by H. W. Brands
Nor would it end until Americans demonstrated that they would—and could—demand respect from all who might be tempted to challenge republicanism. In several letters to Monroe, Jackson sketched a program of military preparedness. The program started with securing the Indian lands along the borders, but it went much further. The federal government should build forts at strategic places along America’s frontiers. It ought to underwrite foundries and armories for the domestic production of weapons. The militia should be reorganized, the army upgraded.
“Then we will have peace,” Jackson predicted, “for then we will be prepared for war. Every man with a gun in his hand, all Europe combined cannot hurt us. And all the world will be anxious to be on friendly terms with us, because all the world will see we wish peace with all but are prepared for defence against those who would wantonly infringe our national rights.”
In January 1818 Jackson received a copy of orders from the War Department to General Gaines to chase Seminole raiders across the border into Florida. The order authorized Gaines to use force against the raiders but forbade him from taking hostile action against Spanish troops or fortifications in the area. Jackson heartily endorsed the first part of the directive. “Your order . . . to enter the territory of Spain and chastise the ruthless savages who have been depredating on the property and lives of our citizens will meet not only the approbation of your country but the approbation of Heaven,” he told Monroe. But he thought the last part of the order could lead to catastrophe. He sketched a likely scenario. “Suppose the case that the Indians are beaten; they take refuge either in Pensacola or St. Augustine, which open their gates to them. To profit by his victory General Gaines pursues the fugitives and has to halt before the garrison until he can communicate with his Government. In the mean time the militia grow restless, and he is left to defend himself by the regulars. The enemy, with the aid of their Spanish friends and Woodbine’s British partisans, or, if you please, with Aury’s force, attacks him. What may not be the result? Defeat and massacre.”
George Woodbine was a British officer who had led Indian troops against American forces during the War of 1812 and was still in Florida; Louis-Michel Aury was a French soldier of fortune employing Florida as a base for attacks on Spain in the name of an independent Mexico. Jackson’s point was that Spanish Florida was a refuge for just such troublemakers, who stirred up the Indians as the British had done for years in the West and the French before them. To declare Spanish towns and forts off limits to American punitive expeditions would simply encourage the miscreants to take refuge there, to the disadvantage and danger of American soldiers and the loss of American honor. Jackson knew that the administration was engaged in diplomacy with Spain and that the president therefore was reluctant to sign an order for action that might upset the talks. Jackson thought that the danger from Florida precluded such delicacy and, in any case, that a bold stroke might move the diplomacy forward. “The whole of East Florida,” he told Monroe, should be “seized and held as an indemnity for the outrages of Spain upon the property of our citizens. This done, it puts all opposition down . . . and saves us from a war with Great Britain or some of the Continental powers combined with Spain.”
Jackson offered to take the responsibility upon himself, sparing the president potential embarrassment.
Let it be signified to me through any channel . . . that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.
At a much later date, the concept of executive deniability would become a standard feature of American foreign policy. Jackson didn’t invent the idea, which certainly originated with some Stone Age Machiavelli. But Jackson’s offer to Monroe is one of the earliest surviving instances of the strategy in American policy. And it threw American politics into a tizzy from which it hadn’t emerged even a decade later when, like so much else involving Jackson’s history, it became an issue in a campaign for president.
Monroe at that later time denied that he had understood Jackson’s offer. “I well remember that when I received the letter from General Jackson . . . I was sick in bed, and could not read it,” Monroe wrote John Calhoun. “You were either present, or came in immediately afterwards, and I handed it to you for perusal. After reading it, you replaced it, with a remark that it required my attention, or would require an answer, but without any notice of its contents. Mr. Crawford came in soon afterwards, and I handed it also to him for perusal. He read it, and returned it in like manner, without making any comment on its contents, further than that it related to the Seminole war, or something to that effect. I never shewed it to any other person.”
Jackson’s memory contradicted Monroe’s. “In accordance with the advice of Mr. Calhoun, and availing himself of the suggestion contained in the letter,” Jackson asserted, “Mr. Monroe sent for Mr. John Rhea (then a member of Congress), showed him the confidential letter, and requested him to answer it. . . . Mr. Rhea did answer the letter, and informed General Jackson”—Jackson was writing in the third person—“that the President had shown him the confidential letter, and requested him to state that he approved of its suggestions.” Jackson obviously wasn’t in Washington to observe Monroe consulting Calhoun or Rhea. His information on this point apparently was contained in the letter from Rhea. Unfortunately for Jackson after the matter became controversial, he burned the letter before he could use it to verify his version of the tale. “General Jackson and Mr. Rhea were both in the city of Washington,” he explained. “Mr. Rhea called on General Jackson, as he said, at the request of Mr. Monroe, and begged him on his return home to burn his reply. He said the President feared that by the death of General Jackson, or some other accident, it might fall into the hands of those who would make an improper use of it.” Jackson gave Rhea the promise he wanted. “Accordingly, after his return to Nashville he burnt Mr. Rhea’s letter, and on his letter-book opposite the copy of his confidential letter to Mr. Monroe made this entry: ‘Mr. Rhea’s letter in answer is burnt this 12th April 1819.’” And in fact Jackson’s letter book did (and does) read that way, except that he inadvertently wrote “1818” for “1819.” On April 12, 1818, Jackson wasn’t in Nashville but in Florida, implementing the strategy that started all the ruckus.
The Seminole War began after an American attack on the Negro Fort. General Gaines had just established himself upstream from the fort, on American soil, when a supply convoy passing the fort en route to his camp came under fire. At least three Americans were killed and one was taken prisoner. An American expedition sent against the fort fell in with some friendly Seminoles who were hunting blacks to enslave. The Americans and the Seminoles made common cause against the Negro Fort, to which they laid siege. For several days nothing much happened. The blacks inside the fort fired their cannons at the Americans and Seminoles, who ducked behind the trees that surrounded the fort. But in late July 1816 an American gunboat reached the fort from the Gulf. It attracted the fire of the fort’s cannon and returned fire of its own. At first the small rounds from the boat simply bounced off the walls of the fort. But then the artillerists increased the elevation of their guns and loaded them with balls heated to glowing. Lobbed over the parapets, one of these balls landed in the large stockpile of powder in the fort. An enormous explosion rocked the entire river valley. Everything inside the fort was flattened, and nearly all the more than three hundred persons there were killed. The Americans and Seminoles who entered the fort as the smoke cleared found it a welter of blood, gore, and body parts. One of the few survivors was the commander of the fort, who explained, apparently under duress, that the American captive had been executed after torture. The commander was given by the Americans to the Seminoles, who killed him.
The success of their joint venture might have disposed the Americans and Seminoles to continue cooperating, and in fact for several months an uneasy peace settled over the border. But Florida remained an outlaw zone, with the Spanish too weak to control what happened there and mos
t of the residents happy to be out of control. The Seminoles resumed their raids on American territory, and American slaves continued their escapes south. Assorted filibusters—would-be revolutionists—launched anti-Spanish operations from Florida across the Caribbean. Smugglers, pirates, and garden-variety criminals made their home among the forests, swamps, and islands of the area.
Jackson determined to clean things up, starting with the Seminoles. He sent Gaines to lecture the Seminole chief King Hatchy on the failings of his tribe. “You have murdered many of my people, and stolen many good horses,” Gaines said. “Many good houses that cost me money you have burned.” Gaines demanded that Hatchy let him pursue the criminals and escaped slaves who had taken refuge in the Seminole lands in Florida. “If you give me leave to go by you against them, I shall not hurt any thing belonging to you.” Gaines said he knew that British agents were fomenting trouble among the Seminoles; these must be cast out. If they weren’t, Hatchy would have only himself to blame. “I have got good strong warriors with scalping knives and tomahawks.”
Hatchy resented Gaines’s arrogant attitude. “It is I who have cause to complain,” he said. For every American killed, several Seminoles had died. What did Gaines propose to do about that? Hatchy denied that he harbored escaped slaves. And as for the Americans’ trouble with the British, that wasn’t the Seminoles’ problem. “It is for you white people to settle those things among yourselves.” Hatchy warned Gaines against getting pushy. “I shall use force to stop any armed Americans from passing my towns or my lands.”
Gaines answered Hatchy indirectly. The head man of a Seminole village on the American side of the border, a place known as Fowltown, had been consorting with undesirables—in Jackson and Gaines’s view—for some time. In November 1817 Gaines dispatched a mounted column to bring him in for questioning. The Seminoles fired on the approaching soldiers, who outnumbered them five to one. The soldiers returned the fire, killing a few of the Seminoles, including one woman, and scattering the rest. The soldiers entered the village and discovered a British military uniform of the kind given by British commanders to their Indian allies, and a letter from British Colonel Nichols to the local chief, describing him as a loyal friend of the Crown. The American soldiers took the letter and uniform as evidence and burned the village.
This angered the Seminoles, including Hatchy. A week later a boat on the Apalachicola River carrying American troops and several women and children was ambushed by Seminoles. Nearly all the Americans were killed and most were scalped. Other attacks followed, on soldiers and civilians alike. During the final weeks of 1817 the border region appeared utterly out of control.
It was at this juncture that Jackson, in Nashville, made his offer to Monroe to settle the Florida question definitively, without implicating the president. Whether or not he received Monroe’s approval, he acted as though he had. He called his West Tennessee volunteers back into service. “With this force, in conjunction with the regular troops,” he explained to War Secretary John Calhoun, “I can act promptly and, with the smiles of heaven successfully, against any force that can be concentrated by the Seminoles and their auxiliaries.” He marched his men south from Nashville, gathering recruits along the way.
The size of his army—which eventually included almost two thousand friendly Creeks, led by William McIntosh, a mixed-race brigadier general in the U.S. Army—strained the supply network in the South. The winter weather didn’t help. “The excessive rains have rendered the roads so bad that I ordered the troops, on their march here, to take their baggage on the wagon horses, and abandon their wagons,” Jackson wrote from Fort Early, on the Flint River in Georgia. “This facilitated their march to this place, which they reached today; and eleven hundred men are now here without a barrel of flour or bushel of corn.”
In March, Jackson reached Fort Scott, a post erected by Gaines in southern Georgia, above the place where the Flint and Chattahoochie rivers come together to form the Apalachicola. Supplies remained short, almost paralyzingly so, leaving Jackson to decide whether to turn back, wait for provisions, or press ahead. Naturally he pressed on. His initiative was rewarded when he met a boat coming up the Apalachicola laden with flour. He continued south to the ruins of the Negro Fort, which he ordered his engineers to rebuild—and rename, as Fort Gadsden, after chief engineer James Gadsden. He was joined by Gaines, who staggered into camp looking quite unlike a general. Gaines’s boat had wrecked upriver; several men had drowned and all the food and extra clothing had been lost. The survivors wandered through the woods for nearly a week before finding Jackson.
While Gaines recovered, Jackson sent McIntosh and the friendly Creeks into East Florida. They encountered some of the Red Stick refugees from the war in Mississippi and resumed that conflict. Conditions were wretched. “The creek swamp was so bad we could not pass it for the high waters,” McIntosh explained to Jackson, regarding his approach to the camp of an enemy chief. “My men had to leave their clothes and provisions and swim better than one half of the swamp, about six miles wide.” McIntosh and his men surrounded the camp and carefully closed in. But the chief and most of the warriors somehow slipped the cordon and escaped. McIntosh rounded up those left behind: “fifty-three men and one hundred and eighty women and children.”
McIntosh and others sent Jackson reports on the men presumed to be leading the Seminole resistance. One, a prophet named Francis, was a fugitive from the Creek War who had never accepted defeat and was determined to continue the struggle against Jackson and the Americans. Another, Alexander Arbuthnot, was a British national—Scot, to be precise—who had traded among the Seminoles for some while and was thought to be encouraging them to fight American encroachment. Jackson learned that these and other resisters, including runaway slaves from the United States, were headed for St. Marks, a Spanish fort east of the Apalachicola and above Apalachee Bay. “It is all important that these men should be captured and made examples of,” he declared.
Jackson left Fort Gadsden in late March and linked up with McIntosh’s Creek regiment on April 1. Later that day the combined force encountered a small party of hostile Indians occupying a point of land amid a swamp. “They maintained for a short period a spirited attack from my advanced spy companies, but fled and dispersed in every direction upon coming in contact with my flank columns,” Jackson wrote Calhoun. Jackson’s column occupied a Seminole village whose inhabitants had dispersed in advance of the invaders; he ordered the houses burned and the village’s corn stores seized. If Jackson had wanted evidence to warrant the destruction, he soon found it. “In the council houses . . . more than fifty fresh scalps were found, and in the center of the public square, the old Red Sticks’ standard, a red pole, was erected, crowned with scalps.”
The grisly sight drove Jackson toward St. Marks. Though the fort was nominally Spanish, its garrison was too weak to keep foreigners and Indians out—and even less able to fend off Jackson. He ordered his troops to surround the fort while he delivered an ultimatum to the Spanish commander chastising Spain for failure to keep order in Florida and asserting an American right of self-defense in doing what Spain couldn’t do or wouldn’t. He unpersuasively asserted that he came “not as the enemy, but as the friend of Spain,” and added, a bit more credibly, that Spanish property would be protected. Then he gave the order to occupy the place and packed the Spanish commandant off to Pensacola.
“I may fairly say that the modern Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed,” Jackson wrote Rachel, referring to the Seminole village and St. Marks. “These two places were the hot bed of the war.” In St. Marks Jackson’s men captured Arbuthnot. “I hold him for trial.” The prophet Francis and another chief were lured onto an American vessel in the harbor, thinking it was British. The captain delivered the two to Jackson, who heard testimony of their involvement in the torture, murder, and mutilation of Americans. “These were hung this morning,” he told Rachel.
The capture of St. Marks, while satisfying, didn’t end the war. Too ma
ny hostiles had escaped east. “Tomorrow I shall march for the Suwanee River,” Jackson wrote Calhoun on the second day in control of St. Marks. His objective was the stronghold of Bowlegs, a Seminole chief who harbored warriors, fugitive slaves, and sundry others with neither respect for nor fear of Americans or their laws. Between St. Marks and Bowlegs’s village lay a hundred miles of waterlogged forest and plain.
McIntosh and his Creeks were the first to encounter resistance, in the form of a large group of enemy Creeks. “They were in a bad swamp, and fought us there for about an hour,” McIntosh reported. “They ran and we followed them three miles. They fought us in all about three hours. We killed thirty-seven of them, and took ninety-eight women and children and six men prisoners, and about seven hundred head of cattle.” McIntosh’s company lost only three men killed and five wounded.
On the seventh day from St. Marks, Jackson’s column neared the Suwanee, where he hoped to capture or kill Bowlegs and end the conflict. He pressed his men forward, only to find the route blocked by a lake still several miles short of Bowlegs’s town. “Here I should have halted for the night had not six mounted Indians (supposed to be spies) who were discovered, effected their escape,” he explained to Calhoun. Knowing the riders would report the approach of the invaders, Jackson ordered his men back on the march. The combined force of Americans and friendly Creeks struck Bowlegs’s town at sunset. They killed a handful of Indians and blacks and took a few prisoners, including a British national named Robert Ambrister. But the main body of the enemy crossed the river and vanished even farther east.