The Black Seminole Revolt: A Website Documents
the Most Successful U.S. Slave Rebellion
by Amy Sturgis
This article was originally published in ReasonOnline.
"Nowhere in American history books will students find an example
of a community of armed black rebels who successfully fought the tyranny of
slavery."
John
Horse's story feels like an answer to every Hollywood studio's wish list: a mix
of Spartacus, Braveheart, Amistad, and Glory, with just a pinch of Dances With Wolves. A
sweeping tale of a decades-long struggle against oppression, the movie would
show how Horse and the Black Seminoles created the largest haven for runaway
slaves in the American South, led the biggest slave revolt in U.S. history, won
the only emancipation of rebellious North American slaves before
the Civil War, and formed the largest mass exodus of slaves in U.S. history. In
the 1830s Horse's people journeyed from the Florida Everglades to what is now
Oklahoma and then across the border to Mexico, where they ultimately secured
title to their own land.
What is perhaps most amazing about this story is how it has been overlooked so
consistently, not just by filmmakers and popular audiences but by almost every
historian of slavery. Now a nonprofessional historian - J.B. Bird, an
administrator at the University of Texas - has written and produced an
engrossing multimedia Web documentary, Rebellion: John Horse and the Black
Seminoles, the First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery. (To see it for
yourself, go to
johnhorse.com.) In the process, Bird has illustrated not just an important
part of the American past but also one of the ways cyberspace is changing how
history is studied and taught.
Bird's narrative begins in Spanish Florida in the early 18th century, when two
groups fled from the colonial South: Seminoles migrating from Alabama and
Georgia to escape white encroachment and blacks fleeing the bonds of slavery.
Both were welcome in Florida. The escaped slaves, in fact, were offered their
freedom if they would defend the Spanish crown. Both the Catholic Church and
Spanish law treated slavery as an unnatural condition, and both recognized
blacks and American Indians as human beings (if not equals). More practically,
offering sanctuary to English slaves created a human buffer zone and a free
fighting force against the British colonists.
"The escaped slaves were offered their freedom if they would
defend the Spanish crown."
The mixed society that emerged in Florida produced "maroons" or
"Indian negroes" - today known as Black Seminoles, people of Seminole
cultural traditions and full or partial African descent. Mose, north of St.
Augustine, was soon established as "the first legally sanctioned free
black town in North America."
By the start of the American Revolution, Great Britain controlled Florida. The
Seminoles and blacks living there overwhelmingly sided with the British during
the conflict, as they had no love for the colonists who had dispossessed and
enslaved them. At the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles returned Florida
to Spanish rule in 1783.
The Southern states did not rest easily with free and armed blacks living
nearby and welcoming runaway slaves - especially since those communities were
allied with thousands of equally free and armed Indians. From George Washington
onward, presidents tried to deal with the "problem." In 1818, during
the Monroe administration, Gen. Andrew Jackson invaded Florida, ostensibly to
pursue justice against those who had attacked Fort Scott in Georgia. In the
process he seized the peninsula for the United States, executing those who
opposed him and "cleaning out" many Seminole and Black Seminole
villages to make Florida more suitable for annexation. The United States
formally purchased the peninsula from Spain the following year.
When Jackson became president, he decided to drive the remaining communities
out of Florida by force. The result was the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), the
largest and most costly of the Indian Wars.
By this time, 45 percent of Florida's population was enslaved. Not
surprisingly, given the close links between the territory's black and Indian
populations, the Seminole struggle spawned a slave revolt. As Bird explains,
"Maroon warriors and plantation slaves played integral roles in the
uprising. By April of 1836, the Black Seminoles and their Indian allies had
sparked the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history, as more than 385
plantation slaves fled their masters and joined in the wholesale destruction of Florida's sugar mills - at the time some of the
most valuable plantations in all of North America."
One Seminole leader at
this time was the legendary chief Osceola, who drew much of his support from
the Black Seminoles and was reputed to have a black wife. During the war,
another leader emerged: the former slave John Horse, half black and half
Indian, who was destined to lead the Black Seminoles on a long, complex exodus
in pursuit of freedom.
In 1838 the Black Seminoles agreed to cease fighting and move to the Indian
Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in exchange for legal recognition of their
freedom. Once relocated, though, Horse and his people were threatened
repeatedly with re-enslavement - by Indians as well as whites - with little or
no protection from the law. In 1848 U.S. Attorney General John Y. Mason
announced that the United States never had the power to free the Black
Seminoles, and that they therefore were still legally slaves.
"The legendary chief Osceola drew much of his support from the
Black Seminoles and was reputed to have a black wife."
With no security in the Indian Territory, Horse and his Seminole ally
Coacoochee promptly led their people to Mexico, where slavery had been outlawed
for two decades. There Horse became a famed colonel in the Mexican army. When
slavecatchers from the Republic of Texas attempted to capture the Black
Seminoles in Mexico, they met resistance from Mexicans as well as Black
Seminoles. In the 1850s, Horse and his people finally gained a legally
recognized Mexican homeland in Nacimiento.
Although Bird is careful not to assign too much nobility or heroism to Horse or
any other actors in the story - he acknowledges, for example, Horse's duties as
"professional Indian killer" while guarding the border of Mexico - he
is not above celebrating the tale he has recovered and preserved. "As a
nation," he writes, "we have dimly remembered the failed black
militants of prior centuries but have completely forgotten our most successful
black freedom fighters. We celebrate the founding fathers for taking up arms
against the oppressor, yet nowhere in American history books will students find
an example of a community of armed black rebels who successfully fought the
tyranny of slavery."
Bird argues that several factors combined to "bury" the tale of John
Horse and his people. One is the inherent difficulty in separating the
intertwined threads of the Native American conflict, "maroon war,"
and slave rebellion that made up the Second Seminole War. Many scholars simply
did not attempt to extricate one story from another. But Bird believes there is
also an ideological reason most schoolchildren do not know the name John Horse.
Citing the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese's work as an example, Bird notes
how the distinguished scholar concluded "broadly, that after Nat Turner's
uprising in 1831, southern Americans effectively co-opted their
slave-proletariat by improving living conditions and offering them the feeble
hope of emancipation through peaceful means, a naive dream that was easier for slaves to accept than the brutal consequences of leading a failed
rebellion." Such an interpretation is hard to maintain when the largest
slave uprising took place after Nat Turner's rebellion - and was at least
partly successful. But when the giants in the field hold such positions, Bird
suggests, it poisons the well, since many others tend to draw on these giants'
work. (More recently, Genovese and his scholarship have turned from Marxism
toward conservatism. But Bird's point still stands.) By bringing together the
lesser-known insights of revisionists and adding his own significant original
research, Bird seeks to repair oversights such as Genovese's.
With its cross-referenced sources and attention to detail, Rebellion
offers a compelling case for Web documentaries as a significant new medium for
the writing, dissemination, and revision of history. Bird originally conceived
of his project as a film, and he still is pursuing that goal, but the Rebellion
site is an impressive accomplishment in itself. The site's interactive
structure and varied contents are useful to scholars and educators as well as
interested laypeople. From the interactive map of John Horse's life, for
example, visitors may click on any location for images of and additional
information about that place. Or they can leap directly to the specific page
among the 370 multimedia panels that explores the relevance of that place to
the website's larger narrative.
"The site's interactive
structure and varied contents are useful to scholars and educators as well as
interested laypeople."
Does it matter that Bird is not a professional, credentialed historian? Not
really. He knows the difference between primary and secondary sources, and his
citations open the door for additional research by interested parties of all backgrounds.
In some ways, it may be a blessing that Bird is not a professional. His website
manages to be both comprehensible and comprehensive, neither lost in the
self-serving jargon of too many monographs nor myopic and overspecialized to
the point of irrelevance. Bird communicates his message clearly and never loses
sight of why it is
important to the "bigger picture." In so doing he offers a welcome
and edifying example to many in the field.
That said, his greatest accomplishment lies in what he has done, not how he did
it. In Bird's own words, "Readers seeking a politically correct indictment
of American history may be disappointed in Rebellion, but so will those who are
uncomfortable learning the darker sides of the American tradition." He has
told a thrilling and disturbing tale, forgotten for far too long, about people
who were committed to seeking freedom and ultimately successful in finding it.
Amy H. Sturgis (amyhsturgis.com) teaches Native
American studies at Belmont University and is a member of the Scholarly Board
of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. Her newest book is The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal (Greenwood
Press).