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This chapter focuses on the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and how whites and natives both developed new knowledge about the Seminoles as a unique ethnic group through violence against each other’s dead. On the one hand, Euro-Americans looked to native skulls to add scientific legitimacy to assertions that the Seminoles were a clearly defined ethnicity whose supposed predisposition for violence and lack of ancestral bonds to Florida justified their removal. On the other hand, the collection and circulation of white scalps strengthened the Seminoles’ understanding of themselves as a distinct people and allowed them to rebuild complete communities—ones that integrated the living, the multiethnic dead, and Floridian land—despite the trauma of the war.

This chapter establishes Mary Edwards Bryan’s family background, focusing on her parents John David Edwards and Louisa Houghton Edwards. It explains the pertinent history of the Territory of Florida, particularly the Old South regions known as Middle Florida. It describes frontier violence of the time, which ranged from dueling to fighting related to the Second Seminole War. It also takes into account the economic climate from cotton plantation development to bank speculation to economic depression. It details the circumstances of Mary’s birth in Jefferson County, Florida, in 1839.

This chapter takes capeyuye [spiritual singing] as a point of departure to study the Mascogos’ continuous struggle to define themselves as binational people, as Afro-Seminoles living in Coahuila, Mexico. By reflecting on the intersections of race, nationality, and the body within the specificities of Mascogo border culture and history, the chapter problematize Anne Anlin Cheng's notion of “racial melancholia,” suggesting that self rejection might be a more strategic move than Cheng acknowledges it to be. In the end, the author coins the term “dialectical soundings” and propose that the singing of spiritual among the Mascogos in fact operates as such, rendering Blackness visible in the context of the Mexican border essentialist racial discourse

This chapter provides historical development of U.S. relations with the Seminole and the role of the Seminole leader Coacoochee. U.S. relations with the Seminole have too long been viewed through the lens of an ethnocentric American history. The chapters within this book reassess the traditional periods provided for U.S.-Seminole relations, and, in this process, advocate a new approach to how scholars look at the relationship between American expansion and the adverse effects of such expansion on the Seminole people. Each chapter, in its own way, lends support to the contention that the conflict between the young United States and the Seminole people transpired over a period of nearly a century, commencing in the decade prior to the American Revolution and ending in the decade before the U.S. Civil War.

This chapter reveals the intense fear harbored by the Americans, especially those in the slaveholding South, of a massive slave rebellion originating from a concerted alliance of African and Indian in Florida. By focusing on literary accounts of the day, this chapter looks at the Second Seminole War as a war against blacks as much as against Indians. By connecting the slave insurrection on the island of St. Domingo to the Nat Turner rebellion in the United States, whites throughout the American South feared that the events in Florida could indeed incite a substantial slave rebellion. This chapter convincingly shows that the fate of the Seminole joined with that of the African in Florida, and that the topic of slavery and of fugitive and free blacks among the Florida Indians cannot be dissected from the story of U.S.-Seminole relations.

This chapter illustrates how another major political and constitutional crisis in Antebellum America—the Nullification Crisis—involved the long conflict between the United States and the Seminole. Following the outbreak of the Second Seminole War, Nullifiers used the conflict in Florida to ensconce their political power in South Carolina. As a result of their dismal military record in the conflict, the Nullifiers quickly blamed the federal government for the military morass in Florida, which led to national controversy over the conduct of the war and a subsequent investigation of several prominent U.S. commanding generals.

The chickee, the traditional Seminole Indian building, is a classic example of a traditional Florida building type. A part of Seminole life for a long time, it provides an environment for the Seminole Folklife Area at the Florida Folk Festival. To showcase several Seminole traditions, the Seminole Tribe of Florida has constructed a temporary family camp on the festival grounds. Crafts and foodways complement the building tradition itself. This chapter examines chickee architecture and the Seminoles’ family camp and their role in Seminole folklife in Florida. It first describes the form and construction of chickees and types of chickees, before turning to a discussion of their cultural associations and transitions.

The fifth chapter examines white Georgians' drive to extend the state's frontiers and expand plantation slavery in the 1810s. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the growing demand for cotton brought increasing number of white settlers and slaves to Georgia's southern and southwestern frontiers. The resulting pressure to expand brought white Georgians into conflict with the Creek and Seminole Indians, their British and Spanish allies, and the escaped slaves who found refuge in their midst. With the aid of federal troops, the Tennessee militia, and “friendly” Indians, white Georgians defeated their interracial foes in a series of brutal engagements that ultimately extended Georgia's boundaries and defeated the last remaining impediment to the spread of plantation across the Southeast.

This chapter explores the changing fabric of community organization and identity during the late-precontact and early-historic periods (early eighteenth century) in Spanish Florida. Changes in population structure and demography are modelled through three time periods among three linguistic groups in northern Florida and southern Georgia. Results indicate an initial increase in between-group genetic variation, reflective of diminished biological integration and decreasing population size. After 1650, however, inter-group genetic variation declines rapidly, reflecting changes in patterns of mate exchange among Florida's indigenous converts. This temporal pattern is interpreted as the genesis of a novel “Spanish-Indian” identity in La Florida that was subjected to diaspora when the English destroyed Spain's colony in 1706. Ethnohistoric, archaeological, and settlement data, combined with these bioarchaeological data, suggest the Florida Seminole have ancestral roots in this nascent Spanish-Indian identity, despite the lack of recognition of this modern tribe for nearly 100 years.

Andrew K. Frank’s essay on the Florida Everglades documents how the Seminole Indians who have always lived there learned to market their culture and tap into tourists’ desire to experience the exotic frontier of that state. As Frank argues, the growth of Florida’s tourism was spurred by what he calls “pay-per-view performances” by the Seminoles, who, since the 1880s, have consciously marketed stereotypical images that consciously linked them to the “wild frontier” of the Everglades.

This chapter provides a historical background to Apalache and Florida, and on the Natives and Spaniards from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Spanish presence in Apalache revolved around Fort San Marcos and dealing with the local Creeks and Seminoles. Spain lost Florida between 1763 and 1783, when Great Britain ruled the area and divided Florida into East (the peninsula) and West (the Gulf Coast) Florida. In 1787 Spain returned to Apalache and Fort San Marcos to forestall British smuggling.

This chapter sketches Bowles's life to 1791, discussing displaced British merchants who wanted to retain their trade with the southeastern Indians and who used Bowles to further their commerce. Bowles soon wanted a greater role among the Creeks and Seminoles and to replace McGillivray as an Indian leader. The Creeks sought weapons to defend their lands from encroaching Americans, and Bowles journeyed to England to seek help in trading on the Gulf Coast.

This chapter discusses both Bowles's travels and Apalache during these years. Colonial authorities sent Bowles to Spain and the Philippines as a prisoner. He created so much mischief in Manila that the governor sent him back to Spain, but he escaped on the return journey. Bowles returned to England and again sought help for his Muskogee state. Great Britain provided little. Apalache, meanwhile, remained restless. The Creeks had no comparable leader upon McGillivray's death in 1793. The Seminoles continued to seek goods from Nassau while the Georgians encroached on Creek lands. Spain's 1795 treaty with the United States placed most Creek lands in American hands. Fort San Marcos sustained heavy damages again in a hurricane, which underscored the weaknesses of Spanish defenses in West Florida.

Spanish–Indian relations improved at Fort San Marcos. Bowles's navy declined further, while the Spanish galleys gained superiority. The Spaniards seized several Nassau vessels bringing aid for Bowles. Governor Halkett of Nassau attempted and failed to recover the Favorite. Tired of warfare, many Seminoles in August 1802 sought peace at San Marcos. DuBreüil agreed, which ended the war for the signing chiefs. Indians returned some but not all prisoners, and most of the fighting ended. Indians, however, refused to surrender Bowles to the Spaniards. Governor Salcedo accepted the treaty, although he questioned DuBreüil's authority to make treaties. Folch was upset that he was not involved. Some Spanish troops left Apalache, but the galleys remained. Rewards went out to officers who helped in peace negotiations. Folch became a colonel, and later, with Spain giving up Louisiana, the governor of West Florida.

Some Seminoles disdained the peace treaty, but others wanted it and signed their adherence to the peace in December 1802. Kinache of Miccosukee, however, returned to aid Bowles. He still tried to cause more harm. Indians, however, refused to surrender all prisoners, and sporadic attacks continued at San Marcos. Anti-Bowles chiefs wanted the 4,500-peso reward. Since Seminoles and Lower Creeks were deserting him, Bowles sought and failed to find help from the Upper Creeks. Many chiefs refused to hear his harangues. In early 1803, Bowles rapidly lost supporters. At the May Indian conference, his final Seminole supporters surrendered Bowles, who had attended the meeting, to guards who conveyed him to New Orleans. They received 1,500 pesos immediately and more money later. Bowles was sent to Havana in June 1803, and it ended the turmoil that he had caused.