The leader of the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States was a man born in West Africa, enslaved in the English colonies, who fought his way to freedom in Spanish Florida and then spent his life defending it with a gun in his hands. His name, the one he took in Florida, was Francisco Menendez, and his story is the human spine of the freedom-seeker history that connects, at its far southern end, to the mouth of Tampa Bay. He was no relation to the conquistador Pedro Menendez; he took the name in Florida.
Menendez was born around 1704 in West Africa, of the Mandinga people. Captured and carried across the Atlantic, he was enslaved by an English planter in the Carolinas sometime before 1720. There he learned, as many enslaved people in Carolina did, of the promise to the south: by a royal edict of the Spanish king Charles II in 1693, any enslaved man who fled an English plantation and reached Spanish Florida would be granted his freedom, provided he accepted the Catholic faith and took up arms in the militia. It was a promise worth risking everything for.
His freedom did not come easily or at once. When the Yamasee people rose against the English in 1715, Menendez escaped in the upheaval and fought alongside the Yamasee against his former enslavers, reaching Spanish Florida in the company of Yamasee allies by the late 1720s. Yet despite the 1693 edict, he and some thirty other escaped Africans were not at first granted the liberty they had been promised; they were held in a servitude of sorts even in Florida. Menendez did not accept it quietly. He became literate, was made captain of St. Augustine's free Black militia in the 1720s, and petitioned the Spanish governor again and again to honor the king's promise of freedom for himself and his compatriots.
In 1738 he prevailed. Governor Manuel Montiano freed the petitioners and established a fortified town for them just north of St. Augustine, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, with Francisco Menendez as its civil and military leader. It was the first free Black town in what is now the United States, and it was also St. Augustine's first line of defense against the English to the north. The test came fast. In 1740 an army under the Georgia governor James Oglethorpe invaded Florida and seized the abandoned fort, and in the ferocious counterattack that followed, remembered as the Battle of Bloody Mose, Menendez and his militia helped retake the ground and break Oglethorpe's siege of St. Augustine, though their town was wrecked in the fighting.
With Mose in ruins, Menendez took to the sea as a privateer aboard Spanish corsairs, raiding English shipping. His luck ran out when the English captured him; for the offense of being a free Black man in arms against them, he was brutally punished, by the accounts whipped and abused, before he escaped and made his way back to Florida. He left a written account of the ordeal, a rare first-person record from such a man in that century. He resumed his leadership, saw Fort Mose rebuilt in 1752, and governed his community for another decade.
When Spain ceded Florida to Britain in 1763, the free people of Mose faced re-enslavement under English rule, and they chose exile over that. Francisco Menendez sailed with them for Spanish Cuba, his name on the rolls of the evacuation, and there the documentary trail goes quiet. He had been born unfree in Africa, enslaved across an ocean, and had made himself, by will and courage and decades of struggle, the leader of free people and the first Black militia commander on the American mainland. The flight to Cuba that ended his known story was the same path the maroons of Angola, near Tampa Bay, would take two generations later, which is why his life reaches all the way to this archive.