Description
Book SynopsisHeaven's Soldiers chronicles the history of a community of free people of African descent who lived and thrived, while resisting the constraints of legal bondage, in East Florida in the four decades leading up to the Civil War. Historians have long attributed the relatively flexible system of race relations in pre-Civil War East Florida to the area's Spanish heritage. While acknowledging the importance of that heritage, this book gives more than the usual emphasis to the role of African American agency in exploiting the limited opportunities that such a heritage permitted. Spanish rule presented institutions and customs that talented, ambitious, and fortunate individuals might, and did, exploit. Although racial prejudice was never absent, persons of color aspired to lives of dignity, security, and prosperity. Frank Marotti's subjects are the free people of African descent in the broad sense of the term 'free,' that is, not just those who were legally free, but all those who resisted th
