Joseph Hernandez

Joseph Hernandez was a significant figure in early Florida whose life was closely tied to his Mala Compra Plantation, where the main buildings stood on this site. He acquired three plantations in what is now Flagler County: Mala Compra in 1816, Bella Vista to the north, and St. Joseph across the Matanzas River. On these plantations he raised cotton, sugar, and oranges, and Mala Compra produced sea island cotton, a longer, stronger fiber than the short-staple cotton grown throughout the South, though it required far more labor to harvest, clean, and pack. Plantation ownership and a large labor force placed Hernandez in the planter class, whose members identified themselves with their estates, held political office, influenced voters, served as militia officers, and were expected to be gracious hosts. Hernandez called himself “of Mala Compra” and hosted the naturalist John Audubon, who later depicted the plantation in his illustration of the American coot. Hernandez, born in Spanish St. Augustine in 1788 to parents who had come from Minorca in 1768, remained in Florida when it became part of the United States in 1821, even as his relatives moved to Cuba. He became the first presiding officer of Florida’s territorial legislature in 1822, helped choose Tallahassee as the state capitol, was elected mayor of St. Augustine in 1845, served as a director of the Union Bank in Tallahassee, and was apparently the first Hispanic person to serve in Congress, though later efforts to advance his political career failed. Commissioned by President James Monroe as a brigadier general in the territorial militia in 1823, he was called into active service in December 1835 during the Seminole War. Leading about 250 troops to a conference with Seminole leaders near Fort Peyton, south of St. Augustine, Hernandez followed General Thomas Jesup’s order to disregard a white flag of truce and seize them, capturing Osceola and 80 others. Floridians celebrated Osceola’s capture, but many Americans outside the war zone regarded the act as dishonorable, and Hernandez and Jesup were court-martialed but not convicted. In his family life, Hernandez married the widow Ana Maria Hill Williams in 1817, gaining her four children and inherited assets, most of them enslaved laborers, and together they had ten more children. During the Seminole War the family lived in St. Augustine. After Ana Maria’s death in 1849, Hernandez moved in the 1850s to his family’s sugar estate in Matanzas, Cuba, where he was buried.

Florida · United States