What Hath God Wrought (15 page)

Relations with Spain turned out to be much more problematic than those with Britain. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, East and West Florida still belonged to the Spanish Empire, cutting off the United States from access to the Gulf of Mexico east of New Orleans. The Pearl, Perdido, and Apalachicola Rivers of Mississippi and Alabama all flowed into the Floridas before reaching the sea. Because Spanish control over these river mouths stunted the economic development of the American Southwest by limiting access to markets, commercial as well as strategic considerations encouraged the United States to covet the Floridas. But the most pressing motive prompting successive administrations to intervene was that the Spanish had allowed the Floridas to become a haven for African Americans and Native Americans fleeing oppression on the U.S. side of the border. Jefferson had tried in vain to take over West Florida through secret diplomacy and threats without overt military action. Madison had proved more successful, taking advantage of Spain’s preoccupations with the Napoleonic Wars and Latin American revolutions to snatch two substantial bites out of West Florida in 1810 and 1813. Monroe’s administration pursued this objective of Republican expansionism to its ultimate conclusion, the complete acquisition of both Floridas.
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The means by which Republican administrations had carried on their Florida policies never enjoyed unqualified support from American public opinion. Jefferson’s designs on West Florida had been frustrated when his behavior was denounced by John Randolph. An attempt by Madison to gain East Florida by using freebooters from Georgia to stage a pretended revolt in the Spanish colony likewise ended in public embarrassment.
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The most controversial of all these episodes, however, was the invasion of Florida by Andrew Jackson in 1818.

After the defeat of the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, a renewed migration of Creek refugees flowed into Florida, and since the destruction of the Negro Fort incidents of violence had continued to erupt along the international boundary. On November 12, 1817, troops under the command of General Edmund Gaines burned the Creek village of Fowltown on the Georgia side of the border and killed several of the villagers. The local Indian agent criticized the action as an unwarranted use of force against people who had never been hostile, but Fowltown was located on land claimed by the whites under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Jackson. On November 30, those who had been made homeless hit back hard. Warriors from Fowltown, allied with escaped slaves, attacked a boat carrying forty U.S. soldiers and eleven of their dependents on the Florida side of the border: Four men escaped; one woman was taken prisoner; everyone else was killed. The First Florida War, also called the First Seminole War, had begun.
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Upon receiving news of these events, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun issued orders to General Gaines, dated December 16, to demand satisfactory reparations from the Seminoles, as all the refugees of Florida, whether red or black, were called. If atonement was not forthcoming (it is not clear what could have been acceptable), the general was to cross into Florida and attack the Seminoles. But he was specifically forbidden to attack Spanish forts, even if they harbored Seminoles. Ten days later Calhoun diverted General Gaines to lead an expedition against Amelia Island on the east coast of Florida, long a center for smuggling. There was some possibility that the Amelia outlaws might seek an independent Florida, which would complicate U.S. objectives. Gaines captured the island in due course.
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The administration decided to turn over the main theater of operations to General Andrew Jackson, who was summoned from Tennessee to Fort Scott, not far from Fowltown. The choice of Jackson showed a disposition in Washington for a commander of demonstrated energy and aggressiveness. (He was also known to disobey orders, having refused instructions to return lands to the Creeks in 1815.) There is a letter dated January 30, 1818, in which the president tells Secretary Calhoun to instruct Jackson “not to attack any post occupied by Spanish troops.”
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But Calhoun never sent the order. Perhaps he forgot to send it; perhaps the president changed his mind and told him not to; or perhaps Calhoun believed the order to Gaines did not require restating for Jackson. Maybe the letter was only intended to absolve the president from responsibility. In any case, the limitations placed on Gaines’s discretion were never explicitly imposed on Jackson but left to implication. Jackson, however, had been sent a copy of Gaines’s orders, and indeed had expostulated over them.

On January 6, 1818, before receiving news of his own appointment, Jackson had already written Monroe stating that he disapproved of the limits imposed on Gaines. Jackson believed “the whole of East Florida [should be] seized and held as an indemnity for the outrages of Spain upon the property of our citizens.” He volunteered to carry out such a policy if the president agreed. To preserve the strictest confidentiality, Jackson proposed that the reply be sent through a trusted friend, John Rhea, congressman from Tennessee.
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Jackson never received a response to this suggestion. But Monroe did compose a letter to Jackson, dated December 28, 1817, giving him vague yet momentous instructions, or rather, exhortations. “Great interests are at issue, and until our course is carried through triumphantly & every species of danger to which it is exposed is settled on the most solid foundation, you ought not to withdraw your active support from it.” Quite possibly all Monroe really intended was to urge Jackson not to resign his commission (as he had threatened to do when feeling unappreciated) at a time when the country needed his services. But Jackson seems to have chosen to interpret this letter—even though its date proved it not a reply to his inquiry—as presidential authorization for the conquest of Florida.
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What did the Monroe administration really hope for from Jackson? Did they intend him to attack only Seminoles or Spanish forts as well? Secretary of State Adams was already negotiating with Don Luis de Onís to see if Spain would cede the Floridas, and the administration was always careful to relate all foreign policy actions to this major objective. Monroe claimed he never saw Jackson’s letter of January 6 until a year later, after it had been overtaken by events, although Calhoun and Crawford both admitted reading it when it arrived.
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Once a decision had been made to entrust a highly sensitive operation to Jackson, the failure of the administration to provide him with a clear response to his proposal would seem culpable negligence—if negligence it was. It is conceivable that the administration deliberately chose ambiguity, leaving the impetuous Jackson to expose the weakness of Spanish authority, while allowing the president to disavow later an intention to wage an undeclared war. This is what Monroe had done in 1811–12, when as Madison’s secretary of state he had prompted General George Mathews to intervene in East Florida and then disavowed him when the episode became embarrassing to the government. Many a covert action in the area of foreign policy has been undertaken in such a way as to preserve official deniability. Andrew Jackson, however, proved to be a more dangerous loose cannon than his civilian superiors had foreseen.
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Jackson took a thousand volunteer Tennessee militiamen with him and led them by forced marches to Fort Scott. The 450-mile trip, on short rations and across swollen rivers, took forty-six days. On a similar tough march in 1813 his men had called him “Old Hickory”; this time he showed the nickname still appropriate. At Fort Scott, Jackson found reinforcements but little provision for his hungry men. He allowed them but a day’s rest before moving south toward Florida on March 10, 1818. In five days they reached the site of the ruined Negro Fort, where they were met by a long-awaited supply boat bearing food. Jackson ordered the fort rebuilt and renamed Fort Gadsden, and gathered further reinforcements, including friendly Creeks under the command of their chief, William McIntosh. McIntosh regarded the campaign as a resumption of the Creek civil war of 1813-14.
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By now Jackson had about three thousand white soldiers, both regulars and militia, and two thousand Indian allies. He then moved his army toward the east, attacking and destroying village after village of the Miccasukee band of Seminoles. The year before, the Miccasukee had refused General Gaines’s demand to allow him to send an expedition to recapture fugitive slaves. Jackson hoped for a decisive confrontation with his enemies, but they melted into the forest and swamps, leaving him to wreak vengeance on their homes and fields. In one of the villages, Jackson’s men found the scalps of those slain on the Apalachicola River the previous November.
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On April 6, Jackson’s army arrived at the Spanish fort of St. Mark’s. Here he demanded the commandant to surrender so as to prevent the fort falling into the hands of “Indians and negroes.” He promised to respect private property and to provide a receipt for all public property. Lacking the military capacity to resist, Francisco Caso y Luengo complied. As he later explained to Secretary Calhoun, Jackson primarily wanted the fort as a supply base for further operations. He found no hostile Seminoles there, but he did arrest a prominent British trader, Alexander Arbuthnot, whom Jackson blamed for encouraging and supplying his enemies.
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Jackson’s next objective was the cluster of Seminole villages on the Suwannee River. There he hoped to find Peter McQueen, a former Red Stick, as well as Billy Bowlegs, chief of the Alachua Seminoles. Especially important to Jackson were the hundreds of fugitive slaves living in settlements of their own nearby, among whom two talented leaders, Abraham and Nero, were accounted most dangerous. In the ensuing campaign, Jackson delegated responsibility for attacking the Indians to his Creek allies under McIntosh, while he went after the blacks. In the event, the Suwannee peoples of both races, warned of Jackson’s advance by Arbuthnot before his capture, mostly succeeded in escaping. A small force of black men engaged the invading army to cover the retreat of their families and friends. Once again Jackson could only burn houses and seize livestock. But the friendly Creeks rescued the white woman captured on the Apalachicola four months earlier. Jackson arrested another Briton, Robert Ambrister, a soldier of fortune and former royal marine, who had been helping train and equip Seminoles for battle. After a brief pause for his troops to rest and share their booty, Jackson’s force returned to St. Mark’s.
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Back in St. Mark’s, the general convened a court-martial to try Ambrister and Arbuthnot on charges of helping the Seminoles fight against the United States. The two trials took little time (April 26–28); neither defendant was represented by counsel or had opportunity to obtain witnesses in his behalf. Arbuthnot, an idealist as well as a businessman, claimed he had only sought the Natives’ welfare and had actually tried to dissuade them from warmaking; this was probably the truth. Ambrister had indeed been helping the Seminoles prepare for war—but against the Spanish, whose rule in Florida he hoped to overthrow. Both defendants were found guilty. The court sentenced Ambrister to flogging and a year at hard labor, Arbuthnot to death. Jackson changed Ambrister’s sentence to death also and carried out the executions the next day so there would be no chance of an appeal. A former justice of the Tennessee state supreme court, he must have known the convictions would not stand up to appellate scrutiny. Jackson reported to Calhoun that he hoped “the execution of these Two unprincipled villains will prove an awfull example” to the British government and public.
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Meanwhile, an American naval officer had tricked two Seminole chiefs onto his riverboat by flying the Union Jack instead of the Stars and Stripes. They were Himomathle Mico, a former Red Stick, and Hillis Hadjo, also known as Francis the Prophet, who had served with Tecumseh and had sought British help to invalidate the Treaty of Fort Jackson. They too were executed, without a trial.
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In May, Jackson heard rumors (which turned out to be false) that Seminoles were gathering at Pensacola. He welcomed the opportunity to move against the capital of Spanish West Florida. Only then did Governor José Masot protest the invasion and declare he would pit force against force, but Jackson warned that if the capital city offered resistance, “I will put to death every man found in arms.” Threats by Andrew Jackson had to be taken seriously. Masot evacuated Pensacola and took refuge in nearby Fort Barrancas. There, after a brief exchange of artillery fire, the governor surrendered on May 28, 1818. Jackson proclaimed that American occupation of Florida would continue unless and until Spain could station sufficient military force there to control the borderlands. He sent the Spanish governor and his garrison off to Havana, appointed a U.S. territorial governor and a collector of U.S. customs, thanked his army, and went home to Tennessee.
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In Florida the Seminoles, red and black, relocated their communities farther down the peninsula. In Washington there was an uproar.

The administration responded to events in Florida with the slowness typical of the era. In this case, problems of communication were compounded by bureaucratic inefficiency at the War Department and Monroe’s habitual deliberateness. The president learned of the execution of Ambrister and Arbuthnot from newspapers in mid-June; Jackson’s own reports took even longer to reach him.
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Much of the press bitterly criticized Jackson. Foreign envoys were demanding explanations. Not until July 15 did Monroe take up the Florida issue with his cabinet. By this time he faced a crisis, both diplomatic and political.

Jackson’s occupation of St. Mark’s does not seem to have upset official Washington, although it contravened the order given Gaines not to move against Spanish forts. But by now Jackson had evidently gone further than anyone in the administration had expected, executing two British subjects and evicting the whole Spanish government from Pensacola. Within the cabinet, Secretary of War Calhoun had the most at risk as a result of Jackson’s behavior. He had the biggest interest in preserving civilian authority over the military and was potentially the most to blame if negligence should be identified as the cause of the problem. He argued that the government should dissociate itself from Jackson’s conduct and court-martial him for disobeying orders. Secretary of the Treasury Crawford took the same line; he had experienced Jackson’s recalcitrance during his own tenure at the War Department in earlier years. Attorney General William Wirt supported Calhoun and Crawford. But Secretary of State Adams argued that the government could use Jackson’s conduct, headstrong and brutal though it had been, to advantage. He proposed to take a hard stand in his discussions with the Spanish envoy Onís, arguing that since Spain could not control what went on in the Floridas, she should sell them to the United States. Monroe deftly adopted a toned-down version of the Adams plan, which avoided antagonizing the general’s popular following while denying administration complicity in waging an undeclared war.
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