The "First" Emancipation Proclamation: Black Rebellion, Removal, and Freedom during the Seminole Wars

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The “First” Emancipation ProclamationBlack Rebellion, Removal, and Freedom during the Seminole Wars
• Kristen T. Oertel (bio)

The brutal war had dragged on for years with no end in sight. The president grew increasingly frustrated by how poorly US troops had performed, and the people’s tolerance of bad news waned with each casualty report from the battlefield. Perhaps most concerning, debates in the US House of Representatives revealed that support for the war was precariously low, with one congressman complaining, “Immense sums of the public money have already been expended on this war and . . . have been extracted, like teeth, from this House.”¹ Something drastic had to be done to turn the tide, to win this seemingly endless war. Could the emancipation of enslaved Blacks trigger that turn and launch the US Army on a path to victory?

President Lincoln likely asked this question as he wrestled with issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862. But instead of picturing Lincoln in the Oval Office after Antietam, place yourself in a Florida swamp in 1838, and you will find Gen. Thomas Sidney Jesup issuing the “first” emancipation proclamation, twenty-six years before Lincoln’s, and freeing hundreds of enslaved [End Page 11] Blacks.² During the Second Seminole War, after repeatedly failing to negotiate peace with the Seminole Indians and their Black allies, Jesup promised the Black combatants “freedom and protection on their separating from the Indians and surrendering.”³ Hoping to divide and conquer the Seminole and Black forces that had been fighting the US Army for decades, Jesup used emancipation of Black soldiers, many of whom were enslaved by Seminole citizens, as a military tool to weaken the opposition and quite literally remove a portion of enemy troops from Florida to Indian Territory. Negotiating with Black leaders like John Horse, he claimed that if they surrendered and moved to the West, the army would protect their freedom. In an order issued in March, he specified: “That all Negroes the property of the Seminole . . . who . . . delivered themselves up to the Commanding Officer of the troops should be free.”⁴ As historian Kevin Mulroy has already noted, “Black emancipation and Removal had become the policy of the U.S. Army.”⁵

Of course, the British had offered the first promise of freedom to enslaved Blacks in what is now the United States during the Revolutionary War with Dunmore’s Proclamation in 1775, the Phillipsburg Proclamation in 1779, and again during the War of 1812, and the Spanish had used this playbook for decades in Florida and the Caribbean.⁶ But Jesup’s is likely the first emancipation proclamation made by a US official, and similar proclamations issued early in [End Page 12] the Civil War by antislavery generals like John C. Frémont and David Hunter mimic Jesup’s. So why have Civil War historians and scholars of emancipation virtually ignored the legal and historical precedent of Jesup’s proclamation? A quick review of the recent articles and books published about Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation merits exactly zero mentions of Jesup’s order, thus demonstrating historians’ neglect of its significance to military policy and sectional conflict in the antebellum era.⁷ Native American historians and amateur scholars of Black history laud Jesup’s proclamation as a signal event in Seminole and Black history, but this act must also be included by Civil War historians and historians in general as a key part of the uneven process of Black emancipation.⁸

This article highlights the tradition of Black rebellion embedded in the Second Seminole War and examines it as historical precedent for Black resistance in the Civil War era and as a precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation. By revealing the causes and consequences of this “first” proclamation, I hope to fill a historiographical hole that illustrates how resistance by enslaved Blacks and the Seminole Indians motivated Jesup’s proclamation and actuated what could be considered the only successful slave rebellion in North American history.⁹ [End Page 13] Finally, the debate surrounding Jesup’s proclamation and its repercussions in Indian Territory reveal the fundamental questions connected to America’s tortured history with the institution of slavery and the country...