Mullet Key sits at the southern end of a story that runs the length of Spanish Florida, the story of an Underground Railroad that ran south. Generations before the famous northern one, enslaved people fled the English colonies toward Spanish Florida and freedom, and the first place that freedom took institutional form was Fort Mose, founded near St. Augustine in 1738. It is the origin point of the chain of free-Black and maroon communities that ends, at the mouth of Tampa Bay, with Angola.
The root of it all was a Spanish decree. In 1693, King Charles II of Spain offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped the English colonies and reached Spanish Florida, on the conditions that they convert to Catholicism and, where applicable, serve in the militia. For Spain it was strategy as much as principle, a way to weaken the rival English plantations to the north and to populate and defend a thinly held frontier. For the enslaved people of Carolina and Georgia, it was a destination. They came south, at enormous risk, year after year, and by the 1730s around a hundred freedom seekers had won asylum at St. Augustine.
In 1738 Florida's governor, Manuel Montiano, chartered and had built a fortified town for them about two miles north of St. Augustine: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, known as Fort Mose. It was the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States. Its leader, both civil and military, was Captain Francisco Menendez, a man of the Mandinga people born in West Africa, who had been captured and enslaved in British South Carolina and had escaped to Florida. He became literate, petitioned for his freedom and that of some thirty others, won it, and commanded the free Black militia of St. Augustine. The community at Mose blended African, Spanish, and Native traditions into something genuinely new.
The men of Fort Mose were fighters as well as settlers. In 1740, an English army under the Georgia governor James Oglethorpe captured and destroyed the town in a bloody action remembered as the Battle of Bloody Mose, but the Spanish and the Mose militia together ultimately saved St. Augustine, and the destruction of the town became a defensive victory. Menendez went on to serve as a Spanish privateer, was captured by the English in 1741 and brutally punished, and returned to Florida nonetheless. Fort Mose was rebuilt in 1752.
The town's life ended with the map. When Spain ceded Florida to Britain in 1763, the people of Fort Mose, facing re-enslavement under English rule, abandoned their homes and sailed for Spanish Cuba, Menendez and his family among them. That flight toward Cuba was the same path that the maroons of the Tampa Bay region would take two generations later. For Fort Mose was only the first link in a documented chain of Florida freedom communities: from Mose in 1738, to the Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff in 1816, to Angola on the Manatee River near the mouth of Tampa Bay, destroyed in 1821, whose survivors fled to Cuba and the Bahamas. The same sanctuary policy, the same Cuba-facing geography, the same courage run through all of them. Fort Mose is the proof that the freedom-seeker history of these shores is not a local curiosity but part of a Florida-wide pattern more than a century deep.
The site was rediscovered and excavated by the archaeologist Kathleen Deagan in the 1980s, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994, and is today Fort Mose Historic State Park, a featured stop on the Florida Black Heritage Trail, with a reconstructed fort open to the public. It is verified, dug-up, scholarly history, the very opposite of legend.