Johnalewis74's Blog
Johnalewis74's Blog
Aug 29, 2007 | 1:00 PM PST
Tags: Florida History , Native Americans
Indian Resistance and Removal...
In it's early days, the new United States government carried out a policy of displacement and extermination against the American Indians in the eastern US, removing them from the path of "white" settlement. Until 1821, Florida remained under the control of the government of Spain but the US Territories of Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana were its next-door neighbors. It was clear that the US wanted the Spaniards out of Florida and was willing to consider any means, including warfare, to aquire the rich land.
As it turned out, Spain could no longer afford to support its vast colonial empire, and from 1784 until 1821 (when Spain ceded Florida to the US), Florida became the setting for constant international intrigues as well as a target for greedy adventurers who wished to establish their own personal empires with Florida's vast rescources.
When the Maskoki tribes in Alabama, whom English speakers called "Creeks," rose up against the white settlers in the Creek War of 1813-1814, the brutal repression and disastrous treaty forced upon them by General Andrew Jackson sent thousands of warriors and their families migrating southward to take refuge in Spanish Florida. There, they joined the decendants of many other tribes whose members had lived all across the Florida forests for thousands of years. The Indians who made up this Florida group called themselves 'yat'siminoli' or "free people," because for centuries their ancestors had resisted the attempts of the Spaniards to conquer and convert them, as well as the attempts of the English to take their lands and use them as military pawns. Soon, white Americans would begin to call all of the Indians in Florida by that name: "Seminoles"
Spain could not afford enough soldiers to patrol the long frontiers of Florida. Its choice lands were openly coveted by white settlers who regulary moved across its borders. English war ships anchored off its Gulf coast and English agents encouraged the Seminoles, Creeks and Mikisuki to resist US settlement openly. US officals, angry that the Spaniards could not oust the English or control the Indians, were incensed by the protection and shelter the Seminoles offered to African slaves. These freedom seekers had been finding refuge in Spanish Florida for over a century, but the new US government was determinded to stop this pratice. In the late 1700's and early 1800's, conflicts, skirmishes and ambushes erupted and racial hatred broke into violence more and more frequently on the new frontier.
When the military and political opportunist, General Andrew Jackson, marched across Florida's international boundaries to settle the "Indian Problem," he created international furor. Over a period of several years, he burned Indian towns, captured Africans, and hanged one Maskoki medicine man, Francis, as well as two Englishmen whom he suspected of inciting the Indians. This series of events, wich took place between 1814 and 1818, is known as the First Seminole War.
And the conflicts did not end there; they only escalated.
Through the Treaty of Moultrie Creek (1823), the Treaty of Payne's Landing (1832), and numerous "talks" and meetings, US Indian Agents sought to convince the Flodida Indians to sell their cattle and pigs to the US government, return runaway slaves to their "rightful owners," leave their ancient homelands in Florida, and move west of the Mississippi River to Arkansas Territory. In 1830, soon after Jackson the Indian fighter became Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States, he pushed through Congress the Indian Removal Act. With this Act, the determination of the government to move Indians out of the Southeast and open the land for white settlement became the official policy of the US, and the willingness of the government to spend monies in support of military enforcement of this policy increased.
The clash that resulted from this policy finally began in 1835, and the seven years that it lasted was the most tragic years in the history of US - Indian relations east of the Mississippi River. Known to history as the Second Seminole War, the US government committed almost $40,ooo,000 to the forced removal of slightly more than 3,000 Maskoki men, women and children from Florida to Oklahoma. This was the only Indian war in US history in which not only the US army, but also the US navy and marine corps participated. Together with the Third Seminole War, a series of skirmishes that took place between 1856 and 1858, the United States spent much of the first half of the 19th century in trying, unsuccessfully, to dislodge about 5,000 Seminoles from Florida.
Unlike the "Trail of Tears" that took place in 1838, in which several thousand Cherokee people were sent on a death march to the West, the removal of the Seminole people from Florida began earlier and lasted 20 years longer. Just like the other event, the toll in human suffering was profound, and the stain on the honor of a great nation can never be erased. The Seminole people..... men, women and children, were hunted with bloodhounds, rounded up like cattle, and forced onto ships that carried them to New Orleans and up the Mississippi. Together with hundreds of African ex-slaves who had fought with them, they were then sent overland to Fort Gibson (Arkansas), and on to strange lands where they were attacked by other tribes, in a fierce competition for the scarce resources that they all needed to survive.
In addition to "Old Hickory," as Jackson had come to be known, an impressive list of US military figures joined the fight to remove the Seminoles from Florida. Edmund P. Gaines; Zachary Taylor; Oliver O. Howard (the Christian General), Richard Keith Call, and Thomas S. Jessup, among many others, would nearly ruin their reputations trying to fight the Seminoles in a place that was cold and wet in winter, and hot and wet in summer; where only the Seminoles, alligators, snakes and mosquitoes knew how to survive. And where dysentery and malaria were the rewards for their efforts. One white solder wrote home that, "If the Devil owned both Hell and Florida, he would rent out Florida and live in Hell!"
William S. Harney, who would later tell western tribes, "The Great White Father has sent me to punish you!" learned his Indian-fighting tactics in Florida. Winfield Scott, the only commander of US troops in Florida to emerge with his reputation intact, went on to reorganize the entire US military establishment on the "Open Field" tactics that evolved from the Seminole Wars.
Today, students at US military academies still study the hit-and-run tactics of the Seminoles. This was the first time in its history that US soldiers fought a "guerrilla" war, on which the old "liner" tactics of the European military system were almost useless against warriors who moved in flexible formations, attacked and dissappeared, and used the very terrain as a weapon against their enemies. The US would not fight another such war until its troops entered the tiny southeast Asian nation of Vietnam more than a centuury later......
Up Next:
Two legendary Seminole Leaders...
