Emancipation  
Within two years of Adams’ speech, his arguments found their
first practical application when General Jesup offered
freedom to rebellious Black Seminoles in Florida. Jesup made
the offer for military reasons, to separate the blacks from
the Indians; this move, he wrote the Secretary of War, would
“weaken [the Indians] more than the loss of the same number
of their own people.” Significantly, “Jesup’s proclamation,”
as the Black Seminoles came to call it, was the first
emancipation of rebellious blacks in U.S. history.* And it
was implicitly premised upon federal authority under the war
powers.   
Sources: Jesup to Poinsett March 18, 1838, as cited in Porter Black
95, Littlefield Africans and Seminoles 26-28,
Giddings Exiles 327, House Document 25.3 225: 80, 88.
©
*Jesup did not promise freedom to slaves who fled
plantations during the war. He extended his strategic offer
to “Indian Negroes”—Black Seminole maroons who could claim
to have been living with the Indians before war broke out.
In practice, the distinction between “Indian Negroes” and
plantation rebels was hard to enforce, and military records
suggest that at least a handful of plantation rebels
emigrated west in freedom with the Black Seminoles. The
distinction was also somewhat moot, in that slaveholders
tended to view all of the black combatants as
slaves-in-revolt. This view toward the Black Seminoles
threatened their liberty, led to many of the tensions that
produced the Second Seminole War, and ultimately
necessitated Jesup’s extraordinary offer of emancipated
status to the maroons.
Part 4, Freedom: l |
