Seminole Wars

Seminole Wars (1818; 1835–42; 1855–58).The southeastern border of the United States was continuously turbulent during the early nineteenth century. Runaway slaves escaped into Spanish Florida, while Indian bands and white bands marauded unrestrained. Open war finally broke out on 27 November 1817, when Maj. Gen. Edmund P. Gaines sent a detachment to Fowltown, a Seminole village, to arrest its chief, Neamathla, for defying the authority of the United States.

Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson took over command on 26 December 1817. With an army of about 4,000 men, half of them Creek Indians, he invaded Spanish Florida and destroyed Seminole power west of the Suwannee River. He went on to take St. Marks and Pensacola, offending Spain; then offended Great Britain by executing two British citizens for aiding the Seminoles. The war seemed over to him, and on 30 May 1818, he left Florida. The next year, because of Jackson's conquests, the Spanish government transferred Florida to the United States by the Adams‐Onís Treaty.

For the Seminoles, American acquisition ended an era of prosperity and began one of deprivation. The first U.S. policy, initiated in 1823, confined them to a reservation of 4 million acres of poor land. There were numerous violent confrontations, many of them disputes over the ownership of blacks. U.S. slaveholders, Creek Indians, Seminoles, and the blacks themselves harried each other over slave property.

As Americans shoved into Florida in the years after the war, the Seminoles, a loose association of diverse bands, prepared to fight once more. In 1834, however, their leadership came not from hereditary chiefs but from Osceola, a part‐white warrior without ancestral or tribal standing, whose courage and determination inspired the bands to act together. Miccosukees ravaged the plantations east of the St. Johns River, while Alachuas and others killed the Indian agent, Wiley Thompson, and annihilated Maj. Francis L. Dade's detachment of 108 men on 28 December 1835. Dade's defeat began the undeclared Second Seminole War, 1835–42.

By September 1836, the Seminoles controlled all of North Florida east of the Suwannee River except Newnansville, Micanopy, and Garey's Ferry. But when Osceola sickened in the late summer, cooperation among the bands slackened. Leadership passed from Osceola to Wildcat ( Coacoochee), Alligator ( Halpatter Tustenuggee), Jumper ( Ote Emathla), Halleck Tustenuggee, Billy Bowlegs ( Holata Mico), and Sam Jones ( Arpeika). These men led not a nation but disparate bands that sometimes cooperated.

For the United States, Brig. Gen. Duncan L. Clinch commanded first, followed by Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott. After Scott, the civilian governor of Florida, Richard K. Call, took charge for six months. Then the sequence of ranking general officers recommenced: Maj. Gen. Thomas S. Jesup, Brig. Gen. Zachary Taylor, Brig. Gen. Walker K. Armistead, and Brig. Gen. William J. Worth.

Scott's Napoleon‐like strategy failed. Jesup, frustrated, began to seize key leaders when they came in to negotiate; his most notorious capture was of Osceola on 27 October 1837. Zachary Taylor directed the notable battle near Lake Okeechobee on Christmas Day, 1837. He threw his 800 men head‐on against a position meticulously prepared by the three bands of Seminoles waiting there. He finally dislodged them but sustained 138 casualties.

About 400 blacks, effective fighters, stood with the Seminoles until the spring of 1838. In March of that year, General Jesup reversed previous policies and promulgated his order that all blacks who joined the U.S. force would become free. Thereafter, the blacks shifted allegiance, ceasing to serve alongside the warriors.

The last two U.S. commanders relied on small detachments led by junior officers. Blacks or captured Indians guided them to the ultimate hideaways of the Indians, where they destroyed the remaining Seminole means of subsistence. Ragged, hungry, and short of ammunition, hostile bands began to surrender; in August 1842, General Worth was able to declare the Second Seminole War ended. About 350 Indians remained south of Lake Okeechobee and Pease Creek.

For a few years, Billy Bowlegs and Sam Jones strove to keep the peace; but the United States, pressed by settlers, began to build roads and survey within the Indian preserve. Escalating white encroachments brought an attack on an army camp on 20 December 1855. It was the catalyst for the Third Seminole War. U.S. volunteers rather than regulars provided the main military force this time. The last fight took place on 5 March 1857. Billy Bowlegs, convinced that the cause was lost, accepted several thousand dollars to emigrate, taking with him 165 followers. About 120 Seminoles remained behind. One of them was Sam Jones, who never left, but died in Florida in 1867, one hundred eleven years old. The United States declared the Third Seminole War officially ended on 8 May 1858.
[See also Native American Wars.]

Bibliography

John K. Mahon , History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842, 1967.
James W. Covington , The Billy Bowlegs War, 1855–1858, 1981.
Virginia Bergman Peters , The Florida Wars, 1979.
Kenneth W. Porter , The Black Seminoles, 1996.
Frank Laumer , Dade's Last Command, 1995.
John K. Mahon , The First Seminole War, 1817–1818, Florida Historical Quarterly, Summer 1998.

John K. Mahon