“The Seminoles had set a dangerous example, for if Blacks and Native Americans united everywhere in the Americas, then a genuine racial democracy might emerge.”
On October 12, 1492, when the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus mistakenly made landfall in the Bahamas — on an island the Lucayan people called Guanahani — he helped set into motion two holocausts: one of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the other of the children of Africa. Columbus immediately enslaved several Lucayans, initiating a cruel practice that wiped out their entire bloodline in less than thirty years, and that would reduce the indigenous population of the Americas, two hundred years later, by a staggering ninety to ninety-five percent. In 1491, there were approximately 145 million indigenous people living in the hemisphere; by 1691, less than 15 million remained.
As the near-complete genocide of the indigenous populations unfolded, Europeans sought a new source of labor for the stolen mines and their new plantations in the so-called New World. They turned to Africa, and to a population whom the Europeans cast, first, as un-Christian heathens and later, as biologically distinct beings born only to labor under the savage rule of the white race. In 1517, the first enslaved Africans were brought by the Spanish to the Caribbean. Over the next three centuries, all of Europe would join in an orgy of terror, torture, and death that consumed the lives of tens of millions of Africans for the profits and pleasures of the white world.
But where there is repression, there is resistance. And as the late Guyanese scholar Jan Carew has observed, the twin holocausts of indigenous and African people in the Americas led to moments of solidarity and struggle against their mutual enemies, the white European colonizers and slave owners. In a 1995 essay titled “United We Stand! Joint Struggles of Native Americans and Africans in the Columbian Era,” Carew described the insurgencies of Black and Seminole peoples in Florida, locating this history of Indigenous-African resistance as part of a broader pattern of struggle in the Americas since 1492.
While some celebrate “Columbus Day,” we should view it as a memorial to genocide and slavery – to the twin holocausts of indigenous and African people. But we should also remember those joint histories of struggle whereby Indigenous and African people fought for their survival. Jan Carew’s essay “United We Stand! Joint Struggles of Native Americans and African Americans in the Columbian Era” provides a timely reminder of this history. We reprint it below.
United We Stand! Joint Struggles of Native Americans and African Americans in the Columbian Era
Jan Carew
Historically, Native Americans and Africans have been victims of genocidal practices on the part of Europeans. This shared history of human suffering which forged strong bonds of unity between Native Americans and Africans in the struggle for human rights remains our finest heritage after five centuries.
Black and Indian alliances are known to have existed in Southern Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Guianas, the Brazilian Northeast, and North America throughout the colonial period and beyond. The general character of these little known alliances is probably best understood through an examination of what was undoubtedly the greatest of all these joint struggles: the epic struggle waged by Seminole and Black insurgents in Florida between 1736 and 1853.
When one talks about the “Seminole Wars” it is important to bear in mind that this was an almost continuous low intensity conflict in which white, slave-hunting marauders and renegade Creek mercenaries were hunting down [African] Exiles. Then there were the major battles in which the Armed Forces of the United States fought against Seminole and Black insurgents.
Despite the conspiracy of silence the history of this Florida insurgency still lives on in oral accounts that scattered Black and Seminole descendants continue to retain.
In 1972, an aged descendant of Black-Seminole migrants to Andros in the Bahamas, told me:
I heard ‘bout the battle of Swanee ‘gainst Stonewall Jackson, my grandmother tell me ‘bout it and her grandmother tell her ‘bout it long before. Stories like that does come down to us with voices in the wind. She tell me how the Old Ones used to talk ‘bout the look on them white soldiers’ faces when they see Black fighters looking like they grow outta the swamp grass and the hammocks, coming at them with gun and cutlass. Jackson get hurt at Swanee, man, the ancestors brutalize him there. He run away, and never came back to face Blacks and Seminoles fighting shoulder-to-shoulder–black flesh touching red and brown–that kind of thing does give the white man nightmare and day-fever at the same time. But after them Black and Seminole fighters punish Jackson good and proper, he turn on the women and children that the Seminoles did leave behind, and any of them that look like they had African blood, he carry off to sell into slavery. Oh, God! That man Jackson was cruel, eh! He made slaves of them who was free already for two and three generations. He seel the grandchildren of former slaves to the grandchildren of former slave owners! My old face already beat against eighty-odd-years, and my children and grandchildren all gone to far places looking for work and a better life. But when Jesus of Nazareth decide to send Mantop to carry me to the Great Beyond, wherever my blood-seed scatter, they will spread the word ‘bout how Black and Seminole ancestors fight side by at Swanee.
This battle, known as the Battle of Swanee, was part of an epic insurgency that began during a distant colonial past in the Carolinas when the determined efforts of English colonists to subjugate and enslave the Creeks resulted in large numbers of them escaping into the area between the Carolinas and Florida. By 1736, the number of Black slaves who took their cue from Creek escapees and followed their trails to Florida, had increased to the point where “They were formed into companies, and relied on by the [Spanish] Floridians to aid in the defense of that territory.” They were allowed to occupy frontier lands on the “same terms that were granted to citizens of Spain.”
In 1738, the Colonial Governor of South Carolina sent a messenger to demand the return of “fugitive slaves who had found asylum in Florida.” The demand was rejected out of hand by the Spanish Governor of St. Augustine. The Spanish, who still had slaves by the hundred thousands in their colonial territories were, with an urbane cynicism, willing to offer freedom to the slaves of their imperial rivals since those ex-slaves were redoubtable fighters who could protect a sparsely populated but important strategically located colony. Those armed Black militias, and armed Seminole and Black farmers and cattle ranchers who were ostensibly policing the northern border of Spanish Florida, were in actuality, protecting themselves from slave-catchers and ensuring the integrity of shared Native American lands.
During the Revolutionary War the Exiles enjoyed an undisturbed liberty, but this respite would be brief. In 1775, the Council of Safety for the Colony of Georgia sent an urgent request to Congress for Continental troops to prevent slaves from deserting their masters. General Lee, commanding the Georgian colonial forces in 1776, called Congress’ attention to the fact that slaves were escaping in increasing numbers and seeking freedom among the “Exiles in Florida.”
Once the Revolutionary War had ended, it became clear that the Black-Seminole insurgence was being perceived as the greatest threat to the slave system in colonies that had just freed themselves from British colonial rule. It became clear that freedom from colonial rule was exclusively for whites: it did not apply to Native Americans and Blacks. From the former, the newly independent United States required land, while from the latter, it required slave labor. The Florida insurgency, therefore, had to be crushed by any means necessary.
The Creek nation’s population was steadily being reduced by the white man’s diseases, and its culture was being wracked by intolerable tensions as an aggressive, violent, and racist settler-culture threatened to overwhelm it. It was clear to the Creeks that their very existence was being threatened. What made the threat even more ominous was the fact that it was coupled with an onrushing tide of white immigrants backed by a state apparatus and armed forces equipped with superior weapons.
The Creek nation had already been sundered in 1750 when Seacoffee led a large number of followers into Florida. Seeacofee understood the strategic and geopolitical importance of securing a fighting base in this sparsely populated peninsula where, in league with other Native American and Black allies, the chances of survival could be greatly enhanced.
By 1800, it was becoming clear to the Government of the United States that another war with England was imminent. Florida, still a Spanish colony, became a national issue because it could serve as a springboard for an English invasion of the United States.
Fully aware that if the British invaded Florida, the Seminoles and their Black allies could become a threat to the recently established United States, the U.S. Government took steps to preempt any such occurrence. The Georgia militia which ventured across the border [in 1811] to establish this claim met with the fire of Imdians, of Negroes, and of well-armed Spanish settlers.
These invaders from Georgia were bloodied and repulsed. But in 1812, “under the command of the Adjutant General [another army crossed the border into Florida] with the avowed intention of exterminating the Seminoles who had so long refused to surrender the Exiles… the real object was the recapture and the re-enslavement of the refugees.” But when [that army] emerged from the rank, brutal thickets of Northern Florida, all military glory had been left behind. Wild men, they said, had sprung at them from every bush, cut off their supplies, decimated their men, and bloodied their uniforms. The Seminoles had joined the Negroes and made it a bitter fight. The governor of Georgia, outraged but powerless, sent angry messages that the Seminoles must at least give up “their” Negroes, even if the Spanish would not give up Florida. No answer came back.
In the years 1812, to 1813, Seminole and Black insurgents thwarted the State of Georgia’s bid to conquer Florida. But a new and formidable opponent appeared on the scene–General Andrew Jackson. “Jackson was a man forty-seven years old at this time. A frontiersman, a Tennessean, a Revolutionary soldier, a Congressman, a slaveowner, he had an uncomplicated conviction that the Indians had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and the Negro was born a slave.” In 1814, Jackson crushed the combined forces of the Creek Federation at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama. He imposed a treaty upon the defeated Creek Federation in which several million acres were ceded to the Americans. This sundered and fragmented the Creek lands, making it impossible for them to exist as a cohesive society any longer.
Sacafaca, an indomitable Creek leader, refused to take part in what he discerned to be a ritual of self destruction. He led a thousand warriors and their families over the border into Florida. Sacafaca and his followers were welcomed by the descendants of another large faction that had earlier separated itself from the Creek Confederation: this included the Tallahassees, the Muskhogeans, the Mikasukis, and the Black insurgents.
In July 1816, two years after a Negro Fort on the east side of the Appalachicola river was built in Florida, U.S. naval and land forces invaded Spanish territory without a formal declaration of war and brutally destroyed it. “In that holocaust had died one-third of those Negores who had fled to Florida for safety. The Indians who died with them had been their friends and families.” The destruction of Negro Fort marked a turning point in the Seminole-Black war of liberation. It stiffened the resistance of the insurgents.
The leaders learned that fighting from fixed fortified positions was a mistake. In the future, they would adhere to their traditional easy of fighting: strike and vanish, and strike again and again; maintain numerous secret caches of arms and supplies; be prepared always to move whole communities to safety on the shortest possible notice; see without being seen in the swamps, hammocks, forests, pastures, and tall grass, all of which were as familiar to them as their own faces in a mirror; and like the black panther, lure the enemy into those secret places where they were sure to be invincible. The insurgents took their revenge on Jackson at Suwannee. Jackson was not prepared for their new strategy of resistance. “Just south of Suwanee the found the Indians waiting on his left, the Negroes on his right. To his consternation his right wing crumpled quickly. He sent hurriedly for reinforcements and poured his fire recklessly into the thickets. The Indians and Negores… faded into the woods.”
“It had now become evident that no military force could pursue them [The Seminole-Black insurgents] into their retired fastness, or seek them out when scattered among the hammocks, the swamps, and the everglades of that singular country.” Crushing this insurgency, however, was not simply a means of re-enslaving those who had already freed themselves for over a century; it was more a matter of propping up the entire slave system and its concomitant system of political, economic, and racial domination.
The Seminoles had set a dangerous example, for if Blacks and Native Americans united everywhere in the Americas, then a genuine racial democracy might emerge. At a crucial junction of this struggle, Spain sold Florida to the United States for 5 million dollars. This transaction left the Seminole and Black insurgents naked to their enemies. Before the ink had dried on the treaty that was signed by Spanish and US representatives, those redoubtable fighters knew that, despite the clauses stating that those who were free should remain so, the slave catchers and land grabbers would now turn the full power of the United States against them. The insurgents also knew that from this stage onward they faced an inevitable defeat.
During this second and crucial phase of the insurgency, nouns as the “Second Seminole War,” you and remarkably able leaders emerged. From amongst the Black insurgents there were Abraham, John Horse, Luis Pacheo, Gopher John, and then there were brilliant Seminole War Chiefs like Osceola, Alligator, Wild Cat, Talmeco-Hadjo, Apreika, Tiger Tail, and many others. Despite concerted efforts on the part of a succession of military officers and Government agents to break the alliance between the Seminoles and their Black allies, this extraordinary alliance endured for over 130 years.
By 1834, “the principal part of the Regular Army of the United States – over 10,000 men– was concentrated in Florida.” In the face of the overwhelming odds against them, the insurgents’ strategy was to fight and negotiate. John Horse, Wild Cat, Pacheo, and Abraham–the leader of the Black insurgents–presided over the final phases of this epic insurgency. Accompanied by the most resolute of their fighters they moved to Oklahoma, then to Coahuila. Between January 1, 1835, and August 14, 1843, more than 500 African Americans, men, women, and children, were seized and re-enslaved. It had, however, cost the U.S. Government $80 thousand for the re-enslavement of each individual. And for every Black man who was re-enslaved, it had cost the lives of at least three white men. The Black and Seminole insurgency had struck a deadly blow to slavery, and two decades later, in the midst of a Civil War, the Emancipation Act was passed.
From the very beginning of the Columbian era, therefore, Africans and Native Americans had consciously set about laying the foundations for a new civilization through a joint struggle and a fusion of their cultures. The third aggressive Euro-American culture, interacting violently with both, imbued them with some of the best and the worst it had to offer. With the demographics of the Americas as a whole pointing inexorably toward a Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian majority in the twenty-first century, perhaps Wild Cat and Abraham’s dream of a racial democracy in the Americas will become a reality.
Jan Carew, “United We Stand! Joint Struggles of Native Americans and African Americans in the Columbian Era,” Third World Viewpoint 1 no. 4 (Summer 1995).
[This appears to be a condensed version of a similarly-titled essay published in Monthly Review’s July-August, 1992, issue, marking the Quincentennial. Carew also draws heavily from Henrietta Buckmaster’s 1966 study, The Seminole Wars.]
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