THE SEMINOLE WARS

1816-1818, 1835-1842, 1855-1858

© Jane Anderson Jones

The Seminole Wars, a continuation of the American government's policy of containment and relocation of Native Americans east of the Mississippi, resulted in the removal of nearly four thousand Seminoles to Oklahoma with a remnant of approximately three hundred disappearing into the Everglades

        The conflicts known as the First, Second and Third Seminole Wars were never declared wars on the part of the American government; in some respects it is difficult to date the beginning or end of each of these conflicts, if indeed, they can be regarded as separate events. On the one hand, the Seminole Wars were a continuation of American policy to contain Native American populations east of the Mississippi and remove them to reservations west of the Mississippi, a policy that culminated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. On the other hand, the Seminole Wars might be seen as early battles fought over the jurisdiction of runaway slaves that would eventually escalate into the Civil War.

        The First Seminole War, ended with General Andrew Jackson's (1767-1845) occupation of the city of Pensacola and the Spanish surrender of Fort Barrancas to the American army in May, 1818. His victory led to the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821 in which Spain ceded the territory of Florida to the United States.

        The war was preceded by years of border disputes along the Florida-Georgia border which climaxed in the destruction of Fort Negro on the Apalachicola River. Built by the British in 1815 and turned over to a band of runaway slaves on the British departure from Florida, Fort Negro proved an obstacle in the supply route to Fort Scott in Georgia. When an American vessel was fired upon from the fort, Jackson ordered General Edmund Gaines (1777-1849) to destroy the fort. A hot cannon ball, fired from the expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Clinch, landed in a powder magazine blowing up the fort and killing 270 of its 344 occupants. Neamathla, village chief of Fowltown, reacted by warning General Gaines that if the Americans tried to cross the border into Florida, they would be annihilated. A gunfight between American soldiers and Neamathla's Seminoles on November 21, 1817, is considered the opening salvo of the First Seminole War.

        The War Department ordered Jackson to take command of Fort Scott and bring the Seminoles under control. On March 9, 1818, Jackson relieved Gaines at Fort Scott and swiftly marched into Florida despite much opposition in Washington. Meeting little resistance, he moved against the Seminole villages around Lake Miccosukee and captured St. Marks on April 6. His capture of Pensacola on May 24 effectively ended the battles of the First Seminole War, but not the hostilities among the white Americans and the Seminole and black inhabitants of Florida.

        Three solutions to the "Indian problem" of Florida were proposed in Washington: 1) total removal of the Seminoles from the peninsula and relocation to Georgia or to Oklahoma, 2) the concentration of the Seminoles on a reservation in Florida and 3) full citizenship granted to the Seminoles with each family receiving a plot of land to break the tribal bond and promote private enterprise. The last suggestion, made by a committee of the House of Representatives, was totally ignored, and the Seminoles were strongly resistant to removal.

T        he 1823 Moultrie Creek Treaty restricted Seminole settlements to a reservation of four million acres north of Charlotte Harbor and south of Ocala with no land within twenty miles of any coast, a stipulation that would hinder foreign contacts. The Seminoles also agreed not to make the reservation a haven for escaped slaves. Six small reservations were granted to six north Florida chiefs, including Neamathla, the elected spokesman for the tribes at the conference. However, almost before the treaty took effect, President James Monroe was moving towards a policy of general Indian removal, and the Indians, suffering losses from displacement and drought, were reluctant to move south to a land inhospitable to their usual forms of agriculture and sustenance.

        One of the first bills proposed by the newly elected President Jackson in 1830 was the Indian Removal Act which mandated that that Eastern Indians be encouraged to trade their eastern land for western land. If they failed to do so, they would lose the protection of the federal government and come under the harsher jurisdictions of the states. After the act was made law on May 28, 1830, pressure was applied to the Seminoles to conform to the new law.

        James Gadsden was named special agent to the Seminoles with the purpose of persuading them to move west. In May, 1832, he convened a meeting with the chiefs at Payne's Landing. What transpired at the meeting has been the subject of much political and scholarly controversy as no minutes of the meeting were kept. All that is certain is that a treaty was signed by seven chiefs and eight subchiefs on May 9, 1832, in which they agreed that seven chiefs would travel to inspect the lands in Oklahoma, and if they found them satisfactory and could reach amicable terms with the Creeks already located there, they would agree to move west as a part of the Creek allocation. The ambiguity of who "they" were -- the chiefs or the tribal councils from whom they needed to seek approval -- and the peculiar stipulation that the Seminoles would be absorbed by their long-time enemies, the Creeks, put the validity of the treaty into question. There have been allegations that the Negro Seminole Abraham was bribed to modify the translation of the terms to the chiefs and that the agent coerced the chiefs into signing the treaty or that their marks were forged by sub-chiefs. At any rate, nearly all of the chiefs whose names were on the treaty later repudiated it.

        An exploratory party of seven chiefs left Florida for Oklahoma in October, 1832, and returned to Fort Gibson, Arkansas, in March, 1833, at which time they entered into a series of negotiations with the government agent, John Phagan, and other commissioners. Again there are allegations of coercion and forged marks on the Fort Gibson Treaty in which the chiefs agreed that the Seminoles would move west within three years -- one third of the population each year.

        Replacing Phagan as Indian agent in December, 1833, Wiley Thompson was put in charge of Seminole removal. On his arrival in Florida he found the Indians encouraged in their reluctance to move both by white traders and by their Indian-Negro allies and slaves who had everything to lose if the Seminoles went to Oklahoma. Thompson brought the chiefs together in October, 1834, to discuss plans for a spring removal. The Seminoles gathered in their own council after Thompson's initial meeting, and strong opposition to migration emerged, especially from the war-chief Osceola who advised condemning any Indian who favored removal. At later sessions of the meetings with Thompson, the chiefs expressed their objections to Thompson calling into question the validity of treaties of Payne's Landing and Fort Gibson. Relations deteriorated and skirmishes increased between the government and Seminoles throughout 1835 culminating in the outbreak of war in December. The two most notable incidents occurred on December 28th when the Seminoles presented a two-pronged attack. Jumper and Alligator with 180 warriors ambushed a relief column marching from Fort Brooke to Fort King under the command of Major Francis Dade. Only three of the 108 soldiers escaped slaughter in the fierce battle that followed. Meanwhile Osceola led sixty warriors in an attack on Fort King with the express purpose of killing Wiley Thompson who had imprisoned Osceola in chains earlier during the year.

T        he army was in disarray during most of 1836. General Winfield Scott, put in charge of the Florida campaign immediately began to feud with General Gaines. When Scott planned to cease campaigning during the summer months, the territorial governor, General Call was put in charge of the troops until November when General Thomas S. Jesup was due to arrive in Florida to assume the command.

        Jesup's 1836-1839 command in Florida was the most crucial for the outcome of the Seminole Wars. The General had convinced a large number of chiefs and their tribes to emigrate on the condition that they would be accompanied by their Negro allies and slaves. When opposition arose among the landowners and the press that the Seminoles harbored runaway slaves, a compromise was reached that only those who had lived with the Seminoles before the outbreak of the war would be permitted to go. Over seven hundred Seminoles had gathered at Fort Brooke north of Tampa by the end of May 1837, including Micanopy, Jumper, Cloud and Alligator. However, on the night of June 2, Osceola and Arpeika surrounded the camp with two hundred warriors and spirited away nearly the entire population.

        The defection caused a drastic shift in Jesup's tactics; no longer did he feel any compunction about using trickery to gain his ends. During the summer of 1837, Jesup threatened any captured Seminole with hanging if he did not reveal information as to the whereabouts of his comrades. In September General Joseph Hernandez captured King Philip, Yuchi Billy, Coacoochee and Blue Snake with their followers in the vicinity of St. Augustine and imprisoned them at Fort Marion. Osceola and Coa Hadjo sent word to Hernandez that they were willing to negotiate. When Hernandez set up a conference near Fort Peyton, Jesup ordered him to violate the truce and capture the Indians. News of Osceola's capture spread through the nation, and when he was transferred to Fort Moultrie in Georgia, George Catlin visited him and painted his portrait. His death on January 30, 1838, enshrined him as a martyr to the Indian cause.

        Coacoochee and John Cowaya (or Cavalo), an Indian Negro leader, having escaped from Fort Marion on November 29, 1837, with sixteen other warriors and two women, headed south to join bands led by Jumper, Arpeika, and Alligator. The largest and last pitched battle of the war was fought on the banks of Lake Okeechobee on December 25. Colonel Zachary Taylor commanded eleven hundred men against approximately four hundred Indians. The Indians finally retreated from the two-and-a-half-hour battle leaving twenty-six killed and one hundred twelve wounded and having sustained eleven killed and fourteen wounded.

        In February 1838, further treachery at Fort Jupiter netted over five hundred Seminoles when Congress refused to grant them a small reservation in southern Florida. Persuasion and mopping-up operations sent many of the remaining Seminole leaders, including Micanopy, on the westward migration. Jesup's tenure in Florida, which had resulted in the capture, migration or death of over 2400 Indians, ended in May 1838, when General Zachary Taylor took over command of the Florida forces.

        Taylor remained in Florida for another two years during which time operations were carried out against scattered bands of Apalachicola, Tallahassee and Alachua in northern Florida and bands led by Coacoochee, Chitto Tustenugee and Halleck Tustenuggee in central and southern Florida. General Alexander MacComb, commanding general of the army, came to Florida in April 1839, and declared the war over when he concluded an agreement with the Seminoles who agreed to withdraw south of the Peace River by July 15, 1839, and remain there "until further arrangements were made." Although a trading post was set up and guarded by Lt. Colonel William S. Harney on the Caloosahatchee River, the Indians learned that they were not to be allowed to stay in Florida. Chekika, chief of the Spanish Indians, led an attack and destroyed the post in July. After he led a raid on Indian Key in August 1840, Harney was sent to seek out Chekika and his band to eliminate them; he accomplished his task in December when he surprised Chekika in the Everglades and executed him.

        The commands of General Walker K. Armistead and General William J. Worth saw the final years of the Second Seminole War. Following the successful policy of deceiving chiefs who came to negotiate, most notably Coacoochee, and through continuing guerilla warfare, the army managed to remove all but about six hundred of Florida's Indians who were restricted to a temporary reservation south of the Peace River when Congress refused to continue to fund any further campaigns in 1842.

        The six and half years of the Second Seminole War were more costly than all of the Indian wars combined. The armed forces sustained 1466 service deaths, an indeterminate number of losses from wounds and diseases; the conflict cost somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million dollars to the United States Treasury, and property losses across the state were huge. On the other hand, the Armed Occupation Act that accompanied the cessation of the conflict brought new settlers to the interior of Florida which had been made accessible by the mapping, exploration and road-building that had attended the fighting. The military had gained skill in guerilla warfare and an understanding of the need for inter-service cooperation, and the federal government learned to exercise its power to convert economic power into military strength.

        Between 1842 and the outbreak of the Third Seminole War in 1855, the Seminoles kept to the reservation and the followed the dictates of regulations imposed upon them, going so far as to capture and turn over renegades who violated the rules or attacked white settlers. The federal government, determined to remove the remaining Seminoles, offered large financial inducements to leave, installed a strong military presence in the territory, imported a delegation of Oklahoma's Seminoles to persuade their kin to join them in the west, and brought chiefs, most notably Billy Bowlegs, to Washington, D.C. to impress them with the power of the government. The Seminoles remained adamant in their opposition to removal until Secretary of War Jefferson Davis declared that if they did not leave voluntarily, the military would remove them by force.

        On December 1825, a patrol investigating Seminole settlements in the Big Cypress Swamp was attacked by a band of forty Seminoles led by Billy Bowlegs and Oscen Tustenuggee, marking the first skirmish of the war that was dubbed "Billy Bowlegs War." It was a war of skirmishes, raids and harrassment against small settlements, both white and Seminole. A treaty signed on August 7, 1856, that granted the Seminoles over two million acres in Indian Territory separate from the Creek allotment along with a generous financial settlement, was the catalyst to the end of the conflict in Florida. Another delegation from Oklahoma led by John Jumper met with Bowlegs and representatives of Assinwar's band. The offer of $7500 to the chief, $1000 to each of four other leaders, $500 to each warrior, and $100 to each woman and child to be paid when the Seminoles boarded a ship at Egmont Key, was accepted on March 27, 1858. Bowlegs and his band left Florida in May and two other bands left the following February. Only the Muskogee band led by Chipco, hidden north of Lake Okeechobee, and Arpeika's Mickasuki band, buried deep in the Everglades, a remnant of one hundred to three hundred souls, remained in relative peace in Florida.

Covington, James W. The Seminoles of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. The most 
        thorough history of the Seminoles in Florida devotes six chapters to the Seminole Wars.

Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War 1835-1842. 1967. Rev. ed. Gainesville: University 
        Press of Florida, 1985. An account of the battles and leaders, the problems of military organization 
        and ordnance, and Seminole culture and history in the period of the Second Seminole War.

Tebeau, Charlton W. A History of Florida. 1970. Rev. ed. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 
        1980. Chapter 11, "The Wars of Indian Removal," of this standard Florida history cover the Seminole 
        Wars.

Wickman, Patricia R. Osceola's Legacy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. A study of the life 
        and myth of Osceola based on a survey of artifacts and documents.

Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. Creeks and Seminoles: Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People. 
        Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. An examination of the culture of the Creeks and 
        Seminoles and their Spanish, British and Black connections, emphasizing the resulting ethnic 
        diversity and the complexity of the African presence and its threat to the institution of slavery.

Portions of this article appeared in a different format in Great Events from History: North America. Rev. ed. Salem Press, 1996.