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.
