Florida's Seminole Wars: 1817-1858

materials.

INTRODUCTION

Over a period of years spanning 1817 to 1858, the United States government fought three wars with the Seminole Indians and their allies. At issue were the lands upon which the Native Americans lived and the blacks, free and slave, who lived under their protection. The Seminoles had a culture that was similar to their cousins, the Creeks, and these tribes had adopted many of the features found in frontier white society. They lived in cabins, herded large numbers of cattle, rotated their crops, and had an active trade with England, Spain, and the United States. Firearms were rapidly replacing bows and arrows and spears for hunting game. Metal pots and pans began taking the place of traditional pottery and reed baskets. In many ways, the Seminoles had begun to surpass many frontier whites in wealth and sophistication of goods. Few whites were willing to recognize the transition of the Seminole Indians and many actually resented it. With the presence of blacks among them and their growing wealth, many whites had decided it was time to do something about it. It took the United States three tries to accomplish its Native American removal policy with the Seminoles and their allies.

In the first war with the Seminoles, Andrew Jackson led the U.S. Army into a foreign land, captured and executed two citizens of the second nation, and accomplished little in the way of Native American removal or destruction of Seminole power. For all of the attention and notoriety of this conflict, it actually had few tangible results. The Native Americans and blacks remained united and elusive. Jackson took possession of two fortified towns of the Spanish nation and caused the international community to censure this action of the United States. He did force the question of the sale of the Floridas to the United States and set the stage for the Adams-Onis (or Transcontinental) Treaty. Twelve years later, the United States Congress passed legislation sponsored by his administration for the permanent removal of the Native Americans from all of the United States territory east of the Mississippi River.

The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek set in motion the removal of the Seminoles. This group, however, had little intention of leaving Florida. Two subsequent treaties did little to alleviate the situation and actually gave a time for hostilities to begin; the date of removal was set for early 1836. The resulting Second Seminole War was the most costly American Indian war fought by the United States both in men lost and money spent. It lasted seven long and bloody years. The war damaged the reputation of almost every commanding officer to serve in it and helped the cause of the rising abolitionist movement. General Thomas Jesup called it a Negro War fought primarily to retrieve runaway slaves and ensure that the South would not have an open territory where their slaves might be free, or worse, armed. As part of that mystical movement called Manifest Destiny, the acquisition of Florida was the final link for lands east of the Mississippi. The war did remove the majority of the Seminoles and their allies, but at what cost?

The final war, the so-called Third Seminole War, was one of the more contrived affairs in the history of white–Native American relations. The Seminoles numbered less than 200 warriors, while the U.S. Army and the Florida Militia numbered nearly 2,000 men. It was a search and destroy mission with the final object to capture, if possible, and remove. From the military point of view, it did provide field training for those who graduated from West Point too late to join in the Mexican War. Many Civil War generals on both sides saw their first action under fire here.

The text that follows will attempt to explain the three wars in their historical context and provide some insights into the policies and people who fought on both sides of the issues. No apologies will be offered for any of the actions of the commanders in the field, but the author hopes to present them within the spirit of their own time. The world of the nineteenth-century soldier and American Indian has no comparative contemporary setting. Theirs was a world of violence and risks. Every man, woman, and child who ventured onto the frontier took their lives into their own hands. They either made it or they died. It should not be assumed that they were unsophisticated or uncaring; they were both, but in a different context than we are used to or can appreciate. As you read the following, please try not to judge the characters on twenty-first-century standards. This will only lead to frustration and misunderstanding.

TEMPORARY DWELLING. While on the move and trying to avoid detection by the army, this type of dwelling was quickly built and could be easily abandoned in time of need.

1. THE PRELUDE

The waters of the Apalachicola River sluggishly pushed towards the Gulf of Mexico, just like they always have and will. The weather had a nip of autumn in the air as the open flat-boat struggled mightily against the heavy current. Attempting to round the bend below Fort Scott, the weakened force of Lieutenant R.W. Scott looked anxiously forward to the safety of the new fort’s walls and the comradeship of its garrison. With the boat loaded with clothing, 20 sick soldiers, 7 women, and 20 men fit for duty, Lieutenant Scott’s little force was no match for what awaited them. After a very short but bloody skirmish, the tiny command was decimated by the fire from the near shore with only six men and one woman surviving the attack. To this day, it is unclear if any children were aboard that ill-fated craft. Thus began the so-called First Seminole War on that fateful autumn day, November 30, 1817.

Was this really the beginning of a new war or simply a continuation of the Creek (Redstick) War, which was a continuation of the War of 1812 amid a whole series of conflicts between two different and competing civilizations? At that time, many of the Creek towns had sided with the British during the conflict. Undoubtedly, a significant number of those who survived the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and other skirmishes had fled southward into Florida, there to join their brethren, the Seminoles and Miccosukees. These two tribes had a well known history of raiding across the borders into Georgia and Alabama. Raids and counter-raids had been a feature of these borders with the nominally Spanish colonies of East and West Florida for many years. As the American frontier expanded into the old Southwest, the pressures leading to conflict continued to rise. The push for more land to graze cattle and raise crops put the expanding white population on a direct course for war. In addition to this volatile mixture was the factor of escaped slaves seeking freedom from the plantation system and a better life for their families. Altogether, the complexity and explosiveness of this frontier became more entangled than the infamous ti-ti swamps of the Choctawhatchee River.

Who exactly were the Seminoles and their allies, the Miccosukees? Both have their origins in what the late Dr. Leitch Wright called the Muscogulges people, a broad group of related tribal units that spoke a variety of languages, including Muskogee, Hitchiti, and Choctaw. White society has pigeon-holed these groups into one loose confederation, which they called Creeks. This is not historically accurate and does not reflect the diversity within the groups. However, there are a number of similarities among this array of tribes. One of the more important is their clan structure. Such clans were matrilineal and membership in the clan was determined by the mother’s family. A man was always a member of his mother’s clan, but his children were members of his wife’s clan. Clan membership defined the individual for life, and some of these clans were named after animals such as the bear, deer, or panther, while others took the names of natural forces like the wind or plants. These relationships also defined responsibilities for an individual: whom to joke with, whom to marry, whom to defend or avenge, etc. As clan membership is also a kinship to others of the same clan, no matter what group, members always had uncles, cousins, and other relatives of the mother’s clan that could be relied upon in time of need. It may be because of these vast relationships that white society became so confused about the nature of Native American society and lumped them all together in a Creek Confederation.

RAFTS DESCENDING THE RIVER. This is a good example of the type of craft that may have been used by the R.W. Scott party as it ascended the Apalachicola River in November 1817.

Clan membership also confused Europeans because the local villages (talofa) and larger ceremonial towns (talwa) were governed by councils that represented the various clans living within them. It was these town councils that allotted the land for each clan to use based upon their population needs. The lands thus assigned were then divided among clan members by the clan council, presided over by the elders. Each clan had a camp within the village that was designated as its own. This camp was to endure with the Seminoles of Florida well into the twentieth century. The larger towns were also further divided into two moieties, or groups, signified by the colors red (for war) and white (for peace). These towns were headed by a miko (chief) who brought the problems to be discussed in front of the town councils. He had no independent power other than to call the council into session when needed. Yet he was always treated with great respect, having earned it by deeds performed throughout his life. The miko did have power over the surplus food supply established by the villagers and was responsible for rationing it out during times of famine or personal catastrophe. On occasion, he could also use this supply to entertain guests of the town. Finally, he often represented the town in larger tribal councils when serious matters threatened the towns and villages of the tribe. It should be noted that the miko did not have independent power and was expected to always follow the decisions of the town council. Thus, the frequent delays experienced by Indian agents, representatives of European governments (and later the United States), and military negotiators were often the product of this system, and not intentional delaying tactics often attributed to these native representatives. A lack of understanding of the clantown-tribal relationship often caused Europeans to become frustrated while negotiating with these Native Americans.

The so-called Creek Confederation never was designed to have a central government. Part of this comes from a further division among the Creeks into the Upper and Lower groupings. The Upper group was centered in the valleys of the Tallapoosa, Coosa, and Alabama Rivers, while the Lower group inhabited the area of the lower Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers. The Lower Creeks are often referred to as Cowetas by some of the white traders and government officials, just as they frequently called the Upper group Tallapoosas. These divisions, again, ignored the complexity of southeastern American Indian society and totally separated Choctaws, Yuchis, Natchez, and some of the Shawnees from their relatives within the Creek Confederacy. These artificial divisions caused confusion for whites that too frequently translated into trouble for the Native Americans. Because of the context of the European experience and from some experiences in the conquest of Central and South America, it was almost inconceivable for whites to understand a government based upon clan relationships and clan, town, and tribal councils. Mikos who led by example and persuasion were too often confused with rulers of the European type. Such cultural bias (or arrogance) would lead to disastrous results for all concerned.

The Creeks and their related neighbors were not simple hunters and gatherers. They were highly sophisticated farmers and adept hunters. They quickly adopted many European methods and technologies. The Creeks rapidly learned the art of ranching and maintaining fairly large herds of cattle, a recent European import, along with the use of the horse. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins noted in his famous journal of a trip through the Creek towns the use of a three-crop rotation system, including the penning of cattle and use of manure for fertilizer. Hawkins also reported that nearly every village he visited had from 100 to 150 cattle.

Many of the mikos lived in framed and shingled houses, a sign of their station within the village. Corn, the mainstay of Native American life, was always grown, as were beans, peas, melons, squashes, and potatoes. Hunting, primarily for deer, provided the bulk of the protein in their diet until the introduction of cattle. As trade grew between the two cultures, firearms, metal utensils, finely woven cloth, and other such items became staples in the homes of the Native Americans. The resultant loss of well entrenched skills, such as pottery making and hunting with bow and arrow, among others, became one of the problems faced by some groups as they began to resist removal and migrate to more primitive areas lacking in trade goods.

One of the basic problems with studying the history of any Native American group is that we rely almost totally upon European observers, who often unintentionally misrepresented the true nature of things. Even Indian agents and traders, who often intermarried with their charges or customers, still exhibited their own cultural bias. Relationships, like those described above, are most often misunderstood. Even as late as the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), the army relied more upon former slaves or free blacks for information on Native American motivations and interpretations of Seminole or Miccosukee culture than they did the tribes themselves. Such reliance upon essentially secondhand knowledge from another cultural view (that of the African cultures—of which there were many represented in the escaped slaves or free black population) made understanding Seminole culture even more confusing. To compound matters even more thoroughly, the Seminoles and Miccosukees often used blacks to interpret European culture for them. This cross-cultural viewing of each other added greatly to these misunderstandings.

Slavery, as practiced by the Seminoles, Miccosukees, and others of their relations, was of a rather benign form. The most common source of acquiring slaves was war. Slavery in this form was culturally sanctioned and practiced long before the introduction of Africans into the Southeast. In common with several groups throughout history, most of the slaves taken in war were women and children. In the Seminole culture, as seen by the famed botanist William Bartram, the slaves were fearful of their new rulers and were often silent and respectful. However, they were permitted to intermarry with the Seminoles under certain restrictions, and the resultant children of these matches were considered free and adopted members of the clan and tribe.

Bartram may not have been aware of the relationship of the captured slaves and the clans to which they belonged and how this may have contributed to their treatment. When African slaves were introduced into the cultural mix, the Seminoles adopted many of the European concepts of private property and considered the slaves as articles of barter or trade. As property, they took on a different aspect, something to be defended, like home and family. When seen as having commercial value, the escaped slave became an item of great worth. Escapes frustrated the slave catchers and slave owners of the South, who viewed them as threats to their own power, which was largely dependent upon slave labor, both economically and culturally. Over time, a bond developed between escaped Africans and the Seminoles that only increased with time and white pressure for their return. The former slaves of the white population soon were able to have villages of their own near those of their Seminole owners and protectors. A strong co-dependence grew over the years, and each group exchanged and adopted something from each other. Living as they both did in Spanish Florida, they represented a threat to the slave-owning southern states and territories. As archaeologist Brent Weisman has correctly observed, as long as there were Seminoles harboring escaped slaves in Florida, no plantation in the lower Southeast was safe. The relationship and existence of the combined Seminoles, Miccosukees, and escaped slaves would be the most important cause of the Seminole Wars.

INDIANS ATTACKING LIEUTENANT SCOTT’S PARTY. This early nineteenth-century etching dramatizes the event, but note that the Native Americans are not dressed in the Seminole manner.

The word Seminole, as is commonly known, comes from the Spanish cimarrones, meaning wild ones or those who broke away. Weisman has found that this was first used relative to those former Creeks who settled in the area of central Florida from around Gainesville southward. He believes that the band later led by the famed Cowkeeper was the group to whom this first applied. It is the band visited by William Bartram and described in his famous travels. They had migrated to the area from the Oconee River region of southern Georgia around the middle of the eighteenth century and tended the cattle found in central Florida left by the old Spanish ranch, La Chua. They were at one time part of the Lower Creeks and had migrated southward in search of better and more open lands, away from the pressure of the expanding white population of Georgia. As they ventured toward the South, they became more separated from mainstream Creek society and began to think and act more independently, especially in their relationship to the colonial powers, Great Britain and Spain. When Governor James Grant called for a meeting with all of the Native Americans in the newly acquired colony in 1765, Cowkeeper studiously avoided being present. Grant, like many to follow him, assumed that all of the other chiefs present could and would make decisions for all. As noted above, no group of mikos could make a decision for the tribe unless they were given that authority by the local councils. Additionally, Cowkeeper’s absence from the meeting indicated his non-acceptance of the conditions Governor Grant wished to impose or negotiate. Cowkeeper’s town and others aligned with it were definitely ones that had broken away from the main groups of the Creek Confederation.

After the Creek War (1813–1815), or Red Stick War, and the signing of the Treaty of Fort Jackson, those who