“Negro Wars”: Black Seminoles
in 19th Century Spanish Florida
The conflict fought in the 1830s and 1840s between the United States government and the Seminole Indians was different from disputes between Americans and Indians in other regions of the countrybecause land was not the main issue. The Seminoles, having given up their prime northern Florida territory in the 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, lived on swampy terrain that was not suitable for the type of plantation agriculture the United States generally envisioned for Indian lands in the southeast. Rather, as General Thomas S. Jesup wrote to the Secretary of State in 1836, theconflict over Seminole removal was “a negro, not an Indian war,” fought over the significant and, to Americans, disturbing presence of blacks, many of them runaway slaves from Georgia and South Carolina, among Seminole military forces and in Seminole communities.[1] The Second Seminole War, as the removal hostilities were called, was not the first time that Americans had encountered a Seminole-black alliance or fought a war focused on the African element. The extended war of the early 19th century which ended with the First Seminole War was fought by the United States to destroy black communities among the Seminoles, thereby eliminating Florida as a refuge for runaway slaves, and to return those fugitives to slavery.
The term “Seminole” is thought to be an English corruption of the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning runaway or wild and is most often used to refer to the Creeks who broke away from their relatives in what would become Georgia and migratedsouth in the middle of the 17th century. Yet, “runaway” also defines the status of the African Americans who fled chattel slavery in South Carolina for sanctuary in Spanish Florida. The first fugitive slaves arrived in the late 17th century, forcing Spain to create a policy to deal with them. The royal edict of 1693 declared that runaway slaves from South Carolina could obtain their freedom and remain in Floridaby converting to Catholicism. This policy was based in Spain’s more benevolent view of slaves, which recognized them as human beings and allowed for the possibility of manumission, but it also arose out of practical and political considerations. Runaway slaves helped to populate the sparsely settled territory and ward off foreign encroachment, while the incorporation of blacks into the militia bolstered Spanish defenses, particularly against the threat of British invasion.[2] Black and Indian militias, though in segregated companies, operated together defending St. Augustine throughout the 18th century and thus the two groups were introduced by the Spanish to an alliance that would unite them more firmly in later years.[3]
The period of British rule in Florida, from 1763 to 1783, had a significant effect on the relationship between blacks and Seminoles. Spanish sanctuary no longer existed, thus, though African Americans slaves continued to flee to Florida, they could not turn to Europeans for protection. Instead blacks established maroon communities in the country and formed military and trading alliances with nearby Seminoles.[4] At the same time, the British introduction of plantations and chattel slavery to the regioninitiated the development of African slave ownership by Seminoles. Given slaves by the British in exchange for military service, the Indians also began to accumulate African property by purchase or barter.[5] Yet, in spite of the dominance of the British system of slavery in Florida, the Seminoles’ past experiences with the enslavement of other Indians, often taken through military capture, the example of Spain’s relatively lenient form of slavery, the fact that they had little use for slavery in the British sense, and the existence of nearby independent maroon communities all combined to influencethe development a unique type of slavery that was seen by many, particularly concerned Americans, as not being slavery at all.[6] As Wiley Thompson, the Florida Indian agent to the United States government, explained in 1835,
[blacks] live in villages separate, and in many cases remote from their owners,
and enjoying equal liberty with their owners, with the single exception that the
slave supplies his owner annually, from the product of this little field, with corn,
in proportion to the amount of the crop; … the residue is considered property of
the slave. Many of these slaves have stocks of horses, cows, and hogs, with
which the Indian owner never assumes the right to intermeddle.[7]
Thompson’s observations revealed the both the agricultural skill of Black Seminoles, as they came to be called, which was greater than their Indian associates who excelled at hunting and fishing, and their economic independence,which enabled blacks to accumulate significant wealth in the form of cattle and surplus produce. Black Seminole autonomy was not limited to the economy. They also maintained an independent society, which reflected African, American, and Indian influences, and chose their own leadership.[8]
1
[1]General Thomas S. Jesup to B.F. Butler, Acting Secretary of War, December 9, 1836. AmericanState Papers: Military Affairs, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832-1861), 7:821 (cited hereafter as ASP:MA).
[2]John J. TePaske, “The Fugitive Slave: Intercolonial Rivalry and Spanish Slave Policy, 1687-1764,” in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-Century Florida and Its Borderlands (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975), 6.
[3]Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 11.
[4]Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 10.
[5]Thomas A. Britten, A Brief History of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 5.
[6] Mulroy, Freedom on the Border, 8;
[7] Wiley Thompson to Lewis Cass, Secretary of War, June 2, 1832. ASP:MA 6:533.
[8]Jill M. Watts, “‘We Do Not Live For Ourselves Only’: Seminole Black Perceptions and the Second Seminole War,” UCLA Historical Journal 7 (1986): 8; Kevin Mulroy, “Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Seminole Maroons,” Journal of World History 4 (Fall 1993): 290, Rebecca B. Bateman, “Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the Black Carib and Black Seminole,” Ethnohistory 37 (Winter 1990): 13.