Washington declares the Seminole war over; no one signed anything
Seven years of guerrilla fighting in the sawgrass came to a quiet, unofficial close on August 14, 1842. General William J. Worth declared the Second Seminole War over after his troops spent the final campaigns burning villages and crops and killing livestock rather than chasing fighters through the swamp. More than 3,600 Seminoles had already been shipped west to Indian Territory. No treaty was signed. Between 350 and 500 Seminoles simply stayed, and they retreated deeper into the Everglades. Neither side put the truce in writing.
The war cost the U.S. government roughly $40 million, making it the longest and most expensive Indian war the Army ever fought, and it exposed how far Washington would go to enforce the Indian Removal Act of 1830. That Seminoles never formally surrendered, and that their descendants still hold land in Florida today, made this the one Removal-era war the government could not fully close on paper.
QWhat happened when Major Dade's column was ambushed in December 1835?
Major Francis Dade led 110 soldiers from Fort Brooke toward Fort King on December 23, 1835, and Seminoles shadowed the column for five days before ambushing and wiping it out on December 28. The action, known as the Dade Massacre, killed nearly the entire command and opened the war, though it does not directly explain the losses among the Sixth Infantry at Lake Okeechobee two years later, which are detailed in the next answer.
QWhat happened to the officers of the Sixth Infantry at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee in 1837?
Colonel Zachary Taylor sent about 800 men, mostly on foot, straight into a sawgrass hammock on Christmas Day 1837 against fewer than 400 Seminole fighters led by Alligator, Sam Jones, and Coacoochee. The Missouri volunteers broke and their commander, Colonel Gentry, was fatally wounded, but the worst losses fell on five companies of the Sixth Infantry, where every officer but one was killed or wounded along with most of their non-commissioned officers. The Army suffered 26 dead and 112 wounded against just 11 Seminole dead and 14 wounded. Taylor still claimed the field, capturing 100 ponies and 600 head of cattle, but no Seminoles were taken prisoner.
QHow did the Seminole Wars follow the tribe even into the Civil War decades later?
In July 1864, Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon received word that a man named A. McBride claimed to have raised a company of sixty-five Seminole volunteers to fight for the South, trading on his own experience fighting in the earlier Seminole wars. McBride never actually fielded the unit. Meanwhile Seminole leaders Halleck Tustenuggee and Sonuk Mikko, known as Billy Bowlegs, refused to sign with the Confederacy and instead withdrew from Florida to join the Union. After the war, Washington voided all prior treaties with Seminoles in Indian Territory over the disloyalty of some who had sided with the South, forcing new treaties that stripped tribal councils of power.
