While not easy to imagine considering its contemporary persona of sunshine and tourism, the present area of downtown Miami once held a plantation using enslaved labor. Records of the estate and its people are extremely scarce, and little is known of the workers who labored at the mouth of the Miami River. The path of one person, however – Chasy Sanks – shows how an individual enslaved in antebellum Miami can still be traced through the remaining documentation and provides a window into the life of an enslaved woman.
The future site of Miami sat in what would become Dade County, an entity formed in 1836, nine years before Florida became a state. An isolated, difficult place to live, Dade was only lightly populated, with small settlements at the mouths of the Miami and New Rivers, the Upper Keys, and on Indian Key, the county seat. Very few residents held slaves.
Richard Fitzpatrick arrived from South Carolina and established a plantation on the Miami River in 1830, relying on the work of approximately sixty enslaved persons to grow sugar cane and citrus. Fitzpatrick abandoned the site when the Second Seminole War broke out in 1836. He eventually transferred ownership of the Dade land to his nephew, William English, who had moved to South Florida a few years earlier from Columbia, South Carolina. English re-established the estate in 1842 near current Fort Dallas Park, this time with a hundred enslaved workers planting cotton, tobacco, and indigo.
After the discovery of gold in California, English decided to close the Florida operation and head west to try mining. In 1851, he sailed on the Commodore Stockton from Philadelphia to San Francisco. The ship’s manifest listed English as a passenger and had a cryptic mention of “36 unidentified in storage,” almost certainly a reference to enslaved individuals he brought with him.[1] It was a number far fewer, however, than the hundred that had labored in Miami.
Upon his arrival the same year, English began working the Kentucky Ridge Mine in the northwest part of California. Despite its status as a free state, English continued to use the enslaved workers from Miami to dig there for gold. In 1852, he died in an accidental shooting while dismounting a horse, and the individuals working the mine dispersed shortly afterward.
Very little written evidence remains of the workers at the English plantation in Miami, even for those who went to California. The Dade agricultural operation was closed and abandoned without leaving any documentation behind; a check of the English family plantation records in Columbia failed to turn up mention of individuals who had been enslaved in Miami.[2] Nearly all of Dade’s government records date from well after the Civil War. Further complicating research, the transfer of enslaved individuals was often informally done, leaving little paper evidence even at the time of a sale. Deaths among the enslaved were also poorly recorded, if at all. In 1840, the United States Census gave only the number of enslaved persons, listed by owner, age group, and gender. For 1850, it listed individual enslaved persons by gender and age, and sometimes provided their given names, although this was not done in Dade County. It recorded only twelve enslaved individuals in Dade that year, demonstrating that the Census, being essentially moment-in-time information, missed the time of the English plantation entirely.
In the case of William English, two other documents helped to shed light on the identity of some of the Miami enslaved. As part of a petition to be deemed an official port of entry by the United States government, Indian Key performed its own census in 1838, listing enslaved persons by their first name and the owner’s last name. This census showed six persons enslaved by English shortly before he restarted the plantation, one of them a female with the unusual name of “Chasy English.”[3] When English transported a group of enslaved persons between Key West and New Orleans on the Columbia in 1842, the ship’s manifest recorded the first name, age, and height of each of the fourteen enslaved persons he brought with him – Chasy appeared as a ten-year-old girl who stood an even five feet tall.[4]
Even for those Miami enslaved with less common first names such as Bina and Minder, census records generally proved an unreliable resource to definitively trace a particular person – this was even more so for frequently-used names. (One possible exception was “Jacob English,” working as a laborer in Key West in 1870, whose location, name, age, and South Carolina background make him a likely candidate to have been the “Jacob” listed on the Columbia manifest.[5]) Unlike others on the two earlier documents, Chasy’s first name and age, cross-referenced with other resources, allowed the census to give valuable information on her fate.
In the 1860 United States Census of Nevada County, California, she was listed as “C. Sanks,” a married African American woman who was born “about 1835” in South Carolina. She was married to “I. Sanks” and had two male children, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. The value of their real property was $1,000; their personal property was listed at $200.[6] A decade later, the census showed “Chasey Sanks,” born “about 1834” in South Carolina, was married to 52-year-old Isaac Sanks, had a 12-year-old son, and was “keeping house” in Nevada County; it is unclear what happened to the older of the two children listed in 1860.[7] The 1880 Census showed that “Chacy Sanks,” born “about 1831” in South Carolina, was still married to Isaac; they had a son, also named Isaac.[8] The differing ages and spellings given in the various censuses exemplified the relative lack of quality records at the time, particularly for the formerly enslaved.
The Grass Valley Morning Union, the closest newspaper to the mine, made occasional mention of the formerly enslaved residents in the area. Five years after the end of the war, Joe Thomas and Isaac Sanks traveled back to Florida to “look up their old time companions.”[9] Later that year, Thomas had a doctor remove an arrowhead from an old injury he received fighting during the Seminole War.[10] Fanny Green, noted by the paper as having been brought to California from Florida by English – although not listed in the Indian Key census or the Columbia manifest – died in 1875 at the age of forty-nine.[11]
In reporting Isaac Sanks’ death in 1894, the Morning Union wrote that “arriving here, Mrs. Sanks procured employment as cook at the old Osborne Hill boarding house at a salary of $100 per month, and soon she earned sufficient money to buy her husband’s freedom and to transport him to California.”[12] (It was uncertain, however, if Isaac had ever been at the Miami plantation since he was referenced as a ship’s pilot operating out of Key West.) Chasy, described as a “paralytic” in the same article, survived him, as did their son Isaac. Two years later, the same paper reported that:
Mrs. Isaac Sanks . . . who has been in poor health for a number of months past, died
peacefully at her home on Church street yesterday afternoon about 2 o’clock. Deceased
was one of our oldest residents, having come to this city in 1850. She was born in
Columbus, South Carolina, about 70 years ago. Deceased leaves a son, Isaac.[13]
The same newspaper wrote that Joseph Thomas, noted as Chasy’s brother, had also been enslaved on the English estate in Miami, and had died four years earlier.[14] Although he did not appear in the Indian Key census, his age corresponded with that of the “Joe” listed in the 1842 manifest. A 1909 San Francisco Chronicle article referenced six former enslaved persons who had worked at the English mine and lived in California afterward; aside from Chasy and possibly Joe, none of the other names were mentioned in the earlier Florida records of 1838 and 1842.[15] Due to the lack of government documentation and the transient nature of its operation, the William English plantation in Dade County left even fewer records than most places on its enslaved workers. A unique first name and a handful of documents, however, provided a consistent trail sufficient to trace what became of Chasy Sanks, and showed her path from a young enslaved girl in Florida to a married free woman in California. While the fates of a few other Miami workers can possibly be gleaned to a lesser degree from the surviving records, the story of most of the rest of those enslaved in Miami will likely never be known.
[1] Louis J. Rasmussen, San Francisco Ship Passenger Lists Vol. II (Colma, CA: Clearfield Company, 1966): 130.
[2] Alfred English Dolby papers, Collection of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.
[3] The Senate of the United States, Third Session of the Twenty-fifth Congress, Begun and Held at the City of Washington, December 3, 1838, and in the Sixty-third Year of the Independence of the United States, Volume II, Containing Documents from No. 18 to No. 146 (Washington, D.C.: Blair and Rives, 1839).
[4] The National Archives in Washington, DC; Washington, DC; Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860; Microfilm Serial: M1895; Microfilm Roll: 9.
[5] 1870 U.S. Census; Census Place: Key West, Monroe, Florida; Roll: M593_132; Page: 369B.
[6] The National Archives in Washington D.C.; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M653; Residence Date: 1860; Home in 1860: Grass Valley, Nevada, California; Roll: M653_61: Page: 236.
[7] 1870 U.S. Census; Census Place: Grass Valley, Nevada, California; Roll: M593_75; Page: 162B.
[8] 1880 U.S. Census; Census Place: Grass Valley, Nevada, California; Roll: 70; Page: 73C; Enumeration District: 061.
[9] Morning Union, July 24, 1870.
[10] Morning Union, October 29, 1870.
[11] Morning Union, February 23, 1875.
[12] Morning Union, May 9, 1894.
[13] Morning Union, November 6, 1896.
[14] Morning Union, December 22, 1892.
[15] Matt Hamilton, “This California Mine Was Worked by Slave Labor,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 11, 1909.