The 1526 Anti-Slavery Rebellion and the Birth of Afro-Indigenous Maroonage in Georgia
Today marks the 497th anniversary of the first rebellion by enslaved African people in North America, which inaugurated a centuries-long multi-racial tradition of resistance and solidarity in Georgia’s lowcountry. The following is excerpted and adapted from my forthcoming book, “All Will Be Equalized”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers and Their Accomplices, 1526–1865.
The Atlantic slavery system was among the most violent horrors in human history. Over the course of 300 years, more than 12 million African people were kidnapped, trafficked, and enslaved in the service of European settler-colonialism in the Americas. It was one of the most brutal social and economic institutions in recorded history. But in spite (or because) of slavery’s brutality, there was fierce resistance against this inhuman institution from its very beginning.
This anti-slavery resistance was simultaneously part of a broader multi-cultural resistance to European colonialism in the Americas. As such, anti-slavery movements were often animated by a spirit of inter-communal solidarity among the multitude of communities oppressed by settler colonialism in the Americas. Georgia’s history, in particular, offers remarkable examples of cross-cultural solidarity against slavery, from the first arrival of enslaved Africans to the region.
Atlantic slavery first touched North America in September 1526, when Spanish colonialists brought a group of approximately 100 enslaved Africans to San Miguel de Gualdape, the first documented European settlement of colonial-era North America. The exact location of the settlement is debated by historians, but it is widely believed to have been somewhere along the present-day Georgia or South Carolina coasts, perhaps near Sapelo Sound.[1]
This region, which we now refer to as coastal Georgia, was the homeland of two indigenous cultures: the Guale, Musckogean-language speakers who lived in the coastal region and Sea Islands between what is now St. Simon’s Island and St. Elena Island; and the Timucua, who spoke a distinctive language similar to the Warao of northern South America, and who occupied a vast area across southern Georgia and northern Florida between the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts. In the sixteenth century, Sapelo Sound was situated within the Guale coast, but was near enough to Timucua lands for Spanish colonizers to be noticed by people from both cultures.
The 600 Spanish settlers of San Miguel de Gualdape lacked the knowledge and experience necessary to live in the coastal lowcountry, leading to disastrous consequences. The shallow water table and porous soil meant that their drinking wells quickly became contaminated with human and animal waste. Many Spanish settlers quickly became ill and died from dysentery. Few people were healthy enough to work, and re-supply expeditions from the island of Hispaniola were infrequent.
The Spaniards’ food and other supplies soon ran low, but indigenous Guale (pronounced “Wally”) communities — who were probably concerned about the Spaniards’ poor hygiene and the spread of disease — refused to trade with them. A group of Spaniards raided a Guale village, attempting to steal supplies and kidnap people for slave labor. The Guale resisted, of course, and the Spanish attack proved unsuccessful.
When the leader of the Spanish colony, Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, died of dysentery on 18 October 1526, a violent conflict erupted between two different Spanish factions, each seeking to govern the colony. During the Spaniards’ infighting, the enslaved Africans of San Miguel de Gualdape saw an opportunity for self-emancipation. They set fire to a Spanish leaders’ cabin and presumably made their escape to a nearby Guale community.[2] These individuals became not only the first enslaved Africans recorded in North America, but also the first Africans in North America to rebel against slavery. The fact that their rebellion was successful makes their story even more compelling. Moreover, they were only the first of many enslaved Africans to liberate themselves in the land we now call Georgia.
After their escape from slavery the African rebels of 1526 were stuck in North America, but it is likely that they found some safety and stability in Guale country, at least for a while. They probably got married, had children, and spent the rest of their lives among the Guale. This foundational uprising foreshadowed a model of anti-slavery resistance and multi-racial solidarity, known as “maroonage,” that would remain a radical — and liberating — force of defiance throughout the next 300 years of settler-colonial terror. Freedom-seeking African runaways eventually became known as “maroons,” a term derived from cimarron, a Spanish adaptation of an indigenous Taino word that describes the flight of an arrow.[3]
Out of the original 600 Spanish settlers of San Miguel de Gualdape, only 150 survived. They fled the mainland and returned to the Spanish colony of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In spite of this initial failure, Spanish state and religious authorities remained interested in colonizing the North American coast. They made multiple failed incursions into the land they called “La Florida,” before eventually establishing a network of Catholic missions, through which they established exploitative trade relationships and interfered in the customs and politics of Georgia’s indigenous societies.
African maroons who had escaped Spanish slavery and now lived among the Guale, Timucua, or Georgia’s other indigenous communities sometimes served as translators between Spanish and indigenous representatives. Africans’ experiences in the early slavery system also undoubtedly informed anti-colonial resistance throughout the region, including the 1597 Guale Revolt, a rebellion against Spanish rule that encompassed almost all of Georgia’s Sea Islands.
The arrival of English settler-colonialism in North America and the establishment of the Carolina colonies in 1663 brought about a terrifying expansion of African slavery in the region. While the Spanish had introduced African slavery to North America, the English “plantation” system (really, forced-labor farming) was unlike anything that had ever been seen in the region. The use of captive African laborers — women, men, children, everyone — forced to work on threat of brutal violence on large-scale mono-crop prison farms constructed on stolen Indigenous land represented both a social and ecological disaster on an apocalyptic scale.[4]
Africans who managed to escape enslavement in the rice fields of English colonies like South Carolina (and later, in Georgia) established clandestine communities in Georgia’s backwoods and swamps, including in the expansive Okefenokee Swamp. Self-emancipating Africans frequently used the cover of swamplands to conceal their escapes from slavery. They even established their own communities of resistance within swamps like the Okefenokee, which became a natural gateway to freedom for Africans fleeing south to Spanish Florida via the Suwanee River. Afro-Indigenous maroon communities proliferated not only in the swamp itself, but all along the banks of this river.
In 1684 Carolina Governor James Moore attacked and destroyed every Guale community and Spanish mission along the Georgia coast. Surviving Guale eventually reconstituted themselves, alongside other Indigenous and African refugees, as the Upper Yamasee. In 1703, James Moore turned the eye of British imperialist genocide toward the remaining Timucuan communities. The British launched a heavy assault on the Timucua, enslaving or killing every individual they encountered. Scattered survivors fled to Spanish towns, but Timucuan society was never re-established. By 1759 there were only six recorded Timucua-speaking adults remaining in Florida. Other survivors of the genocide were probably absorbed by the Muskogee or Yamasee, and, eventually, their descendants were likely born into Seminole communities.
The Seminoles themselves emerged as a multiracial alliance of freedom-seeking peoples who had all, for one reason or another, been pushed into the peripheral regions of southern Georgia and Northern Florida. Through this process of ethnogenesis, Seminole communities in Georgia and Northern Florida very probably included descendants of the Timucua and Guale peoples. The name itself emerges from the root cimarrons, just as the term “maroon” had earlier. Essentially, “maroon” and “Seminole” are the same word and carried the same meaning. Africans, Indigenous peoples, and even some renegade Europeans, were all present in Seminole communities, as were their descendants.
Dr. Modibo Kadalie, a historian, political scientist, and elder activist of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and pan-Africanist movements, has argued that Afro-Indigenous maroon communities were remarkable examples of genuinely multi-ethnic direct democracy on an intimate scale. These democracies were, of course, violently and systematically assaulted by European colonial power and, eventually, by the expansionist United States of America.[5]
Stories of anti-colonial resistance — waged in the face of unbridled genocide — can be found in almost river, creek, island, and swamp of the Georgia wilderness. Indeed, as we have seen, Georgia was the birthplace of anti-slavery resistance in North America. Today, we commemorate the victory of the African rebels of San Miguel de Gualdape, and honor their contributions to our collective and historic struggle for human freedom everywhere.
[Note: Obviously, there is a lot more to say about these freedom-seekers and their remarkable contributions to history. In the interest of brevity, I had to keep this article quite short and necessarily incomplete. Please be on the look out for my forthcoming book, “All Will Be Equalized”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers and Their Accomplices, 1526–1865, which will be available Summer 2024.]
[1] John E. Worth, “Spanish Exploration,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, 29 September 2020. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/spanish-exploration/
[2] Gillian Brockell, “Before There Was 1619, There Was 1526: The Mystery of the First Enslaved Africans in What Became the United States,” Washington Post, 7 September 2019.
[3] Most secondary sources debating the etymology of this word are, understandably, written in Spanish. One valuable English-language resource exploring this question is: Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, “Maroons in the Montes: Toward a Political Ecology of Marronage in the Sixteenth-Century Caribbean,” in Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, Miles P. Grier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) p. 15–35.
[4] Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North of America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 179.
[5] Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom (Atlanta: On Our Own Authority!, 2022).
