Recent consciousness of the ethnic diversity of American society has renewed interest in the Old World source of colonial American immigrants. It is well known that Florida’s colonial capital, St. Augustine, was largely settled by immigrants of Hispanic origin. It is less recognized that within the term “Hispanic” there was a variety of groups almost as diverse as the present-day American ethnic mixture. These groups were divided both by racial background and by geographic origin. Not only was there the usual division between the peninsulares, who migrated from the Iberian Peninsula, and the criollos, who had been born in Spanish America, but even among peninsulares, there was separatism and discrimination based on one’s native municipality or province. The Spanish-American group was equally diverse. Besides criollos, it included a variety of mixed-bloods, for example, mestizos, mulattoes, and zambos. As in the other parts of Spanish America, mestizos were further differentiated by degrees of Spanish and Indian blood: the term castizo usually referred to those mestizos who had a relatively small amount of Indian blood and were treated as “whites,” while other mestizos with a small percentage of Spanish blood were regarded as illegitimate and looked down upon. Also present were full-blooded Indians, not only from St. Augustine’s hinterland (Apalache and Guale) but from Mexico and the rest of Spanish America. Finally, there were pure blacks (morenos) who came from the Antilles or as escapees from Carolina. Colonial St. Augustine was thus a melting pot of ethnic groups, loosely bound together by a common Catholic faith, Castilian tongue, and the political dominion of the Spanish Crown.1 My purpose here is to establish the origin of St. Augustine’s early inhabitants and then, relying primarily on secondary sources, discuss their backgrounds.
The origin of these early inhabitants is a topic that can best be approached by using quantitative techniques. Studies of specific families are helpful, but they can illuminate only a small link in the chain of relationships that make up an ethnic or national group. It is not an easy matter to find sources for a quantitative study, particularly during the colonial period. Because of this difficulty, quantitative studies are—despite their apparent objectivity—at best tentative and approximate, to be used only as a single piece of evidence within a framework of interpretation derived from other sources. In this study I have used the list of marriages in the St. Augustine Parish Records to trace the origin of a considerable number of St. Augustine’s inhabitants.2 The disadvantage of using the marriage lists is obvious: the lists do not record the arrival of settlers at St. Augustine, but rather indicate the presence of those who are already there, and these only incompletely since the lists only deal with those married in St. Augustine. Still, the marriage records have their advantages. The sacrament of marriage was not taken lightly in Hispanic settlements; the native origin of both the bride and groom was recorded with accuracy because it was an obligation of Catholic society. Moreover, over a reasonably lengthy period of time, it was almost inevitable that a large proportion of the inhabitants would have been married or remarried. Loneliness at a frontier post, frequent death through disease and military service, the number of available widows, and the social disdain for bachelorhood, made it highly probable that an inhabitant of St. Augustine would make several trips to the altar. Thus the Parish Marriage Records are a far more accurate indicator of the entire spectrum of society than they would be today when marriage is common only among the younger generations.
It should be noted that alternative sources to the marriage records for an examination of such migration offer even greater difficulties. Lists exist of passengers who sailed from Seville, Cádiz, and the Canary Islands bound for Florida. They represent efforts by the Spanish Crown to regulate immigration to the Americas. However, as one might suspect, they are incomplete (lists for several years apparently do not exist) and fail to take into account those who sailed without government authorization.3 The researcher could also turn to documentary information, abundant in this case, on the efforts of the Council of the Indies, the Casa de Contratación, and the Governors of Havana and Florida to populate Florida. But the vast majority of the proposed enterprises were never carried out. Furthermore, even those expeditions that left Spain bound for Florida, often made Havana, Vera Cruz, or Campeche their final destination, or took only a fraction of their passengers to St. Augustine.4 In contrast, the marriage records do offer firm proof that an immigrant was actually a resident of St. Augustine, even if it is impossible to ascertain the date of his arrival. In this sense, then, the marriage records provide a much more accurate sample, than do either passenger lists or the correspondence of Spanish political authorities, of those who resided in St. Augustine.
To show the percentage of the various national and ethnic groups that inhabited St. Augustine, I have organized a Table covering the period 1658-1756. The Table consists of males only, because 85.7 percent of the females recorded in the marriage records for the period were designated as being natives of St. Augustine, while the males represented a wide spectrum of origins.5 To identify patterns of migration to St. Augustine, I have divided the sample into four time periods: 1658-1670, 1671-1691, 1692-1732, and 1733-1756. These periods were set up before data were collected from the marriage records, and they were based upon previous historical and population studies of St. Augustine,6 as well as upon the need for an extensive enough time period in each case—thirteen, twenty-one, forty-one, and twenty-four years—to develop patterns from the marriage sample.
After analyzing material from the parish records, the periodization was rechecked and found to be consistent with the new information. Each period has certain characteristics that affected settlement and the growth of population. Specifically, each period reflects a stage of migratory increase or decrease in St. Augustine’s growth. The first period was one of precarious existence for a small population, the colony being without adequate defenses and exposed to destructive pirate raids. The second period was one of expanding population, security, and prosperity. It was based on the influx of wealth, labor, and troops needed to construct and garrison Castillo de San Marcos. For the first time the interior of Florida was penetrated for settlement, and a criollo aristocracy appeared in St. Augustine, based on the necessity for supplying the garrison with beef and grain from local ranches and farms.7 The third period, however, brought this expansion to a standstill, resulting in a decline in population and development. Even before the attack of Governor James Moore’s Carolina troops in 1702 and the other destructive raids of the English in the early eighteenth century, the presidio was in difficulty. In 1691, the Spanish Crown gave up its attempt to prevent large numbers of natives from serving in the garrison. This had the effect of cutting off the normal in-migration of peninsulares and Spanish Americans who would have filled the places in the garrison. Thus, the levelling of the town by Moore’s forces only aggravated an existing situation, leading to a time of hunger and distress. The fourth period, 1733-1756, brought back the expansion and stability of the 1670s and 1680s. Motivated by the presence of the English in nearby Georgia, the Spanish Crown sought to create a population and military barrier in Florida to thwart English expansion. The defenses of St. Augustine were strengthened, blacks were encouraged to escape from the Carolinas, and the population grew to its highest figure. It was at this time that colonial St. Augustine showed its greatest ethnic and geographical diversity.8 (Also, see Table I.)
At least three statements can be derived from the quantitative data in Table I. First, as to the peninsulares, it has generally been accepted that Canary Islanders and Galicians made up the bulk of this group.9 The chart does not substantiate this; clearly Andalusians were more numerous, and, in comparison, Canary Island and Galician immigration was never as extensive or steady. The percentage of Galicians in St. Augustine reached a peak in the 1692.1732 period, while the Canary Island percentage was at its height even earlier, during the second and third periods, 1671-1732. In the 1733-1756 period, even the percentage of Castilians and Aragonese surpassed those of Galicians or Canary Islanders, and the overall percentage of Castilians for the entire period was slightly greater than Canary Islanders and this percentage clearly surpassed Galicians. Thus, the striking feature of the Table is the steady and dominating percentage of Andalusians. Certainly, more attention must be paid to Andalusians as the major source of peninsular migration.
A second important finding concerns the extensive migration of people from New Spain to St. Augustine. Normally strong emphasis has been placed upon the high percentage of peninsulares or “whites” in the St. Augustine garrison and settlement. This has tended to separate St. Augustine from the other Spanish borderlands, which were largely populated by criollos and mestizos from Mexico.10 The Table supports this contention for the third and fourth periods, 1692-1756, but for the earlier two periods, 1658-1691, one out of five of St. Augustine’s inhabitants was a native of Mexico. So extensive was the influx of immigrants from the rest of Spanish America that in the period 1671-1691 Spanish Americans outnumbered peninsulares. In the second half of the seventeenth century, at least, St. Augustine’s ethnic makeup was not so different from Santa Fe, El Paso, San Fernando (Texas), and the cities of northern Mexico that made up the Spanish borderlands. Hence, we must look for a northward movement from Mexico, as well as for a westward movement from Spain, to explain the sources of St. Augustine’s population.
A third observation concerns the presence of a large black and mulatto population in St. Augustine and its suburbs from 1733 to 1756. When the percentages in the African and British American columns are added,11 blacks in the period 1733-1756 number 11.5 percent of the population and as a group were growing more rapidly than the white population. This figure corresponds to the evacuation reports of 1764, where blacks and mulattoes number about 14 percent of the population, approximately one quarter of these being of freeman status.12 The figure does, however, scale down the report of the Bishop of Trícale in 1736, which claimed that almost a third of the population of St. Augustine was black.13 Regardless of the discrepancy, St. Augustine can claim the largest concentration of blacks, both slave and free, in the Spanish borderlands.
In the second portion of this article an attempt will be made to illuminate the conclusions of the Table, by examining the causes of migration for these various ethnic and geographical groups. Before looking at the specific groups, the fundamental point should be made that the vast majority of immigrants to St. Augustine were reluctant migrants. St. Augustine had few attractions: it was isolated, agriculturally unproductive, and exposed to vigorous enemy attacks. Instead of migrating of their own free will, the inhabitants of St. Augustine were fundamentally victims of the Spanish Crown’s mercantilist defense policies, which attempted to regulate the rise and fall of St. Augustine’s population in order to hold the Florida frontier against English and French encroachment. Hence, the majority of the immigrants to St. Augustine were soldiers who specifically came to serve as members of the garrison of Castillo de San Marcos. Civic life never developed in St. Augustine. Those who lived in the town did so because of the inadequacies of housing and supply in the fortress. Though St. Augustine was the largest of the Spanish borderland settlements, a municipal cabildo was never reestablished after 1570 when that of Menéndez de Aviles was terminated.14 Some inhabitants did engage in occupations to supply the garrison, but the majority, who were soldiers, disdained manual labor and depended upon the crown’s subsidy; even the industrious found it unusually difficult to cultivate the poor soil around the settlement.15 This failure to develop the soil can also be attributed to the fact that a substantial number of the inhabitants had been recruited among the prisons and galleys of Spain and America, and though they married and settled in St. Augustine, they were inexperienced with farming techniques and anxious for excuses to leave the presidio.16 St. Augustine was, then, a settlement of rootless soldiers who had neither the will nor the inclination to establish a sound civic and economic basis for the town.17
Of the provinces of Spain, Andalusia was the most consistently recorded in the Parish Records as the native land of peninsulares. This should come as no surprise, despite previous opinion, for Andalusia has been generally regarded as the principal source of Spanish migration to the entire New World.18 Several reasons have been given to show why the southern portion of Spain was the preeminent source of migration to America. For one, the trend of Spanish population movement from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period had been from north to south. The effects of the Reconquista, the opening of new lands, the founding of new cities, brought an influx to the province of population seeking profit and opportunity. When the population became excessive, the next step was emigration to America.19 This relates to another reason why Andalusia was a source of immigrants. The Andalusian Atlantic ports, particularly around the Guadalquivir estuary and river valley, were the gateways to the New World. The establishment in Seville (in 1503) of the Casa de Contratación, to regulate trade and passage to America, made that city the official center of trade with America. Seville maintained this position until the end of the seventeenth century when Cádiz began to replace it as the leading port of embarcation.20 Most of the troops sent to garrison St. Augustine embarked from Cádiz or Seville and claimed these cities as home, though in reality they may have come from elsewhere.
Most Andalusian emigrants came from overcrowded cities like Seville, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Málaga, and San Lúcar de Barrameda.21 There, hidalgos, drawn from Extremadura and Castile, lived on meager incomes, without opportunity to use their swords; and consequently these idle nobles were eager to soothe their pride by migrating as soldiers and adventurers to America. The cities also possessed a depressed middle class of professionals and merchants who could not make a living from their trade and who sought the status of hidalgo by migrating to the New World.22 The majority of emigrants were, however, farm laborers who suffered an unbearable existence because they could work only seasonally on the latifundia of Andalusia.23 A final group were prisoners, languishing in Cadiz’s and Seville’s dungeons for debt and petty crime. Every so often the prisons were swept clean to fill the empty ranks of garrisons in America. This was the origin, for instance, of the recruits arriving in St. Augustine in 1705.24
Another major source of peninsular emigration to St. Augustine were the Cantabrian Provinces: the Basque Provinces, Santander, Asturias, Galicia. The last of these four was the most important source of Cantabrian migration, and it will receive our greatest attention. In Galicia there was a problem of overpopulation that followed a different pattern from the overcrowded cities of Andalusia. The population of Galicia was the largest, densest, and among the fastest growing of any province in Spain, but the cities remained small and did not absorb excess population. Galicia’s population crisis was located in the countryside instead of in the cities. Most Galicians were proprietary farmers, but constant subdivision of their small farms and exhaustion of the soil meant that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Galician families could no longer support themselves.25 To survive in a land of too many mouths and not enough fertile soil it became necessary to migrate to America.
There were many opportunities for Galicians and other Cantabrians to go to America. The broken Cantabrian coast possessed a large number of small fishing and trading ports, from which one could travel to America. To be sure, direct trade with America was discouraged by the Crown in favor of commerce with the Spanish Netherlands and the British Isles. Still, expeditions occasionally sailed to America from Galicia and Asturias, including part of Menéndez de Avilés’s 1565 expedition to Florida. Galician sailors and soldiers also sailed with the fleets from Cádiz and Seville. Galicia was a particularly fertile ground for recruiting soldiers for the New World after 1668. Previously several militia units had been created to defend the Galician ports during the wars that characterized the period. When hostilities ceased, the Galician authorities were unable and unwilling to maintain the costly militia. With nowhere to go, these poorly trained troops were sent to America.26 Seventy of them, for instance, arrived at St. Augustine in 1702, and 171 Cantabrian and Asturian troops arrived with Governor Montiano to serve at the post in 1738.27
St. Augustine’s governors seemed to have placed greater emphasis on another portion of the Galician population. They urged that Galician farm families settle in Florida, particularly in Apalache.28 There was good reason to hope that Galician families might come to America and cultivate the soil. Large numbers of them were so impoverished by their inadequate plots of land that they were forced in the summer to migrate as farm laborers to Castile, harvesting Castilian crops and then returning home barely in time to salvage their own meager crops. These migrations of Galician farmers to Castile were frowned upon by the Crown and economic advisors as a cause of vagabondage.29 But, despite official efforts to encourage Galician families to migrate to Florida, Galician authorities reported they would not go. According to a report of 1691, the Galician farmer would rather continue to put up with this miserable existence because of his love for his motherland.30 Hence, few Galician families were willing to come to St. Augustine, and the typical Galician there was a young recruit for the garrison, a transient who did not plan to settle.
The kingdoms of Castile and Aragón—the original heartland of Spain—were not an important source of immigrants for St. Augustine until the final period, 1733-1756. Castilians had participated in the southward movement of population into Andalusia and continued from there to America. Generally, they went to the most attractive parts of America, often as administrators and officers, rather than as common settlers.31 Backward St. Augustine had little to attract Castilians until its most extensive development in the final period. In the second half of the seventeenth century Castilians also failed to come to St. Augustine (as well as to Spanish America) because of demographic and economic decline. The wars previous to 1668 took a greater portion of men and wealth from Castile than from any other part of the Spanish Empire. Because of Castile’s exhaustion from its efforts to provide the bulk of the Empire’s manpower and equipment, emigration of Castilians to the New World came to a standstill. Only with the revival of economic prosperity and population in the eighteenth century, did Castile again have excess population to send to America.32
The case of the Crown of Aragón is different from that of Castile. The Crown of Aragón was divided into three provinces: Catalonia, Aragón, and Valencia, which had strong ties to the province of Murcia. In our Table, Catalonia and Aragón have been placed together under the term “Aragón,” while Valencia has been placed with Murcia because of the similarity of their migratory histories. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inhabitants of the Crown of Aragón were discriminated against by the Castilian Crown, which regarded Spanish America as the exclusive patrimony of Castile.33 But there has been exaggeration as to the effect of this discrimination as the major factor in preventing the Aragonese from migrating to the New World. In reality, natives of the Crown of Aragón were allowed to emigrate to America, but they were forbidden to trade with Americans or to hold office in the New World. These factors, combined with the small population of the Crown of Aragón and its economic orientation toward the Mediterranean, discouraged the migration of the Aragonese to America.34 However, under the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, these restrictions were gradually lifted, and the Crown of Aragón integrated into the rest of Spain. From 1707 to 1715, for instance, the special “liberties” of its provinces were abolished, enabling the Aragonese to trade directly with America and Catalán troops to be used beyond the borders of Catalonia.35 As a result, profiting from the earliest industrialization in Spain, Aragonese businessmen spread first to Andalusia and then to America. In 1737, under Manuel de Montiano, troops from Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia were sent to St. Augustine.36 The Parish Records show these transients were largely recruited from cities like Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Tarragona. It was these new conditions in Spain that explain the rapid rise of the Aragonese contingent during the period 1733-1756.
A final source of peninsular immigration was not, strictly speaking, from the Iberian Peninsula. The Canary Islands had become part of the kingdom of Castile in the sixteenth century. Such recognition made them legally peninsulares, although in practice they had more in common with Spanish Americans than with Iberians.37 The Canaries served as the most important transitional base from which people, institutions, and ideas were transmitted to the New World. The colonial past of the Canary Islands was recent; they had not been completely subdued until the 1490s. Moreover, the location of the archipelago off the coast of Africa made the Canaries the main station on the way to America. Legally and illegally, the Islands rivaled Seville and Cádiz as a base for colonization by providing supplies and filling the gaps among crews and regiments that had originally embarked from Iberian ports. In the case of St. Augustine, Seville and the Canaries were the only places to which direct trade was allowed.38 The climate, soil, and topography of the Canary Islands were so strikingly similar to those of the Antilles that emigrants from them had little difficulty adapting to the environment. As early as 1519, Canary Islanders were transferring their knowledge of sugar cultivation and refining to the Antilles, creating the basis for a new sugar industry.39 In sum, the Canary Islanders seemed exceptionally fit to colonize the New World.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the limited supplies of land in the Canary Islands created a surplus population for broader migration. The rich volcanic soil of the Islands had been cultivated in the early sixteenth century by proprietary farmers, many of them immigrants from Galicia. But as the sixteenth century advanced, cultivation by slaves on large estates proved to be much more profitable than proprietary farming. Slaves were readily available from the African coast, and the proprietary farmers, unable to compete, were forced from their land.40 Thus, the Canary Islanders, like the Galicians, became a source of excess-farming population that both the governors of St. Augustine and the royal authorities felt would make ideal settlers for Florida.41 The Crown aimed at filling its empty borderlands with such farming families, and Canary Islanders were sent to Santo Domingo in the 1680s to offset French incursion. At the same time plans were broached to settle Canary Island families in Florida. These plans were reiterated in the following decades, but the only proof we have of the arrival before 1757 of Canary Islanders in St. Augustine is in the Parish Records.42 Clues that suggest their earlier arrival do exist in the official correspondence. For example, we know that in 1685, Juan de Ayala y Escobar, the daring sea captain who later became Governor of St. Augustine, brought directly from the Islands, thirty-eight recruits for the garrison. But there exists also a document in which Ayala is accused of stealing these recruits and is ordered to send them to Havana, their original destination.43 It is also quite plausible that some Canary Islanders were among troops sent from Cádiz. However, it does not appear that large numbers of Canary Islanders arrived in St. Augustine until 1757-1761, under a contract at last fulfilled by the Royal Company of Havana.44 Thus, though we know of the existence of prominent Canary Island families in St. Augustine before 1757 (a good example is the family of Tomás González who built the “oldest house”), we do not have definite proof of when they arrived.
Outside of the peninsulares, we have noted the neglected importance of Spanish American immigration to Florida, which preceded the more familiar migration of the twentieth century. Ties between St. Augustine and Spanish America were strongest with Mexico from 1658-1691, and during the rest of the period were strongest with the Antilles, particularly Cuba. Numerous Mexicans came to work on the building of Castillo de San Marcos and to fill gaps in the ranks of the garrison. Most were mixed-bloods (mestizos or zambos) and Indians against whom the “white” governors, peninsulares, and criollos showed prejudice.45 In reality, the Mexicans were scarcely different from many of the peninsulares. Like many peninsulares, the Mexicans were from the excess population of large urban centers and often had criminal records. The Parish Records of 1658-1691 show that most Mexicans were natives of Mexico City or Puebla, the largest cities in central Mexico.46 Like the floating population of Seville or Cádiz, these mixed-bloods were usually unemployed and subjected to shortages of food. Food riots took place in Mexico City in 1694, and the rioters were punished by sentences to garrison-isolated frontier presidios.47 These were the types of Mexicans sent to St. Augustine in 1703 by the Viceroy of New Spain. They supplemented criminal labor brought from New Spain to St. Augustine, in 1685 and 1743, for instance, to work on the fortifications.48 There can be little doubt that these “victims of society,” with their criminal records, made up an important segment of the population.
Not all immigrants from New Spain came from the excess and unemployed population of the cities. Some may have been forced to leave profitable positions and become soldiers because of the “boom-bust” economic cycle of New Spain’s mining towns. A respectable ensign of the garrison in 1687, Nicolás de Bertadillo, was a native of Pachuca, Mexico. We know that this mining town suffered a decline in production in the second half of the seventeenth century, probably convincing inhabitants like Bertadillo that mining no longer provided an adequate future.49
Florida’s governors also recognized the value of Mexican Indians. They urged the migration to Florida of Yucatán and Tlascalan Indian families, as weavers and farm laborers, respectively. The skilled and civilized Mexican Indians were to serve as teachers and examples for the less-sophisticated Florida tribes. There is no direct evidence the governors’ proposals were carried out, but it does appear that the skills of Mexican Indians were used in the construction of Castillo de San Marcos.50
Another large group of Spanish Americans migrated from Cuba, mainly from 1733 to 1756. Mixed-bloods were rare among the Cubans, who were mostly criollos and consequently better accepted by criollos and peninsulares at St. Augustine. The Cuban immigrants were of a higher social status than the rest of those from New Spain, usually carrying on the business of supplying the colony and providing the few craftsmen available. Many of the leading families of St. Augustine, for example, the Ayala y Escobar or Pedrosa families, were of Cuban descent and they lived alternately in St. Augustine and among their relatives in Havana.51 Still there were some Cuban elements of lowly origins. In 1673, 1702, and 1709, Cuban troops arrived to garrison St. Augustine, and another large number were present from 1742 to 1750.52 Mainly recruited from the streets of Havana, these troops were little different in origin from the rootless of Seville, Cádiz, Mexico City, or Puebla. Among almost every group, then, there were upper and lower social elements.
The blacks at St. Augustine were Catholicized and Hispanicized, and in a minority of cases were given their freedom. During the period studied, their first influx into St. Augustine dated from the building of Castillo de San Marcos, when labor was in demand to help build the fortress.53 After completion of Castillo de San Marcos, blacks continued to work in St. Augustine as the town’s labor force, serving as household slaves who probably cultivated small family plots outside of the walls. Many of these blacks originally came from tribes living inland from the West African coast; by area, tribe, or linguistic group, St. Augustine had blacks from Senegambia (Mandingos and Cabo Verdes); from the Ghana-Nigeria-Slave Coast area (Cavabalis); and from the Congo (Congoese). As is well known, the blacks had been shipped to America under terrible conditions, and the majority ended up as laborers in the plantations of the Antilles.54 Although a small number of blacks were carried to St. Augustine from Seville, the town was not directly involved in the slave trade, and most blacks came to the colony secondhand, by purchase or conscription from Cuba.55 The rapid increase in the number of blacks in St. Augustine from 1732 to 1756 may have been caused by the corresponding rise in the number of Cubans who came to the presidio bringing blacks as household slaves.
Another source of the growth in the number of blacks in St. Augustine is more certain, though this source was less substantial than Cuba. The founding of the Carolina colony by the English in 1670 created an important supply of black population, as fugitive slaves fled the English colonies to establish themselves in St. Augustine. A considerable number of these fugitive blacks from the Carolinas obtained the status of freemen in St. Augustine. The Spanish Crown had established a policy, from at least 1688, that encouraged manumission of slaves who had run away from Carolina—providing compensation was paid to their English owners.56 But St. Augustine’s governors, living from hand to mouth until the subsidies arrived, often found it impossible to raise such compensation. One of them noted that giving compensation to the English owner was, in practice, trade with the English colonies—something forbidden by the Crown.57 Still, the Crown favored encouragement of runaways as part of a policy of hostility to the Carolina settlement. In 1693, the Crown ruled that fugitive slaves who became Catholics were to have the status of freemen, though they were to remain within a seigniorial system, bound to work perpetually on the fortress.58 At the beginning of the 1733-1756 period, this liberal policy granted the status of freeman to all runaways who became Catholics and served a four-year term as public or state slaves in St. Augustine. Compensation to English owners was forbidden.59 The Crown’s policy brought so many refugee slaves to St. Augustine that by the time of the evacuation in 1764, one-quarter of the black population was free.
Broadly speaking, the Hispanic settlers of St. Augustine were of diverse origins, migrating in a variety of patterns. In the early part of the period examined, 1658-1691, immigration to St. Augustine moved from two directions: one wave westward from the Iberian Peninsula, and a second wave northward from Mexico and the Antilles. Later, in the 1692-1756 period, the northward movement from Spanish America was greatly diminished, while a movement of blacks from Africa via the Antilles and Carolinas supplemented the Iberian thrust. What type of settler formed the majority in these population movements? Fundamentally, two characteristics are clear: that he was a single male, without his family, destined for garrison duty or to work on the fortifications; and that he was a native of or had had extensive experience in a large urban center. Most often he was among the surplus, unemployed, landless population of Seville, Cádiz, Granada, Málaga, Córdoba, Mexico City, Puebla, or Havana. Often his idleness and misery had led him to crime as then defined. He was swept from the streets or prisons of these cities and conscripted for service in St. Augustine. But, although he came to St. Augustine as a transient, the inevitable delay in leaving forced him to become a part of St. Augustine’s society.60 Of course, there were also more respectable families of immigrants from the Canary Islands or Cuba, but they were a minority. It is to the credit of these single immigrants of questionable background that they were able to marry among the criollo population, obliterate the memories of their past, and do honorable service to their king and faith.
Succinct introductions to a topic treated by an extensive literature are Magnus Mörner’s Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, 1967), pp. 1-73; and Lyle N. McAlister’s The “Fuero Militar” in New Spain 1764-1800 (Gainesville, Fla., 1957), pp. 43-54.
This study has used photostatic copies of the Cathedral Records, St. Augustine Parish, in The St. Augustine Historical Society, St. Augustine, Florida. The Records are divided into marriages, births, and deaths.
Catálogo de pasajeros a Indias durante los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII, 3 vols.: I (1509-15.34), II (1535-1538), III (1539-1559) (Seville, 1940-1946); Luis Rubio y Moreno, ed., Pasajeros a Indias in Colección de documentos inéditos para la Historia de Iberoamérica (Seville, 1917), VII, XII; Juan Friede, “The Catálogo de pasajeros and Spanish Emigration to 1550,” HAHR, 31:2 (May 1951), 333-348.
For example: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (abbreviated hereinafter as AGI), 58-1-26/49, Dec. 7, 1677 (North Carolina Collection of Spanish Records, Raleigh, North Carolina [abbreviated hereinafter as NC] 4-43); AGI 58-1-21/206, Dec. 24, 1677 (Stetson Collection, Gainesville, Florida [abbreviated hereinafter as S]); AGI 54-5-14/151, Feb. 18, 1680 (S); AGI 54-5-11/106, June 28, 1683 (NC 5-36); AGI 54-5-15/92, Aug. 20, 1692 (NC 8-37); AGI 58-1-30/74, Feb. 28, 1718 (S).
It is the author’s working hypothesis that women settled permanently in St. Augustine more readily than men. Many wives lost their husbands through military action, disease, or abandonment. To receive a widow’s pension it was necessary to remain in St. Augustine. Talented sons were sent away from St. Augustine to make their fortunes. Thus, families headed by widows were not uncommon in the town.
John R. Dunkle, “Population Changes as an Element in the Historical Geography of St. Augustine,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 37:1 (July 1958), 3-10.
Charles W. Arnade in “Cattle Raising in Spanish Florida,” Agricultural History, 35:3 (July, 1961), 6-7, argues that a criollo aristocracy brought prosperity to St. Augustine from 1680 to 1702; but Dunkle’s study and mine show a population and immigration decline beginning in the 1690s, which is the basis of the 1692-1732 periodization.
No attempt is being made in this periodization of St. Augustine’s history to attribute its prosperity solely to the flow of immigration. A much broader history of St. Augustine’s colonial development from the administrative standpoint is: John TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida (Durham, North Carolina, 1964).
Verne E. Chatelin, The Defenses of Spanish Florida 1565-1763 (Washington, 1941), p. 73; Albert C. Manucy, The Building of Castillo de San Marcos (Washington, 1942), p. 28.
The domination of the garrison by criollos and peninsulares in the late seventeenth century is noted by Luis R. Arana, “The Spanish Infantry: The Queen of Battles in Florida, 1671-1702,” M.A. Thesis University of Florida 1960, pp. 9, 78, 80, 81.
Blacks constituted all of those who migrated from Africa and British America. Occasionally blacks could also be found among emigrants from Spanish America and Europe.
At least 87 blacks, probably more, were free. AGI 86-6-6/43, April 16, 1764 (S); AGI 86-7-11/11, Aug. 29, 1763 (S); Wilbur H. Siebert, “The Departure of the Spaniards and Other Groups from East Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 19:2 (October, 1940), 146; Robert L. Gold, “The Settlement of the East Florida Spaniards in Cuba, 1763-1766,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 42:3 (January, 1964), 216-217.
AGI 58-2-14/122, April 29, 1736 (S).
AGI 86-7-18/22, Nov. 12, 1762 (S); TePaske, pp. 26-27.
AGI 86-6-6/36, March 26, 1762 (S); AGI 58-1-26/34, July 30, 1675 (S).
AGI 58-1-27/A45-45, Dec. 4, 1703 (NC 9.103); AGI 58-2-2/110, July 7, 1705 (S); AGI 58-2-2/111, July 14, 1705 (S); AGI 58-2-2/113, July 19, 1705 (S); AGI 58-2-2/117, Aug. 18, 1705 (S).
Arana, “The Spanish Infantry,” pp. 6.10.
Peter Boyd-Bowman, Índice geobiográfico de cuarenta mil pobladores españoles de América en el Siglo XVI (Bogatá, 1964), I (1493-1519), xii-xiii, xxii-xxiii; Boyd-Bowman, “The Regional Origins of the Earliest Spanish Colonists in America,” PMLA, 71:5 (December, 1956), 1152-1163; Boyd-Bowman, “La emigración peninsular a América: 1520-1539,” Historia Mexicana, 13:2 (October-December, 1963), 165-192; Boyd-Bowman, “La procedencia de los españoles de América: 1540-1559,” Historia Mexicana, 17:1 (July-September, 1967), 37-71.
Julio Gonzales, “Reconquista y repoblación de Castilla, León, Extremadura y Andalucía (Siglos XI a XIII),” in La reconquista española y la repoblación del pais, ed. José María Lacarra (Zaragoza, 1951), pp. 163-206; Jaime Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, trans. Frances M. López Morillas (Princeton, 1969), pp. 333, 486.
J. H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (New York, 1966), pp. 115-135; Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, 1972); Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, pp. 398-400; 435-438.
Natives of Seville, Cádiz, Málaga, Granada, Córdoba, and San Lúcar de Barrameda made up the following percentages of Andalusians at St. Augustine: Period I (1658-1670), 75.0%; Period II (1671-1691), 73.7%; Period III (1692-1732), 60.3%; Period IV (1733-1756), 51.3%.
J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469-1716 (New York, 1963), pp. 62-65; Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 21-129.
Edward E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolutions in Spain (New Haven, 1970), pp. 50-64.
AGI 58-2-2/110, July 7, 1705 (S); AGI 58-2-2/111, July 14, 1705 (S); AGI 58-2-2/113, July 19, 1705 (S); AGI 58-2-2/117, Aug. 18, 1705 (S).
Antonio Domínquez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1955), pp. 291-292.
Javier Ruiz Almansa, La población de Galicia, 1500-1945 (Madrid, 1948), pp. 277-278.
AGI 87-1-1/63, June 3, 1737 (S).
AGI 54-5-12/61, April 1, 1688 (NC 7-34); AGI 58-1-24/4, Feb. 1715, (S); AGI 58-1-24/30, Jan. 18, 1716 (NC 13-20).
Ruiz Almansa, La población de Galicia, pp. 169-170; 177-178; 276-277.
AGI 58-2-5/7, Mar. 11, 1691 (S); AGI 58-2-5/9, June 24, 1691 (S); AGI 58-2-5/10, Aug. 5, 1691 (S); AGI 58-1-22/176, Aug. 8, 1691 (NC 8-24); AGI 54-5-12, July 9, 1723 (S); AGI 58-2-15, 1725 (NC 2-13). On the greater success of settling Galician families in the Río de la Plata area in the eighteenth century, see Luisa Cuesta, “La emigración gallega a América,” Archivos del seminario de Estudios Gallegos, 4 (1932), 157-176.
Boyd-Bowman, Índice ge obiográfico, I, pp. xxi-xxii; Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, pp. 333-334.
Domínquez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVII (Madrid, 1963), pp. 91-99; Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, pp. 412-416; Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 329-337.
Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, pp. 312-314.
John Lynch, Spain under the Hapsburgs: Vol. II (New York, 1969), pp. 160-161.
Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, pp. 552-555.
AGI 87-1-1/63, June 3, 1737 (S).
Francisco Morales Padrón, “Colonos canarios en Indias,” Anuario de estudios americanos, 8 (1951), 2.
Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (Madrid, 1943), I, p. 593.
Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, 1970), pp. 22-23; 156-157; Morales Padrón, “Colonos canarios en Indias,” pp. 2-4; Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, pp. 406-408.
Verlinden, p. 47.
AGI 41-5-39/14/1, Feb. 11, 1676 (S); AGI 61-6-20/2, March 13, 1676 (S); AGI 58-1-21/305, Nov. 10, 1681 (NC 4-85); AGI 58-1-21/306, Nov. 10, 1681 (S); AGI 61-6-20/5, Nov. 19, 1681 (S); AGI 61-6-22/11, March 19, 1699 (S); AGI 58-2-16/5, June 12, 1720 (NC 2-12); AGI 58-2-16/6, July 11, 1720 (S); AGI 58-1-20/193, June 7, 1724 (S).
Morales Padrón, “Colonos canarios en Indias,” pp. 28-31.
AGI 54-5-15/11, May 12, 1685 (S); one scholar maintains the 13 Canary Islanders stayed in the garrison: Arana, “The Spanish Infantry,” p. 79.
Morales Padrón, “Colonos canarios en Indias,” pp. 27-28.
AGI 54-5-10/95, Feb. 19, 1666 (S); Arana, “The Spanish Infantry,” p. 91.
During the peak period of Spanish American emigration to St. Augustine, natives of Mexico City and Puebla de Los Angeles made up the following percentages of Mexicans at St. Augustine: Period I (1658-1670), Mexico City 23.1%, Puebla 61.5%; Period II (1671-1691), Mexico City 45%, Puebla 22.5%.
Chester Lyle Guthrie, “Riots in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City: A Study of Social and Economic Conditions,” in Greater America: Essays in Honor of Herbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley, Calif., 1945), pp. 243-258.
AGI 58-1-27/A45-45, Dec. 4, 1703 (NC 9-103); Dunkle, “Population Changes . . .”, pp. 6-7.
Agustín Cue Cánovas, Historia social y económica de México 1521-1854 (Mexico City, 1967), pp. 71-76.
AGI 58-1-21/154, Feb. 13, 1676 (NC 4-26); AGI 58-1-21/300, Oct. 11, 1681 (NC 4-87); AGI 58-1-21/295, Oct. 11, 1681 (S); AGI 54-5-11/106, June 28, 1683 (NC 5-36); AGI 58-1-21/396, June 18, 1684 (NC 5-50); AGI 87-7-6 (Mex. 1117), Feb. 16, 1688 (S); AGI 58-1-22/154, Dec. 15, 1690 (NC 8-19); AGI 58-1-27/23, Oct. 30, 1701 (S); AGI 58-2-3/27, Sept. 3, 1704 (S); AGI 58-1-28/28, Jan. 12, 1704 (S).
William Gillaspie, “Juan de Ayala y Escobar, Procurador and Entrepreneur: A Case Study of the Provisioning of Florida, 1683-1716,” Diss. University of Florida 1961, pp. 29-30; Armando Alvarez Pedroso, “A Cuban Name in Early Florida: The Pedroso Family in St. Augustine,” El Escribano, 51 (1964), 12-16.
AGI 54-1-20/5, Aug. 30, 1673 (S); AGI 58-1-23/165, July 24, 1702 (S); AGI 58-1-23/205, April 20, 1703 (S); AGI 58-1-30/4, July 19, 1709 (S); AGI 87-3-12/36, Feb. 4, 1742 (S); AGI 86-7-21/50, Jan. 14, 1750 (NC 17-60).
AGI 58-1-26, no. 21A, Dec. 15, 1672 (NC 3-55); AGI 54-5-11/12, Dec. 4, 1674 (S).
Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (Boston, 1961), pp. 102-107.
AGI 58-1-27/A20, March 12, 1703 (S); AGI 58-1-20/76, May 14, 1703 (S); AGI 86-7-21/53, Feb. 15, 1750 (S); Gillaspie, “Juan de Ayala y Escobar,” p. 41.
AGI 54-5-12/74, March 9, 1689 (S); AGI 58-26/127, Oct. 7, 1693, (NC 8-51); AGI 58-1-26/127, Nov. 7, 1693 (S); AGI 54-5-13/140, Sept. 15, 1697 (S); AGI 58-i-3i/3, Nov. 2, 1725 (S); AGI 58-1-31/162, June 10, 1738 (NC 16-100).
AGI 58-1-22/176, Aug. 8, 1697 (NC 9-26).
John TePaske, “Slavery and the Fugitive Slave Question in the Southeast, 1670-1764,” (paper delivered at Bicentennial Conference, Gainesville, Fla., May 17, 1972), pp. 2-5.
Ibid., pp. 5-10. An outpost of free blacks who had escaped from Carolina was established in 1738 at Mosa and was rebuilt in the late 1740s and 1750s.
Further study of the marriages, births, and deaths in the St. Augustine Parish Records is necessary to explain how the large influx of single males was absorbed by criollo families, thus preserving the family unit in colonial St. Augustine.
Author notes
The author is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Florida State University, Tallahassee. He would like to thank Ms. Ruth Kent and Ms. Jacqueline Bearden of the St. Augustine Historical Society for their courtesy and help.
