Seminole War Research Articles

The “First” Emancipation Proclamation: Black Rebellion, Removal, and Freedom during the Seminole Wars

The “First” Emancipation Proclamation: Black Rebellion, Removal, and Freedom during the Seminole Wars

Remembering the “Dade Massacre”

Just over a hundred years ago, the state of Florida created Dade Memorial Park to commemorate 108 US soldiers killed by Seminole Indians in 1835, an engagement at the time labeled “Dade’s Massacre.” Whereas the event itself briefly gained much attention throughout the United States and triggered the Second Seminole War (1835–42), the site’s creation and interpretations tell us much about the factors that shaped historical memorialization in public spaces in Florida and the Deep South. Specifically, this article examines the role of settler colonialism theory and Native American perspectives in the setting’s evolution into today’s Dade Battlefield Historic State Park.

Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill

Reviewed by: Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill Angela Pulley Hudson Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818. By James L. Hill. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 323 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. In his influential essay "Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations," historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen "outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history."1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as "legal oddities" since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field's oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no "foreign policy" and were both "disconnected from" and "irrelevant to … international events."3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill's monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill's study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years' War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay's indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and [End Page 408] Miccosukee figures, as Hill's careful analysis demonstrates, used maritime voyages, overland travel, and shrewd diplomatic dealings to advance their aims and protect their autonomy. Though the overall success of their actions was undoubtedly modest, Creek Internationalism lays bare the importance and impact of their efforts. It thus effectively answers DeLay's call for scholarship that undertakes "excavations of the struggle between indigenous polities, settlers, and states for practical control over space" and engages with "Indian polities and individuals as historical actors, rather than mere objects of state and settler aggression."5 Creek Internationalism argues that the two competing movements that emerged in the late eighteenth-century Creek world—one pushing for centralization (a nascent Creek nation) and one striving to protect and even enlarge town (talwa or talofa) autonomy and power—both engaged in inter/intranational diplomacy to achieve their aims. This broad assertion contributes to a long-standing discussion (some call it a debate) in Creek historiography: the degree to which the term nation appropriately describes what the Creek confederacy was or what mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Creek people wanted it to be. Scholars such as Steven C. Hahn, Joshua Piker, and Andrew K. Frank, among others, have produced thoughtful analyses around the question of Creek nationhood, as have a new generation of historians including Bryan C. Rindfleisch and Steven J. Peach.6 But consensus is elusive. And Hill's study does not move us any closer to resolution. To be fair, that is not his goal; instead, he takes that fundamental tension as a given and convincingly uses it as the foundation for his exploration of how foreign relations informed the internal debate in Creek country to a degree not fully recognized in extant literature. Through six more or less chronological chapters, Hill examines key episodes in which both Creek nationalists (those advocating some level of centralization) and Creek localists (those working on behalf of a distinct talwa or group of talwas) deployed "internationalism" (15), which he defines as a strategy designed "to secure recognition that their communities possessed sovereign rights" (15–16) on par with nation-states. Creek Internationalism makes two significant...

Examining Miami Area Incidences and Impacts of Settler and Native American Conflict During the Second Seminole War

Examining Miami Area Incidences and Impacts of Settler and Native American Conflict During the Second Seminole War

On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Claude Berube

Reviewed by: On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Claude Berube David Head (bio) Keywords U.S. Navy, Andre Jackson, Maritime history, Naval history On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era. By Claude Berube. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 248. Cloth, $54.95). Claude Berube once asked Robert Remini, the late Andrew Jackson biographer extraordinaire, what Old Hickory thought of the navy. "He didn't like it," Remini replied. "He didn't understand it, and he didn't use it" (xii). Remini's assessment reflects the conventional wisdom. Jackson was an army man, after all, a nationalist who was thrifty with a dollar—not the kind of person to project American power across the globe with expensive ships. But as Berube shows, this view of Jackson is inaccurate, a result of a lack of serious engagement with Jackson's relationship with the navy. It turns out that because of Jackson's support, the U.S. navy emerged from the 1830s as a larger, better organized, more technologically advanced, and more professional service than it had ever been. In six thematic chapters, Berube gives a full appraisal of the antebellum navy. He discusses how the navy differed from the army—cruising distant seas, for example, meant going months without orders from Washington and depending on foreign governments for port access to resupply. The book covers as well how the navy was governed, shipbuilding and the adoption of steam power, the development of a strategy that prioritized protecting commerce through the selective use of force, and the professionalization of an officer corps that participated in a self-conscious maritime republic of letters. Berube deftly uses traditional sources, such as presidential speeches, official correspondence, and magazines, in addition to less often used documents including records of the House and Senate Naval Affairs Committee, which show legislators hashing out policy before it got to the floor of Congress and into the Congressional record. Berube also mined some 16,000 pages worth of courts-martial records. Berube's background as a former Senate staffer allows him to offer insight on the budget process and the nitty-gritty politics of appropriations. Overall, Berube argues that Jackson's presidency was a vital period of growth that left the United States poised to take its place among the naval [End Page 634] powers of the Earth later in the century. The navy created international squadrons. It built ships—seventeen of them, the same number as under James Madison and behind only John Adams, both administrations that fought naval wars (69). It began the transition to a steam fleet, with small steam-driven vessels that would be especially effective during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) along the coast and through the rivers of Florida. Jackson's administration reformed the naval bureaucracy and brought order to issues of personnel, supply, construction and maintenance, logistics, and budgeting. The officer corps professionalized, particularly in educating new officers. The haphazard system of teenage midshipmen learning math, science, and literature from the ship's chaplain, who was often someone mostly interested in having a naval rank and not an actual clergyman let alone a teacher, gave way to more rigorous shipboard training and, eventually, the founding of the Naval Academy in Annapolis (1845). Though Jackson is present in some chapters more than in others, there's plenty for Jackson scholars to learn about his presidency. For example, Berube argues that the naval dimension of Jackson's foreign policy, centered on protecting American commerce, showed restraint dictated by America's position in the world. Berube discusses four incidents in which American ships suffered attacks in far-flung locales: in the Falkland Islands (1829–1831), Quallah Battoo in Sumatra (1831), Savai'i in Samoa (1834), and the Namorik Atoll in the Marshall Islands (1835). A belligerent Jackson would have authorized naval reprisals in all four, but as Berube points out, Jackson authorized force only for the Falkland Islands and Quallah Battoo, because he saw both as critical to U.S. trade. A naval officer acting on his own attacked Savai'i, which Berube doubts Jackson would have approved, and he ordered no response to the...

Settlers as Conquerors: Free Land Policy in Antebellum America (Transatlantische Historische Studien, No. 58) by Julius Wilm

Reviewed by: Settlers as Conquerors: Free Land Policy in Antebellum America (Transatlantische Historische Studien, No. 58) by Julius Wilm Katrine Barber SETTLERS AS CONQUERORS: FREE LAND POLICY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA (TRANSATLANTISCHE HISTORISCHE STUDIEN, NO. 58) by Julius Wilm Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 284 pages. Cloth €52.00. Understanding Oregon’s past demands a knowledge of the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act (DLCA) and the enticement of free or low-cost land at what would become the nation’s far western edge. Why else would people risk crossing the continent to new, raw communities then just being knit to the nation? The journey West and the founding families that benefitted from the DLCA have populated numerous books, movies, and museum exhibits. Decades of congressional debates, the details of policies they rejected, and those they eventually passed to distribute Western lands have garnered less attention. But Julius Wilm’s fascinating, nuanced study should reinvigorate interest. It certainly places the DLCA — too often treated in isolation — into the broad, complex context of the nineteenth century’s free land movement. Employing the underused twenty-eight volumes of The Territorial Papers of the United States and newly accessible digitized records that make his statistical and geographical analysis of land claims possible, Wilm sets out to provide an “update to the public land histories” and “bring an understanding of the complicated and contradictory policies and economics of land distribution” within settler imperialism (p. 20). The result is a compelling investigation of antebellum free land policies, especially the Florida Armed Occupation Act (1842), the Donation Land Claim Act (1850), and state-led policy in Arkansas. Between 1789 and 1829, Congress debated six free-land proposals, although none passed. Proponents touted free land as a way to tie lower classes to the nation and induce their loyalty. They argued that such policies would create tax-paying patriots whose actions on behalf of their own interests would align with those of the nation. Furthermore, by drawing “reliable populations” into frontier spaces, such policies would “solve imperial crises,” such as conflicts between imperial nations and between the United States and tribal nations (p. 54). Opponents feared that free lands could jeopardize the value of property and erode the work ethic of beneficiaries. More critically, the federal government’s sale of lands was fiscally important. Wilm asks what factors made these proposals “conceivable” enough to merit debate despite the often-vigorous opposition to them. He points to the specter of Indigenous violence, sometimes real but often manufactured, that proponents used to raise support for free lands. Wilm argues that “the free land proposals in Congress promised to create a demographic foundation for white control over populations that were seen as too multi-ethnic and for displacing Indian nations” (p. 54) and were based in “extreme anti-Indian racism” (p. 257). Although ultimately unsuccessful at overcoming opposition, the debates over free-land policies moved the needle as proposals were becoming increasingly popular with the electorate, especially in the expanding West. Wilm tracks the negotiations of successful proposals in the state legislature of Arkansas, and federal programs in Florida and Oregon. Federal proposals rested on claims that armed settlers could resolve otherwise uncontrollable Native violence against American interests. This was especially true in Florida, where armed settlers were to conclude the costly Second Seminole War. In Oregon, Great Britain was also a threat, and settlers were encouraged to migrate to tip the scales against British claims, with the promise of land to follow. After establishing Congressional passage of new land policy, Wilm analyzes how successful it was in light of its original aims and its impact on Indigenous people. He argues that any “emancipatory potential of the concept of [End Page 401] free land” for middling-to-low-income settlers was never as important as the government’s interests when implementing policies, and he then breaks down the policies’ effects county-by-county and demographically (p. 155). Arkansas politicians hoped that free land would increase the state’s population and rate of development. Although records are spotty, Wilm finds that they succeeded. Florida’s free-land program was limited to a single year and included...

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt

Reviewed by: Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt Julia Lewandoski (bio) Native Americans, Indigenous, Indian removal, Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. Pp. 396. Paper, $16.95.) In Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, Claudio Saunt reframes the well-known story of the deportation of Indigenous peoples beyond the Mississippi River in the 1830s. He begins by choosing new, properly descriptive words. Instead of the "artfully vague" phrase Indian removal, Saunt uses three terms—deportation, expulsion, and extermination—to capture the destructive violence of the massive federal project that forcibly moved 80,000 people west from their traditional territories (xiii). Saunt has three central arguments. First, expulsion was a departure, in its scale and brutality, from earlier U.S. Indian policies. Second, eliminating Native peoples east of the Mississippi marked a grim milestone in U.S.-Indian relations, one that would shape the next era of military violence in the American West. Third, the mass expulsions of the 1830s were not inevitable but the product of contingent political decisions, intellectual currents, and human actions. Unworthy Republic proves these points easily, but its greatest strength is as a gripping narrative account. It is an exceptionally readable and deeply human story of the political and social processes of expulsion. It begins with the nascent visions of Indian "salvation in the west" proposed by Protestant missionaries and the familiarity with the internal slave trade that made the deportation of entire human populations imaginable to southern politicians (18). Saunt examines the ascendency of President Andrew Jackson and the Congressional debates over removal, [End Page 143] conducted among a resounding chorus of other voices, Indigenous and settler, who opposed it. Next, he describes the grim bureaucracy and short-sighted logistics of the process. He movingly demonstrates how the "divergence between the government's ambitions and its limited capabilities" led to grotesque cruelty and unnecessary suffering during forced deportations (183). Removal was a federal project, but settlers colluded along every step of the way. Saunt shows the intimacy of deportation, as "U.S. citizens moved into Cherokee houses, slept in their beds, and ate out of their pots" (278). By 1836, expulsion had descended into all-out extermination in the extraordinarily violent and expensive second Seminole War in Florida. Unworthy Republic situates removal primarily in the American South and in the 1830s. While it discusses the expulsion of tribes from Ohio and the U.S.-Sauk War, most of the book concerns the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. This is a more conventional approach than other recent work, such as Jeffrey Ostler's Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT, 2019), or John P. Bowes's Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman, OK, 2016), both of which broaden the geographic and temporal scope of the subject. But for Saunt, removal is a southern story for persuasive reasons. The three-fifths clause enabled removal legislation to pass Congress. The southern states who threatened the nullification of tribal sovereignty under state law gave President Jackson's federal removal plans real teeth. And slaveowners were especially determined to "leave not a single indigenous person in the region, thereby making white men the masters of every square foot of the South" (275). White southerners, even after appropriating the exceptionally fertile lands of the Creek and Choctaw, still sought to remove the Cherokee from lands not at all suited to plantation cotton. It was white supremacy, not just greed for land or profit motive, that made removal so thorough and relentless. Saunt relies on written sources to tell this multinational story. Unworthy Republic is populated by nineteenth-century Native male writers, including William Apess,John Ross, and Elias Boudinot, alongside familiar villains like Secretary of War Lewis Cass and Georgia politician Wilson Lumpkin. The book shows just how present these Indigenous voices were in mainstream nineteenth-century debates over removal. [End Page 144] In a few places...

An Officer of the Old Guard: Lewis Stephenson Craig, 1807–1852 by William Harris Bragg

Reviewed by: An Officer of the Old Guard: Lewis Stephenson Craig, 1807–1852 by William Harris Bragg Robert Wettemann An Officer of the Old Guard: Lewis Stephenson Craig, 1807–1852. By William Harris Bragg. ( Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2020. Pp. lvi, 295. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-764-2.) Prominent antebellum U.S. Army leaders and commanders often left paper collections or memoirs readily digested and reexamined by historians and scholars, making new material on the antebellum U.S. Army fruitful for further exploration. Such is the case with William Harris Bragg's study of Lewis Stephenson Craig, which brings Craig's letters, journals, and a heretofore untouched family archive to the forefront. The result is a rich personal portrait of a Virginia gentleman and military officer, who had been denied his plantation by unscrupulous older siblings and guardians and was given an officer's commission when lengthy court battles cost him his inheritance. Abandoning hopes of a place among the Virginia gentry, Craig sought martial glory, gaining a commission as an officer in the Second Dragoons, which he led into the fray in the battle of the Loxahatchee River during the Second Seminole War. Having demonstrated his martial abilities at a time when non–West Point graduates faced prospects of resignation, Craig received a transfer to the Third Infantry regiment. While serving on the southwestern frontier, he not only met and [End Page 158] married Elizabeth Church but also continued to distinguish himself before being ordered to accompany the Third Infantry to the U.S.-Mexican border in anticipation of war. At this point, Bragg's narrative assumes a new form, a deft balance of historical contextualization with excerpts from Craig's journal of his service in the Mexican War. Bragg's efforts are workmanlike as he lets the officer speak: the reader follows Craig in the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, shares in his promotion to captain, and marches into the battle of Monterrey, where the Third Infantry distinguished itself in seizing the city. Craig continues as the dominant narrator, describing his path into the enemy works at the battle of Cerro Gordo and thence down the National Road into central Mexico. Craig's wartime journal concluded with General Winfield Scott's capture of Mexico City and Craig's brevet promotions to major for gallantry in the battle of Monterrey and to lieutenant colonel for his efforts at Contreras and Churubusco. After the war, Craig received an appointment to the Joint United States and Mexico Boundary Commission, functioning as the military escort to those charting the boundary between the two nations. The author's narrative continues to balance Craig's extant journal (it is missing the October 26–November 16, 1851, period) with additional historical context tracing the surveying team's progress. Departing from San Antonio and proceeding to El Paso, Craig chronicled the challenges faced by the infantry company under his command, such as Native attacks and actions by U.S. Army deserters. This latter threat brought an ignominious end to Craig's career, as he was murdered while attempting to apprehend a deserter on June 5, 1852. Bragg is at his best when discussing Craig's experience, effectively describing the social and cultural context of life in the Old South and how a young man looked to military service as an alternative to plantation life. Bragg's deeper understanding of the antebellum U.S. Army is less nuanced. While he repeatedly speaks of military professionalism and national service, Bragg's treatment of those notions with respect to officers' possessing a recognized body of military expertise, their shared responsibilities regarding commitment and national service, and the larger corporate nature of officership is cursory at best, particularly considering Craig's uniqueness in receiving a commission direct from civilian life and otherwise lacking the shared West Point traditions that defined the army officer corps before the Mexican War. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Bragg is to be credited for making the life of Lewis Stephenson Craig available to future scholars of the antebellum U.S. Army. Robert Wettemann United States Air Force Academy Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

“The mildest form ever known upon earth?”: reconsidering racial slavery in Seminole society, 1800–1835

ABSTRACT The extent of the multi-ethnic integration of the Seminoles remains a cause of debate in both Florida history and the wider field of Indigenous studies. This article argues against the notion that the Black experience among the Seminoles prior to the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) was homogenous and considers the role of those who experienced the restrictions of enslavement: the Estelusti. Through a synthesis of published observations and archival evidence on the Seminoles, this paper highlights that the varying treatment of the Estelusti is a means of understanding the barriers to coalescence in the Native South.

The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community by Matthew J. Clavin Patrick Luck The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community. By Matthew J. Clavin. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 253. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4798-3733-5.) Over the last several decades, one of the great shifts in how American history is understood has been the recognition that slavery and slaves should be at the center of that history rather than at its margins. In his new study, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Matthew J. Clavin makes a similar historiographical intervention by placing the "Negro Fort" at Prospect Bluff in Spanish Florida at the center of the dynamics that led to the various invasions of Florida undertaken or ordered by Andrew Jackson during and after the War of 1812, crucial episodes in the expansion of American slavery. However, Clavin interprets the fort not only as a direct spur to American expansion but also as emblematic of both "the larger fight over freedom and slavery that raged throughout the Americas at the turn of the nineteenth century" and the fact "that the American government had always [End Page 700] sanctioned slavery" (p. 2). Even more ambitiously, he claims these events are "early evidence of what came to be known as the Slave Power" and a sign that "ambivalence over the institution [of slavery] had disappeared since the nation's founding" (pp. 12, 14). Clavin's book is organized as a chronological narrative of the events that led to the battle of Negro Fort, the battle itself, and its long aftermath (including an epilogue on how abolitionists used the fort's story). The origin of the fort was in the British policy during the War of 1812 to encourage slaves to fight for the British empire. As a result of these British efforts, this fugitive slave community was based in a well-constructed fort, well-armed, and organized on military lines; they even wore British military uniforms, indicating that they conceived of their community "as a 'sovereign enclave of British subjects'" (p. 86). Andrew Jackson was the community's main antagonist, and many of the actions he took that led to his rise to prominence (such as the American invasions of Florida) were driven by his desire (shared by many white southerners) to destroy the fort and capture its residents. Despite the importance of the British and of Jackson to this story, Clavin places African Americans at its center, carefully excavating the diverse backgrounds of the hundreds of people (including Native Americans) who lived in and around the fort. Clavin concludes that these African Americans were not "slave revolutionaries" but rather individuals who seized the opportunity presented by British intervention for "'self-determination, self-reliance, and self-rule,'" much like other maroon communities throughout the Americas (p. 12). Clavin also shows that, even after the fort was destroyed, many of the African Americans who had congregated there managed to escape and continued their resistance for years afterward, typically in close alliance with Native Americans (particularly Redstick Creeks and Seminoles). Perhaps Clavin's greatest contribution, besides retelling an important event from American history that has been largely lost to memory, is to show how important the actions of the residents of Negro Fort were to the course of the conflicts on America's southern border in the 1810s and after. The great fear of many white southerners, manifested in the fort, was that slaves and Native Americans would unite with the support of the British to halt and perhaps even reverse American expansion. Clavin shows how these fears justified military expeditions into Spanish Florida as well as the later Seminole Wars. In this excellent study, Clavin concludes that, much like during the Civil War, the willingness of slaves to run to and even join a power fighting against their enslavers drove crucial events in American history. Patrick Luck Florida Polytechnic University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression

Book Review| April 01 2019 The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression. By C.S. Monaco. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018. 304 pp. List of illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth). Yoav Hamdani Yoav Hamdani Columbia University Yoav Hamdani is a PhD candidate at the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation uncovers the history of slavery within the US Army in the first decades of the American Republic. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2019) 38 (3): 117–119. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.3.0117 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Yoav Hamdani; The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2019; 38 (3): 117–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.3.0117 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression by C. S. Monaco

Reviewed by: The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression by C. S. Monaco Samuel J. Watson The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression. By C. S. Monaco. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 289. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2481-1.) Although several books about the Second Seminole War have been published in the last few decades, none have broken as much new ground as C. S. Monaco does here. While building on the attention that Joe Knetsch, John and Mary Lou Missall, and Milton Meltzer have given to white Floridians and national politics, and that given by Patricia Wickman to the Indian side (meaning Miccosukees, Creeks, Alachua Seminoles, and others) of the story, Monaco goes to new lengths exploring ecological and medical phenomena and the violation of norms of warfare in a balanced military, political, and cultural history. Monaco begins from the standpoint of settler colonialism to explain U.S. aggression and emphasizes the unique ecology and disease environment of Florida to explain its limits. As one might then expect, his bibliography provides outstanding contextual range, and his research base in newspapers and archives is the strongest of any book on the conflict. The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression is more topical, thematic, and suggestive than it is comprehensive or conclusive, and despite Monaco's criticism, students will still resort to John K. Mahon's History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (rev. ed.; Gainesville, Fla., 1985) for a fuller narrative. Thus, for example, Monaco presents a unique section on landscape and mental trauma, which goes beyond the usual references to [End Page 437] disillusionment and alienation among U.S. troops but does not do more than previous works to explore settler motives or experiences. For political historians, Monaco provides the most attention yet to Whig critics of the war, though he recognizes that their motives were more partisan than humanitarian. He emphasizes that northeastern urban Democratic newspapers expressed sympathy for Osceola, suggesting an urban-rural sectional dimension to support for settler colonialism and U.S. territorial expansion, but he does not examine southern Whig responses to the conflict, which may also demonstrate tension between section and party. For military historians, Monaco helps explain General Zachary Taylor's system of defensive "squares" as an effort to calm and attract settlers and clarifies the motives for General Walker K. Armistead's aggressive strategy (p. 129). Monaco criticizes U.S. practices of breaking truces to seize Indians but does not fully explain these practices either in the context of the character of the conflict and the negotiations—in which both sides routinely used deception—or in the debate among U.S. Army officers over the strategy. As a result, divisions among the Indians remain obscure, though persistent U.S. military pressure and the promises made in near-constant negotiations with small groups (what I have called elsewhere "family diplomacy" between Indians and the army) clearly aggravated the Natives to the point that many felt compelled to surrender. Monaco's most important historiographical argument is against those who see people of African descent as the leaders of the resistance to U.S. aggression or the defense of slavery against marronage as the principal motive for the war. Monaco convincingly deconstructs the evidence for such claims. In the process he provides extensive attention to Indian motives, values, and objectives. All sides in this passionate debate can take heart from his conclusion: "historians have a responsibility to treat all those who trace their traditions to the Florida war with a sense of equity," while adhering to evidence over polemic (p. 191). Monaco's significant argument regarding the war itself is that the climate and disease environment were most important in limiting U.S. success. Monaco asserts that their full impact has been "heretofore unrecognized" by scholars, but every survey has done so (p. 139). Monaco does argue in detail that disease limited Florida's attraction to settlers, and thus limited the impact of the settler colonialism that helped motivate the war, but in doing so he revives an insight that U.S. Army officers recognized at the time. Here, unfortunately...

Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami by Andrew K. Frank

Reviewed by: Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami by Andrew K. Frank Jessica Chopin Roney, Whitney Martinko, and Samantha Seeley (bio) KEY WORDS Miami, Florida, Tequestas, Seminoles, Seminole Wars, Spain, Henry Flagler, Julia Tuttle Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami. By Andrew K. Frank. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. 161. Paper, $16.95.) Andrew K. Frank’s Before the Pioneers is a deep history that explores 4,000 years of human settlement on the north bank of the Miami River, the location of present-day downtown Miami, Florida. Frank’s volume examines a site that is only a few square acres, but the book ranges through thousands of years of history. He begins with Florida’s geologic formation and the migration of people to the Florida peninsula some 12,000–14,000 years ago. The book ends where, as he notes, many histories of Miami open—with booster Julia Tuttle, industrialist Henry Flagler, and the incorporation of the city in 1896. In between, Frank explores the many people who shaped the north bank site to suit their own purposes—Tequestas and Seminoles, Bahamian mariners and shipwrecked sailors, fugitive slaves, deserters, Spanish missionaries, and American plantation owners. Throughout the book, Frank traces the physical tools, structures, and landscape modifications the inhabitants of the north bank left behind. The Tequestas were the first to form a sedentary community at the site, which they occupied as early as 3,500–4,000 years ago. Frank calls the Tequestas the north bank’s first urban planners. They built a complex of round buildings and burial mounds that was home to up to 1,000 people, as well as a ceremonial site across the river. In the sixteenth century, the Tequestas allowed Spanish missionaries to build a palisaded fort and a mission at the site. The Spanish and the Tequestas abandoned the [End Page 327] north bank only in the early eighteenth century when slave raiders threatened the region. After they left, a series of deserters, runaway slaves, and shipwrecked sailors created autonomous communities in the abandoned structures, where they remained despite the changing imperial winds that passed the Florida peninsula from Spanish to British and back to Spanish rule. When enslaved people and two slaveholders bearing Spanish and then United States land grants arrived at the north bank in the early nineteenth century, they found fruit trees that had been planted by Bahamian sailors decades before. The north bank plantation was short-lived, however. During the Second and Third Seminole Wars, the plantation buildings were abandoned, and the United States army repurposed them to create Fort Dallas, a launching point for raids against the Seminoles. By linking these physical remainders of human habitation over thousands of years, Frank argues that “the Tequesta Indians and other earlier inhabitants of the Miami River built the foundations for the city of Miami long before Julia Tuttle, Henry Flagler, or any of the other city ‘founders’ or so-called pioneers were born” (3). Frank’s concern for physical remnants stems from a contemporary debate over archaeology and the future of downtown Miami. In 2013, archaeologists discovered the remains of the Tequesta north bank town during a historical analysis of the site for a major residential and retail complex. Frank suggests that Miami has long destroyed the old to make way for the new. “Through little or no fault of their own, Miamians lack a sense of the deep historical terrain that they occupy,” he writes (5). This was by design. In the 1890s, developers demolished much of the evidence of earlier north bank settlements to lay out the new city. African American workers leveled Tequesta mounds to build Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel and the city grid, and the remains of Fort Dallas were eventually destroyed or removed beyond the city center. Flagler’s hotel was anointed “the birthplace of Miami,” a moniker that rooted the founding of the city in a venture that boosters believed symbolized “progress and modernity” rather than the past (106–107). Frank shows how communities create the past they need, highlighting narratives that will best serve the interests of tourism or...

Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America's Contested Spaces, 1500-1850 ed. by Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers

Reviewed by: Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America's Contested Spaces, 1500-1850 ed. by Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers James L. Hill Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America's Contested Spaces, 1500-1850. Edited by Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers Contested Boundaries. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. [vi], 217. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-5495-7.) Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers have assembled an impressive volume that aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of borderlands scholarship. The editors' introduction constructs a framework for the chapters that follow by providing an excellent synopsis of borderlands historiography. Ranging from Herbert E. Bolton's pioneering work of the 1920s to the contested meanings of the term borderlands in modern-day scholarship, the historiographical overview is a valuable resource for scholars and students in need of a comprehensive review of the field. Each of the contributing authors seeks to take borderlands scholarship in new directions, whether geographically, chronologically, or thematically. As the editors observe, each author interprets the meaning of borderlands differently. Frank's chapter on Seminole ethnogenesis frames Florida as a political and ethnocultural borderland both shared and contested by Creek migrants, enslaved and refugee Africans, and American colonizers throughout the early 1800s. The author revises scholarly interpretations of the Second Seminole War, arguing that the war interrupted, but did not eliminate, an ongoing process of Seminole ethnogenesis that involved both African and Creek peoples. Also examining the Native South, Tyler Boulware focuses on the mechanism through which the creation of social and cultural borderlands occurred: the proliferation of horses. Boulware argues that the mobility offered by horses undermined efforts to set firm territorial boundaries and facilitated [End Page 139] cross-cultural connections among various Native and Euro-American populations. Meanwhile, Carla Gerona conceptualizes borderlands as "geographic zones marked and marred by disappearances" (p. 97). Complicating historical narratives about early Spanish entradas along the Gulf Coast and into modern-day Texas, Gerona argues that significant numbers of both Spaniards and Native people simply vanished as a result of the violence, death, and dislocation that these encounters produced. Other authors in the volume define borderlands as areas that complicated social and legal boundaries, existing in tension with ideas about race and slavery in the antebellum United States. Rebekah M. K. Mergenthal argues that the Missouri Valley (specifically, the surprisingly permeable boundary between the state of Missouri and the federally designated Indian Territory) functioned as a borderland between slavery and freedom for people of African descent. Mergenthal shows that enslaved people labored in bondage to both white and Native masters in Shawnee territory, where slavery should not have existed according to federal law, and that refugees from slavery along the border often chose to flee to more distant Illinois and Iowa instead. Moving farther south, to antebellum St. Louis and its environs, Julie Winch finds a racial borderland where free people of color flouted legal restrictions that sought to limit their access to education, mobility, and property ownership and crossed racial boundaries as it suited them. Looking at the complicated case of the mixed-race Clamorgan family, Winch finds that the descendants of French trader Jacques Clamorgan and his multiple black concubines navigated complex webs of Spanish and American law in their attempts to defend claims to freedom, property, and various legal privileges. The editors emphasize their inclusion of the Ohio Valley under the borderlands framework as particularly significant. Three of the volume's eight chapters focus on this region. Rob Harper's chapter analyzes Dunmore's War as an example of how borderlands environments created opportunities for building coalitions among diverse peoples. Harper frames modern-day Kentucky as a contested zone in the 1760s and 1770s, where a wide range of British colonists and Native peoples vied for control. Harper argues that through negotiations with rival speculators, land-hungry backcountry settlers, militia officers, and Delaware and Haudenosaunee chiefs, Virginia's last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, fleetingly but successfully asserted claims to a sizable chunk of the southern Ohio Valley. Philip N. Mulder and Michael Pasquier examine the Ohio Valley as both...

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression by C. S. Monaco

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression by C. S. Monaco

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression

The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression

Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal

In U.S. history textbooks, Indian removal often comes across as an episode in southern rather than national history. Authors focus on the expanding cotton economy, Andrew Jackson's Indian hatred, the doomed resistance of the Five “Civilized” Tribes (Cherokees in particular), and the long, slow bleed of the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). In his new study of removal in the Old Northwest, John P. Bowes argues that this southern focus distorts our view of American history. Indian removals occurred in nearly every region of North America, and they took place not during a narrow period but throughout the entire first century of American independence. Removals of one kind or another occupied the agendas of most of the first twenty U.S. presidents. Indian emigrants sometimes moved voluntarily, which led American officials to conclude they could “persuade” others to emigrate with minimal coercion. And removal did not always result in ethnic clean sweeps; Native American families found ways to remain in their old homelands, in many cases to the present day.

Whose War Was It?: African American Heritage Claims and the Second Seminole War

Whose War Was It?African American Heritage Claims and the Second Seminole War C. S. Monaco (bio) Clearly, blacks and Seminoles cooperated during the resistance, and some blacks acted as interpreters, messengers, and even advisors to Seminole leaders. From those facts, however, an unsupportable logical leap precedes the conclusion that interpreting, advising, carrying messages, and knowing about white men equate with ruling. Susan A. Miller, “Seminoles and Africans under Seminole Law”1 Contentious heritage claims based on rival notions of agency and empowerment during the Second Seminole War (1835–42) have surfaced from a group of scholars and from amateur historians who promote the unorthodox idea that African Americans, rather than Indigenous people, constituted the real “backbone” of military resistance.2 Competing claims often accompany memories of war, as victors and losers inevitably bring opposing versions of dramatic events that inflict death and suffering on a massive scale. In this case, however, rival assertions have arisen from the same side that fought and died together in the Florida wilderness in a long but ultimately ill-fated effort to thwart removal efforts by the United States Army. Historian Larry Rivers has recently inverted the standard paradigm of Seminole tragic heroes (Osceola being the most renowned) who led Indian warriors and their black allies into battle by reconfiguring the latter as the war’s principal leaders and by framing their motives as a slave rebellion, not an Indian war. In a fairly audacious move, Rivers even renamed the Second Seminole War as the “Black/Indian Rebellion,” thus rejecting the core concept that the war [End Page 31] was the second of three campaigns that were primarily aimed at Seminoles.3 Other authors, some without formal historical training, have espoused pricklier narratives; one has demanded that blacks reject history that has consigned them to the subservient role of playing “Tonto” to the Seminoles.4 High-end websites have also entered the picture and utilize new media to promote themes of African American volition in Florida.5 Various lectures, symposiums, and conferences, including one under the aegis of the National Park Service, additionally support the thesis of black empowerment and rebellion.6 All this has taken place despite the fact that leading historians of slavery and slave revolts, such as the late Eugene Genovese and Herbert Aptheker (both of whom would hardly have been deterred by controversy), are conspicuous by their omission of any such rebellion. Yet a romanticized freedom fighter motif—one that not only embodies the subaltern struggle against white oppression but also affirms a new power identity amid the Florida backwoods—continues to impact the memory of an extended seven-year conflict that has never been fully integrated into American history and is still poorly understood by nonspecialists. For this and myriad other reasons, such a radical retelling certainly warrants scrutiny. To date, only a single journal article by Seminole historian Susan A. Miller—a former professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University—and a section in Miller’s book Coacoochee’s Bones have confronted the issue.7 In the former, Miller directed a blistering rebuke at those who “cast heroes of African resistance as stars, and made supporting players of the Seminole people.” Indeed, she declared that “Seminole place, identity and history” have been plundered “as raw materials for a triumphalist narrative celebrating the new thread in the history of [African American] people.”8 Despite such heated charges, the most characteristic reaction has been silence, a strong indication of the hazards awaiting historians who dare enter the fray—a veritable heritage minefield.9 At present the concept of black sovereignty appears oddly impervious to critique, and while some mainstream scholars have applauded Rivers, others—particularly military historians—have bypassed this perspective entirely while they continue to apply the standard narrative of Seminole leadership.10 Despite obvious obstacles, including the opposing claims of two groups who have long been oppressed and marginalized and whose historical traditions have been intensely politicized, this essay will nevertheless [End Page 32] attempt to place the notion of black sovereignty into much-needed critical context. Unlike Miller, who assumed a defensive posture in her article, focused on the period after removal, and aimed to...

“Wild People in the Woods”: General Jackson, Savannah Jack, and the First Seminole War in the Alabama Territory

“Wild People in the Woods”: General Jackson, Savannah Jack, and the First Seminole War in the Alabama Territory