Frank Marotti. Heaven's Soldiers: Free People of Color and the Spanish Legacy in Antebellum Florida.

Abstract

Frank Marotti's Heaven's Soldiers: Free People of Color and the Spanish Legacy in Antebellum Florida is a multifaceted study of free blacks in a slave society undergoing the transition from Spanish governance to the rule of the United States. During the Spanish period free people of African descent enjoyed legal protections and a modicum of public engagement, especially if they descended from white planter parentage. As Marotti and others have pointed out, when the United States gained control of the Florida colonies and organized them as a territory, many of the formal and informal practices toward free blacks were renegotiated. What Marotti adds to this story is the active role free blacks played in these negotiations; and this contribution is an important one. Few scholars have examined the ways in which notions of rights or even citizenship move out of the confines of legal history to explore the ways people on the street participated in shaping the laws and policies that guided their daily lives.