Black Seminoles: history and culture

Politics makes strange bedfellows, we are told, with the implication that those brought together by the vagaries of politics would be best kept apart. But sometimes this is not true at all. In the case of the Black Seminoles, politics brought slaves and Seminole Indians politics brought together two groups of people who would - had the history of the South been written just a little bit differently - would never have had much in common. But slaves fleeing their masters and Seminoles trying to lay claim to what was left of their traditional lands and ways found each other to be natural allies in Florida and in time in other places as well. This paper examines the origin of this particular American population, describing how the Black Seminoles changed over time and how their culture reflected both African and Seminole elements.

The Black Seminoles began in the early 1800s in the most remote and swamp-like parts of Florida, places in the state where runaway black slaves believed that they might be safe from those who were looking to reclaim them as their property. While some blacks did try to escape to the North, this was an especially difficult task for slaves beginning in Florida: The Mason-Dixon line was a very long way off from Florida and many slaves believed that they would be recaptured or killed if they tried to make it all the way to the North. Thus they fled south, into the swamps where the Seminole Indians often took them in.

Those escaped black slaves were lucky in seeking asylum with the Seminole rather than with other native groups, many of which were far less accepting of outsiders. But the Seminole were not so much a tribe as this word is usually applied to the native peoples of the Americas but rather a confederation that was already culturally diverse. The Seminole both married people from other groups and adopted them into their confederation, so when escaped slaves came to them there was already a tradition of welcoming outsiders into the group.

The slaves had another reason to retreat South into Florida: Since the 17th century slaves had been seeking refuge in Florida during those historical periods when it was Spanish Territory and so not subject to British or, later, American law.

Although the Seminoles were racially, culturally, and linguistically mixed, they did not lack for a sense of identity. In fact, of all of the Eastern American Indian tribes, the Seminole were some of the fiercest in fighting for their rights as an independent people and in seeking to limit the power of white Americans over their territory and their customs (Mulroy, 1993, p. 7).

Another link between the Seminole and many of the slaves who sought refuge with them was that, like the Seminole the slaves themselves were of mixed blood. These slaves, whom today we would call black or African-American, were in the antebellum called maroons and were recognized as a distinct demographic group that-based many of its traditions directly on African precedents. The maroons who became Black Seminoles - who had integrated both African and American elements into their lives - also integrated Seminole customs, taking on the traditional Seminole costumes of brightly colored applique, moccasins, and turbans (Thybony, 1991, p. 92).

The Black Seminoles had their own language, a creole (which is a recent combination of two or more languages that often develops when different kinds of people are thrown together as the former slaves and the Seminoles were). This language, called Gullah, is a variety of English, although the grammatical and lexical influences of African languages, Spanish, and Muskhogean Indian would make it difficult for anyone speaking "standard" English to understand.

This brief introduction should suggest the ways in which escaped slaves were inclined to feel at home among the Seminoles while the Seminoles were also culturally inclined to welcome the slaves into their settlements. But while the two groups can be seen in many ways to have been natural allies, their alliance was not always a smooth one because of a variety of pressures brought against them by a variety of outside forces.

The political life of Florida is a complex one, for the territory was used as a bargaining chip on a number of different occasions by the colonial powers with interests in the continental United States - Britain, France, and Spain - as well as by the United States. Whenever the territory of Florida changed hands, the rights of the Black Seminoles also changed, as the next section discusses.

There was also always the question of race: What made a person black or Indian?

Not Black, but Not-Black

White slaveowners were, of course, aware of the fact that slaves were taking refuge with the Seminoles. After 1763, when the Spanish ceded the territory of Florida to Britain, maroons from far Southern states such as Georgia as well as Florida itself continued to enter into partnerships with Seminole villages (Mulroy, 1993, pp. 10-11). Ironically, during the early 18th century (the exact time is not known), the Seminoles themselves began to keep the maroons as slaves - although the relationship was never as brutal as white ownership of blacks.

Slavery among the Seminoles was not new. They captured other Indians in battle, "adopted" them into their tribe to replace members who had been killed and treated them amicably. Some Black slaves were purchased, others were given as "gifts" to chiefs by the British who had acquired Florida from the Spanish in 1763. Many of these Blacks lived independently in villages separate from their Indian "owners." This independent living was the foundation of a new social group. They were efficient and productive farmers, owned livestock, and armed themselves against intruders. In deference to the Indian chief, they paid an annual tax, usually corn or some other foodstuff to be used for the common good. In return for their allegiance they were given the protection of the larger Seminole Indian community. An American general aptly described the relationship between the two groups as "vassals and allies." (http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/library/News/seminoles2.html).

Mulroy (1993, p. 11) argues that it was more feudal in nature, with obligations owed on both sides. The maroons tended to live in separate villages and to marry among themselves. They owned their own property and were free in many ways, but they paid some form of tax or tribute to the Seminoles and went on raids with the Seminoles, who seem to have had the right to call on maroons to go into battle with them (Porter, 1971, pp. 302-303).

The Seminoles were far less concerned about racial categories than wer whites. And they recognized the humanity of the maroons in a way that whites never did.

The experience of the Black Seminoles was similar to other maroon societies which proliferated throughout the Americas before slavery was abolished. Because they were in constant fear of being recaptured, they defended their freedom by developing extraordinary skills in guerilla warfare. They were proactive in finding ways to survive economically in new environments and they were savvy in their interaction with Native Americans. Leaders emerged from their communities who were skilled at understanding and negotiating with whites. Most important, all of these maroon communities, borrowed and blended elements of their experiences and integrated them into their own African heritage.

Historically the central question for those who came in contact with the Black Seminoles was whether they were African or American Indian. This issue of classification hounded them throughout their search for freedom. Individuals, agencies and institutions labeled them for their own purposes, more often than not determined by their own vested interests (http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/library/News/seminoles2.html).

We might think that someone's race is a fixed category, but in fact it is determined far more by cultural than by biological factors. The Black Seminole communities were constantly under threat by slavehunters who defined black in the broadest possible sense - the definition that would net the largest number of slaves to bring back - while the former slaves and Seminoles defined race in ways that benefited them.

Race is in fact of the most bedeviling of all cultural or social characteristics. Race has about it a sense of the objective, a categorizing of humans that is conducted from the outside. We may believe that we can tell someone's race by looking at them (and without knowing anything about them). This is in fact not true, and is reflected today in a shift to the term ethnicity - a category that is much more often applied by people to themselves and it usually involves knowledge of national or family origin, often of religious belief. We are much less confident that we can guess at someone's ethnicity simply by observing them. We must get to know them to determine their ethnicity. But slave-hunters labored under no such niceties. Dark skin was dark skin to them.

Racial categories are in most probability so widespread because they are one of the simplest mechanisms by which people can pursue that age-old habit of dividing the world into us and them. This remains true in widely diverse cultures despite the fact that race is not - by the accounts of both biologists and physical anthropologists - a scientifically useful category for the simple reason that people cannot be clearly and unambiguously divided into discrete sets based on physical characteristics.

It is in fact most accurate to look at the idea of races within a (as purely as possible) biological framework. As such it is the identification within a species of subpopulations whose members share with one another a greater degree of common inheritance than they share with individuals from other such subpopulations. This is a neutral definition so far (except for the fact that it doe tend to assume that such identifications are meaningful and useful to make) (Jantz, 1995, p. 346). But bounty hunters had neither the intellectual skills nor the desire to distinguish between mixed-race maroons and mixed-race Seminole, and many who considered themselves to be Indians were turned into slaves by being re-classified as black.

Another irony of life for the Black Seminole is the fact that their communities were raided not simply by white slave hunters but also by Indian slave hunters - including some groups of Creek Indians - who often seized women and children to take back to slavery because these were the most easily seized members of the Black Seminole communities.

The Seminole Negroes were descendants of escaped slaves who settled among the Seminole Indians of Florida. In the late l830s and early l840s, the U.S. government moved the Seminoles and Seminole Negroes to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Slave hunters and pro-slave Creek Indians persecuted them there. One band of Seminoles and a band of Seminole Negroes consequently moved to Mexico.

Although the Seminole Indians returned to the United States in 1858, the Seminole blacks did not. They feared kidnapping and a return to slavery back in the United States. Mexico prohibited slavery. As a result, the Seminole blacks were safe as long as they lived south of the Rio Grande. They drew on survival skills learned in the Florida wilderness and adapted those skills to the harsh and barren terrain of the Mexican borderlands (http://www.nps.gov/foda/Fort_Davis_WEB_PAGE/About_the_Fort/Seminole.htm).

Spanish Once Again and the Seminole Confederation

Florida was in British control for less than a generation at the end of the 18th century before it shifted once again to Spanish control. During the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, the Black Seminoles created a distinct cultural group, one that joined with the Seminole Confederation in 1812 (Mulroy, 1993, pp. 17-19).

The Seminoles, who often joined with the British against the Americans in the Anglo-American skirmishes that marked the beginning of the 19th century, were courageous fighters whose skills and experience adapted them well to the rigors of fighting in the Florida swamps. U.S. forces believed that there was a continuing threat to U.S. interests by both Seminoles and Seminole maroons. Two wars were fought between U.S. forces and the Seminoles. After the Second Seminole War (1835-42), the federal government initially decided to relocate Seminole Indians and maroons to southern Florida. But white landowners did not want the fierce Seminoles close to them. The Seminoles would soon find themselves, like other native peoples, being moved from one territory to another

Racism as a Consistent Response

It is important to underscore the fact that to some extent blacks, Black Seminoles and what were then called "Red Seminoles" were bound together by some extent by the racism of those around them. This would change to some extent (as noted above) when the Seminole moved westward.

The western United States would begin to attract both Seminoles an Black Seminoles after the end of the Indian wars. It is not difficult to see why the West should have attracted them. The most obvious reason for this, at least initially, was that the Western states were not slave-holding and so offered a degree of freedom unavailable in the South for both "real" blacks and for the Seminoles who had married blacks or whom were sometimes identified as blacks so that they could be sold into slavery. And even though the Western states were regulated by federal laws that required people in free states to return slaves, effectively the force of such legislation was much less in the West than it was in other, more populated and more settled parts of the country. A slave that made it to the West was not as safe as one who made it to Canada, but nearly so, and had the advantage of not having to try to sneak across the international border.

Many of the blacks who came West (even before the Civil War) were in fact free, and the Western states therefore offered them not the promise of legal freedom but rather a social milieu in which old rules and old ideas about the proper station of blacks and to a lesser extent mixed-race peoples and American Indians, would have held less away. This is not to say that the West was an idyllic zone free of bigotry, of course not. Rather, because life in the West was harder than in the settled East, people were in all likelihood inclined more to judge people by their actions and the content of their characters than simply by their skin color.

The plight of blacks and mixed-race people like the Black Seminoles in the American West was certainly not perfect, with black Americans still facing some of the hatred and violence that they would face in other parts of the country. But the relative isolation of the West as well as the fact that white Americans in the West lived alongside Indians as well as Asians and blacks made life better for blacks and mixed-race people identified as blacks in the West than it would have been in other parts of the country as well as better than it was for the native peoples. These facts led a number of Black Seminoles in the middle decades of the 19th century - but before the Civil War - to consider migrating to the West.

Indian Territory

But many Seminoles would find themselves going west involuntarily. After a number of battles between the U.S. Army and the Seminoles, the army seized a Seminole leader named Wild Cat and threatened to kill him unless the Seminole agreed to be deported. By 1841 most Seminoles had agreed to be moved West to Indian Territory, with the exception of a few Seminoles left in the Everglades (who would fight in the Third Seminole War) (Wickman, 1991, p. 97).

The Seminole who traveled to Indian Territory (in what is now Oklahoma) did not fare as badly as some others on that Trail of Tears, but here the story of both Black and Red Seminoles merges for a time into that of many of the other Eastern tribes. Beginning in 1830, the federal government departed from its policy of respecting the legal and political rights of American Indians living in their traditional homelands.

Federal officials and U.S. soldiers began to force people from their land and settle them far away from whites, on land that was the least desirable. Andrew Jackson vigorously promoted this new federal policy of forcible displacement, which was formalized as a part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. A number of northern tribes were peacefully resettled in western lands considered undesirable (because of their low potential for arability, due almost entirely to the lack of easy access to water) for white settlers (Jahoda, 1998, p. 32). The key political - and humanitarian - problems lay in the Southeast, where members of what were known as the Five Civilized Tribes - the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Creek. A number of each of these Indian Nations refused to trade their cultivated farms for the promise of permanent title in a land that they had never seen (Perdue, 1995, p. 61).

After their refusal to give up their lands, about 100,000 people from these tribes were forced to march westward under U.S. military guard beginning in the 1830s. Estimates are that up to one quarter of all of these people - many of whom were forced to march in manacles because they had fought in Indian Wars against U.S. soldiers - died along the way. The terrible forced march of the Cherokees (during the years 1838-39) became known as the infamous "Trail of Tears" for the loss of so many innocent lives. But this title could have been applied to any of the trips taken by the Southeastern Indians like the Seminoles across the country.

For the Seminoles, leaving their home was for many a tragedy that would never be overcome. For the Black Seminole, whose cultural and religious connections to Seminole territory in Florida were less deep, the trip was perhaps somewhat less psychologically terrible. But for them the removal was complicated (again) by the issue of whether they were black or Indian, slave or free. In the end, Black and Red Seminoles were deported together, a recognition of common cultural ties.

The Seminoles were among the last to relocate to Indian Territory. Abraham helped to negotiate the removal of the Seminoles -- both Black and Native to Indian Territory. Several attempts from white slave owners were to seize the blacks, but as a group, they refused to leave unless all were allowed to go as a nation. A Treaty had already been signed in 1832 among the runaway Seminoles, making both black and Creek-Seminoles, citizens of the same nation (http://members.aol.com/angelaw859/movement.html).

Those Black Seminoles who remained behind often fared badly.

After removal of the Seminoles, both black and red, to Indian Territory, peace did not come to the blacks. Although most were given freedom papers in Florida, many were kidnapped by slave hunters from the Creek nation and sold. As a result, many of the Seminole natives were forced to "purchase" their black citizens back if they wanted them. Many conflicts occured over the next several years, until it was decided among about 200 to leave the territory, again for Mexico. Thus in 1848, the second exodus began. However, this was both red and black Seminoles leaving together (http://members.aol.com/angelaw859/movement.html).

The Seminole, like the other native peoples who were "removed" would not fare well so far from home. Some would return to Florida. But for the Black Seminoles, returning to a slaveholding state - even one that had become home - was a proposition that seemed too dangerous to many of them. The removal of the Seminoles at first brought Black and Red Seminoles together, but its aftermath would split many of them apart.

While the fate of the native peoples of America was often terrible, they maintained a level of legal autonomy and freedom as a result of their indigenous status that blacks did not have.