Emancipation

Two other legal events involving the rights of black rebels—the Amistad case in 1839 and the mutiny on the slave ship Creole in 1842—garnered far more public attention than Jesup’s proclamation. But the emancipated status of the Black Seminoles remained a bitter topic of debate in Congress through the 1840s and early 1850s. Minutiae from these debates appeared in The North Star and other important abolitionist publications. Antislavery newspapers even went so far as to print detailed transcripts of Congressional debates on Black Seminole-related topics like the status of Louis Pacheco, an ally of the maroons accused of betraying the Dade party in 1835.

A common theme to all of these debates was the right to emancipate slaves under the war powers. In 1848, members of the House Committee on Claims took up the war powers argument in discussions over Seminole war claims for lost slaves. The question surfaced again in 1848 when the U.S. Attorney General ruled on the Black Seminoles’ status out west—the ruling that precipitated John Horse’s flight to Mexico.