What Hath God Wrought:The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) by Daniel Walker Howe

Author:Daniel Walker Howe [Howe, Daniel Walker]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

VII

Van Buren sealed his white supremacist policy by carrying out Jackson’s Indian Removal. The notorious forced march of the Cherokees along the Trail of Tears occurred on Van Buren’s watch. In trying to implement Removal, Van Buren also renewed Jackson’s conflict with the Seminoles and wound up fighting the Second Florida War, the longest and most costly of all the army’s Indian Wars. The issues Jackson had faced, the Seminoles’ independence and the refuge they offered to fugitive black slaves, persisted. Whites said the Seminoles kept the runaways as slaves of their own; this would facilitate reenslaving the blacks while sending the Native Americans off to Oklahoma. In reality, however, the African Americans lived in separate villages with their own farms and animals as tenants, paying a portion of their crop to the local Seminole chief. Only a minority of them were slaves of the Indians in any sense, and even they were permitted to live largely autonomously. Sometimes the African Americans intermarried with the Seminoles, and some of them achieved positions of high influence, particularly linguists who could interpret among English, Spanish, and Muskogee.83

So few were the Seminoles in number (some five thousand men, women, and children, plus perhaps a thousand blacks), and so remote and inhospitable their lands, that the government could well have ignored their refusal to remove to Oklahoma. That it did not do so was mostly owing to pressure from slaveholders who resented the refuge available to runaways. As General Thomas Jesup accurately declared, “This, you may be assured is a negro and not an Indian war.”84 Once begun, the war dragged on through seven years (1835–42) and six army commanders; repeated promises of victory in sight proved premature. Early in the conflict the Seminoles raided plantations, where they recruited slaves to join their cause; later, however, they waged a defensive guerrilla war. The army—with help from the navy along Florida’s coasts, rivers, and swamps—ended up waging economic warfare against the Natives’ villages, farms, and herds. The soldiers’ morale became a major problem, not only because of disease, insects, and the dangerous sawgrass, but also because many of them agreed with Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary that the treaty the government was trying to impose constituted “a fraud on the Indians: They never approved of it or signed it. They are right in defending their homes and we ought to let them alone.”85

A significant turning point in the war came with the capture of Osceola, leader of a combined Indian and black band and an irreconcilable opponent of Removal, along with ninety-four other Seminoles on October 22, 1837. When the American public learned that the capture had been effected by treachery under a flag of truce, there was an outcry leading to a debate on the floor of Congress. Far from letting this reaction deter him, General Jesup violated a flag of truce again the following spring to seize over five hundred more Seminoles, 151 of them warriors. Osceola did not survive long in the dungeon at Fort Moultrie, Charleston; he died there of malaria in January 1838.

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