Last in Their Class - James Robbins

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flank, no doubt broken through and descended on the Indian settlement they had been seeking.

      The Battle of Wahoo Swamp ended inconclusively, as many other such battles had. Seven of the forty-nine graduates of the USMA Class of 1836 were at this battle, and in all there were about sixteen West Pointers on the field. Lieutenant Colonel Brown was brevetted for gallant conduct.20 Morris would receive a brevet a few months later for Wahoo and other services. There were nineteen American casualties. Seven enlisted men were killed in action. David Moniac was the only officer to die on the field. Marine Lieutenant Ross, mortally wounded, died that evening. In his report to General Call, Colonel Pierce wrote, “I think it a brilliant day, redounding to the honor of our arms, and calculated to bring the war to a speedy termination.”21

      IN THE FIRST YEAR OF THE Seminole conflict, the War Department claimed to have killed only 131 Indians and captured 15.22 Estimates of total enemy forces were still uncertain, but a field intelligence report from July 1837 calculated 1,513 Seminole warriors in the theater of conflict, double Secretary Cass’s high estimate at the outbreak of war and almost four times Jackson’s estimate.23 Failure to pacify the territory incited further political squabbles in Washington. There were rivalries between generals and other officers, political interference and sniping at the president and the secretary of war, congressional hearings, debates in the press, and backroom deals with contractors seeking to benefit from the newly doubled War Department budget. In Florida, commander followed commander as battles were fought to inconsequential and expensive victories.

      One bright spot in the conflict was the capture of Osceola in October 1837. He had been taken without bloodshed during a parlay, a controversial but effective subterfuge ordered by the new field commander, Major General Thomas S. Jesup. For security reasons, Osceola was removed to Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, where he was treated as a celebrity. Portraitists flocked to the city to capture the image of the terror of the swamps. He graciously sat for them in full panoply: white smock, red bandanna over his cropped black hair, topped with a black-and-white feather. The portraits showed a strong face, stately and confident, in some pictures looking benevolent, but never warlike or fierce. He had expressive eyes and a Roman nose, and the paintings very much conveyed the image of an aboriginal sovereign that the romantics made of him.24

      Osceola would not long enjoy this renown. He had been suffering from an unknown sickness since the time of his capture, and at the end of January 1838 he died, surrounded by his family. By then Osceola was well on his way to becoming a folk hero, in part because of the idealization of his struggle, and also because the way he was captured was seen as unfair. Many outside of Florida condemned Jesup’s move. Lucy Hooper, a young poet who wrote a lengthy paean to Osceola, said that Jesup’s stratagem was “a transaction which should ever cover the officer’s name with lasting infamy.” Another poet, the Reverend John Pierpoint, said that Jesup had dishonored “a flag that [even] Tartar hordes respect.”25 As late as 1858, Jesup was called upon publicly to defend his actions.26 Meanwhile Osceola, in death, had become the epitome of the noble savage. Counties, towns and ships were named after him, poems and memorials written in his honor. The men he had killed and his role in planning the Dade Massacre and other atrocities were forgotten, but the war he had incited ground on.

      LIEUTENANT RICHARD B. SCREVEN served in Florida with the Fourth Infantry. He had continued his studies at West Point after his reprieve in the Eggnog Mutiny and graduated last in the Class of 1829. Like William W. Morris he had been escorting Indians west when the war broke out; his unit moved south and got into the action within weeks. Screven had fought in several heavy skirmishes, and in December 1837 the Fourth Infantry moved into the interior for what he hoped would be the final battle.

      Screven was part of a column of 1,350 troops, four-fifths of whom were regulars, heading south into the heart of the Seminole stronghold, led by Colonel Zachary Taylor. Over 400 Seminoles awaited Taylor’s force in a prepared position near Lake Okeechobee, led by Alligator, Coacoochee (also known as Wild Cat) and Halleck Tustenuggee, a six foot two inch Mickasukie warlord with a fanatical following. Their defensive bastion was in a broad hummock fronted by a half-mile-deep swampy glacis, with waist-deep water and five-foot saw grass. The Indians were deployed in three groups; they had fixed their fields of fire, cut corridors in the tall grass, and rested their rifles in notches cut into the cypress trees. Lake Okeechobee was to their rear, with escape routes to the right and left. They had planned to meet a frontal assault, and Taylor did not disappoint them.

      Taylor deployed a regiment of Missouri Volunteers as a skirmish line, followed by the Fourth and Sixth Infantry regiments, with the First Infantry in reserve. The Missourians moved forward at 12:30 P.M. into the teeth of the Seminole fire, and their commander, Colonel Gentry, went down at once, mortally wounded. The militiamen ducked, seeking shelter, and the troops behind them opened up on the Indians. Some of the Missourians were wounded in the crossfire and many fell back. The Seminoles kept up their accurate fire, raking the two regular infantry regiments. Almost every officer and noncom was wounded. Colonel Alexander Ramsey Thompson, Class of 1812 and son of Mrs. Thompson whose rooms were so much in demand at West Point, was struck down leading the Sixth Infantry. He exhorted his men to “Remember the regiment to which you belong!” before succumbing.

      After two and a half hours of bloody stalemate, Taylor attempted a flanking maneuver.27 He sent the reserve force to hit the Indians on their right. The enemy flank buckled, and the main body of the Seminole force scattered back towards the lake. Screven and some elements of the Fourth gave chase until nightfall. Taylor was left holding the field, but there was no chance to exploit the victory, if it could be called that. The Indians took 25 casualties, 11 of them killed. Taylor’s force suffered 138 casualties, 26 killed. William H. T. Walker of the Sixth Infantry, a Georgian who had graduated from West Point that spring close to the bottom of the Class of 1837, was “literally shot to pieces” by one account, having four balls pass through his body and being grazed by several more. Remarkably, he survived.28 Colonel Gentry, in his last minutes, made a final request to Taylor: “be as easy on [the Missouri militia] as you can in your report.”29 But Taylor did not honor the request; his account as much as accused the Missourians of cowardice, leading to another political row in Washington. Despite angry calls for his resignation, Taylor was promoted to brigadier general.

      Taylor took over command in Florida the next spring. Jesup, shot through the cheek leading troops at the Battle of Lockahatchee, had grown weary of the conflict. During his tenure in Florida, 2,400 enemy had been captured or killed, 700 of whom were warriors.30 These numbers were greater than the initial estimates of total Seminole strength, and yet the conflict continued. In the spring of 1838, Jesup wrote to the War Department questioning the wisdom of continuing the costly war against such an elusive enemy, fighting over ground that white farmers would never settle even if it were secured. But his views were not shared by the secretary of war, and in May 1838 he was transferred.

      Taylor too had been frustrated by the conduct of the war, and wrote his friend Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky that were he a member of Congress, he “would never vote to appropriate a dollar to carry it out under present circumstances.”31 Like Jesup, he believed that if the remaining few Seminoles were left confined to their wilderness refuges they would pose no particular threat, certainly not one worth the effort currently being undertaken. Taylor’s innovation was the system of “squares,” twenty miles on a side, that he mapped out in the spring of 1839. His idea was to establish a grid in the area of resistance, with a garrison in the middle of each square connected by roads. Each garrison commander would have the responsibility to send out regular mounted patrols and gradually take control of the whole area.

      Lieutenant Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, commanding F Troop, Second Dragoons, was sent to establish a post on the bank of the St. Johns River, with few supplies, no guide, no map, and “wholly ignorant of the country in which I am expected to operate.”32 Wyche had been in Florida for several years and had not seen major action. At “Fort Hunter” he sent out periodic patrols but

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