“I have sold my slaves in that county, to Col: White of Florida, who will take them in families, to that territory. He gives me for them, (with the exception of a few sold there) five thousand dolrs., which are paid, by obtaining for me, a release in that amount, from J. J. Astor, for a loan obtain’d of him in the late war, offerd by himself, on hearing that I was pressd for money”.
James Monroe to James Madison, Oak Hill, March 28th. 1828.
Virginia to Florida – The Antelope – Casa Bianca Plantation, Florida – Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church – Re-Examined History
A group of enslaved families arrived in Jefferson County, Florida in 1828. They had been sold and forcibly removed from Virginia, the only home they knew. After a 700-mile journey, they arrived to the sparsely settled, newly U.S.-acquired Florida territory and their new home: Casa Bianca plantation.
Joseph Mills White, their new enslaver, bought this group of enslaved people from former President James Monroe. Like many Virginians in the 1820s, Monroe was in debt. For years he sought to sell his Albemarle County property, Highland, including the enslaved people laboring there. He blamed external factors in his decision to sell human beings.
Monroe and White knew each other since at least 1817 – while White was from Kentucky, his mother’s family was from Albemarle County, and White had lived for a time there, qualifying as an attorney at the Albemarle Bar. For $5,000, Monroe sold nearly two dozen people to White: Toby and Betsy with their children; Dudley and Eve with their children; Jim Harris and his wife Calypso with their children; and eight-year old Mary Baker. No deed for the sale has been found – the names of the families have been extracted by comparing documents associated with both Monroe and White.
The families arrived in Florida to find another group of enslaved people toiling at Casa Bianca – enslaved African.
In the summer of 1820, the United States revenue cutter Dallas intercepted the Antelope, a slave ship flying an American flag, off the coast of Florida. Over 250 chained Africans were found on board. Their average age was fourteen years old. The Antelope had plundered a Spanish and a Portuguese ship, stealing the human cargo off the coast of Africa earlier in the year. The Dallas escorted the Antelope to Savannah, where an eight-year court battle began which reached the Supreme Court and spanned both President Monroe’s and John Quincy Adams’ administrations. Slave importation to the United States had been prohibited by Congress in 1807. Further legislative acts passed during President Monroe’s administration in 1819 and 1820 enhanced the slave trade prohibition, placing any illegally imported slaves under Presidential control and declaring the offenders to be engaged in piracy, an offense punishable by death. The Antelope captain was indicted for taking the property of a Portuguese subject and a Spanish subject. He was not tried for piracy, nor was the illegal transportation of the Africans mentioned in the case. The jury found the captain not guilty. The next cases determined how the Africans would be divided between the Spanish and Portuguese claimants, a process which took until the end of 1827 to resolve.
After the African captives arrived in Savannah, a yellow fever epidemic ravaged the city. A month later, 184 captives remained, half of them children under ten years old and the other half between the ages of ten and twenty. While waiting for the determination of their fate, court and Savannah officials forced them to work on public works projects and on plantations near Savannah. By 1827, the courts decided that 134 of the African captives were to be freed and sent to Liberia. The court determined that 39 of the captives belonged to the Spanish claimant, and they were ordered to be taken out of the United States. But the Spanish claimant sold his share of the captives to Richard H. Wilde, a Georgia Congressman and the business partner of Joseph White. Together the two men created Casa Bianca plantation as a joint business venture, and the Africans that Wilde purchased became part of Casa Bianca’s enslaved population.
Except for two sold in Savannah, Wilde separated the remaining African captives from the families they formed during their time in Savannah and sent them to Casa Bianca. There, along with the enslaved families from Virginia, they cleared the Florida wilderness to grow sugar cane and cotton for their enslavers.
Casa Bianca Plantation, Jefferson County, Florida
Casa Bianca plantation was about 1500 acres when the enslaved people arrived there. White began purchasing the land in 1826, and by his death in 1839, Casa Bianca was over 2000 acres. Wilde sold his interest to the plantation to White in the 1830s, but it would be White’s wife Ellen, the daughter of Kentucky governor John Adair, who was the longest owner of Casa Bianca. She enslaved and sold families during her 21-year ownership of the plantation.
The early years at Casa Bianca would have been a shock to all the newly arrived enslaved people. Those from Monroe’s Highland, forced to leave the long-settled Virginia Piedmont, came to a wilderness frontier in Middle Florida. The Antelope survivors carried not only the traumatic scars of the Middle Passage, but also separation from the families they created in Savannah. But their arrival also displaced Native peoples, and the enslaved in the county experienced new fears and panic from the Indian raids that took place around Monticello during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). A series of attacks by the displaced Native Americans in May 1836 sent some enslaved from Casa Bianca to the town of Monticello to build stockades for defense. The county’s enslaved also suffered the added stressors of malaria and yellow fever outbreaks that ravaged the local population.
Casa Bianca had originally been created as a sugar cane plantation, and White and Wilde heavily invested in sugar cane equipment. But the north Florida climate was ill-suited for the crop, and after a few years the plantation transitioned to cotton production. Both crops were labor-intensive for the enslaved people toiling there, but their numbers steadily grew over time: 60 in 1830; 94 in 1844; and 126 in 1859.
In 1860 Ellen decided to sell Casa Bianca. Robert W. Williams, a Tallahassee lawyer, purchased the core 3000 acres and 82 enslaved families, promising to ensure their safety on the voyage from Florida to his plantation on the Mississippi. Ellen’s nephew, James Patton Anderson, who in 1855 agreed to live at Casa Bianca, pay his aunt a yearly stipend, and oversee the plantation, purchased the remaining 400 acres known as “The Scrub,” which was about two miles away from the main house, and 38 enslaved people. After the Civil War, Anderson moved with his family to Memphis, Tennessee and rented out his Jefferson County land to the families he enslaved. He died in Memphis in 1872. Meanwhile Ellen lived off the charity of her relatives and died in Oxford, Mississippi in 1884. Robert Williams sold off portions of the plantation during the Civil War, and by 1870, the central portion of Casa Bianca, which included the White’s columned mansion, was owned by the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent.
Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church
The majority of those enslaved at Casa Bianca remained in Jefferson County after emancipation. Most of them sharecropped with former area enslavers. All of them made sure their children attended the new Freedmen’s schools. And a few families of those formerly enslaved at Casa Bianca plantation came together and created an institution that still exists today: the Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church.
Five trustees – Alfred Williams, William McGuire, Isham Nelson, Anthony Robinson, and Tony Robinson – signed the deed creating the church in 1872 on former Casa Bianca plantation land and in close proximity to the plantation house. Alfred, William, and Isham had been enslaved at Casa Bianca, and William was a toddler when sold by Monroe to Florida. Anthony and Tony Robinson (its yet unknown how or if they were related to each other) lived nearby [Tony Robinson (b.~1841) and his wife Margaret lived a few doors down from Isham Nelson and David Straws, the first pastor of Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church, according to the 1870 census. Anthony Robinson (b.~1835) was a single man and lived in that same census township].
The first pastor of the Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church was David Straws, another man enslaved at Casa Bianca and the brother-in-law of church trustee William McGuire. Straws married William’s sister Hannah. a daughter of Dudley and Eve from Virginia. William spent his early years at Monroe’s Highland plantation, and while he may have been too young to remember his time there, his mother Eve was alive and may have shared her religious memories while the Casa Bianca church was created.
Today descendants of those enslaved at Casa Bianca plantation continue to attend services and call the Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church their home church.
Back in Albemarle County, Virginia, almost 200 years later, James Monroe’s Highland announced the archaeological finding of the original 1799 Monroe house. The re-examination of the plantation’s history spurred two docents at the site, Miranda Burnett and Martin Violette, to question the fate of the enslaved families Monroe sold to Florida. For years the assumption had been that the stories of their lives had been lost. Oral histories of their descendants, so important in the histories of the plantations of the Virginia founding fathers, would possibly never be part of Highland’s history.
Burnett and Violette’s Take Them in Families project, the name taken from Monroe’s letter to Madison about the Florida sale, began the search for these enslaved families. Shortly thereafter, Take Them in Families and Highland learned that descendants of those Monroe enslaved still lived in Albemarle County. Their community centered around Blenheim and the Middle Oak Baptist Church, established in 1871. Since then, the descendants of those in Albemarle County and Highland formed a new community together, the Highland Council of Descendant Advisors, collaborating on inclusive reinterpretation of the plantation site.
As Burnett and Violette researched the families sold to Florida and got to know the descendants in Albemarle County, they realized that two descendant groups, separated nearly 200 years ago, could be reunited. In September 2018 Burnett and Violette traveled to Monticello, Florida to visit the Casa Bianca plantation site and, more importantly, attempt to connect with descendants there. Their presentation at the local library yielded results.
On the first Descendant’s Day, held at Highland on June 11, 2022, descendants from the Florida families joined together with the Albemarle families. The following October, a contingent of descendants and researchers traveled to Monticello, Florida to meet up with members of the Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church and families whose ancestors had been enslaved at Casa Bianca. Members of the Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church attended the second Descendant’s Day at Highland on June 10, 2023.
