Battle of Lake Okeechobee

The Lake Okeechobee Battle site was purchased by the State of Florida in 2006.

Battle Of Okeechobee, Community by Rebecca Fell - January 2, 2018

This year, 2017, is an important year of anniversaries for the Seminole Tribe of Florida. It marks the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Seminole Wars, in 1817. It is the 60th anniversary of federal recognition of the Seminole Tribe of Florida as a government and a business enterprise. Over this year, this column will alternately explore key events of the Seminole Wars and highlight the great advances of the Tribe during the last 60 years. This month we will feature a battle that took place on Christmas Day, 180 years ago along the shores of Lake Okeechobee, Okeechobee county, Florida.

Guy LaBree’s depiction of the Battle of Okeechobee. A print of this painting is in the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum’s collection. (Courtesy photo)

Many history books say the December 25, 1837 Battle of Okeechobee was won by the U. S. Colonel Zachary Taylor. They certainly spun it to the press that way. This battle is often credited with giving him the fame to rise in the ranks of the military and ultimately become president.

Seminole historians see the story very differently. Colonel Taylor’s reason for claiming victory rests solely on the Seminoles leaving the battlefield first. However, this ignores several aspects of the U.S. government’s war with the Seminoles and the battle itself.

The Seminole warriors’ battles against the U.S. are some of the finest examples of guerilla warfare tactics. The warriors recognized they were vastly outnumbered. However, they knew the landscape, had better training, and had better guns. There was no reason to stand in formation and fight like Europeans. A surprise attack and melting back into the scenery produced far more devastating effects and preserved more Seminole lives.

There is good reason to believe the Seminoles led Colonel Taylor’s men to their chosen battlefield by Lake Okeechobee. Taylor’s men conveniently “captured” a Seminole warrior the day before, a man who uncharacteristically gave no fight and pointed the troops to the spot. The landscape the troops traversed to reach the Seminoles was 5’ tall sawgrass, muddy, uneven, and full of dying vegetation. But, the area directly in front of a stand of trees was mown and clear of saplings. After the battle, Taylor’s men found notches in the tree branches where Seminole warriors had rested their guns.

That stand of trees also provided two convenient escape routes to the west and east. When two companies of U.S. troops attacked from the east, some warriors gave cover while the rest of the Seminoles escaped west.

The most telling proof of Seminole victory lay in the numbers. Having left a few men at Camp Bassinger, Taylor arrived to the battle with just over 800 men. The totals for Seminole warriors have ranged from 380-480 men. At a 2:1 ratio, Taylor’s men should have overwhelmed the Seminoles. Instead, they lost 26 men with 114 wounded. The dead were primarily officers, a wise tactical move that made it hard to regroup or give a hard chase. There were only 11 dead and 14 wounded on the Seminole side.

So how could the U.S. claim a victory?

Fake news and bias have long been an issue in the media. The truth was the U.S. government was spending a lot of money and getting nowhere with Seminoles. Commander of the war and Taylor’s boss, Colonel Thomas Jesup’s reputation was already in tatters for capturing warriors, most famously Osceola, under a flag of truce. Finally, Florida was an isolated frontier few knew anything about. The newspapers were not going to ask the Seminoles for their version of the story. So what the officers said was taken for truth. Given how poorly the war was going (and would continue to go), Colonel Taylor made the case for victory.

Original 1939 memorial to the battle—and to A.R. Thompson, Okeechobee, Florida, 2015, dff.

From Blackpast.org

"Battle of Lake Okeechobee, Christmas Day, 1837" William L. Katz, "Battle of Lake Okeechobee," Posted 3 February 3, 2014

On Christmas Day, 1837, during the Second Seminole War, the Africans and Native Americans comprising Florida’s Seminole Nation defeated a superior U.S. fighting force. In more than half a century of Florida invasions, this was the worst defeat the Seminole Nation inflicted on the American Army, which was the strongest military force on the continent at that time. This victory, though long omitted from history books, is a milestone moment in American history.

Spain claimed Florida during the 17th and 18th centuries, but so loosely governed it that it attracted untold numbers of pirates, adventurers, and – in particular – runaway slaves from Georgia and Carolina plantations. Spanish colonial officials offered sanctuary to escapees from the British colonies.

After the United States became an independent nation and plantation agriculture – and slavery – increased, more runaways sought out Florida and freedom. After 1776, Creek dissidents known as “Seminoles” (derived from the Spanish word for “runaways”) who broke away from the Creek nation also sought refuge in Florida.

There they were welcomed by the Africans, who taught them methods of rice cultivation learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone.

As the Africans welcomed and incorporated the Seminoles and their descendants who had fled to Florida, the two peoples forged an economic and military alliance. U.S. slaveholders in turn confronted what was for them a nightmare: Florida now served as a beacon that offered additional escapees shelter and military assistance in preserving their freedom.

Planters demanded U.S. military intervention; by 1811, President James Madison authorized covert slave-catching invasions into Spanish Florida. In 1816, General Andrew Jackson, probably supported by President James Monroe, ordered an attack to “restore the stolen negroes to their rightful owners.” This invasion destroyed “Fort Negro” on the Apalachicola River, the center of a region where hundreds of Seminoles and runaway slaves had villages, farms, and cattle. In 1818, Jackson invaded Florida again, seizing fugitive slaves as well as free black women and men, returning them to the United States.

In 1819, the United States government purchased Florida from Spain for $5,000,000; this purchase, however, did not mean pacification. For the next four decades the U.S. Army fought three Seminole Wars to bring that Indian nation under control and to end the Seminole practice of sheltering fugitive slaves. These wars involved the seizing of women and children as hostages and destroying crops and villages.

The Second Seminole War (1835-1842) cost 1,500 U.S. military lives and over $40,000,000 from the U.S. Treasury, eight times the initial purchase price of Florida. These wars, however, were the largest and longest slave revolt in U.S. history, and were the strongest military alliance between African Americans and Indians in North America. Numerous military figures such as Osceola, Wild Cat, and John Horse led the Seminoles.

On Christmas Day, 1837, on the northeast corner of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, about 450 Seminole soldiers and their black allies awaited Colonel Zachary Taylor and his 70 Delaware Indians, 180 Tennessee volunteers, and 800 U.S. infantrymen. Initial Seminole fire sent the Delaware fleeing. Tennessee riflemen marched into withering fire that brought down most of their commissioned officers and then their noncommissioned officers. With their leadership in disarray, they fled.

Taylor then ordered his three U.S. Infantry Regiments forward. Pinpoint Seminole fire brought down, he later reported, “every officer, with one exception, as well as most of the non-commissioned officers.”

After a two-and-a-half-hour battle, Colonel Taylor counted 26 U.S. dead and 112 wounded, four Seminole dead, and no prisoners. After his survivors limped back to Fort Gardner, Taylor officially declared victory. “The Indians were driven in every direction,” he erroneously stated in his report. On the strength of that report, Taylor was promoted to General. Decades later, after serving in the Mexican War, he was elected the 12th president of the United States. The real victors, however, were the Indians and the blacks, who held on to their freedom for another two decades.

• COPY Katz, W. (2014, February 03) Battle of Lake Okeechobee (1837). Retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/battle-lake-okeechobee-1837/

Sources

• Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Negro on the American Frontier (New York, Atheneum, 1971);
• Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003).

The Battle

The Battle of Lake Okeechobee was one of the major battles of the Second Seminole War. It was fought between 800 troops of the 1st, 4th, and 6th Infantry Regiments and 132 Missouri Volunteers (under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor), and between 380 and 480 Seminoles led by Billy Bowlegs, Abiaca, and Alligator on 25 December 1837. The Seminole warriors were resisting forced relocation to a reservation in Oklahoma. Though both the Seminoles and Taylor's troops emerged from the battle claiming victory, Taylor was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General as a result, and his nickname of "Old Rough and Ready" came mostly due to this battle.

Taylor's command

Major General Thomas Jesup was placed in command of the war in Florida in 1836. In 1837 Jesup planned a major campaign to finally remove the Seminoles from Florida. In November, four columns started sweeping down the peninsula. One column moved down the east coast from the Mosquito Inlet along the Indian River. A second column moved south along the St. Johns River. A third column crossed from Tampa to the Kissimmee River and then proceeded down the river to Lake Okeechobee. The fourth column moved up the Caloosahatchee River. Colonel Taylor was in charge of the third column. Jesup ordered him to set up a depot somewhere near the Peace River. Taylor built Fort Gardner (near Lake Tohopekaliga) on the Kissimmee River. On December 19, Taylor left Fort Gardner with more than 1,000 men, marching down the Kissimmee towards Lake Okeechobee. As a number of Seminoles surrendered to Taylor's column, he stopped to build Fort Basinger, and left prisoners, guards and sick men there.<ref>

• Article about preservation of battle site
• Chapter One, THE SEMINOLE WAR PERIOD 1835-1860, History of Okeechobee
• Okeechobee Battle Friends