United we stand! Joint struggles of native American and African American in the Columbian era - Columbus and the New World Order 1492-1992

Monthly Review, July-August, 1992 by Jan R. Carew

The Seminoles had joined the Negroes and made it a bitter fight. The Governor of Georgia, outraged but powerless, sent angry messages that the Seminoles must at least give up their [emphasis added] Negroes, even if the Spanish would not give up Florida. No answer came back.

One interesting detail emerged for the first time: Negro "soldiers" were mentioned by the Georgians and the Carolinians. Mentioned in whispers, it is true, and their skill deprecated and all mention deleted from the newspaper accounts. But however many asterisks the editors of the Savannah and Charleston inserted in the reports (informing their readers that the deletions were for reasons of local security), an incontestable fact had been established: that Negroes, organized in bands, well armed, had successfully fought a regiment of American soldiers... A second army was raised and went to seize eastern Florida and wipe out the Negro settlements.

It was hard for them to grasp the fact that this army was also defeated. It took the slaveowners two years to grasp this point. They sent in more men with guns. The Seminoles, who were masters at fading into the dense swamps and forests, lost a few men and some cattle but claimed that not a single Negro was captured...

Some of the Georgians brought back tales of extraordinary courage, of Indians and Negroes fighting together, the Indians under the leadership of Indians, the Negroes under the leadership of Negroes--and the great devotion between the two groups.29

An enraged Adjutant General ordered Colonel Smith to "Punish those Indians who have taken the warpath, burn their property which cannot be transported. Execute without mercy Negroes captured under arms, and take all other Negroes prisoner." In the years 1812 to 1813, Seminole and Black insurgents thwarted the State of Georgia's bid to conquer Florida. But a new and formidable opponent appeared on the scene--General Andrew Jackson. As Buckmaster writes, "this man wove the fabric of Indian-Negro conflict with the white man into such a tight weave that it became a veritable noose around the necks of them all."[31] His policy was a simple but unequivocal one: crush the Seminoles and re-enslave their Black allies ! In 1814, strutting his way once more onto the stage of history, after having fought in the Revolutionary War, Jackson crushed the combined forces of the Creek Federation at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama. He had prepared for this battle by using fair means and foul and superior fire power in a two-year struggle against the Redsticks, those redoubtable Native Americans who had barred the way of settlers bent on spreading out to the Mississippi and beyond. "Jackson was a man forty-seven years old at this time... A frontiersman, a Tennessean, a Revolutionary soldier, a Congressman, a slaveowner, he had an uncomplicated conviction that the Indians had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and the Negro was a born slave. [32]

The victorious Jackson imposed a treaty upon the defeated Creek Federation by which several million acres were ceded to the Americans in such a way that it sundered and fragmented the Creek lands, making it impossible for them to exist as a cohesive society any longer.