Interracialism and Revolution on the Southern Frontier: Pensacola in the Civil War

The anomie of war produced cross-cultural contact and collaboration throughout the Confederacy, yet the alliances in Pensacola among African Americans and European Americans were part of a long-standing tradition of interracialism that derived primarily from the city's liminality.4 In the first half of the nineteenth century, while neighboring seaports along the Gulf Coast like New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, and distant Atlantic ports such as Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, experienced explosive population growth and rapid economic development to become major metropolitan centers, Pensacola remained an inchoate and isolated frontier town with only a few thousand residents.5 To be sure, since the United States' acquisition of Florida formally in 1821, the former capital of Spanish West Florida had acquired some of the trappings of a proper southern city, including chattel slavery; nevertheless, the remote outpost was never integrated fully into the Old South, remaining, as it had been at the time of the War of 1812, an economic and cultural backwater inhabited by "traders, smugglers, privateersmen, Indians, half-breeds, runaway negroes, and white men who had fled from American territory for good cause. [...]neither the drift toward sectional war nor the conflagration itself managed to destroy the genuine bonds of affection that had already developed between enslaved black people and the free white mechanics, shopkeepers, and sailors they lived, worked, and often rollicked beside.