60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

124 Flight to Freedom
The next major episodes in Spanish Florida’s border relations had to do
with the now independent British North American colonies (the United
States). African fugitives made their way once again in large numbers into
the Spanish zone. Contemporary records suggest that some Indians, especially
the Choctaw and Chickasaw, kept them in conditions of slavery similar
to those on the American plantations, but other Indian groups treated them
as free persons or held them under a light form of servitude. For instance, the
Seminoles – meaning “runaways”, according to Porter (1932, 323) – who were
latecomers to the area and themselves victims of war and oppression that led
to their forced migration, are said to have held Blacks in a form of bondage
that was hard to distinguish from freedom. 11 This encouraged Blacks to
abscond to Florida and take their chances with the Seminoles, even if that
meant reduction to the form of enslavement practised by their new hosts.
Whatever the early situation, the Blacks belonging to the Seminoles
increasingly developed symbiotic relations with them, marrying Indian
women and assuming positions of authority within the various communities.
In time, many Blacks became powerful figures in Seminole society.
Blassingame (1979, 211) reckons that by 1836 there were some twelve hundred
Maroons in the various Seminole towns, and states that by the midnineteenth
century the Indians and Africans had become so intermixed that
they were often indistinguishable from each other. Mulroy (1993, 2, 4, 17–19
passim) rejects this view, arguing that the Seminole Maroons, as he chooses
to call them, usually occupied different land spaces and retained fairly distinct
cultural forms from their Indian brethren. He (1993, 5) brilliantly sums
up their impact on contemporary society:
The maroons’ history of origins, plantation slavery, Spanish and Native
American associations, Florida wars, and forced removal to the Indian Territory
culminated in a Mexican borderlands mosaic embracing slave hunters, corrupt
Indian agents, filibusters, revolutionaries, foreign invaders, Apache and
Comanche raiders, border outlaws, and Buffalo Soldiers. What emerges is an
epic saga of slavery, flight, exile and ultimately, freedom. Theirs is a success story.
In 1814, during the war between Britain and the United States, the British
built a fort (later called Negro Fort) at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola
River in Florida and garrisoned it largely with Black runaways. After the
signing of the Treaty of Ghent between the two combatants, the British
departed in 1815, leaving the fort and a considerable amount of arms and