The Seminole Wars, Florida's Longest Conflict

The word Seminole likely derives from a Spanish rendering of a Creek word meaning something close to wild or runaway, people who had moved away. The Seminole were not a single ancient tribe but a coalition that formed in Florida across the eighteen hundreds, drawing from Creek bands moving south from Georgia and Alabama, from remnant Florida peoples, and from African Americans who had escaped slavery in the English colonies and found refuge and freedom in Spanish Florida. This mixing produced a distinct Florida people, and their resistance to removal became one of the longest conflicts in American military history.

The First Seminole War in eighteen seventeen and eighteen came when General Andrew Jackson, operating under ambiguous orders from Washington, crossed into Spanish Florida to crush Seminole villages he accused of sheltering runaway enslaved people. Jackson seized the Spanish posts at Saint Marks and Pensacola, executed two British traders he accused of inciting the Seminole, and effectively handed the United States a conquest that the Adams-Onís Treaty of eighteen nineteen then formalized diplomatically. The Second Seminole War, from eighteen thirty-five to eighteen forty-two, was the costliest and longest Indian conflict in American history.

The United States spent an estimated forty million dollars and lost more than fifteen hundred soldiers killed. The Seminole fought a guerrilla war in the wetlands, melting into the Everglades and Big Cypress when pressed, ambushing supply columns from the hammocks. Their military leader, Osceola, became famous across the eastern United States for his skill and his defiant refusal to sign removal treaties.

He was captured under a white flag of truce in eighteen thirty-seven, a violation that scandalized even newspapers sympathetic to the removal policy. He died of illness in captivity in eighteen thirty-eight at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. A Third Seminole War in the eighteen fifties produced further removals but never removed everyone.

Several hundred Seminole retreated deep into the Big Cypress and the Everglades and were never defeated. The Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, both federally recognized today, descend from those who stayed.