INTRODUCTION

On a humid evening in 1781, nine people gathered at a dock on Ossabaw Island, twenty miles south of Savannah, to peer at a twenty-foot yawl recently covered with pitch, and dream a dream that a husband and wife had long entertained. The five adults proposed to put their four children and themselves into the small vessel and set out for St. Augustine, the tiny capital of British East Florida, one hundred miles away. They were leaving behind over one hundred acquaintances on three plantations, enslaved people who cultivated indigo, raised cattle, grew provisions for Savannah, and cut live oaks to build transatlantic ships on this seemingly isolated barrier island. If the British invasion of Georgia two years earlier had brought a mass exodus of slaves from their settlements in and around Savannah, the people on these Morel plantations had remained in place and continued life much as they had since the island was settled twenty years before.¹

Betty and Hercules, one born in South Carolina, the other in Angola, had been laying plans to escape with their sons, Prince and Winter, for several months.² Far from allowing themselves to be frustrated by an earlier failed attempt, the two began thinking more boldly and brought into their plot another family, Jupiter and Auba and their two children, as well as Jack, a single person in his forties, also from Angola. They chose the only accessible vessel, a yawl with four oars and one small sail that Hercules had helped build for the Morels, three brothers whose father had purchased the island and left each with a plantation. The idea of going well over a hundred miles in a twenty-foot yawl, designed for short distances, overloaded with nine people, spoke to the strength of their beliefs.³ It was a leap of faith.

In a remarkable feat of seamanship, Hercules piloted the boat to East Florida without incident. Once there, the squat, strongly built man placed himself and his family under the protection of one of the most powerful and capable British officers in the province, Col. Thomas Brown, commander of the King’s Rangers during the Siege of Savannah in 1779.⁴ Jupiter, Auba, and Jack chose another route. According to a notice placed in the Gazette of Georgia in 1785, “[They went up] among the Indians from St. Augustine and have not been heard of since.” Jupiter and family knowingly chose to carve out a life for themselves among the Seminoles and to live in a society where they would enjoy relative autonomy and a measure of respect in return for an annual tribute from their crops.⁵

The choices facing Georgia and Carolina slaves in the East Florida capital were limited. During the remaining years of the eighteenth century, at least thirty-one other enslaved people from the Morel holdings or nearby plantations made for the St. Marys River, the boundary between the state and the Spanish colony, in the hopes of securing their freedom.⁶ They had good reason. At the end of the Revolution, Spain had regained sovereignty over its old colony of Florida, founded in 1565 and lost to the British in 1763. The Crown did not hesitate to resume its former policy of offering asylum to fugitives from English-speaking territories who converted to Catholicism. Rooted in medieval and Roman law, the Spanish judicial system recognized a legal personality in enslaved people as well as freemen, while Spanish society showed a sensibility in matters of race and freedom that was radically different from that of Anglo Americans.

Those Morel plantation–based slaves were not following an idiosyncratic path. In prerevolutionary times, Carolina freedom seekers had sought out St. Augustine and been a staunch ally of the Spanish. The movement all but stopped when the British seized East Florida but resumed with the outbreak of the War of Independence. From the beginning of the American Revolution to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually thousands of Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of relative peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people.

In recent years, scholars have been reconceptualizing the geography of freedom in America during the time of slavery. Perhaps no period has received greater attention than the Age of Revolutions, when thousands of Black people crossed borders, boundaries, and frontiers in North America, Hispaniola, and the British and French Caribbean, with many heading to Canada, England, continental Europe, and Africa in the quest for liberty.⁷ The renewal of scholarship on the Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Law has likewise extended attention to areas beyond the United States, first and foremost Canada but increasingly Mexico, the British Caribbean, and Indian lands to the west. By the 1830s, crossing the borders of the United States offered the possibility of formal freedom recognized in law as opposed to the semiformal freedoms that fugitives gained in northern towns where their status remained ambiguous or in the informal freedoms found in southern towns where it was possible, but highly risky, to pass oneself off as a free Black person.⁸ In this outpouring of work, one area has been neglected: the movement of freedom seekers in the Southeast from the Revolution to the end of the First Seminole War.

Throughout this period, movement was an essential characteristic of life along the coast, a precursor of the phenomenon known as the Underground Railroad. The actual numbers did not approach the volume of people leaving the Upper South between 1830 and 1860, estimated at somewhere between one thousand and five thousand per year in a population that approached four million in 1860.⁹ But the American Revolution in Georgia had opened vistas to people of color who discovered something of the geography of the coast, whether through escaping, at least for a time, or being rudely dislocated from their plantations as patriots and loyalists fought over them as the spoils of war. The creation of a fictive state by a British-backed adventurer in Seminole country in 1800 and the multiple conflicts associated with the War of 1812 provided additional opportunities. Between these major events, there was a steady flow of freedom seekers attracted to Spanish Florida even after the official policy of sanctuary ended in 1790. The tolerance for fugitive slaves combined with a short-handed government to create a relatively welcoming space.

Nor were fugitive slaves the only Black people crossing the borders, a realty that makes the Southeast unlike any other region of the United States. The various movements included all those who were not part of the quest for freedom: war captives whom Creeks and Seminoles seized during the Revolution or in sporadic raids in the years thereafter; Black people purchased directly by Natives, never a large number but still part of the diversity of people of African descent who found themselves in Lower Creek or Seminole towns; those who were kidnapped by outlaws on both sides of the St. Marys River to be sold in another polity; those who were carried across boundaries by enslavers at the end of the Revolution; and those brought by planters escaping debt in Georgia in 1791–1793, a surprising one thousand people. Nor can one neglect the significant flow of Black people into Georgia during the early 1780s, when loyalist planters sold their enslaved people to gain liquidity for their move to another colony of the empire, while others decided to return to the new state as the best of all the options. Several captives fled to become members of one of the largest and longest-lived maroon communities in the history of the United States; others escaped back to Florida, contributing to the rich mosaic of crossings.¹⁰

Too often, coastal Georgia is seen as a backwater region where enslaved people existed in a deeply isolated space on barrier islands or coastal plantations, a world that was overwhelmingly Black and where customs and traditions brought from Africa were preserved until the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, the Gullah Geechee people evolved a unique culture with deep African retentions that are clearly visible in their distinctive language, arts, crafts, foodways, and music. The image, however, needs considerable amending. The Africans and African Americans on the coast of Georgia resisted slavery with all their might, and hundreds and eventually thousands took the chance and made their way to other lands. Far from being cut off and ignorant of the flow of events and ideas in the Atlantic world, they became participants in the great struggle over who would prevail in the Southeast, leaving traces that were picked up and mirrored several decades later in the Underground Railroad.¹¹ Although no network of hardy “conductors” existed, and individuals or groups crossed borders on their own initiative, the commitment of these freedom seekers to self-emancipation was every bit as significant.

Who were these people willing to risk leaving behind family and friends and make a break for distant lands where the outcomes were uncertain? Most fugitives originated in the small number of counties bordering the Georgia coast, a strip of land already integrated into the Atlantic world through the rice and deerskin trade with Britain and the timber and livestock trade with the Caribbean. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 had created an anomalous situation when, by the terms of the treaty, it paired the state of Georgia, whose population was growing at a rapid rate, with Spanish East Florida, whose population was many times smaller and relatively static, a modest military colony little more than a northern outpost of a struggling Spanish Empire.

Few captives on coastal plantations decided to escape alone. The odds of making it by water or overland through wetlands or along the few paths or roads were long. Most escaped in groups, often in families, with women frequently present. They faced daunting odds. Crossing boundaries required a plan, indeed a sophisticated plan to navigate the challenges. For much of the period, boats or canoes had to be secured; supplies had to be accumulated, including water, food, clothing, and sometimes a gun; a waterman needed to be part of the escaping party; and tides and ocean currents had to be calculated. If one headed to Seminole or Creek territory, one had to discover Indian trails and paths and be ready to confront Indigenous people whose reception might be less than friendly.

Most succeeded in escaping by crossing the St. Marys River or Cumberland Sound at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. Only a few hundred yards wide at its widest point, the modest river separated the two polities and became an international border of consequence. The boundary between Florida and Georgia mirrored the deep political, religious, and cultural divides in this multicultural region and the many cross-currents that regularly swept through it. The river extended to the Okefenokee Swamp, turned south, and then looped northward, offering an ideal terrain for horse and cattle thieves, adventurers, men seeking to escape their debts, Black people in search of freedom, and Creeks and Seminoles who on occasion rode down the river systems of both territories to raid for cattle and slaves.¹²

Indeed, the area from the Altamaha River to the St. Johns River in Florida, a seventy-mile stretch of wetlands, savannas, grasslands, and pine forests, represented a borderland characterized by a disconcerting vacuum of power. Neither the Americans nor the Spanish were in full control of an of a lightly populated area on both sides of the border that attracted people looking to take advantage of the relative absence of state power. Native Americans continued to assert their undeniable claims to sovereignty. Over the decades, this region represented as much a process as a place, one where African Americans found a constantly changing set of circumstances.

Escaping across these borders demanded a substantially different set of calculations than the flight into the swamp and woods surrounding coastal plantations that others undertook, whether to see family, seek a time-out from a harsh work routine, or become a maroon seeking autonomy in a hidden landscape. The planning more nearly foreshadowed the planning involved in finding boats and watermen to cross the Ohio River or using the railroad system from Maryland to Pennsylvania during the 1840s and 1850s. Scholars have now broadened our understanding of the Underground Rail-road to free it from the romanticized tale of conductors operating an interconnected system full of codes, tunnels, and hidden messages in which allies, white and Black, guided the process. The role of white abolitionists and free Blacks must be understood in more modest terms as scholars bring forward the determination and risk-taking of the fugitives themselves. The bravery, fearlessness, and willingness to face daunting odds were found in both periods.

However, the similarities in the motives and roles of fugitives between the two periods can take us only so far. The stories of the lives of fugitives from the Georgia Lowcountry illustrate a larger and more fundamental truth. The movement of people of color across borders and boundaries over a long period of time was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast, not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different groups of people that inhabited the region and contended for power. Prominent were the Creeks of the Upper and Lower Towns, the Alachua and Mikasuki Seminoles, Spanish colonists, British imperialists, adventurers and freebooters of all nationalities, expansion-minded American settlers, Africans, and African Americans. Through this diverse mixture of communities, the Atlantic world laid special claim to this part of the North American mainland, a claim that lost none of its force through the 1810s.

Historian Elijah Gould reminds us that no European power posed a greater threat to the new American Republic or cast in sharper relief the post-independence vulnerability to foreign powers than Spain.¹³ Its empire on the North American continent stretched from Upper California to the Florida Keys and enabled the Spanish during the later 1780s and early 1790s to intervene in the affairs of the United States in multiple ways: providing sanctuary to escaped slaves in Florida, refusing to allow Anglo-American farms to ship goods through New Orleans, and encouraging secessionist talk among disaffected settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee. Even after it ended the policy of offering sanctuary to escaped slaves in 1790 and opened the Mississippi to American trade, Spanish America still remained important to the story of people of African descent.

Over a long and productive career, historian Jane Landers has pulled from obscurity the vitality and richness of Black life during the Second Spanish Period (1784–1821) and re-created a lost world where Black women could be litigants in court, Black entrepreneurs carved a niche for themselves in St. Augustine, Black couples married in the Catholic church, and a Black militia evolved into the most reliable pillar of defense outside St. Augustine. The “Atlantic creole,” that African who crossed many countries and king-doms in a lifetime, spoke several languages, and was willing to take great risks to achieve a measure of freedom, thrived in this setting that eventually pitted Black Georgians fighting white Georgians.¹⁴ Fugitives from Georgia and South Carolina formed the backbone of the Free Black militia that became an essential prop of the Spanish government and hence a key player in the balance of power in the Southeast. White Georgians raged at “the vilest species of troops” on their doorsteps and the example being set for their own captives.¹⁵

When Spain repealed its policy of sanctuary in 1790, benefits still accrued to Black residents of East Florida, and the colony remained a destination for fugitives. But a growing number headed for the towns of the Seminole Indians on the Alachua Prairie in the east or to the Mikasukis near the Apalachicola River in the northwest of Florida. The Seminoles had coalesced into a society that remained open and inclusive, capable of absorbing a range of people that included Ochese Creeks from what later became central Georgia, Mikasuki speakers from among the Lower Creeks, Upper Creek refugees expelled from their towns for various misdeeds, Yuchis, and “Spanish Indians,” Natives who had intermarried with Cubans and worked on fishing boats along the Gulf Coast. Drawing on earlier notions of captivity, we can see a remarkably pluralistic society in which African Americans found a place that offered more freedom, respect, and opportunities than in any other society in North America at that time. In this unique setting, Black freedom seekers became an even more significant factor in the constantly shifting balance of power in the Southeast. They evolved from cultural brokers and interpreters to occasional fighters alongside bands of warriors to Black Seminoles fighting together as a unit.¹⁶

The Creek Nation had a more problematic relationship with Black people on the Georgia coast because of the infusion of war captives and those purchased during the Revolution and immediately afterward. The Creeks in the Lower and Upper Towns held most African Americans in some form of captivity that ranged from absolute servitude to required light labor to the possibility of achieving freedom through incorporation into a clan or family. Although many were war captives taken by raiding parties, Black people still made their own way to the Indian towns along the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers. That decision posed a more equivocal choice than heading to East Florida, where a white man’s culture held sway and the markers were easier to understand. To go from a coastal plantation to a Native town was to face a radically different culture, different expectations, different ways of communicating, and unknown outcomes.¹⁷ Whether as captives or as free actors, Black people played a minor but distinct role in confronting white settlers pushing the boundaries of Georgia beyond the Oconee and Altamaha Rivers.

A study of this scale and covering this length of time requires choices. The first is focusing on the lives of a handful of people whose careers throw light on the geopolitical landscape as well as on how individual decisions were made. The narratives of individuals like Titus and Nelly, John Peter, Mahomet, Hercules and Betty, Nancy, and Ned Simmons allow the reader to dive beneath the surface and explore the many dimensions in making an escape and in understanding the types of power arrayed against these freedom seekers. The story of Black Georgians in Indian country poses a special challenge for scholars given the paucity of sources. The claims for compensation for “war captives” by coastal planters provide a valuable and underused resource. The career of a Scots-Indian named John Kinnard on Kinchafoonee Creek offers an exceptional window for assessing the collective experience of men and women like Pompey and Betsy—who were captured, purchased, and maybe escaped—and how they influenced relations between the United States and the Creek confederacy.

This epic story constitutes a powerful counter-narrative to American history, a tale of how Black people found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. The rise and fall in the numbers of freedom seekers between the Revolution and the First Seminole War serves as 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 all African Americans. Their constant movement across boundaries and borders, whether through flight or as unwilling captives, marked the closing act of a chaotic eighteenth century in which empires struggled for position and Native peoples resisted the relentless advance of empires and nations bent on eroding their lands and freedom. It is a powerful reminder that Africans and African Americans in the Georgia Lowcountry were far from an isolated people stuck on coastal plantations and cut off from the flow of news and ideas in the Atlantic world.

For the eighteenth century and the first fifteen years of the nineteenth, the enslaved population of coastal Georgia could nourish a realistic hope for a life beyond the chains of an enslaved existence. Much like those gaining freedom during the period of the Underground Railroad, the freedom seekers heading south were primary actors who emancipated themselves or failed by a hair’s breadth in feats that showed an indomitable courage, a willingness to take high-level risks, and a dogged perseverance. In contrast to those in the Underground Railroad, enslaved people on the Georgia coast sought out the competing visions for the region’s future offered by the many racial, ethnic, and religious groups in the Southeast and played a distinctive role in tilting the balance of power in the region, if only for a moment of time.¹⁸ It is a little-known story that highlights the role of Black Georgians in knowing how to take advantage of the patchwork of identities and cultures in the Southeast to pursue their own aims and coincidentally stiffen resistance to the expansion of the United States.