Locating Slavery's Legacies @ Virginia Military Institute

Enslaver of persons of African descent

Fatio, Francis P.

Francis Philip Fatio was a Swiss planter in Northeast Florida during the British and Spanish colonial periods, who owned three large plantations and many enslaved persons.

Francis Philip Fatio was a planter and colonial administrator during the English period of Florida settlement (1763 to 1784) and continued to operate a large plantation in Northeast Florida under Spanish colonial rule from 1783 until his death in 1811. His largest plantation, “New Switzerland,” included 10,000 acres of land on the east bank of the St. Johns River. While it seems like detailed records were not kept (somewhat unusual for such a large plantation in this period and place), the enslaved workforce for Fatio’s plantation was probably around eighty enslaved people at any given time (Gallman). In an 1801 Census return, Fatio is listed as housing eighty-six enslaved people on his plantation. Precious little has been documented about the individuals who comprise this “eighty-six” number, but the same census return describes Fatio’s plantation as having “twenty-seven cabins for the Negroes”—comprising more than half of the forty-three total buildings in Fatio’s ownership (Willis).

It’s also worth discussing that Fatio was heavily involved in his colonial government’s relationship with Native Americans and, by many accounts, facilitated the dispossession of Native Americans from their land. Historian Nancy O. Gallman’s article on this (linked below) concludes with this sentiment: “After generations of colonial experience in North America, the British imported the force of its principles and its consequences to their new colony of East Florida. There, beyond its fenny swamps, officials and planters gradually cleared the land of trees and Native peoples and made room for the rise of a disruptive plantation economy” (Gallman 190–91).

1724

1811

1820-1865: Slavery, Anti-Slavery, and Civil War

Gallman, Nancy O. “Reconstituting Power in an American Borderland: Political Change in Colonial East Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 94, no. 2 (2015): 169–191.

Klos, George. “Blacks and the Seminole Removal Debate, 1821-1835.” Florida Historical Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1989): 55–78.

Strang, Cameron B. Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 97–104.

Willis, William Scott. “A Swiss Settler in East Florida: A Letter of Francis Philip Fatio.” Florida Historical Quarterly 64, no. 2 (1985): 174–188.