William Lowndes and the Transition of Southern Politics, 1782-1822 by Carl J. Vipperman

Author:Carl J. Vipperman [Vipperman, Carl J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9781469640082
Google: J4U6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-11-01T22:19:22+00:00

IX

Constitutionalist

As William Lowndes headed homeward in April 1818, Major General Andrew Jackson pushed through the wilderness of Spanish East Florida with two thousand Tennessee militia and volunteers in pursuit of Seminole Indians. After the close of the Creek War in 1814, bands of Seminoles augmented by runaway slaves and dispossessed Creeks had raided southwestern Georgia from the Spanish Florida sanctuary. By 1816 the border had become a virtual no-man’s-land. Troops sent to the area that year had successfully intimidated the Seminoles and removed the menace posed by the runaways by blowing up their Apalachicola River fort. Quiet had returned to the frontier until November 1817 when General Edmund R Gaines, commanding troops along the border, attacked and burned the Indian village of Fowltown. The Indians had retaliated with a massacre of captured soldiers, and the Seminole War was under way.

Wishing to restore peace in the area, President Monroe in consultation with Secretary of War Calhoun had decided to move General Gaines to Amelia Island on the Atlantic coast and call Andrew Jackson down from Nashville to take command of the Apalachicola region. The key document in the controversy over Jackson’s subsequent invasion of Spanish Florida was Calhoun’s order of December 16, 1817 assigning Jackson to the command. The vital passage read: “With this view you may be prepared to concentrate your forces and to adopt the necessary measures to terminate a conflict which it has ever been the desire of the President. . . to avoid; but which is now made necessary by their settled hostilities.”1 Although restrictions that had been imposed on Gaines remained in effect—they authorized the commander to reduce the Indians by force, pursuing them into Florida if necessary, but on no account to molest a Spanish fort or garrison—Jackson had construed the passage quoted above as authorizing a latitude of action agreeable to his aggressive disposition. To secure presidential confirmation of his design, he had written directly to Monroe offering to secure the Floridas within sixty days. His later claim that he received that assurance, indirectly through Tennessee Congressman John Rhea, became a subject of controversy when Monroe denied the story.

Nevertheless, in April 1818 Jackson stormed into Florida with all the self-assurance of a man who had the entire nation at his back. By the end of May he had routed the Indians, taken every Spanish post in the region except St. Augustine, captured and executed two British subjects, deposed the Spanish governor, and extended the laws of the United States over the territory. He then departed for home, leaving behind a diplomatic problem of the first order for the Monroe administration.

When the cabinet assembled in July to discuss the problem, Calhoun recommended a reprimand on the ground that Jackson had violated orders. Monroe, however, yielded to the persuasive arguments of Secretary of State Adams, who advised an aggressive defense of the audacious general as an expedient that might pry Florida loose from the ineffectual grasp of Spain. To give the appearance of presidential sanction for

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