On one sense, what destroyed the plantations was a three-way clash between Hispanic Floridians, Seminoles, and Anglo-Americans. But in a deeper sense, what killed the plantations was the "race" notion. You see, for decades, Americans from Georgia and the Carolinas had seen Floridians of even slight African appearance as runaway slaves. But Hispanics and Seminoles saw things differently. In their towns, about one person in ten looked European, one in ten was looked African, and most were somewhere in-between.
The Seminoles descended from Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans who fled slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Culturally, they considered themselves Native Americans and spoke Miccosukee. But they were not Indians in the sense of being hunters. They were farmers who lived west of the St. Johns. They sold horses, cattle, timber, corn, beans, pumpkins, and deerskin leather to colonists for Spanish doubloons and bought iron tools, muskets, and cloth in return. They lived in solid frame houses in organized towns. Nowadays, Floridians call houses of Seminole design, "cracker houses" or "shotgun houses." Each family plowed its fields and raised cattle and horses on the open range. Some were wealthy ranchers with herds numbering in the thousands and they maintained friendly relations with Hispanic planters east of the river.
The slave-owning planters were also of mixed ancestry. On average, every peninsular (person born in Iberia) had eight-to-ten
percent African ancestry. This was because Spain and Portugal repopulated after the Moorish wars by importing about 100,000
equatorial African slaves in the sixteenth century. Within a few generations, Iberia's Blacks vanished without a trace, assimilated into the European melting pot as thoroughly as the Danes into England. In addition, the typical criollo (person born in the New World) had forty-to-sixty percent African ancestry consequent to long-standing genetic assimilation of the descendants of African slaves.
Other planter families besides the Hernandez clan were "racially" mixed, including the Kingsleys, Frasers, Erwins, Wiggins, Sanchez, Mattiers, and Leslies. The province's royal treasurer Miguel Ysnardy, the merchants Eduardo Wanton, Jorge and Carlos Clarke, and the physicians Tomás Tunno and Tomás Sterling all boasted mixed ancestry. Indeed, one searches East Florida records in vain for a wealthy Hispanic family that did not openly display some biracial roots. Generations of intermarriage had produced people who saw themselves as White Hispanics despite having known African ancestry.
None of the raids was formalized by a declaration of war against Spain. Each was opposed by an alliance of Hispanic and Seminole troops led by the planters. After all, it was the planters' workers, vendors, and customers who were being kidnapped. For twenty years, the plantation owners had seen invading American raiders as their mortal enemies. Then, Spain sold Florida to the United States.
The planters tried to keep a low profile but it did not work. Although some continued to visit each other for christenings, weddings, and funerals, the planters split into two factions. Some, like Hernandez, learned English and adopted U.S. ways. Others, like Bulow and Addison, continued to see Americans as invaders. John Bulow drilled his workers in military tactics to defend Bulowville plantation against the Americans. He even bought a four-pounder field artillery cannon and added it to his plantation's arsenal.
John Addison, owner of Carrickfergus (named after the Irish town of his ancestors) also bought muskets and trained his men. One day, Addison's new German overseer, Hans Wellman, was on his way back from a week learning cattle-ranching skills among the Seminoles. As he rode into Carrickfergus, he spotted his first alligator. With more enthusiasm than forethought, he lassoed it. The gator promptly charged, and Wellman's horse bolted in panic, dragging the reptile by the rope. The whole entourage, horse, rope, and gator, with Wellman clutching the saddle horn, thundered into Carrickfergus. Wellman's shrieks triggered a scramble for weapons. "The Americans are attacking!" As musket balls whizzed past his head, Wellman released his grip and fell with a thump, as horse and gator galloped into the woods.
The opposite planter faction also armed themselves. They expected to defend against attacks by the Seminoles. José (now "Joe") Hernandez formed a volunteer cavalry regiment from St. Augustinians eager to fight the Indians and their allies. He was made a general of the U.S. militia.
For ten years, the two factions grew farther and farther apart. As the U.S. tightened its grip on Florida, the slave raiders became bolder in raiding Seminole towns. Both sets of planters bought more guns and powder.
The Seminoles were separated. Dark-skinned families who had lived free for generations were "returned to slavery." Light-skinned Seminoles were deported to Oklahoma. A few hundred in-between Seminole families refused to be torn apart. Those few abandoned their homes and farms and fled deep into the Everglades. They own casinos now.
The war lasted so long that the Hispanic planters of both factions also had to abandon their farms and begin new lives elsewhere. They never returned. Their vegetation-overgrown ruins still dot the woods of northeast Florida today. The "race" notion had done its work.
Christmas Day, 1835, started out beautifully. The sun rose over two dozen plantations that stretched from St. Augustine in the north to New Smyrna in the south, from the St. Johns River on the west to the Atlantic beaches on the east. Some, like Moultrie and Bulowville, had manicured lawns and hedge mazes inhabited by peacocks. Their manor houses were stocked with fine wines to accompany seven-course meals cooked up by French chefs. Others, like San José and Carrigfergus, were working sugar farms, molasses factories using the latest agricultural techniques. San José's irrigation system and modern steam engines had been featured just six months earlier in the July 1835 issue of The Farmer's Register.
The plantations were the last fragment of colonial Spain east of the Mississippi. They were homes to a unique planter class, many of whom traced their ancestry to African as well European roots. But that Christmas Day ended horribly. By sunset, most of the plantations were in flames. Within the week, all were reduced to smoking rubble. Let me tell you how it happened.
English-speaking visitors could not understand the Seminole focus on culture, rather than on appearance. Some wrote that the Black Seminoles lived in their own neighborhoods. Others wrote that the dark ones were the light ones' slaves. Still others wrote that the dark ones were the tribal rulers. In reality, all were partly right. The Seminoles simply did not consider complexion very important. Americans and Seminoles never did understand each other. In 1817 and again in 1823, the U.S. Army offered peace if the Seminoles would just give up their Blacks. But their leaders insisted that no Blacks lived among them -- just dark Seminoles. Generations of intermarriage had produced a people who saw themselves as Indians although many looked as dark as slaves to Americans.
For example, José Mariano Hernandez (at left) owned three plantations -- San José, Malacompra, and Bella Vista -- along what is now Florida's highway A1A between Flagler Beach and Marineland. His parents, Martin and Dorotea, were among the forced laborers of Andrew Turnbull's New Smyrna Colony (brought from the Balearic Islands, southern Italy, Sicily, Africa, and Greece) who fled during the chaos of the American Revolution and migrated to St. Augustine. By 1821, the "Minorcans" (as they are still called, despite their genetic diversity) had become middle class. A few, such as fair-complexioned Hernandez, had become planters.
On the other hand, complexion was important to the slave-hunters from Georgia and the Carolinas. Wherever dark folks lived, they followed. They vowed to "return to slavery" anyone who looked African in their eyes. For twenty years, the United States sent slave raids into Spanish Florida. Some like the one called "First Seminole War," were waged by U.S. soldiers. Others, like the one called "Patriot Rebellion," were covert operations by the Executive Branch with secret Congressional funding. Some, like the 1818 invasion of Fernandina, targeted dark Hispanics. Others, like the Alachua raids of 1820, enslaved dark Seminoles. Some failed and retreated back across the border after defeat in battle. Others were victorious and marched north into slavery, dozens of dark-complexioned speakers of Miccosukee or Spanish.
The Spanish negotiators of the Adams-Oníz Treaty ceding Florida had known that U.S. conquest of Florida was inevitable. To prevent a repetition of the mass disfranchisement inflicted upon Louisiana's dark Creoles twenty years earlier, they proposed the treaty's Article VI:
The inhabitants of the territories which his Catholic Majesty cedes to the United States shall be… admitted to the enjoyment of all privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States.
Article VI was vital because two points about U.S. citizenship were foremost in Floridians' minds. First, the citizenship-by-birth of Blacks and Seminoles was unclear. (Decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857, that free Blacks could not become citizens and had no more civil rights than livestock.) Second, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which remained in force until 1965, allowed only White people to apply for naturalized citizenship. Mixed-heritage Floridians feared that U.S. authorities would sift through the population, as they had done in Louisiana, affixing the dreaded "free Black" label to many and stripping their rights. Authorities might even require Floridians to apply for naturalization and then, per federal law, refuse to consider papers from those who were too dark. Once both nations ratified the treaty, Floridian's fears would be over. Free Floridians of every complexion would automatically become U.S. citizens upon annexation. The Adams-Oniz treaty, with Article VI intact, was ratified by Congress and Florida was transferred to the United States in 1821.
In the event, Article VI protected no one. The first public act by Florida's new governor, Andrew Jackson, decreed that Article VI was no longer in effect, that Floridians had to apply for naturalization, and that neither Seminoles nor Hispanics with visible African ancestry could become citizens. St. Augustine's "Minorcans," who had become a civic-minded, politically active segment of the community were dubbed "Turnbull's niggers."
In 1835, just a few months after the issue of the Farmers Register featuring San José came out, President Jackson (at left) ordered the U.S. Army to take the dark Seminoles into custody, return them to slavery, and deport all the light-skinned ones to Oklahoma. Jackson's order triggered what historian Larry Rivers calls "the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history." On that terrible Christmas Day, Seminoles and their allies attacked San José, Malacompra, Bella Vista, and the other plantations owned by the anti-Seminole faction. Anglo-American militia under Hernandez retaliated by attacking Bulowville, Carrickfergus, Rosetta and the other plantations owned by Seminole supporters. John Bulow's cannon did not help much. After a hopeless defense, he was ox-carted to St. Augustine in chains. Every plantation was looted by one side then burned by the other. In the end, all were destroyed.
The conflict became the longest, bloodiest, and costliest interracial war in U.S. history. For ten years, U.S. troops pursued the Seminoles, trying to split Black from Indian in a culture that lacked the very concept of "race." As Major General Thomas Sidney Jesup wrote in 1836, "This... is a negro, not an Indian war." In 1837, General Joe Hernandez thought he had won by capturing the enemy commanding general Asi-Yahola (nowadays known as "Osceola," at right), a man of Scottish descent. Hernandez had lured him into an ambush under a sham flag of truce. But instead of surrendering, the Seminoles fought on. Seven years later, when Colonel William Worth finally announced that, "hostilities with the Indians within this Territory have ceased," two thousand U.S. soldiers and the same number of Seminole soldiers had lost their lives.
Two excellent books on the interracial background of the Second Seminole War are Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1996) and Lary Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2000). Readers interested in the history of the "race" notion in America overall should read the series of booklets by the author titled Paths not Taken. The entire series is available for online purchase at www.backintyme.com/books2.htm or from Amazon.com. They are also sold at numerous historical site and museum gift shops in Florida, or can be borrowed from libraries.
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