The Saltwater Railroad

How thousands escaped slavery and found freedom
in Florida and the Bahamas.

Most Floridians have heard about the Underground Railroad, that network of secret tunnels and safe houses that led enslaved African Americans north to freedom from the 1820s until the Civil War. But few realize that another, earlier Underground Railroad also offered hope and sanctuary to fugitives. That Underground Railroad ran south to Florida and later extended into the Caribbean islands, an offshoot that came to be called the Saltwater Railroad. And while white Abolitionists helped escapees travel north, those who fled to Florida and across the Gulfstream made the journey on their own, braving swamps, dense forests, unknown seas and predators both wild and human. Many were captured or died, but thousands survived to live in freedom.

In 1526, the first enslaved Africans landed in the colony of Carolina. By the late 1600s, the English settlers had established a plantation economy dependent upon huge numbers of enslaved workers. Slave ships brought more than 150,000 Africans to the region from the 16th to the mid-19th century. By 1729, enslaved Africans made up two-thirds of Carolina’s population. The horrors of their captivity and whispered stories of La Florida, a Spanish-controlled territory where Africans could find freedom and fellow escapees, inspired some to risk everything and run south.

Florida, claimed by the Spanish since 1513, was sparsely populated, with most people clustered in a few settlements. The largest was St. Augustine, where a 1689 census counted 1,444 inhabitants. At least 13 of those were fugitive Africans from Carolina who had arrived by boat two years earlier—eight men, two women and a 3-year-old. The adults found work as paid laborers, and when an English official came to reclaim the fugitives, the governor refused to give them over, declaring they had become Catholics and were useful workers.

Spain did have a system of slavery, but it granted slaves more rights than the English did, including the opportunity to earn their freedom. The Spanish aim in colonizing the New World was not only to gain wealth for the Crown but also to convert new souls to Catholicism—and unlike many Europeans, the Spanish believed Africans had souls. It was also to Spain’s advantage to increase population—and thus defenses—in their territories. In 1693, King Charles of Spain issued an edict that advanced this strategy, granting freedom to all runaways.

“As soon as you get this letter, set them all free and give them everything they need, and favor them as much as possible,” he wrote.

These free Blacks, in St. Augustine and throughout Florida, came to be known as maroons.

Soon more fugitives, most from plantations in Carolina and Georgia, were living in Florida, some in villages, often close to the Seminoles, and some in settlements under Spanish authority. In 1739, in recognition of their growing numbers, Governor Manuel de Montiano established the first official Black settlement in North America, Gracia Real de St. Teresa de Mose, which came to be known as Fort Mose.  With about 100 founding residents, it was located at the head of Mose Creek, a tributary of the North River that provided an abundance of shellfish and saltwater fish. Freedmen planted in the fields nearby and smaller maroon communities developed in the vicinity.

Stories of a safe haven for African American fugitives had spread north; and in September 1739, a band of enslaved men near Charles Town in South Carolina attempted to escape to Florida. As they marched south, their numbers growing, they executed slaveholders and their families, burned homes and seized weapons. But they were soon attacked and defeated by South Carolina’s militia. Theirs was the largest slave revolt in the North American British colonies; and as the news raced across plantations, it thrilled enslaved people and terrified colonists.

That same year, alarmed by the threat of Spanish Florida’s growing and hostile free Black population, the British attempted to erect a fort in the Apalachee region, northwest of St. Augustine, but the Blacks they imprisoned revolted, murdered all the whites and escaped. They sought directions to St. Augustine and Fort Mose from Native Americans they met in the woods, evidence that Fort Mose and the surrounding maroon villages had become known as the center of Black freedom.

The next year, Georgia’s Governor James Oglethorpe invaded Florida, determined to seize Spanish lands and re-enslave as many maroons as he could. Although Oglethorpe’s invasion was unsuccessful, he destroyed many Spanish forts and settlements, including Fort Mose. By 1752, the settlement was rebuilt and reoccupied by Blacks. But in 1763, the British seized St. Augustine. Fearing re-enslavement, most of the maroons in the St. Augustine region, including all who lived in Fort Mose, fled to Cuba, where they developed their own community, Ceiba Mocha, in the Matanzas province.

The Saltwater Railroad was up and running.

During the American Revolution the British offered freedom to any Blacks who would join the fight. Many Blacks ran away from the colonies to join the British cause. A relationship similar to the one they once had with the Spanish began to develop with the British. At the end of the war, many Blacks who had fought alongside the British were relocated to other British territories in Canada as well as to the Caribbean.

During the War of 1812, the British again offered freedom in exchange for military service. During the war’s southern campaign, British officials authorized the enlistment of approximately 5,000 Blacks. In Florida, maroons, freed Blacks and new runaways fought for the British up and down the Gulf Coast. From 1775 to 1815 (the end of the War of 1812), the British freed tens of thousands of enslaved Blacks who had run away to join their cause.

The 1800s witnessed a transformation of the Florida maroons. Many had formed close relationships with the Seminoles. Initially, the Seminoles accepted the fugitives as slaves, although their conception of slavery was more like indentured servitude. The Blacks often lived in villages of their own, where they planted crops and paid a share of their harvest to the Seminoles who lived nearby.

The fierceness with which the residents cherished their freedom is reflected in the names they gave their villages, such as “Disturb Me If You Dare,” “Come for Me If You Be Men” and “I Shall Moulder Before I Be Taken.”

In 1826, U.S. Army Major George McCall described one such settlement, Pilaklikaha, in what is now Sumter County:

“There now flourishes one of the most prosperous towns in the Indian territory. We found the Negroes in possession of large fields of the finest land, producing large crops of corn, beans, melons, pumpkins and other succulent vegetables. They are chiefly runaway slaves from Georgia, who have put themselves under the protection of [Chief] Micanopy, to whom they render a tribute of one-third of the produce of the land and one-third of the horse, cattle and fowl they may raise. Otherwise, they are free to come and go at pleasure and in some cases are elevated to the position of equality with their masters…the houses were larger and more comfortable than those of the Indians themselves.”

By the 1820s, about 400 African Americans lived among the Seminoles. In 1826, an observer noted they appeared “wholly independent, or at least regardless of the authority of their masters and are slaves but in name.” Some became valued interpreters for the Seminoles.

In her University of Florida doctoral thesis, anthropologist Rosalyn Howard, who later wrote the book The Black Seminoles in the Bahamas, notes that one such interpreter, Abraham, was described by a white observer as having enormous influence over the tribe: “With an appearance of great modesty, he is ambitious, avaricious and withal very intelligent.”

Over the decades, the Seminoles and maroons came to see themselves as intertwined, with the same interests and a common foe in the Americans who sought to hunt down and subjugate the escaped Blacks and eradicate the Native Americans. Their history of cohabitation, intermarriage and collaboration bound them together, and the Florida maroons became known as Black Seminoles.

The U.S. militia frequently attacked their settlements, driving the survivors farther south and into wild and inaccessible areas. Meanwhile, the Black Seminoles’ relationship with the British empire, which had turned against slavery and officially abolished it in 1833, strengthened.

After the War of 1812, about 800 Blacks who fought with the British were relocated to Trinidad. Other Blacks, including Florida maroons, were relocated to other British possessions, among them Nassau in the Bahamas and Barbados. The Saltwater Underground Railroad, that journey by sea from Florida to the Caribbean, was becoming well-traveled.

After the war, Britain’s Col. Edward. Nicolls, in appreciation for the Florida maroons’ valiant efforts, gave them one of the forts the British had established. It became known as the Negro Fort. This sent shockwaves through plantation society. The establishment of a fort meant that a full colony of formerly enslaved people would soon develop and inevitably lure more enslaved people to run away, an affront and threat to the whites’ prosperity and continued economic and racial dominance.

In 1816, Gen. Andrew Jackson, a fervent supporter of slavery, responded by destroying the Negro Fort. A single cannonball hit the gunpowder magazine, setting off an inferno. A few inhabitants escaped and fled south to Central Florida, but most died. About 50 survivors were marched off to slavery in Georgia. That began the First Seminole War.

In the October 16, 2024 issue of the Black Agenda Report, writer Jan Carew describes how an elderly descendant of the Black Seminoles on Andros Island in the Bahamas characterized Jackson during a 1972 conversation: “I heard ’bout the battle of Swanee ’gainst Stonewall Jackson, my grandmother tell me ’bout it and her grandmother tell her ’bout it long before. Stories like that does come down to us with voices in the wind. Oh, God! That man Jackson was cruel, eh! He made slaves of them who was free already for two and three generations.”

The destruction of the fort, Carew writes, hardened the resistance of the Black Seminole and Native American insurgents. It also taught them that rather than fighting from a fixed position, they should adhere to their traditional style of war: “strike and vanish, and strike again and again; maintain secret caches of arms and supplies; be prepared to move whole communities to safety on the shortest possible notice; see without being seen in the swamps, hammocks, forests, pastures and tall grass, all of which were as familiar to them as their own faces in a mirror; and like the black panther, lure the enemy into those secret places where they were sure to be invincible.”

The insurgents employed this strategy at the 1818 Battle of Suwanee, where the Americans fired fruitlessly into thickets as the Blacks and Native Americans fled into “the hammocks, the swamps and the everglades” where “no military force could pursue them,” Carew writes. But although they had escaped Jacksons’ forces, the insurgents were soon dealt a devastating blow.

In 1819, the Spanish, whose La Florida had extended from St. Augustine to the Mississippi River Valley, sold the territory to the United States for $5 million. In 1821, Florida became a territory of the United States, and Andrew Jackson was appointed as the first territorial governor. Florida maroons and those who sought freedom in La Florida could no longer rely on Spanish protection.

Blacks and Native Americans now faced a relentless enemy, one who would use its full power to invade and resettle their lands, kill or enslave any and all Blacks and drive the Seminoles out of Florida.

The First Seminole War ended in 1819; and by then, the majority of the Black Seminoles had retreated to Central Florida and the Tampa Bay region. Many lived in the village of Angola, in present-day Bradenton.

The Seminoles had oceangoing dugout canoes rigged with sails and capable of holding several dozen people that could make the trip from Florida to the British-controlled Bahamas in three days. In 1819 and again in 1821, they sent emissaries to the Bahamas to ask for help in their existential struggle against Americans. In addition to previous military alliances with the British, the tribe had longstanding trade relations with the Bahamas. But they received little help from their allies beyond some provisions for the return trips.

In 1821, Andrew Jackson attacked Angola, burning it to the ground and terrorizing not only the inhabitants but Blacks throughout Florida. Later that year, a group of Black Seminoles decided to take matters into their own hands. They gathered at Cape Florida in Key Biscayne and made the 154-mile journey to the Bahamas, landing on Green Bays in Andros Island.

In earlier centuries, the island, the largest in the Bahama chain and perfectly situated for attacks on Spanish ships sailing to Cuba, had been an outpost for pirates. When the Black Seminoles arrived, only a few people lived on Andros. Hundreds more Black Seminoles and other Black fugitives were soon traversing the Saltwater Railroad to the island, some on Bahamian sloops that picked them up in Florida, some in dugout canoes and even rafts. Others were liberated by the British Navy, which stopped and searched U.S. ships in island waters long before slavery was officially outlawed.

Green Bays was on the coast, visible to ships and slave catchers as well as susceptible to storms. In time, the colony moved to a more remote settlement on the northwest coast of Andros called Red Bays. Much of the land around Red Bays was below sea level and considered uninhabitable, while its shallow offshore waters kept ships away. Isolated from the British government or American slave hunters—and for many years, even from other islanders–the tiny community adapted and survived, with many residents making a living as sponge divers or by salvaging goods from shipwrecks.

In 1825, British authorities proclaimed that enslaved U.S. citizens arriving in the Bahamas would be declared free. And in 1834, all slavery was outlawed in British colonies.  By then, some 6,000 enslaved people had escaped to the islands and were officially declared to be a “class of devoted subjects.”

By 1835, rising tensions between the Seminoles and the United States led to the Second Seminole War. This war, which lasted until 1842, was the longest, costliest and deadliest “Indian war” in United States history. However intent the Americans were in ejecting all Native Americans from Florida, they were equally—indeed, more determined—to ensure that any Blacks living with the Seminoles or on their own would be killed or returned to slavery. Understanding their peril, more Black Seminoles and newly escaped runaways fled to Biscayne Bay or the Florida Keys to take the Saltwater Railroad to freedom.

Gen. Thomas Jesup, the leader of the American forces, made clear the mortal danger Florida Blacks faced when he declared the conflict a “Negro, not an Indian War.” Indeed, some scholars now consider the “Negro War” in Florida the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history.

Every journey on the Saltwater Railroad was dangerous, but the most dramatic was a revolt at sea. In 1841, 18 of 135 enslaved people aboard The Creole, which was sailing from Richmond, Virginia, to the slave markets of New Orleans, seized command of the ship, killing a crew member and wounding the captain.

Then they forced a crew member to navigate to Nassau.

An international uproar ensued. Since slavery was illegal in the Bahamas, the British freed most of the Blacks when the ship arrived, but the American consul insisted they charge those who had led the rebellion with mutiny. The U.S. government demanded their return, while British Abolitionists countered that the incident had occurred in international waters, outside of U.S. authority. Eventually, British officials set everyone free.

(The few surviving details about one of the mutineers reveal the astonishing courage some enslaved people showed in seeking to reunite their families: Madison Washington, a cook, had previously escaped to Canada but made a daring return to Virginia to find his wife; instead, he was captured and sold. Another detail from the Creole story raises questions but offers no answers: We can only guess why five of the enslaved passengers—three women, a boy and a girl—chose to sail back to New Orleans and slavery.)

The geopolitical complexity of the revolt increased awareness of the Saltwater Railroad, incensing slaveholding America and inciting more enslaved Blacks to flee from plantations to southern Florida’s watery escape routes. By the 1840s, the Bahamas had more formerly enslaved runaways than any other British possession in the Caribbean.

The Third Seminole War (1855-1858) resulted in the removal of all but a few hundred Seminoles from Florida. During the Civil War, formerly enslaved people continued to use the sea route to the Caribbean to escape re-enslavement or death in combat.

Free and forgotten by the rest of the world, those who settled in Red Bays passed down African and Native American traditions, including a distinctive basket-weaving style. They also intermarried with Bahamians and absorbed aspects of island culture. Only in the 1930s and following decades did scholars begin to unearth the history of Red Bays’ Black Seminoles.

About 300 people live in present-day Red Bays. They praise their ancestors, who risked terror and death to make the perilous journey to an unknown land. Some descendants attend academic symposiums and conferences that explore their history and culture. And every year, the community holds a homecoming celebration to honor its heritage.

One of those descendants, Rev. Bertram A. Newton, told anthropologist Howard, who in the process of writing The Black Seminoles in the Bahamas spent a year living in Red Bays, that the memory of those ancestors was a priceless gift.

“These were very brave people to have crossed the Gulf Stream and come over here. It is a rich history. When I think back on the history, I believe that I am a millionaire,” Newton said.

Anthony E. Dixon, Ph.D., is the author of Up From Incarceration: Dispelling the Myths of the Thug Life, A TImeline of the African Diaspora Experience in Florida and Florida’s Negro War: Black Seminoles and the Second Seminole War 1835-1842. He is the scriptwriter and a producer for “ Ghost in the Grass”, a full-length feature film now in production and based on the latter book.

Pam Daniel contributed to this story