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?

Race, Identity, and the Maroon Experience

White slaveowners were, of course, aware that slaves were taking refuge with the Seminoles. After 1763, when the Spanish ceded Florida to Britain, maroons from far Southern states such as Georgia, as well as from Florida itself, continued to enter into partnerships with Seminole villages (Mulroy, 1993, pp. 10–11). Ironically, during the early eighteenth century, 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 had 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 after they 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 received the protection of the larger Seminole community. One American general aptly described the relationship between the two groups as one of "vassals and allies."

Mulroy (1993, p. 11) argues that the arrangement 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 participated in raids alongside them; the Seminoles appear to have had the right to call on maroons to go into battle (Porter, 1971, pp. 302–303).

The Seminoles were far less concerned about racial categories than whites were, and they recognized the humanity of the maroons in ways that whites never did.

The experience of the Black Seminoles was similar to that of other maroon societies that proliferated throughout the Americas before slavery was abolished. Because they were in constant fear of recapture, they defended their freedom by developing extraordinary skills in guerrilla warfare. They were proactive in finding ways to survive economically in new environments and were skilled in their interactions with Native Americans. Leaders emerged from their communities who could understand and negotiate with whites. Most importantly, all of these maroon communities borrowed and blended elements of their varied experiences and integrated them into their African heritage.

Historically, the central question for those who came into contact with the Black Seminoles was whether they were African or American Indian. This issue of classification followed them throughout their search for freedom. Individuals, agencies, and institutions labeled them for their own purposes, more often than not determined by vested interests.

We might think that race is a fixed category, but in fact it is determined far more by cultural than by biological factors. Black Seminole communities were constantly threatened by slave hunters who defined "black" in the broadest possible sense — the definition that would yield the largest number of slaves to bring back — while the former slaves and Seminoles defined race in ways that benefited themselves.

Race is in fact one of the most bedeviling of all cultural or social characteristics. It carries a sense of objectivity, as if it were a classification conducted from the outside. We may believe we can determine someone's race simply by looking at them. This is not true, and is reflected today in a growing preference for the term ethnicity — a category far more often applied by people to themselves, usually involving knowledge of national or family origin and often of religious belief. We are far less confident that we can guess someone's ethnicity simply by observing them. But slave hunters labored under no such nuance. Dark skin was dark skin to them.

Racial categories are in all probability so widespread because they are one of the simplest mechanisms by which people can pursue the age-old habit of dividing the world into "us" and "them." This remains true across 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 most accurate to examine the idea of races within a biological framework as the identification, within a species, of subpopulations whose members share a greater degree of common inheritance with one another than with individuals from other subpopulations. This is a relatively neutral definition, though it does tend to assume that such identifications are meaningful and useful (Jantz, 1995, p. 346). Bounty hunters had neither the intellectual inclination nor the desire to distinguish between mixed-race maroons and mixed-race Seminoles, and many who considered themselves Indians were reclassified as black and sold into slavery.

Another irony of life for the Black Seminoles is that their communities were raided not only by white slave hunters but also by Indian slave hunters — including some Creek Indians — who often seized women and children, the most easily captured members of Black Seminole communities.

The Seminole Negroes were descendants of escaped slaves who had settled among the Seminole Indians of Florida. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the U.S. government moved the Seminoles and Seminole Negroes to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Slave hunters and pro-slavery 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. Mexico prohibited slavery, so the Seminole blacks were safe as long as they remained south of the Rio Grande. They drew on survival skills learned in the Florida wilderness and adapted those skills to the harsh terrain of the Mexican borderlands.

Spanish Control and the Seminole Confederation

Florida was in British control for less than a generation at the end of the eighteenth century before it shifted once again to Spanish control. During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, 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 nineteenth century, were courageous fighters whose skills and experience adapted them well to the rigors of combat in the Florida swamps. U.S. forces believed there was a continuing threat to American interests from 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, and the Seminoles would soon find themselves, like other native peoples, being moved from one territory to another.