Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Early Freedom Fighters: The African-Seminole Alliance
The Native American Indian people that comprised the Seminole Nation grew out of the Creek Nation in Florida. Multilingual and diverse, the Seminoles (from a word meaning “runaway") became infamous for intermingling with runaway slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas...slaves that, as historian William Loren Katz explains, “Since 1738 had built prosperous, free, self-governing communities.”
Katz explains the genesis of this alliance: “Africans began to instruct Seminoles in methods of rice cultivation they had learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Then the two peoples forged an agricultural and military alliance that challenged slave-hunters and then U.S. troops. Some African families lived in separate villages, others married Seminoles, and the two peoples with a common foe shaped joint diplomatic and military initiatives. Africans, with the most to lose, rose to Seminole leadership as warriors, interpreters, and military advisors.”
“The two races, the negro and the Indian, are rapidly approximating; they are identical in interests and feelings,” said U.S. Major General Sidney Thomas Jesup at the time. “Should the Indians remain in this territory the negroes among them will form a rallying point for runaway negroes from the adjacent states; and if they remove, the fastness of the country will be immediately occupied by negroes.”
What Katz calls “the first foreign invasion launched by the new U.S. government” was the 1816 assault on the Seminole Nation...an assault met with fierce resistance. After Spain sold Florida to the U.S. in 1819, America’s full military might was put to work reclaiming the land from both former slaves and their indigenous co-inhabitants. In a scenario that would presage future U.S. interventions in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Iraq, roughly 4,000 black and Indian fighters effectively utilized hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against more than 200,000 U.S. Army troops
“Because they fought on their own soil, Seminole forces ran circles around the numerically and technologically superior U.S. armies,” Katz says. “U.S. officers violated agreements, destroyed crops, cattle and horses, and seized women and children as hostages. They tried to racially divide the Seminole Nation. Nothing worked and resistance only stiffened.”
Although the sheer numbers would eventually bring defeat to the brave Red and Black Seminoles, the resistance of Christmas Eve 1837 remains a powerful example of the cunning forces of right prevailing over the arrogant power of might.
“An estimated 380 to 480 freedom-fighting African and Indian members of the Seminole nation threw back an advance of more than a thousand U.S. Army and other troops led by Colonel Zachary Taylor, a future president of the United States,” says Katz. “The Seminoles so badly mauled the invaders that Taylor ordered his soldiers to fall back, bury their dead, tend to their wounded and ponder the largest single U.S. defeat in decades of Indian warfare. The battle of Lake Okeechobee is not a story you will find in school or college textbooks, and has slipped from the public consciousness. But in a country that cherishes its freedom-fighting heritage, Black and Red Seminoles of Florida sent everyone a message that deserves to be remembered and honored.”
(Excerpted from 50 American Revolutions...order your copy today: http://tinyurl.com/dxk4y)
(William Loren Katz: http://www.williamlkatz.com)
Later...
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
