Background: 1693 - 1812

Almost a generation before John Horse's birth, in the early 1800s, a new community was just emerging in Florida, a group of free and fugitive blacks allied with Seminole Indians. Described variously as "Seminole Negroes," Muskogees, maroons, and black Indians, they would come to be known as the Black Seminoles. Like other New World communities, the Black Seminoles forged their identity in a crucible of war, slavery, and hemispheric conflict. They rose to prominence after 1800, but their emergence was rooted in the very founding and settling of North America -- and in the contradictory promise of American freedom.