Levka#SwampWar #déjà_vu #history #Seminoles #BlackSeminoles
"Guerrilla War in the Swamps
By the end of the engagement, 108 of the 110 soldiers were dead or dying. Private Ransom Clarke and Private Joseph Sprague survived with severe wounds. A third man escaped but died the next day.
Halpatter Tustenuggee helped plan the ambush. 'We had been preparing for this more than a year,' he later said. 'Just as the day was breaking, we moved out of the swamp into the pine-barren. I counted, by direction of Jumper, one hundred and eighty warriors.'
On the same day, Osceola's warriors attacked Fort King. They killed Indian Agent Wiley Thompson and six others. Thompson had been enforcing Seminole removal. News of the massacres spread across the nation. Americans demanded military action.
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General Thomas Jesup took command of all U.S. forces in late 1836. He noted the overall racial undertones of the campaign. 'This is a negro, not an Indian war,' he warned. 'If it be not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on their slave population.'
Fewer than 2,000 Seminole warriors faced a U.S. force that grew to 30,000 troops. The numbers meant little. Florida's terrain gave the defenders the advantage. Swamps, sawgrass prairies and dense hammocks made conventional military operations nearly impossible. Summer heat and disease killed more soldiers than combat. Malaria and yellow fever probably caused most of the 1,500 American deaths during the war.
The Seminoles hid their families on remote islands in the Everglades. Warriors struck American troops in unsuspecting ambushes. They disappeared into the terrain where the American soldiers couldn't follow. They used feigned retreats to draw the pursuers into kill zones. They positioned themselves in dense tree islands surrounded by sawgrass and mud, forcing U.S. forces to advance across exposed ground."
Seminole Warriors Fought the US Military to a Stalemate in the Florida Swamps
Fewer than 2,000 Seminole warriors held off an American force that eventually numbered more than 30,000 troops. It became the longest, costliest and deadliest conflict the United States fought against Native Americans.