The Underground Railroad to Spanish Florida

Most Americans learn about the Underground Railroad that carried enslaved people north to freedom. St. Augustine is home to the opposite story.

Beginning in 1693, the Spanish crown offered freedom to any enslaved person who escaped the English colonies to the north, reached Spanish Florida, and converted to Catholicism. For decades, men and women risked everything to travel south — a reverse Underground Railroad — toward St. Augustine and the promise of liberty.

In 1738, the Spanish governor established Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose — Fort Mose — about two miles north of the city. It was the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States, more than a century before the Civil War. The people who reached it built it, and defended it. Today the story is told at Fort Mose Historic State Park, one of the most genuinely important “firsts” in a city full of them.