The Second Spanish Period

1784-1821

Part Twelve

Painting by Jackson Walker

Jackson Takes Fort San Marcos de Apalache

After leaving McIntosh and his Creeks behind at Lake Miccosukee, the army began its southward march to San Marcos on April 5, 1818, perhaps using the old Spanish Road that traveled past the Natural Wells in present-day Woodville, and reached their destination the next day. Another source indicates that Jackson and his army traveled the old Indian path that DeSoto and Narvaez once used, that later became the line of the Tallahassee-St. Marks Railroad.[1] On April 6, 1818, Jackson’s forces set up camp about a mile from the Spanish garrison at San Marcos de Apalache. Jackson wrote to Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, that, “I will take possession of the Garrison as a depot for my supplies, should it be found in the hands of the Spanish Garrison, they having supplied the enemy”, Jackson continued, “but, if in the hands of our Enemy, I will possess it for the benefit of the U.S., as a necessary position for me to hold, to give peace and security to this Frontier, and put a final end to Indian warfare in the South.”[2]  General Jackson then sent his adjutant, Lieutenant James Gadsden, to the fort with a letter for the Spanish commandant Don Francisco Caso Y Luengo. “Sir”, Jackson pinned, “to chastise a Savage Foe, who, combined with a lawless band of Negro Brigands, have for some time past, been carrying on a cruel and unprovoked war against the citizens of the United States, has compelled the President to direct me to march my Army into Florida. I have penetrated to the Mickasuky Towns, and reduced them to ashes…The Barbarians who escaped death have fled. From information, communicated by the Governor of Pensacola, to 2 of my Captains…I was induced to believe that they had fled to St. Marks for protection…To prevent the recurrence of so gross a violation of neutrality, and to exclude our savage Enemies from so strong a hold as St. Marks, I deemed it expedient to garrison that Fortress with American Troops, until the close of the present war…This measure is justifiable on the immutable principle of self-defense…I come not  as the enemy, but as the friend of Spain. Spanish rights and property will be respected…an early and prompt Answer is requested to this Letter.”[3]

Jackson demanded the surrender of Fort San Marcos and Luengo politely refused. Luengo sent Jackson a reply that stated he denied providing munitions to Indians, and that his kindness towards the Americans showed the friendship between Spain and the United States. Furthermore, Luengo explained that he did not have the authority to surrender the fort, even to Spain’s allies. He requested that Jackson wait for consent. That is all Luengo could do, as he did not have a large enough garrison to stop Jackson.

The Americans sent in a white flag, and the Spanish reciprocated, sending out a white flag of their own and opened their gates to Jackson. Luengo turned over Duncan McCrimmon to Jackson’s forces, as well as William Hambly and Edmund Doyle, agents of the John Forbes Company who had been captured by the Seminoles. Alexander Arbuthnot had sentenced the men to be tortured, but instead they eventually were turned over to the fort at San Marcos. That day, the Americans were allowed to enter and exit the fort as they pleased, and the Spanish even provided medical care for a few sick Americans. Jackson said that surrendering the fort to him would benefit Spain because the Americans could better prevent its capture by Indians.

Jackson decided not to wait for consent from the Spanish at Pensacola, and on April 7, Jackson ordered two light companies from the Seventh U.S. Infantry and one from the Fourth U.S. Infantry, under the command of Major Twiggs, to storm through the opened gates and take the fort. The seventy men garrison inside the fort were taken by complete surprise, and their attempt to man their cannons was easily stopped. With the fort now securely in the hands of the Americans, Jackson rode in and lowered the Spanish flag himself, then raising the Stars and Stripes, his conquest to gain Florida had begun.

Capturing Enemies of the United States

Captain McKeever’s small fleet had been sitting at the mouth of the San Marcos River since the first of April. Once they spotted the American flag on the fort’s flagpole, they came ashore. Hambly and Doyle told Captain Isaac McKeever all they knew about the Indians in the area. They told McKeever that if he lowered the American flag on his ship and raised the British Union Jack, he could lure his enemies to him, who were expecting supplies from the British in order to keep fighting the Americans. The trick worked. The Prophet Josiah Francis and Chief Homathlemico, who led the attack that resulted in the Scott Massacre, were captured when they went aboard a ship anchored off the coast of San Marcos, a ship that was flying the Union Jack. Josiah Francis and Homathlemico thought they were their British allies, there to help them fight a war against Jackson. Instead, it was an U.S. vessel, the USS Thomas Shields, which Jackson had sent there to prevent the enemies escape to the Gulf.

After capturing the two Creek leaders, sailors handed them over to General Jackson in chains. Without a trial, General Andrew Jackson ordered the execution of Josiah Francis and Homathlemico, and on April 8, the two were hanged from the USS Thomas Shields’ yardarm.[4] After the bodies were cut down, Jackson was asked if the bodies should be tossed into the river. He responded, “No, they have ceased to be enemies, let them be buried, and decently as our means will admit of. See that it is done.”[5] That same day, around sixty horrified men, women, and children from Josiah Francis’s village on the Wakulla River turned themselves in to Jackson at St. Marks, including Francis’s daughter, Milly.

In addition to capturing two chiefs who were hostile towards the United States, and the village on the Wakulla River that turned themselves in, U.S. forces also captured Alexander Arbuthnot, the elderly Scottish trader that was friendly with the local Indians who was a guest of the fort when Jackson arrived. To Jackson and the United States, Arbuthnot was behind all the Seminole hostilities towards Americans. He railed against the Treaty of Fort Jackson, and enticed the Indians to reject it with force and actively sought after British arms and goods to supply them to do so. He was the rival of the American friendly John Forbes Company, whose agents he had captured, Hambly and Doyle, and sentenced them to be tortured. Arbuthnot managed to get a letter out before his arrest to his son at the Suwannee River, warning his Seminole friends under Chief Boleck (Billy Bowlegs, not the same as the Second and Third Seminole War leader with the same name) at Old Suwannee Town about Jackson’s army, “The main drift of the Americans is to destroy the black population of Suwannee. Tell my friend Boleck (Billy Bowlegs), that it is throwing away his people to attempt to resist such a powerful force as will be down on Suwannee.”

Luengo protested Jackson’s actions, and demanded that he and his garrison be allowed to remove themselves to Pensacola. After shipping the surrendered Spaniards off to Pensacola, and leaving a garrison of U.S. troops behind at San Marcos, or St. Marks as the Americans began calling it, General Jackson decided to march his army to Old Bowlegs Town on the Suwannee River, and destroy it as well as any other villages that may come across. Since the destruction of Fort Prospect (or Negro Fort as whites at the time called it), the Suwannee River was the primary destination of runaway slaves from the United States, and destroying the Black Seminole village was a number one priority of Jackson and the United States. The army began their 107 mile trek through harsh swamps and punishing thickets of palmettos on April 9 to reach Bowlegs Town, taking with them only eight days of rations.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                     

March to the Suwannee River and the Capture of Ambrister

 On April 10, the Tennesseans and McIntosh’s Creeks that stayed behind at Lake Miccosukee finally caught up with Jackson. Three days later on April 12, Jackson commanded his men to set up camp for the night near Econfina Creek. That night, the men could hear the sounds of cattle and dogs in the distance, proof that the Seminoles were nearby. The next morning, Jackson dispatched McIntosh and his Creek warriors to search the area.

McIntosh’s Creeks discovered that the sounds were in fact from a group of Red Stick Creeks under the leadership of Peter McQueen, a Red Stick leader who fled into Florida after the Red Stick defeat at Horseshoe Bend. The battle that ensued was a fight on the run. The Red Sticks were chased for three miles. After the fighting was over, casualties were 37 Red Sticks dead, and nearly 100 Creek women and children captured, as well as 500 cattle confiscated. Only three Americans were killed. The Red Sticks who escaped eventually re-settled in the Tampa Bay area. In the captured Red Stick village, McIntosh’s Creeks discovered Elizabeth Stewart, the woman who was kidnapped during the Scott Massacre on the Apalachicola River. Peter McQueen again eluded the Americans, and it is believed he died around 1820.[6]

General Jackson was worried that refugees from McQueen’s Ecofina Creek town would run and warn the Seminoles at Bowlegs’s town. He did not want the Indians to escape him again. Bowlegs Town was on the western bank of the Suwannee River, and the Black Seminole villages were to the west and north of the Indian village.[7] Jackson and his army continued toward the Suwannee River, which they reached on April 16, and found Bowlegs Town by sunset. Jackson formed his lines, on his left flank were the Second Regiment of Tennessee volunteers, commanded by Colonel Thomas Williamson, and a portion of friendly Creeks, led by Colonel Noble Kennard. They were to be the first to engage the Seminoles. Jackson commanded the center, consisting of regulars, Georgia militia, and the Kentucky and Tennessee guards. The right flank consisted of the First Regiment of Tennessee volunteers, led by Colonel Robert H. Dyer, and a part of the friendly Creeks under McIntosh. The right flank was expected to cut off the Seminoles retreat. Most of the Indians had fled before Jackson ever arrived, but several hundred black warriors, with their backs facing the river, put up a fight, but were forced to retreat across the Suwannee. Colonel Dyer and the friendly Creeks did a lot of damage to the Seminoles, and the next day, the bodies of nine black warriors and two Indians were found. Two black warriors were captured and eventually sold into slavery in the United States.

Jackson sent Gaines to pursue the fleeing Seminoles, but they would never find them. They did however find more cattle and corn, which they took for themselves. Upon entering Billy Bowleg’s dwelling, Americans discovered the warning letter that Alexander Arbuthnot had sent him. This letter angered Jackson. If Arbuthnot had any chance at all of escaping execution for a lighter punishment, it was now gone. The army spent the rest of their time there to burn all the dwellings and surrounding buildings, which numbered around three-hundred. A group of soldiers discovered Arbuthnot’s store on the banks of the Suwannee River, which they then looted and destroyed.

 Additionally, while U.S. forces were still encamped at Bowlegs Town, the twenty-one year old Robert Ambrister wandered into the village wearing his British red military uniform, and to his surprise, was immediately apprehended. He came into the town at night, assuming the campfire belonged to friendly Seminoles and free blacks. Ambrister was a former British marine who served with Nicholls and followed him to Florida during the War of 1812. Now a British agent to the Seminoles, Ambrister was sent to Tampa Bay in 1818 to train the Seminoles and maroons in modern warfare, to be used in future fights for the British. Now in north Florida, Ambrister was trying to procure a ride by boat back to Tampa Bay. He had a deal with the captain of Arbuthnot’s schooner, the Chance, to get a ride with him, but first he had to trade him some supplies, which is why he came into Bowlegs’s Town.

Ambrister identified more with the Black Seminoles, stating that he came to Florida to complete the work of Nicholls, and to “see the Negroes righted.” Jackson responded to the young prisoner, “you are engaged in keeping alive the hostility of the Indians to the United States, and inciting them with the Negros to commit depredations upon the frontier, I can give you no hope.”[8] Ambrister was cooperative with Jackson, telling him where he could find Arbuthnot’s schooner. Jackson sent men under the command of James Gadsden to the mouth of the Suwannee River to take it. Jackson then used it to transport his sick and wounded back to Fort San Marcos. A few days later, Jackson decided the Seminole War was over. He had burned the Suwanee River towns, and the Mikasuki villages north of Fort San Marcos, destroyed hundreds of homes, confiscated vast amounts of food, executed two known enemies of the U.S., Josiah Francis and Homathlemico, taken  Fort San Marcos, and drove the Seminoles into the swamps. Also, Jackson was ill and wanted to return to his beloved wife Rachel and his home the Hermitage.

He sent the Georgia militiamen back to Georgia from the Suwannee River, and told McIntosh to take his men to Fort Scott to be mustered out of service. He planned on marching back to  Fort San Marcos with the remaining soldiers, the U.S. regulars and the Tennessee volunteers. He told the War Department he would evacuate Florida from Fort San Marcos. Jackson reached Fort San Marcos on April 29. Gadsden arrived there on the Chance just hours before Jackson.

 The Trial and Executions of Arbuthnot and Ambrister

With Ambrister as his prisoner, General Andrew Jackson returned to Fort San Marcos where a military tribunal was convened for Ambrister and Arbuthnot, with Edmund P. Gaines presiding. Arbuthnot was charged with enticing the Creeks to war against the United States, acting as a spy for the enemies of the United States, supplying the enemies of the United States, and encouraging Indians to capture and torture Hambly and Doyle, allies of the United States. Ambrister was charged with aiding and abetting enemies of the United Sates, and providing United States military intelligence to the Seminole and their black allies, and leading the Lower Creeks to war on the United States. The documents found on the two Britons were damning evidence against them. Robert Ambrister through himself at the mercy of the court, while Arbuthnot maintained his innocence, stating that he only conducted legal trade, as authorized by the Spanish.

Jackson’s military tribunal sentenced both men to death, but then they recanted Ambrister’s sentence to fifty lashes and a year of hard labor, perhaps because of his young age. However, Jackson reinstated Ambrister’s death penalty, and he was executed by firing squad on April 29, 1818. The elderly Alexander Arbuthnot was hung from the yardarm of his own ship, the Chance. The sentence was carried out by Brevet Major A.C.W. Fanning of the artillery, who became the commanding officer at Fort San Marcos during the first American occupation. An account was published in Florida Breezes in 1882 of a visit to the graves of Arbuthnot and Ambrister. The burial site was described being about one-hundred yards from the moat on the north side of the fort, and it was marked by two or three cabbage palms.[9]  

The End of the First Seminole War

General Andrew Jackson left a garrison of two-hundred soldiers at the Fort San Marcos under the command of Fanning, and they would remain there until 1819, when it was finally turned back over to the Spanish. Jackson then headed back to Fort Gadsden on the Apalachicola River. During this first American occupation of Fort San Marcos, times were grim and boring for the garrison. Fanning wrote a letter to Brigadier General Daniel Parker in Washington requesting old newspapers or “anything that may remind us that we are among the living.”[10] During this time, military service at Fort San Marcos was extremely unpleasant, and desertion and death were all too common. This would also be the case during the second American military occupation of Fort San Marcos, July 1821- May 1825.

 From Fort Gadsden on the Apalachicola River, Jackson decided to continue his Florida war by marching on Pensacola, believing that the Spanish were supplying Indians who were gathering around the city. On May 7, 1818, he and 1,000 men headed for Pensacola. When Jackson reached Pensacola, Governor of West Florida Jose Masot, and a 175 man garrison, retreated to Fort Barrancas, leaving Pensacola open for Jackson to enter. The two forces exchanged cannon fire until May 28, when Masot surrendered to Jackson. Before finally returning home to Nashville, Andrew Jackson left Colonel William King as Military Governor of West Florida. The First Seminole War was ultimately the beginning of the chain of events that lead to Florida becoming a United States territory, opening the door for Americans to move into the area.

           As for Milly Francis, and the rest of the Creeks and Seminoles that Jackson captured during the first Seminole War, they were sent off to Fort Gadsden, and then to then back to the Creek nation in Alabama. Eventually, along with many Native Americans, Milly was forced to walk the Trail of Tears, and arrived in Fort Gibson, present-day Oklahoma, in January of 1838. There she remained until the day she died. Milly was living in poverty five years later, when Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock met her and heard the story of how she saved McCrimmon from certain death. Moved by her desperate situation, Hitchcock wrote the War Department to ask that something be done to help relieve this honorable women’s suffering. Two years later, Congress passed a bill that gave a pension of $96 a year for “Milly, a Creek women.” The act also awarded her a medal of honor, the first women to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor, even though she is not on the list of recipients. Sadly, Milly Francis died of tuberculosis before receiving a dime of her pension, or her medal of honor. Milly Francis has two monuments that honor her, one on the campus of Bacone College in Oklahoma, and the other is at San Marcos de Apalache. A historic marker telling her story can be seen at the Fort Gadsden Historic Site.

Sources used:

Kilgore, J. (19--). Old St. Marks in Florida: An Historical Work.

Moser, H. D., Hoth, D. R., & Hoemann, G. H. (1994). The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume IV, 1816-1820. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.

Belko, W. S. (2011). Epilogue to the War of 1812. In W. S. Belko, America's Hundred Years' War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763-1858 (pp. 54-102). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Remini, R. V. (2008). Andrew Jackson: A Biography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heidler, D. S., & Heidler, J. T. (1996). Old Hickory's War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for an Empire. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.

Dailey, R. C., Morrell, L. R., & Cockrell, W. (n.d.). The St. Marks Cemetery.

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[1] Kilgore, p.19

[2] General Jackson to the Secretary of War, Head Quarters, Division of the South, Fort Gadsden, East Bank of the Apalachicola River, formerly  

      Negro Fort, 25^th March, 1818

[3] General Jackson to F. C. Luengo, Head Quarters, Division of the South, Before St. Marks, 6^th April, 1818

[4] Belko, p.81

[5] Remini, p.152

[6] Remini, p.153

[7] Heidler and Heidler, p.150

[8] Belko, p.82

[9] Dailey, Morrell, and Cockrell, The St. Marks Cemetery, p.8

[10] Brevet Major A.C.W. Fanning, St. Marks, to Brigadier General Daniel Parker in Washington, May 11, 1818