[News] Christmas Eve Freedom Fighters
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Dec 24 11:06:47 EST 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/katz12242009.html
December 24, 2009
The Battle of Lake Okeechobee
Christmas Eve Freedom Fighters
By WILLIAM LOREN KATZ
This Christmas Eve marks the 172nd anniversary of a battle for
liberty in 1837 on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, Florida, that helped
shape the United States of America. An estimated 380 to 480
freedom-fighting African and Indian members of the Seminole nation
threw back an advance of more than a thousand US Army and other
troops led by Colonel Zachary Taylor, a future President of the United States.
The Seminoles so badly mauled the invaders that Taylor ordered his
soldiers to fall back, bury their dead, tend to their wounded and
ponder the largest single US defeat in decades of Indian warfare. The
battle of Lake Okeechobee is not a story you will find in school or
college textbooks so it has slipped from the public consciousness.
But in a country that cherishes its freedom-fighting heritage, Black
and Red Seminoles of Florida sent everyone a message that deserves to
be remembered and honored.
Around 1776 the Seminole nation had reconstituted itself as a
multicultural nation by aligning itself with escaped Africans who had
long lived in the peninsula. Beginning in the early 18th century
hundreds of African Americans had fled bondage in Georgia and the
Carolinas to find refuge and a productive life in Florida. Though
Spain claimed Florida, it was an ungoverned land in which Native
Americans roamed freely as did slave runaways, pirates and whites who
rejected the limitation established by European invaders.
Generations of slave runaways established plantations in Florida,
raised cattle and horses, brought up their children and took care of
their elderly. For fifty miles along the Appalachacola river, African
people ran plantations, and pursued a healthy, happy family life.
When the Seminoles, a break-away segment of the Creek Nation, arrived
in the penninsula around the time of the American Revolution,
Africans were on hand to instruct them in methods of rice cultivation
they had learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Based on this
cooperation, two peoples of color hammered out an agricultural and
military alliance against US slaveholder posses that periodically
raided their communities.
In 1816 General Andrew Jackson, hero of New Orleans and commander of
US Armies in Florida, determined to terminate this resistance on the
southern flank of the US border. To Jackson and slaveholders who
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767912314/counterpunchmaga>
[]
dominated the federal government, Florida's free Seminole people of
color constituted a clear and present danger to the US slave system.
They saw these free communities as holding a beacon light that could
entice thousands of runaways to bolt Georgia, the Carolinas and
Louisiana. Even more, the Seminoles offered escapees a safe haven.
Perhaps most important, since Africans played a leadership role in
the newly-integrated Seminole Nation, their villages stood as a
successful, alternative societies, and refuted white claims that
Africans were meant to be slaves.
Prodded by slaveholders, Washington officials connived at destroying
the Seminole alliance, and re-enslavement of the African members.
Beginning in 1811 President James Madison, Virginia slaveholder and
father of the U.S. Constitution, provided covert US support to this
military effort. Finally, in 1819, the United States purchased
Florida from Spain, and prepared to settle scores with the Seminoles.
The Seminole nation, however, refused to capitulate, and rejected any
surrender its African brothers and sisters members.
The result was three Seminoles wars that lasted from 1816 to 1858, at
times tied up half of the US Army, cost the Congress $40,000,000 and
took 1500 US military deaths. This also represented the single
largest and longest explosion of slave resistance in the United States.
Throughout Africans played key roles. In 1837, when US troops were
engaged in the second Seminole wars U.S. General Sidney Thomas Jesup,
the best informed US officer in the field, wrote "This, you may be
assured, is a negro and not an Indian war." He continued:
Throughout my operations I have found the negroes the most active and
determined warriors; and during the conferences with the Indian
chiefs I ascertained they exercised an almost controlling influence over them.
Because Seminoles fought in a jungle area they knew better than the
white invaders, their armies ran circles around their numerically and
technologically superior foe. Though they had the added burden of
moving their families out of harm's way, Seminoles soldiers were able
to baffle, surprise and humiliate the US army, navy and marines. In
its desperation to quell resistance, the US officers ordered the
taking of women and children as hostages and the violation other
codes of warfare. These tactics did not achieve victory or split the
red-black alliance but they indicate that the Seminole war can be
viewed as early versions of US intervention and disaster in Vietnam.
In 1837 Chief Osceola and other Seminole leaders were seized coming
with a white flag to a conference called by U.S. authorities.
Osceola's personal bodyguard of 55 at the time included 52 men of
African descent. US forces imprisoned the Seminoles in a cell in
Castillo de San Marcos, later renamed Fort Marion, in St. Augustine.
Osceola, ill and depressed, sat slumped on the floor, his life ebbing
away. Army officials also captured another Seminole peace delegation
that included two fire-brands of the resistance, Wild Cat or
Coacoochee, 25, and his Black sub-chief, John Horse, also 25.
Bilingual, tall, powerfully built and a commanding presence, Horse
draped himself in silver amulets, rich sashes and elaborate, bright
plumed head shawls. Widely respected for his knowledge of the foe,
and a crack shot, Horse occupied a strategic position among the
Seminoles. Revered for his often-tested diplomatic talent, calm
self-assurance and courage in battle, he also was brother-in-law of
Holatoochee, a leading Seminole who had the ear of Miconopy, the
nation's ruler. Chiefs such as Jumper and Holatoochee repeatedly
asked Horse to negotiate with US authorities.
From their 18 foot by 33 foot cell at Fort Marion where they were
held with two dozen Seminole prisoners, Coacoochee and Horse devised
a plan. "We resolved to make our escape or die in the attempt," Wild
Cat later wrote. They took weeks to loosen the iron bar in the jail's
18 foot roof and create a hole eight inches wide. The heavier
prisoners agreed to diet in order to slip through, and some 20
prisoners, including two women, escaped through the opening. For over
five days the band made its way southward gathering allies and guns
and living "on roots and berries"
U.S. Colonel Zachary Taylor raced after them accompanied by 70
Delaware Indian mercenaries, l80 Missouri riflemen and 800 U.S.
regular army soldiers from the Sixth Infantry, the Fourth Infantry
and Taylor's First Infantry Regiment. The day before Christmas US
forces located the Seminoles, who had carefully positioned themselves
at the northeast corner of Lake Okeechobee. Seminole marksmen were
perched in the tall grass or in trees, the sprawling Lake a few
hundred yards behind them.
Taylor's forces advanced through a swampy area and its five foot high
razor-edged sawgrass. Movement was impassable for horses, and
extremely difficult for humans as soldiers sank up to their thighs in
the mud and water beneath them.
At 12:30 in the afternoon of Christmas eve Seminole snipers prepared
for battle. The first shot had yet to be fired when the Delawares,
sensing disaster, deserted and left. The Missouri riflemen charged
toward the Seminoles but a withering fire brought down their
commander, many commissioned officers and some of non-commissioned
officers. The Tennesseans fled.
Colonel Taylor then ordered his regular army troops forward but they
encountered deadly rifle fire. He later reported their earliest
barrages brought down "every officer, with one exception, as well as
most of the non-commissioned officers" and left "but four . . .
untouched." After a two and a half hour battle in which they had been
outnumbered, Semnole forces fell back their canoes and made their escape.
As Christmas Day dawned Colonel Taylor forces counted 26 U.S. dead
and 112 wounded, seven dead for each dead Seminole fighter, and the
US had taken no prisoners. US troops rounded up 100 Seminole ponies
and 600 cattle.
Lake Okeechobee was the US military's most decisive defeat in more
than four decades of warfare in Florida. Four days after his army
limped back to Fort Gardner, however, Colonel Taylor claimed victory.
He said: "the Indians were driven in every direction." The US Army
accepted his report, and promoted him.
From that point, however, US officers had to recognize the unity and
strength of the African-Seminole alliance. Said General Thomas Sidney
Jesup, "The negroes rule the Indians, and it is important that they
should feel themselves secure; if they should become alarmed and hold
out, the war will be resumed."
Based on his reputation as an "Indian fighter," Zachary Taylor was
elected the 12th President of the United States. Historians continue
to distort the battle of Lake Okeechobee. In The Almanac of American
History (1983), Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summarized the battle in one
inaccurate sentence, "Fighting in the Second Seminole War, General
Zachary Taylor defeats a group of Seminoles at Okeechobee Swamp, Florida."
This is the nation of Patrick Henry and "Give me Liberty or give me
death!" The United States was born in struggle against British
colonial rule. It proudly declared people had natural rights and
dedicated itself to self-determination. The heroic, freedom fighting
struggle of the Seminole nation stands as a milestone in the American
battle for liberty.
William Loren Katz is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0689809018/counterpunchmaga>Black
Indians: A Hidden Heritage. His new, revised edition of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767912314/counterpunchmaga>The
Black West [Harlem Moon/Random House, 2005] also includes information
on the Philippine occupation, and can now be found in bookstores. He
can be reached through his website:
<http://www.williamlkatz.com/>www.williamlkatz.com
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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