What Freedom Means

By Crispin Sartwell

For generations, the Seminoles of Florida had given haven to escaped slaves from the American south, and were by the early nineteenth century an interracial tribe.

The United States made war on the Seminoles - starting with attacks shortly after the War of 1812 by Andrew Jackson and finishing up with attacks by William Tecumseh Sherman in the 1840s - in order to recover fugitive slaves and their descendants and force the Seminoles onto the trail of tears.

Resistance was initially led by the great war chief Osceola. In 1835, when Osceola was visiting the trading post at Fort King, his beautiful wife Morning Dew - the mother of his four children - was seized by slavecatchers. From that moment, he was an implacable foe.

He once "signed" a treaty by stabbing it with his knife, declaring that "I will make the white man red with blood, and then blacken him in the sun and rain, where the wolf shall smell of his bones, and the buzzard live upon his flesh." 52 of the 55 warriors in Osceola's retinue were of African descent.

He was captured by the army in 1837 when he came in under flag of truce to negotiate, the approach that later defeated and killed the Lakota war chief Crazy Horse and many others. Osceola died of malaria in a cell at Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine.

His two lieutenants Wild Cat and the Black Seminole John Horse, who had been captured with him, were held with two dozen others in an 18 by 33 foot cell. Wild Cat said that "We resolved to make our escape or die in the attempt."

They spent weeks loosening the stone work in the jail's roof and starving themselves in order to fit through the hole. The band escaped south for five days, surviving on roots and berries, and finally rejoined Wild Cat's tribe near the Tomoka River.

They were pursued by U.S. Colonel Zachary Taylor, 180 Missouri riflemen, and 800 regular army soldiers. Wild Cat and John Horse lured this force into an ambush in the swamp (the Battle of Lake Okeechobee), in which 26 U.S. soldiers were killed and 112 wounded. Four Seminoles died. Wild Cat and John Horse remained free and for many years prosecuted a successful guerilla war against the United States.

But over the years they were worn down by hunger and harassment. Wild Cat's twelve-year old daughter was kidnaped by the army. Eventually the whole band surrendered and was sent West under Wild Cat's leadership to the Indian territories of Oklahoma.

They faced starvation on the way, and then again at their destination, where they were assigned the same territory as the Creeks, a tribe with which they had been at war for decades, in part because of the Creeks' cooperation with the government of the United States and the slave trade.

Slave traders continued to capture and enslave Black Seminoles, despite government pledges of protection that had been essentially the only condition of the surrender. In 1849, Wild Cat and John Horse with a band of their people escaped through a gauntlet of Creeks, settlers, and peddlers of human flesh to Coahuila, Mexico, where they disappeared.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives."