THE BLACK SEMINOLES EPIC QUEST FOR FREEDOM
Inn the 1830s, when the Black Seminoles were just starting their epic quest for freedom, their struggle was not widely known. Informed Americans followed the war in Florida, but few understood that rebellious slaves and free blacks were involved, not just Seminole Indians. And so, on that fateful Christmas day in 1837, as John Horse and his followers prepared to face Zachary Taylor, they were truly on their own. They were fighting for the greatest of all American ideals, freedom. Would they find liberty or death?Christmas day, 1837. Nearly 400 black and Indian warriors hide deep in the swamps of Florida, preparing to face Colonel Zachary Taylor and 1,000 U.S. regulars.
The two sides are about to fight the decisive battle in the Second Seminole War, the bloodiest, most costly Indian conflict in U.S. history. But this is not just an Indian war, it is also a slave uprising, the largest that the country has ever seen, or ever will see. For three years, hundreds of black rebels allied with Seminole Indians have fought the U.S. Army to a standstill. Known as the Black Seminoles, these fugitive slaves and free blacks have defied the country’s leading generals and inspired terror across the South. For white soldiers, they have been the most fearsome enemies of the Seminole alliance.”The negroes, from the commencement of the Florida war, have, for their numbers, been the most formidable foe, more blood-thirsty, active, and revengeful, than the Indian …. For them to surrender would be servitude to the whites; but to retain an open warfare, secured to them plunder, liberty, and importance.” — Lieutenant John T. SpragueBy late 1837, the leader of the Black Seminoles is John Horse. Already this “recklessly brave” warrior of mixed African and Indian descent has escaped from Florida’s strongest prison, defied American treachery, and reenergized the black resistance. But on this Christmas day in 1837, John Horse and his Indian allies are outnumbered almost three-to-one. What can he possibly hope to win? Surely not freedom for his followers, a marginal group of black rebels fighting the agents of the slaveholding South.Almost a generation before John Horse’s birth, in the early 1800s, a new community was just emerging in Florida, a group of free and fugitive blacks allied with Seminole Indians. Described variously as “Seminole Negroes,” Muskogees, maroons, and black Indians, they would come to be known as the Black Seminoles.
Like other New World communities, the Black Seminoles forged their identity in a crucible of war, slavery, and hemispheric conflict. They rose to prominence after 1800, but their emergence was rooted in the very founding and settling of North America — and in the contradictory promise of American freedom. Free blacks were first reported living with Indians in Florida in the early 1700s. Very little is known about these early black pioneers, except that they were most likely fugitives from the Carolinas who sought freedom on Spanish soil. By taking to the wilderness, they contributed to an age-old tradition in the New World. Wherever African slaves were imported in the Americas, some escaped. In Brazil, Mexico, Surinam, and other colonies, fugitive slaves founded rebel communities that endured for generations. The Spanish referred to the members of these communities as cimarronnes, or runaways. The British shortened cimarron to maroon, which is still in use today. England and Spain both tried to use cimarron colonies to their own advantage. Sir Francis Drake initiated this tradition in 1572 after a community of free blacks rescued him on his famous voyage to Panama. Drake’s men described the “Symerons” as, “[C]ertain valiant Negros fled from their cruel masters the Spaniards.”According to Drake’s chaplain on the expedition, the cimarrons nursed the explorer and his crew back to health, helped them attack a Spanish mule train loaded with gold, and even led Drake to the famous tree where he first saw the Pacific Ocean.
Drake subsequently used cimarrons as allies in his attacks on the Spanish at Panama (1572), Cartagena and Florida (1586). After the Florida attack, he deposited his black allies at the British colony of Roanoke in present-day North Carolina. This makes it quite possible that the descendants of these free black warriors were living in North America when the British founded their first permanent colony at Jamestown in 1605. Spain made the next full-scale attempt to employ maroon warriors — in Jamaica from 1655-1660. When England ousted Spain from the island in 1655, the Spanish recruited Jamaica’s free blacks as military allies. For five years the plan worked. The maroons harassed the British, successfully staging guerilla raids and then retreating to their mountain strongholds. The black warriors were so effective that the Spanish discharged their own military early in the conflict. Unfortunately for Spain, however, the maroons had their own interests at heart. When the British gave them a better offer in 1660, the maroons joined with England and drove Spain permanently off the island.*The Black Seminoles may seem marginal today, but they were well known to the leaders of early America. Seven of the country’s first eight presidents wrote policies dealing with this troublesome group of armed, semi-autonomous blacks. In all, eleven presidents, from Washington to Lincoln, dealt directly or indirectly with the rebels. One of the first treaties in U.S. history, the Treaty of New York (1790), sought to recover Black Seminoles from Florida. Washington, who signed the document, followed up by dispatching his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, to negotiate further with Spain for their recovery. (Years later it was even reported that one of Washington’s own slaves might have escaped to Seminole territory.) Subsequent presidents waged war on the rebels, brokered peace with them, and oversaw crucial rulings on their legal status.From 1776 to the closing of the Texas frontier in the 1880s, the Black Seminoles played a fascinating, at times paradoxical role in American history.
As quasi-free African Americans, they often found themselves in armed conflict with a country that was the cradle of world liberty. From the Revolutionary War through the age of Andrew Jackson, they opposed the United States through violence, rebellion, and sometimes terror. In the 1840s they became allies of the U.S. Army in Oklahoma and Florida, but the partnership could not protect them. Ultimately, the twin tides of “Manifest Destiny” and slavery forced the black rebels to seek freedom in Mexico. he West (1838-1850), and the Southwest (1850-1880s) — the Black Seminoles were like a shadow soul of the expanding American empire. Politically and historically, the country did not want to recognize its shadow. As a group, the rebels raised uncomfortable ideas — the threat of slave revolt, the nightmare of Indians and blacks uniting, the contradiction of American freedom, founded on the backs of African slaves. And so the national consciousness suppressed nearly all memory of the Black Seminoles, through ideological trends, censorship, and even legal measures. Briefly prominent during the rise of the abolitionist movement (1836-1863), the group quickly faded from mainstream awareness. By the 1900s they were a mere footnote to history. Americans would remember the revolts led by Nat Turner and the white abolitionist John Brown, but not the larger, more successful rebellion led by John Horse and the Black Seminoles. Somehow, only the smaller, failed uprisings entered the national consciousness. Even today, the vast majority of American scholars, black and white, unconsciously follow the nod of a southern-dominated tradition when they discuss slave rebellions, overlooking the uprising inspired by the Black Seminoles, though it was the largest in U.S. history.
