Florida's 1836 Seminole Indian Raids

In 1836, a war party burned 21 plantations along the St. Johns River,making off with hundreds of slaves and permanently crippling the North Florida sugar industry. For more than 150 years, most historians believed only Seminole Indians and their free black allies conducted the raids. But a growing, if controversial, body of research points toward a conspiracy between the black warriors -- known as Black Seminoles or maroons -- and the plantation slaves. That would make North Florida the locus for the largest mass slave uprising in U.S. history.