The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World

9. Political and Military Organization

195 9  Political and Military Organization In a sense the maroons had achieved freedom as soon as they escaped their bondage and certainly by the time they had arrived at Prospect Bluff and begun to form a community. However, the primary goal of the community was much more than achieving freedom by escaping to the Florida wilderness and carving out a simple survivalist existence. Rather the maroons at Prospect Bluff sought to achieve a multi-dimensional version of freedom. Central to this process was claiming their perceived rights as British subjects. As was evidenced by the community’s daily activities, the actions of its refugees during the First Seminole War, the case of Mary Ashley and Susan Christopher in Cuba, and the behavior of the refugees in the Bahamas, the“British blacks” at the fort had stuck to the cause of defending their perceived rights as British subjects as promised to them by Edward Nicolls and formalized in their “free papers.”As a result, the maroons had claimed their freedom in physical, spatial, economic, gendered, intellectual, and cultural terms in a process that had gone a long way in liberating their bodies and minds. The maroon community ’s political and military organization made another bold statement of freedom and autonomy that was shaped by Nicolls’s anti-slavery ideology and the former slaves’ belief in their British status. The specifics of the community’s political and military structure bore some similarities with but more differences from examples from across the hemisphere . The community’s perceived British status was far and away the most important difference between the Prospect Bluff community’s political freedom and that of other maroons. Knowledge of Nicolls’s anti-slavery ideology allowed the maroons to believe that they had achieved full political and legal inclusion and equality within the British Empire. As a result, the community at Prospect Bluff defined its political freedom in distinctly modern The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World 196  and ideological terms, which was unusual in comparative perspective. This claim to the fullest set of rights and highest standards of political and legal inclusion in the contemporary Atlantic world placed these maroons in line with the most advanced liberationist movements of their time and spoke volumes about their desire to wage a rebellion against slavery as a social system. Closely examining the community’s government and political outlook provides a valuable window on how slaves understood contemporary definitions of political freedom as well as on their broader political consciousness.What emerges is a clear picture that the maroon community came to view itself as a complete polity of British subjects. In turn this picture is perhaps the single best opportunity to view the political consciousness of North American former slaves in action, free from any restraints, on their own terms. One of the community’s leaders, Garçon, testified to the power and centrality of this belief when, with his last words on earth, he told his American and Creek executioners that“he fought under British colors.”1 Maroon Government in Comparative Perspective The particulars of maroon government in the Atlantic world varied according to local circumstances,size,stability,cultural influences,and practical considerations , with defense and survival looming the largest.Accordingly, communities might be organized as centralized states, loose or shifting federations, or remote bands if they were not destroyed shortly after their creation.2 Early maroons feared internal disorder, spies, violent adversaries, and the consequences of failure, but they lacked developed institutions for maintaining social control. As a result, in such communities individual leaders tended to consolidate a tremendous amount of centralized power over a group’s government and military, power that could be wielded brutally to assure order.3 These and later leaders tended to have the best houses, material goods, and diets as well as multiple wives.4 Many of these early leaders claimed to have been royalty in Africa or were powerful religious figures, using these characteristics to justify their rule. By the eighteenth century most communities came to be governed by creoles, who had frequently been born in the maroon community and styled themselves “captains,”“governors,” or “colonels.”5 This reflected both demographic changes and a growing maroon belief that the best leaders were those who most fully understood the broader world in which a maroon community was situated. By the time that maroon settlements had reached this stage,most had developed more advanced institutions for governance with...