The Civilized and the Savage:

The Army’s Ethical Conduct in The Second Seminole War

David Wayne Rolfs

Florida State University

       The idea that nations should try to wage just wars was first articulated by the Roman lawyer and statesman Cicero in the first century b.c. Later Cicero’s just war principles were given a Christian context, and re-introduced by Saint Augustine to encourage pacifist Christians to defend Constantine’s empire from the Barbarians. In his Summa Theologica treatise, Saint Thomas Aquinas took Augustine’s principles and systematized them into a just war doctrine that was eventually canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Originally this doctrine concerned itself primarily with the legitimate conditions for going to war or, jus ad bellum. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries however, the Counter-Reformation theologians Francis de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez developed jus in bello, or additional conditions that had to be observed if a war was to be waged justly.

       Unfortunately, the Church proved incapable of honoring its own just war doctrine. During the Thirty Years War the Catholic Church often endorsed the use of unlimited violence in its holy crusade to purge Europe of Protestant heretics. The horrors of this religious war prompted Hugo Grotius’ seminal work, On the Law of War and Peace, which successfully merged both jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria into a secular, humanistic version of the earlier Catholic doctrine and created the international rules of war later recognized by Western Europe and the fledgling United States.

       The Second Seminole War, one of America’s most protracted Indian wars, presents an excellent case study for examining how well professional military values held up in the context of North American Indian conflicts. While several scholars have evaluated the war from a jus ad bellum perspective, this paper will focus primarily on the principles of jus in bello, or whether the United States waged a just war against the Seminole Indian Tribe of Florida.[1]

       This investigation of potential just war violations by the U.S. military during the Second Seminole War addresses three important questions. First, were the alleged perpetrators of these crimes familiar with just war concepts? Second, what was the nature of these charges, or how did the United States Army violate jus in bello criteria during the war? Finally, if regular army officers did violate just war rules during the Second Seminole War and other North American Indian conflicts, why did they do so?

       From the very beginning of the English Colonial experiment in North America, many professional English military officers were familiar with the international conventions governing warfare. For example, during the Colonial Indian wars in New England, Puritan soldiers like John Mason and Myles Standish justified their sometimes questionable military conduct using principles derived from the mediaeval just war code.[2] Later, in the early national period, the new American government also carefully tried to observe this international legal code both in its foreign relations with Europe and its relations with neighboring Indian tribes. The Northwest Ordinance affirmed that the Indians “land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty they shall never be invaded or disturbed unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.”[3] Secretary of War Henry Knox reiterated the Ordinance’s language in a letter to President George Washington stating, “Indian land can only be taken from them by consent or by right of conquest in a just war.”[4] Even outspoken Western nationalists like Andrew Jackson, surely no friend of the Indian, were familiar with just war principles governing retaliation against recalcitrant tribes.[5]

       By the 1820s, the new United States Military Academy at West Point was institutionally committed to the ideal of fighting just wars against its future enemies. The U.S. Military Academy had adopted Vattel’s internationally recognized text, Law of Nations, as its official source for the rules of war. In his legal treatise, Vattel devoted considerable space to a modern discussion of Grotius’s jus in bello principles. These jus in bello principles dealt with three principal issues: (1) who could lawfully be attacked in a war between two nations; (2) what means could lawfully be used to attack them; and (3) how should enemy hostages and prisoners be treated?[6]

       So how well did these new professional military values hold up in the context of a North American Indian war? In the case of the Second Seminole War, not so well as some U.S. officers were apparently more concerned with defeating the Seminoles than honoring their professional code of conduct. Allegations concerning the army’s violation of truces, use of unnecessarily extreme measures, and mistreatment of hostages and prisoners during the war must therefore be carefully examined.

       The most flagrant examples of the U.S. Army violating truces with the Seminole Indian Tribe took place during the third year of the war. In December, 1836, Brevet Major General Thomas Sidney Jesup was transferred to Florida with orders to subdue the Seminoles and ship them west, a task his two predecessors had proven incapable of completing. During the first months of his command Jesup appeared to be optimistic about the course of the war. Hard fighting in January of 1837 had forced some of the Seminole leaders to come to the bargaining table. A truce was negotiated at Fort Dade, and in March some of the Seminole leaders agreed to establish a permanent cease-fire and immediately migrate west of the Mississippi.[7] By the end of April however, with the truce still in effect, it had become clear that some bands of the Seminole Tribe, including Osceola’s, had no intention of honoring the March migration agreement.

       Perhaps the most frustrating defeat for Jesup came on June 2nd, when Osceola led a raid on the detention camps housing Seminoles awaiting transport to the West. Nearly 700 Seminoles, including those who had come in since January, escaped.[8] Jesup, who had received prior warning of the raid and tried to circumvent it, blamed his subordinates for the fiasco and became increasingly bitter about the Seminoles’ continued resistance. He now accepted his predecessors’ conclusion that the Indian migration strategy was doomed to failure, and in June asked his superiors to be relieved of command.

       Before leaving Florida however, Jesup decided to try and redeem his military reputation and punish the Seminoles for their intransigence. Over the summer months Jesup stepped up his campaign to divide the Seminoles from their African-American allies, and this strategy produced immediate results. One of the ex-slaves that came in was John, a slave that had served King Philip, the head of the Seminole Tribe. John agreed to lead his captors to Chief Philip’s secret hideout, which led to Philip’s capture. Three weeks later, on October 27, 1837, Osceola and Coa Hadjo sent word that they wished to arrange a parley. Jesup agreed to the peace conference but ordered his subordinate, General Hernandez, to try and capture the two Seminole leaders during the meeting. When the two opposing parties met near Fort Peyton under a white flag of truce, General Hernandez sprang his trap, and surrounded the Indian party with 250 mounted soldiers. Osceola and Coa Hadjo, and over eighty of their fellow tribesmen and allies, were taken into captivity.

       In late December, the U.S. government also sent in a Cherokee delegation to try and convince Micanhopy, the chief of the Alachuas, to surrender. Once again, Jesup repeated his treacherous strategy. The Cherokee delegates successfully persuaded Micanhopy and his chiefs to come in under a white flag of truce to parley with Jesup. When the Cherokees failed to bring in the rest of the Seminoles, however; Jesup seized Micanhopy and his headsmen as hostages and had them transported to St. Augustine’s Castillo de San Marcos. The Cherokee delegation was understandably outraged. They protested that Micanhopy had come in under a flag of truce and added that they had personally guaranteed his safe conduct, but Jesup remained indifferent.[9]

       Jesup’s tactics may have helped turned the tide in the Second Seminole war, but when word leaked out about his methods, national newspapers condemned his acts of duplicity.[10] One such example was the Niles National Register, which after congratulating Jesup for his capture of Osceola disclaimed “…all participation in the “glory” of this achievement of American generalship, which, if practiced towards a civilized foe would be characterized as a violation of all that is noble and generous in war.”[11]

       The U.S. House of Representatives also immediately passed a resolution calling on the Secretary of War to answer “whether any Seminole Indians, coming in under a flag of truce, or brought in by Cherokee Indians, acting as mediators, have been made prisoners by General Jesup.” The subsequent report included a letter drafted by the government’s Indian agent, John Ross, which castigated Jesup’s interference in the Cherokee diplomatic mission. In his letter Ross expressed his outrage over this “…unprecedented violation of that sacred rule which has ever been recognized by every nation, civilized and uncivilized, of treating with all due respect those who had ever presented themselves under a flag of truce before their enemy…”[12]

       Regular Army officers serving in Florida also privately voiced their disapproval with Jesup’s actions, which were a clear violation of the rules of war.[13] Vattel had been very specific in his instructions concerning truces: “if the truce has been entered into…it would be bad faith to make use of it to gain some advantage….[and] To seize subjects of the enemy or property belonging to him, unless some special provocation has been given, is an act of hostility, and consequently not permissible during a truce.”[14]

       Though never formally proven guilty, Jesup spent the rest of his life trying to assert his innocence in the matter.[15] The most troubling aspect of Jesup’s defense, however, was its evolving nature; the accused kept changing his story. His first explanation of his conduct, offered in a letter submitted to the Army Navy Chronicle, claimed that it was Osceola’s raid on the white detention camps and attempt to use the parley to capture white hostages which justified the means used to capture him. The irony of course was Jesup’s accusation that Osceola intended to use a parley to seize hostages for use as bargaining chips described exactly what Jesup himself had done with Osceola and Micanhopy. In the official report Jesup submitted to Congress, however; the principal reasons listed for seizing the Indian delegation were the Seminoles’ murder of a white settler, the Indians’ past deceptions, and their unsatisfactory answers to General Hernandez’ questions.[16] At the time, Jesup offered no detailed explanation for his violation of the second truce which had been negotiated by the Cherokees.

       In a later recollection of the event, however; Jesup introduced arguments broad enough to justify violating both truces. He claimed he did not have to honor truces made with Seminoles because they were prisoners of war, or hostages who had violated their parole by not surrendering and moving west. Therefore Jesup had every right to disregard a truce negotiated with Seminole criminals. Technically, according to Jesup’s interpretation of the just war doctrine, he could have executed Osceola and his subchiefs as bandits, but Jesup had instead mercifully spared their lives in the interest of humanity and hopefully hastening the end of the war.[17] This radical re-interpretation of jus in bello, however, which viewed subjects of a nation who broke a treaty as bandits worthy of death, clearly contradicted the spirit of Vattel’s advice concerning hostages.[18]

       Jesup also argued that the policy of his command had always been to seize and detain any Seminoles bearing white flags.[19] Yet this was obviously not true. Jesup had allowed Phillip’s son Coacoochee, or Wildcat, to come in and go out freely under the white flag of truce in October. On this occasion Jesup wrote: “The Seminole chief Coacoochee having, as General Hernandez informs me, come in as a bearer of a flag, I have, on full consideration of all the circumstances of the case, considered it due to the sanctity of the flag to permit him to return.”[20]

Perhaps the most damning evidence of his guilt came from Jesup himself. On June 7, several days after Osceola’s “illegal” liberation of the Seminole hostages, Jesup made the following revelation in a letter addressed to Secretary of War Poinsett:

The principal Seminole chiefs met me in council on the 1st instant [sic], and I might have seized them and captured their camp; but such an act would have been an infraction of the treaty, and the capture of two or three hundred Indians would have been a poor compensation for the violation of the national faith; the Indians now have no confidence in our promises, and I, as the representative of the country here, was unwilling to teach a lesson of barbarism to a band of savages.[21]

       After his humiliating June 2 defeat by Osceola, Jesup’s despair over his lost opportunity began to fuel a strong desire for revenge against his Seminole enemies. Having abandoned the traditional constraints of civilized warfare, for Jesup it was no longer a question of which means could lawfully be employed against the Indians, but which means would likely be severe enough to break their resistance. Jesup wrote bitterly to Secretary of War Poinsett that:

To rid the country of them you must exterminate them. Is the government prepared for such a measure? Will public opinion sustain it? If so, resort must be had to the bloodhound and the northern Indian.”[22]

       According to Vattel, when determining whether a given war measure was lawful, civilized countries should always ask two questions: first, was it absolutely necessary for overcoming the resistance of the enemy; and second, could a less severe method secure the same end?[23] In light of these questions, the use of Spanish bloodhounds to defeat the Seminoles was probably both extreme and unnecessary.

            As early as the spring of 1837, Jesup had sent word to Osceola that if he and the other subchiefs did not come in, the army would loose Spanish bloodhounds on them.[24] Three years later, Governor Reid of Florida tried to fulfill Jesup’s threat by offering the army sixteen fierce Cuban-imported Bloodhounds that had previously been used to track down runaway slaves. Although the animals proved incapable of tracking the Indians through Florida’s numerous swamps and lakes, when news of the Bloodhound experiment reached the American public, dozens of memorials poured into Congress from all around the country denouncing the contemplated use of this uncivilized weapon against the Indians.[25] The Niles Register asked, “…what can compensate for the impression to be made on the civilized world by the fact of a Christian people employing brute beasts as allies against the untutored savage?”[26]

            In Congress, legislators defending the army’s use of the Bloodhounds tried to dismiss the memorials by claiming they were the product of emotional women and children. These supporters were probably chagrined; however, when illustrious Senators like Daniel Webster and Thomas Benton; and prominent anti-slavery Representatives like Joshua Giddings and John Quincy Adams all took turns publicly addressing the issue.[27]

            Congressional critics of the policy were later relieved when they learned that the national government had not instigated the importation of the Bloodhounds, but they nonetheless passed a special resolution to investigate the affair.[28] In the end, while the hounds were rarely used against the Seminoles, the threat to use such means—delivered to the enemy and circulated throughout the states—cast a dark shadow on the army’s reputation.

            Besides violating truces and adopting unnecessarily extreme measures against the enemy, in his desperate bid to redeem his military career after the disastrous Fort Dade affair, Jesup also mistreated Seminole hostages and prisoners of war. In addition to condemning the murder of hostages, Vattel’s Law of Nations also denounced the practice of threatening hostages or prisoners with bodily injury or death. Here, Vattel’s comments about threatening the life of a besieged enemy commander to hasten victory seem appropriate:

But although you should gain greatly by unlawful conduct, you are not therefore justified in resorting to it. The threat of unjust punishment is itself unjust; it is both an insult and an injury.[29]

       In his discussions related to the treatment of prisoners of war, Vattel claimed that the same just war arguments that gave nations the right to kill their enemies during wartime also placed limits on that right. Typically, when the enemy submitted and laid down his arms, a nation no longer had the right to take his life. Vattel’s rules of war made two important exceptions, however, in the case of an enemy which had gravely violated the laws of war and in the event of a war against savages:

There is one case however, in which we may refuse to give quarter to enemies who surrender, or to accept any terms of capitulation from a town reduced to extremities. This is when the enemy have rendered themselves guilty of some grave violation of the Law of Nations, and especially when they have violated the rules of war. Such a refusal to spare their lives is not a natural consequence of the war, but a punishment of their crime, a punishment which the injured person has a right to inflict. But in order that the punishment may be just, it must fall upon those who are guilty. When a sovereign is at war with a savage nation which observes no rules and never thinks of giving quarter he may punish the Nation in the person of those whom he captures (for they are among the guilty), and by such severity endeavor to make them observe the laws of humanity; but in all cases where severity is not absolutely necessary mercy should be shown.[30]

       Vattel argued that in wars with savages it was permissible for nations to take the lives of enemy prisoners, but he added two corollaries to his interpretation—that punishment should only fall on the guilty, and that whenever possible, nations should treat their enemy mercifully. Thus, while savages were technically guilty and could therefore be killed, Vattel urged that in most cases mercy should triumph over judgement. He clarified exactly what he meant in the next section of the Law of Nations entitled “Retaliation”:

It is a dreadful and extreme measure thus to inflict a miserable death upon a prisoner for the fault of his general and if we have already promised to spare the life of that prisoner, we can not retaliate upon him without injustice. However, as a prince, or his general, is justified in sacrificing the lives of his enemies for his own safety and that of his people, it would seem that if he is dealing with an inhuman enemy who frequently commits atrocities such as that above mentioned, he may refuse to spare the lives of certain prisoners whom he captures, and may treat them as his own men have been treated. But the generosity of Scipio is more worthy of imitation. That great man, having reduced to subjection certain Spanish princes who had revolted against the Romans, told them that if they broke faith with him he would not hold innocent hostages accountable, but themselves; and that he would not avenge himself upon unarmed prisoners, but upon soldiers in open battle….It is thus that an enemy who violates the laws of war is to be checked …[31]

According to Vattel then, even when nations confronted savages—a situation where the enemy could legitimately be denied quarter—nations should mercifully spare the lives of unarmed prisoners. Vattel’s commentary on retaliation contained three important principles. First, in the rare event when justice required that enemy prisoners be punished; only the guilty enemy leader or party should be targeted. Second, if a promise had been made to honor an enemy’s flag of surrender, it would be unjust to take the lives of those that had laid down their arms. The third and final principle suggested that the truly just nation did not avenge its enemies’ crimes by punishing innocent victims, but instead destroyed its adversaries on the battlefield.

       The first recorded incident involving Jesup’s mistreatment of hostages occurred a little over a month after Osceola’s June second liberation raid. An Indian named Holata Mico was threatened with hanging if he did not reveal the location of the Seminole bands that had escaped.[32] Other captives were also told they would be hung if they did not cooperate. Following King Philip’s capture in September, Jesup told Philip’s son Wildcat that if he failed to bring in Philip’s bands, Philip would pay for it.[33] Wildcat had little choice but to obey Jesup’s instructions, and surrendered along with his bands. In December; however, Wildcat successfully escaped from his confinement at St. Augustine’s Castillo de San Marcos. Infuriated by this second successful Seminole escape, Jesup again threatened to punish the father for his son’s actions. Jesup initially declared that Philip would be hung if Wildcat did not immediately turn himself in. After further contemplation however, Jesup instead had Philip and the rest of the Indian captives placed in chains—a punishment most Indians loathed more than death.[34]

       Even after Jesup left the Floridian theater, new commanders continued his deplorable practice of mistreating hostages and prisoners of war. For example, in 1841 General William Jenkins Worth threatened to hang the recently recaptured Wildcat, together with fifteen of his warriors, unless the rest of his tribe surrendered immediately.[35] While these threats were rarely carried out, the Seminoles seemed to take them very seriously. Given their unpredictable relationship with whites from 1820–1840, the Seminoles understandably assumed the worst.

       Since the wartime experiences of General Jesup and other officers who served in Florida indicate that even model U.S. Army officers violated Vattel’s just war code, perhaps it would be helpful to try and understand why they did so. These men were not ignorant concerning the rules of war. For over two decades West Point had been equipping its graduates with an ethical framework for waging war, and judging from the defense Jesup offered for his behavior, even older officers who had not graduated from the Academy were familiar with the principles of just war. These crimes were also not the result of battlefield chaos or stress. Jesup’s illegitimate seizure of Seminole peace delegations and mistreatment of hostages were carefully premeditated strategies, not random acts of violence.

       In Jesup’s case frustration with a protracted and seemingly endless guerilla war probably played an important role in motivating these war crimes. In the spring of 1837 Jesup believed he had successfully pacified the Seminole Tribe. When Osceola’s raid deprived him of his anticipated victory, the general apparently could not reconcile himself to the defeat. Anxious to redeem his reputation and escape Florida, Jesup probably implemented his morally questionable policies because he hoped they would hasten the war’s end.

       Another important factor may have been the American cultural perception of the Indian himself. Most Americans viewed Indians as either noble savages who could be successfully civilized and absorbed into a superior English culture, or more sinisterly as deadly creatures of the forest.[36] In either case, the Indian was somehow not quite as fully human as his or her white counterpart. Thus, as the Second Seminole War progressed, Indians once deemed capable of making treaties with other sovereign nations were gradually transformed into murderous wolves.

       The newspaper letters written by the inhabitants of Florida between 1839–1841 help flush out this devolving, racist image of the Indian. In one such letter, written during the debate over the proposed use of Bloodhounds against the Seminoles, a frontier inhabitant of Florida completely rejected the Seminole’s humanity:

Men, women and children, of every age and color, are slaughtered with wolf-like ferocity….Why, then, should they not be pursued and destroyed by dogs, as are other wild beasts of prey?….Toward such wretches the ordinary rules of war do not apply. They have thrown themselves out of the pale of humanity,…[37]

In other words, the inhumanity of the Indian, and his failure to abide by the rules of war justified whatever means the American soldier employed to destroy him.

       If anything, this tendency to view uncooperative non-whites as dangerous animals, in need of severe discipline, became even more prevalent in the latter part of the 19th Century as the country looked to scientific racism and Social Darwinism for answers to its Negro and Indian problems. The nation’s deteriorating racial climate may explain why some of America’s worst Indian atrocities occurred between the years of 1860 and 1890.[38] During this period, American politicians finally reached a consensus concerning the Indian problem: uncivilized savages who stood outside the pale of humanity would have to either submit to the government’s new reservation system or suffer extinction. Thus, when the Plains Indian Tribes later resisted the government’s new policy, General Sheridan and other regular army officers understandably shared their belief that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.[39]

       There were, however, always a small minority of Americans who rejected this racist image of the Indian and who viewed the Army’s alleged war crimes against the Seminoles with horror and disgust. Even some of the army personnel fighting in Florida privately sympathized with the Indians. John T. Sprague thought the Seminoles only sin was that they were patriotically defending their homes. Other officers believed the government had imposed unjust treaties on the Seminole Tribe, and now had to fight an unjust war to enforce them.[40] Upon learning of the army ethical violations in Florida, one concerned citizen felt compelled to remind Americans that the Seminoles were human beings and the U.S. was still a civilized country:

For whatever may be the opinion of some that Indians are not men, (and from the treatment they have received, we are borne out in the conclusion that they are considered by some, at least, as not within the pale of human beings and, therefore, not entitled to human treatment, or human sympathies,) I shall so consider them, and I believe the great mass of mankind will agree that they should be so considered. Well, then Indians being men, we have but to appeal to our own consciousness, and ask, what means are those which operate most effectually to allay our excitements, and subdue our rage?….Will force—overwhelming force? Ah, yes, sire, that may conquer, but even that cannot subdue. It may enslave, but can never make a friend. It may exterminate—annihilate, I admit this…[but] in what age of the world would the murderous resort be adopted, and the peaceful, as a first step, rejected? Humanity, Christianity, sir, with a voice that may be heard over the length and breadth of the land, answers “NOT IN THIS—NOT IN THIS.” No thank God! The age of the barbarian is gone by with us…[41]

       From a historical perspective, the Second Seminole War represented a critical crossroads for the recently professionalized U.S. Army. Would the army’s new professional military standards hold up in the context of a savage Indian war? Although the Army initially tried to fight within its ethical framework of war, unexpected Seminole resistance ultimately convinced several officers to abandon it. During the Plains Indian Wars, this pattern of behavior would be repeated with even greater frequency as the Army conducted ruthless police actions against intransigent tribes unwilling to submit to a new reservation system. Periodic violations of the Army’s just war code became the norm, and not the rare exception.

            The Army’s professional military code had ultimately proved incapable of overcoming America’s racial hatred of the Indian. Some regular officers obviously had a stronger commitment to their racial stereotype of the Indian than they had to a just war code. Had the Army’s professional code really been enforced by military authorities, it might have helped curtail some of these war crimes against Indians, but it was not. Although unethical military behavior was repeatedly condemned by the public and in national newspapers, it was never seriously addressed by the Army.

            In the end, the Seminole Tribe’s successful resistance to the treaties that dispossessed them of their homeland severely tested the U.S. Army’s ability to fight under its new professional code. In their overwhelming desire to bring the war to a successful conclusion, some officers failed that test. They eventually discarded the rules of civilized warfare and employed savage means to defeat the Seminoles. Frustration with a protracted guerilla war and racial hatred had ultimately blurred the line between the civilized and the savage.

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[1] A few of the modern scholars who have addressed the causes underlying the war include John Mahon, Francis Prucha, Michael Rogin, and Ronald Satz. For the best modern treatment of the war, see John K. Mahon’s, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842. (Gainesville, Florida). In his final analysis of the Payne’s Landing and Fort Gibson Treaties, Mahon concludes that the Seminoles did not recognize the removal treaties as legitimate and it was this rejection that ultimately provoked the war. See John K. Mahon, “Two Seminole Treaties: Payne’s Landing, 1832, and Ft. Gibson, 1833,” Florida Historical Quarterly, XLI (July, 1962), 1–21.

[2] James Drake, “Restraining Atrocity: The Conduct of King Philip’s War,” New England Quarterly (70:1;1997), 35–36. Drake argues that the destruction of the Mystic Village in the earlier Pequot War, along with its inhabitants, was completely justified according to the “Law of Nations,” because the fortified village had failed to surrender.

[3] Richard Perry and John Cooper, Sources of Our Liberties: Documentary Origins of Individual Liberties in the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. (Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co., 1991), “Northwest Ordinance,” 396.

[4] Rogin, Fathers and Children, 128. Originally cited in Merritt Pound’s Benjamin Hawkins: Indian Agent (Athens, Ga, 1951), 52.

[5] Ibid., 160. Jackson revealed as much during the War of 1812, when he threatened Pensacola’s Spanish governor with a letter noting, “It is not on the heads of helpless women and children that retaliation will be made, but on the head which countenanced and excited the barbarity. He is the responsible person, and not the poor savage whom he makes the instrument of execution.”

[6] Paul Christopher. The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues. (New York: United States Military Academy, 1994), 100.

[7] Mahon, 200. The Fort Dade “Capitulation” was negotiated with Jumper, Holatoochee, and Yaholoochee. While Osceola and others refused to honor its terms, Yaholoochee, Micanopy, Jumper, Cloud and Alligator did and later entered the white detention camps in preparation for their travel west. They were subsequently freed by Osceola’s and Sam Jones’ June 2nd raid.

[8] Ibid., 204. Some scholars believe that Jesup’s attempt to divide the Seminoles from their African allies during this sensitive period of negotiations helped incite Osceola’s attack.

[9] Mahon, 223.

[10] George H. Walton, Fearless and Free: The Seminole Indian War, 1835–1842. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 163.

[11] National Register, November 4, 1837. Fifth Series, No. 10, Vol. III, 1.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Walton, 168.

[14] Vattel, 327.

[15] Walton, 166–167.

[16] “Seminole Indians Made Prisoners of War,” H Doc. 327, 25 Congress, 2 session , April 11, 1838, 2–5. Hernandez also reported discovering loaded weapons in the Seminole camp, but not until after Osceola’s party had already been apprehended.

[17] Thomas Sidney Jesup, Seminole Saga: The Jesup Report (Fort Myers, Island Press, 1973), 18. Reprint.

[18] Vattel,197–198. According to Vattel hostages who escaped were to be returned to their original captivity without suffering any additional punishment.

[19] Jesup,16.

[20] U.S. War Department, Executive Documents, 25 Congress, 2 session, 108.

[21] Ibid., 159.

[22] Ibid.

[23]Vattel, 279.

[24] Mahon, 200.

[25] Niles National Register, February 15, 1840, 2–3.

[26] Ibid., 1.

[27] Walton, 210. Here Walton discusses the use of the Seminole War in some of the Congressional debates over slavery.

[28] “To the Employment of Bloodhounds Against the Hostile Indians in Florida,” S Doc. 187, 26 Congress, 1 session, February 17, 1840, 1–3.

[29] Vattel, 282.

[30] Ibid., 280.

[31] Ibid., 281.

[32] Mahon, 209.

[33] Ibid., 214.

[34] Ibid., 229. While Jesup rescinded this order after a few days, he must have known that this was an especially demeaning punishment for the proud Seminoles. In his history of the Second Seminole War, Mahon even suggests that Indian Agent Wiley Thompson’s decision to humiliate Osceola by placing him in chains may have been a major cause of the war.

[35] Walton, 229.

[36] Rogin, 118.

[37] Ibid., August 19, 1840, 1–2.

[38] Richard H. Dillon, North American Indian War. (New York: Facts on File, 1983), 139–250. See for example the “Indian massacres” at Fort Flaunteroy (Fort Lyon), Sand Creek, Washita, and of course, Wounded Knee. Some of these so-called massacres were actually one-sided skirmishes where U.S. cavalry troops armed with cannons attacked villages filled with women and children.

[39] Ibid., 162. Whether or not the expression originated with Sheridan is still debated by historians.

[40] Mahon, 270.

[41] Daily National Intelligencer, March 29, 1841, 3.