| dc.description.abstract | In 1818, Cuban slave traders sent over one hundred enslaved Africans to Spanish Pensacola. Unbeknownst to them, Andrew Jackson had just begun the Occupation of Pensacola. American military officials captured the ships and accused the Spanish of violating the American laws that had abolished the slave trade in US territories. Although Spanish West Florida was not a US territory and Jackson had not received congressional approval for his military occupation, American officials nonetheless turned the enslaved Africans over to the Alabama territorial court as property of the US. The Cuban slave traders soon pursued a number of lawsuits in Alabama and Florida and before the US Supreme Court to retrieve the captives and raise questions about the legality of the occupation and the subsequent war itself.
My dissertation follows these lawsuits as they transformed from straightforward capture cases into disputes about the legality of the slave trade and a contest over American expansionism and Spain’s legal authority in Florida. At the center of my project are issues of sovereignty. I demonstrate that Cuban slave traders deployed the language of sovereignty as the most important legal authority in their arguments. Indeed, they argued that Pensacola was still a Spanish territory upon their arrival and therefore well within a jurisdiction that allowed for the international slave trade. They insisted that it was not they who violated American law, but rather the US military: when Jackson invaded Florida, he violated both Spanish sovereignty and US law by capturing the enslaved Africans and continuing to hold them as property. But Cuban traders were not the only ones to deploy this language: through comparative research with other similar slave trade cases, I found that enslaved captives leveraged issues of sovereignty and national belonging when insisting on their freedom at court, as well. Therefore each, in different ways, used the slave trade to influence a dynamic and politically charged Atlantic legal culture: slave traders and the enslaved alike took advantage of competing jurisdictions and pluralistic legal orders to stake their claims. | |
