A Nation Rising (17 page)

After Nat Turner's rebellion, the militant defense of slavery took on a whole new meaning. But in Florida, it would be merged with Jackson's crusade to rid the American Southeast of the Seminole Indians.

The Seminoles—or
cimarrón
—had embraced the maroons, runaway and escaped slaves who had established secret communities in many parts of the Americas, from Cuba to Martinique, Brazil, and Jamaica, as well as in New Orleans and Florida, where these slaves had always been welcomed as a part of official Spanish policy. When they first migrated to Florida, the earliest Seminoles had also absorbed the remnants of earlier Florida tribes, such as the Yamasee and Apalachiola, who had been all but wiped out by contact with Europeans, through disease and warfare.

But after the American Revolution, the Seminoles also began to incorporate into their communities the growing number of escaped slaves, coming out of Georgia, South Carolina, and later the Louisiana Territory, who sometimes lived in independent communities. After the Red Stick War and the defeat at Horseshoe Creek in 1814, many Upper Creek refugees had also joined the Seminoles.

The acceptance of runaway slaves and other blacks by the Seminoles would set the Second Seminole War apart from many other Indian wars in American history. It was as much an “African-Indian” war as an “Indian war.” For the most part, the so-called “Black Seminoles” were descendants of free Africans and slaves who escaped from coastal South Carolina and Georgia into Florida, beginning in the late 1600s. Joining Native American bands then living in Florida, the Seminole tribe emerged as a multiethnic, biracial alliance. In the nineteenth century, their white enemies called them “Seminole Negroes.” Their Indian allies called them “Estelusti,” or “Black People.” Sometimes the Seminoles held these blacks as slaves, but it was a different sort of slavery from American plantation slavery.

In maroon societies, the historian Richard Price points out, “Seminoles and maroons, during their long history of close collaboration and intermarriage, maintained their separate identities more clearly; they fought side by side but in separate companies against the whites, and maroons (even while being ‘domestic slaves') served as trusted advisers and counselors of Seminole chiefs.”
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P
ERHAPS THE MOST
notable and influential of these Black Seminoles was a former slave named Abraham. He had been born into slavery in Pensacola and was about forty at the beginning of the Second Seminole War. Abraham may have won his freedom in the War of 1812, when the British offered freedom to slaves who would enlist to fight against the United States. Abraham later showed up in the town of Micanopy, the principal Seminole chief, and his knowledge of both English and the Muskogee Seminole tongue led to his use as an interpreter. Although he was at first Micanopy's slave, Abraham received his freedom after serving as the chief's interpreter during a trip to Washington in 1826. He later married the widow of another Seminole chief, and by the time of the crisis over removals, Abraham had become chief counsel or “sense bearer” to Micanopy. A portrait of Abraham, one of many water color paintings of significant Seminoles that have been preserved, shows him as a large man wearing a traditional Seminole turban. Abraham was said to be a “sensible and Shrewd Negro” and “the most cunning and intelligent Negro we have seen.”
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Part of his shrewdness may have been playing both sides in this affair. While seemingly loyal to the Seminole chief. Abraham may
have had his own agenda when some of the most important Seminole leaders met in 1832 with Andrew Jackson's envoy, James Gadsden, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Creek War. In return for $15,400 in cash and some blankets and clothing, many of the Seminole chiefs accepted the terms Gadsden offered under the Treaty of Payne's Landing. It stipulated that every Seminole would be out of Florida within three years. By most accounts, Gadsden “browbeat” the Seminoles into signing the treaty, and many of the tribes that had not been represented in the council later repudiated it.

According to the account of Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a Vermonter who served in the Seminole Wars, Gadsden had bribed Abraham, who received $200 when the Treaty of Payne's Landing was signed. A grandson of the Revolutionary War hero and noted iconoclast Ethan Allen, Major Hitchcock was also conspicuously—and unusually, for his day—sympathetic to the Native cause. He would be among the men who discovered the remains of Dade's column in February 1836, and he commented in a journal published after the war: “The government is in the wrong, and this is the chief cause of the persevering opposition of the Indians, who have nobly defended their country against our attempt to enforce a fraudulent treaty. The natives used every means to avoid a war, but were forced into it by the tyranny of the government.”

 

I
N
O
CTOBER
1834, the Seminoles were ordered out of Florida. The major chiefs, including Osceola, met in council. Now about thirty-five, Osceola had come from Creek country in Alabama. After the crushing defeats by Jackson in the Creek War, he and
his mother had migrated to Florida with the Red Sticks. Although he was not a chief by inheritance, he was recognized as a natural leader. According to some reports, his wife was a black woman.

“My brothers! The White man says I shall go, and he will send people to make me go,” Osceola reportedly told the council. “But I have a rifle, and I have some powder and some lead. I say, we must not leave our homes and lands. If any of our people want to go west we won't let them; and I tell them they are our enemies, and we will treat them so, for the great spirit will protect us.”
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For the Seminoles and Osceola, the last straw came in 1835, after the government decided to increase the pressure. General Wiley Thompson, a Georgia militia officer whom the government had made an Indian agent, called the Seminole leaders to sign another document, by which they would pledge to leave Florida quietly. In a story that has the ring of legend, one of the chiefs strode to the signing table and plunged his hunting knife into the treaty. That rebellious Indian was known as Osceola.
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Wiley Thompson had Osceola clapped in chains. In exchange for his freedom, Osceola signed the document, agreeing to bring in Seminoles who would go west. But once released, the Seminole war chief began to organize the resistance.

By the late fall of 1835, Osceola had the Seminole nation on a full war footing. Burning and plundering white plantations, his bands of Seminole warriors sent Florida into a panic. Then Osceola crafted the plan that would lead to the two attacks of December 28. While one force attacked Dade's column, Osceola took his personal vengeance on Wiley Thompson. Days later, on New Year's Eve, Osceola led a large Indian force against a combined force of army
regulars and Florida militiamen and routed them at the Withlacoochee River.

Hearing the news, Jackson appointed General Winfield Scott, another veteran of 1812 who had also fought against the Creeks in Alabama, to take over in Florida. Schooled in European battlefield techniques, Scott was outwitted and overmatched by the guerrilla tactics of the Seminoles. In fairly short order, he was recalled to Alabama.

After an inconclusive year of fighting in which the Seminoles struck freely at white settlements around the state, a new general, Thomas Sidney Jesup, a Virginian by birth, was named to lead the American army's Florida campaign in December 1836. A veteran of the War of 1812, during which he had been taken prisoner by the British, Jesup was a career officer who had served for ten years as quartermaster general of the army and had won praise for reorganizing a department that had traditionally been riddled by corruption and inefficiency. Transferred from the Creek theater to fight the Seminoles, Jesup immediately wrote to his superiors in Washington his assessment of the “real war” he was facing: “This, you may be assured, is a Negro, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of next season.”
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But after a year, Jesup, like Scott, had made no headway against the Seminole resistance. So he switched tactics. Perhaps he had read Napoléon's biography—or Toussaint-Louverture's—because he used the same ploy that had worked against Toussaint. In October 1837, Jesup lured Osceola to negotiations under a flag of truce.

The niceties of war meant nothing to Jesup; disregarding the
promise of a truce, he had Osceola put in irons. Chained and imprisoned in a fort in Saint Augustine, the betrayed chief fell victim to malaria three months later. Just before Osceola's death, the famous painter George Catlin visited him and produced a sympathetic portrait showing a noble leader. Even among those who had no love of Indians and supported Indian removal, the deceit that led to Osceola's capture was deemed an act of cowardice. To add to the indignity inflicted on Osceola, one of the doctors who had treated him decapitated his corpse and kept the head, either as a souvenir or as a medical curiosity.

Jesup did not profit from his success in capturing Osceola. The general outpouring of sympathy that followed Osceola's death in captivity left a scar on his record from which Jesup never recovered. Jesup's appointment had come just as a great change swept over Washington, D.C. The man who had dominated American politics almost since his victory over the British in 1815 completed his second term in March 1837. Honoring the tradition established by George Washington, Andrew Jackson did not run again and left the White House. Mounting their first presidential campaign in 1836, the newly formed Whigs failed to coalesce behind a single nominee, sending out three favorite sons instead. The most successful was William Henry Harrison, the former general whose nickname, “Old Tippecanoe,” celebrated his reputation as an Indian fighter. Hugh White and Daniel Webster, the other Whigs, finished far behind.

Easily outdistancing them all was Martin Van Buren, Jackson's vice president and handpicked successor, who was to have the distinction of being the first president born an American citizen. An
adept tactician tutored by Aaron Burr, Van Buren had begun to master the new politics of group voting, or machine politics, and was responsible for delivering New York's electoral votes to Jackson. But he utterly lacked Jackson's ability to win popular support. Van Buren came to office just as America experienced one of the worst economic downturns in its early history, the Panic of 1837. It would ultimately cost him a second term.

Along with a bad economy, Van Buren had inherited Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policies and continued the federal effort to uproot the remaining Seminoles. But the Seminole War was a quagmire for the Van Buren administration. In yet another change of command, Van Buren dispatched Colonel Zachary Taylor to Florida. Taylor was also a veteran of the War of 1812, though he had seen mostly garrison duty. An Indian fighter who had earned the nickname “Old Rough and Ready,” Taylor was a Virginian whose father had served with George Washington during the Revolution. A future American president, he claimed Robert E. Lee as a kinsman and James Madison as a cousin. Madison gave him a commission in the army. But just as Americans were growing increasingly weary of this very expensive and seemingly endless war, Taylor had some success. On Christmas Day 1837, he had tracked down and defeated a Seminole force at Lake Okeechobee.

Around the time that Taylor took command, Robert Reid, the new governor of Florida, suggested bringing in Cuban bloodhounds. They had been used for decades in Jamaica to control rebellious slaves and track runaways. News of the decision to use the dogs, which not only were expensive but required special handlers, brought outraged cries from the abolitionist movement. The northern press and
the war's opponents in Congress assailed the bloodhound strategy as contemptible. The “peace hounds,” as a skeptical press dubbed them, proved to be of little value in Florida's swamps.

For the next two years, the war dragged on, settling into an endless series of skirmishes until it simply ran out of steam in 1842, having produced less than the government's desired results. In 1840, Taylor requested a transfer to the Indian campaign in the Southwest. Leaderless, their numbers dwindling from attrition, the Seminoles were unable to mount any real resistance. And in Congress, there was no longer any patience with a war that limped along at great expense without—in a modern phrase—any light at the end of the tunnel. Exasperation prompted Senator Daniel Webster to rise and complain, “This Florida war has already cost us over twenty million dollars”—four times the cost of buying Florida from Spain.
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And still the Second Seminole War sputtered on, costing the nation a total of more than $30 million. It was the longest U.S. war between the American Revolution and the Vietnam War.

According to the military historian John K. Mahon, the price paid in casualties for the lessons learned and for the ground “liberated” was high. The regular army suffered 1,466 deaths, including 328 men killed in action. Deaths in the navy totaled sixty-nine. Less than one-quarter of the losses were from battle; as it is in most wars, disease took the greatest toll.
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A
FTERMATH

M
OST OF THE
Seminoles had been removed from Florida by the end of 1839. But as the war wound down in 1842, the army was reduced to paying a bounty for the capture or killing of a Seminole warrior. By that point, most of the Seminole elders and war chiefs were gone and one of the few remaining warring leaders, a chief named Halleck, refused to surrender or submit. Using Jesup's trick, the army invited Halleck to visit, promising a meal. While Halleck was at Fort King, the rest of his fighters were captured and Halleck was taken prisoner and transported west. As he boarded the army ship, he said, “I have been hunted like a wolf and now I am about to be sent away like a dog.”