Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1308775
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 1585421863
Dewey Decimal Number: 975.9004973
EAN: 9781585421862
Publication Date: September 16, 2002
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Product Description
"A remarkable story brilliantly told." (Bill Bryson)
"In Our Land Before We Die, Jeff Guinn embarks on a personal quest to explore the heartbreaking--yet ultimately inspiring--legacy on the Seminole Negro Indians in their search for freedom. The result is a triumph of oral storytelling, thwarting past efforts to erase these people from the land and history itself." (Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking)
"Jeff Guinn recounts an important American story here that has long needed telling, and he tells it with passion, skill and humor." (James McBride, author of Miracle at St. Anna and The Color of Water)
Every September the Seminole Negro Indians hold a tribal gathering in the town of Brackettville, Texas. After a short parade down Brackettville's four-block main street, one hundred or so men, women, and children gather in the one-acre Seminole Scout Cemetery and tell the story of their people. In Our Land Before We Die, Jeff Guinn echoes their voices as he traces the little-known history of the runaway slaves who fled to the Florida Everglades to live beside the Seminole Indians.
Deeply rooted in oral tribal history and based upon extensive interviews with descendants, Our Land Before We Die describes the incredible circumstances of a people who sought shelter in the shadow of a tribe whose land and welfare already hung in the balance. And yet in their tireless journey-from Florida to Indian Territory in Oklahoma; on the seven-hundred-mile flight from persecution that took them across the Rio Grande into Mexico; and then back across the Rio Grande to Texas-they never surrendered the hope of one day attaining land of their own.
Our Land Before We Die brings to life the largely forgotten history of a courageous people and the descendants for whom this story is their only legacy.
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 A Solid Popularized Account of a Forgotten Bit of History July 4, 2008
This is a useful journalistic retelling of the story of the Black Seminole in Texas (on the Mexican border), capturing the odyssey of these people from their earliest formative years, now lost in the mists of early American history in Florida, to their position today as a remnant of a much oppressed group seeking to hang onto their rapidly fading traditions. Based partly on oral traditions collected from the few surviving members of the group (or "tribe") and partly on research or the statements of scholars on the subject, author Jeff Guinn intermixes the tale of the Black Seminole today, presenting their contemporary factional disputes (and the gradual moving away of their children into the wider culture) with the parallel tale of how these people came to be where he found them and what made them what they became.
Essentially, theirs is a tale of escaped African slaves in the old South who found their way to a kind of de facto freedom in Florida before and after the Revolution under the protection of the Seminole Indians, themselves a disparate group of exiles from the motley of tribes making up the "Creek" nation in Georgia and Alabama at that time. Mixing with the black slaves owned by the Seminoles, the renegade Africans made up a community within a larger Indian community and eventually became the Indians' allies in a bloody war with the white Americans who came down to Florida in droves from Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama (among other American states). As Guinn recounts, the American Army ultimately fought a bloody seven years war to force the Indians out of Florida (enforcing President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act) and to re-enslave the feral black population (since the new republic had banned importation of new slaves, making the blacks living freely in Florida a profitable source of new slave labor to be shipped up north to the slave states). The Army's various officers were, in many cases, manifestly unhappy with their role as slave-catchers but were under constant pressure to act in this way or to cooperate with other whites who did so. Adding to the complexity of the circumstances, the Creek Indians (from whom the Seminole had originally come) had split into two main factions and the triumphant group were those who had been acculturated to the white civilization all around them. This group, led by Chief William McIntosh, a half-breed Indian, and later by his brother and son, joined forces with the U.S. Army, the Georgians and the Florida planters to run down and capture the Seminole blacks.
These fought as hard or harder than the Indians, given that their lives and freedom were at stake in a way that the Indians' were not (since the Indians faced only removal to the western territories beyond the Mississippi if they lost). American General Thomas Jesup, the most successful of the U.S. generals in the Second Seminole War (if you count the number of Indians he captured and shipped west), considered the war a slave war as much, or more, than an Indian war because the blacks fought harder, he believed, and had tremendous influence with the Indian leaders, keeping them fighting in his view. Jesup eventually suborned the leading African chief, Abraham, a former slave of a Pensacola merchant in exchange for financial remuneration and freedom for himself and his family. Since Abraham was not only a war leader but a primary adviser to the Indian leaders, his decision to work with the Americans was a blow to the Seminole resistance.
A young mixed blood fighter named John Horse eventually took his place and formed a fighting alliance with Coacoochee ("Wildcat") who took up the banner of resistance after Osceola was treacherously seized by Jesup during a parley under a flag of truce. Coacoochee and John Horse had been taken, too, but managed to escape after being imprisoned in Fort Marion (the old Spanish Castillo de San Marco in St. Augustine). They spent much of the following year in a number of actions throughout the Florida hinterlands but eventually John Horse, too, was persuaded to give up and he voluntarily brought in a large number of black fighters, accepting transport to the trans-Mississippi Indian Territory with the understanding they would be allowed to live there as part of the Seminole tribe in the same condition of freedom as they had had in Florida.
Unfortunately, Jesup's word wasn't any better this time than it had been when he had promised Osceola safe passage although in his favor it must be said that he worked hard, after he got to Washington, to ensure that what he promised would be kept. But other forces were working against this. John Horse, keeping his word to the Americans, returned to Florida to serve as an interpreter and scout and eventually persuaded Coacoochee and other Indian leaders to surrender and accept resettlement in the West. Coacoochee and the others seem to have resented Horse's service to their enemy but they recognized, as he had, that they were fighting a losing war against vastly superior forces.
In the West, the U.S. government, seeking to keep its word to the Creek faction that had cooperated with them, tried to force the Seminole to recombine in a political union with the Creek though the Seminole opposed this as much because of the historic political rift that had initially divided them as because of ethnic factors. (Guinn doesn't note this but it looks like the Creek were dominated by the Muskogee faction while the Seminole mainly, though not exclusively, consisted of Hitchiti speaking Indian groups who resented the Muskogee.) However one of the big dividing points was this: The Creek had acculturated to white ways to such an extent that they were slave holders like the whites from where they had come and maintained large plantations on which they used black slave labor while the Seminole mostly wanted to retain their previous, largely informal, relationship with their black allies and, in some cases, slaves.
The Creek, like the whites in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, viewed the Seminole blacks as potential new slaves and made many claims concerning them, backed up by white slavers from nearby Arkansas who saw tremendous profit in the new residents brought to Indian Territory. John Horse made at least two visits to Washington, one as interpreter for Coacoochee and other Seminole chiefs and once alone, to meet with and solicit the support of Jesup, now Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army. Jesup, perhaps cognizant of the less than honorable way he had fought the Second Seminole War, determined to keep his word and wrote numerous letters and testified before Congress in behalf of the Seminole blacks.
But the pro-slavery faction proved stronger and in 1848 secured a decision by the U.S. Attorney General overturning Jesup's wartime order of emancipation of the Seminole blacks who had voluntarily surrendered to him, and declared they must be returned to slave status. The blacks, frightened and determined not to submit, followed John Horse to a settlement he built in Indian Territory called Wewoka and there prepared to defend themselves against the coming onslaught of slavers and Creek. The U.S. Army which, up to this point, had served as a buffer and protector for them, was instructed by Washington to now facilitate the re-enslavement of the Seminole blacks.
John Horse, who had a personal writ of manumission from another American officer, General Worth (one of Jesup's successors), and who had also officially been set free by the Seminole tribal council after they had been relocated to Indian Territory, could have saved himself or ridden away but, instead, he decided to remain with the others of his kind, including his wife Susan and their young son, Joseph, neither of whom had papers setting them free. When things looked bleakest, Horse's old war buddy from Florida, Chief Coacoochee, showed up at his door with a proposition.
Coacoochee had been hoping to succeed to the high chieftainship of all the Seminole when the old chief, Micanopy, died. But when that happened, the council chose another, a man who wanted rapprochement with the Creek and was prepared to restore the Seminole blacks to slave status. Coacoochee had been working to convince the plains Indians in the southwest to join him in a league of Indians to hold back the whites. Unsuccessful, he had hit on a second plan. Mexico, now free from Spain for a number of decades, had formally abolished slavery. But the Mexicans were worried about defending their sparsely populated northern borders against the encroachments of plains Indians and voracious Texans. They were offering land and citizenship to anyone prepared to come and settle there and fight for them. Coacoochee proposed that John Horse join him in this endeavor.
Thus, John Horse raised a group of intrepid Seminole blacks (not all were willing to go) and secretly joined Coacoochee's exodus. They made a nine hundred mile trek through the wilds of the new American state of Texas, dogged by Creek and white slave catchers from the Territory and, later, by the Texas Rangers who wanted to capture and re-enslave the blacks, too, through the country of hostile Commanches, until, nearly a year later the motley collection of exiles reached the Rio Grande. There, just as the Rangers were about to catch up with them, they escaped, in the dead of night, by makeshift raft across the river that marked the Texas-Mexican border, to safety in Mexico.
Their travails didn't end there but they officially won their freedom when they entered Mexico and were accepted as settlers in the border region. After numerous years of service to the Mexican government, and the American Civil War, many of them recrossed the border and settled in the Texas border area where they eventually found employment with the U.S. Army as scouts and Indian fighters. However, with the cessation of Indian hostilities in the late nineteenth century, their group was disbanded and they began a long struggle to claim land they said had been promised them by the Army. That land was never given to them and is the great cause of discontent among their descendants in Bracketville, Texas today.
Some of the Seminole blacks tried to return to the Seminole reservation in Indian Territory but the tribe refused to take them back. Others remained in Mexico where they had a constant struggle to retain the land they had been granted by the Mexican government. Guinn has amply recounted this complex story and breathed life into the heroic figures in the Seminole past who made the Seminole blacks into a distinct tribal group. Of special interest is how Guinn slips back and forth between recounting the history and reporting the situation at the time he was writing this book, including giving us the many contemporary names and personalities he came in contact with. The switching back and forth is a little disconcerting and detracts, to some extent, from the fascinating account of the historic events which led to the current situation of these people. But Guinn has done an admirable job in providing a popular account of a long forgotten part of American history, an account that can only make Americans ashamed to have dealt so insensitively with these tough and resilient people.
SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga and A Raft on the River
 Winner of the 2003 Texas Book Award March 27, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Jeff Guinn's book "Our Land Before We Die" has won the second biennnial TCU Distinguished Award for the best book about Texas. The award is sponsored by TCU Press and The Friends of the TCU Library. Stephen Harrigan was the first receipient for his book, "Gates of the Alamo."
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