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Black Seminoles

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Peoples

   19th-century engraving depicting a Black Seminole warrior of the First
   Seminole War (1817–8).
   Enlarge
   19th-century engraving depicting a Black Seminole warrior of the First
   Seminole War (1817–8).

   The Black Seminoles are descendants of runaway slaves who escaped from
   coastal South Carolina and Georgia into the Florida wilderness
   beginning as early as the late 1600s. The runaway slaves joined with
   various Indian groups escaping into Florida at the same period.
   Together, the two groups formed the Seminole tribe, a multi-ethnic and
   bi-racial alliance. Today, Black Seminole descendants still live in
   rural communities in Oklahoma and Texas and in the Bahamas and Northern
   Mexico. In the 19th century the Florida "Black Seminoles" were called
   "Seminole Negroes" by their white American enemies and Estelusti, or
   "Black People," by their Indian allies. Modern Black Seminoles are
   known as "Seminole Freedmen" in Oklahoma, "Seminole Scouts" in Texas,
   "Black Indians" in the Bahamas, and "Mascogos" in Mexico.

Origins

   The Spanish strategy for defending Florida was based, at first, on
   organizing the indigenous Indians into a mission system with the
   mission Indians serving as militia to protect the colony from English
   incursions from the north. But a combination of raids by South Carolina
   colonists and tropical diseases coming via the slave trade from West
   Africa decimated Florida's native population. After the local Indians
   had all but died out, Spanish authorities encouraged renegade Indians
   and runaway slaves from England's North American colonies to move
   south. The Spanish were hoping that these traditional enemies of the
   English would prove effective in holding off English expansion.

   As early as 1689, African slaves fled from the South Carolina
   lowcountry to Spanish Florida seeking freedom. Under an edict from
   Philip V of Spain, the black fugitives received liberty in exchange for
   defending the Spanish settlers at St. Augustine. The Spanish organized
   the black volunteers into a militia; their settlement at Fort Mose,
   founded in 1738, was the first legally sanctioned free black town in
   North America.

   But not all the slaves escaping south found military service in St.
   Augustine to their liking. It is likely that many more runaway slaves
   sought refuge in wilderness areas in Northern Florida where their
   knowledge of tropical agriculture -- and resistance to tropical
   diseases -- served them well. Most of the blacks who pioneered Florida
   were Gullah people who had escaped from the rice plantations in South
   Carolina (and later Georgia). As Gullahs, they had preserved much of
   their African language and culture heritage and their African
   leadership structure. These Gullah pioneers built their own settlements
   based on rice and corn agriculture, and they proved to be effective
   allies to the Indians escaping into Florida at the same time.

   A new influx of freedom-seeking blacks reached Florida during the
   American Revolution (1775–83), when several thousand American slaves
   agreed to fight for the British in exchange for liberty - the black
   Loyalists. (Florida was under British control throughout the conflict.)
   During the Revolution, Seminole Indians also allied with the British,
   and as a result, Africans and Seminoles came into increased contact
   with each other. Members of both communities sided again with the
   British during the War of 1812, solidifying ties and earning the wrath
   of the war's American hero, General Andrew Jackson.

   When Africans and Seminoles first started to interact, the Seminoles
   were themselves recent immigrants to Florida. Their community evolved
   over the late 18th century and early 19th century as waves of Creek
   Indians left present-day Georgia and Alabama. By the time the American
   naturalist William Bartram visited them in 1773, the Seminoles had
   their own tribal name, derived from cimarron, the Spanish word for
   runaway, which connoted the tribe's breakaway status from the Creeks.
   Interestingly, cimarron was also the source of the English word maroon,
   used to describe the runaway slave communities of Florida, the
   Caribbean, and other parts of the New World.

African-Seminole relations

   By the early 19th century, maroons (free blacks and runaway slaves) and
   Seminole Indians were in regular contact in Florida, where they evolved
   a system of relations unique among North American Indians and blacks.
   In exchange for paying an annual tribute of livestock and crops,
   maroons found sanctuary among the Indians. Indians, in turn, acquired
   an important strategic ally in a sparsely populated region.

   Typically, many or all members of the Seminole maroon communities were
   identified as slaves of individual Indian chiefs. Seminole slavery,
   however, bore little relation to the system of chattel slavery
   practiced in the American South. Historians have compared the practice
   to a feudal arrangement. Maroons lived in their own independent
   communities, elected their own black leaders, and could amass moderate
   wealth in cattle and crops. Most importantly, they bore arms for
   self-defense.

   Under the comparatively free conditions, the Black Seminoles
   flourished. U.S. Army Lieutenant George McCall recorded his impressions
   of a Black Seminole community in 1826:

     We found these negroes in possession of large fields of the finest
     land, producing large crops of corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, and
     other esculent vegetables. [I] saw, while riding along the borders
     of the ponds, fine rice growing; and in the village large corn-cribs
     were filled, while the houses were larger and more comfortable than
     those of the Indians themselves.

   "An Indian town, residence of a chief," from Lithographs of Events in
   the Seminole War in Florida in 1835, published by Gray and James in
   1837.
   Enlarge
   "An Indian town, residence of a chief," from Lithographs of Events in
   the Seminole War in Florida in 1835, published by Gray and James in
   1837.

   An 1822 census estimated that 800 blacks were living with the
   Seminoles, constituting by far the largest maroon community in North
   American history. The black settlements were overall highly
   militarized, which was hardly the condition of America's southern
   slaves. The military nature of the African-Seminole relationship led
   General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, who visited several flourishing Black
   Seminole settlements in the 1820s, to describe the maroons as "vassals
   and allies" of the Indians.

   While Seminole slavery was benevolent compared to southern slavery, it
   remained a relationship of inequality. Seminole chiefs won prestige and
   wealth from their association with black warriors and slaves. Neither
   Seminoles nor whites considered the Black Seminoles to be members of
   the Indian tribe. Black headmen were occasionally admitted into
   Seminole bands through marriage or recognition of service, but this was
   the exception, not the rule.

Culture

   Abraham, a Black Seminole leader, from N. Orr's engraving published in
   1848 in The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War by John
   T. Sprague.
   Enlarge
   Abraham, a Black Seminole leader, from N. Orr's engraving published in
   1848 in The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War by John
   T. Sprague.

   The Black Seminole culture that took shape after 1800 was a dynamic
   mixture of African, Indian, Spanish, and slave traditions. In the
   tradition of the Indians, maroons wore Seminole clothing, strained
   koonti, a native root, and made sofkee, a paste created by mashing corn
   with a mortar and pestle.

   Living apart from the Indians, however, the maroons developed their own
   unique African American culture. Black Seminoles inclined toward a
   syncretic form of Christianity inherited from the plantations. Certain
   cultural practices, such as jumping the broom to celebrate marriage,
   hailed from the plantations; other customs, such as the names used for
   blacks' towns, clearly echoed Africa.

   Language especially showed the Black Seminoles' distinct culture.
   Afro-Seminole Creole was strongly related to Gullah, the dialect of Sea
   Islanders along the Carolina and Georgia coast. Like Gullah,
   Afro-Seminole was a creole language that incorporated words from
   Spanish, English, and Muskogee, as well as Bantu and other African
   languages.

Blacks in the Seminole Wars

   From the time of the founding of the United States, the existence of
   armed black communities in Florida was a major concern for American
   slave owners. Slaveholders sought return of Florida's black fugitives
   in the Treaty of New York (1790), the first treaty ratified after the
   adoption of the United States Constitution. General Andrew Jackson
   targeted Florida's maroon communities in 1816 by orchestrating an
   attack on the Negro Fort, a Black Seminole stronghold. Breaking up the
   maroon communities was one of Jackson's major objectives in the
   subsequent First Seminole War (1817–18).
   Massacre of the Whites by the Indians and Blacks in Florida, engraving
   by D.F. Blanchard for an 1836 account of events at the outset of the
   Second Seminole War (1835–42).
   Enlarge
   Massacre of the Whites by the Indians and Blacks in Florida, engraving
   by D.F. Blanchard for an 1836 account of events at the outset of the
   Second Seminole War (1835–42).

   The Second Seminole War (1835–42) marked the height of tension between
   the U.S. and the Black Seminoles and also the historical peak of the
   African-Seminole alliance. The war resulted from U.S. efforts, under
   the policy of Indian Removal, to relocate to the western Indian
   Territory Florida's 4,000 Seminole Indians and a portion of their 800
   Black Seminole allies—a portion, because during the year before the
   war, at least 100 Black Seminoles were being claimed by prominent white
   citizens as runaway slaves. Fearing the direct attempt to enslave these
   100, and anticipating attempts to enslave more members of the
   community, the Black Seminoles became staunch opponents of relocation.
   In councils before the war, they stoked efforts to resist removal and
   threw their support behind the most militant Seminole faction, led by
   Osceola. After war broke out, individual black leaders John Caesar,
   Abraham, and John Horse played key roles. In addition to aiding the
   Indians in their fight, Black Seminoles conspired in the rebellion of
   at least 385 plantation slaves at the commencement of the war. The
   slaves joined Indians and maroons in the destruction of 21 sugar
   plantations from December 25, 1835, through the summer of 1836. Some
   scholars have described this as the largest slave rebellion in U.S.
   history.

   By 1838, U.S. General Thomas Sydney Jesup succeeded in separating the
   interests of the black and Seminole warriors by offering security and
   promises of freedom to the blacks. His act was the only emancipation of
   rebellious African Americans prior to the emancipation of the southern
   slaves by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Black Seminoles in the West

   After 1838, 500 Black Seminoles emigrated with Seminole Indians to the
   Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Despite Army promises of
   freedom, however, out west the Black Seminoles found themselves
   threatened by slave raiders, including pro-slavery Creek Indians and
   even some former Seminole Indian allies, whose allegiance to the
   maroons diminished after the war. Officers of the federal army tried to
   protect the Black Seminoles, but in 1848 the U.S. Attorney General
   bowed to pro-slavery lobbyists and ordered the army to disarm the
   maroons.

   Facing possible enslavement, in 1849 the maroon leader John Horse and
   about 100 Black Seminoles staged a mass escape from the Indian
   Territory to Mexico, where slavery had long been outlawed. The black
   fugitives crossed to freedom in July 1850. They rode with a faction of
   traditionalist Seminoles under the Indian chief Coacochee, who led the
   expedition. The Mexican government welcomed the Seminole allies as
   border guards on the frontier.

   For the next 20 years, Black Seminoles served as militiamen and Indian
   fighters in Mexico, where they became known as los mascogos. Slave
   raiders from Texas continued to threaten the community, but with arms
   and reinforcements from the Mexican army, the black warriors ably
   defended themselves.

   Throughout the period, several hundred Black Seminoles remained in the
   Oklahoma Indian Territory as allies of the Seminole Indians. With the
   end of slavery in the U.S., these maroons became known as Seminole
   Freedmen. They lived—as their descendants still do—in and around
   Wewoka, Oklahoma, the community that John Horse founded as a black
   settlement in 1849 and that is presently home of the Seminole Nation of
   Oklahoma.
   Key locations in the 19th-century odyssey of the Black Seminoles, from
   Florida to Mexico. For more detail, the copyright holder at
   www.johnhorse.com freely offers an interactive version of this map.
   Key locations in the 19th-century odyssey of the Black Seminoles, from
   Florida to Mexico. For more detail, the copyright holder at
   www.johnhorse.com freely offers an interactive version of this map.

   In 1870, the U.S. Army invited the Mexican-based Black Seminoles to
   return to the U.S. and serve as army scouts. The Seminole Negro Indian
   Scouts (originally a black unit despite the name) played a lead role in
   the Texas Indian wars of the 1870s. The scouts became famous for their
   tracking abilities and feats of endurance. Four of them won
   Congressional Medals of Honour. They served as advance scouts for the
   commanding white officers and the all-black units known as the Buffalo
   Soldiers, with whom they were closely associated. After the close of
   the Texas Indian wars, the scouts remained stationed at Fort Clark in
   Brackettville, Texas, until the army disbanded them in 1914. Family
   members settled in and around Brackettville, which houses a cemetery
   for the scouts and remains the spiritual centre of the Texas-based
   Black Seminoles.

   The community in Nacimiento, Coahuila, persists on lands adjacent to
   the Kickapoo Indians. Yet another Black Seminole community resides half
   a continent away on Andros Island in the Bahamas, where refugees from
   the 19th-century Florida wars found a sanctuary from American slavery.

   In 2003 and 2004, Seminole Freedmen in Oklahoma were in the national
   news because of a legal dispute with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma
   over membership and rights within the tribe. Freedmen were trying to
   gain access to services provided by a $56 million settlement awarded to
   the Seminole Nation. The dispute developed after Seminole Indians voted
   to exclude some Freedmen from inclusion in the settlement and
   membership in the tribe. In June 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court refused
   to allow the Seminole Freedmen to sue the federal government for
   inclusion in the settlement unless they could obtain the Seminole
   Nation's consent.

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