From the mid-eighteenth into the nineteenth century, Black maroons or self-emancipated enslaved people from the Georgia and Florida borderlands (and beyond) gravitated to the Indigenous Seminole Nation. For scholars such as Jane Landers, these multi-lingual Atlantic Creoles were renowned for their cultural adaptability, social agility, and political agency resulting from their astute navigation of the Atlantic world beyond the plantation systems. Cosmopolitan and diasporic, Africans and African Americans served monarchies and independent republics as decorated veterans and could be literate, urban, and propertied as well as rural or enslaved.

Atlantic Creoles migrated south into what is today Florida with members of the Indigenous Creek Nation. In these southeastern borderlands, those who coalesced and separated from the centralized Creek polity—who would quickly become the Seminole—established common everyday practices with the Black refugees and resistors from enslavement. Together, Atlantic Creoles adopted Indigenous Muskogee scarification rituals while the emerging Indigenous nation of the Seminoles incorporated West African dances. Collectively, inhabitants of the Seminole Nation wore deerskin skirts, grew corn, hunted deer, traveled by canoe, and spoke Indigenous languages such as Hitchiti. Intertwined and dependent, Seminole settlements were connected to smaller, semi-autonomous affiliated Black villages by well-worn paths and by extensive waterways from the Florida panhandle into the interior savanna and across to the Atlantic coast.

Indigenous Seminoles and Atlantic Creoles occasionally intermarried. From these intimate and political unions, the Seminole confederacy slowly and ceremonially incorporated Atlantic Creoles as clan, town, and family members who identified as kin, allies, advisors, and neighbors of the Indigenous nation. African warriors and chiefs such as Nero, Garçon, Cyrus, and Prince sat in counsel with the Seminoles. These Atlantic Creoles directed joint military operations with the Seminole when the Georgia militia and US forces invaded during the Patriot War (1812–1814) and led 300 Black soldiers during the First Seminole War’s Battle of Suwannee in 1818. Atlantic Creoles and Seminoles together opposed the expanding imperialism and racial slavery of the southern United States. Black Maroons provided critical military support to the Red Sticks political movement as well as the armed struggle at Prospect Bluff fort and Black soldiers defended the village known as Fowltown and the Maroon stronghold of Angola east of Tampa Bay. Some Black Seminoles rose into leadership positions. Abraham, who used the Seminole name Souanaffe Tustenukke, served as “hoponaya” or the official who pronounced the Seminole leader’s statements as well as the interpreter for the council. Even in defeat, following the Second Seminole War in 1838, the Atlantic Creole Abraham negotiated for the Seminoles in writing and in person with US forces.

Throughout the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the Seminole people also profited from the enslavement of Black people who they defined as Estelusti. For the Seminole, enslaved people were categorized as a lower subservient group and, as captives, lacked necessary kin ties to be considered as political, social, and cultural equals. Enslaved people were acquired with violence and sold among owners. Still, enslaved Atlantic Creoles could be more mobile and independent among the Seminole. For example, rather than having to work for their Indigenous enslavers Black families lived together in separate villages near Indian settlements and paid an annual tribute to the Seminole people in the form of provisions as well as ritual gifts. Yet even radical Seminole leaders who opposed Spanish colonialism, US imperialism, and the rising power of southern plantation owners returned enslaved fugitives to white enslavers and relegated agricultural duties, considered to be women’s work, to enslaved men. By 1800 Seminole chiefs, ranchers, and enslavers raided Georgia plantations along the St. Johns River to carry off enslaved laborers as slave ownership was considered to increase prestige among the Seminole.

The Seminole Nation took part in the changing racial ideologies of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Prior to the Second Seminole War, the Seminole perceived Africans to be a different sort of human being. This racial distinction, for the Seminole, justified the exclusion of enslaved Atlantic Creoles from Seminole matrilineal clans. By the 1820s, the Seminole would embrace plantation economies dependent on the lifetime labor of enslaved Black people who were now dedicated to growing large stands of sugarcane with manumission, or individual freedom, rarely granted.