Last in Their Class - James Robbins

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Corps, which would not provide him with lumber or other supplies he needed to establish his post. He poured out his scorn in his diary in pages of invective. “A dolt, dunce, dullard, anything could be a Q. Master now-a-days. . . . The first official act of the Q. Master is to make himself comfortable—the second more comfortable—the third most comfortable—the last to make everyone else as uncomfortable as the licenses of the services will permit. . . . ’Tis a villainous trade.”33 His rudimentary defenses would be insufficient to ward off a Seminole assault, and he noted that he would be “extremely obliged if the Indians would give me a wide berth in their various excursions through the country.”34 It was a sore point for Wyche, who had previously served at a post the Seminoles had infiltrated and burned. He was forced to overwork his troops, with whom he empathized because they reminded him of “some galley slave chained to the bench.”35 Many fell sick, others “chop their feet or do something else (accidentally of course) to excuse them from duty.” By the end of his first month in the field, Wyche was finally sent some nails for construction, but unfortunately no hammers. He noted, “I’m most essentially disgusted.”36

      Despite Hunter’s assessment, the squares had some impact. Few Indians were apprehended, but the system of outposts began to corral the Seminoles, and more bands made peace and were moved west. So much progress had been made that General Macomb himself came to Fort King to parley with the Seminoles over ending the war. He reached an agreement with several of the remaining chiefs, represented by Halleck Tustenuggee, in which the Indians were to move south of Pease Creek and Lake Okeechobee, to live unmolested until other arrangements could be made. On May 20, 1839, with great ceremony, General Macomb declared the cessation of hostilities. “The Major General commanding in chief has the satisfaction of announcing to the Army in Florida, to the authorities of the Territory, and to the citizens generally, that he has this day terminated the war with the Seminole Indians.” The Indians withdrew south, Macomb returned to Washington, settlers began to return to the land, and politicians and the public focused on other matters.

      One of the provisions of the peace agreement was that a trading post be established in the Seminole lands, and oversight of the task fell to Lieutenant Colonel William Selby Harney of the Second Dragoons. Harney was thirty-nine years old, six foot three, physically commanding, handsome, confident, and suspicious of the Seminoles. He was from a well-to-do Tennessee family, a neighbor and friend to Andrew Jackson, who employed Harney’s brother James as his personal lawyer. The site chosen for the trading post was Charlotte Harbor, a riverside pine barren twelve miles from the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. Twenty-six men, a storekeeper and clerks were building the post. The truce was holding, and Indians peacefully came and went, expressing satisfaction with the pact.

      On the night of July 22, 1839, Harney sacked out half clothed after a boar hunt. At daylight the next morning, 160 Indians led by a chief named Chakaika mounted a surprise attack. Many of the attackers had been to the post many times and knew exactly where to strike. They had surrounded the large hospital tent being used as quarters for most of the men and tore into it simultaneously. Eighteen were killed, most of them in their beds, some pursued to the river and shot, others led to safety by supposedly friendly Indians and then struck down. Seminoles looted the stores, taking thousands in silver coins and materiel. Fourteen men escaped, including Harney, who ran to the river in his underwear and swam for it, then floated downstream in an Indian dugout. Other survivors were forced to hide for days, evading roving Indians and eating raw oysters and fiddler crabs.

      The attack sundered the truce. A new wave of Indian violence followed, and public confidence plummeted. Secretary of War Joel Poinsett came under fire by the president’s political opponents for his conduct of the hostilities. He was accused of lying to the public and to Congress about the progress of the war and about its costs. The budget was a particularly sensitive issue. Martin Van Buren had inherited a growing economy and the only Treasury surplus in United States history.37 However, he stepped immediately into a recession, the Panic of 1837, and the public account went back into debt. The economy failed to recover and the president was tagged with the nickname “Martin Van Ruin.” War expenses were so great that some critics argued it would be cheaper just to pay the Seminoles to behave. Northerners saw the war as a means of gathering slaves or guaranteeing Florida’s admission as a slave state. But the most celebrated dispute arose over bloodhounds.

      On his own initiative Governor Call imported thirty-three bloodhounds from Havana, where they had been trained to track runaway slaves, to be used for locating Indians. Taylor, highly skeptical of the efficacy of the dogs, allowed two to be used on a test basis. The experiment was a failure; Wyche, who observed the use of the bloodhounds, wrote, “Dogs of no value whatever . . . the last hope of terminating the war has proved a chimera—a humbug—a hoax.”38 In the Washington echo chamber, the bloodhounds became a national issue far out of proportion to their importance. Many believed the purpose of the dogs was to run down and maul the Indians. Petitions from all parts of the country were laid before Congress to protest this inhumane method of war. The War Department denied responsibility for the move and sent firm instructions to the field that the dogs be muzzled and kept on leashes to ensure that they could only track and did not actually bite the Seminoles. An editorial cartoon showed dogs receiving brevet promotions, and congressman and former president John Quincy Adams submitted a taunting resolution that “the Secretary of War be directed to report to this House the natural, political and martial history of the bloodhounds, showing the peculiar fitness of the class of warriors to be the associates of the gallant Army of the United States . . . and whether he deems it expedient to extend to the said bloodhounds and their posterity the benefits of the pension laws.”39 The issue was a symptom of an administration that had lost its direction. The futile war that Van Buren had inherited from Andrew Jackson helped end his chances at reelection. He lost to William Henry Harrison, famous for defeating the Indians at Tippecanoe, who died after a month in office, leaving the war to President John Tyler.

      War Without End

      THE SEMINOLE WAR WAS HAVING a devastating effect on the Army. Morale was poor in both officer and enlisted ranks. Where enlisted men chose to escape by desertion, officers resorted to resignation. In the first year of the war, 117 Regular Army officers had resigned, with an average of thirty per year thereafter leaving the colors. Some were frustrated at their inability to find or engage the enemy, others by the seeming ineptitude of their commanders; still others were fed up with life in the Florida wilds. Above all, they were perturbed by a war that refused to come to a close. As an Army camp song put it,

       Ever since creation,

       The best calculation,

       The Florida war has been raging;

       And ’tis our expectation

       That the last conflagration

       Will find us the same contest waging.

      There was some sympathy for the Indians, even among the soldiers, that echoed the thoughts of the admirers of Osceola. Captain Hitchcock stated that the Seminoles have “nobly defended their country against our attempt to enforce a fraudulent treaty.”40 Lieutenant John T. Sprague wrote that “Their sin is patriotism, as true as ever burned in the hearts of the most civilized.”41 The Indians were compared to the Founding Fathers, fighting for “their homes, their property, their families, and their rights.”42 Wyche, upon receiving a “no prisoners” order from Colonel Taylor, wondered why he would issue such an inhumane directive and vowed to his diary that “No Indian prisoner while under my command shall suffer a premeditated death. I should be proud of an opportunity of showing my utter disrespect for such an order.”43 His experiences in the war had convinced him that there was something fundamentally unjust about the conflict. “I’ve tried every argument to still my conscience,” he wrote, “but this restless imp will not be quiet. . . . Have God and justice no claims upon you prior and paramount to a government, that incites you to the commission of a crime? . . . Is not every act of the Indians sanctioned by the practices of civilized nations?”44 The Army began to adapt to Indian warfare, developing guerilla-style units and tactics. Though these irregular methods were controversial, they were effective; but for every success against the Seminoles, there were cruel reminders that the war

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