With the topic of slavery in the news, you might wonder about its history in our city.
There was not widespread slavery here for the simple reason that there was not a city. Fort Lauderdale was not incorporated until 1911, almost 50 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
If you’re thinking the city of Plantation was named after slaveholders, you’re incorrect. The land Plantation was built on was swampland until 1902. A rice plantation was planned there but never came about. Still, the name stuck.
There were large plantations with slaves statewide before the Civil War. The largest, raising cotton, were in the center of the state.
Though slavery was rare here, there are two accounts of slaveholders – one up for debate – in the pre-Fort Lauderdale area along the New River.
Perhaps a surprise to some, one of the slaveholders was William Cooley. It was his family that was massacred by Seminoles at his home on the New River west of Tarpon Bend in 1836. A second was a “swashbuckling” figure named William Augustus Bowles, who with his band of “Indians, rogues and slaves” waged battles against Spanish outposts in the late 1700s.
For those unacquainted with the history, Cooley was the accepted leader of a colony of 70 settlers on the New River. He arrived in 1824 from North Florida to farm, and built a business processing and shipping arrowroot, an edible starch used in gum and candy. It was made from the plentiful coontie plant, long harvested by the Seminoles.
From his wharf, schooners took the product to Key West where it was shipped north. Essential to Cooley’s success was his friendship and knowledge of the Seminoles, including fluency in their language. At one point he took their side in recouping lands illegally confiscated from them.
Cooley eventually took on the role of justice of the peace for the area. After two whites killed a Seminole leader, the slayers were captured and remitted by Cooley to Key West for trial. Unfortunately, they were released, supposedly for lack of evidence. Tragically, the Seminoles blamed Cooley.
When he and his men were on the coast salvaging a Spanish shipwreck (another hat Cooley wore), 15 to 20 Seminoles stormed the family residence. They killed Cooley’s wife, three children and the family’s tutor, then plundered the estate.
The raiders left without harming two slaves or the Seminoles who worked for Cooley.
There you have it. Cooley had slaves, no dissent on that. Soon after, the settlement was abandoned, and whites fled the area as The Second Seminole War erupted.
Turning to Bowles, we need to go further back, to 1790, and we get much of this story from historian Stuart McIver. The Spanish governor of East Florida at the time, Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada, was given an economic report from that year, referring to the Gulf Coast and New River environs.
“No people settled in those localities,” it noted, “because no one wants to risk his negroes and his properties to the inroad of the Indians, pirates and rogues from the Bahamas who infest all those coasts.”
So clearly, before those cotton plantations in the middle of Florida sprouted up after the U.S. took over from Spain, the Spanish didn’t want to risk “their negroes.”
Bowles was a former U.S. soldier and adventurer, who retired early and made his home in the backwoods of Florida, comfortable in the company of Native Americans and living a renegade lifestyle. When pressure came from the Spanish governor, he managed to pull together a band of Creeks and Cherokees, launching guerrilla-style attacks on Spanish bases.
McIver writes, “In the course of his swashbuckling career, he called himself ‘director general of The State of Muskegee, a sovereign nation of Creeks and Cherokees.’”
Nepomuceno sent spies to track Bowles deep into the Everglades. One of the spies kept a journal, and history is much indebted to him. The spy mission took them up the New River, where they found a family that had received a gift of five horses from Bowles. That family was none other than that of Bahamians Charles and Frankee Lewis.
The spy scouted out the Lewis homestead and gave us a rare account of the small farm belonging to the first non-native settlers on the New River.
Was Bowles a slaveholder? Maybe, but digging a little deeper, I found that the slaves in his camp were “former slaves.” Bowles, it turns out, was a protector.
