Meticulously researched in local archives, this study focusses on the small community of free people of color in St. Augustine and in St. Johns County, East Florida, after the former Spanish colony came under US control. On one level, the story is a dismal one. Numbering 126 in 1830, this group had declined to sixty-seven by 1860 and, by the end of the antebellum period, its members amounted to but “an impoverished vestige of the class that had flourished under the Spanish flag” (130). On another level, however, the story is an uplifting one, as Frank Marotti celebrates the many ways in which free black East Floridians used the Spanish legacy of “four pillars of black liberty” – “family ties to whites, manumission, military service, and landownership” (11) – to protect their increasingly precarious economic and social position.

In eight short chapters and 151 pages of text, Marotti shows how the free black people who chose not to emigrate after 1821 adapted to the “new usages and customs … daily gaining ground” (26), as one freedwoman put it. She, like many others, hastened to secure documentation of freed status, all the more important because many had originally gained freedom under the Spanish sanctuary policy. Free black people resisted discriminatory taxation and often found surprising support among the white population. Some local planters argued in the late 1820s that free black people were an important buffer between masters and enslaved men and women and that, therefore, their legal rights should be protected. Despite territorial laws restricting manumission, the traditional colonial practice of coartación (conditional manumission) continued and small numbers of enslaved men and women gained their freedom without being forced to emigrate. By the terms of the Adams–Onís Treaty, Washington committed to paying compensation for damages caused by the US Army during the so-called Patriot War of 1812–13 and dozens of free black claimants collectively received almost $275,000 in the 1830s (53). Their claims provided a wealth of information about free black peoples’ economic activities and family relationships; the testimony about their military service against the failed invasion kept memories of the colonial black military tradition alive, even as the segregated Spanish colonial militia units disappeared under US rule. The free black people who served in the Second Seminole War (1835–42) likewise shared this martial heritage, Marotti argues, as did a group of enslaved men and women led by Andrew Gué who stole a boat and escaped to the Bahamas in 1842, thereby sparking an international incident when Britain refused to extradite the fugitives to face murder charges. By the mid-1840s, most members of the “leading family of color, the Clarkes,” had abandoned Saint Augustine; some went to Key West and others to the Pacific Northwest (93). The book's final chapter traces the steady erosion of free black landownership as families like the Clarkes sold out prior to leaving and others fell afoul of certain individuals’ “knack for acquiring free black peoples’ land at rock-bottom prices” (133). Throughout, Marotti amply documents the family and patron–client ties to whites that helped protect free black peoples’ position.

The prose is sometimes informal and even colloquial – University of Alabama Press copyeditors did not catch several sentence fragments – and there is no conclusion to the book. At times, it seems that Marotti tried to mention the name of every free black individual in the county; the index lists fully forty-one Clarkes and twenty-four members of the Sanchez family. Genealogies would have made it easier to visualize the family relationships that are so important to this study. To characterize the flight of Gué and his companions and violent resistance to curfew ordinances as continuations of free black peoples’ “military” heritage (chapter 7) stretches the term “military” beyond recognition and misrepresents the challenges to authority by members of the lower classes – free, freed, and enslaved – that appear in all unequal societies. Marotti refers only to dated studies of Spanish American slavery and free black people to set the East Floridian story in a larger context. The emphasis on enduring “Spanish-era customs” (150) as the foundation of the free black community's relative success in preserving its members’ position may place too much emphasis on culture and draw attention away from the stagnant economy that left more space for free black people in St. Johns County than in the booming plantation districts of Middle Florida whose slave society more closely resembled the rest of the antebellum South.