Joshua R. Giddings

“ Perhaps no vice is more general among mankind than a desire to represent ourselves, and our country and government, to mankind and to posterity as just and wise, whatever real truth may dictate. Surely, if General Jessup’s official reports be regarded as correct, the people of Florida should have been the last of all who were concerned in that war, to claim the virtue of magnanimity or forbearance, or to charge the Seminoles or Exiles with ferocity or bad faith. ”

“ Our national influence and military power had been put forth to reënslave our fellow men; to transform immortal beings into chattels, and make them the property of slaveholders; to oppose the rights of human nature; and the legitimate fruits of this policy were gathered in a plentiful harvest of crime, bloodshed and individual suffering.
The great body of the people were ignorant as to the real causes of the war. General Jackson had been popular as a military officer, and was not less so as President of the United States. ”

“ The sun, which shines warm and bright, brings forth our crops; and the moon brings back the spirits of our warriors, our fathers, our wives and children. The white man comes; he grows pale and sickly; why can we not live in peace? They steal our horses and cattle, cheat us, and take our lands. They may shoot us—may chain our hands and feet; but the red man’s heart will be free. I have come to you in peace, and have taken you all by the hand. I will sleep in your camp, though your soldiers stand around me thick as pine trees. ”

“ The love of liberty is universal. We honor the individual who gives high evidence of his attachment to this fundamental right, with which God has endowed all men, and we applaud him who manfully defends his liberty, whether it be a Washington with honors clustering upon his brow, or the more humble individual who defends his liberty in Florida, by slaying the man who attempts to deprive him of it. ”

“ Amid the gloom of the evening, silent and sad they took leave of their western homes, and fled from the jurisdiction of a people who had centuries previously kidnapped their ancestors in their native homes, brought them to this country, enslaved them, and during many generations had persecuted them. Many of their friends and relatives had been murdered for their love of liberty by our Government; others had been doomed to suffer and languish in slavery—a fate far more dreaded than death. ”

“ It is one of the imperfections of human government, that the men who conceive and direct the perpetration of great national crimes are usually exempt from the immediate dangers which beset those who act merely as their instruments in the consummation of transcendent wrongs. Had General Jackson and General Cass been assured they would have been the first individuals to meet death in their efforts to enslave the Exiles, it is doubtful whether either of them would have been willing to adopt a policy which should thus consign them to premature graves. ”

“ Some of the most wealthy Seminoles had purchased slaves of the white people, and for many years, perhaps we may say for generations, had been slaveholders. They held their slaves in a state between that of servitude and freedom; the slave usually living with his own family and occupying his time as he pleased, paying his master annually a small stipend in corn and other vegetables. This class of slaves regarded servitude among the whites with the greatest degree of horror. ”

“ The Seminole Indians had lost some thirty men, who had intermarried with the Exiles, and were in the fort at the time of the massacre. They entertain the opinion that the souls of their murdered friends are never at rest while their blood remains unavenged; nor could it be supposed that the Exiles would feel no desire to visit retributive justice upon the murderers of their friends. Long did this desire continue, in the minds of the surviving Exiles, until, many years subsequently, their vengeance was satiated, their hands were stained, and their garments saturated, in the blood of our troops. ”

“ Officers and men who would cheerfully meet danger and death upon the field of honorable warfare in defense of freedom, were compelled to meet death in all its various and revolting forms in Florida to uphold oppression, to sustain an institution which they abhorred; nor can we wonder that the consciousness of these facts should have created a feeling of hostility between our regular troops and the slaveholders of Florida, who were constantly charging them with inefficiency and want of energy in the capture of negroes. ”

“ The perfidious pretense of enforcing the treaty of Payne’s Landing, without giving them a separate territory according to the supplemental treaty, now stood exposed in its proper light. Abraham was a man of influence with his brethren. He had used his utmost efforts to induce them to emigrate. He had been honest. He believed in the integrity of our nation, of its people, its government; but his error had been fatal. The Exiles were in the Western Country, without a home, and with no means of support, except the stipulation of Government to furnish them provisions for one year. ”

“ Eighty thousand dollars was paid from the public treasury for the enslavement of each person, and the lives of at least three white men were sacrificed to insure the enslavement of each black man. The deterioration of our national morality was beyond estimate, and the disgrace of our nation and government are matters incapable of computation. The suffering of the Indians and Exiles amidst such prolonged persecution, such loss of lives and property, we cannot estimate. ”

“ We have already noticed the fact, that the citizens of Florida supposed the war to have been commenced principally to enable them to get possession of negroes whom they might enslave. Indeed, they appear not to have regarded it as material, that the claimant should have previously owned the negro. If they once obtained control of his person, he was hurried into the interior of Georgia, Alabama, or South Carolina, where he was sold and held as a slave. And the Florida volunteers, while nominally in service, appear to have been far more anxious to catch negroes than to meet the enemy in battle. ”

“ There was, among the people of the entire nation, an intense anxiety to render every part of the Union satisfied and pleased with the Federal Government, then just formed, as they felt that their only hope of prosperity depended upon a continuance of the federal union. There was also a general sympathy throughout the nation with the slaveholders of the South, who were supposed to have suffered much, by the loss of their servants, during the war of the Revolution; few people at that time realizing the moral guilt of holding their fellow-men in bondage. ”

“ E-con-chattimico was one of the chiefs whose reservation lay on the west side of the river. He had long been highly respected by the whites. He owned some twenty slaves, who were residing with him in a state of partial freedom—paying him an annual stipend of provisions for their time, and holding such property as they could acquire. Connected with these slaves, and with some of the Indians on the Reservation, were about an equal number of Exiles, who had never known slavery, but whose ancestors, in former generations, had toiled in bondage. ”

“ The laws of war, as embraced in the works of Brynkershoeck, Vattel and Wheaton, clearly sanction the principle, that all persons taken in battle, or who may be forced to surrender, whether officers, soldiers, or followers of the enemy’s army, are prisoners of war. * * *
“Among savage nations, it is universally known and admitted, that in war they have no non-combatants, excepting only such as are physically incapable of wielding arms. Every man, without regard to age or color; every boy able to fire a gun, or wield a hatchet, or an arrow, is a warrior. ”

“ Louis Pacheco was too enlightened to smother the better sympathies of the human heart. He was well informed, and understood the efforts that were making to reënslave his brethren, the Exiles. With many of them he had long been acquainted; he had witnessed the persecutions to which they had been subjected, the outrages heaped upon them, and now saw clearly the intention to subject them to slavery among the Creeks. He had spent his own life thus far in servitude, and, although his condition was regarded with envy by the plantation servants around him, he yet sighed for freedom. ”

“ The Exiles were not the property of the Indians in any sense. The Indians did not claim to own them. Under the rule prescribed, if a white man could get one of the Exiles within his power, he could at any time prove some circumstance that would entitle him to claim some negro; when he proved this, the law of Florida presumed every colored man to be a slave, unless he could prove his freedom. ”

“ The bill and discussion had been thrust upon the House by slaveholders: its whole merits were based upon the most vital principles of slavery. The question of property in human flesh, constitutes one of the essential elements of the institution, without which it could not survive one hour. The slave power had not for many years been defeated on any proposition touching slavery, and it appeared painful for those interested in that institution to have their influence doubted. ”

“ These circumstances failed to convince the President that it was useless for the Executive of a great nation to contend against the plainest dictates of justice; against those convictions of right which dwell in the breast of every human being who has not extinguished the moral feelings of his nature. ”

“ Bartlett, of Vermont, a Democrat, took the position that the Government, nor its officers, had power to enter into any agreement with Indians or white men, by which they should enjoy any privilege, or receive any compensation, not authorized by law; that the contract between General Jessup and the Creeks was of no validity, but absolutely void; and every transaction touching the enslavement of the Exiles was without authority, and of no effect. ”

“ During the nineteenth century, perhaps no despotism has existed among civilized nations more unlimited, or more unscrupulous, than that exercised in Florida, from 1823 to 1843.
This state of affairs determined the Exiles not to be arrested by white men. Thus, when Governor Duval ordered a compensation for a slave claimed by Mrs. Cook, to be retained from their annuities, the chiefs held a talk with the Agent, and assured him that the “man was born among the Seminoles, and had never been out of the nation.” ”

“ Mothers and children now shrieked with terror as the roar of cannon, the whistling of balls, the explosion of shells, the war-whoops of the savages, the groans of the wounded and dying, foretold the sad fate which awaited them. The stout-hearted old men cheered and encouraged their friends, declaring that death was to be preferred to slavery. ”

“ Perhaps nothing so touches the vanity of a savage as an expression of his greatness; and the consummate policy of General Worth was never more apparent than in the manner of his treating this savage chief. After recounting the devastation and death which Wild Cat had scattered throughout the Territory, he told him, with great emphasis, that he had the power to put an end to the war. ”

“ The troops at Fort King were called on to aid in the arrest of fugitive slaves; but their efforts merely excited the ridicule and contempt of both Indiana and negroes. These circumstances becoming known to the slaves of Florida, naturally excited them to discontent; and while their masters were engaged in efforts to arrest negroes to whom they had no claim, their own servants in whom they had reposed every confidence, suddenly disappeared and became lost among the Exiles of the interior. The white people became irritated under these vexations. ”

“ This report was duly transmitted to the proper department at Washington, and the Old Chief, with his people, once more reposed in apparent security.
It has been alleged, that men who so far paralyze their own moral sensibilities as to rob their fellow-men of their labor, their liberty, their manhood, and hold them in degrading bondage, can not entertain any clear conceptions of right and wrong. However this may be, it is certain that men who deal in slaves, are ever regarded, even by slaveholders, as destitute of moral sentiment. ”

“ There could be no proof of identity, nor was there any court authorized to take testimony, or enter decree in such case; but they were delivered over upon claim, taken to the interior, and sold to different planters. There they mingled with that mass of chattelized humanity which characterizes our Southern States, and were swallowed up in that tide of oppression which is now bearing three millions of human beings to untimely graves. ”

“ Congress appointed three commissioners to examine the existing causes of difficulty, and if possible to negotiate a treaty with the Creeks that should secure justice to all the people of the United States.
Communities, like individuals, often exhibit in early life those characteristics which distinguish their mature age, and become ruling passions when senility marks the downhill of life. Thus Georgia, in her very infancy, exhibited that desire for controlling our National Government which subsequently marked her manhood. ”

“ The enemy felt secure in their strong-holds—sallying forth in occasional forays, murdering the people, and plundering the settlements with impunity. The Administration appeared astonished at the audacity with which a few Indians and negroes hurled defiance at our army and the nation. The expedient of employing savages to assist in the war had failed; the more questionable policy of employing blood-hounds, had not only failed, but was supposed by many to reflect discredit upon the army and nation. Nearly five thousand troops were kept in Florida, maintained at vast expense ”

“ It had long been the policy of those who administered the Government, to select Southern men to act in all offices in which the institution of slavery was likely to be called in question. From the time General Washington sent Colonel Willett to ascertain facts in regard to the controversy between the State of Georgia and the Creek Indians, in 1789, to the period of which we are now speaking, no Northern man was appointed to any office which required his personal attention to the situation of the Exiles. ”

“ The officers of Government, and historians of that day, appear to have avoided all reference to the fact, that the people thus murdered had been far longer in the wilderness than were the children of Israel; that they were contending for that Liberty which is the rightful inheritance of every human being. Indeed, more than twenty years elapsed after this massacre, before a distinguished Philanthropist gave to the public the first intimation that such a people as the Exiles had existed. ”