The Spanish strategy for defending their claim of Florida at first was based on organizing the
indigenous people into a
mission system. The mission Native Americans were to serve as militia to protect the colony from English incursions from the north. But a combination of raids by South Carolina colonists and new European
infectious diseases, to which they did not have immunity, decimated Florida's native population. After the local Native Americans had all but died out, Spanish authorities encouraged renegade Native Americans and runaway slaves from England's southern colonies to move to their territory. The Spanish were hoping that these traditional enemies of the English would prove effective in holding off English expansion.
As early as 1689, African slaves fled from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Spanish Florida seeking freedom. These were people who gradually formed what has become known as the Gullah culture of the coastal Southeast.
[4] Under an edict from
King Charles II of Spain in 1693, the black fugitives received liberty in exchange for defending the Spanish settlers at
St. Augustine. The Spanish organized the black volunteers into a
militia; their settlement at
Fort Mose, founded in 1738, was the first legally sanctioned
free black town in North America.
[5]
Not all the slaves escaping south found military service in St. Augustine to their liking. More escaped slaves sought refuge in wilderness areas in Northern Florida, where their knowledge of tropical agriculture—and resistance to tropical diseases—served them well. Most of the blacks who pioneered Florida were
Gullah people who escaped from the rice
plantations of South Carolina (and later Georgia). As Gullah, they had developed an Afro-English based Creole, along with cultural practices and African leadership structure. The Gullah pioneers built their own settlements based on rice and corn agriculture. They became allies of
Creek and other Indians escaping into Florida from the Southeast at the same time.
[4] In Florida, they developed the
Afro-Seminole Creole, which they spoke with the growing Seminole tribe.
What else would they have been? They practiced either Islam or traditional Afrikan religions. Some Kongo may have been Christian but Christianity was only introduced by Portuguese colonizers.
Not to mention to my knowledge all African countries at the time were under European mercantilism?
