Celebrating A Victory for Freedom

[Jacuma]

Celebrating A Victory for Freedom

Written by William Loren Katz
Monday, 17 December 2007
By William Loren Katz

This Christmas Eve, the freedom-loving Bush administration had a chance
to mark the anniversary of a great victory for formerly oppressed people
on U.S. soil. The President is unlikely, however, to notice or heed the
meaning of this particular milestone, whose cast of characters and
historical lessons he would undoubtedly regard as all wrong.

December 24th, 1837 marks the 170th anniversary of the U.S. government's
first significant military defeat in its first foreign incursion. The
place was Florida, then a Spanish colony. The foe was a united force of
Africans, on the run from the south's slave plantations, and Seminoles,
whose self-determination was endangered.

The runaway Africans had been establishing prosperous, self-governing
communities in the peninsula since 1738. During the American Revolution
they merged with Seminole Indians into a multicultural nation that
cultivated crops according to techniques learned in Senegambia and
Sierra Leone. Out of this came an alliance that shaped effective
diplomatic and military responses to invaders and slave catchers.

By the early 19th century, U.S. slaveholding classes saw these groups as
a clear and present threat to their system of wealth production through
chattel slavery. Hoping to plug the leak, they began invading Florida
during the administration of President James Madison, father of the U.S.
Constitution and Virginia slaveholder.

Then in 1811, Madison authorized covert U.S. military operations to
assist the posses, and in 1816 General Andrew Jackson invaded, seeking
annexation. A leader in that invasion, Army Lt. Colonel Duncan Clinch,
reported: "The American negroes had principally settled along the
Appalachicola River and a number of them had left their fields and gone
over to the Seminoles on hearing of our approach. Their corn fields
extended nearly fifty miles up the river and their numbers were daily
increasing."

Spain, whose claim to Florida rested on a visit by Ponce De Leon and
imperial hubris, gave in to U.S. persuasion and agreed to sell the
colony. But this led to a protracted U.S. occupation known as the “Three
Seminoles Wars." In 1837, the well-informed Major General Sidney Thomas
Jesup found that Africans had become resistance leaders.

He stated: "Throughout my operations I have found the negroes the most
active and determined warriors; and during conferences with the Indian
chiefs I ascertained they exercised an almost controlling influence over
them."

Citing the dangers presented by the two peoples from different
continents having forged a single nation, he said, "The two races, the
negro and the Indian, are rapidly approximating; they are identical in
interests and feelings . . . . Should the Indians remain in this
territory the negroes among them will form a rallying point for runaway
negroes from the adjacent states; and if they remove, the fastness of
the country will be immediately occupied by negroes."

Although U.S. forces destroyed crops, cattle and horses, violated
agreements, and seized women and children as hostages, the multicultural
Seminoles, as they protected their families and homes, ran circles
around the technologically and numerically superior invaders. U.S.
tactics aimed at racially dividing the Africans and Seminoles also
failed. "The negroes rule the Indians,� Jesup observed, and to seek
peace, “it is important that they should feel themselves secure." But
peace lay two decades in the future.

The day before Christmas in 1837, U.S. Colonel Zachary Taylor marched
1,000 troops in pursuit of about 400 Seminoles. Commander Wild Cat and
his sub-chief, the African Seminole known as John Horse, positioned
their black and red marksmen in trees and tall grass in the northeast
corner of Florida's Lake Okeechobee. As Taylor's 180 Missouri riflemen,
800 soldiers from the U.S. Sixth, Fourth, and First Infantry Regiments
and 70 Delaware scouts approached, the wary Delawares hesitated, then
fled. Next, the Missourians broke and ran. Taylor then ordered his
regular Army forward, reporting later that pinpoint Seminole rifle fire
had brought down "every officer, with one exception, as well as most of
the non-commissioned officers" and left "but four . . . untouched."


On Christmas morning Taylor found the Seminoles had fled in canoes. He
counted 26 U.S. dead and 112 wounded, found less than half a dozen slain
Seminoles and took no prisoners. This Second Seminole War alone
(1835-1842) would involve U.S. Naval and Marine units, at times half of
the Army, cost 1500 military deaths and taxpayers $30,000,000.

Once his decimated army limped back to Fort Gardner, Zachary Taylor won
promotion by claiming, "the Indians were driven in every direction."
Later, his self-promotion as an "Indian fighter," won Taylor election as
the 12th President of the United States.

Lake Okeechobee was the Army's worst defeat in Florida. But the truth of
that battle and the war remain buried or distorted. For example, Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr. in The Almanac of American History, wrote: "Fighting
in the Second Seminole War, General Zachary Taylor defeats a group of
Seminoles at Okeechobee Swamp, Florida." Well, not exactly.

The Seminoles' sustained and heroic resistance to the new American
Republic's first foreign invasion created one of liberty's proudest
moments. Those who cherish freedom-fighters should know their story.
And how about those in power who have a penchant for waging "preemptive"
wars?
__________________________________________________ ___________
Copyright William Loren Katz. He is the author of BLACK INDIANS: A
HIDDEN HERITAGE [Atheneum Publishers] from which this article is
adapted. His website is: http://www.williamlkatz.com