Black Creek: The Taking of Florida

A credible fictionalized account of early Floridian history, this novel (based, the author explains, on actual historical records of his family members) takes us through Florida's early years as an American territory from the point of view of the white pioneers who poured in from nearby states after Andrew Jackson's unauthorized invasion of the then Spanish colony (the First Seminole War) and Spain's subsequent decision to sell that territory to the United States. For years the Spanish and, briefly, the British (who held Florida for a time and later returned it to Spain) had encouraged Indians from the United States to enter and settle the region as a way of building up a defense against American encroachment and (in the case of the British) of using the Indians against the new republic. Along with the Indians, the colonial authorities in Florida had welcomed and armed escaped black slaves, many of whom found sanctuary as soldiers with the Spanish or as allies of the Indians. (The original Seminole settlements, prior to Jackson's attacks, had been large communal villages with lots of farm land and livestock. Only later were the Seminole and their black allies driven to a nomadic and often subsistence existence. Blacks, many of whom the Indians counted as "slaves" but generally treated as allies, were established in separate farming communities with their own lands and livestock -- until the whites ultimately made such settlements impossible for blacks and Indians both.).