Beginning Saturday, July 29, the exhibition “Florida Before Statehood” will be on display at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa. The opening event begins at 2pm with a presentation by historian Ben DiBiase, director of educational resources for the Florida Historical Society.
“It covers Florida history from the Ice Age to the modern day,” says Madeline Calise, museum manager at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science. “We take a look at Spanish exploration, early settlers and their challenges, the mission period of Florida, the British period, and a little bit about all the flags that Florida has flown under and the impacts that those different nations had on Florida.”
The foundation of the exhibit, including a series of informational panels and a timeline display, was created in Tallahassee.
“It is a traveling exhibit from the Museum of Florida History, so we’re really excited to have it,” says Calise. “It was created as part of the Viva Florida program in 2013, which was celebrating 500 years of Florida history, starting with 1513.”
While Ponce de Léon gave our state its name in 1513, people have been living here for more than 14,000 years. The “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit explores that history as well as European contact and occupation.
“Europeans had been living in Florida over 330 years before Florida became a state in 1845, and prior to European contact, indigenous groups had lived in the state for thousands of years,” says Ben DiBiase. “In 1565, we had the establishment of St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in North America, so there was generation of people living in St. Augustine before Jamestown was ever established.”
St. Augustine was established to secure Spain’s claim on Florida. In 1564, the French built Fort Caroline near Jacksonville, but the colony was wiped out by the founders of St. Augustine. The Spanish then constructed a series of missions in Florida and the American southeast.
“Moving into the eighteenth century, after the French and Indian War, the Spanish actually lost control of Florida,” says DiBiase. “Beginning in 1763, the British took control. They partitioned the territory into East and West Florida, with the Apalachicola River being the dividing line. St. Augustine was the capital of East Florida, Pensacola the capital of West Florida. In 1783, after the end of the American Revolution, the Spanish again gained control of Florida. That’s what we call the Second Spanish Period.”
By 1821, Florida was a United States Territory, gaining statehood in 1845. All of this rich and colorful history is detailed in the “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit.
In addition to the informational panels and timeline provided by the Museum of Florida History, the version of the exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science will be augmented with displays of fascinating original documents and artifacts from the Florida Historical Society archives and the Brevard Museum collections.
One of the additional objects to be displayed is a chronological history of Spanish colonization originally published in Spain in 1723.
“It’s a very Spanish perspective,” says DiBiase. “This is the original book. It’s the original binding, a leather bound book. It has the original vellum pages, some beautiful script work. This is really more a work of art now, than a historical narrative. A lot of the facts can be argued today, but what’s important is that it informed generations of Europeans who were coming over to the New World about the history of Florida.”
Other documents and artifacts that will augment the exhibit include a British map from the 1760s, Seminole Indian clothing, original papers from Territorial governor Richard Keith Call, and a set of rifles used in a duel to settle a political dispute in the 1830s.
The temporary “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit fits in well with the permanent displays at the Brevard Museum which include skeletons of Ice Age mega-fauna, artifacts of prehistoric people, displays of pioneer life, and images of outer space. There is also a Butterfly Garden and 22 acres of nature trails to explore.
The “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit is included in the regular museum admission of $9 for adults and $5 for children 4-12.
Aviles Street in St. Augustine is the oldest street in the United States. Many of the Spanish colonial buildings that line the narrow brick street now serve as museums or businesses catering to tourists.
On March 2, 1800, at about 5pm, two men had an altercation on Aviles Street that resulted in one of the men’s death.
“I’ve been researching criminal court cases from the colonial period for a while,” says James G. Cusick, curator of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida. “I’ve looked at slanders, I’ve looked at a child abuse case, I’ve looked at a number of murders, and this one was very interesting to me.”
It was a Sunday afternoon and the shops on Aviles Street were closed. Several young apprentices were hanging out together, including free black teenager Jorge Fish and slave Marcelino Sánchez from the tailor shop, and their friend Juan Seguí, a slave from the bakery a few doors down. A slave named Benjamin was also part of the group.
As the young men were talking, a slave named Juan Carlos, who was trained as a cobbler, nodded to the group as he walked past.
“Benjamin broke off from the group, took off his shoes, and threw them up against the door of the tailor shop, took off his hat and threw it through the open window, took off after Juan Carlos, grabbed the hat off of Juan Carlos’s head, and got into a fight with him,” says Cusick.
Several women tried to break up the fight, including a 60 year-old slave named Amelia, a free black woman named Frances who sold pastries at a shop on Aviles Street, and Reyna, a free black woman about 30 years old.
The fight continued as Benjamin chased Juan Carlos into the courtyard of the Leonardi House, the home of a wealthy Italian family. Benjamin proceeded to overpower and brutally beat Juan Carlos. A free black merchant named José Bonam tried unsuccessfully to break up the fight.
As a crowd gathered, Benjamin eventually turned to walk away from the fight. The bloodied and beaten Juan Carols pulled a knife and fatally stabbed Benjamin twice in the back.
A soldier arrived and arrested Juan Carlos.
Juan Carlos was put on trial, but the process was not what we would expect today. Most people are familiar with procedural courtroom dramas like the television series “Law and Order” that reflect how our modern justice system works. A murder is followed by a police investigation, an arrest, and a trial.
“The way court proceedings worked in the Spanish colonial period was almost more like a police investigation than a trial,” says Cusick. “There was no court room, there was no judge, there was no witness stand. Everything was done by deposition. Unlike modern lawyers, these men had no idea what was going to come up in testimony. They were learning things as they went along.”
At first glance, this killing could have been seen as a case of self-defense, since Juan Carlos was attacked by Benjamin, but as testimony was gathered, some evidence indicated that this may have been a premeditated murder.
Juan Carlos believed that Benjamin was having an affair with his wife, Maria Agustina. Benjamin left his shoes and hat behind at Juan Carlos’s home. Juan Carlos slashed the shoes and hat with a knife in front of Benjamin’s friends, saying that the same would happen to their owner.
Despite possible mitigating circumstances, Juan Carlos was found guilty of the murder of Benjamin.
The verdict came with a harsh sentence. Juan Carlos was to be lashed 200 times. If he survived that, he would spend 10 years doing hard labor. In an unusual theatrical twist, Juan Carlos would endure his lashing at various points along Aviles Street, to ensure the biggest possible audience.
The Haitian Revolution was occurring in 1800, and there was concern about a similar slave revolt in the United States. “I can’t think of any other reason that the punishment would have been delivered in this way,” Cusick says.
Today, visitors to St. Augustine can walk down Aviles Street where some of the buildings associated with this case still stand.
The importance of Florida in early American history is often overlooked.
The so-called “thirteen original colonies” that would lead to the creation of the United States exclude the fourteenth and fifteenth colonies of East Florida and West Florida.
St. Augustine, Florida was an active city for more than four decades before the English established a settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.
The Spanish gave Florida its name in 1513, and established the first continuously occupied European settlement in what would become the United States in 1565. After two centuries under Spanish occupation, the British took control of Florida in 1763.
The British separated the area into East Florida, with its capital in St. Augustine, and West Florida, with its capital in Pensacola. Under British rule, East Florida consisted of what is the modern boundary of the state, east of the Apalachicola River. West Florida included the modern Panhandle of Florida, as well as parts of what are now Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Roger Smith focused his doctoral studies at the University of Florida on the topic of Florida in the American Revolution.
“On August 11, 1776, when news of the Declaration of Independence became known in St. Augustine, they became so incensed that they made effigies of John Hancock and Samuel Adams and hung them in the trees in St. Augustine Plaza and set them on fire,” Smith says. “This colony was adamantly loyal when the war broke out.”
At the start of the American Revolution in 1776, East Florida and West Florida were the only two southern colonies that remained loyal to King George III. This was a problem for the British, as the southern colonies in North America supplied food, clothing, and other supplies to their sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
“We always look at the American Revolution from an American perspective, with thirteen colonies from New Hampshire down to Georgia,” says Smith. “When you look at the war from a British perspective, you realize that we’re not talking about thirteen colonies, we’re talking about thirty-three colonies that they had to be concerned with, from Nova Scotia down to Grenada. Half of those colonies, sixteen of them, were in the Caribbean.”
During the American Revolution, approximately sixty percent of the British military was stationed in the Caribbean, to protect sugar production. In the eighteenth century, sugar was as important to the global economy as oil is today.
The Floridas were located right between the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and the northern colonial revolt. The British launched attacks on the American rebellion from both St. Augustine in East Florida, and Pensacola in West Florida.
St. Augustine was particularly important to the British, as it had the only stone fortresses south of the Chesapeake Bay. The British had repeatedly attacked the Castillo de San Marcos when it was under Spanish control, and realized the strength of its coquina walls.
“They saw East and West Florida as barriers to sedition from rolling out into the Caribbean, and then launching pads for regaining the American south,” Smith says.
Although the importance of Florida in the American Revolution is usually ignored in history books, George Washington was well aware of the area’s strategic significance. Washington wrote more than eighty letters about the Florida colonies to the Continental Congress and his generals, and he authorized five separate invasions of East Florida between 1776 and 1780.
During a series of battles from 1779 to 1781, Spain was able to recapture West Florida from the British. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, England returned East Florida to the Spanish to keep control of Gibraltar.
Florida would become a United States Territory in 1821, and was named a state in 1845. During the Civil War, Florida seceded from the Union, which is probably why its role in the American Revolution has been minimized.
It wasn’t until the 1880s that doctoral degrees in History were available in the United States, and early American historians tended to write from a northern perspective. “They took the opportunity to get their own little bit of vengeance on the south, and they basically wrote the southern colonies out of the first five years of the American Revolution,” Smith says.
1565 – Pedro Menendez de Aviles received his “asiento” or settlement orders from the Spanish government to travel to La Florida on this date. Two years earlier, Don Juan Mendedez, Pedro Menendez’s only son was lost in a wreck near the Bahamas and Menendez was determined to find him. He was also instructed to reconnoiter the gulf and east coasts, making detailed observations about the ports, currents, hazards, etc., and settle the new territory. The Spanish government also tasked Menendez with driving the French settlers out of La Florida.
