Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

make souvenirs*.(12) Naturally, Jackson had a vicious
hatred of Indians and Afrikans. He spent the majority of
his years in public office pressing military campaigns
against the Seminole in Florida, who had earned special
enmity by sheltering escaped Afrikans. U.S. military campaigns
in Florida against first the Spanish and then the
Seminole, were in large part motivated by the need to
eliminate this land base for independent Afrikan regroupment
.
The Seminole Wars that went on for over 30 years
began when Jackson was an army officer and ended after
he had retired from the White House-though he still sent
Washington angry letters of advice on the war from his
retirement. They were as much Afrikan wars as Indian
wars, for the escaped Afrikans had formed liberated
Afrikan communities as a semi-autonomous part of the
sheltering Seminole Nation.(l3)
The first attacks on these Afrikan-Seminole took
place in 1812-14, when Georgia vigilantes invaded to
enslave the valuable Afrikans. Afrikan forces wiped out
almost all of the invaders (including the commanding
Georgia major and a U.S. General). Two years later, in
1816, U.S. naval gunboats successfully attacked the
Afrikan Ft. Appalachicola on the Atlantic Coast; two hundred
defenders were killed when a lucky shot touched off
the Afrikan ammunition stores. The next year, in 1817, army
troops under Jackson's command invaded Florida in
the First Seminole War. The Afrikans and Seminoles evaded
Jackson's troops and permanently withdrew deeper into
Central Florida.
The decisive Second Seminole War began in 1835
when the Seminole Nation, under the leadership of the
great Osceola, refused to submit to U.S. removal to
Oklahoma. A key disagreement was that the settlers insisted
on their right to separate the Seminole from their
Afrikan co-citizens, who would then be reenslaved and put
on the auction block. When the Seminole refused, Jackson
angrily ordered the Army to go in and "eat (Osceola) and
his few". Fighting a classic guerrilla war, 2000 Seminole
and 1000 Afrikan fighters inflicted terrible casualties on
the invading U.S. Army. Even capturing Osceola in a false
truce couldn't give the settlers victory.
Finally, U.S. Commanding General Thomas Jesup
conceded that none of the Afrikans would be reenslaved,
but all could relocate to Oklahoma as part of the Seminole
Nation. With this most of the Seminole and Afrikan forces
surrendered and left Florida.* Those who refused to submit
simply retreated deeper into the Everglades and kept
ambushing any settlers who dared to follow. In 1843 the
U.S. gave up trying toaroot the remaining Seminole guerrillas
out of the swamps.
The settlers lost some 1,600 soldiers killed and additional
thousands wounded or disabled through disease.
The war-which Gen. Jesup labelled "a Negro, not an Indian,
war w -cost the U.S. some $30 Million. That was
eighty times what President Jackson had promised Congress
he would spend in getting rid of aN Indians East of
the Mississippi. By the time he left office, Jackson was infuriated
that the Seminole and Afrikans were resisting the
armed might of the Empire year after year. He urged that
the Army concentrate on finding and killing all the enemy
women, in order to put a final, biological end to this stubborn
Nation. He boasted that he had used this strategy
quite successfully in his own campaigns against
Indians.(l4)
SWEEP OF THE NATIONAL DEMOCRACY. THE ELECTORAL VOTE IN 1828
* While some of Hitler's Death Camp officers are said to
have made lampshades out of the skins of murdered Jews,
the practicalities of frontier life led Jackson and his men to
make bridle reins out of their victim's skins. 27
Time and again Jackson made it clear that he
favored a "Final Solution" of total genocide for all Indians.
In his second State of the Union Address, Jackson
reassured his fellow settlers that they should not feel guilty
when they "tread on the graves of extinct nations", since
the wiping out of all Indian life was just as "natural" as
the passing of generations! Could anyone miss the point?
After years and decades soaked in aggression and killing,
could any Euro-Amerikan not know what Jackson stood
for? Yet he was the chosen hero of the Euro-Amerikan
workers of that day.
While Hitler never won an election in his life-and
had to use the armed power of the state to violently crush
the German workers and their organizations-Jackson was
swept into power by the votes of Euro-Amerikan workmen
and small farmers. His jingoistic expansionism was
popular with all sectors of settler society, in particular with
those who planned to use Indian land to help solve settler
economic troubles. Northern workers praised him for his
opposition to the old colonial elite of the Federalist Party,
his stand on the National Bank, and his famous "Equal
Protection Doctrine". The later piously declaimed that
government's duty was not to favor the rich, but through
* Even in the Oklahoma Territory, repeated outbreaks of
guerrilla campaigns by Afrikan-Seminole forces were
reported as late as 1842.