A Nation Rising (15 page)

Soon, for America and Americans, the question of slavery would be the only question.

A
FTERMATH

“S
LAVE
.” “I
NSURRECTION
.” T
OGETHER
, those two words struck fear into the hearts of Americans, before, during, and after independence. Now added to them were the names of Toussaint, Gabriel, Vesey, the
Amistad
, and the
Creole
.

One of the most persistent myths of the slave era is that slaves—both those recently arrived from Africa as well as those born in servitude in America—were docile, somewhat childlike laborers, content with their situation and often treated as “family members” if they were “house slaves.” It is a myth that is perpetuated in
Gone with the Wind
and other examples of romanticism about the Deep South, and in the benighted view of such presumably heroic American slaveholders as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee. Many modern Americans still seem willing to give these American legends a free pass when it comes to the subject of slavery, protesting that they were enlightened owners, who treated their slaves well and sought to emancipate some.

Washington, his admirers love to note, wouldn't sell his slaves because he didn't want to break up families. He treated them well. He emancipated his slaves in his will. But in an earlier time, Washington had offered rewards for the return of runaways. And when
he took slaves to New York to serve him as president, they certainly were not free to leave. As for Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence was totally dependent upon slave labor to operate his plantation, profitably or not. He also contemplated emancipation of his slaves, but was too much in debt to do so at his death. Robert E. Lee was said to be morally opposed to slavery, yet he and the other Lees of Virginia were entrenched members of Virginia's slave aristocracy.

These men
owned
human beings. All the niceties about their feelings and intentions cannot disguise or ameliorate that fact. They had the power of life and death over other human beings, people they could buy or sell at will. And, like many slaveholders, they knew slavery was wrong and an offense to the ideals for which they had fought.

The price Americans were going to pay for slavery was soon to rise in ways that the Founders had never dreamed of. The scattered insurrections and rebellions were about to coalesce as two groups with a common interest—blacks and Native Americans—increasingly joined forces to fight the power of the American government and the slaveholders who continued to press south and west.

The next battlefield would be a familiar one: Florida. When Andrew Jackson first ordered troops into Florida Territory, he couldn't know that this action would be only the first of three linked Seminole Wars, which would last for decades. The Native Americans fighting for survival there had strengthened their ties with their African-Americans allies. United, they began a struggle for survival and freedom that would prove to be one of the longest, most costly wars in American history.

1830
The Indian Removal Act is passed.

 

1831
Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Virginia.

 

1833
Great Britain outlaws slavery in its colonies. England abolishes slavery in August 1835.

 

1835
The Second Seminole War begins.

1836
Congress passes the first “gag rule,” automatically tabling any discussion of antislavery measures or petitions. Gag rules remain in effect until 1844.

1837
The Seminole war chief Osceola is captured.

 

1838
About 14,000 Cherokee Indians from Georgia are removed and herded, on the “Trail of Tears,” into Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 Cherokees die en route.

 

1842
The Second Seminole War ends.

December 28, 1835

A
S A LIGHT
rain fell at predawn on this December day, the men in Major Francis Dade's company finished their coffee, hardtack, and bacon. Although they were in tropical Florida, the men had felt the change in the air during the night. As they prepared to break camp and resume their march, Major Dade called out to his infantrymen, hoping to keep up their spirits.

“We have now got through all danger; keep up good heart, and when we get to Fort King, I'll give you three days for Christmas!”
²

It was already three days after Christmas when Major Francis L. Dade made that cheery promise. After four days of travel through what he considered the most dangerous of Florida's Seminole country, where an ambush would be most likely, Dade had let down his guard. A veteran of the sporadic fighting with Seminoles since
the United States took control of Florida in 1821, Dade now commanded a relief column, marching from Fort Brooke, near Tampa, to Fort King, near what is now Ocala. His command included seven other officers, a surgeon among them, and 100 infantrymen, many of them recent immigrants to America who had found the army their only real opportunity for employment.

On December 23, Dade and the company left Fort Brooke on a journey of approximately 100 miles. Dade and his men were traveling a rough-hewn “highway” built in 1828. Hacked from the dense wilderness of pinewoods and palmettos, it linked forts Brooke and King. Both had been constructed by the United States to secure Florida after it was “purchased” from Spain in 1821, following the First Seminole War. In spite of the American flag that now flew over Florida, the terrain itself had not changed much since the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 1500s and met their match in Florida's mosquito-infested swamps and fierce Native resistance.

Juan Ponce de Léon had died in Florida after a deadly encounter with a poisoned Indian arrow in 1521. In 1527, Pánfilo de Narváez lost half of his 600 men in Florida and most of the other half in the Gulf of Mexico when they attempted to sail away in crude boats. And in 1539, the conquistador Hernando de Soto lost his life, along with hundreds of his men, in an attempt to colonize Florida. Its climate, tropical diseases, and hostile Natives had done in these conquistadors and their Spanish armies, with their persistent dreams of cities of gold. Spain's loose colonial control over Florida had come only when they chose instead to establish a “mission system” to convert the Indians rather than trying to conquer them.

Dade's men wore their heavy coats, as the midwinter weather
was growing chilly, even for coastal Florida. Confident that they had passed all danger, Dade had permitted the soldiers to carry their weapons under their greatcoats, to keep the weapons dry. Breaking camp, he divided his command into an advance party, a main body, and a rear guard, marching in two columns. Secure in his belief that danger had passed, he chose not to send out any riders as “flankers” or scouts. In addition to their personal arms, his troops carried with them one cannon, a six-pounder, hauled by a team of oxen.

As morning broke on December 28, the advance guard began the march, a sergeant and five men in single file. After they had moved out 200 yards, the drummer began the beat to “march” and the main column followed in double file. The line of march stretched longer and longer, followed by horses, limber—the small, two-wheeled cart on which the tail of the gun rested—artillery piece, and crew. Then came the lumbering oxen and their wagon with two drivers, then another interval, and at last the rear guard. The woods were silent except for the noise of woodpeckers and squirrels.
³

Dade was in his early forties, a native Virginian with considerable experience fighting the Seminoles. He had assumed command of this relief force from a fellow officer, Captain George Gardner. First in his class at West Point (1814) and nicknamed “the war god,” Gardner had stepped aside to tend his ailing wife, but then rejoined Dade's column.

Slowed by the plodding oxen, the column had made scant progress on the march north; they probably had several more days of travel before them. Since leaving the fort, Dade had seen evidence of Indians along the way, but he did not know that the Seminoles had been following his troopers the entire length of the journey.
Nor could he know that the Seminoles had probably received detailed information about the size of the column and its departure date from Louis Pacheco, a black slave in his forties who traveled with the column as guide and interpreter. Pacheco was a useful man who spoke four languages, including Seminole.

Pacheco knew that the Seminoles and their black allies lay in wait in the tall palmetto grass and amid the forest of pines. As the column approached a small pond along the road, an Indian known to the white men as Jumper gave the war whoop. A storm of fire swept the column, and as John K. Mahon described it, “The sky blue uniforms of the soldiers made easy targets.”
⁴
Dade and the other mounted officers at the front of the column fell instantly. So did nearly half the command. Louis Pacheco dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead.

Jumper's real name was Ote Emathla, and he was brother-in-law of the head Seminole chief, Micanopy. A Red Stick Creek, Jumper had fought against Andrew Jackson in 1818 and had become the chief's “sense bearer,” or counselor. Urged on by his warriors, Micanopy had somewhat reluctantly fired the first shot. Halpatter Tustenuggee—whom white men knew as Alligator—would later report that 180 Native Americans and blacks took part in this attack.

Despite the sudden shock of the attack, and the loss of most of their officers, including Major Dade, the soldiers quickly organized a defensive position. The surviving officers, in command of a gun crew, unlimbered the lone field piece and started to fire at the Seminoles. Other soldiers felled large pine trees and started to construct a simple triangular barricade. But their situation was hopeless.

“The soldiers resisted bravely and manned their single artillery piece, firing as rapidly as they could,” recorded the historian Joe Knetsch. “As the men attempted to reload the piece, they were shot down by their attackers. In the end, six men manned a makeshift breastwork and fired at the Indians until overwhelmed…. The Indian war that all had feared was now on in earnest.”
⁵

Only three U.S. soldiers, left for dead, escaped the massacre and could make their return to Tampa. All were severely wounded, and only one ultimately survived to provide an account of the attack. In the sudden and sweeping ambush, the Seminoles and their black allies had lost only three men, with another five wounded. When the fighting was over, they moved in quickly and took food, clothing, and ammunition from the fallen soldiers' bodies, before tossing the cannon into the pond and disappearing into the dense Florida woods.

A little later that same day, a second deadly ambush in Florida caught another group of Americans by surprise. Some fifty miles away at Fort King, the intended destination of Dade's column, another group of Indians lay in wait, ready to strike a murderous blow in vengeance. Their target was Wiley Thompson, the federal Indian agent in Florida, who was dining that evening with some of the army officers at Fort King. Thompson was awaiting the arrival of Major Dade and his men. Their task was to complete the “removal” of some Seminoles who had agreed to leave Florida for western territory they had been promised by the federal government.

After finishing his dinner, Thompson took a walk outside the compound with one of the officers. He did not know that he was being watched by a Seminole warrior named Osceola, concealed
with other warriors just outside Fort King. The fiercest leader of the Seminole nation, Osceola (or Asi Yolah) was burning for revenge against Thompson, whom he hated for pressing the Seminoles to leave Florida. Catching the two Americans unaware, Osceola's band ambushed, killed, and scalped them and then attacked the fort and killed and scalped four more white soldiers before the alarm was sounded.

When Osceola's war party returned to their camp, some of the warriors were wearing the white men's bloody scalps on their heads; they then hung the scalps from a pole in the middle of their camp to mock the hated Indian agent. Sometime later, the other victorious raiding party returned to the Seminole village, flush with the killing spree that had wiped out nearly the entire relief column in what the rest of America would soon call “Dade's Massacre.”

Until this moment, Florida had been as remote to most Americans as the farside of the moon—a distant, exotic land of swamps, snakes, insects, and Indians. Since the Spanish had controlled it for most of America's history, the territory of Florida had mostly been an irritant and source of trouble, especially to southerners in the bordering states. Indians from Florida occasionally raided American settlements and then returned to what was a foreign country. Runaway slaves found a refuge there, either with Jesuits or with Indians. When Andrew Jackson invaded Florida and the Spanish surrendered it, most Americans were content to cheer Jackson and ignore the territory.

All that changed overnight with these Seminole attacks. Up and down the eastern seaboard, American newspapers screamed one word: “Massacre.” By the spring of 1836, the Seminoles had also
begun to attack plantations, killing white settlers across the state. A widely published etching depicted the killings of Dade's column, Wiley Thompson, and white settlers in Florida. Its headline read: “Massacre of the Whites by the Indians and Blacks of Florida.” Beneath the illustration, the caption read, “The above is intended to represent the horrid Massacre of the Whites in Florida in December 1835 and January, February, March and April 1836, when near Four Hundred (including women and children) fell victim to the barbarity of the Negroes and Indians.”
⁶

Shortly after the treaty that made Florida an American territory in 1821, President James Monroe made the official policy of the United States government very clear: the Seminole Indians “should be removed…or concentrated within narrower limits.”
⁷

Most Americans learn something about the later Monroe Doctrine, a declaration, made in 1823, that Europe's powers should no longer meddle in the affairs of either North or South America. Less familiar is this other “Monroe doctrine,” dealing with America's Natives. In modern parlance, Monroe's announced policy was, in essence, “ethnic cleansing”—the deliberate, forced relocation or eradication of a group—and it would soon become an official American policy known as Indian “removal.” That brutality, war, plunder, and deception would be used to accomplish the goal was nothing new in the annals of the European and American encounters with Native Americans—from the moment Columbus stepped onto the sands of San Salvador in the fateful fall of 1492, the history of Europeans' relations with the natives they encountered would be written in blood. It was a story of endless betrayals, butchery, and broken promises, from Columbus and the conquistadors through John Smith, the
Bay Colony, the French and Indian War, the War of 1812, and the Creek War. From the outset, “guns, germs, and steel,” in Jared M. Diamond's memorable phrase, determined the outcome; superior weapons, the force of numbers, treachery, and disease—the most deadly weapon of all—had been part of a tragic collision between two cultures that surely ranks as one of the saddest and cruelest episodes in history.

That policy perfectly suited Andrew Jackson during his service as Florida's first military governor and throughout the rest of his political career. Elected president for the first of two terms in 1828, the brash, uncompromising hero of New Orleans stood atop a political platform that was fairly simple: suspicion of the upper classes and big business, typified by the Bank of the United States, which Jackson vetoed in 1832; increased voting rights (for white men, at least); a general opening of the political process to the middle and lower classes; freedom of economic opportunity, which included maintaining the role of slavery in America; and eliminating the Indians to open up their lands for white expansion.

Hollywood has left the impression that the great Indian wars took place in the Old West during the late 1800s, a period that many think of as the “cowboy and Indian” days when America's buffalo herds were slaughtered nearly to extinction and Custer made his “last stand.” But in fact that was a mopping-up effort. By then, the vast majority of Native nations were nearly wiped out, and the survivors' subjugation was complete. The killing, enslavement, and land theft had begun with the arrival of the first Europeans and was elevated to federal policy with the enforced relocation of Indians from their traditional lands for reservations west of the Mississippi.

Following Monroe's 1821 pronouncement, under subsequent administrations, federal actions toward Indians moved from the broadly popular anti-Indian sentiment and sporadic regional battles to an official federal policy enacted by Congress and Jackson in 1830 and continued by his successor, Martin Van Buren. The tidy word given to this policy was “removal.” The Indians called it the Trail of Tears.

In fact, the “Indian question” had been an issue of federal policy from Washington's time. His secretary of war, Henry Knox, signed one of the first formal treaties in 1790, an agreement made with Creek chief Alexander McGillivray, son of a Scottish trader and a French-Indian mother. In 1804, Thomas Jefferson took up the issue in his second inaugural address: