[June 25th marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of countless fraught moments across the long history of the so-called “Indian Wars.” There are few more frustrating, more tragic, nor more tellingly American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of those conflicts, leading up to a weekend post on Little Big Horn.]
On two distinct and equally American sides to a more than four-decade conflict.
I blogged about the late 1810s First Seminole War as part of this post on the 1819 Treaty of Adams-Onis, which concluded that conflict and also (especially when it was expanded by the 1821 Transcontinental Treaty, about which I also wrote in that post) ceded the Spanish territory of Florida to the expanding United States. All of those contexts are very relevant to this post as well, so check out that prior post if you would and then come on back for more on the Seminole Wars.
Welcome back! That 1810s conflict came to be known as the First Seminole War because there would be two more over the next four decades: the 1835-42 Second Seminole War, during which the thousands of Seminoles who refused to be forcibly relocated to Indian Territory under the Indian Removal Act fought a guerrilla war against more than 30,000 U.S. soldiers; and the 1855-58 Third Seminole War, in which the few hundred Seminoles who had remained in Florida after the conclusion of that prior war fought against the increasingly sizeable presence of white settlers who had been encouraged to migrate by the 1842 Armed Occupation Act (part of the conclusion of the Second Seminole War, ironically enough). When viewed as a trilogy, those conflicts make plain just how willing and able the U.S. military and government were to treat indigenous communities as enemies and to wage seemingly eternal war on them until they were more or less entirely eliminated from the particular region in question (which, eventually, would be almost every region of the U.S.). As much as I’d like to hate on Andrew Jackson in particular (and he was certainly both the violent driving force behind the First Seminole War, as I traced in that above post, and the creator of the Indian Removal Act), this was clearly a consistent trend across countless presidential administrations, federal governments, military officers, power structures, settler communities, and more.
To quote the one and only Neil McCauley, though, there’s a flip side to that coin. While the story of the First Seminole War is to my mind entirely one of white supremacist and imperial aggression (although of course the Spanish in Florida were their own empire, so I suppose we could say imperial conflict to be most accurate), the story of the Second and Third Seminole Wars is at least as much about indigenous resistance. That’s most overtly the case with those dramatically outnumbered Seminole warriors waging seven years of guerilla warfare on tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers—and then, as one of my favorite scenes in my favorite movie notes, just up and leaving one night rather than surrendering. But it’s most strikingly the case when the few hundred Seminoles still present in Florida fought their own war more than a decade after that mass departure—and indeed, it seems likely that the survivors of that third conflict retreated into the Everglades rather than leaving the state. In a moment when we’re seeing countless acts and movements and communities of inspiring resistance to white supremacist fascism, it’s worth remembering the foundational and enduring histories of such resistance—and the Seminole Wars embody that story, exemplify our best as well as our worst.
Next conflict tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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