RJA #11a: Introduction

The history of the ongoing active African resistance to slavery remains, in large part, suppressed and or censored in the discourse on American history. One such group, a fragment of the Gullah from the barrier Sea Island along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, made their way along the second Underground Railroad, the one leading south to Spanish Florida promised freedom from American slavery if the runaways could make it to St. Augustine. There they intermingled and cooperated with indigenous peoples. The Africans, having been forcibly migrated from a climate very similar to the Florida swampland, was better suited for survival and waging warfare against encroaching bounty hunters and later encroaching armies. Much of this information seems to have been suppressed. It is understandable that in the interest of maintaining a hold on their “property” slaveholders would censor news of slave insurgencies. However the question remains, who benefits from the suppression of that information now? The truth of ongoing African resistance to the institution of slavery, such as that of the so-called Seminole Wars, is crucial not only to discourse concerning the Civil War, but vital to the lexicon of American history.