After sunrise, the leader of the Seminole Nation walked into a clearing near the Agency house. Chief Micanopy was the head of a fragmented coalition of tribes and their constituent bands of loosely allied guerrilla fighters. The Americans knew that there were many factions but often called them all Seminoles anyway, which made it easier to convince the public that the treaties were valid. The designation derived from the Spanish cimarrón, or “untamed,” a reference to Indians who left the troubled Creek Confederacy to build new lives.
Chief Micanopy was, in fact, a Seminole. Hefty, gentle, and in his fifties, he was known to be faithful to friends and to enjoy a glass and a fine meal. He and other chiefs shook the officers’ hands with firm grips that left the Americans with sore digits. Thompson opened the meeting with an “altogether too grandiloquent” speech about an old treaty signed by leaders who did not speak for all bands or families.
The details of the talks were nothing. The pattern was everything.
Thompson was only following a script. The government had a playbook, it turns out, for kicking Native people off their lands without any unseemly, costly bloodshed. The scheme involved several moving parts. First, settlers pushed in on Indians and drove away their game. Once families were starving, Washington sent envoys to meet with them in a clearing. After sharing a meal and laying out gifts, the emissaries would insist that the Indians move to where the animals were plentiful. They were starving, after all, and the government was only trying to be a friend and to help, and to protect them from the corrupt settlers and unfair local courts that would cheat them. If they didn’t leave, the army would attack, but since the government was a friend, it hoped to avoid war.
“The white people are settling around you,” Wiley Thompson announced, reading directly from a letter written by President Jackson to the chiefs. “The game has disappeared from your country. Your people are poor and hungry.”
White people were not settling all around like in Georgia and Alabama. Much of the interior was no good for farming. Some bands were hurting, but Micanopy’s people were flush with livestock. They weren’t hungry. They weren’t poor.
“Every true friend would advise you to remove,” Thompson continued, numbly reciting the president’s address verbatim. “But you have no right to stay, and you must go. I am very desirous that you should go peaceably and voluntarily.”