It's hard to imagine that Hollywood hasn't jumped all over this, you would think it would
be box office gold because it's part Spartacus and part Braveheart and part Amistad and part
Glory with a little bit of Dances with Wolves thrown in. A story, decades long, of oppression
and freedom fighting, I don't understand why there hasn't been more attention to
John Horse and the Black Seminoles, but hopefully we can correct this.
John Horse and the Black Seminoles deserve to be remembered for a number of reasons.
They created the largest haven in the U.S. South for runaway slaves. They led the largest
slave revolt in U.S. history. They secured the only emancipation of rebellious slaves
prior to the U.S. Civil War, and they formed the largest mass exodus of slaves across the
United States, moving from the Florida Everglades through Indian Territory—what would become
Oklahoma—eventually locating in Mexico where they secured title to their own land. It's
a remarkable story.
It's overlooked not just by film makers; it's not well known in popular culture,
and in fact it's been overlooked by historians of slavery, if you can believe it. In the
early 18th Century, two groups in particular fled the colonial South into Spanish Florida,
into the Everglades. One of these groups were Seminoles who were migrating from the various
colonies, just trying to avoid white encroachment basically, trying to move some place that
white colonists weren't.
And the other group was runaway slaves, people who were fleeing and trying to create a free
life for themselves. Both were welcome in Florida and in fact the Spanish crown offered
runaway slaves their freedom if they would defend the land for the crown, for the Spanish.
So a mixed society emerged in the Everglades of intermarriage, family intermingling between
these runaway slaves and the Seminoles. And in fact the first legally sanctioned black
free town in the North American continent was in the Spanish Florida Everglades.
After the American Revolution, people living in the Southern States didn't really like
living that close to a large armed population of former slaves, particularly when they were
in league with the local Native American nation, the large, armed group of free Seminoles.
And they knew that their own slaves felt free to run away and be harbored by this group.
They knew that they were welcomed. And so from George Washington's administration
on there was questions of what do we do about the problem of the Florida Everglades.
In 1818, this was James Monroe's administration, General Andrew Jackson actually moved into
Florida, invaded it. Not authorized to do so, he was actually pursuing justice against
those who'd attacked Fort Scott in Georgia, but he did it anyway. He went into Florida
and claimed it for the United States. When he seized the peninsula he took the opportunity
to execute some of the people who opposed him and also to clean out some of the areas
of former slaves and Seminoles because he felt this would make it better for annexation.
The United States then soon actually bought Florida from the Spanish. When Jackson became
president he decided to make sure that the Black Seminole communities were moved out
by force. So he pursued this in his policy, his larger policy of Indian removal. This
led to the Second Seminole War, which was 1835--1842, and became the largest and costliest
of the so called, Indian wars.
Because the two communities were tied together—that is the former slaves and the Seminoles—when
the Seminoles were attacked in the Seminole War, this led to an uprising of the former
slaves. In April of 1836, Black Seminoles and their Indian allies moved together to
create what was the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. This wasn't just a matter
of runaway slaves. More than 385 plantation slaves ran away from their masters and joined
the Black Seminoles, essentially in laying waste to the Florida sugar mills, which were
some of the most valuable areas, plantations, in the whole continent.
One Seminole leader at the time was the leader Osceola, who is justly remembered by history.
Another leader who rose up at this time was John Horse, who was ethnically a Black Seminole
and who would ultimately lead his people on a long and trying exodus for freedom. In 1838,
John Horse and the Black Seminoles agreed to stop fighting the U.S. government in exchange
for moving to what was then considered to be Indian Territory, which is now today the
State of Oklahoma and for legal recognition of their freedom. So despite the fact that
many of them were runaway slaves, they would have the opportunity to start over again as
free individuals.
Once they moved from the Everglades to Indian Territory, however, they found that their
freedom was under attack both by whites and by other Native Americans. In 1848, a decade
after they had made the agreement with the U.S. government, the U.S. attorney general
announced that the government never had the authority, the power, to recognize their freedom,
and in fact they were still, those who had been slaves, still enslaved.
This was like opening season on them, basically declaring that they were there for the picking.
And so they did the only thing that they could do, they fled once again. Without security
in Indian Territory, Horse and his Seminole ally Coacoochee promptly went to Mexico where
slavery was already illegal and had been for a couple of decades. There Horse became famous
as a general in the Mexican army and his people found a way to make a life.
Once they relocated to Mexico, things changed. When slave catchers from the Republic of Texas
went over the border to try to find the runaway slaves, now free men, they met resistance
not only from the Black Seminoles but also from the Mexicans and the Mexican Army itself.
Eventually the Black Seminoles, led by Horse, gained legally recognized Mexican land, Nacimiento.
Why isn't this recognized today? Well for one thing, historians tend to be historians
of Native American history or historians of slavery, but there's not many that move
among these subjects. And it's a bit confusing because you have both the issue of runaway
slaves and the issue of Native Americans kind of blended together so it seems to fall through
the cracks.
Tradition is that Nat Turner's rebellion is the big turning point in the history of
slavery and slave revolt. That happened before the rebellion of the Black Seminoles, so it
doesn't really fit the traditional trajectory. And perhaps most importantly, it really represents
a blemish on U.S. history. Not only because of the poor treatment of Native America as
represented by the Seminole War, not only the poor treatment of African Americans through
the device of slavery, but also because this group really did manage to negotiate a separate
peace with the U.S. government and 10 years later the government turned their backs on
them.
So it's, in multiple ways, a difficult story for people of the United States to tell, but
it's worth remembering that a community of freedom fighters trekked from Florida to
Oklahoma to Mexico and found, ultimately, peace and freedom and prosperity in lives
that they could direct as their own. I recommend highly the website www.johnhorse.com for more
information.