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Murder, Spanish Law, and Native Justice in Florida

Friday, January 26, 2018 - 3:00pm

Stephanie Grauman Wolf Room
McNeil Center Early American Studies
3355 Woodland Walk
University of Pennsylvania


Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

McNeil Center Early American Studies Seminar

“‘With respect to Satisfaction for Mr. Houston’: Murder, Spanish Law, and Native Justice in the Florida Borderlands, 1784-1821”
 
Nancy O. Gallman, 2017-2019 MCEAS Barra Postdoctoral Fellow



Gallman's research focuses on cross-cultural law and violence on the Florida-Georgia border after the American Revolution. She argues that attempts by Anglo-Americans to take East Florida by force failed in part because of alliances that Native polities, people of African descent, and Spanish officials built on the strength of a plural legal culture. She compares Spanish colonial law and the laws of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles in conflicts over land, robberies, runaway slaves, and murder. Tolerating and even drawing strength from each other’s different legal cultures, Spanish officials and Native leaders sustained a plural system of justice that reinforced Native principles of law and, for African Americans, created economic and political opportunities unavailable to them north of the border. In the Florida borderlands, free and enslaved African Americans incorporated colonial and indigenous legal principles and practices to construct their own legal ways as litigants, trial witnesses, and messengers. Gallman's research shows how diverse principles of law defined relations between indigenous peoples, African Americans, and settlers in the Southeast, at a time when the United States sought to expand the authority of an Anglo-American legal framework and use it to control more land, commerce, and people.
 
Chapter Two explores the connection between multicultural alliances and law by comparing indigenous and settler conceptions of justice in the adjudication of a cross-cultural murder: the 1793 killing of an Anglo-American, allegedly by a Lower Creek or Seminole. This conflict reveals the significance of competing meanings of justice to the alliance formed between the colonial Spanish government, the Lower Creeks and Seminoles, and African Americans to guard against threats of invasion by Anglo-American settlers.
 

Everyone attending the seminar should read the paper in advance.
Contact Amy L. Baxter-Bellamy [abaxter@sas.upenn.edu] at the McNeil Center to request a copy.