skill of the federal troops, but by deception. General Jesup requested a “truce” conference in Osceola’s camp; Osceola complied—and was treacherously taken captive. Consigned to a prison cell at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, Osceola contracted “acute quinsy” and died on January 30, 1838.
Despite Osceola’s capture and death, the war continued from 1835 to 1842, a period during which 3,000 Seminoles did submit to removal, but at the average cost of one soldier killed for every two Indians “removed.” The Second Seminole War never really ended, but petered out, only to become reactivated during 1855-58 as the Third Seminole War. The last Seminole holdouts refused to sign treaties with the United States until 1934.
“The Cruelest Work I Ever Knew”
During the summer of 1838, Major General Winfield Scott began a massive roundup of Cherokees. In accordance with the terms of the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokees were to be removed to “Indian Territory,” an area encompassing present-day Oklahoma and parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Those few Indians who did not successfully find refuge in the Blue Ridge Mountains were herded into concentration camps, where they endured the misery of a long, hot, disease-plagued summer.
During the fall and winter of 1838-39, the Indians were marched under armed escort along the 1,200- mile route to Indian Territory. Cold, short of food, subject to the abuse of their military guards (including theft, rape, and murder), 4,000 of the 15,000 who made the journey perished. Many years later, a Georgia soldier recalled: “I fought through the Civil War and have seen, men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever saw.” The Cherokees forever afterward called the experience the “Trail of Tears.”
Indian Territory
What awaited the Cherokees and other Native peoples removed from the East was a vast tract of relatively barren western land. Whereas their eastern homelands had been lush and green, the Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota region was arid. Much of the stubborn soil was resistant to cultivation and certainly unsuited to the type of agriculture the Indians had pursued in the East. The hardships of soil and climate, combined with the callous inefficiency and general corruption of the federal system that was obligated by treaty to aid and support the “resettled” Indians, killed many. Others, certainly, died of nothing more or less than broken hearts. Yet, over time, many among the removed tribes made the best of their grim situation and, in varying degrees, even prospered.
Contrary to treaty agreements, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reduced the area of Indian Territory. During the Civil War, many Cherokee, Creeks, and others allied themselves with the Confederates. The victorious Union forces punished these Indians in 1866 by further reducing the size of Indian Territory, confining it to the area encompassed by present-day Oklahoma.
The Least You Need to Know
In the Nullification Crisis, “states’ rights” confronted federal authority in a prelude to civil war.
The Indian Removal Act was an attempt to separate Indians and whites by means of land exchanges. In practice, the act authorized the brutal exile of Cherokee, Semi-nole. Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek Indians (the “Five Civilized Tribes”) to and Indian Territory concentrated in present-day Oklahoma.
Word for the Day
To cede land is to give it up, usually as a condition of surrender or in exchange for something of value (money or other land). Cession is the noun form of the word and is not to be confused with secession, which refers specifically to the breakaway of 11 Southern states that precipitated the Civil War.
Voice from the Past
As was true of all white-Indian wars, much time was consumed in fruitless pursuit without encountering the enemy. A young Abraham Lincoln was a member of the Illinois militia in 1832. He later recalled:
“If General Cass [Michigan’s territorial governor, who later became Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war] went in advance of me in picking whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges upon wild onions. If he saw any live fighting Indians, it was more than I did, but I had a good many bloody experiences with the mosquitoes; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.”
Chains, Whips, and Heartbreak
(1724-1857)
