Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro

This is a useful journalistic retelling of the story of the Black Seminole in Texas (on the Mexican border), capturing the odyssey of these people from their earliest formative years, now lost in the mists of early American history in Florida, to their position today as a remnant of a much oppressed group seeking to hang onto their rapidly fading traditions. Based partly on oral traditions collected from the few surviving members of the group (or "tribe") and partly on research or the statements of scholars on the subject, author Jeff Guinn intermixes the tale of the Black Seminole today, presenting their contemporary factional disputes (and the gradual moving away of their children into the wider culture) with the parallel tale of how these people came to be where he found them and what made them what they became. Essentially, theirs is a tale of escaped African slaves in the old South who found their way to a kind of de facto freedom in Florida before and after the Revolution under the protection of the Seminole Indians, themselves a disparate group of exiles from the motley of tribes making up the "Creek" nation in Georgia and Alabama at that time. Mixing with the black slaves owned by the Seminoles, the renegade Africans made up a community within a larger Indian community and eventually became the Indians' allies in a bloody war with the white Americans who came down to Florida in droves from Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama (among other American states). As Guinn recounts, the American Army ultimately fought a bloody seven years war to force the Indians out of Florida (enforcing President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act) and to re-enslave the feral black population (since the new republic had banned importation of new slaves, making the blacks living freely in Florida a profitable source of new slave labor to be shipped up north to the slave states). The Army's various officers were, in many cases, manifestly unhappy with their role as slave-catchers but were under constant pressure to act in this way or to cooperate with other whites who did so. Adding to the complexity of the circumstances, the Creek Indians (from whom the Seminole had originally come) had split into two main factions and the triumphant group were those who had been acculturated to the white civilization all around them. This group, led by Chief William McIntosh, a half-breed Indian, and later by his brother and son, joined forces with the U.S. Army, the Georgians and the Florida planters to run down and capture the Seminole blacks. These fought as hard or harder than the Indians, given that their lives and freedom were at stake in a way that the Indians' were not (since the Indians faced only removal to the western territories beyond the Mississippi if they lost). American General Thomas Jesup, the most successful of the U.S. generals in the Second Seminole War (if you count the number of Indians he captured and shipped west), considered the war a slave war as m

Jeff Guinn's book "Our Land Before We Die" has won the second biennnial TCU Distinguished Award for the best book about Texas. The award is sponsored by TCU Press and The Friends of the TCU Library. Stephen Harrigan was the first receipient for his book, "Gates of the Alamo."