Florida and the Early Colonial Interior South: An Uneasy Relationship

When Europeans landed in the modern-day American South, they brought with them economic, social, and political forces that would reconfigure much about Native life for the next five hundred years.  The first two centuries, however, saw unprecedented upheaval, as the combined factors of encounters with early Spanish explorers, disease, and the incorporation of Native people into the modern world economy through a commercial trade in Indian slaves shattered the pre-contact Mississippian world.  In this shatter zone, the Indians of Florida, in particular, suffered from European-armed Indian slave raiders who targeted the mission Indians for slaves.  When their Mississippian chiefdoms fell, interior Indians began to restructure their lives into the large, formidable coalescent societies such as the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and so on.  The Florida and Gulf Coast Indians, however, racked from over eighty years of slaving, could not coalesce and instead dwindled to small populations, or, in many cases, became extinct.  Thus, one can look at Florida as a safety valve that deflected much of the slave trade away from the interior, that allowed the coalescence of the large interior Indian groups, and that resulted in the near annihilation of Native life in the region.  The result would be a virtual depopulation of the peninsula and panhandle of present-day Florida, opening the way for a colonization of the region in the late eighteenth century by disaffected Creek Indians, runaway slaves, and others who would come to comprise the Seminole Indians.