“The efforts of the General and Territorial Governments to quell the Indian disturbances which have prevailed through four long years, have been unavailing, and it would seem that the prophecy of the most sagacious leader of the Indians will be more than fulfilled; the close of the fifth year will still find us struggling in a contest remarkable for magnanimity, forbearance and credulity on the one side, and ferocity and bad faith on the other. We are waging a war with beasts of prey; the tactics that belong to civilized nations are but shackles and fetters in its prosecution; we must fight ‘fire with fire;’ the white man must, in a great measure, adopt the mode of warfare pursued by the red man, and we can only hope for success by continually harrassing and pursuing the enemy. If we drive him from hommock to hommock, from swamp to swamp, and penetrate the recesses where his women and children are; if, in self-defense, we show as little mercy to him as he has shown to us, the anxiety and surprise produced by such operations will not fail, it is believed, to produce prosperous results. It is high time that sickly sentimentality should cease. ‘Lo, the poor Indian!’ is the exclamation of the fanatic, pseudo-philanthropist; ‘Lo, the poor white man!’ is the ejaculation which all will utter who have witnessed the inhuman butchery of women and children, and the massacres that have drenched the Territory in blood.
“In the future prosecution of the war, it is important that a generous confidence should be reposed in the General Government. It may be that mistakes and errors have been committed on all hands; but the peculiar adaptation of the country to the cowardly system of the foe, and its inaptitude to the operations of a regular army; the varying and often contradictory views and opinions of the best informed of our citizens, and the embarrassments which these cases must have produced to the authorities at Washington, furnish to the impartial mind some excuse, at least, for the failures which have hitherto occurred. It is our duty to be less mindful of the past than the future. Convinced that the present incumbent of the Presidential Chair regards with sincere and intense interest the afflictions we endure; relying upon the patriotism, talent and sound judgment of the distinguished Carolinian who presides over the Department of War, and confident in the wisdom of Congress, let us prepare to second, with every nerve, the measures which may be devised for our relief. Feeling as we do the immediate pressure of circumstances, let us exert, to the extremest point, all our powers to rid us of the evil by which we are oppressed. Let us, by a conciliatory course, endeavor to allay any unkindnesses of feeling which may exist between the United States army and the militia of Florida, and by union of sentiment among ourselves, advance the happy period when the Territory shall enjoy what she so much needs—a long season of peace and tranquillity.”
Perhaps no vice is more general among mankind than a desire to represent ourselves, and our country and government, to mankind and to posterity as just and wise, whatever real truth may dictate. Surely, if General Jessup’s official reports be regarded as correct, the people of Florida should have been the last of all who were concerned in that war, to claim the virtue of magnanimity or forbearance, or to charge the Seminoles or Exiles with ferocity or bad faith. The expression that “it is high time that sickly sentimentality should cease,” manifests the ideas which he entertained of strict, equal and impartial justice to all men.
This message was an appropriate introduction to the legislative action which immediately succeeded its publication. It was that legislative body which first gave official sanction to the policy of obtaining blood-hounds from Cuba to aid our troops in the prosecution of this war. Of this atrocious and barbarous policy much has been said and written, and its authorship charged upon various men and officers of Government. At the time of the transaction, it was represented that the blood-hounds were obtained for the purpose of trailing the Indians, and historians have so stated;[123] but for various reasons, we are constrained to believe they were obtained for the purpose of trailing negroes. It was well known that these animals were trained to pursue negroes, and only negroes. They would no more follow the track of a white man than they would that of a horse or an ox. It was the peculiar scent of the negro that they had been trained and accustomed to follow. No man concerned in obtaining these animals, could have been ignorant that they had, in all probability, never seen an Indian, or smelt the track of any son of the forest.
Every slaveholder well understood the habits of those ferocious dogs, and the manner of training them, and could not have supposed them capable of being rendered useful in capturing Indians. The people of Florida appear to have been stimulated in the commencement and continuance of this war solely by a desire to obtain slaves, rather than to fight Indians; and while acting as militia or as individuals, they were far more efficient in capturing negroes and claiming those captured by other troops than in facing them on the field of battle. Nor can we resist the conviction, that catching negroes constituted, in the mind of General Jessup, the object for which those animals were to be obtained. Such was evidently his purpose when he wrote Colonel Harney, as quoted in a former chapter, “If you see Powell (Osceola), tell him that I intend to send exploring and surveying parties into every part of the country during the summer; and that I shall send out and take all the negroes who belong to white people, and he must not allow the Indians or Indian negroes to mix with them. Tell him I am sending to Cuba for blood-hounds to trail them, and I intend to hang every one of them who does not come in.”
We cannot close our eyes to the fact, that General Jessup intended the blood-hounds to be used in catching “the negroes belonging to the white people,” as he said. Those white people were mostly slaveholders of Florida; those who proposed in the legislative assembly of that territory the obtaining of the animals, and adopted a resolution authorizing their purchase. They did not wait for the President to act, nor for the “Secretary of War,” whom the Governor of Florida characterized as “that distinguished Carolinian” on whose judgment and patriotism the people of Florida so much relied.[124]
By resolution, Colonel Fitzpatrick was “authorized to proceed to Havana, and procure a kennel of blood-hounds, noted for tracking and pursuing negroes.” He was fortunate in his mission. He not only obtained the animals, but he accomplished the journey, and reached St. Augustine as early as the sixth of January, 1840, with a reinforcement for the army of the United States of thirty-three blood-hounds well trained to the work of catching negroes. They cost precisely one hundred and fifty-one dollars seventy-two cents, each, when landed in Florida. He also procured five Spaniards who were accustomed to using the animals in capturing negroes; and as the dogs had been trained to the Spanish language, they would have been useless under the control of persons who could only speak the dialect of our own country.
The very general error that existed throughout the country, at the time of this transaction, arose from a misapprehension of the facts. There had been much said in regard to these blood-hounds before they were actually obtained. When the report of the War Department, under the resolution of the House of Representatives of the twenty-eighth of January, 1839, was published, containing the letter of General Jessup addressed to Colonel Harney, which we have quoted, many members of Congress appeared indignant at what they regarded as a stain upon our national honor in obtaining and employing blood-hounds to act in concert with our troops and our Indian allies in this war. Party feelings ran high, and southern members of Congress, who were acting with the Whig party, were willing to seize upon any circumstance that would reflect discreditably upon the then existing Administration.
On the twenty-seventh day of December, 1839, the Hon. Henry A. Wise, a member of the House of Representatives from Virginia, addressed a letter to the Secretary of War, inquiring as to facts relating to the employment of blood-hounds in aid of our troops.[125]
To this letter Mr. Poinsett, the Secretary of War, replied on the thirtieth of December, as follows: