If there was a constant theme in the first three hundred years of European settlement in North America, aside from frontier hardships and political chaos, it had to be the Indian problem. No one subject in American history has been so closely scrutinized, debated, and recorded. Florida had its own Indian problem from the earliest days of Spanish colonization. Most memorable of all Florida’s Indian Wars was the Second, or Great Seminole War, 1835-1842. Two thirds of the entire American Army would fight there, parts of the Navy and Marine Corps, plus thousands of citizen volunteers from Florida and states as far away as Missouri. It was the Second Seminole War that got Florida into the history books of Indian Wars, and some of its consequences remain to plague state politics even today.
The Second Seminole War had everything: battles, massacres, famous men, heroism, stupidity, fortitude, and treachery. Like most Indian wars, it involved only a few hundred or a few thousand combatants on either side at any given time, and was fought in an enormous natural and primitive amphitheater. There were remarkably few battle deaths, although deaths from disease in Florida’s unhealthy climate, added many hundreds of names to the casualty lists. This war was fought from one end of the settlement to the other; near towns and settlements, in the forests and in the great swamps that covered large parts of the peninsula. After seven years it ended with most of the Indians living peacefully in today’s Oklahoma on the cash bounties given them by the U.S. Government. (Some of these transported Seminoles fought in the Confederate Army and others in the Union Army during the Civil War; one Florida born black Seminole would win the Congressional Medal of Honor as an Indian scout on the Staked Plains of Texas in 1876).
Read Full Article »