CONCLUSION
Underground Railroad
By the conclusion of the First Seminole War, the taming of a troublesome borderland for white Southerners was far from complete, but the outcome no longer in doubt. From the moment the Revolutionary War concluded, the United States had pushed relentlessly to expand the southeastern boundaries of the republic to secure supremacy over an intricate web of multiracial and multicultural societies. Hispanic peoples, French Creoles, Muskogeans, Seminoles, former loyalists, ambitious adventurers, and African Americans who had discovered a niche with other people found their room for maneuvering either eliminated or seriously constrained. The multiple conflicts involved in the War of 1812 created the last great set of opportunities for Black Georgians to escape into this other world. The tragic aftermath marked the decisive moment in the transformation of the emerging cotton frontier and the consequent closing off of most avenues of escape.1
In the wake of the bloody Creek War, Congress granted independent territorial status to the newly designated Alabama Territory and touched off an onslaught of backwoods settlers and speculators elbowing their way not only into the territory along the Alabama and Tombigbee River valleys but also the lands and villages of the Creeks. The cotton frontier moved westward as settlers led carts full of their possessions, including enslaved people, onto former Native lands.2 The Seminoles were equally hard-pressed following the transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States in 1821, opening the way for American settlers to move into fertile sections of what had been East and West Florida. The large Mikasuki bands near the Apalachicola moved to a location west of the upper Suwannee. Bowlegs’s band headed farther south near today’s Lake Harris in central Florida. Micanopy and his Red and Black Seminoles settled at nearby Pekaclekcha. Some thirty towns were scattered throughout the Florida peninsula from the Georgia border to Tampa Bay and continued to shelter “Negro villages,” as Americans called them. As conflicts between newly arrived white Floridians and the Seminoles became endemic, territorial authorities began plotting how to move the Natives onto reservations or, failing that, how to remove them from Florida.3
After the signing of the Transcontinental Treaty of 1821, the free Black community in St. Augustine faced a frontal assault on its rights and liberties. The new territorial legislature outlawed manumission, restricted the right to carry firearms, imposed head taxes on males, and instituted draconian punishment for those who could not pay. It eventually required every free Black person to place himself or herself under a white guardian, as was the custom in the southern United States.4 Northern Florida once again became a world in flux but a different kind of flux as immigrants of a new type— fiercely independent, white, ambitious, crude in manners, and thoroughly racist—pushed their way in and jockeyed to impose their ideas and values.
As the windows on the borders of freedom were slamming shut, the flight of hundreds and eventually several thousand Black Georgians in the postrevolutionary era nevertheless left an important legacy for generations to come. Despite the image of the Gullah-Geechee people created in the twentieth century, Black people living on the coast of Georgia were never isolated or clueless about events in the republic or in the greater Atlantic. They shared in a collective wave of hope and fear that came from the realization that they were living in a time of profound change.5 Over a forty-year period, freedom seekers sought out the competing visions offered by the many racial, ethnic, and religious groups in the Southeast. How they defined freedom may have taken on an infinite number of shapes and forms depending on the circumstances in which they found themselves, but they possessed one clear goal—freedom from bondage.
As a region, the Southeast offers a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. In many respects, what took place from 1776 to the end of the War of 1812 can be understood as an early version of the Underground Railroad, that grand metaphor describing how thousands of enslaved people fled the Upper South between 1830 and 1860 for northern cities, Canada, and, as recent scholarship has shown, Mexico and the British Caribbean in extraordinary acts of bravery.6 The similarities are many. In both time periods, the process of making a successful flight required incredible fearlessness, daring, and boldness in the face of long odds. Men and women of both periods were in search of a society that recognized their humanity and accorded them a measure of equal treatment. In both instances, families played an important part in deciding who was to go and how to make the run for freedom.
In the earlier period, escape was primarily by water or by Indian trails. In the latter, it was small groups of Black people who were assisted by a vast and largely informal network of free Black people and sympathetic whites as well as those still enslaved in the South. Nevertheless, historians of the Underground Railroad are now recognizing that, to better understand the phenomenon, increasing emphasis must be on a narrative of self-emancipation rather than the story of high-minded white people assisting frightened and helpless African Americans.7 That brings the story several steps closer to the experience in the South several decades earlier.
However, the apparent similarities of the flights take us only so far. Pursuing freedom in the Lower South required a different mind-set than it did in the Upper South. For both sets of people, the decision to make a clean break with an enslaved community and a culture in which one had grown up was a costly emotional one. All freedom seekers no matter the period of time had to calculate the personal sacrifice involved in leaving places and people they knew for the uncertainty of the unknown and the risk of being retaken and either severely punished or sold away. African Americans in the Southeast faced an additional challenge. They had to be prepared to enter a different world, speak a different language, and operate by cultural norms that were foreign by definition. They had to possess the adaptability to integrate themselves into societies for which they had little or no familiarity. In the words of historian Ira Berlin, they had to possess “cultural plasticity” in order to navigate borders, boundaries, and frontiers.
As they filtered across those borders, Black Georgians played a notable but largely unnoticed role in the shifting balance of power in the region. The Southeast may have evolved from a place of many cultures and peoples to a dominant culture where slavery was racialized, non-English Europeans were marginalized, and Natives were dispossessed of their lands, but that reality does not diminish the value of what Black Georgians brought to this struggle. Fugitives strengthened Hispanic and Native societies in distinct ways: the addition of manpower in areas with a static population, a willingness to accept prevailing cultural norms and act as participants, and their unrelenting commitment to resist, by force of arms if necessary, settler colonialism.8 They played an underappreciated role in resisting the push by American frontiersmen and settlers to eliminate Native groups and expel the Spanish from the continent.
Black men and women were willing to pick up weapons to defend their rights and engage in combat, a remarkably different phenomenon from the landscape of people fleeing to Philadelphia and New York or Cincinnati and Canada. In the revolutionary and postrevolutionary age, African Americans were tenacious fighters against white oppressors when there was a realistic hope of making a stand. This meant reliance on the British, Spanish, Creeks, or Seminoles, whether organized in the defense of Savannah in 1779 or at the Prospect Bluff fort in 1815–16, whether with the Black militia of Hispanic Florida or the Black Seminoles, or accompanying warriors from the Lower Towns of the Creeks. In virtually all cases, the fighting was defensive in purpose, even in maroon communities. Unlike the Upper South, the Southeast spawned a spectrum of independent maroon communities that showed a diversity of goals and aspirations that arguably matched those in the Caribbean while sharing in the universal quest for autonomy and self-determination.
The Southeast offers a vital link between the stories of Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years before the Civil War. That narrative has been obscured by the absence of chroniclers of their flight, the episodic geopolitical events that raised larger issues, the relative lack of documentation of Native societies, and the archival silence that exists when looking into southern slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An epic story, it is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the postrevolutionary South, a remarkable gauge of the depth of feeling and commitment that existed among African Americans. Their constant movement marked the closing act of a chaotic eighteenth century when empires struggled for position and Native peoples resisted the relentless advance of nations bent on eroding their lands and freedom. In a larger sense, the story marks the passing of the torch of liberty from the generation of the Revolution to those who belonged to the era of the Underground Railroad, a grand connecting arc that stretches over a forty-year period.