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History of the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842

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This superb book will fascinate anyone with a love for American history. The Second Seminole War is almost unknown today, but it was a major conflict in our country's history before the Civil War. The conflict cost more in lives and money than all the famed Indian wars of the western plains, and a number of celebrated American officers (Zachary Taylor, Edmund Gaines, Winfield Scott) cut their teeth in the conflict. They also often failed spectacularly, as Mahon demonstrates. He superbly treats the military strategy of the war, painting a big picture while weaving a skillful narrative which will interest military historians and novices alike. As Mahon shows, the 2nd Seminole War was our country's least successful military engagement of the century -- in fact, the least successful until Vietnam. Readers today will be surprised to learn of the stirring protests that Americans leveled against the war in the 1830s and 40s. We are conditioned to think that American history is one long series of evil white men raping and pillaging innocent blacks and Indians. Mahon's book vividly depicts a few events that conform to this vision of our past, but the book shows how much more complex the 19th century truly was -- how complex was the political situation of the Seminoles, and how Americans of the time expressed widespread dissent, anger, and anguish over the way that the country chose to deal with them. Amazingly, the US officer corps charged with fighting the war was itself in the vanguard of the protest movement agains the conflict. This is a slice of the American past that people rarely see. Readers will also be fascinated to learn more about the "Seminole Negroes," today known as Black Seminoles -- African and slave allies of the Indians, who played a central role in the conflict. The only shortcoming of Mahon's book is its occasional paucity of detail on this group, but readers can usefully complement the book with Kenneth Wiggins Porter's fascinating history of the Black Seminoles. The 2nd Seminole War deserves renewed historical attention. Scholars and general readers alike will find their attention well rewarded by Mahon's excellent history.

The book should be part of all Native Floridians recommeded reading. The history of our state is more than tourist and palm trees. Before there was a wild west there was an wild and undeveloped area called Florida. This book is for those interested in history and the people that lived in the area.

Mahon's work is simply timeless. It is the best overview, with some detail, of the Second Seminole conflict. There is sufficient detail for the history buff, while giving the novice a great foundation for further reading (Dade's Last Battle comes to mind). I did not find the reading difficult at all, and have re-read the book several times. If you want one title for this period of history, or if you are starting a collection, this is one title you "must have"

A solid, and solidly massive, tome covering in vast detail the facts leading up to, causing and surrounding the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), John K. Mahon's book is a tough but rewarding read. There is so much information to digest, however, that the book (despite the fact that a lot of this material has been covered by many other offerings on the same subject) has its hands full from the start. That makes this book one for the serious scholar, not the historical dabbler looking for a quick and entertaining read.

One of the earlier twentieth century works on the subject, and among the most definitive, Mahon's history tracks and documents the vicissitudes of the Seminole peoples and their allies (escaped slaves of African descent who found refuge among them) as they sought to avoid and then resist the increasing encroachment of American whites on their territory once the old Spanish colony of the Floridas had been ceded to the Americans in the aftermath of Andrew Jackson's destructive incursions (known as the First Seminole War -- circa 1817-18). At the same time Mahon carefully documents the military record of engagements, strategies, losses, logistics and, regrettably, betrayals of the Indians against whom the American military fought.

Jackson, violating international boundaries at the time of the First Seminole War, charged down from Alabama into northern Florida to scatter and destroy the settled Seminole and escaped African slaves' villages that had been built, with Spanish agreement, on the rich Alachua plain. These people would never regain their old prosperity, after those attacks, though they tried desperately to hang on in the face of a subsequent white American settler invasion from the north.

Mahon focuses on the military and political players, more than on the demographic pressures, reading extensively from the ample contemporary and near contemporary record as he follows the course of events in the wake of white settler pressure to dispossess the Indians and re-enslave the blacks in their midst (many of whom had been born into freedom, or its equivalent, among the Indians). The dynamics of the southern plantation economy, transplanted from Georgia and Alabama to the new Florida territory, led the whites to demand the Seminoles' land and their black "slaves" (only some of whom actually held that status among the Seminole bands with whom they lived, but who, even so, were more free than their brethren still in bondage on the plantations of the Old South).

In the throes of discontent over slavery, the U.S. military was re-forged, after the War of 1812, in the crucible that was untamed Florida where America's officers and enlisted men met the toughest enemy they had faced until then in some of the most hostile terrain in a kind of forerunner to the guerilla conflict that would later be fought by the American military in Vietnam. In the end, the casualties suffered by American soldiers were substantial, as much from disease incurred in the back country swamp lands of central and south Florida as from the depredations of battle.

Nonetheless the Seminoles and their allies were relentlessly whittled down by a force much vaster than themselves (they were estimated to have been no more than about 5,000 at their height including maybe 500-1,000 escaped African and mixed-race slaves and their children). Those of the Seminole (themselves a motley amalgam of many different tribal groups and bands from the Creek confederation in Alabama and Georgia) who survived and many of their black allies were shipped off to Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi in what is today Oklahoma, under terms of a treaty that had been foisted on them through subterfuge (during Jackson's subsequent presidency) and which they ultimately had no choice but to accept.

The American Army grew in capacity from the adversity of the seemingly never-ending Florida campaign (it took seven years of bloody conflict and killing) and many of the officers tempered there went on to play major roles in the Mexican War of 1845 and the American Civil War which was to finally split the country over the slavery question in 1860. Slavery was a major issue in the Second Seminole War and many in the U.S. military bridled at the role they were obliged to play in seizing and re-enslaving free blacks in the course of the war. The upper echelons of the American forces were conflicted and, even when they acted with perfidy, as General Thomas Sydney Jesup did in breaking truce terms he had previously agreed to in order to treacherously seize Seminole leaders, they were rarely at ease in meeting the demands of the plantation-owning settlers and slave hunters.

Jesup, especially, tried several times to end the war by offering advantageous terms to the blacks, whom he thought the critical factor behind the Seminoles' continued resistance, but his inability to live up to his word in the crunch created ongoing problems for him and prolonged the war, even as it led to problems in later days for those blacks who accepted his offer of freedom in return for surrender.

Mahon does a yeoman's job in culling the facts from the vast array of sources but his writing is dry and detailed and not always easy to read as some here have noted. But this is not a book meant for easy reading. For that, interested readers may want to access any number of popularized and therefore simpler accounts. But for a definitive look at the course of the war itself, nothing is richer or more reliable than Mahon's fine work.

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

The book should be part of all Native Floridians recommeded reading. The history of our state is more than tourist and palm trees. Before there was a wild west there was an wild and undeveloped area called Florida. This book is for those interested in history and the people that lived in the area.

Dr. Mahon is known as the father of 2nd Seminole War history because of this book. Written 30 years ago, nobody has since written more about the 2nd Seminole War. His bibliography in the back can lead you to many other sources of research into the war. If you buy only one book on the Second Seminole War, this is it.

The only thing the book doesn't cover as much as it should is the different state volunteer units and their participation in the war. (Although Dr. Mahon covers them adequately for starting into their history as well.)

The book should be part of all Native Floridians recommeded reading. The history of our state is more than tourist and palm trees. Before there was a wild west there was an wild and undeveloped area called Florida. This book is for those interested in history and the people that lived in the area.

The Problem is a simple one. There are few books on the Seminole Wars available right now, and this is one of them. But to get through it you have to persevere. The subject not the writing has to be the reason you plow through these pages. Just think of a tough old sargent in a forage cap, grumbling "close it up: keep moving," and you will get the idea.