Precarious

lives
Black Seminoles
and other
freedom seekers
in Florida
before the
US civil war
Precarious lives
Black Seminoles and other freedom seekers
in Florida before the US civil war

A. A. Morgan
Copyright 2020 A. A. Morgan
This is an authorized free edition from www.obooko.com. It is licensed under
the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. You are welcome to share it,
within a few basic limits stated in the license, as long as you credit the author
and do not alter the work. To view a copy of the license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0.

I gratefully acknowledge the insightful and constructive feedback received

from Cheryl Nicchitta and Donna Stokes. All remaining mistakes and
infelicities are my own.

This work is offered free of charge. If you enjoy reading it, please consider
making a small donation to the charity of your choice.

i
Dedication
Sandy Perryman
? – 1839
warrior, diplomat, linguist

ii
Contents
1 Introduction
3 Seeking freedom in the Americas
18 Florida — a precarious haven
19 Seeking freedom in Florida
27 A fragile freedom
41 War
75 After Florida
78 Notes
95 Sources

iii
Introduction
Florida was once a place where people in bondage came to be free. For
generations, fugitives from the slave plantations of Alabama, the Carolinas, and
Georgia crossed the border into Spanish Florida, where they sought official
sanctuary or disappeared into the peninsula’s uncharted forests, swamps, and
savannas. There, many of them fell in with American Indians, also relatively new
to the region, who would become known as Seminoles.
Their relationships with the Indians took many forms and have been described
over the years in many ways — from slavery (similar to the Euro-American
version but less brutal), to a form of vassalage in which they owed an annual
tribute but were otherwise left to their own devices, to alliances between equals in
which they served as trusted advisors, interpreters, and military allies. Both
groups were reinventing themselves — enslaved people taking back their
freedom, and Seminoles dissolving their ties with the Creeks to the north. The
two groups often lived in separate villages but practiced a similar mix of hunting
and farming.
Florida’s potential as a place of refuge was a perennial thorn in the side of
American slaveholders, and their demands for federal help with this problem
largely drove the 19th century Seminole wars. In four decades of nearly
continuous insecurity and turmoil, black and Indian families and warriors were
driven farther and farther down the peninsula, until most of the survivors
consented to removal to the west.
Life was not only difficult and dangerous; it was also marked by endless dizzying
change. Alliances shifted, priorities meshed and diverged again, promises were
made and broken, treaties undermined, homes made and uprooted and made
again. Facing these challenges required not only courage and endurance but also
extraordinary agility.
By 1842, most historians agree, all but a few Black Seminoles had been relocated
to the US west. There they would face new challenges and threats that would
continue to demand their courage and agility. Those years have been well
described elsewhere.1 This story focuses on a few highlights of the Florida
journeys of the men and women who risked everything to leave slavery behind
and take their freedom into their own hands.
It is not a comprehensive history of that era. Wars, independence movements,
economic ups and downs, epidemics, diplomatic maneuvers, and US westward
expansion all helped to define the turbulent times during which these stories
played out, in ways that are not addressed here. Rather, this is the story of how a
few people — most survivors of US-style chattel slavery, some still reeling from
their violent relocation from Africa — faced down a seemingly monolithic power,

1
overcame an almost endless series of setbacks, and, through their skill, courage,
and perseverance, created a legacy that even their most powerful enemies were
unable to erase.
This Florida saga was part of a larger story of flight toward freedom, which is as
old as slavery itself. The section that follows briefly explores that movement,
drawing on examples from four centuries across the Americas. The next section
provides a rough sketch of the Florida to which these freedom-seekers were
drawn, and the people — diverse and evolving native communities, as well as
colonists under the Spanish, British, and US flags — who inhabited it. Finally, the
focus narrows to the Black Seminoles and other free black people of Florida, the
lives they built, the battles they fought to protect those lives, and the outcomes —
some victorious, some tragic, and some lost to history — of those battles.
• • •
A note on names and terms: Many of the words needed to tell this story risk
sounding more precise than they really are. The two native groups that were most
active in Florida during this era, the Seminoles and Creeks, had complicated
identities and histories; they defined themselves, and were defined by others, in
different ways at different times. Inland Florida and its inhabitants were a
mystery to most of the colonial officials who sought to control the peninsula —
and who created most of the historical record. The roles played by black people in
this complicated world were similarly complex and varied, in terms of both their
level of freedom and the closeness of their ties to different Indian and white
actors and to each other.
It may be impossible to describe these men and women in words that are at once
simple, precise, and accurate. The terms Seminole, Creek, and American Indian/
Native American are not mutually exclusive. (They were also created by
outsiders.) Not all escaped slaves in Florida were Black Seminoles, and not all
Black Seminoles were fugitives from slavery. Much about all of their lives and
relations remains unknown.
Thus, the terms used here to refer to groups of people can give only a fleeting and
imperfect glimpse of who those people were. These terms are not hard-and-fast
labels; they are meant to convey respect for the people and for the mystery they
left behind.
Any person mentioned here by a single name was described thus in the available
records.

2
“Un nègre fugitif” from P. T. Benoit’s Voyage a Surinam, 1839.

Seeking freedom in the Americas

As long as there has been slavery in the Americas, some enslaved people have
tried to escape — undeterred by their lack of resources, the unfamiliar landscape,
or the brutal consequences they faced if caught. Out of this courageous minority,
an even smaller minority succeeded.2
“A fugitive slave had everything against him,” former fugitive Isaac D. Williams
remembered in 1885,
big rewards offered for his capture, and no knowledge of the country he
was to pass through. He had no compass to guide him … and was
forced to shun every human face … Every man’s hand was against him,
and there were very few good Samaritans to help the unfortunate on his
way until he got further north. Where he might have met kindness and
encouragement of a practical nature, he would fear and tremble to ask
it. So often did hypocrisy clothe itself in the garments of benevolence,
and self-interest be the governing motive, that he would find too late
that his confidence had been treacherously betrayed. I mention these
few facts so my readers will understand the difficulties of our situation
and the many unknown perils we would have to face.3
As slavery survivor Anthony Dawson told an interviewer in the 1930s, there were
“devils and good people walking in de road at de same time, and nobody could
tell one from t’other.”4

3
Some had help, including from the anti-slavery network that came to “Our ignorance was the greatest
be known as the Underground Railroad, while others escaped on their hold the South had on us.”
own. They left on foot, by ship (as stowaways or mutineers), in “We took advantage of every
opportunity to educate ourselves.
disguise, and in plain sight with counterfeit papers. Some fought off
The greater part of the plantation
bloodhounds; others tried to throw dogs off the scent using everything owners were very harsh if we were
from onions to graveyard dust. Some disappeared into the anonymity caught trying to learn or write …
of the city or headed north to the free states or Canada (or in the latter We were never allowed to go to
town … Our ignorance was the
years of slavery, south to Mexico). Others traveled deep into
greatest hold the South had on us.
inhospitable swamps and jungles. Still others hid out just past the edge We knew we could run away, but
of the plantation and returned stealthily to visit loved ones and get what then?”
supplies — or left for short periods and returned after winning
concessions from a master or finding themselves unable to survive in
the wild.6
Most people escaping from slavery in the United States were men and,
regardless of gender, young — not surprising, given the extreme
difficulty that an escape attempt entailed. Women were more likely to
be caring for children and were often less familiar with the world
outside the plantation, less skilled in hunting and fishing, and more
conspicuous on the road. Nonetheless, some women did run away,
with or without children, including while pregnant.7
Sometimes entire families escaped together — like George and Lettus — John W. Fields,
and their five children, whose escape was reported in Tallahassee, Lafayette, Indiana, 19375
Florida, in 1839. Children as young as eight ran away on their own, often
searching for their parents.8
Perhaps the most difficult task was for an entire family — husband,
wife, children, grandparents, grandchildren — to try to escape together.
Collecting food, clothing, and other necessities before leaving,
coordinating the time and place for the getaway, and traveling in a
group without being detected were only a few of the obstacles entire
families faced … Parents had to assist youngsters, remain calm, and
convey a mood of confidence. It was necessary to remain positive and
encouraging despite the constant dangers. Nevertheless, families did
leave together, and while they rarely made it to freedom, some were
able to find refuge for extended periods.9
Three survivors of slavery, whose names were recorded as Aunt Kitty, Uncle Ben,
and Isaac Jones, told an interviewer in Alabama in 1910 about a woman who hid
in the woods with her children for several years:
At dusk you sometimes caught a glimpse of a wild, naked, little figure
moving in and out among the trees: that was one of the woman’s
children. It was not wise to go near the place, but one might drop a
piece of food at the wood’s edge confident that it would reach a little
hungry stomach.10

4
A number of fugitive families sheltered in the Great Dismal Swamp, which spans
the border between Virginia and North Carolina. An enslaved man named
Joseph met a journalist there in 1853 and told him that “children were born, bred,
lived, and died here …. There were people in the swamps still, he thought, that
were the children of the runaways, and who had been runaways themselves all
their lives.”11 An escaped slave named Charlie who spent some time there before
reaching Canada told an interviewer that couples had fled to the swamp and
raised families there without ever seeing a white man.12
Recent studies have highlighted some audacious and successful family
bids for freedom. Heather Andrea Williams, in Help Me to Find My
People, tells the story, first published by the Canadian abolitionist
newspaper Voice of the Fugitive in 1851, of the Murdock family,
enslaved on two different plantations in Arkansas and torn apart, like
many families, when some members were sold to a Kentucky-based
slaveholder. But Mrs. Murdock and her children escaped en route to
their new location and made it safely to Canada. Once there, she
wrote to her former master, and the news of that letter made its way
to Mr. Murdock, who escaped and eventually managed to reunite
with his family in Ontario.14 Jane Johnson escaped from slavery
in 1855 with two young sons.
Sylviane Diouf’s book Slavery’s Exiles recounts the story of William, Confined in a hotel in an unfamiliar
who escaped from slavery in Georgia, built a home in the woods city (Philadelphia) and only briefly
behind his plantation, and went back for his wife and children; the left unsupervised, she managed to
get word to local members of the
family remained hidden until they emerged as free people in 1865.
Underground Railroad, who staged
But other escape attempts ended in tragedy, such as the death of a a dramatic dock-side rescue.
three-year-old shot during an 1820s raid on the camp of the South Pennsylvania at the time was a free
Carolina bandit Forest, an escaped slave, three days after Forest’s own state but subject to the Fugitive
Slave Law. When Johnson’s
death. It is not clear what happened to the child’s parents; most rescuers were put on trial, she
members of the band were eventually killed or captured.15 made a surprise appearance to
testify on their behalf, leaving the
• • • courthouse only after a tense
People who escaped on their own, singly or in groups, and made a life stand-off between federal officials
determined to detain her and state
in the wilderness (rather than, say, fleeing to an urban area or a free officials equally determined to
state) are often referred to as maroons. Marronage began almost as ensure her escape.13
soon as slavery itself — by 1503, Spanish officials on Hispaniola were
complaining about escapees and their influence on native people. It lasted, in
North America, until the last fugitives walked out of wilderness hideaways after
the US civil war.16
Well-known maroon societies include Palmares in Brazil, which harbored several
thousand fugitives who successfully defended their freedom for almost the entire
17th century. In Suriname, maroon communities won their freedom in the 18th
century. In the mountains of Jamaica, maroons established a network of thriving

5
 settlements, fought two wars against the British, and eventually signed peace
treaties with a slaveholder government that was unable to defeat them.17
In the swamps south and east of New Orleans, a band of maroons led by the
charismatic Juan St. Maló held sway for over a decade in the late 18th century.
Other slaves fled across the border into Spanish Florida, and their experiences are
described in more detail below.
Maroon communities remained perpetually under threat, from both outside and
within; many eventually met a violent end. As one recent summary expressed it,
“Escaped slaves were a part of everyday reality of the slave systems of the
Americas, [but] permanent escapes — grand marronage — did not account for a
very large portion of total escapes.”18

Maroon life
For maroons, escape was only the first in a long line of challenges. An early maroon sanctuary
They had to cross forests, swamps, and mountains to find a hiding Describing an island off the
place, build homes, feed and clothe themselves without attracting northeast coast of what is now the
Dominican Republic, a 16th
unwanted attention, keep a lookout for enemy forces, and be ready to
century French explorer wrote:
defend themselves or flee, sometimes at a moment’s notice. The rough
“There is an island inhabited by
and dangerous terrain that discouraged their pursuers was equally hard wild Negroes who fled to avoid
on them; they just had to be more determined and skillful. serving the Spanish. These savages
have become accustomed to this
As time went on and the crisis of escape turned into the routine of island, along with their wives and
daily living, they had to organize themselves and choose leaders, create children, who have multiplied and
and maintain a security system, and reach a modus vivendi with the continue to multiply, and all go
naked as beasts except for a small
people they encountered — whether other maroon bands, Indian
cloth over their private parts. They
communities, or members of the slaveholder society from which they defend themselves with bows and
had fled. They had to find safe ways to incorporate newcomers into arrows, so that the Spaniards
their community. And in this uncertain environment, they had to cannot enter, and make their
homes among the trees.”19
establish families and raise children. Some maroon communities
survived for generations; others were cut short much sooner.
Relations between maroons and enslaved people ranged from support and
cooperation to conflict and betrayal. A study of marronage in Suriname found “an
absolutely staggering amount” of contact between maroons and slaves there. And
a recent history of colonial-era Louisiana described slaves meeting with fellow
slaves from other plantations as well as with maroons and legally free people, in
the cypress swamps behind the plantations and at parties in the slave quarters.20
Information found its way along the “grapevine telegraph,” which crossed
plantation boundaries and sometimes stretched hundreds of miles. One
plantation owner warned that “no overseer, or Planter should speak on such
subjects even before a small house boy, or girl, as they communicate all that they
hear to others, who convey it to the spies of the runaways.”21

6
 In spite of the obvious dangers, people who remained enslaved often helped the
fugitives. One man told Fisk University sociologist Ophelia Settle Egypt, who
interviewed former slaves in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1929 and 1930, “I’ve
known my mother to help them [runaways] the best she could; they would stay in
the thick woods and come in at night, and mother would give them something to
eat.” In his memoir From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, William H. Robinson described
his escape as a teenager from a North Carolina plantation and his search for a
maroon band that he knew was nearby: “I went to an old mother — we were
taught to call each old woman mother, and they called us son or daughter … She
gave me a chunk of fat meat and half of a corn dodger and directed me the way to
a hiding place. Then with her hand upon my head she prayed.”22
But relations could turn bad as well. Throughout the Americas, black soldiers
sometimes fought on the slaveholders’ side, and maroons sometimes signed
treaties promising to turn in slaves who sought refuge with them later. Maroons
who turned to banditry sometimes preyed on people of color; some maroon allies
were pressured or tempted into betrayal.23 A slavery survivor named Green
Cumby told an interviewer in Texas in the 1930s, “To see de runaway slaves in de
woods scared me to death. They’d try to snatch you and hold you, so you couldn’t
go tell.”24
Countries in South America with powerful maroon histories include Brazil and
Suriname. Colonial governments in both countries left a substantial written
record; the descendants of the Suriname maroons have also maintained a robust
oral tradition of their escape and fight for freedom. Some highlights of their Green Cumby
history are outlined below.

Brazil
In northeastern Brazil, a maroon enclave known as Palmares survived for most of
the 17th century, fighting off both Dutch and Portuguese colonial forces until its
fall in 1694. Historians have referred to Palmares as an African state and
compared it to Haiti in terms of its challenge to white slaveholder society.25
Palmares was made up of nine settlements stretching for 100 miles across a
mountainous area a few dozen miles from the coast; it was home to as many as
20,000 maroons. Colonial officials who saw Palmares were impressed with its
sophistication, one noting that it had “all the trappings of any Republic.” They
saw towns — one with 220 houses, another with 800, and another with 1,500 —
with cisterns, a parade ground, and a palace, council house, and church
(Palmaristas practiced Christianity but also polygamy).
The maroon stronghold had well-developed agriculture, metal foundries, and “all
sorts of craftsmen.” One observer admired the “well-kept lands … beautifully
irrigated with streamlets.” The maroons traded food crops for products they
couldn’t produce themselves, such as weapons and salt.26

7
The scattered settlements adopted African-influenced forms of governance; all
owed allegiance to a supreme ruler with the title Ganga Zumba (Great Lord) and
supported a centralized army. A network of spies infiltrating nearby towns and
plantations often forewarned the maroons of attacks and enabled them to evade
capture. At least one town had a defensive perimeter made up of two strong
fences with the ground in between lined with spikes. It is likely that some
maroons, in Palmares and elsewhere, had military skills learned before they were
captured in Africa.27
Over time, Palmares continued to take in people who escaped slavery on their
own, and to capture slaves in raids on plantations. Slaves captured in raids
remained enslaved, but they could gain their freedom by joining another raid and
bringing back a captive to take their place. People who escaped the plantation and
made their own way to Palmares were free immediately.28 Leaving Palmares again
may not have been an option — a Dutch observer reported in 1645 that “their
king ruled them with severe justice ... and when some blacks would flee, he would
send [crioulos or native blacks] on their trail, and when they were caught, they
would be killed, such that fear reigned among them.” This harsh response was
likely due to fear that the people leaving Palmares would betray the kingdom to
the colonial authorities.29
Relations between Palmares and nearby white settlements were a mix of peaceful
trade and violent aggression. The violence included raids by government forces
and private militias against the maroons, and by the maroons against the
plantations. In the lulls between raids, maroons and settlers engaged in an illegal
but flourishing clandestine trade. The Palmaristas’ main products included farm
produce, meat, handicrafts, and sometimes items seized during plantation raids.
The settlers offered firearms, farm tools, other manufactured goods — and, for a
steep price, advance warning of military raids.
Brazil’s colonial settlers had mixed opinions of the rebel kingdom: Those who
profited from the clandestine trade preferred a live-and-let-live approach or even
a formal peace treaty, while others feared maroon violence or resented the
kingdom’s attraction for slaves contemplating escape. Meanwhile, the maroons
embraced trade opportunities but pushed back against settlers’ attempts to
encroach on their land.
Tensions rose as colonial settlements expanded closer to Palmares; during much
of the final decades of its existence, raids and reprisals occurred yearly or even
more often. Palmaristas, like most maroons, had to remain agile to adjust to ever-
shifting threats and opportunities.30
Relations with local Indians were also mixed. Indians numbered among
Palmares’s defenders as well as its attackers, and Palmaristas may have sometimes
raided Indian settlements; but escaped slaves and Indians also made common

8
 cause against their colonial overlords. Some historians estimate that Indians
made up a fifth of the Palmares population (a few white people may also have
been present).31
Little is known about family life in Palmares. A Dutch observer estimated in 1645
that women and children made up two-thirds of the population; in a 1677 battle,
several children and grandchildren of the ruler were captured, along with many
women. Contemporary accounts describe women joining maroon settlements in
Brazil of their own free will and others captured during raids on plantations and
markets; some men had multiple wives.32
Ganga Zumba eventually negotiated a peace treaty, under which Palmares
residents would have to relocate and turn over many escaped slaves to the
Portuguese. A faction led by his nephew Zumbi rejected the treaty terms.33 Ganga
Zumba was poisoned, possibly by Zumbi or his allies, and Zumbi led a shrinking
and increasingly desperate resistance until his defeat and death in 1695. He is
celebrated in Brazil today as an anti-slavery hero; Brazil’s National Black
Consciousness Day is on November 20, the anniversary of his death,34 and is also
called Zumbi Day.35

Suriname
When Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), on the northeastern coast of South
America, was attacked by French privateers in 1712, coastal plantation owners
sought to protect their wealth by hiding their slaves in or near the rainforest;
several hundred enslaved people took that opportunity to make a break for
freedom. In smaller numbers, others had been doing so for years. Some remained
close to the plantations, but most moved upriver deep into the rainforest,
navigating swamps and rapids and fending off parasites and predators.36
They moved frequently, especially in the early years, pushing deeper into the
forest, evading the slave-state authorities and sometimes competing with each
other for prime locations. Like maroons elsewhere, they had to find ways to cope
with terrain that was rough and remote enough to discourage their pursuers.
They brought many skills with them but had to learn others on the spot; for
example, their first canoes were said to be fairly crude. They raised poultry and
goats and kept large gardens, practicing shifting cultivation, raising a variety of
food crops as well as cotton. Some gardens were camouflaged, difficult to access,
and far away from the residences, so they survived even if the village was
destroyed. They hunted and fished, sharing what they caught with the whole
community, and raided the plantations to get supplies they couldn’t make or
grow themselves.37

9
“March thro’ a swamp or marsh in terra firma” by William Blake shows troops of the
slaveholder regime pursuing maroons in 18th century Suriname, led by an enslaved guide.

Once free, maroons who may not have had much in common except their hatred
of slavery had to find a way to live and work together.
In a way, those who ran away and banded together in the Guianese
forest were forced to start from scratch. They came from a wide variety
of different African backgrounds, and … found themselves in a largely
unfamiliar environment without a preexisting social structure, fully
shared culture, or sense of collective identity. These they were forced to
construct anew, while struggling to survive in the forest.38
Leaders emerged because of their military skills and spiritual presence, traits they
had sometimes developed before they were kidnapped from Africa.39
Most maroons started out in small groups, often made up of people from the
same plantation. These groups sometimes cooperated on plantation raids and
formed other loose and shifting alliances; sometimes, severe losses during

10
government raids forced the surviving bands to unite. Communication between
villages took place by drum as well as by individual messengers.40
Raids and counter-raids were a fact of maroon life, and maroons had to be
constantly on the lookout for attacks. Settlements were repeatedly relocated to
evade government troops. Some were protected by palisades with watchtowers,
others with booby-traps that sent boulders or logs crashing down on attackers. A
hiding place could always be betrayed by a deserter, and desertion could be
punished by death.41 New recruits were sometimes brought to the maroon
settlements “by way of numerous detours and without going on any real paths, so
that once they are there, they cannot find their way back.”42
The arrival of new runaways was a dangerous time for both the community and
the newcomer — especially for lone men, who were often killed out of fear that
they might be spies or guides for a white military expedition. Oral histories
describe some escapees lurking on the outskirts of a village, stealing what they
needed to survive, until they could make contact with someone they knew who
could vouch for them; relationships established on the plantation could be a
lifesaver.43
In spite of the dangers, communities accepted many newcomers and helped them
get established. Sometimes newcomers were run off by several villages before they
found one that would accept them. Some lone newcomers are remembered as
bringing valuable gifts to their new home in the form of óbia, which could be
translated as anything from medicine to magic. One such gift, for healing broken
bones and gunshot injuries, was said to be so effective that it remained in use
long after western medical treatments became available.44
Other forms of óbia are said to have helped enslaved people escape, navigate
dangerous terrain, and evade or overcome their pursuers. Leaders, who
sometimes possessed strong óbia skills themselves, were often advised by óbiama,
some of whom were Indian shamans.45
As was true elsewhere, early maroon communities in Suriname had
disproportionately few women, and maroons sometimes raided plantations
specifically to capture women. For both women and men, the line between
kidnap and rescue is not always clear in accounts of these raids. Some were
clearly rescue missions; at other times, raiders killed enslaved people who refused
to go with them. Raids were also a chance to get revenge — and to get supplies,
like iron pots and axes and salt, they couldn’t produce themselves.46
Suriname maroons had mixed relations with local Indians. Some had served
together on the plantations. Some Indians helped maroons escape or sheltered
them after they escaped; others worked as bounty hunters returning maroons to
captivity and as guides to military expeditions. Maroons kidnapped Indian
women for wives and others as a reprisal for the bounty hunting, but also gave

11
refuge to Indians fleeing war; even the captives eventually became assimilated.
Indians, mostly women, taught maroons survival skills.47
Relations with plantation slaves also varied. The enmity evoked when slaves were
killed in a maroon raid was not quickly forgotten. One Suriname slave — known
in colonial records as Graman Quacy and in maroon oral histories as
Kwasímukámba — gained his freedom and high standing in the colony by
serving the anti-maroon forces as a guide, spy, and bounty hunter. (He also
became internationally known as an herbalist and had a plant, Quassia amara,
named after him.)
In spite of the potential for violence and betrayal, slaves and maroons often found
ways to cooperate, for example in helping more slaves escape. Even during
routine plantation operations, enslaved people spent time in the forest, where
they might meet maroons who encouraged them to escape. As one historian Graman Quacy, anti-
maroon spy and bounty
described it, slave–maroon relations “were always a matter of great delicacy,
hunter, was also an
danger, and unpredictability.”48 herbalist; the plant Quassia
amara (bitterwood) was
In spite of their shared hatred of slavery, different maroon bands did not always
named in his honor.
get along. The strongest bonds existed between people who had escaped from the
same plantation, and when tensions arose between maroons who did not share
that bond, they could lead to armed conflict. Different bands made peace with the
colonial government at different times, and conflict arose between pacified and
non-pacified bands. At other times, different bands got along fine, or competed
in less violent ways over land or in ritual performances.49
Unlike the maroons of Palmares, most maroon bands in Suriname eventually
entered into peace treaties with the government, and many of their communities
have survived into present times. Peace came at different times for different
groups, spread over almost a century, in one case only three years before slavery
was abolished altogether. Treaties were not always fully observed. For example,
they usually included a promise by the maroons not to take in any more escaped
slaves, a promise that was sometimes broken.50
• • •
An 18th century account of the Dutch colonial war on the maroons of Suriname
described both cordial and hostile relations between maroons and slaves. One
slave uprising started in 1757 and ended with a peace treaty in 1761. During
treaty negotiations, the maroons had this to say on behalf of their enslaved
comrades:
We desire you to tell your Governor and your court, that in case they
want to raise no new gangs of rebels, they ought to take care that the
planters keep a more watchful eye over their own property, and not to
trust them so frequently in the hands of drunken managers and
overseers, who by wrongfully and severely chastising the negroes,
debauching their wives and children, neglecting the sick, &c. are the

12
 ruin of the colony, and wilfully drive to the woods such numbers of
stout active people, who by their sweat earn your subsistence, without
whose hands your colony must drop to nothing.51
The author himself participated in a 1775 night battle with blacks fighting on
both sides: maroon “rebels” and colonial “rangers” (enslaved men who had been
promised freedom in exchange for fighting the maroons). After the initial attack,
he wrote,
we lay prostrate on our arms until sun-rise, during which time a most
abusive dialogue was carried on between the rebels and the rangers,
each party cursing and menacing the other … the former reproaching
the rangers as poltrons [cowards] and traitors to their countrymen, and
challenging them next day to single combat; swearing they only wished
to lave [wash] their hands in the blood of such scoundrels, who had
been the principal agents in destroying their flourishing settlement. The
rangers d--’d the rebels for a parcel of pitiful skulking rascals, whom
they would fight one to two in the open field, if they dared but to shew
their ugly faces; swearing they had only deserted their masters because
they were too lazy to work. After this they insulted each other by a kind
of war-whoop ... [until] the firing commenced once more from the
rebel negroes.
The rebels were even more scornful of the white colonial troops, he reported:
“They told us that we were to be pitied more than they, that we were white slaves,
hired to be shot at and starved for fourpence a day; that they scorned to expend
much more of their powder upon such scarecrows.” Eventually, “the rebels
disbursed with the rising sun.”52

Bandits and pirates

Escaping from a violent system like plantation slavery inevitably entailed the risk
of more violence. Was a particular fugitive a criminal? a freedom fighter? simply
on the run from personal catastrophe? Trying to draw a clear line between these
categories (and our 21st-century understanding of them) would be a futile
exercise, not helped by the fact that slaveholders often used indiscriminately
harsh language, including “bandit,” to refer to escapees.53
That said, some maroons embraced violence more than others. Some joined
mixed-race gangs; occasionally, whites joined primarily black gangs. Maroons
committed (or were accused of committing) horse theft, cattle and hog rustling,
highway robbery, burglary, and sometimes rape and murder.54
Outlaw bands rarely survived for long, but while they did they could wreak
havoc. Escaped slaves who had fought for the British during the American
revolution fought on in the backcountry in the southern states, in the name of the
king or their own survival, into the 1790s.55 A gang in one North Carolina county
frightened local residents into fleeing their homes in summer 1821 until a 200-
man militia chased them down through the coastal swamps and forests. In 1856

13
 in the same state, bounty hunters with dogs refused to hunt another outlaw gang
without backup — they considered it too dangerous.56 Bandits
hid out in densely forested, swampy areas that were virtually
inaccessible to anyone unfamiliar with the terrain. Even whites who
knew these areas feared entering them. Even when few in number,
gangs of outlyers struck fear into the hearts of white inhabitants.57
Bandits found allies in slave quarters who passed on critical information, and
others in white communities who fenced their stolen goods and sold them arms.58
Some bandit leaders’ colorful personalities and stirring reputations are described
in Diouf’s book Slavery’s Exiles — including the General of the Swamps, the
stylish Billy James, a man named Bob whose band made a daring attack on a slave
“coffle” that freed two allies, and a man who gained the nickname Forest for his
woodsman’s skills. Forest led a band that included women and children and
roamed over an area of more than 5,000 square miles in South Carolina, ranging
from the edge of the plantation to the deep swamp and forest.
Most bandit leaders met a violent end. Forest, betrayed by a slave, was
decapitated and his head placed on a pole as a grim warning to others. But a few
survived (or at least, evaded further notice by the newspapers and courts).59
Fugitive slaves sometimes turned to piracy as well. Black men joined pirate crews
either of their own initiative or when their ship was captured; several sailed with
the famous pirate Blackbeard. Some were part of a remarkable episode in the
early 18th century when for five years, pirates made the Bahamas island of New
Providence their home base, turning the island into a magnet for the dispossessed
and desperate from New England to the Caribbean — “unemployed seamen,
indentured servants, criminals on the run, even a few escaped slaves from Cuba,
Hispaniola, and beyond … prostitutes, smugglers, and arms dealers.” Escaped
slaves could make up a quarter or more of a pirate crew. But many other blacks,
both would-be pirates and captured slaves, were sold back into slavery, enslaved
on shipboard, or murdered.60

Blurred boundaries at the edge of the law

Many maroons disappeared into rugged and remote terrain, used military skills
to defend themselves, and met at least part of their survival needs through theft
and raiding. But many (as described above for Palmares in Brazil) also developed
trade and labor relationships with free and enslaved members of mainstream
society who were willing to turn a blind eye to their outlaw status, out of altruism
or for profit or convenience.
In 18th century Peru in the Carabayllo Valley, maroons helped local landowners
clear forests. In Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, the Barba Negra maroons worked on
nearby ranches, and warnings from local people helped them to survive several

14
raids. Maroons in Louisiana delivered cypress logs to sawmill owners, sold
handicrafts and agricultural surplus, and traded meat and hides for guns and
ammunition, in networks that included slaves, free blacks, and whites.61
Enslaved people who escaped into the city rather than the wilderness often tried
to pass themselves off as free or as having permission to hire out their time (a not
uncommon arrangement); sometimes they traded in handicrafts, stolen goods,
and other merchandise.62
They worked as laborers, dockhands, domestics, laundresses, gardeners,
brick layers, stone masons, waiters, cooks, barbers … Although
prohibited by law, self-hire was widespread and if runaways could
convince a potential employer that they had been sent by their owner to
find work they could be hired with few questions asked.63
The slave economy had its loopholes and grey areas. Fishermen — whose work
required both skill and physical endurance, often in remote locations, under ever-
changing natural conditions — often had substantial autonomy, even if they were
enslaved. Slave lumbermen, too, often worked far from the plantation. Even in a
system as brutally constrained as plantation slavery, some people were able to
work a few hours for themselves, keep a garden, hunt, or earn money for
“overwork”; sometimes they used that money to pay maroons to help them with
their work.64
Ellen and William Craft’s 1838 escape from slavery in Georgia required disguises,
parts of which had to be bought from local white merchants. This was a risky
process but one with good odds; as William Craft wrote in a memoir of their
escape:
It is unlawful in Georgia for a white man to trade with slaves without
the master’s consent. But, notwithstanding this, many persons will sell a
slave any article that he can get the money to buy. Not that they
sympathize with the slave, but merely because his testimony is not
admitted in court against a free white person.65
Maroons sometimes worked for lumbermen deep in the Great Dismal Swamp, in
exchange for necessities and a little cash. It was a rough and dangerous existence.
A writer who visited the swamp in the early 1850s met a slave there named Joseph
who told him that it was easy to recognize a maroon: “Dey looks strange ...
Skeared like, you know, sir, and kind o’ strange, cause dey hasn’t much to eat, and
ain’t decent [decently clothed], like we is.”66 When it was time to be paid,
maroons were sometimes betrayed to the slave-hunters instead.67
Another mid-19th-century visitor to the Great Dismal Swamp observed how the
profit motive outweighed the law and gave maroons a chance to earn a living.
Shingle makers, he reported,

15
 often return greater quantities of work than could by any possibility
have been produced by their own labor, and draw for two or three
times the amount of provisions necessary for their own subsistence. But
the provisions are furnished, the work paid for, and no questions are
asked.68
One historian has described “conspicuous silences” in otherwise meticulous
recordkeeping by the Dismal Swamp Land Company, which could hint at under-
the-table payments to maroons.69
As industry reached deeper into the swamp, it created both dangers and
opportunities for escaped slaves. The writer who interviewed Joseph believed that
most swamp maroons had been hunted down by the time he made his trip. But
others believed that whole families continued to survive deep in the swamp
beyond the reach of either industry or slave-hunters, and some are known to have
survived there until after slavery was abolished.70

Escape routes opened by great-power rivalry

Sometimes conflicts between colonial powers worked to the advantage of
enslaved people who sought freedom, and sometimes those colonial powers
leaned heavily on the help of escaped slaves.
European powers depended on black and indigenous allies to do much
of their fighting. This dependency gave both Indians and blacks a
certain leverage, but persons of African descent moved between worlds
more often and more easily than did indigenous peoples. The enslaved,
of necessity, became adept at “reading” political events and
manipulated them, when possible, to achieve freedom.71
In the 16th century, maroons in Panama rescued the British explorer and
privateer Francis Drake, who had been wounded and his crew devastated during
an attack on the port city Nombre de Dios. The maroons nursed the survivors
back to health and helped them attack a Spanish treasure caravan. A century
later, in the battle for colonial control of Jamaica, maroons fought on both sides
— first for the Spanish and later for the British.72
In the late 17th century, Spanish colonial Florida began to offer sanctuary to
slaves escaping from British plantations in Georgia and the Carolinas (see the
section “Spanish sanctuary” below). While the policy was couched in religious
terms, it was also a way for Spain to harass, and bolster its defenses against, a
bitter colonial rival.73
Britain used a similar tactic against the United States during the American
revolution and the war of 1812, promising freedom to slaves who fought on the
British side. French agents tried in a similar way to destabilize late-18th-century
Spanish Louisiana.74

16
A revolutionary age
Enslaved people were well aware of the radical ideas sweeping the Atlantic world
in the 18th and 19th centuries, embodied in the American, French, and Haitian
revolutions and the abolitionist movement.75 Historians have argued that they
well understood both the philosophical meaning of this revolutionary wave and
the tactical advantages they might gain from it. Knowledge of the Haitian
revolution, for example, “spread like wildfire throughout slave communities
across the Western Hemisphere [and] led to a major upsurge in resistance that
lasted well into the nineteenth century.”76
As American revolutionaries gathered to denounce British oppression and plot
their way to freedom, enslaved people were waiting on them — and listening.
After an evening talking with fellow revolutionaries worried about enslaved
people deserting to the British, US founding father John Adams noted of
American slaves that they “have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence
amongst themselves; it will run several hundreds of miles in a week or
fortnight.”77

The American revolution

During the American revolution, Virginia’s royal governor promised freedom to
American slaves who escaped to fight on the British side, and thousands took up
the challenge, forming a unit the British called the Ethiopian Regiment. They ran
enormous risks to do so: Slave patrols were intensified and punishments were
severe in what one historian has referred to as a reign of terror. Others took
advantage of the wartime chaos to escape on their own initiative — sometimes
after being abandoned by fleeing slaveholders — and headed for maroon enclaves
in the swamps and woods, inland Indian communities, or port cities.78
The slaves who managed to reach the British did not all find the freedom they
were seeking. The British turned some of them over to soldiers as rewards and
some to Loyalist planters as compensation for their wartime losses. While
promising freedom to black volunteers, they also promised captured slaves as
booty to Indian allies. Many who answered the British call died of smallpox.79
The treaty that ended the war contained a last-minute amendment prohibiting
the British from taking their black recruits with them (“carrying away any
Negroes or other Property of the American inhabitants”). During the British
evacuation, George Washington pushed hard to enforce this provision. The
British pushed back and were able to take many black soldiers and their families
with them to freedom; but between the Americans’ intransigence and their own
lack of transportation, they also left many behind.80
“The postsurrender environment,” one historian concluded, “was savage.”
Especially vulnerable to re-enslavement were orphaned children who were too

17
 young to have made a decision to join the British themselves but too old to have
been born behind British lines; sometimes families were split when a husband or
parent was cleared to depart but a wife or child was not. Those who did leave
with the British scattered across the globe — to Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and
Central America in the western hemisphere as well as to England, Germany,
Sierra Leone, and Australia.81

Florida — a precarious haven

In Florida, escaping slaves found two routes to freedom — under the legal
protection of the Spanish colonial government, and in remote areas beyond the
government’s control. During the decades that at least one of these routes was
open (from the late 17th century to the mid 19th century), Florida itself was also
undergoing dramatic changes. By the mid 18th century, most or all of its original
indigenous communities had disappeared — kidnapped into slavery, killed in
colonial or intertribal wars, or dying of diseases introduced from Europe. The last
survivors probably left Florida with their Spanish protectors when the peninsula
passed to British control in 1763.82 (The Spanish would return 20 years later, and
would cede Florida to the United States in 1821.)
The entry of new indigenous groups into Florida after 1700 probably overlapped
with the death and exile of those earlier peoples. This process may never be fully
understood, given the limited grasp contemporary writers had of Florida
geography and of Indian identities and alliances. Those alliances were themselves
in flux; one recent history described a “near-constant fissioning and realignment”
during this era.
Many of the newcomers were members of the Creek confederacy, a loose
affiliation of southeastern Indians. Some came to fight, either on their own
account or as allies of the British, or to raid for slaves. Some of the raiders pushed
far down the peninsula, driving the surviving remnants of earlier peoples into the
Keys and then to Cuba. Others settled peacefully at the invitation of the Spanish
colonial government; after the colony changed hands in 1763, British-allied
Creeks did the same.83
The peaceful settlers were drawn to Florida’s fertile land and rich natural
resources; many were also dissidents seeking to distance themselves from Creek
control. Over the 18th century, many of these settlements loosened their ties with
the Creek heartland. After the Red Stick (loosely speaking, more traditionalist
and anti-US) faction was defeated in the Creek war of 1813–1814, many of its
members also fled into Florida.
These Seminole or proto-Seminole groups, spread throughout northern Florida,
maintained their independence from each other and from the Creeks. Only after

18
 the United States became a military threat did they attempt to present a unified
front, and that unity was slow to develop and fragile.84
• • •
Well into the 19th century, much of Florida remained terra incognita to its Florida from European
would-be European colonists, who settled in St. Augustine (on the Atlantic contact to statehood
coast), Pensacola (on the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico), and a 1500s: exploration
handful of other coastal locations. The Spanish presence on the east coast 1565: Spanish colony
ended at the St. Johns River, the west bank of which was sometimes 1763: British colony
referred to as the Indian shore. 1783: Spanish colony
1821: US territory
As late as the onset of the second Seminole war in December 1835, the
interior of Florida, by then a US territory, remained a mystery to the 1845: US state
Americans, and military maps were vague and unreliable. One officer
lamented, “we are ‘strangers in a’ very ‘strange land’”; another wrote, “we have,
perhaps, as little knowledge of the interior of Florida as of the interior of China.”85
Inland Florida was much better known to Indians, though: Hunters made regular
winter trips down the peninsula, sometimes connecting with fishermen from
Cuba who worked the waters off Florida’s southwestern coast.86

Seeking freedom in Florida

The first known fugitives from British slave plantations to ask for Escape into Florida
sanctuary in Spanish Florida arrived in 1687. For the next century, there 1687: Florida governor
was a route to legally recognized free status in Florida for escapees from initiates sanctuary policy.
slavery north of the border. (At the same time, slavery remained legal in mid to late 1700s: Fugitive
slaves begin to join native
Florida.)
communities.
Other fugitives made their way to the Florida backcountry, where 1790: Florida’s sanctuary
black/Indian alliances probably emerged in the last half of the 18th policy ends.
century. Most surviving Black Seminoles had left Florida by the end of 1858: The last known Black
1838, though a few remained to fight alongside Billy Bowlegs until his Seminoles relocate to the
west.
surrender in 1858 at the end of the third Seminole war. Thus, for a century
and a half, Florida was the site of an intense and multifaceted quest for freedom.

Spanish sanctuary
The earliest known beneficiaries of the Spanish sanctuary policy were eight men,
two women, and an infant from Carolina who arrived in St. Augustine by canoe
in 1687, asking for instruction in the Catholic faith. The fugitives were assigned
to wage labor in St. Augustine — most of the men on the construction of St.
Augustine’s fort, the Castillo de San Marcos, and the women as servants in the
governor’s household. When a British messenger arrived the following year to

19
 demand their return, the Spanish refused. The Florida governor’s sanctuary
policy was backed in 1693 by a royal decree, and enslaved men and women
continued to escape into Florida.87
Sanctuary did not mean full and immediate freedom or complete equality. The
newcomers had to convert to Catholicism and serve a four-year indenture. They
were required to labor (for pay) on public works projects, had earlier curfews
than white residents, and were not allowed to carry knives or to cultivate land
without white supervision. They could not always choose where to live. Nor was
the move completely without risk. Slavery itself was still legal in Spanish Florida;
and despite a royal prohibition, some of the fugitives were re-enslaved, albeit
under less brutal conditions than they had experienced before.88
Men served in a militia that repeatedly fended off attacks by British colonists.
After reaching safety in Florida, escaped slaves were also encouraged to return to
their old plantations, stealthily or in open raids, and help others escape. As word
of the Florida sanctuary spread, more slaves risked flight; participants in the 1739
Stono (South Carolina) Rebellion were trying to reach sanctuary in Florida.89
Free blacks in Florida also served as emissaries from the Spanish colonial
government to the Seminoles, carrying out diplomacy and trade and
coordinating military efforts.90

Fort Mosé
The short-lived outpost at Fort Mosé (1738–1740 and 1752–1763), about two
miles north of St. Augustine, is considered the first free black settlement with
formal legal standing in what is now the United States. It was intended to serve
not only as a home for black freedmen and women but also as a defensive buffer
between the city and British invaders from the north. In a 1738 letter to the king
of Spain, the freedmen promised to be the “most cruel enemies of the English”
(los mas crueles enemigos de los yngleses) and to shed their “last drop of blood”
(hasta derramar la ultima gota de sangre) to defend the Spanish crown and the
Roman Catholic faith. The settlement’s full name was Gracia Real de Santa Teresa
de Mosé, and the fort was garrisoned by a free black militia. 91
Shortly after Mosé was established, tensions between Spain and Britain erupted
into the oddly named “war of Jenkins’ ear” (1739–1748), fought for complicated
reasons that included disputes over the border between Spanish Florida and
British Georgia. In 1740, British forces captured Fort Mosé. While all the
residents of the settlement escaped, and the fort was recaptured a few months
later, it was badly damaged and had to be abandoned. Members of the Mosé
community remained in St. Augustine. Some earned a living selling groceries,
baked goods, or honey or working as blacksmiths, carpenters, or musicians;
others became privateers.92

20
After a couple of attempts by the colonial government, the fort and settlement
were rebuilt in 1752, not far from the original location — next to a salt creek, now
called Robinson Creek, which feeds into the Tolomato River just north of St.
Augustine, in a varied landscape of forest, grassland, and marsh. The new fort,
which had six cannons, was a three-sided structure, about 70 yards to a side, with
the creek forming the fourth side. The walls were made of packed earth covered
in clay, topped with prickly-pear cactus, and surrounded by a dry moat that may
also have been filled with cactus. Inside the fort was a wooden church, with living
quarters for the priest.93
Most people lived outside the fort, among their farm fields, in thatched huts
similar to the homes in nearby Indian villages. A 1759 census listed 20 households
with 67 residents — 37 men, 15 women, and 15 children. In many cases, both
husband and wife had escaped from slavery farther north, but some of the men
were married to Indian women or to enslaved black women in St. Augustine.94
It was a diverse community. Residents came from different parts of western and
central Africa and had spent time in the Americas with English or Spanish
colonists or with Indians. They had close ties to nearby Indian villages, where
residents also came from a mix of tribal backgrounds, and with the vibrantly
multicultural city of St. Augustine. They had their own church, but they also
celebrated major life milestones at the parish church in St. Augustine.95
Residents farmed, fished, and hunted, much like their Indian neighbors, but
never became fully self-sufficient and received government supplies of meat,
corn, and rice as well.96
Moving to Mosé was mandatory, at least at the start, although many residents
may have preferred to remain in St. Augustine, with its greater amenities and
variety, rather than serve as the city’s first line of defense against Indian and
British attacks. Resisting the move to Mosé in 1752, they emphasized the security
issues; the governor disparaged these concerns and threatened them with
unspecified punishments, but he also agreed to strengthen the fortifications and
assign mounted troops to supplement the Mosé militia.97
Just a few years later, however, the security situation became untenable. By the
late 1750s, Spanish Florida was in decline — impoverished, mismanaged, and
increasingly under Indian attack. When Fort Mosé militiamen ran low on
ammunition, the governor advised them to defend themselves with wooden
clubs. By 1759, most residents had gotten permission to return to St. Augustine,
with only a small military force spending nights at the fort and an even smaller
group staying there full time.98
Even after leaving Mosé, the militia continued to play a key role in Spanish
Florida’s defense. But in 1763, as part of the settlement at the end of the French

21
 and Indian war, Spain ceded Florida to Britain. Most Spanish colonists, along
with Fort Mosé veterans and other free black residents, moved to Cuba.99

The end of sanctuary

Sanctuary ended when the British took over Florida in 1763. After the Spanish
returned in 1783, the policy resumed, but it ended permanently in 1790 after
diplomatic pressure from the newly independent United States.
In spite of the policy change, the Spanish may not have put a lot of effort into
helping the Americans recover their “property.” The American heading up the
effort to recapture US slaves, a customs official based just across the border in
Georgia, found Spanish cooperation less than enthusiastic. One of his own slaves,
a man named Will, escaped from him twice, apparently with the help of allies on
a Florida plantation. In spite of an official complaint to Florida authorities, Will’s
second attempt appears to have been successful.100
And even after the sanctuary policy ended, inland Florida, largely out of reach of
government control, remained a potential haven.

Refuge in the backcountry

By the time the Black Seminoles emerged in the last half of the 18th century,
cooperation between black and Indian people had a long history in the Americas
— dating back at least to 1526, when African slaves and Guale Indians forced
Spanish colonists to abandon a settlement at San Miguel de Gualdape, on what is
now the southeast US coast. Since then, other black people had joined other
native groups — as slave or free, living separately or together with the Indians,
influencing and being influenced by Indian cultures. Cooperation between the
two groups sometimes started when both were enslaved and escaped together.101
White fear of black–Indian cooperation was also well entrenched and led to bans
(apparently largely ignored) on traders taking black slaves into Indian country —
as well as attempts to create enmity between the two groups by, for example,
using black soldiers to fight Indians and offering Indians a bounty for capturing
or killing escaped slaves.102
The people who would become Seminoles probably first settled in northern
Florida around 1740. Black people probably began to join them — as fugitives,
free Spanish subjects, and slaves — about a generation later. In addition to the
Seminoles, maroons in Florida often had close ties to people enslaved on Florida
plantations, and they crossed paths with Anglo, Cuban, and Bahamian
neighbors.103

22
Maroons and Seminoles
Interactions between maroons and Seminoles were complex and varied. Black
men and women came to the Seminoles under a variety of circumstances, which
were described in various ways by contemporary authors, whose work has been
interpreted variously by scholars since then. Little enough is known about the
most active and influential Black Seminoles, and even less about the rank and file.
It’s unlikely that we can fully understand them from this vantage point in time,
but a few tentative glimpses are possible.
The most well-known way that black people joined the Seminoles was as fugitives
from US, British, or Spanish slavery. Others were bought as slaves, received as
gifts from white slaveholders, inherited, or (at least according to contemporary
descriptions) captured in battle; it’s not clear whether those newcomers were
treated differently from people who joined on their own initiative.104
Free black people joined the Seminoles as well. Some, from Spanish Florida,
participated in a short-lived maroon/Indian community on the Apalachicola
River in 1815–1816 (see the section “A brief postwar experiment in freedom”
below), and may have been among the survivors who joined the Seminoles after
that community was destroyed. And when Florida became a US territory, some
joined the Seminoles rather than evacuating to Cuba with the Spanish or trusting
their luck under American rule.105
Contemporary writers often referred to black people living with the Seminoles as
slaves, but these writers’ perceptions may have been colored by the assumptions
and expectations they brought with them as members of a slave society.106
Speaking more generally of Creeks and Seminoles in the southeastern United
States, one historian wrote in 1986, “The legal status of black Muscogulges almost
defies comprehension. Whether a particular Negro was slave or free or who was
his master often depended on whom one asked.”107
Most observers described the Black Seminoles as living in separate villages under
their own leaders with substantial autonomy.108 An American traveling in Florida
in 1822 reported:
The Negroes uniformly testify to the kind treatment they receive from
their Indian masters, who are indulgent, and require but little labour
from them … [They] dwell in towns apart from the Indians, and are the
finest looking people I have ever seen. They dress and live pretty much
like the Indians, each having a gun, and hunting a portion of his time.
Like the Indians, they plant in common, and form an Indian field apart,
which they attend together.109
A US Indian agent described them in 1835 as living

23
 in villages separate, and, in many cases, remote from their owners, and
enjoying equal liberty with their owners, with the single exception that
the slave supplied his owner annually, from the product of his little
field, with corn, in proportion to the amount of the crop.110
The amount and content of the tribute varied and could include livestock. Similar
tribute arrangements existed among other southeastern native peoples.111
Some maroons gained substantial influence with the Seminoles, which was a
source of frustration for US officials. In 1826 the governor of Florida complained
that the blacks had “unbounded influence” with the Seminoles and “have by their
art and Cunning the entire Controul over their Masters.” Time and again, Indian
agents, territorial officials, and military officers described the relationship in
terms ranging from “influence” to “control.”112
One asset that maroons brought to the Indian communities they joined was a
deeper understanding of white society and an ability to move with agility between
the different worlds of the triracial, slaveholding southeast. They tended to be
more fluent in English, French, and/or Spanish than their Seminole hosts.113
A visitor to East Florida’s slave quarters during the American
Revolution might have heard English, French, Mandingo, Fulani,
Hausa, and Mende, among other languages. In the Indian country there
were black Hitchiti and Muskogee speakers. A pidgin, such as Gullah,
was emerging and presumably was spoken with varying degrees of
proficiency by a majority of East Florida blacks.114
Black men and women served as interpreters, and their geopolitical and cultural
knowledge made them valuable advisors. “Because the black fugitives were better
acquainted with the language, religion, and other ways of whites … [they] served
as cultural go-betweens for Native Americans and whites.”115

Black Seminole
leader
Abraham
(center rear)
with Seminole
chiefs in New
York in 1852,
between the
second and
third Seminole
wars.

They also brought military skills (often admired by their US adversaries) to their
alliance with the Seminoles, sometimes fighting separately under black leaders
and sometimes in mixed black/Indian forces. In the second Seminole war
(discussed in more detail below), many of the warriors in Osceola’s band were
black, and at least a few Indians fought under the Black Seminole warrior John

24
Caesar, whose raids unsettled the St. Augustine area until his death in 1837. As
spies, they could also more easily infiltrate white towns and military camps, and
they were indispensable in organizing the east coast plantation attacks that
helped launch the second Seminole war.116
While day-to-day black/Seminole relations were clearly more humane and flexible
than relations under US- or British-style chattel slavery, some Seminoles do seem
to have seen their black associates as slaves — referring to them as property and
demanding financial compensation if they were lost to fraud or kidnap.117 A writer
early in the US era reported that troublemakers from St. Augustine,
for the purpose of alarming the Indians, and inducing them to sell their
slaves for almost nothing … went into the nation and spread reports
that two thousand American troops … were coming down to expel
them from their lands and carry away their slaves and cattle. The
Indians upon this abandoned their crops and sold many of their slaves,
by which the avarice of the speculators was gratified.118
And the Seminole chief Jumper argued in 1828, in a dispute over slave
ownership, “he … sold her to the Indians, who honestly paid for her, and are
therefore the fair owners of her,” and went on to complain more broadly: “It is
well known that a great deal of our property, negroes, horses, cattle, &c. is now in
the hands of the whites, and yet their laws give us no satisfaction, and will not
make them give this property up to us.”119
It may seem difficult, from a 21st-century perspective, to reconcile these different
approaches. Were Black Seminoles “vassals and allies,” as a US general described
them during the Seminole wars,120 living under a very light yoke if not entirely
free — or chattel slaves? The answer may be “both.” Conditions, status, and
identity might have varied depending on how people first entered the Seminole
community (for example, on their own as runaways or purchased as slaves) or
how long they had been there.121 And the wording Seminoles used when engaging
with the US legal system may not reflect the way they would have spoken
amongst themselves about their daily lives.
Some historians have also suggested that Seminoles may have been ready to claim
ownership of their black protégés simply to protect them from a white intruder’s
attempt to claim them. And “captured” may have been a euphemism for “escaped
to the Seminole side during battle.”122
Who knows to what extent written records — generated at the interface between
two very different societies, often under intense stress — accurately reflect day-
to-day life in 19th century Seminole country? Seminole society itself was diverse
and rapidly evolving,123 so conditions are also unlikely to have been uniform
across all of Florida or throughout their time on the peninsula.

25
Maroons and plantation slaves
In Florida, like elsewhere in the Americas, maroons maintained ties with friends
and family members who were still enslaved. Many Black Seminoles kept in touch
with wives and other loved ones on the plantations.124 Florida slaves, maroons, and
Indians also mingled at “frolics” or dances.125 According to one 1986 study:
Slave and free Negroes resided in Indian villages scattered throughout
Florida, on Indian plantations on the Apalachicola River, and with
whites in Saint Augustine and Pensacola … A continuous and easy
intercourse existed between black [Seminoles and Creeks] in Indian
settlements and Negroes serving in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia as
field hands or in Saint Augustine and other cities as domestics, artisans,
and fishermen.126

Maroons and the outside world

Like their counterparts across the Americas, maroons in Florida sometimes
sought safety in remote places or behind fortress walls. But at other times and
places, they welcomed (or at least tolerated) visitors from nearby slaveholder
communities, and did business with transients and part-year Florida residents
from Cuba and the Bahamas.
In the years between the first and second Seminole wars, several white American
visitors described peaceful, apparently routine interactions with Florida maroons.
The 1822 travel writer quoted earlier described staying overnight in a black
village where, although he got lost and didn’t arrive until 11 p.m., he was offered
a “bunk by the fire-side” in the home of a man named Cudjoe. (Other people in
the room talked late into the night, so he didn’t get much sleep.) In a second
black village, he was put up in a public dance house (possibly alone, since he
reported sleeping better). On his travels, he got help from at least two guides
(about whom he said little, but they appear to have known the villages reasonably
well). 127
A white Floridian who traveled through Florida on behalf of the territorial
government in 1823 spent time in the black village of Pilaklikaha, where he
“procur[ed] a guide, interpreter, and horses” for his trip. He visited another
settlement of Black Seminoles to whom he had given some sugarcane cuttings a
few months previously, found the plants growing well, and made another rest
stop in Pilaklikaha on his way home. He described these interactions — doing
business in black villages as a representative of US slaveholding society — as
routine and non-adversarial. If interracial relations in the world he was traveling
through seemed different to him from those in his home world, he didn’t remark
on it.128
An army officer who camped near Pilaklikaha in 1826 was impressed by the
village, whose residents he realized were runaway slaves. He met the village

26
 headmen and described them approvingly.129 Thus, there seem to have been some
circumstances under which Florida maroons could interact in a fairly routine,
businesslike way with representatives of a society that was committed to their
enslavement.
In addition to hosting white visitors, black and Indian villages had extensive
contacts with each other and with the world outside Florida. Overland trails led
across the panhandle, south at least as far as Tampa Bay, and east to the St. Johns
River. Maroons also had connections by sea to the Bahamas and Cuba, especially
from the southwest coast, sometimes via their own vessels and sometimes
through Cuban fishermen or Bahamian “wreckers” (ship salvagers) and possibly
pirates.130

A fragile freedom
Florida maroons took advantage of even short-lived opportunities to build homes
and communities. Many farmed communally and raised horses, cows, and pigs.
Maroons may have gained their agricultural know-how in Africa or on the
plantations before they escaped; some contemporary observers considered them
better at farming than the Indians. Crops included corn, rice, potatoes, melons,
peas, beans, peppers, and cotton. They hunted and fished, and some were sailors.
Other skills they may have brought from slavery included nursing, carpentry,
shipbuilding, lumbering, turpentine extraction, basketmaking, and barrel
making.131
Black Seminoles built their homes in much the same style as the Seminoles —
with boards and shingles lashed (rather than nailed) to a frame and a palmetto
thatch roof. An Army engineer who served during the first Seminole war said of
the maroon homes on the Suwannee River: “Their cabbins were large and better
constructed than those of the Indians and many of them had neat gardens
enclosed by paling and affording good fruit and vegetables.” They dressed much
like the Seminoles.132
With all its hardship and danger, life still offered opportunities to socialize and
celebrate. Little is known about the Black Seminoles’ leisure activities, but a
passage from a US army officer’s diary provides a rare glimpse into that side of
life. On New Year’s Day 1839, as the second Seminole war dragged on, he visited
a black encampment near his military post “to witness their dancing,” which, he
said, “was extremely amusing.” The women were dressed “with considerable
taste,” some all in white, and the men “cut up all imaginable capers … to music
play’d on a crack’d fiddle & tin pan. Roasted pigs, softki [a corn-based soup or
porridge], sweet potatoes & hominy constituted the bill of fare.”133

27
 There are a few clues to the presence of black families among Florida Indians.
Among the people captured (or liberated) by Seminoles in 1801 from Francis
Fatio’s plantation on the St. Johns River (near present-day Jacksonville) were
several families. At least one of those families spanned three generations, from
the matriarch Artemisia to the infant Cuffee. The raiders also took Old Harry and
his wife, Old Peggy, both over 60 years of age. Some children were also carried off
without their parents. Of their lives after the raid, nothing is known.134
Although women often had a harder time escaping slavery than men did (see the
section “Seeking freedom in the Americas” above), a traveler in the early 1820s
seemed unsurprised to find women in the Florida maroon settlements, and
several Black Seminole settlements are known to have included children. A
woman named Molly escaped from a Georgia slaveholder, joined the Seminoles,
and sold cattle to an agent of the Spanish government around 1808. Frank Berry,
a slavery survivor interviewed in the 1930s, said that his grandmother (not named
in the interview record), a nurse enslaved in the Tampa area, had been captured
by Indians during the Seminole wars, married a chief, and was later recaptured by
slaveholders — according to Berry, not an unusual series of events.135
But often, the only traces of families in Florida’s maroon communities are the
records of their members’ death, capture, or displacement. These include women
and children who were killed in 1816 during a US attack on a maroon outpost on
the Apalachicola River, sent across the Suwannee River to safety in 1818 while
warriors tried to fend off the US attack on their settlements, and captured in 1836
from otherwise mostly abandoned settlements on the Withlacoochee River (see
the “War” section below).136 Attacking “gallantly” in 1837 on Hatcheelustee
Creek, US forces captured “twenty-five Indians and negroes, principally women
and children; the men having all fled into the swamp.”137 Women and children,
including a surprisingly high proportion of children and teenagers, appear on
military lists of black people who surrendered during the second Seminole war
for removal to the west.138
Whenever maroons achieved a modicum of safety and stability, they began to
rebuild family life. As one Black Seminole wrote in 1838, “We do not live for our
selves only, but for our wives & children who are as dear to us as those of any
other men.”139

Pilaklikaha: a Black Seminole village

The village of Pilaklikaha, home mostly to Black Seminoles, flourished for about a
generation before the second Seminole war. Built on seasonally flooded prairie-
and-hammock land just east of present-day Bushnell, its name probably reflected
that geography, meaning “many ponds” or “scattered hammocks” in a Native
American language. Most surviving eyewitness descriptions were written by

28
visitors in the 1820s, shortly after Florida became a US territory, or by soldiers
during the second Seminole war.140
An 1823 visitor described the town’s setting: “Like Islands, the Hammocks are
very numerous, & contain from 20 to 300 Acres each, all of which are surrounded
by Savannahs.” Thirteen years later, a member of the US military force that came
to destroy it described “a most beautiful open savannah country interspersed
with clumps of trees … The whole region swarmed with cattle and ponies …
Considerable ground had been cultivated and the Indians must have lived a
happy life.”141 (He appears not to have realized that it was a black village.)

Pilaklikaha shown on a map from the second Seminole war.

Contemporary population estimates for the settlement ranged from 75 to 160.

Most residents were black, but some Indians lived there as well. The Seminole
chief Micanopy was a part-time resident, and at least one visitor believed that the
residents belonged to him.142
Visitors described Pilaklikaha as large and prosperous, possibly more prosperous
than nearby Seminole settlements. A member of the military unit that destroyed
the town estimated it had contained 30 to 40 houses, some quite large; another
noted a large orange tree in full bloom outside one of the larger houses, possibly
the one that belonged to Micanopy.143
Visitors admired the settlement’s farm fields and cattle herds. An 1820s visitor saw
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 well filled, while the houses were larger and more
comfortable than those of the Indians themselves.144
Another commented: “The rice, indeed everything planted here, is equal to any I
have ever seen in Florida.”145 The overseer of the Pilgrimage plantation, located
well to the north, bought cattle from Pilaklikaha and paid villagers to help round
up stray cattle.146

29
The village was abandoned during the second Seminole war ahead of an
American attack. Among the belongings villagers left behind, a US officer
reported, were “a ball stick, an Indian flute, and small gopher shells, or box-turtle,
with rattling Indian shot, or palmetto seed: the music of their dance.”147 Even as
fugitives, they had clearly found ways to enjoy life.
Pilaklikaha was also known as Abraham’s Old Town, after its headman,
a Black Seminole warrior and diplomat. Abraham, who had a long
history with the Seminoles, was an advisor to Micanopy and an
influential figure in his own right in both the black and Indian
communities. One of the tribe’s most trusted interpreters, he played a
key role in negotiations both before and after the outbreak of the second
Seminole war, traveling as far as Washington, DC, and Fort Gibson in
the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).
An American army officer who met him in 1837 described him like this:
“He always smiles, and his words flow like oil. His conversation is soft
and low, but very distinct, with a most genteel emphasis.” Another Abraham
called him “a perfect Talleyrand of the Savage Court.” But he was also a
senior military leader during the first 14 months of the war. And in the runup to
the war, he served as one of the tribe’s clandestine envoys to the slaves on the east
coast plantations, organizing support for the attacks that launched the war. He
also reached out to free black St. Augustine residents, and to Spanish fishermen
who still operated in Florida waters, setting up an ammunition supply chain at
least part of which continued to function more than a year into the war.148
One visitor reported that there were two “principal men” at Pilaklikaha in
addition to Abraham, named July and August; he described all three as “shrewd,
intelligent fellows, and to the highest degree obsequious.”149
Pilaklikaha and the predominantly Indian town of Okahumpka 12 miles to the
northeast were linked through their affiliation with Micanopy. Both were
probably founded by survivors of American attacks on settlements farther north
in 1813 and 1818. A military officer described the black residents of Pilaklikaha in
1826 as “chiefly runaway slaves from Georgia, who have put themselves under the
protection of Micanopy, or some other chief, whom they call master” and
described the same kind of tribute relationship noted by other observers. Aside
from that, he noted, “they are free to go and come at pleasure, and in some cases
are elevated to the position of equality with their masters.”150
This officer and another 1820s observer (a civilian traveling on behalf of the
territorial government in 1823) appear to have been perfectly comfortable staying
overnight with people they believed to be escaped slaves. (The comfort level of
their hosts went unrecorded.) Both men were pursuing other tasks and
apparently sought in Pilaklikaha only a convenient place to overnight. Both

30
 served, in different capacities, a firmly pro-slavery government (the civilian’s
mission even included “bring[ing] in all the run away slaves that you can
obtain”), but they seem to have been willing to overlook this consideration when
it suited them.151
Pilaklikaha met its end three months after the start of the second Seminole war. It
was already abandoned when US troops burned it to the ground on March 31,
1836.152 The same attacker who wrote “The whole region swarmed with cattle and
ponies … the Indians must have lived a happy life” (without, apparently,
understanding that most residents had been Black Seminoles) also reported: “We
burned every house and hovel … Our men killed great numbers of calves, all
seemed tame and gentle … Not an Indian was to be seen. All had fled at our
approach.”153
The sack of Pilaklikaha had been part of an elaborate three-pronged attack
intended to drive the Seminoles into a smaller and more manageable area. But
soon after that campaign ended, one US officer concluded that it had been
a complete failure. The enemy had not been found in sufficient
numbers to induce anything like a general engagement; and when met
and defeated, he had always succeeded in effecting his escape. All was
conjecture as to what had become of him.154

Frequent moves
Pilaklikaha’s emergence and destruction were part of a larger pattern of loss and
dislocation that played out repeatedly across the peninsula. The threat to the
Black Seminoles intensified after Florida became a US territory in 1821. Even in
peacetime, kidnappers crossed into Seminole country, and business deals and
legal maneuvers that were often suspect even by slavery-era standards carried
men, women, and children into bondage.
From their first known affiliation with the Seminoles (about the time of the
American revolution) until the United States started taking a strong interest in
Florida (about the time of the war of 1812), Black Seminoles appear to have lived
peaceful and productive lives based on farming and hunting, as described above.
After that, they faced repeated, often traumatic, displacement by US-led
or -affiliated military forces, fleeing in tandem with the Seminoles but often
continuing to maintain separate settlements. As the American attacks (which
started before Florida became a US territory) intensified, previously unaffiliated
black people — escaped slaves and a few people with Spanish free papers — also
joined the Black Seminoles.155
Their forced migration followed a complicated path, broadly trending south and
inland, during the so-called Patriot war (1812–14), in the aftermath of the war of
1812 (1812–15), and during the 1821 Coweta Creek raids on the southwest coast
and the first (1817–18) and second (1835–42) Seminole wars.156 Very little of

31
 what they had to say about their displacement has been preserved, but some hints
about the experience can be gleaned from the words of the people who pursued
them. A few examples follow.

The Alachua savanna, 1813

From 1812 to 1814, Americans — a complicated mix of private-sector
adventurers, militiamen from southern states, and federal forces — tried to wrest
control of northeastern Florida from the Spanish colonial government in an
incursion known as the Patriot war (see the “War” section below). Seminoles,
Black Seminoles, and other free blacks fought on the Spanish side. In February
1813, US militiamen attacked Seminole settlements on the Alachua savannah
(now called Payne’s Prairie, near present-day Gainesville). Their attack took place
over several days and included a day spent tearing down a Black Seminole
village.157
Most members of the Alachua settlements escaped with their lives, but their
homes were destroyed. Col. Thomas Smith, commander of the US forces,
reported on February 24:
We burnt three hundred & eighty six houses; consumed & destroyed
from fifteen hundred to two thousand bushels of corn; three hundred
horses & about four hundred cattle were collected, many of which were
lost in attempting to drive them in. Two thousand deer skins were
found in Bolegg’s magazine; part were used by the troops, the others
destroyed.158
Survivors fled the ruined towns to establish new homes on the Suwannee,
Withlacoochee, and Peace rivers and on Florida’s southwest coast.159

Southwest Florida, 1821

A black settlement known as Angola was established on the Manatee River, just
south of Tampa Bay, by at least 1812 and possibly much earlier. As the decade
progressed, more black people fled to the area from homes farther north,
displaced during attacks by American troops and by the Americans’ Creek allies,
establishing settlements from Tampa Bay to Charlotte Harbor. Indians, too,
moved to this area, which they knew well from earlier hunting trips.
The southwest Florida coast was difficult to reach, at least for awhile, for the
fugitives’ main enemies: US military forces and private slave-hunters. It offered
rich farmland, good hunting, opportunities to trade with nearby Seminoles and
with more distant Spanish and English markets, and connections by sea to Cuba
and the Bahamas (through Cuban fishermen who lived part-time in the area and
through Bahamian “wreckers” based in the Florida Keys).160
But American authorities, even before Florida became a US territory, had their
eyes on the area. An 1818 military report described the coastal communities as

32
“the last rallying spot of the disaffected negroes and Indians”; another reported in
the same year that they had received arms from Spanish and British suppliers.161
In summer 1821, around the same time that Florida was formally transferred to US
control, a Coweta Creek raiding party attacked the southwest coast settlements,
leaving a trail of destruction from Tampa Bay to Charlotte Harbor and seizing
many captives and returning them to slavery. A contemporary newspaper account
said the raiders were under orders to “make prisoners of all the men of colour,
including women and children, they would be able to find.” At Angola, they
surprised and captured about 300 of them, plundered their plantations,
set on fire all their houses … The terror thus spread along the Western
Coast [and] broke all the establishments of both blacks and Indians,
who fled in great consternation. The blacks principally, thought they
could not save their lives but by abandoning the country.162
The leaders of the raid had ties to wealthy Georgian slave speculators and to
General Andrew Jackson, who had asked for and been denied permission to
attack the settlements. The US government disavowed the raid, and the secretary
of war warned the Cowetas not to make good on their threat to return. Shortly
thereafter Jackson became Florida’s first American governor.163
Some survivors of the raid fled overland or by canoe to Cape Florida and the
Keys, and from there sailed to the Bahamas, transported by fishermen or
“wreckers” or crossing on their own in dugout canoes. Others fled inland to a
settlement called Minatti (near present-day Bartow) on the Peace River. Minatti
was burned down 15 years later during the second Seminole war.164
• • •
Two years after the raids, an American traveling on behalf of the territorial
government reported that he had been told about black settlements on islands off
Florida’s southwest coast, possibly including Pine Island:
I was here informed that on the inner chain of Islands along the coast
from Tampa to Charlotte Harbour [there were] several settlements of
refugee Negroes who had communications with white persons who
resorted to these places in armed vessels. The marshes between the
Islands & main land are at low water easily passed over. The Indians
state that there were frequently landed from on board vessels with big
guns, packages of goods at different depots on these Islands, and that
the Indians had at different times been prevented by force from
communicating with these Settlements as the Negroes were all
completely armed with Spanish musquets, Bayonets & Cartouche
boxes. When these persons were in want of Cattle they landed on the
main to obtain them, & paid always in powder, lead, molasses & rum ...
It is a fact pretty generally known, that there are persons belonging to
the city of Havannah who have settled on these Islands since the change
of flags, and carry on a constant communication with the West Indies,
& have been the means of carrying off a number of refugee Negroes.165

33
 Other second- and third-hand accounts of outlaw communities on the southwest
coast — with ties to Seminoles and Cuban fishermen and communication by ship
with Cuba — continued to be reported at least through the early 1830s.166

North-central Florida, 1822

The 1822 travel writer quoted earlier visited two black villages during his tour,
which took place not long after the raid on black and Indian settlements on the
Suwannee River during the first Seminole war (1818, see the “War” section
below) and the Creek attack on the southwest coast (1821, described in the
previous section). Of the first village he reported:
These people were in the greatest poverty, and had nothing to offer me;
having, not long before, fled from a settlement further west, and left
their crop ungathered, from an apprehension of being seized on by the
Cowetas, who had recently carried off a body of Negroes, residing near
the Suwaney.
“I, several times, in my route,” he continued, “saw the sites of Indian towns,
which had been recently broken up, and the crops left standing on the ground.”167
He set out the next morning, with a new guide and fresh horses, for another black
village about 30 miles away. As it had the day before, night fell while he was still
underway. “Though there were several Negroes going the same way, who had
often travelled it,” he remarked, “there was no one but my guide, who, after it
became dark, seemed to know the route.”
As many of these Negroes were refugee slaves, and some had … fought
against the Americans, 1 did not feel perfectly safe, while travelling in
such company, through swamps and obscure paths, in the Seminole
country.
(He did not hold this train of thought for long, though; in the next paragraph he
blamed black and Indian mistrust of Americans on propaganda by “the
Spaniards.”168)
The second village seems to have been more well-to-do than the first. He stayed
overnight in a “new and excellent house .… constructed in the Indian manner,
without nails,” and slept well “upon a bed of deer skins.” He considered his hosts,
“as usual, stout and even gigantic in their persons,” and noticed that their farm
fields produced well. 169
His next stay was with a white host at the site of the future town of Micanopy, a
few miles south of the Alachua towns that had been destroyed in 1813. Indians
still lived in the area, his host told him, but avoided the site of the tragedy.
Visiting the area, he wrote, he “felt a melancholy sensation in listening to the
remarks of our guide, a Negro, who had once resided on the settlement, and
spoke of its former plenty and population.”170

34
Central Florida, 1837
In the Seminole wars, the battlefront for blacks and Indians was rarely far from
the home front. In January 1837, a little over a year into the second Seminole war,
a chief named Osuchee or Cooper was recovering from battle wounds near Lake
Apopka when Indian troops under US command overran his base. They killed
him, one of his sons, the native healer attending him, and another warrior. Nine
Indians (women and children) and eight black people (two men, two women, and
four children) were captured. The main force had left before the Americans
arrived, but the prisoners disclosed their general direction, and the Americans
followed the tracks of their livestock.
When they caught up with them four days later, most of the fugitives made a
narrow escape. One American officer, in a letter to his family, described finding
“fifty Indian huts, where the meat was on the fire, cooking, and all their utensils
were scattered about. But no Indians could be found.” The Americans split into
several groups, chasing the fugitives through the woods and swamps and across
Hatcheelustee Creek.171 Among the events of that frenetic day:
A volunteer … brought information that fresh signs of women’s and
children’s tracks were discovered … When we came up with [the officer
who had sent that message] he was in possession of two Indian women
and three children, besides a body of negroes taken by the volunteers in
the adjoining pine woods. He had also in his possession over a hundred
ponies, a large quantity of plunder packed on them, as well as several
stand of arms. The main body of the enemy escaped in the swamp.
[After hot pursuit, a firefight in the swamp, and the fugitives’ further
retreat], a negro man and woman, with a child, were taken … The wife
and child of the negro man were kept, and he was sent to the enemy to
induce them to come in, as they had lost all their clothing, blankets, and
other property …
The result of this day’s operations was the capture of two Indian
women and three children, and twenty-three negroes, (young and old,)
over a hundred ponies, with packs on about fifty of them. All their
clothing, blankets, and other baggage, was abandoned by the enemy,
and either taken or destroyed by us.172
Another officer noted the capture of 400–500 cattle; the general in charge
reported that the captives were mostly women and children.173

Kidnappers and swindlers

Even in peacetime, maroons and their Indian allies often fell prey to kidnappers
(operating legally or illegally under the laws of the slavery era) and swindlers
taking advantage of their vulnerable position in the legal system.
Frontier raiders crossed from Georgia and Alabama into British and Spanish
Florida — and, in the US era, into Indian lands that were supposed to be off

35
 limits to whites — to seize black people regardless of their legal status (escaped
slave, free, or under the protection or ownership of a Seminole). During the
American revolution, the Georgia–Florida border region was desolated as the
Georgians raided Florida and the mixed-race St. Johns Rangers regiment struck
back. The raids continued in the US era. Even legally legitimized efforts to
retrieve runaway slaves often degenerated into kidnap and fraud, and even
Americans who supported slavery and Indian removal denounced the “hoard of
desperadoes” engaged in slave-hunting and the US government’s inability or
unwillingness to restrain them.174

Pro-US Indians on the Apalachicola River

Slave raiders hit settlements on the Apalachicola River in the months just before
and after the outbreak of the second Seminole war, seizing black women, men,
and children who were held by or affiliated with local Indians, many of whom did
not consider themselves Seminoles and in fact supported the United States
during the war.
In the early 1830s, a chief named Econchattamico was sued by a white man who
claimed ownership of black men and women who had been in the chief’s “quiet
and undisputed possession” for 30 years, as well as their children. The claimant
withdrew his suit (the judge later stated for the record that he had had “no
shadow of a claim”), but sold his spurious claim to two men from Georgia, who
tried to take the blacks by force. After their first attack failed, they spread a rumor
that the chief and his warriors were about to take up arms against the United
States. (Econchattamico had actually sent warriors to fight on the US side in the
second Seminole war, which had started a few months earlier.)

The rumors took hold, and the chief was pressured into giving up his People abducted from Chief
weapons. The second attack occurred the next day, and on March 10, Econchattamico’s land
1836, 20 black men, women, and children under his control were carried “Henry, aged twenty-five years;
Robertson, twenty-four years of
off to be sold outside of Florida, possibly in New Orleans. Maroons living
age; Dacio, a man, aged thirty;
with or near them may have been caught up in the raid. Neither Fanny, aged thirty; Betsey, a girl,
Econchattamico nor his white supporters held out any hope that the twelve years old; Butler, a negro
blacks could be rescued. The elderly chief petitioned Congress for boy, eight years old; Daniel, a
boy, two years old; also Tom,
financial reimbursement for his loss.176 aged forty-five; Wanda, aged
forty, and an infant child; Rubin,
In the same month, the same perpetrators kidnapped six black people aged thirty; Nanie, aged five
from another Apalachicola River chief, John Walker. The year before, years; Hannah, aged forty; Jenny,
Walker — who, like Econchattamico, had already fended off a legal twenty-one; Tenor, fourteen;
challenge and an initial attack — had written to the Indian agent Wiley Ballow, a boy, aged fourteen;
Mary Ann, aged five years; Moses,
Thompson for help and advice: aged twenty-eight; Toney, aged
twenty-six, and a woman called
Anluza, aged forty-five.”175

36
 I am induced to write you in consequence of the depredations making
and attempted to be made on my farm by a company of men, negro
stealers … It is reported and believed by all the white people around
here that a large number of them will very shortly come down here and
attempt to take off Billy, Jim, Rose and her family, and others … I
should like to have your advice how I should act. I dislike to make any
trouble, or to have any difficulty with any of the white people; but if
they will trespass on my premises and on my rights, I must defend
myself in the best way I can. If they do make this attempt, and there is
no doubt but they will, they must bear the consequences. But is there
no civil law that will protect me? Are the free negroes and the negroes
belonging in this town to be stolen away publicly — in the face of all
law and justice carried off and sold to fill the pockets of these worse
than “land pirates?” Certainly not. I know you will not suffer it. Please
direct me how to act in this matter. Douglas and this company hired a
man, who has two large trained dogs for the purpose, to come down and
take Billy. The man came, but seeing he could do nothing alone, has
gone off somewhere, probably to recruit. He is from Mobile, and
follows for a livelihood catching runaway negroes with these large
dogs.177
Walker’s plea passed up and down the chain of command — to the commissioner
of Indian affairs in Washington, and back to the US district attorney in Pensacola
— to no avail. All six black people on Walker’s farm were carried off. The
calamity they had been dreading at least since 1834 — when they told a
government interpreter that they were “fully hot to go” west because they were
“very much alarmed” about attempts to take them from Walker — had come to
pass. Rose Factor, the free black/Indian wife of the Indian Sam Factor, her
children Sarah and William or Billy, and Sarah’s children, were carried into
slavery in Georgia. Rose and Billy Factor eventually escaped, but Rose’s daughter
and grandchildren did not. The support (or at least neutrality) of the local Indian
agent, and the advocacy on the couple’s behalf of several north Florida Indian
chiefs, were not enough to prevent the kidnapping.178

Seminole slaveholders
Seminoles made numerous complaints to US authorities about black slaves being
stolen from them; white observers also acknowledged the issue. An 1848 history
of the second Seminole war, discussing various problems created by
unscrupulous whites in the 1820s, noted:
The Indians had in their possession a number of slaves, many who were
born among them, and others purchased from the whites. The Indians
possessing no rights in a court of justice or in law, and the negroes
having been purchased and paid for, efforts were made to take
possession by force.
The Indian, conscious of his rights, and knowing that he paid the
money, though incapable of showing the papers executed under the
forms of law, as he had received none … protested most earnestly
against these demands.179

37
 Whatever the nature of black people’s practical day-to-day relationships with
their Indian patrons, they are described in these complaints as slaves. Speaking at
the Seminole agency (near present-day Ocala) in 1829, chief John Hicks said:
There is a negro girl at Charleston, that belongs to my daughter — her
name is Patience. I want her restored to me. She has a husband here;
she has a child about a year old, and I suppose that by this time she has
two children.180
The documents contain substantial detail about every element of these conflicts
except how they would have been experienced by the people taken from their
homes and sold into US-style chattel slavery.

An unscrupulous Indian agent

Sometimes the Indian agents who were supposed to mediate these conflicts
became part of the problem. One example is the 1835 dispute between Gad
Humphreys, former Indian agent, and a Seminole woman named Culekeechowa.
Culekeechowa had a slave named Caty (sometimes spelled Katy), who married a
man named Mungo (apparently a Seminole) and had four children with him.
During a period of scarcity shortly before Florida became a US territory, Mungo
had gone to work for a trader who had a plantation on the St. Johns River, and
Caty and the children eventually joined him there.
Somehow, the trader cut a deal with Culekeechowa’s aunt and uncle to sell him
Caty and her children, paying “in whiskey and goods a trifling consideration.”
Culekeechowa called on Humphreys, then the Indian agent responsible for the
Seminoles, for help getting them back. The trader offered the family for sale in St.
Augustine. Humphreys bought them, ostensibly to prevent their being sold out of
Florida — and then kept them as his own property. When Caty’s sons, Jim and
Israel, grew older, they fled back to the Seminoles; but Caty, her daughters Sally
and Nancy, and her grandchildren remained under Humphreys’s control.
In the early 1830s Humphreys, by then a private citizen, continued to press his
claim on the two young men. Months after the case was submitted for guidance
to the secretary of war (who was responsible for Indian affairs), the second
Seminole war broke out. Katy was captured (or liberated) by the Seminoles in
summer 1836, but recaptured by US forces the following year and sent west.181

Shifting allegiances
Maroons also had to be agile enough to survive in a world where allegiances
repeatedly changed and promises were not always kept.
As discussed earlier, Spanish Florida’s sanctuary policy officially ended under
pressure from the United States in 1790. Although the new policy may have been
only half-heartedly implemented, and some individuals were still able to navigate

38
the gray area between policy and enforcement, Spanish Florida ceased to offer a
state-sanctioned refuge.182
The British offered freedom and relocation to US slaves who joined their ranks
during both the American revolution and the war of 1812. In both wars, the
promised reward proved elusive for many. After the American revolution, as
discussed above, the Americans pushed hard to prevent the defeated British from
transporting their black recruits to freedom. After the war of 1812, many black
British recruits were left behind at a fort at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola
River in Spanish Florida. They received military discharge papers and recognition
as free British subjects, which eventually proved useful for the few who were able
to make their way to a British jurisdiction, and apparently a promise that the
British would come back for them, but that promise went unfulfilled. (See the
sections “War of 1812” and “A brief postwar experiment in freedom” below.)
Alliances with the Seminoles were also vulnerable to change as pressures from the
slaveholding societies around them changed and intensified. Seminoles sometimes
gave refuge to fugitives from slavery and at other times cooperated with demands
to turn them in. A British planter remarked in 1771 that “it has been a practice for
negroes to run away from their Masters and to get into the Indian towns, from
whence it proved very difficult and troublesome to get them back.” He suspected
that the Indians sheltered escaped slaves more often than they admitted; he had
some success, though, in offering bounties for their return.183
Around 1817 US General Edmund Gaines wrote to the Seminole chief Kinache
(also known as King Hachy or King Heijah), accusing him of harboring black
fugitives and demanding that he turn them over. The letter opened abruptly with
“Your Seminolys are very bad people” and ended: “You harbour a great many of
my black people among you, at Sahwahnee. If you give me leave to go by you
against them, I shall not hurt any thing belonging to you.” Kinache rebuffed him:
I harbour no negroes. [This was almost certainly untrue.] When the
Englishmen were at war with America [the war of 1812], some took
shelter among them, and it is for you, white people, to settle those
things among yourselves, and not trouble us with what we know
nothing about. I shall use force to stop any armed Americans from
passing my towns or my lands.184
When the American invasion came, however, Kinache’s forces were unable to
stop it. Kinache died either during the first Seminole war or shortly thereafter; he
was about 80 years old.185
An observer remarked in 1822 on the Seminoles’ relation to their “slaves”:
“Though hunger and want be [very strong], the greatest pressure of these evils,
never occasions them to … dispose of them, though tempted by high offers, if the
latter are unwilling to be sold.”186 After an 1828 dispute over an escaped slave the
Seminoles were accused of harboring, a commentator noted:

39
 It was thought the presence of troops would intimidate the Indians, and
cause an instant delivery. But the demand, under such circumstances,
was ridiculed, and while the commander was wasting his arguments,
the negroes were immediately taken to the swamps and hammocks,
under direction of experienced guides.187
Refuge among the Indians was far from guaranteed, however. In 1766, four
escaped slaves who joined up with a party of Indian hunters were turned in by the
Indians — who “were very fond of them, and employed them as servants, but
immediately gave them up when they were applied for.”188
Even the Seminole chief Bowlegs — who welcomed many black refugees
(escaping directly from slavery or from destroyed maroon communities) and
would rely heavily on black warriors during the first Seminole war, gave in to
pressure (and a monetary reward) from the Spanish authorities in 1815 and
turned in some of the escaped slaves who had come to him for refuge.189
Seminoles appear to have sold or surrendered more fugitive blacks during the
hard times after the first Seminole war. Hardship intensified after Florida became
a US possession in 1821 — they were soon confined to an inland reservation,
plagued by food shortages, hounded by opportunistic outsiders with schemes
ranging from the unscrupulous to the violent, and pressured repeatedly to
surrender the black people living with them and to emigrate west.190 These
stresses would have been enough to fracture even strong relationships.
In 1828, the chief John Hicks, making a formal complaint at the Seminole agency,
recalled turning in a black man to the US government, even though “he is not a
runaway, but was raised in the nation, out of which he has never been.” Hicks’s
main complaint appeared to be that “the negro was never properly paid for.” A
few months later, again at the Seminole agency, Hicks said, “I agreed to send
away all the black people who had no masters.” Again he primarily expressed
concern about unfair business and legal transactions and the fact that his
cooperation had not been reciprocated.191
During the second Seminole war, the Seminoles’ refusal to abandon their black
associates was recognized by US officials as a key barrier to peace. As the war
dragged on and pressure on both sides mounted, Seminoles sometimes refused to
turn in their black associates and other times willingly did so.192
Seminole leaders sometimes disagreed with each other on whether to give in to
US pressure to turn in fugitives from slavery. Some maroons who surrendered
during the second Seminole war described a dramatic debate on the issue
between the well-known warrior Osceola and another chief in 1837. And
maroons did not always go quietly when Seminoles withdrew their support. A US
military officer reported in 1837: “There was a party on Cedar Creek who were all
runaways and … resisted telling the Indians that they [the Indians] had not taken
them & that they [the maroons] would not give up.” Even before the war, an

40
 Indian agent reported in 1828 that “one of the most respected and valuable chiefs
in the nation [was] killed in an attempt to arrest a runaway slave.”193
It seems clear that the relations between blacks and Seminoles, however positive
and mutually beneficial and preferable to chattel slavery, were also complex and
precarious. It may be difficult or even impossible to get a clear picture, from this
vantage point in time, of how these relationships played out. Given the variety of
ways black people arrived in the Seminole communities (on their own initiative,
purchased, or captured), the presence of newcomers as well as long-term
residents, the differences in their skills and other assets, and the loose-knit and
evolving nature of the Seminole communities themselves, they may not all have
been treated the same.

War
When war erupted, whatever stability black people in Florida — whether
maroons, legally free, or enslaved — were able to achieve was immediately
threatened. By the time of the American revolution, black people in all three
conditions were probably already living with the Seminoles. Florida, which had
been a British colony since 1763, did not join the revolution; many Loyalists
moved to Florida from the rebel colonies and brought slaves with them. A mixed-
race military unit known as the East Florida Rangers, which may have included
fugitive slaves from the north, helped to protect Florida’s border with Georgia
and raided pro-independence plantations farther north.194 Black Seminoles had a
greater, or at least better documented, role in wars on the Florida peninsula
beginning with the so-called Patriot war in 1812.

Patriot war
In March 1812 a small fighting force calling itself the Patriots of East Florida,
made up primarily of Georgians and a few pro-US Florida plantation owners,
attacked northeast Florida, seizing Amelia Island and marching south to besiege
St. Augustine from a base at the site of the old Fort Mosé two miles north of the
capital. Their goal was to declare an independent republic and turn the territory
over to the United States. (Many northeast Florida plantation owners had strong
ties to the United States.)195
The beleaguered Spanish colonial government relied heavily on the help of its
black and Indian allies — as well as its own black militia, with reinforcements
from Havana — to fend off the invasion. As rural residents moved to St.
Augustine for safety, members of the black militia patrolled the countryside and
herded cattle to the capital to feed the besieged population.196

41
Many of the plantation owners who fled to St. Augustine left the people enslaved
on their plantations behind to fend for themselves. Some slaves used the
opportunity to escape, either to the Seminoles or farther afield. Some were killed
or captured by Seminole/Black Seminole raiders or by the invaders. Both
enslaved and free black people were vulnerable to slave hunters, many of whom
carried their victims into Georgia. Historian Patricia Griffin uncovered the story
of a man named Jim, enslaved on the Pellicer plantation (near today’s Princess
Place Preserve in Flagler County). When the family fled, Francisco Pellicer gave
Jim a gun and told him to protect the house. Jim died trying to defend Pellicer’s
property from the Patriots.197
Hundreds of enslaved people escaped from Georgia and South Carolina
plantations to join the fight on the Spanish side. Leaders of the Patriot invasion
believed that Florida, which had officially ended its sanctuary policy in 1790
under US pressure, was again promising freedom to runaway slaves, this time in
return for military service. Spain’s reliance on black fighting men offended the
Patriots, who feared that it would inspire a slave uprising on the home front.198
During the siege of St. Augustine, the governor of Georgia complained to the
governor of Florida about
the black troops which you have in your service. Your certain
knowledge of the peculiar situation of the southern section of the
Union in regard to that description of people, one might have
supposed, would have induced you to abstain from introducing them
into the province, or of organizing such as were already in it … I may
venture to assure you that the United States will never tolerate their
remaining in the province.199
But the Spanish authorities, aside from their outrage at this attempt by the
aggressors (“the banditti, whom you unblushingly call patriots”) to present
themselves as the injured party, were not about to give up an indispensable
military asset. Black men made up more than half of St. Augustine’s defense
force, and the Black/Seminole alliance provided critical support in the
backcountry. In any case, the Spanish colonies had long since incorporated black
and mixed-race troops into their armed forces.200
In late July, Indian and black fighters attacked the pro-Patriot St. Johns River
plantations, shaking morale and leading to widespread desertions from the
invasion force.201
In September, a supply convoy — traveling between the invaders’ base at Fort
Mosé and a depot on Davis Creek, just off the St. Johns River to the northwest —
was overrun in a night attack in the Twelve Mile Swamp. The convoy was
guarded by US Marines and Georgia militiamen; the attackers were a mixed
group of black militiamen, Black Seminoles, and Seminoles, led by Prince (Juan
Bautista) Witten, a lieutenant in Florida’s free black militia. The convoy survivors

42
fled to Davis Creek. The attack effectively cut the invaders’ supply line and ended
the siege of St. Augustine.202
Later that month, another Patriot force marched inland in the invaders’ first
attempt to destroy the Seminole towns on the Alachua savannah (now called
Payne’s Prairie). But it was stopped before it reached the towns and barely
survived its encounter with Seminole and Black Seminole warriors, enduring a
week’s siege and a miserable retreat that lasted almost another week. In his
report, the colonel who led the ill-fated excursion described the black warriors as
his enemy’s best soldiers.203
While the Alachuans succeeded in fending off the American attack, they did so at
a price. The Americans estimated that at least 50 “Indians” had been killed or
wounded. One of the casualties was the 80-year-old King Payne, who died days
later of a wound received during the battle.204
The Alachua towns would enjoy only a few more months of peace. In February
1813, Tennessee and Georgia militiamen marched on the savannah, with the aim
of destroying the towns and killing or returning to slavery as many black
residents as possible. Although they met vigorous resistance, they were able to
loot and burn at least three settlements: Payne’s Town, Bowlegs’ Town, and an
affiliated black village. The villages were deserted when the Americans arrived;
most survivors soon left the Alachua region.
The invaders could chalk this up as a victory, but the resistance they encountered
also slowed their advance. Domestic opposition to US support for the Patriot
movement grew, and by mid-May 1813 US federal troops had been withdrawn
from Florida. Diehards held out for another year, some resorting to banditry, but
the invasion ultimately failed — thanks in large part to the military prowess of the
Seminoles, the Black Seminoles, and Florida’s black militia.205
• • •
Antonio or Tony Proctor was enslaved to the trading firm Panton, Leslie, and
Company when the Patriot war broke out. Known as a highly skilled interpreter,
he was sent inland by Florida’s governor to recruit Seminole warriors to fight for
the Spanish. He was in his late 60s.
Proctor was captured by the Patriots, who tried to force him to translate for them
in their own negotiations with the Seminoles. While feigning cooperation, he in
fact warned the Seminoles that the Patriots planned to subdue them and take
their land. When the meeting failed to produce the desired results, the Patriot
negotiator lost his temper and switched from promises to threats, thus further
alienating the Seminoles. Proctor eventually escaped and succeeded in recruiting
hundreds of warriors for the Spanish cause.

43
 Proctor was born in Jamaica around 1743, served a British officer during the
American revolution, and probably came to Florida during the British era, where
he most likely learned Indian languages while working for traders. During the
Patriot war, in addition to his services as a negotiator and interpreter, he was one
of the few Spanish subjects who dared to leave the safety of St. Augustine to
round up cattle to keep the beleaguered city fed. For his services during the war,
he was freed by the governor and received a land grant. He remained in Florida
during the American era and lived to an advanced age.206

War of 1812
The war of 1812, between the United States and Britain, began while the Patriot
invasion in Florida was still underway. During the war, Britain again encouraged
American slaves to defect with a promise of freedom and relocation. Enslaved
people heeded the call from across the south, including from Spanish Florida;
British ships sailed along the US Atlantic coast picking up runaways.
Britain hoped to mobilize both blacks and Indians for the war effort. To this end,
in May 1814, a British captain landed on Florida’s Gulf coast at the mouth of the
Apalachicola River, distributed arms to Indians and escaped slaves, and sailed
upriver about 20 miles to Prospect Bluff, where he started to build a fort. The fort
was in Spanish territory, about 50 miles as the crow flies south of the US
(Georgia) border. Three months later, Major Edward Nicolls assumed command
of the fort. For Nicolls, the British policy of recruiting and freeing slaves was
more than a military tactic; he was an impassioned abolitionist.207
At Prospect Bluff, several thousand black and Indian recruits trained and drilled
and received weapons, uniforms, and a regular wage. In late 1814, they carried
out raids on the Georgia frontier that did considerable damage and kept US
troops tied up. Nicolls thought highly of his black recruits, comparing them
favorably to their British counterparts. “Better or braver soldiers,” he wrote
decades later, “I would never wish to serve with.” Free blacks from Spanish
Florida as well as escaped slaves rallied to Prospect Bluff.208
In the last major conflict of the war, the January 1815 Battle of New Orleans
(which famously took place after the peace treaty had been signed), Britain lost
badly; but the war itself essentially ended in a draw. Nicolls remained at Prospect
Bluff for a few months after that, and escaped slaves continued to arrive at the
fort.

For a brief period at the end of the war, the British still hoped to protect the
Indians’ postwar interests and to curb American influence in Spanish Florida. But
by March, Nicolls’s orders changed: He was to leave his recruits as well supplied
and armed as possible and come home. Nicolls, who already had a reputation for
exceeding or ignoring orders, continued to advocate on behalf of the Creeks and

44
Seminoles and encouraged them to resist white encroachment on lands they still
considered theirs. He did not leave Prospect Bluff until early summer.209
Before Nicolls and the British left, they provided the black recruits with military
discharge papers that implicitly acknowledged their status as free British subjects.
Nicolls encouraged blacks and Indians to continue cooperating, to avoid strong
drink and contact with Americans, and to continue welcoming escaped slaves
who reached their community. He left the fort well armed, and promised to send
for the freedmen when he could; but he was unable to keep that promise. After
their service in the war of 1812, more than 4,000 former slaves were transported
by the British to freedom in Canada and Trinidad, but the majority of the
Prospect Bluff veterans were left behind.210

Map of the Apalachicola River region, 1815; the red arrow points to the fort at Prospect Bluff.

45
A brief postwar experiment in freedom
After the British left, the community at the fort survived for a little over a year.
Many of the Indians left shortly after Nicolls did, but the black population
swelled as escaped slaves fled to it from neighboring American states and from
Spanish Florida. Free black people were also drawn to this precarious experiment
in liberty, and some Indians, most frequently referred to as Choctaws, remained
as well.211
The Prospect Bluff maroons could count on a number of assets that weren’t
available to other escaped slaves. They could live stable lives out in the open,
under the protection of a well-made fort with thick earthen walls and wooden
palisades. Located on a bluff overlooking the Apalachicola River, surrounded by
forest and swampland, the fort was nearly inaccessible by land. The British left
ample supplies behind, including weapons, tools, and several boats. Community
members possessed a variety of skills learned in both urban and plantation
settings and had a well-organized defense force. They had access to fertile
farmland and bountiful forest for hunting and gathering.212
Maroons at the settlement came from a wealth of different backgrounds. “There
were Africans; Spanish creoles from both Floridas [east and west], Cuba, and
elsewhere in Spain’s empire; English-speaking former slaves from the United
States and Anglo-Caribbean; and people from French colonies. Other members
of the community had lived with various southeastern Indians or in independent
maroon communities.” The community not only welcomed newcomers (which
could be dangerous for less well-defended maroon settlements) but actively
recruited them.213
Family life flourished at Prospect Bluff — partly because of the community’s
relative (if short-lived) stability and because women, while still a minority as in
most maroon communities, were a relatively large one, making up perhaps one-
fourth to one-third of the population. The community also included children,
and a number of married couples escaped to Prospect Bluff together.214
Most residents lived outside the fort, with homes and farmland stretching for
miles along the river. In addition to farming and hunting, they traded with a
number of black and Indian settlements. They supplied arms to the Seminoles —
a trade that disturbed the Spanish colonial government because their product was
so superior that it threatened the Spanish arms trade. There was at least one
allegation that the maroons also engaged in piracy.215
Traveling on foot and by boat, Prospect Bluff residents established ties with
maroons in the town of Miccosukee in northern Florida, settlements to the south
on the Suwannee River and Tampa Bay, and to the east on the St. Johns River.
They were also in touch with a number of Indian groups, no doubt including

46
 some who had spent time at Prospect Bluff. One measure of the breadth of their
connections is the concern expressed by their enemies about how easily they
could escape if attacked, using their small marine fleet or the network of forest
trails. 216
However, hostility toward the outpost on the Apalachicola was growing.
Slaveholders resented its attraction for freedom-seeking slaves; Spanish and
American officials feared violence from the heavily armed settlement; the
maroons were accused not only of providing safe haven but of actively recruiting
on nearby plantations, as well as of piracy, kidnapping, cattle rustling, and
attacking river vessels.217 While the British were still at the fort, at least three
delegations — two Spanish and one Creek — visited demanding the return of
escaped slaves. The British allowed aggressive persuasion but not forced removal;
only a handful of maroons agreed to return to slavery, most of them mothers
with small children. There was also at least one armed attack, which the maroons
were able to repel, a few months after Nicolls departed.218

Destruction
Although Prospect Bluff was on Spanish territory (Florida would not become a
US possession until 1821), it was the Americans who led the calls for its
destruction. A military outpost (Camp Crawford, later renamed Fort Scott) was
built in spring 1816 just north of the Georgia border. The Spanish gave the
Americans permission to send supplies up the Apalachicola from the Gulf of
Mexico, but the fort at Prospect Bluff blocked this access. Protracted negotiations
between increasingly forceful US military officials and an ambivalent Spanish
government eventually yielded something the Americans felt able to interpret as a
green light to attack.219
In mid-July 1816, two American forces headed toward the fort. One moved
downriver from Camp Crawford and was joined by a party of pro-American
Creeks, while the other, a naval convoy sailing from New Orleans, moved upriver
from Apalachicola Bay.220 The maroons’ scouts soon alerted them to the
Americans’ presence. During the blockade, a party of maroons lured an
American boat, sent for fresh water, into an ambush, killing three men
immediately and capturing another, who they later burned alive.221
Many of the Prospect Bluff warriors were away on a hunting trip, and a
messenger sent to ask Seminole allies for help was captured by the Americans.
Still, the fort was nearly impregnable, and the maroons who remained were well
organized and determined. The Camp Crawford contingent arrived across the
river from the fort on July 19; but four days later, the attack had stalled.222
Creek chiefs known for their negotiating skills were sent in to try to talk the
maroons into surrendering, but the maroons remained defiant. Declaring that
they were British subjects defending British territory and would sink any

47
 American ship that tried to pass, they raised a red flag signifying their intention
to fight to the death. “We were pleased with their spirited opposition,” one
American officer wrote to his father, “though they were Indians, negroes, and our
enemies. Many circumstances convinced us that most of them determined never
to be taken alive.”223
Under that red flag, the siege continued, with neither side inflicting decisive
damage, until July 27. On that day, a heated cannonball fired by the Americans
landed in the fort, possibly making a direct hit on a powder magazine, triggering
an explosion that could be heard 135 miles away in Pensacola. The same officer
wrote:
You cannot conceive, nor I describe the horrors of the scene. In an
instant, hundreds of lifeless bodies were stretched upon the plain,
buried in sand and rubbish, or suspended from the tops of the
surrounding pines. Here lay an innocent babe, there a helpless mother;
on the one side a sturdy warrior, on the other a bleeding squaw.224
The American commander estimated that 300 people were in the fort when the
bombardment began — 100 warriors and 200 women and children, probably
mostly Spanish-speaking ex-slaves from Pensacola and some of their Choctaw
allies — and only about 50 survived, many of those badly wounded.225
One of the maroons at Prospect Bluff was Mary Ashley. During the siege,
according to a letter Nicolls wrote years later on her behalf, she raised and
lowered the fort’s flag daily and fired the “morning and evening gun,” hoping to
alert the absent warriors. Ashley was one of the few who survived the explosion;
she was sold into slavery in Cuba.226
Two men considered leaders of the maroon community, a black warrior (and
former carpenter from Pensacola) named Garçon and an unnamed Choctaw
man, survived the explosion but were killed by the Americans’ Creek allies with
the Americans’ blessing. The remaining survivors, and others captured in the
vicinity of the fort, were re-enslaved. Most of them had escaped from slavery in
Spanish Florida or among the Creeks; many of the American ex-slaves had left
the area before the attack.227

Aftermath
During the slow American advance on Prospect Bluff, many residents, especially
those living outside the fort, were able to escape. Many fled to the Suwannee
River area; others fled farther south, especially along Florida’s west coast. The
settlements established by Prospect Bluff survivors continued to attract new
runaways, and their warriors, especially on the Suwannee, continued to train and
drill. They received some covert assistance from men with ties to Nicolls. But as
the geopolitical winds on the continent shifted, the possibility that Nicolls would

48
 send for them (as he later said he had promised to do), or transport them to the
freedom promised when he first recruited them, dwindled to zero.228
When they next fought the Americans, they would fight on their own. Their
military discharge papers, which gave them the status of free British subjects in
British eyes, would mean little in other jurisdictions. Their quest for freedom
would continue to involve harsh and often lonely choices, as it had before and
during their time at Prospect Bluff. But their experience there allowed them to
develop stronger military and organizational skills, social and diplomatic ties, and
a sense of connection to global movements toward freedom and equality.229

First Seminole war

Exactly when the first Seminole war began depends on which events, out of a
generally violent era, are chosen to define its start and end points. As many
historians describe it, it lasted about six months — from November 1817 to May
1818 — with most of the sustained action taking place in Spanish Florida over
about a month in March and April.230
Factors that drove the war included white–Indian conflict over land as well as
general lawlessness in the border area. A former Georgia governor described
conditions just before the war in written testimony to Congress:
The peace of the frontier of Georgia has always been exposed and
disturbed, more or less, by acts of violence, committed as well by the
whites as the Indians; and a spirit of retaliation has mutually
prevailed … [The situation is aggravated by] lawless and abandoned
characters, who had taken refuge on both sides of the St. Mary’s River,
living principally by plunder.231
American slaveholders, driven by their fear of slave escapes and revolts, wanted
to root out maroon and Indian safe havens across the border in Spanish
Florida.232 Word also got back to the United States that blacks and Indians,
among them many survivors of the Prospect Bluff catastrophe, were organizing a
military force. A February 1817 letter to a US military officer reported that
residents of the black/Indian settlement of Fowltown in southern Georgia (near
present-day Bainbridge) “speak in the most contemptuous manner of the
Americans, and threaten to have satisfaction for what has been done — meaning
the destruction of the negro fort.” He also reported, presumably referring to the
towns on the Suwannee River, that an acquaintance
saw the negroes on parade there: he counted about six hundred that bore arms.
They have chosen officers of every description, and endeavor to keep up a
regular discipline … There is said to be about the same number of Indians
belonging to their party, and there are both negroes and Indians daily going to
their standard. They say they are in complete fix for fighting, and wish an
engagement with the Americans, or McIntosh’s troops [US Creek allies who had
joined the attack on Prospect Bluff]; they would let them know they had
something more to do than they had at Apalachicola.233

49
Blacks and Seminoles considered themselves British subjects and allies — as they
had been encouraged to do by Edward Nicolls at Prospect Bluff — and continued
to hope that Britain would intervene on their behalf. While Nicolls never
returned to Florida, several men associated with him did reappear and encourage
continued resistance, providing military training and supplies.234 One of them
wrote to him from the Suwannee River:
There are about three hundred blacks at this place, a few of our Bluff
people. They beg me to say, they depend on your promises, and expect
you are on the way out. They have stuck to the cause, and will always
believe in the faith of you.235
The war’s opening battle was the US attack on Fowltown in late November 1817.
A few days later, in retaliation, a supply boat coming up the Apalachicola River to
Fort Scott was attacked, killing more than 40 people, including women and
children. In the weeks that followed, black and Indian warriors shooting from the
shore made resupply of the fort by river almost impossible.236
Andrew Jackson was ordered to take over the command at Fort Scott and “adopt
the necessary measures to terminate [the] conflict.” Arriving at the fort in early
March, Jackson’s army marched down the Apalachicola and built a new fort at
the site of the ruins on Prospect Bluff. Then, reinforced by a large contingent of
pro-US Creeks, they captured the Spanish fort at St. Marks near the Gulf coast,
and laid waste to Indian and black towns near Lake Miccosukee and on the
Suwannee river.237
The community on the Suwannee River, led by the Seminole chief Bowlegs, was
one of the main targets of the campaign. Many of the residents were rebuilding
their lives there after fleeing from Alachua, Prospect Bluff, and other locations
during earlier bouts of violence. On the Suwannee, as they did elsewhere, black
and Seminole people lived connected but physically separate lives; their towns
were about a mile apart. The black community was probably larger than its
Seminole counterpart and the largest maroon settlement in the US south.238
The leader of the black warriors was a man named Nero, who was also an advisor
to (and sometimes described as a slave of) Bowlegs. Very little is known about
Nero. Although apparently a Prospect Bluff veteran himself, he once intervened
to help save the lives of two white men accused of helping US forces destroy the
fort. A man who spent time in the Suwannee towns later testified that “Nero
commanded the blacks, and was owned and commanded by Bowlegs; but there
were some Negro Captains, who obeyed none but Nero.”239
When the American attack came, the settlement would be obliterated, but many
people would be able to escape thanks to the community’s military preparedness
and advance warning. Men with ties to Edward Nicolls appeared on the
Suwannee before the war, offering their help. Robert Ambrister, who had served
under Nicolls in the war of 1812 and reportedly said that he had come to the

50
Suwannee “to see the Negroes righted,” helped train the black warriors and
apparently took over their command from Nero for a few months. Alexander
Arbuthnot, a trader and Indian advocate who had corresponded with Nicolls,
sold them ammunition and other supplies.240
Arbuthnot sent a warning from St. Marks, just a few days before that post was
captured, to warn that Jackson was coming. “The main drift of the Americans,”
he wrote, “is to destroy the black population of Suwannee. Tell my friend Boleck
that it is throwing away his people to attempt to resist such a powerful force.”
About the same time, refugees from the devastated Lake Miccosukee towns began
to arrive. By the time the American troops approached, the settlement was on
high alert, and scouts discovered them a few hours before they arrived.241

Map of the settlements on the Suwannee River, 1818.

The Suwannee settlement was attacked late in the day on April 16, 1818, by a US
force of more than 3,000, which included some of the same Creek allies who had
participated in the attack on Prospect Bluff. It appears to have been mostly the
black warriors who fought off the American advance long enough for the
remaining noncombatants to escape. Ambrister left the settlement before the
battle began, returning command to Nero, and most of the Seminoles had already
fled into the swamps and woods on the east side of the river. Badly outnumbered,
the warriors fought long enough to enable the villagers remaining on the
Suwannee’s west bank to cross the river. After darkness fell, they crossed it
themselves; the Americans did not follow until the next day.242
This was considered the fiercest battle of the war.243 Two black members of the
Suwannee community who survived the battle testified about it years later in a
related civil case. John Prince, one of the warriors who had fought the rearguard
action, said

51
 that he was at the town when the attack was made; that he remained
with the Indians and negroes, and fought as long as he dared; but they
came too hot upon them, and they all ran to save their lives, and that all
their houses were burnt before their eyes … There were a great many of
them, and so strong that we stood no chance.
The second witness, named Nero Bowlegs, testified that he “did not engage in the
fight, being occupied in swimming horses across the river” to the east side, but
knew that “a good many Indians and negroes were killed by the assailants.”244
Both men recalled hearing about black residents fleeing as far as an island in the
river but being captured there by pro-US Creeks and carried into slavery in the
United States. Both had also heard that a man they knew at Suwannee named
Harry had been wounded and captured during the battle and that Harry was later
killed trying, again, to escape. Both witnesses had spent time, in the intervening
years, with the Creeks and had talked with them about the attack.245
Jackson’s army burned hundreds of homes, destroyed food stores, and made off
with livestock; it’s impossible to know how many people were killed or captured.
Those who survived the attack scattered in many directions, from the panhandle
to the southwest coast and beyond.246
The destruction of the Lake Miccosukee and Suwanee towns was completed by
mid-April. Jackson then took two actions that were controversial both at home
and abroad. In late April he executed Ambrister and Arbuthnot for supporting
the Seminole war effort. And in May he attacked and occupied Pensacola, the
capital of Spanish West Florida. The United States soon returned control of
Pensacola to Spain, but negotiations were already underway that ended in the
1819 Adams-Onís treaty ceding all of Florida to the United States.247
• • •
The man named Nero who served as a war leader and chiefly advisor on the
Suwannee River may have died during the Suwannee battle, or he may have lived
on.248 There are at least three other mentions of a man named Nero in the
histories of the era.
In 1812, a very young man by that name either was captured or escaped during
an Indian raid on the New Switzerland plantation on the St. Johns River. If this
was the same person, he would still have been quite youthful for a role as military
commander and senior advisor on the Suwannee six years later.249
In 1828 (as described above), a free black man named Nero Bowlegs made a
sworn statement in a civil proceeding about people he had met at Suwannee and
his experiences during the battle.250
And in 1836, “old Nero, who had lived long with the Indians” worked for US
forces as a guide and interpreter in the early months of the second Seminole war.
At least one of the men familiar with his work remarked on his bravery and

52
 honesty, and he had served as a guide to the Florida governor. He and two other
men were once sent to a tense parley with the enemy during a lull in fighting on
the Withlacoochee River. To reach the meeting place, they had to cut through
dense vegetation on the side of a “prairie pond.” A few minutes into the meeting,
his two companions fled, sensing a trap, but Nero stood his ground and
completed the mission.251
The Nero who disappeared from the St. Johns area in 1812 would have been in
his 30s or early 40s in 1836, and the bravery shown by the latter is consistent with
that shown by the troops defending the Suwannee settlement; but the four
references could just as plausibly refer to four different men.

Hard times between the wars

Formal control of Florida passed from Spain to the United States in 1821.
Although almost another 15 years passed before the outbreak of the second
Seminole war, those years were not free of turmoil and dislocation.
The Coweta Creek raid on the southwest coast settlements (see the “Frequent
moves” section above) took place at about the same time that Florida was
changing hands. The settlements were destroyed, captives were sold into slavery,
and the survivors scattered, some to inland Florida and others to Cuba and the
Bahamas.252
The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek required most Seminoles to relocate to an
inland reservation. US officials were not familiar with the land they had designated
for the reservation, but the Indians apparently were: During negotiations, chief
Neamathla said that its soil was poor and that “we hope that you will not send us
south, to a country where neither the hickorynut, the acorn, nor the persimmon
grows.” His objections were in vain; and the Seminoles did indeed suffer severe
food shortages on the reservation.253 A military officer wrote in 1825:
The major part of the nation are, and have been, suffering for some
time in extreme want. Some have died from starvation … I can assure
you they are in the most miserable situation … It is impossible for me,
or any other officer who possesses the smallest feelings of humanity, to
resist affording some relief to men, women, and children, who are
actually dying for the want of something to eat.254
They were also vulnerable to harassment by a range of opportunists, from shady
businessmen to armed robbers, from whom the government was unable or
unwilling to protect them. Black people living with the Seminoles in the 1820s
and 1830s were also vulnerable, as discussed earlier, to raids by slave hunters —
some considered legitimate under the slave regime, others without any pretense
of legality. For the land the Seminoles had relinquished under the 1823 Treaty of
Moultrie Creek, they were promised a modest annuity, some of which was
withheld as a penalty for harboring fugitive slaves.255

53
 The Seminoles faced a deadline in January 1836 to assemble for transport west or
be forcibly removed. Tensions simmered throughout 1835. The Seminoles may
have appeared, to superficial observers, to be resigned to leaving. But looking
back later on the start of the war, Seminole chief Halpatter-Tustenuggee
(Alligator) said, “We had been preparing for this more than a year. Though
promises had been made to assemble on the 1st of January, it was not to leave the
country, but to fight for it.”256 Black Seminoles would play an important part in
these preparations.

Second Seminole war

The second Seminole war was costly, complex, and marked by betrayals,
confusion, and civilian suffering. This section offers a brief overview of the war,
and then explores in more detail a few elements with especially strong Black
Seminole involvement.
Scattered violence took an irreversible turn into war during Christmas week
1835, with a Seminole attack and slave uprising on plantations in east Florida. On
December 28, a military column led by Major Francis Dade was attacked on a
lonely road between Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay and Fort King (near present-day
Ocala); only two men made it back to Fort Brooke alive. At Fort King on the
same day, warriors led by Osceola killed Indian agent Wiley Thompson and
several other men.257
Many east coast plantation owners fled to St. Augustine, the Florida city most
heavily affected by the war. US military efforts in the year that followed achieved
little and were marred by infighting between key generals.258 Fighting in early
1837 inflicted significant losses on the Seminoles but also impressed the
Americans with their enemy’s tenacity and elusiveness. An agreement in March
known as the Fort Dade capitulation raised hopes that the war might be nearing
an end, but broke down with a dramatic Seminole exodus in June.
Within a few months, however, Seminole and Black Seminole ranks were thinned
by a series of defections and surrenders and the capture in September of Philip,
chief of the St. Johns River Seminoles. Philip’s son Coacoochee (Wildcat) came in
to confer with his father and was taken prisoner. Several key war leaders,
including Osceola and the Black Seminole chief John Horse, were also taken
prisoner during talks held under a flag of truce. Wildcat and John Horse, along
with 18 others, made a daring escape in November from the Castillo de San
Marcos in St. Augustine. Osceola died in prison, and Philip died en route to Fort
Gibson in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).259
After that, the focus of the war moved south. In a battle at Lake Okeechobee on
Christmas day 1837, the Seminoles bought time for women and children to
escape, inflicting more casualties than they took, and then scattered in small

54
groups. In January 1838, two battles on the Loxahatchee River ended without a
decisive victory. After that, US forces built a fort at Jupiter Inlet and took some
time to resupply.260
Although the Fort Dade capitulation had failed, the Americans remained
conscious that US policy toward the Black Seminoles was critical to their ability
to win the war. At the urging of his senior officers and with the help of a Black
Seminole messenger, General Thomas Jesup offered the chiefs a tentative new
peace agreement, which they welcomed, camping near the Americans while Jesup
sought his superiors’ approval. When Washington rejected the deal, Jesup’s
forces attacked the peace camp and rounded up hundreds of warriors and
civilians. In the weeks that followed, hundreds more Seminoles and Black
Seminoles surrendered. A number of Black Seminoles joined the US ranks and
played a critical role as guides and interpreters.261
After the Fort Jupiter roundup, the war continued for four years, mostly in
smaller skirmishes that sometimes covered the same ground multiple times. In
the Withlacoochee River area in central Florida, US troops continued to find
villages they had missed in earlier searches, and seemed unsurprised to find that
crop fields they had destroyed had been replanted.
The year 1840 saw Seminole attacks from St. Augustine to the Keys. In the town
of Mandarin in northeast Florida, three years of peace ended abruptly in 1841
with an attack a few days before Christmas. “So sudden an outbreak in a section
of country thickly settled,” a contemporary wrote, “caused much dissatisfaction
and alarm.” While the Seminoles faced an increasingly desperate war of attrition,
they had enough strength left to create a persistent threat.262
Black fighters on the Seminole side appear in the historical record for this era only
“fleetingly and singly,” as historian Kenneth Porter noted. Porter found references
to one or two black fighters taking part in an Indian attack on a family near
Tallahassee in the summer of 1838 (as reported by the sole survivor, a five-year-old
girl), a “most demoniacal looking” black man serving as advisor to the Seminole
chief Sam Jones (Arpeika) in August 1839, and black warriors in an April 1840
firefight near Fort King and in a raid the next month on a wagon traveling between
Fort Fanning and Deadman’s Bay on Florida’s northern Gulf coast. During the
August 1840 raid that killed botanist Henry Perrine at Indian Key, his daughter,
from her hiding place, heard one of the attackers speak and had the impression, she
wrote later, that he was a “runaway negro.” In a lull in the fighting during a
September 1840 US attack on a village on the Chocochatti savannah (near present-
day Brooksville), a black villager approached by the Americans’ interpreter said that
they “did not want to talk, they were ready for a fight” — which was a good call,
because the overture was a trick. (Apparently, all of the villagers were able to escape
that day.) And in March 1841, at an army post in Sarasota, “an Indian and a negro

55
 came in … with a white flag and said they were tired of the war and wanted
something to eat, for they had nothing for three days.”263
While these references may be scanty, several letters between military officers in
Florida and officials in Washington, continuing at least into September 1841,
acknowledged the Black Seminoles’ continued influence. Of the Black Seminoles
remaining in Florida, Wildcat’s band probably had the largest number. Of the
229 emigrants on the ship that took Wildcat west in October 1841, 18 were
black.264
The last major battle of the war took place in April 1842 in central Florida near
the site of Pilaklikaha, the Black Seminole village burned in 1836. Fighting in “a
mass of grassy ponds and oak islands, intersected here and there by pine ridges,”
Seminole warriors led by Halleck Tustenuggee managed to delay and distract US
troops long enough for women and children to escape into the swamp. John
Horse, along with other black and Indian warriors fighting on the American side,
took the most intense fire.265
While the new village was probably not as elaborate as the one destroyed in 1836,
it did contain “well-constructed bark and palmetto huts [that] indicated a
permanent abode.” The Seminoles had left behind “large quantities of dried deer-
meat, dressed deer-skins, half-finished moccasons [sic], axes, hoes, kettles, and
articles of clothing,” as well as “thimbles, needles, thread, and several highly-
ornamented dresses.”266
While the civilians and most of the warriors had escaped, they were destitute. By
the end of April, Halleck Tustenuggee had approached the US camp asking for
talks, and on July 14 he and his band left Florida for the west. John Horse and his
family left on the same ship. The United States declared the war at an end on
August 14, 1842.267
• • •
The rest of this section explores parts of the second Seminole war in which Black
Seminoles and other black actors played an especially critical role: the plantation
attacks that launched the war, wartime St. Augustine, fluctuating US policy on
concessions for the Black Seminoles, and the black guides and interpreters who
worked on the US side.

Plantation attacks
The east coast plantation attacks that launched the war would have been
impossible without the participation of both maroons and enslaved people. In the
runup to the war, Black Seminole leaders Abraham and John Caesar secretly
recruited plantation slaves to support the attacks, taking advantage of long-
standing ties between the plantations and the world of the maroons. These

56
contacts ensured the attacks a place in history not only as the Second Seminole
war’s opening salvo but also as the largest slave uprising in US history.268
The attacks started during Christmas week 1835 and continued into the following
February. They focused on a stretch of the east coast from St. Augustine to New
Smyrna, but reached as far south as the Miami River and well inland. Some
plantation owners and their families were killed, while others escaped, mostly to
St. Augustine.269
An army sergeant sent to Florida after the first raids described the scene like this:
Everything also that industry and civilization has done is utterly
destroyed. We visited the site of many dwellings which presented a
most desolating scene — many buildings were burned, others partially,
and some cut and hacked to pieces. I saw tables, bureaus, sofas, mirrors,
pictures, beds, books &c strewed about everywhere, cut and broke in all
shapes. The marks of the tomahawk was visible everywhere in the
seilings and walls of unburned houses — not a window or door left
unbroken, feather beds emptied and the contents flying about the
country — the shores of the river and sound lined with chests and
trunks broken open and rifled of their contents. On some plantations
nothing left to tell of the destruction but the naked chimneys and the
ashes of the buildings and contents.270
Various witnesses reported seeing Indians dancing around burning plantation
buildings. One member of a Florida militia known as the Mosquito Roarers also
reported seeing members of his own militia “chasing the chickens around the
burning houses.” The attacks continued for weeks, as plantation owners fled first
to some of the better fortified plantations — such as Bulowville, which was also
briefly used as a military post — and then to St. Augustine.271
Farther south, near present-day Fort Lauderdale, raiders attacked the home of
justice of the peace William Cooley, who had a small plantation on the New
River. The attack on January 6, 1836, killed his wife and children and the
children’s tutor. The few other white families on the New and Miami Rivers fled
to the Cape Florida lighthouse, some bringing slaves with them, and eventually
on to more secure locations including Key West.272
One battle with the insurgents took place on January 17 when Florida militia
volunteers went to the Dunlawton plantation (in present-day Port Orange) to
pick up corn and other supplies abandoned in the initial rush to safety. A 20th
century history described the force sent to Dunlawton as green; one member of
the militia called his comrades an “undisciplined rabble” and was horrified at
their mutilation of an Indian corpse.273
The plantation must have been fired the same day that these troops set out; they
arrived after nightfall to find the buildings still burning and cattle penned up,
presumably for removal the next day. Hoping to ambush the Indians when they
returned for the cattle, they spent the night in nearby slave cabins. But the next

57
morning’s battle quickly went against them. In the chaos, they tried to retreat,
leaving a number of comrades behind. Benjamin Wiggins, a well-known free
black man fighting on the American side, “was greatly scandalized,” a participant
later remembered, “and called out, ‘My God, gentlemen, [are you] going to run
from a passel of dam’d Indians?’” The order to retreat was rescinded, but soon
had to be given again, resulting in a “devil take the hindermost” rush for the
boats, during which most of the guns became too wet to fire. The boats had been
grounded by the outgoing tide; after a struggle, the men were able to get two
canoes afloat, but the Indians commandeered a third, larger boat.274
The first to die in the battle on the American side was an enslaved “good black
waiting man” named Will; three others died or received mortal injuries. The
survivors fled back to the Bulow plantation and after a few days relocated to St.
Augustine. Within weeks, the Bulow property was destroyed as well.275
The uprising would have presented people enslaved on the plantations with
terrible choices — how to respond to the Seminole emissaries when they came
around in the weeks before the war, whether to keep the conspirators’ secret or
warn the whites, how deeply to get involved, whom to believe, and whom to trust
— choices that had to be made at close quarters with little privacy, in conditions
where any choice could be overridden at any time by someone more powerful or
less scrupulous.
There were no safe options — joining the Seminoles could get them killed, but so
could staying loyal to the whites. Some slaves on the Cruger and Depeyster
plantation (in present-day New Smyrna Beach) hid members of the raiding party
on the plantation before the attack, supplied a boat that the raiders used to cross
the Indian River and attack another plantation, and even took to wearing war
paint. During the uprising, a St. Augustine newspaper reported, “Some of
Depeyster’s negroes joined them, and they carried off all the rest, about sixty,
except one old negro man, whom they shot, and burned in his hut.” Some of
those slaves were later recaptured; according to the plantation manager’s wife,
“they were glad enough to get away from the Indians as they treated them very
cruelly.”276
Like they had during the Patriot war, slaveholders sometimes abandoned slaves
on the plantation when they fled to safety. One couple — the manager of the
Cruger and Depeyster plantation and his wife — shared their memories of the
uprising years later. While their reminiscences differed in some details, they both
remembered leaving slaves behind — either to wait with the boat carrying their
belongings until the tide rose, or to spend the night, apparently in the open, while
the white family found a safer place to stay. The manager said that he returned
for the slaves in the morning but they had escaped to the Seminoles, while his
wife recalled the boat being intercepted by the Seminoles but said nothing about
the fate of the slaves.277

58
Some enslaved people carried out feats of bravery on behalf of their
masters. While other plantations burned to the ground, the Douglas
Dummett plantation house, on the east bank of the Indian River,
survived (at least initially) because a “faithful servant” hid on the
property during the attack and managed to put out the fire. And in
early February, men identified only as “two of gen. Hernandez’s
negroes” (Hernandez was a plantation owner and a general in the
east Florida militia) rode for over 30 miles, through a landscape that
had been abandoned by white residents, past the Mala Compra and
St. Joseph’s plantations — the latter engulfed in flames and guarded
by Seminole sentries — and reported their observations in St.
Augustine.278
Other slaves grasped the chance to flee, and fight, for freedom. While
some white military memoirists insisted that few would back the
Seminoles and voluntarily leave their “happy and secure state of
servitude,” more senior officers, and men who knew Florida better,
took a more sober view. Hernandez called the plantation slaves’
support for the uprising “the very worst feature of the whole of this
war.” And General Jesup, shortly after he took command of the US
forces in December 1836, wrote in an often-quoted letter to the
secretary of war, “This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian
war; and if it be not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects
of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.”
Several hundred slaves are believed to have joined the uprising.279
A few months later, people enslaved by the American general
People enslaved on the Cruger and
Duncan Clinch almost managed to join the Seminoles but were Depeyster plantation took part in
caught at the last minute. A field slave was found talking (so the the Seminole/Black Seminole
authorities believed) with Seminoles in a field near the woods outside attacks that launched the second
Seminole war. The plantation ruins
the general’s house, which was doubling as a small fort. At least 11 are now a public park.
people had planned to escape from the fort that night; one had
managed to steal a rifle and hide it under the floor in the slave quarters. An army
officer (who was based at the fort but heard about the incident second-hand)
recorded additional detail in his journal: The conspirators
were … to have gone off with a party of Seminoles, who were to have
made a feint upon the pickets so that it might appear that the negroes
were forced off. Their bundles were already made up and they began
disposing of some of their truck [small possessions] to the soldiers,
which causing suspicion, finally led to their detection. One of the negro
women in the end confessing the plot. Upon the overseer's going to the
negro houses, a woman warned him away and then told him that the
Indians were lying in wait not 50 yards ahead to shoot him.280

59
 Instead of making their break for freedom, “all the male negroes were secured,
and . . . under guard employed in completing the defences.”281
• • •
As the east coast plantations burned, one Black Seminole father’s love for his own
children is said to have inspired him to save the lives of a white mother and four
daughters who he found hidden, half-starved and nearly overcome by fear and
exhaustion, in the swamp. Left alone when the father of the family was drafted
into the territory’s military defense, they had fled their home when their
neighbor’s property went up in flames, and had spent four cold and hungry days
in hiding. The baby’s cries gave away their hiding place. When the warrior, who
was armed with an axe, found them, he was apparently moving through the
swamp alone, though the war whoops of his comrades could be heard all around.
As the mother later told the story, his first reaction was to raise his axe and
approach as if to kill them. But he soon “dropped his axe, and after
contemplating the sad spectacle for a few moments, appeared much affected.” He
had two children of his own, he told them; he had escaped from slavery, but they
were still trapped on the plantation; if he killed these white children, surely “God
would be angry, and might doom his little ones to a similar fate.” He promised to
keep their secret, bring them supplies, and help them escape as soon as possible.
The warrior returned in the evening with food, water, and blankets salvaged from
one of the ruined plantations; the following morning he led them to safety, at some
risk to himself. His name is unknown, as is his fate and that of his own children.
The woman he rescued referred to him as “the humane African (our deliverer).”282

Wartime Saint Augustine

As plantation residents fled to St. Augustine for safety, many of the slaves they
brought with them were held, at the orders of the city government, on Anastasia
Island, just east of the city. There, historians believe, they suffered badly without
adequate shelter and food during an unusually cold winter.283
White residents remained fearful that black St. Augustinians would help the
Seminoles or rise up themselves. But they sometimes undermined their own
security interests. When, after the war broke out, they tried to organize self-
defense patrols, they found that they had left the purchase of ammunition too
late: “Most of the powder at the stores had been bought up by a party of Indians,
just before the commencement of hostilities.” Civilian patrols suffered from
absenteeism and from conflicts with drunk and disorderly soldiers, who seemed
to drink a lot at taverns owned by free black men.284
Black Seminoles were able to infiltrate the city before and during the war,
recruiting both enslaved and free black people for the war effort, and black
residents of St. Augustine were able to cross into enemy territory and return. A

60
major in the Florida militia reported in July 1836 that his entire dismounted force
was tied up just trying to prevent these movements.285
One enslaved man, Andrew Gué or Gay, escaped in summer 1836 but returned to
the city at night to recruit more slaves and brag of his standing with the
Seminoles. Gué joined a band led by John Caesar; he was wounded in the
aftermath of that band’s last raid in January 1837 and recaptured a few weeks
later.286 (John Caesar is discussed in more detail near the end of this section.)
Free black St. Augustinians were mostly asked to contribute information and
supplies rather than to fight. More than a year into the war, the insurgents were
reportedly still being supplied with ammunition by a free black resident.
Supporting them was punishable by enslavement or even death, but some were
willing to take that risk. Free black people in Florida had seen their status and their
freedoms erode sharply when Florida passed from Spanish to US control in 1821.287
One free black man who took up arms on the Seminole side was Joe Merritt, who
belonged to a black family with deep roots in the city. In wartime St. Augustine,
various conflicting stories attached to the Merritt family — Joe Merritt was on bad
terms with his father, Stephen; Stephen Merritt was a Seminole ally like his son, or
had briefly been captured by the Seminoles and escaped, or had had a falling out
with John Caesar over money, or had never met him. The elder Merritt was
accused of treason but acquitted; his son fought and died alongside John Caesar.288
Free black men’s military options had also diminished under the US territorial
government; among other things, they no longer served as officers or had their
own military units. In spite of this, some chose to fight on the US side.289
One of these men was William Clarke, who served in several US militias from
1836 to 1838 — including a stint as a musician, during which he “wore out ‘two
drum heads’” in five months. Clarke’s family, both the black and white branches,
had a tradition of military service; the same was true of other free black men who
chose the same path. The limited military options open to them included serving
as musicians and guides.290
Another free black man who fought on the US side was Benjamin Wiggins, the
man who rallied retreating troops during the battle at the Dunlawton plantation.
Wiggins was well known and respected in St. Augustine circles, with a career
stretching back to the Spanish era, during which he served as a militiaman,
interpreter, and river pilot and spent substantial time among the Seminoles. At
the start of the second Seminole war, he worked as an express rider and military
guide. Severely wounded during the Dunlawton battle, Wiggins continued to
serve as a guide and an officer’s “right hand man.” He died in St. Augustine
during the war.291
• • •

61
The Black Seminole warrior John Caesar played a critical but short-lived role in
the war; from the time he entered the historical record to the time he died was a
little over a year. He was affiliated with Philip (sometimes referred to as Emathla
or King Philip), the leader of the St. Johns River Seminoles.292 Like other Black
Seminoles who took on leadership roles, he has been described both as the chief’s
slave and as his trusted counselor. Unlike some of his Black Seminole
counterparts, his personal life is almost completely unknown, and no portraits of
him appear to exist.
John Caesar was probably about 60 years old when he entered the war, and he
appears to have been living free for a long time. He was described by
contemporaries as an “Indian Negro” — that is, someone who had lived with the
Seminoles long-term and adopted their ways (as distinct, for example, from a
recently escaped slave or someone legally recognized as free by the Spanish or
American government). Whether he was born free or had spent time in
US/British-style slavery, and how he came into Philip’s orbit, nobody knows, but
he was well acclimated to living free in Florida. He was said to have a wife on a
plantation near St. Augustine, but nothing else is known about her. American
officials described him as highly intelligent.293
The parts of John Caesar’s career that made it into the documentary record are
few but critical. His first known contribution to the war effort was to help
organize the east coast plantation uprising.
A little over two months later (on March 5, 1836), he may have tried to broker a
truce with US troops on the Withlacoochee River, during what has come to be
known as the siege of Camp Izard. The Americans had been pinned down since
February 27, but they were expecting reinforcements, and the mixed black and
Indian force knew that. That night a black man hailed the camp to say that the
Seminoles were ready to discuss a truce. Contemporary accounts vary on whether
that man was John Caesar or the better known Abraham, and on whether he had
been sent by the Seminoles or had gone at his own initiative.294
John Caesar may have been the only representative of the St. Johns River
Seminoles at the siege and the negotiations. One contemporary writer said that
his overture to the whites angered the other Seminole fighters so much that they
threatened to kill him and Osceola had to intervene to save him. But whether or
not he was the original emissary, and whether or not the Seminole leadership
originally supported the idea, they were there for the truce talks the next day, and
both John Caesar and Abraham were there to interpret. The talks started off well,
but ended when the Americans’ long-awaited reinforcements arrived and start
firing. The Seminoles disappeared into the woods, and nothing more came of the
truce talks.295

62
 As 1836 progressed, US forces began to get the upper hand on the Withlacoochee
River, driving the survivors east, toward John Caesar’s home territory and that of
his patron, Philip. There, after their dramatic early successes, Philip seems to
have lost his fire; one historian has referred to his subsequent actions as
desultory, spasmodic, and apathetic.296 But John Caesar fought on.
He slipped in and out of St. Augustine apparently at will — conspiring,
organizing, and buying supplies — and built up small guerrilla bands consisting
mostly of recently escaped plantation slaves, with a few free black men and a
handful of experienced Seminole/Black Seminole warriors. Some of his new
fighters had escaped from prominent St. Augustine residents, including the
commander of the local militia. In January 1837, they began raiding again, this
time on plantations closer to the city.297
On January 17, 1837, John Caesar and his band raided a plantation just west of St.
Augustine to steal horses. The raid failed; they escaped, but a posse tracked them
the following night to their camp on the ruins of another plantation, near
present-day Daytona Beach. John Caesar and two others (including Joe Merritt)
were killed, a third man (Andrew Gué) was wounded and eventually captured,
and about half a dozen men escaped.298
No one knows where John Caesar was buried. Historians have given him much of
the credit for recruiting the east coast plantation slaves who helped launch the
war, in what was essentially also the largest slave uprising in North America,
which he led together with his patron, Philip.299
He is considered one of the most important Black Seminole war leaders, for both
his military and clandestine activities. Even in death, he struck fear into the hearts
of St. Augustinians, as the belongings he and his band left behind could be
identified as coming from shops in that city, which suggested that they had allies
there and had been able to enter and leave at will. He, and the fighters he led or
inspired, tied up military forces that might otherwise have been free to fight on
other fronts, and created a persistent threat that helped convince US forces that
this enemy could not be taken lightly.300

Collapse of the Fort Dade capitulation

A little over a year into the war, there was a brief surge of optimism that peace
might be at hand — a peace that hinged on significant concessions to the Black
Seminoles, whose influence on the Seminoles was clear and who were bitterly
opposed to surrender. A tenuous ceasefire in February 1837 led to talks in early
March at Fort Dade (about nine miles north of present-day Dade City).301
The Black Seminole leader Abraham played a critical role in the negotiations. An
army officer described him as “a non-committal man, with a countenance which
none can read, a person erect and active, and in stature over six feet … an enemy

63
by no means to be despised.” The officer described Abraham’s first entry into the
American camp that February:
Abraham made his appearance, bearing a white flag on a small stick
which he had cut in the woods, and walked up to the tent of Gen. Jesup
with perfect dignity and composure.
He stuck the staff of his flag in the ground, made a salute or bow with
his hand, without bending his body, and then waited for the advance of
the General, with the most complete self-possession. He has since stated
that he expected to be hung, but concluded to die, if he must, like a
man, but that he would make one effort to save his people.302
The result of the talks was an agreement known as the Fort Dade
capitulation, which committed the Seminoles to leave Florida and
resettle west of the Mississippi. During the talks, the Seminoles held
firm that any agreement must also apply to the black people living
among them.304 In recognition of this demand, Article 5 of the
agreement stipulated that
the Seminoles, and their allies who come in and emigrate to the
west, shall be secure in their lives and property; that their
negroes, their bona fide property, shall accompany them to the Black Seminole warrior John Horse
west, and that their cattle and ponies shall be paid for by the was known by many names. The
United States at a fair valuation.305 most common alternatives were Juan
Caballo (the Spanish equivalent of
The ambiguity of the terms “allies” and “property” would soon lead John Horse, which pre-dated the
to much grief, but at the time of signing, all parties seem to have English version) and Gopher John (a
nickname based on the tortoise, not
been satisfied with them. The young Black Seminole warrior John
the rodent). Other variations included
Horse (his name recorded as John Ca-wy-ya) was one of the signers Cavallo, Ca-wy-ya, Coh-wy-yah,
of the agreement. Jesup, who was in charge of the Florida Coheia, Cowaniou, Cowaya, Cowiya,
campaign, was optimistic that peace was at hand.306 and Ko-wa-e.303

Starting in late March, Seminoles and Black Seminoles began to gather in two
camps, one at Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay and a larger one at Fort Mellon (in
present-day Sanford) to await relocation. In Tampa Bay, 26 ships waited to
transport them west. They continued to trickle in slowly well past the original
deadline of April 10, and numbers in the camps fluctuated.307
The delays were partly due to the difficult logistics of dissolving households,
selling livestock, and preparing to travel halfway across a continent, but trust
between the Americans and the Seminoles was also fragile. Rumors that the
Americans were planning to harm or even kill surrendering Seminoles led some
to abandon the camps at least temporarily. Other exchanges showed greater trust
and cordiality. When Osceola, who had been deeply reluctant to endorse the
agreement, finally came in, he slept in the Fort Mellon commander’s tent and
arranged a ball game to entertain the troops.308
In the camps, complications soon arose, including an outbreak of measles.
Slaveholders who had (or claimed to have) lost slaves to the Seminoles began

64
entering the camps, which caused many blacks and Indians to flee. Jesup
complained on May 17, not for the first time, that “the arrival of several
Floridians in camp for the purpose of looking after and apprehending
negroes spreads general consternation among them. Those that were in camp
fled, and carried the panic with them, and we cannot now induce them to
return.”309
Florida planters and the Florida press vigorously opposed the terms of the Fort
Dade agreement. Planters held protest meetings, arguing that their right to regain
control of their human chattel was of “scarcely less moment” than ending the
war, and sent formal complaints to Congress and to the secretary of war. Jesup
had issued an order (general order 79) on April 5 banning white civilians from
entering the territory where Seminoles were gathering; but in early May, after
planters complained, he modified the order, creating so many exceptions that it
became nearly meaningless.310
Soon the question of who among the Black Seminoles was protected under the
terms of the Fort Dade capitulation — in either of the two categories it
established, “allies” and “bona fide property” — became critical. Whatever Jesup
originally thought, and whatever he encouraged the signers of the agreement to
think, he came to exclude black people who had joined the Seminoles during the
war (whether as runaways or captives) from its protection.311
Over the space of a month, his official correspondence expressed a kaleidoscope
of views on the subject. To his superiors in Washington, he emphasized the need
to ensure that the Black Seminoles felt secure. To the head of the Florida militia,
he held out hope that black fugitives who had joined the Seminoles during the
war would be recaptured and re-enslaved. Another letter to Washington
contained both messages. Writing to a fellow military officer, he distinguished
between runaways and captives. And to a slaveholder in St. Augustine, he made
an ambiguous promise that not only recent escapees/captives but also “those who
absconded before the war” would be kept behind in Florida (and presumably
returned to slavery) — though for the latter group, he said, “I have no right to
require the Indians to surrender them.”312
Whether these messages represented a change in approach over time, a conscious
attempt to create a false sense of safety, an honest semantic distinction, or simply
a muddle (as he told one correspondent in early May, “I hope you will be able to
make out the sense of this letter … I am a good deal confused”), it spelled danger
for the Black Seminoles.313
After all his efforts to prevent other white people from alarming the Black
Seminoles, Jesup himself sent an aggressive message via the Fort Mellon
commander on May 25:

65
 If you should see Powell [Osceola] again, I wish you to tell him that I
intend to send exploring and surveying parties into every part of the
country during the summer; and that I shall send out and take all the
negroes who belong to white people, and he must not allow the Indians
or Indian negroes to mix with them. Tell him I am sending to Cuba for
blood hounds to trail them, and I intend to hang every one of them who
does not come in.314
It is not clear whether the message was delivered.
Only three days after he issued general order 79, Jesup also negotiated, in what
was apparently a not-very-well-kept secret, an agreement with Coa Hadjo and
possibly other chiefs to turn in the black people who had joined them during the
war. Coa Hadjo was second-in-command of the St. Johns River Seminoles, whose
black allies presumably included veterans of the east coast plantation uprising
that had launched the war and helped ensure the Seminoles’ early successes. If so,
it would have been a spectacular betrayal. Many black people were in fact seized
from the relocation camps and returned to slavery.315
Eventually, the threats outweighed the promises and whatever trust had been
established by the Fort Dade agreement was broken beyond repair. On the night
of June 2, the emigrant camps emptied, led by Osceola, John Horse, and the
militant Miccosukee (also spelled Mikasuki) chief Sam Jones or Arpeika. A few
Seminole chiefs, including Micanopy, resisted and were taken along by force.
About 700 people left the camps overnight and “fled to their former fastnesses,
far in the interior, and once more determined to defend their liberties or die in
the attempt.” 316
The Fort Dade capitulation, which had seemed so close to ending the war, had
“entirely failed,” Jesup reported. The war, less than halfway into its second year,
would drag on for another five. The short-lived peace process had required the
Black Seminoles to navigate a welter of rapidly changing agendas and loyalties
and to keep their footing amid secret plots and broken promises. Many survived,
but about 200 were lost, including a substantial part of the black leadership.
While John Horse escaped, Abraham remained a captive. Jesup later remarked, “I
have promised Abraham the freedom of his family, if he be faithful to us; and I
shall certainly hang him if he be not faithful.” Abraham served the US Army as an
interpreter and emissary until he emigrated west in 1839.317
• • •
In the months that followed, some maroons left the Seminoles and surrendered
to US forces — perhaps overwhelmed by the hardships of life on the run, or
seeing their bonds with the Indians deteriorate under the strain of war.318
Newspapers reported in September 1837 that

66
 Four negroes … who were captured by the Indians in 1835, made their
escape and delivered themselves up … They were delighted to rejoin
the whites, and complain of hard fare among the Indians; they have
been living on nothing but coonty [a starchy food derived from a
species of cycad], alligators, and fish.319
There is reason to take the words “captured” and “delighted” with a grain of salt.
Given the brutal punishments that were routinely inflicted on slaves for trying to
escape, it seems unlikely that people would admit to running away if they had an
alternative. During the war, “captured” was sometimes used as a euphemism for
“helped to escape.”320 As one 1985 history put it: “Some of them [the returning
slaves] told tales of dreadful hardship, even of abuse at the hands of the
Seminoles. This was what slaveholders wanted to hear; they were sure that
Negroes were better off in slavery than in any other condition.”321
One such defector, John Philip, turned himself in at the ruins of the Bulow
plantation in September 1837 and guided US forces to the capture of Philip, John
Caesar’s patron and the leader of the St. Johns River Seminoles, who was camped
about 25 miles away on the ruins of the Dunlawton plantation.322

Elusive compromise
The second Seminole war was arguably fought to preserve slavery as much as to
remove Indians to the west. But pursuit of these two goals often worked at cross
purposes, given the importance of Black Seminoles to the larger Seminole
community, their military prowess, and their fierce opposition to surrender.323
This tension persisted almost to war’s end.
A contemporary writer on the war summed up the argument for compromise,
noting that the fugitives had become accustomed to freedom and had developed
close ties with the Seminoles:
These habits could not be subdued, nor these ties broken, without a
struggle … It was folly to turn the negro, thus imbued, and with such
ties, upon his white master … The independence and freedom so long
enjoyed, unchecked, had unfitted him for any usefulness to the
claimant. To have deprived the Indians of this property, on
surrendering, would have greatly embarrassed the favorable results
anticipated. True policy dictated otherwise. The negro, returned to his
original owner, might have remained a few days, when he again would
have fled to the swamps, more vindictive than ever; while his Indian
master, between whom there was cherished a mutual affection, had
embarked for Arkansas, dissatisfied and deeply wronged.
Prolonging the fight would also have been even more costly, he argued:
The negroes, from the commencement of the Florida war, have, for
their numbers, been the most formidable foe, more blood-thirsty,
active, and revengeful, than the Indian … Ten resolute negroes, with a
knowledge of the country, are sufficient to desolate the frontier, from
one extent to the other.324

67
But officials were caught — as the undoing of the Fort Dade capitulation clearly
showed — between military considerations and the demands of slaveholders.
US willingness to compromise developed in fits and starts — with promises
made, broken, made again, kept for some people and not others, implemented
unofficially and then officially, on the military field and finally, formally, in
Washington. Eventually the US position came around again to one similar to that
offered at the Fort Dade capitulation, but more complicated and ambiguous and
much less well documented.
Outsiders divided the black people living with the Seminoles into multiple
shifting and overlapping categories — recent runaways, long-term runaways,
slaves captured by the Seminoles during the war (and, theoretically at least, either
set free or enslaved by them), slaves owned by Seminoles (through purchase,
inheritance, gift, or capture), vassals owing their patrons only a light annual
tribute (usually of agricultural goods), and free blacks.325
These labels could determine an individual’s fate, but it is difficult to imagine
how anyone could keep track of, much less verify, each person’s status. As one
historian summed it up, “The blacks emigrated under a tangled web of legal and
social arrangements.” Even the way they surrendered during the war — alone or
with Seminoles — could affect how their claims to freedom were treated later.326
The first major step toward compromise was taken at the Fort Dade capitulation
but failed, as described above. Another took place after the January 1838 battles
on the Loxahatchee River, at Fort Jupiter. The Americans initially built a fort at
Jupiter Inlet to recover from the Loxahatchee battles (among other things, after
fighting and marching through sawgrass, 400 soldiers no longer had shoes). Both
sides had apparently fought to a state of exhaustion and misery.327
General Jesup sent a Black Seminole messenger to the chiefs, and by early March,
a tentative truce had been reached and several hundred people had come in and
camped near the fort, waiting for Washington’s approval of the agreement.328 The
wait appears to have been a congenial affair, with ball games and dances, plenty
of liquor and cigars, and visits back and forth between the Indian and army
camps, which were about a mile apart.329
Jesup promised the Black Seminoles who were still at large freedom if they would
leave the Indians and surrender. And he promised the Indians that he would try
to persuade Washington to let them remain in south Florida. But he was adamant
that the blacks had to leave. His promises to the Black Seminoles were apparently
not written down until years later, and were ambiguous and inconsistent enough
to ensure continued uncertainty and difficulty long after the warriors and their
families had relocated to the west.330
On March 17, Jesup received word that the secretary of war had rejected his
proposal; the Seminoles would have to leave Florida. On March 19, he

68
 summoned them to a council to be held the next day. It’s possible that the
Seminoles had gotten wind of the bad news, since they didn’t respond to the
summons and they appeared to be getting ready to leave.
So Jesup ordered his troops to surround the Seminole camp and seize its
residents. In an attack that started before dawn and went on for at least two days,
US troops rounded up hundreds of warriors and civilians — a betrayal of trust
(and not the first of its kind) that damaged Jesup’s reputation but did far worse
harm to the Seminoles’ chances of survival in Florida. In the weeks after this
calamity, hundreds of other black and Indian people surrendered, including
Alligator and John Horse.331 And yet the war dragged on.
It was apparently not until 1841 that Jesup’s ambiguous informal promise to the
Black Seminoles was formalized in print, and then only in letters between
military and government officials. Meanwhile, the pressure from slaveholders
continued. A captain stationed at Tampa Bay reported in March of that year that,
during talks on emigration, six white strangers had arrived, claiming they had
authorization from Washington and asking to speak with the Indians, but the
Indians adamantly refused to see them: “All the Indians said at once, they came
here to look out for Negroes, and if they were not sent off, the Negroes that were
out with the hostiles would prevent them from [coming] in.” Military officials
sent the whites packing.
Later the same month, the secretary of war instructed the commander of the
Florida forces that blacks should not be seized if “the effect of this would be to
prevent the Indians from coming in and removing. This should by all means be
avoided” — but added that unresolved slaveholder claims could be pursued again
after relocation.332
By August, the Florida forces had a new commander, who reported: “Indians
have been solemnly guaranteed retention of slaves indifferently ... to the mode or
time ... they obtained possession.” At this late date he still felt the need to justify
his decision: “If ... the swamps of Florida … become the resort of runaways, their
intelligence, so superior to the Indian, might impose upon the general
government a contest, quadruplicate in time and treasure than that now being
waged.” The office of the secretary of war confirmed in September that this was
the desired approach.333

Black guides and interpreters

After they surrendered or were captured, a number of Black Seminoles served the
US military, willingly or under duress, as interpreters, scouts, and guides. They
went into the swamps and forests seeking to persuade others to surrender,
participated in negotiations, and sometimes took up arms. Sometimes they were
able to establish rapport with their former comrades, and other times they died
trying.334 Five of their stories are outlined below.

69
Abraham
After playing a critical military and diplomatic role in the first year and a half of
the war, the Black Seminole warrior Abraham was detained by the Americans
when the Fort Dade capitulation failed. He then served as an army interpreter
and guide for almost two years.335 In September 1837 he dictated a letter to the
chief Coa Hadjo, an old friend, urging him to come in.
I wish you to remember that you and I went to Arkansas together and
now recollect that one rainy evening after passing a hill we sat down
together on a bee tree which we had found & felled. The country was a
good one … You said “Abram, I used to think that all the whites hated
us, but I now believe they wish us to live” …
You have since talked to the General as you then talked to me. You did
not know who would Kill you first — the whites or yr own people. If
you can believe me listen to me — and I have been known to you so
long that I think I have a right to expect credit for my talk.
Come in with as many of yr people as you can & if you can bring none
come alone. Do not sacrifice yourself to the advice of crazy men …
Think in a minute as much as in a day and act.336
The following month, Coa Hadjo was one of the warriors seized with Osceola
under a flag of truce and imprisoned in the Castillo de San Marcos in St.
Augustine; he emigrated west in 1838.337
Abraham participated in the talks at Fort Jupiter; later, he helped to persuade the
Seminole chief Alligator and his band to turn themselves in. On April 25, 1838,
he wrote a letter to Jesup, asking to be released from service:
Myself and ’Tony Barnet have done everything promised by us, and
expect the General will do by us as he said at the beginning of this
Campaign … We wish to get in writing from the General, the
agreement made with us … I cannot do any more than I have. I have
done all I can, my heart has been true since I came in.
But the army required him to stay on as an interpreter (albeit one of its best-paid
ones) for almost another year. He left Tampa for the west in February 1839.338

Primus
If the various mentions in the histories all refer to the same man (which is
plausible but not at all certain), Primus had a complicated war. He was enslaved,
but his wife lived among the Seminoles. He worked for the Fort King sutler, who
was killed with Wiley Thompson at the start of the war. Three days after that
incident, at the end of the first battle on the Withlacoochee River, the Americans
sent him out as a scout, and he came back with a report on Seminole casualties.339
Two months later, he was reportedly with the Seminoles during the siege of
Camp Izard (February 27 to March 6, 1836), also on the Withlacoochee. But after
the siege, somehow back with the Americans, he was sent out again to scout.

70
Accounts vary on how often he went back and forth between the US and
Seminole forces, but eventually he failed to return to the US side. A first-person
account of the war published in late 1836 mentioned a rumor that he had “gone
down to the seashore.”340
Primus spent less than a year with the Seminoles before he was captured by Creek
allies of the US forces near the Ocklawaha River in January 1837. He gave up some
information about the Seminoles (possibly under duress): Osceola was sick, he
said, and accompanied by only three warriors, but able to raise a force of 100.341
After his capture, Primus “became a faithful interpreter” and emissary for the
Americans. One 20th century historian seemed to suggest that he may have been
working almost as a double agent: “His services as messenger and informant
during the earliest stage of the Seminole War may have been as valuable to the
people among whom his wife was living [ie, the Seminoles] as to the generals who
employed him.”342
Military correspondence in late 1841 contained a brief reference to “Primus,
who … is getting infirm.” But he was still at work the following April, when “old
Primus” was listed as interpreter during talks between the commander of the
Florida forces and Halleck Tustenuggee, the last major chief to surrender, and he
accompanied the chief back to his camp at the end of the first day of talks. Primus
may have won his freedom in the end; there was at least one man with free papers
by that name in Indian Territory in 1850.343

Murray
A black man named Murray came to be recognized as “the best and most useful”
interpreter and “the best guide in the nation.” Captured by US forces in January
1837, Murray was listed in military records as having three different putative
owners, two Seminole and one white.344 In summer 1837, a man who claimed to
own him wrote to the army to see if any of his missing slaves had shown up
among the war captives. Jesup wrote back:
Murray was taken in January, and is now here; he will be so important
to us as a guide, should the army take the field in the fall, that I have
thought it necessary to retain him; should he be killed, I will be
responsible that the Government pay for him. Pay will be allowed for
him as a guide.345
A few months later, however, Jesup promised Murray that if he remained loyal,
Jesup would free him, as well as his wife and his cousin Katy (also spelled Caty) —
the Seminole slave who fell into the hands of Indian agent Gad Humphreys and
then was captured by the Seminoles and recaptured by the Americans (see the
“Kidnappers and swindlers” section above) — if he remained loyal. In May 1838,
on his last day as commander of the Florida forces, Jesup signed a statement
confirming this promise, at least as far as Murray’s own freedom went.346

71
But Murray did not live long enough to see whether that promise would be kept.
In May 1839, he and other black interpreters played a critical role in arranging a
new round of peace talks, which were initially labeled a major success by the US
general who led them. But before the month was out, Murray was killed — not, as
Jesup had thought might happen, by a former Seminole ally, but by an American
soldier: a sergeant who had complained about the accomplished and widely
respected interpreter’s “insolence” and, enraged when his superior officer didn’t
investigate as quickly as he wanted, shot Murray to death in his sleep.347
Murray’s cousin Katy made it safely to the west, where she lived at Fort Gibson
and worked as a cook. But her freedom, for which Murray had arguably paid with
his life, remained precarious and threatened, as it did for many of the relocated
Black Seminoles. In 1845 she and two children were kidnapped but eventually
rescued. In 1850, multiple slaveholders, both white and Indian, were still
pursuing complicated legal claims against her, and she may have eventually been
returned to slavery. What happened to Murray’s wife is unclear.348

Sandy Perryman
Also supporting the May 1839 peace talks was Sandy Perryman, “a negro
interpreter of considerable cleverness.” Perryman was sent out from Key Biscayne
to approach chiefs in the southern part of the peninsula.
Entering Seminole territory during the war could, of course, be dangerous. The
general who headed the talks noted that “it had been given out that the Indians
would … destroy any person that might approach them with a flag. This threat
[had] been executed more than once.” And a newspaper article describing
conditions just before the talks said that the senior chief Sam Jones (Arpeika),
who had a strong influence in the area where Perryman traveled, “had sent in
word, that any stranger who approached his camp, under any circumstances
whatever, should be put to death.” However, several black and Indian men (in
some cases accompanied by women and children) were sent out to approach
“the hostiles.” It’s not clear how much choice they had in this, but their
persuasive skills must have been up to the task, because a number of chiefs —
including Sam Jones, although he did not personally attend — agreed to give the
talks a try.349
Negotiations resulted in an agreement under which the participating chiefs
would move with their people to a designated area in southern Florida. The
agreement had a number of weaknesses: Many white Floridians vehemently
opposed it; senior military officers doubted it would do any good; it was not
written down; it did not specify how long the new arrangement was meant to last
(the Americans had no intention of making it permanent); and the chiefs who
agreed to it did not represent all of the Indians remaining in Florida. All the

72
same, the general who organized the talks was so convinced of their success that
he announced that the war was over.350
Under the terms of the agreement, a trading post was established two months
later on the Caloosahatchee River. But within days, the store and the army camp
guarding it were attacked, and 16 soldiers and civilians were killed. Sandy
Perryman was captured in the attack and another black interpreter, named
Sampson, disappeared.351
Sampson surfaced two years later with a gruesome story of torture, murder, and
terror. Sandy Perryman had been burned alive, he reported, four days after being
captured, and he himself had been threatened with the same fate several times,
but Billy Bowlegs interceded on his behalf; another prisoner from the trading
post had had his head bashed in. Sampson had been unable to escape for two
years, he said, but finally saw an opening and ran for it.352
The information Sampson provided helped US advances against the Seminoles
and was considered credible. (A newspaper report published a few weeks after the
attack gave one detail that seemed to diverge from his version; it said Perryman
had been found “dead on the ground,” not tied to a pine tree and burned.)353
Sandy Perryman paid with his life for his affiliation (whether voluntary or
involuntary) with the American forces — but this did not earn him much
recognition. Instead, he became the target of at least two unproven (and in one
case, highly implausible) accusations.
Articles appearing in Florida newspapers claimed that he had heavy-handedly
interfered in tribal politics to install more cooperative men as chiefs. One paper
said that he “deposed” Sam Jones and “appointed” commoners to attend the
peace talks as chiefs. Later, reporting his death, the same paper suggested that in
dying he had “attoned [sic] for his offences.” Another paper — in an article so
virulently opposed to the peace process that it was headlined “Shame! Shame!
Shame!” — claimed that Perryman had been heard saying that he “found Sam
Jones so thick headed and Wild Cat such a fool that he ... made Chitto
Tustenuggee chief.”354
Aside from the unlikelihood of such a project succeeding or even being
attempted, given the racial and military makeup of the era, there is ample
contemporary evidence that Perryman’s arrangements had the full approval of
both US military officials and Sam Jones, the chief who had supposedly been
“deposed.”355
Another accusation — made by the general who headed the failed peace talks, in
a report written several months after the incident in which Perryman lost his life
— was that “the interpreter Sandy, a negro of great influence among the Indians,”
had spread a rumor that the peace deal was a trap and that the Americans still
intended to forcibly remove them from Florida.356

73
In fact, the Americans did intend to do that — the United States was still fully
committed to Indian removal. And this truth hardly needed Sandy Perryman to
publicize it, since it was discussed openly in Florida newspapers, including in a
statement by the US secretary of war.
Just before the peace talks started, a “friendly Indian” who had gone over to the
“hostiles” was accused of spreading the same rumor. And a journal kept by a
military officer present at the talks identified another suspect in the rumor:
“Genl. T[aylor] believes [it] to have been told them by the whites in the Territory,
many of whom are using every exertion to continue the war” (in order to
maintain lucrative military contracts and other war-related opportunities).357

John Horse
John Horse, who surrendered in April 1838, left Florida for the west that June.
But after three months he asked to return to Florida to help persuade others to
turn themselves in. By May 1839 at the latest, he was back and working for US
forces. As the pool of interpreters shrank through emigration or death, his
services were in increasing demand as both an interpreter and a negotiator, and
he persuaded many Seminoles, including Wildcat, to come in.358
While his main role seems to have been as an interpreter and negotiator, he also
participated in military actions.359 In April 1842, he fought in the last major battle
of the war. A contemporary writer described his role like this:
The fire of the enemy was concentrated principally upon the Indian
guides and negro interpreters … The tall figure of the negro interpreter,
Gopher John, his loud voice, and negro accent, the repeated discharge
of his unerring rifle, well known to the Indians as he was, made him a
conspicuous object of assault. The balls flew by him so thick, striking
the trees around, that he suspected his courage was oozing out, when,
pulling from his pocket a well-filled flask [he said] to an officer by his
side, ‘I feel all over, mighty queer, de Ingen fight so strong! I must take
a big un;’ and suiting the action to the word, he drained his bottle,
reprimed his rifle, whooped, and was soon lost in the midst of foliage
and smoke.360
The target of that operation was a chief named Halleck Tustenuggee, who was
holed up in a village not far from the old black settlement of Pilaklikaha, which
had been destroyed in 1836. Halleck, most of his warriors, and all of the band’s
noncombatants escaped, but their supplies were exhausted. Within a few days
they approached the US camp asking for talks; but the talks dragged on, and the
US forces grew suspicious and impatient. Eventually they raided the Indian camp
and took the chief and his people captive; John Horse participated in that raid as
a guide and interpreter.361
John Horse’s last known action in the war took place about a week later; he left
Florida for good in July 1842, a month before the war officially ended. During his
stint with the US army, he had persuaded more than 500 Seminoles to surrender.

74
 Military officers who worked with him remembered him as an excellent hunter,
fisherman, and tracker — and as a first-rate cook who enjoyed dressing elegantly
when he could afford it. One 19th century military historian remarked that he
“could smell an Indian a mile off [and] follow a trail by moonlight, at a gallop
over a burnt prairie.”362
When he left he carried with him two letters, signed by army generals,
confirming his freedom and that of his wife and children, and apparently enough
savings to get him started in his new life. He was 30 years old.363

After Florida
By 1842, when the second Seminole war ended, most Black Seminoles had left
Florida. A small number participated in the third Seminole war (1855–1858),
including Ben Bruno, who left Florida in May 1858 with Billy Bowlegs (Holata
Micco) and was described by Harper’s Weekly Magazine as the chief’s slave but
also as his “guide, philosopher, and friend.”364
Relocated to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), the Black Seminoles initially
worked to establish the same kind of loose tributary alliance they had had with
the Seminoles in Florida. But under the stresses of the new environment,
relations between the two groups deteriorated. White and Indian slave raiders
became increasingly aggressive, sometimes targeting children.365
Steps by US authorities to regularize the Black Seminoles’ legal status were
halting and contentious, and within less than a decade, nearly every promise
made to them during the war in Florida had been broken and they faced mass re- Ben Bruno
enslavement.366
So some of them took their fate into their own hands again. In 1849 and 1850,
John Horse and Wildcat led the first of several groups to flee south through Texas
and into Mexico, where slavery had been outlawed in 1829. The Texas–Mexico
border was a turbulent place — with the Mexican–American war (1846–1848) a
recent memory, Comanches and other indios bárbaros fighting US and Mexican
control, Texas slaves fleeing south into Mexico, and debt peons, who faced almost
equally grim servitude in Mexico, fleeing north — and many who fled were killed
or recaptured.367
Even in Mexico, slave raiders continued to pursue them, and new fugitives
continued to join the community. In return for safe haven in Mexico, Black
Seminoles, now called Mascogos, fought Comanches and Apaches, and
sometimes helped Mexican authorities repel invasions by “filibusters” (military
adventurers) from Texas.368

75
John Horse went on to a long career of military and civic service. As one
historian recently summarized, “Over a long life he defeated leading US generals,
met two Presidents, served as an adviser to Seminole chiefs, a Scout for the US
Army, and a decorated officer in the Mexican military. He defended free black
settlements on three frontiers.” He died in Mexico City in 1882.369
The interpreter and ex-warrior Abraham had a mixed career after leaving Florida.
The ship that carried him west in 1839 was the scene of a bitterly emotional
leave-taking, according to one observer: “The women were very reluctant to go
and upbraided the men with cowardice … The vessel departed amid their
lamentations and taunts.” In the Indian Territory, he worked off-and-on as an
interpreter. He seems to have been drawn into the conflict between Seminole
militants and accommodationists, and to have sided (unlike John Horse and
Wildcat) with the latter; he and his family also suffered at least one attack by slave
raiders.
Abraham’s last stint as an interpreter was a high-profile one: He joined an 1852
delegation sent to Florida to persuade Billy Bowlegs to emigrate, and toured east
coast cities with the chief. After that, he appears to have withdrawn to his home
on the Little River and raised cattle; according to one newspaper account, he lived
until at least 1870.370
After slavery was abolished in the United States, some Mascogos settled in Texas,
some eventually returned to Indian Territory, and some remained in Mexico. In
1870, Black Seminole warriors in Texas joined the US army, forming the
Detachment of Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. There, they continued to be
recognized for their military prowess and tracking skills, while their people
continued to struggle for land and a living. The black communities in Indian
Territory, already decimated, underwent further suffering and dislocation during
the US civil war and struggled to gain a foothold after it; the survivors were
eventually recognized as members of the Seminole nation.371
The Seminole Negro Indian Scouts were disbanded in 1914. The Seminole tribal
roll closed in 1907, the same year Oklahoma became a state. The Mascogos’ land
grant in Coahuila, Mexico, called Nacimiento de los Negros, was confirmed in
1887 and again in 1919, and the community has survived to this day.372
From Florida, black people seeking freedom continued to flee to the Bahamas
until the civil war. Many who fled in the 1820s settled clandestinely at first on the
more remote islands, especially Andros; but by the end of the decade they had
been recognized as free British subjects. Before their discovery by British officials
in 1828, they had already built a church and started a school. The Bahamas
community, too, has survived to present times.373
Andrew Gué, the escaped St. Augustine slave who fought alongside John Caesar
during the second Seminole war but was recaptured two months after John

76
Caesar’s death, made another break for freedom after the war. In July 1843, he
fled St. Augustine with six other men in a stolen boat, traveling down Florida’s
east coast to Key Biscayne and from there to the Bahamas — an exploit that
caught the attention of British and American abolitionists and created diplomatic
tension between the United States and Britain. Free black Bahamians paid for a
lawyer for the fugitives. In the end, the Bahamas refused to extradite them, and
they appear to have remained free men.374
Mary Ashley, the Prospect Bluff veteran who was captured and sold into slavery,
was still fighting for her own and her children’s freedom a quarter-century later
— enlisting the help of the British consul in Cuba based on the status as a British
subject she had acquired at Prospect Bluff. She no longer had the papers she
received at the fort, and British officials tried to verify her claim in the
government archives. Most of what we know about her comes from a letter
Edward Nicolls wrote in 1843 confirming that she was one of his recruits. It is not
clear whether her claim succeeded.375
For those who were brave or desperate enough to reach for it, and the smaller
number who were fortunate enough to grasp it, the ultimate prize of the
maroons’ perilous journey was freedom and a chance to live in peace. As fugitives
from slavery, some may have been just a few years or a generation removed from
Africa. All of them no doubt experienced pain and fear and the wrenching loss of
beloved people, places, and beliefs. But whether as individuals they experienced
prosperity or ruin, their tenacity and courage would help to shape the soul of
America.

The family of Ben July, a sergeant in the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts, at Seminole
Camp outside Brackettville, Texas, in the 1870s.

77
Notes
The source notes use abbreviations to refer to American State Papers (ASP), an
archival collection at the Library of Congress, and three sections of that
collection: Foreign Relations (FR), Indian Affairs (IA), and Military Affairs (MA).
This is one of several collections cited in the notes that have made materials
available online; the internet addresses for these collections are listed at the top of
the bibliography.

1
Bird, Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles; Etienne-Gray, Black Seminole Indians; Littlefield, Africans and
Seminoles; Lozano and Mock, My Black Seminole ancestors; Mock, Dreaming with the ancestors; Mulroy, Freedom on
the border; Nichols, Line of liberty; Porter, Black Seminoles; Sivad, Juan Caballo. Excellent studies of escape and
marronage with a broader geographical scope include Diouf, Slavery’s exiles; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway
slaves; Kelly, Masterless people; and Price, Maroon societies.
2
Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 712, 737; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 116, 118,
145, 279-280; Schweninger, Maroonage, 16.
3
Williams, Sunshine and shadow, 12.
4
Anthony Dawson, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Oklahoma. Some transcripts of interviews conducted
for the Federal Writers’ Project were heavily edited, including through the introduction of dialect and nonstandard
spellings that did not accurately reflect the interviewees’ speech patterns. (For a discussion of this, see for example
Blassingame, Slave testimony, xlvii-l, and Library of Congress, A note on the language of the narratives.) In spite of
these distortions, the interviewees’ words deserve attention. Two shorter interview collections, conducted slightly
earlier by more highly trained interviewers, are John Cade’s Out of the mouths of ex-slaves and Ophelia Settle Egypt’s
Unwritten history of slavery.
5
John Fields, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Indiana.
6
Berlin, Generations; Bolster, Black Jacks; Cade, Out of the mouths of ex-slaves; Diouf, Slavery’s exiles; Egypt, Unwritten
history of slavery; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves. Many former slaves spoke or wrote about daring and
inventive escape techniques, including William Craft (Craft, Running); Octave Johnson, interviewed in Louisiana in
1863 by the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (Blassingame, Slave testimony, 394–395); Isaac Williams
(Williams, Sunshine and shadow); and Samuel Simeon Andrews and Gus Smith, interviewed in the 1930s by the Federal
Writers Project (Slave narratives, Florida and Missouri). A short selection of accounts by former slaves about escapes
during the slavery era has been published online by the National Humanities Center at
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text8/runawayswpa.pdf.
7
Baptist, Creating an old south, 79; Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 89–92; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 63–64,
210–213; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 156; Riordan, Finding freedom, 35; Schweninger, Maroonage, 14.
8
On George and Lettus: Baptist, Creating an old south, 79. Also, Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 46, 74, 87–92, 134; Franklin and
Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 50, 63–64, 213, 233; Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “Flight from
slavery was often a family affair,” “The runaways left in families,” “Here we have one family”; Maris-Wolf, Hidden in
plain sight, 453.
9
Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 66.
10
Told by all three interview participants; reproduced in Blassingame, Slave testimony, 533–543, at 538 (first published
in Mary White Ovington, Slaves’ reminiscences of slavery, The Independent, vol. 67 [1910],
https://books.google.com/books?id=Z5weAQAAMAAJ&ppis=_e&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false, 1131–
1136).
11
Olmsted, Journey in the seaboard states, 159.
12
Redpath, Roving editor, 288–295, at 293.
13
Still, Underground Railroad, 83–92.
14
Williams, Help me to find my people (digital edition), “The article, titled ‘Another Family Are Free.’”
15
Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 86, 252.

78
16
Bird, The mystery of the cimarrons in colonial Virginia, in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles; Diouf,
Slavery’s exiles; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves; Price, Maroon societies; testimony from former slaves in
Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives: Samuel Simeon Andrews (Florida), Leah Garrett (Georgia), Margrett
Nickerson (Florida), Jordon Smith (Texas).
17
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares; Bilby, Ethnogenesis; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas; Kelly,
Masterless people; Lockley, Runaway slave colonies; Mann and Hecht, Where slaves ruled; Parris, Alliance and
competition; Price, Maroon societies.
18
Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 737. See also Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves;
Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana; Maris-Wolf, Hidden in plain sight; Price, Maroon societies; Schweninger,
Maroonage.
19
Translation adapted from Price, Maroon societies, xviii; original quote appears in Jean et Raoul Parmentier, Le
discours de la navigation de Jean et Raoul Parmentier de Dieppe (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1883,
https://archive.org/details/lediscoursdelana00parm/page/n7), 99.
20
Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 123; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 720; Franklin and Schweninger,
Runaway slaves, 291–292; Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “Slaves and maroons from various
plantations,” “These maroon ‘passages,’” “They met in the cipriére”; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 190–191; Price,
First-time, 102 (“an absolutely staggering amount”).
21
Lockley, Runaway slave colonies, 6; Berlin, Generations, 189, 202; Cecelski, Waterman’s song (digital edition), “Long
vital agents of communication”; Willis Dukes, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Florida; Robert Glenn, in
Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, North Carolina; Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “The
slaves were very well informed”; Landers, Black society, 25; Landers, Atlantic Creoles 5, 24–25; Millett, Maroons of
Prospect Bluff, 13, 240–241; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817–1818, 225; Price, First-time, 81; Pybus, Epic
journeys, 5–6.
22
“I’ve known my mother”: unnamed interviewee in Egypt, Unwritten history, 53; “I went to an old mother”: Robinson,
From log cabin to the pulpit, 29–30.
23
Baptist, Creating an old south, 203; Julia Blanks, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Texas; Julia Brown, in
Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Georgia; Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 25, 126–127, 145, 170, 183, 230–255;
Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 718–720, 723–724; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves,
85–89, 292; Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “During the spring of 1784”; Lockley, Runaway slave
colonies, 6–7, 11–14; Maris-Wolf, Hidden in plain sight, 453; Price, First-time, 153–159.
24
Green Cumby, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Texas.
25
Kent, Palmares: An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190.
26
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares, 553; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas (“all sorts of
craftsmen,” 729); Funari, Conflict; Kent, Palmares: An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190
(“well-kept lands,” 178); Lockley, Runaway slave colonies; Mann and Hecht, Where slaves ruled; Parris, Alliance and
competition.
27
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares, 551–552, 555; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 731; Kent,
Palmares: An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190; Lockley, Runaway slave colonies, 5–6.
28
Kent, Palmares: An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190.
29
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares, 551–552; Lockley, Runaway slave colonies, 8.
30
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares; Kent, Palmares: An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190;
Parris, Alliance and competition.
31
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares, 559; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas 722; Kent, Palmares:
An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190; Lockley, Runaway slave colonies, 8.
32
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas; Kent, Palmares: An
African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190.
33
Kent, Palmares: An African state in Brazil, in Price, Maroon societies, 170–190.
34
Ibrahim, The Afro-Brazilian story; Wills, Brazil’s maroon state.
35
Anderson, Quilombo of Palmares, 546.

79
36
Johannes King, Guerilla warfare: A Bush Negro view, in Price, Maroon societies, 298–304; Price, First-time, 1, 56, 75,
78, 82, 94, 98, 100, 161, 179; Price, The Guianas, in Maroon societies, 293–297; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 467–468,
473.
37
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 127–128; Johannes King, Guerilla warfare: A Bush Negro view, in Price, Maroon societies, 298–
304; Louis [last name unknown] and M. Le Tenneur, Rebel village in French Guiana: A captive’s description, in Price,
Maroon societies, 312–319; Price First-time, 51, 65, 78, 81, 85, 89, 105, 107, 115, 161; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 470–
471.
38
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 132.
39
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 128; Price, First-time, 81.
40
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 127–129, 134; Price, First-time, 89, 161; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 466–471.
41
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 128; Louis [last name unknown] and M. Le Tenneur, Rebel village in French Guiana: A captive’s
description, in Price, Maroon societies, 312–319; Price, First-time, 51–53, 78, 93, 121, 135–137, 140, 143; van der Linden,
The Okanisi, 470.
42
Louis [last name unknown] and M. Le Tenneur, Rebel village in French Guiana: A captive’s description, in Price,
Maroon societies, 312–319, at 315.
43
Price First-time, 59, 64, 121–122; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 472.
44
Louis [last name unknown] and M. Le Tenneur, Rebel village in French Guiana: A captive’s description, in Price,
Maroon societies, 312–319; Price, First-time, 51, 63–64, 121.
45
Price, First-time, 47–49, 54, 70, 78, 80, 82, 85, 89, 90, 93, 98, 112, 124; Price, Uneasy neighbors, 4.
46
Johannes King, Guerilla warfare: A Bush Negro view, in Price, Maroon societies, 298–304; Price, First-time, 51, 102,
128–134, 144; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 471, 475.
47
Price, First-time, 45, 48, 49, 51, 80, 145, 162; Price, Uneasy neighbors; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 467–468.
48
Johannes King, Guerilla warfare: A Bush Negro view, in Price, Maroon societies, 298–304; Price, First-time, 56, 81,
115–116 (“were always a matter of great delicacy”), 153–159; Stedman, Narrative, volume 2, 359–361.
49
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 127; Price, First-time, 70, 116, 148–149; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 470, 478.
50
Bilby, Ethnogenesis, 127; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 723–724; Price, The Guianas, in
Maroon societies, 293–297; van der Linden, The Okanisi, 471–472, 477–478, 480–481.
51
Stedman, Narrative, vol. 1, 68–70.
52
Stedman, Narrative, vol. 2, 116–11.
53
Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 230; Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “Although the maroons were
denounced as brigands.”
54
Baptist, Creating an old south, 158, 203; Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 28, 231–236; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and
quilombolas, 719–720, 725; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 86–89.
55
Herbert Aptheker, Maroons within the present limits of the United States, in Price, Maroon societies, 151–167, at
153–154; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 86; Landers, Slave resistance, 82.
56
Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 87–89.
57
Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 89.
58
Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 230–255.
59
Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 236–252.
60
Bolster, Black Jacks, 13–16; Woodard, Republic of pirates, 1, 3, 78–80, 87–88, 112–114, 131 (“unemployed seamen”),
153, 159, 213, 262–266; Woodard, More than a pirate.
61
Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 121, 122; Florentino and Amantino, Runaways and quilombolas, 718, 721, 730; Hall, Africans
in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “The growth of the cypress industry,” “By the early 1780s,” “During the spring of
1784,” “a powerful family network.”
62
Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 89–90, 124–136.
63
Schweninger, Maroonage, 15.
64
Berlin, Generations, 185–186; Cecelski, Waterman’s song (digital edition), “Together, the character of the coastal
landscape”; Williams, Sunshine and shadow, 60.
65
Craft, Running, 30.

80
66
Olmsted, Journey in the seaboard states, 161.
67
Olmsted, Journey in the seaboard states, 160.
68
David Hunter Strother, quoted in Maris-Wolf, Hidden in plain sight, 452; original article is in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine, vol. 13, p. 451, https://harpers.org/archive/1856/09/the-dismal-swamp/.
69
Maris-Wolf, Hidden in plain sight, 455–456; see also Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 213–215.
70
Olmsted, Journey in the seaboard states, 159–160; Diouf, Slavery’s exiles, 209–229.
71
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 96.
72
Andrews, 10 things about Francis Drake; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-headed hydra, 195; Price, Maroon societies,
14; Twyman, Black Seminole legacy, 25–28.
73
Berlin, Generations, 43–49; Landers, Black society, 24–66.
74
Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital edition), “Jacobin agents”; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff; Pybus, Epic
journeys; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 90–93.
75
Berlin, Generations, 201; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 13; Hall, Africans in colonial Louisiana (digital
edition), “It is clear from the extensive testimony,” “The slaves were very well informed”; Pybus, Epic journeys, 5–6.
76
Millet, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 13.
77
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 24–25; also viewable in The Works of John Adams, vol. 2 (Boston: Little and Brown, 1850,
https://ia800202.us.archive.org/33/items/worksofjohnadams02adam/worksofjohnadams02adam.pdf), 428.
78
Berlin, Generations, 124–125; Bolster: Black Jacks 3, 94; Public Broadcasting Service: Revolution; Pybus, Epic journeys,
8–11, 22–23, 38; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 84–90.
79
Berlin, Generations, 112; Pybus, Epic journeys, 17–19, 50–53; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 85.
80
Pybus, Epic journeys, 60–71; the text of the Paris Peace Treaty is available online at
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp.
81
Pybus, Epic journeys, xvii, 53, 70; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 85.
82
Florida Native American heritage trail; Milanich, Original inhabitants; Worth, Evacuation; Landers, Black/Indian
interaction.
83
Weisman, Like beads, 27 (“near-constant fissioning”), 37; Digital Alabama, The Creek confederacy; Florida Native
American heritage trail; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 179–180; Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 1–2; Mahon and
Weisman, Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee peoples; Sattler, Remnants, renegades, and runaways, 44–50; Wright,
Creeks and Seminoles, 1–2.
84
Covington, Seminoles; Sattler, Remnants, renegades, and runaways; Sturtevant, Creek into Seminole; Weisman,
Unconquered people; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles.
85
“We are strangers”: Cohen, Notices, 215, italics in the original (the reference is to a Bible verse—Exodus 2:22, “I have
been a stranger in a strange land”); “as little knowledge”: Thomas Jesup, letter dated 9 April 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 867.
Also, eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts: Bartram, Travels, 90; Forbes, Sketches, 96; Military court of inquiry,
General order no. 13, Headquarters of the Army, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, 21 March 1837, published in
Niles’ Register, 1 April 1837, 71–73, at 72 (“absence of all knowledge by the general, or any part of his forces, of the
topography of the country”); and more recent accounts: Covington, Seminoles, 82; Fairbanks: Ethnohistorical report, 22;
Mahon, History, 129; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 100, 156; Riordan, Finding freedom, 35.
86
Brown, Tales, 7–8; Covington, Seminoles, 27; Hammond, Spanish fisheries, 355, 357; Missall and Missall, Seminole
wars, 155–156; Simmons, Notices, 78; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 13, 64.
87
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose; Landers, Black society, 24–25, 32–35; Landers, Spanish sanctuary; Riordan,
Finding freedom, 25–26; Wright, Dispatches.
88
Berlin, Generations, 46–49; Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 1, 20; Landers, Black society, 7–8, 27–28, 50, 137, 188,
201; Landers, Spanish sanctuary; National Park Service, Fort Mose site.

81
89
Berlin, Generations, 44, 74; Landers Black society, 27, 30, 34, 47; Landers, Spanish sanctuary. George Cato, a
descendant of the leader of the Stono Rebellion, shared his family’s account of the rebellion with an interviewer for the
Federal Writers’ Project in 1937. That interview was not included in the project’s standard collection for South
Carolina, but a copy of the interview transcript exists with the other Federal Writers Project papers at the University of
South Carolina’s South Caroliniana Library, and it has been reproduced in several secondary sources, including the
National Humanities Center’s online resource Two views of the Stono slave rebellion,
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/peoples/text4/stonorebellion.pdf.
90
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 181–182; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 11.
91
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 20; Landers, Black society, 30–35; Landers, Spanish sanctuary; Los Negros
Fugitivos de los Plantages de Yngleses á S.M., Florida, Junio 10 de 1738, in Wright, Dispatches, 175; National Park
Service, Fort Mose site.
92
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 22–23; Landers, Black society, 36–37; TePaske, Fugitive slave.
93
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 24–25; Landers, Black society, 30, 47–49; National Park Service, Fort Mose site.
94
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 32–33; Florida Museum of Natural History, Fort Mose; Landers, Black society, 49.
95
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 30–31; Florida Museum of Natural History, Fort Mose; Landers, Black society, 32,
49–53, 113.
96
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 34; Landers, Black society, 55–56; TePaske, Fugitive slave.
97
El Gobernador de la Florida, D. Fulgencio Garcia de Solis á S.M., S. Agustin de la Florida, Diciembre 7 de 1752, in
Wright, Dispatches, 187; Landers, Black society, 47–48; Landers, Spanish sanctuary.
98
Landers, Black society, 52–57.
99
Deagan and MacMahon, Fort Mose, 37; Landers, Black society, 59, 113; Landers, Spanish sanctuary.
100
Landers Atlantic Creoles, 48, 98–100, 111; Landers, Spanish sanctuary, 311.
101
Landers Atlantic Creoles, 100; Landers, Black society, 13; Parr, San Miguel de Gualdape; Wright, Creeks and
Seminoles, 6, 73–100, 164–165, 278.
102
Landers, Slave resistance, 85; Riordan, Finding freedom, 24, note 1; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 84, 86.
103
Covington, Seminoles 5, 12; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 192–193; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 6–7; Porter,
Black Seminoles, 4–5; Weisman, Labor and survival, 70.
104
Covington, Seminoles, 96; Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 130–131; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 179–
180, 185; Porter, Black Seminoles, 4–5; Riordan, Finding freedom; Weisman, Plantation system, 142; Wright, Blacks in
British East Florida.
105
Brown, Tales, 7; Landers, Black society, 3; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 61, 142–143, 148, 204; Porter, Negroes
and the Seminole War, 1835–1842, 427.
106
Bird, Did Seminole slaves have a “controlling influence” over their Indian masters? in Rebellion: John Horse and the
Black Seminoles; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 185; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835–1842, 427–428.
107
Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 98.
108
Nineteenth century accounts: Giddings, Exiles, 4–5, 79; McCall, Letters, 160; Morse, Report, 311 (quoting Indian
agent Jean A. Penieres). More recent accounts: Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 130; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 5.
109
Simmons, Notices, 76.
110
Wiley Thompson, letter dated 27 April 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 533–534.
111
Nineteenth century accounts: McCall, Letters, 160; Williams, Territory of Florida, 240. More recent accounts: Porter,
East Florida annexation plot, 14; Weik, Archaeology, 139–140; Weik, Ethnogenesis, 224–225.
112
“Unbounded influence”: William Duval, letters dated 12 January 1826 and 2 March 1826, Territorial papers, vol. 23,
413–414 and 452–454. Other contemporary accounts: Richard Call, letter dated 22 March 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 464;
William Duval, letter dated 20 January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 458; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 26 March 1837, ASPMA
vol. 7, 835; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 16 June 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 876; Sprague, The Florida war, 81, 100, 309; Wiley
Thompson, letter dated 1 January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 453–455; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 27 April 1835, ASPMA
vol. 6, 533–534. More recent accounts: Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 19; Porter, Black Seminoles, 27.
113
Horatio Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 84; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 185; Mahon, History, 78;
Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 97–98.

82
114
Wright, Blacks in British East Florida, 427.
115
“Because the black fugitives”: Hall, African religious retentions, 49. Also, Porter, Black Seminoles, 6; Porter, East
Florida annexation plot, 14–15; Weisman, Labor and survival, 77.
116
Nineteenth century accounts: letter from a highly respectable gentleman of Florida, dated 20 January 1836, ASPMA
vol. 6, 20 (“better disciplined and more intelligent”); J. B. Hogan, letter dated 1 February 1836, ASPMA vol. 7, 259
(“decidedly the most active, keen, and intelligent fellows among them”); Daniel Newnan, letter dated 19 October 1812,
published in Smith, United States troops (part 3), 155 (“including negroes who were their best soldiers”); Sprague, The
Florida war, 309 (“the most formidable foe”). More recent accounts: Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 181, 185; Marotti,
Heaven’s soldiers, 65; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 16, 19; Porter, East Florida annexation plot, 14–16; Porter,
Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835–1842, 428–429.
117
Sprague, The Florida war, 34, 57, 66; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 180; Weisman, Plantation system, 142. Years later, in
Texas, the Seminole warrior Wildcat, who had strong ties to the Black Seminoles, nonetheless tried to sell two of his
black associates during a drinking spree in Fredericksburg — Porter, Black Seminoles, 129–130.
118
Vignoles, Observations, 134–135.
119
Sprague, The Florida war, 50–51.
120
“Vassals and allies”: Edmund Gaines, letter dated 28 February 1836, ASPMA vol. 7, 427.
121
Nineteenth century accounts: Alachua County slaveholders, petition dated January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 465; Coe,
Red patriots, 14; Sprague, The Florida war, 66. More recent accounts: Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate,
131–132; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 181; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 98–99.
122
Mahon, History, 201; Porter, East Florida annexation plot, 13–14; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 405.
123
Fairbanks, Ethnohistorical report; Sattler, Remnants, renegades, and runaways; Weisman, Like beads; Wright, Creeks
and Seminoles.
124
Douglas, Autobiography, 120; Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 131, 150; Porter, Abraham, 17–18;
Porter, Florida slaves and free, 391.
125
Frank Berry, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Florida; Sheldon, Seminole attacks, 189.
126
Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 218.
127
Simmons, Notices, 41, 44.
128
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88–95 (“a guide, interpreter, and horses,” 89).
129
McCall, Letters, 160.
130
Nineteenth century accounts: Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 87, 92; C. Fitzpatrick, letter
dated 9 January 1836, ASPMA vol. 7, 218–219. More recent accounts: Brown, Peace River, 8, 11; Brown, Tales, 7, 10;
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 180, 190, 193.
131
Nineteenth century accounts: Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88–89; McCall, Letters, 160;
Simmons, Notices, 48, 76; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 27 April 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 533–534; Young, Topographical
memoir, 100. More recent accounts: Frank Berry, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Florida; Florida black
heritage trail; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 19, 20, 85; Parker, Cattle trade, 153–155; Porter, East Florida annexation
plot, 14–16; Schafer, Yellow silk ferret, 85; Weik, Ethnogenesis, 228; Weisman, Labor and survival, 76.
132
Young, Topographical memoir, 100 (“Their cabbins”); Porter, East Florida annexation plot, 15–16; Simmons,
Notices, 44, 76.
133
Jarvis, Army surgeon’s notes, part 4, 270.
134
Landers, Black society, 163–164.
135
Women: Simmons, Notices, 45; Frank Berry, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Florida. Children: Millett,
Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 148, 155–156, 235; Weik, Archaeology, 134. Molly: Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 183; Landers,
Black society, 91–92.
136
Nineteenth century accounts: Marcus Buck, letter dated 4 August 1816, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 25
February 1836, 115–116; Duncan Clinch, letter dated 2 August 1816, published in Niles’ Register, 20 November 1819,
186–188; Giddings, Exiles, 135–136. More recent accounts: Covington, Seminoles, 45–46; Millett, Maroons of Prospect
Bluff, 228, 243–244; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817–1818, 273–274.
137
Thomas Jesup, letter dated 7 February 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 828.
138
Weik, Archeology, 133–134.

83
139
Quote: Abraham, letter dated 25 April 1838, reprinted in Porter, Abraham, 38, and Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 200–
201. See also Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 161–165.
140
Nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 174; Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88, 93;
Jones, Brief narration, 63; McCall, Letters, 160; Simmons, Notices, 59. More recent accounts: Weik, Archaeology, 126–
127, 150; Weisman, Plantation system, 144.
141
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88; Jones, Brief narration, 63.
142
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 196; Porter, Black Seminoles, 26;
Weik, Ethnogenesis, 221.
143
Cohen, Notices, 174; Jones, Brief narration, 63; McCall, Letters, 160; Weik, Archaeology, 128.
144
McCall, Letters, 160. See also Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88; Jones, Brief narration, 63.
145
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 88.
146
Weik, Ethnogenesis, 228.
147
Cohen, Notices, 176.
148
“He always smiles”: John Casey, quoted in Coe, Red patriots, 45–46; “perfect Talleyrand”: unnamed officer of the
army, letter dated 22 May 1837, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 15 June 1837, 378; phrase also appeared later in
Motte, Journey, 210. Other nineteenth century accounts: Childs, Extracts, 374; Coe, Red patriots, 45–46; Cohen, Notices,
239; Douglas, Autobiography, 121; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 7 June 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 871; McCall, Letters, 160;
Sprague, The Florida war, 100; Williams, Territory of Florida, 214. More recent accounts: Klos, Blacks and the Seminole
removal debate, 141; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 11, 175, 185, 194–198; Landers, Black society, 224, 236; Mahon, History,
62, 77, 79, 128, 199, 201; Porter, Abraham 5, 7, 10–11, 13, 17–19; Porter, Black Seminoles, 27, 33, 48, 77.
149
McCall, Letters, 160.
150
“Chiefly runaway slaves”: McCall, Letters, 160. Other nineteenth century account: Dexter papers reproduced in
Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 82, 88. More recent accounts: Landers, Black society, 236; Porter, Black Seminoles, 24–25, 54–
55; Weik, Ethnogenesis, 214.
151
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter; McCall, Letters. Horatio Dexter’s trip took place in 1823, and
one of his instructions (at least theoretically) was to bring in runaway slaves; George McCall visited Pilaklikaha in 1826
but did not publish his account until 1868.
152
Nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 174; Jones, Brief narration, 63; Potter, War in Florida, 173–174. More
recent accounts: Mahon, History, 156–157; Porter, Black Seminoles, 55–56.
153
Jones, Brief narration, 63.
154
Three-pronged attack: Mahon, History, 143–157; Porter, Black Seminoles, 53–57; “a complete failure”: Cohen,
Notices, 192.
155
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 179; Landers, Black society, 3; Mahon, History, 19; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 61,
142–143, 148, 204; Porter, Black Seminoles, 4–6; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 73–100.
156
Brown, Peace River; Covington, Seminoles; Cusick, The other war of 1812; Landers, Atlantic Creoles; Mahon, History;
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff; Porter, Black Seminoles.
157
Cusick, The other war of 1812; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 110–119; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 5–7; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 3–12; Porter, East Florida annexation plot, 26.
158
Thomas Smith, letter dated 24 February 1813, published in Smith, United States troops, part 4, 271–274.
159
Brown, Peace River, 6–8; Brown, Sarrazota; Covington, Seminoles, 33; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 232;
Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 13; Weisman, Like beads, 78.
160
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 81; Brown, Peace River, 4, 7–8; Brown, Sarrazota, 6–8; Brown,
Tales, 7–10; Davis, The Gulf, 119–121; Dodd, The wrecking business; Hammond, Spanish fisheries; Klos, Blacks and the
Seminole removal debate, 133–134; Landers, Black society, 237; Weisman, Like beads, 74–75.
161
Gadsden, The defenses of the Floridas (“the last rallying spot,” 248); A.C.W. Fanning, letter dated 27 November
1818, ASPMA vol. 1, 752.
162
“Make prisoners of all the men of colour … surprised and captured”: report in the Charleston City Gazette and
Commercial Advertiser, quoted in Brown, Sarrazota, 13. Also, Brown, Peace River, 7–9, 19–22; Brown, Tales; Landers,
Atlantic Creoles, 193; Worth, Creolization, 153.
163
Brown, Peace River, 21; Brown, Sarrazota, 12–15; Brown, Tales, 11–13.

84
164
Nineteenth century accounts: John Bell, letter dated 17 July 1821, Territorial papers, vol. 22, 125–126; Forbes,
Sketches, 105; Vignoles, Observations, 135–136. More recent accounts: Baram, A haven from slavery; Brown, Sarrazota;
Brown, Tales; Goggin, Seminole Negroes of Andros, 204; Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas, 45–47; Landers,
Atlantic Creoles, 193–194; Landers, Black society, 237; Neill, Sailing vessels; Newton, History of Red Bays; Worth, Early
African heritage.
165
Dexter papers reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 92.
166
Gad Humphreys, letter dated 2 March 1825, Territorial papers, vol. 23, 202–203; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 1
January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 453–455, at 454; John Winslett, letter dated 21 December 1833, ASPMA vol. 6, 453.
167
Simmons, Notices, 41.
168
Simmons, Notices, 44.
169
Simmons, Notices, 44.
170
Simmons, Notices, 46, 51.
171
Childs, Extracts, 372–373 (“fifty Indian huts”); Thomas Jesup, letter dated 7 February 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 827–829;
Mahon, History, 198–199; Porter, Black Seminoles, 69–70.
172
Archibald Henderson, letter dated 28 January 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 829–830.
173
Childs, Extracts, 373; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 7 February 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 827–829.
174
Nineteenth century accounts: Potter, War in Florida, 14–27 (“hoard of desperadoes,” 17); Sprague, The Florida war,
5. More recent accounts: Covington, Seminoles, 32; Fairbanks, Ethnohistorical report, 22; Foreman, Indian removal, 320;
Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 31; Schafer, Yellow silk ferret, 94.
175
Econchattamico, petition dated 2 April 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 462.
176
“Quiet and undisputed possession” / “no shadow of a claim”: J. A. Cameron (judge, West Florida district), statement
dated 12 April 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 467–468. Other nineteenth century accounts: Giddings, Exiles, 89–92; Potter, War
in Florida, 14–16; William Duval, letter dated 26 January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 458–459; William Duval, letter dated 23
May 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 461–462; Econchattamico, petition dated 2 April 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 462; Grand jury,
Jackson County, statement dated March 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 469–470; William Pope, affidavit dated 2 April 1836,
ASPMA vol. 6, 462–463; George Walker, letter dated 21 April 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 468. More recent accounts:
Foreman, Indian removal, 324–325; Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 30, 49; Porter, Black Seminoles, 35.
177
John Walker, letter dated 28 July 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 463 (italics in the original).
178
“Fully hot to go” / “very much alarmed”: Stephen Richards, letter dated 4 November 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 465. Also,
Daniel Boyd, letter dated 15 July 1838, published in Johnston, Documentary evidence, 39–40; Elbert Herring, letter
dated 4 June 1832, ASPMA vol. 6, 459–460; Elbert Herring, letter dated 28 October 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 459; Potter,
War in Florida, 16; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 24 November 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 463–464; Wiley Thompson, letter
dated 23 September 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 463; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 5 October 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 547;
George Walker, letter dated 21 April 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 468; John Walker, letter dated 28 July 1835, ASPMA vol. 6,
463.
179
Sprague, The Florida war, 34.
180
Sprague, The Florida war, 66.
181
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 37–38; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 19 July 1835, ASPMA vol. 6, 460.
182
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 48, 98, 111; Landers, Spanish sanctuary, 311.
183
Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 131–133; Schafer, Yellow silk ferret, 93 (“it has been a practice”).
184
Narrative of a voyage, 221–222.
185
Covington, Seminoles, 41, 44; Landers, Atlantic Creoles 187, 311, note 29; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 239–242;
Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 214–215.
186
Simmons, Notices, 50.
187
Sprague, The Florida war, 48.
188
Schafer, Yellow silk ferret, 93.
189
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 192.

85
190
Sprague, The Florida war, 26–27, 37–38, 47; Covington, Seminoles, 50–71; Foreman, Indian removal, 319–321;
Landers, Black society, 174; Mahon, History, 29–50; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 26; Schafer, U.S. territory and state.
Also see the “Kidnappers and swindlers” section above.
191
Sprague, The Florida war, 57 and 66.
192
For more on this, including source citations, see the discussion of the Second Seminole War below, especially the
sections “Collapse of the Fort Dade Capitulation” and “Elusive compromise.”
193
“There was a party”: Porter, Florida slaves and free, 407, quoting Lieutenant Colonel W. S. Harney, 16 May 1837;
“one of the most respected”: Sprague, The Florida war, 46–47, quoting Indian agent Gad Humphreys, 1 March 1828.
Also, Porter, Black Seminoles, 81; Porter, Osceola and the Negroes, 236–237.
194
Landers, Slave resistance, 81; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 6–7; Porter, Black Seminoles, 4–5; Riordan, Finding
freedom, 35; Schafer, Yellow silk ferret, 93; Weisman, Labor and survival, 70. On the East Florida Rangers: Wright,
Blacks in British East Florida, 435; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 91.
195
Nineteenth century account: Smith, United States troops. More recent accounts: Cusick, The other war of 1812;
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 110–115; Porter, East Florida annexation plot.
196
Landers, Black society, 220–228; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 7, 117; Porter, Black Seminoles, 8.
197
Cusick, The other war of 1812, 205–207, 217, 221; Griffin, Life on the plantations, 169–170; Marotti, Heaven’s
soldiers, 65.
198
David Mitchell, letter dated 19 September 1812, extract published in State papers and publick documents of the
United States, vol. 9 (Boston: Thomas B. Wait, 1819, available from the Internet Archive at
https://archive.org/details/statepaperspubli09uspruoft/page/n3), 168–172 (allegation on page 169); Thomas Smith,
letter dated 30 July 1812, published in Smith, United States troops, part 2, 106–107; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 111;
Porter, East Florida annexation plot, 24.
199
David Mitchell, letter dated 6 July 1812, published in State papers and publick documents of the United States, vol. 9
(Boston: Thomas B. Wait, 1819, available from the Internet Archive at
https://archive.org/details/statepaperspubli09uspruoft/page/n3), 194–196.
200
“The banditti”: Benigno Garzia, letter dated 12 December 1812, published in Niles’ Register, 16 January 1813, p 311–
312. Also, Cusick, The other war of 1812, 232; Landers, Black society, 202–228; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 12.
201
Cusick, The other war of 1812, 217–218; Landers, Black society, 224; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 7; Porter, East Florida
annexation plot, 9.
202
Cusick, The other war of 1812, 232–234; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 114–115; McClellan, History, chapter 19, 8–10;
Porter, Black Seminoles, 9.
203
Daniel Newnan, report dated 19 October 1812, published in Smith, United States troops, part 3, 146–155 (“including
negroes who were their best soldiers,” 155). Also, Covington, Seminoles, 29–31; Cusick, The other war of 1812, 239–244;
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 115; Porter, Black Seminoles, 9–11.
204
Daniel Newnan, report dated 19 October 1812, published in Smith, United States troops, part 3, 146–155; Covington,
Seminoles, 29, 31; Cusick, The other war of 1812, 241–244; Porter, Black Seminoles, 10.
205
Covington, Seminoles, 32; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 7; Monaco, Fort Mitchell, 5–6; Porter, Black Seminoles, 11–12;
Porter, East Florida annexation plot, 26–28.
206
Cusick, The other war of 1812, 216–217, 309; Landers, Black society, 225, 361 note 96; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 117–
118.
207
Landers, Black society, 229–231; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 19, 40–47; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 24;
Owsley, Struggle for the Gulf borderlands, 96–105.
208
Landers, Black society, 229–231; Malcomson, Edward Nicolls; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 61–65 (“Better or
braver soldiers,” 64), 77, 86–88, 148, 200, 204; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 25–26; Porter, Black Seminoles, 15.
209
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 121–125; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 75–77, 88–94, 117, 124; Owsley, Struggle for
the Gulf borderlands, 179–184.
210
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 125–126; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 97, 108–109, 115–118, 120, 124–125, 161, 163;
National Park Service, Enslaved African-Americans confront difficult choices; Porter, Black Seminoles, 16; Public
Broadcasting System, Black soldiers and sailors in the war of 1812.
211
Cusick, The other war of 1812, 206; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 61, 76–77, 125, 127, 144, 148, 150, 159, 189–
192, 200, 204; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 14; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817–1818, 260–261.

86
212
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 133–135, 138–140, 159–160, 173–175, 178, 193, 202, 210; Missall and Missall,
Seminole wars, 25–26; Porter, Black Seminoles, 16; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 183.
213
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 147, 151, 154 (“There were Africans”), 189–190.
214
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 6, 45, 105, 117, 144, 148, 155–165, 163, 170, 228.
215
Coker and Watson, Indian traders, 302; Landers, Black society, 231; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 139, 176, 178–
180, 192–193, 224, 228, 258; Porter, Black Seminoles, 16.
216
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 180, 190–193.
217
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 123–124; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 151, 192, 210; Porter, Negroes and the
Seminole War, 1817–1818, 261; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 197.
218
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 124–126; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 102–110, 115–116, 216.
219
Mahon, History, 23; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 220–223; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 14; Porter, Negroes
and the Seminole War, 1817–1818, 261.
220
Duncan Clinch, letter dated 2 August 1816, published in Niles’ Register, 20 November 1819, 186–188; Millett,
Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 222–225; Mahon, History, 23; Porter, Black Seminoles, 16–17; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
197–199.
221
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 224, 226; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817–1818, 218, 222.
222
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 225–226.
223
“We were pleased”: Marcus Buck, letter dated 4 August 1816, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 25 February
1836, 116. Also, Duncan Clinch, letter dated 2 August 1816, published in Niles’ Register, 20 November 1819, 186–188;
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 225–227; Porter, Black Seminoles, 17.
224
Marcus Buck, letter dated 4 August 1816, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 25 February 1836, 116.
225
Duncan Clinch, letter dated 2 August 1816, published in Niles’ Register, 20 November 1819, 186–188; Landers,
Atlantic Creoles, 121–127; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 28–30; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 144, 222–228.
226
“Morning and evening gun”: Edward Nicolls, letter dated 11 September 1843, published in Correspondence on the
slave trade 1844, 13–14. Also, Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 118–119, 226.
227
Marcus Buck, letter dated 4 August 1816, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 25 February 1836, 115–116;
Duncan Clinch, letter dated 2 August 1816, published in Niles’ Register, 20 November 1819, 186–188; Landers, Atlantic
Creoles, 124–127; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 205–206, 228–229; Porter, Black Seminoles, 17; Wright, Creeks and
Seminoles, 199–200.
228
Nineteenth century accounts: Edward Nicolls, letter dated 11 September 1843, published in Correspondence on the
slave trade with foreign powers 1844, 13–14; George Perryman, letter dated 24 February 1817, ASPIA vol. 2, 155. More
recent accounts: Brown, Peace River, 7–8; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 45, 117, 119–120, 223–227, 236–239;
Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 31; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 15.
229
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 101, 127, 180, 208, 210–213, 231.
230
Brown, Peace River, 9–10; Mahon, History, 17, 24; Mahon and Weisman, Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee
peoples.
231
David Mitchell, statement to the US Senate dated 23 February 1819, ASPMA vol. 1, 748.
232
Mahon and Weisman, Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee peoples; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 243, 248;
Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 41; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817–1818, 254.
233
George Perryman, letter dated 24 February 1817, ASPIA vol. 2, 155. Also, Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 234–
235.
234
Brown, Sarrazota, 6; Coker and Watson, Indian traders, 314–316; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 187–190; Millett,
Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 96, 231–232, 236–240; Wright, Note on the first Seminole war, 572–574.
235
Robert Ambrister, undated letter, published in The trials of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, 69–71.
236
Covington, Seminoles, 41–42; Mahon, History, 24–25; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 240; Missall and Missall,
Seminole wars, 35–40; Porter, Black Seminoles, 20.
237
“Adopt the necessary measures”: John Calhoun, letter dated 26 December 1817, ASPMA vol. 1, 690. Also,
Covington, Seminoles, 43–46; Mahon, History, 25–27; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 241–242.

87
238
Covington, Seminoles, 45; Landers, Atlantic Creoles 185, 187; Mahon, History, 10, 16, 24; Millett, Maroons of Prospect
Bluff, 232–233, 243; Porter, Black Seminoles, 13, 18, 22.
239
“Nero commanded”: testimony by Peter Cook, The trials of Arbuthnot and Ambrister 8, 37. Also, William Hambly,
certificate dated 24 July 1818, Appendix to the history of the fifteenth Congress (second session), 2018–2019,
https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&fileName=034/llac034.db&recNum=116; Landers, Atlantic
Creoles, 11, 183, 185, 187; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 233–234, 241; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War,
1817–1818, 266, 269, 272.
240
“To see the Negroes righted”: testimony of John Arbuthnot, The trials of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, 66. Also, Millett,
Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 236–239; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 122, 187–188; Porter, Black Seminoles, 18, 21; Missall and
Missall, Seminole wars, 33.
241
“The main drift”: Alexander Arbuthnot, letter dated 2 April 1818, ASPFR vol. 4, 584. Also, Porter, Black Seminoles,
21–22; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 205.
242
Brown, Peace River, 9–10; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 41; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 16; Porter, Negroes
and the Seminole war, 1817–1818, 273–275.
243
Mahon, History, 25.
244
John Prince and Nero Bowlegs, testimony given in St. Augustine, 10 and 11 January 1828, published in United States
congressional serial set, 27th Congress, 2nd session, House of Representatives
(https://books.google.com/books?id=WI9HAQAAIAAJ&dq), pages 4–5 of Report 723, dated 20 May 1842 (pages
1545–1547 of the document as a whole). The two men’s statements were entered into the congressional record in 1842
as part of an investigation into a claim by an east Florida slaveholder for compensation for the loss of his “property”
during the first Seminole war. (The claim was denied.)
245
John Prince and Nero Bowlegs testimony 1828, as described in the previous note, pages 4–6.
246
Brown, Peace River, 9–10; Covington, Seminoles, 46–47; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 190–192; Porter, Black Seminoles,
23, 25.
247
Covington, Seminoles, 46–47; Mahon, History, 27; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 38–47; Porter, Black Seminoles,
19–24; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 208.
248
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 191; Porter, Black Seminoles, 26.
249
Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 183–184; the author refers to this young man as an adolescent.
250
John Prince and Nero Bowlegs, testimony given in St. Augustine, 10 and 11 January 1828, published in United States
congressional serial set, 27th Congress, 2nd session, House of Representatives
(https://books.google.com/books?id=WI9HAQAAIAAJ&dq), pages 4–5 of Report 723, dated 20 May 1842 (pages
1545–1547 of the document as a whole), pages 4–6.
251
“Old Nero”: Simmons, Recollections of the late campaign, 554–555. Also, Cohen, Notices, 189, 195; G. S. Drane,
testimony in a military court of inquiry dated 27 January 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 384–385; Samuel Parkhill, letter dated 18
July 1837, published in Niles’ Register, 19 August 1837, 397–398; Porter, Negro guides and interpreters, 178–179; Potter,
War in Florida, 176.
252
Brown, Sarrazota, 13–16; Brown, Tales, 11–14; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 193; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff,
250–251.
253
“We hope that you will not send us south”: Neamathla, statement on 11 September 1823, ASPIA vol. 2, 439. Also,
Gad Humphreys, letter dated 6 March 1827, published in Sprague, The Florida war, 37–39; Covington, Seminoles, 52–
54, 58–60; Mahon, History, 29–50; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 70–72.
254
George Brooke, letter dated 20 December 1825, published in Niles’ Register, 18 March 1826, 37.
255
Sprague, The Florida war, 47; Covington, Seminoles, 52–53; Porter, Black Seminoles, 28–29; Schafer, U.S. territory
and state. See also the “Kidnappers and swindlers” section above.
256
Sprague, The Florida war, 84–90 (“We had been preparing,” 90); Foreman, Indian removal, 326; Mahon, History, 95–
96; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 431–433.
257
Covington, Seminoles, 79–80; Mahon, History, 103–106; Porter, Black Seminoles, 39–43. See also the “East coast
plantation attacks” section below.
258
Mahon, History, 131, 148–150, 161–166, 183, 191; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 65–66; Missall and Missall, Seminole
wars, 80, 108, 130–131.

88
259
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 24–25; Mahon, History, 197–199, 205, 223–224, 252; Missall and Missall, Seminole
wars, 126–127, 134, 141; Porter, Black Seminoles, 36, 69–70, 82–86, 97; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–
1842, 441–442; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 264, 300.
260
Nineteenth century accounts: Jarvis, Army surgeon’s notes, part 3, 451–452; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 6 July 1838,
published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 26 July 1838, 49–54; Sprague, The Florida war, 214. More recent accounts:
Florida Seminole wars heritage trail; Mahon, History, 219–235; Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 142–145; Porter,
Black Seminoles, 88–93.
261
See the sections “Elusive compromise” and “Black guides and interpreters” below.
262
“So sudden an outbreak”: Sprague, The Florida war, 400. Also, Walker Keith Armistead, letter dated 30 May 1840,
published in Niles’ Register, 27 June 1840, 260; Benjamin Beall, report dated 27 September 1840, published in Army and
Navy Chronicle, 21 October 1840, 268; J. G. Rains, report dated 29 May 1840, published in Niles’ Register, 27 June 1840,
260; Sprague, The Florida war, 278–279, 400, 457–458; Covington, Seminoles, 98–100; Mahon, History, 197, 305–308;
Missall and Missall, Seminole wars, 168, 183–185, 200–201.
263
Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 448–449; Important from Florida, Niles’ Register, 18 August 1838,
386; Letter from a young officer, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 8 August 1839, 92–93; G. J. Rains, report
published in Niles’ Register, 27 June 1840, 260; Recent Indian murders in Florida, Niles’ Register, 23 May 1840, 180–181;
Walker, Massacre; Benjamin Beall, report dated 27 September 1840, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 21 October
1840, 268–269; letter from Fort Armistead, Sarasota, dated 14 March 1841, published in Niles’ Register, 10 April 1841,
90.
264
See the section “Elusive compromise” below. On Wildcat’s band, Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842,
448.
265
McCall, Letters, 401–404 (“a mass of grassy ponds,” 401); Sprague, The Florida war, 456–459; Covington, Seminoles,
105–106; Mahon, History, 307–308; Porter, Black Seminoles, 106.
266
Sprague, The Florida war, 458.
267
McCall, Letters, 404–409; Sprague, The Florida war, 462–468, 482, 485–486; Covington, Seminoles, 106–109; Mahon,
History, 308, 315–321; Porter, Black Seminoles, 106.
268
Douglas, Autobiography, 120–121; Sheldon, Seminole attacks, 189; Bird, The largest slave rebellion in US history and
Tally of plantation slaves in the Black Seminole slave rebellion, in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles; Klos,
Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 131, 150; Mahon, History, 128; Porter, Black Seminoles, 33, 39; Rivers, Slavery
in Florida, 13.
269
Nineteenth century accounts: An authentic narrative; Cohen, Notices, 79–80, 88–91; Jones, Brief narration, 59; The
Seminole war, Niles’ Register, 27 February 1836, 441; Ormond, Reminiscences, 18; Potter, War in Florida, 116–118;
Sheldon, Seminole attacks, 188–190; Sprague, The Florida war, 106; St. Augustine Herald, untitled article dated 13
January 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 21–22; Williams, Territory of Florida, 224. More recent accounts: Black, Richard
Fitzpatrick’s South Florida, 39, 40; Boyd, The Seminole war, 58–69; Florida Seminole wars heritage trail; Griffin,
Halifax-Mosquito, 20–21; Kirk, William Cooley, part 1, 7–9, and part 2, 24; Mahon, History, 102, 135–138; Porter,
Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 433–434.
270
Jones, Brief narration, 59–60.
271
“Chasing the chickens”: Ormond Reminiscences, 14–15. Also, Cohen, Notices, 89–92; St. Augustine Herald, untitled
article dated 13 January 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 21–22; The Seminole war, Niles’ Register, 27 February 1836, 441; Carrier,
Trade and plunder networks, 76–78; Griffin, Halifax-Mosquito, 20; Mahon, History, 112.
272
Nineteenth century accounts: An authentic narrative; Cohen, Notices, 79–80; Potter, War in Florida, 117. More
recent accounts: Black, Richard Fitzpatrick’s South Florida, 39–40; Boyd, The Seminole war, 67; Kirk, William Cooley,
part 2, 24–25.
273
“Undisciplined rabble”: Ormond Reminiscences, 15. Other nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 91;
Williams, Territory of Florida, 224. More recent accounts: Boyd, The Seminole War, 64; Mahon, History, 112, 137–138.
274
Nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 92–94; Ormond Reminiscences, 14–18 (“Ben Wiggins … was greatly
scandalized,” “devil take the hindermost,” 16); Potter, War in Florida, 118–119; Sheldon, Seminole attacks, 190–191;
Williams, Territory of Florida, 224–225. More recent accounts: Boyd, The Seminole war, 64; Carrier, Trade and plunder
networks, 78; Mahon, History, 112, 137–138.

89
275
“Will, a good black waiting man”: Ormond Reminiscences, 16. Other nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices,
94–96, 143; The Seminole war, Niles’ Register, 27 February 1836, 441; Jones, Brief narration, 59. More recent accounts:
Boyd, The Seminole war, 64–65; Knecht, Florida’s Seminole wars, 83; Mahon, History, 112, 138.
276
“Some of Depeyster’s negroes”: St. Augustine Herald, untitled article dated 13 January 1836, ASPMA vol. 6, 21–22.
Also, Potter, War in Florida, 118; Sheldon, Seminole attacks, 191–192 (“they were glad enough,” 192); Carrier, Trade
and plunder networks, 74; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 433–434.
277
Sheldon, Seminole attacks, 189; Gold, History of Volusia County, 52; Sweett and Marsden, New Smyrna.
278
“Faithful servant”: Potter, War in Florida, 118; “two of gen. Hernandez’s negroes”: The Seminole war, Niles’ Register,
27 February 1836, 441. Also, Cohen, Notices, 92; Boyd, The Seminole war, 63–64; Carrier, Trade and plunder networks,
138; Griffin, Halifax-Mosquito, 6, 19.
279
“Happy and secure state of servitude”: militia volunteer quoted in Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842,
434; “the very worst feature”: quoted in Porter, Florida slaves and free, 394; “this, you may be assured”: Thomas Jesup,
letter dated 9 December 1836, ASPMA vol. 7, 820–821. Also, Bird, The largest slave rebellion, in Rebellion: John Horse
and the Black Seminoles.
280
Andrew Humphreys, journal entry for 19 June 1836, in Pearcy, Documents, 226. Also, Porter, Florida slaves and free,
396.
281
L. Gates, letter dated 12 June 1836, quoted in Porter, Florida slaves and free, 396.
282
An authentic narrative, 8–12.
283
Nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 96; Douglas, Autobiography, 120. More recent accounts: Boyd, The
Seminole war, 65; Carrier, Trade and plunder networks, 79–80; Griffin, Life on the plantations, 172.
284
“Most of the powder”: Douglas, Autobiography, 120–121. Also, Jones, Brief narration, 60; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers,
66, 71–73; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 396–397.
285
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 65–71; Porter, Abraham, 17; Porter, Black Seminoles, 73–74; Porter, Florida slaves and
free, 397–398; Porter, John Caesar, 197–199.
286
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 71; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 398, 402–403.
287
Carrier, Trade and plunder networks, 74; Landers, Black society, 248; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 66; Porter, Abraham
17; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 433.
288
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 67–71; Porter, Black Seminoles, 74; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 401–402; Porter, John
Caesar, 200.
289
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 62–63. On other losses of rights and status under US rule, see Landers, Black society, 242,
248, 252.
290
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 52–62.
291
Nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 95; Ormond Reminiscences, 15; Scenes in the Florida war, 502; Sketch
of the Seminole war 201, 215 (“right-hand man”). More recent accounts: Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 112, 182, 252;
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 61–62, 73; Porter, Black Seminoles, 82; Porter, Negro guides and interpreters, 179–180.
292
Mahon, History, 129; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 393; Porter, John Caesar, 191; Porter, Three fighters, 58.
293
Nineteenth century accounts: Douglas, Autobiography, 121; Sketch of the Seminole war, 28. More recent accounts:
Heard, John Caesar; Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 150; Porter, John Caesar, 191–192.
294
Nineteenth century accounts: Potter, War in Florida, 154–164; Prince, Amidst a storm of bullets, 24; Sprague, The
Florida war, 110–111. More recent accounts: Mahon, History, 149; Porter, Black Seminoles, 48–52; Porter, John Caesar
194–195.
295
Nineteenth century accounts: Potter, War in Florida, 154–164; Sprague, The Florida war, 112. More recent accounts:
Porter, Black Seminoles, 51–52, 73; Porter, John Caesar, 194–196.
296
Porter, Black Seminoles, 73; Porter, John Caesar, 196–197.
297
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 67–70; Porter, Black Seminoles, 73–74; Porter, John Caesar, 197–201.
298
Heard, John Caesar; Mahon, History, 197; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 67, 71; Porter, Black Seminoles, 74; Porter, John
Caesar, 199–200.

90
299
Nineteenth century accounts: Cohen, Notices, 86–87; Douglas, Autobiography, 121; Sketch of the Seminole War, 19.
More recent accounts: Bird, The largest slave rebellion and Tally of plantation slaves, in Rebellion: John Horse and the
Black Seminoles; Mahon, History, 128; Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 65; Porter, Black Seminoles, 33, 39; Porter, John
Caesar, 192–193.
300
Thomas Jesup, letter dated 16 June 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 876; Porter, Black Seminoles, 74; Porter, John Caesar, 201–
207.
301
Giddings, Exiles, 138–139; Coe, Red patriots, 45; Covington, Seminoles, 90; Mahon, History, 199–200; Porter,
Abraham, 22; Porter, Black Seminoles, 69–72.
302
Letter from an unnamed officer dated 22 May 1837, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 15 June 1837, 378. On
Abraham’s role in the negotiations, other nineteenth century accounts: Childs, Extracts, 9; Giddings, Exiles, 138, 141.
More recent accounts: Foreman, Indian removal, 344; Mahon, History, 201; Porter, Abraham, 24; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 72–77.
303
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles; McReynolds, The Seminoles; Mulroy, Freedom on the border; Porter, Black
Seminoles; Sivad, Juan Caballo.
304
Giddings, Exiles, 139–140; Foreman, Indian removal, 344–345; Mahon, History, 201.
305
The full text of the agreement is recorded in Sprague, The Florida war, 177–178 and in Negroes, &c., captured from
Indians, 52–53.
306
Nineteenth century accounts: Giddings, Exiles, 139–141; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 18 March 1837, Negroes, &c.,
captured from Indians, 54–55; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 9 April 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 867; Sprague, The Florida war,
178–179. More recent accounts: Foreman, Indian removal, 344–345; Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 18; Mahon,
History, 201–202; Porter, Black Seminoles, 77.
307
Nineteenth century accounts: Giddings, Exiles, 141; Sprague, The Florida war, 178. More recent accounts: Boyd, Asi-
Yaholo, 291–293; Covington, Seminoles, 90; Foreman, Indian removal, 345–346; Mahon, History, 200–204; Porter,
Black Seminoles, 78–79.
308
Thomas Jesup, letter dated 8 May 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 870; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 17 May 1837, ASPMA vol. 7,
838; Boyd, Asi-Yaholo, 292; Covington, Seminoles, 90; Foreman, Indian removal, 346; Porter, Black Seminoles, 79.
309
“The arrival of several Floridians”: Thomas Jesup, letter dated 17 May 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 838. Other Jesup letters:
27 March 1837, quoted in Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 9; 18 April 1837 to Gov. Call, quoted in Giddings, Exiles,
153; 27 April 1837 to J. L. Smith, quoted in Giddings, Exiles, 150; 7 June 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 871. More recent
accounts: Boyd, Asi-Yaholo, 292; Covington, Seminoles, 91; Foreman, Indian removal, 346–347; Mahon, History, 202–
203; Porter, Black Seminoles, 79.
310
“Scarcely less moment”: Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 108–110; general order 79 (issued April 5, modified
May 1 and May 2): Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 2–3, 13–14 (see also 55–56). Other nineteenth century
accounts: Coe, Red patriots, 75–76; Giddings, Exiles, 144, 148, 152. More recent accounts: Foreman, Indian removal,
346; Mahon, History, 201–203; Porter, Black Seminoles, 78.
311
Mahon, History, 202; Porter, Black Seminoles, 78.
312
Letters from Thomas Jesup: 26 March 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 835; 29 March 1837, published in Niles’ Register, 29 April
1837, 133; 9 April 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 867; 26 April 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 12; 27 April 1837,
Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 12–13. See also Mahon, History, 201–202.
313
Thomas Jesup, letter, May 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 870–871 (date not specified, possibly 8 May—compare From the
Army, Niles’ Register, 3 June 1837, 213). See also Mahon, History, 205.
314
Thomas Jesup, letter dated 25 May 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 16.
315
Nineteenth century accounts: Giddings, Exiles, 149–151, 252–253; C. A. Harris, letter dated 5 May 1837, Negroes,
&c., captured from Indians, 39–41, at 40. More recent accounts: Bird, Betrayal, in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black
Seminoles; Mahon, History, 202; Porter, Black Seminoles, 78–79; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 405–407.
316
“Fled to their former fastnesses”: Giddings, Exiles, 154. Also, Covington, Seminoles, 90–91; Littlefield, Africans and
Seminoles, 19–21; Porter, Abraham, 24–25.
317
“Entirely failed”: Thomas Jesup, letter dated 5 June 1836, ASPMA vol. 7, 838; “I have promised Abraham”: Thomas
Jesup, letter dated 24 September 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 70–71. Other Jesup letters: 14 June 1837,
Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 18; 20 July 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 65–69. Also, Mahon, History,
204; Porter, Black Seminoles, 80; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 439–440.

91
318
Nineteenth century accounts: Joseph Hernandez, letter dated 16 September 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 849–850; Jarvis,
Army surgeon’s notes, part 4, 285; Motte, Journey, 116, 132. More recent accounts: Mahon, History, 324; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 79.
319
Report dated 6 September, Army and Navy Chronicle, 21 September 1837, 187.
320
On punishments, see for example Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway slaves, 239, 251–252; Diouf, Slavery’s exiles,
50–51, 298–301; on “captured” as a euphemism, see for example Porter, Florida slaves and free, 392.
321
Mahon, History, 205.
322
Nineteenth century accounts: Reports dated 12 and 13 September 1837 in Army and Navy Chronicle, 28 September
1837, 200, 203–204; report dated 13 September 1837 in Niles’ Register, 30 September 1837, 66; Joseph Hernandez, report
dated 16 September 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 849–850; Jarvis, Army surgeon’s notes, part 4, 277–278; Motte, Journey, 116–
123. More recent accounts: Porter, Black Seminoles, 82; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 441.
323
Nineteenth century accounts: Thomas Jesup, letter dated 14 June 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 18; Jean
Penieres, letter dated 15 July 1821, ASPIA vol. 2, 411–412; Sprague, The Florida war, 309; Wiley Thompson, letter dated
1 January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 454; William Worth, letter dated 19 August 1841, quoted in Porter, Negroes and the
Seminole War, 1835–1842, 446. More recent accounts: Klos, Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 146; Mulroy,
Freedom on the border, 28; Porter, Black Seminoles, 33; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835–1842, 429–432. See
also the earlier section “Maroons and Seminoles.”
324
Sprague, The Florida war, 309.
325
Alachua County slaveholders, petition dated January 1834, ASPMA vol. 6, 465; Coe, Red patriots, 14; Dexter papers
reproduced in Boyd, Horatio S. Dexter, 81, 84; Fort Dade capitulation (Sprague, The Florida war, 177–178; Negroes,
&c., captured from Indians, 52–53); Edmund Gaines, letter dated 28 February 1836, ASPMA vol. 7, 427; general order
79 (Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 2–3); Giddings, Exiles, 79, 148; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 29 March 1837,
published in Niles’ Register, 29 April 1837, 133; McCall, Letters, 160; Morse, Report, 310; Jean Penieres, letter dated 15
July 1821, ASPIA vol. 2, 411–412; Simmons, Notices, 75–77; Wiley Thompson, letter dated 27 April 1835, ASPMA vol.
7, 533–534; Vignoles, Observations, 135. More recent accounts: Mahon, History, 201; Missall and Missall, Seminole
wars, 75; Porter, Black Seminoles, 28–29; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 427, 439, 447; Wright,
Blacks in British East Florida, 430–431; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 98–99.
326
“The blacks emigrated”: Bird, The largest slave rebellion, in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles. Also,
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles 15–35 (especially 26–27), 98–137; Mahon, History, 235; Porter, Black Seminoles, 94–
96, 111–126; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 443–434.
327
Nineteenth century accounts: Jarvis, Army surgeon’s notes, part 3, 451–452; Thomas Jesup, letter dated 6 July 1838,
published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 26 July 1838, 49–54, at 52; letter dated 15 July 1838 from a young officer,
published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 16 August 1838, 105. More recent accounts: Foreman, Indian removal, 358–
359; Mahon, History, 235.
328
Thomas Jesup, letter dated 6 July 1838, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 26 July 1838, 49–54, at 52–53;
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 26; Mahon, History, 235–237; Porter, Black Seminoles, 93–95.
329
Jarvis, Army surgeon’s notes, part 4, 452–453; Motte, Journey, 209–217; Mahon, History, 236–237.
330
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles 15–35, especially 27; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 31–32; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 94–96; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835–1842, 443–446.
331
Nineteenth century accounts: Giddings, Exiles, 185–186; Jarvis, Army surgeon’s notes, part 3, 453; Thomas Jesup,
letter dated 6 July 1838, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 26 July 1838, 49–54, at 53. More recent accounts:
Covington, Seminoles, 95; Foreman, Indian removal, 361–362; Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 27–28; Mahon,
History, 237–238; Porter, Black Seminoles, 96; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 443, 447.
332
“All the Indians said at once”: John Page, letter dated 3 March 1841, Territorial Papers, vol. 26, 276–277; “the effect of
this”: secretary of war, letter dated 12 March 1841, Territorial papers, vol. 26, 282–283.
333
William Worth, letter dated 19 August 1841, quoted in Porter, Florida slaves and free, 419; secretary of war (acting),
letter dated 15 September 1841, Territorial papers, vol. 26, 374–375.
334
Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 448–449.
335
Porter, Abraham.
336
Abraham, letter dated 11 September 1837, published in Porter, Abraham, 39–40.
337
Porter, Black Seminoles, 84, 97.

92
338
“Myself and ’Tony Barnet”: Abraham, letter dated 25 April 1838, published in Porter, Abraham, 38, and Landers,
Atlantic Creoles, 200–201. Also, Thomas Jesup, letter dated 24 September 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians,
70–71; Motte, Journey, 210–211; Foreman, Indian removal, 362, 370; Mahon, History, 128, 238; Porter, Abraham 25–29;
Porter, Black Seminoles, 96, 98.
339
Potter, War in Florida, 163; Covington, Seminoles, 81–82; Porter, Black Seminoles, 68; Porter, Negro guides and
interpreters, 180.
340
Nineteenth century accounts: Thomas Jesup, letter dated 12 January 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 825; Potter, War in
Florida, 163; report dated 18 January 1837, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 2 February 1837, 79; Simmons,
Recollections of the late campaign, 555 (“gone down to the seashore”); Sprague, The Florida war, 112. More recent
accounts: McReynolds, The Seminoles, 166; Porter, Negro guides and interpreters, 181.
341
Nineteenth century accounts: Thomas Jesup, letter dated 12 January 1837, ASPMA vol. 7, 825; report dated 18
January 1837, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 2 February 1837, 79. More recent accounts: McReynolds, The
Seminoles, 166; Porter, Black Seminoles, 68; Porter, Negro guides and interpreters, 182.
342
“Faithful interpreter”: Sprague, The Florida war, 112; “his services”: Porter, Negro guides and interpreters, 182; also
John Sprague, journal kept during the 1839 peace talks, published in White, Macomb’s mission, 164.
343
John Garland, letter dated 5 December 1841 to William Worth, quoted in Sprague, The Florida war, 396–398, at 397
(“getting infirm”); Sprague, The Florida war, 463 (“old Primus”), 465; Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 152.
344
“The best and most useful”: report from Fort King, 30 May 1839, Niles’ Register, 22 June 1839, 265; “The best guide
in the nation”: Registry of negro prisoners, in Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 68. The people identified as claiming
ownership of Murray were John Crowell (with whom Jesup corresponded — see the note immediately below), Nelly
Factor, and Miccopotoka; the Niles’ Register article said Murray “belonged to Micapotaka, now west.” Also, Littlefield,
Africans and Seminoles, 17, 21, 25, 30–31; Porter, Black Seminoles, 99.
345
Thomas Jesup, letter to John Crowell dated 17 June 1837, Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 18; Littlefield, Africans
and Seminoles, 21.
346
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 25, 30–31, 38; Negroes, &c., captured from Indians, 68.
347
Report dated 30 May 1839, published in Niles’ Register, 22 June 1839, 265, and in Army and Navy Chronicle, 20 June
1839, 394; John Sprague, journal kept during the 1839 peace talks, published in White, Macomb’s mission, 164, 178;
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 25, 33 note 19; Porter, Black Seminoles, 99.
348
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 113–114, 152–153.
349
Nineteenth century accounts: Alexander Macomb, General orders issued at Fort King, Florida, 18 May 1839, and
letter to the secretary of war, 22 May 1839, published in Sprague, The Florida war, 228–232 (“it had been given out,”
230); Alexander Macomb, report dated 27 November 1839, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 16 January 1840,
38–41 (“a negro interpreter of considerable cleverness,” 39); report dated 27 May 1839, published in Army and Navy
Chronicle, 13 June 1839, 379–381, at 379 (“Sam Jones had sent in word”); report dated 26 August 1839, published in
Niles’ Register, 14 September 1839; John Sprague, journal kept during the 1839 peace talks, published in White,
Macomb’s mission, 145–146, 164–165, 169–179. More recent account: Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–
1842, 448.
350
Nineteenth century accounts: Alexander Macomb, General orders issued at Fort King, Florida, 18 May 1839, and
letter to the secretary of war, 22 May 1839, published in Sprague, The Florida war, 228–232; John Sprague, journal kept
during the 1839 peace talks, published in White, Macomb’s mission, 164, 172; more recent accounts: Mahon, History,
257–261; Sturtevant, Chakaika, 44–46.
351
Nineteenth century accounts: Alexander Macomb, report dated 27 November 1839, published in Army and Navy
Chronicle, 16 January 1840, 38–41, at 39; report dated 26 August 1839, Niles’ Register, 14 September 1839, 44; Sprague,
The Florida war, 233–236. More recent accounts: Covington, Seminoles, 98; Mahon, History, 262–263; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 99; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 448.
352
Sprague, The Florida war, 315–319; Mahon, History, 263; Porter, Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842, 448.
353
Sprague, The Florida war, 319; report dated 26 August 1839, published in Niles’ Register, 14 September 1839, 44.
354
Report dated 7 July 1839, published in Niles Register 20 July 1839, 321; Niles Register, 14 September 1839, 44; The
Floridian, June 22, 1839, quoted in West, Abiaka, 394–395; Mahon 257.
355
John Sprague, journal kept during the 1839 peace talks, published in White, Macomb’s mission, 176–177; report
dated 27 May 1839, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 13 June 1839, 380.

93
356
Alexander Macomb, report dated 27 November 1839, published in Army and Navy Chronicle, 16 January 1840, 38–
41, at 40.
357
Joel Poinsett, secretary of war, extract of a letter to a Florida resident, published in Niles Register, 6 July 1839, 289;
“friendly Indian”: Army and Navy Chronicle, 13 June 1839, 379; “this story Genl. T. believes”: John Sprague, journal
kept during the 1839 peace talks, published in White, Macomb’s mission, 162. A contemporary history of the war, also
written by Sprague, asserted that both whites and blacks, as well as “Spaniards on the Gulf coast,” undermined efforts to
end the war: “Some of every class of society, every profession, the opulent as well as the humble, in and out of the
territory, had a pecuniary interest in the prolongation of the war” (Sprague, Origins, 268–269; see also Giddings, Exiles,
283, and Mahon, History, 298). Other accounts: Coe, Red patriots, 145–149; Mahon, History, 258–259; Sturtevant,
Chakaika, 45.
358
Porter, Black Seminoles, 97–105.
359
Porter, Black Seminoles, 99–106.
360
Sprague, The Florida war, 459; other accounts of the battle include Porter, Black Seminoles, 106; Mahon, History, 308.
361
McCall, Letters, 404–406; Sprague, The Florida war, 457–467 (“well-constructed … huts”: 458); Mahon, History,
307–308; Porter, Black Seminoles, 106.
362
McCall, Letters, 399–401; Covington, Seminoles, 108; Florida Seminole wars heritage trail; Mahon, History, 318;
Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 37; Porter, Black Seminoles, 99–100 (“could smell an Indian”), 106, 111; Sivad, Juan
Caballo.
363
McCall, Letters, 164; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 37; Porter, Black Seminoles, 3, 100, 106, 111–112.
364
Billy Bowlegs & the Seminole war; Covington, Seminoles, 143; Porter, Black Seminoles, 97, 106–107.
365
Bird, Exile: 1838–1850, in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles; Etienne-Gray, Black Seminole Indians;
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 36–204; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 35–51; Porter, Black Seminoles, 111–225.
366
Bird, American justice, in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles; Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 119–137,
157–158, 162; Porter, Black Seminoles, 115–116, 118–125.
367
Porter, Black Seminoles, 124–136, 139–140; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 61–64, 78; Nichols, Line of liberty.
368
Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 61–81; Nichols, Line of liberty, 430–431; Porter, Black Seminoles, 137-158, 161–162.
369
“Over a long life”: Bird, Frequently asked questions: Who was John Horse? in Rebellion: John Horse and the Black
Seminoles; Porter, Black Seminoles, 217–225.
370
“The women”: report dated 13 March 1839, Army and Navy Chronicle, 28 March 1839, 205; Littlefield, Africans and
Seminoles, 101, 156, 171; Porter, Abraham, 29–37; Porter, Black Seminoles, 112, 121.
371
Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 162–204; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 107–132, 152–173; Porter, Black
Seminoles, 175–214.
372
Ferguson, Why this Mexican village celebrates Juneteenth; Mulroy, Freedom on the border, 162–175; Muñiz Estrada,
Los negros mascogos; Porter, Black Seminoles, 205–225; Sieff, Their ancestors fled.
373
Brown, Tales, 12; Gallagher, Seminoles found on Andros; Gallagher, “Black Seminole” descendants; Goggin,
Seminole Negroes of Andros, 204; Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas; Howard, The “wild Indians” of Andros;
Kersey, The Seminole Negroes of Andros Island; Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 168, 170, 252; Newton, History of
Red Bays; Porter, Black Seminoles, 26; Tinker, Bahamas, chapter 6; Winsboro and Knecht, Saltwater railroad.
374
Marotti, Heaven’s soldiers, 71, 80–89; Porter, Florida slaves and free, 397–398, 402–403; Winsboro and Knecht,
Saltwater railroad.
375
Millett, Maroons of Prospect Bluff, 188–119; Correspondence on the slave trade 1843, 42–43, 49, 50, 57;
Correspondence on the slave trade 1844, 11–14 (Nicolls’s letter, 13–14).

94
Sources
While this story draws heavily on both primary and secondary sources, it does not reflect an
exhaustive search of archival records. The important paper trails through the archives were opened
by other people’s hard work and ingenuity. In those archives, a thousand untold stories remain.
Image credits are listed at the end of the bibliography.

Online collections cited in the endnotes without URLs

• American State Papers (abbreviated in the notes as ASP)
https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwsp.html

• Army and Navy Chronicle

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000598196;
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011570155

• Niles’ Register
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000552334
• Territorial Papers of the United States
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000495370

Bibliography
Amos, Alcione M. 1977. Captain Hugh Young’s map of Jackson’s 1818 Seminole campaign in
Florida. Florida Historical Quarterly, 55(3), 336–346.
An authentic narrative of the Seminole war and of the miraculous escape of Mrs. Mary Godfrey and
her four female children. 1836. D.F. Blanchard; Internet Archive.
https://ia800105.us.archive.org/1/items/Ayer_209_A9_1836/Ayer_209_A9_1836.pdf.
Anderson, Robert Nelson. 1996. The quilombo of Palmares: A new overview of a maroon state in
seventeenth-century Brazil. Journal of Latin American Studies, 28(3), 545–566.
Andrews, Evan. 2019. 10 things you may not know about Francis Drake. History.com.
https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-francis-drake.
Baptist, Edward E. 2002. Creating an old south: Middle Florida’s plantation frontier before the civil
war. University of North Carolina Press.
Baram, Uzi. 2008, June. A haven from slavery on Florida’s Gulf coast: Looking for evidence of
Angola on the Manatee River. African Diaspora Archaeology Network Newsletter.
http://www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news0608/news0608.html.
Bartram, William. 1791. Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida,
the Cherokee country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and
the country of the Chactaws. James & Johnson; Documenting the American South, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bartram/menu.html.

95
Berlin, Ira. 2003. Generations of captivity: A history of African-American slaves. Harvard
University Press (Belknap Press).
Bilby, Kenneth. 1996. Ethnogenesis in the Guianas and Jamaica: Two maroon cases. In Jonathan
D. Hill (editor), History, power, and identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, 119–
141. University of Iowa Press.
Billy Bowlegs & the Seminole war. 1858, June 12. Harper’s Weekly Magazine. Floripedia
(Exploring Florida). http://fcit.usf.edu/FLORIDA/docs/b/bowlegs.htm.
Bird, J.B. 2005. Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, first black rebels to beat American
slavery. http://www.johnhorse.com/.
Black, Hugo L. 1981. Richard Fitzpatrick’s South Florida, 1822–1840, part 2: Fitzpatrick’s Miami
River plantation. Tequesta, 41, 33–68.
Blassingame, John W. (editor). 1977. Slave testimony: Two centuries of letters, speeches, interviews,
and autobiographies. Louisiana State University Press.
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. 1997. Black Jacks: African American seamen in the age of sail. Harvard
University Press.
Boyd, Mark. 1951. The Seminole war: Its background and onset. Florida Historical Quarterly,
30(1), 3–115.
Boyd, Mark. 1955. Asi-Yaholo or Osceola. Florida Historical Quarterly, 33(3–4), 249–305.
Boyd, Mark. 1958. Horatio S. Dexter and events leading to the Treaty of Moultrie Creek with the
Seminole Indians. Florida Anthropologist, 11(3), 65–95.
Brown, Canter. 1990. The “Sarrazota, or runaway negro plantations”: Tampa Bay’s first black
community, 1812–1821. Tampa Bay History, 12(2), 14–16.
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/flstud_pub/2533.
Brown, Canter. 1991. Florida’s Peace River frontier. University of Central Florida Press.
Brown, Canter. 2005. Tales of Angola: Free blacks, Red Stick Creeks, and international intrigue in
Spanish southwest Florida, 1812–1821. In David H. Jackson and Canter Brown (editors), Go
sound the trumpet: Selections in Florida’s African-American history, 5–21. University of
Tampa Press.
Cade, John B. 1935. Out of the mouths of ex-slaves. Journal of Negro History, 20(3), 294–337.
Carrier, Toni. 2005. Trade and plunder networks in the second Seminole war in Florida, 1835–1842
[master’s thesis, University of South Florida]. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2811/.
Cato, George. 1937. Unpublished interview, Federal Writers’ Project. South Caroliniana Library,
University of South Carolina. http://libcat.csd.sc.edu/record=b3286930~S14.
Cecelski, David S. 2001. The waterman’s song: Slavery and freedom in maritime North Carolina.
University of North Carolina Press.

96
Childs, [first name not given]. 1873. General Childs, USA, extracts from his correspondence.
Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, History and
Biography of America, 2 [3rd series], 299–374. HathiTrust Digital Library.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112097462532&view=1up&seq=7.
Coe, Charles H. 1898/1974. Red patriots: The story of the Seminoles. University Press of Florida.
https://ufdc.ufl.edu/uf00101387/00001/print?options=1JJ*.
Cohen, M.M. 1836. Notices of Florida and the campaigns. B. B. Hussey; Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/noticesofflorida00cohe/page/n18/mode/2up.
Coker, William S., and Watson, Thomas D. 1986. Indian traders of the southeastern Spanish
borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847. University
of West Florida Press.
Correspondence on the slave trade with foreign powers ... from January 1 to December 31, 1843,
inclusive. 1844. William Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; Google Books.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Correspondence_on_the_Slave_Trade_with_F.html
?id=3NxCAQAAMAAJ.
Correspondence on the slave trade with foreign powers ... from January 1 to December 31, 1844,
inclusive. 1845. William Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; Google Books.
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=KxNcAAAAQAAJ&pcampaignid=books_w
eb_aboutlink.
Covington, James W. 1993. The Seminoles of Florida. University Press of Florida.
Craft, William. 1860. Running a thousand miles for freedom; or, the escape of William and Ellen
Craft from slavery. William Tweedie; Documenting the American South, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/craft.html.
Craig, Alan K., and Peebles, Christopher S. 1969. Captain Young’s sketch map, 1818. Florida
Historical Quarterly, 48(2), 176–179.
Cusick, James G. 2007. The other war of 1812: The Patriot war and the American invasion of
Spanish East Florida. University of Georgia Press.
Davis, Jack. 2017. The Gulf: The making of an American sea. Liveright.
Deagan, Kathleen A., and MacMahon, Darcie A. 1996. Fort Mose: Colonial America’s black
fortress of freedom. University Press of Florida.
Digital Alabama. 2020. The Creek confederacy. Digital Alabama.
https://digitalalabama.com/alabama-native-american-tribes/creek-indian-trobe/the-creek-
confederacy/22359.
Diouf, Sylviane A. 2014. Slavery’s exiles: The story of the American maroons. New York University
Press.
Dodd, Dorothy. 1944. The wrecking business on the Florida reef 1822–1860. Florida Historical
Quarterly, 22(4), 171–199.

97
Douglas, Thomas. 1856. Autobiography of Thomas Douglas, late judge of the Supreme Court of
Florida. Calkins & Stiles; State University Libraries of Florida.
https://palmm.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fsu%3A96077#page/001/mode/2up.
Egypt, Ophelia Settle (editor). 1941/1972. Unwritten history of slavery: Autobiographical account
of Negro ex-slaves. Greenwood.
Etienne-Gray, Tracé. 2010. Black Seminole Indians. Handbook of Texas online.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bmb18.
Fairbanks, Charles H. n.d. Ethnohistorical report of the Florida Indians, before the Indian Claims
Commission, Seminole Indians of the State of Florida v. the United States of America,
docket nos. 73 and 151. Florida State University Digital Library.
https://fsu.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fsu%3A385969.
Federal Writers’ Project. 1941. Slave narratives: A folk history of slavery in the United States, from
interviews with former slaves. Library of Congress Digital Collections.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-
1938/?fa=online-format:online+text.
Ferguson, Wes. 2019, June 19. Why this Mexican village celebrates Juneteenth. Texas Monthly.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/mexican-village-juneteenth-celebration/.
Florentino, Manolo, and Amantino, Márcia. 2011. Runaways and quilombolas in the Americas. In
David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (editors), The Cambridge world history of slavery,
volume 3: AD 1420–AD 1804, 708–739. Cambridge University Press.
Florida black heritage trail. 2007. Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources.
https://dos.myflorida.com/media/32347/blackheritagetrail.pdf.
Florida Museum of Natural History. n.d. Fort Mose: America’s black colonial fortress of freedom.
Florida Museum. https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/histarch/research/st-augustine/fort-
mose/.
Florida Native American heritage trail. n.d. Florida Department of State, Division of Historical
Resources. https://dos.myflorida.com/historical/preservation/heritage-trails/native-
american-heritage-trail/.
Florida Seminole wars heritage trail. 2015. Florida Department of State, Division of Historical
Resources. https://dos.myflorida.com/historical/preservation/heritage-trails/seminole-wars-
heritage-trail/.
Forbes, James Grant. 1821. Sketches, historical and topographical, of the Floridas, more particularly of East
Florida. C. S. Van Winkle; Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/sketcheshistoric01forb.
Foreman, Grant. 1972. Indian removal: The emigration of the five civilized tribes of Indians.
University of Oklahoma Press.
Franklin, John Hope, and Schweninger, Loren. 1999. Runaway slaves: Rebels on the plantation.
Oxford University Press.

98
Funari, Pedro Paulo A. 2003. Conflict and the interpretation of Palmares, a Brazilian runaway
polity. Historical Archaeology, 37(3), 81–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376613.
Gadsden, James. 1818/1937. The defenses of the Floridas: A report of Captain James Gadsden,
aide-de-camp to General Andrew Jackson, August 1, 1818. Florida Historical Quarterly,
15(4), 242–248.
Gallagher, Peter B. 2001, April 13. Seminoles found on Andros. Seminole Tribune, 1, 8.
https://seminoletribune.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Seminole-Tribune-April-13-2001.pdf.
Gallagher, Peter B. 2013, June 25. “Black Seminole” descendants survive in Andros Island.
Seminole Tribune. https://seminoletribune.org/black-seminole-descendants-survive-in-
andros-island/.
Giddings, Joshua R. 1858. The exiles of Florida: Or the crimes committed by our government against
the maroons who fled from South Carolina and other slave states. Follett, Foster and Company;
Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/exilesoffloridao00giddrich/mode/2up.
Goggin, John. 1946. The Seminole Negroes of Andros Island, Bahamas. Florida Historical
Quarterly, 24(3), 201–206.
Gold, Pleasant Daniel. 1927. History of Volusia County, Florida. EO Painter Printing Company;
University of Central Florida Digital Collections.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cfm-texts/112/ .
Griffin, Patricia C. 1999. The Halifax-Mosquito plantation corridor: An overview. Florida
Anthropologist, 52(1–2), 5–23.
Griffin, Patricia C. 2003. Life on the plantations of East Florida, 1763–1848. Florida
Anthropologist, 56(3), 163–182.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. 1992. Africans in colonial Louisiana: The development of Afro-Creole
culture in the eighteenth century (digital edition). Louisiana State University Press.
Hall, Robert L. 2017. African religious retentions in Florida. In David R. Colburn and Jane Landers
(editors), The African American heritage of Florida, 42–70. University of Florida Press.
Hammond, E.A. 1973. The Spanish fisheries of Charlotte Harbor. Florida Historical Quarterly,
51(4), 355–380.
Heard, Joseph Norman. 1987. Caesar, John. In Handbook of the American frontier: The
southeastern woodlands, vol. 1, 73–74. Scarecrow Press.
Howard, Rosalyn. 2002. Black Seminoles in the Bahamas. University Press of Florida.
Howard, Rosalyn. 2006. The “wild Indians” of Andros island: Black Seminole legacy in the
Bahamas. Journal of Black Studies, 37(2), 275–298.
Ibrahim, Abdulrazak. 2013, November 15. The Afro-Brazilian story I: Black November and
Zumbi dos Palmares. Atlanta Black Star. https://atlantablackstar.com/2013/11/15/afro-
brazilian-story-black-november-zumbi-dos-palmares/.

99
Jarvis, N.S. 1907. An army surgeon’s notes on frontier service, 1833–48. Journal of the Military
Service Institution of the United States, 39–40. HathiTrust Digital Library.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008898037.
Jones, Joel W. n.d. A brief narration of some of the principle events in the life of Joel W. Jones with a
few observations [typed transcript]. George A. Smathers Library, University of Florida.
web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/pkyonge/joeljones/JoelJones.pdf.
Kelly, Joseph. 2018. The masterless people: Pirates, maroons, and the struggle to live free [excerpt
from Marooned: Jamestown, shipwreck, and a new history of America’s origins (Bloomsbury,
2018)]. Longreads. https://longreads.com/2018/10/30/the-masterless-people-pirates-
maroons-and-the-struggle-to-live-free/.
Kersey, Harry A. Jr. 1981. The Seminole Negroes of Andros Island revisited: Some new pieces to
an old puzzle. Florida Anthropologist, 34, 169–176.
Kirk, Cooper. 1976. William Cooley: Broward’s legend. Broward Legacy, 1(1), 12–20, and 1(2),
24–36. https://journals.flvc.org/browardlegacy/issue/archive.
Klos, George. 2017. Blacks and the Seminole removal debate, 1821–1835. In David R. Colburn
and Jane Landers (editors), The African American heritage of Florida, 128–156. University of
Florida Press.
Knecht, Joe. 2003. Florida’s Seminole wars: 1817–1858. Arcadia.
Landers, Jane. 1984. Spanish sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790. Florida Historical
Quarterly, 62(3), 296–313.
Landers, Jane. 1990. Black/Indian interaction in Spanish Florida [paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, DC, 24 March].
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED320845.
Landers, Jane. 1999. Black society in Spanish Florida. University of Illinois Press.
Landers, Jane. 2004. Slave resistance on the southeastern frontier: Fugitives, maroons, and
banditti in the age of revolution. In Jan Smith and Deborah Cohn (editors), Look away! The
US south in New World studies, 80–93. Duke University Press.
Landers, Jane. 2010. Atlantic Creoles in the age of revolutions. Harvard University Press.
Library of Congress. n.d. A note on the language of the narratives. In Born in slavery: Slave
narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-
1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Rediker, Marcus. 2000. The many-headed hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners,
and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon Press.
Littlefield, Daniel F. 1977. Africans and Seminoles: From removal to emancipation. University
Press of Mississippi.

100
Lockley, Tim. 2015. Runaway slave colonies in the Atlantic world. In Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford University Press.
http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/a
crefore-9780199366439-e-5.
Lozano, Alice Fay, and Mock, Shirley B. 2004. My Black Seminole ancestors: Running to freedom.
University of Texas Institute of Texas Cultures.
Mahon, John K. 2017. History of the second Seminole war, 1835–1842. University of Florida Press.
Mahon, John K., and Weisman, Brent R. 1996. Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee peoples. In
Michael Gannon (editor), The new history of Florida, 183–206. University Press of Florida.
Malcomson, Robert. 2012. Nicolls, Edward. In Encyclopedia of the war of 1812: A political, social,
and military history, vol. 2. ABC-Clio.
Mann, Charles C., and Hecht, Susanna. 2012, April. Where slaves ruled. National Geographic.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2012/04/maroon-people.
Maris-Wolf, Ted. 2013. Hidden in plain sight: Maroon life and labor in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp.
Slavery & Abolition, 34(3), 446–464. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2012.734090.
Marotti, Frank. 2013. Heaven’s soldiers: Free people of color and the Spanish legacy in antebellum
Florida. University of Alabama Press.
McCall, George A. 1868/1974. Letters from the frontiers. University of Florida Press; HathiTrust
Digital Library. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ufl2.uf00100326_00001.
McClellan, Edwin North. 1931. History of the United States Marine Corps. Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheUnitedStatesMarineCorpsVol1.
McReynolds, Edwin C. 1957. The Seminoles. University of Oklahoma Press.
Milanich, Jerald T. 1996. Original inhabitants. In Michael Gannon (editor), The new history of
Florida, 1–15. University Press of Florida.
Millett, Nathaniel. 2013. The maroons of Prospect Bluff and their quest for freedom in the Atlantic
world. University Press of Florida.
Missall, John, and Missall, Mary Lou. 2004. The Seminole wars: America’s longest Indian conflict.
University Press of Florida.
Mock, Shirley B. 2010. Dreaming with the ancestors: Black Seminole women in Texas and Mexico.
University of Oklahoma Press.
Monaco, Chris. 2000. Fort Mitchell and the settlement of the Alachua Country. Florida Historical
Quarterly, 79(1), 1–25.
Morse, Jedidiah. 1822. A report to the secretary of war of the United States, on Indian affairs
comprising a narrative of a tour performed in the summer of 1820. Davis & Force; HathiTrust
Digital Library. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100267481.

101
Motte, John Rhett (author), and Sunderman, James F. (editor). 1845/1963. Journey into
wilderness: An army surgeon’s account of life in camp and field during the Creek and
Seminole wars 1836–1838. University of Florida Press.
Mulroy, Kevin. 1993. Freedom on the border: The Seminole maroons in Florida, the Indian
Territory, Coahuila, and Texas. Texas Tech University Press.
Muñiz Estrada, Belem Concepción. 2017. Los negros mascogos de Múzquiz, Coahuila, y su
comunidad autosustentable. Secretaría de Medio Ambiente.
https://www.sema.gob.mx/descargas/manuales/50%20NORMAL.pdf.
Narrative of a voyage to the Spanish Main in the ship “Two Friends.” 1819. John Miller; Internet Archive.
https://ia800208.us.archive.org/15/items/narrativeofvoyag00lond/narrativeofvoyag00lond.pdf.
National Humanities Center. n.d. Runaways: Selections from the WPA interviews of formerly
enslaved African Americans, 1936–1938. America in class: The making of African American
identity, volume 1: 1500–1865.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text8/runawayswpa.pdf.
National Humanities Center. n.d. Two views of the Stono slave rebellion, South Carolina, 1739.
Becoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690–1763.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/peoples/text4/stonorebellion.pdf.
National Park Service. 2017. Enslaved African-Americans confront difficult choices.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/slave-loyalism.htm.
National Park Service. n.d. Fort Mose site, Florida.
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/american_latino_heritage/fort_mose.html.
Negroes, &c., captured from Indians in Florida, &c. House of Representatives Document 225, 25th
Congress, third session. 1839. University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons.
https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/indianserialset/221/.
Neill, Wilfred T. 1956. Sailing vessels of the Florida Seminole. Florida Anthropologist, 9(3–4), 79–86.
Newton, Bertram A. 2001, April 13. Rev. Newton’s history of Red Bays. Seminole Tribune, 8.
http://seminoletribune.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Seminole-Tribune-April-13-2001.pdf.
Nichols, James David. 2013. The line of liberty: Runaway slaves and fugitive peons in the Texas-
Mexico borderlands. Western Historical Quarterly, 44(4), 413–433.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. 1856. A journey in the seaboard slave states. Dix and Edwards; Internet Archive.
https://ia600609.us.archive.org/7/items/journeyinseaboarolms/journeyinseaboarolms.pdf.
Ormond, James. 1892. Reminiscences of the life of James Ormond. University of Florida Digital
Collections. https://ufdc.ufl.edu//IR00003201/00038 (a scan of the handwritten version is
also available at https://ufdc.ufl.edu//IR00003201/00037).
Owsley, Frank Lawrence Jr. 1981/2017. Struggle for the Gulf borderlands: The Creek war and the
battle of New Orleans, 1812–1815. University of Florida Press.

102
Parker, Susan R. 2000. The cattle trade in East Florida, 1784–1821. In Jane Landers (editor),
Colonial plantations and economy in Florida, 150–167. University Press of Florida.
Parr, Karen L. 2016. San Miguel de Gualdape. In South Carolina Encyclopedia. University of
South Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies.
http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/san-miguel-de-gualdape/.
Parris, Scott V. 1981. Alliance and competition: Four case studies of Maroon-European relations.
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 55(1), 174–224.
https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-90002124.
Pearcy, Matthew T. (editor). 2006. Documents: Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’ Seminole war field
journal. Florida Historical Quarterly, 85(2), 197–230.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1943. Florida slaves and free Negroes in the Seminole war, 1835–1842.
Journal of Negro History, 28(4), 390–421.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1943. Three fighters for freedom. Journal of Negro History, 28(1), 51–72.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2714784.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1945. Negroes and the East Florida annexation plot, 1811–1813. Journal of
Negro History, 30(1), 9–29.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1946. John Caesar: Seminole Negro partisan. Journal of Negro History, 31(2),
190–207.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1946. The Negro Abraham. Florida Historical Quarterly, 25(1), 1–43.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1950. Negro guides and interpreters in the early stages of the Seminole war,
Dec. 28, 1835–Mar. 6, 1837. Journal of Negro History, 35(2), 174–182.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1951. Negroes and the Seminole war, 1817–1818. Journal of Negro History,
36(3), 249–280.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1955. Osceola and the Negroes. Florida Historical Quarterly, 33(3–4), 235–239.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1964. Negroes and the Seminole war, 1835–1842. Journal of Southern History,
30(4), 427–450.
Porter, Kenneth W. 1996. The Black Seminoles: History of a freedom-seeking people. University of
Florida Press.
Potter, Woodburne. 1836. The war in Florida: Being an exposition of its causes and an accurate history
of the campaigns of Generals Clinch, Gaines, and Scott. Lewis and Coleman; Internet Archive.
https://ia802307.us.archive.org/30/items/warinfloridabei00pottgoog/warinfloridabei00pottgoog.pdf.
Price, Richard. 1983. First-time: The historical vision of an Afro-American people. Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Price, Richard (editor). 1996. Maroon societies: Rebel slave communities in the Americas (3rd
edition). Johns Hopkins University Press.

103
Price, Richard. 2010. Uneasy neighbors: Maroons and Indians in Suriname. Tipití: Journal of the
Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 8(2), article 4.
Prince, Henry. 1998. Amidst a storm of bullets: The diary of Lt. Henry Prince in Florida, 1836–
1842. University of Tampa Press.
Public Broadcasting Service. 1998. Revolution 1750–1805. Africans in America.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/title.html.
Public Broadcasting System. n.d. Black sailors and soldiers in the war of 1812. The war of 1812.
https://www.pbs.org/wned/war-of-1812/essays/black-soldier-and-sailors-war/.
Pybus, Cassandra. 2006. Epic journeys of freedom: Runaway slaves of the American revolution and
their global quest for liberty. Beacon Press.
Redpath, James. 1859. The roving editor: Or, talks with slaves in the southern states. A. B. Burdick.
https://archive.org/details/rovingeditorort00redpgoog/page/n11/mode/2up.
Riordan, Patrick. 1996. Finding freedom in Florida: Native peoples, African Americans, and
colonists, 1670–1816. Florida Historical Quarterly, 75(1), 24–43.
Rivers, Larry Eugene. 2000. Slavery in Florida: Territorial days to emancipation. University Press
of Florida.
Robinson, William H. 1913. From log cabin to the pulpit, or, fifteen years in slavery. James H. Tifft;
Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/robinson/robinson.html.
Sattler, Richard A. 1996. Remnants, renegades, and runaways: Seminole ethnogenesis
reconsidered. In Jonathan D. Hill (editor), History, power, and identity: Ethnogenesis in the
Americas, 1492–1992, 36–69. University of Iowa Press.
Scenes in the Florida war. 1858, March. Russell’s Magazine, 26, 502–508. Google Books/Harvard
College Library.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Russell_s_Magazine/ldoaAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv
=1&dq=%22scenes+in+the+florida+war%22&pg=PA502&printsec=frontcover.
Schafer, Daniel L. 1996. U.S. territory and state. In Michael Gannon (editor), The new history of
Florida, 207–230. University Press of Florida.
Schafer, Daniel L. 2017. “Yellow silk ferret tied around their wrists”: African Americans in British
East Florida, 1763–1784. In David R. Colburn and Jane Landers (editors), The African
American heritage of Florida, 71–103. University of Florida Press.
Schweninger, Loren. 2002. Maroonage and flight: An overview [paper presented at the Fourth
Annual International Conference at the Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance, and Abolition — Unshackled Spaces: Fugitives from Slavery and Maroon
Communities in the Americas, Yale University, 6 December].
Sheldon, Jane Murray. 1930. Seminole attacks near New Smyrna, 1835–1856. Florida Historical
Society Quarterly, 8(4), 188–196.

104
Sieff, Kevin. 2019, March 15. Their ancestors fled US slavery for Mexico. Now they’re looking
north again. Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/their-
ancestors-fled-us-slavery-for-mexico-now-theyre-looking-north-
again/2019/03/15/6c64a14c-45cf-11e9-94ab-d2dda3c0df52_story.html.
Simmons, James W. 1836. Recollections of the late campaign in East Florida. Atkinson’s Casket,
11, 542–557. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006057558.
Simmons, William H. 1822. Notices of East Florida, with an account of the Seminole nation of Indians.
A. E. Miller; Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/noticesofeastflo00simm/mode/2up.
Sivad, E. Douglas. n.d. Caballo, Juan. Handbook of Texas online.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fcacl.
Sketch of the Seminole war, and sketches during a campaign, by a lieutenant of the left wing. 1836.
Dan J. Dowling; Google Books.
https://books.google.com/books?id=xbdXAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_g
e_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Smith, Thomas Adam. 1931. United States troops in Spanish East Florida, 1812–13. Florida
Historical Society Quarterly, 9(1–4) and 10(1).
Sprague, John. 1848. The origin, progress, and conclusion of the Florida war. Appleton; Internet Archive.
https://ia802604.us.archive.org/10/items/originprogressa03spragoog/originprogressa03spragoog.pdf.
Stedman, J. G. 1813. Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of Surinam in
Guiana. J. Johnson; Internet Archive.
https://ia802702.us.archive.org/18/items/narrativeoffivey01sted/narrativeoffivey01sted.pdf (vol. 1),
https://ia802702.us.archive.org/18/items/narrativeoffivey02sted/narrativeoffivey02sted.pdf (vol. 2).
Still, William. 1872. The underground railroad. Porter & Coates; Project Gutenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm.
Sturtevant, William C. 1953. Chakaika and the “Spanish Indians”: Documentary sources
compared with Seminole tradition. Tequesta, 13, 35–73. Florida International University
Digital Collections Center. http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1953/53_1_03.pdf.
Sturtevant, William C. 1971. Creek into Seminole. In Eleanor B. Leacock and Nancy O. Lurie
(editors), North American Indians in historical perspective, 92–128. Random House.
Sweett, Zelia Wilson, and Marsden, J. Cyril. 1925. New Smyrna, Florida: Its history and
antiquities. EO Painter Printing Company; University of Florida Digital Collections.
https://ufdc.ufl.edu//UF00055148/00001.
TePaske, John J. 1975. The fugitive slave: Intercolonial rivalry and Spanish slave policy, 1687–
1764. In Samuel Proctor (editor), Eighteenth-century Florida and its borderlands, 1–12.
University Press of Florida.

105
The trials of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, charged with exciting the Seminole Indians to war against
the United States of America, from the official documents which were laid by the President
before Congress. 1819. James Ridgway; Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/trialsofaarbuthn00arbu/page/n8.
Tinker, Keith L. 2011. The Bahamas in American history: From early European contact to
Bahamian independence in 1973 (digital edition). XLibris.
Twyman, Bruce Edward. 1999. The Black Seminole legacy and North American politics, 1693–
1845. Howard University Press.
van der Linden, Marcel. 2015. The Okanisi: A Surinamese maroon community, c. 1712–2010.
International Review of Social History, 60(3), 463–490. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859015000383.
Vignoles, Charles Blacker. 1823. Observations upon the Floridas. University Press of Florida;
Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/observationsupon00vign/mode/2up.
Walker, Hester Perrine. 1926. Massacre at Indian Key, August 7, 1840, and the death of Dr. Henry
Perrine (narrative of Hester Perrine Walker, a survivor). Florida Historical Quarterly, 5(1), 18–40.
Weik, Terrance M. 2012. The archaeology of antislavery resistance. University Press of Florida.
Weik, Terrance M. 2009. The role of ethnogenesis and organization in the development of
African–Native American settlements: An African Seminole model. International Journal of
Historical Archaeology, 13, 206–238.
Weisman, Brent R. 1989. Like beads on a string: A culture history of the Seminole Indians in north
peninsular Florida. University of Alabama Press.
Weisman, Brent R. 1999. Unconquered people: Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians.
University Press of Florida.
Weisman, Brent R. 2000. The plantation system of the Florida Seminole Indians and Black
Seminoles during the colonial era. In Jane Landers (editor), Colonial plantations and
economy in Florida, 136–149. University Press of Florida.
Weisman, Brent R. 2011. Labor and survival among the Black Seminoles of Florida. In Robert
Cassanello and Melanie Shell-Weiss (editors), Florida’s working-class past: Current
perspectives on labor, race, and gender from Spanish Florida to the New Immigration, 64–85.
University Press of Florida.
West, Patsy. 2016. Abiaka, or Sam Jones, in context: The Mikasuki ethnogenesis through the third
Seminole war. Florida Historical Quarterly, 94(3), 366–410.
White, Frank F. Jr. (editor). 1956. Macomb’s mission to the Seminoles: John T. Sprague’s journal
kept during April and May, 1839. Florida Historical Quarterly, 35(2), 130–193.
Williams, Heather Andrea. 2012. Help me to find my people: The African American search for
family lost in slavery (digital edition). University of North Carolina Press.

106
Williams, Isaac D., and Goldie, William F. 1885. Sunshine and shadow of slave life. Evening News
Printing and Binding House; Documenting the American South, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/iwilliams/iwilliams.html.
Williams, John Lee. 1837. The territory of Florida. A. T. Goodrich; HathiTrust Digital Library.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009590400.
Wills, Matthew. 2019, July 11. Brazil’s maroon state. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/brazils-
maroon-state/.
Winsboro, Irvin D. S., and Knetch, Joe. 2013. Florida slaves, the “Saltwater Railroad” to the
Bahamas, and Anglo-American Diplomacy. Journal of Southern History, 79(1), 51–78.
Woodard, Colin. 2007. The republic of pirates: Being the true and surprising story of the Caribbean
pirates and the man who brought them down. Harcourt.
Woodard, Colin. 2018, November 22. More than a pirate, a rebel with a democratic spirit. New
York Times. https://nyti.ms/2zpyZyv.
Worth, John. 2006. Early African heritage in southwest Florida: Free and enslaved Africans on early
19th-century Pine Island, Useppa. Friends of the Randell Research Center, 5(3), 2.
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2017/03/RRC_Vol5_No3.pdf.
Worth, John E. 2003. The evacuation of South Florida, 1704–1760 [paper presented at the 60th
annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Charlotte, NC].
https://pages.uwf.edu/jworth/WorthSEAC2003Calusa.pdf.
Worth, John E. 2012. Creolization in southwest Florida: Cuban fishermen and “Spanish Indians,”
ca. 1766–1841. Historical Archaeology, 46(1), 132–160.
Wright, Irene A. 1924. Dispatches of Spanish officials bearing on the free Negro settlement of
Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Florida. Journal of Negro History, 9(2), 144–195.
Wright, J. Leitch. 1968. A note on the first Seminole war as seen by the Indians, Negroes, and
their British advisers. Journal of Southern History, 34(4), 565–575.
Wright, J. Leitch. 1976. Blacks in British East Florida. Florida Historical Quarterly, 54(4), 425–442.
Wright, J. Leitch. 1986. Creeks and Seminoles: The destruction and regeneration of the Muscogulge
people. University of Nebraska Press.
Yetman, Norman R. (editor). 2002. When I was a slave: Memoirs from the slave narrative
collection. Dover Publications.
Young, Hugh. ca. 1818/1935. Topographical memoir on East and West Florida with itineraries of
General Jackson’s army, 1818. Florida Historical Society Quarterly, 13(1–3).

107
Image sources
Sources are listed in the order of their appearance.
Cover: H. S. Tanner, Tanner’s universal atlas: Florida, 1833, Florida Memory, State Library and
Archives of Florida (http://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/323201)
“Un nègre fugitif”: Wellcome Collection (https://wellcomecollection.org/); originally published in
Benoit, Voyage a Surinam
John Fields: Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Indiana
Jane Johnson: New York Public Library digital collections (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/)
Green Cumby: Federal Writers’ Project, Slave narratives, Texas
“March thro’ a swamp”: Wellcome Collection (https://wellcomecollection.org/); originally
published in Stedman, Narrative, vol. 2
Graman Quacy: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/); originally published in
Stedman, Narrative, vol. 2
Quassia amara: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/); originally published in
D.N.F. Dietrich, Flora medica, oder, Abbildung der wichtigsten officinellen Pflanzen (August
Schmid, 1831)
Abraham and Seminole chiefs in New York: Illustrated London News, 21 May 1853, p. 396, Hathi
Trust (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000520935)
Pilaklikaha shown on a map from the second Seminole war: John Mackay, Map of the seat of war
in Florida (US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, 1839), Florida Studies Center Gallery,
University of South Florida (https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/flstud_gallery/2264/)
Abraham: Bird, Rebellion; published earlier in Giddings, Exiles, and Sprague, The Florida War
Map of the Apalachicola River region: V. S. Pintado, Plano del Rio Apalachicola, territorio é yslas
adyacentes, 1815, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
(https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/)
Map of the Suwannee River settlements: H. Young, Sketch of the Indian & Negro towns on the
Suwaney River, 1818, US National Archives, Record Group 77, Civil Works Map File, Map
Number L247-94
Plantation ruins: photo by the author
John Horse: Bird, Rebellion; published earlier in Giddings, Exiles, and Sprague, The Florida War
Ben Bruno: Harper’s Weekly Magazine, 12 June 1858, p. 377, Internet Archive
(https://archive.org/details/harpersweekl00bonn)
Family of Ben July: Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, Sul Ross State
University, Alpine, Texas (https://library.sulross.edu/archives/)

108