FOREWORD
Flights to freedom are among the most compelling stories in American history. From Hannah Dunston’s 1697 self-liberation to the Abenaki to David Ogden’s escape from the Iroquois in 1781; from Harriet Tubman’s trek to freedom to Afromexicanos who took shelter in independent Mexico; even from Yaqui fugitives escaping Mexican extermination among kindred in Arizona to Dull Knife’s Cheyenne Outbreak of 1874, we sense the universality of a desire to command one’s own life story.
Yet seldom do we hear tales of enslavement and emancipation that combine American Indians and African Americans in the same pages. Looking to the Deep South during the Revolutionary and Early Republic eras, Paul Pressly brings us the fascinating story of a multi-faceted Southern Underground Railroad that destabilizes simpler narratives about the institution of racial slavery in the Old South. Opening with the surreptitious journey of a fugitive-packed twenty-foot yawl that slipped away from Ossabaw Island in 1781, and extending as far west as Indian Territory, Pressly’s little-known Southern variant of routes to freedom offers a vivid new narrative on the universal human urge to self-determination. Dr. Pressly, of course, is the ideal writer to bring us this story. Long-time director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance and award-winning historian who is deeply immersed in the landscape, cultures, and archives of the early South, his skill for enlivening critical turning points and characters is evident on every page.
Pressly’s keen eye for the telling detail makes clear the protean nature of a colonial society where, we might assume, incorrectly, that race was one of the more stable categories. In early Savannah’s cobblestone streets and signature squares, premised on the prohibition of enslavement, a visitor might see free people of color, enslaved Black people, even enslaved Indians under the power of Native trading elites like Coweta-born Mary Musgrove. From its very inception, the anti-slavery colony of Georgia, with founding Governor Oglethorpe’s explicit endorsement, engaged in the Indian slave trade as the big bills of exchange for a reciprocating market in gunpowder, lead, muskets, rum, and the finely tanned deer skins to produce the butter-soft riding pants prized by English Gentry. The Caribbean export trade in Indian slaves, however, once the engine of wealth production in early Carolina, dwindled as importation of African slaves was approved by the Trustees in 1750.
From the opening days of the Seven Year’s War (1756–63) to the American war for independence, through the rise and fall of the William Bowles and his strikingly multi-racial United Nations of the Creeks and Cherokees (1799–1803) into the era of Indian expulsions (1814–38) that followed the Creek War, Pressly shares the complexities of relations between self-emancipating enslaved folks from the coastal rice and henequen plantations and expanding cotton frontier, and the Creek and Seminole peoples to the west and south. Freedom-seeking Black people from the Sea Islands might head for British-held Florida (1763–83), which offered them independence in return for military service, an extension of Spain’s earlier strategy of employing fugitive Black escapees as frontier militia to counter British designs on Castillo San Augustine.
Or they might also head for Indian Country, where divergent cultural developments would shape their lives. In northeast Florida, Indigenous peoples reconstituted from tribes shattered in colonial wars were coalescing in the stronghold of Alachua Prairie as the Seminole Nation, receptive in its own multi-ethnic diversity to the incorporation of Black people as affines and kinfolk. The emergence, however, of Native creoles or mestizos, often the mixed-descent offspring of British, Spanish, or French traders married into Lower Creek matrilines, cultivated as class-allies by American agents like Henry Knox and Benjamin Hawkins, would solidify the primacy of a Euro-Indigenous Planter Class under the leadership of elite men like Sam Moniac, Lachlan McGilvray, and William McIntosh. From these latter would evolve the White Stick opposition to Tecumseh’s revolutionary movement to unite the Indian tribes of the cis-Mississippi frontier.
The Creek War ended in 1814 at Tohopeka, or Horseshoe Bend, with Andrew Jackson’s annihilation of Menawa’s Red Stick coalition, and the long era of contingency, in which Black people and Indians alike experimented with freedom and alliance, ended. Territorial status opened the floodgates to settlers and land speculators alike, while Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws suffered deportation (the wealthy among them marching their enslaved with them as capital-on-foot). The Plantation Era celebrated by films like Gone with the Wind would last a mere generation, yet in the deeps of Florida’s multi-racial maroon communities, in the Gullah communities of the Sea Islands, and in Indian Territory, the complex legacy of the Black and Indigenous drive for independence survived to take new forms. Paul Pressly has re-envisioned both the birthplace and the early foundations of freedom-and-justice seeking in the United States, and we are the beneficiaries.