THE FREE AND THE DEAD

Historical narrative of the Seminole Wars, the strongest theater of Native American resistance in the Southeast.

The Seminole people—whose name derives from the Spanish word for “runaway”—were actually many peoples, including enslaved African Americans who had escaped into Spanish Florida. “Uniting African and Indigenous heritages,” writes Holmes, “they wove mixed cultural fabrics from fast-unraveling threads.” When Florida became an American territory in 1821, white residents from the slaveholding South flocked to claim land and, in the bargain, establish a new slave state—a problem, Holmes notes, inasmuch as Florida was “in large part unconquered.” While some Seminole leaders agreed to relinquish their lands, many did not, and the result was a vicious war that lasted for decades. The best-known Indigenous war chiefs were Osceola and Micanopy, but many of their fellow leaders and lieutenants were Black, including an interpreter and emissary named Sawanok’ Tustenuggee, or Shawnee Warrior. Against them were arrayed a large portion of the standing American army and militias, led by fellows such as Francis Dade, who “insisted on wearing his long crooked sword at all times, even indoors, where it clanked ‘as he walked about and…dragged on the floor and struck against the furniture,’” as one contemporary recorded. Dade was shot to pieces for his troubles (Dade County bears his name), and the war dragged on. During his presidency, Andrew Jackson ordered the uprooting of more than 45,000 Native people from the Southeast for relocation to what is now Oklahoma, but it took far greater effort to remove the Seminole, many of whose descendants are still in Florida. As for Sawanok’ Tustenuggee, Holmes notes at the end of this vivid narrative, he did finally move west, there to be lost to the record—and, Holmes adds, “historians never did discover when or where he died.”

A fast-moving account of a war too little remembered in American history.