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