GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistancewhere Afrikan slavery was first centered, large revolts frequently broke
out and escaped Afrikan slaves took refuge amongst Caribs and Arawaks.
In Northeast Brazil, an Afrikan rebellion succeeded in organizing the ter-
ritory of Palmares—which grew to one-third the size of Portugal.
Probably one of the most famous Afrikan and Native alliances was
the example of the escaped Afrikan slaves and the Seminole in Florida.
The escaped Afrikans had “formed liberated Afrikan communities as a
semi-autonomous part of the sheltering Seminole Nation”.^25 Together,
these two peoples would carry out one of the strongest resistance strug-
gles against the U.S. The so-called Seminole Wars began in 1812 when
Georgia vigilantes attempted to recapture Afrikans for enslavement, and
continued for thirty years under the U.S. campaign of relocations. The
Seminole Wars, under the fanatical direction of President Jackson, were
the most costly of the U.S. ‘Indian Wars’; over 1,600 U.S. soldiers were
killed and thousands wounded at the cost of some $30 million. Even
after this, the Seminole-Afrikan guerrillas remained unsubjugated. The
solidarity between the Afrikans and the Seminoles is most clear in the
second Seminole War of 1835. The Seminoles, under Osceola, refused to
accept relocation to Oklahoma—one of the key disagreements also be-
ing the U.S. insistence on separation of the Afrikans from their Seminole
brothers and sisters. The U.S. forces relaunched their war, and were never
able to achieve a clear victory.
By the mid-1800s, slavery was viewed by some parts of the U.S. rul-
ing class as an obstacle to economic growth and expansion. The anti-
slavery campaign, led by the North, was a practical effort to free land and
labour from the limitations of the closed system of plantation agriculture
based on slave labour;
Slavery had become an obstacle to both the continued growth of
settler society and the interests of the Euro-Amerikan bour-
geoisie. It was not that slavery was unprofitable itself. It was,
worker for worker, much more profitable than white wagelabour.
Afrikan slaves in industry cost the capitalists less than one-third
the wages of white workingmen... But the American capitalists
needed to greatly expand their labour force. While the planters
believed that importing new millions of Afrikan slaves would
most profitably meet this need, it was clear that this would only- J. Sakai, Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat, Morningstar Press, 1989,
pg. 27.