The Black Seminoles of Florida: A Wanting Narrative

By Shane Majors

This is a presentation I gave to the Society of American Archivist Students and New Archival Professionals (SNAP) group on the theme of Records of Resistance.

Archivist Terry Cook famously wrote, “…there is not one narrative in a series or collection of records, but many narratives, many stories, serving many purposes for many audiences across time and space. Documents are thus dynamic, not static. And the archivist as much as the creator and researcher is one of the narrators.” His words upended my ideas of what archival work was and expanded what it could be. Never did I think I would put this idea of diverse perspectives into practice before I even graduated. While working on an independent project, I came across a document that mentioned a place that made me look twice at what I was reading. When asked for the closest creek or river east of a newly proposed post office, the respondent wrote “Negro Town Creek”. It took a second for that to sink in. Was there a Black community just a few miles from where I live? Before I could go any further, I had to find context – place and time – for this settlement. The landscape has changed dramatically over the decades so to get a better idea of the terrain before development, I found a land survey from 1849 and to my amazement, the marsh area that was being referred to in the application was also listed here as Negro Town Creek, sixteen years before the end of the Civil War. I needed answers and so I began to dig, little realizing this odyssey would be filled with revelations about the place I grew up. For instance, Florida had been a safe haven for those who escaped enslavement since the seventeenth century. The newly liberated established their own villages near the villages of the Seminole tribe, and the two groups thus formed a symbiotic bond. As America set its eye on the Florida frontier, the Seminoles and the Black Seminoles (as the Black communities were called) began to feel the hostilities of the United States which culminated into a series of three Seminole Wars, the second war (1835-1842) being the most violent.  

As I searched for evidence of the nearby village, I read through countless records – letters, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts and found references to men I never heard of. Growing up in Florida, I knew the names of Osceola and Micanopy as chiefs, but I never heard of the Black Seminoles or their leaders like Abraham. I began to realize my state was a stranger to me; its history lay unseen in documents or ignored altogether. Reading the letters of Major General Thomas Jesup who oversaw the campaign from 1836 to 1838, I gained an insight into the dynamics of the Seminole and Black Seminole relationship. In the beginning, the goal of the United States was to send the natives to Oklahoma and sell the Black population into the plantation system. Jesup was the first to realize that wasn’t going to be possible. Found in the National Archives, he penned a letter to the Secretary of War where he states quite candidly,  

“…[chiefs] Micanopy, Philip, and Cooper, who are about a day’s march from each other, each with from one hundred and twenty to two hundred Indian and negro warriors – the latter, perhaps, the more numerous….This, you may be assured is a negro, not an Indian war, and if it not be speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.”  

The prevalent narrative, I began to realize, downplayed the role of Black leaders and warriors and followed the tradition of silencing the voices of people of color, but in this case the non-native voice. Abraham, who was Chief Micanopy’s trusted advisor and interpreter and a senior amongst the Black leaders, advocated for migration to the west. A former slave and soldier, he seemed to have had a better understanding of the American war machine and what was at stake for the Black community if they lost. Working with Jesup, he was instrumental in the inclusion of Article 5 in an 1837 treaty stating,  

“…the Seminoles, and their allies, who come in, and emigrate to the West, shall be secure in their lives and property; that their negroes, their bona fide property, shall accompany them to the West…”  

Through his efforts Abraham helped defy the motives of the United States government and by the end of the war, over 800 Black Seminoles were transported to Oklahoma and to freedom. His commitment to his people can be felt in his statement to Jesup,  

“We do not live for ourselves only, but for our wives & children who are as dear to us as those of any other men. When we reach our new home, we hope we shall be permitted to remain while the woods remain green, and the water runs.” 

The modern narrative had been molded almost 60 years ago with John Mahon’s book History of the Second Seminole War and while it doesn’t paint Abraham and other Black leaders negatively, it really doesn’t paint much of a picture of them at all. The book calls out Abraham as duplicitous for “playing both sides” but also calls him an “important war leader”. However, Mahon doesn’t do a good job explaining why. I don’t think this is a case where there is a lack of records; Jesup’s diary from 1836-37 is digitized and available as part of the Florida Memory Project, the correspondences between he and the secretary of war are available through the National Archives. It’s the established narrative that needs to be challenged, and yet only a few have done so. So how, as archivists can we contest what’s been called the “authoritative modern reference” of this war? Or any so-called authoritative reference that obstructs other perspectives? I think when we find these innocuous yet tantalizing records, we should question what we’re looking at, investigate them.  In her book Urgent Archives, Michelle Caswell challenges how we should view records in the context of time. When we stop treating them as something that happened, but rather is happening, we begin to see that time is cyclical – what happened “then” is happening “now” and will inevitably happen in the “future” – the past has always been present but we fail to see it.  So, we need to remove records as something of the past to activate them as something of the now. This is particularly important for groups that have been historically marginalized and erased from records – the discovery of the self is a form of resistance; not conforming to some preconceived notions of who one should be but rater who one truly is is liberating. Writing articles and blogs, posting what we find through social media, creating exhibits and encouraging collaboration with community archives are ways we can be records activators; helping to reframe narratives that otherwise would have sat lifeless in a Hollinger box.  

I’ve been motivated most of my life to find, collect, and preserve stories which started with collecting my own. As a budding archivist, I’m seeing the importance of finding and telling the stories of those who history hasn’t allowed, that society deemed unimportant and valueless based on race, gender, sexuality, or some other convoluted barrier. Archivist Verne Harris speaks of the ghosts of archive – ghosts of the dead, of the living, and of those yet born. We don’t necessarily need to build monuments to the dead, but we do need to listen to them so we can better the present generation and the next to follow. Motivation dictates narrative. When I discovered these records of resistance, I was surprised to find out about the free Black communities of 17th – 19th century Florida with one of those communities just two miles from my home. And the freedom fighters they mention like Abraham, amplified that sense of purpose to uncover and tell their stories to reframe the narrative because their stories are as relevant now as they ever were.