Kongolese Sacred Sovereignties and Legalities in the Early Modern Trans-Atlantic

Abstract

This article draws on political theology to provide a history of sovereignty (law-generating power) and legality (law-maintaining power) across an overlooked early modern trilogy of historical events. (1) The Kingdom of Kongo voluntarily adopted Catholicism in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Catholicism became a core part of its political identity and a major way through which Kongo resisted Portuguese exploitation and enslavement. However, Kongo’s compromises with Portuguese power gave rise to a heretical movement that triggered conflict, reforms, and mass enslavement and deportation. Some of those deported found themselves in South Carolina. (2) Deportees may have been part of a ditch-cutting crew at Stono that led the largest slave uprising in England’s mainland American colonies. Their Rebellion has many Kongolese characteristics and may have partly been a Kongolese Catholic response to English Protestantism. This is especially so because the rebels apparently meant to reach sanctuary in Spanish Florida. (3) Escapees from enslavement by Protestant rivals inspired Spain to offer freedom to fugitive slaves who converted to Catholicism. While Florida had a racial hierarchy and practiced slavery, its versions of these was somewhat milder due to religious and legal influences. Free Black people, especially escapees from the English, proved loyal subjects and militiamen—and Spain reciprocated with protection and inclusion. Chronicling sovereignty and legality across these three episodes is important for telling the history of how early Americans found the heart they needed to make their world less heartless.

1. Introduction

“We don’t lak slavery. We start to jine de Spanish in Florida. We surrender but we not whipped yet and we is not converted”. De other 43 say “Amen”.

—George Cato, Columbia, SC (1930s)1

This article explores three connected episodes: (1) the Catholicization of the Kingdom of Kongo and how that society used religion to resist exploitation and enslavement; (2) the 1739 Stono Rebellion, which was led by Kongolese Catholics; and (3) the sanctuary those rebels hoped to reach at Fort Mose in Spanish Florida. This trilogy sheds new light on sovereignty and legality across the early modern trans-Atlantic. In turn, political theology, “the story of the names we give to the law making, law policing, and law destroying work” of sovereignty and legality, offers a new way to understand these Kongolese histories.2

Sovereignty is “constituting” and “law-making” power—in contrast to legality, or “constituted” and “law-applying” power.3 Sovereignty generates political institutions and erupts to cause radical political change.4 Sovereignty and legality are inseparable from religion. Sovereignty surges forth as passions that “forge, transform, and police the law”.5 Sovereignty creates legality by combining the following: (1) specific vessels of meaning, like words and concepts; (2) intense emotions associated with these; and (3) political initiative.6 It “animates a core network of affects, beliefs, and ideas around which polities arise and cohere”.7

When sovereignty “congeals” into “forms reflecting what a given community holds most sacred”, it founds a new legality.8 That legality is anchored by religious and ideological expressive forms.9 These reflect something of absolute, transcendent sovereignty.10 However, they “shift from a creative to a conservative function: policing the boundaries of the forms they have created”.11 Legality’s anchoring narratives are sacred, identifying ultimate origins and ends, standards and concerns.12

Legality requires commitment from the people living in it.13 However, sovereignty continues to pulse beneath the surface.14 Law strives to translate some aspirations for justice into reality and designates others as eschatological hope, removed from functional human aspiration.15 Sovereignty and legality wrestle across “ordinary legal doctrine at work in mundane affairs; in utopian and messianic yearnings, imaginary shapes given to a less resistant reality; in apologies for power and privilege and in the critiques” aimed at it.16 Legality cannot be plotted out ahead of time and then deployed neatly into history. It emerges “within a spiraling current of accidents”.17 Meanwhile, religion cannot be neatly reduced to political calculation. It emerges as “bodies splash and splatter” through life.18

The discussion below explores a centuries-long dance enacted by Kongolese people across the early modern Atlantic. It responds to core questions of political theology: “What cognitive and cultural resources are available to produce and sustain (or supplant) what sorts of … over-beliefs in a particular time and place?” and “what kind of … over-belief” does the sacred animate “at a given place and time, with what consequences for political governance”?19

Historiography has yet to tell this story in a unified way, and popular awareness of it is faint.20 These events occupy historical blind spots. African Christianity is still seen as a European imposition.21 Catholicism has been sidelined from Black religious histories.22 Central Africa is overlooked because African Americans identify more with West Africa, even though around a quarter can trace their origins to the former region.23 Spain’s role in the early American Southeast is neglected, too.

However, the Kongolese trilogy did long endure in memory, as evidenced by George Cato’s quote above. That man was interviewed in the 1930s and claimed to be descended from the Stono Rebellion’s leader (known to history as “Jemmy” or “Cato”).24 He recounted his ancestor’s speech shortly before the rebels’ defeat.25 The leader said that those he led did not like slavery, were headed to Florida, and “is not converted”, leading the crowd to reply, “Amen”.26 Drawing historical meaning from this recollection depends on assuming that the rebels had a plan to escape to Florida and were Catholic. (Not to mention that Mr. Cato’s story was historically accurate.) Nevertheless, the Kingdom of Kongo was indeed Catholic, the Stono Rebellion had hallmarks of Kongolese Catholicism, and Florida’s Fort Mose did receive escapees like the Stono rebels. That is reason enough to “analyze systematically the political dynamics of religion” across this trans-Atlantic story.27

2. The Kingdom of Kongo

[A]n army of horsemen led by Saint James himself appeared in the sky under a resplendent white cross and struck scores dead.

—Afonso I, King of Kongo (r. 1506–1542)28

As civil war broke down the pre-Catholic Kingdom of Kongo, sovereignty surged forth and new religious expressive forms arose, and then congealed into a new legality. Catholicism soon helped the Kingdom challenge the Portuguese. In time, the Kingdom’s compromises with Portugal and slavery triggered a new sovereign movement that sought to replace orthodox Catholicism and the reigning legality. The reigning legality triumphed, but it too adopted new religious expressions. Deported rebels may have been among those who later attempted another sovereign rebellion at Stono.

3. The Catholic State

Following internal conflict, the Kingdom of Kongo re-founded its legality on Catholicism.29 The Kingdom’s original founding myths taught that in the late 1300s, a young prince named Lukeni lua Nimi (or Ntinu Wene) and his followers crossed the Congo River from the north, using military prowess and iron smelting to conquer the region and found a new capital city, known as Mbanza Kongo (“City of Congo”).30 These narratives included voyage and violence. “Sovereignty is commonly expressed in acts of founding violence” and events like migrations that feature “a temporary inversion of the social order”.31 New political understandings rest upon “the kind of exceptional commitment that prepares one to kill or die”—or journey to a new homeland.32 Sovereignty also includes notions of escape from a previous state of affairs.33 Kongolese origins reflect the “widespread tendency to incorporate references to sovereignty and to the foundations of polity as inherently violent, or at least antinomian”.34 Within a century, the new Kingdom reached from the Congo River to Luanda, as well as eastward to the Inkisi River, ruling 350,000 people and nearly 40,000 square miles.35 It was the most powerful political entity in Central–West Africa and was independent until 1888.36

Portuguese sailors arrived in 1483, hoping to reach India or recruit allies against Islamic powers.37 Two years later, King Nzinga a Nkuwu appointed an ambassador to Portugal, directing him to bring back priests and craftsmen who could build a “house of prayer”.38 Nzinga sent children along, and educational exchanges would remain frequent for decades.39 The embassy returned in 1491 and two years later, Nzinga was baptized as King João I.40

João died in 1506, possibly having apostatized, and his sons Mvemba a Nzinga and Mpanzu a Kitima both claimed the throne.41 Kongo’s succession law failed to resolve their dispute.42 Mpanzu represented the old Kongolese legality, while Mvemba embraced Catholicism and Portuguese aid.43 At this point, there emerged a “state of exception” beyond the law’s foresight and capacity.44 Sovereignty broke through.45 The siblings battled at Mbanza Kongo, and Mvemba triumphed.

Mvemba credited literal divine intervention, writing that “Saint James, wearing a scarlet cape and riding a white horse, had appeared under the sky leading an army of knights under a white Constantine cross”.46 Mvemba’s account echoed Iberian legends and became important in Kongolese ideology.47 He was baptized as “Afonso”, renamed for Afonso Henriques, the founding Portuguese king who also credited Saint James for his victory.48 These pious expressions reflected sovereignty overwriting the previous legality.49

Afonso, who reigned all the way until 1542, re-founded the Kongolese legality with a new religious orientation.50 Upon his baptism, he had pre-Christian religious items burned.51 He placed onto the country’s coat of arms symbols associated with Saint James, including a scallop and the swords of the knights who accompanied the saint in the vision at Mbanza Kongo.52 Afonso built churches atop the former “house of idols” and royal cemetery; one of the central churches housed a cross-shaped stone revealed to a chief in a dream.53 The head pre-Christian priest became the chief cleric at this new shrine.54 Afonso sponsored the creation of schools.55

These changes strengthened the position of the king as the bearer of religious sovereignty (nzambi).56 In Richard Sherwin’s words, “Linguistic, visual, and other performative mediations of affective excess”—symbols, rituals, and myths—bound together the new legality.57

Afonso wanted a distinctly Kongolese Catholicism. Kongolese people educated in mission schools became lay catechists (mestres de escola, adongi a aleke).58 Missionary priests were scarce, partly due to the Portuguese politicking discussed below, so priests’ role was limited to celebrating the sacraments—baptism for many, marriage for a few, and the Eucharist in urban centers.59 Later, between the mid-1700s and late 1800s, the missions declined further, giving laypeople an even greater role.60 These circumstances led to interreligious blending.61 Kongolese understood salt to be the key to baptism (a ritual known in Kikongo as curia mungua, or “to eat salt”) due to its local role in guarding against witchcraft.62 Traditional spiritual remedies remained popular, although the Church deemed their practitioners to be “fetiçeiros” (akin to folk healers found in Europe)—sinners, but not outside the Christian fold altogether.63 Kongolese narratives said “that the Garden of Eden was in Central Africa and close to Kongo, and in all likelihood, Adam and Eve were African and probably Kongolese”—as were Jesus and Mary.64 One Kongolese participant in the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution declared himself a subject of the kings of Kongo, France, and Spain—each descended from one of the New Testament’s Three Magi who visited the baby Jesus.65 Afonso tried to convince the Vatican to let Kongolese priests marry because “the tropical climate made celibacy impossible”, and Kongolese Catholics practiced concubinage.66 In time, most local priests were the illegitimate sons of other priests.67

Some scholars consider the Kingdom’s Catholicism “a dialogue of the deaf”, with the Portuguese and Kongolese lacking a common religion.68 Others note that missionaries—who were guests of indigenous kings—rejected only those aspects of native culture they deemed incompatible with Christianity.69 Contemporary Europeans saw Kongo as Catholic.70 A bust of Kongolese ambassador António Manuel stands in Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.71 The Vatican sent the Kingdom gifts.72 Visitors saw the Kongolese kneel before wooden crosses, wear rosaries, frequent the sacraments when they could, and join Holy Week processions by the thousands.73 What is more, European definitions of Christianity narrowed over time to exclude popular devotions of the sort that were a hallmark of Kongolese Catholicism.74

In any event, Afonso and his people certainly indigenized their Church.75 While the Portuguese may have wanted Catholicism to make Kongo servile, the religion’s local development proved uncontrollable from the outside.76 Afonso, too, may have wanted this process to be more centralized, but European legality stood in the way. With Portuguese support, he did have his son Henrique consecrated as a bishop.77 Afonso proposed a fully indigenous clergy in 1526.78 However, eight years later, conflict erupted. The Portuguese convinced the pope to let them name a new, Kongo-supervising bishop in São Tomé.79 Portugal claimed this authority as part of its padroado (“patronage”), or papally granted right to control appointments to ecclesiastical offices in its overseas realms.80 Portugal’s padroado dated to 1452, when Pope Nicholas V sanctioned efforts to extend the Reconquista into Africa.81

Portuguese control over Kongo’s Church appointments remained controversial. Christianity lost its status as the state religion at some point before being restored in 1548.82 In 1583, a Kongo noble told King Álvaro I that God authorized Álvaro to appoint bishops, but Álvaro laughed this off.83 He instead credited orthodox Catholicism for his 1574 victory over southern invaders.84 He renamed Mbanza Kongo “São Salvador” (“Holy Savior”) and sought a resident bishop, which the Vatican granted in 1596.85 Portugal resisted this too, ultimately relocating the bishop to its colony at Luanda in 1624.86 King Álvaro II (r. 1587–1614) considered claiming the power to appoint bishops, but declined to do so after the Inquisition tried some of his advisers.87

Why did both Álvaros decline to appoint bishops, even though doing so was arguably in their political self-interests? Power contests alone do not dictate religion. People can commit to “over-beliefs they deem most worthy of whatever sacrifice it may take to sustain them”.88 Religion is decided by “accident-driven, affective economies” and sincere convictions at least as much as by “rational self-interest” defined in an entirely worldly way.89

Kongo did seek a Church free of Portuguese domination. Kongo’s kings paid missionaries’ expenses, beginning because of a Portuguese decree of 1512.90 In the 1550s, King Diogo I stopped funding Jesuits during a dispute.91 By 1619, the bishop found that whenever he excommunicated the king, the bishop would in turn lose his income, wood, food, and water.92 Though Portugal introduced this financial arrangement, Kongo used it effectively.

The Kongolese legality also received reinforcement from a royal princess, who in the 1580s showed interest in joining the Carmelite religious order.93 Her father King Álvaro asked the pope to authorize Kongolese monks and nuns.94 A Carmelite prioress mentioned this request to a young patron, Jean de Brétigny.95 Nothing happened for many years.96 Then, in 1610, Pope Paul V expressed anger at Portuguese authorities for blocking religious orders from ministering in Kongo.97 He sought funding for an independent mission.98 The now 56-year-old Brétigny had voiced his own longstanding desire to send nuns to Kongo.99 Fulfilling these hopes took another 30 years, but in 1640, the Vatican founded a Capuchin Franciscan mission to the Kingdom.100 These efforts helped lead to the worldwide Congregation for Propaganda Fidei (“the Propagation of the Faith”).101 The Kingdom of Kongo thus resisted Portugal overseeing its religious life.102 Another instance of this came in 1622, when the Kingdom secured papal condemnation of an attempted Portuguese invasion.103 While the Portuguese brought Catholicism to Kongo, the local religion proved “radically uncontrolled” by them.104 Religious expressive forms of legality can trigger “subjective commitment to an objectified understanding”, which then restrains the exercise of power.105 Catholicism and the commitments it entailed for the Kongolese, Portuguese, and popes became resources for the Kingdom.106

Catholicism also continued its ascent within the Kongolese legality. By the mid-1600s, the royal coronation ceremony featured the new king wearing a bag around his neck holding a papal bull (the bag was called the santissimo sacramento, or “most holy sacrament”).107 The Kingdom also understood itself as spiritually superior to its neighbors.108 Under Diogo, Kongo evangelized its neighbors, and Catholicism spread regionally by 1600.109 Kongolese Catholicism proved durable. In 1642, the Dutch tried to send preachers to the Kingdom, but King Garcia II refused “because the evil of the Portuguese, founded in ambition, is not sufficient for me to put aside the Catholic faith”.110 He burned Calvinist literature sent by the Dutch.111 During one conflict, a Kongolese count refused to hand a hostage over to a Dutch merchant for safe return because the merchant was a “heretic”.112 The Kongolese military adopted the Order of Christ, a Portuguese institution whose members wore shirts embroidered with a cross.113

Kongo’s religious and political transformation happened “under extremely hostile circumstances, marked by violence, exploitation, and enslavement”.114 Still, the Church became Kongolese as the Kingdom became Catholic. The sovereign eruption of Catholicism in the civil war congealed into a new Catholic legality.

4. Slavery’s Scourge

Catholicism also became an important part of Kongo’s resistance to European enslavement. Oral traditions traced local slavery to Lukeni and archival reports referred to the practice in 1502.115 Afonso gifted a thousand slaves to Portugal for supporting his war for the throne.116 However, the Kingdom’s legality restricted enslavement. Afonso’s letters mentioned free classes of gente (freeborn, taxable subjects); nossos filhos, parentes, e naturaes (royal children and native citizens), naturaes forros (free citizens), and fidalgos (nobility).117 Apart from these were espriuos or espravos—“slaves”—who alone could be exported.118 They were war captives (kijikos).119 Convicts could also be enslaved, but with restrictions on their treatment and sale, and many were instead exiled.120 Some slaves held high public office.121 Women could not be sold to the Portuguese.122 Afonso criticized the Portuguese enslavement of freeborn Kongolese and of women.123 He even threatened to abolish the slave trade altogether in 1526.124 A century later, King Pedro II courted Dutch aid against Portuguese enslavers.125 Álvaro sent a relative to São Tomé and Portugal to free subjects enslaved illegally, bringing many of the returnees into his royal administration.126 In 1604, Manuel (the envoy honored by a bust in Santa Maria Maggiore) freed a Kongolese man enslaved in Brazil.127 Twenty years later, Pedro II protested that Portuguese colonists from Angola had illegally enslaved thousands of Kongolese.128 Brazilian authorities investigated and sent some freeborn Kongolese home.129 In 1641, Garcia II’s coronation ceremony included his being ordered to give alms for the purpose of freeing slaves.130

These measures had some effect. When the Kongolese legality was strong, few freeborn subjects were enslaved, and in 1620, an observer recorded that the Kongolese “do not trade people”.131 Still, Garcia II lamented that “in our simplicity we gave place to [slavery] from which grows all the evils of our country” and he vowed to “die to liberate my people”.132 One neighboring queen, Njinga, even apostatized from Catholicism for a time in the face of Portuguese greed.133

Nevertheless, the Kingdom’s legality also furthered slavery. Authorities increasingly treated rebels as criminals who could be enslaved.134 Rulers calculated a tax in terms of slaves.135 By the mid-1600s, civil wars, political contests, insolence, thefts, adultery, witchcraft, private disputes, guilt through family association, and other ever-expanding excuses led to the enslavement of huge numbers of people.136

Catholicism interacted with this deteriorating legality in complicated ways. Jesuit missionaries had enormous plantations in Brazil and profited heavily from the African slave trade.137 Catholic abolitionists were no more than a small minority.138 However, as early as 1512, the Portuguese forbade missionaries from engaging directly in the Kongolese slave trade.139 The Church also forbade the sale of slaves to Protestants.140 Church officials did let the Dutch and English transport slaves to Spanish colonies in the Americas, and regardless, profit motives prevailed over religious objections by the late 1600s.141 Even after that, though, some enslaved Kongolese preferred Catholic masters. Two boys in 1747 tried to steal a pig from Catholic missionaries so that they would “remain slaves at your post and live as Christians as we desire”.142

Catholicism also served as the crux for a remarkable international legal dispute. In 1684, the Kongolese-descended Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça—who had been exiled in a dispute with the Portuguese over a tax to be paid in slaves—brought a criminal complaint at the Vatican against European enslavers.143 He became the attorney for Black religious confraternities.144 Run by lay Catholics, Black cofradías had existed for centuries. Seville’s first was founded in the 1300s.145 These groups were important sites for Black organizing.146 They raised emancipation funds and asserted legal rights.147 Women helped lead many of them.148 So did Kongolese people.149 Mendonça claimed that the Vatican had acted criminally in treating European enslavers with impunity and failing to prevent abuses against Black people, Indians, and Jewish converts to Christianity (conversos).150 He demanded abolition of the international slave trade and sought criminal prosecutions.151 He presented evidence compiled by cofradías—a remarkable example of sovereignty breaking through to pressure legalities.152 Mendonça asked the Vatican to recognize that African laws limited slavery’s scope and duration.153 He asked the pope to excommunicate people engaged in the slave trade.154

The Vatican ruled in favor of punishment for enslavers and then pressured Spain and Portugal to implement changes.155 Both countries’ kings endorsed abolition, but could not overcome internal opposition.156 Portugal did order shipping improvements and pledged to prosecute abusers.157 This fell far short of Mendonça’s goals. Still, he and the cofradías demanded legal redress and won it.158 Catholicism proved the basis for Mendonça’s struggle against slavers.159 A commitment for all the actors involved, religion legitimized both the predominant legality and reforms to it.160 Mendonça proved “an international lawyer par excellence” and a forerunner of modern international criminal law.161

Complete Vatican endorsement of abolitionism would come only late into the 1800s.162 However, law could help people undermine slavery in other ways. Governments never have a monopoly over legal meaning—they may even act “in an unprivileged fashion” alongside popular interpreters.163 Ordinary Africans had their own understandings of legality. In 1612, a priest wrote that enslaved people were “shocked by the way the Portuguese make slaves of them” against African laws and the law of humanity.164 Under the laws of the Mbundu people, who neighbored Kongo, kijikos enslaved in wars could become free by returning home or becoming the subject of a powerful protector.165 These options were available if a kijiko believed that “legal process had not been followed” or “the legality of his or her capture had not been proven”.166 Such legal norms may have been on the minds of later escapees to Florida, including the Stono rebels.

How did these rebels end up in South Carolina? No one knows for sure, but the Kingdom was torn apart at the start of the 1700s by a heretical religious movement. Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita proclaimed herself to be a prophetess possessed by Saint Anthony.167 She was burned at the stake and many of her followers were punished through enslavement and deportation.168 Her failed sovereign challenge to the Kongolese legality triggered punishment, while the legality renewed itself through religious recommitment.

5. The Antonian Apocalypse Averted?

Kimpa Vita attempted a radical break with the Kingdom’s Catholic expressive forms, its legality, and its Portuguese entanglements. Born a noblewoman in 1684, she was burned to death for witchcraft 22 years later.169 In between, she believed God had sent the medieval Italian friar Saint Anthony, “incarnate in her”, to bring peace and re-found the Kingdom.170 God had specially created Kongo and she would help Him reinvigorate it.171 Kimpa Vita aimed to embody sovereignty. She positioned herself as an alternative to missionaries and other legality-sanctioned religious authorities, saying “she died every Friday and spent each weekend in Heaven conferring with the Heavenly Father about the affairs of Kongo”.172 Among the revelations she claimed to receive were that Jesus was born in Kongo, where the Virgin Mary was enslaved, and Jesus was baptized at São Salvador.173 Kimpa Vita’s followers depicted Jesus as a Black man dressed in Kongolese clothing.174 She accused the Capuchins of prioritizing images of European saints while denying the existence of Black ones.175 She insisted that, “there are black Kongolese up in heaven”.176 Kimpa Vita said Saint Anthony possessed her so he could “preach in Kibangu,” a local language.177 Her mission was to transgress European-inspired Christian norms and replace the Kingdom’s expressive forms with Kongolese ones.178 She wanted to radicalize Kongolese religion against European exploitation.

Kimpa Vita’s purported insights into Christianity’s origins and claim of direct access to divine authorities enacted a sovereign “return to chaos or the state of nature”.179 This was no mere theater. In 1704, she led followers to Mbanza Kongo, which had been destroyed in 1668 during a civil war (and following a defeat by the Portuguese), to resurrect the Kingdom.180 Hipolyta, wife of King Pedro IV, believed in her.181 Several rivals for the Kongolese throne did, too, including one of Pedro’s generals.182

That turned Pedro against Kimpa Vita. She also became pregnant by a companion she called her “Saint John” and “guardian angel”, causing her to doubt her own authority to lead.183 An apocalyptic movement’s failure to maintain sovereign purity can devastate it politically, and indeed, Kimpa Vita left São Salvador and was captured by Pedro’s men.184 He had her burned to death as a heretic and witch (under Kongolese law, not canon law).185 Following this, 30,000 Kongolese people, including many of her “Antonian” followers, were enslaved and exported, some to South Carolina.186 European missionaries sanctioned enslavement and deportation as punishments for witchcraft.187

Kimpa Vita believed that the Kingdom’s legality could not change without a sovereign rewriting of its religious expressive forms. However, Pedro achieved many of her political goals while strengthening orthodox Catholicism. He implemented power rotation among competing families and decentralized the government.188 These reforms yielded decades of peace and stability.189 Pedro even rebuilt São Salvador in 1709, five years after Kimpa Vita’s journey there.190 Kongolese political ideologies alternated between absolutism and consensus-building.191 In keeping with his new power-sharing legality, Pedro emphasized Lukeni’s role as the forging “blacksmith king” instead of that founding monarch’s military conquests.192 Pedro also fostered orthodox Catholic renewal. Rejecting an effort by Kimpa Vita to have a cross removed from a town square, Pedro and his supporters wore small crosses in front of their foreheads.193 He explained, “We wear the sign of the cross because we are Christians and in our hearts we profess the faith of the cross”.194 The kings who succeeded Pedro also embraced Catholicism, which remained an ideological resource for the legality even as institutional political authority became more diffuse.195

Like many Kongolese religious visionaries over the centuries, Kimpa Vita wanted a political revolution; she sought to use sovereignty to challenge legality.196 She triggered Pedro’s Catholic renewal instead. However, Kimpa Vita’s counternarratives may have endured. One of her slogans, Lukangu (“liberty”, from kanga or “salvation”), was chanted by Kongolese people during the Stono Rebellion, and then again before the Haitian Revolution.197 Many of those deported after her death “brought with them the attitudes that had fueled” her movement.198 Perhaps her prophecies brought apocalypse for overseas enslavers rather than for Portuguese missionaries. She may have primed sovereignty for resistance to future legalities.

6. The Stono Rebellion

Several Negroes joined them, they calling out Liberty, marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating.

—An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina (c. 1739)199

Religion “often constitutes a series of exit signs from a condition that is regarded as limited, alienating, unjust, illegitimate, [or] intolerable”.200 Sovereignty can erupt during a state of exception.201 Such a state commonly includes the inversion of what emotions count as desirable. For example, long-suffering may give way to exuberance and aggression.202 Surging “joy, disgust, fear, awe, and wonder” arm sovereignty to contest a legality.203 These emotions find expression in symbols, mythology, music, and ritual.204 “Nations rise and fall in crucibles of heightened emotional states”.205 Sovereignty motivates lawless violation of a legality.206 A government’s claims of control over meaning confront violent resistance.207

Sovereignty crested over the course of one day when enslaved Kongolese Catholics rose up against their South Carolina masters. What happened should not be overly valorized. The rebels killed people—if not quite indiscriminately, then at least with little hesitation.208 They were resisted by White militiamen as well as by enslaved people.209 In addition, unduly glorifying rebellion implies that “the majority, notably women, who carried on their lives as best they could … were less commendable”.210 Nonetheless, the Stono Rebellion showcased sovereignty contesting a colonial American legality.211

Late on 8 September or early on 9 September 1739, twenty local slaves from a ditch-cutting crew met at a storehouse outside of Charles Town (modern-day Charleston).212 They were supposed to be back on their plantations, but the overseer had left early.213 Although the store was closed, two White men were inside; one of them may have even been the absent overseer.214 The crew broke in, killed these two, and seized guns, munitions, provisions, and white cloth they used to make banners.215 According to one later account, the crew even left the White men’s heads on the steps.216 If this happened, it may have had cultural significance or inverted a form of punishment often meted out to slaves.217 The band proceeded to several plantations, killing 23 White people, sparing just one they deemed “a good Man and kind to his Slaves”.218 They were also prevented from killing others by fellow slaves.219 By the next afternoon, they had proceeded ten miles along the Pon Pon Road chanting “Liberty”, singing, banging drums, and gathering 60–100 marchers.220

They also fortuitously ran into Lt. Gov. William Bull, who called out the militia.221 At four o’clock, the militia met the slaves dancing in a field and fired on them, killing fourteen.222 The slaves fought back and then dispersed, with many quickly apprehended and executed; their heads were placed on every milepost along the way to Charles Town.223 The militia claimed to capture and kill another 30 fighters about a week later, although locals remained sure that more were still at large.224 Another 30 were reportedly seen a year after, “roaming around in gangs in the Carolina forests”.225 Thus ended the largest slave uprising in England’s mainland North American colonies.226 Some of the rebels probably did reach Florida.227

Perhaps these events lacked the significance given to them by English contemporaries and modern historians.228 Peter Charles Hoffer doubts that workers would have tried to escape on a dark night when they were “dead tired”.229 (He is not even certain that the rebels were the Stono ditch crew.230) He thinks the slaves meant only to break in and take “what they thought was their due for a hard day’s labor”.231 Perhaps they decided to press on only after they committed the capital offenses of burglary and murder at the storehouse.232 Or maybe they “just wanted to escape”.233 Be that as it may, the rebels, or some critical subset of them, were likely Kongolese Catholics with a plan to reach a southern sanctuary.234

7. Assuming They Were Catholic…

Kongolese Catholics were probably involved in the Stono Rebellion.235 That makes sense of Mr. Cato’s reference to the rebels being “not converted” and wanting to reach Spanish Florida. An English report on Stono identified among the rebels “a people brought from the Kingdom of Angola in Africa” who spoke Portuguese they learned from missionaries; “many Thousands of the Negroes there profess the Roman Catholic Religion” (these are clues that the rebels’ homeland was in fact Kongo).236 More than 10,000 Africans arrived in South Carolina to work on the rising rice and indigo plantations and of these, 60 percent came from the port of Kabinda, the “vast majority” of whom were Kongolese (often traded through intermediaries due to the anti-Protestant restrictions).237 Additionally, the Rebellion happened only 33 years after Kimpa Vita’s execution, which caused mass enslavement and deportation. The rebels may have been Antonians or others caught up in the strife.238

The Rebellion itself had Kongolese hallmarks. Rebels seized guns, raided effectively, and then lived off the land. Many Kongolese would have had military training, including with firearms.239 Recall also that the rebels chanted “Liberty”, carried white banners, and used drums. Each of these may have been a Kongolese religious or military expressive form. The Kikongo equivalent for “liberty” was an Antonian slogan.240 The root word also means “to bind or tie up”.241 This double entendre may have told other slaves to seize freedom by taking hold of their masters.242 In any event, the liberty chant was an act of naming. Possibilities are “actualized” in naming, and sovereignty’s power is actualized “within the event horizon of terror and wonder” caused by a state of exception.243 Chanting “liberty” bound the rebels “in shared responsibility” for a political ideal they held sacred.244

The color white could have had ideological meaning also. One narrative said Afonso won a victory after the Virgin Mary appeared in white, which “dazzled the non-Christian enemy”.245 São Salvador’s white cathedral was dedicated to Our Lady of Victory.246 White had connections to the dead and ancestors, too, and Kimpa Vita said the Virgin Mary had been Kongolese.247 The rebels’ banners may have been recalling some of this.248 As for the drums, a missionary in the early 1700s observed that before making war, one Kongolese noble would have drums played accompanied by shouting.249 The rebels could have been doing the same. Drums were also used at Kongolese Catholic Masses.250

Mark M. Smith notes another detail: the Rebellion’s timing.251 The uprising began on either a Saturday night or the early Sunday morning hours.252 (By order of law, ditch crews were denied the Sunday rest available to other enslaved people.253 Johann Boltzius, a local Lutheran missionary, saw the Rebellion as divine punishment for this English sacrilege against the Christian Sabbath.254) Catholics dedicate Saturdays to the Virgin Mary, and September 8 was the day her Nativity was celebrated.255 Although Smith finds no direct evidence of Kongolese commemorations of this holiday, Kongolese Catholics knew the liturgical calendar.256 Smith points out another peculiarity: the Rebellion was eleven days before the Nativity as calculated by the Gregorian calendar.257 But it was right on time under the Julian calendar, which English Carolinians still followed.258 Maybe the rebels wanted auspicious timing for their sovereign uprising.259

Finally, after encountering Bull, the rebels stopped in a field and then “set to dancing, Singing and beating Drums”.260 This was the point when the rebel leader reportedly delivered the speech quoted by his descendant.261 The English took the dancing to be either drunken or an effort to rally others.262 (Mr. Cato agreed with the alcohol explanation.263) Another commentator interprets the dance as sheer “exhilaration”.264 To be sure, sovereign emotions can include “glory in domination of those deemed less worthy of respect—the ‘enemies’ in Carl Schmitt’s infamous ‘friend/enemy’ dyad”.265 But another explanation refers to the Kongolese sangamento (from Kikongo ku-sanga or nsanga, referring to leaping).266 A sangamento was a “mock fight ritual” before battles.267 The sangamento raised fighting spirits.268 Until at least 1880, one was performed in commemoration of Afonso I.269 It also came to the Americas and may have inspired modern Carnival celebrations.270 In the early 1600s, dancing the sangamento was a declaration of war.271 Perhaps historians have read too much into drunken revelry. Maybe the dance was a generic form of Victor Turner’s communitas.272 Or perhaps the rebels’ sovereignty effervesced into familiar religious and cultural expressive forms.273 Perhaps, faced with a brutal legality, Kongolese Catholic sovereignty brimmed over—in the words of South Carolina’s official report on Stono, seeking “Liberty and Life”.274

8. Assuming They Had a Plan…

South Carolina’s legality included religious tyranny and the English thought that this factored into the Rebellion. Fewer than two months earlier, Savannahians detained a suspected Spanish spy.275 After the Rebellion, leading Georgia colonist William Stephens believed this man to have “been employed a pretty while, in corrupting the Negroes of Carolina”.276 One Charlestonian urged “the taking of St. Augustine” due to “the Encouragement & Protection given by [the Spanish] to our Negroes that Run away there”, including the Stono rebels.277 Blaming Spain was certainly convenient.278 Still, while there is no direct evidence that the Spanish incited the Stono Rebellion, sanctuary was no mere conspiracy theory.279 It was religiously inspired Spanish policy and the Stono rebels would not have been the first enslaved Carolinians to avail themselves of it.

Shortly before the Rebellion, an English colonist wrote, some Africans escaped to St. Augustine, and when Georgia’s leadership demanded their return, the Spanish refused based on royal policy.280 News of this reached other enslaved people, “as it is believed, from the Spanish Emissaries”; four slaves and an Irishman reached Florida and “were received there with great honours, one of them had a Commission given to him, and a Coat faced with Velvet”.281 Theorizing as to how word had traveled, the English observed that many Central Africans spoke Portuguese—“which Language is as near Spanish as Scotch is to English”—due to Catholic missionaries back in their homelands.282 Kongo’s religious legality affected imperial power struggles across the ocean.

So did the Spanish religious legality to Carolina’s south. Soon after the escape of the five people, several Spaniards who would “give no account of themselves” were detained in Georgia.283 Another partially successful escape attempt led to the hanging of an African in Charles Town.284 South Carolina started offering bounties for escapees’ scalps.285 Then, at the end of July 1739—just two months before Stono—a Spanish emissary went to Charles Town on the pretense of sending a message to General James Oglethorpe, who was nowhere in the area.286 Bull concluded that the Spanish were inciting slaves.287 He warned White Carolinians that the Africans upon whom they depended “may in little time become their Enemies, if not their Masters”.288

Religion can be a set of exit signs out of tyranny, and here it signaled a well-frequented highway to St. Augustine.289 In 1687, eleven people undertook the first slave exodus from Carolina to Florida.290 By 1738, a year before the Stono Rebellion, over 100 people had gone, and 253 people escaped Carolina slavery between 1732 and 1739, over a tenth of them West-Central Africans.291 Many of these efforts involved sophisticated planning, including a 1724 escape arranged by people on three plantations and another involving 23 people held on different plantations.292 In August 1739, two months before the Stono Rebellion, an Indian reported that a hundred slaves working to build a frontier fort killed their English overseer and then asked how to get to Florida.293 One official recounted other escapees asking about “the road to the Spaniards”.294

In line with George Cato’s recollection, religion likely motivated some escapees. Complex cultural and religious histories can congeal into stable commitments. People’s commitments “are complex, chunky genealogies, bricolages of existing forms” founded on “a local confluence of social, political, economic, and cultural contexts”.295 Kongolese Catholics often showed great commitment to their religion. They evangelized other enslaved people in Brazil and the Caribbean, and mestres de scola may have had an important role in sustaining Catholicism and developing Vodou.296 As late as 1860, slaves were seen on a ship leading a ceremony “much like a chanting of the Litany in Catholic churches”, and John Thornton suspects that this was indeed a Vespers service.297

Some Kongolese Catholics resisted Protestantism quite stridently. African Catholics in 1600s Amsterdam maintained a secret house church called “Moyses”.298 Catholics on Barbados decried being held on an “island of heretics”.299 In 1641, cofradía members in Brazil assaulted Protestants who refused to venerate an image of the Virgin Mary.300 Enslaved Catholics on Dutch Curaçao resisted Protestantism until their rulers adopted toleration and in time, nearly the entire Black population was Catholic.301 Slaves on English St. Christopher had their own weddings, prayed before crucifixes, hosted secret missions by French Catholic priests, and refused to let a French Protestant lead their prayers.302

Catholic intransigence was not universal. Many Black Catholics in New Netherland became Protestant, as did some in South Carolina and Dutch Brazil, where they fought against their former Portuguese masters.303 However, one Black New Netherlander named Abraham Jansen refused to pay a Protestant tithe, citing his Catholicism.304 “Spanish Negroes” instrumental to an attempted 1741 uprising in New York “insisted on being identified in court by their Iberian Catholic baptismal names” and one “made a point of kissing a crucifix on the day of his execution”.305

Protestant legalities opposed Catholicism in return. Many Carolinians had left England hoping to halt Spanish Catholic expansion from Florida.306 However, their own legality made them reluctant to bring African slaves into Protestant folds. Katherine Gerbner has examined how Protestants “tended to view conversion as inconsistent or incompatible with slavery” until the mid-1700s.307 There were early Protestant missions to slaves, many featuring attacks on African Catholicism.308 In 1737, John Wesley, the future founder of Methodism, preached along the very Pon Pon Road where the Stono rebels would later march.309 He was followed by the legendary evangelist George Whitefield in 1738, who condemned slavery and said rebellions were divinely inspired.310 However, these efforts met with strong rejection and even violence from slaveowners.311

Legalities sought to prevent the rise of any Black Protestant sovereignty. Where Iberian Catholics saw baptism as a way to induce slave conformity, White Protestants thought it risky, especially in places like South Carolina where “even a modest percentage of Christianized Africans could easily form the majority of a congregation”.312 Dutch Protestants made it harder to convert.313 English colonial legal codes and nearly all-White churches started defining “Christian” and “Negro” as opposites.314 Virginia redefined Africans as “‘hereditary heathens’ who were ineligible for Christianity”.315 Protestants racialized their religions in support of their slavery legalities. Only in the late 1600s did they begin to open baptism to Africans and reframe slavery as based on race.316 Colonists still limited Black church membership to a select few domestic slaves, while other enslaved people “ceased to be of concern to most Anglican missionaries”.317

Francis Le Jau was an exception, criticizing planters who did not overcome the legality for the sake of religion and see their slaves “as Christian Brethren, & use ‘em with humanity”.318 South Carolina’s changing legality depended instead on narratives of slaves’ inhumanity. The earliest versions of Carolina slavery let Black Charlestonians congregate and saw enslaved cowboys roam the backwoods.319 However, the colony’s first slave code, enacted in 1690, reflected concerns about Black sovereignty. It restricted slaves’ movements and immunized colonists who killed escapees.320 Accused slaves were tried by White juries and frequently sentenced to death, perpetual servitude, and torture.321 Soon, South Carolina made slavery hereditary and authorized new mandatory punishments like branding, castration, and other forms of mutilation.322

Brutal legality was backed by religious developments. Protestants took more interest in slaves, possibly to dissuade them from escaping to Florida.323 Their religion was made compatible with slavery.324 Five years after criticizing Carolina’s enslavers, Whitefield became one.325 When one of his White followers began preaching emancipation, the government intervened.326 Evangelicals converted only a few Black people.327 Le Jau started requiring enslaved converts to declare: “you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live”.328 He came to believe that Black Christian literacy posed threats after encountering a Carolina man who prophesied that “there would be a dismal time and the moon would be turned into blood”.329 Protestant missionaries wanted to reinforce the opposite narrative: that Christian slaves were the most compliant.330 The Anglican missionary Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.) lobbied for a law confirming that baptism did not trigger manumission.331 The S.P.G.’s mission to enslaved peoples was, Gerbner writes, “completely master-centered” and contributed to slavery’s racialization.332 As these efforts started to persuade masters, the S.P.G. had them force their slaves into Anglicanism.333 Africans resisted, and missionaries criticized them as too unintelligent to become Christians.334 Fear of Black Protestant sovereignty outweighed religious motives to convert slaves.

The Stono Rebellion could have inspired sovereignty anyway and been taken as counterevidence of Africans’ intelligence. To combat this, South Carolina made its legality even more oppressive in 1740. Enslaved people were subjected to random interrogations, barred from traveling without passes, and disarmed.335 Slaves who informed on each other were rewarded.336 Manumission was restricted to the legislature.337 Possibly responding to the Rebellion, Sunday labor was condemned.338 Perhaps most strikingly, teaching slaves to read and write was outlawed.339 South Carolinians even tried to restrict the importation of West-Central Africans in favor of White people and other Black people.340 They complained about enslaved people using religious gatherings as a pretext for subversion.341 Enslaved sovereignty stoked White paranoia and South Carolina’s legality responded by trying to monopolize religious and racial narratives.342 The persistence of alternative worldviews forced White South Carolina to decide just how committed it was to violence, and strict supervision and coercion proved to be its answer.343

In this context, what might have been the meaning of the Stono rebels’ reported remark, “we ‘is not converted’”?344 Maybe it was a reference to the rebels rejecting Christianity. Carolina Africans were starting to develop “Obeah or Conjure”, discerning spiritual forces like those found in indigenous African religions (belief in which survived in Kongo despite missionaries’ efforts).345 Related cosmology would contribute to Haitian Vodou.346 However, there is also evidence of Catholic intransigence. The Stono rebels evidently aimed to reach Florida, where conversion to Catholicism was a precondition for sanctuary.347 For people willing to die rather than become Christians, this would have been a strange destination.348 But for Kongolese seeking to join fellow Catholics in freedom, it would have been natural. In any event, given the religious dimensions of the English legality, being “not converted” amounted to a declaration of sacred sovereignty.

9. The Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose

The freedmen of Mose had vowed to be ‘the most cruel enemies of the English’, and to shed their ‘last drop of blood in defense of the Great Crown of Spain and the Holy Faith’, and many did so over nearly thirty years of armed service.

—J. Landers (1996)349

What sort of legality, what “paradigms for dedication, acquiescence, contradiction, and resistance”, awaited Africans in Florida?350 Sanctuary founded upon religion and imperial interests, a realm that practiced slavery in ways different than the English, and a home where Black people could enter into an enduring political covenant with Spain even in the face of English and then American hostility.

10. Religious Sanctuary

The waves of Black Carolinians exercising their sovereignty and leaving the English legality helped form a new legality: Spanish sanctuary. Ten adults and a baby escaped to St. Augustine in 1688.351 They sought Catholic baptism.352 The Spanish governor Diego de Quiroga y Losada had them catechized and given sacramental baptisms and marriages, set them to work as laborers in his house, and then refused an English demand for their return.353 The Spanish legality integrated the escapees using religion, although Quiroga later sold these people and settled accounts with the English.354 More escapees followed over the next three years, causing English governor James Colleton to say slaves were fleeing “dayly”, a situation the English (correctly) predicted would lead Black people to “massacre their masters and then to desert”.355 Florida’s leadership sought legal guidance, and in 1693, King Charles II decreed in an order-in-council (cédula) that the escapees, “who fled on the pretext of being baptized”—perhaps even without full sincerity—would enjoy liberty “so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same”.356 This decision mirrored 1680 decrees granting sanctuary to slaves who reached sparsely populated Trinidad and were then baptized.357

The legality of sanctuary had begun, built upon African and Spanish Catholicism and hostility toward Protestantism. It would be strengthened by another dozen royal decrees issued over the following century offering liberty to those escaping enslavement from the Leeward Islands “to Puerto Rico, from French to Spanish Hispaniola, from Jamaica to Cuba, from English outposts in Belize to Guatemala and Honduras”, and from “Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao[ ] and the Wild Coast of South America to Venezuela”.358 Finally, in 1750, Spain granted liberty to any slaves who arrived in the empire from English and Dutch territories seeking to become Catholic.359 The Spanish legality deployed religion as a weapon against Protestant colonies.

Sanctuary was not always granted in reality. In 1697, Florida’s governor returned six escapees to the English to avoid conflict and not create a perverse incentive for the English to let slaves escape and then demand compensation.360 A similar “case-by-case” approach was initially taken by Gov. Antonio de Benavides (in office 1718–1734).361 Benavides auctioned off a group of escapees, interpreting the 1693 decree as applicable only to the very first group who arrived.362 He soon changed his mind for strategic and humanitarian reasons.363 In 1721, South Carolina officials fretted that slaves had nearly executed “a new Revolution” that “would probably have been attended by the utter extirpation” of the colony.364 In 1724, hoping to secure escapees’ return, South Carolina’s governor forbade the English to attack St. Augustine or its allied Indians.365 Benavides urged his negotiators to cite sanctuary and make Carolinians aware of it.366 That year, ten escapees arrived, saying they knew about the policy.367 In 1725, Benavides did not answer English demands for the return of eight escapees.368 By 1728, the English believed he was paying 30 pieces of eight for every African rescued to Florida.369

Benavides sought further royal guidance.370 In 1731, the Council of the Indies decreed that escapees were to remain in Florida without compensation to English owners.371 The legal rationale combined realpolitik and religion.372 The Council noted that the English lost profit when slaves escaped.373 It also reiterated that people who said they wanted to become Catholic should not be returned to “Heretic Owners”.374 People arriving in Spanish domains knew what was expected of them. Many who sought freedom, possibly advised by priests and legal experts, said they wanted to convert.375 They understood “how to live” in Florida’s legality.376

Benavides and his successor, Manuel de Montiano (in office 1737–1749), at least considered inciting English slaves to rebel.377 In 1733, the Spanish king confirmed that sanctuary was available for escapees, though they had to work as indentured servants for four years (a period shorter than English indentures).378 Benavides broadcasted this news “by beat of Drum round the town of St. Augustine (where many Negroes belonging to English Vessels … had the Opportunity of hearing it)”.379 Montiano later boasted that English slaves knew about sanctuary.380 It would either win Carolina’s labor force over to the Spanish or trigger revolts.381

Montiano granted freedom to arriving escapees in 1738, a year before the Stono Rebellion, and the refugees laughed when their previous master tried to retrieve them.382 Montiano also forwarded to Madrid a “Plea of the Fugitive Blacks from the Plantations of the English”.383 It declared escapees’ desire “to be Christians and to follow the True Religion in which We Are Saved”.384 They pledged to forever be the “most cruel enemies of the English” and “shed the Last drop of Blood in defense of the Great Crown of Spain and our Holy faith”.385 They saw their sovereignty and Spain’s as mutually entangled.

Montiano also granted fugitives an outpost later called the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (“Royal Benefit of Saint Teresa of Mose”, more commonly referred to as “Fort Mose”).386 Eight months before Stono, Montiano published an edict (bando) designating this as a home for escapees.387 The English blamed this for the Rebellion.388 With Madrid’s approval, the site was settled by 38 married men and their families.389 The Council of the Indies also forbade the sale of any future escapees.390 Fort Mose sat just north of St. Augustine, on the site of a former Indian mission village decimated by disease, and it was a promising buffer against the English.391 Its obvious strategic value has led some scholars to call sanctuary “less than authentic”.392 However, the area was also rich in resources and the Spanish expected it to become agriculturally productive.393 Spain gave residents the royal subsidies available to “soldiers, religious and government officials, pensioners, converts, and others”.394 Fort Mose was given a Catholic priest and led by Francisco Menéndez.395 It did participate in the Spanish colonial legality, but then, no actual society embodies pure sovereignty.396

Menéndez led a life of both sovereignty and legality. Born in West Africa, he was enslaved in South Carolina.397 With nine others, he fled to St. Augustine and was sold at Benavides’s auction.398 A Yamasee Indian chief allied with the Spanish credited Menéndez with fighting alongside them, but said a Yamasee warrior had wrongly sold Menéndez back into slavery in Florida.399 In time, Menéndez became a militiaman.400 This was a momentous way of joining Florida’s legality. Legalities are “held together by the force” of commitments to them.401 Two otherwise-identical societies will differ greatly if one is “universally venerated” while the other is considered “fundamentally unjust”.402 Conviction matters, and militia service was a sign of political faith made by Black refugees.403

Menéndez proved to be a pillar of the legality. In 1728, he was awarded a commendation and a promise of freedom for defending Florida against English invaders.404 He ultimately won liberty from Montiano after petitioning on behalf of himself and others.405 Montiano then made Menéndez the authority over Fort Mose, whose residents included many Kongolese.406 Menéndez proved a great leader. Infuriated after the Stono Rebellion, at Bull’s and Oglethorpe’s urging, the English again invaded Florida.407 Their goal was to stop Spain from stirring slave sovereignty into rebellions.408 (Florida was also a theater in the broader nine-year conflict that came to be known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.409) Fort Mose’s residents were evacuated into St. Augustine and Oglethorpe attacked the outpost.410 The night before, Florida’s leaders promised 500 Black people great rewards if they would defeat the English.411 The Spaniards were desperate and Montiano believed St. Augustine would fall.412 The English force counted thousands of fighters against the mere hundreds in the Spanish militia.413 Oglethorpe did take Fort Mose, but the defenders swiftly counterattacked with Cuban reinforcements.414 They killed 50 English soldiers and captured another 20 as the English withdrew to prevent another rumored slave revolt in Carolina and to get home before hurricane season.415 Armed Black sovereignty in Florida, and the threat of more in South Carolina, defeated the English effort to avenge Stono.

Menéndez won another commendation and then took to the sea in hopes of reaching Spain and collecting a militia captain’s pension.416 He was captured by the British, who flogged him and ordered him re-enslaved.417 (Coincidentally, the ship he was held on was in New York when the city executed the “Spanish Negro” rebels.418) Somehow, he was back in a leadership role at Fort Mose by 1752, possibly due to the advocacy of the Spanish, who regularly protested the seizure of their Black mariners.419 Fort Mose kept growing and appealing to Carolina slaves’ sovereign hopes. In 1740, 150 slaves revolted unsuccessfully outside Charles Town, possibly hoping to reach Florida.420 Another conspiracy aiming to reach St. Augustine was discovered in 1743.421

The Spanish developed a legality of sanctuary to undermine the English and honor their own Catholicism. Black people, including those led by Menéndez, made it their own by converting and risking their lives in its defense. These included Kongolese and others, but surely “the Church’s presence in Florida made Spanish St. Augustine even more attractive to enslaved Catholics”.422 Whether escapees went to Florida because they were Catholic or they became Catholic because they needed sanctuary there, religion opened the way to a freer legality.423

11. Florida’s Racial Order

Florida’s racial legality was shaped by Catholicism and other factors that made it somewhat less rigid than South Carolina’s. Spanish slave law was based on Roman law, which recognized slaves as human beings who naturally loved liberty—not chattel, as in English colonies.424 Spanish law “favored” freedom on an abstract level.425 Slaves could have personal property and some of their earnings.426 Slavery was multiracial, involving war captives, convicts, and debtors.427 The seminal thirteenth-century legal code known as the Siete Partidas (“Seven Parts”) humanized slavery and provided ways out of it.428 It allowed for the manumission of slaves abused by their masters.429 Slaves could sue their masters on this ground.430 They could also bring criminal complaints.431 If a master intended to sell a slave, the slave could litigate to seek a new owner, including one who might manumit.432 Converts to Catholicism were disproportionately freed, perhaps because of the “piety and integrity” of masters.433 Slaves also had rights under canon law, including to marry and to family unity, which they used to prevent separation.434

Africans were in Florida from the very start of colonization (and even before, in the case of one mulatto shipwrecked in 1554)—the free Black man Juan Garrido explored the region and slaves labored to build St. Augustine in 1565.435 Africans had been involved in Spanish society during 700 years of Moorish rule, with many occasions to prove their fighting skills and intelligence.436 Many of the Africans enslaved in Florida were Christians. By the mid-1500s, Spain required owners to baptize slaves and let them attend Mass.437 Some Florida slaves were Kongolese Catholics, shipped to the Americas by English Protestants. Here the Spanish engaged in legal subtlety, saying that owners bought these slaves unaware of their being baptized—despite many of them having cross markings on their chests.438 In addition, if Floridians could not keep Kongolese Catholics as slaves, then these people would be sold to heretics.439 The exact nature of the legal problem is unclear, as Spanish law allowed for Christians to be held as slaves.440 In any event, Catholic authorities in Florida saw the Kongolese as un-catechized and would provisionally baptize them, assuming baptisms in Africa may not have been valid.441 Where early Protestant legalities saw Black Christianity as inviting a threatening sovereignty, the Spanish legality understood religion as a way to ameliorate danger.

Other aspects of the legality helped enslaved Africans. Spanish courts gradually interpreted the law in favor of two rights: coartación, or self-purchase out of slavery, and ownership change.442 Both rights grew out of local litigation, not royal decrees.443 Enslaved people also appealed to last testaments allegedly manumitting them, reliance on masters’ promises of “conditional liberty”, the right of dependent people (miserabiles) to receive writs of protection (amparo), and their own right of self-preservation against masters’ violence.444 Some aspects of labor were less harsh than in Carolina, too: “slaves had free time to engage in their own social and economic activities; slaves were able to utilize the resources of both frontier and coast to advantage; [and] the trade in slaves was never massive”.445 Sovereign revolts did not arise in Florida as they did in South Carolina.

Black participation in the legality may have been part of the reason. Governments are not the sole creators of law.446 Through litigation, slaves made law and helped define Enlightenment ideas about “natural rights, tyranny, and humanity”.447 Many legal suits were funded by Black people and brought by women in particular, showing that “street vendors, wet nurses, and artisans … had access to cash to put up for their own freedom or that of relatives”.448 Cofradías provided institutional support.449 Such efforts hearkened back to an aspect of West-Central Africa’s legality: the kijiko-focused Principle of Return (Mucuâ), which urged solidarity in support of freedom—the need for a “community to which an enslaved could return”, for an nbata rinène (“great house”).450 African and Spanish legalities combined into a new community bound by “common symbols and discourse, common narratives and interpretations”.451

To be sure, slave litigation was never widespread. Bianca Premo counts just 268 cases brought by slaves against their masters during the entire eighteenth century.452 And Spanish slavery could often be harsh. The first known enslaved Black people brought to the modern United States accompanied a Spanish expedition in 1526.453 They joined a native uprising and burned the Spaniards’ huts.454

However, the Spanish legality did channel hopes for liberty that might otherwise have triggered sovereign revolt. Manumission was “reasonably attainable in some regions” and coartación “led to a robust free black population in Latin America, particularly in cities”.455 Those people had real opportunities, as Menéndez’s life shows.456 So did mixed-race people, who were usually freed and legitimated if their fathers were White and who could serve in public roles.457 Within the Church, Black people sometimes became lay leaders and even held respected offices, although they could also be excluded from religious orders.458 Fort Mose had its own resident-built church.459 Black people chose godparents within and across racial lines, creating close familial and patronage ties.460 Archeologists have found rosaries at Fort Mose and a medal of St. Christopher carrying Jesus over the water—a fitting symbol for people who had come so far, some bolstered by Catholic faith, and some hoping to traverse the native-African “watery divide separating the living and the dead and be reunited with long-lost African ancestors”.461 Florida’s religious legality invited Black participation.

Spanish Florida recognized its dependence on free Black people.462 There was also an alternative: exercising fuller sovereignty and becoming maroons. Opting out of a legality can be a powerful way of critiquing it.463 Florida’s backcountry was home to several large, independent Black communities.464 These helped Black people resist racial restrictions. Spain did not destroy these communities and so had to negotiate terms of coexistence.465 Black people made dignified space for themselves both inside and adjacent to the Spanish legality, and in time they were one out of every four St. Augustinians.466

12. The New Political Covenant

In Kongo-neighboring regions, runaway kijikos (enslaved war captives) could avail themselves of safe haven and asylum.467 A person enslaved wrongly could seek protection from a powerful lord and someone wrongly accused of a crime could move to a new area.468 Both options required protective and welcoming communities.469 Both carried mutual obligations. Escapees sometimes enacted this in maroon communities.470 Florida’s legality had parallels.

One of the most prominent was the Black militia, as Menéndez’s life shows. Africans may have been part of the first Floridian expedition against the English in 1676.471 St. Augustine’s Black and mulatto militias dated to 1681.472 Two years later, there were 48 Black militiamen.473 They were led by their own elected officers and received the same pay and uniforms as White men.474 In 1685–1686, Black people and other Spanish soldiers raided the English, liberating a dozen of the Carolina governor’s slaves.475 Escapees brought with them knowledge of the backcountry, the English language, and sometimes (as for many Kongolese) military experience.476 Escapees were armed—“sometimes almost immediately”—and sent back to Carolina to free others.477 England’s labor force became St. Augustine’s fighting one.478

The English contemplated arming their own slaves lest the colony fall.479 They attacked St. Augustine in 1719 to try to block Black insurrectionary sovereignty.480 Before the Stono Rebellion, rumors spread that the Spanish were paying Black soldiers for White scalps—and they at least considered doing so.481 Around the same time, Oglethorpe discovered that his White ranks included Catholic spies.482 English Virginians feared that their slaves communicated constantly with Spanish officials in Cuba.483 Fear of Black sovereignty spread.

England’s racialized paranoia materialized three times. In 1706, the Spanish unsuccessfully invaded Carolina with a mixed-race force numbering hundreds.484 Then, in 1715, indigenous Carolina Yamasees and enslaved Africans launched a failed rebellion.485 This “Yamasee War”, which Le Jau blamed on English cruelty, was what led Menéndez and others to Florida.486 The Spanish also bought and freed the Yamasees’ Black slaves and then sent them to raid Carolina.487 The English complained that their slaves were “taken”, not that they had revolted.488 The English legality could not conceive of Black sovereignty. In 1741, an Englishman even wrote that escapees were betrayed by the Spanish and would not aid them in future conflicts.489 That proved false the following year when Spanish Black and mulatto regiments—led by non-White officers—joined thousands of others in invading Georgia.490 The London Gazette reported with shock that Black officers accompanied the Spanish governor on the frontline, “dressed in Gold and Silver Lace Clothes like other officers and … kept in the Pay as the other regiments”.491 One escapee militiaman used his knowledge of the terrain and language to ambush enemy soldiers.492

The Spanish were rebuffed.493 However, the legality of Georgia was transformed. Georgia was founded in 1732 with a ban on slavery, often attributed to a desire to better the lives of poor White poeple.494 The policy also noted the security risk posed by Florida’s sanctuary law—Boltzius, the Lutheran minister, referred to Black people and the Spanish as “cruel enemies within and without”.495 Georgia was an all-White buffer and escapee-catchment zone.496 After the Spanish invasion’s defeat, in 1750, slavery was legalized due to economic concerns and bolstered confidence, with even Boltzius agreeing despite his earlier criticism of forced labor on the Christian Sabbath.497 However, this provided Spain with another opportunity. In 1753, shortly after Menéndez’s return to Fort Mose, Florida’s governor successfully threatened to have Black militias invade Georgia unless the English released other Black mariners.498

Militia service was not useful merely for Spain. It also meant Black people’s integration into the legality. Men held leadership roles.499 Martial ties often led to marital and godparent relationships.500 It also gave new legal rights: militiamen received the fuero (civil immunity), as well as medical and veterans’ benefits.501

The relationship between Spanish and Black Floridians was not always equal. In 1749, a new governor ordered Black people to move out of the city and back to Fort Mose.502 However, they complied only after he promised strengthened defenses.503 Fort Mose built a new church and rectory.504 In 1763, 3000 Black people lived in the city and outpost.505 The local bishop celebrated Black peoples’ roles within the local Church.506

In keeping with kijiko norms, militia service triggered Spanish responsibilities.507 A great test came in 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to the English.508 Despite the English promising religious liberty for Catholics, many Black people joined a royally funded exodus to Cuba.509 A wealthy Cuban donated land to provide a new home for these wayfarers, including Menéndez.510 Frontier life was brutal and Black people suffered racial discrimination, including in widows’ benefits.511 Poverty afflicted many.512 Still, Spanish sanctuary continued to appeal to escapees exercising sovereignty, including from Carolina—who arrived now by boat instead of on foot.513

However, the Spanish legality was beginning to change, in part due to new Enlightenment narratives favoring efficiency and centralization over piety and duty.514 Spain drastically strengthened the African slave trade.515 Religious expressions were revised as slavery’s defenders emphasized that captivity among Catholics was better than freedom among infidels.516 Spain arranged for the return of escapees to the Danish in 1767, albeit conditioned on religious liberty for them.517 The Haitian Revolution drastically raised fears of Black sovereignty, leading many Spanish planters to criticize their legality as too lax.518 Black cofradías were restricted.519 Spain ended sanctuary for escapees from the French.520 Slave revolts within the Spanish Empire contributed to authorities seeing (canonically forbidden) family separation as expedient.521 Spaniards feared that Black sovereignty could no longer be controlled by their legality, so they tightened it.

The old legality and religious commitments were not entirely dead. Spain overrode Venezuelan authorities to free escapees from the Dutch in 1787.522 In 1779, Black Cuban militiamen proved their continued allegiance by defending the island during the American Revolution.523 The Spanish retook Florida in 1783.524 Escapees from Georgia and its defeated Tory masters headed south.525 Florida granted them sanctuary with work and registration requirements, subjecting their religious sincerity to only light scrutiny.526 Two hundred and fifty-one former slaves were registered over the outgoing English governor’s objections and then given shelter with the new governor and other townspeople.527 They soon became local leaders.528 In 1790, Florida introduced new laws allotting newcomers land, and Black people who were free participated in this system, sometimes as equals and even as slaveowners.529 Black people became the local majority, and ten to twenty percent of them were free.530 A school was opened, with Black children required to sit by classroom doors but protected against insults.531 Other racially discriminatory legal measures went unenforced, including weapons restrictions and curfews.532 Spanish courts considered claims of illegal enslavement.533 Fort Mose, now abandoned, became a “favorite spot for large Sunday afternoon oyster roasts”.534

Black militiamen continued to defend the colony, including against Andrew Jackson’s invasions.535 Maroon Black people comprised part of the Seminole forces that fought American intrusions into the backcountry.536 There even arose another leader like Menéndez. In 1786, Prince and Judy Whitten, together with their son and daughter, escaped across the St. Marys River from Georgia into Florida.537 Renamed “Juan Bautista” and “María Rafaela Quenty”, the senior Whittens served as godparents for 54 people.538 When María Rafaela’s employer demanded that she work in the fields, Juan Bautista litigated for new employment and restitution for her.539 María Rafaela even (unsuccessfully) sued several local patricians for insults and mistreatment.540 In 1793, the French attacked Florida, and Juan Bautista enlisted in the Black militia, which was commanded by his next-door neighbor and included many escapees; they elected him their sergeant.541 The men helped retake what is now Jacksonville and Amelia Island, earning them the governor’s praise.542 Twenty years later, when Georgians invaded Florida, Juan Bautista led a key attack on their supply lines.543 He and his comrades were fighting against their own re-enslavement at American hands.544 Perhaps they felt like sovereigns even as they defended their legality.

Despite efforts like these, the United States triumphed where England had failed. In 1790, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson convinced Spain to abolish sanctuary.545 Spain occasionally gave the owners of escaped slaves restitution and even re-enslaved some people.546 Georgia’s governor told President James Monroe that armed Black people in Spanish Florida would inspire insurrections.547 This renewed fear of Black sovereignty inspired American invaders to defeat the Spanish.548 A new generation of Black people faced the same choice of legality as their forebears: stay in Florida or go to Cuba. One hundred and forty-five free Black people sailed to the Caribbean.549

Neither those who left nor those who stayed enjoyed the old legality. The Americans forbade free Black men from any government roles and denied land grants to those who served in the integrated militia (sometimes as musicians and not even as full soldiers).550 Cuba’s government embraced Enlightenment liberalism—and racially exclusive suffrage.551 New national legalities upended the old one, however checkered, of inclusion and freedom.

13. Conclusions

The “good old Flag of Spain … enslaved none but the slaves giving equal rights & privileges to all as his subjects without distinction…”.

—Eliza M. Whitwell, quadroon and Florida heiress (1868)552

Memories of Kongolese Catholicism lived on. Catholic-esque religious societies and penitential practices were recorded among South Carolina Sea Islanders in 1834.553 Black Catholics attacked early Protestant missionaries in 1800s St. Augustine, just as the Brazilian Kongolese had done to the Dutch who would not bow to the Blessed Virgin Mary.554 Floridian Catholic slaves entered sacramental marriages and then used pressure from priests to keep their families together.555 St. Augustinians fighting for the Union in the Civil War sang “O hail, Ma-ry, hail!”556

The Stono Rebellion was remembered, too. George Cato, born years after the Civil War and nearly 150 years after the uprising, recounted his ancestor’s speech referring to Spanish sanctuary and possibly to Kongolese Catholicism.557 He believed his ancestor took “a darin’ chance on losin’ his life, not so much for his own benefit as it was to help others”.558 He was proud of this sacrifice. “He die but he die for doin’ de right, as he see it”.559

Spanish sanctuary was not forgotten, either. Abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings wrote in 1858 of how Spain gave those “[t]orn from their native land, their friends and homes” a second freedom, until the Americans “murdered many of these free men, and brought others to the United States and consigned them to slavery”.560 He deemed the American conquest of Florida “our national turpitude”.561 Ten years later, mixed-race Florida élite Eliza Whitwell wrote the nostalgic words quoted above. In the 1920s, Irene Wright and the prolific Black Floridian scholar Zora Neale Hurston published early historical notes on Fort Mose.562

A memory of utopia, whether fully accurate or not, is “like a seed, a legal DNA, a genetic code by which the imagined integration is the template for a thousand real integrations of corpus, discourse, and commitment”.563 From Whitwell’s genteel drawing room to Hurston’s study to the battlefields and polemics of the Civil War, the Kongolese episodes discussed here became a “primordial, imaginary, true unity that occurred in a vanished instant of long ago”—and kept firing new sovereign hopes and visions.564

The Kongolese trilogy does not enjoy that pride of place in modern popular or academic history. It should. Legalities can make new epics relevant to their self-understanding.565 The history considered here is epic: trans-Atlantic in scope, with waves of sovereignty shaping legality across centuries, it offers a centering of Black sovereignties and religiously inspired inclusion. It chronicles human aspirations to “something more than reason and legality alone”, to “the affective commitment signaled by sacrifice; for a justice that transcends legality; for the possibility of grace, pardon, or redemption … and, when all else fails, for an escape”.566 Those memories can broaden modern understandings of American origins and pursuits of freedom, opening new horizons of inspiration for today. Some even see glimpses of God in these things. Somewhere in the dance of legality and sovereignty there happened mercy, justice, betrayal, discrimination, resistance—and the heart many people needed to make their world less heartless, the soul to make their conditions less soulless.567