This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

At various points on the show, most recently on our episode on the rendition of Anthony Burns,

we have talked about people liberating themselves from enslavement and escaping to Canada from the United States.

Slavery was abolished in some parts of what's now Canada in the 1790s,

and then it was abolished all across the British Empire that Canada was part of

under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

It has not come up as often, but we've also talked about people fleeing south to Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1829, and that included people escaping from enslavement in Texas, which was part of Mexico in 1829, but was exempted from the decree abolishing slavery just a few months after it was issued.

And, of course, people did also escape to other U.S. states and territories,

although they still faced the risk of re-enslavement under the Fugive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.

I am not sure, though, whether we have ever talked about the period in which people were

escaping to Florida.

At the time, Florida was Spanish territory, and slavery had not been abolished there.

And that's at the heart of today's episode

about the first officially sanctioned settlement

for free black people in what is now the United States.

That was known as Fort Mose, just outside of St. Augustine, Florida,

in the 18th century.

St. Augustine served as the capital of Spanish Florida, or La Florida, and it's the oldest

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