More Fights for Peaceful Folk
from 1835 to 1842, during which years we employed 41,122 men. In the regular army alone our losses from killed, and soldiers who died of wounds, were 1,466. Add to this the losses of volunteers and militia, for whom there are no available statistics. No well-informed man doubts that the Seminoles killed more Americans than they had warriors. The British had massacred us just as badly in our assaults upon Canada, which we satisfactorily explained by saying that the British were regulars. Here were Indians doing the same thing. The Florida War, about which so little is said, became our bloodiest and costliest affair, proportionately; yet competent troops could have ended it with the first battle. Indian resistance would have been paralyzed at the Withlacoochee, if the volunteers and militia had been trained men and properly handled. The raw militia called out at the beginning of this war were only supposed to serve for three months. I am not going into details of those heart-breaking seven years, seven years of wading through
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