The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People [Hardcover]

KENNETH W. PORTER (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This fascinating story chronicles the lives of fugitive slaves who aligned themselves with Seminole Indians in Florida beginning in the early 1800s, fought with them in the Second Semiole War, and were removed, along with them to Indian Territory, where they struggled to remain free. To prevent reenslavement, their remarkable leader, John Horse, led much of the group to Mexico, where they served as a buffer for the Mexicans against marauding Apaches. Returning to the United States after the Civil War, many became scouts for the army. Porter (The Negro in the American Frontier, 1973), a historian and expert in black Seminole history, died in 1981; his work has been updated and published here for the first time. It complements Daniel F. Littlefield Jr.'s Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (1977). Recommended for all American history collections.?Mary B. Davis, Huntington Free Lib.,
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Florida; 1st edition (September 14, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813014514
• ISBN-13: 978-0813014517
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #482,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insider's Perspective, June 15, 2000

By 

Mary Blount (Tallahassee, Florida USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Hardcover)

As a descendant of Florida's Apalachicola Indians removed to Texas in 1834, I know the Black Seminole as my kin. Porter's narrative parallels our oral tradition and enhances it with photos and maps. Facts presented are well researched and documented with scholarly precision. Historic accuracy is near flawless. Language of the text is readable and the style captivating. No dry history here! Porter brings this forgotten segment of Florida's mixed blood Seminoles to life in seventeen easy chapters. Like a piece of tender, seasoned vinson, it leaves the reader filled but wanting more. No worse injustice could be done to Professor Porter that compare The Black Seminoles to another text. The power of the Porter pen has no peer. Without reservation, Porter's text is a unique gift to all of us. [e-mail]

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Treasure Chest, July 19, 2001

By 

Umar A. Hassan - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Hardcover)

This is a classic. Every serious historian of African Americans needs to have this book. I am a descendant of these people and much of what is in the book confirmed what I have been told since I was a boy. Thanks to those tireless warriors who coompleted this work for without them, it would have remained hidden away.

This account of a people dedicated to freedom is a must read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughgoing, Comprehensive and Rich with Detail, September 6, 2008

By 

Stuart W. Mirsky "swm" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Hardcover)

Kenneth Wiggins Porter apparently died before he finished the manuscript for this one and so it fell to others (Alcione M. Amos and Thomas P. Senter) to edit and update this book. It's hard to sort out the contributions of each but the result is a well documented narrative of the Black Seminole from the early days in Florida to the early part of the twentieth century. Built mainly around the rise and life of the still little known Western hero, John Horse, a man of mixed blood (his father seems to have been a Seminole tribesman, perhaps of mixed blood himself, his mother an African and escaped slave in pre-Civil War America), it details the formation and development of a unique tribal people in America's history.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that thousands of Africans fled the chattel bondage of South Carolina, Georgia and, later, the states of Alabama and Florida in the 18th and early nineteenth centuries, forming communities that existed under the protection of the Florida Indians (themselves exiles from internecine conflict in Georgia and Alabama within the Creek nation or from white Americans who set out to suppress them under Andrew Jackson). The exiled Muscogulge peoples (the proper name for the Creek as suggested by J. Leitch Wright Jr. in his own well documented work "Creeks and Seminoles", University of Nebraska Press) initially kept slaves, a practice learned from the whites, but did not have the economy to use them as the whites did. And so Seminole slavery evolved in a very different fashion. While purchasing or receiving some slaves as gifts from whites, the Seminole treated them as status symbols and pretty much let these people operate independently. Gradually, escaped slaves joined the Indian communities and built up their own communities under the influence and protection of the Seminole chiefs. They were seen more as vassals than slaves by the Indians who left them to their own devices and basically expected them to hunt and raise their own crops to feed themselves, only remitting an annual portion in tribute to the tribal chief.

Free to come and go as they pleased, the blacks developed their own eclectic tribal culture, partly in emulation of the Seminole and partly reflecting the lives they had lived in bondage to the whites. Into this world John Horse was born around 1812. He was still a boy when Andrew Jackson violated international boundaries and Spanish sovereignty in Florida to carry his war against the defeated Creek Red Sticks in Alabama into Florida. Driven by a fear of the free and growing black communities under Seminole auspices, Jackson and other whites sought to wipe these people out. They had other goals, too, including forcing Spain to accept American expansion into East and West Florida and pushing the Creek Indian renegades (the Seminole) out.

John Horse seems to have been a child on the Suwannee River in northern Florida when Jackson appeared and burned the black and Indian villages. Later John appears on Florida's western coast around Tampa Bay at around 14 years of age where he is documented as trying to cheat the local army commander over some turtles. From these creatures, called gophers by the locals, he took his lifelong nickname, Gopher John. The story of the Black Seminole follows John's career as he came to the fore in the second year of the Second Seminole War (which lasted for seven years), becoming an important sub-chief and leader of the Seminole-affiliated blacks.

Taking part in many of the major battles, he is first documented in a fight at Okeechobee though he may have been present earlier at Dade's Massacre, the Battle of the Withlacoochee, of Camp Izard and of the Great Wahoo Swamp. In the fighting, the American military soon realized that the black fighters, though fewer, were fiercer antagonists in many ways than the Seminole warriors, no doubt because they had more to lose. While the whites were mainly interested in driving out the Indians, relocating them to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, they were keen to use the war with the Seminole as a pretext to capture blacks for re-enslavement since the new republic had banned importation of new slaves from abroad.

John Horse honed his tracking and fighting skills in that war but was finally convinced of the futility of the effort and was among those blacks who decided to take a chance on the promises of then U.S. Army general in charge, Thomas S. Jesup, that blacks who freely surrendered would not be re-enslaved but sent with the Seminole to the West. Unfortunately Jesup, whatever his original intentions, soon came under pressure by the white population of Florida to allow re-enslavement of many of the blacks. When this became known, John Horse and various Seminole leaders raided and freed some 700 Indians and blacks who had voluntarily surrendered and were awaiting transfer to the West near Fort Brooke in Tampa.

Jesup seems never to have gotten over this loss and repeatedly thereafter used trickery and deceit to capture and imprison the Indian leaders though he continued to hold out the promise of freedom to their black allies in order to wean this group away. John was one of the few remaining black leaders by 1837 (the war had begun in 1835) still free and actively resisting and was finally persuaded to accept Jesup's terms. Thereafter he was sent, with others, to Indian Territory in what is today Oklahoma. There the Seminole blacks found they had new problems for the Creek were already there and the Creek wanted to reassert control over the Seminole who had originally been part of their polity. But the Creek had adopted the institution of chattel slavery from the whites and insisted that the blacks with the Seminole had to be re-enslaved.

John Horse spent some time back in Florida working as a scout for the Army there against his old allies and eventually was instrumental in convincing many of them to come in and accept deportation, too. But when John was ultimately obliged to return to Indian Territory in the West, he found a situation that was untenable for the blacks. John, who was half Seminole himself and had papers freeing him issued by the U.S. Army leader he served, General Worth, as well as freedom from the Seminole tribal council, could have stayed on without fear while the other blacks were forced back into slavery. But he refused to do so and advocated strongly to see that Jesup's decree was fulfilled by the American government. Jesup, to his credit, did the same. But the slave interests in the region, including planters and slavers in nearby Arkansas, would not abide a community of free blacks so close by. More, many of them coveted title to the Seminole blacks.

When the U.S. government refused to sustain Jesup's decree and, instead, decided to force the black Seminole back into servitude, John found an ingenious way to save many of his people. Allying with the Seminole chief Wildcat, an old ally from the Florida war, he took a contingent of blacks and Indians in a dash across Texas to freedom in Mexico. Pursued by Creek warriors determined to re-enslave them and by Arkansas slavers, and hounded by Texas Rangers who supported the slavers, they were also attacked by Commanche intent on preventing their crossing the Rio Grande to take up arms in defense of Mexico's northern border. Still, John's and Wildcat's combined people managed a successful exodus, crossing the Rio Grande in the dead of night on makeshift rafts -- just ahead of the Texas Rangers who arrived at dawn the next morning.

In Mexico John Horse and Wildcat proved a daunting team though Wildcat died early on in a smallpox epidemic and John became the revered and effective leader of the "Mascogos" (as the Mexicans called the black Seminole). Through a tumultuous career, he led and defended his people. This book tells that story as it closely follows the battles and struggles of this forgotten American hero, John Horse, a man who risked his own life and freedom many times to defend the lives and freedom of others.

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga
and A Raft on the River