'- Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
They were the most expensive conflicts in U.S. history on
U.S. soil between the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
Expensive in terms of human cost,
expensive in terms of resources,
and yet we don't hear too much about the Seminole Wars.
We'll shed some light not only on the
largest of the Seminole Wars,
but also get a good insight into what
America was like in those years.
And my guest, guiding us through the Seminole War,
the Second Seminole War in particular,
is UW-Madison military historian John Hall.
Welcome to University Place Presents.
- Thanks, Norman, pleasure to be here.
- Well, this takes us down to Florida.
- [John] Yes.
- In the 1830s and 1840s, and when we say Seminole,
they're considered one of the five civilized tribes,
and yet it's, like so many things, not quite so simple.
- No, it's not that simple at all.
So they're called the five civilized tribes
because each of the tribes in the southeast.
And when typically we tell the story of Indian removal,
Andrew Jackson's policy of Indian removal in the 1830s
and 1840s in particular,
we focus on those five matrilineal tribes in the southeast.
Which is to say that they trace their family lineage through
the matriline, or through the mother's family.
And because of that, there's a lot of intermarriage with
European traders into the tribes where children of those
unions are then members of the tribe,
full fledged members of the tribe, but sometimes they
benefit from education in European style schoolhouses.
Sometimes they are highly acculturated.
They become very successful in business.
And it creates a fissure, or an aperture through which a lot
of European culture is able to infuse these societies and
missionaries then find them low-hanging fruit.
And so a lot of missionary efforts are among these tribes
to try to win converts to Christianity.
And the tribes are also distinguished then for some
internal division between those who wish to acculturate
and those that wish to retain traditional culture,
but inherently they retain unique identities
as their own Indian peoples.
And they're called the civilized tribes then
because of this relatively high degree of acculturation.
The Seminoles are unique, however,
because what defines them as a people is not necessarily
a common ethnic identity or history,
but rather, a shared desire to avoid colonization,
to avoid acculturation.
And so they are predominately descended from the Creeks
a Muskogean-speaking people, but they flee what would
later become and what are sometimes at the time of the
flight the states of Alabama and Georgia into the safe
haven, the refuge of Florida because Florida,
until the 1820s, is actually a foreign possession.
Between the Seven Years War and the end of the
American Revolution it is a British possession,
prior to that it's Spanish, and after that it is Spanish.
And so they take advantage of this safe haven to run away
from the pressures of European style colonization,
of U.S. colonization, and to carve out for themselves
relatively traditional existences in the wilds of Florida.
And there they undergo a slow process of ethnogenesis
and form, over time, a distinct identity as Seminoles,
which becomes, eventually, to this day,
three recognized tribes.
A Seminole tribe in Florida, a Seminole tribe in Oklahoma,
and then a Miccosukee tribe in Florida as well.
But at the time of the Second Seminole War,
these different elements certainly don't
qualify as a nation, which the Cherokees by this time
in fact do, and it's disputable whether or not
they are actually even a tribe.
So all politics are local, and that is especially true
amongst these diverse Seminole bands.
And so as much as Americans will try to
impose a principal chief, a lion's chief,
to speak for all of the Seminole bands in Florida,
they are trying to create an office
that doesn't really exist,
and whomever holds that office has limited power.
Also, because they're in Florida,
they're not the only people who seek safe refuge there.
We are, of course, talking about states
that practice chattel slavery,
and a lot of those slaves recognize as well that
they can find better lives and freedom in Florida.
And so beginning in the early 1700s,
runaway slaves will leave plantations,
principally in Georgia, and take up residence in Florida
where they enter into a symbiotic relationship
with the various Seminole bands.
Some people describe this as slavery,
but it's not the same kind of slavery, certainly,
that's practiced by Anglo-Americans.
It's not chattel slavery.
I think probably it's more akin to what we would think of
as sharecropping where they have a tremendous
amount of autonomy and independence.
They are living on someone else's lands
that they are working, and they have to pay
some manner of tribute to their Cherokee,
or, excuse me, to their Seminole neighbors and landlords,
but it's not slavery as we would understand it.
- 1819, Florida becomes a U.S. territory,
and that changes the game for the Seminoles?
- It changes the game for the Seminoles because
they no longer have this safe harbor.
And they can now no longer trade space for time
the way that they had and take advantage
of this international border.
They do have a relative benefit in Florida in that it is not
at that time among the most highly sought after lands
in the United States.
- [Norman] A backwater.
- It is something of a backwater.
There is obviously a lively fishing economy along the coast.
But the interior of Florida is regarded, then, if not today,
as being nearly uninhabitable and of very little use.
- Still is sometimes.
- Very little use to Anglo-American
cattle ranchers or farmers.
That's the real industry, the Anglo-American industry,
that's going to take off here is cattle ranching.
And so there are going to be pressures for those lands,
and those pressures, not surprisingly,
are going to begin in the northern part of Florida
where you've got the nearby states of Alabama and Georgia
and also where the land has more value
to Anglo-Americans.
And so there is going to be almost immediate pressure
on the Seminoles who are ,
some would say coerced but,
dealing from a position of weakness following
the First Seminole War, they enter into a treaty with
the United States in 1823 and agree, for the most part,
to remove to a large reservation in the very center part
of the state where it's thought they'll be out of the way
of white settlers and ranchers.
They'll be able to maintain some kind of
buffer or separation.
- They won't have contact with foreign powers either.
- Right.
And that's actually a huge part of this consideration.
So it's something that's often overlooked by those that
don't study the Second Seminole War from the
perspective of foreign relations or
U.S. military history writ large, but a lot of
military thinkers at this time regard Florida to
be a tremendous vulnerability for the United States
because it's got some deep-water ports.
This is not an era of free security
in the eyes of these military men, and Florida,
dangling on out there, provides a very easy point
for a European power to invade North America and to put arms
in the hands of people who are predisposed to use them
against the United States, runaway slaves
and hostile Indians.
And so the idea of keeping them away from white settlers
and off of the best lands is probably the primary concern.
A secondary concern though, is also keeping them away from
the shoreline where they can trade with Cuba or
potentially come into contact with foreign adventurers.
- Well, let's look at some of the persons involved in this,
some of the leaders and the real estate too,
which we have here side by side.
- [John] Yes.
So, because of the nature of the Seminoles at this time,
the number of leaders is incredible.
So there are a number of very notable leaders.
The one who's most well known, obviously,
amongst Americans is Osceola, which is interesting and
people who know anything about Osceola know that he
was captured, which we should probably get to.
- [Norman] Under that flag of truce. - Under a flag of truce.
We'll probably get to that very shortly.
People who know something else about him will often
point out he's not actually even a chief.
And that's actually correct.
He is a war leader and, as often happens during times of
national emergency amongst American Indian groups,
war leaders can rise to the fore and exercise leadership of
a larger body of people by their charisma,
by their ability, and by their message.
And Osceola is one such leader,
but actual leadership is
ostensibly vested in a leader named Micanopy.
There are a number of other leaders, Tiger Tail,
Sam Jones or Arpika is another very important--
- Micanopy is in the upper right there.
- Yeah, that's correct. - A series of portraits.
- That's correct.
Sam Jones, or Arpika, who's actually a mentor to Osceola
and will hold out in the Everglades throughout the war.
Sam Jones will not be conquered in this war,
and the United States will leave him to his haunts
in the Everglades.
So there are a great number of American Indian leaders
and heroes in this war.
When it comes to principal leadership
of the American forces,
it's an interesting conflict because it's a seven-year war,
a little bit less, but a seven-year war that sees that seven
senior commanders from start to finish.
And among the senior commanders are two future
presidential candidates: Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor.
And Zachary Taylor will, of course, win the presidency.
Neither of them are going to earn any political points that
help in their futures as a consequence of this conflict.
So Taylor does garner some laurels
for some exploits in this war,
but, by and large, Florida, for the regular army,
is a graveyard for reputations.
Which is why there's so many senior commanders.
A great many of them ask to be relieved of their command
because they have no desire
to see reputations that they had built
during the War of 1812 and guarded jealously ever since
to see those reputations trammeled
in what many of them see as a god-forsaken
piece of land in what many of them
also see as an unjust war.
- And perhaps with unclear victories too.
- Yeah.
The victory ultimately is rather unclear.
This is a war that ends not with a bang
but with a whimper.
It ends because the United States declares that it is over.
Not because there's a grand settlement in which
all parties agree to set aside their grievances.
And, in fact, there are hostilities that continue even after
the declaration that the war is over in August of 1842.
And I think it's one of the reasons why this war is so often
regarded as a forgotten war in U.S. history is because,
in point of fact, it's largely forgotten even in
American society in 1842 when it draws to a close.
And a large part of that has to do with the fact that
the nation is becoming
transfixed by other issues.
Slavery, which is related to this conflict,
being at the forefront of that westward expansion.
Rather than southward expansion.
So there are a lot of things going on
in the United States at this time,
and this is the war that just refuses to go away.
And a lot of Americans just quit paying attention to it.
But I think other reasons why Americans don't typically
think of the Second Seminole War as being one of the
United States' major conflicts is because we like to
lump together Indian wars.
I think we like to aggregate Indian wars.
And as we look backward in time,
it's oftentimes hard for us to see behind
the tragic romantic events of the Battle of Little Big Horn
or the just plain tragic events of Wounded Knee,
and these resonate with us more deeply, I think,
because most Americans can see these events
or conceive of these events as being
pivotal in American history.
It's the end of an era.
It's the closing of the frontier.
The end of the 19th century and something modern follows.
And so a lot of Americans I don't think have a very sharp
conscious idea about Indian wars east of the Mississippi
and after the American war for independence.
Another reason which I think is fairly obvious why
Americans don't remember this war that well,
Americans tend to prefer to celebrate wars.
This war is an embarrassment for the nation
while it is engaged in the conflict.
There are four different administrations
that have to superintend it.
It is an albatross for every one of them.
And, in hindsight, we can appreciate with clarity that
this is a war in which, unequivocally,
the United States is on the wrong side of humanity
and on the wrong side of history.
Americans-- - The wrong side of legality. - Yes.
Well, yes, you could say on the wrong side of legality,
but that's a theme that runs throughout
all of these wars of Indian removal.
And de Tocqueville pointed this out,
that the Americans are painstaking in making sure
that these crimes pass as legal.
And so the problem with these wars,
you often hear about broken treaties.
- [Norman] Sure.
- Broken faith, U.S. breaking treaties.
In this era, the problem is not broken treaties.
The problem is fraudulent treaties.
The problem is coercing Indians or finding
unrepresentative elements of Indian groups to
sign treaties, to sign away their lands,
to make promises that they're not authorized to make.
And very oftentimes, afterward,
the signatories will protest that's not what they agreed to,
that's not what was told to them.
Very often they cannot read the treaties for themselves.
But once the Senate ratifies it, the United States
will adopt a sanctimonious sort of posture,
and so this is a solemn obligation and our national honor
demands that we uphold this legal instrument.
- Was this war, the Second Seminole War,
really then just a war of removal?
- It is, yes.
It is fundamentally a war of Indian removal.
So, following that first treaty in 1823
that puts the Seminoles inside of a reservation
in the center of Florida, that's not subsequently
good enough for the people who reside in Florida,
which is still not yet at this point a state.
But they can't abide by the presence of what they perceive
to be a hostile Indian population amongst them,
and so they push for the removal of those Seminoles.
And so President Jackson will appoint James Gadsden
as a treaty commissioner and have him negotiate
another treaty, the Treaty of Payne's Landing in 1833,
which convinces them, ostensibly, that they are going to,
within three years of the ratification of that treaty,
evacuate Florida for new lands in the west.
There are no witnesses to this treaty.
He has no secretaries.
This is one of the most irregular--
- No minutes?
- There are no minutes, and that's what makes this treaty
very irregular, even in this era of defrauding Indians
that usually there are interpreters, there are traders,
there are people keeping the minutes.
There is none of that.
And one of the things that is agreed upon is that
a Western delegation, delegation can go out West,
and inspect their new homelands and vote yea or nay,
or report back to leaders of the Seminoles.
- This is, what is it no- Yes.homa?
And so that Treaty of Fort Gibson,
which they subsequently sign,
there are Army officers present who say the Indians
were coerced into signing that.
There are no witnesses for the first one,
but there are U.S. Army officers that say that the Seminoles
were coerced into signing the second treaty.
And so that's one of the things that sort of poisons
the moral of the regular army throughout the conduct
of the Second Seminole War is it is a widely shared article
of faith amongst the officers of the Army that
the pretext for the war is manufactured.
- That it's dishonorable.
- That is is a dishonorable war.
Now, there are a great many people inside the Army
that think that the Indians need to go,
and there are no doubt some very violent
and racist officers and men within that force
that absolutely no misgivings.
People of that disposition weren't necessarily the kind
inclined to pick up a pen and write a whole lot.
But they do have debates with one another in the trade rag
of the time with the Army and Navy Chronicle, and,
writing under pen names, officers will go back and forth
about whether the war is just and honorable.
Honor is the core of all of these conversations,
but what seems to be in competition here are two
different notions of honor, of national honor.
On the one hand is the idea, and this is an idea that's very
popular with the Jacksonians, the United States is an
adolescent nation on the world stage
and has a chip on its shoulder.
And it is very,
it has a hair trigger.
It is inclined to take offense at the greatest insult,
and they think with the eyes of the world watching them
that they're being disgraced and humiliated to let,
in their words, oftentimes their words,
a band of half-naked savages show them up
and embarrass them.
And so for them, national honor demands that they
ruthly prosecute this war and
rid Florida of the Indians.
That's one conception of honor.
The competing notion of national honor is one that it's not
deliberately inculcated at West Point.
I can find no evidence, for instance,
that curriculum there says.
They're not paying much attention to Indians,
but they are teaching enlightenment philosophy.
But the idea that's in evidence
amongst a lot of the West Point graduates
of this era is the idea that
being on the wrong side of history is dishonorable.
Treating with the Indians in bad faith is dishonorable.
And there is a recognition that comes through,
in many occasions during the conduct of the war in Florida,
in which not only do officers acknowledge that the Indians
are in the right for defending their homeland,
but also even indicating they don't have a terrible problem
with the ways in which they are doing it.
That the Indians are defending their homeland,
their families, and they're fighting the way
that Indians have always fought.
And so this is another thing, I think,
that makes this war fairly unique.
- And apparently fairly widespread too.
You mentioned northern Florida at the beginning of the war,
John, but I see here that we have an image
from what's now Tampa.
- [John] Yes.
So, Tampa was founded, essentially,
as a military installation, originally Cantonment Brooke,
named after its commander,
and later it was upgraded to Fort Brooke.
But many of modern,
I think probably
to a greater extent than most American states,
the principle cities of Florida have their origins
outside of the old Spanish cities as military
installations established during the Second Seminole War.
- [Norman] A lot of cities that have the name fort in front of them.
- Yeah, obviously all of those have the name fort,
but even those that no longer have the name fort,
such as Tampa, Ocala, Miami, these are all military
installations that are established, some of them,
such as Fort Brooke, or Cantonment Brooke,
before the war as a colonial outpost.
And so there aren't a lot of settlers.
There's a hostile indigenous population,
and so it falls to the Army to colonize Florida,
to make it safe for civil governance and for settlers
to come in and continue the process of colonization.
So a lot of scholars today will say that the United States
practices settler colonialism.
And it has a different
sort of tenor in different places.
In the most of the South,
there is settler colonialism that doesn't need
a lot of exercise of federal power to take place,
and it's among these states, for instance,
you see a very strong volunteer military
citizen soldier ethos, a lot of volunteerism.
Indian fighting is part of the social fabric
amongst these communities.
If young men in these communities
want to be somebody in life,
they need to have established bona fides as
Indian fighters and so forth.
- But in Florida, you didn't really have
any settlers there.
- You did have some settlers, but you didn't have enough.
You did not have enough to fill the manpower quotas.
- [Norman] A militia.
- That are needed for this conflict.
Going back to some of the things that make this war
remarkable is that the size and scale of this conflict,
aside from the number of commanders, is phenomenal.
At the peak of the war, there are 9,000,
nearly 9,000 U.S. troops engaged in the war.
- That's huge for the time.
- That is incredible.
If you were to adjust that figure on the basis of
population growth in the United States,
adjusted for the current day population,
it's roughly 200,000 soldiers.
Which is on par almost to a T
with the peak U.S. troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In many dimensions, the Second Seminole War is
analogous in terms of scale, in terms of scale and duration,
to the concurrent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and
also in terms of the sort of political argument
that these conflicts engender.
- You don't usually think of an Indian war as having
a naval component, and this one apparently did.
- Another very interesting aspect of this war,
and, of course, it has to do with Florida's
geography that there is opportunity
to have a substantial naval component in this conflict.
And so you will have a good portion of the
West Indies squadron engaged in this conflict.
And then what you see emerge by the second half of
the war is fairly steady
state operations by naval forces.
And so you've got Marines and sailors
penetrating the Everglades, scouring the Everglades,
trying to hunt down Indian encampments,
and you also have then littoral operations by a number of
U.S. Navy ships, by converted revenue cutters,
and these are, for most of the conflict, under the command
of Naval Lieutenant McLaughlin who, you can see here
on the slide, is pictured with his flagship,
the rather humbly named USS Flirt.
And so these operations call for different kinds of ships.
And so they actually have to contract and acquire for the
inland riverine operations, operations in the Everglades.
They've got to acquire a lot of flat bottom boats
that can navigate in there.
But, yeah, this is fairly remarkable
for an American Indian war.
- I'm guessing it's, despite the eclectic nature
of the Seminoles, fairly easy to identify the enemy
if he scatters and fades into the woods and swamps?
- Well, in terms of identifying the enemy,
the volunteers don't care
whether it's the enemy or not.
To most of the volunteers, an Indian is an Indian.
- [Norman] Or a Black Indian or a half-White Indian.
- Yeah, so the Black Seminoles,
there's a different motivation that goes into that because
the Black Seminoles have cash value.
And so there is a
incentive to capture Black Seminoles,
and, for a brief period of time,
one of the senior U.S. commanders in Florida,
Thomas Sidney Jesup, actually offers a bounty on
dead Black Seminoles until he realizes
this has both pragmatic and moral
problems associated with it.
So that's a brief-lived policy.
Ultimately, from that extreme, Jesup will come around
and become and inadvertent emancipator of a great many
Black Seminoles because, ultimately, he will guarantee
freedom for any Black Seminole that agrees to migrate
to the new homes in the West.
But he waffles considerably, and it's not
a straight course that he takes to get to that point.
And so for the rest of his life for, among other reasons,
Jesup is going to deal with the criticism of
having turned the U.S. Army into a slave-catching force.
But there are enclaves of Native Americans in Florida
that want no part of this conflict.
And most of them can't avoid but
being swept into it
regardless of whether or not they engage in hostilities.
And the same is even true of Creole populations that live
on coastal villages and on islands around Florida.
And so they're completely Creolized in terms of culture.
They're part Spanish, part English, part Minorcan,
part Cuban, part Indian.
They speak multiple languages and Army officers
sent to these communities have to
write back for instructions because--
- What do I do with this person? - Right.
And so in a tripartite racial taxonomy,
there are Whites, Indians, and Blacks.
These people confound that order,
and so one of the things they have to contend with
as a colonizing force is,
what do we do with people like this?
- Is this one here,
This is one of the participants
in the conflict that we're seeing?
- Yeah, so the Black Seminole interpreter
named Abraham is probably the most famous
of all of the Black Seminoles
because of his language skills
and other natural attributes.
He renders himself an invaluable intermediary.
And so there are a number of people in the American Army
who don't trust Abraham, who think that he is
an opportunist, that he's misleading the Army,
that he's misleading the Seminoles,
and all of these things might, in fact, be true,
or none of them are true.
Nevertheless, he's a really remarkable figure in this
conflict that several U.S. commanders are going to have to
rely on as they do with other Black Seminoles.
So once Jesup makes the determination that the easiest way
to remove Black Seminoles from the strategic equation is
to guarantee all of them, whether they're runaways or not,
to guarantee all of them emancipation and their new homes
in the West, it then makes those Black Seminole interpreters
assets that the U.S. Army is able to use.
To use as emissaries to send back out
into the interior of Florida with invitations to parley,
with invitations to negotiations and these things.
And this doesn't always sit
terribly well with the Seminoles.
Jesup once infamously exclaimed to.
In two pieces of correspondence, he exclaimed,
"This, I can assure you, is a Negro, not an Indian war."
And critics, both then in Congress
and in later days as historians,
will point to that statement to argue that this war was
fundamentally about the preservation of slavery
and that Indian removal was a secondary concern.
I don't necessarily share that view, I do think slavery
is certainly inextricably intertwined
with this conflict, but if you take a look at
Thomas Sidney Jesup's writings over time,
you can recognize that he also has a fairly conventional
military mind, and even before this war began he was one
of those people that saw Florida as a strategic liability
because of a hostile interior population,
because of the ease of invasion.
And so, to him, the Black Seminoles represented
the greatest threat to national security for that reason.
The flip side of it was he never thought it made any sense
to try to clear the Seminoles out of Florida
in the first place, he thought the land was useless,
that the treaties were fraudulent.
- [Norman] Out of the way.
- And that they ought to be just be left to stay there.
And so he, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly,
lobbied Washington at multiple points during the war to
try to get Washington to change its war aims
and to let the Seminoles remain.
And every time he was told no, and every time he did
his duty to the best of his ability,
which meant as expeditiously as possible
and it stained his legacy at every turn.
- You mentioned some division
that appeared even in the military press.
What about the press in general in the United States?
- So the press in general at this time is very partisan.
We have a belief in the United States today that its
partisan division has never been this bad,
and that the media has never been so biased.
I can assure you that's not the case.
It has been this bad, and it has been this biased before.
And I would go straight to the Jacksonian era.
And so Jackson's Vice President, and then his successor,
Martin Van Buren, is sometimes credited with
inventing modern party politics.
And so the two parties, the one that has some
history behind it
is Jackson and Van Buren's Democratic Party.
The other one takes form during this conflict.
And that is the Whig party.
And the Whig party represents
a whole array of different groups,
but included among those groups are what
I would call a Federalist persuasion.
That was the first part of the Party of Washington.
So the party that represented, that had faith in
a central national government and thought it was good to
stimulate industry and thought banks were maybe
a good thing that you needed to have.
Foreign trade is a good thing you want to have.
That had been the Federalist party.
That party committed suicide over
the late 1700s and early 1800s.
But the ideas that were at the core of that live on
and are part of this confederation, if you will,
of different interest groups that form the Whig party.
The Whig party will use this conflict and Indian removal
as a couple of the issues that define them
as the opposition, as the anti-Jackson party.
And so some scholars will say that the Whigs
don't really care about Indians.
They care about the Cherokees because
the Cherokees were so assimilated
There were so many Christian Cherokees.
There aren't a lot of assimilated Christian Seminoles,
so they don't care nearly as much about the Seminoles.
And the Seminoles, by the way, are conducting
horrific attacks on frontier establishments.
So in the newspapers there are these tales of horrible acts
of what they would see as barbarity against their settlers.
And so it's politically not popular
at the beginning of this war to say
let's hold on a second and recognize that we
caused this war and the Seminoles are in the right.
So in the beginning, everybody more or less goes along with
the movement toward war because the Seminoles commit
what we would today call
acts of terrorism against the United States.
And they're not of a mind to question
the underlying morality of the war.
But as the war goes on, the Whigs become more and more
trenchant in their criticism of the Jackson and then
the Van Buren administration's conduct of this war.
And eventually there will also be abolitionists in Congress
that are going to violate the gag rule,
which is supposed to preclude any kind of discussion
of slavery in Congress because they recognize
that disunion could result.
If they let slavery rise to the fore inside
the halls of Congress,
that they might have the Civil War disunion right then
in the 1830s, and so they agree to not discuss this except
some of these Whigs are going to contest the gag rule
and are going to use the Second Seminole War as
an opportunity to bring slavery to the fore,
but primarily to lampoon the Jackson
and Van Buren administration's conduct of the war.
So one of the more controversial episodes of the war is,
under the Van Buren administration,
the use of bloodhounds to try to find Seminoles
that are hiding in Florida.
And so a political cartoon here
depicts future President Zachary Taylor
astride his horse leading the legions
of the United States against what in the cartoon
is depicted in a classic style as a tragic,
romantic, noble savage.
And if you can see in the background there the people
that are fleeing, that are running away from their
incorrectly depicted teepees,
are women and children.
And Taylor is literally unleashing
the dogs of war upon them.
This is the kind of episode that Whigs will use
as a disloyal opposition to attack
these two administrations.
And so the war does become politicized, but you never see
in Congress the same kind of sympathy for the Seminoles
that you saw for the Cherokees.
- [Norman] And that is because they're less assimilated.
- It's because they're less assimilated and there are
no Christians to care.
These Indians are not just like us in their eyes.
These Indians represent
a savage vestige of the past that
need to be gotten rid of efficiently and humanely,
if possible.
- Is there a way to say at what point this war actually started?
- Well, the actual commencement of the hostilities is
usually marked as being
December 23, 1835.
A simultaneous attack on Fort King,
the site of present day Ocala,
where Seminoles, likely Osceola, also assassinated their
Indian agent Wiley Thompson and nearly simultaneously
Seminoles ambushed a column of U.S. troops under
Major Francis Dade marching from
Fort Brooke to Fort King.
And the ambush is almost completely successful.
There were only a couple of survivors from this ambush,
and there are 104 killed.
And so it is a remarkable defeat for the U.S. Army.
It's the most complete defeat of a
U.S. Army force at Indian hands
since the famous St. Clair Massacre
of 1791.
And I'm fighting the impulse to use air quotations on TV.
But these names have some historical currency,
but it's something within the field that we always point out
whenever Indians win a lopsided victory,
White chroniclers like to call it a massacre.
- [Norman] Yes.
- And if the White forces win a lopsided victory
over the Indians, it's the Battle of Horseshoe Bend
or the Battle of the Thames.
It's not the Massacre of Horseshoe Bend.
- Usually the case, yes.
- The Battle of Bad Axe during the Black Hawk War
is another one in which later day
historians have affixed to it.
- Sand Creek Massacre is the only exception in can think of,
which is much later.
- That is much later, and it's also easier for some
Americans to wash their hands of the Sand Creek Massacre
because it is Colorado militia troops, Colorado volunteers
that perpetuate that massacre,
not genuinely Federal forces.
But sensibilities had evolved a little bit
by that time as well.
- So, motivations among the military.
We know pretty much, I think,
what the Seminole motivations were,
but in terms of the military and the volunteers,
different reasons for getting involved in this.
- Yeah, so in the very early stages of the conflict,
at least, it's very difficult to discern much
in the way of difference.
Of course, they're raised in a similar culture.
And if they're wearing a uniform, they have some
aspiration of achieving martial glory, distinction,
of acquitting themselves well by this trial of combat,
of winning the acclaim of their peers and their countrymen,
of, in the case of the volunteers,
returning home to a hero's welcome.
But once they get to Florida, they find that opportunities
for this kind of distinction, this kind of glory,
are few and far between.
And so Dade's command certainly did not
find glory or distinction.
Subsequent forces are going to get a taste of it,
I suppose, and so,
Zachary Taylor rises to national attention
a little bit for his exploits early in the war
at the Battle of Okeechobee.
But that kind of conflict,
where there's an opportunity to actually charge a hammock
in Florida's swamps and to display bravery under fire,
that kind of opportunity is going to almost completely
disappear beyond the first year of the conflict.
And what's going to follow that is going to be a lot more
hardship and a lot of unpleasant business.
Unpleasant at least in the eyes of
many of the regular officers.
And so back to your question about the divergent motives
or the ways in which the motives are a little bit distinct.
I mentioned earlier that amongst a lot of the Southern
states in particular, the colonization and conquest that
occurred without much recourse to Federal power.
They did it themselves.
And in this part of the United States you find some
legitimate material for the arguments
about Americans growing up as hardy frontiersmen,
skilled in the use of a rifle and so forth.
The ugly flip side of that that we don't like to often
acknowledge is that they weren't using
those rifles just on squirrels.
They were engaged in very bitter,
terrible kinds of conflict with Indian neighbors.
And Kentucky volunteers or military forces, in particular,
developed this reputation.
And there is sort of an ethos of Indian hating
and frontier fighting that migrates westward
along the banks of the Ohio River and
up the Mississippi and up the Missouri.
In a lot of these states and the neighboring territory,
as I said earlier, men are raised to think that
this is integral to their manhood.
That you're not a real man unless you're able to
assert your superiority
over your cultural and racial inferiors.
And this manifests itself in a
stereotyped bellicosity in Southern culture.
People demanding honor.
It's stereotyped but there is an element of--
- There's a reason for the stereotype.
- Right, and a lot of this also comes back to
the institution of slavery.
And this self-actualization
that depends upon a conviction
that there is a racial hierarchy and all Whites,
regardless of their social class,
stand above all other people of color.
And if you can't be a wealthy plantation owner,
you can nevertheless distinguish yourself amongst
your countrymen by bravery and exploits in war.
And you take all of these things together and it creates
a very dangerous sort of cultural mixture,
dangerous particularly if you are an American Indian.
And so this war represents, I think,
the peak of this age of
Indian-hating expeditionary volunteerism.
So the militia of an earlier era that we celebrate in which
all men, not just volunteers, though the volunteers
did most of the fighting during the revolution,
but the idea of the militia,
of a universal service obligation,
people fighting for their hearth and home.
One of the things that regular Army officers
never liked about that was that commitment to defending
hearth and home and not doing anything else.
And so during the revolution and during the War of 1812--
- [Norman] You go home.
- Yeah, exactly.
And it drives regular Army officers to distraction because
they are trying to invade Canada or leave the boundaries
of a colony or state, and the militia will throw on
the brakes at the border and say that's not what we do.
These are a different brand of citizen soldiers.
So, there are militia forces,
properly constituted militia forces
that are involved in this war, but by and large
these citizen soldier are volunteers.
Some of them are from Florida,
but a lot of them are coming from states
that are not sharing a border with Florida.
They're coming from Missouri, they're coming from Tennessee,
they're coming from South Carolina,
they're coming from across the South,
and they are performing a rite of masculinity
and a rite of
Indian fighting that has become
central to their identity.
- So, fighting for its own sake rather than
for a bigger purpose.
- Well, so will they oftentimes site something
akin to the spirit of '76
and think that they are following
in the footsteps of their forefathers
And I think that they genuinely
believe that they are doing this.
At the same time, one of the things that makes their
motivation interesting and in some regards paradoxical is
their references to
the nation or their countrymen are commonplace,
and yet among those people for whom this
motivation is the strongest,
their notion of the bonds of nationhood
are the most liberal, the most elastic.
And so they're also coming from those states or those
regions of the United States where Federal authority
is contingent and balanced.
So I'm now talking about the ethos or the convictions
about states' rights and the idea that sovereignty really
rests in the states and they are the paragons of
lowercase R republican virtue.
The same kind of republican virtue that they think
animated their forbearers during the revolution.
They think they have it.
They think they are fighting for the same thing that that
revolutionary generation had fought for except now
it's not the oppression of a tyrannical Britain.
It is to remove from the Republic
this intolerable blight of a red menace.
And so they are motivated by the idea that they are
fighting for country,
but they look upon Washington
with a tremendous amount of suspicion,
and that suspicion certainly does not
abate during these wars
because they fight oftentimes under the
senior command of Army officers whom,
and they bridle and they chafe under the command of
these Army officers because the professional Army
officers are interested in things like logistical planning
and waiting for the supplies to arrive before you march out.
And a lot of the volunteers don't
have the patience for that.
They want to show up in Florida.
They always insist on riding horses.
They will never march because that's beneath them.
That's for the
poor hard luck cases that form
the rank and file of the regular Army.
- There'd be some hard places to get to in Florida on a horse.
- But nevertheless they will try to take them there,
and horses will die in droves as a consequence.
And so it's worth pointing out at the same time,
they often distinguish themselves and their virtue by
juxtaposing it with the lack of virtue, the lack of
republican virtue amongst the rank and file
of the regular Army.
So this is an era in which the regular Army is still the
subject of a fair amount of derision.
The rank and file soldiers are seen as a bunch of
hard luck cases who can't make it in the real world.
A lot of immigrants they wish weren't in the United States
in the first place.
And they look at the officer corps of the regular Army as
a bunch of would-be aristocrats
more concerned with their own reputations,
oftentimes a true allegation,
than with chastising the enemy.
And so there's a fair amount of friction.
But the junior officer corps that goes in Florida in the
regular Army has been almost uniformly
educated at West Point.
And so they come in with this notion of
winning martial glory,
but once that's out of the way, a lot of them become,
if not vocal critics of the war,
at least co-commiserators,
and they gripe to one another a lot in their letters.
There's a huge exodus from the officer corps of the Army.
No less than 17% of the officer corps of the U.S. Army
resigns from the Army because they don't want to be
stuck in Florida.
And there are a number of reasons for that.
Probably only a minority because of genuine moral
misgivings about the war.
The economy is booming in the early stages of this war,
until, of course, the great panic late in the 1830s.
But they just see that their fortunes are not to be
found in Florida, and reputations are certainly
not to be made there either.
- You mentioned this notorious flag of truce under which
Osceola finally - [John] Yes.
- How did that drama play out?
- Well, so Thomas Sidney Jesup is certainly one of the
more interesting figures in this conflict.
He is one of the only of the senior generals
to command U.S. Army forces in Florida
who is singled out by name in summaries of the conflict.
And it's because of,
from the perspective of his legacy, two regrettable things.
The first one was calling the war a Negro war,
not an Indian war.
And so he becomes a public enemy
for abolitionists in Congress,
and particular to a gentleman named Josiah Giddings.
But he is also responsible
for capturing Osceola under a white flag of truce.
This is not without precedent
that Americans will venerate and celebrate
a hostile Indian leader during the conflict.
During the Black Hawk War, there was some sympathy for
Black Hawk even while the war was
still being conducted, just a little bit.
Usually it grows in measure after the war.
Once the hostile Indian leader has fought the good fight.
- [Norman] And the danger is over.
- And the danger is over and been vanquished,
they are redeemed.
And it's easy to then co-op them as an American hero.
- Right, right. - And the same with Tecumseh.
So, Tecumseh was on the right side of history.
Was the quintessential noble savage.
- Went down - [Nswinging.ght.
He did everything an Indian is supposed to do
in the eyes of the Indian,
that element of American society
that sympathizes with the plight of the Indians.
To fulfill the expectations of a noble savage,
to fight the good fight, and then get out of the way
so that progress can continue unabated.
- [Norman] That's the theme.
- And Osceola is very convenient for this narrative as well
because of the tragic, treacherous circumstances of
this capture and then his tragic death.
And so he can become a martyr for all of the Seminoles.
And for the rest of Jesup's life this is
the darkest stain on his escutcheon.
This is something he cannot ever escape.
And what happens to Jesup and the reason I say
he's so interesting is because very few of the senior
commanders are so candid in their correspondence
and in any of their writings
as is Jesup.
And he seems positively schizophrenic.
In one letter he's writing a subordinate saying
if they don't surrender we have no option
but to exterminate them.
And so critics of Jesup have jumped on this and said
that's probably his preference.
I don't think that was Jesup's preference,
and I think that Jesup was taking
a rhetorically absurd point usually with his audience,
to get them to consider the consequences.
Obviously we can't do that so we need to reassess.
And when he uses this line writing to Washington,
that's exactly what I think he's trying to do.
- [Norman] Hyperbole.
- You're not going to alter the war aims?
You're going to insist on complete removal?
Then we have no option but extermination.
Are you ready for that? Is the country ready for that?
And I think that's usually the vein in which he meant it,
but because the Van Buren administration
would never deviate
from the goal of absolute removal,
Jesup found himself in a position where he had to choose
between duty and honor, and he chose duty.
And what that meant to him was
eventually guaranteeing all of the
Black Seminoles emancipation
after he had adopted heinous policies prior to that.
Even though it meant he was going to get beat up in the
Florida press and throughout the South for being
a lackey of the abolitionists.
By the end of this conflict he has no friends.
So the abolitionists think he's public enemy number one;
the slave owners think he's public enemy number one
because of his inconstant course on this regard.
But he makes a decision out of pragmatism.
After that he decides that he is going to negotiate
with the Seminoles and then capture them
when they come in for negotiations.
The principle reason he did that is he had a good faith
negotiation with a large number of Seminoles who had
gathered in an emigration camp outside of Fort Brooke,
present day Tampa, and were just waiting
to get on the ships.
They were in a relocation camp and ready to go,
and then in the middle of the night Osceola and some
others snuck into camp and either liberated them or
coerced them or most likely a combination of the two
depending upon the audience, led them back into
central Florida and back into a state of hostility.
And so, at this point Jesup's military reputation
is in complete tatters.
The administration will not bend in its aims.
He, in a, you know, bit of a fit says, "I resign."
And they say, "Okay, you can resign."
"Well, I didn't really mean that.
"You're supposed to coddle me a little bit
"and tell me how indispensable I am.
"No, I'm going to make this right."
And so he sticks around and what he does is whatever is
most expeditious, and that ultimately means capturing
Indians under a white flag of truce.
Osceola was not the first.
He was the most famous, and then he subsequently died
in U.S. captivity in Fort Moultrie outside of Charleston.
- From malaria or something natural.
- [John] Right.
And then the doctor who apparently was caring for him
seems to have taken a genuine interest in his well being,
a sincere interest.
- [Norman] We just saw, by the way, the site where he was
supposedly captured.
A mon- Yes.there.
It's a monument to the perfidy of the United States
and of Thomas Sidney Jesup as a person.
And to add insult to injury,
he's captured under a white flag of truce,
he dies in captivity, and then the doctor taking care of him
collects his head as a specimen,
which suggests the place that Indians occupy
in 19th century racial taxonomy.
Even among those who really,
really like and sympathize with the Indians,
a dead Indian is still a specimen.
- Yeah, or even a trophy by implication.
- Right.
And so there are some disputes about
the circumstances of the capture.
- [Norman] Here's another image here of the actual capture.
- And so this second image is a political cartoon
which is showing Osceola as
an indignant prisoner.
That he's been seized.
He cannot believe that Jesup, who, by the way,
was not actually here, this was done on his orders,
that the Americans would do this to him.
The next image shows a different Osceola.
And most of the eyewitness accounts I think substantiate
this vision better, which is one of resignation.
One, most of the eyewitnesses suggest that
the Indian delegation didn't flinch.
They didn't act indignant.
Indeed, they did not act surprised.
And it may be, in fact, that they expected
something along these lines to happen.
And it wasn't until later when Osceola found himself
at Fort Moultrie that I think there's convincing testimony
that he became
convinced that he had been wronged.
- So, again, we find in the press,
it's a burgeoning era for editorial cartoons.
- Yeah, so this is one of the things that
the Whigs will make a lot of political hay out of,
and then the subsequent thing that we've already
touched on a little bit that they're going to use
to great effect to lampoon the administration
is that deployment of bloodhounds to Florida.
Jesup usually gets a pass on this.
Although, there's some evidence that Jesup himself
did suggest that bloodhounds could
prove useful in this regard.
Bloodhounds are, of course, being used
to hunt down runaway slaves.
In this part of the country and in this era,
this is not a terribly innovative or novel idea that you
could have bloodhounds to help find the Seminoles
because the Seminoles do retire to the almost
impenetrable interior parts of Florida,
which are labyrinthine, which they know very well,
and which are very, very difficult for American forces,
especially those mounted volunteers, to get at.
And so they encounter a great deal of frustration and
not a lot of success in their extended campaigns.
And so the idea is, if you can get the bloodhounds
on Seminole trails, we can actually find their camps
and we can take the prisoners.
And as I said before,
once you have their women and children,
the logic goes they have nothing really to fight for
and they will agree to move out West.
As I said, Jesup usually doesn't get implicated in that.
Zachary Taylor, who is his successor as a senior commander,
does inquire about the bloodhounds,
but it's actually a Florida governor
who purchases the bloodhounds.
And that Florida governor, Robert Reid,
is also prone to making lots of bombastic statements
about the Seminoles.
This is a real man of the people and of the
Jacksonian persuasion with a lot of
genocidal language about the Seminoles.
- It's still territory, by the way.
- It is still a territory throughout this period,
which means that the governor is actually appointed by
the President rather than popularly elected.
And so, not surprisingly, they're going to get somebody
that reflects the views of the administration
in that office at this time.
So it's the governor that authorizes the purchase.
And he suggests the purchase and the state legislature,
they have a large enough population
that they have one of those,
they buy the bloodhounds from Cuba and bring them in,
and they find nothing but controversy.
And this becomes a public relations disaster for the
Van Buren administration because it doesn't,
it's not a policy that begins at the top and
works its way down.
And Joel Poinsett, who is the Secretary of War whom--
- Poinsett is a name because, yeah.
- I was just going to say, most Americans are familiar with him.
- Famous botanist. - Yes, and so,
he was also one of the best Secretaries of War
in the 19th century in a kind of pedantic,
narrow view of things.
So if you're looking at American military policy and
calculation of strategic requirements and this sort,
Poinsett was among the best of these.
To him, the Second Seminole War was very much a distraction,
it was not a priority,
and it did not get his full attention.
This issue with the bloodhounds got his full attention
because there are memorials to Congress and then
Congress is asking for documents
And so Poinsett's got to inquire,
has to inquire into where the idea of bloodhounds came from.
Did bloodhounds actually tear people apart?
And so in the end they proved almost useless because
we're talking about Seminoles that are living in
the Everglades and in very wet places.
And anybody that's--
- Can't track through water.
- Yeah, anybody that's seen an old movie knows that when
the lynch mob's after you, you're supposed to jump in
the river and run away,
and the bloodhounds can't chase them.
And so the bloodhounds are useless in that regard,
and the people reporting back to Poinsett report also
that the dogs stayed muzzled when they were used.
They were scent hounds.
They were not. They weren't attack--
- [Norman] Hunting types, yeah. - It didn't matter.
It didn't matter. - They were ineffective anyway.
- Well, it didn't matter because they were ineffective and
because to the opposition, to the anti-Jacksonians,
whether they were genuinely morally outraged,
which a great many Americans were and for very good reason,
or because it was politically expedient to be outraged,
this was a huge embarrassment for
the Van Buren administration.
- So, if you were to pick two figures who represented
the extremes in this spectrum of
moral attitude toward this war,
who would they be?
- So, inside of the regular Army.
So to this point I've been sort of contrasting the volunteer
Indian-hating frontier-fighting ethos against the
professional Army that wants to fight an honorable war
but doesn't have one and has to fight
the war that it's sent to fight and seems
halfhearted about it for most of the time.
That's not to suggest that the Army was uniform
in its own views of the war.
So a great many Army officers,
whatever their educational background,
whether they were from North or from South,
thought that the nation's honor depended upon
vanquishing the Seminoles, thought that the
tactics used by the Seminoles forfeited them
any kind of regard or sympathy because they did attack
civilians and mutilate bodies and do other things that
certainly ran against the grain of
public sentiment at the time.
So there is a spectrum of attitudes within the Army,
but I would say at the two poles of those I'd single out
John Wolcott Phelps, who's pictured on the left-hand side
of the screen, and William S Harney,
who's pictured on the right-hand side of the screen.
Now, these are pictures from a later era.
They're a little bit younger at the time
of the Second Seminole War.
But Phelps, to me epitomizes
a notion of manhood
that is becoming stronger and indeed
perhaps commonplace in the regular Army of this era.
Roughly 65% of the Army's officer corps is
coming from the North in this era.
West Point is controlling nearly 100% of officer accessions.
And so nearly all of the junior officers are going to be
educated at West Point,
and they develop there,
a fairly anti-Jacksonian sensibility.
So the notion of manhood to which they subscribe
has echoes of
gentrified manhood.
Gentile manhood of the late 18th century.
The kind of manly conduct that George Washington
would expect of somebody.
And I think there's probably a persistence there
in the professional Army that never completely goes away.
But by the time of the Second Seminole War,
it's also converging with a new idea of
restrained manhood that's gaining currency,
especially in the
industrializing parts in the North
where you see the emergence of what we today
regard as modern middle class values.
It's the idea that wanton violence is to be abhorred
That a real man is in complete check of his passions.
A real man can cry at his daughter's wedding,
but a real man doesn't fly off in a blind rage
and demand satisfaction when he is insulted.
The couple of scholars that have influenced my
interpretation of this are Amy Greenberg and Lorien Foote
who both looked at manhood in the 19th century.
And Lorien Foote looks at the Union Army at the beginning
of the Civil War,
and is able to show that Army regulations,
U.S. Army regulations at the beginning of the Civil War,
essentially codified this notion of restrained manhood.
And it created a sort of paradox when you had this
oftentimes celebrated, sometimes unjustly,
roughneck American frontier Indian fighter sort put on a
blue uniform in the Union Army, found himself in a lot of
trouble because he could not abide by the regulations,
he was inclined to want to demand satisfaction
when he was insulted.
The idea of military subordination was anathema
to this kind of attitude.
And so there's a culture conflict that is actually unfolding
in the Second Seminole War between two
competing notions of masculinity.
- Is one more northern and one more southern?
- I do think that there is a regional dimension to this,
and where I am with my research on this is
still at a fairly preliminary phase.
It's not an absolute dimension.
There is an old myth about a Southern martial heritage
that had a lot of traction in some older histories
and is now been more or less completely debunked,
at least prior to the Civil War.
There were, in terms of military schools and
military associations, they were as common in the North
as they were in the South.
It does become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'll say in the long term the South embraces the notion of
a Southern martial tradition, and, over time,
it will become reality if for no other reason
than the US military is going to establish a lot of
permanent fortifications in the South.
But one element of that old depiction I think
still has some merit is the idea that there might
not have been any increased affinity
for military organizations and military
pomp and circumstance in the South, vis-a-vis the North.
But there was a different expectation of men that
Amy Greenberg would call martial masculinity.
And it is that idea that a real man
can't abide by an insult.
A real man will assert his superiority over lessers
violently if need be, and sometimes if want be.
And this stands in stark contrast to this idea of
restrained masculinity in which a real man
demonstrates his worth by succeeding in business,
by establishing a professional competency
and then doing very, very well in that competency.
The reason, I think, that the distinction has
escaped a lot of historians
is if you're talking about professional officers,
their professional competency is winning wars.
And so it appears as though these two competing notions
of manhood aren't competing at all,
but they're entirely congruent.
And I don't think that they are.
And figures like Phelps and Harney
illustrate that to some extent.
Phelps is a very interesting guy because he's
incredibly candid in his writings.
You can tell that his heart's not entirely
into the war.
He's not a vocal critic of the war.
Although, if I recall correctly,
at one point he has to defend himself
because there's an anonymous article published in the
Army and Navy Chronicle that is critiquing the war,
and everybody assumes it's him.
He's go to say, no, it wasn't me.
Who knows whether it was or not,
but he's very candid in his disdain
for William S Harney.
And Harney is a regular Army officer.
He's not West Point educated.
Indeed he's barely literate.
And he, although he works for the Federal government,
is an almost perfect embodiment
of martial masculinity.
Those that have studied the Sioux wars and Dakotas
will know Harney as being a monstrous figure
form those conflicts.
And in Florida, his conduct is sometimes equally heinous.
An act of retribution, at one point they dress like Indians
and they sneak into a Seminole camp
in the middle of the night and they shoot down
the people that try to run away and they summarily
hang the people who don't hang away,
excuse me, who do not get away.
And Phelps frequently points Harney out as being
an example of a monster in blue, if you will.
He keeps a porpoise tied up outside of his command tent,
at one point of the war,
walks by and kicks it just out of
pure meanness as he goes in or out of his--
- Well, that would have to be Florida, wouldn't it?
- Yeah, exactly.
And so I just want to make that point very clear as I
talk about misgivings on the part of the Army's officers.
It is a heterogeneous population of officers that
runs the gamut of national perspectives.
But I do think what's been overlooked is the emergence of...
within the Army a more
restrained notion of the way
an honorable man is supposed to conduct himself
under these circumstances.
And Phelps is among other Army officers who are outraged
to learn news of the capture of Chief Philip,
and later Osceola under a white flag of truce,
that think that this is scandalous.
And this is another thing that's often, I think,
lost in the discussions about Osceola in the popular outrage
over the capture of an Indian under a white flag of truce is
I think it was the regular Army that was responsible for
establishing the expectation in the first place
that an Indian flying a white flag of truce should be
afforded any of the courtesies of
civilized war in the first place.
The pattern in warfare up through the colonial era
and into the early 19th century really afforded Indians
no such consideration.
And the outrage in society at large is reflected within
the Army as well because I think it is in part
their attempts to impose a code of honorable warfare
on the Second Seminole War that comes to a
sad conclusion in the case of Osceola.
- Is this an image contemporary with the Seminole War?
- It is.
This is another interesting figure of one of the
poetic sorts of officers who regrets that conflict,
and that's John Rogers Vinton, who,
interestingly, is a confidante of Jesup.
So Jesup's legacy is certainly ambiguous to say the least.
Vinton works for him, and Vinton shares his conviction
that the Seminoles ought to be left in Florida.
And he goes as an envoy to the War Department
at one point of the war to make the case in person,
and Joel Roberts Poinsett says, "I'm not my own master."
The Secretary of War essentially tells him I would,
that I could, this is President Van Buren's war.
He was the vice president when the war began,
and he's not going to surrender those war aims.
And so Vinton goes back to Florida,
and he spends nearly the entire war in Florida.
He has a momentary respite where he gets to
participate in Cherokee removal.
And in his perspective, he does get to participate in
Cherokee removal because
he abhors wanton violence.
He's writing home to his mother nearly incessantly about
how distasteful the duty that he has in the Army is,
but that he just doesn't know whether or not
he has what it takes to make a career outside of the Army.
He thinks about getting a job as a professor
or as a clergyman, but he's worried that he's not up for
the physical demands of either of those professions.
So it shows perhaps, I would hope,
how things have changed a little bit.
That he stays in the Army because
he doesn't have to do real work,
and he's afraid if he becomes a professor or a preacher
he'll have to do real work,
and his constitution can't bear that.
But in terms of moral strength,
he's rather steadfast throughout the conflict in his,
at least in the conviction that
what he is doing is lamentable.
And going to remove the Cherokees is a reprieve because
he does not think the Cherokees will resort to violence,
and he's well weary of having a part of
what's going on in Florida.
And so the two paintings, the first one The Traveler's Rest
and then the second one, are paintings that Vinton
actually did while he was in Florida.
At the very beginning of the conflict he,
like everybody else that had not yet been there,
was eager for an opportunity to prove himself in battle.
And he got that in some modest measure,
and he wrote home to his mother and his wife
very proud that he had passed the test.
And once he passed the test, he had absolutely no desire.
No desire to be part.
- [Norman] To continue.
- To continue, to have any,
to be involved in the shedding of Indian blood.
He eventually did get the opportunity to win
everlasting glory in a more conventional war.
And that was the Mexican-American War,
which followed fairly closely on the heels
of the Second Seminole War.
- Just three or four years. - Just four years, exactly.
And Vinton would die heroically in
the siege lines outside of Veracruz.
And that war then provided Vinton a--
Obviously his life is over, but it provided him
the sort of martial glory that so many men had
gone to Florida seeking and none of them found.
And so for the regular Army writ large,
the war against Mexico was a godsend.
A lot of them didn't bother to really question
the legitimacy of that conflict either.
Some of them did.
U.S. Grant has famously said even at that time it was
the most unjust war ever waged by
a powerful nation against a weak one.
But having endured what they thought they had endured.
I mean, I realize how ridiculous that sounds when you look
at the conflict from the Seminole perspective,
but from the Army officer corps perspective,
they had done thankless, godless work in Florida for
seven years and against Mexico
get to fight a conventional Army organized
on European lines with a proper diplomatic dispute
that at least had a patina of legitimacy in their eyes.
And so I think that the Mexican-American War provided
the Army something I would call a Napoleonic catharsis.
So the things that they studied at West Point and
the way they idealized war, they find that in Mexico.
- [Norman] Or make it.
- Or make it.
And it also helps that the Mexican army on paper
is very impressive, but in reality was a more
lopsided contest than at first it might have seemed.
So not only is it the kind of war that they wanted,
but they get the kind of outcome that
they wanted out of that conflict.
- And they get to fight virtually all of it in Mexico.
- Yes, yes.
- A convenience if ever there was one.
- Very much.
- The legacy of the Second Seminole War,
we have a map here, and I think gives the big picture
of Indian removal, doesn't it?
- It does.
So this shows the multiple trails of tears.
Most people associate that term
exclusively with the Cherokees,
but it actually applies to any of the groups
not merely in the southeast.
The groups in the Midwest and the Upper Mississippi
also endured their own Trail of Tears.
And, in fact, the term, if I recall correctly,
originates with the Choctaw emigration
rather than the Cherokees.
But this map shows the migration of the so-called
five civilized tribes to their new homes
in what would become Oklahoma.
And so the legacies of the conflict,
carrying on from the last point,
I will say for the regular Army,
the legacy is the lesson to not engage
in Indian fighting again if you can ever help it.
Or perhaps the lesson that there is not
such thing as an honorable Indian war.
And so subsequent to this conflict and subsequent
to the war against Mexico,
the Army will develop a far more compartmentalized
conception of its role with Indians.
Up until the Second Seminole War,
it had been very much a colonial constabulary
in the most complete sense of the term
in which it's engaged directly in diplomacy.
It's stationed in the midst of Indian country,
and sees itself as a moderating force of sorts
between settlers and the indigenous population.
A police force, if you will.
After the Mexican-American War and the creation of
the Department of the Interior at the very end of the 1840s,
the Indian office moves out of the War Department
and into the Department of the Interior.
And the Army will come to regard itself as
the force you call when hostile Indians
have left the reservation.
And it becomes a break glass in case of
Indian hostilities force,
and far less of an actual
militarized diplomatic kind of--
- [Norman] Containment.
- And so I think that that alters its relationship,
and part of that is because of the bitter memories
and the bitter legacy and their perspective
of the Second Seminole War.
It also has something to do with that
by the time they get out to the western plains
they're dealing with Indian groups
with whom they feel less sympathy than the groups
that they had encountered east of the Mississippi.
And I've actually seen this in official regimental histories
During the era of Indian removal there's a palpable note
of remorse for the Indians.
Again, savage, tragic foes,
who are on the wrong side of history
and were fated to melt away
like the snow before the rising sun,
but it's sad because they did nothing that
we would not have done ourselves.
You get to the Western tribes, particularly predatory
horse-mounted buffalo hunting tribes in the Great Plains.
Tribes in the Southwest,
there's not a hint of sympathy.
And instead racial attitudes in fact are hardening and
crystallizing as the 19th century moves along.
And so I think that the Army replicates
the rest of society as that happens.
And so you're probably seeing a more genuinely racist
officer corps encountering Indians that have.
Not only are they rejecting assimilation but they seem
even further away from this ideal of civilization than the
Indians they had known in the eastern woodland culture zone.
Those Indians practiced large-scale agriculture,
had diplomatic relations, carried on trade.
They were sovereign entities recognized by imperial powers.
The tribes in the West are, in their language,
nothing more than savage banditry.
And so that sympathy large goes away,
and by the end of the 19th century,
those who sympathize with the Indians
in Congress and among humanitarian groups regard the
Army as being wholly part of the problem,
not part of the solution,
which is a dramatic change.
The more important legacy certainly is the legacy for
the Indian peoples that were affected by
Jackson's removal policy.
I call it Jackson's removal policy, but it was really
the American people's removal policy.
Jackson was an instrument of the popular will.
His election sometimes is called the,
associated with a democratic revolution of 1828.
The first real man of the people,
to occupy that office.
And he was there because he represented their will.
And so lumping blame for Indian removal
on Andrew Jackson is disingenuous.
I think it's a way that subsequent generations--
- He's a public servant. - He was a public servant.
He was also a remark,
saying he's a man of the people does not mean
he was an average man.
I mean, he was a,
he was a great and terrible man
in equal measure, historically.
He was a remarkable man, but he was very much
an instrument of the people at that time.
And so the legacy of the Second Seminole War,
in particular of course, is it
made Florida safe for
colonization under circumstances that were comfortable
to Anglo-Americans that could not abide the idea
of a pluralistic society at that time.
With the passage of time,
Floridians came not only to abide
by the idea of the pluralistic society but to look at
the Seminoles who avoided removal,
ultimately, some 1700 Seminoles
or more that reside in Florida today,
looking upon them as being American heroes,
Floridian heroes, our own heroes.
It was Jackson and the Army in the 30s,
those were the bad guys.
These were the good guys.
And what they stood for and represented is what
we as Americans stand for and represent.
And Osceola then is also converted into the greatest hero--
- There's a town in Wisconsin named after him.
- I mean, there's a national forest.
- Three counties.
There's a mountain in New Hampshire.
- Exactly, exactly.
The number of honorifics bestowed upon Oceola is
remarkable for somebody who was an embittered enemy
of the United States who sparked a war
against the United States essentially by
assassinating a low level diplomat, if you will.
So that is another legacy of the war, I think,
is that with hindsight things do become
more clear to us.
And we have no problem admitting in the 21st century
that this was an unjust war waged by the United States.
But I do think that we need to reconsider the narrative
that suggests that this was a momentary
sin committed by one exceptional President.
This was a manifestation of the popular will.
But the Seminoles resisted in Florida.
One of the reasons Floridians celebrate them so much
is because of this steadfast resistance.
There are today Seminoles in Florida who are
unrecognized by the Federal government and
are very proud of that.
That they have never lost, never surrendered,
and continued to exercise an independent existence.
But the bulk of the Seminole nation,
which is today an actual nation.
Resides in the West.
And continues to live,
to preserve elements of their traditional culture,
and to deny
the efforts of the people who tried to
colonize them in the 19th century.
- John Hall, thanks for walking us through
the Second Seminole War.
- My pleasure. - A pleasure.
And we'll go back to an image that we sort of
skipped over briefly and one of the more
remarkable ruins of that war near
Daytona Beach or New Smyrna Beach in Florida.
The ruins of Bulow sugar plantation
burned down during that war.
I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me
next time around for University Place Presents.