JOHN D. MILLIGAN

Supposing that discontent should have encouraged slaves to flee the system, but still, confronted with the fact that substantially permanent maroons did not develop in North America, historians, comparing slavery on this continent with its counterpart in Latin America and elsewhere have posited several factors that operated to prevent American slaves from sustaining successful maroons, which could embolden more slaves to join them and resist efforts of the slaveholding community to destroy them. Geographic and climatic factors played a significant role. In contrast to much of Latin America and the Caribbean islands, where a tropical or semitropical environment provided readier access to food and demanded less permanent shelter and where plantations adjoined often unexplored swamps, jungles, and mountains, most of North America suffered harsh winters and after the seventeenth century was not an unexplored, trackless wilderness.1

Secondly, throughout the late colonial, early national, and antebellum periods,

Day Resistance to Slavery," Journal of Negro History 27 (1942): 388-419; Aptheker, "Maroons Within the Present Limits," pp. 167-184, and American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943); Wendell G. Addington, "Slave Insurrections in Texas," Journal of Negro History 35 (1950): 408-435; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956); William F. Cheek, Black Resistance Before the Civil War (Beverly Hills, 1970); and Blassingame, Slave Community.

4 Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 124; Genovese, In Red and Black, p. 132; Klein, Slavery in the Americas, pp. 71, 155, 181; Degler, Neither Black Nor White, pp. 51-52.

demographic factors discouraged maroons. As compared to the Southern Hemisphere and the Caribbean, Carl N. Degler observes that "even the frontier areas of the United States were too well settled and accordingly too well policed." If some small American maroons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were able to resist the colonial militia, subsequent spreading white settlement and improvements in communication and transportation put an end to prolonged resistance of the kind described by Aptheker. Henceforth, in the words of Eugene D. Genovese, blacks in the American South "were in general, floating in a white sea. The planters were residents, not absentees; the nonslaveholders were loyal, armed, and disciplined; the country immediately beyond the plantation areas was inhabited by armed whites completely hostile to the slaves." 5

Cultural factors were also important in determining if maroons could be established and survive. Throughout the Western Hemisphere there was a direct correspondence between the frequency of rebelliousness among slaves and whether or not they had been born in Africa. Stanley M. Elkins has observed that the psychic and physical shocks of being kidnapped from Africa, exposed to the horrors of the "middle. passage," and subjected to the American breaking-in process severely weakened the

5 Degler, Neither Black Nor White, pp. 51-52; Aptheker, Slave Revolts, pp. 171-277, passim; Genovese, In Red and Black, p. 133.

capacity of the newly enslaved Africans to resist oppression. More recent studies, by contrast, suggest precisely the opposite. Those blacks who underwent what Genovese calls "the shock and detachment process from Africa to America" made greater contributions to slave disorders than those who had been born as slaves in the Americas. The higher incidence of slave rebelliousness in Brazil and the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans continued to be imported until the mid-nineteenth century, and the less frequent outbreaks in North America, where before 1800 each of the slave states had for a time forbade the importation of slaves and where the slave trade was officially ended in 1808, attest to the significance of this factor. The key to this phenomenon is the perpetuation of cultural cohesion among the newly arrived. slaves. The continued "interaction between certain universal elements of West African culture," in John W. Blassingame's words, prevented the loss of cultural identity and provided the impulse that encouraged cooperative resistance and in the case of the Brazilian maroons led to a social organization patterned closely after that of the African states of the period. By contrast, notes Degler, the native-born slaves of North America, "bereft of the African culture" and "raised from birth to be part of the system," were "divided by their many personal connections with the whites among whom they lived." In sum, wherever a favorable climate and a wilderness were combined with a weak state, slaves who shared a common African heritage and identity founded durable maroon colonies. "With minor qualifications," concludes Genovese, "those conditions did not exist in the United States." Had they, similar slave outbreaks

6 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), pp. 98-103; Genovese, In Red and Black, pp. 89, 132; Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 3; Degler, Neither Black Nor White, p. 54. A consideration of the largest and most durable of the Brazilian maroons is R. K. Kent, "Palmares: An African State in Brazil," Journal of African History 6 (1965): 161-175.

would doubtless have occurred.

There was, however, a time and a place when all of these conditions did coincide to create an environment propitious for a long-lived aggressive maroon in North America. Among the comparativists, only Blassingame has given this colony of fugitives due consideration. Degler, after noting that it approached in "size and duration" the most successful of the Brazilian maroons, describes it as "the one that history calls the Second Seminole War," which would seem to imply that its vigorous life was limited to the period 1835 to 1842. Actually, the vigor of the Florida maroon lasted for a much longer time. As the studies of Kenneth W. Porter have shown, fugitive blacks from the Carolinas and Georgia had been finding refuge in Florida. since the late seventeenth century. With its semitropical climate, sparse white settlement, and chronic political instability resulting from international rivalry over its boundaries, Florida, of course, made an ideal haven for runaway slaves. For much of the life of the maroon, furthermore, the continued importation of Africans into the colonies to the north of Florida, guaranteed a steady stream of hostile fugitives. Even after the United States had closed off the slave trade, the Florida maroon continued to attract fugitives who openly demonstrated their enmity toward American slave society. Quite clearly, if in the first place newly imported Africans had been encouraged by a propitious environment to found the maroon and to mold its activist character, once they had established the tradition, American-born fugitives took advantage of

7 Degler, Neither Black Nor White, p. 52; Kenneth W. Porter, "Negroes and the East Florida Annexation Plot, 1811-1813," Journal of Negro History 30 (1945): 9-29; "Negroes on the Southern Frontier, 1670-1763," ibid. 33 (1948): 53-78; "Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817-1818," ibid. 36 (1951): 249-280; and "Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842," Journal of Southern History 30 (1964): 427-440. Porter has conveniently collected these and over twenty more of his valuable articles in one volume, The Negro on the Frontier (New York, 1971).

that same environment to continue the

maroon.

Finally, an important objective condition favoring the maroon in Florida after the mid-eighteenth century was the sympathy of the Seminole Indians to the plight of the refugees. The tribe of the Seminole (meaning "broken off" or "people who camp at a distance") had migrated during the first half of the century from the Lower Creek towns on the Chattahoochie and Flint rivers in Georgia after the Creeks had cooperated with the British to lay waste the northern Florida communities of certain Indians who had been christianized by the Spanish. Whenever the Seminole, who had mixed with the remnants of the scattered tribes, came in contact with fugitive slaves, they "were inclined to accept them as free citizens." 8

8 American State Papers. Indian Affairs, 1: 15; Angie Debro, The Road to Disappearance (Norman, 1941), pp. 5-6; Frederick W. Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 30 (Washington, D. C., 1907-10), 2: 67-68, 500; John R. Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 73 (Washington, D. C., 1922), pp. 398-400; Edwin C. McReynolds, The Seminoles (Norman, 1957), pp. ix-x, 10-12, 23, 48, 74. Historians have on occasion considered these people as rebellious Creeks or outlaws, but more recent students of their culture have recognized them as forming a distinct group.

Some historians have described the relationship of the Seminole to the fugitive slave as that of master to slave, but others have made clear that it was more that of landlord or even patron to sharecropper. The blacks lived in their own towns, raised their own crops and livestock, and paid the Indians small tributes in grain and cattle. That the blacks considered their condition favorable is evinced by their determination to maintain it; there is no record of their fleeing whence they had come. For relations between the blacks and the Indians, see American State Papers. Military Affairs, 6:533-534; Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 121; Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians, p. 404; Rembert W. Patrick, Florida Fiasco: Rampant Rebels on the Georgia-Florida Border, 1810-1815 (Athens, 1954), pp. 183-184; Joshua R. Giddings, The Exiles of Florida: or, The Crimes Committed by Our Government Against the Maroons Who Fled from South Carolina and Other Slave States Seeking Protection Under Spanish Laws (Columbus, 1858), pp. 2-5; T. Frederick Davis, ed., "United States Troops in Spanish Florida, 1812-1813," Florida Historical

Sanctuary and security, however, were not always the sole objectives of the runaways who crossed the Florida boundary. In this respect, the Florida maroon apparently differed from the maroons of Brazil, which, Degler contends, must not be confused with slave revolts. These maroons, he argues, were primarily asylums for fugitives and "clashed with white society only when the whites sought to bring back the runaways or . . . acted to remove what the whites perceived as a threat to the unity of Brazilian society." Indeed, he holds that the leaders of Palmares, the most successful of the Brazilian maroons, "would have been quite content to have remained aloof as an African state, separated by the forest from white society." This description does not accurately portray the attitudes of the fugitive slaves in Florida. They were often unwilling to rest on the defensive, waiting for the white man to attack. Encouraged and armed first by the Spanish and during the Revolution by the British, these blacks joined the Indians in raiding the frontiers. of South Carolina and Georgia.9

To affirm the aggressive character of the Florida maroon is not to deny that the blacks and their Indian supporters were frequently under attack themselves. Quite the contrary, the one assured the other. Even had this colony of fugitives been satisfied merely to defend itself, the slaveholders to the north would probably have

Quarterly 9 (1930): 106-107; and Porter, "Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817-1818," pp. 252-254.

9 Degler, Neither Black Nor White, p. 48. Degler's view that a quiescent maroon should not be interpreted as a revolt is open to question. In distinguishing three types of slave revolts in North America, Marion D. de B. Kilson explicitly includes as one type the mere attempts of groups of slaves to run away. See "Toward Freedom: An Analysis of Slave Revolts in the United States," Phylon 25 (1964): 178, 181. Aptheker, Slave Revolts, pp. 23-24, 86; Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Philadelphia, 1929), pp. 232, 247-248, 255; Verne E. Chatelain, The Defense of Spanish Florida, 1565-1763 (Washington, D. C., 1941), pp. 92-93, 160-161, 167; Porter, "Negroes on the Southern Frontier," pp. 53-78, and "Negroes and the East Florida Annexation Plot," pp. 9-29.

felt compelled to break it up and to restore the runaways to slavery. The willingness of the maroon members to endanger their desperately won freedom and their lives in raids on plantations, during which they recruited new people, made off with animals, and burned buildings, provides still stronger proof of the fugitive slave's rebellious, perhaps even protorevolutionary, attitude toward the institution of slavery and guaranteed that slaveholders or their agents would themselves have to go over to the offensive.

The most common target of the American soldiers and militia, who began making incursions across the Florida boundary in the 1740s, were the colonial military forces of Spain. On several occasions, however, as in 1812 when the Georgia militia marched south, a specific aim was to strike at the black community. Even when the Spanish were the primary target, the invaders usually had to battle the warriors of the maroon and the Seminole tribe, who preferred the relaxed jurisdiction of Spain to reenslavement and cultural subjugation. Whenever the Americans met the blacks, moreover, the latter seldom remained solely on the defensive. Supported by the Indians, the blacks not only fought savagely to retain their freedom but initiated attacks on the invaders and in the case of the Georgia militia sent them reeling back across the border. 10

In describing these operations, historians have sometimes treated the blacks as mere auxiliaries to the Indians,11 but an episode in which blacks composed all but a frac

10 Patrick, Florida Fiasco, esp. chap. 14; Rowland H. Rerick, Memoirs of Florida (Atlanta, 1902), 1:121-122; Niles' Weekly Register, Dec. 3, 1812, pp. 235-237; Porter, "Negroes and the East Florida Annexation Plot," pp. 9-29.

11 See, for example, Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables, 1971), pp. 105-110. Not uncommonly, present-day textbooks in American history and diplomacy cover the repulse of the 1812 invasion and the two Seminole wars without emphasizing or sometimes without noting the role of the blacks.

tion of the force resisting not only regular American military and naval contingents but also hostile Indians illustrates the capacity of this maroon to resist aggression. Although the incident culminated in the complete destruction of a fort and the death of almost all of its black defenders, nevertheless it reveals that the blacks were openly eager for battle, planned and struck the first blow, and then defied the Americans and the Indians to counterattack.

The fort, which lay about twenty-five miles north of the Gulf of Mexico up the Apalachicola River, had been built during the War of 1812 by the British, then allies of Spain. Establishing the work as their headquarters, the British proceeded to raise its garrison from among the Indians and fugitive slaves of the maroon. One British officer reported that as runaways came in from the United States, he had authority from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cockrane "to protect and recruit them for the service of his Britannic Majesty." Cockrane seemed convinced that the bravest of the new recruits would be the blacks; and in later raids on the borders and coasts of Georgia, they earned a reputation which, according to one scholar, caused Georgians to fear them "more than any others." 12

Although the British had embarked for England in the spring of 1815 following the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent, the blacks and Indians were left with the distinct impression that they could continue to count on His Majesty's support in their struggle against the Americans. As a pledge, the local British commander had turned the

12 Benjamin Hawkins, agent for Indian Affairs, to Secretary of War, June 15, 21, and August 16, 1814, American State Papers. Indian Affairs, 1: 859860; “Disposition [sic] of Sgt. Samuel Jervais, May 9, 1815, and Capt. [Ferdinand] Z. Amelung to Andrew Jackson," June 4, 1816, American State Papers. Foreign Relations, 4: 551, 557; Niles' Weekly Register, Sept. 14, 1816, p. 37; J. Fred Rippy, Rivalry of the United States and Great Britain Over Latin America, 1808-1830 (Baltimore, 1929), pp. 45, 55; Capt. George Woodbine to Don Sebastian Kindelan, Dec. 30, 1814, American State Papers. Foreign Relations, 4: 491-492; Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 285, 288.