Back in 2007 Daily Kos published a diary about the Slaves who escaped from Georgia into Spanish Florida (with no help from White abolitionists) and, when the US army invaded Spanish Florida to recapture them, they fought for their freedom until the US army finally gave up and agreed a treaty which recognised their freedom.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The first step in that story happened just over two hundred years ago.
In April 1814 a hundred British Marines landed at Prospect Bluff, in Franklin County in the Florida panhandle under Lieutenant Colonel Edward Nicolls from Coleraine, Northern Ireland.
On 26 August 1814 Lieutenant Colonel Nicolls established the Colonial Corps of Marines and started recruiting locals to man it. These were mostly men who had escaped from slavery in Georgia and Alabama and were living free in Pensacola and the panhandle of Spanish Florida.
The slaveowners freaked out.