The History of Florida (41 page)

1812, a naval attack on the black and Indian fort and settlement at Prospect

Bluff on the Apalachicola River in 1815, and Andrew Jackson’s devastating

raids against Seminole vil ages along the Suwannee in 1818. The same U.S.

hostility toward free blacks living among the Seminole, and the Seminole

refusal to return their allies and family members to slavery, contributed to

the three Seminole wars from 1818 to 1858.

Florida’s black troops were able to slow but not stem the tide of U.S. ex-

pansionism. When Spain final y turned Florida over to the officials of the

U.S. territorial government in 1821, it did not abandon its free black citizens.

As in Louisiana, cession treaties required that the legal status and property

rights of free blacks be respected by the incoming government. Some free

blacks, like Prince Witten and Edimboro Sánchez, who had won his free-

dom despite the protests of his former owner, had acquired property and

invested years of hard work in improving it. They decided to stay in Florida

and risk trusting the newcomers to honor their treaty promises. But Prince’s

proof

daughter, María, and Edimboro’s daughter, Nicolasa, joined their husbands

and most of the free black community in a second exodus to Cuba. Like

their predecessors in 1763, these exiles received government assistance as

they remade their lives in Cuba.

Meanwhile, African Americans who had made their free lives among the

Seminole rather than among the Spanish were still at risk from the incom-

ing Americans, who brought with them chattel slavery and a firm convic-

tion of their racial superiority. These new homesteaders had long objected

to the free blacks living in Florida, fearing their militancy, their al iance

with Native Americans, and the dangerous example they set for plantation

slaves. Finding the racial climate in Florida increasingly restrictive, more

free blacks from St. Augustine left for Cuba in the American territorial

years, and in 1857 another community of free blacks living in Pensacola

departed for México.

These new migrations underscored the fact that Florida was an extension

of the Caribbean, where Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans had

interacted for centuries. Embroiled in the struggles of the European “su-

perpowers” of their day, Africans in Florida and in the circum-Caribbean

became adroit at reading the political tides. They were pragmatic diplomats,

Free and Enslaved · 193

shifting al egiances when they saw the need. In some areas of the South-

east their strategic advantage lasted well into the eighteenth century, and in

Florida it ended only when the region became part of the American South

in the nineteenth century. Historians Daniel Schafer and Canter Brown Jr.

have shown that even then Spanish legal traditions and customs left an im-

print in northeastern Florida that blunted some of the more restrictive and

punitive aspects of territorial race legislation.

Free and enslaved Africans helped shape international geopolitics in the

Southeast for more than three centuries before slavery was final y abolished

in Florida, yet their existence and their impact has been obscured by tradi-

tional historiography. As new historical and archaeological investigations

are determining, African Americans exercised more important and varied

roles in the colonial history of the Spanish frontiers of the United States than

has previously been appreciated. These studies make it clear that no history

of Florida, or the Southeast, is complete without considering this complex

and multidimensional African experience.

Notes

1. Fernando Miranda to the King, 20 August 1583, cited in Verne E. Chatelain,
The

proof

Defenses
of
Spanish
Florida,
1565–1763
(Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1941), p. 138.

2. Royal edict, 7 November 1693, Santo Domingo 58-1-26 in the John B. Stetson Col-

lection, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida, Gainesville (hereafter

cited as PKY).

3. Fugitive Negroes of the English plantations to the King, 10 June 1738, SD 844, on

microfilm reel 15, PKY.

4. Letter of Alexander Semple, 16 December 1786, “To and from the United States,

1784–1821,” on microfilm reel 41, EFP, PKY. According to this letter, Prince had attempted

twice before to escape.

5. J. H. Alexander, “The Ambush of Captain John Williams, U.S.M.C.: Failure of the

East Florida Invasion,”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
56, no. 3 (July 1977):286.

Bibliography

Colburn, David, and Jane Landers, eds.
The
African
American
Heritage
of
Florida.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995.

Ferguson, Leland.
Uncommon
Ground:
Archaeology
and
Early
African
America,
1650–1800.

Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1992.

Hal , Gwendolyn Midlo.
Africans
in
Colonial
Louisiana:
The
Development
of
Afro-Creole
Culture
in
the
Eighteenth
Century.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

194 · Jane Landers

Landers, Jane. “Africans in the Land of Ayl ón: The Exploration and Settlement of the

Southeast.” In
Columbus
and
the
Land
of
Ayl ón,
edited by Jeaninne Cook, pp. 105–230.

Darien, Ga.: Lower Altamaha Historical Society, 1992.

———. “An Examination of Racial Conflict and Cooperation in Spanish St. Augustine:

The Career of Jorge Biassou, Black Caudillo.”
El
Escribano
(December 1988):85–100.

———. “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial

Florida.”
American
Historical
Review
95, no. 1 (February 1990):9–30.

Mul in, Michael.
Africa
in
America:
Slave
Acculturation
and
Resistance
in
the
American
South
and
the
British
Caribbean,
1736–1831.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Mulroy, Kevin.
Freedom
on
the
Border:
The
Seminole
Maroons
in
Florida,
the
Indian
Territory,
Coahuila,
and
Texas.
Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993.

Patrick, Rembert W.
Florida
Fiasco:
Rampant
Rebels
on
the
Georgia-Florida
Border.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1954.

Porter, Kenneth Wiggins.
The
Negro
on
the
American
Frontier.
New York: Arno Press, 1971.

Thornton, John.
Africa
and
Africans
in
the
Making
of
the
Atlantic
World,
1400–1680.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Usner, Daniel H., Jr.
Indians,
Settlers,
and
Slaves
in
a
Frontier
Exchange
Economy:
The
Lower
Mississippi
Val ey
Before
1783.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Wood, Peter W.
Black
Majority:
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South
Carolina
from
1670
through
the
Stono
Rebel ion.
New York: Norton Press, 1974.

proof

12

Florida’s Seminole

and Miccosukee Peoples

Brent R. Weisman

Origins

The Native Americans that today compose Florida’s Seminole and Miccosu-

kee tribes have roots deep in the cultural prehistory of southeastern North

America. The modern political division between the two tribes, dating for-

proof

mal y only to the 1950s, belies their fundamental cultural similarity and

shared historical origin in the lower piedmont of present-day Georgia and

Alabama. Here dwel ed the Creeks, Yuchis, and other related groups, the

immediate cultural ancestors of the Indians to be known in Florida as
cim-

marones
. This word, of Spanish origin, meant in the usage of the time people

separate from, or apart from, their major ancestral population center. In the

native Muskogean tongue, the Spanish word became “Seminole,” forms of

which were in use in British Florida by 1765. The transformation of Creek

into Seminole is the story of both cultural adaptation to the environmental,

political, and economic conditions of a rapidly globalizing world and the

cultural persistence of ancient customs and beliefs deeply seated in place

and time.

The foundations of both Creek and Seminole culture lie in the aboriginal

mound-building chiefdoms of the lower Southeast. By the tenth century

A.D., or C.E., such societies were presided over by hereditary chiefs and a

priestly elite who resided in formal towns consisting of temple and residen-

tial mounds arranged around a central plaza. Much of the populace lived

in the surrounding countryside in small farming hamlets on the banks of

streams or tributary creeks. Society was divided into matrilineal clans, that

· 195 ·

196 · Brent R. Weisman

is, clan membership was determined through the mother’s line. In this sys-

tem, a man’s sons were not members of his clan, nor could they inherit to

him. Instead, he had a set of responsibilities and obligations to his sister’s

sons, and they to him. Thus we see in Creek and early Seminole leadership

the succession of chiefly power from a man to his nephew. It is likely also

that the women and their families living together in the farming hamlets

shared clan membership. In the historic Creek period, these small maternal

clan groups were known as
huti,
while in Seminole society of the recent past

such groups were known as
istihapo
, or clan camps.

Creek religion stressed purity of mind and body, which was achieved

through the ritual use of tobacco, scratching or blood-letting, and imbib-

ing the “black drink,” a tea brewed from Ilex (hol y) leaves and other herbs,

to induce vomiting. Annual or seasonal ceremonies held in the plaza or

squareground emphasized community purity and solidarity. The most

important and enduring of these ceremonies was the Green Corn Dance,

or busk (from the Creek
poskita
, to fast), still practiced by the Creeks and

Seminoles today. This event, typical y lasting four days, consisted of sched-

uled social, political, and religious activities. Males and females, armed with

webbed ball sticks, played vigorously at the ball game. Boys would step up

to become young men through the naming ritual and puberty rites. Crimes

proof

were atoned for and grievances heard by the tribal council on Court day.

The medicine man would publicly examine the medicine bundle, then se-

crete it away until next year. Then there were the dances, in which the danc-

ers circled a ritual y prepared low mound of earth or moved in patterned

formation across the dance ground. Above al , the goal was to produce

harmony and a sense of well-being for both the individual and the larger

community.

The Creek cosmos, inherited from the Mississippian mound builders,

was shaped by beliefs associated with the four cardinal directions. The east,

for instance, associated with the rising sun, was thought to have beneficial

power. Mythical serpents, horned monsters, and other creatures had their

place in the Creek and Seminole cosmos. Colors also were given symbolic

meaning, with red being the color of war, and white associated with peace.

In daily life, the principal occupation of men was to hunt and make war.

Both activities usual y required small groups of men to be absent from their

households for extended periods of time, during which time the women

would tend garden plots, fish and gather plant foods available closer to

home, take care of the children, make pottery and clothing, and engage in

numerous other domestic tasks. Warfare was not the mass frontal assault

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 197

familiar to Europeans, but instead consisted of raids on the enemy. The re-

wards for personal bravery and stealth shown in such raids included in-

creased prestige among the warrior’s peers, the privilege to wear a tattoo,

and the opportunity for a young man to earn an adult, or warrior’s, name.

The coming of the Europeans to the interior Southeast, beginning with

the Spanish
conquistadores
in the mid-sixteenth century, had drastic and

far-reaching consequences for the aboriginal populations of the region. The

Creeks, possibly owing to their interior, buffered location, were spared im-