What if Spain invades South Carolina in the War of Jenkins' Ear

raharris1973

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In OTL, the Spanish invaded Georgia during this war but were repulsed at Bloody Marsh.

What if a Spanish force came from Florida by sea, bypassed Georgia, landed in South Carolina captured Charleston, sparked a slave rebellion in South Carolina and devastated the colony which sees english authority only restored after a hard-fought campaign involving the help of external troops from Georgia.

Could this encourage Georgia to remain a no-slavery colony for another generation, into independence?
 
Unless they succeed (as with Haiti), slave rebellions prior to the 19th century actually tend to have the opposite of the effect you described; increased repression of blacks, both free and enslaved, and narrowing of opportunities for a slave to become free or attain better living conditions after such. I doubt Spain would want to incite a slave rebellion in Georgia when they themselves also use slavery on a large scale in the nearby Caribbean.
 
Spain gladly accepted runaway slaves from the colonies during the conflict, though, and encouraged them. They formed a thriving community in the Jacksonville area (I think). It would have interesting to see what happened there, had not the seven years war put an end to Spanish Florida.

I welcome being corrected, but I think whites stayed away from encouraging/sponsoring slave rebellion. Britain could turn around and do the same in Spanish slave territories. Methinks the war club of slave rebellion is used exponentially more in alt history TLs than in OTL.

That said, you need to make spanish troops a bit more competent to launch such an invasion.
 
Giving arms to freed slaves would probably not be very effective but could the Spanish offer to train select volunteers as an auxiliary force? If so, could this unit if successful discredit slavery earlier?
 
Tbh, Spain would probably annihilate the infant Georgia colony and then continue north until being stopped between the rock of powerful Native American nations to the west and the hard place of more fortified parts of what would become the Carolinas. You might be able to have Georgia (or in this timeline "Itaba" or "Guale" or "Santa Isabel" or something else since I seriously doubt Georgia would stick) be given to Spain if Spain is victorious, which could give what otl would become Georgia a fascinating Afro-Latino culture, perhaps similar to the Gullah or other groups. What happens afterwards really depends on how the growing powers of the Cherokee and Muscogee(creek) nations develop, and how and if there is an American Revolution. People forget that the conquest of the Americas was very much up in the air at many points, and if you destabilize the southeast the OTL domination by European powers may not occur.
 
People forget that the conquest of the Americas was very much up in the air at many points, and if you destabilize the southeast the OTL domination by European powers may not occur.
IMO, native americans can't retain supremacy forever unless they adopt European ways, which they didn't want to do. NA lifestyle only works while they have overwhelming population advantage and vulnerability to European disease ensures that isn't going to remain forever. Central and northern colonies will continue to grow and encroach. Spanish Florida will continue to grow.

It's possible that, given enough time, NA could merge the two cultures and retain control, but 1740 is too late to be given the time. OTL NA response to encroachment was to resist until whites made resistance futile, then retreat. Thus the frontier was constantly moving, and only rarely in NA favor. If the area is a Spanish color on the map, the natives have an easier go of it, but in the next major war, Britain will look to change that color. IF Spain is powerful enough to prevent that, they're powerful enough to retain hegemony over the natives.
 
Giving arms to freed slaves would probably not be very effective but could the Spanish offer to train select volunteers as an auxiliary force? If so, could this unit if successful discredit slavery earlier?
I believe Spain did recruit blacks into their forces. Post war, they encouraged a free black community as a buffer against the British. Colonial Spain typically tolerated free blacks far more than the British. After they took control of Louisiana a couple decades later, they changed the laws to make it easier for slaves to gain their freedom.

not all cultures of slavery are created equal.
 

raharris1973

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Unless they succeed (as with Haiti), slave rebellions prior to the 19th century actually tend to have the opposite of the effect you described; increased repression of blacks, both free and enslaved, and narrowing of opportunities for a slave to become free or attain better living conditions after such. I doubt Spain would want to incite a slave rebellion in Georgia when they themselves also use slavery on a large scale in the nearby Caribbean.

A slave rebellion in Georgia would not have been possible because slavery was still at this time illegal in the colony. At the Georgia colony's founding in 1732 slavery was outlawed. The slavery ban in Georgia was overturned in 1749, after Georgian whites had 17 years to witness South Carolina whites grow relatively wealthier under a system allowing plantation slavery. Part of the original slavery ban was the concept of social experimentation, preserving labor opportunities for the "worthy poor" of Britain. Another part however was for security against Spanish attack. As a border settlement with Florida, it was thought safer to not have a slave population. But, an outcome of the historic War of Jenkins Ear, despite a Spanish invasion, was a resounding defensive victory at the battle of Bloody Marsh, making the colonists feel pretty secure Spanish invasion would no longer be a concern.

Also, in the OP I am not proposing emancipation or any real lightening of slave codes in any colony where slavery was legal.

In the OP, the Spanish invasion of South Carolina, and the slave uprising it sparks, most likely does not lead to anything but a grim fate of a different sort for the slaves of the area.

[Others have explained Spanish willingness to harbor and arm escaped slaves from english colonies in previous posts. I would only add that Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico were far less slavery dependent than the plantation colonies of the English, French and Dutch Caribbean, and that the Spanish had ample motive for including servile rebellion in their tactics since their invasion of Georgia in OTL, and South Carolina in the ATL, came only after serial aggression by the British against Spanish Caribbean ports and St. Augustine Florida. In the scenario I am envisioning, the Spanish are trying to devastate South Carolina to screw up the British good]

So, I am thinking that the slave revolt leads to widespread killings, property destruction, burnings, and escapes. I think the Spanish cannot really stick around to hold ground forever and that eventually the British will regain control of South Carolina. But suppression will be messy and take some time. Many, many escapees/revolting slaves will be killed as the British regain control. Others will live on the fringes in escapee or maroon communities for awhile. The luckiest will survive in maroon communities that migrate further away, perhaps up and over the Appalachians. I am not sure if Indian beaver wars had turned Kentucky into a "hunting ground" with minimum permanent population, but one interesting possibility would be if a mass of South Carolina escapes ends up migrating to Kentucky and Tennessee and intermixing with Amerindians and forms a proto-Seminole group.

I figured the white Georgia militia could be heavily called upon to help the suppression of the Spanish invasion and uprising.

The net effect of all this is that the Georgia trustee's initial decision to make Georgia a non-slave colony is validated. It is considered important to have a white buffer on the frontier. Also, South Carolinians, taking some time to recover from property destruction and repopulating themselves, will not be inspiring so much envy among Georgians in the 1740s. So, Georgia goes into the 1750s with some vivid reasons to stick with the no slavery model for awhile.

If this circumstance can be kept up through the beginning of the American revolution, slavery may never start in Georgia, even as it gets fully reestablished in South Carolina.
 
Something of interest:

Before the American Revolution, both the colonies and Great Britain regulated the African slave trade to what became the United States. The British government gave special protection to the Royal African Company, which brought more Africans slaves to the American colonies than any other single entity. The slave trade was an important part of Britain's mercantile policy: it collected taxes on the slaves while colonial governments both taxed them and occasionally sought to limit their arrivals.

After the Stono Rebellion (1739), South Carolina suspended the trade for a few years because its leaders believed that large numbers of freshly imported Africans would undermine the safety of the colony. Then in 1751 South Carolina imposed a special tax on foreign slaves to slow the trade and, nine years later, once again banned it altogether because leaders of the colony still feared the growing number of African-born slaves. The royal authorities disallowed the law. But in 1764 the colony levied new taxes on African-born slaves because, as the legislature noted, their rising number "may prove of the most dangerous consequence."

Shortly before the Revolution, Virginia also tried to ban the trade, not for prudential reasons but to prevent the outflow of capital from the colony. Virginians attempted to use prohibitive taxes to discourage the trade, but the Crown overruled this law, because the slave trade was vital to the British economy and because the Royal African Company had powerful patrons in the government.
 
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