The Seminole Wars were a series of three military conflicts between the United States and the Seminoles that took place in Florida between about 1816 and 1858. The Seminoles are a Native American nation which coalesced in northern Florida during the early 1700s, when the territory was still a Spanish colonial possession. Tensions grew between the Seminoles and settlers in the newly independent United States in the early 1800s, mainly because enslaved people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border. A series of cross-border skirmishes escalated into the First Seminole War in 1817, when American General Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections. Jackson's forces destroyed several Seminole and Black Seminole towns, as well as the briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818. The U.S. and Spain soon negotiated the transfer of the territory with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.
A U.S. Marine boat expedition searching the Everglades for Seminoles during the Second Seminole War
Andrew Jackson led an invasion of Florida during the First Seminole War.
Edmund Pendleton Gaines commanded Federal troops at the Battle of Negro Fort.
The trial of Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot during the First Seminole War
The Seminole are a Native American people who developed in Florida in the 18th century. Today, they live in Oklahoma and Florida, and comprise three federally recognized tribes: the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, as well as independent groups. The Seminole people emerged in a process of ethnogenesis from various Native American groups who settled in Spanish Florida beginning in the early 1700s, most significantly northern Muscogee Creeks from what are now Georgia and Alabama.
A Seminole mother and her children from the Brighton Reservation in Florida. (1948)
Coeehajo, Chief, 1837, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Sign at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park commemorating hundreds of enslaved African Americans who in the early 1820s escaped from this area to freedom in the Bahamas.
Captain Francis Asbury Hendry (center, standing) poses with a group of Seminole Indians