smoke; and, most of all, the arresting sight of people from all over. Reflecting on the piers of

New York, there was something Conradian about the way that Munroe described “black deck

14

Munroe, The Commodores Story, 71-72.

The channel of the Gulf Stream, roughly 90 by 220 miles, had been the chosen method of sail from the New World

to Europe since the early sixteenth-century because of its collaboration with the eastward-blowing, Atlantic Trade

Winds. The Spanish navigator and pilot Antón de Alaminos is often credited with sailing the first West Indies

treasure fleet back to Spain via the Gulf Stream in the year 1519. Before the legendary introduction of steamboats,

like the New Orleans, to the Mississippi river in the year 1811, sailors that tried to pass through the Gulf Stream

southward often found themselves propelled backwards by the extreme current. For more on steamboats, see Walter

Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of

Harvard University, 2013), 74-96.

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hands [who] laughed with gleaming teeth and chattered unintelligibly.”15

Now, over one

thousand and four hundred miles from home, Munroe could hardly contain his excitement. The

world of the circum-Caribbean was unlike anything he had ever seen.16

Munroe united with Brickell at the port of Key West. Afterward, their group sailed

around the Florida peninsula, between the reef bed and the upper Florida Keys, and Munroe

began to recall those “tales of pirates and wreckers.” He distinctly remembered what Ned Pent

and his crew had said, that the Staten Island wreckers were nothing less than the “blood

brothers” of the Caribbean pirates from the days of old. Then, as Munroe entered the lagoon of

Biscayne Bay for the first time, through a small and natural inlet known as Caesars Creek, he

received a more specific story:

again we were invested with the spirit of piracy, for this was the stronghold of Black Caesar, a

giant Negro, who took toll from passing vessels along the reef until patience ceased among

underwriters and owners, and a full-fledged naval expedition under Jackson’s administration put

an end to his operations. He escaped, and was said to have been killed at last by a woman when

boarding a vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. His location here was certainly admirable for the trade,

protected by the outside by shoals and blind-mouthed channels. When he was too hotly pursued,

coco palms and mazes of deep channels inside, heavily bordered with mangroves, enabled him to

dismast and sink his craft and so lie secure from observation until the fuss was over.17

Although he did not know it at the time, the moment that Munroe passed into Biscayne Bay

through the cut of Caesars Creek in the year of 1877 was an extraordinarily symbolic moment. If

the recollections that he penned in his memoir are to be trusted, then this moment is the earliest

instance in which historians can definitively pinpoint the passing of Bahamian oral tradition

about the Black Caesar legends. As such, Munroe was not only passing into an unknown

15

Munroe, The Commodores Story, 19.

For a discussion of this Conradian language, compare Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s

‘Heart of Darkness,’” Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782-794, and Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New

York: Dover Publications, 1990). 16

The concept of the “circum-Caribbean” is sometimes referred to as the “Greater Caribbean” or the “Wider

Caribbean.” For one of the premier discussion of this geographical concept, see Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in

Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900 (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1983). For a discussion about how this concept applies to the history of the Florida

peninsula, see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 17

Munroe, The Commodores Story, 74-78.

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territory—one that was being drastically redefined by northern American pioneers such as

himself—but he was crossing over in his role from a passive recipient of both pirate lore and

Robinsonade literature to an active creator of south Florida legend. In the decades following his

arrival, legends that had been rooted in Bahamian oral traditions, and only suggested in the

British cartographic record, would find their way into American print culture. This process

would lay the foundation for an emerging settler identity after the completion of a previous

American conquest in the region of south Florida and the Florida straits. Without the efforts of

such late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century naturalists and imperialists, like Bernard

Romans, Commodore David Porter, and General Andrew Jackson, northerners like Ralph

Middleton Munroe would never have “discovered” the “yachtsman’s paradise.”18

Congruence between the Black Caesar legends and the Anglo-American conquest of

south Florida officially began during the British tenure of the peninsula (1763-1783). Although

these legends were often based in the post-Spanish Succession period of the Golden Age of

Piracy (1714-1726), the stories do not actually appear in reference to the region of south Florida

until the year 1774, when the Dutch-born British surveyor, navigator, and author Bernard

Romans labeled Black Caesars Creek for the first time on his Maps of East and West Florida.19

Romans, who moved to the American continent in the year 1757, took a position as the deputy

surveyor of the southern district in the year 1768. This district included the recent acquisition of

18

Ralph Munroe, The Commodores Story, 80. 19

The post-Spanish Succession period of piracy is defined by the Atlantic historian Marcus Rediker in Villains of All

Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 19-29.

Bernard Romans also mentions Black Caesars Creek in his A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, ed.

by Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: Alabama, 1999), 307-308, however, he does not say anything about the

place beyond its mere location.

There are many good websites for digitized reproductions of this particular map series, as well as the other maps that

are mentioned later in this essay. One of these sites is called “Old Florida Maps,” published by the University of

Miami libraries, and accessed on November 20, 2013 (http://scholar.library.miami.edu/floridamaps/). The best place

to access Maps of East and West Florida (1774) is in the Geography and Map division of the digital repository of

the Library of Congress, under the call number G3861.P5s500.R6 Vault.

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La Florida, which Britain had acquired from the Spanish Crown in the Treaty of Paris that ended

the French and Indian War. Immediately after this treaty, Britain divided the region at the

Apalachicola River into two separate entities—called East and West Florida—and then

expediently called for surveys:

We find ourselves under the greatest difficulties arising from the want of exact surveys of these

countries in America, many parts of which have never been surveyed at all and others so

imperfectly that the charts and maps thereof are not to be depended upon.20

Since this official request was made by the Board of Trade and Plantations in London, at

least half a dozen European mapmakers—viz. John Gibson, Thomas Kitchen, Thomas Jefferys,

and Jacques Nicholas Bellin—who had never even visited Florida began working from existing

maps at their escritoires in order to draft the first interpretations. In this respect, Bernard Romans

was significantly different. Along with a few of his contemporaries—viz. George Gauld,

William Storke, and William Gerard deBrahm—Romans constituted the first wave of royally

appointed surveyors who would work directly in the peninsula. As a result, his maps are not only

records of what existed in the Florida territories. They are historical arguments about how these

acquisitions should be interpreted for posterity. It is in this sense that modern-day historians must

grabble with such strange and mysterious inclusions as Black Caesars Creek.

In addition to receiving an annual salary of £30, the position of deputy surveyor provided

Romans with the opportunity to earn extra dividends from surveys that he conducted for the

holders of royal grants. In one of these instances, Romans was hired to conduct an in-depth

survey of a potential plot of 20,000 acres in Biscayne Bay, granted to the English merchant,

planter, broker, and commercial tycoon Samuel Touchette. Romans conducted this survey

between the years 1770 and 1771; although, since Touchette was prevented from inhabiting his

estate by the outbreak of the American Revolution, Romans was never actually compensated for

20

John Gear William DeBrahm, The Atlantic Pilot (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1975), x.

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his work.21

Nonetheless, he acquired detailed information about Biscayne Bay and the Bahaman

banks during his expedition; and it is generally believed that his cartographic depictions of these

particular regions, including his unique label of Black Caesars Creek, are derived from this

experience.

Prior to the publication of Maps of East and West Florida, the name “Caesar” had been

used—in such forms of entertainment as biographical literature and theatrical performance—in

reference to an alleged pirate from the Golden Age (1650-1730).22

According to an embellished

and popular biography of the notorious pirate Blackbeard that was published by Charles

Rivington in the year 1724, this particular “Caesar” was hanged on the Williamsburg gallows in

colonial Virginia. Even though Blackbeard and other pirates had notable ties to the Bahamian

islands, where they had operated with relative impunity until the royal governor Woodes Rogers

chased them out of the archipelago in the year 1718, no written mention of “Caesar” has yet been

found in connection with either the Bahaman islands or southeast Florida. Speaking solely of the

print record, Romans is often credited with establishing this connection, thereby providing the

justification for future generations of settlers and residents to link an already-dubious pirate

legend from the tidewater flats of Virginia, and the mahogany bookshelves of London, to the

hammock shoals of the Florida Keys.23

21

Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “Bernard Romans: His Life and Works,” in A Concise Natural History of East and

West Florida, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 2-7. 22

See David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates (New York:

Random House, 1996), 196. Also, Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most

Notorious Pirates (Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2010), 52. 23

For a discussion of the historical relationship between piracy in the Bahamas, mainly in New Providence, during

the Golden Age, and the arrival of the royal governor Woodes Rogers, see Michael Craton, A History of the

Bahamas (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1962), 97-99, 100-121.

For mentions of Bernard Romans in the historiography of the Black Caesar legends, see David O. True, “Pirates and

Treasure Trove of South Florida,” Tequesta: The Journal of the Historical Association of South Florida (1947): 9.

Also see Dean Love, “Pirates and Legends,” Florida Keys Magazine (1981): 11. In the former work, it is likely that

Maps of East and West Florida is “the chart” displayed at the State Society at the Biltmore Hotel, of which Romans

was a known member.

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One of the biggest obstacles for historians wishing to trace the origins of the Black

Caesar legends is the simple fact that “Caesar” was an extraordinarily popular name in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the American historian John C. Inscoe argues, “Caesar”

was the most popular classical name on a list of Carolinian slave names that derived from Greek

and Roman origin.24

Not only were these names bestowed upon slaves by their white masters at

purchase or birth—a process exemplified in slaves narratives such as that produced by the

African author Olaudah Equiano—but black slaves and freedmen often chose to perpetuate these

names in their family legacies, even down to the twentieth century.25

The combination of these

factors explains both the prominence of “Caesar” as a slave name in antebellum America, and

the persistence of “Caesar” as a common black name in subsequent generations.26

In terms of its

origins, there is evidence to believe that the name “Caesar” was associated with slaves in the

popular sphere since at least the year 1688, when the prolific English writer Aphra Behn

bestowed that cognomen upon the enslaved and disinherited protagonist of her most famous

novel, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave.27

In several of the most famous examples, the lieutenant governor who commissioned the

naval expedition against Blackbeard owned a slave named Caesar on his estate in western

24

John C. Inscoe, “Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 49, No. 4

(1983): 527-554. 25

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African

(London: Olaudah Equiano, 1789). During this narrative, Equiano explains how his name was changed, from Jacob

to Michael to Gustavo, as he was passed from one master to another. 26

African-American historian Joseph A. Bailey identifies “Caesar” as the only classical slave name on his list of

most popular slave names from the British colonies of America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See

Joseph A. Bailey, “Slave Names in the Americas,” Blackvoicenews.com, last modified October 12, 2010,

http://www.blackvoicenews.com/columnists/joseph-a-bailey-ii-md/45114-slave-names-in-the-americas.html. After

these periods, variations of the name “Caesar” persist on census records in Florida and the Florida Keys, particularly

among charcoal makers and farmers. 27

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (London: Will Canning, 1688). Behn likely chose the slave name

“Caesar” for her protagonist in order to emphasize the irony of his fall from royal stature as a former African prince.

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Virginia in the year 1740.28

The American president George Washington had a runaway slave

named Caesar on his Union Farm in the year 1796.29

A judge from New Orleans ordered a slave

named Caesar to be hanged on the gallows following the suppression of the German Coast

Uprising in 1811.30

There was a former slave named Caesar Tarrant who became a river pilot in

the Virginia State navy, and there was another slave from Alabama named Caesar Blackwell

who became a famous Baptist reverend.31

Most importantly, there was a “turbulent” Black

Seminole named John Caesar who rallied slaves for raids on Florida plantations during the first

and second Seminole wars.32

Regardless, all of these individual people are dwarfed by the

numberless “Caesars” that appear on slave rolls, ship manifests, and census records from the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The name “Caesar” was also ripe for legend making because, as a Romanesque sobriquet,

it was redolent of epic connotations. The Australian historian Cassandra Pybus writes about a

black convict, bushranger, and revolutionary who also went by the nickname of Black Caesar.33

Similarly, the London-based, theatrical broadsheet The Age indicates that a variety of plays

based on this particular legend were quite regular fixtures of the wooden boards during the

nineteenth century.34

Besides the ironic, inherent, and powerful juxtaposition between

28

Walter Havighurst, Alexander Spotswood: Portrait of a Governor (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg

Foundation, 1967) 114. 29

Jeffry H. Morrison, The Political Philosophy of George Washington (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,

2009), 89. 30

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 21. 31

On Caesar Tarrant: Robert Armistead Stewart, The History of Virginia’s Navy of the Revolution (Richmond:

1933), 176, 255. On Caesar Blackwell: Wilson Fallin, Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in

Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 32

Thomas Sidney Jesup, “Entry from February 10, 1837,” in The Diary of Thomas Sidney Jesup. State Archives of

Florida, Florida Memory, http://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/252864?id=53, 53. 33

Cassandra Pybus, “Black Caesar, Our First Bushranger,” Arena Magazine, 57 (2002): 30-34. 34

R.D. Richard (editor), The Age: the very age and body of the time, Vol. IV, No. 169. August 10, 1828, and The

Age: the very age and body of the time, February 12, 1832. Both retrieved on Access Newspapers Archive,

http://access.newspaperarchive.com/. These stage productions were called Black Caesar, or the Indian Thicket—

playing at Sadlers Wells in Islington—and Black Caesar; or, The Fatal Thicket—playing at the Coburg Theatre in

Lambeth.

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enslavement and kingship, the name “Black Caesar” also implied connotations of legacy and

honor. In this sense, it should be remembered that the namesake Julius Caesar also inherited his

surname, which, after his death, came to represent something greater than an individual person.35

Interestingly, the name “Caesar” also had explicit connections to piracy. Although none of the

perpetuators of the Black Caesar legends seem to make this connection, according to the Greco-

Roman biographers Suetonius and Plutarch, Julius Caesar had his own interactions with Sicilian

pirates on the Mediterranean Sea in the year 75 BC.36

Despite the general prominence of the bestowed name “Caesar,” it is likely that Bernard

Romans chose his label because of connection that was directly related to the surrounding area of

Biscayne Bay. Romans had a habit of lambasting his contemporaries, particularly his superior

William Gerard deBrahm, for naming so many geographical landmarks after his British

patrons.37

For this reason, Romans preferred to use the prevailing local names—whether they

were Spanish, indigenous, or Bahamian—whenever possible. Unfortunately, the human diversity

of the circum-Caribbean leaves no shortage of candidates to choose from when investigating

where Romans might have obtained the inspiration for his label. While Biscayne Bay was

officially devoid of permanent settlers in the years that Romans conducted his survey,38

35

Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), The Natural History, trans. John Bostock and Henry Thomas Riley

(London: Taylor and Francis, 1855). See section IX of book VII, entitled “Of Those Who Have Been Cut Out of the

Womb.” 36

Gauis Suetonius Tranquillus (Suetonius), Lives of the Caesars, trans. Catharine Edwards (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2009). Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch), Parallel Lives Volume II, trans. John Dryden (New

York: Modern Library, 2001). 37

Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “Romans’s History as a Source for Understanding the Eighteenth-Century South, in A

Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 1999), 69. Romans was particularly criticizing a concise guide of south Florida, entitled the Atlantic

Pilot (1772), that deBrahm had published only one year after the completion of the Touchette survey. On the

enclosed map of this guide, readers can see this renaming practice in such labels as Hawks Channel and Jenyns Key.

Bernard Romans, A Concise History of East and West Florida, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund, 335. 38

Roland E. Chardon, “Northern Biscayne Bay in 1776,” Tequesta: The Journal of the Historical Association of

South Florida Vol. 35 (1975), 37. As for southern Biscayne Bay, it appears to have remained devoid of permanent

settlers until a Spaniard by the name of Pedro Fornills (possibly a Minorcan survivor from the failed colony of New

Smyrna) took up residence on a grant of 75 acres on “Key Buskin” in the year 1804.

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contemporary narratives suggest that it was anything but desolate. On the contrary, as an

extension of the greater Florida Keys environment, Biscayne Bay was a popular destination for

seasonal residents who commuted from nearby places in the circum-Caribbean, such as the

Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, the Spanish colonies, and the rest of the Florida peninsula, in order

to engage their trades as pirates, barterers, transports, navigators, fishermen, divers, spongers,

wreckers, turtlers, and foresters.39

Contemporary narratives help historians recreate the multicultural and heavily trafficked

environment of the Florida Straits during the final decades of the eighteenth century. Among

these usual suspects, it seems unlikely that Bernard Romans named Black Caesars Creek after an

encounter that he had with a black individual, even though he must have noticed—as Munroe

would notice one hundred years later—that there were many black sailors, particularly of

Bahamian origin, operating in the region of the Gulf Stream. Along with contractual surveys,

Romans is known to have dabbled in slave trading for extra profit, a practice that he actually had

in common with such notorious pirates as Blackbeard.40

Also, like many of his white

contemporaries, Romans did not have a particularly high opinion of black people, although he

declared sympathy for their treatment as slaves. 41

Overall, the evidence suggests that Romans got his label of Black Caesars Creek from

encounters that he had with white Bahamian sailors in the region of southeast Florida or the

For a primary-source account of the human diversity of the Florida Straits during the late eighteenth century, see

David Fanning, The Narrative of Colonel David Fanning, ed. by Lindley S. Butler (Charleston: Tradd St. Press,

1981). Fanning was a loyalist refugee from the American Revolutionary War who, along with several of his

companions, spent four months wandering the Florida Straits during the year 1784. 39

See also John Viele, The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers (Sarasota: Pineapple Press,1996) 13-19. This

book is the first installment of a three-volume series on the history of the Florida Keys. 40

For primary-source references to the accusation that Blackbeard engaged in slave trading, see Alexander

Spotswood, “America and the West Indies: December 1718, 22-31,” Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America

and West Indies, Volume 30: 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlan, (1930): 424-446, accessed at British History Online,

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/catalogue.aspx?type=3&gid=123.For secondary research on the same topic, see

David D. Moore and Mike Daniel, “Blackbeard’s Capture of the Nantaise Slave Ship La Concorde: A Brief Analysis

of the Documentary Evidence,” Tributaries, Vol. 11 (2001): 14-31. 41

Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund, 152.

Leigh 16

Bahaman bank, as the name seems to be neither indigenous nor Spanish.42

Historians already

known that northerners like Ralph Middleton Munroe inherited the Black Caesar legends from

Bahamian wreckers like Ned Pent and his father, Temple Pent, who had settled the region of

Biscayne Bay only thirty five years after Romans conducted his survey. These connections

suggest that the Black Cesar legends were already a part of Bahamian oral tradition one hundred

years before northerners like Ralph Munroe arrived in south Florida to both inherit and reshape

them. Because of this possibility, the label from Maps of East and West Florida cannot be

underestimated, as it serves to mark the beginning of a one-hundred year period of Anglo-

American imperialism in the region of south Florida.

The linguistics professor Mary Louis Pratt has already analyzed connections between the

exportation of natural history through travel writing and the expanding nature of imperialism.43

In light of this research, Bernard Romans was only the first in a long line of Anglo-American

naturalists who sought to document the region of south Florida in Linnaean terms, thereby

securing its conquest—alongside imperialists like Commodore David Porter and General

Andrew Jackson—through the imposition of names and places. These manifold conquests blazed

the trail for northerners like Ralph Middleton Munroe, who would pick up the torch of American

expansion in south Florida and unwittingly carry it to a new phase in its development, one that

involved the appropriation and invention of legends such as those of Black Caesar.44

42

The Spaniards tended to name their landmarks after Catholic, biblical allusions. It was uncharacteristic of them to

pay homage to the Roman Empire, which the Spanish Crown generally considered to be godless, secular, and

foreign. Also, if the name derived from Spanish origin, it is likely that Romans would have refrained from

transliteration, as he did in the case of Rio Ratones at the mouth of the present-day Miami River. See Humberto E.

Ruiz and Manley F. Cobia, “Boca de Ratones: An Etymological Reassessment,” Boca Ratones Historical Society,

accessed November 11, 2013, http://www.bocahistory.org/eGallery/upload/Boca%20Raton%20Historical%

20Society/Boca%20Raton%20Historical%20Society/Files/bocaderatones_origin.pdf 43

Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge: 2003). 44

Other naturalists in this category include the horticulturalists John and William Bartram, the American surveyor

Andrew Ellicott, the French-American ornithologist John Jay Audubon, and the botanist Henry Perrine. In

Leigh 17

After the publication of Maps of East and West Florida in 1781, the label of Black

Caesars Creek became a permanent fixture in the American cartographic record. The label was

featured on at least five separate maps from the territorial period (1821-1845). When Florida was

inaugurated as a state in the American union in the year 1845, the cartographer Carl Christian

Franz Radefeld included the label on his map of the peninsula; and, in this manner, the trend

continued through the statehood period and down to the present day, where it still remains as the

only suggested title for both the creek and rock at the southern end of Biscayne Bay, the very

spot where Munroe first arrived in 1877.45

In fact, when Brickell navigated his single-mast turtler

into the bay, he and Munroe were passing through this cut at the one hundred and third

anniversary of its naming in the cartographic record of Florida. Notwithstanding this history, it is

doubtless that either of these two pioneers understood just how much had occurred since then.46

When the American lawyer Robert Livingston brokered the Louisiana Purchase with the

French Treasury Minister François de Barbé-Marbois on April 30, 1803, the new republic of

America acquired all of its present-day territories extending west from the former thirteen

colonies to the banks of the Mississippi River, except Florida.47

Florida reverted to Spanish

particular, Bernard Romans seems to have been inspired by the naturalist craze brought on by the work of the

Swedish taxonomist Carlos Linnaeus, particularly Systema Naturae (1735). 45

Two maps from the territorial period were made in the year 1823, likely inspired by the recent acquisition of

Florida by the president James Monroe. One of these maps was drawn by the New-York born American

cartographer Henry Scheck Tanner, and the other map was drawn by the British railway engineer and first surveyor

of St. Augustine during the American period, Charles Blacker Vignoles. Two other examples are from the surveyors

John Lee Williams (1837) and Henry Scheck Tanner (1834). Some maps from the statehood period to feature the

label are by the Connecticut-born American geographer Samuel Augustus Mitchell (1845), the surveyor general

Robert Butler (1845), the American publishing house Thomas Cowperthwait and Company (1850), and the

American coastal surveyor Alexander Dallas Bache (1854). The labels “Black Caesars Creek” and “Black Caesars

Rock” can still be found on maps of southern Biscayne Bay today; they are the official labels on Google Maps. 46

The American, environmental historian William Cronon employs the distinction of “Second Nature” to describe

lands that have been altered by human contact but are still perceived by settler populations as wild, untamed, and

entirely natural. This distinction can be applied to the area of Biscayne Bay, where settlers like Ralph Middleton

Munroe perceived the region as untouched wilderness, despite the decades of nineteenth-century imperialism that

served to make his inhabitance possible. See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991). 47

America also did not acquire the top portion of the state of Maine, which would not come until the year 1842,

when the United States brokered the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Britain.

Leigh 18

control after the Revolutionary War, where it would remain for another fifteen years, until the

Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819. Nonetheless, the presence of a Spanish colony at the southern end

of the new republic would not prevent the United States from jumping its borders and trying to

extend its military jurisdiction into the commercial waters of the Gulf Coast. The fledgling

American navy—only a few sloops in the Chesapeake Bay during the Revolutionary War, and a

few revenue cutters thereafter—was forced to grow in response to The Quasi War (1798-1800)

with France.48

Shortly thereafter, the navy cut its teeth in the Mediterranean during the First

Barbary War (1801-1805), while an enlarged naval presence was assigned to the Caribbean,

ostensibly spurred onward by “turbulence centered around the island nation of Haiti.”49

The protracted slave rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804)—led by such revolutionary

individuals as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dutty Boukman, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines—disrupted

traditional trading networks in the Caribbean and psychologically threatened American planters

who feared similar insurrections on their plantation estates.50

One of the most important

revolutionary figures of Haiti was the military leader Benoit Joseph André Rigaud, a mulatto and

colonial-sympathizer who commanded an armada of pirates known as “picaroons” on the south-

west corner of the Gulf of Gonaives. According to biographer David Long, these boats, which

48

The United States navy reduced itself to a few coastal revenue cutters in the early 1790s, but increased problems

with France and colonial privateers in the Caribbean and Atlantic sphere required the government to significantly

grow its naval force by commissioning the construction of several frigates. See “Communications from the

Secretary of War” between 1794 and 1798 in the United States Congress, American State Papers: Naval Affairs,

Vol. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1794-1825). 49

David F. Long, Nothing too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter, 1783-1843 (Annapolis: The

United States Naval Institute, 1970), 12.

For alternative biographies of Commodore David Porter, see Archibald Douglas Turnbull, Commodore David

Porter (New York: The Century Company, 1929). Also consider the memoir written by his son, David Dixon Porter,

Memoir of Commodore David Porter of the United States Navy (Albany: J. Munsell & Sons, 1875). 50

The French colonial government decided to abolish slavery in Haiti after the initial uprising (1794). This act

destabilized the colonial system of exporting vital commodities like sugar cane and coffee. As a result, white and

mulatto planters fled the island as refugees and resettled in major port cities of the American south, where they

disseminated stories about the fear of black rebellion. For more on this relationship, see Tim Matthewson, “Abraham

Bishop, ‘The Rights of Black Men,’ and the American Reaction to the Haitian Revolution.” The Journal of Negro

History 67 (2): 148-154. Also, Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 22, 68-69.

Leigh 19

“carried a single gun and some forty men, harried the shipping of all nations.” The nineteen-

year-old American naval officer Commodore David Porter, who would command Temple Pent

in the anti-piracy squadron twenty three years later, was given one of his first assignments

policing this region in the warship Amphitheatre. Some accounts of this era suggest that Rigaud

commanded upwards of 400 black and creole pirates during the year 1800, but it is particularly

difficult to measure the accuracy of such claims.51

While the Haitian Revolution drastically changed ideas about who had access to the

waters surrounding the west coast of Hispaniola, it also came to fruition during the first decade

when the United States was ready to extend its military jurisdiction to the sphere of the

Caribbean. When maritime conflicts with the French become a motif in the American historical

record at the turn of the century, this discourse reflected an extension of American power to a

new geographical arena. Despite what the American naval record suggests, the new actors in the

upper Caribbean and the Gulf of Gonaives were not black and creole picaroons and pirates, many

of whom had sailed in similar capacities under French colonial rule. Rather, they were American

military ships under the nascent republic, determined to secure commercial rights in the waters

of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Far and away, the most defining naval action in the

American historical record from this period is the engagement between the American frigate USS

Constellation and the French frigate La Vengeance. With or without the Haitian Revolution, the

entrance of the United States navy into the sphere of the circum-Caribbean was going to require

significant military action. Not surprisingly, in the century after American settlers like Ralph

Munroe inherit the Black Caesar legends from Bahamian oral tradition, this period emerges as a

defining historical anchor, competing with the previous anchor of the Golden Age of Piracy.52

51

David F. Long, Nothing too Daring, 12-13. 52

For a discussion about the intersection of American imperialism/expansion and the development of south Florida

Leigh 20

When Commodore Porter returned to the Caribbean as the head of the anti-piracy

squadron in the year 1823, he would receive an official court martial for disobeying the Munroe

Doctrine (1823) and landing a ground siege on the port of Farjada, on the eastern coast of the

Spanish colony of Puerto Rico.53

In hindsight, it is easy to understand the fatal mistake that

Porter made. During his twenty year absence from the Caribbean scene, American imperialism

had run amok, expanding its influence to the entirely of the Florida peninsula, the lower Florida

Keys, and the island chain of the Dry Tortugas.54

When Commodore Porter had last patrolled

against alleged piracy in the Caribbean Sea, he was operating in the midst of Spanish colonies.

When he returned twenty years later, his squadron was based out of the American territory of

Key West and the naval base at Pensacola harbor, both new acquisitions. What would become a

serious breach of federal law following the Munroe Doctrine was practically standard military

procedure in the previous decade, when the military general Andrew Jackson had launched a

temporary incursion into the Spanish colonies of West and East Florida.55

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Tennessee militia commander Andrew

Jackson was a star on the rise. His military career reached an unprecedented high following his

successful leadership during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and the Battle of

pirate legends in the context of the equally-legendary figure Gasparilla, associated with Charlotte Harbor, see André-Marcel dAns, “The Legend of Gasparilla: Myth and History on Florida’s West Coast,” Tampa Bay History

Vol. 2 (1980): 5-29. For an example of the Black Caesar legends as they become tied to the Haitian Revolution, see

Jim Woodman. Key Biscayne, the Romance of Cape Florida (United States: Jim Woodman, 1972), 18. 53

For primary sources relating to the court martial, see United States Congress. American State Papers: Naval

Affairs, Vol. 2 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1824–1827). 54

Imperialism is defined in this context more along the lines of the Bauer-Hilferding, neo-Marxist theory of

imperialist expansion—forwarded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writers like Rudolf

Hilferding, Otto Bauer, John Hobson, and Vladimir Lenin—than according to the definition of ‘self-perpetuating

expansion’ proposed by their contemporary Joseph A. Schumpeter in his essay “The Sociology of Imperialisms,”

Arhiv fur Sozialwissenshaft und Sozialpolitik 46 (1919): 3-96. Since the American conquest of Florida had direct

commercial incentives, and was eventually checked from expanding beyond the Florida Keys by the Munroe

Doctrine, it should not be considered as a form of “objectless” and prima ratio imperialism. 55

David F. Long, Nothing too Daring, 208.

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Horseshoe Bend in the Red Stick War.56

In the years following these engagements, Jackson gave

the Spanish governor of East Florida—José María Coppinger—an impossible ultimatum: police

your territory effectively against runaway slaves and Indian raids, or abdicate your claim to the

peninsula and face irrevocable American conquest. 57

By issuing this ultimatum, Jackson was

reacting directly to cross-border raids from Native Americans like the Yamasees, the Yuchis, and

the Creeks, as well as to runaway slave settlements that had coalesced on the borders of western

Florida. The most prominent of these settlements was known as the Negro Fort on the

Apalachicola River. This fort was an outpost for runaway slaves and Indians during the War of

1812. It was encouraged by British forces who were trying to destabilize the American plantation

economy while establishing a beachhead for resistance in the south.

As historian John Mahon notes in his History of the Second Seminole War, the “Negro

Fort” was considered to be “a center for hostility and above all a threat to the security of slaves”

belonging to southern planters.58

Given the context of the Haitian Revolution as well as the

opening of the Mississippi delta to the emerging cotton kingdom, the issue of runaway slaves

was extraordinarily sensitive. When the last British lieutenant left the Negro Fort in the hands of

Seminole Indians and fugitive slaves in the summer of 1815, pressure rose exponentially for

Jackson to continue the momentum of his southern campaigns, and launch a full-scale invasion

of the western peninsula. Publications representing the interests of southern planters, such as the

56

There is a colorful depiction of the military scene at the Battle of New Orleans in the opening of Daniel Walker

Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2007), 8-15. The Jackson engagements of the Red Stick War are depicted in Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Tohopeka:

Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012). 57

David Saville Muzzey, An American History (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1920), 204-205. 58

John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 23.

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Savannah Journal, continued to implore, “How long shall this evil, requiring immediate remedy,

be permitted to exist?”59

While publications such as the Savannah Journal allow historians to understand the

avowed causes of an historical moment that is now called the First Seminole War (1816-1818),

historians must also examine the indirect causes of the conflict through the longue durée of

imperialism in the American colonies and the new republic.60

The Spanish domain of Florida

began offering refuge to runaway slaves from the British colonies of North America as early as

the year 1687.61

In this regard, Spain created one of the first known black maroon colonies—

known as Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé—in North America on the front lines of the

English colonial enterprise. This project served the triple purpose of bolstering Spanish

populations in the colonies, destabilizing the British colonial economy, and creating a buffer

zone between the English colonies and the Spanish capital of St. Augustine. The project also

demonstrated a specific wartime tactic that would become habitual in subsequent eras. The

British government would offer freedom to slaves that fought for the loyalist cause in both the

American Revolution and the War of 1812, and leaders of the Union army would extend a

similar promise to American slaves during the Civil War.

Exploiting the labor force of a wartime enemy by extending the promise of freedom to its

disenfranchised members became a common military practice. Almost eighty years before the

destruction of the “Negro Fort,” these tactics had compelled the British general and founder of

59

Savannah Journal, June 26, 1816. Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1943), 31. 60

The idea of the longue durée is typically associated with historians from the French Annales School in successive

waves of the twentieth century. Some of the forefathers connected with this approach are Marc Bloch, Lucien

Febvre, and Fernand Braudel. For an early work that demonstrates this approach, see Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch:

Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (New York: Dorset Press, 1990) originally published in French as

Les Rois Thaumaturges in the year 1924. 61

Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 24-25.

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the colony of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, to occupy and destroy Fort Mosé in the year 1740.62

As the British colonial enterprise pushed southward following such Indian-settler conflicts as the

Tuscarora War (1711-1715) and the Yamasee War (1715-1717), the Florida peninsula became

one of the last contiguous bastions of freedom for runaway and displaced groups.63

In the early

nineteenth century, these groups included both new slaves from the cotton kingdom and the

ancestors of slaves and Native Americans who had been fleeing southward colonial expansion

for decades, if not centuries.64

Although Jackson sold his conquest of western Florida in his January letter to President

Monroe on the unique demands of early-nineteenth century planters, a longer historical

perspective suggests that any unconquered land in the southern United States would remain a

persistent threat to nearby plantation economies. Such was the fragility of the slave system in the

early nineteenth century. This explains why Jackson did not stop at the destruction of the “Negro

Fort,” an instance that resulted in thedeath of nearly 330 black and Indian inhabitants, and an

instance that should go down alongside the Fort Pillow Massacre as one of the most tragic and

mass losses of black lives in nineteenth-century American history.65

After the destruction of the “Negro Fort,” the Jackson military machine chased runaway

Indians and blacks to the present-day region of Tampa Bay and Fort Myers. It was here that

consistently uprooted, nonwhite communities were coalescing themselves on the Suwannee and

Manatee rivers around Charlotte Harbor. These black communities would eventually be ascribed

62

Ibid, 35. 63

William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 37, 110, 117. 64

Specifically, these groups included the disparate Indian tribes—mainly Creeks, Yuchis, and Yamasees—that

would become known as the Seminole tribes in Florida. They also included the Black Seminoles, groups of

individuals with mixed Indian and African ancestry who would create their own civilizations, sometimes called

“Black Towns,” alongside the Seminole peoples. 65

For more information on Andrew Jackson and the First Seminole War, see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson &

His Indian Wars (New York: Viking Press, 2001). For a description of the Fort Pillow Massacre, see Richard L.

Fuchs, An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002).

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the term “Angola” on the basis that many of the Carolinian runaways were ostensibly “saltwater

slaves” who had originated on the West African coast.66

The Florida historian Adam Wasserman

indicates that the Angola communities had a population of between 750 and 900 black

residents.67

These peoples were supported with trade and weapons delivered by the Scottish

trader Alexander George Arbuthnot and the former royal marine Robert Ambrister, two

individuals whom Jackson had summarily executed during his peninsular campaign.

Captain James Gadsden, after whom the American replacement to the obliterated “Negro

Fort” was named, called the region of Tampa Bay “the last rallying spot of the disaffected

negroes and Indians.”68

In acknowledging this sentiment, and remaining consistent with his

desire to eradicate Indian and black resistance to American expansion, Jackson commanded one

of his brigadier generals, William McIntosh, to employ a war party of two-hundred Coweta

Creeks to eradicate the settlements. These Indian mercenaries killed many residents, burned each

of the villages, plundered belongings, kidnapped residents, and scattered the remaining

inhabitants of the Angola community.69

Many of the survivors took dugout canoes around the

southern tip of the Florida peninsula in a mass exodus that placed them among the middle and

upper Florida Keys. Observers near Cape Florida on the northern end of Biscayne Bay, such as

the first mayor of Saint Augustine during the territorial period, James Grant Forbes, and the

surveyor of that same city, Charles Blacker Vignoles, recalled seeing “sixty Indians, and as many

66

The short rise and fall of these particular African communities is depicted , among other places, in Adam

Wasserman, A People’s History of Florida: How Africans, Seminoles, Women, and Lower Class Whites Shaped the

Sunshine State (Sarasota: Adam Wasserman, 2009). 67

Ibid, 197. 68

Ibid, 198. This declaration was also mirrored in 1822 by the previously mentioned U.S. surveyor and resident of

St. Augustine, Charles Blacker Vignoles. See Canter Brown Jr., “Sarrazota, or runaway Negro plantations: Tampa

Bay’s First Black Community,” Tampa Bay History 12 (Fall-Winter 1990): 5. 69

Ibid, 141.

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runaway Negroes, in search of sustenance, and twenty-seven sail of Bahamian wreckers.”70

According to an “eye-witness” referenced in the Charleston City Gazette and Commercial

Advertiser on November, 1821, approximately 250 “negroes” were carried to Nassau by English

wreckers out of Cape Sable and Key Tavernier.

The flight of these Angolan refugees through the lagoon of Biscayne Bay and the upper

Florida Keys was later corroborated by a government investigation in the Bahamas. Seven years

after the 1821 raid in west Florida, the Customs Officer for the Port of Nassau, Winer Bethell,

seized “ninety-seven foreign Negro slaves” from the northwest shore of Andros, the largest

island of the Bahamian archipelago, and ferried them to the capital of New Providence. Bethell

was under the assumption that these individuals, residing in the present-day community of Red

Bay, were illegally imported by Spanish authorities after the British abolition of the slave trade

in 1807.71

But when the Bahamian Governor James Carmichael Smyth investigated their case,

he was surprised to find that many of these individuals were in possession of “discharges from

His Mayjesty’s service” that dated to the War of 1812.72

This evidence corroborated testimony

that the group had been settled on Andros for a period of seven years, thus dating their arrival to

the context of the Angola refugees.

In recent decades, ethnographic, archaeological, and sociological scholarship addressing

naming similarities, material evidence, and oral traditions that span the Gulf Stream has strongly

70

Ibid, 141-142. Wasserman cites an “eye-witness” newspaper account of the destruction of the Angola communities

and the subsequent fleeing of refugees to the upper Florida Keys on pages 199, 201, and 204. This source is listed as

“Advice to Southern Planters,” in Charleston Gazette, November 1821, reprinted in Philadelphia Gazette and

Literary Register, December 3, 1821. For excerpts of this supposed eye-witness account, see Canter Brown Jr.,

“Sarrazota, or runaway Negro plantations,” 15. 71

Grant L, “Letter from June 30, 1828,” CO23/78/58. Microfilm (Nassau, Bahamas: Bahamas National Archives). 72

James Carmichael Smyth. August 10, 1831. In A Guide to Selected Sources for the History of the Seminole

Settlements at Red Bays, Andros 1917-1980, ed. D. Wood (Nassau: Bahamas Department of Archives, 1980)

Leigh 26

supported the Florida-origin theory of the Red Bay community. 73

This theory has been widely

embraced by local and national historians. As of the year 2005, a site on the northern end of

Biscayne Bay has been designated a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Site,

and the plight of the 1821 migrants has been memorialized by a public kiosk depicting the

alleged migration routes.74

For the sake of comparison, a site on the southern end of Biscayne

Bay, on Adams Key at the northeast corner of Black Caesars Creek, has been dedicated with an

interactive display featuring an artist rendering of the legendary pirate Black Caesar. Unlike the

former case, this claim is supported by little more than a questionable label from an old map.

The Home Office in London passed an official ruling in the year 1818 that “any slave

brought to the Bahamas from outside the British West Indies would be manumitted.”75

This

specific decree likely combined with Indian knowledge of circum-Caribbean waters as well as

previous relationships that both Seminole and Black Seminole leaders—such as Kenadgie,

Abraham, and John Caesar—had with Bahamian wreckers and government officials in order to

determine the exact destination of the 1821 migration. By taking the longue durée, however,

historians can interpret the Bahaman Islands as the latest bastion of refuge in a southward-

moving constellation of sanctuaries that included Fort Mosé, the “Negro Fort,” the Angola

communities, and Cape Florida.76

73

See Rosalyn Howard, “Black Seminole Diaspora: The Caribbean Connection,” Caribbean and Southern

Transnational Perspectives on the U.S. South (2006): 73-88. Howard began conducting research on Andros Island in

the year 1996. Her article includes an overview of that research as well as a historiography concerning the Black

Seminole community of Red Bay, citing such authors as Mary Moseley, Kenneth W. Porter, and John Goggin. 74

Margo Harakas, “Voyages of Freedom,” Sun Sentinel, February 22, 2005, 1-4. 75

Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before

Emancipations (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 103. 76

Many Black Seminoles in the region of southeast Florida may also have had origins in the Spanish slave trade,

which continued until the year 1819, when the territory was transferred to American control. See Jane Landers,

Black Society in Spanish Florida, 179. Black Seminoles may also have origins in several short-lived slave

plantations in the region, first by Richard Fitzpatrick in 1830 and then again by his nephew William English in 1842.

For mention of these plantations, see Paul S. George, “Miami: The First One Hundred Years,” South Florida History

Magazine Vol. 24 (1996): 23-36.

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Although this constellation is telling, it should not be interpreted as monolithic. Just as

northern runaway or loyalist slaves did not all flee to the territories of upper Canada, Nova

Scotia, and Britain, Indian and black individuals in Florida did not all adhere to a specific

progression of destinations. Surely, many Indian and black individuals in the region of the

present-day southern United States attempted to assimilate in such western cities as Natchez and

New Orleans, on the Mississippi River. Many other individuals sought refuge in the Spanish

colonies of the Caribbean, where they shared a cultural similarity rooted in the Spanish tenures

of places like Florida, Pensacola, and New Orleans. Others headed for the fledgling black

republic of Haiti, where they anticipated opportunities that seemed impossible within the

boundaries of the United States. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly to the unfolding history of

Florida in the nineteenth-century, there were many groups of Seminoles and Black Seminoles

who refused to abandon the peninsula altogether.

The Florida campaign of Andrew Jackson was mostly a littoral conquest, moving down

the west coast of the peninsula from Fort Barrancas, to St. Marks, to the Apalachicola River,

and, finally, to the region of Tampa Bay. After Jackson abdicated his brief governorship of

Florida in the year 1821, the United States began to solidify its coastal acquisitions and

reevaluate its authority in the Caribbean. Revisiting its maritime actions at the beginning of the

nineteenth century, the United States government—in an “Act to Protect the Commerce of the

United States”—called for the immediate suppression of piracy in the West Indies. When James

Biddle preceded Commodore Porter as the first captain of the anti-piracy squadron on March 22,

1822, he was given command of two frigates, two sloops, four schooners, an estimated crew of

1,330 officers, and an estimated artillery of 178 guns. 77

Over the next few years, both Congress

and the president repeatedly approved the construction and commission of new vessels to the

77

David Long, Nothing too Daring, 205.

Leigh 28

upper-Caribbean on the basis of suppressing piracy.78

Not surprisingly, these pirates were mostly

sailors of Cuban and Spanish extraction—individuals who suddenly found themselves operating

in American waters after the conclusion of the First Seminole War.79

It is nothing short of symbolic that the anti-piracy squadron was based out of naval yards

built at Key West and Pensacola, “to afford facilities for protecting the commerce of the United

States.”80

Neither of these advantageous locations were available to Commodore David Porter

during his Haitian patrols twenty years prior. Pensacola was a direct acquisition of the Jackson

military campaign, and Key West was an indirect acquisition. The latter is often described as an

uninhabited island that was “purchased” by the American businessman John Siminton at a café

in Havana one year after Jackson left Florida.81

But this acquisition only constituted one of many

expressions of American ownership in the Florida Straits. Following the annexation of Key

West, American and Bahamian migrants established permanent settlements on several of the

nearby islets, namely Indian Key and Key Vacas. In that same year, the United States

government solidified its western and eastern periphery by building a lighthouse on Garden Key,

in the Dry Tortugas, and a lighthouse on Cape Florida, on the northern end of Biscayne Bay.82

78

United States Congress. American State Papers: Naval Affairs, Vol. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1774–

1825). The naval records from these years feature a variety of requests from President Munroe and the houses of

Congress calling for more ships in the Caribbean. For some examples from the month Commodore Porter assumed

control, see “Recommending the employment of an additional force for the suppression of piracy in the West Indies,

December 9, 1822, and “Estimates of the cost of a steamboat, ten schooners, and five cutters, to be employed in the

suppression of piracy,” from December 12, 1822. For a few years later, see “On the expediency of providing an

additional naval force for the suppression of piracy,” January 11, 1825. 79

United States Congress. American State Papers: Naval Affairs, Vol. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1774–

1825). For information about the nature of the pirates captured during this period, see the annual dispatches of the

United States Navy Department. For the year in question, see “Condition of the Navy, and its Operations,”

December 3, 1822. 80

United States Congress, “Expediency of establishing a naval depot at Key West, January 20, 1823,” American

State Papers: Naval Affairs, Vol. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1774–1825), 871. 8181

John Viele, The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers, 21. 82

The United States military also solidified its control of Florida by ringing the Seminole reservation, and the entire

peninsula, with a series of new military stockades. Some of these forts were Fort Brooke (1823) in present-day

Tampa Bay, Fort King (1827) near present-day Ocala, Fort Drane (1835) in present-day Reddick, Fort Dallas (1836)

in present-day Miami, Fort Lauderdale (1838) in the city of its name, and Fort Dulaney (1838) in present-day Fort

Myers.

Leigh 29

The latter structure was placed literally at the nexus of the Seminole passage from southeast

Florida to Andros Island, representing a conquest of traditional Indian networks.83

From this

perspective, it is telling that the Cape Florida lighthouse—as well as the Carysfort lightship off

Key Largo and the Cooley Plantation on New River in Biscayne Bay—were among the first

targets of Indian warriors during the second Seminole conflict.84

As the United States began to express ownership over the boundaries that it had acquired

during the Jackson military campaign, many of the Indians and Black Seminoles who chose to

remain on the peninsula retreated to the interior where they continued to resist American

expansion. The next forty years of Floridian history resounds with echoes of the past as well as

trends of the contemporary. “Black Towns” among the Seminole tribes—most famously the

settlement of Pelahlikaha—joined the ranks of the “Negro Fort” and the Angola community

when they are rousted out by military campaigns and destroyed. The remaining Seminole tribes

were confined to an interior reservation by the Treaty of Moultrie Creek (1823), but this

reservation soon proved unsatisfactory for American expansionist ideals, and the government-

sanctioned objective—embodied in the Indian Removal Act (1830) generally, and the Treaty of

Paynes Landing (1832) specifically—became a complete relocation of Indians and Black

Seminoles to the Creek reservations in the region of present-day Oklahoma.

83

Although the stated purpose of the lighthouse was to guide mariners and revenue cutters through the region of

Hawks Channel and the Florida coastline, that treacherous region which Bernard Romans had compared to Scylla

and Charybdis from the Odyssey, the lighthouse also served the purpose of cutting off Seminoles and Black

Seminoles from access to the Gulf Stream. During these years, Florida politicians like Governor Duval insisted that

the United States government continue to pursue runaway slaves across the Gulf Steam to the Bahamas. See Adam

Wasserman, A People’s History of Florida, 202-203. 84

In terms of the Second Seminole War, the attack on the Cape Florida lighthouse marked the latest in a series of

skirmishes that would bring some of the remaining Seminole tribes down the east coast of Florida. The young

Seminole chief Osceola had shot and killed Wiley Thompson, the Seminole Indian agent, and six others outside Fort

King on the same day as the infamous Dade Massacre. Less than ten days later, Seminoles had attacked the coontie

plantation of William Cooley at New River, in present-day Fort Lauderdale.

Leigh 30

What is called the Second Seminole War (1825-1842) became mostly a campaign of

attrition, narrowing the interior settlements of the Seminole tribes from villages on the

Withlacoochee River in the north to holdouts in the cypress swamps of the Everglades in the

south. The war ended with the symbolic passing of the Armed Occupation Act (1842), a

legislative incentive for American settlers to south Florida that presaged its Homestead

counterpart by exactly twenty years. Several bands of Seminole Indians still remained within the

Florida territory, and this federal legislation practically guaranteed their involvement in another

military engagement.85

The relatively short conflict that is known as the Third Seminole War

(1855-1858) ended with Billy Bowlegs and 165 of his native followers emigrating west to New

Orleans. Afterward, the Florida government speculated that little more than one hundred

Seminole Indians remained in the Florida peninsula, mostly around the lacustrine region of Lake

Okeechobee, and the riparian region of the Miami River. In the month of February, 1859, many

of these remaining individuals were also shipped west.86

The Seminole families who remained in southeast Florida began to associate with new

groups of migrants who were settling in the region after the passing of the Homestead Act.

Unlike those who preceded them, these individuals were not government surveyors, seasonal

visitors, plantation entrepreneurs, naturalists, soldiers, or lighthouse keepers. Rather, they were

the first permanent, white homesteaders. Some of them were Bahamians with a family legacy of

squatting in the region—like Edward ‘Ned’ Pent and his father Temple Pent—who eventually

settled in the farming community of Lemon City on the north banks of the Miami River. Others

were northern Americans like William Brickell and Ralph Middleton Munroe, who chose to

85

For more on the consequences and implications of this federal legislation see Joe Knetsch and Paul S. George, “A

Problematic Law: The Armed Occupation Act of 1842 and Its Impact on Southeast Florida,” Tequesta: The Journal

of the Historical Association of South Florida Vol. 1. (1993): 63-80. 86

James W. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 140-143.

Leigh 31

settle in the village of Coconut Grove on the south banks of the Miami. The latter “boasted that

the whole bay could claim but a few dozen settlers…[and] it would have been quite possible to

meet them all in 24 hours at most.”87

About the remaining Seminoles, Munroe states “the [native] remnants in Florida today

descended from the few hundreds the government could not subdue…the only Indians in the

country [that are] not wards of the United States.”88

In this quote, Munroe expresses a common

and prevailing narrative about the place of the Seminole tribes in American history. It is the idea

that they constitute the one unconquered native tribe in the present-day region of the United

States. Without taking anything away from the resistance of the Seminole peoples, the longue

durée suggests an interpretation that is quite different. It suggests that the conquest of the

Seminole tribes—groups formed by runaway slaves and displaced Indians—was something of a

foregone conclusion when they entered the region of present-day Florida. During the hundred

year period between the arrival of the naturalist Bernard Romans and the arrival of the yacht

designer Ralph Munroe, a new breed of American imperialists had achieved something

significant. They had conquered the Florida peninsula, and they had secured their conquest with

such means as the proliferation of landmarks and the passing of legislation.

It was the Irish novelist James Joyce who once said, “The true symbol of British conquest

is Robinson Crusoe.” 89

In the last decades of the nineteenth-century, between the arrival of

Ralph Middleton Munroe in 1877 and the construction of the Florida East Coast Railway in

1896, this statement serves to capture the complicated nature of Americans settlers in the region

of Biscayne Bay. Although the Bahamian settlers may have known better, as some of their

87

Ralph Munroe, The Commodores Story, 97. 88

Ibid, 101. 89

This quote was excerpted from a lecture that James Joyce delivered at the Università Popolare in Trieste, Italy, in

February and March of 1912. The lecture series was called, Verismo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese, or

“Realism or Idealism in English Literature.”

Leigh 32

legacies dated to years before the anti-piracy squadron, American settlers from the north had

little sense of what came before them. Arriving in the year 1877, Munroe claimed that “no more

isolated region was to be found in the country.”90

Like the intrepid Robinson Crusoe, cast away

on a desert island with only a pocket-knife and a pipe, young men who were raised on stories of

maritime adventure could hardly resist the ironic and safe temptation of Biscayne Bay, a

“wilderness” with a pre-conquered history.

It is no coincidence that the last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a

revival of the Robinsonade. There was the French science-fiction novelist Jules Verne, who

wrote a series of contributions that included L’Oncle Robinson (1870) and The Mysterious Island

(1874). Then there was H.G. Wells and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), written at the dawn

of Miami—the very year that the industrial magnate Henry Flagler extended his railroad south.

Lastly, Treasure Island (1881), by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, became the

defining text of the resurgence. Stevenson modeled his antagonist, Long John Silver, after

descriptions of Blackbeard that dated to the Golden Age of Piracy. For the boatswain, he chose

the name of Israel Hands, borrowed from an actual member of the Blackbeard crew. Perhaps

most importantly, his protagonist was an innocent, white male adolescent named Jim Hawkins,

in whom an entirely new generation of Ralph Middleton Munroes could image their future.

When the Cape Florida lighthouse was decommissioned in the year 1878, its

replacement—the Fowey Rock Light—was exhibited in Fairmount Park, at the American

Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. In fact, Munroe went to go see it. It is often said that

history is stranger than fiction, and it is certainly hard to invent a more symbolic moment than

this. Looking up at the “white inner column” and the Fresnel lens of the lighthouse before they

were shipped south, it is hard to believe that Munroe appreciated the weight of their significance.

90

Ralph Munroe, The Commodores Story, 91.

Leigh 33

After one-hundred years of American progress, the region of Biscayne Bay was a conquered

territory for white settlers from the north. Along with the Homestead Act, the lighthouse tower

was nothing short of a beacon, inviting him in.

When Munroe entered the cut of Black Caesars Creek the year prior, he became an

integral part of the next one hundred years. Like Bernard Romans, who had stamped his culture

on obscurity with his Maps of East and West Florida during the colonial age, Ralph Middleton

Munroe would come to stamp his own culture on the same region with his memoir, The

Commodores Story. And like Romans, who transmitted the label of Black Caesars Creek to

subsequent generations, settlers like Ralph Middleton Munroe would translate and reshape the

legends of Black Caesar for posterity. All the while, the story would remain embedded with

untold meanings. All the while, it would camouflage a deeper reservoir of multicultural, pre-

American history.

Leigh 34

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