The freedom-seeker story that begins at Fort Mose, near St. Augustine, in 1738 reaches its far southern end right here, near the mouth of Tampa Bay. In the years around 1812 to 1821 a community of self-emancipated and free-born Black people and Black Seminoles lived on the Manatee River, just south of the bay, in a settlement remembered as Angola. It grew into one of the largest maroon towns in the history of the South, and it was destroyed, deliberately, in the violence that brought Florida into the United States. Its story was nearly erased, and has only in our own century been recovered from the ground and from Bahamian memory.
Angola was the last link in a chain of armed freedom that ran down the length of Florida. It began at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River, the “Negro Fort” held by self-emancipated people and their Native and British allies, until a U.S. naval attack destroyed it in July 1816. Survivors fell back to the Suwannee River, and when Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida shattered that refuge at the Battle of Suwannee in 1818, the survivors fell back again, this time all the way south to the Manatee River near Tampa Bay, where they gathered into the community the Cuban fishermen called Angola. It was, by 1820, the last great stronghold of the maroons in Florida, the end of the road for people who had been retreating before American power for half a decade.
Angola flourished because it sat in a thinly governed borderland with access to the wider Caribbean world. The maroons farmed and raised cattle on the river, and their position near the Spanish and Cuban fishing ranchos at Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor gave them markets in Havana and the Bahamas for fish, timber, and crops, which in turn bought them the arms and powder that let them defend their freedom. The people were a fluid mix the records name in many ways, free blacks, self-emancipated slaves, African Seminoles, Black Seminoles, maroons, alongside Red Stick Creek refugees and Spanish neighbors, and the British trade goods later dug from the soil mark how far their connections reached. At its height the community may have numbered in the high hundreds; the accounts of its destruction, counting refugees and captives together, suggest a population approaching nine hundred. For a brief window it was simply a place where Black people lived free at the southern edge of a slaveholding world.
That window closed with the American takeover of Florida. A free, armed, prosperous Black community on the Gulf coast was intolerable to the planters of Georgia and to Andrew Jackson, who in 1821 was becoming the de facto governor of the newly ceded territory. Without the official backing of the federal government, Jackson set his Creek allies to do the work. In 1821 the Creeks fell on Angola, by the contemporary account surprising and capturing some three hundred people, plundering the plantations, and burning every house, then pushing south to plunder the Spanish ranchos as well. Hundreds were scattered; many were dragged back into the slavery they had fled. The 1821 South Florida expedition that mapped the area labeled its chart, with brutal candor, “A draft of Sarrazota, or Runaway Negro Plantations,” and that word, Sarrazota, is the root of the name Sarasota.
But not all were taken. Bands of survivors scattered across the peninsula, some north to other doomed maroon settlements, some inland, and a large number south to Cape Florida, near present-day Key Biscayne, where Bahamian fishermen carried them across the straits to Red Bays on Andros Island in the British Bahamas. There they became free British subjects, and there their descendants live to this day, keeping the memory of the Florida maroons alive across two centuries and an ocean. In fleeing toward the islands the people of Angola followed exactly the path the people of Fort Mose had taken sixty years before, when they too chose exile over re-enslavement. The same sanctuary impulse, the same flight toward Cuba and the islands, runs through both ends of the chain.
Angola was nearly erased, surviving mainly in Bahamian oral tradition until the historian Canter Brown, Jr., reconstructed it from archival clues in 1990. In 2004 a community scholar, Vickie Oldham, organized the interdisciplinary “Looking for Angola” project, which over a decade of excavation by the Manatee Mineral Spring in Bradenton, led by the New College archaeologist Uzi Baram, turned up the first material traces of the settlement, the British ceramics and other evidence of the freedom-seekers' lives. The site is now recognized on the National Park Service's Network to Freedom, part of what scholars call the southern spur of the Underground Railroad, the road that ran not north to Canada but south to Florida and the sea. Its recovery reframes the whole history of this bay. Mullet Key and Fort De Soto are usually told as a story of Spanish explorers and American soldiers; Angola insists on the other history these waters hold, that the mouth of Tampa Bay was also, for a time, a doorway to freedom, and the scene of its violent closing.