Not Another Military History Podcast · Jakob Sibley

The Seminole Wars, Episode 1: Jackson Fucks Around in Florida

·30 min·1 clip

A cannon shot hit the powder magazine and blew the Negro Fort apart 100 miles away in Pensacola.

Jacob opens by kicking off a new Seminole Wars series. He says the Seminole Wars are the longest and most expensive Indian wars ever fought by the United States. The Second Seminole War alone cost $35 million and lasted about seven years. He turns that into almost $1.3 billion and calls it insane. The conflict is framed as a struggle over U.S. attempts to colonize Florida and remove the Seminoles from their land. The time span runs from 1816 to 1858. That stretch reaches from just after the War of 1812 to just before the Civil War. He points out that over a span like that, plenty of people would have lived and died without ever seeing the wars end. Then he backs up into the deeper background of Florida. About 500 years ago, the region held around 350,000 people. Two hundred years after the Spanish arrived, virtually the entire native population of Florida had been wiped out. The Seminoles later offered aid to the Patriots against the Spanish. The Patriots rejected the aid. The Seminoles then sided with the Spanish and started ambushing Patriot supply columns. The Patriot war soon ended after that. Jacob jokes that the Patriots basically played themselves. That outcome made the Americans hate the Seminoles even more. It also fed fears of a slave uprising, because Americans saw Black people fighting alongside Native people and understood exactly what that could mean for their slave economy. The episode then moves into the War of 1812. During that war, the British occupied parts of Florida. They handed out guns to the Seminoles. The British fought several battles with Americans in western Florida and Alabama. At Horseshoe Bend in 1814, Andrew Jackson destroyed an army of Creek Indians and seized a vast swath of their territory. That set his sights on Seminole land for the future. The episode also turns to the Negro Fort. It was a fort staffed by roughly 200 to 300 escaped slaves along the Apalachicola River in northern Florida. Jacob notes that he is reading the name as written in the source and not using a slur casually. The Spanish tried for a while to do something about the fort. They did not have the resources to destroy it. Jackson, as head of the Southern Department of the Army, told the Spanish that if they would not deal with it, he would. A Spanish governor replied that they had to wait for permission from Havana. Jackson then went to work provoking war.

As heard by us

A blunt, setup-heavy opening that frames the Seminole Wars as a long, expensive Florida conflict.

The episode starts with a plainspoken, tightly ordered account of the Seminole Wars, and the scale of the conflict comes through fast as Florida land, U.S. expansion, numbers, and timeline are laid out together.

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Why you'd press play

If you want Florida history, empire politics, and a blunt host with no heroic varnish.

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