Black Seminoles: Origins, Culture, and the Fight for Freedom

Introduction: An Unlikely Alliance

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 together two groups of people who would — had the history of the South been written just a little differently — never have had much in common. 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 where runaway black slaves believed they might be safe from those seeking to reclaim them as 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 from Florida, and many slaves believed they would be recaptured or killed before they could reach the North. Thus they fled south, into the swamps, where the Seminole Indians often took them in.

Those escaped black slaves were fortunate 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 in the conventional sense as 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.

The slaves had another reason to retreat south into Florida: since the seventeenth century, slaves had been seeking refuge in Florida during those historical periods when it was Spanish territory and therefore not subject to British or, later, American law.

Although the Seminoles were racially, culturally, and linguistically mixed, they did not lack a sense of identity. In fact, of all the Eastern American Indian tribes, the Seminole were among 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 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 often of mixed blood. These slaves — whom today we would call Black or African American — were in the antebellum period 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, having already integrated both African and American elements into their lives, also integrated Seminole customs, taking on the traditional Seminole style of brightly colored appliqué, moccasins, and turbans (Thybony, 1991, p. 92).

The Black Seminoles had their own language — a creole that developed when the former slaves and the Seminoles were brought together. This language, called Gullah, is a variety of English, though the grammatical and lexical influences of African languages, Spanish, and Muskhogean Indian would make it difficult for anyone speaking standard English to understand.

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

The political life of Florida was complex, as the territory was used as a bargaining chip on a number of occasions by the colonial powers with interests in the continental United States — Britain, France, and Spain — as well as by the United States itself. Whenever Florida changed hands, the rights of the Black Seminoles changed as well. There was also always the question of race: what made a person black or Indian?