Black Militants

The impact that both the contrabands and the Black Seminoles had on emancipation brings to light one of the buried themes of American history, the effectiveness of black militancy. The contrabands offer the best demonstration of successful black militancy against U.S. slavery; after them, there is no finer example than the Black Seminoles, who won the country's first offer of freedom for rebel blacks not through the benevolence and idealism of white rulers, but through the forceful assertion of black rights and interests. The quasi-legal emancipation of the Black Seminoles and some of their allies in 1838 was only indirectly related to the general southern emancipation of 1863, and yet the later event vindicated the courage, perseverance, and vision of the black militants in Florida. And it confirmed the historical and moral vision of those nineteenth-century Americans, like Joshua Reed Giddings, Frederick Douglass, and an array of top-ranking federal army officers, who drew inspiration from the Black Seminoles and their story.