158
saddlebag dispatches
T
HINGS HAD BEEN GOING well for Indian Agent Wiley Thompson since he’d been assigned to Florida. His mission was to get all the Seminole bands of Florida to agree to President Andrew Jackson’s plan to transport them to Indian Territory. If he could persuade Principal Chief Micanopy to go along, the chiefs of the smaller bands would follow suit, and Micanopy was an aging, pliable leader. Agent Thompson called a meeting of influential members of the tribe, to show them the major details for their removal. He spread an official looking document on a table for everyone to see even though none of the Seminole could read. Success seemed to be within the agent’s reach unless something totally unexpected happened. Naturally, it did. A charismatic young warrior pushed his way to the front of the crowd, drew a knife, and plunged the blade into the agent’s table, some say through the document. He declared, “The only treaty I will ever execute will be with this.” The rebellious young man’s name was Osceola. Everyone would remember it after the spectacle in Wiley Thompson’s office. Osceola had no official standing within the tribe. He’d been born into a faction of the Muscogee Creek Nation that had rebelled against white rule and were defeated by Andrew Jackson in the Red Stick War. But his friendship with Micanopy had grown strong over the years, and lately he’d become a close advisor.
Many Red Sticks had been assimilated into the Seminole tribe. They spoke the same language, had similar customs, and shared a strong moral opposition to enslavement of free people. Even though Osceola had no hereditary claim on leadership, the faction of the tribe that didn’t want to leave Florida would listen to him. Relocation plans for the Seminole were put on hold. — PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON HADN’T expected much resistance from the Seminole when he signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 into law. As a general, he had crushed their fighting forces when their British allies pulled out of Florida after the War of 1812. U.S. troops had forced the natives into the swampiest part of Florida where they could hardly survive without government rations. White settlers had already seized all the Seminole’s productive land and had designs on their Everglades reservation. Jackson would have left the native population alone if they hadn’t opened their villages to runaway slaves. Plantation owners demanded the elimination of the tribe as a refuge for their enslaved workforce. And since the successful Haitian slave revolt of 1804, the thought of hundreds of armed, free blacks living among the Indians made white slave owners understandably nervous. The Indian Removal Act promised to transport
