The Invisible War: The African American Anti-Slavery Resistance from the Stono Rebellion through the Seminole Wars

PREFACE

When a body of scholars finally evolves the capacity to objectively scrutinize our contemporary understanding of the history of African-American peoples––which presently is derived largely from an Anglo-American perspective being brought to bear on pre-existing documents and records produced and maintained by Anglo-Americans over the centuries––they will be shocked at the extent to which that history and its data have been conditioned by what can only be referred to as the victor’s political paradigms. They will be shocked at the degree to which the history of African-Americans was and continued to be written to transmit, promote and justify to succeeding generations both the benefits and liabilities of the then-existing politico-economic order, and the victors’ rabid propaganda of the past.

They will see how the orientation, lies and omissions of the past served to re-enforce and prolong the orientation and lies of the present––not only in defense of past history, but in defense of maintaining inequitable socio-economic and cultural interrelations which unceasing systemic domination has made possible and perpetuated over the centuries.

Such a manipulation of history is an inherent component of victor’s justice. Like victor’s justice, there is victor’s history (known among African-Americans as his-story). Victor’s history is the intentional distortion of historical data and events to conform to political dicta which serve the present and future interest of the victor––in this case, the Anglo-American ruling class. It is used to preserve or maintain a collective political or cultural orientation that makes it extremely difficult for a group or nationality to reorientate itself towards a political assertion of its own view of past events, its own successes and capacities and needs, and from that, towards the elimination of oppression, domination or multi-faceted exploitation that have heretofore been entrenched.

The worst cruelty and savagery of victor’s justice in conditioning African-American history does not lie in its academic inadequacy or its emotional foundation. It lies in this manifestation of an intentional effort to validate and promote––rather than repudiate and correct––a history that has facilitated the maintenance of the most vicious racist stereotypes of African-Americans (the others) as descended from slaves, a legalized category forced upon captured Africans by the victors. Under the rubric of slaves, the forced immigrant African population could be viewed as a largely helpless body of incompetents without prior personal or collective history, without dignity, without purpose, without morals, fit only to be somehow raised, by those who termed themselves masters, to what those masters termed civilization. Indeed, coming from a vastly different language and civilization, it may have taken these Africans a long time to comprehend what the word slavery even meant. They likely viewed themselves as being in captivity, and in their turn evolved terms such as the Buckrah for application to their captors. Who is to say that another liberationist scholarship might not evolve in America which, when looking back to this period, might discuss it in terms of captured Africans and the Buckrah?

At the time, this depiction of captured Africans sought to justify their ill-treatment and exploitation. But its ongoing historical perpetuation through a failure to abandon the historical lexicon, perspectives and paradigms, has served to promote dysfunctional (non-competitive, non-equal status) development of Africans in America across the present and future generations. Surely the cause of such historiography is obvious, and remains the same now as what it was then: to block the possibility of the development of a collective Gullah-Geechee or African-American sensibility, to block their expectations of their own collective socio-economic development, and any effort to seek political institutions which might facilitate their equal status as a founding people in the USA.

It’s a truism that the historical understanding of past wars is shaped by the victors, yet it is rare to find a situation where this dictum is more applicable than in the near erasure from contemporary awareness of the collective resistance of captured Africans to the American colonial enslavement system. The Invisible War seeks to repudiate an existing political dictum––that the captured Africans did not, in any significant way, resist their captivity––not only their individual captivity, but the institution of slavery, itself. Its purpose is to raise significant questions concerning central misconceptions related to the enslavement period still largely accepted by American historiography:

•That collective resistance to the enslavement system by captured Africans was negligible

•That self-liberated Africans mostly fled northward to freedom, rather than southward to the free territories of Georgia and Florida

•That the Seminole Wars were simply another set of Indian wars, rather than wars which marked the collective African resistance to the enslavement system

•That the records of the period (official documents, newspaper records, etc.) were accurate descriptions of fact, rather than censored materials produced in wartime, with a view to enhancing public support and calming public fears.

Of equal importance, this book questions why scholarship in the one and a half centuries since this period has failed to challenge the historical records, and shed the light of contemporary political science on their interpretation, as opposed to a balanced interpretation by recording what the free and self-liberated Africans understood and thought.

This book seeks to serve as an instrument to impel thinkers and scholars to readdress this historical period, to seek out and recover this important part of African-American history that has been distorted by political dictums, borne of the Anglo-European colonists’ desire to protect and maintain systemic African captivity, which they viewed as necessary if they were to continue to successfully occupy and reap profit from the land of the First Nations, while competing with contesting European colonial states. Early colonial representations of colonial history sought to support certain bases upon which the savage grab for First Nations’ land and the labor of captured Africans could successfully be legitimized and sustained. The ideational fabric of early colonial America needed to be such as would attract and morally unify settlers from the various European nations whom it solicited to the new world, in order to maintain dominance over those peoples whom it had dispossessed or captured.

In short, the history of the African-American was first written in such a manner as to dehumanize their reaction to having been captured for forced labor. Americans take it for granted that the primary universal human value is freedom, and that all peoples value this and struggle to attain it. Yet American history still projects that for the captured African population held in bondage in America, and for their descendants, this was not the same: they did not resist, they did not struggle and fight for their freedom. They acquiesced to their capture, they were dormant, passive endurers of their circumstances. In its most extreme, African-Americans were portrayed as benefiting from enslavement, as happy darkies who were given shelter on the great plantations and in elegant homes, rather than as grief-stricken and rebellious captives who had been deprived of all that they had previously held dear, endured a malignant stormy passage across the ocean in order to be held in captivity by those who precluded all sense of their equal humanity.

These Africans had been forcibly emigrated to the U.S. and placed under colonial laws which pronounced and celebrated their captivity. Exactly what did they do in response to being taken captive? Of course, they sought freedom, regardless of where or how it was offered: by the Spanish in Spanish Florida at first, and later by the promises of the Yankees––by any means necessary. They allied with those with whom they could make common cause: the English who sought their help to prevent the American settlers from securing independence; the Spanish who solicited their assistance to prevent the colonists from overrunning Spanish Florida, and of course, with the most natural of their allies, the equally oppressed and aggrieved indigenous First Nations.

This book seeks to impel scholars to resist the lopsided interpretive blanket which has viewed historical events from the perspective of the Anglo-American colonists and to view them also from the perspective of those captured, those resisting, those who did not see their captors as masters, nor themselves as slaves, who did not acknowledge as their names, the names which had been given them, or even as their religion, the religion which had been imposed on them, who did not agree to but were forced into exploitative and oppressive inter-ethnic relations.

Why has American public understanding so celebrated the journeys to the north, and not what may have been the first North American liberation struggle, the Gullah War? Even today, American historiography and popular culture celebrate the Underground Railroad to the North, while ignoring the struggle waged against the enslavement system itself, waged by free Africans who had fled to the South––whose collective efforts and presence were deemed so threatening that colonial armies were sent out against them.

The flight of hapless individuals, shepherded by courageous guides, to freedom in the northern U.S. and Canada has been magnified out of all proportion as the primary manifestation of African-American resistance to captivity. Who has not heard of Harriet Tubman? Of Sojourner Truth? But who has heard of the leaders and fighters of the resisting Africans who fled, not north, but south? Who challenged the system, rather than merely escaping it? Who has heard of Abraham [Ibrahim]? Of John Horse? Who knows the real truth of the Indian warrior, Osceola, who fought with Africans, one of whose wives was African? Who knows that the cover-up of African resistance went to the extent that their struggle of resistance and liberation was historically recorded as wars by resisting elements of American First Nations?

Disguised as Indian wars (the Seminole Wars) in the official documents and newspaper reports of the victors, the captured Africans’ anti-colonial war of liberation was waged from the free territories of the South, and threatened the hold of what was then a numerical minority of Europeans resting fearfully atop an expansive enslavement system trembling with acts of revolt, large and small, real and imagined, recognized and successfully disguised.

While the records of the day––the newspaper accounts, official documents, journals and diaries––might be excused for diminishing or omitting altogether the African presence in the so-called Seminole Wars due to their fear of such knowledge spreading among those still held captive, and their effort not to diminish the attraction of the colonies to would-be European settlers, what can one say of the ongoing histories of today which continue to regard the Seminole Wars as primarily Indian wars, conducted by a group of Indians who had had no collective identity or history––who simply did not exist as Seminoles––prior to the conflicts taking place?

Even though the Anglo-American writing of American history has recorded the egregious conditions of enslavement and repudiated that system along with apartheid, the discipline has failed to bring a new consciousness to bear on these past events, reflected in a new lexicon (captured or enslaved Africans, not slaves; liberated not runaway, African resistance/liberation struggles, not slave revolts), and grounded in new political paradigms that reflect the legitimate interpretation and expression of African peoples in relation to the historical events that beset them.

Why should the Africans who liberated themselves from captivity in the American colonies even today be referred to in books as runaways––with that term’s orientation to their bondage as a legitimate condition, with the runaway implicitly a scurrilous malefactor rather than a liberated African whose struggle for freedom should be applauded by all who value that ideal? From a culturally neutral perspective, the captured Africans no more became runaways than they had been slaves.

While referring to the records of the past, contemporary historiography still thoughtlessly adopts and transmits such references as masters, and was owned by. This is vicious in the sense that it is intentional, and savage in the sense that it ignores the full individual, cultural and collective humanity and human rights of the other. It is also fanatical in the sense that even generations after the original rationale of maintaining the enslavement system––which might be seen to have necessitated the historical distortion––ended, the same historical paradigms and lexicon is still being formally maintained and perpetuated.

African-American history as written largely remains a political history which has admitted the historical flow of systemic change (from enslavement to apartheid to civil rights/nondiscrimination in the modern period) without challenging the domination of the Anglo-American perspective on it (his-story), and thereby denying the Africans in American equal cultural status to Europeans,

Even when the Africans’ simple humanity could no longer be effectively denied, the new historians, greatly influenced by the emerging abolitionist movement, once again wrote African American history––this time to prove African-American humanity on the basis of their ability to adapt to Anglo-American cultural and educational norms, that is, be the same as Anglo-Americans, and their Anglo-Americanized European immigrant allies. Of course, for an African to act in any manner different from the Anglo-Americans has long lent proof of his savagery, and was initially forbidden by the law of the Black Codes. On the other hand, the Black Codes served, in fact, to introduce and enforce differences––but not such as naturally occur between peoples of equal status but different cultures. Rather, they sought to introduce differences that re-enforced a sense of caste: preventing the wearing of certain fabrics, the pursuit of certain economic activities, and so