Black Seminoles
The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles, are an ethnic group of mixed Native American and African origin associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped former slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Their history includes a continuous struggle against invasion and enslavement while preserving their distinct culture and reconnecting with their relatives throughout the African diaspora. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or Freedmen in the past.
Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminoles. Some were held as slaves, particularly of Seminole leaders, but the Black Seminole had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arms. Today, Black Seminole descendants live primarily in rural communities around the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Its two Freedmen's bands, the Caesar Bruner Band and the Dosar Barkus Band, are represented on the General Council of the Nation. Other centers are in Florida, Texas, the Bahamas, and northern Mexico. Their culture is a blending of African, Gullah, Seminole, Mexican, Caribbean, and European traditions.
Since the 1930s, the Seminole Freedmen have struggled with cycles of exclusion from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. In 1990, the tribe received the majority of a $56 million judgment trust by the United States, for seizure of lands in Florida in 1823, and the Freedmen have worked to gain a share of it. In 1999, the Seminole Freedmen's suit against the government was dismissed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; the court ruled the Freedmen could not bring suit independently of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which refused to join on the claim issue.
In 2000 the Seminole Nation voted to restrict membership to those who could prove descent from a Seminole on the Dawes Rolls of the early 20th century, which excluded about 1,200 Freedmen who were previously included as members. Excluded Freedmen argue that the Dawes Rolls were inaccurate and often classified persons with both Seminole and African ancestry as only Freedmen. The District Court for the District of Columbia however ruled in Seminole Nation of Oklahoma v. Norton that Freedmen retained membership and voting rights.
History
Colonial era
Spaniards were the first Europeans to colonize Florida and North America in the 16th century. The colony of Spanish Florida included Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Alabama. Prior to colonization, Native Americans lived on the land for thousands of years where they hunted, fished, raised cattle, and performed religious ceremonies. Over time, European contact affected Indigenous peoples' way of life. Indigenous peoples in Spanish Florida defended their lands from European settlers and colonists. By the 17th century, Spaniards lacked the resources to protect all of Florida's territory. Spain lost control of the Carolinas in 1633 and the Georgia colony in 1670 to the English.To escape conflict with Europeans, Muscogee people from Alabama and Georgia fled to Florida in search of new lands. Over time the Creek were joined by other remnant groups of Southeast American Native Americans, such as the Miccosukee, Choctaw, and the Apalachicola, and formed communities. Other Native American tribes, the Yuchis and Yamasees, merged with the Muscogee and by a process of ethnogenesis, the Native Americans formed the Seminole. Spain had given land to some Muscogee Native Americans. Their community evolved over the late 18th and early 19th centuries as waves of Creek left present-day Georgia and Alabama under pressure from white settlement and the Creek Wars. In 1773, when the American naturalist William Bartram visited the area, he referred to the Seminole as a distinct people. He believed their name was derived from the word "simanó-li", which according to John Reed Swanton, "is applied by the Creeks to people who remove from populous towns and live by themselves."
William C. Sturtevant says the ethnonym was borrowed by Muskogee from the Spanish word cimarrón, supposedly the source as well of the English word maroon. This was used to describe the runaway slave communities of Florida and of the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and other parts of the New World. But linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal Language, says, "If there is a connection between Eng. maroon, Fr. marron, and Sp. cimarron, Spain probably gave the word directly to England."
Enslaved and free Africans in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia gradually formed what has become known as the Gullah culture of the coastal Southeast that will influence Black Seminole culture. As early as 1686, enslaved people from the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Sea Islands fled British plantations on the Underground Railroad, finding refuge and alliance with Florida's Indigenous populations. These freedom seekers became known as the "Black Seminoles" and "Seminole Maroons". Under a 1693 edict from King Charles II of Spain, Gullah freedom seekers received liberty in exchange for defending the Spanish settlers at St. Augustine against the British. The Spanish organized the Black volunteers into a militia; their settlement at Fort Mosé, founded in 1738, was the first legally sanctioned free Black town in North America. In 1739, Carolinas slaveholders complained to Governor Manuel de Mantiano of Spanish Florida about enslaved laborers escaping to Spanish territory. Mantiano upheld the right to sanctuary, established in Spanish law, for Gullah people seeking freedom.
In St. Augustine, not all freedom seekers found military service to their liking. More fugitive slaves sought refuge in wilderness areas in northern Florida, where their knowledge of tropical agriculture—and resistance to tropical diseases—served them well. The majority of Africans who pioneered Florida were Gullah people who escaped from the rice plantations of South Carolina. As Gullah, they developed distinct cultural practices and African leadership structure. Black pioneers built their own settlements based on rice and corn agriculture. They became allies of Creek and other Native Americans escaping into Florida from the Southeast at the same time. In Florida, they developed the Afro-Seminole Creole, which they spoke with the growing Seminole tribe.
By 1750, the Muscogee people established an "Indian Country" in Florida and had more semi-autonomy than other Native Americans in colonies controlled by the Spanish and the British. Enslaved people continued to seek refuge in Indian Country, and British American slaveholders demanded the return of their enslaved laborers from the Muscogee and Seminole Indians. Native Americans allied with Black people and together they fought against European colonists and slaveholders. The Maroons lived in proximity to Seminole villages but lived in independent separate communities on Native land and were culturally and politically autonomous.
Antebellum era
had been a refuge for fugitive slaves for at least 70 years by the time of the American Revolution. Communities of Black Seminoles were established on the outskirts of Seminole villages in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Bowlegs Town on the Suwannee River, an Alachua Seminole village in Paynes Town, Florida, and Okahumpka community of free people and Alachua Seminoles, and others. During the Revolution, the Seminole allied with the British, and African Americans and Seminole came into increased contact with each other. The Seminole held some slaves, as did the Creek and other Southeast Native American tribes. During the War of 1812, members of both communities sided with the British against the US in the hopes of repelling American settlers; they strengthened their internal ties and earned the enmity of American general Andrew Jackson.Seminole Wars
After winning independence in the Revolution, American slaveholders were increasingly worried about the armed Black communities in Florida. The territory was ruled again by Spain, as Britain had ceded both East and West Florida. The US slaveholders sought the capture and return of Florida's Black fugitives under the Treaty of New York, the first treaty ratified under the Confederation.Wanting to disrupt Florida's maroon communities after the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson attacked the Negro Fort, which had become a Black Seminole stronghold after the British had allowed them to occupy it when they evacuated Florida. Breaking up the maroon communities was one of Jackson's major objectives in the First Seminole War. Andrew Jackson directed Edmund P. Gaines to destroy Negro Fort, a haven for escaped slaves and their Seminole allies; however, Gaines delegated the mission to Duncan L. Clinch, whose troops destroyed the fort on July 27, 1816, resulting in 270 deaths. The survivors of Negro Fort settled in other free Black and Maroon communities in the Florida peninsula. The US military focused on eliminating the fort because white Americans worried about a growing community of Black and Native resistance. On April 16, 1818, at the town of Seminole leader Bolek on the Suwannee River, Andrew Jackson and his troops burned 400 Maroon and Seminole homes, destroyed their food supplies, and took several horses and cattle.
Under pressure, the Native American and Black communities moved into south and central Florida. The enslaved and Black Seminoles frequently migrated down the peninsula to escape from Cape Florida to the Bahamas. Hundreds left in the early 1820s after the United States acquired the territory from Spain, effective 1821. Contemporary accounts noted a group of 120 migrating in 1821, and a much larger group of 300 African-American slaves escaping in 1823, picked up by Bahamians in 27 sloops and also by canoes. Their concern about living under American rule was not unwarranted. In 1821, Andrew Jackson became the territorial governor of Florida and ordered an attack on Black Seminoles and other free Black settlements near Tampa Bay.
Anticipating attempts to re-enslave more members of their community, Black Seminoles opposed removal to the West. In councils before the war, they threw their support behind the most militant Seminole faction, led by Osceola. After war broke out, individual Black leaders, such as John Caesar, Abraham, and John Horse, played key roles. In addition to aiding the Natives in their fight, Black Seminoles recruited plantation slaves to rebellion at the start of the war. The slaves joined Native Americans and maroons in the destruction of 21 sugar plantations from Christmas Day, December 25, 1835, through the summer of 1836. Historians do not agree on whether these events should be considered a separate slave rebellion; generally they view the attacks on the sugar plantations as part of the Seminole War.
By 1838, U.S. General Thomas Sydney Jesup tried to divide the Black and Seminole warriors by offering freedom to African Americans if they surrendered and agreed to removal to Indian Territory. John Horse was among the Black warriors who surrendered under this condition. Due to Seminole opposition, however, the Army did not fully follow through on its offer. After 1838, more than 500 Black Seminoles traveled with the Seminoles thousands of miles to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma; some traveled by ship across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River. Because of harsh conditions, many of both peoples died along this trail from Florida to Oklahoma, also known as The Trail of Tears.
The status of Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves was largely unsettled after they reached Indian Territory. The issue was compounded by the government's initially putting Black people and Seminole under the administration of the Creek Nation, many of whom were slaveholders. The Creek tried to re-enslave some of the fugitive Black slaves. John Horse and others set up towns, generally near Seminole settlements, repeating their pattern from Florida.