The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic 101dered to Jackson and ceded twenty-three million acres of their ances
tral lands to the United States in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The Red
Sticks, however, joined the resistant Seminole Nation in the Florida
Everglades and three more decades of Muskogee resistance ensued.
During this period, Anglo-American slave owners, and Andrew
Jackson in particular, were determined to destroy the safe havens
that Seminole towns offered to Africans who escaped from slav
ery.15 The Seminole Nation had not existed under that name prior
to European colonization. The ancestral towns of the Indigenous
people who became known as Seminoles were located along rivers
in a large area of what is today Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina,
and the Florida Panhandle. In the mid-eighteenth century, Waka
puchasee (Cowkeeper) and his people separated from the Coweta
Muskogees and moved south into what was then Spanish-occupied
Florida. As Spain, Britain, and later the United States decimated
Indigenous towns throughout the Southeast, survivors, including
self-emancipated Africans, established a refuge in Seminole territory
in Spanish Florida in the Everglades. European incursions came in
the form of military attacks, disease, and disruption of trade routes,
causing collapse and realignments within and between the towns.1^6
The Seminole Nation was born of resistance and included the
vestiges of dozens of Indigenous communities as well as escaped
Africans, as the Seminole towns served as refuge. In the Caribbean
and Brazil, people in such escapee communities were called Ma
roons, but in the United States the liberated Africans were absorbed
into Seminole Nation culture. Then, as now, Seminoles spoke the
Muskogee language, and much later (in 1957) the US government
designated them an "Indian tribe." The Seminoles were one of the
"Five Civilized Tribes" ordered from their national homelands in
the 1830 s to Indian Territory (later made part of the state of Okla
homa).
The United States waged three wars against the Seminole Na
tion between 1817 and 1858. The prolonged and fierce Second
Seminole War (1835-42) was the longest foreign war waged by the
United States up to the Vietnam War. The US military further de
veloped its army, naval, and marine capabilities in again adopting a