I keep waiting for a twitter thread from someone better versed in the history of the Spanish Southeast than I - so I guess I'll spark the convo, which lends additional context to the discourse about 1619. Let's talk about the African slaves brought to Georgia in 1526.

In 1521, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, who trucked in sugar and enslaved Indians and Africans, sent a slaving expedition to the Bahamas. Finding the region depopulated (Caribbean scholars can chime in here), they continued north & made landfall at Winyah Bay in present-day SC.

There, they captured sixty indigenous peoples and returned to Hispaniola, going on, as these invaders tended to, about the fertility and beauty of the coast. (One of these captives, Francisco de Chicora, was a fascinating person, but that's a story for another time).

In 1523, Ayllón got a cédula from Charles V which granted him permission to form a colony on the indigenous land that the 1521 slavers had invaded - in exchange for conducting a survey, establishing missions, churches, etc, and generally bringing God and commerce to the region.

Another exploratory voyage later in 1525, Ayllón set off in July 1526 with six ships, supplies for est. a fort, and dozens of horses, sheep, cows, and pigs. 600 to 700 people boarded the ships. An unknown but doubtlessly there number of African slaves were among them.

The fleet landed near Winyah Bay a month later, where their flagship (& its vital supplies) ran aground & sank. No one died - in fact, a number of the indigenous people captured there five yrs earlier & brought along as guides escaped.

Modern-day Pawleys Island didn't please Ayllón; too sandy. After workers built a makeshift replacement for the flagship, the new fleet sailed south and arrived at what was likely Sapelo Sound in Georgia in September 1526. There, the group constructed houses & a church.

Nothing went well, from Ayllón's perspective. Dysentery and water-borne diseases, an early, cold winter, & hunger killed hundreds; and the nearby indigenous peoples, likely the Guale, understandably did not want to trade with the invaders. Ayllón himself died in October 1526.

Two factions developed along 2 lines: "yes let's stay" & "no, let's leave." The leader of "no, let's leave," Gines Doncel, plotted to assassinate his opposition. But that night, some of the enslaved Africans torched his house - the first outright rebellion of its kind in the U.S.

Though Doncel and his supporters were arrested, the rest of the colony soon came around to their thinking and limped back to the Spanish Caribbean, abandoning the colony. No records yet found describe the fate of the Africans at San Miguel.

13 yrs later, Hernando de Soto would launch his raid across the Southeast, in part convinced by the collapsed colony of San Miguel that violence would be necessary to quell the indigenous peoples of the region. He almost certainly had enslaved Africans w/ him as well.

I need to give credit to the scholars whose work I learned this from: David Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America; Paul Hoffman, A New Andalucia; David Hurst Thomas in Coastal Nature. Please add more scholars here! I'm sure I've forgotten someone & don't mean to.

Let me be clear: I think the 1619 project is so important, & that year is also significant. So why bring this up? Why does 1526 matter?

Luckily @wihorne has basically summed it up for me: "1) challenges the ethnonationalism that treats English imperialism as the sole origin of the U.S., 2) explains importance of ecology to colonizers, & 3) locates indigenous ppl w/in Euro-enslavers' project of exploitation."

The history of the Spanish in the American South matters, as many scholars have argued. The Spanish & their livestock spread disease, killing thousands of indigenous people, thus weakening their political, cultural, & social resilience once the English arrived ~100 yrs later.

And enslaved Africans were there - forced to labor for the Spanish invaders as they engaged in their violent project of colonization. Okay, fin, now I encourage scholars of this time/place to please chime in - y'all are the real experts here!

*And let me add that, in reviewing my thread, I realize that I used "enslaved Africans," the proper terminology, in some of the tweets but screwed up with using the word "slave" in some of the earlier ones. I apologize for that.