The Exiles of Florida / or, The crimes committed by our government against the Maroons, who fled from South Carolina and other slave states, seeking protection under Spanish laws.

by Joshua R. Giddings

1827.

While the Department at Washington supposed the Agent to have neglected his duty, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the territory supposed the Agent had been quite too faithful to the slaveholders. On the twentieth of March he wrote Colonel Humphreys, saying, “Many slaves belonging to the Indians ARE NOW IN POSSESSION OF THE WHITE PEOPLE. These slaves cannot be obtained for their Indian owners without a lawsuit;” and he then directed the Agent to submit the claim, in all cases where there was an Indian claimant, to the chiefs for decision.

In these contests between barbarians and savages, concerning the rights which they claimed to the bodies of their fellow men, the Exiles had no voice. They well understood that the rapacity of the slave claimants was unbounded and inexorable; they therefore endeavored to avoid all contact with the whites, and to preserve their freedom by affording the piratical slave-catchers no opportunity to lay hands on them.

These demands for negroes alleged to be among the Indians, continued to excite the people of Florida and to perplex the officers of Government, threatening the most serious results,[59] and continually enhancing the dangers of the Exiles.

1828.

The troops at Fort King were called on to aid in the arrest of fugitive slaves; but their efforts merely excited the ridicule and contempt of both Indiana and negroes. These circumstances becoming known to the slaves of Florida, naturally excited them to discontent; and while their masters were engaged in efforts to arrest negroes to whom they had no claim, their own servants in whom they had reposed every confidence, suddenly disappeared and became lost among the Exiles of the interior. The white people became irritated under these vexations. Their indignation against the Indians was unbounded. The Agent, Colonel Humphreys, gave a vivid description of their barbarity, in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.[60] But remonstrances with the Indian Department appeared to have no effect. Peremptory orders for the arrest and delivery of slaves continued to reach the Agent. These orders he could not carry into effect, as he could command no force adequate to the arrest of the fugitives. Governor Duval began to regard the Agent as remiss in his efforts, and so reported him to the War Department. Some of the most wealthy Seminoles had purchased slaves of the white people, and for many years, perhaps we may say for generations, had been slaveholders. They held their slaves in a state between that of servitude and freedom; the slave usually living with his own family and occupying his time as he pleased, paying his master annually a small stipend in corn and other vegetables. This class of slaves regarded servitude among the whites with the greatest degree of horror.

The owners of fugitive slaves, or men who pretended to have lost slaves, when able, would seize and hold those belonging to the Indians. The Indians being ignorant of legal proceedings, were unable to obtain compensation from those who thus robbed them of what the slaveholders termed property. This practice became so common that, on the seventeenth of April, many of the chiefs and warriors assembled at the Agency, and made their protest to the Agent, declaring that “many of their negroes, horses, cattle, etc., were in the hands of the white people, for which they were unable to obtain compensation.” Contrary to the treaty of Camp Moultrie, white men were at that time in the Indian country searching for slaves, and the chiefs demanded of the Agent the reason why the white people thus violated the treaty to rob the Indians? The Agent could only reply, that the white men were there by permission given them by the Secretary of War.[61]

So flagrant were these outrages upon the Indians and negroes, that Colonel Brooke, of the United States Army, at that time commanding in Florida, took upon himself the responsibility of addressing the Agent, advising him not to deliver negroes to the white men, unless their “claims were made clear and satisfactory.”[62] The District Judge of the United States for the Territory, also wrote Colonel Humphreys, giving his construction of the rules adopted by the Indian Bureau. He thought, in no case, should a negro be delivered up, where the Indians claimed him, until proofs had been made and title established before judicial authority.[63]

No law was looked to as the rule by which officers of Government were to be controlled in their official duties. The opinion, the judgment, of the individual constituted his rule of action. During the nineteenth century, perhaps no despotism has existed among civilized nations more unlimited, or more unscrupulous, than that exercised in Florida, from 1823 to 1843.

This state of affairs determined the Exiles not to be arrested by white men. Thus, when Governor Duval ordered a compensation for a slave claimed by Mrs. Cook, to be retained from their annuities, the chiefs held a talk with the Agent, and assured him that the “man was born among the Seminoles, and had never been out of the nation.”[64]