The atlas records Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears; the Florida wars were its longest and costliest theatre and are usually treated separately. The first conflict began in 1817-18 when Andrew Jackson led forces into Spanish Florida in pursuit of Seminoles and of people who had escaped slavery in Georgia, destroying Seminole, Mikasuki and Black Seminole towns. After the United States acquired Florida in 1821, the Treaty of Moultrie Creek confined the Seminole to a central reservation, and the 1832 Treaty of Payne's Landing, whose validity the Seminole disputed, required them to move to Indian Territory. Resistance produced the Second Seminole War of 1835-1842, in which fewer than 2,000 Seminole fighters held off a force that grew beyond 30,000; when pursuit failed, American commanders turned to destroying villages and crops to force surrender by starvation. By 1842, 3,612 Seminoles had been deported west; a Third war from 1855 to 1858 pushed most of the remainder out, leaving a few hundred in the Everglades. The Seminole Tribe of Florida regards the three conflicts as a single war and its members as never having surrendered.
The United States fought three wars in Florida to take Seminole land and deport the Seminole and Black Seminoles to Indian Territory
Estimates rest on US Army returns, agency counts and treaty rolls rather than a census; the Seminole population of Florida around 1820 is usually put at 4,000-6,000, including several hundred to a thousand Black Seminoles. The Seminole were themselves a recently formed population of Creek and other refugees plus people escaping slavery.
About 1,500 United States soldiers died in the Second Seminole War, the great majority from disease rather than combat, and these are the only well-recorded deaths. Seminole military and civilian deaths, including those from hunger and exposure after the destruction of villages and crops and during removal, were never counted; the upper bound is an estimate combining army losses with the fragmentary evidence for Seminole mortality.
The deliberate destruction of villages and food crops as a means of forcing surrender is documented in United States Army correspondence and orders of the Second Seminole War and in the standard military histories drawn on by the cited account.
United States of America