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The Exiles of Florida, by Joshua R. Giddings
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Florida was originally settled by Spaniards, in 1558. They were the first people to engage in the African Slave trade, and sought to supply other nations with servants from the coast of Guinea. The Colonists held many slaves, expecting to accumulate wealth by the unrequited toil of their fellow-man.
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.00" w x .39" l, .52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A Valuable Firsthand Account
By Stuart W. Mirsky
An apparent reprint of a 19th century edition, this book contains what appear to be many of the original errors of the typesetters of the period as well as some archaic conventions (e.g., the use of open quote marks on every line of a continuing text). The font itself is somewhat blurred and hard to read and the book lacks any scholarly overview, putting the text into perspective. Still with this book we have a birdseye view of how things looked to a contemporary author who was in a position to observe the political tug-of-war around the issue of slavery firsthand.
Joshua Giddings, the author, was a well known politician and abolitionist in his day and served in Congress for a number of terms where he was witness to the great slavery debates of the era and ardent spokesperson against what he termed the "slave power" in American political and economic life. Describing the causes and proceedings of the conflict in Florida which culminated in the Second Seminole War, he notes how that war was mainly fought at the instigation of southern slave interests, initially in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida, with the object of seizing the population of escaped slaves and their descendants who had fled to Florida while it was still under Spanish rule to gain sanctuary from the slavery to which they or their forebears had been subjected in the American colonies (later the American states).
Giddings blames southern fear of free blacks disrupting their own slave holdings and, even more, their venal desire to obtain slaves from among that black population living in the wilderness of Florida under the auspices of the loosely affiliated Seminole Indian bands (themselves exiles from the Creek tribal federation in the states immediately north of Florida). Andrew Jackson, when he became president in the early 1830's, initiated the removal of eastern Indians in the southern states to Indian territory set aside by the U.S. west of the Mississippi and Giddings argues that the Seminoles themselves only became the object of this removal because they were harboring the renegade ex-slave population.
What is unspoken here, but probably a factor, is that since the U.S. had long since banned the importation of slaves, the Florida renegades not only represented "lost property" to slave holders in the south but a valuable source of fresh slave labor since they could no longer hope to bring more slaves into the country. So economic factors were also at work, putting a premium on slave hunting and slave catching, thus making the re-enslavement of the renegades and their descendents an especially lucrative enterprise.
In Giddings' description of events, gleaned from his own firsthand observations in Congress and from reviewing and researching related materials (which, he claims, were sometimes suppressed by southern Congressmen to avoid open discussion of the role of slavery in causing and prolonging the Seminole War), the war itself was an elaborate charade to mask the slave-catching project of southern slavers and planters. The Seminole blacks lived with and fought beside the Seminole Indians who had harbored them from the first and proved among the most recalcitrant resisters in the struggles with the U.S. Army. The army, itself, had been dispatched into Florida to fight a war the southern planters had agitated for though, Giddings observes, the planters, in Florida at least, suffered the most serious depredations from the Indian and black resisters and ended up costing the federal government far more than had ever been dreamed.
One U.S. general, Thomas S. Jessup, made substantial progress against the Seminole and their allies but lost ground when, after promising freedom to the blacks who surrendered (in the form of relocation with the Seminole to Indian Territory) he reneged under pressure by the white planters and allowed them to "reclaim" the blacks who had voluntarily surrendered or been captured on the battlefield. This decision prompted the Indians and their black allies to flee again and agitated the general to such an extent that he took somewhat extraordinary measures to win his contest with the Indians. In one particularly egregious action, Jessup captured the well-known war chief, Osceola, and his lieutenant Coacoochee with their followers when these came in under a flag of truce. Later, after Coacoochee and others escaped from imprisonment (though Osceola died in American hands), Jessup threatened to bring in bloodhounds and actually did, indicating to Giddings that the war was really about capturing slaves, not beating the Indians.
Giddings notes that the record shows the blacks were among the hardest fighters, given that they could see what awaited them once delivered into American hands. However, eventually, seeing the handwriting on the wall, their leaders decided to take their chances and surrender to the military. According to Giddings' reading of the record, the American military had formed a respect for their Indian and black adversaries and for the most part proved unwilling to collaborate in the re-enslavement (or initial enslavement in some cases) of captured or surrendering blacks. Despite political pressure on Washington politicians and the executive branch of government, Giddings reports numerous instances of military officers working to thwart the slavers' efforts to grab the black prisoners before they could safely be conducted to Indian territory. In many cases these efforts weren't successful but in many others they were, resulting in a large body of blacks finding their way into the Arkansas-Oklahoma territory with the Seminoles who were also being incrementally captured (or who had surrendered) and were transported there.
Unfortunately, as Giddings notes, the Seminole blacks' were not home free in the new territory where the U.S. government allowed the Creek Indians to reassert their authority over the Seminole in various ways, contrary to the terms of the Seminole surrender. Creeks kept slaves and followed a slaveholding system akin to the white south. Given that they believed the Seminole rightly belonged under Creek governance and that many of the Seminole blacks were actually escaped Creek slaves or descendants of such people or were part of a group of blacks captured by Creek fighters in league with Jessup which entitled the captors to claim them as property, they pushed for re-enslavement of the Seminole blacks. In the end the government in Washington was prevailed upon to favor their claim and a large number of Seminole blacks and Indians fled Indian Territory across Texas for safety in Mexico which had outlawed slavery (in 1826).
Giddings is an earnest reporter but it's not clear he always gets it right or that his research is entirely reliable. He seems to confuse the black leader Abraham with the younger black leader John Horse and paints an overly heroic picture of the Indian war chief Coacoochee. Depending as much on word-of-mouth evidence as written documents, Giddings' sentiment seems totally sincere and his eyewitness account invaluable. But as a scholarly documenter of events he leaves something to be desired.
SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
the truth about the black seminoles
By Cynthia Atchico
this book is what you have been waitting for; if you seek the truth about the origins of the black seminole indians.
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