Black Seminoles - African-Seminole Relations

African-Seminole Relations

By the early 19th century, maroons (free blacks and runaway slaves) and the Seminole were in regular contact in Florida, where they evolved a system of relations unique among North American Native Americans and blacks. In exchange for paying an annual tribute of livestock and crops, black prisoners or slaves found sanctuary among the Seminole. Seminoles, in turn, acquired an important strategic ally in a sparsely populated region.

Typically, many or most members of the Black Seminole communities were not identified as slaves of individual Native American chiefs. Black Seminoles lived in their own independent communities, elected their own leaders, and could amass wealth in cattle and crops. Most importantly, they bore arms for self-defense. Florida real estate records show that the Seminole and Black Seminole people owned large quantities of Florida land. In some cases, a portion of that Florida land is still owned by the Seminole and Black Seminole descendants in Florida.

Under the comparatively free conditions, the Black Seminoles flourished. U.S. Army Lieutenant George McCall recorded his impressions of a Black Seminole community in 1826:

We found these negroes in possession of large fields of the finest land, producing large crops of corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, and other esculent vegetables. ... I saw, while riding along the borders of the ponds, fine rice growing; and in the village large corn-cribs were filled, while the houses were larger and more comfortable than those of the Indians themselves.

During the 1820's, it was estimated that 800 blacks were living with the Seminoles. The Black Seminole settlements were overall highly militarized, unlike the communities of most of the slaves in the Deep South. The military nature of the African-Seminole relationship led General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, who visited several flourishing Black Seminole settlements in the 1800s, to describe the African Americans as "vassals and allies" of the Seminole.

In terms of spirituality, the ethnic groups remained distinct. The Seminole followed the nativistic principles of their Great Spirit. Blacks had a syncretic form of Christianity inherited from the plantations. In general, the blacks never wholly adopted Seminole culture and beliefs, nor were they accepted into Native American society. Though later generations of Seminole descended from white and Indian mixtures would not consider the black members of their society to be "Seminole", culturally the mixed Black Seminoles were all but entirely absorbed into the native population.

Most of the blacks spoke Gullah, an Afro-English-based creole language, so they often could communicate better with Anglo-Americans which the Seminole Indians took advantage of. They used them as translators which advanced the trading system that had been created with the British and other tribes. Together in Florida they developed Afro-Seminole Creole, identified as a distinct language in 1978 by the linguist Ian Hancock, who found that Black Seminole and Seminole elders still spoke it in some locations.