The History of Florida (44 page)

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 207

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Osceola, Chief of the Seminole
. Painting by George Catlin, 1838. Catlin painting A-499,

American Museum of Natural History. Courtesy of the Department of Library Services,

American Museum of Natural History (Neg. No. 327045).

General Clinch. Gaines departed from Florida to the border of Texas. Scott

charged him with spoiling his campaign, necessitating a court of inquiry,

late in November 1836. The two generals vilified each other, but the court

found both blameless.

When President Jackson relieved Scott on 21 June 1836, he made a politi-

cal rather than a military appointment. His selection to command in Florida

208 · Brent R. Weisman

was a civilian, Richard Keith Cal , governor of Florida Territory. Cal as-

sembled 2,500 men, a mixture of Tennessee volunteers, Florida militiamen,

regulars, and Creek Indians, once again to penetrate the Cove. On 13 No-

vember he found it abandoned. Desperate to make a creditable showing, he

received evidence that a substantial body of warriors was in Wahoo Swamp

at the southern tip of the Cove. He attacked on the 21 November, but after

several hours of fighting drew back without overcoming the foe. Jackson

did not forgive him for this. He dispatched Brevet Major General Thomas

S. Jesup, quartermaster general of the army, to take command in Florida.

A year of conflict had borne hard on the Indians. Several chiefs, includ-

ing Micanopy, entered into an agreement on 6 March 1837 to migrate. They

stal ed, enjoying the provisions and liquor provided by the government.

At length, though, 700 encamped near Fort Brooke, waiting to be shipped

west. Jesup thought the war was over. Then, during the night of 2 June, the

700 slipped away. Although Osceola’s power had diminished, he, with the

medicine man of the Mikasukis, Arpeika (Sam Jones to the white men),

by some means convinced or coerced the camped Indians to decamp. This

exodus so disil usioned Jesup that he determined to subdue the Seminoles

by any means. The latter, hungry and impoverished, were willing to come

to the military camps to talk, eat wel , and drink whiskey. At such a meeting

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on 9 September 1837, the general seized Coacoochee (Wildcat), who had

arrived under a flag of truce. Wildcat’s father was Philip, his mother a sister

of Micanopy. He had a chief’s lineage but was not yet a chief. Like Osceola,

he lacked formal authority and had to lead by force of personality.

More notorious was Jesup’s seizing of Osceola on 27 October under a

white flag. These two vital leaders were imprisoned in the old Spanish co-

quina fortress Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine, known to the Ameri-

cans as Fort Marion. Wildcat, with nineteen followers, made a miraculous

escape on 29 November, then slipped southward to join the intransigents

under Arpeika and Otulke Thlocco, the Prophet. Arpeika, after hearing

Wildcat’s story, would never again risk attending a white council. Osceola,

now too unwell to influence the war, died at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina,

on 31 January 1838.

General Jesup held to this strategy. On 14 December 1837 he seized Mi-

canopy, three other chiefs, and 78 followers who had come in to his camp to

talk. He had by that time seriously cut into Seminole leadership. Still there

were frequent skirmishes and the major pitched battle of the war. Colo-

nel Zachary Taylor attacked a prepared position near Lake Okeechobee

on Christmas Day 1837. Halpatter Tustenuggee (known to the whites as

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 209

Alligator), a close associate of Micanopy, commanded the center of the In-

dian line; Wildcat held the left with about eighty men, while Sam Jones and

the Prophet directed half the force on the right. Soldiers numbering 1,032,

most of them regulars, assailed 480 Seminoles from diverse bands with no

overall commander. Taylor’s army drove the warriors out of their prepared

position at a cost of 26 killed and 112 wounded. Because it was closer to a

pitched battle than any other action during the conflict, it focused public

attention on Zachary Taylor. He was commissioned a brigadier general for

it, and in the end became the only white commander to emerge from the

war with an enhanced reputation.

In May 1838 General Jesup requested relief from the Florida command.

He had crippled Indian fighting power, shipping 1,978 persons west and

killing perhaps 400. He created opportunities for captured blacks to serve

as guides and interpreters and helped set them against each other. Although

he vacil ated on what to do with the Seminole blacks, final y he sent most of

them west with their masters.

Thomas S. Jesup continued as quartermaster general until his death in

1860, but he never lived down the stigma attached to his seizing Indian lead-

ers, particularly Osceola, under white flags.

Brigadier General Zachary Taylor assumed command on 15 May 1838.

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One thousand Indians remained in the territory; a cluster of bands in Mid-

dle Florida (the Panhandle region), another in central Florida, and a third

in the southwest region of the Big Cypress. They had little contact with each

other, but the leaders in the southwest, Holata Micco (known as Bil y Bow-

legs), Arpeika, and Otulke Thlocco sometimes met together. The Prophet

was a refugee Creek who escaped out of Georgia after the Creek War of 1816.

He became the messiah figure of the Second Seminole War. Because the

other leaders feared his occult powers, he controlled much of the action in

southwest Florida. In the end, though, he could not keep an army detach-

ment from destroying his own camp.

Zachary Taylor initiated a new strategy. He divided the territory north of

the Withlacoochee River into squares twenty miles on each side, with a fort

in the middle garrisoned by soldiers who built roads and regularly patrolled

their squares. He intended to enlarge the area covered by squares when the

commanding general of the army, Major General Alexander Macomb, ar-

rived in Florida. Macomb met with such chiefs as he could assemble and

in mid-May 1839 arranged with them to end the conflict. His peace docu-

ment permitted the Seminoles to remain in 6,700 square miles of south-

western Florida, about half of the Big Cypress Swamp. Floridians detested

210 · Brent R. Weisman

this settlement, but they were not the instruments terminating the peace.

Certain Indian leaders who had not signed Macomb’s pact struck at the new

trading post on the Caloosahatchee River on 23 July 1839, total y destroy-

ing it and kil ing several soldiers. This ended the peace. Taylor’s strategy

of squares was not continued. During his command, 800 Indians and 400

blacks had been shipped west.

At his request, Taylor was relieved by Brigadier General Walker K. Ar-

mistead in May 1840. The new commander established detachments of 100

men and sent them to explore little-known parts of Florida and ferret out

Indian hideaways. But when it seemed that all the Indians had been pushed

into south Florida, destructive raids occurred in northeast and central Flor-

ida, where none had taken place for months. Armistead did what he could

to suppress these, and to corral more Seminoles to ship west. At the end of

the year in which he commanded, 700 Seminoles and blacks were deported

to Indian Territory.

Under a policy to rely ful y on regular troops, militia generals left the

federal service. Once they were no longer present to outrank United States

officers, it was possible for the first time to place a colonel, Wil iam Jen-

kins Worth, in command. At a council in April 1841, Bowlegs, Arpeika, and

the Prophet reaffirmed their determination not to leave Florida, and pro-

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nounced death for any Indian who carried messages from the whites. Far

north in the Long Swamp east of Fort King, two months later, one Mikasuki

chief, two Seminole chiefs, and Octiarche, a Creek fugitive from Georgia,

took the same intransigent stand. No peace terms involving removal were

acceptable.

When Colonel Worth took command in June 1841, he began to change

his strategy. First, in Worth’s plan, rid north Florida of hostiles, because of

their proximity to new white settlements. The Indians had returned to the

Cove of the Withlacoochee, and he divided his force into detachments of

twenty men to clean them out. Second, using partisan tactics, he kept his

troops campaigning right on through the sickly season in the swamps of

south Florida. White Floridians approved of his strategy, but howled when

he sharply reduced the number of civilians and militiamen employed by the

United States.

In June 1841 Major Childs seized Coacoochee when he came into Fort

Pierce. An officer shipped him west, but Worth ordered him returned to be

used to induce other bands to surrender. Not even Wildcat could persuade

Arpeika to place himself in white hands. All in al , though, Worth’s system

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 211

was so successful that by April 1842 only 300 Indians remained in Flor-

ida, 112 of them warriors. They were hungry and miserable, especial y the

women and children. Worth, from his base of operations near Cedar Key,

proposed to the War Department that this remnant be allowed to remain

in Florida in the same 6,700-square-mile reservation proposed by General

Macomb in 1839. White Floridians cried that it was shameful to tolerate any

Indians in the peninsula, but in August 1842 the administration accepted

the plan and the war ended.

Shipment of some of the 300 continued until, by the end of 1843, 3,824

were gone. It is not known how many died during the war, but the Semi-

noles had shown a rare ability to adapt to new circumstances and to survive

as a culture. Their resilience would serve them well in the years ahead. Their

fight to stay in their homeland is as gal ant as any in history. That they held

out for seven years is al the more remarkable because of the diversity of

bands among them and their lack of continuous central leadership. It had

been total war for them.

Not so for the United States where the war required a limited commit-

ment from the people. It did require a ful commitment from the army.

Every regular army regiment served in Florida, straining the logistical and

personnel staffs more than at any time since the War of 1812. There were

proof

1,466 deaths in the regular army, 328 of them combat-related. Seventy-four

of the dead were officers while the corps was reduced sharply due to resigna-

tions of officers who saw no glory or honor for their service in Florida. Fifty-

five citizen soldiers were killed, while unknown hundreds died of disease.

On the plus side, the war amounted to field training for officers who served

later in the Mexican War and Civil War.

The army had to change its strategy and tactics more than once during

the seven years of conflict. The Seminoles proved tactical y adept at engag-

ing the soldiers on terrain of their choosing, and used natural features of the

landscape to their advantage. In response, the heavy columns, supported

by logistical trains used by General Scott, gave way bit by bit to small units

carrying their supplies on their backs. These detachments had to penetrate

nearly inaccessible hideaways, live in part off the land, recruit Indians and

blacks as guides and interpreters, destroy the Seminoles’ food sources, en-

dure extreme hardship, and throughout also protect white settlements. The

partisan style was not carried into the Mexican or Civil Wars, but the Union

did final y employ a strategy against a people, not just against the military

portion of it.

212 · Brent R. Weisman

Third Seminole War

Following the end of the Second Seminole War in August 1842, Bil y Bow-

legs became principal chief over the 300 to 400 Indians remaining in Flor-

ida. Twenty warriors refused to acknowledge his authority. He and Sam

Jones, a trusted leader and head of one of the bands, strove to abide by the

terms of the peace settlement. Thus, when in July 1849, after seven quiet

years, five defiant young warriors kil ed and pil aged outside the reservation,

Bowlegs and Jones undertook to deliver the miscreants to the whites for

justice. They did deliver three, and the hand of one killed, but the fifth had

escaped. The next year they handed over three other rovers who had killed

young Daniel Hubbard of Marion County. Floridians were little affected by

the conscientious effort that the chiefs had made. They simply wanted to be

rid of the Seminoles altogether. An editorial in a St. Augustine newspaper

on 10 August 1850 asked that the natives be outlawed and a bounty of $1,000

placed on every male delivered dead or alive and $500 for every woman or

child delivered alive. Senator Stephen Mallory said that they must get out

or be exterminated.

For a time the United States government sought to achieve removal with-

out war. Powerful chiefs were brought from among the Seminoles in Indian