holocausts of his children; while no motive inspired these massacres, tortures, and banishments, but the most sordid rapacity and avarice, the lowest and basest passions of the human breast.
And so carefully has the truth of this story been covered up with lies, that, probably, very few indeed of the people of the Free States have any just idea of the origin, character, and purposes of the Seminole Wars, or of the character of the race against which they were waged. And yet there is no episode in American history more full of romantic interest, of heroic struggles, and of moving griefs. We have been taught to believe that these wars were provoked by incursions of the savages of Florida on the frontier, and, if the truth could not be concealed, that an incidental motive of our war of extermination against them was to be found in the sanctuary which the fugitive slaves of the neighboring States found in their fastnesses. The general impression has been, that these were mainly runaways of recent date, who had made their escape from contemporary masters. How many of our readers know that for more than three quarters of a century before the purchase of Florida there had been a nation of negroes established there, enjoying the wild freedom they loved, mingling and gradually becoming identified with the Indians, who had made it their city of refuge from slavery also? For the slaveholders of Carolina had no scruples against enslaving Indians any more than Africans, until it was discovered that the untamable nature of the red man made him an unprofitable and a dangerous servant. These Indian slaves fled into the wilderness, which is now the State of Georgia, pushing their way even to the peninsula of Florida, and were followed, in their flight and to their asylum, by many of their black companions in bondage. For near seventy-five years this little nation lived happy and contented, till the State of Georgia commenced the series of piratical incursions into their country, then a Spanish dependency, from which they were never afterwards free; the nation at last taking up the slaveholders' quarrel and prosecuting it to the bitter and bloody end.
This whole story is told, and well told, by Mr. Giddings. And a most touching picture it is. First, the original evasion of the slaves into that peninsular wilderness, which they reclaimed as far as the supply of their simple wants demanded. They planted, they hunted, they multiplied their cattle, they intermarried with their Indian friends and allies, their children and their children's children grew up around them, knowing of slavery only by traditionary legend. The original founders of the tribe passed away, and their sons and grandsons possessed their corn-fields and their hunting-grounds in peace. For many years no fears disturbed their security. Under the Spanish rule they were safe and happy. Then comes the gradual gathering of the cloud on the edges of their wilderness, its first fitful and irregular flashes, till it closes over their heads and bursts upon them in universal ruin and devastation. Their heroic resistance to the invasion of the United States troops follows, sublime from its very desperation. A more unequal contest was never fought. On one side one of the mightiest powers on earth, with endless stores of men and money at its beck,—and on the other a handful of outcasts fighting for their homes, and the liberties, in no metaphorical sense, of themselves, their wives, and their children, and protracting the fight for as many years as the American Revolution lasted.
Then succeeded the victory of Slavery, and the reduction to hopeless bondage of multitudes who had been for generations free, on claim of pretended descendants of imaginary owners, by the decision of petty government-officials, without trial or real examination. More than five hundred persons, some of them recent fugitives, but mostly men born free, were thus reduced to slavery at a cost to us all of forty millions of dollars, or eighty thousand dollars for each recovered slave! Then comes their removal to the Cherokee lands, west of Arkansas, under the pledge of the faith of the nation, plighted by General Jessup, its authorized agent, that they should be sent to the West, and settled in a village separate from the Seminole Indians, and that, in the mean time, they should be protected, should not be separated, "nor any of them be sold to white men or others." This, however, was not a legitimate issue of a war waged solely for the reduction
